The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America by Mark Follman

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America by Mark Follman "An urgent read that illuminates real possibility for change.” —John Carreyrou, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood For the first time, a story about the specialized teams of forensic psychologists, FBI agents, and other experts who are successfully stopping mass shootings—a hopeful, myth-busting narrative built on new details of infamous attacks, never-before-told accounts from perpetrators and survivors, and real-time immersion in confidential threat cases, casting a whole new light on how to solve a grievous problem It's time to go beyond all the thoughts and prayers, misguided blame on mental illness, and dug-in disputes over the Second Amendment. Through meticulous reporting and panoramic storytelling, award-winning journalist Mark Follman chronicles the decades-long search for identifiable profiles of mass shooters and brings readers inside a groundbreaking method for preventing devastating attacks. The emerging field of behavioral threat assessment, with its synergy of mental health and law enforcement expertise, focuses on circumstances and behaviors leading up to planned acts of violence—warning signs that offer a chance for constructive intervention before it's too late. Beginning with the pioneering study in the late 1970s of "criminally insane" assassins and the stalking behaviors discovered after the murder of John Lennon and the shooting of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Follman traces how the field of behavioral threat assessment first grew out of Secret Service investigations and FBI serial-killer hunting. Soon to be revolutionized after the tragedies at Columbine and Virginia Tech, and expanded further after Sandy Hook and Parkland, the method is used increasingly today to thwart attacks brewing within American communities. As Follman examines threat-assessment work throughout the country, he goes inside the FBI's elite Behavioral Analysis Unit and immerses in an Oregon school district's innovative violence-prevention program, the first such comprehensive system to prioritize helping kids and avoid relying on punitive measures. With its focus squarely on progress, the story delves into consequential tragedies and others averted, revealing the dangers of cultural misunderstanding and media sensationalism along the way. Ultimately, Follman shows how the nation could adopt the techniques of behavioral threat assessment more broadly, with powerful potential to save lives. Eight years in the making, Trigger Points illuminates a way forward at a time when the failure to prevent mass shootings has never been more costly—and the prospects for stopping them never more promising.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

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Hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, Forrest S. Chris Voss. Buy my book over there and see all the things we're reading and reviewing. Go over to our big LinkedIn newsletter. that thing's killing it over there in the linkedin group 132 000 people on it over there a bunch of c-class people that i guess got a buck or two or something i don't know also good augurs facebook linkedin twitter instagram all those crazy places those kids are playing except for snapchat for the most obvious of reasons i don't know why that joke is funny but i like it so we're excited to announce my new book is coming out it's called beacons of leadership inspiring lessons of success in business and innovation it's going to be coming on october 5th 2021 and i'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book it's filled

with a multitude of my insightful stories lessons my life and experiences in leadership and character Thank you so much for having me. 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Anyway, guys, today we have another amazing author on the show. We have some of the most brilliant minds that come on the show, and one of them is never me. Today we have Mark Fulman on the show. Fulman. And he is the author of the new books, Trigger Points, Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America. This is going to be an amazing book coming out April 5th, 2022, which you'll probably see the recording of this. He is a longtime journalist and the national affairs editor for Mother Jones. Since 2012, his various investigations into gun violence and its impact on American

society have been honored with numerous awards. His writing and commentary have been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and on national public radio, among other media, including now finally ours. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me, Chris. Thanks for coming. Did we get the pronunciation your last name right? Yes, correct. Mark Fulman. There you go. Sometimes I put so much energy in the show, I'm like, I never know what I say. Like at the end of it, I'm just like, where am I? Who am I? What am I doing?

That's one of those shows. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your plugs for people to find you on the interwebs, your dot com and all that good stuff. Yeah, the new book is called Trigger Points Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America. It's published from HarperCollins on April 5th. You can get it online at hc.com slash trigger point. You can Google trigger points and mass shooting. You can find me on social media, primarily on Twitter at Mark Fulman. I'm always happy to get emails and hear from people. And hopefully people will read and get a lot out of this book.

I'm real excited about it coming out. I've been working on it for eight years. Wow, man. Wow. There's a lot of study and research that went into this. This is why I love having the authors on the show. Because you guys spend 10,000 hours, billion hours, whatever it is, doing these books, 100,000 hours, and I get to spend an hour just getting all the juicy bits and stuff.

So what motivated you want to write the book? What made you go, this is the book that I want to take and write? Well, I have been reporting on investigating mass shootings as a problem in our country for a decade now. I really became focused on it back in 2012 after the massacre in the movie theater in Colorado. That was a particularly bad year. Folks may recall that was also the year later that year in December when the Sandy Hook massacre happened. And so I had just been focusing a lot of work on the issue and trying to understand it better. I built a database of mass shootings. At the time, there was very little of that kind of more detailed and analytical information available

about the problem. There's a lot more of it now. And in the course of my reporting, I started to learn about this field of prevention work called behavioral threat assessment. And at that point, I'd covered gun violence and gun politics for quite a while and was feeling, I think, the frustration that many people feel about this issue, which is that regardless of where you stand on guns politically, wherever you are on the spectrum, we tend to have the same debates over and over again. And we're kind of stuck. Right. And meanwhile, this problem just keeps going on and on. And there's this kind of widespread resignation that, oh, there's nothing we can really do about this. And it's just awful. You know, everyone gets worked up about it and then it goes away until it comes back again. Right.

