This book tackles the important question of how we can understand and learn from the school rampage killings that have been prevented. In the flood of recent accounts and analyses of deadly school rampage killings that plague society and inspire widespread public fear, very little attention has been given to the incidents that almost were. Building on Madfis’ previous book, The Risk of School Rampage: Assessing and Preventing Threats of School Violence (2014), this vital work addresses key gaps in school violence scholarship through the examination of averted school rampage incidents in the United States and advances existing knowledge through ground-breaking insights from the latest research on mass murder, violence prevention, bystander intervention, disciplinary policy, and threat assessment in school contexts. This empirical study utilizes in-depth interviews conducted with school and police officials (administrators, counselors, security guards, police officers, and teachers) directly involved in averting potential school rampages to explore the processes by which threats are assessed and school rampage plots are thwarted. Madfis finds that many common contemporary school violence prevention policies and practices are ineffective at preventing rampage attacks and may actually increase the likelihood of their occurrence. Rather than uncritically adopting such problematic approaches, Madfis argues that schools must model prevention practices upon what has proven successful in averting potentially deadly incidents.

Ten years after the school massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, school shootings are a new and alarming epidemic. While sociologists have attributed the trigger of violence to peer pressure, such as bullying and social isolation, prominent psychologist Peter Langman, argues here that psychological causes are responsible. Drawing on 20 years of clinical experience, Langman offers surprising reasons for why some teens become violent. Langman divides shooters into three categories, and he discusses the role of personality, trauma, and psychosis among school shooters. From examining the material evidence of notorious school shooters at Columbine and Virginia Tech to addressing the mental states of the violent youths he treats, Langman shows how to identify early signs of homicide-prone youth and what preventive measures educators, parents and communities can take to protect themselves from the tragedy.

“An urgent read that illuminates real possibility for change.” —John Carreyrou, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood For the first time, a story about the specialized teams of forensic psychologists, FBI agents, and other experts who are successfully stopping mass shootings—a hopeful, myth-busting narrative built on new details of infamous attacks, never-before-told accounts from perpetrators and survivors, and real-time immersion in confidential threat cases, casting a whole new light on how to solve an ongoing national crisis. It’s time to go beyond all the thoughts and prayers, misguided blame on mental illness, and dug-in disputes over the Second Amendment. Through meticulous reporting and panoramic storytelling, award-winning journalist Mark Follman chronicles the decades-long search for identifiable profiles of mass shooters and brings readers inside a groundbreaking method for preventing devastating attacks. The emerging field of behavioral threat assessment, with its synergy of mental health and law enforcement expertise, focuses on circumstances and behaviors leading up to planned acts of violence—warning signs that offer a chance for constructive intervention before it’s too late. Beginning with the pioneering study in the late 1970s of “criminally insane” assassins and the stalking behaviors discovered after the murder of John Lennon and the shooting of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Follman traces how the field of behavioral threat assessment first grew out of Secret Service investigations and FBI serial-killer hunting. Soon to be revolutionized after the tragedies at Columbine and Virginia Tech, and expanded further after Sandy Hook and Parkland, the method is used increasingly today to thwart attacks brewing within American communities. As Follman examines threat-assessment work throughout the country, he goes inside the FBI’s elite Behavioral Analysis Unit and immerses in an Oregon school district’s innovative violence-prevention program, the first such comprehensive system to prioritize helping kids and avoid relying on punitive measures. With its focus squarely on progress, the story delves into consequential tragedies and others averted, revealing the dangers of cultural misunderstanding and media sensationalism along the way. Ultimately, Follman shows how the nation could adopt the techniques of behavioral threat assessment more broadly, with powerful potential to save lives. Eight years in the making, Trigger Points illuminates a way forward at a time when the failure to prevent mass shootings has never been more costly—and the prospects for stopping them never more promising.

The shooting at Columbine High School riveted national attention on violence in the nation's schools. This dramatic example signaled an implicit and growing fear that these events would continue to occurâ€"and even escalate in scale and severity. How do we make sense of the tragedy of a school shooting or even draw objective conclusions from these incidents? Deadly Lessons is the outcome of the National Research Council's unique effort to glean lessons from six case studies of lethal student violence. These are powerful stories of parents and teachers and troubled youths, presenting the tragic complexity of the young shooter's social and personal circumstances in rich detail. The cases point to possible causes of violence and suggest where interventions may be most effective. Readers will come away with a better understanding of the potential threat, how violence might be prevented, and how healing might be promoted in affected communities. For each case study, Deadly Lessons relates events leading up to the violence, provides quotes from personal interviews about the incident, and explores the impact on the community. The case studies center on: Two separate incidents in East New York in which three students were killed and a teacher was seriously wounded. A shooting on the south side of Chicago in which one youth was killed and two wounded. A shooting into a prayer group at a Kentucky high school in which three students were killed. The killing of four students and a teacher and the wounding of 10 others at an Arkansas middle school. The shooting of a popular science teacher by a teenager in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. A suspected copycat of Columbine in which six students were wounded in Georgia. For everyone who puzzles over these terrible incidents, Deadly Lessons offers a fresh perspective on the most fundamental of questions: Why?

