The Violence Project
Page 17
In chapter 4, we wrote that someone in a suicidal crisis is like a balloon full to bursting—the goal is to let a little air out. Study after study finds that putting even the smallest obstacle between people and the means to kill themselves can do precisely that. The natural gas and the blister packs slowed things down. Firearms, however, the most common means of suicide in the United States and other countries where guns are prevalent, speed things up. They are fast and lethally efficient (resulting in death 85 percent of the time)7 and leave little room for a change of heart or a lifesaving intervention.
Switzerland, like the United States, has a well-established gun culture. It boasts one of the highest rates of firearm ownership in the world—about one-third of all Swiss households owns a gun. That’s because Switzerland has compulsory military service. The famous “Swiss Army” is a well-regulated militia with every able-bodied Swiss man between the ages of eighteen and forty-three expected to serve. Each conscript is issued a personal service rifle, which they keep at home. They have regular drills. And when soldiers complete their service, they have the option to purchase their military-issued rifle from the government at a discount. Many do so because Switzerland has a strong tradition of sport shooting and hunting.
Compared with other European nations, Switzerland also has a remarkably high number of firearm-enabled suicides, about 40 percent of which are committed with army weapons.8 At least, until 2003. That was the year Switzerland introduced new reforms (titled “Army XXI”) and civil service as an option for people who didn’t want to serve in the armed forces. It was the closest thing to a national randomized controlled trial you could get. As a result of the reform, the number of troops was halved over the period of one year, from approximately four hundred thousand to two hundred thousand. That meant far fewer people with access to guns at home. It also meant far fewer suicides, specifically suicides by shooting.9
A 2010 study of the Israeli army found that requiring soldiers to leave their weapons on base over the weekend, as opposed to bringing them home, reduced the suicide rate among troops by almost 40 percent.10 So, there was precedent for this, but in Switzerland, the change was so abrupt that Swiss psychiatrist Thomas Reisch and his colleagues couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They ran the numbers and discovered that the drop in suicides was clustered among people between the ages of eighteen and forty-three—the same group that would have been serving in the military before the 2003 reforms.11 And in a direct challenge to the talking point that if someone is intent on suicide but doesn’t have a gun, they will find another way, Reisch found that 78 percent of the men who would have taken their lives with a gun did not substitute another method of suicide, such as poison or hanging. He observed comparable reductions in suicides after the installation of safety nets and access barriers that prevent people from jumping from bridges, similarly with little or no substitution effect or displacement to other bridges.12
From gas ovens to pill bottles to military arms to bridges, it turns out that reducing access to certain lethal means of suicide can have a dramatic effect on suicide rates. The implication is that if people can’t get their hands on the easiest tools to harm themselves, there will be fewer deaths.
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Simon Osamoh, a former police detective specializing in counterterrorism and security director at the Mall of America, in Minnesota, is a sought-after national trainer on church security. Like James, Osamoh is British, and the two of them first met not long after arriving in the United States, when a mutual friend clocked their accents and decided they could use their good old-fashioned humor to help each other survive the isolation of the harsh Minnesota winters. Osamoh is a huge believer in situational crime prevention, but he focuses more on its softer side. For example, reducing provocations. This is especially important in restaurants and bars and places of commerce and worship, where long lines or poor customer service could tip an already disgruntled visitor over the edge.
For years, Osamoh has trained ushers and greeters at churches—or anyone customer-facing, for that matter—in the subtle art of conversation. He explains his philosophy: “Walk into any Great Clips hair salon in America, and someone at the front desk will ask, ‘What brings you here today?’ The answer is obvious—a haircut. But the question gets people talking. It opens up a dialogue.”
Dialogue is important, Osamoh argues, because it allows someone to begin to probe for verbal and nonverbal cues of harmful intent or actions incongruous with the space. He uses the 2015 Charleston church shooting as an example. “A white supremacist walks into a Bible study at a historically black church, carrying a bagful of guns and ammo, and not one person greeted him to ask what he was doing there.” Osamoh is incredulous. “He sat in the parking lot and then in the building for nearly an hour. No one thought, Wait a minute. He looks lost or out of place.” Osamoh notes that when the FBI questioned the shooter, he said he was surprised by that and that “if someone had approached him that day, he might not have gone through with the crime. In fact, he’d been casing schools and shopping malls beforehand but had decided on the church because it was the softest target—there was no security.”
Osamoh acknowledges that this can sound like victim blaming, especially when churches should be welcoming and nonjudgmental places, but he was referencing the fact that three months before the shooting, security officers at a shopping mall in Columbia, South Carolina, found the Charleston shooter asking employees at two stores unusual questions about staffing and operating hours. He was banned from the mall for a year. Security followed up by dropping off a flyer displaying the shooter’s picture with each of the mall’s tenants. Tenants were told to be on alert and to call security if they saw the young man in the mall again. When he was spotted at the facility a month later, he was charged with trespassing and placed on a new, three-year ban.