So I had felt quite frustrated about this myself. And when I started learning about this field of prevention work, I became very riveted to it quickly because I could see the potential in it. And it's was something new. I mean, very few people had written about it or talked about it back then. And so I started investigating it more. And part of it, too, for me was trying to just get my arms more around what this problem is. There's a lot of kind of big myths we have about the mass shootings problem, which I'm sure we'll talk about. For me, it was kind of, you know, wanting to make more sense of it. You know, we talk about

mass shootings as these senseless tragedies, right? As if we can't explain them, but they can be explained. And that's really what the book's all about, understanding it better so that we can work to stop them. Most definitely. And so you go in depth and do you get access to the FBI's behavioral analysis unit or do you just study it? Yeah, no, that was part of the work. Over time, got to know a number of leading practitioners in this field and pioneers of it and people in different disciplines. So it's essentially a combination or collaboration of work done by people who are in mental health, in psychology and psychiatry, and in law enforcement, and then also working together with community leaders in education and administration and other related areas to creating teams to address cases of concern or

threatening behavior. And so there is a team that does this work and does deep research on this at the FBI, at the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and I was able to spend some time with people there who helped build this program and learn from them about what it's all about and how they do the work yeah so have they been able to build a profile on on people that they can kind of predict might might go off so So no, I mean, this is one of the big myths of mass shootings is that there's a predictive profile. That doesn't exist. People in this field and in criminology and people who study violence have tried for many years to figure out, is there a character profile of a mass shooter that would help us identify them? But there just isn't. The fact is, is that even though there's popular belief that this is like one specific type of person who does this, that's not true at all. There's all kinds of people who commit these attacks. Most of them are male. There

are some sort of broad-based contours that we know well. A lot of them are young white males, but there are many others who do this too. And so really what the work is all about is understanding the behavior and the circumstances that lead up to these attacks. And so in the sense of profiling, it's profiling behavior, behavioral patterns, and understanding better what the warning signs are that can be identified. And that is very rich territory that this field has really built its work out of. On cases going back decades and on many cases that are thwarted attacks, which I learned quite a lot about in the course of reporting for trigger points. There are many, many cases that have been stopped. You don't hear about them because, of course, it's not news if there's no violence and nothing happens.

But there's good outcomes. But you can look at those cases, too, and see these behavioral patterns and warning signs. And so that's really the essence of the work. What are some of the warning signs that they found that predicts this sort of thing or give an indication? So the way I break this down in the book is in what I have is kind of eight broad areas of warning signs. And even within those, it's quite broad. So there's no such thing as like a checklist of behaviors or traits that would indicate violence. But that said, there are patterns of things that we see in these cases.

So, you know, kind of one of the more obvious ones is expressions of threats, threatening communications. And those can come in different forms. We see a lot of that now on social media, right? Where people will post threatening comments or pictures of guns or things like that that sort of suggest what their intentions may be. And sometimes it's direct threats. They may talk about someone they're angry about or how a grievance they have. Or it may be more indirect or veiled threats where, you know, like, don't come to school Friday, everybody, because something bad might happen or something big is going to go down. There's a whole range of behavior like that, that threat

assessment looks at. And beyond that, there are other patterns that have to do with, you know, looking for triggering events in people's experience where, you know, if big things have changed in their life that have set them off, like, you know, divorce or job loss, financial stress, and then some more sort of common factors too in in the realm of mental health like substance abuse depression signs of suicidality are important there's there's a lot of interconnection between suicidal and homicidal intentions with this problem so one of the first things i found in my early database where i started 10 years ago was that the majority of cases are murder-suicides.

More than half of mass shootings commit suicide, either themselves on the scene or some of them do what's called suicide by cop, where they know they're going to die in a shootout. So that tells you a lot about that risk factor as well. So maybe they're at a situation where they think life isn't worth it and they decide they're going to kill themselves, but they take their anger at themselves or life or, well, I guess their anger at everybody out on everybody first and then themselves. That's really, that's a consistent thing. That's kind of interesting. I didn't think about that. A lot of these cases are wrapped up in, in a deep, deeply entrenched grievance in a person, a person who is really stuck on something that they're upset, they feel wronged by, and then they may seek revenge or escape through an act of violence, which they had come to see as a valid solution to the problem. I think

that's one of the more interesting cultural questions that we face with mass shootings. Why is it that people continue to see this as a solution to their anger or despair? And that's what's going on in a lot of these cases. It's not people who are crazy or insane. That's another one of the big myths. There are very few of these cases where you're talking about people who are suffering from acute psychosis or hallucinating. That's not what drives this problem by and large. The, I think I heard someone talk, or maybe this is something I came up with my own, but I think I saw like a commentator years ago talking about it, how sometimes these people, they, they can't bring themselves, especially in death by cop situations. They, they're highly depressed and suicidal, but they can't pull the, you know, they can't bring themselves to pull the trigger.

