Mark Follman
Appearances
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
The Oxford kid who's basically begging his parents to get me mental health help, 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. Often, 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
What was really, I think, fascinating to me in studying Elliot Rodgers' case was the ability to go back and look at all of this material and ask the question, why was this missed? Or how else could you get to this information in a way that could prevent this from happening? And really, almost all of these cases have that in some form, that you can see those behaviors along the way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. Also fundamentally wrong. There are cases where bullying is significant and Elliot Rodgers is one of them. There are others. I think the recent case in Georgia had a significant amount of that too.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I don't know that case as well, but it's there. 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. You may have this circumstance or that circumstance, including bullying. That is not fundamentally the cause.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. So that tells you nothing in and of itself.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. That could be exacerbating it. And that may become their grievance.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
In Elliot Rodgers' 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I'm desperate, I don't wanna live anymore, everyone hates me, I hate everyone, whatever that sort of narrative is, 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 gonna do that. To bring yourself to take your own life or to kill other people,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There's a high bar to that, I think, for most human beings, right? You need justification. And so bullying can be justification. Misogyny can be justification. Political ideology can be justification. And you can see that in this behavioral process too. In Elliot Rodgers' case, he had ideas of hating women for a long time, and he articulated them privately in his journals.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Which were not public until I did the story. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
One other thing I wanted to say about this was that by the time Elliot Rodger got there, which I was able to obtain comprehensively as online footprint in those forums, a lot of which was not public because it was all taken down immediately.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. There was actually a lot of evidence to the contrary in what I looked at. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
He'd already been planning. He had grievances. He had behavioral health issues. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There's significant evidence, and in her view too, that he didn't really identify with incel ideology per se. He certainly had grievances against women. There was a lot of vile misogyny in his writing toward the end of his life and in his video. 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
No, I don't think it was. Is that video still online? It can be found. I think like anything that's been on the internet, if you really want to find it, you can.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. And that became the story of him. But he created a number of videos in the run up to that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And the ones he did weeks prior to that were very different. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It basically set off a welfare check. She contacted authorities along with a social worker in Isla Vista, called from LA and said, I'm worried about my son. I can't get in touch with him. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. His social skills were lacking. He had some developmental disabilities. He was thought to be on the spectrum.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There are issues with social behavior that come up with that. So I think a lot of people saw that and thought like he's weird or whatever. But definitely the point here is that people who saw that video- I think we're right in feeling like something's off here. And that's the fundamental point here too.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yeah. So in May of 2014, Elliot Rodger 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. He rammed his car into a bunch of people. He 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So I think he injured 14 people. And of course, Many others in the community were traumatized, targeted in several places around town.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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 the Center for Investigative Reporting, I name those victims and talk about them.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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 Rodger or others, I do that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And I think that people in the field of threat assessment do this in their research to understand the problem. The purpose of this is solely... to get a better understanding of the nature of this so that we can prevent it from happening. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So there were his roommates, their friend. Then he went to a sorority house through a stroke of good fortune. It turned out there weren't many people there. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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, Del Playa Drive, where all the house parties happened in Isla Vista, which was a focus of his grievance. It was a fixation for him. And that goes back to the question of warning signs.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
He was writing about this and making videos about it and doing a good job of keeping it secret. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. He'd already thought about it and already started to plan it, but that was, I think, a real pivotal moment.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I know that sounds really dark and it is, but here's the thing. 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. And a lot more things happened between that event and what he did, where he was showing warning behaviors, people were concerned about him.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And it's really an amazing case study for lessons learned and how to do better at stopping this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
No, I'm glad you raised that. And we can talk about it in the context of the Elliot Rodger case. 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. It's the same as what I was just discussing with mental illness or mental health. It is not a cause of mass shootings.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There is no evidence to support that scientifically at all. 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 going down what threat assessment calls the pathway to violence.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It's a process over time exacerbated by life circumstances, life stressors, certain kinds of thinking, a set of behaviors. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. And that's really important to understand. I've talked to practitioners about this through my reporting on this subject.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There are cases where, especially with young people in a school, in an education setting, the school system is autistic. That brings up other factors with the way that that person is experiencing social life. And these are some things that play into thinking of related to loneliness, suicidality, anxiety. So that is important in that way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But again, there's no evidence to say that autism causes people to become mass shooters. That's false. Good.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Well, and the incel component, of course, is big and a whole other side of it, I'm sure we'll get to.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
