Quite by happenstance, I checked this book out of my local library (in TN) on the morning of March 27, 2023. The library wasn’t going out of its way to grab my attention: the book was shelved spine-out (in other words not displayed cover-out) in the “new nonfiction” section. The subtitle struck me: who is it that has a “mission to stop mass shootings in America”? I was aware of numerous groups — e.g. Sandy Hook Promise, Moms Demand Action — which to my knowledge were working the gun-control issue very hard, but however worthwhile their aims, they seemed to be political non-starters in my conservative state. Would this book inform me of a different approach, maybe something with political hope?
Later that same day came the news of another mass shooting, this one at the Covenant School in Nashville, the capital of my conservative state. As I write this review, a month has passed and with it the bizarre parade of horrified reactions from citizens mixed in with the shrugs of politicians saying that nothing can be done. The state legislature wrapped up its work, pointedly refusing to act on an “order of protection” proposal from Governor Bill Lee, but Lee has responded by calling a special session to focus on the issue of guns and public safety.
So it was with heightened interest that I read this book, the “missionaries” of which turned out to be practitioners of a field known as “behavioral threat assessment.” Begun by those within such law enforcement agencies as the Secret Service and the FBI trying to guard against assassinations and acts of domestic terrorism, the research soon got the attention of individuals trying to understand the motivations of school shooters. Regardless of the high public profile of the shootings, the work of those studying them was, in the words of author Follman, “an obscure professional niche, virtually unknown to the general public.” Furthermore, the nature of the field’s case studies “made clear how little the public understood about the behaviors and conditions that led to mass shootings,” which were concerningly on the rise, defying a general decline in the overall US murder rate.
Follman — a national affairs editor for Mother Jones whose presumably progressive views are studiously absent in this admirably journalistic work — follows the field from its inception to the present as it followed in the wake of America’s Columbines, Virginia Techs, and Newtowns in a grim effort to derive lessons of scientific value from those horrific events.
If anything, Follman goes overboard in keeping the broader gun issue out of the book: gun control gets scant mention as something that Australia and Great Britain have done in order to make American-style shootings rare. The reason for this, as Follman gives it, is that “hardly ever during my years of reporting did I observe threat assessment professionals openly discussing gun regulations, an apparent third rail in a field populated by a wide range of political views, often conservative ones. … They know that possession of a firearm is not a meaningful predictor of targeted violence, but they also know that readily available semiautomatic weapons and large-capacity ammunition devices make attacks easy and highly lethal.”
In other words, it’s as if to say, “Nope, can’t do guns. What else we got?”
For starters, profiling is out, because it has no predictive value in determining an individual intent on massively violent action. Follman writes, “Countless young white males partake in graphically violent entertainment, are interested in guns, get angry about problems with school, jobs or personal relationships, and struggle with mental health challenges. But the number among them who might aspire to commit mass murder es exceedingly small.”
Mental illness as a root cause comes in for examination that is particularly important especially given the hand-waving by gun advocates that “mental illness pulls the trigger” (Fellman calls it “the most formidable bogeyman of mass shootings.”) The findings of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) are striking: only a quarter of the shooters studied “were known to have been professionally diagnosed with a mental illness of any kind prior to their attacks. Just three cases involved a psychotic disorder;” of the remaining majority, “many of them clearly would not have qualified for a clinical diagnosis of mental illness” [Fellman’s emphasis]. Insofar as mental illness was involved, it seems to have been an “exacerbating rather than a root cause.”
While this may seem to leave us with nothing of predictive value, behavioral threat experts have over the years sharpened their understanding of the kinds of signals that shooters are known to have sent out or given off, in connection with which the experts have identified something they call “the bystander problem”: the signals were there, but they were ignored. Fellman writes, “People around the shooters, the team found, had notified law enforcement in fewer than half the cases — despite the fact that, in every single case, at least one person in proximity to the shooter had noticed a concerning behavior, and that in many cases, multiple people had noticed.” The shooters, in large part, are neither “alien” nor “undetectable.” According to one of Fellman’s sources, “They have jobs. They’re in school. They do talk to people. They come from all walks of life.”
An important and noticeable pattern appeared: to people close to them, the shooters both leaked their intentions and denied them. But who knows this? Nicole Hockley, the mother of Sandy Hook victim Dylan, asked the BAU why they weren’t doing more to share the results of their research. As Fellman puts it, “In the broadest sense the field had its own version of the silo problem. It was rooted in a certain pragmatism …: threat assessment data are complex and nuanced, and case work requires rigorous training to ensure its fairness and efficacy. However, Hockley had raised a strong and ultimately superseding point, … “If we’re going to catch these early, then we also need the people who are often even better positioned to see the warning behaviors.”
Part of the problem here is that family members in particular may let blind love override any sense that there is danger present. But the BAU concludes that this makes it that much more important to publicize their research: “These are the people who may actually be the most in need of the information about what to look for and where to seek help.” One of BAU’s “guiding principles” has become, “What good is research if it’s not usable?”
It seems clear that the tallest order at this point is to get the word out there. Forensic psychologist Russell Palarea, former president of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, says that “far too few communities even know about the work.…We need to get more people to understand what this work is, that it’s a problem-solving model using components mostly already in place, and that it needs to be community-based.” On the subject of pushback from the ACLU, ever-vigilant for infringements on individual rights, Palarea says that such criticism is off track: “We’re trying to help people who are struggling, before they get arrested or hurt themselves or others. There’s no downside to that.”
In fact, threat-assessment practitioners place a supreme value on public accountability, which as Follman says is “a perspective rooted in ethical pragmatism that could help solve the long-running bystander problem.” One such practitioner, Nebraskan Mario Scalar, says “It’s really important to be sensitive to feelings of vulnerability in people who come forward, their concerns about their own personal safety and privacy. … We have to show by our actions that we aren’t overreacting to these reports but actually tying to get struggling people help, rather than punishing them.”
The book reveals a field determined to find appropriate solutions that, it is hoped, can become known widely enough to be effective. Given the importance and timeliness of this book’s information, I would like to see it on the bookstand of every TN legislator with a deadline of whenever the special session is. They do have bookstands, don’t they?
