- It happens too frequently.

The flashing chyrons across the lower third of our television screens, another mass shooting, more innocent lives cut short.

The debate in the following days follows a well worn script of hopeless resignation and incensed outrage.

But today's guest says there are techniques and methods already in use that are successfully preventing mass shootings.

He's Mark Follman this week on Story in the Public Square.

(bright music) Hello and welcome to a Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G.Wayne Miller with a Providence Journal.

- This week we're joined by Mark Follman, the National Affairs Editor at Mother Jones.

He's also the author of an important new book, "Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America" and he joins us today from California.

Welcome to the show, Mark.

- Thanks for having me, it's great to be here.

- You know, we talked about this a little bit before taping, but this is, I think, one of those, one of those really exceptional books that takes a very, very serious topic, and instead of leaving the reader in the sort of pits of hopeless despair, you actually give us something to be a little bit optimistic about.

So we wanna get right to the book.

Mass shootings, they feel like a fairly modern phenomena.

Is that an accurate characterization of them.

- Well, in some respects, yes.

I mean, it's certainly a problem that we've seen grown in recent decades.

But this form of targeted or predatory violence has existed for a long time and it's, I think it's much more in the public consciousness now as we have witnessed a lot of horrific tragedies in recent years.

But, you know, the nature of this problem is really worth digging into, and that's a primary reason I wrote the book, because there's a lot of misunderstanding about mass shootings as well.

- We wanna unpack some of that in just a moment.

But the other thing I wanted to ask you about is, you know, I think that there's a popular meme that goes around every time that there's a mass shooting in the United States, that, you know, it's only in United States that we see these kinds of atrocities in schools, in supermarkets, in concert venues.

Is that accurate?

Is this really a uniquely American phenomenon?

- It's not exactly accurate.

This problem does exist in other societies, other western countries have mass shootings, Canada, Europe, Australia, historically.

But the distinction, of course, is that we have a much greater frequency of this problem.

It's inordinately a bigger issue in the United States than elsewhere around the world.

In that sense, it feels very exceptional.

- So there are a lot of myths surrounding mass shootings, and we're going to get into some of them, but let's start with the idea that is circulated frequently every time there is one, that the person who had his hand on the trigger was insane or just snapped and somehow went off the deep edge, deep end.

That's not the case though.

What is the reality here?

- That's right.

Well, when I first started digging into this problem about a decade ago, that was one of the first real big insights for me.

And digging into cases and the data of mass shootings that, you know, we have this very strong narrative in our media and in politics that the people who commit mass shootings of this kind are totally crazy, untethered from reality.

There is this theme of them just snapping quote unquote.

You often hear that question, "what made the guy snap?"

after a major attack.

None of this reflects the reality of how these events occur.

Meaning that a lot of the people who do this, most people who commit these crimes are going through a lengthy process of planning and preparation.

There's often a quite rational thought process involved.

And so the idea that they are completely out of their minds, hearing voices, acting impulsively, none of that is true when you study the forensic evidence of these cases.

So the role of mental health and mental illness in mass shootings is still to this day widely misunderstood.

We have a tendency to try to blame it fundamentally on mental illness, but that's really not the reality in most of these cases.

- So where do these myths come from?

I mean, myths don't spring from nowhere.

They have a grounding in some belief system.

Talk about that.

- Yeah.

- I mean, it's no question this is a widespread belief.

How did it start and why and where and why does it continue to be the myth?

- It's a good question.

I mean, there's several big myths that we have about mass shooters, another is the notion that they can be profiled, that there's a certain type of person who does this.

That's all so wrong.

There's a wide range of perpetrators historically of mass shootings.

I think that these myths become established because, you know, there's a very strong hunger among the public to explain something so horrific, to have a clear explanation of why something happens.

And I think blaming mental illness is, in a sense, sort of easy.

It's a way to kind of distance ourselves from people who commit this kind of crime.

But ultimately, it's a human behavior.

It's a set of human behaviors that are leading to this type of violence.

I think mental illness being blamed fundamentally as the cause of mass shootings has also really taken a hold for political reasons.

It's used in political debate over guns and gun regulations in our country.

And it becomes sort of an easy way to, I think, for some to distract from the debate over gun regulations, for others to maybe take away blame for the tool of destruction.

I mean, we're a society that has an enormous quantity of firearms and so, you know, regardless of where one falls on the debate over how to regulate firearms, you know, there is some incentive, I think, in that discussion for people to try to deflect blame elsewhere.

Mental illness has become one of the great areas of that over the years.

- So, Mark, let's just, there's a lot more that we wanna get into the book, and the book we should know is not about guns, but let's just sort of take this point head on.

