Childhood Opportunity and School-Related Firearm Incidents: An Ecologic Study

Firearm violence is a national public health crisis, and children and adolescents are disproportionately affected. Although social vulnerability has been linked to higher risk of community-related firearm violence, the authors are unaware of any studies that have examined the impact of neighborhood-level factors on school-related shooting incidents, specifically.

This national ecologic study investigated the census-tract-level association between school-related shooting incidents from the Gun Violence Archive between 2015 and 2021 and the 2018 Child Opportunity Index. Logistic regression adjusting for region, state gun legislation, and urbanization estimated the ORs and 95% CIs for school-related firearm incidents by overall Child Opportunity Index levels, its 3 domains (education, health and environment, social and economic), and subdomains.

There were 444 school-related shooting incidents. After adjustment, census tracts with the lowest overall Child Opportunity Index level had 3.66 times higher odds (95% CI=2.43, 5.51) of experiencing a school shooting than those with the highest Child Opportunity Index level. The education domain emerged as the strongest predictor; tracts with the lowest education opportunity level had 4.23 higher odds (95% CI=2.34, 7.64) of experiencing a shooting incident than those with the highest education level.

This study found a strong inverse relationship between census-tract-level Child Opportunity Index and school-related firearm violence, indicating that areas of low opportunity were more likely to experience shooting incidents. Specifically, lower opportunity in education factors elevated the odds of exposure to firearm violence. These research findings support the importance of addressing broader social determinants of health as potential avenues for preventing school-related firearm violence incidents.