Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America

Many people remember where they were when they first learned the news on December 14, 2012. I was on vacation and with family at City Museum, an adventure cornucopia for kids built inside a former shoe factory in my hometown of St. Louis. As my wife and I stood watching our nieces, ages four and six, scamper through tunnels and down slides, we also harbored the secret joy of having just learned that we would soon welcome our own first child into the world. My phone buzzed with news alerts and urgent messages. For the previous six months, my work as a journalist had been focused on investigating the recurring problem of mass shootings, but even that familiarity couldn’t prepare me for the headline: GUNMAN KILLS 20 SCHOOLCHILDREN IN CONNECTICUT.

The attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, in which six adults also perished, felt like a catastrophic wound opening up in the world. If something like this could happen, nothing was sacred, nowhere safe. I absorbed the news for another moment and then looked around again for my nieces, who were now romping in a colorful ball pit full of other happy kids, most of them around the same age as those twenty first graders.

One incoming call was a request for me to join a rare live broadcast of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, to give some context from a mass-shootings database I’d been building in my work for Mother Jones. I was soon on the air with NPR’s Robert Siegel, whose placid voice I’d known since I was just a kid myself, speaking to a mournful and outraged audience of millions. Though I’d summoned the resolve, it was hard that day to think about the unfolding event beyond how shattering it was for those Newtown families, a new depth to an endless problem quickly to be framed by the contentious national argument over gun control. Before long, however, I would start to learn of a very different way to look at the daunting phenomenon of mass shootings and what could be done to stop them.

First things first: Guns are not the focus of this book. But before going further, I’d like to respectfully offer a few brief words about them. Growing up in the Midwest, I loved the bold thrill and big responsibility of learning riflery and achieving marksmanship. As a professional journalist, I have reported extensively about the impact of gun violence on American society. Personally, I share the view held by a clear majority of Americans, as measured in public opinion polls over the past three decades, that the nation’s gun regulations are inadequate and should be strengthened. Not all mass murderers use firearms, but the majority do—and more than three quarters of those killers acquire their guns legally. Extensive public health research and investigative journalism show that weak regulations correlate with a broad range of gun violence in the United States, from bullet-ridden city neighborhoods to accidental child deaths in suburban homes to suicides in rural towns. Those problems produce far more casualties than the indiscriminate school and workplace mass shootings that so dominate public attention. Study of disparate state laws has made clear that stricter gun regulations would help diminish an overall national toll of nearly 40,000 shooting deaths and 115,000 injuries annually.

Even so, the scope of the mass shootings problem is larger and more complex than its tool of destruction. With this book, my aim is to leave behind the battle over gun laws and instead tell the story of an additional solution to the affliction of mass shootings, one with powerful potential to reduce harm. Its focus is on the intricacy and possibilities of human behavior.

I first began to learn about the field of behavioral threat assessment in 2013, about a year after turning my attention to a spate of gun rampages and working with colleagues at Mother Jones to build a database we called “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America.” After the July 2012 massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, I’d been startled to find that virtually no data were available on this particular type of attack, whether from government agencies, academic researchers, policy groups, or news organizations. No one had put forth a comprehensive, detailed set of cases, let alone any in-depth analysis of the problem. The void was owed in no small part to a political chill dating from the mid-1990s, when the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress orchestrated a de facto prohibition of federal funding for gun-violence research. An additional factor was likely the challenge of defining a “mass shooting,” which, historically, was a matter of loose consensus among criminologists and FBI experts: an attack by a lone assailant in a public place, with an arbitrary baseline of four or more victims killed. Excluding attacks with conventional motives like robbery or gang violence, I worked with my team to assemble a first-of-its-kind online database detailing dozens of cases in the United States going back three decades. The frequency with which it required updating in the following months, and years, was sobering.

Beyond documenting the legal provenance of most mass shooters’ guns, my initial analysis of cases revealed that more than half of the killers ended their attacks in suicide. I grew aware of another stark pattern. Details from news reports, court and police records, and my interviews with experts made clear that many of the perpetrators had acted in worrisome or disruptive ways prior to attacking, often for a long time. These had been potentially lifesaving warning signs, and yet the saturation of news coverage following mass shootings almost always told a different story, routinely quoting people who knew or had come in contact with the killers and expressed utter surprise in the aftermath: “I never imagined he’d do something like this” or “Nobody could have seen this coming.” Evidence from dozens of cases suggested those perceptions were mistaken.

