Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Violence Project with Dr. Jillian Peterson

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

On this episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon is joined by Dr. Jillian Peterson, a leading expert in the research of violence, mental illness, and crime. Today’s conversation may not be suitable to listen to with children in the room, but it is an episode you will want to hear. Sharon and Dr. Peterson discuss the myths and media around violence and mass shootings, and how they compare to the research. They also touch on reframing the idea of the “monster with a gun” and what actions and resources can help diminish gun violence across the country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted that you're joining me today. I have a guest that I know you need to hear from. All Americans need to hear about the work of the Violence Project, How to Stop Mass Shootings. I'm chatting with Jillian Peterson. I'm just going to give you a little content warning that we are going to be talking about things like mass shootings, and so this may not be the most appropriate topic for small children, but parents, you for sure need to listen to this. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I'm very excited to be joined by Jillian Peterson today, who has written a book that I know many of you are going to find very, very helpful and

interesting. And she is one of the lead researchers in this field of mass shootings that America is absolutely plagued by. Thank you so much for being here today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I know that so many people are going to benefit from hearing from you, benefit from your book. I would love to have you just tell everybody a little bit more about yourself and how you became interested in studying this topic. Sure. So before I was an academic, I was actually an investigator. I worked for the New York City Capitol Defender's

Office, which is the public defender's office for death penalty cases. And it was my job to put together what we called the psychosocial life histories of people that were facing the death penalty in New York City. So I spent my days on Rikers Island talking to people who had committed these heinous murders, trying to figure out what their pathway to violence looked like. And with all of those stories, you could just see if something had happened at this point or at this point or at this point, things might have turned out really differently. So that became my passion.

And I went to get my PhD in psychology. And then I got into this mass shooting work about five or six years ago when I realized the problem was we didn't understand the pathway to violence for the perpetrators that were doing this. It just felt like this terrifying phenomenon that was increasing, that was becoming more deadly, that it was impacting all of our lives in terms of kind of the fear and devastation, in terms of kind of the fear and devastation. And we just didn't understand it. And you've written a book that I think every American should investigate. It's called The Violence Project, How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic. And I think we can all co-sign, like, yes, we would like to stop it. And we feel a little powerless to do so.

We feel like, and you even mentioned this in the first part of your book, where America has been very focused on fighting monsters, that we view the people who are perpetrating these mass shootings as monsters. It's always a wage against the monsters among us. And I would love to hear you touch on that topic a little bit more. Who are the people who by and large are committing mass shootings? Yeah. So I think a lot of the things that we do to protect ourselves from mass shootings has this element of protecting ourselves from monsters. So we build these intense security infrastructures and we train

ourselves to run, hide, and fight. And we do all these things that we imagine these outsiders coming in. What we realized with this research is that mass shooters are insiders. They are kids in our classrooms. They are our nephews, our neighbors, our sons. They're people that we could never imagine doing this, but they're giving us all sorts of warning signs. They're telling people about their plans. In retrospect, it's quite obvious, but nobody could see it because the people we imagine doing this are these outside monsters. It's not the kid in my classroom. It's not the kid sitting next to me. And so I think that flip is really helpful.

Before individuals do this, perpetrate these horrific shootings, they're people in our lives. They're insiders at the schools or at our workplaces. And so that really shifts our thinking. And in many ways, it makes prevention a lot more possible. You said in your book, that's why our societal response to mass shootings has been to wage war on monsters. We've tried locking the monsters out. We've turned our schools into secure fortresses with metal detectors, bulletproof windows, and impenetrable doors.