Osamoh explains that situational crime prevention is about being proactive and prepared for the worst. “You don’t leave your car unlocked with the engine running, so why would you leave the church door wide-open with no one watching the entrance?” He explains that the methodology is not about profiling people or creating a hostile space—in fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s about making sure everyone feels seen, which reduces anonymity, a risk factor for violence. It’s also about making sure people feel heard, which de-escalates tensions.
It takes courage to confront a stranger proactively and ask them how they’re doing, Osamoh says, which is why this sort of behavior-detection approach is more commonly deployed by trained professionals at airports and concert venues, locations where security screening is expected. Osamoh wants to change that. He believes that, with good training, anyone could be more situationally aware. He quotes the famous “Moscow Rules” for CIA operatives: “Never go against your gut; it is your operational antenna. If it feels wrong, it is wrong.”
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Situational crime prevention helps us understand why mass shooters target one space over another.13 Our data show that shooters target certain sites if they are identified with or representative of a specific grievance—the school or workplace, for example. Shooters target iconic or symbolic sites like churches and military bases for similar reasons but also to send a wider message to society. They also target sites they know certain people frequent. The routine of religious adherence means that an estranged husband knows where his wife and children will be on a Sunday morning, and a disgruntled worker knows when he can confront his boss outside office hours. The 2019 El Paso shooter even drove eleven hours to a border community from his hometown near Dallas, Texas, to fire at shoppers inside a Walmart. Most of the twenty-three people killed that day were Latinx. The shooter confessed to police that he was targeting Mexicans, and in a statement he had posted to the online message board 8chan, he called the Walmart attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
The site of Perpetrator A’s shooting, an Italian restaurant, “wasn’t his first choice,” explained Marco, the business
manager of a site where, nearly thirty years ago, four people were killed and six others were injured. His “first choice” was the steak house down the road, but it was so busy that night that Perpetrator A couldn’t find a parking spot. So, instead, he visited the nearby Italian eatery, Mario’s. Perpetrator A targeted Mario’s in part because it was familiar—it was well-known and only a mile from home. It was also easier—more accessible and less protected than other sites, like the grocery store across the street with an off-duty cop working security. Mario’s was also busy that warm summer evening, and occupied sites have more potential victims in them than other targets.
We were lucky to meet Marco. For obvious reasons, we tended to book our interviews weeks, sometimes months in advance. We also tended to schedule them with plenty of breathing room afterward, because the interviews often got heavy, and we needed the time and space to process and decompress. As working parents, however, whenever we travel, we also tend to over-schedule ourselves in an effort to get done in three days what should really take four, so we can get back home to our kids. And so it was, one summer, when we were traveling in the South and an interview we had scheduled about a different mass shooting, at a college, got canceled. We looked at the time and made a quick decision to drive an hour south to eat lunch at Mario’s, on the off chance that someone there might remember the tragedy that took place nearly thirty years before.
Pushed for time between interviewees, we arrived at the restaurant rather frazzled because Jill was pulled over for speeding en route—our upgraded sporty rental car drove faster than she was accustomed to. We were also second-guessing our choice the entire journey down, fearing that we’d come off as morbid mass shooting tourists from Minnesota or would retraumatize someone by showing up out of the blue.
We were seated in a corner booth, and as we ordered our lunch, we told the young waitress about our research. (Looking back now, we see it was not our finest elevator pitch.) But she took pity on us. “I bet I could get Marco,” she replied. Marco shows up around the same time as our Caesar salads. He sits down and pours himself a sparkling water into a wineglass and garnishes it with a lemon slice. He’s Greek, with olive skin, distinguished but casually dressed in a loose-fitting T-shirt and shorts. “Pardon my appearance; I’m just here for lunch,” he says. Within minutes we can see that Marco is a pillar of the community. He knows everybody’s name, and they all know his. Patrons stop by to shake hands, and he talks to each and every one of them in a way that makes them feel like they’re the only person in the room. He talks to us that way, too, for nearly two hours.
Marco remembers the night of the shooting as if it were yesterday. He has the date committed to memory. There were about thirty people in the restaurant that night, he says. He had just finished his shift and was sitting at a booth, eating dinner with his wife and her parents, the restaurant’s beloved owners, who had lived in the community for fifty-four years and had introduced pizza to the town. At approximately 10:15 P.M., he says, he heard gunshots outside. (He knew they were gunshots and not firecrackers because he had served in the Greek military before moving to the United States for graduate school.) He peered out a side window to see Perpetrator A outside armed with two shotguns, a rifle, and a bag of ammunition. Marco rushed to the kitchen to lock the back door, but before he could reach it, Perpetrator A had pushed it open from the outside. Marco retreated into the restaurant and told everyone to get out. It was then that Perpetrator A shot and killed the cook.
