August 28, 2025 • 31 mins
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 school shooting database and a man with a deep insight on how school shooters take shape. Riedman joins the show to talk about all of the surprising things he has discovered in this trove of data about an admittedly macabre topic. He will make you question some of the ideas you may have on why and how these school shootings happen. Most importantly, he has some very important ideas on how to make it stop.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We've been watching What's happening in Minnesota played out during
the show yesterday actually another one of these school shootings,
and just horrible details. And at some point during the
show it was really hard to listen to that. It
was like a kid who was one of the victims
who was being interviewed on TV and you're listening to
it and you're like God, And the reporter even said
(00:21):
to this kid at one point something to the effect of, Hey,
how are you doing. You sound You sound okay considering
what happened today. And we were away to stream, like like, yeah,
this has not hit these kids yet. You can't even
imagine the horrors that these kids went through at the
school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So I started off the show
(00:43):
today and I said, I find this all to be
frustrating for a couple of reasons. One within my job,
I want to I want to tell you what's going on.
I want to try to explain to you these news stories.
And when it comes to school shooting stories, when it
comes to like this this attack, which is you know,
far too frequent, like we saw in Minneapolis at the
(01:05):
Annunciation Catholic School, people want a simple answer and often
they want an answer that just reverberates their priors, right.
They want the answer. They're like, I, here's what I
think about this. So yes, that's that's the one I
agree with. And that is why this and some of
these other recent shootings have been incredibly frustrating to me.
So I want to try to work this out a
(01:27):
little bit. And the guy that we've got with us
here is David.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Is it Readman? Am I saying your last name correctly? David?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Hang on, he's up?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Wait? Is it? I don't hear him? David?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
They are David? Okay, David Readman. Thank you? Now we
got you. David Is I'm gonna just call you like a.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Data guru and the world of as horrible as it sounds,
all things to do with school shootings and the like,
and I've seen your substack and all this stuff, but
can you just give everybody a little bit of a
rundown of how you're in this world?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah. I'm a professor at Idaho State University.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
I teach risk management and data analysis and emergency management.
My entire career was in homeland security and intelligence and
emergency services. And I was actually in a homeland security
think tank program sitting in a classroom when the Parkland
shooting happened.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Really and I had been to.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Dozens of briefings about the Boston marathon bombing where two
people died. There were seventeen people, seventeen kids dead at
this high school in Parkland, and I had never been
to any sort of homeland security planning briefing, exercise training,
or anything at the national level about a school shooting. Yeah,
so I was in this think tank program. I wanted
(02:43):
to know everything about the issue. And that's when I
created a database of every shooting I could find on
school property back to the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So you trace back all of these horrible incidents, you
put together what is like the pre eminent database of
all this information. And when you do that, you do
get some insights, certainly as to why is this happening,
Why does it seem to be a fairly American experience,
and a lot of very big questions that we try
to touch on at some point. But in this situation,
in particular, we have another student who leaves behind after
(03:17):
unthinkable horror on this school that was unleashed on these
poor kids. Another student that leaves are another shooter that
leaves behind like one of these manifestos, and everybody wants
a simple answer, like what was the motivation behind this person?
The reason why I said I was frustrated at the
start of the show today is because that is not
an easy answer With somebody like this particular shooter in Minneapolis,
(03:40):
they literally left the treasure trove of information for anybody
to glom onto, Like there was stuff about Jews, there
was stuff about hating Trump, there was transgender there was
all there's all sorts of things that are sort of
flung at the map in a manifesto like this, where
anybody can take from it what they want to, and
(04:00):
you sort of end up walking away with nothing, nothing
that you can fix.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
But did you look.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Through some of the stuff that's come out after this,
and what, if anything, did you take away from this person?
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Well, unfortunately, every time that this happens in terms of
a deliberate, planned attack at the school, it's essentially the
same situation that plays out over and over. People want
a really simple explanation. A simple explanation would be there's
a violent, scary, psychotic person, and if we can just
(04:34):
keep them away from the school, if we can just
have a stronger door and a bigger fence, then we
can keep this scary, deranged outsider away.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Unfortunately, the reality.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Of looking at shootings at schools, I've cataloged more than
three thousand back to the nineteen sixties. About two hundred
and thirty of those are a deliberately planned attack like yesterday,
with the intent to harm as many people as possible.
And this is where it becomes a very complicated issue.
They are almost always committed by current students or former
(05:07):
students at the school. So it's somebody who knows the
layout of the building, has been trained in the lockdown
drills or emergency procedures, They know what times students are
going to be in different places, and often if it's
a current student, they're allowed to be in the school.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
They are permitted to be there.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
If you have biometric monitoring or key cards or badges
or access control, they're allowed to be there in the school.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
So this becomes complicated because it is a person who's
intimately familiar with the building and has a strong connection
to it who almost always commits a school shooting, right.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Which makes them all the more dangerous When all that
information just falls in line.
Speaker 5 (05:50):
That sounds like a weird parallel to that revelation we
had not so long back when, like when we were kids,
everything was stranger danger, stranger danger, all the all of
your risk is coming from the outside, and it turns
out more family members or the problem. Like you're saying that,
like because they said, oh, we've spent all this money
protecting the school, We've spent all this money beefing up security,
(06:13):
but it doesn't matter because it's the ones that are
supposed to be here that are causing all the issues
and them shooting up the place.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, that's exactly the problem.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
I think it goes back to, Yeah, that same idea
in the eighties and nineties, you know, watch out for
the stranger in the white van.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Right, that's a really simple thing.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
Saying, you know, you actually need to watch out for
the strange uncle or the babysitter or the neighbor is
very inconvenient because there's not an easy way to deal
with that.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
It's the same way with schools.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
If you train somebody in the emergency procedures, the assumption
is that they are going to be somebody that you're protecting.
