Trigger points inside the mission to stop Mass Shootings in america. Will tell you all about the book in a minute, but i would like to remind our audience that you can be part of this conversation as well if youre watching us on youtube, please share any questions that you would like us to address in the text chat. This is one of the few times when an internet Comment Section is a good thing. And well make sure to get to some of your questions as we go through the program. Mark its so lovely to see you last. I think ive seen you in person three times in the last two years and two have been within the past week. Yeah, so this is a good sign for sure and im so excited about this book. Not only because its a reporting tour de forests that has taken a lot of your time in the last 10 years. But also because it brings hope and perspective to something. Thats a really grim subject. And we have a lot of grim topics out there right now, but not as much hope and perspective. So im really excited about. Taking our audience on the journey of discovery that youve undertaken here. And maybe to start the journey because it really is this is a book about policy its about science. Its about characters. Its a really gripping narrative and it shows us a discipline called behavioral threat assessment. That is that aims to prevent Mass Shootings and given, you know, and sort of comes out of the fact that we have a horrifying epidemic of Mass Shootings in america and that the debate about the role that the prevalence of guns in our society plays is pretty much. Paralyzed and stuck and so behavioral threat assessment comes at the problem from a different end of the of the challenge that that we confront in solving this. And so to start us out i wanted to go back. To the very beginning which we both happened to be present for we were both working as we are now at mother jones, which is a nonprofit reader supported investigative newsroom. And as journalists do we were in our morning news meeting processing the big stories of the day and trying to figure out how journalism might bring some context and perspective that wasnt fully understood. And this meeting was on july 20th, 2012. So almost exactly 20 or 10 years ago and the night before a man walked into a Movie Theater in aurora, colorado. And open fire during a showing of batman the dark knight. And i remember we were talking about. There had just been a mass shooting here in the bay area a few months before there had been another one earlier that year and we talked about does it not seem as if this is becoming more common and we thought surely there somebody out there researching this keeping track of it who can tell us the answer and so you volunteered to figure that out. What happened next right . Well, and and this was shortly after i had begun working at mother jones and one of the first things i did you may or may not recall was a piece that we had about gun regulations. And so i had written about gun violence in the past, but that had been my initial focus coming into the newsroom as well. And waking up to that news from aurora was just really shocking as you say there were some prior events before that and this this was not a new problem then of course the Previous Year was the mass shooting in tucson, arizona that involved congress then congresswoman gabby giffords. And so right we were all asking this question, you know, what does this all about . I think its a little bit difficult for people to remember this now about that event, but at the time it was really unprecedented. This had never happened in a Movie Theater and the number of victims was quite shocking. There were 70 people shot in that attack twelve died and and it was profound and traumatic and so we wanted to know more about what was going on here and that morning after our news meeting. I sat down at my desk and started looking for data on the problem. There must be a database that shows these attacks going back in time and has some different information that we can start to analyze. And i was startled to find that there was essentially nothing. Theres nothing publicly available. So we decided in the newsroom that we would build it that day and we started. Doing it. And the kind of horrifying part of that story. Is that as soon as you had built it and you had gone back decades you had to start updating it because there was another mass shooting and another one and that winter. There was the, you know, particularly shocking mass shooting at sandy hook elementary. And so you found yourself kind of getting deeper and deeper into the story and you met christina anderson. So tell me about her. Sure. So right after we built the database initially there was several more of these events in the fall and then sandy hook and turned out to be a particularly awful year. It was really the beginning of a of a time period where this problem was escalating. And so there was growing interest and as a result and partly as a result of the work we were doing there was a Panel Discussion in san i was participating. And you see hastings and there was a young woman there named christina anderson, and she came up afterwards and introduced herself to me. She was a survivor of the Virginia Tech massacre. That occurred in 2007 at the time the worst School Massacre in American History 32 people died another 27 were injured or shot just a horrific event and a real watershed event in terms of this issue in the country. I think well talk a little bit later about some of the things that came out of that particular. Attack but christina was she told me she was and said she was interested in talking to me further about the work i was pursuing and of course once she told me who she was i said, of course, id love to talk to you and we sat down the next day and i think we talked for about four hours and she just had a remarkable story. She was beginning to do some public speaking about her experience and she was at the time focused on. How the university had responded and what the Recovery Process was like she was i could tell immediately. She was optimistic at her core. That was really striking to me. Someone whos gone through that. I mean she was severely wounded and i think nearly died. There were 11 of her classmates died in the same room where she was shot and their teacher so just unimaginable horror that shed gone through. And here she was pursuing a deeper understanding of the problem that really stood out to me really was very striking. And so we talked further and she told me a little bit more about what she was doing and it included beginning to become involved in this field called behavioral threat assessment this work of prevention. And i learned that she was essentially telling her story at threat assessment trainings and conferences and i had some opportunity to start seeing her do that and things further evolved from there in terms of my learning about what this this prevention model was all about. Yeah, i remember you were talking at the time about how this was a way to actually prevent these shootings from happening in the first place. So explain a little bit how that works and