"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 28

Episode 28: Can the Next Mass Shooting Be Prevented?

Another mass shooting is making headlines in the United States. With it comes the familiar feeling of powerlessness. But a rare peek inside the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit reveals that at least some shootings are being prevented, using techniques to identify people headed down the ‘pathway to violence.’ In the absence of gun reform, agents share what ordinary people can do to help. And a mother recounts the harrowing story of how she discovered her son’s plans to shoot up a school — and what happened next.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Peter Bergen: When did you first start noticing behavior that was concerning to you?

Nichole Schubert: After my mother passed away. He became withdrawn. He started hanging out with the wrong crowd. So we moved. And then he started doing better for the most part, but had a lot of depression. I came across a notebook and it had some of my son's writing in it. So I went through it, just scanning through it to see if it was garbage or homework or what it was. And that's when I discovered the writing that he did. One was plans to shoot up the school and the other one was plans to kill me and my significant other at the time. I couldn't believe my own eyes.

Peter Bergen: Did you think it was a joke? Did you think it was serious?

Nichole Schubert: I think your first instincts when you see something like that, well, mine anyways, is to take it seriously. There was dates, there was times. He planned to do it on the anniversary of Columbine, which I thought was kind of creepy. I have two other children that are young. They're five and four right now. They were of course younger at the time. And he said that he was gonna take them, put them in the van and drive them to a secluded area and leave them there.

[MUSIC]

It was back in 2019 that Nichole Schubert, then a health care worker living in the Pacific Northwest, discovered her son’s journal — and the painful possibility that he was about to become the gunman in an all-too-familiar American tragedy.

In 2022, there were more than 600 mass shootings in the United States, according to Gun Violence Archive, an independent research group.

And right now, the U.S.is on track to surpass those figures in 2023.

There are so many these days, it's sometimes hard to remember just how not-normal this is. Other countries have even started to warn their own citizens that gun violence makes traveling to the United States a risky proposition.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Japan, Uruguay, and Venezuela are all issuing alerts

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: …warning their citizens not to travel to the U.S.because of our violence and hate crimes.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Beijing has issued a travel warning for the United States given recent shootings.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: And this includes the recent mass shootings in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton.

Mass shootings are a form of American exceptionalism that no one can feel proud of.

While these shootings have happened in other countries…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: The government in Serbia has launched a gun amnesty. The move to take guns out of circulation follows two mass shootings in the past week.

Those countries have often reacted by cracking down on access to guns. But not the U.S. It’s gotten to the point where American kids are accustomed to “active shooter” drills.

The other day, our eleven year old son came home from school, and my wife Tresha noted that he was a little subdued.

Tresha: You were sad when I picked you up.

As it turned out, they’d had an active shooter drill at school that day.

Pierre: Yeah. Everybody was sad. What if your school had a siren that went off and everybody had to hide? That would be pretty scary. It's somebody with a live weapon coming into your school where you're supposed to learn. It's not fun. So if we're outside on the field, we hop over the nearest fence. If we can't do that, we throw rocks, we scratch his eyes. We will do absolutely everything just to distract him. Hurt the guy.

Tresha: You guys are thinking of ways to take down the shooter.

Pierre: If there's nothing else that we can do. Would you rather get shot running away or would you rather get shot fighting so you could save your friends?

None of this is normal folks.

Well, it’s become normal. But it’s not okay.

Every time a mass shooting happens, there are lots of “thoughts and prayers,” lots of political posturing, and lots of sadness and anger. The U.S. Congress can’t seem to do anything meaningful about any of this and we’re stuck. But in our reporting, we came across a new field that’s trying to do something to stop mass shootings, and the approach might surprise you.

You’ll get a rare glimpse inside the FBI’s famed Behavioral Analysis Unit, where they’re trying to identify potential mass shooters to stop them before they can act.

I’m Peter Bergen. Welcome to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Mary O'Toole was working for the FBI in the 1990s as a criminal profiler when she was assigned to the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

Mary Ellen O'Toole: Like the other newer profilers, I was told I needed to get a research topic in some area of violent crime. And I heard about these unusual shootings that were occurring in schools

Back then, school shootings were an emerging phenomena. Mary and her team studied just 18 cases. Since then, there of course have many, many more cases — and that emerging phenomena has now become a fact of American life.

Mary Ellen O'Toole: we started to methodically go through them, get all the case materials, interview people. So, we were taking our time then all of a sudden Columbine happened.

