1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America

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Speaker 1 Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Speaker 2 Why do mass shooters look to previous shooters for inspiration and sometimes for tactical ideas too? What I call in the book emulation behavior. It's known as the copycat problem.

Speaker 2 But they're also looking for a way to get attention. They want notoriety.
They want to be known. They want to be a somebody instead of a nobody because they feel like nobody.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.

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Speaker 1 Today, my guest, Mark Fulman, on school shootings and other mass shootings. This is a horrific problem.
It's kind of a little bit of a depressing topic to do a show on.

Speaker 1 I was a little hesitant at first. Actually, this conversation turned out amazing.
It's an almost uniquely American problem, or is it?

Speaker 1 Either way, this problem isn't or shouldn't be as impossible to solve as it seems to be. Turns out that gun control is not the whole story here.

Speaker 1 Today on the show, we'll discuss predictive measures such as what to look for in a potential shooter, how we could even potentially profile these people, or maybe not quite that, before they become violent.

Speaker 1 We'll also explore why target hardening measures, which is mostly what we do now, right?

Speaker 1 Adding different doors or barricades of security, isn't actually working, and how social media might actually be able to help us not only predict but actually prevent violence.

Speaker 1 Here we go with Mark Fulman.

Speaker 1 I can't even remember how I found the Mother Jones piece. It was probably mass shooting of the week.
And I just was like, why does this keep happening?

Speaker 1 And I still don't know, but your article did shed some light on it because everybody remembers Elliott Roger, who we'll get to in a bit. Everybody remembers the Columbine shooting.

Speaker 1 That wasn't the first, but it was the first big school shooting, at least of my lifetime. And that really just changed everything for a lot of people.
It's hard to decide.

Speaker 1 Do we just talk about school shootings or do we talk about mass shootings in general? Because there's unfortunately a wealth of material on both of those things.

Speaker 1 And I just want to, at the top of the show, acknowledge how horrific this problem really is. I often make jokes about things on this show.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't really want to do that here because it's so dark.

Speaker 1 I also want to focus on what we can look for, what we can do about it, not just lament the problem, because that's all they do on the news anyways.

Speaker 1 What's that onion headline? We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.

Speaker 2 No way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens.

Speaker 1 Right. Yes, exactly.
It's a depressing topic, man. Why couldn't you write a book on AI like everyone else?

Speaker 2 You've already put your finger on it. For me, my focus on violence prevention in this space is really ultimately a hopeful story.

Speaker 2 That's what led me to write the book because I discovered this field of work a decade plus ago called behavioral threat assessment, which is, I think, a potentially very powerful solution to this problem among, I think, a multitude of policy tools and choices that need to be made.

Speaker 2 But the debate was always and still is often only about firearms. And this is a different way of looking at at the problem.

Speaker 2 So, yes, it's very heavy subject matter inherently, but this is a way of looking at it that is really focused on progress and trying to mitigate the problem.

Speaker 1 So, you hinted at this earlier, but is it safe to say that this is only an American problem? I know there's been mass shootings in, I think, the Czech Republic.

Speaker 1 There was one in Australia, and they were kind of like, all right, that's enough guns for everybody. And everybody in Australia kind of went, oh, okay.
And just turn in their guns.

Speaker 1 Not going to happen here.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, that's really one of a number of myths that surround this this problem in perpetuity.
We have an inordinate version of this problem in the United States.

Speaker 2 It's much bigger here, but this goes on in other places in the world.

Speaker 2 There have been quite a few mass shootings in Europe, in Canada, Australia, comparable nations in terms of culture and wealth, but we have much more of it and much more frequent recurrence of it.

Speaker 2 So I think that lends itself to this kind of stereotypical idea that only America goes through this.

Speaker 2 But in the field of threat assessment, which is the focus of my book, this field of violence prevention, the term they use is called targeted violence.

Speaker 2 It's describing a planned or predatory type of violence, of attacking. A person who wants to do this plans it out carefully.

Speaker 2 That's the opportunity to prevent it because there are warning signs along the way. But that form of human violence, of targeted violence, goes on in all societies.

Speaker 2 We are also a country that has a huge number of firearms and they're very easy to get in most places. So therefore, it makes sense on a very fundamental level that we have more mass shootings.

Speaker 1 Some people do think this is not possible to solve. It's hard to think about how we would do this.
And just as a side note, I know that we have mass shootings in other countries.

Speaker 1 It seems like people who are perpetrating a mass casualty event or whatever you want to call it, if it's not a shooting, they just use whatever weapon they can get their hands on.

Speaker 1 And that's why people say it's a gun problem in America, because in China, they use cars or knives. And in China, the crimes tend to be a little bit different.

Speaker 1 Someone will go into a daycare and stab as many kids as they can because there's most people only have one kid in China. So it's like the way way to hurt the most people in one place, right?

Speaker 1 They'll run their car through a crowd of people. We have that here too, of course.

Speaker 1 You mentioned in the book Trigger Points, which, by the way, if people buy books, please use our links in the show notes. That does help support the show.
You mentioned in the book that gun control,

Speaker 1 no, you didn't say it's all the problem. I just want to be clear before people are already like cracking their knuckles to write the emails to me.

Speaker 1 You said that gun control would help reduce the number of shooting deaths just across the board by 40,000 annually.

Speaker 2 No, that's not quite right. That number actually, that was the number of approximate annual gun deaths in America at the time that the book was published, so 2022.
I see.

Speaker 1 I wondered how you figured that out. I was like, that is a lot.

Speaker 2 That's based on CDC data, just in terms of gun injuries and death. So at the time, approximately 40,000.
It's actually higher now. It's more like 50,000 a year annually.

Speaker 2 And the majority of those are suicide.

Speaker 2 And that's something that we'll talk about later when we talk about the Elliott Roger case, because in many instances, the mass shootings problem is a suicide problem.

Speaker 2 These are suicidal, homicidal attacks in which the perpetrators take their own lives. So those statistics are talking about the number of gun casualties.

Speaker 2 I do say, I think, in a general statement in the introduction to the book, that there is quite a bit of evidence-based research that tighter gun restrictions in states that have them have been effective for reducing gun violence.

Speaker 1 How do you balance that with the Second Amendment stuff, though, man?

Speaker 2 That's so difficult. You know, I also say Trigger Points is not a book about guns.

Speaker 2 And that's a provocative thing to say, a book about mass shootings, because of course you don't have mass shootings without guns. I mean, it's intrinsic to the problem itself.

Speaker 2 But really what I was interested in was human behavior. What is the human behavior that is driving this problem? And that's what the field of threat assessment is focused on in terms of solution.

Speaker 2 If you study the behavior that leads up to these attacks, you can learn about it. You can identify patterns of behavior of circumstances that are shared among these perpetrators.

Speaker 2 And that's the opportunity to intervene. If we can understand that better, we can see it coming and we can do things about it constructively to try to prevent it from happening.

Speaker 2 And when I first was learning about this field of work, which I would say a decade plus ago was really completely out of public view, I'd never heard of it.

Speaker 2 And I'd been studying mass shootings already for a couple of years at that point. So that was alone astonishing to me.

Speaker 2 And when I started to learn about cases, prevention cases that were out of public view, that were successful, where you're talking about individuals who were setting up for some pretty scary situations.

Speaker 2 where there are very strong indications that this was a person who was planning violence, who had either already obtained weapons or was had the opportunity to do so, was basically about to go commit an attack of this nature, who were steered away from it through constructive interventions by threat assessment practitioners.

Speaker 2 I was really amazed by that. And I felt that was a really important story to tell in terms of preventing this problem more.
And so that inherently is not necessarily about guns at all.

Speaker 2 That's about helping the person who needs help, the person in crisis, the person who's planning violence, who sees violence as their only solution to their suffering.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that seems to be the only real solution to this. And it's crazy to look at some of the parallels, which we'll get to later on in the show here, about the kids that present these certain issues.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, I'm checking the boxes from when I was a kid.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I would have been on whatever list, but I'd never planned anything like that, obviously. Well, it's not profiling, though, and there's no checklist.

Speaker 2 And that's something important that we'll talk about too. It's different than that.
I think that's a big misconception about this work, too.

Speaker 2 And I also want to add, too, just one more thing about the gun discussion. This is not a zero-sum discussion either.
These are not mutually exclusive things.

Speaker 2 Gun regulations are a huge part of this story too. And those intersect with the work of violence prevention, of course.
It's not one or the other.

Speaker 2 And I think we see a lot of that dichotomy in this debate about gun violence and the issue of mass shootings in our society. Everyone goes to their corners.

Speaker 2 I'm either totally for guns everywhere or I'm against all guns. And this is all about mental health or it's about something else entirely.
Politics, ideology, it's all these things together.

Speaker 2 It's a complex problem.

Speaker 1 It's interesting.

Speaker 1 If you look at the online debate, and I know some of these people in real life, like extreme libertarians who are like, the government shouldn't even be putting out roads or whatever, right?

Speaker 2 I have no taxes.

Speaker 1 Anybody should be able to buy a rocket launcher.

Speaker 1 There's a couple people like that I know, but I'm not even 100% sure that if you took them to task on that, that they would really back all this stuff up.

Speaker 1 Most of the people that I know, and I know lots and lots of gun owners, they're not kooky right-wing crazies who are like, oh, yeah, you should be able to buy a machine gun because the government's coming for, you know, I need a tank in my backyard.

Speaker 1 They're mostly hunters, first of all. Or they're like, hey, they have a saying, it's like, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
I can sympathize with that. You're home with your kids.

Speaker 1 You live in a city. Like, you want to protect yourself.
Most of them are not like, yeah, 15-year-old crazies should be able to go out and buy an unlimited amount of automatic weapon.

Speaker 1 No one has sat here and presented that argument to me, even if I indicate that I might be sympathetic to it. Nobody agrees with that.

Speaker 1 Again, save for crazy extreme libertarians who are kind of like, as long as it doesn't happen near me, I don't care. That's their line.
So gun control is not the whole story.

Speaker 1 It seems like the human behavior side of things is the bulk of it. So are pro-gun folks not completely wrong them when they say this is a mental health issue?

Speaker 2 Oh, no. Mental health is a huge part of this subject, too, of course.
You can start with the premise that no one who commits a mass shooting is a mentally healthy person. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a person who has all kinds of problems. And you look at these cases.
I've studied hundreds of them over the 12 plus years now that I've specialized on this topic.

Speaker 2 So mental health is a big part of it, but mental health is just sort of a blanket response.

Speaker 2 Oh, if we just fix the mental health system or just get people there, put them on medication and that'll fix this. I mean, that's wrong too, of course.

Speaker 2 There are all kinds of factors that are playing into these cases, but certainly I think the mental health component is important.

Speaker 2 And there are a number of cases where you can see where mental health issues and even serious diagnoses are significant factors.

Speaker 2 But this is actually a very big myth about mass shootings too that persists. The idea that mental illness is what causes these attacks, that's fundamentally wrong.

Speaker 2 There are cases where there's mental illness involved and it can be an exacerbating factor, but most of these cases, you're talking about people who are angry, isolated, depressed, and feel increasingly like violence is the only solution to their problem.

Speaker 2 But they're making a choice. It's a decision-making process and it's a planning process that leads up to the attacks.

Speaker 2 So I think the popular misconception is the idea that, oh, mass shooters are all crazy, and they're hearing voices telling them to go do this, or they're hallucinating, or they're totally disconnected from reality.

Speaker 2 That's describing mental health conditions or mental illness known as psychosis or schizophrenia. There are very few cases like that that are actually mass shooters.
It's less than 5%.

