Is There Anything We Can Do to Prevent Mass Shootings?

Incidents like the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting -- and the Portland, OR mall shooting, and the Aurora, CO movie theater shooting -- can leave many of us feeling helpless. They can make us wonder if prevention is ever possible. Do we even bother trying?

• School shooters and other mass shooters typically don't "just snap." Instead, they usually plan their attacks in advance, for weeks, months, or even years. This planning behavior is often observed by, and causes concern to, those around them. If we can uncover someone's plans for attack, we can often stop them before they do harm.

Based on findings from our research on school shootings, we created a model for school threat assessment that guides school personnel and law enforcement on how to seek out and pull together information -- to determine if an individual is planning to engage in violence and to identify the best ways to prevent it. Threat assessment is a process that is widely used in various federal law enforcement agencies to prevent attacks on the President and other public officials. It is the same model that numerous state task forces and national associations recommended for colleges and universities following the Virginia Tech shooting. And most recently, threat assessment was the process recommended by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Predicting Violent Behavior -- convened following the Fort Hood shooting -- as the best tool currently available for preventing targeted attacks from within the military.

While debates over gun control and access to quality mental health care will undoubtedly continue, there are other things we can do in the short term to help prevent mass violence in our schools and communities. The recent mass shootings in public locales -- at the Aurora movie theater, Portland mall, and even Sandy Hook elementary school -- suggest that creating community-based threat assessment processes could address a broad array of threats from within the community more generally (in addition to the teams already in place in some schools, colleges, and workplaces). Developing and training these teams or units could be initiated at the federal, state, or local level, under models previously used to provide school threat assessment training and campus threat assessment training. Training could even be sponsored by some corporate good citizens that are concerned about safety in their communities. In the longer term, a commission on mass violence like the one suggested by Sens. Lieberman and McCain would help our country get a better handle on the larger policy issues that could reduce mass violence. Prevention is possible -- both now and later.

Dr. Randazzo is the former Chief Research Psychologist for the U.S. Secret Service, where she co-directed the largest federal study of school shootings. She is co-author of several books on targeted violence, threat assessment, and violence prevention.