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What Next - The Mass Shooter Database

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Business, News, Society & Culture

3.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2023

⏱️ 28 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. 


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Transcript

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1:04.4

Jillian Peterson oversees the grimest Excel spreadsheet you can imagine.

1:09.0

She's a criminologist. Her database tries to make sense of mass shootings. It does that,

1:14.6

column by column, breaking down a shooter's biography into neat piles. There are the basics,

1:21.7

name, age, gender. But also what Jillian calls known predictors of violence.

1:28.6

So things like, did you have an interesting guns? What was your family like growing up?

1:33.9

How well did you do in school? Did you have a job? Were you married?

1:36.9

Do you want to know how much a mass shooter weighed? How tall they are? It's all here. Jillian's

1:42.9

database will tell you that 30% of mass shooters had a diagnosis of psychosis, and then only four of

1:49.1

them were women. Jillian visits with shooters and their families, too, relentlessly updating her

1:56.4

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

2:03.8

at last cut, I want to say 189 different pieces of information. I thought of Jillian in January,

...

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