But in most cases, active shooter drills are actually a
tutorial and a rehearsal for how to commit a school shooting.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I was in charge of the Department of Education.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
If I was in charge of a school system, I
would never hold any sort of active shooter drill or
publicize any sort of emergency procedures, because you are giving
the person who's most likely to commit the shooting the
playbook for exactly how to.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Do it right, how the classroom is going to be
locked down, what the defensive mechanisms are in place. Again,
this is like Celin was saying, preparing for an outsider
versus an insider, and actually kind of giving away your
hands in so many cases.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Here and what was a little different yesterday was somebody
firing only from the exterior of the building. Looking at
those two hundred and thirty plant attacks back to the
nineteen sixties, about seventy five percent of the shootings begin
and end in the same room, which is another really
complicated concept. When you think about fortifying classrooms, having a
(07:52):
one way door, lock on the classroom door, maybe having
a ballistic chalkboard. If the shooting begins and ends in
the same room, all that you're doing is fortify in
the classroom against police from getting it right.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, then it becomes you're trapped in your own prison.
What we're gonna say, See, David.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
With all that you just said in mind about the
active shooter drills and saying that you would remove them
from schools, would you still recommend that they be done
with teachers and with adult staff. Uh to, So they
have a drill in mind and they have a plan
in mind and just don't tell the kids about it
because that actually makes the kids better for lack of
(08:30):
a better term, school shooters.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Absolutely, And this teachers can only have you know, really
cursory short training in the emergency procedures as well. If
you go to an arena, if you go to a
concert venue, if you go to a shopping mall, you
as as the visitor there or you as the occupant
and of a commercial building have never done the drills.
It's up to the staff that manages that facility to
(08:56):
direct you for what you're going to do during an emergency.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
So a thing with.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Across the security industry is you want to have more randomness,
less predictability, and more flexibility in the way that you
can respond to a variety of different types of emergencies,
and as soon as you have a prescribed plan, then
that gives your adversary an opportunity to start finding identifying
the weakest points in it.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, somebody on chat has an interesting point here, I
think are not on YouTube says there's a movie called
Run Hide Fight about this exact thing, and they go
into details about some of these stories. Now, just the
idea of run Hide Fight in terms of me watching
these stories over the years, you know, going way back
to Columbinen before that, that seems to be kind of
(09:46):
a new tact that some of these places are taking,
where they're telling the students like your life is on
the line, run, hide, fight, do whatever you can do,
but understand that this is a situation that deserves all
of the attention in the world, and anything you could
do in these situations, even fighting your way out, could
be important. Is that something that changed a lot, like
(10:07):
the strategy changed along the timeline somewhere.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
The first viral post that I ever wrote about this
topic was in twenty seventeen, and it was the morning
after the Las Vegas Harvest Festival shooting, and I was
actually sitting in a Department of Homeland Security office and
I was there early, and I just put out a
thousand or so word article on Medium. It was called
(10:32):
when you Can't Run, Hide, or Fight, because I was
looking at all the videos from Las Vegas and realizing
that you're at a large outdoor concert and somebody on
the fortieth floor is shooting at you.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah, you can't outrun the bullets.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
There's nowhere to hide, and there's no way for you
to fight somebody who's forty stories above you. And so
I broke down lots of different venues where those three options,
even though people were taught them, aren't viable. One of
them is a church where you have usually one door
in the back and all of the pews in front
(11:07):
of it. Another there's a large shopping mall with your
open areas. A movie theater like the Aurora Theater shooting.
There's not a scenario where you can be sitting in
the middle of the theater and you're going to run,
hide or fight from somebody firing a rifle at you
from in front of the screen.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
What's interesting is once.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
You go down the rabbit hole on this run, Hide,
Fight was created by a Hollywood production company that had
a grant from the City of Houston in two thousand
and eight to create a PSA. There has never been
an empirical study or research or anything about whether that
is the appropriate set of actions to take, modeling it
(11:48):
in different scenarios. The same with lockdowns. There's never been
empirical evidence that you save lives during a lockdown. Those
are just concepts that get socialized. They are very easy,
these slogans to verifying that stay in a lot.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, that's you know, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
That's kind of one of those things I've always talked
about this stuff where it's like, hey, we do these
things because we've always done these things, and when it
comes down to it, there's like no actual empirical evidence
that suggests these strategies are are useful or certainly in
the most recent case here, that it would have would
have done anything, which I think is just another log
in the fire of everything that makes these stories so frustrating.
(12:30):
One thing that I have seen, and tell me, you
know far more about the numbers on this than I
ever will, but one thing that I have seen down
the line, and so many of these stories that are
that are similar to the planned attacks like we just
saw at this school in Minnesota. Is that almost to
a person, they seem to have a fascination with other
(12:52):
mass shooters and a very very deep knowledge of other
mass shooters that then inspire them to do what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
Yeah, I'm working on an article about that right now.
Because in the online it's called TCC True Crime Communities,
there are private discord chats, there's a lot of social
media activity where people talk about school shootings, people talk
about mass shootings, people glorify the attacks by previous shooters.
(13:24):
And just last year for the first time, so there
was a fifteen year old girl who committed a surprise
attack inside another Christian school.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
In Madison, Wisconsin.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
So that was a surprise attack that started inside the classroom.
She opened fire and then killed herself before the first
police officer arrived. Two months later, in Nashville, at Antioch
High School, there was a seventeen year old and he
committed a surprise attack at the cafeteria during lunch and
also killed himself before the first police officer arrived. It
(13:57):
turns out they were both in the same discord true.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Crime community chat.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
They were having direct interactions with each other, and the
early evidence is that the shooter yesterday was also part
of that same.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
True crime community chat.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
And there are at least four other mass shootings that
were connected to that same discord group, three of which
were averted earlier this year, one targeting a government building
in Florida, another targeting government buildings in southern California. Yeah,
so it's not necessarily the act of the shooting that
would inspire the next person. It's more that there's a
(14:36):
community that can build and shape impressionable teams into eventually
becoming a shooter.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It seems like there's all of these conversations going on
where people are talking about this in the run up
to doing these things, and it doesn't seem like there's
enough eyeballs from you know, the people in charge watching
these conversations in the run up to this. I've got
some experience in that world too, so I want to
talk about this when we come back. That is coming
up next in the news junk Kie and make sure
(15:06):
you favorite that station. Make it a preset over on
the iHeartRadio app. We're talking with David Redman, who is
the top data guru guru of all things in the
world of school shootings. And we see something like we
saw this week with the Minnesota school shootings, there's a
lot of different things that happen. I get frustrated watching
afterwards where half of the people are like, he's on
(15:29):
your team, and the other half's like, no, he's on
your team, and everybody kind of sorts out what they
think the motive was.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
And then we move on and nothing happens. We don't
get anywhere.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
And I was trying to find some commonalities in my world,
and my world is I've for a long time operated
in some of these places on the Internet where a
lot of other people don't go. I've seen these places
where a lot of strange people congregate. And I tweeted
about this yesterday. This is what I wanted to ask
David about. So let me start with this, I said,
(16:00):
wondering where shooters come from yesterday on Twitter slash x
I said one of the biggest blind spots in modern
culture is that most normies have no idea where the
crazy people are radicalized. Most normal people, understandably still have
no idea what nine or order of nine Angels is.
