Can We Predict a Mass Shooting?

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                 Hindsight is 20/20, so looking back, the warning signs seem crystal clear: the online postings, the violent drawings, the fascination with guns, the peculiar conduct, the disquiet of his peers, even the overt threats, which were missed or minimized by educators, police, and parents. The FBI calls those advance indicators “leakage,” a common characteristic of mass shootings. The coming danger should have been obvious. Or should it?

In recent decades, threat assessment has developed into a sophisticated methodology. So why wasn’t 18-year-old Payton Gendron stopped before he murdered ten people last Saturday at a Buffalo supermarket in a mostly Black neighborhood? Why wasn’t 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley stopped before he killed four and wounded six last November in his Michigan school?

The general answer lies in the failures of many local authorities to follow a 22-year-old FBI recommendation to appoint threat assessment coordinators and teams of skilled professionals on call for quick mobilization to assess risks. The FBI’s 46-page report from back then, “The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective,” is a nuanced analysis that ought to be in the top desk drawer of every school administrator and police commander.

“These threat assessment teams have to be multidisciplinary,” said former Supervisory Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, who led the FBI’s project. “The reason is this: A single person looking at these warning signs might deem them to be not too significant, or they may inflate them, or they may not know what to do with them.” So, she told me, the team should include specialists from the school, the mental health profession, juvenile justice, law enforcement—and ideally, an attorney who could advise on whether, say, a backpack can be legally searched.

Threat assessment is not a perfect art, and over-zealous reactions carry risks to civil liberties. Preventive arrest in advance of a crime would be egregious. But short of that, measured interventions may have prevented mass shootings in “dozens of cases across the country,” according to Mark Follman, author of  Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, a new book reporting on a team in an Oregon school district. In the case of one boy making threats, the professionals embraced him in a “wraparound” approach of counseling, academic help, and programs in and out of school.

The Faces of Children

By David K. Shipler

            You could not look away from the grim faces on the front page of The New York Times this morning. They were students in Parkland, Florida, who returned to classes two weeks after their school became the latest memorial in America’s litany of shootings.

            Their hollow gazes chilled me in a special way, because they wrenched me back to a picture I had taken 45 years ago of Cambodian children about two weeks after their village of Neak Luong had been mistakenly bombed by an American B-52. The huge bombs had marched through town leaving enormous craters like the footprints of some giant, smashing most of the hospital, obliterating fragile houses, killing and maiming parents of children and children of parents.

Unlike most kids I’d met elsewhere in Indochina, these youngsters of Neak Luong did not crowd curiously around an American to grin and laugh into his camera. They stood silent and unsmiling, their faces impassive from torment—just like those Florida kids—as if the reverberations of shellshock had not yet died away. And perhaps never would.

            The eyes of the tallest girl in my picture haunt me still. She is probably about 12 years old. She looks straight into the lens, but vacantly, without guile or passion. Her stare seems neither angry nor fearful but emotionally flat, like a veil across a wound.

            In the center of today’s picture, too, is a Florida girl whose downcast eyes, in shadow, should not ever be forgotten. She looks broken. Her head bends slightly forward; she might be carrying a red flower, just visible between two teenagers in front of her. She seems about to weep—for all of us.

The NRA's Dark America

By David K. Shipler

            Years ago, driving through the Wild West Bank, I was stopped by an Israeli army checkpoint on the road up the Jordan Valley. The young soldier asked if I had any weapons in the car. No, I said. Well, in that case, he advised, it would not be a great idea to continue.

            That’s the kind of America envisioned by the NRA: Don’t send your kids to schools where teachers can’t sport .45 Magnums on their hips or keep Tec 9s in their desks. Don’t lull your kids into thinking there are safe places, free from marauding crazies, where they can concentrate on learning. Remind them every moment of every school day how scary the world is, how vulnerable they are, how consistently high their stress and sense of danger should be. Beginning in their early years, keep those cortisol levels elevated to make sure they greet every affront as if it’s a dire threat. With teachers as role models, every kid will want to carry a weapon. What a wonderful country we’ll have.