The response to mass public shootings such as those in Parkland, Pittsburgh, and Las Vegas has become depressingly predictable.

“Every time there’s a mass shooting, we say the same things, and people argue past each other, and then we do nothing,” says Michael Rocque, a criminologist and an assistant professor of sociology at �ֲ���ý. “And then the next one comes along.”

Part of the problem with the public conversation around such shootings, says Rocque, is that it’s fueled by politics and perceptions, both poorly supported by data.

“I see all kinds of research that uses slightly [divergent] terms, or you’re not really sure where the data come from,” he says. “There is no systematic, comprehensive data set that we can all draw on.”

But that will change during the next three years, and Rocque is one of three researchers who are making it happen, thanks to a nearly $499,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque, shown here at a December 2016 planning meeting for the college’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance, is one of three researchers who will use a federal grant to study mass shootings in the U.S. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Titled “The Nature, Trends, Correlates, and Prevention of Mass Public Shootings in America, 1976-2018,” the team’s NIJ-funded project comprises six ambitious research goals — including a forecast of the severity of mass public shootings in years to come.

“Every time there’s a mass shooting, we say the same things, and people argue past each other, and then we do nothing.”

Principal investigator for the project is Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, a prominent authority on violent crime. Working with Fox as co-principal investigators are Rocque and Grant Duwe, director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

“The most important object of this grant,” says Rocque, is to illuminate mass public shootings with data that is publicly accessible and broadly accepted, and whose provenance is clear. (There is no standard definition of a mass public shooting at the moment. The definition used by Rocque and his colleagues is representative: an incident in which four or more victims are fatally shot in a public location within a 24-hour period, and not in the context of other criminal activity.)

“If we’re having a conversation about data rather than anecdotes, then I think we’ll be in a better place,” he says. “We can actually build some strong empirical evidence, a foundation to actually start talking about these things. And maybe we can move forward in a way that actually helps make society safer.”

In addition to the shooting-severity outlook, here are the proposed research outcomes for the project:

• detailed descriptions, comprising dozens of variables, of more than 140 mass public shootings since 1976;
• an evaluation of the impact of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban on the incidence and severity of mass shootings;
• an evaluation of the effects of state-level gun legislation, such as concealed-carry laws, on the incidence and severity of such shootings;
• an assessment of the extent to which mass public shootings reflect the copycat effect, which is when an individual seeks to emulate a crime, and “contagion,” when a crime provokes a rash of similar offenses;
• and a comparison between completed mass shootings and thwarted shooting plots.

Rocque, who in addition to his �ֲ���ý position is a senior research adviser for Maine’s Department of Corrections, has studied mass shooting incidents for years, starting with an article on school shootings that he wrote for the campus paper when he was an undergraduate at the University of Maine.

He studied under Fox at Northeastern, where he earned a doctorate in 2013. And, he says, “Grant Duwe and I have worked together on a couple projects related to our work in corrections.”

“If we’re having a conversation about data rather than anecdotes, then I think we’ll be in a better place,” says Michael Rocque, here teaching his course “Thinking Sociologically with Numbers” in 2015. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The NIJ project “just came together as an interesting way to help advance our knowledge of the phenomenon, but also allow us to work together on a different project,” Rocque says. The trio’s proposal was one of four, including two others related to mass shootings, that were approved in a funding round dedicated to firearms violence.

Much of the data for the project already exists but needs to be augmented with additional research or analyzed in a new way. For instance, the set of shooting descriptions will be based on data that Duwe has compiled, with the research team determining what variables should be added.

“We’ll have to do some digging [to create] what will basically be a huge, comprehensive data set on the assailant, the victims, their background, the location, and how and where the shooting was reported” in the media, including social media, Rocque explains.

“It’s possible for mass public shootings to be both a gun problem and a mental health problem.”

Similarly, predicting the severity of future mass public shootings will be done by applying a statistical technique called power law distribution to existing data about the number of shooting incidents and the number of victims.

Through newspaper op-eds as well as the traditional academic channels, Duwe, Rocque, and Fox have already deployed data to address common (mis)perceptions about mass shootings. Writing in Politico in October 2017, that, despite what feels like a recent onslaught of such shootings, their frequency hasn’t changed much since the 1980s and ’90s.

What has changed, he wrote, offering cold comfort, is that shootings have instead become more deadly — the numbers of victims and of deaths have increased.

“The actual number of incidents seems to be relatively stable,” says Rocque. “But you wouldn’t know that, in part because people use different definitions of mass shootings and in part because the media seemingly have given it more attention of late.”

Rocque’s first article on mass shootings appeared in the campus paper when he was an undergraduate at the University of Maine.

Rocque, who is a familiar presence on op-ed pages in Maine and beyond, and Duwe last February challenged the notion that “mass shooters are not disproportionately mentally ill” (a phrase widely disseminated following the Parkland tragedy).