Speaker 2 And there have been multiple studies on this by psychiatrists at Columbia University, the FBI, behavioral analysis team. That's a big misconception.

Speaker 2 The question I think that's more germane is: how do you think about mental health in this equation? Because it is significant.

Speaker 2 People who are angry, depressed, lonely, isolated, they have mental health issues. There's a lot of suicidality.
And that's a very important warning sign in a lot of these cases.

Speaker 2 One thing that I learned early on was talking to a longtime practitioner in Colorado, actually in the Columbine community, a psychologist who told me that when they're doing threat assessment work and they're talking to a person of concern, especially a young person, if that kid is expressing suicidal ideation, I might want to kill myself, or I'm thinking about killing myself, they'll ask the question, where?

Speaker 2 Because if that kid's thinking about doing it at school or in a public setting, that's a very different response than at home, I don't want anyone around me.

Speaker 2 And sometimes that information is forthcoming and that tells them this is a person that may also be crossing over a line into homicidal thinking. They want to perform the suicide.

Speaker 2 Why do they want that attention? These are just an example of some of the nuances that threat assessment will look at to evaluate individuals in their specific circumstances, thinking, behavior.

Speaker 2 And so that's important as a way to just understand when we talk about mental health and mass shooters, what are we talking about?

Speaker 2 You can't just blame this on mental illness and say, fix the mental health system. It's much more than that.

Speaker 1 Actually, quarterly reminder that most mentally ill people are not dangerous in any way.

Speaker 2 Thank you for adding that. I should have said that as well.

Speaker 1 I always have to do that because whenever we talk about mental illness and we talk about crime associated with anything like this, we get emails from people who are like, hey, my life's hard enough without you guys painting with this hugely broad brush that says schizophrenic people or people who have bipolar disorder are potential mass shooters.

Speaker 1 I want to be really clear about that.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 There are millions of people who suffer from clinically diagnosable mental illnesses, and there are decades of study showing there is no meaningful correlation that is predictive in any way of violence.

Speaker 1 And usually, if those people are dangerous, they're dangerous to themselves, which means they need our help, not to be not invited to your birthday party because you're scared of them.

Speaker 2 And they're also more likely to be the the victims of violence, too.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is also true. What about the research and planning involved in the crimes? Maybe we can interdict that stuff somehow because it seems like these guys, they have plans.

Speaker 1 They assemble the weapons. They know where they're going to go in the school.
They don't just wander in there and go, oh, now's the time. There's a whole thing going on.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Another one of the eight areas, planning and preparation.
And there are a lot of things that go into that. And you see a whole range of this in cases.

Speaker 2 In some cases, it's a lot more developed than others. I'll use the Elliott Rogers story.
There was an extraordinary opportunity opportunity to get to know his mom.

Speaker 2 I think we'll talk about that in a bit and to learn more about his case, but there was also a really unusually large amount of forensic evidence available in that case because he'd written so extensively.

Speaker 2 He'd made the videos that he posted online. He had an online footprint.
There was a very extensive sheriff's investigation.

Speaker 2 And so looking at all of that, and I was able to gather a lot of other evidence that wasn't public from the case. You can see a lot of the planning behavior that he went through over years.

Speaker 2 He was planning that attack for years in some form. It was more nascent, I would say, two years ahead, but he already had the violent ideation going about attacking in that community.

Speaker 2 He started acquiring firearms 18 months before he did it. He bought three handguns.
He started going to shooting ranges in the final months. He was conducting surveillance.

Speaker 2 The places that he attacked in Isla Vista, including Del Playa Drive, which is where all the parties happened, the sorority that he was surveilling that he tried to attack.

Speaker 2 He had cell phone videos that were not public, that were found after the tragedy, where he was talking about his grievances against the perceived people who hated him or wouldn't talk to him, wouldn't connect with him.

Speaker 2 So there was just a multitude of evidence of this nature of planning and preparation and his grievances being articulated.

Speaker 2 But he was doing this all to himself for himself, and he was very good at hiding it. And that's actually unusual because in a lot of these cases, especially with young people, it's leaking out.

Speaker 2 Like the Oxford kid who's like basically begging his parents to like get me mental health help.

Speaker 2 I'm hearing voices and I'm drawing graphic violence in my notebook and I'm researching guns at school on my phone and the teachers are noticing like often that, especially with young perpetrators, that's a cry for help as much as it is a manifestation of my rage and desire to think about doing this, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 What was really, I think, fascinating to me in studying Elliot Rogers' case was the ability to go back and look at all of this material and ask the question, why was this missed?

Speaker 2 Or how else could you get to this information in a way that could prevent this from happening?

Speaker 2 And really, almost all of these cases have that in some form, that you can see those behaviors along the way.

Speaker 1 If these people have grievances and that's the major motivation or one of them, is it just bullying gone wrong? Is it things that are being taken to another level? Or does that not even matter?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because this is another area of mythology, big mythology with the problem that, oh, bullying is what causes all these school shootings. It's also fundamentally wrong.

Speaker 2 There are cases where bullying is significant, and Elliot Rogers is one of them. There are others.
I think the recent case in Georgia had a significant amount of that, too.

Speaker 2 I don't know that case as well, but it's there.

Speaker 2 But again, the way we've been talking about all of these factors, it's the same thing in the sense that, you know, you may have serious mental health issues involved in the case.

Speaker 2 You may have this circumstance or that circumstance, including bullying. That is not fundamentally the cause.

Speaker 2 And again, you can look at it from the same kind of opposite perspective or zoomed out perspective. Like millions of kids experience bullying, but there are very few that are school shooters.

Speaker 2 So that tells you nothing in and of itself.

Speaker 2 That said, if you have a person who is spiraling into crisis, going down this pathway to violence, thinking about violence, starting to plan it, and they're experiencing bullying, that's not going to help.

Speaker 2 That could be exacerbating it. And that may become their grievance.

Speaker 2 In Elliot Rogers' case, his grievance was much more about being rejected by women as he perceived that no women ever paid any attention to him and he developed this like kind of delusional loathing about them that became part of the basis for the whole incel narrative.

Speaker 2 I think one other way to think about this from the perspective of threat assessment is that often a person who is going down this pathway, going through this process, they're looking for justification for what they're going to do because they've decided that this is my only solution.

Speaker 2 I'm desperate. I don't want to live anymore.
Everyone hates me. I hate everyone.
Whatever that sort of narrative is.

Speaker 2 Well, then how can I explain to myself that I'm going to take my own life and the lives of others? That's a very hard thing to do. Most people aren't going to do that.

Speaker 2 To bring yourself to take your own life or to kill other people, there's a high bar to that, I think, for most human beings, right? You need justification. And so bullying can be justification.

Speaker 2 Misogyny can be justification. Political ideology can be justification.
And you can see that in this behavioral process, too.

Speaker 2 In Elliot Rogers' case, he had ideas of hating women for a long time, and he articulated them privately in his journals, which were not public until I I did the story.

Speaker 2 What he did online in the final year of his life is what the whole incel story came out of because he was on some of those forums posting comments.

Speaker 1 I know the forum that he was on because it started off by hating dating coaches, which I know sounds random. So I was mentioned in there a lot because I was actually doing

Speaker 2 that time.

Speaker 1 And then a lot of the people there became the 4chan people, which if people don't know what that is, like an imagine Reddit or whatever, but like no moderation and really gross.

Speaker 1 And there's like Nazi stuff in there.

Speaker 2 Way out on the fringe. Way on the fringe.

Speaker 1 And a lot of those people, it started off as almost like dark humor.

Speaker 1 And then there was some people who tried to be helpful and they got mercilessly ridiculed because it was all like, oh, that's not how reality works. You can never improve yourself.

Speaker 1 And it was very negative. And the stuff that came out of there was really scary.
And he was on that message board. And it didn't surprise me at all when I saw that mentioned in.

Speaker 1 the news sources because I had gone through that message board because I'd get alerts for my name or somebody would say, hey, you're mentioning this.

Speaker 1 And I'd see the other posts and I'm just thinking, who are these people? And they are not all, but some are these crazy, violent incel sort of folks.

Speaker 1 That board is where the incel movement began as well.

Speaker 2 One other thing I wanted to say about this was that by the time Elliot Roger got there, which I was able to obtain comprehensively is online footprint in those forums, a lot of which was not public because it was all taken down immediately.

Speaker 2 But in the first couple of days, you had some researchers and journalists grab some specific comments of him talking about incels that just labeled him as a big incel guy.

Speaker 2 There was actually a lot of evidence to the contrary in what I looked at.

Speaker 2 And that combined with the fact that he really became interested in that in his final year, and yet he'd already had this ideation for quite a while. He'd already been planning.
He had grievances.

Speaker 2 He had behavioral health issues.

Speaker 2 This, I argue in my story, with a deep dive into all this evidence, that that became his justification or solidified it further, that he found something in the online world that kind of, you know, reflected back to him what he wanted to tell himself.

Speaker 2 He was telling himself a story about why he was going to kill himself and kill other people. And that became a vehicle for him in a certain sense.
And you see that in a lot of these cases.

Speaker 2 But investigating that whole incel question further, and a big part of this was also getting to know his mother and talking to her about it because she was close with him.

Speaker 2 There's significant evidence and in her view too, that he didn't really identify with incel ideology per se.

Speaker 2 He certainly had grievances against women and there was a lot of like vile misogyny in his writing toward the end of his life and in his video.

Speaker 2 That's all legitimately there in the case and in the story of what he became and what he did. But was that the cause of what he did? No, I don't think it was.

Speaker 1 Is that video still online?

Speaker 2 It can be found. I think like anything that's been on the internet, if you really want to find it, you can.

Speaker 2 But the final video that he put out literally minutes before he began his attack was the horrible one where he was like filming himself at the beach the night before and saying, tomorrow's my day of retribution and saying all this vile, misogynistic, hateful stuff.

Speaker 2 And that became the story of him. But he created a number of videos in the run-up to that.
And the ones he did weeks prior to that were very different.

Speaker 2 They were not performative in that way of rage and telling what his plans were because he didn't want to be discovered till the last minute.

Speaker 2 Before that, he was airing his grievances and his pain in a much more subtle way that some people did see and were worried about, including his mother. That's part of the story, too.

Speaker 2 It basically set off a welfare check. She contacted authorities along with a social worker in Hyla Vista, called from LA and said, I'm worried about my son.
I can't get in touch with him.

Speaker 2 I saw this video. Please check on him.
They went out to his apartment. He answered the door and presented as normal.
He's like, I'm fine. My mom's a worry ward.
I don't know why she called you guys.

Speaker 2 He was very good at concealing his torment and his planning. But the videos were very interesting because I think to an objective viewer, they were strange too.

Speaker 1 You know, they were like, I just saw the one where he's in his car and his cadence is weird. He's just a very strange guy.

Speaker 2 His social skills were lacking. He had some developmental disabilities.
He was thought to be on the spectrum. There are issues with social behavior that come up with that.

Speaker 2 So I think a lot of people saw that and thought, like, he's weird or whatever.

Speaker 2 But definitely the point here is that people who saw that video, I think, were right in feeling like something's off here. And that's the fundamental point here, too.

Speaker 2 If you're concerned about someone in a way that maybe they're becoming dangerous either to themselves or others, that's the point at which you should seek help. What did Elliot Rogers go on to do?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So in May of 2014, Elliot Roger went on a rampage around the town of Isla Vista, which is adjacent to UC Santa Barbara in Southern California and ended up killing six people.