We've installed high-tech security systems in our workplaces and even stationed police outside of our concerts and casinos to spot the monsters before they get in. And this fact may make mass shooters seem harder to stop the fact that they are, in fact, insiders. The reality is quite the opposite, you say. It means we know where to find them. And with our research, we've learned how to reach them before they ever pick up a gun. And that is the perpetual conundrum that police departments and citizens around the country have been contending with. How do we stop them before they start? And one of the things that I noted in your book is that you have really identified many commonalities that mass shooters share. And I would love to hear you tell everybody about what

those things are. I do want to be clear. Of course, perpetrators are doing monstrous things, like the act itself is so monstrous, but the idea is where did that come from and how do you get to that point? And what we see is these really common pathways over and over and over again where perpetrators often come, their childhoods are often filled with violence, with trauma, with abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. And of course, millions of people suffer that and would never commit violence. But that kind of lays the initial groundwork. That's the foundation where this comes out of kind of untreated trauma histories that builds over time. And these young men become isolated, depressed, hopeless. Many of them attempt suicide and are actively suicidal.

There's kind of a self-loathing there. Then that self-hatred kind of turns out and it becomes whose fault is this and who do I blame? So school shooters blame the school, workplace shooters blame their workplace. Some people blame racial groups or women or religious groups. They oftentimes spend time online getting radicalized, spend time getting their thinking validated, having other people say, yes, violence is the answer to this. They study each other. They study previous shooters. They see themselves in those shooters. Then as they sort of get ready

to do this, they're leaking their plans. They're telling people that they are thinking about doing this. And then of course they have access to weapons and the mass shooting itself, it's sort of a horrible, angry suicide. The perpetrators go in with no plan to come out. They plan to either be killed or to be arrested and spend the rest of their life in prison or many kill themselves in the process. And they're looking for that notoriety. They are looking to be known and to be seen for this in a way that they weren't seen in their lives. And so we see that pattern sort of again and again.

I thought it was very interesting that many shooters also had experienced the suicide of a parent. Yes, that surprised us. In fact, what we did is we built this database. So we had 180 perpetrators that we coded on 200 different pieces of life history information. And it came up so often that we ended up actually adding that as kind of its own column in the database, suicide of a parent, because we were seeing it come up so often. So these are pretty sort of significant early childhood histories of kind of trauma and suffering that this comes from. I also thought it was interesting that the majority of mass shooters had some kind of psychiatric history of some type. And does that mean that you draw the conclusion

that mass shooters who perpetrate mass shootings do so because of mental illness? Is that the conclusion that is meant to be drawn from that data? It is not the conclusion. And so this is something that we were really careful with. We spent a lot of time with. And I think in our national conversations about this, we've made this a black or white issue. Mental illness causes mass treatment or symptoms, thought disorders like hallucinations and delusions are overrepresented compared to the general population, but it's still the minority of perpetrators who experienced that. So what we see is mental health histories being a piece of the story. It's a piece of the pathway. It doesn't explain why it happened. So only about 10% of perpetrators that we studied, we could say this was a result of untreated mental illness. They were actively sort of hallucinating or they were delusional.

That's what made them do this. For the other 90%, the story is much more complicated. Now, no one who does this is mentally healthy and well, right? And so you're actively suicidal, you're in crisis, you're not doing well, you would probably benefit from some sort of mental health intervention that would be helpful before this happens, but that doesn't mean that mental illness caused it. So I think it's complicated. And I think if you say yes or no, neither of those answers are correct. That makes sense. Usually the truth is in the

nuance. Exactly. Exactly. What about video games? People point a finger at video games because they are looking for what has changed in society from the past to now. We have always had children with trauma. We have always had children experiencing trauma. We have always had children experiencing violence, sexual trauma. People's parents have committed suicide since the beginning of time. Many of these things have been present throughout American history, in some cases even worse than they are today, statistically. And so one of the variables that people will point to is violent video games. What are your thoughts about that?

