“Are you planning or thinking of hurting or killing other people?”

Last week we saw not only the shooting at Umpqua Community College plastered across  headlines, but also shootings on Northern Arizona University and Texas Southern University campus’..

That’s three shootings in less a week.  Chances are, there were signs leading up to these shootings.

School shooters don’t exist in a vacuum. They have family, friends, internet personas and more. We see and hear about them on the news in the wake of gunfire and body counts on campuses across the country.

Statistically, most of these shooters show signs of what they’re planning.

They often google “bombs” and look up famous shootings, read manifestos, research weapons, buy guns and join groups or organizations that relate to anger they have.

Another common denominator among perpetrators of mass violence, is a feeling of persecution or being targeted. This feeling may not seem valid to others, but the feeling tends to haunt shooters.

For example, the Isla Vista shooting that rocked the UC Santa Barbara community in 2014 was perpetrated by Elliot Rogers, who felt that he had not received the attention he deserved from women.

These signs attract attention. Friends and family notice. Admittedly not always, the same way people don’t always notice the symptoms of an illness or the impending signs of a suicide attempt.

But these signs could potentially be used to address potential shooters.

How we could spot potential shooters

Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) is training offered by the QPR institute, most notably and relevantly, on college campuses across the country.

QPR teaches those in training how to recognize possible signs that someone is suicidal, and how to ask them if they need help. I’ve gone through QPR training twice now.

We as a society have learned that someone exhibiting unusually “down” behavior, or behaviors of concern, should be checked on. When people talk about ending their life, when they give away possessions , when they stop planning for the future, most people have been trained to see these things as warning signs.

QPR training had one strong point they drove home- – you have to ask that uncomfortable question. You’ll normally get an answer.

The question, “Are you considering killing yourself?” is difficult for a lot of people to say, but it allows “gatekeepers” to know how serious a potential situation is.

A “Gatekeeper”, according to QPR’s website, is “someone in a position to recognize a crisis and the warning signs that someone may be contemplating suicide.”

The QPR site lists friends, family, neighbors, nurses, doctors, spiritual leaders, police, firefighters and office supervisors, among others, as people that could notice the potential changes in behavior that could signify that someone is considering suicide.

When we see someone angry at the world, someone who seems to hate everyone and everything, our natural instinct seems to be to avoid that person.

We need to train ourselves as a society, and especially those in “gatekeeper” positions, to see people that exhibit concerning behaviors that could point toward perpetrating an event of mass violence.

If our society and it’s leaders can learn to ask if someone intends to kill themselves, we should also be able to learn to ask the question “Are you planning or thinking of hurting or killing other people?”

This by no means excuses the actions of shooters, and I’m not comparing people who are suicidal or have struggled with suicidal thoughts with shooters.

I’m comparing how our society used to respond to suicide and the change over recent decades to a possible change in how we approach potential shooters.

As a society we once avoided the topic of suicide, never learned about it in school and lied about the cause of death when someone committed suicide. Lives have been saved today because people are willing to ask difficult questions in the interest of the safety of individuals.

School shooters are vastly different in many aspects, but the point is that we need to ask that uncomfortable question in the interest of saving lives further on down the road.

Even with studies and training, spotting a potential shooter will never become an exact science.

This article argues that certain authority figures should be trained to spot the potential for mass violence in people, but there isn’t necessarily always a readable pattern,  It’s like trying to make sense of something that is, often, nonsensical to most people.

This could be the first part of a foundation that alters the way we approach concerning, angry behaviors.