maybe you can tell us about brandon because thats a really amazing story in the book. Sure. So threat assessment is is a communitybased violence prevention method and it brings together collaborative expertise in Mental Health and Law Enforcement and works with other Community Leaders depending on the settings. So in a School System or a university you also have administrators involved School Psychologists counselors people, who are looking out for the safety and wellbeing of students as well as their educational experience and the way that the process works essentially is when theres a person of concern that comes to the attention of a team. Theyre looking into that persons circumstances and trying to understand better what the issue is and whether or not that person poses a danger whether theyre thinking about planning violence and then making a to intervene and try to help that person and move them away from that idea. So thats essentially how it works. And in this particular case of this kid, how did that . How did the kid come to their attention and what did they do specifically to intervene . So a significant portion of the book. Is set in the city of salem in oregon where i went to immerse in a Threat Assessment Program in a k through 12 Public School district the salem kaiser system was built shortly after columbine in 1999 and theyre one of the kind of leading models today for how this is done and i was able to go there for the better during the better part of 2019 and observe them working cases and look at case files and talk to the practitioners and the leaders of this work. And there were several cases that were. Quite interesting to observe up close. I felt that it was really important to do that do this for the book to show. Readers what this actually looks like in in action how this process works. Explain it and describe the concept but until you see it. I think its in some ways hard to understand and so i sat in on their case evaluation meetings did a lot of interviewing with them and one of the cases that really stood out that i write about in detail in the book is was a High School Junior who i call brandon. Its not his real name the subject case subjects identities needed to be protected. Um, but brandon was a kid who . Was causing some real anxiety and his peers primarily through some threatening comments. He was making said one day at a bus stop to another student dont come to school on friday. Im going to come back here with my dads gun and shoot up the school. And other student students overheard this and and one reported it to a faculty member and then it came to the of the team. So during the case review. The lead School Psychologist a woman by the name of Courtney Mccarthy who was heading the team there reviews the case and what they know about brandon situation and it turns out theres a lot more to whats going on with him. Hed been on their radar before he had kind of history of making comments about School Shootings that you know, sort of raised eyebrows and caught peoples attention. And so theyre asking questions about what else is going on with him that might indicate that hes serious about this or that hes perhaps planning for it. Does he have access to a gun . He had also said to another student that he had gotten a hold of the code to his fathers gun safe at home. And thats how he was going to get the gun. So the teams gathering all this information as quickly as they can one of the first things they need to determine is does he have a gun . So an sro a School Resource off . Serving on the team goes out to his home the same day and interviews him and his mom and determines that he does not in fact have access to weapon. So that was good in terms of any imminent danger. Then the question becomes. How do we manage this situation . What are what is the potential that its going to worsen . What could worsen it . What may cause him to go further down what the field calls a pathway to violence . Its a process of escalation that is marked with lots of behavioral warning signs that these experts are looking at. And they develop a plan to intervene through constructive measures, which the field has learned through research and practice over the years is the most effective way in most cases to resolve the problem to try to help someone especially in in a youth setting especially the school. So they use what they call a wrap around. Energy, they extend them a lot of close personal support through counseling educational support working in this case with the family. That was somewhat cooperative, which is good because in some cases thats not the situation. We just saw this recently with Oxford High School in michigan. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah where you have a very different starkly different picture of how the parents were involved in the case. So through these steps and and these measures over time and i was able to follow the case over months to see how it was developing and to see the way that they were continuing to monitor and evaluate and adjust their plans. They were able to successfully steer brandon onto a better path and he returned to high school of following year as a senior and did pretty well and went on to graduate. So by the measure of what they did to manage him in high school. It a success story. Using this method you and i are both parents and you know, its its really kind of grim that we find ourselves thinking about, you know, does our school does our kids school have behavioral threat assessment in place, but it has become such a normal thing for kids that this is part and this is a book about Mass Shootings not School Shootings, but School Shootings are the ones that i think have really emotionally captured are thinking because it is so terrifying that you know little kids know how to hide under desks older kids, you know speculate about who might or might not be a threat to them. So how widespread is this approach and this work in schools . How how Many School Districts how many schools have this in place . Its a good question, and its a question without a clear answer. Ive asked that question a lot along the way as i was working on the book and whats interesting about this field is that its developed in a very decentralized way a lot of these programs are built at the community level. There are some National Efforts to that. Well talk about but when ive talked to leaders in this field and ask the question, there isnt really a standardized or codified system that they have to even know how much this is going on. It has grown and especially in decent years what happens is after theres a major traumatic attack. And foremost with School Shootings, then theres a surge of interest in this in this work. It happened after columbine. It happens again after sandy hook and again after parkland and especially after parkland where i think theres been a broader growing awareness in the country about this approach. It has spread more and there are actually now a handful of states that require Threat Assessment Programs in their public School Systems. I think its up to about nine now, theres some