One thing about Elliot Rodger in particular with autism that's interesting, he was actually never diagnosed clinically with autism. 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. So it's sort of emblematic in a way of what I'm talking about. He had special education support.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
He had some developmental disabilities that were serious. He was going through a lot of therapy. But none of these things really defined or caused what he did.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I would steer you away from describing this as nuts, the behaviors, because that sounds like crazy or mentally insane. It's like the way we see it, right? Yeah. Normal people don't get a knife out and go to the library and start stabbing at it. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
People who are actually psychopaths is another term that we sort of throw around in lay language. Oh, that person's psycho, but actual psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder, that's a fraction of the set of overall cases. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And I actually explored this at great length to what I call in the book emulation behavior. It's known as the copycat problem. Why do mass shooters look to previous shooters for inspiration and sometimes for tactical ideas too? 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
They want to be known. They want to be a somebody instead of a nobody because they feel like nobody. 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. They feel hopeless. They're suicidal.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 or trench coat, that big myth from Columbine, I'm going to get more media coverage. I'm going to get more attention. And that's happened in a number of cases. The Elliot Rodgers story built on that trajectory too.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You've already put your finger on it. For me... My focus on violence prevention in this space is really ultimately a hopeful story.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 Rodger. And he posted on Facebook right before he drove the van down the street and plowed over a bunch of people. All hail Elliot. And then he's evaluated later by mental health professionals for his court proceedings.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And he essentially confesses to them, oh, that was a lie. 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. And I think in evaluating all the forensic evidence of the case, there were three practitioners who all concluded, yeah, that was a lie.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. But the debate was always and still is often only about firearms.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
He had really nothing to do with this incel ideology. But that shows you the power of that narrative that really started with Elliot Rodger and has been picked up on and repeated over and over to this day in media. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And this is a different way of looking at the problem. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. Again, it's a component of a very complex equation with people in this type of scenario.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I'll take a step back for a minute and just sort of explain what the paradigm of behavioral threat assessment is, because I think that context is important to this question too. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You have teams in different settings who do this work. 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. Somebody is making people nervous, upset, worried. We're worried this high school kid's going to do a school shooting. Why?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. There are cases where you have a level of narcissism that's very unhealthy. Elliot Rodger was one of them.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
His perception of himself and the way that he felt the world saw him was a very important driving factor in what he did. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But his perception of it was very different. 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. And there are other cases like that, and it manifests in different ways.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. We all are capable of this, of lethal violence. So what prevents people from committing lethal violence or why do people do it? I mean, you can understand it from the perspective of defensive, protective violence.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yeah. I mean, that's really one of a number of myths that surround this problem in perpetuity. We have an inordinate population. version of this problem in the United States. It's much bigger here. But this goes on in other places in the world. There have been quite a few mass shootings in Europe, in Canada, Australia, comparable nations in terms of culture and wealth.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. Most people
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
are going to feel inhibited from even thinking in that direction. 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. That is a very different kind of thought process that most people's social barriers stand in the way of, I think.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There were multiple school shootings in the 1990s and some big ones included. that preceded that, 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, but that's actually not right. And you can go back to 1966 to Austin, Texas, a clock tower shooting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I did a lot of research on that case too. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. And it's often not easy to explain. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Or there was a wildfire that burned down the neighborhood. All of these things contribute to a specific story for an individual person and what leads them down this pathway. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. Why do so many shooters have the Catcher in the Rye on their shelf? What's going on with that? That was a fascinating little chunk of history.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. And there's a whole story there. And I tell some of that in the book.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But we have much more of it and much more frequent recurrence of it. So I think that lends itself to this kind of stereotypical idea that only America goes through this. 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. It's describing a planned or predatory type of violence of attacking.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. He also had a copy of Catcher in the Rye with him.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So he was paying attention to this behavior too. And this is all about what the field of threat assessment calls identification behavior. Essentially like, I can be like that guy. I want to be like that guy. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And we see that with school shooters now in the more current era, right? Like looking or acting or sounding like a Columbine guy or Elliot Rodger or other cases that have followed it. What's the common denominator here? They all got a lot of attention, high profile cases, tons of kind of sensational media coverage.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That's something else 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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, you just go online and there's anything you want, right? But I do think media coverage is important and very important. 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
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
perpetrators, especially young ones, are paying attention to media coverage and how it's done and how much of it there is. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Don't give them that attention they're seeking. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Let's figure out what the nature of this problem really is so we can try to solve it better. 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. I mean, journalism... The duty of journalism, at least the kind that I'm involved in, is reporting in the public interest, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