So most perpetrators of mass shootings in our database did not play violent video games. So it's not something that we see in the majority of cases or even a lot of cases. Once in a while, they do, right? And so in the cases where they do, spending a lot of time playing violent video games, we think of that as kind of an accelerant. So not causal, right? Majority of young people can play a violent video game and they are not going to go commit a mass shooting, right? But for certain people who are vulnerable, who are on the edge, who have had these histories, it could be that immersing yourself in that violent content sort of escalates things. But I would say what we see more commonly rather than violent video games

is kind of violent media in general. So social media websites, chat rooms, sort of immersing yourself in school shooter celebration type dark websites on the web. And so I think that has changed. Our access to this type of violent thinking, this type of radicalization, this type of violent content, it used to be that if you were feeling like, oh, maybe I would want to commit a school shooting, I'd like to talk to someone about that, the chances of you finding someone in your classroom are pretty minimal. But when you have access to the entire world on social media, you can easily find someone to validate that and say that you're correct. And so I think that's, again, where we see social media, not as the cause, right? Most people who are on social media aren't going to do this,

but as an accelerant is kind of part of this pathway to violence. Yeah. Most of the people listening to this are on Instagram or Facebook and they do not feel like, wow, it makes me feel violent. They would not associate scrolling Instagram or looking at people's wedding pictures on Facebook with inciting violence. But what I'm hearing you say is that when somebody is in that vulnerable state from a variety of potential causes, they're able to, by virtue of how easy it is to find that kind of information that they would not previously have had access to, they can find it online. And 20, 30, 50 years ago, they could not. Exactly. And some of them find these online chat rooms or platforms

where they feel like they now have this community that they didn't have before, right? And this community is organized around violence and hate. And so in order to be a part of that community, you kind of tumble down that rabbit hole in a way that you wouldn't have been able to previously. that rabbit hole in a way that you wouldn't have been able to previously. And I know you see those sorts of experiences with other people who are involved in political violence, for example, where membership in that community is very valuable to them. They're often lacking in social capital in other aspects of their life. And that membership in the community gives them social capital they didn't have previously. Are you seeing that in the research with mass shooters? We are seeing that.

And so our research included both building that database and also conducting a lot of interviews with perpetrators, with family members of perpetrators, sisters, moms. And there's particular cases we studied where a sister would say, you know, he was doing really poorly. He was depressed. He was angry. He was all these things. And then he got in this chat room and then he got in these communities and he was suddenly emboldened, right? And it was suddenly like, it's not me. It's this specific group whose fault it is. And so that shift, that community saying, hey, it's not you, we feel like you, let's figure out who we blame is being sort of a critical component of this

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You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Can you point to a trigger event? And it seems like many of these challenges, issues that people are facing in the runway to becoming a mass shooter that seem to pile up. It seems to not be a single like, well, they experienced one tragedy as a child and then they're a school shooter.

It seems like things continue to pile up, continue to escalate. seems like things continue to pile up, continue to escalate. Is there often a trigger that you can point to where you're like, and then this thing happened and that was the event that set them off? That was the event that led them to begin planning a mass shooting. So you're exactly right. It's this slow build. It's this escalation over time where things intensify. There often is kind of an event. It's like the tipping point, right? It's a thing that pushes the last straw that pushes them over the edge. And it's not that it was that thing that caused it. It's that thing on top of the fact that they were already so close to the edge. So for example, workplace shooters, it tends to be being fired. You see

that over and over again. It's like they lose their job. For other perpetrators, it's a relationship ending, somebody leaving them. It could be something with their peers or teachers at school, but there's typically something that's kind of the last straw. Sometimes it's actually getting kicked out or expelled from school. That is the final thing. So there's something that's kind of the final straw. And then we talk about this period of kind of being in crisis, right? So once there's that final flip, their behavior is changing. They're acting differently. People are noticing that they're not acting like themselves. We refer to it as kind of a balloon ready to pop and everyone can see how

full this balloon is. That's a really critical moment for intervention is noticing when that behavior is changing and when things are off. I've heard many people say that the solution to stopping mass shootings is just more mental health access. Would you agree with that sentiment? Yes and no. So in the book, if you look at this pathway to violence that I described, you can build off-ramps at any point along this pathway to violence. So we come up with over 30 different kind of off-ramps, types of solutions that individuals, institutions, societal level that we could do. One of them would be things like crisis intervention teams in school, things like suicide prevention