states that are toying with legislation North Carolina has a state program thats based in a state Law Enforcement agency, but its not mandated in schools. So theres this this somewhat mix and match kind of approach going on nationally both, florida and texas now require this in their Public Schools, and thats no coincidence parkland in florida and a horrific big School Shooting that happened three months later in texas at santa fe high school, which is a little bit of clips. I think in peoples minds thinking back on these big cases, but the policy tends to follow across the map where these happen. Wow, so i want to just get something out of the way for our audience because im sure a lot of people listening and watching will be thinking why arent you talking about the guns . Why are you talking about people, you know, and there is, you know sort of this very sharp war and adage that guns dont kill people people do thats not what you were focused on in this book, right it that there is a an intense conversation in america about the role that guns play in our society the prevalence of them the ease of access to the but you wanted to tell theyre probably 99 conversations about that tonight somewhere and this is the one that happens to be about another aspect of this issue. Yeah. Why did you want to do that . Theyre also 99 books about it, too. So, yeah, i we were deep in this subject beginning back in 2012 as we were discussing and i like i think many other people in our country grew frustrated with the sort of stuck paralyzed and trench political debates that we have about gun regulations. Its a very important debate and there has been a lot of things that have changed with it. Not at the federal level. Theres this sort of this cliche nothing ever happens, and thats if you look at congress, but actually totally wrong if you look at the state and local level, theres been all kinds of changes in the past decade with gun laws in a basic sense. The problem is they go in both directions. So we have this real Patchwork Society of regulation for firearms. Some states have very strict laws like here in california and some are very loose about regulating guns. So i didnt want to focus on that because you know years ago. I had the feeling that there had to be other ways to look at this problem. There had to be more we could do to try to figure it out and solve it and when i learned about behavioral threat assessment started digging into it. It was very exciting because i realized that thats what this was. This was a very different way to look at the problem that kind of got past all of that political noise that were very familiar with that. I think in many ways is a nonpartisan way of thinking about the problem. Its its pragmatic. It meets the reality of the problem where it is. Were a society that has many many guns and will continue to we have nearly 400 million firearms in this country. Now that wont change broadly any time soon. So therefore what else can we do to grapple with this problem and as i say at the outside of the book, you know, i believe like the majority of americans that we need more effective gun laws. Thats an important issue, but that the book that i was going to write was not going to be about that that i wanted to go beyond that and look at this from a human behavioral perspective because i think there is a lot of possibility in this approach. So lets talk about that because there really is so much amazing behavioral science in this book and maybe you can take us back to the very beginning of how this discipline emerged and what it came out of. Yeah, so this was this was really exciting for me and i loved writing this aspect of the book. There was a lot of discovery for me and doing it looking at how this field began. And there were some very surprising things about it. So it dates back about four decades and it begins really with a collaborative effort between Mental Health specialists in front forensics psychology and Law Enforcement in this case the United States secret service. In the early 1980s the secret service had become intensely focused on trying to figure out how to do a better job of perhaps predicting who would try to assassinate the president and other high profile public figures and political figures that it was trying to protect people forget. How much what an extraordinary degree of Political Violence that was . Its 70s in particular. Thats right coming out of the 60s and 70s with assassinations of Major Political figures. And so there were some forensics psychologists and psychiatrists in the boston area who were focused on this and starting to look into these questions in a state Mental Health institution in massachusetts and a forensic psychologist by the name of robert fine. Who i whose story i tell an early in the book. Of his mentor a psychiatrist by the name of sherv sherbert fraser who was basically one of the foremost experts on violence and Violent Crime in in the Mental Health field in that era had told him when he was leaving his studies at har. I think you should go work with dangerous men was what he said to him. And robert fine was was kind of floored by this. It wasnt even on his radar and he was essentially saying go to bridgewater the Mental Health stateMental Health hospital for at the time was called this for the criminally insane. And spend time with these incarcerated essentially incarcerated people. I mean, they called it a hospital, but it was a prison a maximum security prison. For people who were considered the most psychotic and dangerous and violent men in the state of massachusetts. And what is mentor told him was by going and spending time with these people you will develop an insight into them and a moral authority about them that you cant get any other way. And so thats what fine went and did he started for years investigating in the context of the hospital with his colleagues in Mental Health and social workers. What is it that brought these people here . And around this time. The secret service was also developing this deeper concern and the two streams converged in a collaboration to try to figure out more effectively who is threatening to attack political figures and the president there were men in that institution who had done that and so part of the question was how can we study this and talk to them and try to understand their mindset and look at the behaviors and circumstances that led up to their assassination assassination attempts and learn from that and so they began pursuing that around the same time was it was this is around 1980 when this is getting going and john lennon is murdered in new york. And right at that time is when the experts at bridgewater and the secret service were talking about pursuing this collaboration. And so there was the recognition that this is also that problem celebrity stalking and there were some other similar things going on in different parts of the country. I just found this very fascinating that this was sort of developing independently in some ways out in los angeles. There was a big celebrity stocking problem in 1980s kind of culminating with a high profile