And so the idea is to go out in a blaze of glory, like, I don't know, the Sundance Kids sort of example or something, I don't know, and become a rock star and get a name for yourself, but also have somebody else do the suicide for you because you can't do it yourself. I don't know if there's any validation to that at all. Yeah, there are a number of cases where there were indications of desire to commit suicide where the perpetrator then did not and perhaps was not able to do that. So I think it is plausible that some see suicide by cop as an easier way to do that, I guess, for lack of a better word. Yeah. What are some other ways

mass shootings are widely misunderstood? We talked before the show and some of my perception, it's kind of weird lately where it's really... I'm more afraid of white nationalist guys who look like me when I go into a crowd. I'm not afraid of Arabic people or Muslims

or anything like that. Some people, I think, put way too much fear on. I'm afraid of people who look like me, 50-year-old angry white guys who are white nationalists, because there seems to be a lot of that going on too on top of the school shootings. But maybe I'm misperceiving that as well. Yeah. Well, certainly in recent years, there has been a rise in political extremism and violent extremism, the nature you're talking about. I've written about that too in my other work as a journalist. And I write about that in Trigger Points as well later in the book, how this is an emerging problem with the

threat landscape in our country. And that's actually something also that I think is striking about this field of work. It's very dynamic. It recognizes that every case, every threat case that is being addressed by this work is in some ways unique, right? It's a, you're talking about an individual person with a specific set of problems and behaviors going on. And so while there are a lot of patterns that are understood around this,

it's also addressing that specific case. And so the field recognizes that it has to adapt to on a case level, but also on a more broad kind of landscape level. So always kind of looking at in the latest research at, you know, what are the emerging threats in the culture that might be feeding into this problem? And certainly mass shootings that we've seen more of them driven by far-right white supremacist ideology in recent years. There's the major mass shooting at the Pittsburgh Synagogue. There was the one in El Paso, Texas. So that is a rising problem.

And the field recognizes the need to adapt to the threats that are happening. But at its heart, the work is very much conducted. And that's what really drew me to it. I think in some ways a very sort of optimistic approach to this problem because, you know, it kind of meets the problem where it is. I mean, we have a very heavily armed country and a violent culture in some ways. And so the fact that exists the way that it does, I think, provokes the question, well, what else can we do? What more can we do to deal with this? This problem, as I say at the beginning of Trigger Points, it's the scope of this problem is bigger than its tool of destruction.

You know, the debates we have over guns and gun laws, I think, is very important. And I've written about it for many years. But this book, Trigger Points, really tries to move beyond that, does move beyond that, to look at this as a problem of human behavior. And what can we learn from the ways people behave about this problem that we can then use to intervene constructively. And there are a lot of cases where that's happening. So it was very interesting to discover that through the reporting work. Yeah, that's true. I was surprised with that in your book because, you know, like they don't really report that.

Hey, we stopped this. I mean, if it's really huge, you know, you might see it on the news. But, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. So that's how the news works, at least on TV. The find out what's going to kill you today by breathing air, you know, that sort of thing. And I don't mean to minimize the news channels because support people earn stuff. But sometimes it's a bit much. Well, you know, what you're getting to there actually does relate to this equation as well

because the way that the media sensationalizes or historically has sensationalized the problem and the issue is relevant to what happens with the field's work and with threat cases. It's something that I also write about in the book, the way that we consume media now in the digital age has in some ways actually affected this problem directly. Because as you were saying earlier, a lot of the people who think about and aspire to commit an attack like this know and want, know that they can get and want to commit an attack like this know and want know that they

can get and want to get sensational attention and they do so the fact that that's going on actually has an impact on some of the people who are who are doing these crimes that's interesting you're right you know i was thinking about i think it was parkland where the news media wouldn't say his name to give him glory. And I think also the Las Vegas shooting. I was in Las Vegas, living in Las Vegas, and someone started texting me. And they go, are you awake right now? Because it was about 1 in the morning or midnight or something. And I was like, yeah.

And they're like, yeah, there's some stuff going on downtown. I'm like, yeah, this is Vegas. And they're like, no, you really should get up and see what's going on i remember it well it was a sunday night yeah unfold yeah yeah one of my good friends in vegas she had been on she had been in the shooting zone an hour earlier and she just decided to go home because they were tired i don't know they had something to do but she left like an hour earlier and she would have she had pictures of her right there in the zone which was just tragic but i think they didn't announce his name either and and i guess the copycat issue is probably something you talked about in the book as well

you know these guys see other guys have fame and i think that guy's motive correct me if i'm wrong because you did the research but i think that guy's motive was to be like the number one worst killer ever or something. I don't know. Wasn't that part of his claim to want a fame? Yeah. In that case, it's actually not clear that that was part of his motivation. And that's actually a very interesting case in terms of the research and kind of forensic study of it afterwards, trying to figure out motive. It's one of the more difficult ones. And a lot of people came away from closer looks at that case, thinking, you know, there is no motive that we can describe here clearly. And that does happen with a lot of these cases. But the quest for sensational attention and the desire to outdo predecessors, previous attackers is very real and exists in a lot of