Speaker 2 He rammed his car into a bunch of people, was driving around town in a black BMW and shooting, shot people in several locations, and then committed suicide at the end of the attack as police were closing in on him.

Speaker 2 So I think he injured 14 people. And of course, many others in the community were traumatized, targeted in several places around town.

Speaker 1 And he originally had wanted to attack, I think, a sorority, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. He started his attack in his own apartment where he murdered his two roommates and then a third friend of theirs who came over lying in wait for those three individuals.

Speaker 2 And I want to say, too, that in my writing about this case and in a podcast episode that we did on our radio show, Reveal with a Center for Investigative Reporting, I name those victims and talk about them.

Speaker 2 And that's important too. I don't have all the names off the top of my head right now, but I encourage people to look at that too, because we're spending a lot of time talking about the perpetrator.

Speaker 2 And I think it's really important to center the victims too. But I want to make clear too that when we spend the time talking about a perpetrator like Elliot Roger or others, I do that.

Speaker 2 And I think that people in the field of threat assessment do this in their research to understand the problem.

Speaker 2 This, the purpose of this is solely to get a better understanding of the nature of this so that we can prevent it from happening.

Speaker 2 It's not to sensationalize it, to glorify it, very against all of that kind of coverage. It's important to know the victims and know what happened to them.
So they were his roommates, their friend.

Speaker 2 Then he went to a sorority house through a stroke of good fortune. It turned out there weren't many people there.

Speaker 2 Most of the members of the sorority had gone on a trip to Las Vegas and he couldn't get in the house. So he left.

Speaker 2 He ended up shooting three women on the street, killing two and injuring one, and then went around town on this rampage, eventually targeting, as I mentioned earlier, the street.

Speaker 2 Del Playa Drive, where all the house parties happen in Isla Vista, which was a focus of his grievance. It was a fixation for him.
And that goes back back to the question of warning signs.

Speaker 2 He was writing about this and making videos about it and doing a good job of keeping it secret.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that the story suggests is that had there been a threat assessment team in place back then, you might have had people involved who would know more what to look for and get access to material like that and understand what's going on with him.

Speaker 2 He had been beaten up at a party on that street almost a year prior, and that became a major triggering event for him, a public humiliation for him that really set him much more, I think, hardcore on this pathway to violence, his planning to attack.

Speaker 2 He'd already thought about it and already started begun to plan it, but that was, I think, a real pivotal moment. And I know that sounds really dark and it is, but here's the thing.

Speaker 2 That was 10 months before he carried out his attack. Oh, wow.
So you can look back at this case and say, that was a 10-month window for intervention.

Speaker 2 And a lot more things happened between that event and what he did, where he was showing warning behaviors, people were concerned about him.

Speaker 2 And it's really an amazing case study for lessons learned and how to do better at stopping this.

Speaker 1 Is there a connection between autism and these kinds of things? Because I've heard people theorize, of course, on Twitter, whatever, but I'll stop you right there. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 I want to break that potential stereotype as well, because Elliot Rogers presented some of these signs that people are like, oh my God, these autistic people are dangerous now.

Speaker 1 And it's like, okay, no.

Speaker 2 No, I'm glad you raised that. And we can talk about it in the context of the Elliott Roger case.

Speaker 2 That's one of multiple reasons why I invested so much in that story because his story was an opportunity to talk about specifically to autism.

Speaker 2 It's the same as what I was just discussing with mental illness or mental health. It is not a cause of mass shootings.
There is no evidence to support that scientifically at all.

Speaker 2 There are cases of threat cases and cases of attacks where individuals were on the spectrum, but it is part of a very complicated mix of factors in a case of someone who may be be going down what threat assessment calls the pathway to violence.

Speaker 2 It's a process over time exacerbated by life circumstances, life stressors, certain kinds of thinking, a set of behaviors.

Speaker 2 Now, if an individual has some disability or personality disorder or other diagnosable conditions, that could contribute, but it's never fundamentally the cause. That's very important to understand.

Speaker 2 And autism, as with the other conditions we're talking about, the vast majority of people who have that condition or diagnosis are not going to be violent. So that tells you nothing about cause.

Speaker 2 And that's really important to understand. I've talked to practitioners about this through my reporting on this subject.

Speaker 2 There are cases where, especially with young people in a school, in an education setting, in a school system, is autistic, that brings up other factors with the way that that person is experiencing social life.

Speaker 2 And these are some things that play into thinking of related to loneliness, suicidality, anxiety. So that is important in that way.

Speaker 2 But again, there's no evidence to say that autism causes people to become mass shooters. That's false.

Speaker 1 Good. I wanted to address that as well because after Elliot Roger, a lot of people were like, oh, you got to be careful, these autistic incel guys.

Speaker 1 And it's like, the Venn diagram is not overlapping the way you think it's.

Speaker 2 Well, and the incel component, of course, is big and a whole other side of it, I'm sure we'll get to. Yes.

Speaker 2 One thing about Elliot Roger in particular with autism that's interesting, he was actually never diagnosed clinically with autism.

Speaker 2 His parents thought that he was maybe on the spectrum, but he didn't get that diagnosis. And there was kind of a broad-based behavioral diagnosis he had as a kid.

Speaker 2 So it's sort of emblematic in a way of what I'm talking about. He had special education support.
He had some developmental disabilities that were serious.

Speaker 2 He was going through a lot of therapy, but none of these things really defined or caused what he did.

Speaker 1 I guess people just assumed it based on the video. I really don't know.
Now, some of these shooters are clearly nuts. They're out there getting Columbine shooter tattoos.

Speaker 1 They're dressing in the trench coat uniform. That might not be mental illness.
That might just be like edgy teen 101, like trying to look tough. But some of the warning signs are absolutely wild.

Speaker 1 I think he was a Korean guy pulling out knives and stabbing at the carpet in the library, threatening people, especially women, who's going to gun ranges with multiple guns and practicing reloading while shooting, which I guess.

Speaker 1 If you work at a gun range, it's like a red flag when people are training to do that because you're not a special forces guy. You're a random college student.

Speaker 1 People were refusing to attend classes with this kid. and then the school still let this kid go to school there, didn't do anything.

Speaker 1 I mean, that school needs to be sued into oblivion, which I assume they were after he did what I was doing.

Speaker 2 I think you're talking about the Virginia Tech case in 2007.

Speaker 1 Okay, I wasn't sure if that was the same thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I wrote about that case extensively in Trigger Points. That is a really good case study in terms of behavioral warning signs that were missed or misunderstood.

Speaker 2 That was also almost two decades ago. And I think the understanding of the problem has evolved and developed quite a bit since then.
But yeah, I think we can get into the discussion of warning signs.

Speaker 2 I would steer you away from the describing this as nuts, the behaviors, because that sounds like crazy or mentally insane. It's like the way we see it, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Normal people don't get a knife out and go to the library and start stabbing at it.

Speaker 2 That's an expression of anger, perhaps psychopathy in certain situations, which is also a fragment minority set of cases among school and mass shooters.

Speaker 2 people who are actually psychopaths is another term that we sort of throw around in lay language.

Speaker 2 Oh, that person's psycho, but actual psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder, that's a fraction of the set of overall cases.

Speaker 2 I think that you're referring to some of the dressing, like the Columbine shooters, the imitation behavior. There's a different way to think about that.

Speaker 2 And I actually explored this at great length too, what I call in the book emulation behavior. It's known as the copycat problem.

Speaker 2 Why do mass shooters look to previous shooters for inspiration and sometimes for tactical ideas too?

Speaker 2 And it's because they see, in many cases, the evidence shows they are drawing inspiration from it, but they're also looking for a way to get attention. They want notoriety.
They want to be known.

Speaker 2 They want to be a somebody instead of a nobody because they feel like nobodies.

Speaker 2 Another way to think about it that I often have heard from experts in this field is these are people who want to seize control of their story, to seize power through violence because they feel powerless.

Speaker 2 They feel hopeless. They're suicidal.

Speaker 2 And they've learned through media reaction that if, well, if I put on a nine inch nails hat and pretend I'm a Columbine shooter, a trench coat, that big myth from Columbine, I'm going to get more media coverage.

Speaker 2 I'm going to get more attention. And that's happened in a number of cases.
The Elliott Rogers story built on that trajectory too.

Speaker 2 I mean, the people who came after him, this whole discussion of incels hating women became a narrative around mass shooters that other people picked up on.

Speaker 2 There are actually cases that followed his where people were emulating him in that way that really wasn't even real. They were doing it because they knew it would get them attention.

Speaker 1 Wasn't there a van attack in Toronto and the kid basically said, like, Elliot Rogers is my hero, some version of this. And it was like, the revolution is beginning.

Speaker 1 And then when he went to prison, he was like, I just said that because I knew you'd put it in the paper.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just to clarify, young man, these are people in their 20s, but young. Yeah, that perpetrator in Toronto, I think the case was in 2018.
So it was a few years after Elliot Roger.

Speaker 2 And he posted on Facebook right before he drove the van down the street and plowed over a bunch of people. All hail, Elliot Roger, the supreme gentleman, something like that.

Speaker 2 The incel revolution has begun. That was the only reference he ever made to incel, you know, literally the moment before he's going to do this.

Speaker 2 And then he's evaluated later by mental health professionals for his court proceedings, and he essentially confesses to them, oh, that was a lie.

Speaker 2 I was just saying that because I knew it would get me a lot more attention. Now, that was a person who also had serious mental health problems, mental illness, but he was making a clear decision.

Speaker 2 And I think in evaluating all the forensic evidence of the case, there were three practitioners who all concluded, yeah, that was a lie. He had really nothing to do with this incel incel ideology.

Speaker 2 But that shows you the power of that narrative that really started with Elliot Roger and has been picked up on and repeated over and over to this day in media.

Speaker 2 The people who are engaging in this kind of behavior, they're aware of that. They're seeing these stories and they're paying attention.

Speaker 1 This is a show about school and mass shootings. So I am not going to be doing a snarky ad pivot.
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Speaker 1 You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. And now, back to Mark Fulman.

Speaker 1 You mentioned in the book that we can't simply label all shooters as mentally ill because it might cause us to ignore other more important warning signs.

Speaker 2 So what about narcissism specifically?

Speaker 1 It seems like a lot of these guys, they feel like nobodies. Okay, fine.
I went through that in middle school too, but I didn't do anything.

Speaker 1 But I'm also not a narcissist, despite what many people who comment on our YouTube videos or in my inbox might say. Is that one of the triggers?

Speaker 1 They feel like a nobody, but in their mind, they're this grandiose, amazing, world-changing person.

Speaker 1 Whereas in middle school, most of us, when we feel like nobodies, we just go, oh, well, them's the brakes.

Speaker 2 These guys are like, no, this can't be true.

Speaker 1 I'm so important. I'm so amazing.
I'm going to force everybody to realize this. And the way I do that is by running them over or putting a bomb in my school.

Speaker 2 There are plenty of cases where narcissism and unhealthy narcissism, malignant narcissism, the term from clinicians, is a factor. Elliot Rogers' case is one of them.

Speaker 2 Again, it's a component of a very complex equation with people in this type of scenario.

Speaker 2 I'll take a step back from it and just sort of explain what the paradigm of behavioral threat assessment is, because I think that context is important to this question too.

Speaker 2 So this is a community-based prevention method, violence prevention method that brings together collaborative expertise in mental health, in law enforcement, education, HR professionals in a workplace.

Speaker 2 You have teams in different settings who do this work.

Speaker 2 And essentially, you're talking about a handful of people who come together around a table or in communication on a daily, weekly basis to talk about cases of concern.