ARCHIVAL 1990s Newscaster: The investigation into the high school massacre is slow-moving and dangerous…

Mary Ellen O'Toole: … and Columbine was such a watershed event.

ARCHIVAL 1990s Reporter: …stalked in their own school by two of their own classmates who went on a rampage.

ARCHIVAL Columbine Student: People were getting shot all around me.

In 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, two students killed 12 of their classmates, along with a teacher, at Columbine High School. They wounded more than 20 others. Then they detonated bombs around the school before taking their own lives. It was among the most lethal school shootings in history, and it’s the episode that seems to have fused school shootings and mass shootings together in America’s collective consciousness.

Mary Ellen O'Toole: I still remember watching it on TV thinking, I don't believe what I'm seeing here. And people were stunned. I remember going back to work the following week and my boss got a call from the attorney general at the time, and they wanted to know what could the BAU, this elite unit that studies human behavior, what could we do to help?

Instead of a topic for her modest research project, this was now a matter of urgent national concern and soul-searching. O'Toole was assigned to put together a conference to examine how to prevent another Columbine.

And instead of just including researchers, psychologists and detectives, like a typical crime conference, O'Toole thought:

Mary Ellen O'Toole: Let's bring in the Columbine folks. Let's bring in also the teacher that knew the shooter. Let's bring in, if we have a survivor. We wanted people that knew these students.

The conference took place in July of 1999, just three months after the massacre.

Mary Ellen O'Toole: I remember it as though I was there yesterday. There was about 125 of us and I had not a clue how this would turn out. It was so emotional for that five days that we were there because we had people that were shot by the shooter - they're crying. The audience is, I mean - [emotional pause] It was hard. You can still see it's hard. These people had been through so much and they were trying to give us so much to understand what happened, and I still remember we had to take breaks so people could cry. Oh my gosh, you have no idea. We brainstormed and we recorded everything that people said. We wired up the rooms and then the responsibility fell on me afterwards to decode all of that. And that was very difficult.

O’Toole had to listen back to those recordings to “decode” what was said and translate those reflections into a report that might help stop would-be shooters.

The groundbreaking report was called The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective. Its focus was not just on Columbine but on the characteristics common among the few examples of school shooters that they could then find: low tolerance for frustration, depression, narcissism, alienation, lack of empathy, change of behaviors, access to weapons, and troubled family relationships.

O’Toole emphasizes that one or two of these indicators does not a school shooter make. A bad day, a spell of depression, an inappropriate joke does not in and of itself merit alarm. But it’s the portrait that emerges when all these factors are taken together, of a person who may be at-risk for committing violence. One of the other important findings of this report was something O’Toole called “leakage.”

Mary Ellen O'Toole: Leakage is announcing in some way, some shape, some form what you're gonna do.

Think back to Nichole Schubert and the journal she found with her son’s plan to commit a mass shooting. That’s leakage.

Mary Ellen O'Toole: I remember at the time people didn't like that term. But we found it in every case. And that was pre social media, pre-internet. So, the shooter would write something on a piece of paper or, or verbally tell somebody, don't, don't come to school today. In the Columbine case as an example, pre-internet and pre all the social media stuff, they tape recorded themselves in dress rehearsals. And those tapes were left in, in his bedroom and found by law enforcement, after the shooting had occurred. They weren't posted, but then it was before all that was done. And so for me, that's a pretty compelling form of leakage.

Peter Bergen: Why are these would-be murderers telling others about their plans to carry out a mass shooting?

Mary Ellen O'Toole: That's such a great question and my opinion on why they're doing it is because they're looking forward to it. They're proud of it. They want the attention. They're excited. They want to get the feedback, they want to scare people. So it's not one reason. It's, I think it's a variety of reasons and it's, it's the antithesis of what you see in other criminal behavior. You don't do that if you're gonna go out, rob a bank, right? Hopefully you don't do that if you're gonna rob a bank or steal a car, you do it stealthily, you try to at least, and you try to do it so that you can get away with it. But that's not the case in these….These crimes are very different crimes in terms of their motivation.

Today, it’s an established part of the mass-shooter narrative — the “leakage” that foreshadows their violence.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The shooter did make statements before the attack on social media apps.

And then all the recriminations and hand wringing about what should have been done or could have been done with that information.