cases. But there has also been a shift as you're pointing to in the way that the media handles this now. That's something that has happened in recent years that is progress in my view. I've written about this quite a bit and I do in the book as well, that this is an important kind of balancing act that we need to take on in the media, but also as a society in general, because people share this stuff on social media and online and it spreads like wildfire. So you can think back, you know, five, 10 years ago to major mass shootings, and we would see the face of the perpetrator all over television, all over the internet. We would see the videos, we would read the manifestos, the so-called manifestos they'd post with their grievances and their rants. That happens less now because I think

the media has come to understand and people have come to understand more widely that that can actually have an ill effect. And it does. I write about it in the book. There's some very specific ways that this is contributing to the problem. Yeah. I think if I remember rightly, one of his guns jams or two of his guns jammed and if it hadn't been for the jams he would have killed a lot more people the vegas shoot i'm just going from memory on that so somebody have to validate that but yeah it's it's i think that's good you know you bring up the thing where a lot of times and i shouldn't say a lot because i don't know that for a fact but many times i've seen where there's some pretty good indications on social media that they're going to go off.

Like they'll post their gun or say, I'm going to go do something. And just the most shameful thing you'll see is their friends making comments like, yeah, go get them. Or, you know, just encouraging stuff when really, if I saw that, I'd be like, 911? Is there something that you found in the profiling and all the studies that they've done where the family or the friends around the people usually are aware that this person has problems? I mean, there's a lot of these kids that had problems. The Sandy Hood kid had a lot of problems. And they decide, well, give him a gun, and we'll teach him gunfire. That's always a good way to fix somebody who has mental health problems. At least that's, like I say, correct me where I'm wrong here.

But the kid recently that was in Detroit. Here in Detroit, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The parents, you know, they're going through a mess. He's going through a mess. They're like, give the kid a gun, you know, they're going through a mess. He's going through a mess. They're like, get the kid a gun, you know, and all these different indications where the family, in fact, I was really glad to see the parents charged.

I've been saying for two decades, parents need to be charged in these things. If you build a monster, you should go to jail with your monster. And that has to be, I guess there has to be a fine line of proving that you built the monster. But, I mean, reckless stuff like that is just insane to me. I don't know. You tell me your thoughts on research. Yeah, I mean, the Oxford High School case in Michigan last fall is a stark one in terms of the circumstances that led up to that attack.

I try to be careful about judgment. You know, in the court of public opinion, people will develop opinions quickly based on what they see in the news. And I think, you know, obviously our system says everyone deserves their day in court and gets, you know, proper justice proceedings and all that. That said, there are some aspects of that case that we know already. And I'm actually writing, I have a story coming out about the Oxford case soon around the time of the book. It's clear that there were some very stark circumstances there where this was a kid who was demonstrating some very concerning behaviors. People were

worried around him at school, teachers, students. The parents, there seemed to be some real issues there with the family relationships and what's going on in the home. But the fact that they got the kid a gun and then didn't respond to concerns from the school, there are not many cases like that that I can recall. And I've researched a lot of cases. So, you know, that being said, I think to your broader question, you know, there are, in all of these cases, there are warning signs. There's a range of what that is and how detectable they are. And it's very important for people to understand that, and leaders in the field of threat assessment will say this, be the first to say this, it's

always easier to see this in hindsight, to see what the warning signs were. And that's really the heart of this work is training people who know what to recognize. And then beyond that, creating a broader community and cultural awareness of what these warning signs are so that people speak up when they have concern. Because there were people around the kid in Michigan who were very worried. There were kids who were skipping school. They were so worried about what he was doing on social media. But had there been a proper threat assessment process there, people examining that threat would have looked at his social media activity. The school has said since that tragedy that they had no awareness of his social media activity before the attack. So there is a lot more that we can do to recognize this as it's coming.

It's, you know, this is one of the real innovations of this field going back decades is to see that there is a often detectable, discernible pattern of behavior that leads up to these yeah is that is that something that my mom was a teacher for 20 years i drove in fact i think yesterday was yesterday thursday yeah thursday it's been one of those weeks south by southwest was this week so i drove by an elementary school my way to the store and i remember seeing a cop there and i thought you know it's really a shame that we've come to this in this country that, you know, you have to have cops parked at the schools. And so do schools have to have access to that? I mean, schools can't.

I mean, how much more do we need schools to do? I mean, we're, you know, we're just trying to educate people here, and they have to have threat assessment you know i grew up i i i grew up and you start the book way back when with john lennon's assassination release your research in 1980 i grew up and graduated high school in 86 and i lived up in american fork utah which is a very rural community if you saw the movie footloose the original one with bacon in it that's where it was filmed and and so everyone's got a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back with a loaded gun in the rack just in case you find a deer. Because there's deer walking around all the time. And so I would go out.

