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tell them. welcome to. the show. running in sammy who elementary america six years ago.

striving youngsters to take up arms and why do tragedies like this continue to happen i guess today's dr peter landesman psychologist and author of the books school shooters and why kids. of school shootings is bleeding in america with school kids and college students having to adapt to constant danger and random senseless messages becoming less with every attack what happens in the mind of someone who decides to find a role. can tragedies like sandy hook can. never be prevented and what will it take to cure the us of this sporadic lethal disease. dr peter langman psychologist and author of the book school shooters and why kids kill welcome to the show it's really great to have you with us. so dr lang when a teen was worst year on record for school shootings was becoming more frequent

deadly can we say school shootings in america are on the rise and was a cost for that well it's hard to say for sure. the federal data the official counts tend to be a couple years behind but certainly it is a serious problem whether or not it's gone up in recent years or is just holding steady we certainly do have serious concerns about these attacks. so jessie osborne the perpetrator of the twenty sixteen school shootings in south carolina admitted that he wanted to be adam lanza the attacker at the sandy hook elementary in two thousand and twelve for the number of victims is the scale and carnage of school shootings going to go up because now we know they're trying to upstage each other. you know sometimes shooters are looking at previous attackers and as in the

case with jessie osborne very aware of how many fatalities there were and sometimes they want to exceed that number other shooters though have no particular connection to previous shooters they're just acting out their own anguish or rage and it's not related to other attackers there's no role modeling or imitation going on so i think we have to be careful about putting all school shooters into the same category not all of them are following in the footsteps of a previous shooter not all of them are doing it just to become famous or to have a higher number of fatalities what is the main reason behind why what do you think moderates them or is there something that they all have in common i mean besides the fact that they're probably mentally disturbed well there's you know three different types of school shooters that i've identified in my research one type is the psychopathic personality who's very narcissistic lacks empathy and is very

intitled second type is the psychotic school shooter and these are the people with major mental illness such as schizophrenia so they may be having hallucinations and delusions and the third type is what i call the traumatized school shooters and these are the children from chronic and severely dysfunctional and violent homes so even though they all may end up committing the same type of act how they got there and why they're doing it is very different so again we have to be careful about looking for a single profile or putting them all in one category you know there is an idea out there that the media should name the shooter when covering attacks could that help . you know there is a movement among some media outlets to minimize the amount of attention they give to the perpetrator and this can be either not naming them or naming them very infrequently as well as not showing photographs of them because some shooters do

cite previous shooters and apparently take them as role models the idea is to minimize the attention on the perpetrators and to focus more on the community the survivors the victims. attempt to you know recover from the tragedy and also use that as an opportunity to educate people about warning signs and preventing future acts of violence rather than focusing so much on the perpetrator you once compared school shootings with acts of terror are terrorist like those who are responsible for let's say but a clown in paris mentally disturbed in the same way as american school shooters the first two types that you cite it. you know when you talk about terrorists even there there's different types there's those who are affiliated with an organization and then there's what we call either lone wolf terrorists or extremists who are

acting on their own so even there it's hard to make generalizations because there's different types of terrorists committing different types of attacks for different reasons when you're looking at more the individual nonaffiliated terrorist based on the research i've done there are some similarities with those who commit school shootings so i do think there is some overlap. our school shootings i mean different in nature from the mass shootings in open spaces like the one in vegas at the concert and i think mass shootings in other settings often are similar to school shootings when we learn about the perpetrators and we don't always learn much about the perpetrators but when we do get significant information they often seem to fall into the categories that i've identified for school shooters particularly psychopathic shooters or the psychotic shooters so we've seen

mass shootings in other settings in schools committed by people who do seem to fall into either the psychopathic or the psychotic types so some of these guys you describe the guy from finland then bravely from norway claimed political reasons for their actions should pay too much attention to the political side of things or are they just triggered for add messed up mind prone to violence. you know when you're looking at someone like breivik in norway he claimed to have political motivation and yet when you study him as a person he had a long history of some very unusual characteristics and i think there was more going on than simply a political rebellion against the government i do think there were some major psychological issues personality issues and breivik so in most cases the shooter's some information hints and they're at their intentions on social media was we had

that is this mere bragging or a disguised cry for help you know what's called leakage when they leak their intentions thinks different forms and they have different reasons in some cases they're clearly bragging to people either friends of theirs or putting it online essentially bragging to the world about what they're going to do and other cases though they may share their intentions with a few friends to warn them to stay away so that their friends don't get hurt in the attack so the motivation there is obviously very different sometimes they leak their intentions to try to get a friend to join them in the attacks so again it's a different motivation different reason i don't know that they're ever doing it as a cry for help because sometimes when their friends take them seriously enough to ask if they really mean it what they're saying about their attack they will pass it off as a joke and do their best to keep their friends from being concerned so it doesn't

