Science Vs - Mass Shootings: How Do We Stop Them?

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Buffalo. Uvalde. Highland Park. These mass shootings keep happening. One side says the problem is the guns, and the other side says the problem is the people. Who’s right? And what policies might actually work to stop mass shootings? We talk to NSSF spokesperson Mark Oliva, gun control researcher Prof. Mark Gius, criminologist Dr. Jillian Peterson, and epidemiologist Dr. Veronica Pear.  CN: This episode discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, in the U.S. you can call or text 988 to reach the government’s suicide and crisis help line. More mental health resources are available at spotify.com/resources. Link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/3VsbWeY For more on this topic, check out Science Vs Gun Violence Science Vs Gun Control This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from Disha Bhagat, Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Additional editing help from Caitlin Kenney and Nicole Beemsterboer. Wendy Zukerman is our executive producer. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard and SoWylie. Thanks to all the scientists we spoke to for this episode, including Prof. Adam Lankford, Dr. Cassandra Crifasi, Dr. Emma Fridel, Prof. Emmy Betz, Dr. Jackie Schildkraut, Dr. Kaitlin Boyle, Dr. Paul Reeping, Dr. Rosanna Smart, Dr. Sonali Rajan, Dr. Tristan Bridges, and Dr. Tara Tober. Special thanks to Jack Weinstein.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just a heads up that today's episode talks about suicide and has the sound of gunshots, so take care while you're listening. We'll share some resources at the end of the episode, and we'll put them in our show notes, too. Hi, I'm Rose Rimler, filling in for Wendy Zuckerman this week. You're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. On today's show, we're going to talk about a nightmare scenario that's been playing out again and again around the world, but especially in the United States. Mass shootings. Several have happened just this year.

Buffalo. Uvalde, Texas. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Highland Park, Illinois. These shootings are awful, and they terrify us. One survey from 2019 found that about a third of U.S. adults said they avoided certain public places or events because of the fear of a mass shooting. And so today we're asking, is there any way to stop them? Because there are all sorts of ideas out there about what to do. And these ideas tend to

split along political lines. Generally speaking, the left says the problem is the guns, especially assault weapons. The right says, no, the problem is the people, that it's mental illness that creates mad gunmen, not the guns themselves. And they say we need more good guys with guns to fend off these murderers. Many of us have been listening to this back and forth for years. Endless debates about what to do. But it seems like people don't usually bring science to the fight. So that's what we want to do today. Cut through all the political crap and ask,

what could really work to stop mass shootings? We're asking, one, should we ban assault weapons? Two, should we have more armed people at schools to stop school shootings? Three, how does mental illness fit into this? Should we be focusing on that? And four, what are red flag laws and do they work? Because when it comes to mass shootings, there's a lot of opinions about how to make them stop.

But then there's science. Science versus mass shootings is coming up after the break. It's really not important to me to have a lot of things to show off fancy cars you know a giant home those things are just not part of who I am but I've been coached and I've learned through my advisor that it's not one size fits all everyone has their own preferences everything that I do with Edward Jones is tailored to who I am. Edward Jones. We do money differently. Visit edwardjones.ca slash different.

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their insurance solutions are designed to help protect you and your loved ones financially giving you the peace of mind to focus on what truly matters find their products through banks credit unions and associations or visit securing canadaianCanada.ca. Securian Canada, insurance designed for life. Welcome back. Today we're asking, how can we stop mass shootings? And first, we want to note that these shootings are rare compared to other kinds of crimes. They're usually defined as four or more people killed, and in the U.S. they happen about two dozen times a year. That number includes domestic violence murders, gang murders, and robberies. If we narrow it down to just the public rampages that tend to make headlines, then it's more like five times a year. And these public

mass shootings do seem to be getting deadlier. Several of the deadliest ones have happened in the past 10 years. And some people argue that this is because killers have access to more dangerous guns, like assault weapons. So let's dive into this. Some states already ban certain kinds of guns that they consider assault weapons. And there was a federal assault weapons ban. It lasted a decade, but it ended in 2004. So one thing we hear a lot is that we should bring this back. Four simple words. Ban assault weapons federally. Is there a will to keep weapons of war off our streets?