They have never heard of seven sixty four, which is
another group most normal people haven't heard of. Kiwi Farms
(16:21):
much less skivity farms or the discords with many of
these deranged people come from. Maybe they've heard of four chan,
but eight kun is not on their radar. Most people
don't know there are hundreds, maybe thousands of very obscure
telegram channels where very disturbed people congregate. It sounds like
a different language to you, probably, but it never fails
that these shooters tend to come from these places. These
deranged people hatch in these shadow communities and unleash their
(16:44):
nihilistic worldview on convenient victims.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
There's a generational gap.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Here where those in charge have very little idea what's
happening online until the next shooting. So the idea here
is there are these communities. And it's not always the
case with these school shootings, but it is a lot
of times the case that there is these communities with
very very mentally ill people who are all sort of
you know, radicalizing each other. And it's hard to explain
(17:13):
to outsiders, David, but have you seen the stories about
this order of nine angles in seven six four?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
In those types of groups.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Yeah, there are numerous groups and places and websites and
discussion boards where people discuss a huge amount of violent content.
I think what's really important is that many of these
services have end to end encryption. Many of these services
are private chats that require an invite from somebody in
(17:42):
the chat room, and that's not something that a random
school official or random local police officer, or in many
cases even somebody in federal law enforcement is a going
to be able to find in a sea of thousands
or tens of thousands of different chats. But then you
can't break the encryption necessarily, or you can't get an invite,
(18:04):
or the servers are housed overseas, so there's no way
to subpoena or take any action. I think a really
good example of this is a shooting that didn't get
a lot of attention at the start of the year.
Was at Perry Middle and High School in Perry, Iowa,
a small community about forty miles outside of Des Moines,
and on the first day back from winter break, a
(18:26):
student went into the bathroom early before classes started, and
he got on the discord school massacre discussions and he chatted.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
With some people.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
He said, I'm finally going to do this. They said,
you've got this, You're going to do it. He took
a shotgun out of his bag, He took a pistol
out of his bag, He walked out into the hallway,
He killed the principal, He killed a fourteen year old student,
He wounded seven others, then he killed himself before an
alert even went out to the police. That discord chat
that he was in. Yeah, it's a predictable title. There
(18:58):
are many chats like that all over the place. You
can't get into it without an invite, and it would
be very, very hard for any sort of police officer
in this small, rural Iowa community to ever stumble across
these messages.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah, so it has.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
To be the parents and it has to be peers
that are going to notice something that nobody else.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Is going to know.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah, I mean the shooter in Minnesota was twenty three
years old. But I always find it's strange, like, is
it possible that there was nobody in this person's life
that saw that they were amassing weapons, that saw that
there was some sort of change in their behavior. Nobody
picked up on any of these things. It seems like
(19:44):
it would be something that if you were a parent
or a sibling or somebody that that would show up
on your radar. But in so many cases, the families
aren't that last stopping system to prevent this from happening
in these schools. They just don't seem to be good
at detecting this.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Well, that's only when it goes wrong.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
I have a paper that's under final review for publication
right now, where with another professor, we studied one hundred
and twenty five averted school shootings. Uh huh, so somebody
that had a plan, intent, and capability to carry out
an attack. And for the first time ever, on those
one hundred and twenty five cases, we mapped the pathway
for somebody to avert the shooting interest and we found
(20:27):
out that eighty five percent of the time it was
either a classmate or a family member that made the
tip to police that averted a very real attack from
taking place. And when you think about the numbers, you
know there's one or two kind of bad rampaid school
shootings every year. This is one hundred and twenty five
(20:49):
very very severe cases that were averted in the last
five years. So we're averting them at more than fifty times,
you know, the rate that one actually happened.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And then there's.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Lots of cases that get averted and there's never any
news about it. So people are being successful at stopping
these from happening.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
That's super interesting.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
You never think about the other side of the corner
there because it just doesn't it doesn't make waves, it
doesn't get the attention. I'm glad you're looking into that,
being that you have been, David. We're talking to David Reeman,
who is a guru all things school shooting data analysis.
You've got a very very very solid knowledge base of
(21:31):
the history of the United States and these school shootings.
If you were given ultimate power, do you think there
are some concrete things that would stop these stories from
coming up over and over again in the United States?
Or is it just one of those things It's like
a terrible fact of life that we have to deal
(21:51):
with now.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
It's absolutely not a terrible fact of life, especially because
it doesn't happen in other countries, and it doesn't happen
with equal distribution across the United States. When there are
the planned kind of rampage school attacks, they're most often
in small communities, small suburban or rural communities, and they're
(22:14):
most often in the Midwest and South.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
There's a study that we talked about in the.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
Last episode of my podcast, the Back to School Shootings Podcast,
which was a study of one hundred rampage attacks back
to the sixties, and the author of the study looked
at the family factors and the home environment of all
of these shooters. Ninety eight percent of these deliberately planned attacks,
(22:41):
the shooter had easy access to accessible guns in their
home ninety eight percent.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
That means the guns were.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Not locked, they were left available, they were left loaded.
