Fame seeking shooters and America’s firearm ecosystem

Institute Professor Maurizio Porfiri and Rayan Succar, graduate student in Porfiri’s Dynamical Systems Lab, discussed their new research finding that fame-seeking mass shooters plan their crimes around the novelty of locations and targets, upending traditional assumptions of what motivates such perpetrators. “What we try to do is bring methodologies in data science, artificial intelligence, time series analysis, to understand better why people buy guns, what are potential implications of gun prevalence, what are the main outcomes of violence, what are policies that work, what are policies that don’t work,” said Porfiri.