Marco’s wife and in-laws dived under their table. Marco remembers seeing his wife cling to the table leg for dear life. Perpetrator A kicked open the saloon-style doors that separated the kitchen from the main dining room “like something out of an old Western,” and Marco escaped out the front door. A few hours before the shooting, Perpetrator A had watched a revisionist Western film. He told us via letter:
I was drinking along with Clint Eastwood in “Unforgiven.” I had peeled the label from my bottle and knocked the plastic from the cork so that my bottle looked just like the whiskey bottle that Clint was drinking from.
Marco fled right into the arms of an off-duty police officer who had heard the shots and had run across the street from the grocery store where he was moonlighting. They heard more shots, nineteen in total. Marco wanted to go back in, but the cop held him back. “I’ve called for backup,” he said. “More of us are on the way.” He then shot Perpetrator A through the window from outside, hitting him in the leg. Perpetrator A went down, but he got back up and continued firing. He shot Marco’s father-in-law in the face and his mother-in-law point-blank in the head. Marco’s wife watched both her parents die before she, too, was shot in the thigh. Then the shooting stopped. Perpetrator A’s rifle had jammed. This afforded one of the first responders on the scene time to crawl through a rear door of the restaurant and shoot Perpetrator A again, disabling him.
Marco is comfortable with long moments of silence. It’s the what-ifs that occupy his thoughts. What if the steak house parking lot hadn’t been full that evening? What if he’d gotten to the back door sooner? What if his family had run out with him, instead of hiding? What if his children had been there that night, as they were most nights, instead of safe at home with a babysitter? What if he had had a gun?
Marco now carries a gun at all times. His whole family does—everyone except his wife. She survived the shooting but “walks with a limp.” She hates guns. She “recovered physically, but not psychologically,” Marco says, his watery eyes spilling over. “You never really recover.” He recalls a family vacation to Greece where the sound of a local farmer using a pneumatic captive bolt pistol to stun goats prior to slaughter triggered his wife’s PTSD. Even for Marco, “whenever a car backfires, it takes me back.”
But Marco is comfortable around guns, and confident. He’s a hunter, military trained, the quintessential “good guy with a gun.” Such a good guy that he even picked up the tab for lunch before taking us on a tour of his restaurant, which had rebounded stronger than ever after the shooting.
“The media and the community really rallied around us,” Marco explains. The restaurant is now double its original size, more upscale, with dark woods, wine racks, and pictures on the walls. Amid the framed Mediterranean vistas are newspaper clippings from that fateful night and photographs of family and friends lost. So much beauty in the pain of tragedy.
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Situational crime prevention works, but no one wants to live in a police state, under a perpetual COVID-like lockdown to stop mass shootings. The question is: How much liberty are we willing to sacrifice for our security? In the United States, firearms are perhaps the ultimate expression of liberty and, in the minds of many, the greatest tool for security. That includes security from mass shootings.
In recent years, several state legislatures have written or revised firearm laws to make it easier for people to carry guns in schools or houses of worship, especially people with a background in the military or law enforcement. Arming teachers is perhaps the most controversial prospect, but there are already a surprising number of armed personnel in America’s schools.
Millions of dollars have gone into federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants to fund additional school police over the past twenty years, and within six months of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, more than $1 billion was added to school security budgets by state legislatures, with funding for school resource officers (SROs) being one of the largest items. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) now estimates that 1.7 million students are in schools with police but no counselors, 6 million students are in schools with police but no school psychologists, and 10 million students are in schools with police but no social workers.14
Measuring the impact of SROs on mass shootings is tricky. We examined every recorded incident in which more than one person was intentionally shot in a school building during the school day, or in which a perpetrator came to school heavily armed with the intent of firing indiscriminately, as reporte
d by the public K–12 School Shooting Database since 1980. Out of 133 cases, 29 (24 percent) had an armed officer on scene when the shooting began. These tended to be larger high schools. We found that armed security yielded no significant reduction in rates of injuries, and, in fact, after controlling for other factors like the school size, the number of shooters, and the number and type of firearms, the rate of deaths was nearly three times higher in schools with an armed police officer or a security guard present.15 Looking at mass shootings in any location, we similarly found that more people were injured when there was an armed person on scene than when there wasn’t (an average of ten people injured versus seven, if you exclude Las Vegas, whose victim count was so high it skews the data).
SROs can respond to mass shootings in unpredictable ways. The armed officer at Parkland, for example, did not enter the school, staying outside for forty-five minutes both during and after the shooting despite seventeen people having been murdered. There are also concerns about the visible presence of police officers in schools negatively affecting the entire school climate and impeding educational progress. Sociologist Aaron Kupchik, author of the 2010 book Homeroom Security, finds that “the presence of police in schools is unlikely to prevent another school shooting and the potential for oppression of students—especially poor and racial/ethnic minority youth—is a more realistic and common threat than Columbine.”16 That’s because, when in schools, police officers do what they are trained to do, which is to detain, handcuff, and arrest. This contributes to a larger social problem known as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which even minor infractions at school are adjudicated by the criminal justice system.17