Speaker 2 Somebody is making people nervous, upset, worried. We're worried this high school kid's going to do a school shooting.
Why?

Speaker 2 They're looking at the information about that and they're collecting more information. And then they're coming together and saying, what do we know about this situation?

Speaker 2 And what can we do to step in and intervene and try to help this person steer them away from violent thinking if that's what's going on?

Speaker 2 Make sure they don't have access to a gun if we're worried that's what they're going to do, and so on and so forth. And there are a lot of different aspects to that.

Speaker 2 So part of that process is evaluating what's going on with them personality-wise, health-wise, circumstantially, if they're getting mental health treatment or need it, those things can be evaluated.

Speaker 2 There are cases where you have a level of narcissism that's very unhealthy. Elliot Roger was one of them.

Speaker 2 His perception of himself and the way that he felt the world saw him was a very important driving factor in what he did.

Speaker 2 He was convinced that nobody cared about him, even his own family at the end, which was really nothing could be further from the truth.

Speaker 2 As I came to learn in depth with getting to know his mother and her story, he had a lot of people caring for him, trying to help him, but his perception of it was very different.

Speaker 2 And narcissism can play into that. He felt very entitled to things that he felt he couldn't have, including intimacy, sexual relationship with women.
That's a case where that mattered.

Speaker 2 And there are other cases like that, and it manifests in different ways.

Speaker 1 I think it's important to note that this is not random. And I think a lot of folks say, look, this is totally random and we can't stop it.
That's not true.

Speaker 1 The fact that these people have a zillion red flags and warning signs in a lot of cases is evidence of that.

Speaker 1 You wrote in the book that social barriers are what prevent most people from deciding to kill.

Speaker 1 But I got to clarify what this means because it sounds like what you're saying is if many people could get away with killing, they would do it. I don't know about that.

Speaker 1 I'm already doing all the raven murder that I want to do, which is zero.

Speaker 2 If you look at this as a problem of human behavior, why is it that most people don't do this or what drives people to do this? Human beings have the capacity to do this kind of violence.

Speaker 2 We all are capable of this, of lethal violence. So what prevents people from committing lethal violence or why do people do it?

Speaker 2 I mean, you can understand it from the perspective of defensive, protective violence.

Speaker 2 If you're a parent of young children and someone's threatening your children, you might kill someone to protect your children. I think that's what that's really talking about.

Speaker 2 The social barriers to violence, broad and strong in most cases, you're not going to do that because you know what the consequences are.

Speaker 2 And you also aren't motivated to do that unless maybe something terrible or threatening happens to you or your family. This is a different type of violence.

Speaker 2 It's a predatory violence that is built on a process, a way of thinking that develops. And what is it that is driving that? That's really what that question is about.

Speaker 2 Most people are going to feel inhibited from even thinking in that direction.

Speaker 2 Everyone gets mad and frustrated or feels socially rejected or goes through these things in life, but you don't think, I'm going to go kill them and I'm going to take everyone with me.

Speaker 2 That is a very different kind of thought process that most people's social barriers stand in the way of, I think.

Speaker 1 The guy Charles Whitman, who climbed in the clock tower and was shooting people with a sniper rifle.

Speaker 2 1966.

Speaker 2 Wow. That was not long ago.

Speaker 1 So didn't he leave a note that said something like, there's something in my brain, do an autopsy and you'll see it. And they found a tumor in his brain.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's an interesting historical case. The story of mass shootings in America, that's in some ways understood to be the original or the first school shooting.

Speaker 2 By the way, what you said about Columbine at the outset, you know, a lot of people today think of Columbine was the first school shooting, but that's not true at all.

Speaker 2 There were multiple multiple school shootings in the 1990s and some big ones included that preceded that.

Speaker 2 But because of some specific things about that event, not least that it was the first that was really like played out on live television, it's seared into the public memory that way.

Speaker 2 But that's actually not right. And you can go back to 1966 to Austin, Texas, a clock tower shooting.
I did a lot of research on that case, too.

Speaker 2 And from all my study of it, that was an inconclusive investigation that the brain tumor that was found in the autopsy, it couldn't be determined in any definitive way, that that was somehow a causal factor.

Speaker 2 But that question was, I think, legitimately raised around it because the sense that altered his personality or his chemistry or his experience of the world, he was sick, obviously, but there were a number of other factors in that case too.

Speaker 2 So that's something to keep in mind. The public is always looking for a clear answer about why these things happen.
And often there isn't one.

Speaker 2 In that case, like many others, there's so many things feeding into what leads a person to this kind of extraordinary act of violence, a horrific thing that most people won't do.

Speaker 2 And it's often not easy to explain.

Speaker 2 It's not just the brain tumor or just the clinical diagnosis or just the fact that the kid got kicked out of school or the person lost their job or got a divorce or there was a wildfire that burned down the neighborhood.

Speaker 2 All these things contribute to a specific story for an individual person and what leads them down this pathway.

Speaker 2 And that is a fundamental way of looking at this that is operative for the field of threat assessment. Each case is unique in a certain sense.
They're studying patterns of behavior.

Speaker 2 There's a body of knowledge about how to go about evaluating and intervening to stop people from committing violence like this, but every case is different too.

Speaker 1 Why do so many shooters have the catcher in the rye on their shelf? What's going on with that?

Speaker 2 That was a fascinating little chunk of history.

Speaker 2 So that was an early example, I think, of the emulation behavior we were talking about, the copycat behavior. That began with Chapman.
Chapman is the guy who shot John Lennon in New York.

Speaker 2 So he bought a copy of Catcher in the Rye the day that he assassinated John Lennon outside the Dakota in New York and had it in his pocket.

Speaker 2 And there's a whole story there, and I tell some of that in the book, but to the point that you're asking about, not long after that, you have John Hinckley who goes and shoots Ronald Reagan and tries to kill him.

Speaker 2 And he's got a copy of it too in his hotel room. So what's that about? He paid attention to Chapman.
I mean, there was other evidence of that in his case. And so he was identifying with that.

Speaker 2 He's like, oh, I can be an assassin who kills a really important global figure. I'm going to do that too.
That's part of the psychology of what goes on with assassins and with shooters.

Speaker 2 And then this manifested again almost a decade later with a guy named Robert Bardo, who killed a famous young TV actress in Hollywood, Rebecca Schaefer.

Speaker 2 He also had a copy of Catcher in the Rye with him. So he was paying attention to this behavior too.
And this is all about what the field of threats assessment calls identification behavior.

Speaker 2 Essentially, like, I can be like that guy. I want to be like that guy.

Speaker 2 Now, the question of why a person feels that way or how they get to that point is much bigger and more complicated in all these cases. But that's the basic explanation of what that's about.

Speaker 2 And we see that with school shooters now in the more current era, right?

Speaker 2 Like looking or acting or sounding like a Columbine guy or Elliot Roger, other cases that have followed that, what's the common denominator here?

Speaker 2 They all got a lot of attention, high-profile cases, tons of kind of sensational media coverage.

Speaker 2 That's something else that that I've focused on in my writing, too, about this issue over the years: is the way that the media covers this and pays attention to shooters.

Speaker 2 That can be very tricky because we sensationalize it at our own peril. You can see it in the case evidence.
These people are paying attention.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember speaking of Catcher in the Rye, there was a Mel Gibson movie. I think it was called Conspiracy Theory, it was probably a 90s movie, but his whole shelf is full of Catcher in the Rye.

Speaker 1 And there's a scene in the beginning where he walks into a bookstore, walks out with a copy of it, and puts it on the shelf next to 500 other copies.

Speaker 1 So this meme or trope or whatever has been around for a while. You mentioned that journalists like us are mentioning these people's names.

Speaker 2 Does that help or hurt?

Speaker 1 Because we've been rattling off a bunch of names here.

Speaker 1 Is there a way to mention them in a way that's diminished so that they don't watch this and go, oh, look how much attention these guys are getting. I don't want to do that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. My thinking about this has evolved over the years.
In a certain sense, like the horse is way out of the barn. You want to find out about shooters.

Speaker 2 you just go online and there's anything you want, right? But I do think media coverage is important and very important.

Speaker 2 And I've written about this a lot and I care about it a lot, I think, because you can see evidence, as I've said, in cases where perpetrators, especially young ones, are paying attention to media coverage and how it's done and how much of it there is.

Speaker 2 And so I believe that as media professionals, we can make an impact on that in being deliberate in how we report on and focus on perpetrators of these crimes.

Speaker 2 Now, that said, there has been a movement over the years to really diminish and ignore, even ignore, there's something called the No Notoriety Movement started by survivors of a shooting in Colorado, the movie theater attack in 2012.

Speaker 2 And there's some other versions of this too that essentially say the media should never name a mass shooter, never show their face, like black it out. Don't give them that attention they're seeking.

Speaker 2 And I understand and empathize with that from a moral or ethical perspective, but as a practical matter, it doesn't really make much sense.

Speaker 2 For me, the answer is more in the middle, sort of figure out how to frame it properly, talk about what is informative and educating the public about the problem.

Speaker 2 Let's figure out what the nature of this problem really is so we can try to solve it better.

Speaker 2 And you can't do that without identifying who you're talking about and explaining the specifics of their story. And furthermore, there's some other reasons to do it too.

Speaker 2 I mean, journalism, the duty of journalism, at least the kind that I'm involved in, is reporting in the public interest, right?

Speaker 2 Trying to shine a light on problems and ideally on solutions to those problems. So that's a core mission there of looking at an event that is very traumatic in communities and has major impact.

Speaker 2 And then there's also this disinformation problem we have. This has been going on for decades with mass shooters.
We see it more now.

Speaker 2 But if the media doesn't identify who the perpetrator is, if authorities don't do that, what fills that void? Sure. A bunch of bullshit, right? Oh,

Speaker 2 he was a Muslim terrorist. Oh, it was a transgender shooter.
That's a good point. So if the media doesn't perform that role, what comes out is far worse.

Speaker 1 Because you see that already pretty much any mass casualty event. People on Twitter, for example, are like, it was ISIS.
And then sometimes they're right, but often it's like, no, it wasn't.

Speaker 1 It was a dude dressed up like Batman. The disinformation is already out there.
Now you've got people who are confused slash they're just consuming conspiracy theories on Twitter instead of real news.

Speaker 1 I don't know how much we can educate those people. They want to believe the wrong thing.

Speaker 2 And yet it's still really important to have the authentic information out there. I've watched this from the front row with many cases over the years.

Speaker 2 Roseburg, Oregon, Virginia Tech, we were talking about earlier, San Bernardino, the Orlando massacre, you name it.

Speaker 2 The first 24 hours, there's all kinds of false information flying around social media. We often hear, oh, there's multiple shooters.
That's wrong. The identity of the shooter, that's wrong.

Speaker 2 And that has real impact in some of these cases, people who are falsely identified, not to mention the sort of categorical demagoguery that plays out.

Speaker 2 So I think it's really important to have good, solid, dispassionate reporting on what's happening. Follow the evidence, tell the story.
That's what I do.

Speaker 1 During the Boston Marathon bombing, I think the internet slash Reddit, they found the guy who did it and then they were wrong, but that person's life is just ruined.

Speaker 2 I think he actually died. I think he committed suicide.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's so much worse than I thought.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. Don't quote me on that.
I would have to refresh, but I think that was a dark case of that for sure.

Speaker 1 You mentioned Ronald Reagan. It seems like the Secret Service should be all all over this profiling threat assessment thing.

Speaker 1 I mean, don't they have to predict who's in actual danger to the president versus who's just like shit talking on X?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I'm glad you asked that because that's actually a big part of where this work started.

