Hello friends, welcome. Delighted that you're joining me today, I have a guest that I know

you need to hear from. All Americans need to hear about the work of the violence project.

How to stop mass shootings. I'm chatting with Jillian Peterson. I'm just going to give you a little

content warning that we are going to be talking about things like mass shootings. And so this may not

be the most appropriate topic for small children, but parents, you for sure need to listen to this.

I'm Sharon McBan and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

I'm very excited to be joined by Jillian Peterson today who has written a book that I know many of

you are going to find very, very helpful and interesting. And she is one of the lead researchers

in this field of mass shootings that America is absolutely plagued by. Thank you so much for being

here today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I know that so many people are going to benefit

from hearing from you, benefit from your book. I would love to have you just tell everybody a little

bit more about yourself and how you became interested in studying this topic. Sure. So before I

was an academic, I was actually an investigator. I worked for the New York City Capital Defender's

Office, which is the public defender's office for death penalty cases. And it was my job to put

together what we called the psychosocial life histories of people that were facing the death penalty

in New York City. So I spent my days on Rikers Island talking to people who had committed these

heinous murders trying to figure out what their pathway to violence looked like. And with all of those

stories, you could just see if something had happened at this point or at this point or at this point,

things might have turned out really differently. So that became my passion. And I went to get my PhD

in psychology. And then I got into this mass shooting work about five or six years ago when I realized

the problem was we didn't understand the pathway to violence for the perpetrators that were

doing this. It just felt like this terrifying phenomenon that was increasing, that was becoming

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