"Inside the Race to Stop the Next Mass Shooter" is a great article in Mother Jones. I urge everyone to read it; there is hope for this horrible problem.
Mass murder is not an impulsive crime—and therein lies the promise of threat assessment.
Since the Jared Loughner rampage killing in Tucson, AZ which killed six people and nearly killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, I've examined the details of several rampage killings, as I'm sure many of you have. There is a definite pattern and commonalities with these killings, and I've wondered why communities and law enforcement have not been doing more to preempt at least some of them.
It turns out law enforcement is making the effort; called threat assessment, and:
As gun rampages have increased, so have security efforts at public venues of all kinds, and threat assessment teams can now be found everywhere from school districts and college campuses to corporate headquarters and theme parks. Behind the scenes, the federal government has ramped up its threat assessment efforts: Behavioral Analysis Unit 2, a little-known FBI team based in Quantico, Virginia, now marshals more than a dozen specialists in security and psychology from across five federal agencies to assist local authorities who seek help in heading off would-be killers. Those calls have been flooding in: Since 2012, the FBI unit has taken on more than 400 cases.
In December 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Simons' FBI unit had helped prevent almost 150 attacks in one year. The nearly two dozen experts I spoke with didn't like to be so definitive, noting that it's impossible to prove a negative. But many cited cases in which they believed threat assessment teams had prevented great harm. Sergeant Jeff Dunn, who leads the Los Angeles Police Department's Threat Management Unit, described a firefighting recruit who became enraged when he failed out of the academy. "He told another recruit, 'When they fire me, I'm gonna come back here and fucking massacre everyone.'" Academy officials alerted the LAPD, and Dunn's unit got a search warrant for the recruit's home. "This guy was absolutely geared to go to war," Dunn said. His arsenal included nearly a dozen semi-automatic handguns and assault rifles and a homemade explosive device. "Had there not been an intervention of some sort," Dunn said—in this case, an arrest on a felony weapons charge—"I have no doubt that it would've resulted in an active-shooter scenario."
I think this puts to rest the notion "nothing can be done to stop rampage killings".
http://www.motherjones.com/...