Opinion | We May Be Able to Prevent Some Mass Shootings

Follman argues that even in the absence of stronger gun regulations, we have been making progress in understanding and perhaps even preventing the most notable forms of mass shootings, rampages in which three or more people are deliberately and seemingly indiscriminately killed, often by a lone attacker.

Who’s “we”? Mental health specialists, academic researchers, state and federal law enforcement officials, and administrators in schools and universities around the country. Follman explores the history and promise of a cross-disciplinary field known as “behavioral threat assessment,” a set of ideas to help officials recognize and redirect a potential shooter away from violence. At the core of the model is the notion that mass shootings are not like lightning strikes — they are not just sudden, unforeseen attacks involving people who “snap.” Mass shootings are more like avalanches: They take time to form, they generally follow a predictable pattern, and if you know what to look for, you can sometimes spot them a long way off, and perhaps even prevent them from happening at all.

“There’s a lot we can do to demystify the mass shootings problem, to make sense of what we typically dismiss as ‘senseless’ or inexplicable tragedies, in order to help prevent them,” Follman told me. This work of prevention is not a panacea; the approach is resource-intensive, it’s constantly evolving, and its success is difficult to measure — after all, the fact that an attack doesn’t occur doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve prevented one. But Follman says he believes behavioral assessment may have prevented a mass shooting in “dozens of cases across the country.” The book makes the first realistic, optimistic case for addressing mass shootings that I’ve heard in — well, probably ever.

Follman is an editor at Mother Jones magazine, where he has been covering mass shootings for the past decade. (Disclosure: In the mid-2000s, he was a colleague of mine at Salon.) In 2012, Follman and two colleagues, Gavin Aronsen and Deanna Pan, created the website’s pioneering database of mass shooting events. As part of that work, Follman writes, he noticed a pattern — that “many of the perpetrators had acted in worrisome or disruptive ways prior to attacking, often for a long time.” The realization led him to researchers who have been working to identify pre-attack behaviors since the 1980s.

The model varies, but behavioral threat assessment generally involves placing teams of trained counselors and administrators in schools, colleges, workplaces and other settings where shootings might occur. To stop a person from killing others, these teams look for patterns of behavior that research has shown people tend to exhibit on their way to mass attack. Among the “warning behaviors” of would-be attackers are acts of aggression and violence, stalking, threatening communications, a fascination with previous shooters and, of course, planning and preparation for an attack. In many cases these signs are glaring — the potential attacker’s friends, family, classmates, teachers and others in the community often can’t help noticing that the person is troubled.