And President Biden says he wants to do this. I'm determined to ban assault weapons in this country. Determined. To me, someone who's never fired anything more powerful than a super soaker, these guns do seem like a huge part of the problem. They just look scary and unnecessary. But a lot of gun owners say they get a bad rap, that they're not more dangerous than other guns. So I wanted to learn more, and I wanted to see them in person.

And the easiest way to do that was to leave the state of New York, because they're banned here. Producer Meryl Horn came with me. Okay, we're about to drive to the shooting range. Here we go. Meryl and I rented a car, which meant we had to drive it out of the rental car parking lot. And that meant we had to find the parking brake. Every time I get in a car, it's a new type of emergency brake.

Oh, what about that P over there? This one here? Yeah. Pull. Pull what? Oh, no, that's not. Oh, I thought I got it. Should I Google it? Oh, maybe. Oh, you did it. Okay. Eventually we hit the road. Welcome to Virginia. Virginia. It's one of 42 states where assault weapons are legal. Neither of us had ever fired a gun before, so we were a little nervous, cracking stupid jokes. And then we're going to go to Balls Ford Road. Pardon? You know, Balls Ford Road.

I think that's where Thomas Jefferson... Forded his balls. The gun range was a huge building about the size of a Walmart. Inside was a big, brightly lit lobby with couches. And that's where we met Mark Oliver. Hi, Mark. I'm Rose. So good to meet you.

Mark is a spokesperson for a gun trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. It's not the NRA. It focuses on advocating for gun manufacturers and sellers. Mark is a solidly built, salt-and-pepper bearded guy who carries a gun in a holster around the belt of his khaki pants. Before this job, he spent 25 years in the Marines. Joke. I've been able to go from one big gun club to another.

The biggest gun club being the military? Yeah. Mark was our gun guide for the day. He owns a bunch of guns, and he brought a few of them with him. So we checked in, watched a safety video, If a problem occurs, keep the firearm entered the range itself, which looked a lot like a bowling alley, only with bullseyes instead of pins. There were already a few

other people in there, shooting guns in their lanes. We took a spot right next to a guy who was shooting a big black rifle. Whoa, I could feel the wind coming off. Is that an AR next to it? It's like producing its own wind when the guy next to us fires. It was the infamous AR-15 style rifle. This gun was originally produced by a company called Armalite. That's where AR comes from.

Armalite Rifle. And now a bunch of gun manufacturers make their own versions, and it's become super popular. Mark pulled his own AR-style gun out of one of his camo-printed bags. This is one of the guns that would be banned in New York. And can you describe this rifle for us? This is a Daniel Defense M4A1. It's a modern sporting rifle. I've got it topped with a Vortex small scope. Many people would call this gun an assault rifle. But as you can hear, Mark prefers the term modern sporting rifle. He taught me to nestle the gun against my shoulder and look through the scope, and I was ready to go.

All right, so now I'm going to load you up. Got 20 rounds. You ready? Yeah. Oh, my God. I found myself laughing kind of up. You got 20 rounds. You ready? Yeah. Oh, my God. I found myself laughing kind of awkwardly after I shot it because I was so nervous. So that was the assault weapon. Then Mark showed me a gun that's not considered an assault weapon. You ready to try a handgun?

Yeah, I'm really curious how that's going to be different. Mark handed me the 9mm handgun from the holster around his waist. It'll fire. Is that all right? Yep, when you're ready. Woo! I'm curious how that's going to be different. Mark handed me the 9mm handgun from the holster around his waist. It'll fire, is that alright? Yep, when you're ready. Woo! Lay down. Feel good?

Whew. How did I feel? Well, a little confused. When we talk about guns in the U.S., we put these two weapons in different categories. An assault weapon that some people want to ban, and basically a regular handgun. But to me, they both seemed really dangerous. There are differences, like the bullets fired from an AR-style gun do move a lot faster than bullets from a handgun. But they were both easy to fire because they were both semi-automatic, meaning that they reloaded themselves.