We know from retail, we know from behavioral economics. If
you put a tiny bit of friction into anything, it
could be a supermarket where there's a long line.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
People will leave, People won't buy the thing that they
were meaning to buy.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Your cart on Amazon, won't check out, you never come
back for that item. Tiny bits of friction stop somebody
from doing things in their life. Yeah, So, if you
can just put a gun in a safe, have a
mandate if you have kids in the house, if you
have teens in the house, your gun has to be
kept in a safe that they don't know the code
to and they can't access. I believe that that could
(23:29):
prevent almost every school shooting from happening.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
What do you think about heavier punishment for parents, are
those in charge of these weapons when that does happen.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
That doesn't help the victims who've been killed.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
It's and there's across I studied criminal justice from my PhD,
and there's not a clear deterrent from harsh punishment.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
People are very bad at perceiving risk.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
I mean, that's the reason that somebody would leave, say
a loaded gun in the drawer of their bed room, even.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Though they have kids in the house.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
Well, they think it's high protectionihood in that incident is
that a young child is going to accidentally shoot one
of their siblings, or somebody is going to be shot
during a domestic dispute in the house.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
So people don't perceive risk.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
There's this one in a million chants of an armed
intruder coming into your house. But meanwhile, you know there
are the leading cause of death for children is firearms.
The majority of those are unintentional shootings.
Speaker 5 (24:27):
What do you think, David in You know, you've obviously
studied a lot of these things, and to the point
where you're seemingly you got this stuff locked in the brain,
pulling it out from memory. What do you think when
you look at all of the different rampaid shootings over
the years that you've studied and kind of compiled data
(24:48):
on is the most overlooked thing in the public eye
that they that they have in common.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
It's back to the lockdown drills and the school procedures
is the vast majority in the almost eighty percent of
school shootings are committed by either a current student or
a recently former student at the school. But with that
in mind, all of the discourse is around keeping an
outsider away from the school, but this is something committed
(25:17):
by somebody within the school community.
Speaker 5 (25:19):
With that in mind, with the idea of getting rid
of the lockdown drills because they're more sometimes more educational
than they are helpful. Do you, as a person who
publishes articles and content about this subject, have to second
guess yourself when you post like you mentioned the article
you posted after the Vegas shooting about like, here's a
(25:41):
list of places that you cannot run, hide and fight from.
And at any point before you hit publish on that article,
did you have to go, am I writing a list
of best places to shoot up?
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Yeah, Fortunately that's the double edged sword with his research.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing it.
We have that discussion around. I've done a podcast around
each manifesto from a school shooter. Huh when it comes out,
breaking it down and are you glorifying the person? Are
you giving their words an audience by doing that? You are,
(26:16):
but you're also giving every listener and insight into what
to look out for, what to watch out for, how
to change policies, how to potentially prevent the next attack.
I think back to Terrorism Post nine to eleven. Every
single book about terrorism, every single report about the Boston
(26:37):
marathon bombing is also a template for how to commit
a better bombing next time.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
There's no era.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
That doesn't mean that you don't do it.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
David.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
One last question for you. One of the things you
hear memewise over and over and over and over again.
Somebody mentioned this in chat was there's nothing we could
do about this, says the only major country in the
world where this happens over and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
When you see these school shootings.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Why does there unless that's some sort of misnomer and
of itself, why does there seem to be a real
American aspect to this whole school shooting phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Overall?
Speaker 4 (27:12):
I think it just comes down to the accessibility of
firearms and the accessibility of firearms to children, and that's
much different in other countries, in places where they are accessible.
There have been school shootings in Brazil and in Russia
and in the Eastern Bloc countries and a few in Europe,
but they don't have the same frequency because there's not
the same accessibility. And this is not to say that
(27:34):
people should not own guns. People can own, how for
many guns that they want, but have that gun in
a safe that no child or teenager in the house
can access.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to actually hear some
different perspective on all of this, and it seems like
a lot of that information doesn't break through.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Honestly.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
You just hear so many people with like their own
part is in arguments about this, and then they use
the terrible, terrible prop of kids that are dead in
a classroom, and then we don't seem to get anywhere.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
But when you actually get into the data.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Like you're doing, see this from a very very different perspective.
Are you hopeful that this is going to get better
or do you think it's going to get worse?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Overall?
Speaker 4 (28:21):
I'm hopeful because back to the study of averted shootings,
there are far more very serious situations where somebody has
a manifesto, has access to weapons, has made a plan,
and they're far more they get averted than actually take place.
And the last thing I'll leave your audience with is
there's two researchers that I work with in Minnesota, right
(28:44):
in the community where this happened, Jill Peterson and James
Densley from the Violence Project. They wrote a book where
they interviewed either in person or through letters or talk
to family members of convicted mass shooters, and they asked
each of them this same question, said, is there anyone
who could have stopped this shooting from happening? And they
(29:05):
got the same answer from every one of those mass shooters.
They all said, anyone could have stopped this shooting because
when somebody's spiraling down this path to crisis, these are
violent public suicides by somebody who thinks that they have
no purpose to live anymore, and everything that's wrong with
their life is based on that school, and the school
(29:26):
is there the source of every one of their problems.
So they want a violent public suicide in that school
if any person shows them kindness connects with them, tries
to connect them with resources.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
It completely breaks.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
That internal narrative that this is nothing but a place
of grievance and it just takes one little action to
take somebody off that path to violence.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Wow, very very interesting stuff. David, thank you for joining
us today. We appreciate you answering our questions. We'd love
to keep you on board for and when these stories
do pop up on the show.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It's always good to have people to go to, so
we'd love to keep you.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
On board when someone like this pops up, if God
forbid it does again.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Yeah, Unfortunately, this is an extraordinally depressing topic that I
work on every single day.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
How are you doing, man, Yeah, you're right, Okay.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Yeah, when these incidents do happen, it's the one opportunity
when the public pays attention.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
To make some sort of meaningful change.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
And if that means one person decides, you know what,
I'm going to take the gun from the dresser and
I'm going to put it in the safe, maybe that's
a life that's saved. If it's a person that reaches
out to that kid in crisis that you know, nobody's
talking to at school. Yeah, maybe that's the one act
of kindness that takes that kid off the pathway to violence.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
All right, well, we appreciate the time, David, Thank you
so much. And oh, by the way, where where could
people follow what work you're doing here?
Speaker 4 (30:50):
You can find me on substack the school Shooting Data
Analysis and Reports. You can also search k through twelve
School Shooting Database. It's the first thing that comes up
on Google. Thank you so much, David. We appreciate the
time in thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
All right, there he goes, see, I think it was
super useful, like to actually get somebody who knows that
much about all the data and takes all the things
that you've thought of your whole life, and it's twisting
on its head. It's like, wait, hold on, think about it.