Writing in the , they cited research showing that, in fact, the opposite is true: More than half of mass shooters either had been diagnosed with or had shown signs of mental illness before the attack. That’s more than triple the rate of mental illness among American adults.

On Oct. 9, 2017, people pray at a makeshift memorial in Las Vegas, Nev., for victims of the mass shooting in the city eight days earlier. (AP Photo/John Locher)

But Rocque and Duwe also cautioned that most people with mental illness are not violent and that calling mass public shootings “strictly a mental health problem rather than a gun problem” is also wrong. “It’s possible for mass public shootings to be both a gun problem and a mental health problem,” they wrote.

In the current political climate, it seems all but impossible to agree on ways to curtail mass public shootings. Yet such agreement definitely won’t be possible without a common foundation of data to build upon.

With that foundation, says Rocque, “we can start to get past, hopefully, some of these conversations that are so political and so personal, and get to a place where we can better understand these events and why they happen.”

As �ֲ���ý continues to transform two 19th-century residence halls into state-of-the-art academic buildings, the college has received a $150,000 grant from the George I. Alden Trust to support the renovation project.
The grant supports the $15 million expansion and renovation of Hedge Hall, built in 1890, and nearby Roger Williams Hall (1895) into homes for academic departments and programs. The Alden Trust, established by George Alden in 1912, supports learning institutions that demonstrate educational excellence, exciting programming and effective administration.

“We are deeply grateful for this support from the Alden Trust,” says �ֲ���ý President Elaine Tuttle Hansen.

“It’s a validation of our belief in the important role that the built environment can and should play in the liberal arts experience. These renovations are more than mere facelifts — they support a number of educational priorities at �ֲ���ý,” Hansen says.

The new spaces are designed to bring faculty and students together both formally, in classes, and informally in lounge and common spaces,” she explains. “This supports our belief that significant learning happens as much in the social arena as in classroom and lab.”

In addition, she says, “�ֲ���ý’ nationally recognized commitment to sustainability is prominently reflected in the Hedge-Williams project,” which, like all new major construction at the college, conforms to the equivalent of the “silver” rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system of standards.

Finally, by providing new focuses for activity and stunning new visuals at the east end of a major college thoroughfare, the Hedge-Williams project continues the redefinition of the central �ֲ���ý campus.

“Foundation funding for infrastructure and capital projects has become increasingly rare,” notes Susan Orton, director of foundation, corporate and government relations. “The Alden Trust understands this, and that’s why this grant is particularly meaningful to all of us at �ֲ���ý.”

The nationally known design firm JSA, with offices in Jacksonville, Fla., and Portsmouth, N.H., did the architectural work for the renovations.

Designed by noted architect G.M. Coombs as a chemistry lab, Hedge Hall was converted into a student residence in 1965. In its return to academic service, it will house the Program in Environmental Studies and the departments of religious studies and philosophy. Currently at 14,764 square feet, the building will gain nearly 5,200 square feet in the renovation, including a major addition.

Roger Williams Hall, designed by Lewiston architect Elmer Thomas, opened in 1895 as the home of Cobb Divinity School at �ֲ���ý. It was converted to combined residential and administrative use in 1908, becoming fully residential around 1964.

Expanding from about 27,300 square feet to more than 34,000, the hall will house the departments of German and Russian studies and of romance languages and literatures; the Program in Asian Studies; the Language Resource Center; and the Off-Campus Study Office.

Begun in March 2010, the Hedge-Williams project is the fourth and final undertaking of the first phase of �ֲ���ý’ campus facilities master plan, which also produced a new residence on College Street; the New Dining Commons, on Central Avenue; and the pedestrian boulevard on campus called Alumni Walk.

Anticipated completion date is summer 2011. The Hedge-Williams project also represents a significant act of historic and architectural preservation, as these buildings, constructed within the college’s first 50 years of existence, help tell the early history of �ֲ���ý.

Hedge and Roger Williams will feature spacious facilities that combine classrooms, lounges, offices and common areas to create intellectually stimulating and emotionally nurturing spaces for students and faculty to come together.

The departments and programs moving to Hedge were previously located away from the center of campus in small wooden buildings. The new location in Hedge will promote easier collaboration and camaraderie both among them and with other disciplines in nearby buildings. Aesthetic additions include new dormer and first-floor windows and a new staircase entrance with a glassed-in stairway that will present an inviting view for passers-by on Alumni Walk.

Follow the progress of the Hedge-Roger Williams renovations through the .

Among distinctive new features in Roger Williams Hall (familiarly known on campus as “Roger Bill” or “the Bill”) is a “cultural kitchen.” New dormers, an addition behind the building and a glass-metal stair tower will transform the exterior.

Hedge and Roger Williams will be 35 percent more energy-efficient than required by ASTM International, a major standards-development organization. “Green” building tactics include hydronic, or water-based, heating and cooling systems; Web-based processes for measuring and verifying energy use; the recycling of construction waste materials; low-flow water fixtures; and motorized windows for automatic ventilation and mitigation of solar warmth gains.

