The best offense, part two

Dear Sec. Hargett:

Pursuant to your 10/27/25 request for a final report on an “age-appropriateness review … of all materials in the juvenile children’s section” to include a “summary of any titles that you determined were not age-appropriate for the juvenile children’s section,” here's the summary:

Zero.

That’s the number of titles that we found to be age-inappropriate for the juvenile children’s department.

Surprised? Don’t be.

In order to qualify for State support, we (and every other public library in TN) must meet the minimum requirements of the “Public Service Library Agreement” promulgated by your department, which last we checked was the “Department of State” — but that’s just what the letterhead says so maybe we’re misinformed?

It just feels ironic that *we* should be giving *you* information about the policies of your own department.

But hey, if that’s the deal, here’s what we already do and have already done for however long you’ve been insisting on this, as per the “Collection Development and Internet Safety Policy Minimum Requirements” attached to the ageement (enumeration as per the attachment):

“4. No funds received are used to purchase, nor will the library otherwise acquire, material that contains ‘child pornography,’ is ‘pornographic for minors,’ or is ‘obscene;’

5. Books and materials that contain sexual themes or content are reviewed by the public library independently for age-appropriateness and cataloged accordingly — even if this overrides the age-appropriateness recommended by the publisher;

6. The library has a written, publicly-accessible library materials challenge policy that (a) defines which parties may dispute or challenge the library’s age-appropriate designation on materials, with such definition, at a minimum, including a parent or guardian of a minor within the library district …”

Etc. etc. but you know the rest, right? I mean, you *do* know the rest, don’t you?

So the library materials challenge policy says if anyone wants to dispute a book like, say (just spitballing here) Fred Gets Dressed, yeah, sure, please pursue a challenge. We welcome challenges because it gives us an opportunity to give our side. It gives us a chance to do the American thing, and that is to bring due process to the settlement of questions of guilt, innocence, or age-appropriateness.

Due process requires — as does our State-approved challenge policy — that the disputant *at minimum* read the disputed material. Please consider adding this to the minimum requirements of verbiage for such a policy.

You’d be amazed at the number of people who think that copying a title off a defunct Moms for Liberty website is an adequate basis for a challenge. If you didn’t know better, you might even be tempted to suggest that a book like, say (just spitballing here) Fred Gets Dressed is “worthy of review.”

Is it just us, or does that sound like deep-state-speak for “you better damn well get rid of this book because I’m carrying water for a guy who doesn’t like it. Has he read it? Hell no! He wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

But surely not. Surely you realize that librarians are already working within the bounds of the rules that you require, and surely you would never require them to perform unnecessary labor (and it is labor) just to jump through hoops because GOP activists are thirsty. Surely you understand that the policies you already require are the due-process basis for challenges to the collection.

Surely you believe that. Surely you believe in the policies that you require. Surely you believe that libraries operate in good faith in carrying out those policies. We refuse to think that you are so cynical as to operate in a way that contradicts the American way that privileges due process as both a right and an ideal.

The best offense, part one

I spent a few hours going through the list of 168 "books of concern" sent to TN Sen. Rusty Crowe by GOP "activists" from Washington Co., TN.

Somehow Six Rivers Media -- which thankfully published them -- got the idea they were all children's books, and the initial, printed version of the list had a front page story that indicated them as such. But a quick-acting Washington Co. librarian verified that fewer than 40 were actually classified as children's books, and once notified of the error, Six Rivers corrected the cover story as it appears online.

The list itself only includes title, author, and a letter code or note indicating the book's "offense." The vast majority -- 112 titles -- offended by being "LGBTQ." If anything that number should be higher, because a separate offense is "gender identity" (it appears 22 times) even though, as applied, there's actually no difference between it and the rainbow letters. And then when you look even more closely, some of the titles that lack the rainbow letters really should have them, e.g. Two Grooms and a Cake, whose crimes somehow are only "AI" ("Age Inappropriate") and "BI" (no, not the "bi" in LGBT, but "Bias/Indoctrination"), when the title clearly indicates its gay content. As for AI, it appears 97 times; BI appears separately from AI 18 times.