I remember walking out of my school doors and you would see all the pickup trucks with all the gun racks with a gun in them. We never had any school shootings. No, we didn't even have to ban them. There was no law saying you can't bring had any school shootings. No, we like, we didn't even have to ban them. There was no law saying you can't bring guns on school property. What happened to our country over the arc of this thing? Is there any research on that as to what's going on? Yeah, well, I found in my research over the years on this, that this problem has grown. It has escalated in some ways, both in frequency and in scope and in lethality.

There were school shootings and mass shootings going back into that era and even earlier, going back to the 60s and 70s. But I think part of the issue is that we see and know about it a lot more now because it's the world we live in. That has its own kind of exacerbating effect, as I talk about in the book. But I did become very interested in the broader question I think you're getting at, which is what are the kind of like cultural forces and historical forces that are behind this problem? And there's no easy answer to that. But I think it's one of the things that I find so compelling about this prevention method is that in a certain way, it doesn't need to answer those questions because it's taking a more practical approach to solving the problem. It's saying,

what can we recognize about this behavior? What are the patterns we can find? And then how do we work to intervene constructively? So it's not prediction, it's prevention. It's not punitive, it's constructive. When it can be, it's not punitive, it's constructive when it can be. It's not always that way. There are cases where people who are behaving in threatening or dangerous ways need to be prosecuted, but that's not the central goal of the work. The central goal of the work is to try to, it's really a twin goal. It is to head off violence perceived to be coming, to be a danger at the same time as giving help to people

who clearly need help. And that's, that's true in almost all of these cases. You're talking about people with serious circumstantial behavioral and mental health problems. The, the question I had for you, I'm popping between two or three different questions in my head. Is this a USA problem or is this not a USA problem? It is a human problem and it's a global problem. These kinds of attacks happen in other places too. However, it is inordinately an American problem, which is to say we have this a lot more here than most other societies that are comparable to American society. A wealthy first world Western nation, if you will. other societies that are comparable to American society, you know, wealthy, you know, first world Western nation, if you will.

There are other societies like ours in other ways of comparison that don't have nearly the frequency or depth of this problem. What if schools had, and I don't know, maybe schools already do this, but schools had like a parent teacher night where they, you know, they get all the parents say, if you want to send your kid to school, they've got to come to a big meeting on shooting prevention and signs to look out for. If your kid is starting to go off the rail, you'd mentioned that earlier, you know, sometimes the kids know that the kid's going to go off the rails. I think the, the Parkland shooter, like they knew that guy was going to go off. I recall

rightly. I think they were worried about the kids in, in L to go, if I recall rightly. I think they were worried about the kids in Littleton, if I recall rightly. But sometimes the kids know. And that's kind of a really interesting indicator. Absolutely. And there are many cases where that's true. Where this gets tricky and I think is really important to distinguish is that while ordinary people who aren't trained in the warning signs or trained in threat assessment wouldn't necessarily know what to recognize, people do have instincts about their concerns, right? works, this approach is essentially tries to cultivate awareness in the community and broadly that if you're feeling that way, if you're worried, reach out for help, speak up. You know, it's really very similar to the notion of see something, say something that became like a national mantra after

9-11, right? That if we're worried about future attacks, whether it's terrorism or a school shooting, if you have something you're concerned about, reach out for help. And at that point, having a team of people in place who know how to do this work, who are trusted in the community to handle it, because it's nuanced and it's delicate in some ways. On the one hand, you want people to speak out and you want to be transparent about what's going on. But on the other hand, you don't want to stigmatize people who are acting in ways that make others uncomfortable, but maybe it's ben on. But on the other hand, you don't want to stigmatize people who are acting in ways that make others uncomfortable, but maybe it's benign. Maybe they're not a threat. And so there's kind of a careful process there where, you know, a team that does this work well, mental health

professionals, law enforcement professionals, school psychologists, HR directors in a corporation know to come together professionally, look at a situation and think about, you know, what's the best way we can intervene. We can talk to this person, find out what's going on with them, see if we can help them with what they're aggrieved about, and so on and so forth. So by taking that approach, it's really trying to dissolve or de-escalate the potential for violence. And if you have someone who's thinking about violence or planning violence, going down this, what they call in the field, the potential for violence. And if you have someone who's thinking about violence or planning violence, going down this, what they call in the field, the pathway to violence,

that's a series of escalations, right? So in a school setting, when kids are feeling worried about another kid who says something on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, that in and of itself doesn't necessarily tell you anything about whether or not that kid's a threat. Lots of kids make dumb comments and mouth off. You need people looking at this who have the training and understanding once it's been shared with them by others who are concerned, right? That's really sort of the basic description

of how this model works. Yeah, because I'm usually watching for the person who's dejected, who seems alienated, who seems like they're cooking on something. I don't know. I don't even know if that's the correct response, but that's what I go with. I mean, when I'm watching crowds and stuff, like I say, when I go to crowds, I'm looking for old white guys who look like me, who are fat, angry, and white nationals. I don't even know if that's the appropriate thing to do.

