Violent incidents, such as mass public shootings and terrorist attacks, are rare, but have widespread and catastrophic impacts within society. These devastating and often high-profile events raise questions about their causes and how best to prevent them. However, rare events are very difficult to predict.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) journal has published an article intended to raise awareness and assist in prevention efforts. Along these lines, the research community (Basia E. Lopez, Danielle M. Crimmins, Aisha J. Qureshi, and Nadine Frederique) must develop a strategy for obtaining, coding, testing, and analysing data on rare violent incidents.

Finding answers to questions that can guide the prevention of these events is complicated. Naturally, one can draw on what the research shows to inform these discussions, but research on rare, albeit high-impact, events is extremely difficult to conduct and even more difficult to generalise. Research designs and methods are in continual development; however, rare incidents are still an exceptionally difficult phenomenon to study.

For example, mass public shootings are rare and context-dependent, meaning that the situation, background or location differs from case to case. As a result, it is a challenge for researchers to quantify their impact. In addition, the rarity of mass public shootings makes it difficult to develop and test theoretical models due to the lack of good quality data.

Research must go beyond these limitations to improve the criminal justice field’s ability to prevent rare violent incidents. For example, there is a lack of reliable and valid information on what factors might lead an individual to commit a mass shooting. Determining these factors requires rigorous data collection methods and analysis. But this is only the starting point. We can also leverage methods used in other disciplines that study rare events to potentially help predict violent incidents and suggest appropriate mitigation strategies.

As the scientific research, development, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, NIJ has played a crucial role in improving knowledge and understanding of rare violent incidents, such as public mass shootings and terrorist events. The Institute has funded a number of studies over the years that aim to provide rigorous data, a better understanding of what the data conveys, better connectivity between data sources, and consistent definitions so that the field has more information about who perpetrates mass violence, their motivations, and how they plan and carry out their attack.

A mass shooting falls under the broader category of mass murder, which is defined as the wilful (non-negligent) killing of at least four human beings by another person by any means (e.g., bomb, knife/machete, firearm, or use of a vehicle). A mass shooting is a mass murder involving at least one firearm and usually carried out at a single time and place.

Mass shootings have additional subcategories, such as:

• Public mass shootings (shootings at schools, workplaces and other places of public access, such as cinemas, restaurants, bars, places of worship or outdoor events in open spaces).
• Domestic mass shootings.
• Crime-related shootings, such as robberies and gang-related shootings (a form of organised crime and turf wars).
• Another example of mass murder is a terrorist attack during which several victims are intentionally killed.

Over the years, NIJ has been committed to supporting research on rare incidents such as terrorism and mass shootings, with special emphasis on school shootings. Recognising that knowledge gaps also exist about mass shootings outside of school settings, the Institute began investing in research on domestic radicalisation to violent extremism and terrorism in 2012, and on other public mass shootings in 2018.

Rare violent incidents are related to a lack of data, which has prompted researchers to use open-source databases to better understand them.

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