Speaker 2 In the 1980s, folks in the mental health field started collaborating with Secret Service focused on the question of how can we prevent assassination.

Speaker 2 It was an era of a lot of political violence with assassinations and other things going on in the 1970s and 80s, including the shooting of Reagan.

Speaker 2 And after that event, which was about three months after John Lennon was murdered, they were talking about this and said, we got to do more to figure out, like, is there a way we can predict or better prevent people assassinating high-profile public figures?

Speaker 2 And so that's where the collaboration actually began. The Secret Service started doing research quietly with some forensic psychologists.
And it's a really amazing story.

Speaker 2 They learned a lot from studying cases, not only of people who tried and succeeded in committing an attack of this nature, but then also looking at what they called near attacks, cases that weren't really known to the public, but were foiled or came close.

Speaker 2 Perpetrators were incarcerated or institutionalized, and studying them, studying who they were as human beings. What led them to do this?

Speaker 2 And in a number of cases, talking to them directly, saying, hey, we want to understand better what led you to become an assassin. You're the expert on this.

Speaker 2 And so we want to learn from you so that we can prevent it.

Speaker 2 And through that research, one of the key findings was that there's no way to profile based on characteristics or demographics, types of people. You can profile the behavior.

Speaker 2 That's what behavioral threat assessment is, it's profiling a behavioral process. But there are all kinds of people who commit this type of targeted violence.
They're different ages.

Speaker 2 They come from different backgrounds, different socioeconomic circumstances. Most of them are dudes, men.
But that's not predictive of anything either because half the population in America is male.

Speaker 2 Most men in America aren't going to go try to assassinate the president or commit a school shooting. So no one characteristic or demographic factor tells you anything.
It's about the behavior.

Speaker 2 It's about the process, the circumstances. And that was first learned by the Secret Service Mental Health Collaboration.
There were others innovating this at the time, too.

Speaker 2 There was some stuff going on at the LAPD. in Los Angeles in the 1980s that was really focused on celebrity stalking.
That Rebecca Schaefer murder in 1989.

Speaker 2 There were some people working in the private sector in and security, close protection for celebrities, political figures.

Speaker 2 FBI was studying violent crime and it was really focused on workplace violence in that era in the 1980s. That was the era you might recall going postal.
Oh, yeah. Postal office shootings.

Speaker 2 And actually, I saw that you're from Royal Oak, right? I am. That was one of the big postal shootings.

Speaker 1 I remember that. That, of course, was talked about quite a bit, considering that we were all right from there.

Speaker 2 And I remember our postal workers, it's Michigan.

Speaker 1 You talk to your postman. We don't do that in in California for whatever reason.
But in Michigan, it's like, sit down and have a drink.

Speaker 1 Or like, he'd give your kids candy and you'd be like, okay, that's fine.

Speaker 2 It's a different time.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, man. And I remember talking to the postmen and being like, hey, what's going on? And they're like, yeah, let me just say, I like being in the truck.

Speaker 1 Basically, they don't hang around the actual post office because they're nervous about it, which is just terrible. And you hear that from teachers now.

Speaker 1 They've got a lot of other things to worry about, like having to teach class in the hallway.

Speaker 2 The problem has come up in different settings over the decades. Workplace violence and those kinds of shootings was much more the focus back then.

Speaker 2 And after Columbine, schools became much more focused. And that's part of the reason why people remember that as the first case incorrectly.

Speaker 2 So that also is another way of seeing this, really zooming out and seeing this is a type of behavior we can look at that manifests in different ways.

Speaker 2 And we can understand it as a process, as a human behavior.

Speaker 1 What about the police? It seems like they can't be very proactive. They react to crime, maybe not prevent it so much.

Speaker 2 You know, in the context of violence prevention, of doing this work of behavioral threat assessment, they're part of a team of collaborators in evaluating cases of concern.

Speaker 2 This is a really interesting thing, too, I think, to think about in the evolution of this work, because it's not the traditional role of law enforcement essentially to prevent crime.

Speaker 2 They're there to investigate crime and help prosecute it, right?

Speaker 2 That's part of the story of why the Secret Service was at the genesis of this work, because their mission inherently was to protect high-profile figures, the president and others.

Speaker 2 That is inherently a preventative mission. But to get law enforcement to think about prevention in this way is a hurdle.
It's a paradigm shift.

Speaker 2 There's some interesting storytelling around that too, particularly with the Los Angeles Police Department, where they were developing a threat management unit in the early 1990s to try to prevent stalking.

Speaker 2 because there were a number of stalking murders, including the high-profile killing of Rebecca Schaefer and people were very frustrated. Why can't you stop this before it happens?

Speaker 2 When this is going on literally for years in some of these cases, the guy that killed Rebecca Schaefer had stalked her for two years and there were a lot of warning behaviors and attempts to make contact with her.

Speaker 2 And so it really shifted the thinking about what police can do to be more proactive to help prevent that type of violence.

Speaker 2 But it is a real shift in thinking about how we perceive the role of police and I think how people do police work.

Speaker 1 Stalking's tough. It's hard to make a lot of the elements a crime.

Speaker 2 Gifts and calls, it's legal to do that.

Speaker 1 You can't make it a crime to give someone a gift. They suddenly don't want it and you go to prison.
That doesn't work. But we did manage to do it in California here.

Speaker 2 That's part of that story, too, with Rebecca Schaefer.

Speaker 2 After that murder and some others contemporaneously, that began to prompt an effort to make legislation in California, an anti-stalking statute that was passed, I think, in 1992, if I'm remembering correctly.

Speaker 2 Prior to that, there was no... legal remedy for that behavior.
There was no way to really prosecute someone because they hadn't yet committed a crime. It's like they can harass the hell out of you.

Speaker 2 They can come to your door, give you flowers and gifts and make you feel really terrible and scared. But until they actually attack you, we can't do anything.

Speaker 2 That was the attitude of law enforcement prior to that era.

Speaker 2 But California passed a law that essentially said if you threaten someone that puts them into a reasonable state of fear for their safety, that is illegal. That's a stalking crime.

Speaker 2 And then that began to spread to other states and eventually pretty quickly became a federal law as well.

Speaker 1 I looked this up, California Penal Code, Section 646.9a. It's all up here.
No, but California stocks.

Speaker 2 I'm impressed you can remember that number.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it makes it illegal to harass, follow, or threaten another person. There are certain elements of the crime.

Speaker 1 The defendant must have willfully and maliciously harassed or followed the victim, made a credible threat to put the victim in fear of their safety, like you said. The penalties, it depends.

Speaker 1 It can be a misdemeanor or a felony, a year in jail, a fine of up to $1,000, or if they have a restraining order against you and you're still doing it, it's worse, right?

Speaker 1 It's not just violating the restraining order. You can be two to four years in a state prison or up to five years, depending on if you've been convicted of certain other crimes.

Speaker 1 And we also have our three strikes law here in California, which can end up putting you in prison for 25 years if you've done a bunch of other things.

Speaker 1 So I guess that's sort of a response to the Hollywood stuff, right? Because celebrities get stalked so much. Other states have surely taken this model.

Speaker 2 Well, actually, it was discovery in the research through that period.

Speaker 2 The experts who were focused on this stalking behavior, they started from that issue because it was LA and they were trying to protect celebrities and people in that world.

Speaker 2 But one of the really interesting discoveries of that research is that actually stalking behavior was a much more widespread problem and that the majority of cases were much more related to intimate personal relationships among ordinary people, domestic violence, domestic abuse.

Speaker 2 This is often current or former partners stalking their counterpart and committing violence. And so there were many more cases like that.

Speaker 2 And that's why the stalking statutes became important more broadly.

Speaker 1 I don't want to get too derailed on the stalking thing. I just thought it was kind of interesting.
In terms of mass shooters, what should law enforcement agents be looking for?

Speaker 1 And what can non-law enforcement be looking for?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the warning signs, right? What are the red flags? There are a broad set of behaviors and circumstances that the field looks at to do this work.

Speaker 2 And in trigger points, I categorize these in kind of eight areas. The ones that I think are kind of most known about in our media coverage of these cases is threatening communications.

Speaker 2 People saying, posting things online or making comments that are disturbing that suggest either they're making direct threats against people or groups of people or they're veiled threats.

Speaker 2 Maybe they're posting disturbing images. These communications can take other forms too, you know, drawings, writings, things like journaling, things like that.

Speaker 2 We've seen a lot of school shooting cases in recent years where they're drawing disturbing pictures. One that comes to mind is the Oxford case in Michigan.

Speaker 2 bloody school shooting drawings that were seen by a teacher the day before the morning of. I think it was the morning of.
Yeah. And there are a lot of cases that have elements like that too.

Speaker 2 So So communications of that nature, in and of themselves, say nothing predictive because lots of people might draw scary pictures or say dumb things, especially kids, or say threatening things that doesn't mean they're going to commit an attack.

Speaker 2 It's, again, this fundamental principle of this work to evaluate danger is looking at a set of things going on together.

Speaker 2 So communications are one, a person in crisis who is deteriorating in ways personally, physically looking more unkempt, or sudden changes in behavior that might cause someone to feel concerned.

Speaker 2 For ordinary people to notice the warning signs, often it's in a lot of the cases that I studied, you hear about people close to a perpetrator who family member or a peer or a teacher, they're just feeling worried.

Speaker 2 They're feeling anxiety, like something's not right here.

Speaker 2 The hair is standing up on the back of my neck a little bit about something that Johnny said yesterday or something that he did, but they don't really understand what it is.

Speaker 2 That's part of what this process is trying to solve too, that the threat assessment professionals can evaluate the things that are causing those feelings along with a whole bunch of other information gatherings.

Speaker 2 To the question of like, how can the general public or just a regular person who knows nothing about this help or participate in figuring out who's going to do this?

Speaker 2 The basic point of departure is like, if you're worried about someone, trust that feeling and reach out for help. There are other things then, of course, that practitioners will look at.

Speaker 2 One is a strong interest in violence and guns and graphic imagery. Someone's fixating on that.
That's in a lot of these cases part of the behavioral process that they see.

Speaker 1 There were kids growing up that did crazy stuff. Like they would talk about guns all the time.
They would blow things up all the time.

Speaker 1 They would drink even when we were like in sixth grade, which is not, maybe that's normal for some schools. For my school, this was not.

Speaker 1 And I remember he would say, like, what did you do this weekend? And I'm like, I don't know, watch TV.

Speaker 1 I'm 13, you know, and he's like, yeah, I stole beer from this person's garage and I drank 24 of them. And I like woke up on the road.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Yeah. I remember him showing me photos of the principal with the head cut off and like him as the executioner.

Speaker 1 He's like, I joined the National Rifle Association. I was like, what is that? I didn't grow up in like a community where people hunted.
This is a suburban town. So that was a little odd.

Speaker 2 The example you use there, like a picture of a principal with the head cut off, I mean, that's a little bit shocking.

Speaker 2 But the question you would ask from a threaticism perspective in a situation like that, is this kid in other ways causing concern or is it just juvenile behavior that's going on?

Speaker 1 He was sent to the principal's office all the time. That's why he hated the principal and he was a tough kid to control.
But he was actually always really nice to me.

Speaker 1 I remember kids in his grade, he was a grade above me. Kids in his grade were like, he's such a loser.
And I was like, oh, he just feels isolated and lonely.

Speaker 1 I think he was in seventh or eighth grade and I was in sixth grade. When I was in eighth grade, I wasn't talking to sixth graders.
They were like little babies.