A person who wants to do this plans it out carefully. 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. We are also a country that has a huge number of firearms, and they're very easy to get in most places.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Trying to shine a light on problems and ideally on solutions to those problems. So that's the core mission there of looking at an event that is very traumatic in communities and has major impact. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But if the media doesn't identify who the perpetrator is, if authorities don't do that, what fills that void? Sure.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Oh, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. Roseburg, Oregon, Virginia Tech, we were talking about earlier, San Bernardino, the Orlando massacre, you name it. The first 24 hours, there's all kinds of false information flying around social media. We often hear, oh, there's multiple shooters.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Why do mass shooters look to previous shooters for inspiration and sometimes for tactical ideas to what I call in the book emulation behavior? It's known as the copycat problem. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That's wrong. The identity of the shooter, that's wrong. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I think he committed suicide. Oh, that's so much worse than I thought. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So I'm glad you asked that because that's actually a big part of where this work started. In the 1980s, folks in the mental health field started collaborating with Secret Service, focused on the question of how can we prevent assassination. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So therefore, it makes sense on a very fundamental level that we have more mass shootings.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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, is there a way we can predict or better prevent people assassinating high profile public figures. And so that's where the collaboration actually began. The Secret Service started doing research quietly with some forensic psychologists.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And it's a really amazing story. 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. Perpetrators were incarcerated or institutionalized and studying them, studying who they were as human beings.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
What led them to do this? 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. And so we want to learn from you so that we can prevent it. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You can profile the behavior. 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. They come from different backgrounds, different socioeconomic circumstances, different
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Most of them are dudes, men, but that's not predictive of anything either because half the population in America is male. 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. It's about the process, the circumstances.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And that was first learned by the Secret Service Mental Health Collaboration. There were others innovating this at the time, too. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There were some people working in the private sector and security, close protection for celebrities, political figures. FBI was studying violent crime and was really focused on workplace violence in that era in the 1980s. That was the era you might recall going postal.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And actually, I saw that you're from Royal Oak, right? I am. That was one of the big postal shootings.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yeah. 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. And after Columbine, schools became much more focused. And that's part of the reason why people remember that as the first case incorrectly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. And we can understand it as a process, as a human behavior.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
They're there to investigate crime and help prosecute it, right? 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 people. high-profile figures, the president and others, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 because there were a number of stalking murders, including the high-profile killing of Rebecca Schaefer. And people were very frustrated.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Why can't you stop this before it happens 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. And so it really shifted the thinking about what police can do to be more proactive to help prevent that type of violence.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But it is a real shift in thinking about how we perceive the role of police and I think how people do police work.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That's part of that story, too, with Rebecca Schaefer. 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 1994. too, if I'm remembering correctly. Prior to that, there was no legal remedy for that behavior.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. That was the attitude of law enforcement prior to that era.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. And then that began to spread to other states and eventually pretty quickly became a federal law as well.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Well, actually, it was discovery and the research through that period, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. This is often current or former partners stalking their counterpart and committing violence.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And so there were many more cases like that. And that's why the stalking statutes became important more broadly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yes. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. Maybe they're posting disturbing images. These communications can take other forms too, you know, drawings, writings, things like journaling, things like that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. bloody school shooting drawings that were seen by a teacher the day before, the morning of.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And there are a lot of cases that have elements like that too. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It's, again, this fundamental principle of this work to evaluate danger is looking at a set of things going on together. 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 concern.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. They're feeling anxiety, like something's not right here.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
The hair's 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
To the question of 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, the basic point of departure is 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 happening.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. I wondered how you figured that out. I was like, that is a lot. That's based on CDC data just in terms of gun injuries and death. At the time, approximately 40,000. It's actually higher now. It's more like 50,000 a year annually.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
The example you used there, like a picture of a principal with the head cut off, I mean, that's a little bit shocking. But the question you would ask from a theoreticism perspective in a situation like that, is this kid in other ways causing concern or is it just juvenile behavior that's going on?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