The theme of astonishment was further contradicted by a remarkable development: many attacks in the making were being stopped, according to the top law enforcement official in the United States. Ten months after Sandy Hook, in October 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder stated in a speech to the nation’s police chiefs that the FBI had helped thwart more than one hundred “active shooters” since the beginning of that year. Now that was compelling news. I soon learned that a little-known threat assessment team within the FBI’s elite Behavioral Analysis Unit had been ramping up outreach to state and local law enforcement agencies, public universities, and other institutions around the country to assist with threat cases at the request of local leaders.

Meanwhile, America’s endless debate over guns bred apathy and surrender. Even as the nation was freshly grieving Sandy Hook, one widely cited criminologist published an article titled “Mass Shootings in America: Moving Beyond Newtown,” in which he wrote: “Eliminating the risk of mass murder would involve extreme steps that we are unable or unwilling to take—abolishing the Second Amendment, achieving full employment, restoring our sense of community, and rounding up anyone who looks or acts at all suspicious. Mass murder just may be a price we must pay for living in a society where personal freedom is so highly valued.”

I couldn’t accept that way of thinking. Especially not as a father-to-be, who, like so many parents around the country, would soon have to contemplate school safety for his child. This was a complex problem that demanded an equivalent response, not complacency or glib pandering. Mass shootings had long been occurring far more frequently in the United States than any other place in the world that wasn’t a war zone. But if this was inordinately an American problem, there also had to be the possibility of American ingenuity. Our society had eradicated diseases, dreamed up airplanes, put people on the moon, and invented the internet. Why couldn’t we contend with this challenge?

Though mass shootings were on the rise, they remained a small fraction of America’s overall gun violence, with the chances of being injured or killed in one infinitesimal. But from the early 2010s, they became everyone’s problem due to their outsize psychological, financial, and cultural impact. It didn’t matter where you lived or what your politics were; this was now the era with “active shooter” in the lexicon and schoolkids everywhere doing defensive drills just in case one came storming in. (Never mind that those drills could be harmful to children’s well-being, fueling anxiety and depression.) In a range of public venues, particularly in the nation’s schools, major resources have since been poured into physical fortifications, attack-response plans, and other “target hardening” measures. Those have included redesigning buildings, arming teachers and administrators, and installing additional locks, cameras, metal detectors, and security officers. Such measures were the focus after Sandy Hook in 2012, and again after the massacre in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

“Unfortunately,” wrote a group of leading researchers, “these responses are not likely to be effective in preventing planned attacks.” The authors were threat assessment experts who reached that conclusion in a study published not long after another devastating gun rampage—the one at Columbine High School, back in 1999.

Nevertheless, in the two decades since then, school security had grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, with sales including everything from high-tech gunshot-detection systems installed in buildings to “bulletproof” ballistic-plated backpacks for kids and consultant-run training drills, whose participants were in some cases shot at with blanks or splattered with fake blood. Some schools went so far as to store miniature baseball bats or buckets of rocks in classrooms for fighting off a possible attacker. What wasn’t available was any credible research showing that these kinds of measures had value beyond the salve of safety theatrics.

Disaster preparedness at a fundamental level makes sense, including for unpredictable, low-probability events. But there was something baffling about the picture of our societal response to mass shootings, especially if other ways existed to diminish the peril.

Between 2013 and 2020, I traveled to numerous cities and towns throughout the United States to look into details of mass shootings and learn about the work of professionals who investigated these attacks and prevented others. Every single case featured in this book involves a subject who showed a mix of warning behaviors—not fulfilling any checklist, as the public commonly expects per the notion of criminal profiling, but comprising a set of actions and conditions that revealed danger to threat-assessment experts. These warning behaviors fall into eight broad areas: entrenched grievances, patterns of aggression or violence, stalking behavior, threatening communications, emulation of previous attackers, personal deterioration, triggering events, and attack planning and preparation.

No single element from any of the eight areas forecasts violence; it is their variety and coalescence in each individual’s unique case that threat assessors must evaluate and work with. Over time, I came to see how greater recognition of warning behaviors, both among trained professionals and everyday citizens, has vast potential for reducing mass shootings.

What if there existed a community-based model for intervening constructively with troubled people well before they armed themselves and went on a rampage? What if, instead of so much emphasis on shooter response, we put a lot more on shooter prevention?

The pages to come unfold the stories of various individuals who have focused on understanding the darker dimensions of human experience and who subscribe to a hard-won belief that good can, and frequently does, win the day. They include innovative mental health specialists, elite FBI agents, psychologists who became cops, an artist turned school security leader, and ordinary people who were harmed by mass shooters’ bullets and responded with extraordinary courage. Collectively, their work debunks myths about mass shooters as inscrutable monsters and reveals a strategy whose twin goal is heading off violence while getting help to people in serious need of it. It is a story of constructive resolve against an excruciating problem, the hard work of community, and above all, hope.