training, because we know these are suicides. And so we can learn a lot from the suicide prevention world. Things like access to school-based mental health care would be helpful for people who were in crisis or suicidal, but that's not right for everyone. It could be that they need peer support or they need mentorship or they need social services. So it's kind of tailoring that. But what we really need is systems where we can report when we're concerned about individuals who are in crisis and teams that can respond to that with kind of this holistic, compassionate care, not to say, okay, we're going to lock you up

forever because we think you're going to be a school shooter, but to say, okay, we're worried about you. How can we connect you with what you need? So mental health care would be a part of that equation, but not the full equation. I want to hear more in a minute about what some of the solutions you propose are, but I wanted to also ask, who are the right people to deal with this issue? Of course, once a mass shooting has happened, of course, law enforcement has to investigate, rarely, but sometimes the shooter is still alive, that person has to be prosecuted. Of course, all of those things are true. But in terms of that runway to the trigger event that causes the mass shooting, in your view, who is the best equipped person or group of people to deal with that? Is it parents? Is it the police? Who is it?

I mean, I would say it's all of us, but in particular, certainly adults that have access to young people. So that's teachers, school staff, administrators, that's parents, that's relatives, that's neighbors. I think we tend to put this on law enforcement, right? Especially if there's like a threat. If someone posts something scary on social media, we say, okay, law enforcement, go investigate. They do what they're capable of, which is figuring out, is this a real threat? Does this person have a gun? If they don't, they're technically kind of done.

And then we wash our hands of it. And what we really should be saying is, wow, why did this kid post that? What is he trying to tell us? He's trying to tell us that he's not doing well, that he needs help. And let's make sure we pull him in to the school or to the family or to the community and give him what he needs rather than push it out. And all of these things, it's not just about preventing school shootings. I think that's a piece of it. It's also about just kind of helping young people in a lot of respects that a lot of these solutions, they might stop mass shootings, but they might also stop suicides and self-harm and other forms

of violence and drug use. It's just building systems to take care of our young people. That's a great point. This is, of course, we should want to stop mass shootings, of course, but there are other positive effects that come from building these kinds of systems. Yes. All right. So let's say you are hired by the federal government and they say, okay, Jillian, build us a program, build us a system that will help address this epidemic of mass shootings. What would that look like if you had your druthers? That's a great question. I think I would start in early childhood, I would start with universal trauma screening and I would start with requiring social emotional learning, especially young boys, right, coping mechanisms and empathy. But I would really focus on middle and high school is building these systems where we have

anonymous reporting systems. If you're worried about someone, we have mechanisms for anyone to report. We're focused on really good relationships between young people and adults in the school. So there is this element of kind of trust. And if I tell you something I trust it's going to be responded to. And then we have teams that have security, mental health, teachers, parents who can investigate these cases when someone's worried and respond with resources, not with a punitive response, but respond by saying, okay, we're worried about you. What is it that you need and how do we follow up and make sure that it's working? And then I would couple that with a safe storage campaign across

the board because most of these perpetrators in schools, at least, are using unsecured guns that they're taking from their parents. That's interesting that you differentiate between responding with resources and responding with punitive action. I think a lot of times, perhaps a peer doesn't feel like reporting a friend because they're like, I'm not trying to get him locked up. You know, like I'm not trying to send him to Juby for three years. Like I'm not going to snitch on that person. They don't deserve to go to jail than when they're just super depressed. So perhaps there is a reticence to report things because they, number one, don't feel like anything will be done.

Like the police will show up. They'll be like, are you okay? And the person's like, yeah, I'm fine. Or they'll determine they're not fine to take them to a mental health facility, take them to jail against their will, et cetera. So what kind of resources are we talking about here? What do comprehensive community resources for people in crisis look like? Yeah, it's an excellent question. And we've studied school shooting cases where 50, 60 kids knew it was going to happen and nobody reported, partially because I think we can't imagine, again, that monster phenomenon that my friend could actually do this.