What you just said right there is really key. From an evaluation perspective, I had tons of friends. The people who do these attacks have no social connections or very poor social connections. That social isolation is really important too in a lot of these cases because aberrant juvenile behavior, obviously very common. There are cases where it can be very complicated to untangle that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There's a case I wrote about quite a bit in the book from 1998, a high school shooting in Oregon the year before Columbine. horrific attack in Springfield, Oregon. And the kid who did that shot a bunch of his classmates in the school and killed a couple of kids.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 But that doesn't predict someone going and committing a school shooting. And so it can be hard to untangle that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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? 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. In those situations, you're not going to be as concerned that someone's going to go commit a school shooting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. And Elliot Rogers is one of those too. There were some major events in his last year or so of life that really showed some significant warning signs that he was on that pathway.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
The majority of those are suicide. That's something that we'll talk about later when we talk about the Elliot Rodger case because in many instances, the mass shootings problem is a suicide problem. These are suicidal, homicidal attacks in which the perpetrators take their own lives. Those statistics are talking about the number of gun casualties.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yes, that's what I was talking about a little bit earlier, the threatening communications. The term leakage was actually, it's interesting, it was developed out of FBI's serial killer profiling back in the 1980s.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That was the theory that someone who's going around killing people and they're trying to figure out who's doing it is an unknown perpetrator, that eventually they're going to leak out what they're doing. through some kind of communication. That term was really applied to this behavioral process, the study of targeted violence of school mass shooters.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
How are they communicating what they're feeling or what they're thinking? Again, it's comments they might make to people, third parties, or people close to them, or things they might write or post online. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. I think in this day and age, if a 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 the school system.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And there was a lot more to that story. He had made other comments like this in months past. 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. There's all kinds of stuff going on with this kid that's signaling, hey, he's going in a
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
first or the most because it makes them feel weird. 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. 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
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yeah, see something, say something, essentially. If you're concerned about someone, you're worried they're maybe going to do something bad, then reach out for help. And that's what this student did in that case. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That's really what this work's all about.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. How do you balance that with the Second Amendment stuff, though, man?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You know, I also say Trigger Points is not a book about guns. 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. But really what I was interested in was human behavior. What is the human behavior that is driving this problem?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. I was basically embedded with the team. This was in 2019 when this was happening.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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? 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 if there's an imminent concern. That's the first thing they want to figure out. Turns out he doesn't have access to a gun. That's good. But then the question is, what else do you do going forward?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. Why is he seeing himself with such acute, low self-esteem?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Why are we thinking he might be suicidal? The signs of that, some changes in his behavior, dropping out of extracurricular drama club that he previously loved. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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? 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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, they call it a wraparound strategy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Education support, counseling, extracurriculars, working with the family where possible. That's not always possible in it. There are cases where, 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. In this case, though, the mother was responsive and was concerned, wanted to help.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And that's what the field of threat assessment is focused on in terms of solution. 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. And that's the opportunity to intervene.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
They're working with her to say, okay, make sure that you watch what he's doing online. 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. So there are protective measures, there are constructive measures, and that's how a case like this would work in a school setting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It's different, of course, in workplace and otherwise.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. Historically, the FBI would try to track down unknown serial killers.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
These are the 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Back then, it was trying to figure out from a crime scene, who is this person? How can we narrow a set of possible suspects?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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? That was the classic... serial killer hunting that became mythologized through Hollywood and popular culture entertainment, probably in some ways accurate and not. But that was about finding someone that they didn't know who it was.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
This is different because there's no finding a school or mass shooter. We know who they are because they do it. You're talking about trying to predict an attack, which isn't possible. This is a minority report.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
For decades, people have tried to figure out, can you predict an act of violence like this? And the answer is definitively no. 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. It's studying the process of behavior and circumstances leading up to the attack.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Well, again, it's that in combination with these other things because regular teen angst is everywhere, right? 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. And I'd been studying mass shootings already for a couple of years at that point.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Suddenly they are saying they don't have any friends even though they skateboard with a couple buddies down the street once a week. Where do shooters usually get their weapons? Family and friends or do they go to the store and buy them? 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. The Elliot Rodger case, he went to gun shops in the vicinity of Santa Barbara and bought three handguns.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And that's actually another thing that's important here too, is that 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I think where the sort of much broader question of gun regulations intersects this kind of prevention work is fairly obvious. 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. You're looking into him.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