murder of a young actor named Rebecca Schaefer in 1989 stalker showed up at her door and shot her to death and this was shocking to the country people of a certain age will remember this and Holly Hollywood was up in arms and people started asking the question. Why do we have to wait for this to happen . This is a person who you could see was dangerous for a long time. Why cant we be more proactive so the lapd starts working on this developing what it called . Its Threat Management unit developing principles of threat assessment work. And so seeing how that all was sort of bubbling up and then starting to come together as a discipline through research and through work in the field. Its just really fascinating for me, especially the way thats you know, these kind of large cultural and Political Forces were kind of feeding into it and what was happening in the country. So as you can see, ive already gotten some questions from the audience. So people are doing what we ask them to do and typing any questions into the text chat. On the youtube live stream and one of them is really pertinent to this which is and it also is really pertinent to one of the really break through insights from your data work on this at mother jones that the frequency of these attacks really has increased in this past decade. And the questioner wants to know. How much energy has been spent figuring out . Why why is this happening so frequently and why is it happening . So frequently in this culture . Yeah, its its a big question and a very complex one. What are the cultural and perhaps Political Forces that are working on this and also the ways in which we process our own culture and our own media. The Digital Media age has changed this problem a lot too. I write about that quite a bit in the book how social media and the spread of information really affects some of these cases. And i think that speaks in some ways to the escalation of the problem. One of the issues. Is that the people who in many cases who think about committing an attack like this have come to believe that it is a valid idea that it is a valid solution to their problems to their suffering or rage or despair. And i think that idea has been reinforced in some ways by our media and the ways that we think about and talk about this problem and one of the things that i try to really do with the book is to demy. I who mass shooters are because we tend to regard them as these insane monsters who just snap right . Thats the phrase that everyone repeats over and over and the question thats asked after the the big attack is what made the guy snap as if this is an impulsive crime. Someone just goes nuts and then goes out and can get some mass shooting but thats just not true. Thats not what happens in any of these cases. These are all if you look at the case evidence, these are all planned crimes. These are planned acts of violence and theyre planned and thought out over days weeks months of time and and therein lies the hope of this work and this field when they recognize that that this is there is a process that leads up to these attacks and there are signs. There are warning signs. We can detect along the way if we can understand that better than we can get in the way of it before it happens. Thats a really interesting perspective and one of our viewers asked to kind of pertinent question to that which ill try to encapsulate as you know, can you learn anything from this discipline about who is going to do this . You know, can you for example they ask you know . Why are most of these perpetrators male . Can you sort of filter the population and say okay males are more prevalent are more likely to do this men in a certain age group are more likely to do this. Is that part of what this is about . In short the answer is no this is not a method of prediction and what experts in the field have learned about this over the years is that prediction is impossible because and its not for lack of trying trying to study this to the point that we could somehow identify through demographics or characteristics might do this. The problem is as i explained early in the book that all of these sort of boxes we can check about shooters. Theyre just far too broadbased. So if youre talking about males, well youre talking about just under half the population if youre talking about white males countless people who are interested in guns who might play violent video games who are angry or struggling with Mental Health issues issues at work are in school or in relationships. There are many many people who have these problems who would never dream of committing a mass shooting. So there is no predictive profile. Thats another one of the big myths about this that i think is widely misunderstood about the problem. Instead the field is focused on prevention and if theres anything that the field of work is profiling its the behavioral process itself. Its not the people. Its what the people are doing and the way that i describe another way that i describe this in the book is to say that in a certain sense. Whats more important about understanding a mass shooting is how the perpetrator got to the point of doing it to the point of attacking not why . The how is what really matters because sometimes in many cases that the question why is very difficult to answer motive is very complicated to try to untangle and a lot of these cases and i think in some of them its just unnowable. And meanwhile, we have a media culture and i think a culture generally and politically that wants a simple explanation and thats thats a natural human instinct right to try to understand something. So horrific you want to clean clear explanation. What is it that caused this . So we we then tend to fall into very simplified explanations. Oh, this is all about Mental Illness. Oh, this is all about leftwing or rightwing ideology. Oh, this is all about being an angry male. Those are all factors that play into these cases, but none of them are defining in a way that is useful to preventing these crimes let alone predicting them. Thats fascinating. So that makes me think of a portion, excuse me of a portion of the book that you call the mind hunters or the new mind hunters where you end up spending a lot of time at fbi headquarters and quantico, virginia, which is an experience that not a lot of people have had talking with these fbi specialists looking at how do peoples behaviors. Tell us about their mental state and what theyre going to do. Tell me a little more about that. Yeah. So this this actually takes us back to the Virginia Tech story in 2007 because after that watershed event the the then president George W Bush is white house asked several agencies within the federal government to look into the problem of Mass Violence on college and university campuses. Essentially. You know, what are we going to do about this . How are we going to figure out what happened here and prevent it from happening again . And so that resulted in a very stepped up effort at the fbi, which historically had done threat assessment work, but this was kind of opening a new chapter where the fbi then whats going