And secondly, because exactly, they don't want to be the snitch. They don't want to be the one who got their friend kicked out of school. There's a fear and a stigma around that. And the only way you get rid of that is to change the response, right? So build those trusting relationships, but also say, when you report, you're not saying, I think my friend's a school shooter. When you report, you're saying, I am worried about my friend, right? And I'm worried that they're not doing well. And I want somebody to know that so that they can help them. That's a really different perspective. And then those schools or those teams have to have the resources to intervene. And so it's going to be tailored for each kid. It might be that they need a peer support group or, you know, an adult mentor in does. It doesn't have to be somebody with the right letters behind their name and an office, right? Like it could just be, you need somebody to be

walking with you, to be checking in with you and to be talking with you. And that could be a mental health professional or it could be someone else. It might be that something in their home environment is dangerous and needs to be looked into. I think it depends on each case kind of what they need, but it's a team willing to investigate and ask those questions. And I think the other piece of this, when I talk to school leaders and they say, I get that, right? I know that when a kid posts this or says this, I know that that's what they need, but the community around me, all these scared parents aren't going to stand for that.

These scared parents want criminal charges and to know that kid is never entering my school again. So part of this is also changing that community response because it's not something we can punish our way out of. You can expel a kid and he can come right back and do it. It actually intensifies their grievance and their anger. What we want to do is let air out, bring the crisis down, wrap the kid in. And so the entire school community is part of that process. That's a great point that expelling a child

is an accelerant and does not deescalate the situation in many cases. As you mentioned before, often a trigger event is something like getting fired, getting broken up with, getting kicked out of school. And we think that perhaps expelling somebody or firing somebody will remove the danger, but in reality, it perhaps intensifies the danger. It's in some ways naive of us to think that somehow that that person cannot gain access to the school. Exactly. Even if we turn a school into a maximum security prison, which, by the way, we will never do. We don't have the resources or the will to do that.

Even if that was the case, it is still naive to think that there would be no way that the perpetrator could access the students at the school because the students come and go. Doors open when the students come and go. There's always a way in. There's always a way in, especially when you're a kid who's been going to that school there. Precisely. Yes. Totally. You know which teachers are always like, why is it so hot in here? And leave their windows open on the first floor. It doesn't take a super sleuth to figure these things out. What do you think of the idea of arming teachers?

Yeah, I mean, I get, I do understand the instinct that it feels like if someone comes in with a gun, if there's a teacher there with guns, maybe we can stop. There's so many problems with it. I think we know that even police officers, highly, highly trained police officers make tons of mistakes in terms of firing people and targeting. I think the chances of a teacher making a mistake, the chances of that gun being taken from that teacher and being used in some other way, the chances of a teacher or somebody being in crisis and not doing well and being armed in the building.

There's just so many, when you have guns there, there's just so many opportunities for error. We did this one study where we looked at cases of school shootings or attempted school shootings, and we tried to figure out what predicts the number of casualties that happens. And what we found is, first of all, if the perpetrator brings an assault weapon, more casualties. And secondly, weirdly, if there was an armed officer on the scene, there was more casualties, right? And so you can think about this kind of being a weapons effect, right? When somebody's firing, somebody's firing back, you just end up having more firing and more firing. And so I think it's, I'm not convinced that weapons and more guns is going to solve this problem. And it also comes down to that that's reaction, not prevention, right? We're so invested in once this is happening, how do we minimize casualties? We have no evidence that having more guns on the

scene would minimize casualties. In fact, most evidence would say it would actually increase casualties. But I think it's also still the wrong conversation. Let's stop talking about assuming this is going to happen. Let's minimize casualties. Let's start talking about how do we make it so that perpetrator never enters the building in the first place and doesn't want to do this. We know that the protective environments against this are these warm, welcoming environments with really good relationships and good communication. The more we turn our schools into maximum security prisons, and especially with all the teachers being armed, the less likely, I mean, that moves so far away from the school environment that we