Assistant Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad is the first member of the �ֲ���ý College faculty to receive a Defense Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the grant is for $388,088 over three years. It will fund Lundblad’s research into atomic activity at ultralow temperatures. �ֲ���ý is the only liberal arts school in the nation and the only academic institution in Maine to receive a DEPSCoR grant this year.

It’s well-established that certain materials become extremely efficient electrical conductors — superconductors — when cooled well below freezing. But why particular materials behave this way at such temperatures, potentially suitable for practical application, isn’t clear. Lundblad hopes to better understand this phenomenon by taking it to the extreme: He will study the subatomic behavior of matter when cooled to about 100 billionths of a degree above the temperature, roughly 460 degrees below zero, where atomic motion ceases — absolute zero.

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“It’s an experimental area where the laws of quantum mechanics, the natural laws that govern the behavior of particles on extremely small scales, become dominant,” he says. “These laws can be very weird and counterintuitive.”

Lundblad plans to observe a sample of ultracold gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate. At such low temperatures, the locations of the gas atoms become fundamentally indistinguishable. With the gas confined in a vacuum chamber, he will use laser beams to create “optical lattice traps” that simulate the complicated behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors.

But the simulation will be “cleaner,” or subject to fewer variables, than its crystalline high-temperature counterparts. The hope is that the gas particles’ behavior at near absolute zero will shed light on particle behavior in crystalline high-temperature situations.

While any applications of the research won’t come for quite a long time, the work could support important technological advances. “An electrical grid made of a high-temperature superconductor, for example, could be immensely cheaper than our current system,” he says. Timekeeping and other measurement systems could also benefit.

Any military applications, Lundblad adds, would be nonspecific and on a long time scale. “I like to think of ultracold atoms as a field similar to the laser in the 1960s — a hotbed of research, but nobody knew quite what to do with them yet.”

The Department of Defense takes the long view, he explains. “Similar to its funding of research related to creating the Internet, they figure that spending research dollars advances the cause of the country in general, and if they reap some technological benefit 30 years down the line, so be it.”

Valentina Calastri ’09 and Grif Peterson ’09, dressed respectively as the Hindu deities Krishna and Kali, get into character before this year’s Pub Crawl, the Carnival-like annual kickoff to Senior Week. Calastri and Peterson’s costumes were inspired by �ֲ���ý travels: she through Sri Lanka and southern India, he in northern India during Short Term 2007 and again in 2008 under a Barlow Thesis Grant.

Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Awarded in September, the two-year grant will support Sommer’s research at �ֲ���ý and at the University of New Mexico, where she will work in 2003. Sommer, a Litchfield resident, is investigating the cardiovascular disease typically found in chickens exposed as embryos to dioxin. The research could indicate a relationship between congestive heart failure in humans and exposure to dioxin or similar toxic chemicals that accumulate in tissue from environmental exposure.

“Knowing the mechanism of how this happens in chickens will make us much more confident about saying whether we think dioxin could contribute to cardiovascular diseases in humans right now, with what we’re exposed to in our diet,” Sommer says. A potent pollutant, dioxin makes its way up the food chain to us through foods like meat, milk and cheese, and is retained in body fat.

Sommer is focusing on the “beta-adrenergic receptor,” a protein that controls the heart’s response to varying workloads. (It’s the same protein controlled by prescription “beta-blocker” drugs.) She hypothesizes that dioxin interferes with this cardiac signaling system and sets off, in her words, a “downward spiral” of heart function leading to failure. Her aim is to try to identify the source of that interference, which could involve impacts on the amount or the chemical properties of the receptor, or the heart’s sensitivity to it.

In January, Sommer heads to the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, where she will work with Mary Walker, a leading researcher in developmental toxicology. There she will treat chick embryos with a range of dioxin doses and other chemicals that will help determine how the dioxin affects the embryos’ hearts. In April, Sommer will bring the treated hearts back to �ֲ���ý for analysis during the following year and a half.

Sommer is from New London, Wisc., and did her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned her doctorate in pharmacology. Her doctoral research investigated how dioxin administered to rats while they were in the uterus or still nursing affected the animals’ reproductive tracts as adults.

She is one of the rare researchers to receive the award from the NIEHS, one of the National Institutes of Health, on the first application. Delighted by the support for her research, she is also pleased that the award will enhance the academic offering at �ֲ���ý. This type of work is more often done at major research universities than small liberal arts colleges.

“It would be very difficult to compete with laboratories that have graduate students, post-docs and research scientists who do this full time,” she says. The affiliation with Walker and the University of New Mexico also benefits �ֲ���ý and its students, she adds. For a researcher, “it’s very important to have these outer links,” she says. “If a faculty member stays current in research, it really improves her teaching.”