We may be able to prevent some mass shootings

Sometime over the past decade, America seems to have resigned itself to thinking about mass shootings as if they were a kind of unavoidable natural disaster.

Like tornadoes or earthquakes, these localized catastrophes seem to come out of nowhere and could happen to any of us. They are quite rare; depending on how one defines a mass shooting, there are a handful to a few hundred in the U.S. every year. Yet even though they are estimated to be the cause of less than 1% of all gun fatalities, mass shootings carry a toll that surpasses their numbers, undermining our collective sense of well-being and public safety. The fear always lurks, the next Big One always just around the corner.

And just as for natural disasters, the most our country seems to be able to do about mass shootings now is hold drills to prepare for their inevitability. Our discourse over these incidents is trapped in a polarized doom loop. A shooting happens and everyone follows the same script. One side demands better gun laws, the other side offers prayers and cynically blames mental illness. Then we forget about the horror, at least until the next one. It's as if we've come to accept living in that classic Onion headline: "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens."

But in a fascinating new book, "Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America," journalist Mark Follman makes the case that despite our intractable political and cultural differences, mass shootings don't have to be inevitable.

Follman argues that even in the absence of stronger gun regulations, we have been making progress in understanding and perhaps even preventing the most notable forms of mass shootings, rampages in which three or more people are deliberately and seemingly indiscriminately killed, often by a lone attacker.

Who's "we"? Mental health specialists, academic researchers, state and federal law enforcement officials, and administrators in schools and universities around the country. Follman explores the history and promise of a cross-disciplinary field known as "behavioral threat assessment," a set of ideas to help officials recognize and redirect a potential shooter away from violence. At the core of the model is the notion that mass shootings are not like lightning strikes — they are not just sudden, unforeseen attacks involving people who "snap." Mass shootings are more like avalanches: They take time to form, they generally follow a predictable pattern, and if you know what to look for, you can sometimes spot them a long way off, and perhaps even prevent them from happening at all.

The model varies, but behavioral threat assessment generally involves placing teams of trained counselors and administrators in schools, colleges, workplaces and other settings where shootings might occur. To stop a person from killing others, these teams look for patterns of behavior that research has shown people tend to exhibit on their way to mass attack. Among the "warning behaviors" of would-be attackers are acts of aggression and violence, stalking, threatening communications, a fascination with previous shooters and, of course, planning and preparation for an attack. In many cases these signs are glaring — the potential attacker's friends, family, classmates, teachers and others in the community often can't help noticing that the person is troubled.

"Don't come to school this Friday," a student heard the boy say. "I'm coming back here with my dad's semi-automatic and shooting up the place." The previous spring, the boy told a teacher that instead of attending an anti-gun-violence rally that students were planning, "Maybe I'll just shoot up the school instead." A science teacher reported the boy asked how to make poison gas. A counselor reported him talking about having "no friends" and feeling humiliated after recently tripping in school; she worried he was at risk for suicide, for aggression or both.

The threat team — a group of more than a dozen experts in education, mental health, social services and juvenile justice — responded with a full-court press. A resource officer visited the boy's home to investigate his access to firearms. The team kept in close contact with his mother, pressing her to secure the gun safe and to discuss safety with parents whose homes the boy visited. They assigned security officials to track his movements around the school.

But rather than just punish him, administrators and teachers struck up a rapport with him. They called it a "wraparound" strategy: "They would extend to him academic support, counseling, and opportunities for programs both inside and outside the school," Follman writes. By the end of the intervention, the boy's demeanor seemed changed. He told administrators he regretted making the frightening comments, and he asked about keeping in touch with the lead psychologist on the risk team.

There is no way to know for sure whether the Salem-Keizer team's response prevented a shooting or a suicide, or merely helped a troubled kid at risk of falling through the cracks — although Follman thinks that the team was able to steer him from planning and thinking about violence after taking significant steps. There are continuing studies aimed at answering such questions broadly, but in any given case, determining a definitive counterfactual is impossible.

But one promise of behavioral threat assessment is that by creating a system to watch for and investigate signs of the worst dangers, it may also address more routine problems in education. Research on schools in Virginia, where districts have been required to establish threat assessment teams since 2013, found that the practice has reduced disciplinary referrals and reports of bullying and aggressive behaviors. In one survey, teachers in schools with threat response systems reported feeling safer.

Behavioral threat assessment raises some concerns. One is that the practice may encourage profiling of students and workers. Another is that threat teams may invade people's privacy by, for example, conducting broad surveillance on what people are posting on social media. Follman argues such dragnet measures are impractical. Although many mass shooters fit a profile — a lot of them are young white men, for instance — the characteristics are so broad as to be useless for predictive purposes. Combing through all of the posts on Facebook in search of problematic ones would be similarly unhelpful — you'd turn up way too many to be of use. Threat assessment instead focuses on would-be shooters' behavior — on what they say and do and how they act around others rather than who they are. Experts might look at an individual's Facebook posts, but usually only if they had other reasons to be concerned about that person's behavior.

Behavioral threat assessment in no way obviates the need for better gun laws. Just the opposite: Stricter gun rules could aid assessment teams in keeping guns away from people exhibiting dangerous patterns of behavior — not to mention addressing the tens of thousands of other lives lost to guns every year.