Emma Fridel’s research has uncovered that school shootings have been declining since the 1990s. She has also discovered that people who live in economically disadvantaged areas are less likely to take their own life after they kill somebody they know. And her work has revealed that between 2015-2017, there was an uptick in romantic partners killing each other with a gun.
Working in tandem with professors James Alan Fox and Gregory Zimmerman, Fridel, a PhD student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, has produced a string of research papers that examines the topics of serial and mass murder, murder-suicide, and school shootings.
In their 2018 excerpt for a book titled “The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions,” Fridel and Fox dismiss the characterization of mass school shootings as an epidemic, asserting that on average, mass murders occur between 20 and 30 times per year, and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school.
