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What Next | Daily News and Analysis

The Mass Shooter Database

What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Slate

News, Daily News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why does someone become a mass shooter? Researchers are interviewing perpetrators and their victims—and those who narrowly averted committing a mass shooting—and discovering a common thread of psychological despair. Can their work be applied to the prevention of future violence? Guest: Jillian Peterson, forensic psychologist, violence researcher, and author of The Violence Project. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Amicus—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:46.4

Jillian Peterson oversees the grimest Excel spreadsheet you can imagine. She's a

0:51.6

criminologist. Her database tries to make sense of mass shootings. It does

0:56.3

that column by column, breaking down a shooter's biography into neat piles.

1:01.8

There are the basics name age gender. But also what Jillian calls known

1:08.6

predictors of violence. So things like, did you have an interesting guns? What

1:14.0

was your family like growing up? How well did you do in school? Did you have a

1:17.6

job? Do you want to know how much a mass shooter weighed? How tall they are?

1:22.8

It's all here. Jillian's database will tell you that 30% of mass shooters had a

1:28.4

diagnosis of psychosis and then only four of them were women. Jillian visits

1:34.6

with shooters and their families too were lentlessly updating her work. She's

1:39.9

tracked every shooting of four or more people since 1966. It's now up to

1:45.8

Alaska. I want to say 189 different pieces of information. I thought of Jillian

1:52.0

in January after shooters struck twice in one week in California. I wanted her

...

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