mark_follman

One of the big myths continually repeated about mass shootings is that mental illness is the primary cause. That is not true in most cases. People who commit these attacks are not mentally healthy, of course -- they have serious personal and circumstantial problems, and some of those problems do clearly relate to mental health. There are many cases involving suicidality. But in many cases, mass shooters do not have clinically diagnosable disease.

What's driving them much more commonly is rage, paranoia, depression, desperation. They develop ideas about violence that they see as a valid solution to their problems. We tend to regard this as totally "crazy." But it involves a rational process of planning and preparing to go out and commit an attack. That process, marked by warning signs, represents the opportunity to intervene.

I learned about quite a few threat assessment cases involving troubled people who were setting up for some pretty scary situations. I had to pick and choose what to use in the book, and decided to focus primarily on school cases. What I can say further about that here (with little room for detail) is that lot of the same behavioral warning signs were present in those cases -- threatening communications, aberrant focus on violence (weapons, past attacks, etc), unhealthy narcissism, interest in extremist ideology, misogyny and domestic violence. It was illuminating to see these situations also being managed successfully in adult settings in a number of cases: workplaces, government agencies, etc. And in some ways that's harder than within a school setting, which is highly structured and offers a lot of opportunities for constructive interventions.

It's a good question whose answer is probably pretty complex and points to larger cultural forces at play. I would defer to other experts on this, but I can say that from the perspective of this prevention method, it has no predictive value. (And there are indeed some cases involving female perpetrators, both with attacks and disrupted plots.)

One related data point here from my research that I do think is significant: what's come to be called "toxic masculinity" -- domestic violence, misogyny, incel ideology -- is a significant and rising factor among mass shootings.

Well said. I write about this early in the book: By regarding mass shooters as unfathomable lunatics, we distance ourselves from the problem in a way that is counterproductive, in my view. Though it's comforting in a certain sense to think that these are unimaginable or 'senseless' acts, they are rooted in a human capacity to act violently that most, if not all of us have inherently.

This is a really good question. I think we have some broader cultural forces at work that tend to exacerbate school shootings. One that I focus on in Trigger Points is the role of digital media: the way we all talk about mass shootings and share information about them on social media -- including some big myths about mass shooters -- has an impact. And these are reinforced by lots of news media coverage of attacks, which tends to be sensationalized (although that has begun to change for the better in recent years). You may be aware of the so-called copycat effect? That's a big part of what I'm talking about here -- and it comes up in a lot of school shooting cases.