All I had to do was squeeze the trigger and there was another bullet ready to go. So I left the shooting range and dug into the research. It turns out that most of the time, mass shooters don't use assault weapons. They're more likely to use some other kind of gun, even a regular handgun. So maybe it's not surprising that when you look at research into assault weapons bans, they don't seem to make a big difference here. The evidence is mixed, but overall, we just don't see a clear drop in the number of mass shootings when these bans are in effect. Another reason that these bans may not have cut down on the number of mass shootings is because of the way the laws are written.

They define assault weapons with criteria that seems a little arbitrary. Like, if an AR-type rifle had a bayonet mount and the butt of the gun could be adjusted to be shorter or longer, it was banned. But if the same AR didn't have the bayonet mount and couldn't be adjusted, it was fine. I talked about this with a different Mark, Mark Geis, a professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. He researches gun control. Well, and I've heard that some of the features or the guns that were banned were kind of cosmetic features. They don't really, is that a fair criticism? Oh, that's totally fair. I mean, they had nothing to do with the rate of fire. Yeah.

It wasn't about how fast the gun could shoot, which in theory would make a gun more deadly. Mark thinks assault weapons got defined this way to make the ban more politically palatable. And he sees another potential problem with the way these laws tend to be written, which is that they don't make people turn in guns that they already have.

Essentially, they grandfathered in all existing assault weapons. So if you owned an assault weapon prior to 94, you could keep it and you could do whatever you want with it. That's one of the big problems with bans on any type of firearm is what do you do with all the existing firearms? I mean, do you buy them back? Are they just illegal? Even if people can't buy these guns at the store, they're already everywhere. Right now in the U.S., we have 400 million guns, which is actually, I think, 1.2 guns

for every person living in the United States. That's a lot of guns. As best we can tell, 20 million of those guns are assault rifles. Now, we're not saying that there's absolutely no connection between mass shootings and so-called assault weapons. We know that in some of the deadliest mass shootings, the killers used assault weapons. But the research suggests that the gunliest mass shootings, the killers used assault weapons. But the research suggests that the gun itself may not be the main factor. The feature that seems to make the most difference is a gun's ability to accept a lot of extra bullets,

using something called a high-capacity magazine. This is a thing you can load into a gun that carries something like 20, 30, 50 bullets. These types of magazines work with assault weapons, but also other kinds of guns, like handguns. And research has found that when killers use them, their rampage is more deadly. Two or three times more people injured or killed. Some states do ban these magazines.

The old federal ban outlawed them as well. And several studies we looked at found that when a mass shooting happened while one of these bans was in place, it was less deadly. Around the world, we've also seen what can happen when you make much stricter weapons bans. Like after a major mass shooting in Australia, they banned way more types of guns than we tried to ban. And they confiscated them. They really got rid of semi-automatic weapons,

essentially. I mean, they made people turn them in. People had to turn in the rifles. They were compensated for it, but they were made to turn them in. That type of law would be so politically unpalatable in this country. I don't think it would even make it out of committee. Australia did a bunch of other stuff too. Like they require licenses to own guns, which by the way is something that studies show would make a difference here as well. Aussies also have to prove that they have a good reason for owning a gun.

And the reason can't be self-defense. Since they put all these rules in place in 1996, Australia has had only one public mass shooting. Conclusion. If we want to focus on stopping mass shootings, we should think about either banning and confiscating large-capacity magazines, or banning and confiscating a lot more kinds of guns. Okay. So let's turn to the next potential solution. This one comes up specifically for school shootings. It's that we need more security at school. Congress just passed a big gun bill that sets aside $300 million for school safety projects. And a lot of people think that the

best kind of school safety is arming people who work at schools. It basically comes down to this NRA catchphrase. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. That's NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. And a lot of schools already do have cops on campus. In fact, government data suggests that about half of public K-12 schools in the U.S. have an armed officer present at least one day a week. So could cops on campus help stop mass shootings? To see what we could find out, we called up Jillian Peterson. She's a criminologist and psychologist at Hamlin University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She's a very sunny and psychologist at Hamlin University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

She's a very sunny person who has studied murderers her whole career. I don't know. There's something about studying the really kind of heavier, harder, uglier parts of life that make you really appreciative of all the good stuff. Jillian studies mass shootings these days, including school shootings. And one thing she wanted to know was, does it help if there's an armed guard at school when a shooting happens? She and her colleagues looked at what happened at 133 schools where someone came to school to do a mass shooting. 29 of those schools had an armed officer at school that day. And they found something kind of weird.

