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 gonna 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 McMahon 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 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 investigator I worked for the New York City

Capitol 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

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