From this perspective. You'll get these kind of messages out there,
very very helpful.
We've been watching What's happening in Minnesota played out during
the show yesterday actually another one of these school shootings,
and just horrible details. And at some point during the
show it was really hard to listen to that. It
was like a kid who was one of the victims
who was being interviewed on TV and you're listening to
it and you're like God, And the reporter even said
(00:21):
to this kid at one point something to the effect of, Hey,
how are you doing. You sound You sound okay considering
what happened today. And we were away to stream, like like, yeah,
this has not hit these kids yet. You can't even
imagine the horrors that these kids went through at the
school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So I started off the show
(00:43):
today and I said, I find this all to be
frustrating for a couple of reasons. One within my job,
I want to I want to tell you what's going on.
I want to try to explain to you these news stories.
And when it comes to school shooting stories, when it
comes to like this this attack, which is you know,
far too frequent, like we saw in Minneapolis at the
(01:05):
Annunciation Catholic School, people want a simple answer and often
they want an answer that just reverberates their priors, right.
They want the answer. They're like, I, here's what I
think about this. So yes, that's that's the one I
agree with. And that is why this and some of
these other recent shootings have been incredibly frustrating to me.
So I want to try to work this out a
(01:27):
little bit. And the guy that we've got with us
here is David.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Is it Readman? Am I saying your last name correctly? David?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Hang on, he's up?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Wait? Is it? I don't hear him? David?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
They are David? Okay, David Readman. Thank you? Now we
got you. David Is I'm gonna just call you like a.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Data guru and the world of as horrible as it sounds,
all things to do with school shootings and the like,
and I've seen your substack and all this stuff, but
can you just give everybody a little bit of a
rundown of how you're in this world?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah. I'm a professor at Idaho State University.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
I teach risk management and data analysis and emergency management.
My entire career was in homeland security and intelligence and
emergency services. And I was actually in a homeland security
think tank program sitting in a classroom when the Parkland
shooting happened.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Really and I had been to.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Dozens of briefings about the Boston marathon bombing where two
people died. There were seventeen people, seventeen kids dead at
this high school in Parkland, and I had never been
to any sort of homeland security planning briefing, exercise training,
or anything at the national level about a school shooting. Yeah,
so I was in this think tank program. I wanted
(02:43):
to know everything about the issue. And that's when I
created a database of every shooting I could find on
school property back to the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So you trace back all of these horrible incidents, you
put together what is like the pre eminent database of
all this information. And when you do that, you do
get some insights, certainly as to why is this happening,
Why does it seem to be a fairly American experience,
and a lot of very big questions that we try
to touch on at some point. But in this situation,
in particular, we have another student who leaves behind after
(03:17):
unthinkable horror on this school that was unleashed on these
poor kids. Another student that leaves are another shooter that
leaves behind like one of these manifestos, and everybody wants
a simple answer, like what was the motivation behind this person?
The reason why I said I was frustrated at the
start of the show today is because that is not
an easy answer With somebody like this particular shooter in Minneapolis,
(03:40):
they literally left the treasure trove of information for anybody
to glom onto, Like there was stuff about Jews, there
was stuff about hating Trump, there was transgender there was
all there's all sorts of things that are sort of
flung at the map in a manifesto like this, where
anybody can take from it what they want to, and
(04:00):
you sort of end up walking away with nothing, nothing
that you can fix.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
But did you look.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Through some of the stuff that's come out after this,
and what, if anything, did you take away from this person?
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Well, unfortunately, every time that this happens in terms of
a deliberate, planned attack at the school, it's essentially the
same situation that plays out over and over. People want
a really simple explanation. A simple explanation would be there's
a violent, scary, psychotic person, and if we can just
(04:34):
keep them away from the school, if we can just
have a stronger door and a bigger fence, then we
can keep this scary, deranged outsider away.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Unfortunately, the reality.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Of looking at shootings at schools, I've cataloged more than
three thousand back to the nineteen sixties. About two hundred
and thirty of those are a deliberately planned attack like yesterday,
with the intent to harm as many people as possible.
And this is where it becomes a very complicated issue.
They are almost always committed by current students or former
(05:07):
students at the school. So it's somebody who knows the
layout of the building, has been trained in the lockdown
drills or emergency procedures, They know what times students are
going to be in different places, and often if it's
a current student, they're allowed to be in the school.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
They are permitted to be there.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
If you have biometric monitoring or key cards or badges
or access control, they're allowed to be there in the school.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
So this becomes complicated because it is a person who's
intimately familiar with the building and has a strong connection
to it who almost always commits a school shooting, right.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Which makes them all the more dangerous When all that
information just falls in line.
Speaker 5 (05:50):
That sounds like a weird parallel to that revelation we
had not so long back when, like when we were kids,
everything was stranger danger, stranger danger, all the all of
your risk is coming from the outside, and it turns
out more family members or the problem. Like you're saying that,
like because they said, oh, we've spent all this money
protecting the school, We've spent all this money beefing up security,
(06:13):
but it doesn't matter because it's the ones that are
supposed to be here that are causing all the issues
and them shooting up the place.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, that's exactly the problem.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
I think it goes back to, Yeah, that same idea
in the eighties and nineties, you know, watch out for
the stranger in the white van.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Right, that's a really simple thing.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
Saying, you know, you actually need to watch out for
the strange uncle or the babysitter or the neighbor is
very inconvenient because there's not an easy way to deal
with that.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
It's the same way with schools.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
If you train somebody in the emergency procedures, the assumption
is that they are going to be somebody that you're protecting.
But in most cases, active shooter drills are actually a
tutorial and a rehearsal for how to commit a school shooting.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I was in charge of the Department of Education.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
If I was in charge of a school system, I
would never hold any sort of active shooter drill or
publicize any sort of emergency procedures, because you are giving
the person who's most likely to commit the shooting the
playbook for exactly how to.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Do it right, how the classroom is going to be
locked down, what the defensive mechanisms are in place. Again,
this is like Celin was saying, preparing for an outsider
versus an insider, and actually kind of giving away your
hands in so many cases.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Here and what was a little different yesterday was somebody
firing only from the exterior of the building. Looking at
those two hundred and thirty plant attacks back to the
nineteen sixties, about seventy five percent of the shootings begin
and end in the same room, which is another really
complicated concept. When you think about fortifying classrooms, having a
(07:52):
one way door, lock on the classroom door, maybe having
a ballistic chalkboard. If the shooting begins and ends in
the same room, all that you're doing is fortify in
the classroom against police from getting it right.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, then it becomes you're trapped in your own prison.