to collaborate with the department of education and dig into data on violence on college. This is of all kinds and they did a kind of an overview survey of 200 plus cases going back quite a few years to to gather data and look at is what they could about, you know, the circumstances and so on and so forth to try to understand better the risks were. And the leaders in in this of this team at the within the Behavioral Analysis unit, which is kind of a storied part of the the agency. Its well known to the public through its history of tracking serial killers became kind of a big sort of pop cultural phenomenon decades ago with with silence at the lambs and and then more recently mind hunter and so thats why landed on this title for the chapter the new mind hunters because what these specialists were doing was kind of an evolution of that work kind of building off that legacy but also different that serial kill work was about profiling unknown criminals who had committed these horrific killings and using the crime scene to try to understand who they were and then go track them down. But this this work that that kind of grew out of that in some ways was again about profiling the behavioral process. Thats the work of behavioral threat assessment doing deep research try to understand mass shooters and so going out and investigating cases as they were happening. And trying to learn from them and this started in the late 2010s after Virginia Tech they built a unit. Theyre called the behavioral threat assessment center. And i spent a lot of time getting to know one of the leaders an agent named Andre Simmons whos since retired, but led led that team for a number of years had a background in Mental Health, which i dont think is coincidental and crisis intervention policing. Its one of them most fascinating things about this work to me is the way that it marries Mental Health expertise and Law Enforcement expertise. Theres a synergy there that really helps to understand the problem better. And to to act upon it and try to get in the way and prevent attacks so that team the fbi went on to do a lot of Significant Research into the Mental Health factors in these cases and looking at active shooters and really continuing to further develop the research in the field. So what kinds of things did they find out . Well one thing that was really striking that to me that came out in a study just a few years ago of active shooters was that the majority of them did not have clinically diagnosable Mental Illness. And this is something that the field has known for quite a while through research, but this really put an emphasis on it and deepened it in some ways through the specific case studies. I think its 60 plus cases. They looked at over a decade plus of active shooters in the 2000s. And this is another one of our big myths about mass shooters that theyre all crazy. Insane mentally ill. I mean it dovetails very closely with the snapping idea and i think that the the public tends to think of that as okay. These are people who are completely detached from reality hearing voices telling them to go kill or whatever things that we might associate with conditions like paranoids schizophrenia. Thats simply not the case and in the vast majority of these cases and even in the small percentage of cases where Mental Illness is significant and diagnosable. Its rarely a primary cause in terms of the how why questions what led this person down this path when you take a deep look at these cases, and so i think thats really important because blaming the solid Mental Illness which happens every time we have one of these cases thats part of the National Discussion is wrong and its counterproductive to understanding whats going on here and its damaging its damaging to people who do suffer from those conditions who the vast majority of whom are not violent. Theres Extensive Research showing that that those afflictions are not predictive of violence or even correlated with violence and any meaningful way. So this is this kind of research at the fbi and elsewhere i think is has really advanced understanding of the problem in some significant ways. Thats really counterintuitive in some ways. It is sort of assume that somebody cant be well. Who does Something Like this and it also . Like you said, you know so often the policy debate focuses on well, lets make sure people with Mental Illnesses dont have access to guns. But maybe you would have more of an impact if you removed access to guns for people who are well. Well, its important to acknowledge that a mass shooter by definition is not someone who is mentally healthy. Obviously. I mean, these are people with Serious Problems but the distinction in sort of delayed description of Mental Illness and the clinical diagnosis Mental Illness is important here because the people doing this their problems by and large are personal and and you know deep grievances and rage and and depression mental Mental Health issues that are serious. Theres a lot of suicidality in these cases. Thats very important as one of our early discoveries with the database at mother jones. Was that the majority of mass shooters are suicidal. So obviously Mental Health is very significant in this equation, but we need to distinguish that from crazy what we call crazy because then were identifying these people as unrelatable and unsolvable and that is and antithetical to the the work of this field. And and i think thats really so it is counterintuitive as say i mean, its also counterintuitive frankly that you have fbi agents in Law Enforcement people doing this work, right . I mean historically Law Enforcement is about investigating crime and helping prosecute crime not preventing crime. So when i first learned about this work in the context of Law Enforcement and particularly at the fbi, it was kind of wowed by that. You know, really theyre fbi specialists who are focused on Mental Health interventions, but there are and theres some Extraordinary People doing this work. I mean, im sure it is thats going to be another counterintuitive piece for many people listening to this that you know, we are to take agencies like the fbi and local Law Enforcement who many people trouble finding a lot of trust in. Yeah, we have trouble finding a lot of trust in. Yeah, we have to trust them to. Be thoughtful and empathetic essentially about what is going on here. For sure, and i think in some ways the bar is quite high for that especially now in an era where trust in Law Enforcement has been called into question and some big ways again, and and i think for some very very serious reasons and so youre asking a lot to ask communities to trust that this method will be used effectively at fairly with constructive interests in mind, but i know from the years of work that i put into researching and writing this book that when this model is used well and effectively its its quite remarkable in what it can accomplish. I think, you know people often ask the question too. Well, how many Mass Shootings have been stopped with this and its a tricky question to answer. In terms of results and i was asking that question