Warning signs in Uvalde

A Mother Jones journalist makes the case for covering instances of school gun violence through a prevention-focused ‘threat assessment’ lens. But he says that’s not mostly what’s been happening in the past week.

By Alexander Russo

Mark Follman’s new book TRIGGER POINTS delves deeply into mass shootings at schools and in other places, noting myths and misconceptions and highlighting some promising approaches to preventing them.

In the following interview, Follman shares his belief that it’s important to give more attention to a relatively new kind of gun violence prevention called threat assessment.

The approach has been questioned in in The Intercept, Searchlight New Mexico, and The Oregonian. However, Follman makes the case that it can be enormously effective if it’s done well — and can help ensure that media coverage of school gun violence doesn’t unintentionally convey that the challenges are unsolvable and hopeless.

“A lot of media coverage has again focused on themes of outrage and resignation,” says Follman about the past week’s Uvalde school shooting coverage. “But I think this narrative has actually become part of the problem.”

This interview has been edited lightly.

Read more commentary and reflection about how news outlets depict schools.

Above: Mark Follman’s new book, Trigger Points

When it comes to school gun violence, what’s the role and responsibility of media?

MF: It is crucial to understand that shooter-focused news coverage and social media content do not cause a person to commit violence, nor is there scientific evidence that graphically violent video games, movies, or music do. In the world of behavioral threat assessment, the more useful way to think about influences from media and entertainment is to recognize their possible association with warning behaviors — as potential additional clues to an individual heading down a dangerous path.

Based on your research and writing, do you think a threat prevention system would have made a difference in the recent Buffalo, New York, grocery store shooting?

MF: In some ways, this appears to be a textbook case where a threat assessment protocol could have potentially done a lot to disrupt this developing plan for violence. That’s always easier to see in hindsight, and leaders in the field of threat assessment will be the first to acknowledge that. But we already know there was a long period in which this shooter was developing his violent ideation, was planning for an attack, and was communicating about it online and in comments he made while he was still in high school. So all of that taken together strongly suggests that threat assessment could have been very useful, had some of those warning signs been heeded and had information been shared with people in a position to try to intervene constructively.

What are the key patterns you see in the media coverage of the Uvalde tragedy so far?

MF: The catastrophic failure by law enforcement in responding at the scene of the ongoing massacre has become a big story, and rightly so. Getting to the bottom of what happened there is crucial. But I think there’s also some risk of that becoming too much of the focus — along with the familiar political arguments and outrage over inaction by Congress — at the expense of another crucial question: How is it that an 18-year-old with a history of deeply disturbing behaviors gains access to powerful firearms and signals his plans for an attack, without any effective response? Threat assessment research makes clear that disasters like these, as with so many others, can potentially be prevented.

A lot of media coverage has again focused on themes of outrage and resignation, as if this problem is essentially unsolvable and hopeless. That speaks to the deep anger and frustration over gun politics that so many Americans feel as we face the profound trauma of children being massacred in Uvalde. But as I wrote late last week, I think this narrative has actually become part of the problem itself—and may even be fueling some mass shooters, who seek validation for their acts.

A lot of media coverage [of Uvalde] has again focused on themes of outrage and resignation. – Follman

Above: Bethany Barnes’ 2018 The Oregonian piece, Targeted

Threat assessment is a controversial approach that has been questioned in several recent pieces. What should education reporters look for in determining the quality or value of a district threat assessment program?

MF: Oversight and accountability are important. I think the bar for doing this work well is relatively high, and vital to that is building community awareness, engagement, and trust in good and fair case outcomes. That goes to concerns about civil liberties, privacy, and stigma, and may be especially sensitive in terms of trust in law enforcement’s role. This approach isn’t intended to be about policing schools, though. The collaborative work of threat assessment teams seeks to be constructive, not punitive.

Perhaps that’s easier said than done, but I’ve found in my research that the risks of not having this kind of prevention work in place may be the more pertinent focus. Look no further than the recent tragedy at Oxford High School in Michigan — which was a disaster that very well could have been prevented, in my view. This is true with many such tragedies over the years. In the book, I document this at length with the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, where there was a catastrophic lack of information-sharing among authorities about the perpetrator.

What are the best examples of school-based threat assessment efforts that journalists and educators can look to in order to see what’s possible?

