The Jordan Harbinger Show
1140: Mark Follman | How to Stop Mass Shootings in America
Tue, 15 Apr 2025
Why do mass shootings occur? Trigger Points author Mark Follman explains warning signs, behavioral assessment, and how to stop attacks before they happen.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1140What We Discuss with Mark Follman:Mass shootings are not random events, but involve a "pathway to violence" where perpetrators plan their attacks over time, showing warning signs that create opportunities for intervention.Mental illness is not the primary cause of mass shootings. While mental health issues may be present, perpetrators are typically making deliberate choices driven by factors like anger, isolation, and perceived grievances rather than psychosis.Many mass shooters seek notoriety and are influenced by previous attackers through emulation behavior — they want to transform from nobody to somebody through violence and media attention.Warning signs that appear before attacks often include threatening communications, research/planning behaviors, significant life stressors, and social isolation — but these must be evaluated collectively rather than as a checklist.Behavioral threat assessment teams offer an effective prevention approach by bringing together mental health professionals, law enforcement, and educators to identify at-risk individuals and provide constructive interventions like counseling, education support, and family involvement — showing that these tragedies can be prevented with the right collaborative approach.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/dealsSign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who are the speakers in this episode?
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Today, my guest Mark Fulman on school shootings and other mass shootings. This is a horrific problem. It's kind of a little bit of a depressing topic to do a show on. I was a little hesitant at first. Actually, this conversation turned out amazing. It's an almost uniquely American problem, or is it? Either way, this problem isn't or shouldn't be as impossible to solve as it seems to be.
Turns out that gun control is not the whole story here. Today on the show, we'll discuss predictive measures, such as what to look for in a potential shooter, how we could even potentially profile these people, or maybe not quite that, before they become violent.
We'll also explore why target hardening measures, which is mostly what we do now, right, adding different doors or barricades or security, isn't actually working, and how social media might actually be able to help us not only predict, but actually prevent violence. Here we go with Mark Fulman. I can't even remember how I found the Mother Jones piece. It was probably mass shooting of the week.
And I just was like, why does this keep happening? And I still don't know, but your article did shed some light on it because everybody remembers Elliot Rodger, who we'll get to in a bit. Everybody remembers the Columbine shooting. That wasn't the first, but it was the first big school shooting, at least of my lifetime. And that really just changed everything for a lot of people.
It's hard to decide, do we just talk about school shootings or do we talk about mass shootings in general? Because there's unfortunately a wealth of material on both of those things. And I just want to, at the top of the show, acknowledge how horrific this problem really is. I often make jokes about things on this show. I don't really want to do that here because it's so dark.
I also want to focus on what we can look for, what we can do about it, not just lament the problem, because that's all they do on the news anyways. Yeah. What's that Onion headline? We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. No way to prevent this, says Only Nation, where this regularly happens. Right. Yes, exactly. It's a depressing topic, man.
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Chapter 2: What is behavioral threat assessment and how can it prevent mass shootings?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh, yeah. Sure.
And actually, I saw that you're from Royal Oak, right? I am. That was one of the big postal shootings.
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Chapter 3: Is the mass shooting problem unique to 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.
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.
there were kids growing up that did crazy stuff. Like they would talk about guns all the time. They would blow things up all the time. They would drink even when we were like in sixth grade, which is not, maybe that's normal for some schools. For my school, this was not. And I remember he would say like, what did you do this weekend? And I'm like, I don't know, watch TV. I'm 13, you know?
And he's like, Yeah, I stole beer from this person's garage and I drank 24 of them and I woke up on the road and I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Yeah, I remember him showing me photos of the principal with the head cut off and him as the executioner. He's like, I joined the National Rifle Association. I was like, what is that? I didn't grow up in a community where people hunted.
This is a suburban town, so that was a little odd.
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?
He was sent to the principal's office all the time. That's why he hated the principal. And he was a tough kid to control. But he was actually always really nice to me. I remember kids in his grade, he was a grade above me. Kids in his grade were like, he's such a loser. And I was like, oh, he just feels isolated and lonely. I think he was in seventh or eighth grade and I was in sixth grade.
When I was in eighth grade, I wasn't talking to sixth graders. They were like little babies. So I think he was just a lonely guy, but it's hard to tell. Nowadays, a lot of this, I listen to Nine Inch Nails. I wore oversized flannel shirts. I was isolated. I was on my computer all the time. I had tons of friends, I think, and I was nice. So that maybe didn't scare people.
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.
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