Speaker 1 So I think he was just a lonely guy, but it's hard to tell. Nowadays, a lot of this, I listen to nine-inch nails.
I wore oversized flannel shirts. I was isolated.
I was on my computer all the time.

Speaker 1 I had tons of friends, I think, and it was nice. So that maybe didn't scare people.

Speaker 2 What you just said right there is really key. And from an evaluation perspective, I had tons of friends.
The people who do these attacks have no social connections or very poor social connections.

Speaker 2 That social isolation is really important too, in a lot of these cases, because aberrant juvenile behavior, obviously very common.

Speaker 2 And there are cases where it can be very complicated to untangle that.

Speaker 2 There was a case I wrote about quite a bit in the book from 1998, a high school shooting in Oregon, the year before Columbine, a horrific attack in Springfield, Oregon.

Speaker 2 And the kid who did that shot a bunch of his classmates in the school and killed a couple of kids.

Speaker 2 He was behaving in ways that I think were perceived at the time as not normal, but aberrant juvenile behavior that's common, throwing rocks off an overpass at cars, things like that, that are dangerous and bad and need to be mitigated or dealt with.

Speaker 2 But that doesn't predict someone going and committing a school shooting. And so it can be hard to untangle that.

Speaker 2 But a person who's doing that, the question then is, do they have other things around them that are normal or healthy or what this approach calls positive inhibitors?

Speaker 2 What things in their life are positive that are supporting them? That what we were talking about earlier, like the social barriers that prevent people from committing violence.

Speaker 2 I've got a bunch of friends or I've got a good family that loves me. I've got a job or I'm doing okay in school.

Speaker 2 In those situations, you're not going to be as concerned that someone's going to go commit a school shooting.

Speaker 1 I feel like I read before this happened, they quit the swim team and they quit the wrestling team and then nobody hung out with them for two months or something.

Speaker 1 And then it's dot, dot, dot, this violent thing happened. So it seems like those are some signals.

Speaker 2 That's another one of the eight categories or areas that I talk about in the book in terms of warning signs, what I call triggering events. So these are also known in the field as life stressors.

Speaker 2 Things that happen that are significant, that are negative for a person that really could set them on a bad path. Loss of a girlfriend or boyfriend or intimate relationship, right?

Speaker 2 Getting kicked out of school, getting fired from a job, a parent dying. There's some cases, recent school shooting cases like that, where perpetrators lost their mother.

Speaker 2 How are they dealing with that major life stressor? Do they show any resilience or are they fragile, brittle, isolating, showing more signs of depression?

Speaker 2 That's where the rubber really meets the road with evaluating a situation of concern. And there are many cases where you can point back, you can go back into the story and find those moments.

Speaker 2 And Elliot Rogers is one of those two. There were some major events in his last year or so of life that really showed some significant warning signs signs that he was on that pathway.

Speaker 1 The book mentions something called leakage, where the fantasies of a killer will eventually seep out because they just can't control themselves.

Speaker 1 What are some examples of this that people could look out for?

Speaker 2 Yes, that's what I was talking about a little bit earlier, the threatening communications. The term leakage was actually, it's interesting.

Speaker 2 It was developed out of FBI's serial killer profiling back in the 1980s.

Speaker 2 That was the theory that, like, someone who's going around killing people and they're trying to figure out who's doing it as an unknown perpetrator, that eventually they're going to leak out what they're doing through some kind of communication.

Speaker 2 That term was really applied to this behavioral process, the study of targeted violence, of school mass shooters. How are they communicating what they're feeling or what they're thinking?

Speaker 2 Again, it's comments they might make to people, third parties or people close to them, or things they might write or post online.

Speaker 2 One specific example, a case I write about in Trigger Points is a high school kid in Oregon who one day at the bus stop, he says to a peer, hey, don't come to school on Friday.

Speaker 2 I'm coming back here with my dad's gun and I'm going to shoot up the place. That's pretty clear leakage.
Now, a comment like that alone, again, may not tell you anything.

Speaker 2 I think in this day and age, if the kid says that, people are going to pay attention. But what else was going on with this kid? That was the role of the threat assessment team in this school system.

Speaker 2 And there was a lot more to that story. He had made other comments like this in months past.

Speaker 2 He was going through some personal deterioration, dropping out of a drama club, and his grades are going down. And his mom's reporting that he's not waking up in the morning.

Speaker 2 There's There's all kinds of stuff going on with this kid that's signaling, hey, he's going in a bad direction.

Speaker 2 But the leakage component is often what people may notice first or the most because it makes them feel weird.

Speaker 2 In that case, actually, it was another student who overheard that comment at the bus stop and she was freaked out and she told a teacher, which was great.

Speaker 2 Like that's what the field of threat assessment wants. It's a component of this process that's really fundamentally important.
They call it the bystander or upstander component.

Speaker 1 If you see something say something.

Speaker 2 Yeah, see something, say something, essentially. Like if you're concerned about someone, you know, you're worried they're maybe going to do something bad, then reach out for help.

Speaker 2 And that's what this student did in that case.

Speaker 2 And in this case, until I wrote about it in the book, no one in the public ever knew about it because they got the kid help and they steered him away from it. That's really what this work's all about.

Speaker 1 As you all know, I highly value my career, so I shan't be doing a tasteless ad pivot in an episode about mass shootings. We'll be right back.
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Speaker 1 Look, I used to write violent stories as a kid, too. The only thing I stalked at the end of the day was a bag of Cheetos.

Speaker 2 So it really, you're right.

Speaker 1 All these factors have to be in play because I didn't have a crazy, miserable, child-abuse home life.

Speaker 2 I was just bored.

Speaker 1 I honestly was just kind of bored and was into internet culture at an early age before anybody had internet. So I was weird.

Speaker 1 But again, had friends, was on the football team, wasn't getting bullied or beat up or anything, just had like an alt thing going on that wasn't that severe.

Speaker 1 But if there was a checklist, it would have been like, oh, maybe we should keep an eye on this Jordan kid.

Speaker 2 That's the problem with the checklist, though, because you have a million kids on the list. You would.

Speaker 1 I got sent to the principal's office once for horsing around with some of the guys.

Speaker 1 I remember the assistant principal, who was the disciplinarian, he looked at me and he goes, what are you doing here?

Speaker 2 Because it was like,

Speaker 1 as if you caused trouble. He literally just told me to go away.
And then it was almost insulting.

Speaker 2 It was like, what? That could be bad.

Speaker 1 And he was like, yeah, get out of here, mathlete.

Speaker 2 What are you doing here?

Speaker 1 I know earlier in the show, we mentioned interventions when we find somebody who sets off red flags.

Speaker 2 What do these look like?

Speaker 1 You said the police showed up at Elliot Rogers' apartment and he was like, ah, my mom's a worry wart. Great.
So they just leave after that.

Speaker 1 I mean, there has to be something that's more than just, he said he was fine and and we took his word for it. So now we can't do anything.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And that was a case where you had a failure of there wasn't a threat assessment process like this in place.
So let's talk about a case where it did work.

Speaker 2 One is this student, Brandon, who I talked about earlier, who at the bus stop said he was going to bring a gun to school. Another kid hears it, tells the teacher, goes to the threat assessment team.

Speaker 2 They quickly gather a lot of information about Brandon. They're very concerned.
This is a high-risk case. And this is actually a case that I was able to watch develop.

Speaker 2 I was basically embedded with the team. This was in 2019 when this was happening.

Speaker 2 And the team spent a lot of time talking about what can we do to help Brandon to get him off this pathway, to get him away from thinking about violence. Why is he in crisis? What's going on with him?

Speaker 2 There was concerns that he was suicidal. The first thing they did was they sent a school resource officer, police officer, out to his house to see if he had firearms.

Speaker 2 He's threatening to bring his dad's gun to school, right? So the officer talks with his mother and with Brandon in the home the night that this is coming up. They jump into action quickly on that.

Speaker 2 If there's an imminent concern, concern, that's the first thing they want to figure out. Turns out he doesn't have access to a gun.
That's good.

Speaker 2 But then the question is, what else do you do going forward? Is he still a concern? And if so, what can we do for him? There are a lot of different measures that a team will take.

Speaker 2 I think in an education setting, first and foremost, you're talking about what is school like for this kid? Does he like being at school? Most kids actually like to be in school, believe it or not.

Speaker 2 Jeez, I can't relate.

Speaker 2 The alternatives at that age maybe aren't so great. And because they have friends, that's important.
Brandon had a bunch of friends, so that's good.

Speaker 2 He had a social life, but he perceived that he was very lonely. He perceived that he didn't have friends.
So that was an important question for the clinicians involved.

Speaker 2 Why is he seeing himself with such acute, low self-esteem? Why are we thinking he might be suicidal?

Speaker 2 The signs of that, some changes in his behavior, dropping out of extracurricular drama club that he previously loved.

Speaker 2 He'd suffered what he thought was a big humiliation there that when they went and interviewed other people, he tripped over a stage prop or something and said, I'm quitting.

Speaker 2 When they talked to the teacher and peers, they were like, We didn't think anything of that. So there was a self-perception issue going on there that they identified.
So, what did they do?

Speaker 2 They offered counseling support to the mother and to Brandon. Do you want to maybe see a therapist? Talk to him empathetically.
What's going on with you? How can we help you?

Speaker 2 Okay, you're not doing well in this class. You dropped out.
What if we give you some independent support here with some tutoring, or you can finish this class on your own?

Speaker 2 Would you like to do that, Brandon? Yeah, that sounds pretty good. How about with the one teacher you do like? Building those kinds of constructive interventions around him.

Speaker 2 They call it a wraparound strategy, education support, counseling, extracurriculars, working with the family where possible. That's not always possible.

Speaker 2 And the cases where, you know, as we've seen in the last couple of years, the parents are a total mess and they're actually accelerating the problem. That's a harder situation.

Speaker 2 In this case, though, the mother was responsive and was concerned, wanted to help. So they're working with her to say, okay, make sure that you watch what he's doing online.

Speaker 2 If he starts fixating on violent stuff, tell us. Let's make sure we know what he's bringing back and forth to school in his backpack.
Lots of measures like that.

Speaker 2 So there are protective measures, there are constructive measures, and that's how a case like this would work in a school setting. It's different, of course, in workplace and otherwise.

Speaker 1 The FBI profiling for serial killers that you brought up earlier in the show, I'm not even sure I know what that means/slash is, but obviously it exists. Why can't we use that for shooters again?

Speaker 2 Because they're two different than serial killers are similar to each other?

Speaker 1 I don't get it.

Speaker 2 I mentioned that historically because in some ways, the work of behavioral threat assessment developed out of that at the FBI, which is one of several places where this work was developing in the 1980s and 90s.

Speaker 2 And, you know, historically, the FBI would try to track down unknown serial killers, right?

Speaker 2 These are the sort of famous Hollywood stories we know, like Silence of the Lambs and finding the unsub, the unknown subject was the term that the Bureau used back then.

Speaker 2 And that kind of work still exists, but although I think they do a lot less of it now for a set of reasons I won't get into because their technology and DNA and things like that make tracking serial killers different now.

Speaker 2 Back then, it was trying to figure out from a crime scene, like, who is this person? How can we narrow a set of possible suspects? Corkboard strings and things,

Speaker 2 right? What weird things are we finding in the crime scene that are a clue to who this person might be that combined with all the other investigation we're doing.

Speaker 2 That was the classic serial killer hunting that became mythologized through Hollywood and popular culture entertainment, probably in some ways accurate and not.

