Newswise — WASHINGTON, DC, December 17, 2012 — In the wake of the recent Newtown, Connecticut, massacre that left 27 victims dead, including 20 elementary school students, the American Sociological Association (ASA) has sociologists available to discuss school shootings and how families and communities recover from these types of tragedies.

Nancy Berns is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Drake University. Her teaching and research interests include grief, death, and violence. She authored the 2011 book, Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us.

Glenn Muschert is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Miami University (OH). His areas of scholarly interest lie in the sociological study of crime and social problems, including the mass media framing of high profile crimes, school shootings, missing persons, and social control through surveillance technologies. Muschert’s extensive work on school shootings includes the 2012 book, School Shootings: Mediatized Violence in a Global Age, which he co-edited, and his 2007 study, “The Columbine Victims and the Myth of the Juvenile Superpredator,” which appeared in Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice.

Katherine S. Newman is a sociologist and the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. In 2004, she co-authored a book, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings.

To request an interview, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA’s Media Relations and Public Affairs Officer, at (202) 527-7885 or [email protected].

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About the American Sociological Association The American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society.