C'mon, let's just call this list what it is: the Biased, Age-Inappropriate LGBTQ Indoctrination Titles. And let's also characterize the censors' fear: that the books are poised to leap out and brainwash witless children by telepathic transfer of black-magick-pilled verbiage from a closed book.

I almost feel sorry for Stamped: Racism, Anti-racism, and You, with its lack of rainbow letters and its criminal codes HT (not in the key. Hot Topic?) and OF ("Omission of fact," an odd complaint from GOP activists given that OF is our sitting President's entire rhetorical game).

If you happen to be predisposed to dislike everything rainbow except what's in the Bible (which when it comes to objection codes, I'll put it up any day against The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie -- a six-time offender, and my next read), such a full-page list of offending titles can overwhelm. So let me provide you with some context:

Show me the 40 rainbow books in this children's department.

If you're browsing, there's a lot to choose from. No library user, adult or child, is a blank slate. Everyone brings a different outlook, interests, and tastes to the shelf; everyone wants the library to magically fit themselves (haha, standard pronoun usage now) with a good book. And what the library has done has been to put literary sleuths on the trail of applied book selection -- based on a wide array of reviews feeding from the source of the book industry.

If you pick a rainbow book, your choice comes from you. There is no coercion; there is no assigned reading. Most kids have an interested parent, usually the mom, who does not hesitate to filter their choices. If you read the book, do you enjoy it? One hopes the answer is yes. What does it mean about you if you do? Did it make you more aware? Was it relevant to your own life? How so? Did it broaden your horizons? Do you use the experience to ask questions and have conversations?

One thing for sure: the words in the book are not black magick pills of indoctrination. That's not the way reading works. At any age. 

One odd thing about this list is that 34 of the titles aren't in either the Johnson City or the Kingsport library, according to the online catalog of the Organization of Watauga Libraries. Most of those titles do appear in the collections of other libraries in the region, but that's not the same thing. And one title, listed as The Breakaways by Meg Grehan, is an out-and-out (sorry, rainbow letters) hallucination. So maybe there's a different kind of AI at work here.

Now that I think about it, the basic bibliographic quality of this list -- accuracy of titles, standardized format for authors' names, etc. -- is pretty darn enshittified. No, the Trans Teen Survival Guide isn't written by "Owl." It's written by Owl and Fox Fisher. And the subtitle of Check Please, book 2, isn't Sticks and Stones. It's Sticks and Scones. And it's a clever subtitle too, if you take time to read the book reviews that come with almost every title in the online catalog.

What a fabulous resource those online reviews are! And yet I bet my bottom dollar that none of the GOP activists who put this list together did anything more than cut and paste a list of these titles from somebody else, if they did that much. I'd be amazed if any of them read the least little thing about these books. When it comes to real, working knowledge of these books, they are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- ignorant. My sense of it is that some party operative ran a canned list against an outdated statewide catalog with location codes, and they've delivered customized lists to county part offices around the state to send to their legislators, and Rusty Crowe was the only one we know of who was -- what's the right word -- premature enough to pop off without bothering to talk to the librarians in his district whose job it is to know the books that they buy for their libraries.

It doesn't rise to the level of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. It's one-party-state political enshittification. And it's how censors do it. Again and again and again. The know-nothings are back. Another safe bet is that the censors won't allow any daylight into how they actually pulled the list together. That's not how they work. They're closet addicts of black-magick-pilled indoctrination. And they do love their Bible pills.

If you take the time to read those online reviews, you can get an idea of the quality of these books. You might not like them, and the subject matter might make you uncomfortable, but you get a sense that the books contain a salubrious complexity that will challenge the reader.

My own sense of it -- as a lifelong reader, as a father and grandfather of readers, as a librarian ensconced in the culture of reading -- is this: the kids reading these books are way smarter, wiser, and able to deal with intellectual and moral challenges than the adults who are trying to tell them they're not old enough to read them.