What we're gonna say, See, David.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
With all that you just said in mind about the
active shooter drills and saying that you would remove them
from schools, would you still recommend that they be done
with teachers and with adult staff. Uh to, So they
have a drill in mind and they have a plan
in mind and just don't tell the kids about it
because that actually makes the kids better for lack of
(08:30):
a better term, school shooters.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Absolutely, And this teachers can only have you know, really
cursory short training in the emergency procedures as well. If
you go to an arena, if you go to a
concert venue, if you go to a shopping mall, you
as as the visitor there or you as the occupant
and of a commercial building have never done the drills.
It's up to the staff that manages that facility to
(08:56):
direct you for what you're going to do during an emergency.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
So a thing with.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Across the security industry is you want to have more randomness,
less predictability, and more flexibility in the way that you
can respond to a variety of different types of emergencies,
and as soon as you have a prescribed plan, then
that gives your adversary an opportunity to start finding identifying
the weakest points in it.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, somebody on chat has an interesting point here, I
think are not on YouTube says there's a movie called
Run Hide Fight about this exact thing, and they go
into details about some of these stories. Now, just the
idea of run Hide Fight in terms of me watching
these stories over the years, you know, going way back
to Columbinen before that, that seems to be kind of
(09:46):
a new tact that some of these places are taking,
where they're telling the students like your life is on
the line, run, hide, fight, do whatever you can do,
but understand that this is a situation that deserves all
of the attention in the world, and anything you could
do in these situations, even fighting your way out, could
be important. Is that something that changed a lot, like
(10:07):
the strategy changed along the timeline somewhere.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
The first viral post that I ever wrote about this
topic was in twenty seventeen, and it was the morning
after the Las Vegas Harvest Festival shooting, and I was
actually sitting in a Department of Homeland Security office and
I was there early, and I just put out a
thousand or so word article on Medium. It was called
(10:32):
when you Can't Run, Hide, or Fight, because I was
looking at all the videos from Las Vegas and realizing
that you're at a large outdoor concert and somebody on
the fortieth floor is shooting at you.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah, you can't outrun the bullets.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
There's nowhere to hide, and there's no way for you
to fight somebody who's forty stories above you. And so
I broke down lots of different venues where those three options,
even though people were taught them, aren't viable. One of
them is a church where you have usually one door
in the back and all of the pews in front
(11:07):
of it. Another there's a large shopping mall with your
open areas. A movie theater like the Aurora Theater shooting.
There's not a scenario where you can be sitting in
the middle of the theater and you're going to run,
hide or fight from somebody firing a rifle at you
from in front of the screen.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
What's interesting is once.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
You go down the rabbit hole on this run, Hide,
Fight was created by a Hollywood production company that had
a grant from the City of Houston in two thousand
and eight to create a PSA. There has never been
an empirical study or research or anything about whether that
is the appropriate set of actions to take, modeling it
(11:48):
in different scenarios. The same with lockdowns. There's never been
empirical evidence that you save lives during a lockdown. Those
are just concepts that get socialized. They are very easy,
these slogans to verifying that stay in a lot.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, that's you know, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
That's kind of one of those things I've always talked
about this stuff where it's like, hey, we do these
things because we've always done these things, and when it
comes down to it, there's like no actual empirical evidence
that suggests these strategies are are useful or certainly in
the most recent case here, that it would have would
have done anything, which I think is just another log
in the fire of everything that makes these stories so frustrating.
(12:30):
One thing that I have seen, and tell me, you
know far more about the numbers on this than I
ever will, but one thing that I have seen down
the line, and so many of these stories that are
that are similar to the planned attacks like we just
saw at this school in Minnesota. Is that almost to
a person, they seem to have a fascination with other
(12:52):
mass shooters and a very very deep knowledge of other
mass shooters that then inspire them to do what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
Yeah, I'm working on an article about that right now.
Because in the online it's called TCC True Crime Communities,
there are private discord chats, there's a lot of social
media activity where people talk about school shootings, people talk
about mass shootings, people glorify the attacks by previous shooters.
(13:24):
And just last year for the first time, so there
was a fifteen year old girl who committed a surprise
attack inside another Christian school.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
In Madison, Wisconsin.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
So that was a surprise attack that started inside the classroom.
She opened fire and then killed herself before the first
police officer arrived. Two months later, in Nashville, at Antioch
High School, there was a seventeen year old and he
committed a surprise attack at the cafeteria during lunch and
also killed himself before the first police officer arrived. It
(13:57):
turns out they were both in the same discord true.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Crime community chat.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
They were having direct interactions with each other, and the
early evidence is that the shooter yesterday was also part
of that same.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
True crime community chat.
Speaker 4 (14:14):
And there are at least four other mass shootings that
were connected to that same discord group, three of which
were averted earlier this year, one targeting a government building
in Florida, another targeting government buildings in southern California. Yeah,
so it's not necessarily the act of the shooting that
would inspire the next person. It's more that there's a
(14:36):
community that can build and shape impressionable teams into eventually
becoming a shooter.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It seems like there's all of these conversations going on
where people are talking about this in the run up
to doing these things, and it doesn't seem like there's
enough eyeballs from you know, the people in charge watching
these conversations in the run up to this. I've got
some experience in that world too, so I want to
talk about this when we come back. That is coming
up next in the news junk Kie and make sure
(15:06):
you favorite that station. Make it a preset over on
the iHeartRadio app. We're talking with David Redman, who is
the top data guru guru of all things in the
world of school shootings. And we see something like we
saw this week with the Minnesota school shootings, there's a
lot of different things that happen. I get frustrated watching
afterwards where half of the people are like, he's on
(15:29):
your team, and the other half's like, no, he's on
your team, and everybody kind of sorts out what they
think the motive was.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
And then we move on and nothing happens. We don't
get anywhere.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
And I was trying to find some commonalities in my world,
and my world is I've for a long time operated
in some of these places on the Internet where a
lot of other people don't go. I've seen these places
where a lot of strange people congregate. And I tweeted
about this yesterday. This is what I wanted to ask
David about. So let me start with this, I said,
(16:00):
wondering where shooters come from yesterday on Twitter slash x
I said one of the biggest blind spots in modern
culture is that most normies have no idea where the
crazy people are radicalized. Most normal people, understandably still have
no idea what nine or order of nine Angels is.
