Many of the overarching themes of Wednesday's Georgia school shooting sound familiar. While mass shootings make up just a small percentage of the large number of gun deaths that happen in the U.S. every year, they are the most attention-grabbing and obvious manifestation of the unique U.S. problem of so many guns.
The problem of mass shootings will likely be with us as long as we have more guns than people, says Vox. “There’s no easy solution,” says Daniel Nagin, a professor of public polic,y and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. Nagin, who helped develop evidence-based recommendations for reducing mass shootings, says that “the sheer volume of firearms” circulating, which are “far more lethal than they were in the past,” make the notion of eliminating mass shootings — commonly defined as a shooting where four or more people are shot — seem distant.
The fact that law enforcement knew of alleged threats from the Georgia shooter over a year ago, and were still unable to stop the shooting or prevent the suspect from getting a gun, points to how difficult it is to prevent mass shootings in advance.
“One of the big stereotypes, or myths we have about mass shootings in general, is that perpetrators who do this go crazy and just snap,” says Mark Follman, author of the book Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, and an editor at Mother Jones. “That’s not the reality at all of how this works.”
Two broad approaches can help mitigate the threat of mass shootings: proactive efforts to identify threats in advance, performed by behavioral threat assessment teams; and targeted gun regulations like red flag laws and bump stock bans.
Mass shootings are almost never random. The vast majority of mass shooters don’t spontaneously decide to pull out a gun in public and start shooting. Learning to identify who’s most at risk for committing mass violence, identifying warning signs and finding ways to intervene, can save lives.
That’s what behavioral threat assessment teams do. The teams investigate that behavior to determine whether someone is at risk of committing mass violence. Then, depending on their conclusion, the team finds a way to reach out to the person and try to get them support before they commit an act of violence.
It is difficult to prove the efficacy of these interventions, because there’s no way to quantify the number of mass shootings that didn't happen because someone got help. Experts and mental health advocates say the work has prevented people from carrying out violence, and Follman has reported on cases where law enforcement believes people were successfully diverted from committing acts of mass violence.
Jillian Peterson, a professor at Hamline University and co-founder of The Violence Project, says, “Nobody goes in planning to come out.” That insight is significant because it means that some of the same tools mental health professionals have to prevent suicides can help prevent mass shootings as well.
Other behavioral indicators help investigators better identify who is most likely to commit mass violence.
Among the most important is a history of domestic violence. In 2021, researchers found that a majority of mass shootings were domestic violence-related. “A substantial fraction of mass shootings are not these killings of strangers in public places, but they occur in ongoing domestic disputes,” says Nagin.
Extreme risk laws, commonly referred to as red flag law, are in place in 21 states. They allow family members and law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily confiscate someone’s firearms if they believe the owner is at a risk of committing harm either to themselves or others.
Vice President Harris has urged states to adopt red flag laws, and former President Trump has expressed support for these laws, despite the concern from gun rights advocates.
Though experts say passing those laws would have an impact, they are not the only thing that can be done. Family members and law enforcement in states that already have red flag laws can try to get the courts to intervene if they’re worried about someone with guns. Individual community members, especially in the workplace and at school, can pay attention when someone seems to be leaking intentions of a mass shooting and report that behavior to the authorities.
Follman says it’s important not to treat the problem as hopeless. Sometimes, he says, that can encourage would-be shooters. “We have this national narrative about how this is never going to end and nothing ever really changes, and there’s nothing we can really do about it.”
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