From an award-winning Mother Jones journalist comes the inside story of the decades-long search for identifiable profiles and warning signs of mass shooters, by way of specialized teams of psychologists, cops, and ordinary citizens who are working successfully to detect and prevent these traumatic attacks — a fearless, in-depth, and ultimately redemptive account of an epidemic that desperately needs solving.
Mass shootings in the United States have tripled in frequency since 2011 and grown more lethal; by one metric, there were more mass shootings in 2019 than days in the calendar year. Despite these staggering statistics, the aftermath is always a familiar cacophony of “thoughts and prayers”, sensationalized media coverage, and polarizing debates over the Second Amendment. But in recent years, threat assessment teams led by forensic psychologists and law enforcement experts have pursued an entirely different approach to combatting the problem: They focus on the behaviors and circumstances leading up to acts of mass violence — warning signs often glaring yet overlooked.
In Trigger Points, award-winning journalist and Mother Jones editor Mark Follman traces the evolution of behavioral threat analysis — from pioneering psychologists’ interviews with the “criminally insane” at a Massachusetts hospital in the 1970s to stalking behaviors discovered by Secret Service agents in the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination and the shooting of Ronald Reagan, to a revolutionizing of the field that accelerated with Columbine and deepened further after Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, and Parkland. Follman reveals how a branch of forensic psychology rooted in early efforts to stop presidential assassinations and in the FBI’s study of serial killers was eventually adapted to thwart the rampage violence brewing within our communities; he goes inside the FBI’s elite Behavioral Analysis Unit and immerses in an innovative program to prevent school shootings with the Salem-Keizer school district in Oregon — the first to develop a comprehensive threat assessment system that prioritizes helping kids and spurns punitive and penal measures. Through reliable and measured reporting on confidential threat cases and never-before-told accounts from practitioners, perpetrators, and mass shooting survivors, Follman ultimately points to how the United States could adopt such techniques more broadly, with powerful potential to save lives.
Weaving panoramic storytelling with fresh investigative insights, Trigger Points offers hope and a way forward at a time when the costs of failing to prevent gun violence have never been higher.