So we saw three times as many people were killed when there was an armed officer on the scene than when there wasn't, controlling for all these other factors. It was worse. It was worse. Yeah. In this study, they found that if an armed guard was there, more people were killed. And we were frankly surprised.

We can't say, here's why, right? We can't, because this is not a controlled experiment. What we can do is say, like, here's our guesses as to why. For one, Jillian's like, it's not usually some rando infiltrating the school. It's someone that goes there, or used to go there, so they know what to expect. These are not scary outsiders who don't know there's an armed officer there. These are insiders who know exactly that there's an armed officer there, where he stands, and so they may come in more heavily armed or kind of planned around that. That's just a guess. It's so hard to know.

And here's a caveat. Jillian's study doesn't tell us whether armed officers might be helping in ways we can't see, like if their presence sometimes keeps a mass shooter from entering the school at all. We can't study how many people thought about it and changed their mind because there was an armed officer on campus. We need more research on this.

But right now, this is the only study on this that we could find. And it doesn't back up the idea that we should be packing our schools with police in order to stop school shootings. Bottom line, there's no guarantee that armed police on campus would help here. Now, a lot of people want to specifically arm teachers so that every single classroom has a good guy with a gun. We couldn't find any studies on whether armed teachers would help, but there's already a big problem with this idea. Teachers don't want to carry guns. We found a number of surveys that asked teachers about this,

and the majority said, no thanks. Even in Texas, 77% of school teachers and other school employees in Texas told researchers they did not want to be armed at school. And one final note on all this, we really can't say whether arming more regular people in general would help stop mass shootings. One database looked at public shootings and found that an armed civilian stopped an active shooter 5% of the time. So it's not happening all that often right now. When we come back, we're going to dive into the science behind another big talking point. That it's not the guns that are the problem. It's mental illness. That's after the break. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000

on two or more major appliances. Shop now in-store or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Welcome back. So far, we've covered two ideas that people say will stop mass shootings, banning assault rifles and putting more good guys with guns in schools. Turns out neither of those things is a slam dunk. So let's turn to the next idea that we hear about all the time, that we need to address mental illness to stop mass shootings. It's something former President Donald Trump brought up a lot when a mass shooting would happen during his presidency. Here he is talking about two shootings in 2019. I do want people to remember the words mental illness. These people are mentally ill. And nobody talks about that. But these are mentally ill people.

Actually, people do talk about it. One person who's talked about it a lot is Jillian Peterson, the academic we heard from earlier in the show. A few years ago, she and a colleague wanted to take a close look at mass shooters, but there was a problem. We realized that there was no data about who these perpetrators were. There was databases that counted how often this was happening or looked at kind of where, but no sort of mass database that really dove deep into who these perpetrators were. So we decided we were going to try to build it. They combed through stuff like mass shooting databases, news reports, and police reports

to identify every American mass shooter going back to 1966. That ended up being 172 people. When it comes to demographics, the only clear thing they had in common? Being male. 98% of them were men or boys. Jillian wanted to find out more about them. Most of them were dead, so she reached out to people who knew them. So we talked to mothers and sisters and fathers and girlfriends and childhood best friends and social workers and teachers, kind of anyone who could help paint a picture of who these perpetrators were and where this came from. Then there were a few dozen mass shooters who were still living.

So she wrote to them in prison. Five wrote back. And Jillian asked them to call her up. I had a number that forwarded to my cell phone kind of day or night so I could answer whenever they got a chance to call. So does that mean that you were like at the movies or at the farmer's market and your phone would ring and it would be a shooter? Yeah, there was moments like that. I have three kids who are mostly home in the pandemic.

And so it would be like I have to step outside into the backyard to talk to this mass shooter. She asked them all kinds of questions about their lives. What their early childhoods were like, what was going on in the day before the shooting or the week before the shooting. A lot around mental health, their family histories. There's some obvious limitations here. A lot of friends and relatives who are not unbiased, talking about what things were like after the fact. And in the case of the living mass shooters, we just have to take their word for what they were thinking and feeling. Jillian knows this. So it's far from perfect, but it was a start.