seem like they're really looking for someone to stop so well fret flaccid people keep an eye out for if not a direct warning about an imminent attack. you know often the red flags the warning signs are very obvious people will announce what they're going to do they will put it in writing on a web page on social media they'll share it with their friends it will be very explicit sometimes that they're going to commit an act of violence other times it's not as obvious you may simply see them really obsessed with the previous school shooting or particular killer they may really dwell on violence and acts of violence to. an extraordinary degree they may be obsessed with guns and other weapons that could be less explicit but still very concerning warning signs so how do you tell a real threat from just one from someone just full iran in line. one

thing to look for is the presence of what's called attack related behavior in other words are they taking steps to make the attack a reality lots of people may threaten things when they're angry or joke around them committing an attack they may even fantasize about it but if they're not actually taking steps to make it a reality then it's not presenting as an imminent threat but when people are gathering guns or bombs when they're diagramming the school to decide you know we're entrance to go in or where to shoot from when they're gathering the materials and planning the attack at that point it's not just an idea or a fantasy it's becoming a reality so one of the important things to look for is attack related behavior you say there is no common profile for shooters and they're not by any means homogenous group now some schools are trying to use artificial intelligence to scout out red

flags and students online behavior especially when it comes to social media can artificial intelligence be the answer to prevention are there patterns for detection. i wouldn't say artificial intelligence is the answer can be part of the answer it can certainly contribute to keeping schools safe because as we were saying there's often a lot of warning signs sometimes they show up in social media so if you have software that can detect certain key words or phrases that can alert someone at the school or in the police department to look further into the case maybe to interview the student in question maybe talk to the students friends so it's not the answer but it's part of the answer because so often as we said there is some form of leakage and often that does show up online. so let's say a school has identified

a student who shows some troubling signs whether it's something they posted on facebook or obsessing over the guns and knives and the student is then refer to you what would be your next steps a psychologist how are such cases investigated. ok well ideally the school would investigated itself by having a threat assessment team within the school or within the local school district so there may be a psychologist on that team what they would be looking for is evidence of attack related behavior it would be talking to the student about whatever warning signs came to their attention but they wouldn't stop there they would also talk to the students teachers to see if he is handed in any homework assignments that might raise red flags they could talk to friends of his to see if they've heard any leakage they could look on his computer to see if there's any evidence of an impending attack there and they could also talk to his parents to see if there's

firearms in the house if they have any concerns if they are found any warning signs in the way woods or no or other things at the home so a threat assessment is really a comprehensive investigation looking for any evidence of danger are going to take a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to peter black men dr peter langley psychologist and author of the books school shooters and why kids kill can discuss the psychology of school shooters stay with us. more of my guide to financial survival this is

a device used by professional scallywags to earn money. that's right these hedge funds are simply not accountable and will just. totally destabilize the global economy. you need to protect yourself and get in for god's guys or for. prosecution only to be criminals in. a softball designed to take on where you question the threat you'll find. by the number one place you do i mean yeah i mean i mean political pressure on a god you've concluded to security genocide knows when to pull your bundled up business models used by american corporations doubtless wason completely is sold on good mental disease as you use the controls on the scene and the solution. lies up in association. i noted when he saw swindle as it is just

simply his ability to maintain an investigative documentary. ghost war on oxy. join me every thursday on the alex simon show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

we're back here in the studio with dr piro lang one psychologist and author of the books of school shooters and why kids kill delving into the mind of the school shooter so dr langland you said that punishment is not the best option for students demonstrating well and tendencies since it can see all the students and so does and hartman and so how should schools treat potential shooters that they have identified. the concern about using punishment such as suspending the student for maybe two or three days or expelling the student from the school is that if that's all you're doing you're not doing an investigation so you don't really know

what the risk is and simply trying to get the student out of your school doesn't prevent a bad student from coming back the same day and the next day a week later or even a month later and committing an act of violence so if your concern is a potential school shooting simply suspending or expelling the student is not really solving the problem you might not even though the depths of the problem if you don't also do an in-depth threat assessment that doesn't mean that you would never suspend or expel a student but if you don't do the threat assessment and find out if there really is a danger then you're not preventing the student from committing the attack so it's not really solving any problem. so when you person school shooters do you feel you have managed to prevent a few tragedies have top some of them out of committing atrocities. you know i

worked with potential school shooters for a period of twelve years and none of the students who we worked with in our facility facility ever went on to commit a school shooting so that gives me hope that if you catch the students early enough and provide the kind of support and mental health treatment that they need that they can come out of the crisis and move on with their lives without committing the act of violence that came to people's attention and got them the help in the first place so i do think that mental health intervention keeping the kid safe can make a difference and they can go on with their lives so the current generation of students have grown up in a world of mass shootings like columbine becoming part of life i mean i have on your q. and a on school shootings and newsweek filed under culture. so is this an. undeniable part of culture now in america in the schools now are routinely doing various