ARCHIVAL NEWSCASTER 2: Handwritten words discovered in a notebook left behind in the car…

ARCHIVAL NEWSCASTER 3: …which included what guns he needed and who he intended to target first.

ARCHIVAL NEWSCASTER 4: It's not just one sign that tells you, oh my gosh, this person's gonna go off the deep end. There's a culmination of events that happened that lead to this.

A perverse byproduct of the rise in mass shootings is that it’s given investigators more and more useful information with which to draw a portrait of the typical killer. But back in 1999, there wasn’t as much to go on. O’Toole’s report became an important contribution to the emerging field of what’s called “threat management.”

This technique was developed, somewhat improbably, in Hollywood. In 1978 a security specialist named Gavin de Becker founded a firm dedicated to protecting movie stars.De Becker’s roster of clients included Olivia Newton-John, Cher, and Madonna, who all contended with stalkers and even threats from rabid fans.

By 1989 de Becker had documented more than five thousand people who had made threats to his stars. He invented a screening system that examined “pre-incident indicators” that helped to filter out “signals” from “noise” and focus on those individuals whose threats needed to be taken most seriously. De Becker came to believe that to protect his clients it was more important to understand the process by which a person turns violent rather than getting too hung up on motive.

De Becker’s framework came to the attention of the U.S. Marshal’s service that does things like protecting federal judges. And today threat management is a key tool used by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, known as BAU.

I first had the chance to visit the BAU a few years ago, when I was doing research for a book on homegrown terrorists in the United States.

After decades of investigating terrorism cases, this visit was an ‘aha’ moment for me. I felt like I finally had a framework for understanding how a person goes from just nursing a grievance — the kinds of frustrations we all have - to carrying out a violent act against innocent civilians.

People used to think that when a mass shooting occurred, the person had just “snapped.” There was even a term for it back in the day: “going postal” — because there were a handful of postal workers who turned homicidal in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

But as the field of threat management evolved, it became clear there are identifiable warning signs leading up to the moment that a mass shooter attacks. And if you know what those are, you might have a fighting chance to stop them.

The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit is ground zero for this effort.

They rarely allow reporters into their offices…

Peter Bergen: We’re going to Quantico…

[SOUND OF CAR SLAMMING, ENGINE RUNNING]

Peter Bergen: Let's go and have a look.

We drove toward the FBI's main training facility in Quantico, Virginia. The BAU is nearby, in a drab office building.

Peter Bergen: Looks like any, Anywheresville, USA here. Completely non-descript brown building. No signage. …. Hi. We're doing an interview with you folks. Is this the right place?

If you’ve ever watched TV shows like Criminal Minds…

ARCHIVAL Criminal Minds: Wow. Behavioral Analysis Unit. You work with Gideon?

You'll probably recognize the BAU. It's the section of the FBI that works on solving the most challenging criminal cases by analyzing the perpetrators.

ARCHIVAL Criminal Minds: Emotional indicators are analyzed through slants. The shooter maintains vertical narrow-lettered writing, both signs of depression…

They also use those profiles to stop potential criminals from acting in the first place.

ARCHIVAL Criminal Minds: What, you think all we do is serial killers. Trust me. We cover the whole spectrum of psychos. We profiled the D.C. Sniper, the Unabomber. We do terrorist, arsonists.

But the real work of the BAU isn’t terribly glamorous. We met with Karie Gibson, a unit chief who is both a psychologist and an FBI Special Agent.

Peter Bergen: You know, Criminal Minds, the show? Is that an accurate depiction of what you do here?

Karie Gibson: [GIBSON LAUGHS] So it's kind of funny.

Peter Bergen: I'm glad you're laughing.

Karie Gibson: Well, there's, I would say there's, there's common themes, but I do think they take some liberties.

Peter Bergen: Do you have a Learjet?

Karie Gibson: There is a Learjet in the FBI. However, I've never ridden on it.

Gibson sure isn't taking any Learjets. Instead, when we met with her, she wheeled in a cart with theactualfruits of her labor: stacks of thick case files.

Karie Gibson: So I have 13 of these that I brought today.

Peter Bergen: So all your personal case files?

Karie Gibson: Yep. I'm more of a, a tactical person. Other colleagues like the tablet and do that. But I, I like the weight, I like the, the paper. I like to see that and grab it and touch it. Ah, oh, did you catch that? That's my life right there.