Here's a breakdown by collection of the books on the list:

Neither library: 34

Children's, Johnson City: 35

Children's, Kingsport: 5

Young adult, Johnson City: 83

Young adult, Kingsport: 56

Adult, Johnson City and Kingsport: 8

Someone had asked for a list of the titles in the Johnson City children's collection:

A church for all

Alice Austen lived here

Being you

Better Nate than ever

Bullied

Call me Max

Dear Mothman

Flight of the puffin

Melissa

How women won the vote

Identity and gender

It feels good to be yourself

I am Jazz

Ivy Aberdeen's letter to the world

Maybe he just likes you

Morris Micklewhite and the tangerine dress

My Maddy

Pink, blue, and you

Payden's pronoun party

Pride: The story of Harvey Milk and the rainbow flag

Rabbit chase

Rainbow: A first book of pride

Puberty is gross but really awesome

Rick

Sir Callie and the champions of Helston

The best liars in Riverview

The deepest breath

The family Fletcher takes Rock Island

The legend of Auntie Po

The list of things that will not change

The mighty heart of Sunny St. James

The real Riley Mayes

To Night Owl from Dogfish

Too bright to see

What was Stonewall?

Commissar Tre Hargett's gulag

If you want an example of grotesque bureaucratic overreach, may I offer you TN Secy. of State Tre Hargett’s Oct. 27, 2025, letter to the principals of the Linebaugh Public Library. After an opening in which he says he believes that “Libraries are best suited to make the decisions regarding the books they purchase, and they also have policies in place to review materials that may be challenged,” Hargett goes on to contradict himself. He and he alone can do that. Why? Because it is part of his job “to ensure that our federal and state funding is used in accordance with all laws and not put at risk due to potential misuse by an individual library or librarian. Said more specifically, I cannot allow the actions of one library to potentially harm and impact over 200 other libraries throughout the state.” Local decisions be damned if Tre Hargett finds something that *he* believes to be "potential misuse."

Potential misuse? Talk about a squirrelly concept ripe for actual abuse.

And actual abuse follows accordingly. Hargett in his letter then demands that libraries "undertake an immediate age-appropriateness review (over the next 60 days) of all materials in your juvenile children’s section. As part of this review please identify any materials that may be inconsistent with Tennessee age-appropriateness laws, in violation of any federal law, including President Trump’s Executive Order” (relating to the promotion of gender ideology).

This is off-the-charts weird. Hargett has for years ruled over a system by which libraries signed off on state standards in order to qualify for grants. Now it seems that Hargett's system isn't good enough for Hargett.

But it gets truly weird when Hargett writes “Additionally, legitimate concerns about a particular book in your juvenile children’s collection have been brought to my attention. Fred Gets Dressed, by Peter Brown, is worthy of review both for age-appropriateness and to determine whether the book and its purchase comply with President Trump’s Executive Order title “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Now it all becomes clear. Somebody has gone to Tre Hargett (maybe the same person who's been "disappearing" the library's copies of Forever by Judy Blume?) to complain about this children’s book, and they want to get rid of it. So Hargett goes, “I know, let me just make y’all do an inventory, and I’ll just mention this book, and boom it’s done.” Or something like that.

Tre Hargett, who calls the shots for the whole state library system, is now specifically going after Fred Gets Dressed? One piddling little kids book? And implying that if LInebaugh keeps this book, it’s threatening the whole state system with losing Federal funding? That is just so off-the-charts BS I can’t begin to shovel it into any sensible conceptual shithole that doesn’t resemble a Soviet gulag.

Why can’t Tre Hargett do what any other citizen would do? Which would be to follow the library policy for review of materials. Linebaugh has such a policy (the State Library requires them). You just have to fill out a form and say what you don’t like about the item, and indicate whether or not (or how much) you’ve read.

Well, in Hargett’s case, this starts not to look like a good idea because he’d have to admit on the form he hasn’t read Fred Gets Dressed. All he has is hearsay: “legitimate concerns have been brought to my attention” according to which the book doesn’t “comply” (don’t you just love the jackboot thump of that word?) with Trump’s gender ideology EO.