From all this, I wanted to know what role mental illness played in their crimes. Are mass shooters typically mentally ill? Oh my gosh, that's such a tricky question. I can't answer that with a yes or no. My response is this is complex and it's complicated. First of all, Jillian wanted to point out that the vast majority of people with mental illness, any mental illness, are not violent.

Because we don't want to create that stigma. We know that, you know, it's what, 50% of people in this country will meet criteria for a mental illness in their lifetime. It's so incredibly normal. We don't want to, you know, in any way, shape, or form, associate that with horrible violence because it's not. I wondered how common it was for people to do these shootings because they were so out of touch with reality that they didn't understand what they were doing.

And Jillian looked at this. She called it being primarily motivated by psychosis. One example is the Waffle House mass shooting in 2018. That guy said he was acting on orders from God and that CIA agents had been tailing him. We took a close look at what percentage of the perpetrators were really being kind of primarily driven by those types of symptoms. It's about 11% is what we came up with, which is higher than the general population, but still a small minority of the overall number of mass shootings. So according to Jillian's team, roughly 1 in 10 of these shooters is doing it because they're psychotic. And other research finds similar numbers, sometimes a little higher. Generally speaking, though, the majority of shooters are doing it for some other reason besides psychosis.

The mental health issue that really stands out here is this. About 70% of the shooters were suicidal. In fact, the probability that a mass shooter dies by suicide after the crime is much higher than for other kinds of murderers. In order to commit a mass shooting, you have to be committed to this being your final act, right? You go in wanting to either be killed, kill yourself, or spend the rest of your life in prison. And so you have to be completely hopeless and suicidal to do it. When Jillian looked closely at the period leading up to these men's crimes, she realized they had often reached some kind of crisis point.

Usually it was because they just had their wife leave them or they just lost their job or something dramatic happened in their family or at school where it was kind of the final thing that pushed them over the edge. A lot of us go through stuff like this, though, and we don't kill people. These people are suicidal. Why do they take other people with them?

Yeah, so these are, they're angry suicides. What we see in these perpetrators, and there's one sister of a perpetrator who put this particularly well for me. She said, my brother, he was saying, it was all about like, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? Right? Why don't I fit in? Why don't I have the things in life that I thought I would have? What is it about me? And then she said there was a switch and it became not what's wrong with me, but what's wrong with everybody else and whose fault is it, right? Who made this happen to me? And so in some cases it's women women, or it's a religious group, or it's a racial group. They kind of choose a target that represents their grievance with the world.

Who is it that they blame? That's why Jillian thinks it is worth talking about mental health care when we talk about how to stop mass shootings. We don't have hard data on this, but after poring over the interviews, Jillian thinks it could make sense to think of this crime unfolding sort of like a suicide, which means we should try to catch these guys in their moments of crisis or before and get them help. She talks about what this might look like for a kid threatening to do a school shooting. The only reason you say, I'm thinking about shooting up this school,

is because part of you wants somebody to say what's going on, right? Part of you want somebody to stop you. And instead of hearing a kid saying, I want to shoot up the school as sort of a violent threat, really hearing that as a cry for help, potentially a suicidal crisis, right? If we think of it that way, arresting them is just going to amplify the crisis. It's going to add air to the balloon. It's going to escalate things. Suspending or expulsion. I mean, we have school shooters who came back to this school and committed this school shooting right after they were expelled. It's just not a problem that we can punish our way out of because that just builds the crisis.

What we really need to be doing is seeing that this kid is saying this, I think he's in crisis. I think he needs help. Conclusion. Many mass shooters have mental health issues, but so do a lot of us. A minority of shooters are doing it because they're experiencing psychosis. Mass shootings are typically suicides, so suicide prevention might be a good way to address this. We can try reaching people before they act, but we can't predict who's going to do a mass shooting based on a mental health diagnosis. Before we leave Jillian, there's something else she found that we need to keep in mind. Some of these shooters choose to do this so they can be famous after death.