The BAU’s files are full of cases — both of shootings that have already taken place — and of potential shooters that they’ve had their eyes on.

Peter Bergen: This episode is about mass shootings. Can they be prevented?

Karie Gibson: Yes, they can.

Peter Bergen: How?

Karie Gibson: From our perspective here at the Behavioral Analysis Unit, we work every day to prevent these attacks. I don't think the broader public gets to see what we see, but absolutely they can be prevented.

What they see, from poring through all those files, are the similarities among mass shooters on what law enforcement calls the “pathway to violence.” It starts with a grievance.

Karie Gibson: They have a specific grievance, along the lines of a slight or humiliation that has happened to them. And they can't move past it, and it becomes very personal. These individuals start to think about how to resolve that grievance through violence.

Peter Bergen: What does that look like?

Karie Gibson: So they start to think what they would wanna do to get justice for the injustice that has occurred to them. In that process they aren't looking for other ways to resolve that more peacefully like you or I would because they lack those resources and that psychological armor to kind of process that. So they start to look at violence as the only way to resolve that grievance. Sometimes in that state of violent ideation it starts with suicidality. The thoughts of, I hate myself, I hate my life. I hate that I'm here. I hate what's been done to me. And then it progresses to wait a minute, I am in this spot because of what this person did to me or what this agency did to me. Therefore, I'm gonna make them pay for what they did to me.

The next step on the “pathway to violence” is researching what weapons or tactics might be used for the attack.

Karie Gibson: They learn from previous attackers in that process. and then it progresses to preparation. Where, now I know what I'm gonna do. I have my plan, now I have to go get the tools to do the attack. And then from there it goes to breach, which is a dry run or security probe to make sure they're gonna be successful, and then the attack. And so for us, we're constantly trying to evaluate, where are they at on the pathway? Do I have movement from thought to action? Do I have key aspects I can intervene on right now to help slow that progression on the pathway?

The BAU has mental health experts and also agents who look at potential attackers from many angles. There are BAU analysts in all of the FBI’s 56 field offices, a critical resource for local law enforcement, who may know how to deal with a criminal, but not how to deal with a would-be criminal.

Karie Gibson: There may be a person in their community that they're concerned about and they're left with kind of, we don't know what to do with this case. A lot of times the challenge is, if you think about it from a police officer optic. There's an arrestable way to deal with calls of service, right? A lot of times these cases, there hasn't been any type of a law broken or a criminal violation yet, and so they're kind of stuck. And so rather than wait for something to happen, we work with them to come up with more of a proactive mitigation strategy for that person.

So the BAU has a pretty good sense of the steps that lead to a mass shooting.. .which begs the question — well, let me have Gibson say it:

Karie Gibson: It does me no good to tell you this person's a high concern case and not tell you what to do with that.

I asked Gibson for an example of how exactly the Behavioral Analysis Unit goes about getting people off the pathway to violence. She offered a case of a young man struggling with depression who was also suicidal. His parents were working hard to keep a roof over the family’s head and they weren’t really in tune with their son’s emotional struggles. The son began to fixate on school shooters and to obsessively memorize the details of different cases.

Karie Gibson: He had come into contact with law enforcement related to being suicidal and that law enforcement officer had been to one of our trainings and had thought, no, this kid knows way too much about this stuff. I'm concerned about him. So they called and, and then ultimately referred it into the BAU. So this person comes from a small town, limited resources that are right there, right? So any time that he is suicidal or has to be hospitalized, it requires at least a two hour commute to a larger city that has those resources. So in that situation, we looked at, who are people in this community where if we were to do an individualized approach with them, how could we best kind of get him to a better spot? And the local sheriff in that town, was somebody who had contact with the family, was very approachable. We talked about the concerns that we had for this young man and just really if we could get his family connected to him in a little bit more of an emotional way and if we could get his mental health needs met, then maybe there wouldn't be such a need to fixate on these other active shooter-type topics.

As you might imagine, truly diverting someone who is already far down the pathway to violence is far from easy. For the sheriff in this case, it was much more complicated than making an arrest.