Let me ask you about the, you know, the schools have done have done a thing and I'm not trying to shame them by saying this, but this thing that they have where, you know, if, if a kid, you know, makes a sign of a gun or draw something funny, I think there's been some really kind of egregious stuff where, or not egregious, but really kind of outside the realm of reality where, I don't know, some guy had like a licorice that he was holding that looked like he was pointing a gun, I don't know, some guy had like a licorice that he was holding that looked like he was pointing a gun or something, you know, something that you just claim, I'm not sure you really crossed the threshold there, but I understand that, you know, the need to protect.

Has that been effective or has that kind of gone too far sometimes? I don't know. Well, I think, I think I understand the example you're drawing. I've seen some things like that come out in local news reporting it's like that in florida not too long ago you know that's really not what this approach is in the sense that like that that's just sort of a uh sounds like like a knee jerk sort of punitive reaction right like really crack down like kick a kid out of school throw someone in jail but that's not effective i mean if you look at there's a long case history also with mass shootings where those kinds of punitive sort of band-aid measures were taken, but then the person comes back and commits an attack.

So that's not to say that aberrant behavior shouldn't be dealt with or punished, but if you're looking for a more broad-based understanding of a threat and then a more kind of long-term and effective solution, you have to go beyond that. It's not just, you know, a person waving a gun signal or posting a threat online. You have to look at the full picture. And, you know, what you were saying earlier about like the kinds of people you might look for in a crowd, one of the things that I found really fascinating when I was researching the original development of this field, it goes back decades. Mental health professionals were starting to collaborate with Secret Service agents to try to stop assassinations, right? They were trying to figure out what else can we do to identify potential assassins in a crowd. And what they found was in studying assassins who had been locked up was that these were not

those stereotypical figures that you described, like the really weird guy muttering under his breath with a trench coat at the end of the crowd. Wait, that's me. These were actually much more normal people. It's much more banal than that, that these were people who, you know, inside were angry or had grievances and they had psychological issues. They had mental health problems. Nobody would look at someone like that and say, this person is mentally healthy. They were not sane and they were not someone who would stand out in a way that you would imagine like from the movies. And so that was an early clue in the development of this field that really what we're talking about here is not trying to define a predictive character profile of a killer that doesn't exist what's

going to find is the set of behaviors we can recognize that lead up to this all right well when i go to the fair i'm gonna have to just have everyone go through a metal detector get near me or something i don't know maybe but no it's it's an interesting thing and i think this is insightful i think you bust a lot of myths and stuff. This reminds me of a few people who have written to me and said, the Second Amendment is more important than the Constitution, which I don't think they understand how the two of them work together, the stack. You can't have one without the other. But did you find any basis to this thing that people say,

well, if teachers had guns or if everyone had guns, they could stop these shooters? Well, that is something that I've looked into quite a lot. I do say at the outset of Trigger Points that the book isn't really about guns or gun laws, that I'm focused on this prevention method and human behavior. But of course, guns are inextricable to the problem. And that is something that comes up in the context of this field's trainings and outreach. In fact, I tell the story of this specifically in the book about that coming up. There are a few mass shooting survivors who have become engaged with this field and spreading

threat assessment nationally. One of them is a really impressive woman who was in Virginia Tech. She was shot three times, survived, and is now part of promoting the work of response and recovery and prevention for the field. And she told me one of the times that we were talking that she had, you know, we'll have people come up to her after she talks about her experience at a training or a seminar, and she'll get asked that question, the good guy with the gun question, right? What if, you know, a student or a teacher had a gun? That all would have ended in a second.

It's just not the reality of how these play out. It talks about, you know, how it happens so fast that, you know, no one has time to react that way. You would have the danger of someone shooting, you know, have a shootout in a classroom. I mean, you can imagine. You have Your background. And there's really no evidence through case examples that that would work. There have been a few cases over the years where somebody with a gun who's a civilian steps in and disrupts a shooting. But there are very few of them.

There are also some that have gone wrong. Yeah. So, you know. I think usually they're police officers, aren't they? Yeah, sometimes they're off-duty police officers or military people who have gone training, expensive training. There's just no scientific proof that that would be

effective at stopping these. Yeah, I remember that was big during the was it the Pure nightclub in Florida? Pulse nightclub. Pulse nightclub, where I had a bunch of gun friends at the time that I'm still friends with on Facebook. They were like, yeah, if everyone just sort of pulled a gun and shot the guy,

and you're like, you're in a dance club. Do you understand you can't just fire a weapon? You've got your background where there's people in the foreground that crossfire in the background. You can't just open fire in a 30 by 30 crowd of 100 people and not expect, you know, you might end up killing more people that way than the other way. But yeah, it's kind of interesting. I mean, really what my book is all about is what if we just never had someone open fire in the club in the first place? That's what we're striving for.

We're trying to figure out who that guy is before he comes in and starts shooting everybody. Without getting into the politics of it, then, what about access to guns? Was there any research that found that a majority of these guys got access to guns? What is the thing that they always talk about where they go, there should be more of a delay when you ask for a gun? Background checks and delays. I think there were some failures of a delay when you ask for a gun, background checks and delays. I think there were some failures of the FBI on a couple of them. Would that have been a factor at all in your research of lessening them, or is that not a factor? Oh, I think it's certainly a factor.

