The Violence Project Quotes

“it’s especially hard to change a conspiracy theorist’s mind, because their theories are “self-sealing,” in that even absence of evidence for the theory becomes evidence for the theory. That is, the reason there’s no proof of the conspiracy, the thinking goes, is because the conspirators did such a good job of covering it up.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Free expression is necessary for a peaceful society, but when we create spectacles out of tragic situations, we inadvertently signal that mass murder is an effective means of communication.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“A gun and the will to murder are two of the purest forms of temporary, situational power.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“In addition to preparing for a mass shooting, teachers, staff, and students are well placed to start preventing them. They do this by building warm and trusting environments that encourage reporting and by instituting crisis teams that can respond quickly and appropriately to a student at risk with care and compassion rather than punishment. This takes a shift in our thinking about what school violence prevention and public safety look like. It’s not metal detectors and bulletproof doors. It’s noticing when children and young people are struggling and then giving them what they need to thrive.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“[The biologist Richard] Dawkins defined memes as ideas that spread from brain to brain—a cultural analogue to genes that replicate and spread. The concept is mostly used now to describe funny or irreverent images that go viral online and then are altered to keep the joke or idea alive as it ricochets around the internet. But in a digital age, when attackers can upload their own words and deeds to social media rather than relying on TV to achieve notoriety, it has a darker connotation….Mass shooters are unique only in that they don’t want to live in the glory of their newly achieved social status and visibility. They want notoriety, to become legends in their deaths.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“What can we do to reconnect the disconnected to our community? We can’t brush off brokenness.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Mass shooters without a history of childhood trauma more commonly experienced significant trauma as an adult. They were more likely to commit mass shootings at restaurants, retail establishments, workplaces, and other public locations than at schools or colleges, which equally implies that their will to murder came later in life.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Untreated childhood trauma can cause permanent damage, but even if a traumatic experience itself cannot be undone, early detection can largely resolve its impact, because children are resilient.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“our data on 133 completed and attempted school mass shootings over the past forty years show that there were no differences in the number of people killed or injured between schools that regularly ran lockdown drills and those that didn’t. The number of casualties in school mass shootings has remained relatively steady over the past forty years, while our attempts at security have become more time-consuming, costly, and elaborate. In fact, evidence suggests that active shooter drills may do more harm than good.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic:

As Individuals:
Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people
Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention
Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption
Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something.

As Institutions:
Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening
Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff
Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children
Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems

As a Society:
Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education
Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools
Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content
Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“If someone says they are thinking about suicide, there’s no need to panic. We don’t have to try to talk them out of it. We don’t have to try to solve it. We need only remain calm and listen. Truly, deeply listen. Ask what’s going on, and keep the person talking. Pose open-ended questions—questions that cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”—and speak without judgment, again focusing on feelings.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Like CPR, crisis intervention is a skill anyone can learn—you don’t have to be a doctor or psychologist. And, like CPR, crisis intervention can save people’s lives. If a person in crisis is a balloon ready to pop, think of crisis intervention as the art of letting a little bit of the air out.

Step 1: De-escalate yourself.
Step 2: De-escalate the space around you.
Step 3: Use nonverbal communication.
Step 4: Actively listen.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“The No Notoriety protocol asks the media to minimize use of a perpetrator’s name, especially in headlines, to a few constrained circumstances and to avoid gratuitous details about the killer’s biography and belief system—“Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them, but Report Everything Else,” as the title of one academic article explains. Still, critics argue that No Notoriety undermines “the public’s right to know” and to be fully informed about critical incidents.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“70 percent of the time psychosis played no role in a mass shooting, meaning the shooter had no history of experiencing delusions or hallucinations either before or during the shooting. In other words, the data do not support blaming mass shootings exclusively on serious mental illness, as President Trump did. Doing so not only risks stigmatizing the millions of Americans who are affected by serious mental illness each year; it also misses other explanations and motiving factors.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“We’ll never know if something as simple as a positive relationship with an adult could have turned around the lives of the mass shooters in our study, but we know the majority of them had no one to turn to.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“The vast majority of mass shooters signal their intentions in advance, which is easy to see with hindsight but difficult to appreciate at the time.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Our data show that mass shooters don’t just snap, acting violently out of the blue. There’s a slow build over time, with air being added to the balloon little by little. Small failures and indignations add up, so the crisis is more than the sum of its parts. For some mass shooters, the final blow is a major loss, such as having their wives leave them, or being kicked out of school or the military. For others, it’s something smaller, like failing a class, being rejected by peers or coworkers, or experiencing paranoia that eventually becomes unbearable. For mass shooters, no matter the cause, reaching this crisis point makes them violently angry and hopeless that things will ever change.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Eighty percent of all mass shooters in our database were in a state of crisis in the minutes, hours, days, or weeks prior to committing their shootings.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“nearly 70 percent of school mass shooters had a known history of childhood trauma. Perpetrators with a history of childhood trauma killed significantly more people than shooters without trauma”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“A mass shooting is a matter of restoration: Although they are the ones who raise the gun and pull the trigger, mass shooters very often see themselves as the victims; they feel some great injustice has been done to them. Retired senior FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole describes mass shooters as “wound” or “injustice collectors,” people who stew in their anger. They never forget, never forgive, and never let go, nursing resentment over real or perceived injustices until, eventually, they strike back.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“When American men lose their jobs, they lose more than their income; they lose their sense of self. It cuts to the core. In America, we admire winners, and winning in America is counted in dollars and social standing. A series of humbling cultural and economic shifts has left some of the long-standing winners in American society feeling humiliated and victimized, unsure of exactly where they fit in, longing to win again.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Michael Kimmel suggests that the relationship between violence and masculinity is particularly acute among the group he labels “angry white men,” because they can no longer “do” gender in traditional ways, such as economically providing for their households.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“for mass shooters in our database, murder was rarely their first violent act—63 percent had a previous violent history. Over a quarter of our sample, 28 percent, had a history of domestic violence, with engaging in physical or sexual violence and coercive control against their wives and families as a precursor to committing a public mass shooting.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“96 percent of all homicides, and this extends to mass shootings—98 percent of mass shooters are male. The reasons men commit ten times more violence than women, both in America and around the world, are many and could fill an additional book.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what [the sociologist Michael] Kimmel calls “aggrieved entitlement,” a sense that those benefits that they believed were their due have been snatched away from them.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Mass shootings are not an inevitable fact of American life; they’re preventable. Mass shooters are people who can be stopped before they do monstrous things.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“For many perpetrators, this is a suicidal crisis. The rise in mass shootings in the United States over the past decade maps onto the dramatic rise among white men of “deaths of despair”—deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related conditions.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic