Profiling School Shooters: Automatic Text-Based Analysis

Area of Science:

• Forensic psychiatry
• Law enforcement
• Behavioral sciences

Background:

• School shootings pose significant challenges to forensic psychiatry and law enforcement.
• Understanding school shooters is complex due to their small numbers, diverse characteristics, and limited pre-incident analysis.
• Existing research lacks comprehensive methodologies for profiling school shooters.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel methodology for the automatic profiling of school shooters.
• To develop measures for identifying potential school shooters through text analysis.
• To assess the effectiveness of the proposed profiling methodology.

Main Methods:

• Automatic analysis of texts from school shooters and a comparison group.
• Development of specific measures relevant to shooter identification.
• Application of a ranking/prioritization procedure, analogous to that used for sexual predator identification.

Main Results:

• School shooters' texts scored significantly higher on Narcissistic Personality, Humiliated, and Revengeful dimensions compared to the control group.
• The proposed methodology demonstrated validity and relevance in identifying potential school shooters.
• The ranking/prioritization procedure showed promise in highlighting individuals with concerning textual patterns.

Conclusions:

• Automated text analysis offers a viable approach for profiling school shooters.
• The identified personality dimensions (narcissism, humiliation, revenge) may be key indicators.
• The developed methodology holds potential for early identification and intervention strategies.