FAQ on Gun Violence

If shooting have been on the rise for 20 years, what makes you so sure we can turn the tide?

First responders are better prepared today than they have ever been to get to the shooters and save lives. Hospitals are better prepared to care for the injured. Emergency management personnel are better prepared to help recovery efforts when violence occurs. Seventy percent of these incidents end in five minutes or less. The missing piece to the puzzle is citizen participation. When citizens realized they can work individually and collectively with their businesses, houses of worship, schools and school districts, they can give us our best effort at prevention. That’s the piece of the puzzle we’re missing right now.

Why did you write this book?

All of us spend time looking elsewhere for answers or blaming others for what is going wrong in the world. I want people to recognize they can’t turn away from this responsibility because they have the ability to make the difference and save lives. It’s difficult when there’s so much information out there and everybody is pointing to different solution that likely involves legislation, rules, and plans. Those are all great, but we need to be as devoted as we were after 9/11 to watch out for each other and when they see something, they need to say something. It sounds simple, and it may be in theory, but it must be an all-encompassing commitment. 

Have you been involved in some of these shootings?

Yes, with the FBI, I worked the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting in Washington DC and the Pentagon shooting in Virginia several years ago. I worked many more while running the active shooter program in FBI headquarters as part of the team coordinating responses from the strategic operations command center. It’s amazing to be among the talented team analyzing and coordinating resources amidst the inevitable, but organized chaos that comes with these types of nightmare situations. My travel to a number of locations where these shootings have occurred has probably had the biggest impact on me. It gave me a chance to speak with people who personally were there when the shooting started such as the Aurora Theatre manager who calmly called for assistance, Virginia Tech survivors, and the people at Columbine high school who climbed into a choir closet to keep more than 100 people safe while the shooting was underway. The people at LAX for example, had to make a decision not only to close the airport and cancel flights locally, but also flights internationally. They knew the impact of the disruption and work aggressively with the FBI to get that airport reopened.

What are some misunderstanding about these shootings?

Probably the biggest one is there’s going to be time to make a decision about what to do or even to tell other people what to do. I hear that all the time. In planning meetings, I hear manager say we’ll make this announcement will direct people to do this. There isn’t time for that there just isn’t time.  You won’t be able to get the broadcasting system or text a message out before the shooting potential is over most of the time. That means people need to be able to think for themselves and react quickly. I think there’s a big misconception that we just can’t prevent these; we just can’t stop them from happening. That’s just wrong. We stop violence all the time in this country because citizens call the police or intervene. Maybe this is an attentive parent, spouse or significant other who sees somebody headed in the wrong direction and steps in. Police officers do this every day, anticipating violence and acting to prevent it. Students and co-workers see something in say something. Our two tip lines are filled with those types of interventions. A big misconception exists that those interventions don’t occur because privacy laws prevent us from releasing all the information, I know successes. I think we’re getting better at releasing that type of information without breaching somebody’s privacy, but I think we need to do a better job with that and still assure the public when they do speak up they can save lives.

Do you believe in the good guy with a gun theory?

I’d like to believe it, but I can’t because we don’t have any data to support it. We have four times as many instances where an unarmed civilian interceded and stopped a shooting. In 20 years, we’ve only had a handful situations where’s it some with a gun was even involved, and often that was off-duty security or police, or former military. Chances are that gun only added to the problems, I’m not even talking about the instances where that gun is present and accessed by mistake that has nothing to do with an active shooter situation. I’m not saying it’s not possible. I’m all supportive of anything that will save lives, but I think it’s misguided to think adding more guns to scene is going to cause less death. Shooting under stress is an incredibly difficult even for the most highly trained law enforcement officers on the street today. It’s not realistic to think that some person who has shot a few hundred rounds at a paper target once a year will be able to swiftly access weapon, make sure it is loaded, know how to clear a jammed shell, shoot and safely take out of shooter, at the same time safeguarding all the others around the shooter. No significant change in gun laws has occurred in the past 20 years and there are more guns on the street now than ever before. Yet, the best we can say is that in a couple of instances a civilian firing rounds has helped to turn the shooter away which, don’t get me wrong, is fantastic. You just cannot put all your eggs in that basket.

Should we be arming school teachers?

No, I don’t support that. First, we don’t hire our teachers to be security guards, and, when the pressures is on, it may be impossible for a teacher to raise a weapons and kill a student they know. In the milliseconds that the teacher hesitates because they looking to the students’ eyes that students can shoot them. We’ve seen that happen. I think that’s asking a lot of our teachers and we ask so much of them already. Shootings in schools are rare occurrences and introducing guns into a school environment just invites accidental discharges, stolen guns, suicides, and even teachers who may choose to pull a weapon because they’re afraid of the student who’s bigger than them. Those things will happen only because the districts and administrators have chosen to introduce a weapon to the scene.

What’s the one thing you want people to carry away from reading this book? 

There are three things because all active shooter situations involved a before, during, and after. I want readers appreciate that before a shooting might occur, they can prevent it. When a shooting occurs, they can keep themselves and others safe if they know already know how to run hide and fight. And, after the shooting is over, good planning can return a community to some sense of normalcy, including getting businesses reopened, and getting students and faculty to have confidence that they can return safely to their everyday activities.

You’re write about threat assessments and threat management here. Can you describe in layman’s terms what that really means?

Sure. When people see something and say something, when police officers get information, when parents and coworker share information, all that information needs to go someplace. We have learned, particularly in the last 20 years, that when we dedicate a diverse group of trained individuals to analyze the new details coming in and match it to what they might already know or can find out, the group can make an educated analysis on whether that person is on a pathway to violence. That group of people is called a threat assessment team. These teams can include human resources personnel, mental health professionals, police officers, company supervisors, school counselors, school principals, athletic coaches, any other relevant members of the community, such a scout leader. Some states like Virginia and Illinois require school districts to have threat assessment teams by law in order to get state funding. Many, many big companies have threat assessment teams meeting routinely, such as monthly. These threat assessment teams analyze the information they receive and then choose the best way to manage that information which is why we talk about both threat assessment and threat management. In some cases there may be an individual who appears to be out of pathway to violence, but managing that threat may involve simply interacting with them to move them off of their pathway to violence, giving them confidence that they have people to support them and help them through their trouble times. That’s a simplistic answer, I think you get the idea.

What’s the difference between an active shooter and a mass killer?

Well first let me say that these terms are often used in order to define what you’re going to research in a particular research project. That’s why my team looked only at active shooter incidents, releasing A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013. We looked at only active shooter situations which are defined as: “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” In 2013, federal law for the first time defined mass killing as three or more people being killed in an incident. So in an active shooter situation, it isn’t it all about the number of people we have been killed or injured. In fact, you could have no one injured. The threat is that there is an individual out in public who want to kill people, and the public has the ability to affect the outcome by the way they respond that includes both police and the citizens. Just an added note, there are other terms used in the media such as serial killer, mass shooting, mass casualty. But there is no clear definition for these. Some researchers and reporters mistakenly say the FBI has a threshold number for mass shooting of four, but it does not. They only used the federal definition for mass killing as identified by the federal statute, and the definition of active shooter as defined in the research I mentioned.