School Shootings and Social Network Analysis

America's history with school shootings presents a good opportunity for Network Analysis experts to test their tools, methodologies used in analyzing social networks on social data on US high schools & colleges to see if they can predict when the next schools shooting may likely happen and narrow down the potential culprits with a very high degree of certainty.

This is a useful application because the number of deaths of teenagers and kids in US schools though on the decline is still the highest in the world. A case in point is the Virgina Tech shooting, when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 others on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. Another deadly case was the Elementary School shooting at Sandy Hook where a lone gun man killed 28 people including 18 children. 

These terrifying incidents have brought a new urgency to efforts to unravel the roots of such deviance and to help educators, parents and psychologists recognize signs of trouble before a problem escalates.

I believe by using social network analysis to analyze social interactions in high schools and colleges we can visualize the data and make inferences on who may be repeatedly isolated, marginalized, picked upon or persons who do not have strong social attachments. These categories of students maybe a potential culprits of a future mass shooting. For example Cho's peers described him as "quiet" and as someone who would not respond when others greeted him. Cho was also reportedly teased and picked on in middle school for being shy and for his unusual way of speaking.

Some of the obvious challenges with gathering accurate data on an issue like include: invasion of privacy and reliability of information collected from minors. Sometimes even getting them to talk with you is likely going to be problematic. However these challenges can be resolved because it is worth saving one more life from being a victim of senseless violence of psychotic proportions.