They have never heard of seven sixty four, which is
another group most normal people haven't heard of. Kiwi Farms
(16:21):
much less skivity farms or the discords with many of
these deranged people come from. Maybe they've heard of four chan,
but eight kun is not on their radar. Most people
don't know there are hundreds, maybe thousands of very obscure
telegram channels where very disturbed people congregate. It sounds like
a different language to you, probably, but it never fails
that these shooters tend to come from these places. These
deranged people hatch in these shadow communities and unleash their
(16:44):
nihilistic worldview on convenient victims.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
There's a generational gap.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Here where those in charge have very little idea what's
happening online until the next shooting. So the idea here
is there are these communities. And it's not always the
case with these school shootings, but it is a lot
of times the case that there is these communities with
very very mentally ill people who are all sort of
you know, radicalizing each other. And it's hard to explain
(17:13):
to outsiders, David, but have you seen the stories about
this order of nine angles in seven six four?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
In those types of groups.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Yeah, there are numerous groups and places and websites and
discussion boards where people discuss a huge amount of violent content.
I think what's really important is that many of these
services have end to end encryption. Many of these services
are private chats that require an invite from somebody in
(17:42):
the chat room, and that's not something that a random
school official or random local police officer, or in many
cases even somebody in federal law enforcement is a going
to be able to find in a sea of thousands
or tens of thousands of different chats. But then you
can't break the encryption necessarily, or you can't get an invite,
(18:04):
or the servers are housed overseas, so there's no way
to subpoena or take any action. I think a really
good example of this is a shooting that didn't get
a lot of attention at the start of the year.
Was at Perry Middle and High School in Perry, Iowa,
a small community about forty miles outside of Des Moines,
and on the first day back from winter break, a
(18:26):
student went into the bathroom early before classes started, and
he got on the discord school massacre discussions and he chatted.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
With some people.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
He said, I'm finally going to do this. They said,
you've got this, You're going to do it. He took
a shotgun out of his bag, He took a pistol
out of his bag, He walked out into the hallway,
He killed the principal, He killed a fourteen year old student,
He wounded seven others, then he killed himself before an
alert even went out to the police. That discord chat
that he was in. Yeah, it's a predictable title. There
(18:58):
are many chats like that all over the place. You
can't get into it without an invite, and it would
be very, very hard for any sort of police officer
in this small, rural Iowa community to ever stumble across
these messages.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah, so it has.
Speaker 4 (19:14):
To be the parents and it has to be peers
that are going to notice something that nobody else.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Is going to know.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah, I mean the shooter in Minnesota was twenty three
years old. But I always find it's strange, like, is
it possible that there was nobody in this person's life
that saw that they were amassing weapons, that saw that
there was some sort of change in their behavior. Nobody
picked up on any of these things. It seems like
(19:44):
it would be something that if you were a parent
or a sibling or somebody that that would show up
on your radar. But in so many cases, the families
aren't that last stopping system to prevent this from happening
in these schools. They just don't seem to be good
at detecting this.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Well, that's only when it goes wrong.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
I have a paper that's under final review for publication
right now, where with another professor, we studied one hundred
and twenty five averted school shootings. Uh huh, so somebody
that had a plan, intent, and capability to carry out
an attack. And for the first time ever, on those
one hundred and twenty five cases, we mapped the pathway
for somebody to avert the shooting interest and we found
(20:27):
out that eighty five percent of the time it was
either a classmate or a family member that made the
tip to police that averted a very real attack from
taking place. And when you think about the numbers, you
know there's one or two kind of bad rampaid school
shootings every year. This is one hundred and twenty five
(20:49):
very very severe cases that were averted in the last
five years. So we're averting them at more than fifty times,
you know, the rate that one actually happened.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And then there's.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Lots of cases that get averted and there's never any
news about it. So people are being successful at stopping
these from happening.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
That's super interesting.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
You never think about the other side of the corner
there because it just doesn't it doesn't make waves, it
doesn't get the attention. I'm glad you're looking into that,
being that you have been, David. We're talking to David Reeman,
who is a guru all things school shooting data analysis.
You've got a very very very solid knowledge base of
(21:31):
the history of the United States and these school shootings.
If you were given ultimate power, do you think there
are some concrete things that would stop these stories from
coming up over and over again in the United States?
Or is it just one of those things It's like
a terrible fact of life that we have to deal
(21:51):
with now.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
It's absolutely not a terrible fact of life, especially because
it doesn't happen in other countries, and it doesn't happen
with equal distribution across the United States. When there are
the planned kind of rampage school attacks, they're most often
in small communities, small suburban or rural communities, and they're
(22:14):
most often in the Midwest and South.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
There's a study that we talked about in the.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
Last episode of my podcast, the Back to School Shootings Podcast,
which was a study of one hundred rampage attacks back
to the sixties, and the author of the study looked
at the family factors and the home environment of all
of these shooters. Ninety eight percent of these deliberately planned attacks,
(22:41):
the shooter had easy access to accessible guns in their
home ninety eight percent.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
That means the guns were.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Not locked, they were left available, they were left loaded.
We know from retail, we know from behavioral economics. If
you put a tiny bit of friction into anything, it
could be a supermarket where there's a long line.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
People will leave, People won't buy the thing that they
were meaning to buy.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Your cart on Amazon, won't check out, you never come
back for that item. Tiny bits of friction stop somebody
from doing things in their life. Yeah, So, if you
can just put a gun in a safe, have a
mandate if you have kids in the house, if you
have teens in the house, your gun has to be
kept in a safe that they don't know the code
to and they can't access. I believe that that could
(23:29):
prevent almost every school shooting from happening.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
What do you think about heavier punishment for parents, are
those in charge of these weapons when that does happen.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
That doesn't help the victims who've been killed.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
It's and there's across I studied criminal justice from my PhD,
and there's not a clear deterrent from harsh punishment.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
People are very bad at perceiving risk.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
I mean, that's the reason that somebody would leave, say
a loaded gun in the drawer of their bed room, even.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Though they have kids in the house.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
Well, they think it's high protectionihood in that incident is
that a young child is going to accidentally shoot one
of their siblings, or somebody is going to be shot
during a domestic dispute in the house.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
So people don't perceive risk.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
There's this one in a million chants of an armed
intruder coming into your house. But meanwhile, you know there
are the leading cause of death for children is firearms.
The majority of those are unintentional shootings.
Speaker 5 (24:27):
What do you think, David in You know, you've obviously
studied a lot of these things, and to the point
where you're seemingly you got this stuff locked in the brain,
pulling it out from memory. What do you think when
you look at all of the different rampaid shootings over
the years that you've studied and kind of compiled data
(24:48):
on is the most overlooked thing in the public eye
that they that they have in common.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
It's back to the lockdown drills and the school procedures
is the vast majority in the almost eighty percent of
school shootings are committed by either a current student or
a recently former student at the school. But with that
in mind, all of the discourse is around keeping an
outsider away from the school, but this is something committed
(25:17):
by somebody within the school community.
Speaker 5 (25:19):
With that in mind, with the idea of getting rid
of the lockdown drills because they're more sometimes more educational
than they are helpful. Do you, as a person who
publishes articles and content about this subject, have to second
guess yourself when you post like you mentioned the article
you posted after the Vegas shooting about like, here's a
(25:41):
list of places that you cannot run, hide and fight from.
And at any point before you hit publish on that article,
did you have to go, am I writing a list
of best places to shoot up?
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Yeah, Fortunately that's the double edged sword with his research.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing it.
We have that discussion around. I've done a podcast around
each manifesto from a school shooter. Huh when it comes out,
breaking it down and are you glorifying the person? Are
you giving their words an audience by doing that? You are,
(26:16):
but you're also giving every listener and insight into what
to look out for, what to watch out for, how
to change policies, how to potentially prevent the next attack.
I think back to Terrorism Post nine to eleven. Every
single book about terrorism, every single report about the Boston
(26:37):
marathon bombing is also a template for how to commit
a better bombing next time.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
There's no era.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
That doesn't mean that you don't do it.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
David.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
One last question for you. One of the things you
hear memewise over and over and over and over again.
Somebody mentioned this in chat was there's nothing we could
do about this, says the only major country in the
world where this happens over and over and over again.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
When you see these school shootings.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Why does there unless that's some sort of misnomer and
of itself, why does there seem to be a real
American aspect to this whole school shooting phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Overall?
Speaker 4 (27:12):
I think it just comes down to the accessibility of
firearms and the accessibility of firearms to children, and that's
much different in other countries, in places where they are accessible.
There have been school shootings in Brazil and in Russia
and in the Eastern Bloc countries and a few in Europe,
but they don't have the same frequency because there's not
the same accessibility. And this is not to say that
(27:34):
people should not own guns. People can own, how for
many guns that they want, but have that gun in
a safe that no child or teenager in the house
can access.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to actually hear some
different perspective on all of this, and it seems like
a lot of that information doesn't break through.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Honestly.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
You just hear so many people with like their own
part is in arguments about this, and then they use
the terrible, terrible prop of kids that are dead in
a classroom, and then we don't seem to get anywhere.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
But when you actually get into the data.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Like you're doing, see this from a very very different perspective.
Are you hopeful that this is going to get better
or do you think it's going to get worse?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Overall?
Speaker 4 (28:21):
I'm hopeful because back to the study of averted shootings,
there are far more very serious situations where somebody has
a manifesto, has access to weapons, has made a plan,
and they're far more they get averted than actually take place.
And the last thing I'll leave your audience with is
there's two researchers that I work with in Minnesota, right
(28:44):
in the community where this happened, Jill Peterson and James
Densley from the Violence Project. They wrote a book where
they interviewed either in person or through letters or talk
to family members of convicted mass shooters, and they asked
each of them this same question, said, is there anyone
who could have stopped this shooting from happening? And they
(29:05):
got the same answer from every one of those mass shooters.
They all said, anyone could have stopped this shooting because
when somebody's spiraling down this path to crisis, these are
violent public suicides by somebody who thinks that they have
no purpose to live anymore, and everything that's wrong with
their life is based on that school, and the school
(29:26):
is there the source of every one of their problems.
So they want a violent public suicide in that school
if any person shows them kindness connects with them, tries
to connect them with resources.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
It completely breaks.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
That internal narrative that this is nothing but a place
of grievance and it just takes one little action to
take somebody off that path to violence.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Wow, very very interesting stuff. David, thank you for joining
us today. We appreciate you answering our questions. We'd love
to keep you on board for and when these stories
do pop up on the show.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It's always good to have people to go to, so
we'd love to keep you.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
On board when someone like this pops up, if God
forbid it does again.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Yeah, Unfortunately, this is an extraordinally depressing topic that I
work on every single day.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
How are you doing, man, Yeah, you're right, Okay.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Yeah, when these incidents do happen, it's the one opportunity
when the public pays attention.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
To make some sort of meaningful change.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
And if that means one person decides, you know what,
I'm going to take the gun from the dresser and
I'm going to put it in the safe, maybe that's
a life that's saved. If it's a person that reaches
out to that kid in crisis that you know, nobody's
talking to at school. Yeah, maybe that's the one act
of kindness that takes that kid off the pathway to violence.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
All right, well, we appreciate the time, David, Thank you
so much. And oh, by the way, where where could
people follow what work you're doing here?
Speaker 4 (30:50):
You can find me on substack the school Shooting Data
Analysis and Reports. You can also search k through twelve
School Shooting Database. It's the first thing that comes up
on Google. Thank you so much, David. We appreciate the
time in thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
All right, there he goes, see, I think it was
super useful, like to actually get somebody who knows that
much about all the data and takes all the things
that you've thought of your whole life, and it's twisting
on its head. It's like, wait, hold on, think about it.
From this perspective. You'll get these kind of messages out there,
very very helpful.
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