Karie Gibson: He started to talk with the, the mom and dad. He started to talk to the young man, and basically went into this mentoring role with the family. He helped with, uh, transport, to help the family get him to where he needed to for his, his mental health appointments, even though there was long commutes, and consistently scheduled time with this young man to be able just to have discussion and thoughts and, and conversation, and make time for him, um, which was huge. He also then built bridges with the school to help them work with the young man in a way that was helpful versus punitive. And ultimately, all of that just layered, to where that young man was able to you get his depression under control help get the suicidal thoughts under control, graduate from high school, go on to college and, and he's doing well today. But this is years in the making, where for a good two years, very strategic focus was put on him to help address those unmet needs that he was seeking.

Peter Bergen: Was he aware that you were involved in this?

Karie Gibson: No. So he was aware, obviously the law enforcement entity from the local place where he lived was involved, but the family didn't know that we were kind of behind the scenes helping navigate that care and concern for their son.

Peter Bergen: And that was clearly a success.

Karie Gibson: Yes.

Peter Bergen: And you know, part of the frustrations perhaps at this job is when you are successful, you can't measure it because something didn't happen.

Karie Gibson: Correct. And I can't call up anybody and say, ‘Hey, guess what? We did a really good thing today.’

Consider the scope of what the BAU and that sheriff were able to do for this young man. It required the cooperation of his parents, the school, an extraordinarily committed law enforcement officer, as well as a shift in attitude. They approached the young man as someone who was in pain, looking for connection, and suffering from depression, who needed help rather than punishment.

Karie Gibson: I think a lot of people think there's no way the police could help but what they don't understand is that threat management is a huge tool in our toolbox. And now more than ever, law enforcement are being proactive in addressing things before they rise to the level of laws being broken.

[MUSIC]

Gibson repeatedly mentioned that this young man was suicidal, which isn’t uncommon when it comes to mass shootings. It may seem counterintuitive but the people killed in a shooting may be only part of what that murderer is after. They often plan to die in the attack, either by killing themselves or death-by-cop.

Karie Gibson: In our work, there's a very thin line between suicidality and homicidality. It starts with I'm hopeless, I'm helpless. I can't stand my life. I don't wanna be here anymore. And then that thought process starts to go to wait a minute, I'm here because of this person, so I'm gonna make them suffer. That's your bridge to homicidality. I'm gonna make them suffer and then take myself out. And so we're constantly looking if we can prevent the suicidality, then we prevent homicidality.

Peter Bergen: Are you religious?

Karie Gibson: Yeah, I would say I'm religious.

Peter Bergen: Do you ever think about the problem of evil with these perpetrators?

Karie Gibson: So I don't, I don't necessarily think about it in that way, I definitely would like to know like who has psychopathic characteristics, right? And I see evil connected to that - I used to work in a prison. There's definitely psychopaths among us. I get it. Like I'm, I'm not, you know, naive in that concept. We just don't see tons of that with everyday stuff that we're working with.

Most mass shooters do not suffer from serious psychiatric illness, but these are not healthy minds either. Many are depressed. There are other common characteristics: they’re overwhelmingly male. In fact, a report by the nonprofit The Violence Project, found that 98 percent of mass shooters were male. Many of them have suffered a painful loss — of a loved one, a steady job, a partner — what the BAU calls a “disappearing anchor,” that can leave potential shooters adrift without people around them to notice concerning behavior.

There’s also a strong connection to domestic violence. This correlation had not yet been explored when Mary O’Toole wrote her report after Columbine. Now she says it’s a key indicator on the pathway to violence.

Mary Ellen O’Toole: When the case gets unraveled and you start to look at the background of the individual, there's either domestic violence in the family home or the home where the person is living or the person engages in domestic violence.

And many had developed an obsession with other school shootings, specifically Columbine. The FBI made a film about it to help educate the public about how to prevent school shootings.

ARCHIVAL Echoes of Columbine, Female Voice:The perpetrator struggled with anger, struggled with frustration. He had been hospitalized on several events because of wanting to harm others.

ARCHIVAL Echoes of Columbine, Male Voice: The mother talked about an incident when he pointed a loaded shotgun at her.

Karie Gibson: So Echoes of Columbine was a project that we did here out of BAU for that purpose of getting that word out to a larger audience outside of the law enforcement community. It's really quite amazing how much Columbine is still there these many years later.

Peter Bergen: Why do you think that is?

Karie Gibson: You know, it's really been romanticized. There's a young group of people that are very connected to that story. There's a lot of young people out there that are struggling, you know, and they're looking for answers and looking for solutions, that's obviously, something that's very readily available and they find friends in those communities and, and they start to build connections in that way.