drills just in the same way that we've been doing fire drills you know for a long long time now so in some ways safety drills are just part of the culture. the public's fascination with school shooters are part of this same culture is obsessing over serial killers or outlaws life bonnie and clyde what's with this strange attitude towards violence because it's definitely there. you know there's certainly a lot of interest if not fascination with perpetrators of violence especially when it involves children so i think that's why school shootings get more attention than other types of violence after all school shootings account for maybe one tenth of one percent of the homicides in the united states but because they involve children they get. extreme portion of attention in terms of media coverage and

people's concern i see one of your works you know that school shootings are not easily correlate it with high gun ownership in and even districts even though they were they were mainly something out of order because so many local teens with easy gun access don't go for it do you mean to say that school shootings are largely not a gun control issue really does that what is it because if they didn't have any guns none of this would happen. and i think it's more of an issue when you're talking about the juvenile perpetrators usually they're getting their guns from their own homes so the parents or legal firearm owners it's really a matter of educating the public to do a better job of securing their firearms in the home because in over ninety percent of the cases that i've studied the juveniles are simply getting guns from family members so it's not so much about the same thing the firearm laws as getting people

to do a better job of securing their firearms how does the politics surrounding a school shooting in fact investigation and the measures taken away because immediately it's all becoming about background checks to second amendment republicans democrats white black does this help deal with the shooting itself. if i understand the question then i would say no. when it comes to school safety schools are doing all kinds of things to improve the safety in their schools educating people about warning signs and implementing programs to get the students to report safety concerns and so on the politics. don't necessarily really touch on what's actually being done day in and day out at our schools now you sad the media coverage in the media aftermath of a not out of an incident is often far from accurate and when things become more

clear the journalists on the public have already moved on to other stories so how informed is the public about the issue in your view i think there's certainly a lot of misinformation or lack of information about school shooters it's a very complex topic and obviously most people are not researchers who specialize in doing in-depth analysis so most people probably have a fairly basic understanding and that probably includes some mistaken ideas about school shooters because it is very complicated there's no simple answers or conclusions and it's hard to get across to the public as a whole let's talk complex this phenomenon is he said there is a complex connection between violence in media and school shooting on the one hand and most people who play g.t.a. or call of duty don't tend to go and shoot people in real life afterwards but on the other hand shooters tend to get obsessed with such things and they see it as

legitimizing violence and as a subject for imitation so do you think there's a case to be made for reconsidering how violence is culturally represented so to say. i certainly think we have to look at what our kids are doing in that maybe more parenting issue than any other kind of issue. it's hard to draw a clear line between media violence and violence because the vast majority of people who watch a violent movie or play a video game never pick up a gun and kill anybody so there may be some connection in rare cases where people are already on the path of violence but generally speaking seeing or playing a game that involves violence does not lead to violence since school shootings have given birth to a campus security and or see worth almost three billion at this point in this

facial recognition gun to action systems will prove doris pepper spray guns for disabling the shooters you name it i mean they got it all so in your personal view can all this stop someone from carrying out an attack you know just to be clear i'm a psychologist i'm not a law enforcement officer i don't do emergency response a lot of the things you're citing are about intervening during an attack to minimize the damage that's an important field but that's a totally different field than what i'm involved with as a psychologist right so here's a psychological question for you after this february florida school shooting present for stadio of arming teachers from a psychological point of view if the perpetrator is determined to stage a massacre in the classroom while the presence of an armed teacher stop him from doing that. no i don't think it will because in many cases the shooters intended

in their attacks whether by shooting themselves or being gunned down by a police officer or other armed individual so i don't think the presence of someone armed at the school would be a deterrent school shootings have occurred where there have been armed guards in fact at columbine there was an armed security guard clearly that was not a deterrent. how do you think the presence of a gun will affect atmosphere in the classroom do you think students will feel more secure that the mere presence of a gun can night a caress of behavior from either the teacher carrying it or his students know different students might react differently currently many schools have what we call school resource officers who carry a firearm in the schools but these are trained police officers who are also trained . into acting with the students and building relationships and so on and generally

their presence i think is seen as a positive one in the schools. so do you believe this kind of thing can be rooted out completely ever is that from your professional experience possible. you know i don't know that we can never rooted out we can certainly do our best to minimize these attacks as we've been talking about through educating people about the warning signs and developing threat assessment systems and other technologies and so on that might identify potential perpetrators or stop them before they can carry out their attacks dr langman thank you for this interview it's been great to have you on the show we're talking to dr peter langman psychologist and author of the books school shooters and why kids kill about the psychology behind mass school shootings that's it for this is the. next time.

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