know protects against this. And so we really need to be pushing, how do we form those relationships? How do we make sure that every kid is seen in this school and someone's checking in on every kid? And that could be smaller class sizes. I mean, we don't think of these things as security, right? We don't think of that as public safety. We think of public safety as guns and metal detectors and bulletproof glass, but public safety is adults and kids in the building having really good, trusting, strong relationships and every kid being seen and adults having the time and space to check in on kids when they're not doing well. That's public safety. We put these things in two very different buckets and they're really one in the same.

That's such a good point. We know that there's a correlation between great public schools, receiving a great education reduces crime in a community and poor quality schools are correlated with an increase in crime rates. It absolutely makes sense that the foundations of a safe community begin with those secure attachments to adults. And you can't always force a parent

to be securely and warmly attached to their children, but we can create the systems in which there is somebody that is there for that child. Exactly. It really, what's incredible is in studying a lot of these cases, and we've also studied cases of averted shootings or people change their mind is that we have these huge conversations around gun control and mental health and all these things that we need. But the reality is when it gets stopped, it is one person connecting with that perpetrator, the potential perpetrator, one person giving them a human connection, giving them a bit of hope, letting some air out of their balloon and getting them through that moment. That doesn't solve every

problem in their life, but it actually, it's more remarkably simple than I anticipated. It's just a matter of making sure that there's someone noticing and someone willing to dig in and have the hard conversation. And it would be great if that somebody had some kind of resources to offer the person in crisis. Sometimes all you need is like, listen, I'm here for you. Sometimes that's what's needed, but sometimes a child's home life is so chaotic and so traumatic, more resources are needed. So we need some kind of backup to the frontline, you know, like, how are you? We need to have resources behind that to be able to offer people. You mentioned in your book too, about Aaron, who had decided, I'm going to be a

school shooter. And he has a TED Talk. And you mentioned in your book, he describes almost becoming a school shooter. He wanted to do a shooting at his high school. He planned to do the shooting and he was suicidal and wanted to take others with him. But one night, a friend invited him over and the friend's mother had baked a blueberry peach pie in his honor. She had no idea what he was going through or contemplating doing, but they all sat together and ate the pie. And he points to that as being what let enough air out of the balloon that he decided not to go through with it. I love that story because we can all be baking pies for everybody around us, right? Like we never know when your act of kindness or your noticing or your asking questions, you just never

know what that one interaction can do for each other. And I think with the pandemic, with so many things, we've gotten so disconnected. We spent so much time apart that really reconnecting with young people, and it can just be a moment that can change somebody's entire trajectory. To me, that is so powerful. And we don't take advantage of that enough, especially when we're seeing young people around us struggling. How do we reach out and pull them in? It's a beautiful story.

And we've studied other averted shootings where it's quite similar. That pie didn't solve all of Aaron Stark's problems and dark history and suicidality. It just got him through that moment, that really dark moment where he was really on the edge. I'd love to hear you talk to parents directly. What can parents who are listening to this, who are like, I do not want my child to become a school shooter or a mass shooter of any kind, what can parents do? Number one, to help inoculate their children from even having, considering this, but number two, if they fear for their child's well-being? Yeah, there's kind of two angles there. There's the parents that are like,

oh, I worry about my kid or I worry about my kid's friends. I think we have to make sure we're taking all that worry very seriously. And it's, you know, I've talked to moms at mass shootings who say, what was I going to do? Call the police and report my kid that he might do this. And the answer is no, that's not what we want to be doing, right? We want to be able though, to have systems where parents could reach out to the school and say, I'm worried about my kid. Can you help partner with me and get him some resources that he needs?