So in these cases, there's a particular motivation. The goal of these is to make headlines and to have their manifestos go viral and have us all read them. And in that case, you know, all of us, we are part of it. About half of the men who do the really high fatality shootings leave behind strong evidence that they wanted to get famous for their crimes. And they seem to understand that the more people they kill, the more attention they'll get. One researcher estimated that high-profile killers get $75 million of free publicity. This can inspire copycats. Someone sees what one shooter did and thinks,

maybe I'll do what he did, and if I get more victims, I'll get more attention. So the media can play a role. And we know that sometimes when the media changes the way it reports things, that can make a difference. We know this from suicides generally. Studies have found that there can be a copycat effect when a celebrity suicide hits the news. One meta-analysis out of South Korea found that suicides go up 13% afterwards. When journalists tamp down their reporting on this, like by not

discussing details of how it was done, there are fewer copycat suicides afterwards. All this is why some activists and researchers have called on the media to change the way they report on mass shootings, to use the shooter's name as little as possible, to avoid showing his picture, particularly if it's a picture of him posing with guns or looking triumphant, and to never ever publish or share someone's so-called manifesto. called Manifesto. Last up today is a potential solution that's getting a whole bunch of buzz. Red flag laws. These have a lot of support from both sides of the aisle. Joe Biden and Donald Trump both say they support them. And in the new bipartisan gun bill, Congress has set aside money to encourage states to pass red flag laws. So what are they? The ultimate purpose, like in a nutshell,

is to separate people who are making threats from firearms. It's actually really a very simple concept. If someone's making threats, make sure they don't have a gun. Exactly. That's Veronica Pair. She's an assistant professor at the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. And she studied red flag laws. This is how these laws typically work. Somebody makes a threat saying they want to harm themselves or someone else. A friend, a relative, or a cop asks a judge for a temporary restraining order to block

that person from either buying or having guns. Then it goes to court, and a judge can decide to issue a longer ban, which means that person's guns get locked up, usually for a year. Veronica told us that California passed its red flag law in 2014 after a shooting near Santa Barbara. That was the infamous incel shooting spree. It was a clear case where his parents had even alerted the police a few weeks before that he was posting these concerning videos on YouTube. They were worried that he was going to do something, that he had access to firearms. And police went to his house, but they didn't have a mechanism, a legal mechanism to take any firearms. So they left.

And then, you know, shortly thereafter, he went on a rampage and killed several people. He ended up killing six people, three with a gun. We adopted our law just months after that occurred. Right now, 19 states plus D.C. have adopted a version of a red flag law. So do they work? Well, we have pretty good evidence that they stop people from dying by suicide with a gun. Like a 2017 study from Connecticut. That was the first state to pass a red flag law. This study estimates that for every 10 to 20 times the law was invoked, one suicide was prevented. But we don't have that kind of data yet for mass shootings because they're much more rare, 10 to 20 times the law was invoked, one suicide was prevented.

But we don't have that kind of data yet for mass shootings, because they're much more rare, and most of the red flag laws are so new. The best evidence we could find came from a study that Veronica and her colleagues did. They wrote to courts all over California and said, send us the case reports for any time a red flag law was triggered for any reason. They got about 200 responses. In other words, 200 times when a red flag law was filed on somebody in California. Veronica was curious if this was ever used to stop someone who was threatening to do a mass shooting. It turns out, out of those 200 cases... We found 58 cases in the first three years where a person was making threats of

mass shootings. So it was quite a bit higher than I expected it to be. Veronica read through these cases and she found that some of them were really striking. One case that always sticks out for me is this one in which a person was fired from his job, and after being fired, he basically threatened to shoot up his former employer, the workplace. He told a co-worker about his plans, and he went to go purchase a firearm. He bought a shotgun, but had to wait 10 days to pick it up because California has a waiting period law. Meanwhile, the co-worker told the police, who filed a petition under the red flag law, and they realized he was eight days into the 10-day waiting period. And just in the nick of time, with two days to spare, was ultimately prevented from purchasing that firearm and nothing went on to happen. Yeah, he couldn't get the gun and he didn't go on to kill anyone.

In fact, that was true of everyone in her study. Veronica's team followed these red flag cases for two to four years. And by the end of that period, none of the people had killed anyone. It really seems like these threats could have materialized into actual mass shootings. So it's heartening to know that at least in these cases, the firearm was removed from the equation and that the threat never was carried out. It's encouraging. And one reason Veronica is so hopeful about this law is because it's common for mass shooters to talk about their plans before they act. The cases that have quote-, leakage, where the person will tell someone or reveal their plans.