MF: One of the pioneers of this model in a K-12 system is in Salem, Oregon. The Salem-Keizer district built a threat assessment program in the aftermath of Columbine, and it’s become a leading model, with multiple stakeholders focused on creating constructive interventions and opportunities for at-risk students or students who are behaving in ways that are raising concerns. Virginia has a well-known model, and a lot of this work is going on in Colorado, including in the district that’s home to Columbine. Threat assessment as a policy is growing and is now required in a handful of states for public school systems.

What are the states where threat assessment is required in schools, in some form or another?

MF: Nobody is tracking it in a centralized way, as far as I know, but there are at least nine states now, with a surge after Parkland. But approaches differ and I’m not aware that there’s model legislation yet. Virginia was the first state to require threat assessment in 2008, first for postsecondary institutions after Virginia Tech, and later expanded the requirement to all public schools in Virginia. Other states include Illinois, Connecticut, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. But in some cases the policy is broadly defined, and it’s left essentially up to school systems to figure out how to go about building protocols or programs.

The Salem-Keizer district built a threat assessment program in the aftermath of Columbine, and it’s become a leading model. – Follman

Above: Searchlight New Mexico featured the downsides of threat assessment for kids with disabilities.

Why is it your view that it is important to name the shooter, which some news outlets no longer do?

MF: It’s important to identify the alleged shooter and to provide context on how he acted. Not only on the crime committed, but also on what led up to it. That’s crucial for understanding how to prevent more attacks of this kind and is the core focus of threat assessment work. That being said, I have long argued that this must be done with a careful balance because it’s also important that the perpetrators of these attacks aren’t given excessive or sensationalized attention. Many of them are seeking notoriety and infamy. Yet, there is also a big problem with misinformation, and there have been past cases where the wrong people have been identified as mass attackers. So the argument for a total blackout for shooters is not only unrealistic but also isn’t in the public interest.

There is understandable resistance among education beat journalists to getting pulled into what are essentially crime stories. What’s your view of the value of having education reporters involved in covering stories like this? What can they do — or what should they not do?

MF: This is a difficult and complicated subject matter. But we know that school shootings have been a rising problem for years, and the safety and well-being of students is paramount, so therefore, there would seem to be a strong case for engagement with this subject matter. And the Buffalo case is a particularly interesting and I think stark example of the potential to make progress on prevention work, because we know that there was this incident in June 2021 in which the alleged shooter made threatening comments while still in high school. That seems a strong indication of what potentially could have been done in terms of earlier intervention. Reporting on this particular problem and what a school system can or can’t do about it is an area of importance, in my view.

Clear-eyed reporting can cast essential light on how and why people commit these attacks, while intentionally shrinking the frame around the offenders. – Follman

Above: Rachel Cohen wrote about the internal debate over threat assessment.

What do you say to those who say that reporting on pre-event protocols and actions gives false exoneration to gun control laws and other more direct measures? Do you feel like covering what did or didn’t happen at the school is putting too much focus or responsibility on schools or mental health providers?

MF: It’s essential to acknowledge that the risk of planned violence of this nature is not solely a problem for schools to handle, nor is it solely a problem for parents, local police, or any other community agency or institution. From the perspective of threat assessment and its multidisciplinary approach, this is a community problem with broadly distributed responsibility. Everyone has a stake in dealing with this danger. Creating better connections between students and adults is particularly key — that was one of the core findings of the Safe School Initiative, the landmark research on this problem that was published in the wake of Columbine.

What can news outlets do better going forward in school gun violence scenarios?

MF: The influence of sensational news attention on mass shooters suggests a unique opportunity for the media to contribute to prevention. A more prudent approach is one that I call “strategic diminishment.” Clear-eyed reporting can cast essential light on how and why people commit these attacks, while intentionally shrinking the frame around the offenders. Because many perpetrators behave with an expectation of gaining notoriety, altering the scale and tone of coverage might help diminish some plotters’ motivation and the overall copycat effect.

Previously from The Grade

The limits of ‘threat assessment’
School shootings, gun violence, & student trauma coverage
‘If you need to cry, cry.’ 6 education reporters’ advice on covering school shootings
What really happened before the Oxford shooting started?
Botched coverage of the Columbine school shooting
Why gun violence journalism needs graphic images
The problem with Parkland