of many people in the field for a long time. You know, i think. Whats so difficult about it is that youre youre proving a negative success and a threat assessment case is the absence of an outcome of a violent outcome the absence of evidence in that sense. Thats also why we never hear about this. Its not news when nothing happens. And so in that sense, its hard to show the results of this work. But in having gone in and watched teams work and looked at many cases. I became persuaded that there are there have been many cases throughout the country that have been stopped dozens possibly even hundreds of these kinds of attacks where youre talking about individuals who were developing a violent idea. Were making plans were taking steps to prepare in some cases had access to weapons. Can you prove that that person was going to commit violence if they dont ever commit violence . Thats an interesting question, right but when you look at the details of these cases and talk to the people whove worked them and worked many cases like them. It is quite compelling that that the results would have been something. Some sort of violent attack had there not in this type of prevention work getting in the way of it. That makes me really curious about the relationship between the behavior that leads to violence and the different motivations that weve seen in these attacks, you know you are tracing some of the history of you know kind of obsession with celebrities in the 80s there have been racially motivated Mass Shootings, ideologically motivated Mass Shootings. We see at the moment kind of arise in Political Violence and politically violent rhetoric. You know misogynist rhetoric has been a factor in some of these. So so there are many different motivations, but it seems like these practitioners. Are a little bit content agnostic and are saying regardless of what youre thinking some of the actions that youre taking may enable us to intervene is that i yeah, i understand that the point youre making i wouldnt say it quite like that because i think that those factors are very meaningful. I think the better way to describe it. Is that the field also has to be adaptive to the way that cases evolve and each case is really handled as a unique situation. Its specific to the the person and the circumstances and the behaviors within that there are many recognizable warning signs and behaviors that become matters of concern. So its not that political ideology or Domestic Violence or misogyny arent relevant as content. Theyre highly relevant. Its more that youre looking always at stick picture with this approach to gauge the level of danger and to figure out the best ways to intervene and i think that in my study of cases both actual attacks that have happened and threat cases that ive been able to gain access to you can see the way that the problem changes and evolves and so in more recent years and thats thats twofold. Its the way that the worlds changing and then its also the deepening research and the further learning about the nature of the problem some of my own work in in that that ive done with with mother jones is to look at the role of whats now called in some settings toxic masculinity which refers to Domestic Violence and the socalled in cell ideology. This is a rising problem. I documented quite a number of cases in recent years where that was in the mix very explicitly. So thats very significant to the field and and the adapts to those changing factors political extreme extremism as well. I ive talked to a number of leaders in the field who have become very focused on that in recent years because of whats happening with with Political Violence in our country the escalation of that and weve seen that with Mass Shootings the tree of life mass shooting in pittsburgh the synagogue there a few years ago motivated by far right violent extreme ideology. Theres more of that in the mix now and thats thats an important recognition thats going on in this work. Lets talk a little bit about access to guns one of our one of our questioners asks and reminder you can still ask questions in the youtube text chat. So feel free. One of our but one of our viewers or listeners asks. Whether the availability of military style assault weapons is a significant factor in the prevalence and lethality and you know asks, is there a reason to allow the selling these which is not exactly our topic tonight, but i am curious how the field looks at. Access to lethal weapons yeah, as you say the discussion about types of weapons and their availability is really a different discussion than the focus of the book, but its one that were very familiar with and that ive also covered in my related work and theres a lot that that can be said about that thats available in in the media and in research, i think as it pertains to to this method and this field of work and trying to grapple with the problem, you know, its interesting when i observe throughout assessment professionals and in a variety of settings over the years, i noticed that theres very little discussion of gun policy. Its not that they wont talk about it or guns availability or regulation. Not that they wont talk about it. Its more that i think the the approaches is grappling with the reality of the problem, which the guns are everywhere. I have i quote one leader in the field early in the book. He says, you know when were working threat cases. We just assume everyone has a gun because its safer to assume that than to not assume that thats to me that was sort of a remarkable distillation of the reality that that threat assessments dealing with because they need to find out in many cases thats the situation. But you know in a basic sense sure that the availability of those kinds of firearms is going to complicate the problem and complicate this work. Someone also asks us. Which is perhaps slightly related whether these shootings are more likely to happen in red states or blue states ie states that have a lot of gun regulation versus ones that dont do you know if theres any correlation that the field has identified im not aware of one and i cant answer that scientifically because i havent studied it in that way, but i can say anecdotally and perhaps empirically that the answer is no i mean these happen everywhere. If you look at our database that we built at mother jones and you know expanded over and over and over again over the past decade. There are very few states in the nation that havent been touched by this problem and a lot of a lot of these attacks have happened and you know what we call blue states or states that have tighter gun regulations. So, you know that gets back into the discussion of a very patchwork system of regulation. But thats not really a meaningful way to look at this problem in my view when talking about this kind of approach to solving it. Buck a little more about the kinds of things that these experts have found that you know us late people might not know one of the things i was stuck by was that the book takes you into these unexpected settings like at one point youre you know in disneyland, you know at a conference of people