Country with 400 million firearms in a population of 330 million or 320 million Americans, the prevalence of guns in our society is a factor in the frequency of these assaults, is it not?

- Oh, I think of course it is.

You don't have mass shootings without guns, so it's inextricably part of the problem.

But that being said, you know, part of the reason I wanted to write this book, Jim, was because I'd studied the issue of gun violence for a long time and reported specifically on mass shootings and noticed, you know, many years ago that whenever they happen, we have these same political debates over and over again that are very dug in, and there seem to be so little progress on policy.

So, on the one hand, we can recognize that, of course, guns are, you know, key to this problem, but for me the question really became, what more can we understand about this problem?

What more can we do about it?

And that's really what inspired me to write the book because I began to discover as I really dug into the problem that there are other dimensions to this that really do offer possibility for preventing these attacks.

- So the first third of the book really documents the work of a couple of researchers, including Dr. Robert Fein, and Dr. Shervert Frazier, who did pioneering early research on what leads people to kill.

I'm curious about how did you find their work and how did you gain access to their research in telling what really is the foundational chapters of the book?

- Yeah, I started to learn about that research which took place beginning in the late 1970s as I was digging more and more into historical study of this problem, of targeted violence.

And it really began with a collaboration between mental health experts of Robert Fein, as you mentioned, a forensic psychologist, who had begun working with colleagues at a state mental institution in Massachusetts to try to really understand better what led people to plan violence.

And this was really done in the context of assassination.

They also began working with the Secret Service at the time.

The goal was to try to protect politicians and other high profile public figures.

And through that work, they started to learn that, as I was saying earlier, there is no way to predict who will commit an assassination, and there's no profile of a person, per se.

Even the role of mental illness was a lot lesser than they had thought initially.

So you could see sort of the early groundwork for this method of behavioral threat assessment in that work.

And then over the years, they began to apply it to the study of mass attacks, of school shootings, of workplace shootings.

So I began to learn about it through digging into some research and some discussions that were going on in the FBI.

There were different areas of the country and different institutions and agencies, primarily in law enforcement that were collaborating with mental health experts to try to do a better job of figuring out how to prevent violence.

And this struck me as quite extraordinary when I first learned about it, because traditionally, the role of law enforcement is not to prevent crime, it's to investigate and help prosecute crime after it happens, so I thought this was quite extraordinary, and I began digging into it and reaching out to people who had been involved in the early work, including Robert Fein, and starting to get some of their old research papers and learning more about how they really began to develop this work more than four decades ago.

- You know, Mark, one of the things that I really appreciated about your writing is that this is, this is, you're telling a story with this, and there are some narrative details that I found absolutely fascinating.

Mark David Chapman was the assassin who killed John Lennon outside of his apartment in New York City, and he was carrying with him a copy of "Catcher in the Rye".

Now, I had heard from popular culture that a lot of other assassins in the 1980s had been found with copies of "Catcher in the Rye", and I had never understood why.

You filled in the points on that and connected that, and it's something called emulation behavior.

Would you explain that phenomenon for our audience?

- Sure, so this is one area of several, I ended up in organizing the book and studying threat assessment, creating sort of broad sets of behavioral areas that are relevant to the work of threat assessment.

There are eight of them that I discussed in the book, and one of them is emulation behavior.

This is known more commonly as the copycat problem, referring to how people who are planning assassinations, or mass shootings, in many cases, if you study them, we've learned over time that in many cases the perpetrators are looking to their predecessors for inspiration.

They wanna identify with them, they want to sometimes use their tactics, and they're seeking ways to go about committing their own version of a crime.

And this often involves looking to what the predecessors did, how they acted, how they dressed, what they had.

And so that early example was really fascinating to me.

Then in the context of assassination, where you had Chapman, you know, strongly identifying with the protagonist of this, you know, watershed fiction in "Catcher on the Rye".

And then after he commits this horrific murder of John Lennon, others who are thinking about high profile assassination, John Hinkley, and later an assassin named Robert Barto, who killed a young Hollywood star, Rebecca Schaeffer, in 1989, they copied this behavior, they carried a copy of "Catcher in the Rye" with them.

And so this was an important early clue in some of the behavioral patterns that are going on in these cases of assassination.

And years later, studying a similar process in mass shooters, the process leading up to those attacks over weeks, months, sometimes even years, you would see emulation behavior.

You would see a keen focus on expectations of how the media would respond to a mass shooting, wanting notoriety, wanting sensational news coverage.

And so I found this really fascinating part of studying this prevention work because it really speaks so strongly to the kind of broader cultural and political forces going on in American society that in some ways are very entwined with this problem of mass shootings.

- So let's zero in for a moment here on copycat killers.