Speaker 2 But that was about finding someone that they didn't know who it was. This is different because there's no finding a school or mouse shooter.
We know who they are because they do it.

Speaker 2 You're talking about trying to predict an attack, which isn't possible.

Speaker 1 This is minority reporting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for decades, people have tried to figure out, can you predict an act of violence like this? And the answer is definitively no.

Speaker 2 There is no way to predict someone doing this, but you can prevent it if you can identify the process leading up to it. So that's what the profiling is.

Speaker 2 It's studying the process of behavior and circumstances leading up to the attack.

Speaker 1 It's so hard to find metrics, not quite the right word, but regular teen angst versus actual threatening behavior. It just seems like that would be so hard to.

Speaker 2 Well, again, it's that in combination with these other things because regular teen angst is everywhere, right?

Speaker 2 But regular teen angst plus, like, suddenly this person's gotten very interested in firearms and they never were before. Suddenly they're not waking up in the morning.

Speaker 2 Suddenly they are saying they don't have any friends, even though they skateboard with a couple buddies down the street once a week.

Speaker 1 Where do shooters usually get their weapons? Family and friends, or do they go to the store and buy them?

Speaker 2 So with school shootings, there are a lot of cases where they're getting them from home or homes of other people. And then a lot of guns are acquired legally.

Speaker 2 That's just the reality in our country that most mass shooters are using legally purchased firearms. It's an overwhelming majority.
You want to get a gun, you can get a gun.

Speaker 2 The Elliott Roger case, he went to gun shops in the vicinity of Santa Barbara and bought three handguns. And that's actually another thing that's important here, too, is that.

Speaker 2 A lot of people who commit these attacks don't have criminal history or they have not been committed involuntarily for mental health treatment, which is a very high bar.

Speaker 2 And there are some states, there's the federal NICS database that prohibit a legal firearms purchase in a licensed dealer if they're in that database.

Speaker 2 But there are a lot of ways around that, of course, the loopholes, right? So you want a gun, you can get a gun. And most perpetrators who commit these attacks are doing it that way.

Speaker 1 So making it harder for people to buy guns might not necessarily even solve this problem because they could just go to their friend's house and steal one.

Speaker 2 Look, I think that's a question that applies to gun violence broadly. Right.

Speaker 1 Because I think a lot of people oversimplify this. They're like, oh, we just need to stop selling guns to people at stores.

Speaker 1 And it's like, okay, there's 400 million guns floating around the United States, most of which they're not held by drug cartels. They're like in your uncle's attic.

Speaker 1 And he hasn't looked for it in 20 years, but you know it's there.

Speaker 2 I think where the sort of much broader question of gun regulations intersects this kind of prevention work is fairly obvious.

Speaker 2 If we had more effective gun regulations, that would be a tool that could be more effective in the setting of violence prevention. In other words, you've got an individual you're worried about.

Speaker 2 You're looking into him. The first thing you want to know is, does he have a gun?

Speaker 2 If you're worried someone's going to use a gun to kill people, you want to know if he has one, or can he get one, or can you stop him from getting one?

Speaker 2 There are a lot of places where you just can't do that because of the way the laws work. Yeah, the Second Amendment thing is I'm always so torn on this.

Speaker 1 Another red flag you mentioned were specific plans, right? Was it the specificity that makes it more serious?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it can. That's certainly a signal in cases, including the story I was telling about, Brandon.
That case, the specificity of what he said was very important in that moment.

Speaker 2 He said, don't come to school on Friday. I'm bringing my dad's gun back and I'm shooting up the school.

Speaker 2 The points of specificity in that, when he's going to do it, how he's going to do it with what instrument. A lot of school shooting threats are more broad.
Oh, school shootings are cool.

Speaker 2 Statements like that in cases. I'm going to shoot this place up someday.

Speaker 2 I remember that moment well, actually, I was sitting in the meeting with the threat assessment team where they were talking about that.

Speaker 2 You know, this is very concerning because previously, Brandon had made a couple of comments about school shootings that were broader like that.

Speaker 2 In 2018, there was, I don't know if you remember, but there was like a big national school walkout after Parkland when the March for Our Lives movement was starting among kids.

Speaker 2 So kids were walking out of school and a teacher had asked Brandon about this. I think she'd ask him, Are you joining the walkout tomorrow?

Speaker 2 And he said, No, I think maybe I'll just shoot up at the school instead.

Speaker 2 That comment made its way to the threat assessment team, but that wasn't as specific as, I'm coming here on Friday with my dad's gun.

Speaker 2 So that is a sign in many cases of progression on the pathway, a planning process that is now escalating.

Speaker 1 I've heard people mention things like, if the shooter talks about future plans that they have, that means they're maybe less serious.

Speaker 1 Or if they don't have any future plans, because they know they're going to die on a specific day, that's, do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 Oh, like positive things in the future.

Speaker 1 Say someone says, I'm really looking forward to graduation. I think I'm going to take a gap year.
Maybe I'll learn how to ski.

Speaker 1 That's different than somebody just not having any future plans after school.

Speaker 2 I mean, that actually came into play in this case, too, with Brandon, when the the lead psychologist on the team sat down with him. She told me about this.

Speaker 2 I was there the day, not in the meeting with him, but later that day, she told me that one of the things he said that was really important was he talked about how he wanted a summer job so he could earn money to buy a car.

Speaker 2 That's a goal, like a positive goal. So, yes, he was depressed.
Yes, there was concern he was starting to become suicidal, but he also had aspirations.

Speaker 2 Cases of desperation, suicidality that's more extreme, you don't see that kind of talk, I think, in most cases. Yeah, that can be very significant.

Speaker 2 Again, it's a set of data that I think becomes very complex and unique to each case.

Speaker 2 And I don't think this is easy work to do, but it can be very effective when it's done well at a level of quality with expertise.

Speaker 2 There's actually a term that they use in the field called structured professional judgment, which is referring to, okay, we've gathered all this information.

Speaker 2 Now, you know, we're going to analyze it together as a team, bringing our various expertise with a system, with a methodology.

Speaker 2 We're going to go through these different areas that we know about and draw a conclusion from that about how concerned are we, what's the level of danger, and what should we do about it.

Speaker 2 So, that's also by way of saying that there is judgment going on here by professionals. They're trying to figure out how to interpret these behaviors and these signs, and it's not always clear.

Speaker 2 If a kid says, I'm really looking forward to my summer vacation, that's going to be a good signal.

Speaker 1 This sounds so labor-intensive, but I guess if you think about it, school shootings, while they seem like they happen all the time, they're rare enough where you could probably have something like this at the sheriff's office at the county level, where they just collect reports and then intervene as needed.

Speaker 1 And that might not even be most of those people's full-time thing. And if that prevents people from getting shot at school, it's a worthy investment, I would say.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a great question that comes up a lot around this subject because it does sound very resource-intensive. And in some ways, it is.

Speaker 2 I've been in a lot of settings where leaders and communities or school systems are asking, like, how do we do this? Like, how do we get the resources?

Speaker 2 Teachers and administrators are already so overtaxed anyway. Now you're asking us to do this whole other job.

Speaker 2 But if you flip that on its head, it's like the people who are going to do this work are already in place.

Speaker 2 Teachers and administrators and counselors in a school system, they're already tasked with the safety and well-being of students.

Speaker 2 And so it's really more about training and expertise and institutional knowledge of how to handle the situation when it arises. You touched on something else that's important here.

Speaker 2 There's this perception that this is happening all the time. There's this kind of inordinate fear that school shootings are happening every day.
That's just not true.

Speaker 2 We've spun ourselves up as a society into thinking that this problem is much bigger than it is. But it's complicated or it's tricky because it's a significant problem.
It's a recurring problem.

Speaker 2 And it's, I think, a problem that probably most, if not everyone, would agree. We want to be zero.
And it may never be zero, but let's make it less and less.

Speaker 2 So I think to your point, the idea that we would devote resources to it is defensible. Certainly we pour a shit ton of resources into reactive measures, which arguably are not effective at all.

Speaker 2 The drills and target hardening and more cops and more guns in schools and all these things. And I want to say, too, those are not mutually exclusive.

Speaker 2 I think that prevention is a broad-based issue, and that in some ways, all of these solutions or policy ideas should be on the table in combination.

Speaker 2 But my point is, as a country, we emphasize all that stuff, make the school into more of a citadel that you can't penetrate with bulletproof windows and locks on every door and guards at the door and metal detectors.

Speaker 2 And now let's teach all the kids what to do when a shooter comes in and traumatize them and all that stuff. But no one's thinking enough about prevention.

Speaker 1 Does the target hardening stuff work? I feel like we've seen that after Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas, the shootings, but yeah, metal detectors and then these doors are bulletproof.

Speaker 1 I think we all remember the fear-mongering with the bulletproof backpacks for kids or whatever that came out after that stuff. It was just gross.

Speaker 2 I don't want to be dismissive of physical security. Physical security is important on a fundamental level.
And so those are serious and significant concerns.

Speaker 2 But I think that the attention on that and the way that it is treated as an emotional response to show a community, okay, we're doing something about this. We're going to make it much harder.

Speaker 2 It's a really important question. Like, does this actually work? Is it effective? And in a basic sense, we can look at this issue over the past two decades.

Speaker 2 Let's peg it to Columbine when school shootings are on the radar at a whole next level and the issue of school and mass shootings is beginning to escalate we've had more of these in the last two decades with a lot of physical security and target hardening going on a lot of investment in that stuff so does it stop this from happening i think the answer clearly is no in a broad sense there may be specific cases where it has come into play and been effective i think some recent shootings and if i'm remembering correctly the one in georgia last year, there's been some suggestion that, oh, because they had locks on the doors and locked down quickly and people knew what to do, fewer people were injured and killed.

Speaker 2 And that may be the case. I think that's hard to prove, right? But to me, that question is, okay, is that a success story? You still had a bunch of people injured and killed.

Speaker 2 Like, why aren't we talking about stopping this before it happened? So it's the prevention versus reaction equation that I think is still very out of balance.

Speaker 1 You mentioned leakage before. Are there warning signs on, say, social media? Because I feel like, don't these guys post things online?

Speaker 1 You mentioned the one guy posted something online right before the van attack in Toronto. Are there other warning signs?

Speaker 1 Is this something where AI could monitor someone's communication habits on Instagram or Reddit or whatever, and then eventually say, like, hey, this person is writing weird screeds in their DMs and it's triggering something?

Speaker 2 Social media has become a major factor in this equation over the past, say, decade and a half for obvious reasons.

Speaker 2 Like threatening communications are happening much more in the digital space than they used to. So yes, it's very common in threat cases, both known to the public and not.

Speaker 2 I've seen many of them that aren't where this is going on.

Speaker 2 In a lot of cases of attacks, you have that kind of behavior, posting disturbing images, posting threats, either obscure, veiled comments or direct threats.

Speaker 2 So the question is, what can we do maybe technologically about this to look for it? And there may be some solutions on the horizon with AI or with further developing technology.

Speaker 2 Again, going back to the principle of the work of threat assessment, it's not intended to be like dragnet surveillance.

Speaker 2 That's not really an effective way to approach this because, again, you're going to have so much noise and so little signal to try to find in there.

Speaker 2 Lots of people are talking about guns on social media. Millions of people are talking about guns.
School kids and other are looking at violent material.

Speaker 2 And that isn't really a way, I think, in most cases to identify a case of concern. It's really sort of the opposite.
You've got a kid you're worried about.

Speaker 2 because of something they said at the bus stop or something in their behavior, or now they're suddenly really interested in guns.

