Professor Paul Mullen

Well, once you've got these people, as it were, tagged...

then you can start looking at other things.

You can look at how many guns they have.

You can look at their mental health histories.

You can start to look at their employment and social histories.

You sort out the ones that look high risk.

So you can then approach them.

Approach them at two levels.

One, a mental health approach.

Two, a police approach.

The mental health approach is to get to talk to these people.

see if they can respond to any kind of attempted assistance, psychologically and emotional assistance.

You can take their guns away and the police can start observing them and keeping tabs on them, particularly if they try and obtain guns illegally, etc.

So you've got them there.

What's interesting, I've seen a number of people who've been identified and one of the things that's always surprised me, yes, they've thought about it, yes, they've planned it, yes, they're definitely en route, but they've never really distinguished it from fantasy.

It exists for a long time as a fantasy solution for them.

It exists really up until, in many of them, almost the time they do it.

The reality of it has not really penetrated.

And when you've got someone in front of you who's taking it seriously, who really thinks you may go out and shoot people or club people to death and get killed yourself, suddenly you're confronted with the real world.

The real world saying...