The first thing you want to know is, does he have a gun? 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? There are a lot of places where you just can't do that because of the way the laws work.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yeah, it can. That's certainly a signal in cases, including the story I was talking about Brandon. That case, the specificity of what he said was very important in that moment. He said, don't come to school on Friday. I'm bringing my dad's gun back and I'm shooting up the school. The points of specificity in that, when he's going to do it, how he's going to do it, with what instrument.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
A lot of school shooting threats are more broad. Oh, school shootings are cool. Statements like that in cases. I'm going to shoot this place up someday. I remember that moment well, actually, I was sitting in the meeting with the threat assessment team where they were talking about that. This is very concerning because previously,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Brandon had made a couple of comments about school shootings that were broader like that. In 2018, there was, I don't know if you remember, there was like a big national school walkout after Parkland when the March for Our Lives movement was starting among kids. So kids were walking out of school and a teacher had asked Brandon about this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I think she'd asked him, are you joining the walkout tomorrow? And he said, no, I think maybe I'll just shoot up the school instead. 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. So that is a sign in many cases of progression on the pathway. a planning process that is now escalating.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So that was alone astonishing to me. And when I started to learn about cases, prevention cases that were out of public view,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That actually came into play in this case too with Brandon when the lead psychologist on the team sat down with him. She told me about this. 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. That's a goal, like a positive goal.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So yes, he was depressed. Yes, there was concern he was starting to become suicidal, but he also had aspirations. 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. Again, it's a set of data that I think becomes very complex and unique to each case.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
that were successful, where you're talking about individuals who were setting up for some pretty scary situations, where there were very strong indications that this was a person who was planning violence, who had either already obtained weapons or 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Now, we're going to analyze it together as a team, bringing our various expertise with a system, with a methodology. 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. So that's also by way of saying that there is judgment going on here by professionals.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
They're trying to figure out how to interpret these behaviors and these signs, and it's not always clear. If a kid says, I'm really looking forward to my summer vacation, that's going to be a good signal.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yeah. It's a great question that comes up a lot around the subject because it does sound very resource intensive. And in some ways it is. 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? Teachers and administrators are already so overtaxed anyway. Now you're asking us to do this whole other job.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But if you flip that on its head, it's like the people who are going to do this work are already in place. Teachers and administrators and counselors in a school system, they're already tasked with the safety and well-being of students. And so it's really more about training and expertise and institutional knowledge of how to handle the situation when it arises.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You touched on something else that's important here. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It's a recurring problem. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. It's a really important question.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Like, does this actually work? Is it effective? And in a basic sense, we can look at this issue over the past two decades. Let's peg it to Columbine when school shootings are on the radar at a whole next level and the issue of school mass shootings is beginning to escalate.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. And that may be the case. I think that's hard to prove, right? But to me, the question is, okay, is that a success story?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You still had a bunch of people injured and killed. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Social media has become a major factor in this equation over the past, say, decade and a half for obvious reasons, like threatening communications are happening much more in the digital space than they used to. Yes, it's very common in threat cases, both known to the public and not. I've seen many of them that aren't where this is going on.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. The question is, what can we do maybe technologically about this to look for it? There may be some solutions on the horizon with AI or with further developing technology, but
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Again, going back to the principle of the work of threat assessment, it's not intended to be like dragnet surveillance. 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. Lots of people are talking about guns on social media. Millions of people are talking about guns.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
School kids and other are looking at violent material. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
because of something they said at the bus stop or something in their behavior, or now they're suddenly really interested in guns, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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? I get it. I mean, it's a question that I think is interesting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It's hard to nail down, but specifically with violent content, video games or movies or music, lyrics, 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 trying to pin it on satanic rock music. That's a canard, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. It's more about what I was describing earlier with the fixation behavior on graphic content.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
If you've got someone who's in crisis, who's on this planning pathway and other kinds of bad things are going on and suddenly they've lost their job or kicked out of school and all these things going on and they're spending all their time playing violent video games, you might ask why. But ultimately, there are a number of cases that I looked at very deeply where
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