Speaker 2 You're also going to look at their social media at that point to see what they're posting because in a lot of cases, you're going to find material there that will reveal some things.

Speaker 2 So it's valuable that way. What about video games?

Speaker 1 I remember people used to blame video games and music, whether it was Nine Inch Nails, which is now stuck in my head, or Marilyn Manson.

Speaker 2 That's out of the column mindcase too.

Speaker 1 Right. That just seems like BS.
Tens of millions of us played Grand Theft Auto, and we've beaten up zero gangsters or prostitutes with baseball bats. I have used zero rocket launchers in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 It doesn't seem like it leads directly to that, but maybe it does.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, this question has been around for decades and sort of hand in hand with the even broader version of the question is like, what is it about American culture that's so violent that causes us to do this?

Speaker 2 And I get it. I mean, it's a question that I think is interesting.
It's hard to nail down, but specifically with violent content, video games or movies or music, lyrics.

Speaker 2 There's actually this kind of comical version of it in some early FBI research that I talk about in the book where they're like trying to pin it on like satanic rock music. That's a canard, right?

Speaker 2 There's no scientific evidence to support the idea that any of that material causes someone to go commit violence like this. That said, there are some ways that it can become relevant in a case.

Speaker 2 It's more about what I was describing earlier with the fixation behavior on graphic content.

Speaker 2 If you've got someone who's in crisis, who's on this planning pathway, other kinds of bad things are going on, and like suddenly they've lost their job or kicked out of school and all these things going on.

Speaker 2 And they're spending all their time playing violent video games, you might ask why. But ultimately, there are a number of cases cases that I looked at very deeply.

Speaker 2 The playing of violent video games, really, what's important about that is the social isolation.

Speaker 2 It's not the game itself, it's the fact that they're not leaving their apartment anymore and they're depressed and angry. And they've got this idea that this is what they think they need to do.

Speaker 2 And there is some theorizing or some thought that I came across among experts in threat assessment in cases like that.

Speaker 2 There may be some psychological rehearsal going on, like playing a first-person shooter is a way to get psyched up.

Speaker 2 That's not a practical way to train yourself to go use a real firearm and shoot people. But there's certainly no evidence I've seen in all my research that it's causal.

Speaker 2 We want to blame that stuff culturally. And I think the cultural concerns are legitimate about violent content.
I mean, you and I both know this as parents, right?

Speaker 2 They're things you don't want your young kids to see, right? And it's much more vivid and graphic now than it was when we were kids.

Speaker 2 That's real and that matters, but I don't think that's causing anyone to go commit a school massacre. Probably not.

Speaker 1 I did show my kid a boxing video and he ran around punching everyone for the rest of the night. So we're not doing that anymore.
But yeah, I can see where there's clear limit to reenacting violence.

Speaker 1 By the way, how do we have the best chance of surviving in an active shooter situation?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that question, I think, for obvious reasons comes up a lot or is on people's minds.

Speaker 2 And it really falls into the category we're talking about of like response and reaction to the perceived threat or danger of this problem in the country, right?

Speaker 2 In the last decade, we've watched lockdown drills become like the norm in schools.

Speaker 2 We didn't grow up with that, but now it's thought, if not most places, that you got to teach teachers and kids what to do if this happens, which the probability of it happening is so small.

Speaker 2 It's infinitesimally small.

Speaker 2 So there's questions about that too, but there is some conflicted thinking about the effectiveness of that kind of training, run, hide, fight approach, what you're supposed to do if this happens, shelter in place.

Speaker 2 Should you leave? Should you try to fight back if you have to? At the end of the day, I guess my response to it is like, is that really the most important question for us to be asking?

Speaker 2 Should we be trying to like really focus on what to do in the very improbable situation happening, or should we be thinking more about what we can do to get on the front side of this?

Speaker 2 In the world of law enforcement and military, they call left of bang. You don't want the bang to happen at all.
And sure, you should be prepared for low probability disasters.

Speaker 2 We do it with earthquakes and fire and flooding and plane crashes and all these other things that can happen, aren't likely to happen.

Speaker 2 I'm just not sure that we should really even focus so much energy on having everyone know what's your best chance of defeating an active shooter. It's just not going to happen.

Speaker 2 It's not going to happen to you. It's not going to happen to me, hopefully.

Speaker 1 Can civilians even stop an active shooter?

Speaker 2 No, it is interesting that the thinking about those tactics has shifted.

Speaker 2 Originally, my understanding of it, the original version of that was the first thing you should do is try to hide in a school, like in a closet or like be quiet, lock the doors, turn off the lights.

Speaker 2 That's a big part of the lockdown drill training that goes on now in schools. Second choice is run away.
Third Third choice is last resort, you fight back.

Speaker 2 If the guy's in the room, you throw a stapler at him or whatever. But that actually shifted.
I think there are a number of experts in security who say, now you should just get the hell out.

Speaker 2 The first thing you should do is run. Don't run, hide, fight.
Don't hide because they're going to come in and shoot you in the closet. That's happened in a lot of cases, tragically.

Speaker 1 I think that's why it's run, hide, fight. It's run if you can.
If you cannot, then you hide. And if you get found, then you fight.

Speaker 2 But then meanwhile, we've got a lot of schools that are training kids to all quickly scramble to the corner of the room, turn off the lights, and pull the shades. That's not running.
That's hiding.

Speaker 2 It's sheltering in place.

Speaker 2 There are questions about it tactically, but again, I think for me, the bigger question is like, why aren't we talking more about prevention and putting more resources into that?

Speaker 2 You should never have a person entering a school building with a firearm in the first place who's intent on doing this. And that's about a lot more than metal detectors.

Speaker 1 Do we know like the statistics of one in X people will be in a mass shooting? Do you have anything off the top of your head?

Speaker 2 I have it on school shootings broadly.

Speaker 2 At least at the time that I I was finishing the research for trigger points, the probability of being shot in a shooting at a school was something like one in 2 million for a student in America.

Speaker 2 So it's a highly unlikely thing to happen.

Speaker 2 Part of the problem with trying to come up with these statistics is that there is no official or perfect way to measure mass shootings because the criteria varies and there is no perfect criteria.

Speaker 2 How many people do you need to get shot to have a mass shooting? There's some subjective choices that have been made in the criteria.

Speaker 2 When I first started studying this intensively in 2012, I created really what was the first online public database of mass shootings at Mother Jones. Nothing like that existed in 2012.

Speaker 2 So part of the reason why I did it, we had to figure out like, what is the criteria for this? What are we going to include?

Speaker 2 And I ended up taking what was a very conservative approach to defining the problem because That was the year of the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado.

Speaker 2 That's what really set me off on this path in the first place. And then there were several more attacks that fall.
And then Sandy Hook happened in December 2012.

Speaker 2 So I was gathering this data because it didn't exist publicly and had defined what the data was.

Speaker 2 I was going with what criminologists who studied the problem had used and the FBI had used in more serial killer related research. And it was like four or more people killed.

Speaker 2 Why is it four people instead of five or three? But that's what the professionals were using. So we went with that.

Speaker 2 And then also, I was ruling out cases of like armed robbery or gang wars or things happening in people's private homes because what I was interested in understanding better was what is this thing that just happened in the movie theater?

Speaker 2 This is crazy. Like, is this happening more? It was a year after the mass shooting in Arizona, where then Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and a bunch of other people were shot and killed.

Speaker 2 It felt as someone who had studied and reported on gun violence for several years, something's shifting here.

Speaker 2 So I went looking for data on mass shootings and I couldn't really find any, which blew my mind because this was not a new problem. It goes back to Columbine and even before.

Speaker 2 So it's a definitional problem too, to try to say how many mass shootings are there. After we did that database, a bunch of other groups and media started collecting data.

Speaker 2 And now we're accustomed to these headlines that say, oh, there's been 782 mass shootings this year. But that's a broader way of measuring the problem.

Speaker 2 They're using a broader criteria than we did back then, which was like using a handful of cases that fit a more specific set of things.

Speaker 2 Because of that range of criteria, it's very hard to say like, what is the probability? But I think the overall picture, it is a low probability event.

Speaker 2 There are not mass shootings happening every day in cities across America.

Speaker 2 And I think the public perception has been warped a lot by very intense media coverage that does occur when we have a very high profile tragic event.

Speaker 1 Mark, thank you for coming in today. I know it's a dark topic.
I'm glad you did a deep dive on this. Somebody had to, I suppose.
I can't imagine this was a fun thing to research.

Speaker 2 To be honest with you, I was drawn to this subject initially because of the tragedy and trauma of it. And I was reporting on it in the way that journalists do.

Speaker 2 But when I learned about this violence prevention method, I actually saw it as very hopeful because it's another way to look at the problem, another way to try to think about solving it.

Speaker 2 And in a lot of ways, it goes around the highly polarized partisan debate over guns. It's let's look at this as a problem of behavioral health, of human behavior that is more broad-based.

Speaker 2 It's a kind of a non-partisan way to look at it. So I found that very hopeful and exciting, right? Yes, it's a heavy subject, but but it's something that we can deal with.

Speaker 2 That's another big myth I think we have with this problem to this day. And I say this a lot when I'm talking about this work: this idea that talk about the onion headline, right?

Speaker 2 With that, like no way to prevent this as the only country that has this all the time, but there are a lot of things we can do to prevent it. And I think that's really hopeful and worth focusing on.

Speaker 2 And that's why I've done it for so long. So I think people should think about it that way.
We can do a lot more.

Speaker 1 I agree. Thank you so much, man.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Pleasure to talk to you.

Speaker 1 Here's a trailer featuring featuring Tom Hardin, once entangled in insider trading, who transformed into Tipper X, a pivotal informant instrumental in exposing major securities fraud cases for the FBI.

Speaker 6 So insider trading, trading stocks on information that's material.

Speaker 6 And if you have that information before the public, you can place your long trade or your short trade if they're going to miss or beat the estimates from Wall Street.

Speaker 6 So if you were to have this information before everybody else, then you can make profitable trades. And my rationalization was: seems like everybody's doing it.
Who am I hurting?

Speaker 6 The boss was looking the other way.

Speaker 2 I'll do it just this once and never do it again.

Speaker 6 I placed the trade and it was just a few keystrokes. Years later, people say, what were you thinking? It was all a very slow, slippery slope.

Speaker 2 Like, this is how I rationalized it.

Speaker 6 And I hear this guy behind me say, hey, are you Tom? Turn around.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 And then there was two FBI agents and he's like, look, man, we know about your four trades. And my first thought was, I know why they're here.
And oh my God, my dad's going to kill me.

Speaker 6 Oh, my God, my wife's going to divorce me. And then I thought, holy crap, this might impact my career.
Oh, my God, I might go into prison. So I went from dad to prison.

Speaker 6 I immediately started making implicating statements. So the sentencing guidelines is based on the money my firm made, just over a million.

Speaker 1 So I was looking at three years in prison.

Speaker 6 If you would have told me when I graduated from Penn, you know, a few years later, you're going to be insider trading. I would never do that because I'm a good guy.
It was all self-inflicted.

Speaker 6 I did this all to my family myself.

Speaker 6 You know, for the past past seven years now, pretty much every week, I get in front of a group of people, a complete group of strangers, and tell them the worst thing I've ever done.

Speaker 1 Don't miss this compelling story of a transformation and redemption on episode 918.

Speaker 1 All things Mark Fulman will be on the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

Speaker 1 Please consider supporting those who make the show possible.

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Speaker 1 This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.
Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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Speaker 1 In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learned. And we'll see you next time.

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Speaker 1 This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation?

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Speaker 1 Find Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.