Every time there is a mass shooting, and very frequently, even when there's a shooting that involves only one victim, or even just a threat, I'm thinking of schools now, law enforcement, other people talk about beware there's a threat of a copycat killer.

How common is that actually in reality, and is it a real, I mean, obviously it's a real thing, but how common is that today and historically?

- It's relatively common in threat cases and in cases of mass attacks that we've experienced, particularly in the setting of school shootings.

And I write at length in Trigger Points about what I call the Columbine Effect.

It is most rooted in imitation or emulation of that event more than two decades ago now in Colorado, that shooting at Columbine High School.

And really kind of a whole sort of subculture developed around that, largely online and continued to be furthered through social media as that grew in the past decade plus.

And what we see in cases is that perpetrators and plotters are often very interested in getting attention.

And this speaks to the sort of behavioral and circumstantial problems in a lot of perpetrators.

And so they know that one way to do that is to connect with sensational material.

And for many years, the way that we would talk about mass shootings and school shootings in the media, I think inadvertently was feeding this problem.

And I write about this in the book, that by continually recycling the images of Columbine and by contextualizing school shootings all in the context of Columbine, we're sort of repeating how important that event is.

And so for the few people who are actually looking at that and seeking attention themselves, they're very aware of it and they want to connect with it, and so it did become an exacerbating factor.

It's one of many factors in case studies of mass shooters, but it is real and significant, and I think that there has been a growing recognition of that in more recent years.

I wrote about it and reported on it quite a bit for Mother Jones and in the book to try to help raise awareness about, you know, the role of the media being significant, but it's really the general public too.

It's the way that we share content on social media and talk about mass shootings as a society.

If we're constantly giving it a certain reverence, or sort of excessive attention on the perpetrators, that's problematic as I argue in the book.

- Well, Mark, I before you, this is an incredibly powerful conversation and it's easy to sort of get mired in just the horror of it.

But as I said at the outset, one of the things that I really found wonderful about this book is that you don't just stop with the phenomena of mass violence.

You also move into some really interesting pioneering work that's being done in places like the Salem-Keizer School System in Oregon.

What are they doing there and why is it so important?

- Yeah, so for me, the real mission of the book was to understand what we can do about this problem more broadly, and that's really what the work of behavioral threat assessment and threat management is.

So again, this was pioneered in the context of assassination and celebrity stalking, but then was applied to school shootings, primarily beginning after Columbine.

The school district in Oregon that I spent a lot of time with for the book, Salem-Keizer, they were one of the first to implement this model.

And the model is essentially bringing together multidisciplinary expertise on a team.

You have mental health experts in a school setting, in the case of schools, you have a school psychologist, you have counselors, you have administrators, you have a law enforcement role, school resource officers, the local police department is a part of the team, you have social services involved, educators and so on, and you bring together a range of perspectives.

And what they do is evaluate individual cases of concern that come to their attention, assess the level of danger.

A student who is not doing well, who may be starting to stir real anxiety and concern and fear in others around them, evaluating what's going on here, and then making a plan to intervene, ideally constructively, getting help to people who need it.

That's essentially what this model is.

And in many cases that I was able to go inside of, a number of which I recount in the book, you can see over time how these constructive interventions help begin to steer a person away from violent thinking and planning, you know, troubled kids who are really focused on school shootings and getting them resources and help that they need to be on a better path.

That's the work that that school district is doing in Oregon and many others around the country.

- And so you conclude that it can and does work, this type of new, quote unquote, new approach.

Is that correct?

- Yeah, I came to see with an immersion in this work over several years that it is quite promising.

It's tricky to measure the results of this work as I describe in the book, because really what you're doing is essentially proving a negative outcome, negative meaning nothing happens.

The evidence of success in a threat management case is the absence of evidence in a certain sense.

There is no violence that happens.

And that's not news so we never hear about it publicly.

But I was able to gain access to a lot of these cases over time and to follow them over time.

There are two that I tell quite in depth from the Salem-Keizer program, where you can see over years the young individuals are helped and go in a better direction.

And there was very strong evidence in these cases that these were people who were quite seriously thinking about and considering and in some ways planning for violence.

And so as much as you can say you prevented violence that never occurred, these are cases that show that because there's very compelling evidence that these were people who were almost certainly going to carry out acts of violence if they weren't intervened with in the ways that they were.

- So you're making a very strong argument that this type of approach and program should really be in every school and school district in the country and, of course, that is not the case.

What you have in many schools and many districts instead is the presence of armed police officers.

They're called by different euphemisms, including resource officers.

You have people, politicians, and programs that want to arm teachers.

That seems to be the other extreme.

