Gendered Massacres: Examining the Effects of Cultural and Structural Gender Inequality on the Incidence of Mass Public Shootings

Schmuhl, Margaret PhD
Capellan, Joel A. PhD

¹Criminal Justice Department, State University of New York—Oswego, Oswego, NY
²Assistant Professor of Law and Justice Studies, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ

Disclosure. The authors have no relevant financial interest or affiliations with any commercial interests related to the subjects discussed within this article.

Funding. The author(s) received no specific grant or financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Correspondence regarding this article should be directed to Margaret Schmuhl, PhD, Assistant Professor, Criminal Justice Department, State University of New York—Oswego, Oswego, NY, 7060 New York 104, 440 Mahar Hall, Oswego, NY 13126. E-mail: [email protected]

Violence and Victims 35(6):p 885-905, 2020.

With nearly 97% of incidents within the past 40 years committed by men, mass public shootings are a gendered social problem. Yet, empirical research on this phenomenon largely neglects gender hierarchy and cultural factors as predictors, in favor of individual- and event-level characteristics. Despite calls from scholars to place masculinity and threats to patriarchal hegemony at the center of analyses, no empirical studies to our knowledge have examined the role of gender inequality in mass public shootings. The findings indicate that gender inequality, structural and ideological, are important predictors of mass public shootings and that future research should continue to investigate such violence from a gendered lens.