Rapid Fire: The Pathway to Violence (with Shavaun Scott)
Republicans in Congress want this to happen. They want this to happen, or they would have stopped it long ago.
Republicans in Congress want this to happen. They want mass killings, they want carnage, they want weapons of war used indiscriminately against innocent civilians at elementary schools, high schools, movie theaters, music festivals, Wal-marts, supermarkets, churches, synagogues, mosques, Fourth of July parades. They want this to happen, or they would have stopped it long ago.
Democrats try to enact gun safety laws; Republicans in the Senate won’t allow these bills to be voted on. Either Mitch McConnell or the fascist filibuster has stymied any attempt Dems have made at gun safety reform. One party tries to solve the problem, the other allows it to continue. It’s as simple as that. The filibuster is not a parliamentary procedure; it’s an insidious accomplice to mass murder after mass murder after mass murder. The filibuster brings death.
So I say again: Republicans in Congress want this to happen. They like it. They may even get off on it. “The victims,” they tell us, after each grotesque massacre, “are in our thoughts and prayers.” But what does that even mean? What is the nature of those thoughts and prayers? Rapture implies both heightened eroticism and profound religious experience. A set that is not just comfortable but titillated at the prospect of a supernatural deity returning to earth to off most of mankind—to Hell with all the sinners and heretics!—is clearly okay with Uvalde and Sandy Hook and Highland Park.
Maybe Ted Cruz and his odious ilk think these mass killings are mini-Revelations. Maybe they imagine the Second Coming will involve Jesus mowing down most of humanity with an AR-15. I don’t know. I can’t pretend to understand what goes on in the head of a Ted Cruz or a Marjorie Taylor Greene or a Debbie Lesko, who this week, in the wake of the massacre in that tony Chicago suburb, said, “I rise in opposition to HR 2377. I have five grandchildren, I would do anything, anything to protect my five grandchildren, including, as a last resort, shooting them if I had to, to protect the lives of my grandchildren.” HR 2377 is a gun safety bill. The sitting Congresswoman from Arizona would mow down her own kin to prevent Congress from enacting a gun safety bill.
Republicans in Congress want this to happen. They want this to happen, or they would have stopped it long ago. Whether their obdurate stance is grounded in nihilism, sexual sadism, rank stupidity regarding the meaning of the words well-regulated, militia, and arms, or plain old greed, I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. The result is the same.
We know what to do to prevent these massacres from happening. We know why they happen here and not other countries. It couldn’t be more obvious:
Even so, Republicans in Congress refuse to stop it. Which means they want it to happen. McConnell wants it. Cruz wants it. Romney wants it. Susan Collins wants it. Ron Johnson and John Neely Kennedy want it. Martha Blackburn wants it. Josh Hawley wants it. Years after sharing a stage with survivors of Parkland, of lying to their faces, Marco Rubio still wants it.
So we will continue to do the dumb thing, the cruel thing, the indefensible thing, because a minority party that doesn’t technically control the Senate has hijacked not just our political discourse, but our lives. All Americans now have a proverbial gun to our heads, courtesy of Cocaine Mitch and his sick crew.
If banning weapons of war is off the table, what remains? Is there anything we can do? Yes, there is. We have to get Minority Report on these monsters. We have to stop the slaughter before it happens.
“Probably the biggest thing that [the media gets] wrong is that there’s nothing we can do,” says the mental health therapist P. Shavaun Scott, author of The Minds of Mass Killers: Understanding and Interrupting the Pathway to Violence and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “And then what goes with that is, ‘We don’t know why this happens.’ We do know why it happens. We know exactly why it happens. If you look at the data, if you look at the research—the FBI, the Secret Service, the criminologist research—we’ve known for many years why this happens. And of course if we say we don’t understand and there’s nothing we can do, it’s going to continue to happen—which is what we’re living with now.”
In her book—which provides an excellent overview into what is and is not true about mass killers, including what she calls “the mental illness myth”—and in our discussion, Scott takes us through the steps that lead to a potential mass murderer unleashing carnage on an innocent group of people.
“The other myth is, ‘The person just snapped. He seemed completely normal, and then he just snapped.’ And nobody ever just snaps,” she tells me. “There’s always a pathway to violence.”
As Scott explains it, there are five phases on this pathway. The first is a “collection of grievances.” The eventual murderers need to find someone to blame for their own inadequacy and loserdom. The scapegoat can be minorities. It can be Jews or Muslims. Often it’s women, because these people are incels, or involuntary celibates—in other words, guys women won’t go near with a ten-foot pole. Someone, or some group, becomes the focus of their displaced rage. The collection-of-grievances phase can last for many years.