Damn, Tre, go down to the library and check it out. And see for yourself that whatever Mr./Ms. “Legitimate Concern” told you, this book has *nothing* to do with gender ideology. Or with sexual matters of any kind. It’s about a boy who wanders around the house naked until he discovers his parents’ clothes closets and decides his mother’s clothes look better on him, after which both of his parents get into the act and help him with makeup. I didn’t realize that “birth of a theater kid” could bring on a full-blown Stalinist purge, but here we are. If Tre Hargett wants to be the guy to make something sexual out of this book, I won't stand in his way. I'll just say it doesn't pass the smell test that he himself has worked for years to establish.

What really pisses me off about this is what it says about Tre Hargett’s complete and utter contempt for library staff. He might talk a good game, but this right here is him showing his true colors. In spite of his years of contact with the profession, he seemingly has no understanding of or respect for the pride and professionalism that library staff bring to their job. Age appropriateness? Library staff invented age appropriateness when they started children’s departments and young adult libraries. They want people to read. They live for people to read the books that they purchase for the community. On their own — in their own professional organizations — they have developed model policies that set out to balance collection-building with the uniquely American right to free speech.

It is not an easy thing to do. The reason collection development policies are so important is that they articulate the balance that library staff try to strike. They say, “This is how we are going to go about choosing materials that are right for our community. We will adopt a positive stance. We will add materials for positive reasons that can be discerned a variety of ways, primarily through reviews and recommendations. We believe in the value of what we’re doing. If, however, any citizen thinks we fall short, we also have a challenge procedure so that items can be measured against collection criteria.”

So someone on the library staff at Linebaugh did the necessary legwork and determined that Fred Gets Dressed would be a good fit with the community. It’d be a book that some kids and their parent(s) might enjoy together. Not everybody, of course, but some people. And if not, after a few years it’d get weeded for underuse. A library staffer thought the book a good risk for helping the library’s mission to engage people with books.

Then along comes Tre Hargett willing to stroke Mr./Ms. Legitimate Concern’s narrow-minded sex fixation and here we are in a steaming pile of collusive skulduggery.

Whom do you believe, Hargett or library staff? I’ll take the library staff over Tre Hargett any day, because I know them, and I know their hearts. Hargett can't even trust his own system, nor can he even abide by the controls that he has set up.

As a career librarian, I respectfully ask Rutherford Co. library staff: when you close down for inventory, consider these things: 

    

1. Post anonymously (on Facebook) to the Rutherford County Library Alliance the specific weeding criteria you’ve been given.
2. Understand that any potential withdrawal criteria other than the ones listed below (which are from Rutherford Co. policy and State Library requirements) — particularly as they may relate to age appropriateness or gender ideology “promotion” —  are not based on any statutory requirements that relate to public libraries in TN. You will note that there is no content-based criterion for withdrawal other than "misleading or dangerous." This reflects the confidence that policy places in the intial work of library staff to build the collection appropriately. The only avenue for content-based withdrawal is the "Request for Reconsideration," which requires a thorough process of review that mirrors the work and effort intially performed to add the item in question. The work you are being asked to perform here directly violates this process.
3. Remember that it was a colleague (or you!) who put those books there, and respect their work.
4. Carry out a brief work stoppage or walkout in order to express your opposition at being made to violate library policy.
5. Consider organizing. If the State is trampling all over policies that the State itself has been instrumental in creating, and if your Board and administration are not standing up to this abuse of power -- or worse, are abetting it -- you are the only ones in a position to uphold your own professional, ethical standards, as well as the standards for library governance that Tennessee has worked for years to accomplish.

Work to rule, Rutherford County comrades. Might as well: it's the only way to push back when you're inside the commissar's gulag.