researching Mass Shootings, you know in this in this fantasy setting what was going on there. Yeah, thats actually open the book with this because it was so surreal to me the first time i went. I ended up returning a number of times to this annual training conference run by a Nonprofit Organization called the association of threat assessment professionals a group for a Membership Group for people who do this work. Come together and train and and learn the work and and network as well and they hold an annual conference in disneyland and it was so strange to i remember the first time i walked into a Conference Room in the disneyland hotel. Id just been outside by like the tiki bar and the Swimming Pool and and all these families are frolicking. It was in all they have they hold this in august. So its like the peak of Summer Vacation season and then i walk into this darkened ballroom. Thats like cold because theyve got the air conditioning down so that people will stay awake all day, or maybe its too hot outside. I dont know and you know looking at slides of related to mass murder and psychopathy and and you know hear all these professionals have come in from all over the country to sit there and do that all day for four days 20 years of workplace shooting homicidal cyber stalking evil thoughts wicked deeds, you know, thats what these training sessions are called. You walk outside again after the days over and theres like kids with ice cream cones and mickey mouse and its a small world playing on the speakers and its very surreal setting the reason that they hold it there has to do with the historic roots that i was describing earlier in the lapd as they were building an early version of this at the at the lapd the Threat Management unit. They were starting to network with other Law Enforcement and Mental Health professionals, and theres a strong connection in los angeles to the Entertainment Industry because of celebrity stalking issues, and that was a big focus for the Threat Management unit in its early years and so as a result they had started hosting this at disney and i guess they have just continued their ever since but as a setting to like focus on this work, it was just kind of wild to see that the first time and you wouldnt really know it if you were there. Its all happening, you know behind closed doors, so yeah, 20 years of workplace shootings. Yeah, it seems it seems to apropos in a certain way because there is this aspect of this problem that is very much about a kind of Public Performance that the shooter is engaged in and im curious how people doing this work. Think about the change over time from a kind of legacy media environment where the channels that everybody would learn about you would were mediated where you know television and newspapers or journalists like us. Would tell the story of the sort of horrific event to now. Where we have seen shooters livestream the tragedy themselves. How are there insights from behavioral threat assessments about threat assessment about how media and platforms need to think about this . Yes, absolutely contained in in the work of the field and in the research and this is something that ive focused on a lot with my own reporting and i do write about length and trigger points later in the book. I think that Digital Media and social media has changed this problem in enormous ways and has big implications for how the media the news media reports on and covers these events. Primarily what were talking about here is whats known as this socalled copycat factor or the copycat effect. This is a problem thats been around for a long time. But as i was getting to know the work of the fbi leaders at the Behavioral Analysis unit. I was hearing from them that they were noticing in in the 2010s worsening trend with this problem some very unsettling patterns of case details where there were quite a few perpetrators of School Shootings in particular and people individuals who are threatening or plotting School Shootings who were fixated on Previous School shooters primarily or foremost the columbine attackers. I started referring to this is columbine effect in my reporting and documenting these cases by the time and i started this a number of years ago by the time i was writing the book there were over a hundred cases like that both threat cases and actual attacks where the perpetrators had taken inspiration from columbine had identified with the shooters were dressing like them trying to talk like them. So theres something going on here. Thats very significant that relates to our media environment as i said that that problem has been around for a long time and i document much earlier examples of it in the book the behavior is i think better described as emulation behavior. Its one of the areas of warning the signs. I in the book. Identifying with fixating on and trying to perhaps outdo predecessors of this crime, but with social media really accelerated in some alarming ways, and i was hearing about this from fbi leaders and then finding it in the cases i was studying and it says a lot i think about how we talk about and frame and cover these cases because meanwhile, i think as many people know the media tends to sensationalize these horrors and really focus on the attackers splash their pictures all over the front page and show them on the screen over and over again and the body count the body counts. Theyre manifesto so called manifestos where they rant and rage whatever theyre thinking often without much coherence and as i looked into this more more i realized theres kind of a unique opportunity here for us to change it certainly within the media. We dont need to do that and still deliver the reporting on this issue that is important in the public interest, which is i mean, we do need to report on the people who do these crimes we need to understand the context and the circumstances and thats very much aligned with what this field of work does. But we can do that forensically and and use an approach. Thats more balanced and i advocate for that in the book and in my work from other jones ive written about this too. I arrived at a term for this that i call strategic diminishment. Which is the idea that while we have to focus on this to some extent we can really shrink the frame around the perpetrators and only identify them and talk about them in ways that have value to the public interest, but then no more not excessively and also theres some steps we can take to avoid sensationalizing they want to be seen in many cases. As looking evil and dangerous and they pose with pictures of guns on facebook and knowing that those will get circulated widely on social media and in the news and historically thats been the case the Research Shows that many of these perpetrators are seeking sensational media attention. So by continuing to give it to them were exacerbating the problem and theres good news here. This has changed a lot in recent years. I think a lot of people in the media have started to recognize the problem with this and have written about it myself and others and you dont see that so much anymore even just in the past