The playing of violent video games, really what's important about that is the social isolation. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And there is some theorizing or some thought that I came across among experts in threat assessment in cases like that. There may be some psychological rehearsal going on, like playing a first-person shooter is a way to get psyched up. That's not a practical way to train yourself to go use a real firearm and shoot people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But there's certainly no evidence I've seen in all my research that it's causal. 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? There are 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That's real and that matters. But I don't think that's causing anyone to go commit a school massacre.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Yeah, so that question, I think, for obvious reasons, comes up a lot or is on people's minds, and it really falls into the category we're talking about of response and reaction to the perceived threat or danger of this problem in the country, right? In the last decade, we've watched lockdown drills become the norm in schools.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. It's infinitesimally small.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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, 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Well, it's not profiling, though, and there's no checklist. 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. And I also want to add to just one more thing about the gun discussion. This is not a zero sum discussion, either. These are not mutually exclusive things.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Should we be trying to 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? 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. It's not going to happen to you. It's not going to happen to me, hopefully.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Can civilians even stop an active shooter?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It's interesting that the thinking about those tactics has shifted. 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 be quiet, lock the doors, turn off the lights. That's a big part of the lockdown drill training that goes on now in schools. Second choice is run away. Third choice is last resort.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You fight back. 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. The first thing you should do is leave.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. I think that's why it's run, hide, fight.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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 sheltering in place. 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I have it on school shootings broadly. At least at the time that I was finishing the research for trigger points, the probability of being shot in a shooting at a school was something like one in two million for a student in America. So it's a highly unlikely thing to happen. Part of the problem with trying to come up with these statistics is that
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
There is no official or perfect way to measure mass shootings because the criteria varies and there is no perfect criteria. 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. When I first started studying this, intensively in 2012.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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. I'm either totally for guns everywhere or I'm against all guns.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
I created really what was the first online public database of mass shootings at Mother Jones. Nothing like that existed in 2012. It's part of the reason why I did it. We had to figure out what is the criteria for this? What are we going to include? I ended up taking what was a very conservative approach to defining the problem because I
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That was the year of the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado. 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. So I was gathering this data because it didn't exist publicly and had to find what the data was.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. Why is it four people instead of five or three? But that's what the professionals were using. So we went with that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And then also, I was ruling out cases of 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? This is crazy. Is this happening more?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. It felt as someone who had studied and reported on gun violence for several years, something's shifting here. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
It goes back to Columbine and even before. 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
They're using a broader criteria than we did back then, which was using a handful of cases that fit a more specific set of... 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. There are not mass shootings happening every day in cities across America.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
To be honest with you, I was drawn to this subject initially because of the tragedy and trauma of it. I was reporting on it in the way that journalists do. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And this is all about mental health or it's about something else entirely. Politics, ideology, it's all these things together.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. It's a nonpartisan way to look at it. I found that very hopeful and exciting. Yes, it's a heavy subject, but it's something that we can deal with.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
That's another big myth I think we have with this problem to this day. I say this a lot when I'm talking about this work. This idea that, talk about the onion headline, right? 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Pleasure to talk to you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
So mental health is a big part of it, but mental health is just sort of a blanket response. 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. There are all kinds of factors that are playing into these cases, but certainly I think the mental health component is important.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And there are a number of cases where you can see where mental health issues and even serious diagnoses are significant factors. 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. There are cases where there's mental illness involved and it can be an exacerbating factor.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. But they're making a choice. It's a decision-making process and it's a planning process that leads up to the attack.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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%.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And there have been multiple studies on this by psychiatrists at Columbia University, the FBI, behavioral analysis team. That's a big misconception. The question I think that's more germane is how do you think about mental health in this equation? Because it is significant. People who are angry, depressed, lonely, isolated, they have mental health issues. There's a lot of suicidality.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
And that's a very important warning sign in a lot of these cases.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
One thing that I learned early on, I 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
They'll ask the question, where? 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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
You can't just blame this on mental illness and say, fix the mental health system. It's much more than that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Absolutely. There are millions of people who suffer from clinically diagnosable mental illnesses, and there are decades of studies showing there is no meaningful correlation that is predictive in any way of violence.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. In some cases, it's a lot more developed than others. I'll use the Elliot Rogers story. There was an extraordinary opportunity to get to know his mom. I think we'll talk about that in a bit and to learn more about his case.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But there was also... really unusually large amount of forensic evidence available in that case because he'd written so extensively. He'd made the videos that he posted online. He had an online footprint. There was a very extensive sheriff's investigation.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
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1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
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. So there was just a multitude of evidence of this nature of planning and preparation and his grievances being articulated.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
But he was doing this all to himself, for himself, and he was very good at hiding it. That's actually unusual because in a lot of these cases, especially with young people, it's leaking out.