Ten years in the works, a masterpiece of reportage, this is the definitive account of the Columbine massacre, its aftermath, and its significance, from the acclaimed journalist who followed the story from the outset. "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . ." So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year. What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors. Expanded with a New Epilogue

Adam Lankford looks at the motivation of suicide bombers and other rampage killers.

"Groundbreaking." ―Rachel Louise Snyder, bestselling author of No Visible Bruises An examination of the phenomenon of mass shootings in America and an urgent call to implement evidence-based strategies to stop these tragedies Winner of the 2022 Minnesota Book Award Using data from the writers’ groundbreaking research on mass shooters, including first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, The Violence Project charts new pathways to prevention and innovative ways to stop the social contagion of violence. Frustrated by reactionary policy conversations that never seemed to convert into meaningful action, special investigator and psychologist Jill Peterson and sociologist James Densley built The Violence Project, the first comprehensive database of mass shooters. Their goal was to establish the root causes of mass shootings and figure out how to stop them by examining hundreds of data points in the life histories of more than 170 mass shooters—from their childhood and adolescence to their mental health and motives. They’ve also interviewed the living perpetrators of mass shootings and people who knew them, shooting survivors, victims’ families, first responders, and leading experts to gain a comprehensive firsthand understanding of the real stories behind them, rather than the sensationalized media narratives that too often prevail. For the first time, instead of offering thoughts and prayers for the victims of these crimes, Peterson and Densley share their data-driven solutions for exactly what we must do, at the individual level, in our communities, and as a country, to put an end to these tragedies that have defined our modern era.

Any murder causes pain and suffering that ripple through families and communities—of both the victims and the perpetrators—but premeditated murders cause the worst kind of damage. The Allure of Premeditated Murder is about the worst kinds of premeditated homicide in which the perpetrator plans an attack over a period of days, weeks, or months, leaving behind massive carnage and unspeakable suffering. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with murderers, sociologists Jack Levin and Julie B. Wiest help readers understand why such vicious murders occur and what we can do to minimize their incidence. Throughout the book, theyexamine why people engage in acts of premeditated murder—planning and implementing terrible violence against others—from the perpetrator’s viewpoint. By juxtaposing the motivations for these hideous homicides against everyday social circumstances, these often-baffling crimes are explained in an easy-to-understand manner that paves the way for promising solutions. In the process of examining the characteristics of premeditated murder, the book also addresses those questions that are commonly asked about this kind of violent crime but usually unanswered. How could a killer have enjoyed his murderous rampage when he committed suicide right afterward? Why do sadistic killers sometimes regard their murders as great accomplishments? What can be done to effectively reduce the likelihood of this kind of homicide? As violence remains such a prominent and troubling topic nationwide, The Allure of Premeditated Murder successfully explores the reasons behind the worst violence as well as the most promising solutions.

School Rampage Shootings and Other Youth Disturbances creates a framework for understanding and preventing the likelihood of rampage violence, related forms of school-based aggression, and other internalizing and externalizing problems and disorders. The materials on the downloadable resources lay out exercises and targeted tactics that

This lofty volume analyzes a circular cultural relationship: not only how trauma is reflected in cultural processes and products, but also how trauma itself acts as a critical shaper of literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, and religion and mythmaking. The political power of trauma is seen through US, Israeli, and Japanese art forms as they reflect varied roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness. Traumatic complexities are traced from spirituality to movement, philosophy to trauma theory. And essays on authors such as Kafka, Plath, and Cormac McCarthy examine how narrative can blur the boundaries of personal and collective experience. Among the topics covered: Television: a traumatic culture. From Hiroshima to Fukushima: comics and animation as subversive agents of memory in Japan. The death of the witness in the era of testimony: Primo Levi and Georges Perec. Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and the possibility of writing a traumatic history of religion. Placing collective trauma within its social context: the case of the 9/11 attacks. Killing the killer: rampage and gun rights as a syndrome. This volume appeals to multiple readerships including researchers and clinicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and media researchers.