So I would say, if you're worried, take that worry seriously. Not to say I'm worried my kid's going to be a school shooter, but I'm worried there's something up, right? I'm worried my kid's in crisis. I'm worried he's not talking to me, or I don't really know what's going on. And dig in. Welcome in more people from just sort of parents who are fearful of this. And I say this as a parent of three elementary

school kids, right? Where it's ever present. We just had you all day. Our kids are going back to school. It's terrifying. One is that it doesn't feel like it, but statistically speaking, school is still one of the safest place for children to be compared to, you know, in cars or in swimming pool, like school is still safe. These are rare events. They do happen though. And so it makes it feel terrifying. But again, this idea that the best thing we can do to kind of inoculate ourselves against this and to protect ourselves is to build those strong, warm relationships within the school, to have really good communication with your kid, to go in and ask the school what their plan is, right? If people are worried, do they have a system where people can report and how do they respond to that?

Are their teachers trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention? I think asking those questions and making sure the school has not just an emergency response plan in place, but a prevention plan in place. And so what are the resources that are missing? What does the school have in place? And so I think it's easy to feel terrified, but we can be more empowered by training ourselves in some of these skills, by making sure that our schools have some of these systems in place. And also certainly in the case of something like Uvalde, there's a lot that went wrong there. No question. A lot went wrong, including the school security's response, et cetera. But generally, broadly speaking,

we are not going to solve the issues of mass shooting because we know that a lot of these suicidal ideations or the things that begin to build up to those suicidal ideations. And again, as you mentioned in the book, mass shootings are almost always intended to be suicide or a like, I'm going to prison forever. I don't care. I want a way to get out of their current life. Yes. Whatever that is, I want out of my current life. Those don't generally begin at age 40. They begin as a young person. And so if we want to prevent these kinds of things, the way to do it is not to perpetually vilify schools and teachers as a whole. Cutting funding, making teachers out to be the scapegoats for every societal ill, that's

actually going to be counterintuitive to solving the crisis of mass shootings in America. Yes, exactly. The more that we can support our schools and our teachers and give them resources, it's a lot. We ask teachers to do so much. And now we're saying, could you also be on the front lines of preventing violence? But the reality is they are. They're the ones that see a lot of these kids every day, but if they don't have the training or the time or the space or the resources to do anything about it, you know, that's problematic. So how do we make sure that our schools are resourced and our teachers are supported in doing this? And then how do parents partner with teachers in this becomes really important as well.

partner with teachers in this becomes really important as well. All right. People can read your book, which is coming out in paperback called The Violence Project. I highly suggest that they do so. It will be very eye-opening, very useful. You'll be able to arm yourself with well-researched data on this topic. So we're not just spewing random things online that just contribute to misinformation. So I highly suggest that people read the Violence Project, but where else can people find you online? Where can they go to get more information if they want it? Yeah. So we have a website, that's theviolenceproject.org that has a lot of data, quick data articles, we've written things that resources

there. From there, you can connect to another website. That's off ramp dot org. Off ramp has training videos. If you want to train yourselves and things like crisis intervention, suicide prevention, social media safety, they're all free. There's downloadable resources for schools to use. It has connections to mental health and crisis intervention across the country. You can search by state. So that's really kind of a good resource hub. And then we are on social media. We're at the violence pro on Twitter, Instagram. We'd love to connect with you that way. I love the idea that you are offering these kinds of like free trainings so that people who are on the front lines, like teachers, school counselors, administrators, parents can better equip themselves with de-escalating that situation, letting some air out of that balloon instead of accelerating it and inflaming it. instead of accelerating it and inflaming it.

Exactly. And that it takes some training and some practice, but once you get into it, it's remarkably easy. And it's something that once I learned to do it, I use it all the time, right? It's useful for parenting. It's useful for relationships. It's useful sort of cross situations. It's just a good skill to have as a human on earth. Exactly. Exactly. It is.

Yes. I am really grateful for your time today. Thank you so much for your work. And I really think people are going to find this incredibly useful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and

Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.