Look, what the field of threat assessment does, I think, from my perspective in taking on this issue, is contend with the reality, meets the reality where it is, right? We have roughly 400 million firearms in the United States. They're easy to get in many places. So that's just the fact that we live with, right? Now, if you had a harder time for people who were disturbed, angry, and planning to go out and shoot up a nightclub, a movie theater, or a school, if it was harder for them to get it gone, sure, that would help. But we need a lot more than that, right? Because that's just not the reality.

I do take on gun laws in some very specific ways in the book, in my research, in the ways in which they intersect with this work. So one example would be a newer type of statute that we have that's started to spread in multiple states called, they're referred to as red flag laws. I don't know if you're familiar with this. They're also called extreme risk protection order. This is essentially a civil mechanism where a family who's concerned about a loved one or a friend could go to a court and petition the court to remove firearms, to bar them from having firearms for a temporary period of time because they think they're a danger to themselves or others. And a judge decides that, right? That's an important tool in a threat case where you've got someone who you have evidence is planning to commit suicide, is talking about

targeting kids at school they hate and wants to kill or coworkers. So there's some specific tools like that within the realm of firearm regulation that I think are very important and growing with respect to threat assessment work and background checks as well. I mean, certainly, you know, people who are having a hard time and moving down a pathway, making threats and maybe planning violence. If you had more stringent background checks for somebody who's not doing well, that may be helpful if they qualify under that regulation because they have some kind of criminal record or involuntary mental health commitment in some states. The problem there is that a lot of these cases, you don't have records like that in the perpetrators. Wow. So that's not going to necessarily stop them either. Yeah. It's a complex issue.

And I'm glad you've gone in depth with it because, you know, busting some of the myths. I mean, I, I had a lot of myths that I'm just like, Oh, I thought that was the thing, but maybe it's not. It definitely is a much wider and broader complex problem that we understand. And, and I guess we're just, we just have to research it more and more and maybe get better at these things or something. Yeah. Well, I think it's happening, at least through the work of this field, which has been growing. And that's, for me,

is a real part of the excitement of the book. I think that, you know, Trigger Points has the potential to change the way people think about this problem. We recycle a lot of the myths in the media and on social media over and over that, you know, everyone who does this is insane and they just snapped and came out of nowhere. None of that's true, you know, everyone who does this is insane and they just

snapped and came out of nowhere. None of that's true. These, most of the people who do this are making rational plans. They're planning out what they're doing and then doing it. And, you know, we can look back at it and say, well, it's not rational to shoot up a school or a movie theater, but to them, you know, they were convinced of what they were doing as valid. It was something they needed or wanted to do to end their rage or suffering or sadness or despair to or to find a way out of whatever predicament they were in and then planned out how to do it very methodically. And so if we don't recognize the reality of that, we're not really, you know, as well equipped to deal with the problem to keep a gun away from that person or to prevent them from going and using it, right? It's not necessarily easy to detect these things, but they are detectable through this method. And I think that the fact that this is becoming more known and that more places are doing this from schools to corporations to the government

and government agencies is promising. There are actually about a half dozen states now that mandate threat assessment programs in their public schools. And that's a recent development. So hopefully, you know, more of these cases will be caught before it's too late. Yeah, hopefully they will. I think the, I believe that, you know, and this is my opinion, but I've been saying for 20 years, if you raise a monster and we can show that you, you did a shitty job being a parent, you should go to jail with your

kid at, there's a certain age or something. I don't know. You'd have to figure all that out. And it's not my job to, it's hard though, right? I mean, it's a slippery slope, you know, who's a, who's a bad parent. I mean, yeah, who's a bad parent. Who's not because I mean, I mean, all parents are phoning it in the, but. But I think the Michigan thing with the parents that got prosecuted, I think that sends a good warning shot across the bow. Stuff like that, prosecuting the parents, sends a message to people that, hey, maybe we want to pay a little bit more attention to what's going on with the kid. I don't know.

That's just my opinion. But what do I know? Well, I would at the least agree that, as I said earlier, the circumstances of that case and the role, the apparent role of the parents is very stark. And I think that what you're suggesting seems to be in the thinking of the prosecutors there that this is a case they need to show that through a court of law and we'll see if it happened you know if they're convicted of manslaughter that's unprecedented so the mother of the sandy hook sure that kid had problems the father was alienated the mother was a single mother trying to hold it together that kid had problems and she knew he had problems and she knew he was getting worse. You know, the stuff he was doing in his room where I think he was phoning up the

windows and doing all sorts of weird stuff. If I recall rightly, you've been correct or if I'm wrong, but I remember reading kind of in depth of what was going on with that kid. That was like the wrong trajectory to, to take him down. Of course we can't prosecute her cause he killed her,

but, but I don't know, man. Somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. I understand what you're saying. I think it's very, very hard to judge how a parent would handle having a child like that. Right. It's just, it's, it's so complicated and difficult. And one thing that I have seen in a lot of cases that I've researched that