few years. I think people probably recall some of the biggest Mass Shootings the perpetrators from 10 years ago, but maybe not from four and five years ago because they werent getting nearly as much spotlight even though were still identifying who they are and what they did and explaining the case to the public thats also important by the way because of this enormous and growing issue of misinformation. There are a number of cases i talk about in the book where people have been wrongly identified in the immediate aftermath as the mass shooter. It happened at Virginia Tech a person was identified on fox news as the shooter. It wasnt him and there was some significant repercussions for that person Boston Marathon Boston Marathon bombing. Thats right. There are a few others. So its important that the the media report on this accurately and cleareyed but also with an eye to this balance to not sensationalizing this anymore and that also goes to what i was talking about earlier with the need to really demystified this problem. If we regard these people as evil monsters and give them the tabloid treatment. Were just perpetuating those myths. So the clock is ticking down. Im going to try to do a little bit of rapid fire. Yes, get through our remaining audience questions. One of them is really interesting. The person asks is the threat assessment for a mass shooting similar. To the thread to harm yourself and you talked about suicides a little bit. Yeah, thats a great question. And yes, there is a very strong intersection of those risk factors a lot of threat cases involve suicidality and many Mass Shootings and in suicide, so that is an important factor that throughout assessment teams look at for sure and the kinds of interventions that threat assessment teams use are also helpful to preventing suicide no doubt this person has a question also about media, but from a different perspective than what we were just talking about the type of media that somebody consumes and they say, you know people who that i know who are angry fearful and resentful nearly always consume a certain type of media though not all of them act out. Thank goodness. Is there something to that . Yeah. Thats a thats a great question and i do address that in the book because i was curious about that too. We often see evidence in cases of these attacks that the perpetrator was. Intensely interested in graphic violence in firearms in violent video games the short answer is that that is present in a lot of cases, but theres no evidence at all that it is that it it relates to causation that does not cause people to commit attacks. Whats interesting about it is that it may correlate in some ways in in cases with warning signs with behavioral warning signs. In other words a person who is not doing well broadly is also doing this and there is some thought in the field leaders in salem have talked to me about this and elsewhere and also at the fbi that that some perpetrators will use violent content violent media as a way of sort of psychologically gearing up for an attack to rehearse, you know, a First Person Shooter video game or to just get psyched up for what theyre gonna do. So in that sense, it could be highly relevant as a warning sign, but theres no evidence of it as a factor of causation. So i thought thought that was a really interesting. Kind of discovery through this work because of course violent media has been blamed for a very long time as the cause of these attacks to going all the way back to columbine and and before thats a really fascinating perspective because we forget that, you know doing something horrific like this is very hard for a human to to do yeah, we have a lot of a lot of things that stop us from doing that. Thats right. And yet all of us are capable in a very fundamental way of Something Like this. So thats an interesting i think juxtaposition to to think about the kind of deeper behavioral science thats involved here. Yeah, ive always been really fascinated by the research about the crimes of nazi germany and the way that ordinary people are capable of monstrous things. Yes. Thats right. Which seems highly relevant. Slightly moving back to the policy arena. This questioner wants to know how successful groups like moms demand have been in helping combat this and i think maybe a way that it ties. Back into your research is our policy advocates using the insights from behavioral threat assessment to propose particular solutions. I think that has started to happen more recently and in some ways it may be happening without them even fully realizing it the theres a really powerful and i think effective Grassroots Movement with that organization and others although primarily with with moms demand action to affect policy change at the local and state level and some of the policy ideas that they have pursued do relate to prevention. I think probably the most pertinent is the advent. More recent policy called red flag laws, which now exists in 19 states, and its pretty new phenomenon and what that is quickly in a nutshell is is a civil procedure to petition a court to take away a firearm from someone whos considered a threat to either themselves or other people and thats can be done by family members of that person in most states where this is now legislated there are a few variations on it that start to bring in Law Enforcement with the capability to do that and then the court can judge will determine if a firearm should be removed. You can see how that would be a very useful tool additionally in this field of work too. So, i think there is an increasing synergy with those kinds of efforts. The clock is ticking way down. Ill give you one more question that. Has that hopeful note in it if you could propose one small policy fix. One small change drawing on all the research youve done. Can you think of one . Is it red flag laws everywhere . I dont know if i would say that but i do i do think there is promise with that tool. I think its no coincidence that it has strong bipartisan support. I think people recognize the value in it. It goes straight to that question of how do we keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people that we understand to be dangerous and shouldnt have a firearm. We always have that debate after one of these attacks. Why not get in the way of it proactively right . I think that also goes to the question of scaling this method in the country. I think it has a lot of potential and from my perspective and all the work ive done to put into this book that we could be doing more of this work to great effect. Thank you so much mark. I want to remind people of the title of the book. Its trigger points inside the mission to stop Mass Shootings in america and as you might imagine its available everywhere. That books are sold. I would love to thank all of you who tuned in and participated reminder that if youd like to watch more programs or support the commonwealth clubs efforts in making both virtual programs like these but also in person programs hopefully very soon, please visit commonwealth club. Org slash events. Thank you so much, and thank you. Mark