The second phase is fantasy. They actively imagine themselves in the act. They are Rambo or John Wick, action-movie heroes with heavy weaponry, annihilating the bad guys. (In the fantasy, the slain are always bad guys.) They talk about it a lot, enough to raise red flags among their family and friends. They make threats.
The third phase is planning. They go online, into the darkest reaches of the web, and commune with the weirdos who fetishize this kind of thing. They research previous mass killings. Before Columbine, there was only reading material. But with the advent of the internet, and video, and now smartphones, there is a lot more footage to look at, a lot more images to stew in. They pick anniversary dates. They decide what to wear. They amass weapons and learn how to use them.
The last two phases are breach of the location and the act itself. The former is where the good guy with a gun would, in NRA Fantasyland, stop them; that seldom if ever happens, as we saw most recently in Uvalde and Highland Park. The culprits must be stopped—the pathways interrupted, in Scott’s phrase—before the fourth phase, ideally.
Although I recorded the conversation with Scott a few weeks before Highland Park, the Fourth of July mass murderer fits the profile. He traveled the pathway to violence from phase one to phase five, leaving blinking-red warning signs along the way. His parents did fuck-all to stop him. And here we are.
As Scott writes in her book, “When we see that mass killings follow patterns, they are to some degree preventable. Anything that can be predicted can be prevented— if we know what to do. . . . As epidemiologists tell us, anyone who has died from a firearm has died from a preventable injury. This is a public health crisis. We deserve to live in a world that is safe from mass killings.”
I wrote a column about school shootings and the American gun problem in March of 2001:
This past week not one but two teenagers took up arms against their classmates. Andy Williams, 15, a freshman from a tony suburb of San Diego, killed two students and wounded 13 others when he indiscriminately fired his .22 down the hall. The next day a Catholic schoolgirl in Williamsport, Pa., went postal, shooting another girl as she ate lunch.
Since February 1997, there have been 16 separate incidents involving shootings in schools. The body count: 34 dead and almost 100 wounded. Most of the assailants were teenagers. The youngest was just six years old.
That was over 21 years ago. We’re well into our third decade of Republican negligence, of Thoughts and Prayers. I remember talking to a friend of mine around that time. “There has to be a body count,” I said. “There has to be a raw number of deaths this will get to that will make the Republicans do something.”
I was wrong. There is not. A gunman shot and almost killed Steve Scalise, a Republican Congressman who was in the House leadership at the time. Even his opinion on the subject hasn’t changed. Ghouls are gonna ghoul.
Republicans in Congress want this to happen. They want this to happen, or they would have stopped it long ago.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S3 E15: Rapid Fire: The Pathway to Violence (with Shavaun Scott)
Greg Olear talks to the mental health therapist P. Shavaun Scott, author of “The Minds of Mass Killers: Understanding and Interrupting the Pathway to Violence,” about the scourge of mass shootings, how to identify potential killers before they strike, and what can be done about the problem. Plus: Stephanie St. John’s National Anthem for 2022.
Follow Shavaun:
https://twitter.com/shavaunscott
Buy her book:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09MB86W17/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
Watch The Five 8 tonight:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0BRnRwe7yDZXIaF-QZfvhA
I share the rage I feel in your words: Yes, the Rs want this death and chaos; Yes, they will obstruct any efforts to proceed in a simple and logical way to end the violence; Yes, they will continue to control the narrative.
In my 72 years, I have voted and actively worked on many political campaigns for many, many years. I have worked as a teacher in the public school systems for over 30 years. I have participated in the subversion required by people who longed to change the state of Justice in the US.
And yet...the Senate is controlled by insurgents; the Courts are in the hands of racists and homophobes for the next 30 years; the POTUS is completely ineffectual in the face of the insurgency.
Voting, writing letters to congress and LTEs, working on campaigns, and educating others to be critical thinkers doesn't seem to have done much to prevent this. I'm not ready to give up yet, but I need a new plan, and I don't have one yet.
Clearly, our system is broken when the renegades in the federal government go against the wishes of 60% of the nation. I'd like to see a path through this, but I don't. Giving up is not an option. So...
There is power in your words. I hope they go far. I hope a lot of "republicans" have their feelings hurt. It won't change whatever ails them, whatever sickness motivates them, but I hope their little teensy feelings get hurt.