**************************************************************

Withdrawal “guidelines” as per RCLS policy:

1. Obsolescence

2. Misleading or dangerous information

3. Relevance of subject matter within overall collection

4. Existence of a new or better edition of the same work

5. Number of copies in collection

6. Lack of shelf space

7. Material’s availability via other libraries or outlets

8. Physical condition of the material

9. Lack of use

10. Expiration or withdrawal of user license (in the case of electronic resources)

TN State Collection Development requirements

1. All materials are selected by the local public library in accordance with the individual public library’s full Collection Development Policy;

2. The public library’s Collection Development Policy is approved by the public library’s Board of Trustees (or equivalent governing body) at least annually;

3. All books selected for purchase by the individual public library, through the Regional Library System or otherwise, are reviewed by the public library’s director before purchase, with the library director then sharing a list or lists of newly purchased materials with the public library’s Board of Trustees (or equivalent governing body);

4. No funds received are used to purchase, nor will the library otherwise acquire, material that constitutes “child pornography,” is “pornographic for minors,” or is “obscene;”

5. Books and materials that contain sexual themes or content are reviewed by the public library independently for age-appropriateness and cataloged accordingly – even if this overrides the age appropriateness recommended by the publisher

Nick Hornby's anti-muse

It was a relief in the Berlin airport, right before a long flight back to the US, to find a book to read that I was sure to enjoy: Just Like You by Nick Hornby. Sure enough, I did enjoy it. It was vintage Hornby, and it lasted almost the entire sleepless flight. Almost. I did cut into it at one point to pair it with a movie, a fruity French farce in which two debt-ridden scumbags, on the lookout for free food and drink, charm their way into a cell of eco-protesters, with surprising consequences — one of which is however NOT the final scene, a schmaltzy dénouement  in which the clueless savoir-flair of one of the scumbags receives a dose of While You Were Sleeping gravitas and is -- of course -- rewarded with the partnership of the Statue-of-Liberty-visaged sparkplug of the Ecolos in a waltz on a bridge. (I did wonder what the pont was.) This was for me decidedly too much party fizz: I guffawed and snorted throughout much more than one should on a crowded Airbus. I was glad to have Hornby to chase the Folies with sense and sensibility: lightly humorous and cool handling of well-delineated individuals in thrall to a romantic attraction that raises eyebrows at first (sorry, more details would spoil it for you if you want to read it), but in the end reveals itself to all to be a postmodern summum bonum:  good enough for now is good enough.

I have always enjoyed Hornby — High Fidelity, A Long Way Down, About a Boy, and another one whose title I don’t remember, maybe About a Band or something like that, or maybe he didn’t write it after all (but who? Roddy Doyle?), but it doesn’t matter because the point is to say that one of the pleasures of Hornby is how he uses music and talks about music.

Pop music, anyway.

Before this book I wouldn’t have used the qualifier “pop.” It never occurred to me that someone as seemingly attuned as Hornby to music’s modes of appeal would turn out to be a musical isolationist who rejects entire colors from the musical rainbow.

It doesn’t spoil any of the story to delve into this apparently defining quirk of his. On page 66-7, Hornby -- via the thoughts of one of the main characters (presumably, but the paragraph reeks of the narrator on high) -- trashes the lute and lute music: Two hours of Its “lugubrious” sound (via movie soundtrack) is enough to make Hornby, in his disguise as a character, want “to gather up every lute in the country and burn them on a gigantic bonfire.”

Ho-hum: would that be the same bonfire of already-disfavored instruments that includes banjos, accordions, and bagpipes, the one lit by tiresome, self-appointed tastemakers of music? 

Lute music is lugubrious? There’s plenty of joyous lute music out there, and lots of lively, fleet-fingered stuff as well. Can Hornby really be that ignorant? I set out to find his published musical beliefs, and it turns out that he is similarly clueless about classical music in general. Ah, but savoir-flair makes up for so much.

One of Hornby’s books is Songbook, about songs that have meant something to him. I want to read this book someday, and I’m sure it’ll reward my reading. One of the chapters of the book is about Van Morrison’s song Caravan; the chapter was published online by Medium in 2016.

I suppose I have to give Hornby credit for his disarming honesty. And when I say “disarming,” I mean he totally lays down his rhetorical weapons and says, “I never respond to Mozart or Haydn as music.” I’m like, “what the fugue, man? It’s music, isn’t it?” Not to Hornby. It’s the equivalent of lighting a candle. It’s atmosphere. Next he’s talking about a “they” who diss pop music because it’s too simple, compared with the superior complexity of classical music (also: “They” have another defect in that “they often hate sports, too.” Oooh, that cuts. So much for disarmament.) I can't deny that those assholes are out there, but my experience is that classical musicians — the ones who actually play instruments — tend to have broad musical tastes.

