David Riedman

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40 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

David Riedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 1: The Chain of Events (Update) · 9 May 2025 podcast

We could take that same model and apply it to a national crisis center where we tell people to look for red flags.

I think the national crisis center would be more than school shootings, even more than mass shootings. Because what we've seen leading up to a mass shooting or leading up to a school shooting is a person who's in crisis and they're actively suicidal.

And within that umbrella of somebody being suicidal and in crisis, you can also have self-harm, you can have physical and psychological abuse, you can have substance abuse. And this would be a resource that would provide services across all of those different major issues.

a one-stop resource where somebody who is concerned that they're seeing the red flags in a friend or classmate or coworker can go and get assistance, get a plan of action. That is paired with investment in community crisis intervention training as well as violence interruption programs because we know that community violence interruption programs have been successful to prevent shootings.

It is. Really, the biggest objection is the thought that if there's a tip line and red flag laws, that that will lead to guns being taken away from somebody. That if you have a widely available system of reporting, that somebody who is an innocent gun owner will have an anonymous report made against them and then have their gun seized.

I think that that's a very difficult policy question to answer because it comes down to the philosophical point of do you care about the public good or do you care about your individual freedoms? And I try to look at history and look at the context for these events. And following Ruby Ridge and Waco and Oklahoma City, We put very significant restrictions on who is allowed to buy explosives.

But I fear that this is an issue that's far too polarized. And I get death threats just for reporting school shootings. Can you describe one? Oh, yeah. I get emails that say, you know, we're going to find you and you'll be eviscerated in front of your family. So it's a very careful path that one has to walk.

And I really try to objectively report a problem that is in every community and every part of the country over now a 60-year period of modern history. And I do that in really an objective manner that can be studied for just about any research purposes. I'm also extraordinarily hopeful because far more shootings are averted than attacks that happen.

A student walked into the bathroom and he found a bullet that was sitting upright on the toilet seat. And he knew that something was wrong. So he went and he found the school resource officer, the vice principal, the principal, and a teacher and told all of them there's a problem because he wanted to make sure that he was heard. And they took him seriously.

They watched the surveillance footage, figured out which student had left the bathroom, and they detained a student. And in his backpack, he had a loaded handgun, three loaded magazines, a hit list, and a written plan to commit a shooting that day. And that is because these mass shootings and these school shootings are public suicides.

And somebody is going to cry for help until the moment right before the attack. And that bullet was left there, hoping somebody would find it. And that's the opportunity that we have. If somebody knows what to do and has someone to talk to, we can prevent almost every one of these attacks.

For their book, they interviewed convicted mass shooters in jail. And one of the questions that they asked each person they interviewed is who could have prevented the shooting? And the answer they got was anyone could have prevented the shooting.

I think that's why we need this system where the public knows the red flags, knows that there's somebody in crisis, and then has a system to get that person help. There's a gentleman named Aaron Stark, and he did a TED Talk about when he plotted a school shooting when he was in high school. He was a victim of serious abuse at home.

And he thought that this school shooting would be something that would finally really get back at his parents. He had bought the gun and he had the plan. And there was one classmate who reached out to him and said, why don't you come over to my house and have some lunch and let me get you a clean shirt. And that one act of kindness showed him that his life had value.

And he never committed that shooting.

Here is David Riedman again, the school shooting researcher. And I think that that's what we're missing. In fortification of the schools, in adding school police officers, in creating all of these levels of fortresses around schools and public spaces, the person that ultimately wants to commit a mass shooting is somebody who's very, very deeply hurt.

And rather than trying to keep that person further out and demonize that person even further, if we can just show them a tiny bit of kindness, you know, a lot of these shootings would never happen. Probably none of these shootings would happen.

In October 2002, there were 17 different random sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area. And there was no clue as to why they were happening and where the next one was going to be. So there were two gentlemen, one older, one a teenager, The older man was the car driver. The younger man laid in the back and fired through a hole that they had made in the trunk.

And they drove to random locations and shot people. And they were only caught when they started leaving clues, which eventually led to their arrest. And that was three weeks where really going to school every day, there was genuine fear that you weren't going to come home. We left the school in groups of five, running in a zigzag pattern.

And that really framed, I think, a lot of my future experiences around school shootings and gun violence.

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