Give us an assessment of those two issues, armed police officers in schools and armed teachers, which I think many teachers, maybe most would say is crazy.

- Well, I do think that one of the big challenges for this field of work is to do more to explain how this works and to engage the community in it.

It's prevention work.

It's constructive ideally in its truest form.

And so the distinction here is prevention versus reaction.

When you talk about having armed police in schools responding to violent attacks, or having armed teachers to respond to it, we have so much emphasis on physical security in response to school shootings and mass shootings and being ready for the next attacker, or active shooter drills.

I think there's validity to those range of policy responses, but in my view, there is such a heavy over emphasis on reaction versus prevention.

And so the role of law enforcement in threat assessment is, I think, particularly challenging to convey to the public because it's not intended to be prosecutorial.

It's not, this isn't about trying to arrest our way out of this problem.

It's really about early intervention to try to help people who are struggling before they get to the point of planning and carrying out violence.

And in the course of researching and reporting Trigger Points, I came to know a number of school resource officers, or police officers who work in these programs with the specific training who are quite valuable to this process and they're contributing to the prevention work.

And yet, you know, we have I think, some very kind of negative context and connotations around police in schools with good reason.

It's caused a lot of problems in the last couple of decades.

In particular, it was a trend after Columbine to try to, you know, create more armed security in schools and that led to quite a number of problems in terms of punitive action against troubled youth and particularly minorities.

But this work fundamentally, if it's done right, is really meant as, you know, to be countervailing to that, to do the opposite, to try to keep kids in school, to try to help them to try to have less contact with the criminal justice system.

And in programs where it's done well and effectively, including in Salem-Keizer, they've shown that through their work that there is less prosecution of troubled youth in that context.

- Hey, Mark, after the gunman killed 19 elementary aged students in Uvalde, Texas, and two adults, I should know, you wrote a column in Mother Jones, basically saying that the narrative, the public narrative, that there was nothing we could do about this actually perpetuated the risk of violence.

Can you explain that for our audience?

- Sure.

I've come to see that that narrative is counterproductive in my view.

It's unhelpful to understanding the nature of this problem because, you know, we see this repeated every time there's a horrific mass shooting, particularly after a terrible tragedy in an elementary school, again, in Texas this year.

And it's, you know, it's conclusion is that we're stuck with this forever, that we're in a state of despair and resignation and nothing can really be done.

And I just think that we need to fundamentally reject that, not only because there are other ways that we can tackle this problem, including the work of behavioral threat assessment and community based prevention, in my view, it's all of the above.

We have to work on gun policy, gun regulations, we have to work on prevention.

There are underlying socioeconomic factors in these cases, real problems with substance abuse and domestic life, all of these things need to be addressed.

And so to resign ourselves to the idea that there's no way forward, I think is wrong.

And it's not just a matter of, you know, perhaps political or moral or policy imperative, it also feeds the problem.

I wrote about this as well, that, again, when you look at case evidence of perpetrators of these attacks, they're keenly aware of these narratives, of the way that we frame this culturally and politically in our media and in our discussion of the politics of guns.

And so when we reinforce this idea that these will never end, it in a certain sense validates this form of violence.

And there are quite a few perpetrators who see what they're doing as justified, as, you know, they've arrived at this idea that it's the only valid solution to their problems.

And so I think that that narrative in a way contributes to that and is something that we should move away from, not just because there's more that we can do, but also because it is in a certain sense fueling that attitude among shooters.

- Mark, we've only got about 30 seconds left, but one of the things that struck me, the cases that I didn't see in the book, the shooting at the AME Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Prior to publication, after publication, the shooting, the mass shooting at the African American grocery store in Buffalo, I didn't see hate crimes or cases of hate crimes addressed with this approach.

Is it as valid in those cases as it is in these other forms of mass violence?

- Absolutely.

And I do address in the book the role of political ideology and extremism as a factor in the behaviors and circumstances that do underwrite quite a few mass shootings.

That's one of many factors that threat assessment experts will look at, so it is significant in that context too.

You know, frankly, there's so many cases that we can dive into for study of the problem that, you know, I had to pick and choose for various reasons which ones to really focus on.

But certainly that is a significant factor, and I've written recently about how it's a growing factor in some of these cases too.

So again, this underscores the broad based approach to this problem that we need to understand the nature of it much more widely than just our debate over regulating firearms.

That's a really important debate and it will go on.

But in terms of the circumstances and the context and the human behaviors feeding into this planned violence, it doesn't come outta nowhere, these are planned attacks, and therein lies the opportunity to intervene.

And that's the real hope of the book.

- Mark, it is an exceptional book.

The book is Trigger Points, it's a must read.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org.

For Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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