Peter Bergen: That was pre the internet and or at least the internet as we know it today. So how does that complicate things for you, or make it easier, the fact that, you know, everybody can say anything to millions of other people and can find out immediately everything there is to know about Columbine within five minutes. How does that make your job easier or more difficult?

Karie Gibson: I do think that the leakage has been a key concept to allow people to understand and to look for. ‘Cause a lot of times it's just white noise and people aren't looking for it. But when we say, are they leaking any violent intent, are they leaking any fixation on suicidality or homicidality or, fixation on weapons? They'll say, well, I don't know. I have to look at that. And we’re like well look on social media, look, you know, school assignments, look at poetry, artwork, all of that.

Leakage becomes just a tragic part of evidence after the shooting — unless someone sees it early and intervenes.

Andrea Fancher, an intelligence analyst who works with Gibson at the BAU, researches the role of people close to potential shooters — people the FBI calls “bystanders” - They are the most likely to see those social media posts or hear those alarming comments about other school shootings.

Andrea Fancher: When we talk about bystanders we're talking about, overwhelmingly those peers and family members who are around an individual that do become aware of concerns before something bad happens. What makes it difficult is sometimes they're seeing these smaller changes that aren't kind of the glaring, in your face, I wanna go out and kill people or commit some sort of attack. They're seeing over time, maybe interests that are shifting. They used to be perhaps involved in sports or just spending time with friends or family members, and now they've got really protracted interests in this specific area, one being an interest in past attackers. They've also got a lot of mental health struggles that they're dealing with, or financial stressors or, uh, just relationship kind of interpersonal problems that they're trying to navigate, problems at school or in the workplace. It makes it really difficult for people to say, you're gonna do something violent if there's not that overt threat.

Peter Bergen: So how do you deal with the First Amendment questions and how do you deal with, okay, well this is sort of just regular teenage angst of one kind or another versus somebody who might be a threat?

Andrea Fancher: You know you bring up a great point with First Amendment protections because that's what our country is founded on, and that really is what makes bystanders so important. Law enforcement doesn't have the legal authority to be looking at everybody. We don't have the resources to do that, even if we had the authority. So we need those folks in the community who know others around them and know really what's normal for that particular person and know when things are shifting away from their norm.

Gibson acknowledges that if you check in with someone you think might be at-risk, you may not get a straight answer.

Karie Gibson: People go to the offender first and say, I'm concerned about you. I'm seeing these violent drawings, this fixation on prior attackers, what can we do to help you? A predatory offender is not gonna say, ‘You got me, I've been planning to do a school attack.’ What they're gonna say is, ‘I'm good. it's okay.’ They want you to go away and they want to be successful. And so that means that they will be covert. That means that they will lie to you. And so what we, we, we train on and it's very key when our work is corroborate, right? So if somebody says to me, ‘My mom's overreacting, I had a school project on, on Columbine, and that's all I was doing.’ Go ask, is there a school project? Go ask Mom, ‘is this what you said?’ All of that has to be done.

Peter Bergen: What would you like to come out of this research?

Andrea Fancher: I think the biggest point. If people hear nothing else from the research that we've done here, when a bystander becomes aware of information and does nothing, an individual is 16 times more likely to go on and commit an act of violence.

Peter Bergen: Wow.

Andrea Fancher: Whether it's the more overt talk about actually committing an attack and people aren't acting on it, it's really we think, perceived as almost permission by the individual.

I kept thinking back to that conversation with Nichole Schubert — who found her son's journal with that detailed plan for a shooting. A bystander at a crossroads.

Nichole Schubert: I called up one of my best friends and told her what I found, and she said, you need to call the police immediately. And I knew she was right, so I contacted the police.

Peter Bergen: What did you say?

Nichole Schubert: I told them what I had found. They came immediately and went through it and waited for him to get home from school. The cops sat down with him and just started questioning him about it and from the get-go he said that it was a creative writing assignment, which I thought was strange cuz he didn't have creative writing at the time.

Peter Bergen: Is it the hardest decision a mother can make?

Nichole Schubert: No. Everybody asked me that, but you know, I don't think I hesitated at all. I don't really think I had much to think about. In this situation, you, you not only have to think about your child, but others, there was so many other people involved or what could have been involved. It's not always about you, you know. I had to put myself in other people's shoes. You know you always hear about these things, but you always think, oh, this won't happen to me, or this, this'll never be my kid. But it did and it was.