Such a weird term, by the way, leakage. I know. I know. I don't really like it. Leakage, as in leaking the plan before it happens. According to data collected by Jillian and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, about half of mass shooters threaten some kind of violence before their crime. So if we could use a red flag law on shooters who leak, if the system worked perfectly, we'd cut mass shootings almost in half. But one problem here is that people need to know these laws exist. If people don't know about them, then they're kind of useless. In 2020, researchers did

a survey of Californians and found that two-thirds of them had never heard of this law. You know, the reality is that most people, it's not on their radar. So what do we need to do? Do we need to go out in the street with one of those signs and spin it around, you know, like at a car wash? You know, what should we do? So, yeah, I mean, I'm not a marketing person. Rather than spinny car wash signs, Veronica said it would make more sense to start by spreading the word among people who work with people in crisis, like school counselors or ER doctors. It turns out that when people do learn about red flag laws, they generally like them,

even gun owners. One survey found that at least 60% of U.S. gun owners supported red flag laws. Still, there's a lot we don't know yet. For lots of states, it's early, and different states have different versions of these laws, so results may vary. But the research we have so far suggests that red flag laws are a really promising idea, especially now that they're getting more attention and more money. So when it comes to stopping mass shootings,

how do all these different ideas stack up? One, should we ban assault weapons? Well, there's some evidence that banning high-capacity magazines that they're often used with might make mass shootings less deadly. But overall, the bans would probably work better if they were bigger and bolder, banning more kinds of guns and confiscating guns. Two, should we arm more people at schools? Well, very occasionally,

an armed bystander will stop a shooter, but it's not happening routinely by any means, including at schools with armed guards. And teachers, they don't want to keep a gun in their desk. Three, do we need to focus on mental illness to fix mass shootings? Well, the majority of mass shooters do struggle with mental illness, like being suicidal. So intervening in the way we do with suicides could make a difference. But we can't use mental illness as a predictor of who's going to do a mass shooting. Four, do red flag laws work? While it's too soon to know for

sure, researchers think they might help. They separate potential mass shooters from guns. All in all, I found that when we look at what's on the table right now, there isn't one obvious solution to mass shootings in this country. It's more like a bunch of smaller, imperfect changes that could each do a little bit of good. Jillian put it this way. Since every potential solution has holes in it, imagine each one like a slice of Swiss cheese. What we want to do is layer these pieces of Swiss cheese on top of each other, each one which has holes. But the more you layer them on top of each other, you cover up all of the holes. And that's where we can get,

is that it's going to be a whole bunch of imperfect solutions that get us to actually stopping this. I love that analogy because I like thinking about cheese. That's Science Versus. And we wanted to share some resources if you or someone you know needs mental health help. In the U.S., you can call or text 988 to reach the government's suicide and crisis helpline. More mental health resources are available at spotify.com slash resources. Hi, Disha Bagut. Hi, Rose Rimler. How natural.

Disha, how many citations are in this week's episode? We are at 122 citations. Okay, and if people want to see these citations and check out the links themselves, where should they go? They can head over to our show notes and there's links to the transcript with all of our citations. Sounds good. And we're also going to post links to two other episodes that we made a few years ago about guns and gun control. They're both really good episodes and go into more detail on some of this stuff and they're worth checking out thanks so much Disha

no problem, bye this episode was produced by me, Rose Rimler with help from Disha Bhagat, Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang we're edited by Blythe Terrell additional editing help on this episode from Caitlin Kenney and Nicole Beamster-Bower. Wendy Zuckerman is our executive producer.

Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord, and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all the scientists we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Adam Lankford, Dr. Cassandra Corfasi, Dr. Emma Friedel, Professor Emmy Betts, Dr. Jackie Schildkraut, Dr. Caitlin Boyle, Dr. Paul Reeping, Dr. Rosanna Smart, Dr. Sonali Rajan, Dr. Tristan Bridges, and Dr. Tara Tober. Special thanks to Jack Weinstein.