Next, after proclaiming “I’m not an inverted snob” he demonstrates himself to be, in fact, an overt one: “I dislike it [classical music] because it sounds churchy, and because, to my ears at least, it can’t deal with the smaller feelings that constitute a day and a week and a life, and because there are no backing vocals or basslines or guitar solos, and because a lot of people who profess to like it actually don’t really like any music (or any culture) at all, and because I grew up listening to something else, and because it does not possess the ability to make me feel, and because I don’t need any music to sound any ‘better’ than it does already — a great, farting, squelching, quick-witted sax solo does the job for me.”

I could take Hornby to the mat on the positive influence that great, farting, squelching sax solos — quick-witted or not — have had on me, and yet at the same time I can say the same thing about a Bach cello suite. I don’t experience any qualitative difference. It’s all great music, and it feels good: complexity has nothing to do with it. As for classical music not having basslines and guitar solos, damn, basslines and instrumental solos practically describe the best of the classical subgenre Baroque music. It has pop's  continuous basslines and lyrical, wailing instrumental solos (substitute oboes for guitars).

But such protests are in vain. Hornby has, sadly, consigned it all to the bonfire. Why has he done this? Why does he banish classical music from the world of really musical music? Because it doesn’t speak to him, because he didn’t grow up with it, and because his resultant ignorance of it, plus his stereotyped caricature of those who favor it, gives him all the justification he feels he needs.

Classical music has such a powerful, negative hold on Hornby’s musical imagination that his beef with it causes him to consider not following through on his strong desire to have Caravan played at his funeral. He loves the song. It is perfect for his funeral. But rather late in the performance he wants to use, there is “classical music.” Actually, there is not classical music. There is a string section that happens to be playing Van Morrison’s song Caravan, but Hornby is too blinded by prejudice to realize this. To him — because it is a string section — it represents something non-musical. A string section can mean only one thing: classical music, a noisy zombie that smells like pumpkin butterscotch. And Hornby can’t be entering eternity without hardening his visage against violins and cellos.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to imagine who it was that made him hate classical music so much. At least three times in the essay he goes very ad hominem on that “lot of people who profess to like it” — classical music — but who probably, he says, don’t actually like music at all. I’m imagining some kind of intellectual bullying in his tender adolescence, something that left real scars, something that demands payback, but his target(s) is/are unreachable because they — years ago — consigned him to an inferior plane, and there’s no getting out. Only death can free him — or will he just be compounding his failed aesthetic, adding surrender to insult, by making “concessions” because his funeral football-goal-hymn has a string section? This poor man is actually living in musical purgatory, trying and trying to find some escape, to no avail.

There’s a novel there, and (spoiler alert!) here’s how it ends: Hornby books an interview with Keith Richards, or Steve Winwood, or any of The Zombies, all of whom were boy-choristers before their voices changed, and who thus had substantial experience with music of the “churchy” variety, and who (no doubt) harbor some affection for an item or two among all that old stuff. Hornby asks him/them to change his mind about classical music — because he/they’ve seen both sides and maybe there’s a bridge. One of them (I like to think it’s Richards) says, “Y’know, for me there’s a very simple test for music. All I ask of music is that it sounds good.” Then Hornby wakes up — the interview was a dream — realizing that he himself wrote those words in an essay about a Van Morrison song, and, feeling free for the first time ever, he remembers that in the dream Richards (or whoever) recommended a song to him in which Xerxes sings about the simple pleasure of sitting in the shade of a plane tree -- the kind of "smaller feelings that constitute a day and a week and a life." The song is by Handel, it is in Italian, and it is sung by an adult male soprano, but Richards said that’s all part of the appeal: never-mind-the-string-section-it’s-the-Sex-Pistols. So Hornby finds it on YouTube, runs it through the hi-fi, and somehow it doesn’t smell like pumpkin butterscotch.

It doesn’t smell like anything. Because it's fucking *music*, Nick.

Oh, and about the lute: enjoy the cartoon!

Book Review: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, by Mark Follman

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?