case and others that, you know, the, the denial, emotional denial in a parent is very powerful it's very hard for a parent to see their own child as a dangerous threat or what we would consider you know a monster right in in this kind of lay cultural sense and that's happened in many other cases there's a case in in oregon in 1998 at high school where the the mass shooter there his father bought him a gun it was part of the hunting culture in Oregon. And he thought, I think, essentially he could mollify his son's interest and troubles by engaging him in that interest, right? Well, in hindsight, if you look at the behavioral warning signs, that was not a good thing to do. But that's a harder thing for

a parent to see in that situation. Look at Columbine. You know, the parents of those kids, you know, to this day say that they couldn't see it. And one of the shooter's mother, Dylan Klebold's mom, Sue, went on to do suicide prevention work for 20 years and wrote a book about her experience and, you know, became very persuaded of the inability of a parent to recognize that in a child of their own. So I think it's important to recognize that that's tough. I'm not saying that, you know, those behaviors are justified. I think you're right. I didn't think about the aspect of, you know, when you're a parent, you have an endearment towards your child. I know that sometimes families have known there's something wrong,

a kid that's schizoid or whatever, and sometimes their mental health facilities or the ability to have them. I know a lot of them were destroyed under Reagan. You know, when I was a kid, if somebody was a wacko, you sent them down to the Utah County Health Clinic and they locked them up for a week and did whatever they did to them. And I think some of the shooters, or at least one story I'm remembering, the parents were really concerned and they couldn't keep him in a facility or something. I don't know.

Wasn't that also the Ronald Reagan shooter problem? Wasn't he schizoid? Well, you know, it's really interesting that you bring that up. The guy, well, so the person who attacked Ronald Reagan, I don't know if he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but he had serious mental health problems and was locked up under that premise and had an insanity defense. But your point to that reminds me, too, that I write about in the book that the very genesis of this field came about through forensic psychologists going into state mental hospital and studying people who were thought to be criminally insane in the 1970s and you know kind of all just thrown into this place and locked up and throw away the key but the people who then did this work and went and investigated to try to understand better what were the the thought processes and behaviors leading them to what they did and what were their life

circumstances and and and do they have clinical mental illness and asking all those questions and getting to understand at a much deeper level people who have problems and risk like that did a lot toward developing this model, right? That like, you know, that's not a good solution either. There's a reason why we had that era of deinstitutionalization in the country where, you know, the country sort of realized in that period that, you know, locking everybody up when we think it's crazy or dangerous isn't really a good policy either. Right. Yeah. One of the first ones. Well, this has been really insightful. I mean, as you've heard, I have a lot of myths and a lot of things that I don't understand quite a bit. And, and I think a lot of people do, and hopefully people have seen that.

And so that's the more important to read your book and understand it. The one thing man can learn from his history, I always say, is that man never learns from his history. So we need to try and learn from our history and how things work so that we don't repeat them. And hopefully we'll be able to put the nail on the head this one of these days and stomp on this. Yeah, well, I hope that one thing that the book does or includes is I tell a number of stories of cases in depth, of cases where this

has been prevented. And I hope through that storytelling that people will be able to see and understand this process really well, because it's one thing to sort of explain how it works. And we've done some time doing that in this discussion, but it's another to actually see it in a specific case. And gaining access to that took me quite a bit of time. But once I was able to do that, I found it just really illuminating to see, you know, some of these warning signs that we talk about and then see how an experienced team handled them, how they addressed it and worked with a case over a period of weeks and months to try to help somebody onto a better path, to get them away from thinking about violent behavior. And in a number of cases, doing it quite successfully. And again, you don't hear about

these because they never make the news and that's what you want. Somebody doing well does not make the news. But in telling those stories, I hope that people will see that there is a way we can deal with this problem that isn't just about arguing over gun control. That's an important argument. We're going to continue to have that debate and hopefully progress on those policies. But we also need to do more to address how we handle mental health and how we do community-based work to try to handle this problem before it happens. You know, we're so caught up in reactive response to this now, right? Active shooter girls everywhere and cops in schools, as you said earlier, and arming people and, you know, doing surveillance of social media.

None of those things are going to prevent attacks in the way that addressing this more holistically up front will. That's what I've come to believe through the work of this book. And I hope people will see that. If I can change people's understanding in that way, then I'll be really, really gratified with the work of the book. Most definitely. Most definitely. Well, thank you very much, Mark, for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it, man. Great discussion. My pleasure. Great to talk with you, Chris. Thank you. Give us your plugs where people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you. Yeah. So the book, again,'s called trigger points inside the mass inside the mission to stop mass shootings in America. I am actively on social media myself, primarily on

Twitter at Mark Fulman. I'm also an editor from mother Jones. You can find my byline and work there and go ahead and get the book at HarperCollins.com slash trigger points or Google trigger points and mass shootings. And you'll find it that way. And I hope people enjoy reading it and get, get some insight from it. Yeah. We all need to get educated much better on this and see if we can do more prevention.

Thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Foss to the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com for just Chris Foss. All of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places.

Order up the book wherever you find books are sold. Trigger Points, Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America comes out April 5th, 2022. You definitely want to get a hold of that so you can be one of the first ones on your block to read it. Thanks for tuning in. Be sure to be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys.