Book Review: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America (2022). Mark Follman.

By now, after decades of horrifying mass shootings across the United States, in schools, malls, grocery stores, post offices, concerts, movie theaters and anywhere else that groups of people gather, most people have probably lost all hope that we will ever get this problem under control.

Particularly with the perpetual political deadlock and partisan divides on the issue of gun control, mass gun violence in our country seems to be an intractable problem from hell, with no realistic solutions available to stop the killing, and seemingly no one really trying to do anything useful.

Mark Follman’s new book, Trigger Points, provides a refreshing bit of relief from our weary and jaded view of this grim situation, along with many new insights into the nature of the problem. His topic is the field and study of threat assessment, a discipline that can be applied to many different behaviors and real-world situations, but in this case has to do with those experts in law enforcement, psychology, and education who have quietly and slowly begun to piece together a set of tools for identifying those at risk of committing attacks and finding constructive ways to head off or prevent those attacks before they happen.

In the process of telling the history of the small groups and individuals who have done the research and developed theories and practices for application in differing situations, we learn many interesting details of the research data and conclusions of the experts, which often contradict popular beliefs about mass gun violence and its perpetrators.

Some of the most important and surprising revelations in the book have to do with the popular but mistaken beliefs about the categories of people who commit these terrible violent acts. For example, it is widely believed that the perpetrators are almost all young white men, but in fact there have been many men across the entire spectrum of races and ethnic backgrounds, as well as a few women, who have carried out these kinds of mass attacks.

Another widespread but wrong belief is that all these murderous individuals are “mentally ill”. While many or most of them undoubtedly are coping with issues of depression, domestic neglect or abuse, self-loathing and suicidal ideation, only a fraction of these disturbed individuals who commit mass attacks have previous diagnoses of major mental illness. And many of them are leading lives that from the outside appear "normal", while holding down jobs, attending school or otherwise appearing to function in society.

A third misleading and useless popular belief, according to the author and the research, is that there is a useful “profile” of the mass killer that can be used to easily identify who is a likely potential mass murderer. Instead, what the threat assessment researchers have found is that there is a process, a life path followed by the individual, which has common features across many cases, and which can be recognized and interrupted with suitable interventions.

It would be easy to belittle this research, and the experts who have been developing this field of threat assessment, by pointing to the many cases of mass gun violence that continue to occur. The counter argument to that skepticism is the number of cases that have already been prevented by threat assessment experts and teams, and the lives that have already been saved, which the author spotlights from little-known case histories. As bad as it is, it could be worse.

What becomes clear from Follman’s account is the fact that these techniques and insights, developed from extensive research over the past fifty years (including extensive interviews of surviving mass killers), are not yet widely known outside the small expert community. The point is that they should be known, and the techniques and science behind it more widely shared.

Where there are existing threat assessment programs in place, combining the expertise of law enforcement, school officials, HR representatives, and others to help intervene and assist people headed down the road toward mass violence, there have been many successes. It was interesting to learn that the state of Oregon, and now Washington, are among the leading areas in the country for threat assessment programs. We need more of these programs, and many more people trained to recognize and report the common symptoms of troubled people preparing for violent acts in time for interventions to take place.

There will never be a way of anticipating every mass casualty attack, and as the author acknowledges, the number of deaths in mass gun violence events pales beside the ordinary daily toll of gun-related murder and suicide. There is no perfect solution. But in this book, we see sensible, research-based methods of heading off many of the worst gun massacres in our society, and saving the lives of victims and even sometimes the perpetrators.

It is also encouraging to hear the message that even with the huge numbers of guns in our population, the ease of acquiring them and our inability to put effective limits on access to guns due to political hyper-partisanship on this issue, there are still things we can do to improve our situation and lower the risk.

This is an important myth-busting expose’ on a confounding problem which is practically never out of our headlines anymore. It offers hope, insight, an inspiring tale of a few dedicated researchers and activists on a long mission to find effective solutions, and a plan for how we might begin to stem the tide of mass gun violence in our country. Highly recommended.