Nichole may not have been familiar with the field of threat management, but she knew that something was up with her son: There was a marked change in his behavior — once a class clown type, he’d retreated into his room.

And he was feeling the effect of disappearing anchors: a recent move and the loss of his grandmother.

[MUSIC]

Speaking up can feel scary for the bystander. They may also feel like they’re unfairly punishing the person they’re reporting on, someone who hasn’t yet committed a criminal act. But Gibson says, people planning these attacks are often crying out for attention. When they don’t find real-life connections they go deeper down the rabbit holes online to feel like they’re part of something, even if that something is a group that celebrates violence and mass murder. Raising an alarm can be a way of showing you care.

Karie Gibson: It sends a message, you matter. I care. Let's fix this. Versus, ‘Oh, so you're researching all the serial killers and all the active shooters. Oh, that's a nice hobby. I gotta go, you know, do whatever.’ And it sends that kind of idea that you don't matter. You know, in the conversations we've had with offenders. They felt like nobody was really paying attention to them like they were blending into the background but they found solace with the people online who supported their views or encouraged them to be violent.

Peter Bergen: And unfortunately we are now in a situation where, back in the day you might have had to go and meet somebody in person to sort of get encouragement. But now you have a huge self-selected fan base on social media that can kind of encourage you.

Karie Gibson: Right absolutely. And what we tell law enforcement officers, when we're training them is that these type of people, those bystanders, like when they call in or they, they make that hard decision of, I need law enforcement intervention here because I'm concerned, it's really life or death. Like in their mind, they're coming forward because they understand the gravity of the situation and they're concerned and we need to treat it as such, it's life or death situation versus. Okay. Just in the queue. Gotta call in. Okay, let's get to that next week. No. Like if, if a parent or a friend calls in, we need to go now to talk with them.

Peter Bergen: I mean, it's very paradoxical cuz you’re saying on a daily basis you’re preventing mass shootings. And yet at the same time some mass shooters are getting through and they're obviously, we're seeing a lot of mass shootings right now. I think this is the, the historic high. Is that sort of depressing for you? You come into work, you do all this good work yet so many people are still getting through.

Karie Gibson: For me it's not discouraging as it is just kind of the reality of where we are today. we're all learning, right? And we're all trying to get to a better spot. Nobody wants this reality that we have right now. When I started here eight years ago, we were getting about 150 referrals in a year. Um, now we're over 350 a year. We've been very successful in not having, you know, them result in violence.

I wanted to know what happens if they’re referred a case from local law enforcement, and it turns out they’ve gotten it wrong. What if the person suspected of being the next mass shooter wasn’t planning to do anything at all?

Karie Gibson: We do get what I would call false positives, right? Where sometimes you might get a referral in and as you pull that thread you realize, nope there's not a fire here. For example, let's say you have a, a case where it comes in,you had a play that's being written about a school attack, Okay, what else do we have? Okay, so he said that he's working on this project with friends. Okay. Is that true? Let's go talk to friends. Yeah. And the friends corroborate what he says. Okay. Then let's look at what's happened at school. Are there any problems he's having? No, everything's great here. They're doing wonderful, good grades involved in all these extracurricular activities. Okay, you zoom out right outside of that school looking at the home life And do you have somebody who has connected guardians that are in their life? Um, or do you have incapable guardians and if you find that you have capable guardianship, you have somebody who's well adjusted, you have somebody who deals with stress in an appropriate way, has these resources, sometimes it's just a school assignment now. Not the best school assignment, or best choice, right? But a school assignment. We wanna go about things in a very respectful way. One of the things we know from research, the ones that went on to commit the attacks experienced a humiliating event within two years of the attack. So now we know humiliation is huge.

Peter Bergen: That humiliating event — what is it? Is it loss of a job, death of a parent, and what are the sort of triggers?

Karie Gibson: I think a humiliating event would be more specific to some type of humiliation publicly, for that individual.

Peter Bergen: We're talking about kids, juveniles at this point?

Karie Gibson: Both, for both adults or juveniles. And so looking at was there some type of humiliating event that happened, um, making sure that we're not being humiliating in our interventions with them or our contact with them.

Peter Bergen: Well, that's absolute key. So how do you kind of manage this intervention? So it isn't counterproductive?

Karie Gibson: So, for example sometimes you'll get someone who'll say, well, we should probably search that person before they come into the school because they could have a weapon. Okay. But we're gonna single that person out, that could be humiliating, right? And so how are we gonna go about that in a way that's respectful to that person and, and still within policy of that institution there's still ways to be involved and interact with that person in a way that's respectful and not humiliating. We don't become the grievance, right? Law enforcement could easily become the grievance, and that would be something that we would not want to do.

Right now, you may be thinking about the cruel irony behind this episode: The field of threat management has advanced significantly in the past decades since the FBI’s Mary O’Toole wrote her seminal report on school shootings, and since Gavin de Becker created his framework for protecting his movie star clientele. Meanwhile, mass shootings have ballooned, becoming a daily part of the news cycle. And it’s very clear what makes the United States so horrifyingly exceptional when it comes to mass shootings. The United States is rife with guns. There are more guns in the U.S. than people.

As someone who grew up in the UK, it’s always been striking to me that you are around 50 times more likely to be killed by someone in the U.S. with a gun than is the case in Britain. Without the American love affair with guns, there would surely be other forms of violence. But the fatalities of those events wouldn’t compare.

Threat management isn’t some kind of magic solution. Mary O’Toole kept going back to one unifying feature in these tragedies.

Mary Ellen O'Toole: Access to weapons.

Peter Bergen: You've mentioned that multiple times.

Mary Ellen O'Toole: Yeah. but it goes overlooked. It goes overlooked so often that, my son, my nephew, my neighbor, they have problems and they have access to weapons, and the red bells don't go off. I find that still stunning.

Peter Bergen: Because if you only have access to a, you know, pen knife, there's a limit—

Mary Ellen O'Toole: You can't do anything with a really, with a pen knife. You can't kill a dozen people. and I know it goes into, you know, a constitutional argument when people talk about weapons, but in, in the world that I live in, I have tried as, as my colleagues have tried over years and years and years to push that pink elephant to the corner and it won't move.

Peter Bergen: Does that engender a sense of hopelessness?

Mary Ellen O'Toole: My emotions have changed over the years with these cases. Sadness leads to anger. Originally it was horror when I saw Columbine. I'm very angry that these cases continue.

Peter Bergen: What's your advice to anybody who might be listening who has some family member who seems to be exhibiting behaviors that are aberrational?

Mary Ellen O'Toole: I think at this point people that are listening might be rolling their eyes. And the reason that I say that there are many family members they know they've got a loved one that has the potential. And they have tried everything in the book and nothing has helped. So they're listening to me and they're thinking, she doesn't have a clue. I do have a clue. I, I, I understand that when you go and you seek out mental health intervention, there's not a lot out there right now. So while we've made all of these advances in threat assessment, what can families do? The one thing I would say is this. Whatever you do, if you are concerned, these cases cannot be carried out unless that loved one of yours has access to weapons.

[MUSIC]

And caring bystanders can help stop them from being carried out if they take the brave step of alerting authorities, just like Nichole Schubert did, when she found her son’s journal and his plans to attack his school.

Peter Bergen: You've said it's important to mind your child's business, to stay in it. What do you mean?

Nichole Schubert: Know what they're doing. Know where they are. Know where they're going, know who they're around. It's our jobs as parents.

Peter Bergen: How are you doing today?

Nichole Schubert: I'm okay.

Peter Bergen: How's your son doing?

Nichole Schubert: He's doing good overall. He hasn't been in any trouble since he has turned 18. He'll be 21 in February. He has a job. He's finished high school. He wants to go to college.

Peter Bergen: You saved him.

Nichole Schubert: I believe I probably saved a lot. But you know, sometimes your kids, as bad as this may sound, are safer in jail.

Peter Bergen: How do you feel now when you see stories in the news about school shootings?

Nichole Schubert: It breaks my heart. It's something that should not even happen.

Peter Bergen: There's no doubt in your mind that he was gonna go through with this?

Nichole Schubert: I have doubts. I mean, only God knows, but if I wouldn't have said anything to prevent it, and it did happen - I would never be able to forgive myself.

According to the BAU, if you are worried that someone you know may be on the pathway to violence, the most important thing you can do is tell someone you trust. Don’t keep it to yourself.

If you’re interested in learning more, we recommend: Mark Follman’s book Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings, Dave Cullen’s Columbine, Mary O’Toole’s Dangerous Instincts, and Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy by Elizabeth Williamson.

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IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

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