We’ve Known How To Prevent A School Shooting for More Than 20 Years

How the statement ‘F all politicians’ ended up in California’s voter guide

We’ve Known How To Prevent A School Shooting for More Than 20 Years

• FiveThirtyEight: “…Marisa Randazzo’s and Mary Ellen O’Toole’s parallel reports came to remarkably similar conclusions….So how do we spot the ones who are planning an attack at a school? The studies she and O’Toole published years ago showed that, like people planning to attack the president, would-be school shooters don’t keep their plans to themselves. They tell friends or even teachers that they want to kill.
•  They talk about their anger and their suicidality. They lash out violently against family and friends. And as more teens have attacked their schoolmates, that pattern has proved to hold true over time. It was true for Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter. It was true for Payton Gendron, the Buffalo shooter. It was true for Salvador Ramos, the Robb Elementary shooter.  While all the experts I spoke with said that policies that keep guns out of the hands of teenagers are an important part of preventing mass shootings, they all also said it is crucial to set up systems that spot teens who are struggling and may become dangerous. 
• You can’t predict violent events or who will go from threatening behavior to murder, O’Toole said. But it is possible for us to look around and see the people who are having problems and need intervention. Interventions can prevent violence, even if we can’t predict it, she told me. For example, at least four potential school shootings that were averted in the weeks after Parkland all stopped because the would-be killers spoke or wrote about their plans and someone told law enforcement…”
• See also Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD “…Mental illness and violence in general – If we cast a wider net and examine violence more broadly, evidence suggests mental illness does not cause violence. Large epidemiological studies have shown that rates of violence among people with mild-to-moderate mental illnesses range from 2%–4%, compared to 1%-3% in the general population. One of the strongest longitudinal studies, called the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, found that only 1% of patients discharged from psychiatric facilities committed an act of violence against a stranger with a gun.  
• Stronger associations emerge between having a mental illness and victimization. One study found individuals with mental illness were three times more likely to be a victim than a perpetrator of violence. Those with mood disorders, such as major depression, are not more likely to hurt others, though they are more likely to harm themselves. Firearms are used in 50% of suicides and account for 3/5 of all gun deaths in the U.S. 
• People with anxiety disorders are less likely to harm others. Some studies have shown severe mental illness predicts violence, even after accounting for substance use/abuse. Specifically, people with psychosis—very severe symptoms such as hallucinations (hearing or seeing things that are not there) and delusions (false and sometimes bizarre beliefs)— are 15 times more likely to commit homicide. However, it’s uncommon for symptoms of psychosis to immediately precede violent acts. 
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• This also doesn’t explain all mass shootings, as psychosis only plays a major role in 11% of mass shootings… A research group studying mass shootings for decades (called The Violence Project) concluded that mass shootings are largely the results of a constellation of behaviors involving a buildup of childhood trauma, an identifiable crisis point (separate from psychosis), the need to blame someone, and the opportunity to conduct a mass shooting (i.e. access to firearms). 
• Blaming mental illness entirely “conceals it more than it reveals it.”  Among mass school shootings, in particular, the U.S. Secret Service found a similar theme. While they reported that most teen perpetrators had symptoms of mental illness, few had a psychotic illness and nearly all had histories of severe bullying, social isolation, school discipline, and adverse childhood events, like abuse, substance use in the home, parental incarceration, or parental mental health problems…”

I tried to read all my app privacy policies. It was 1 million words.  Washington Post Washington Post – “Let’s abolish reading privacy policies. Here’s how we can use the law and technology to give us real privacy choices. Twitter simplified its privacy policy earlier this month, encouraging us to read it by turning parts into a video game. Yes, a game — it’s called the Twitter Data Dash. 

In it, you use keyboard arrows to take a dog named Data to the park while dodging cat ads and battling trolls, meanwhile learning about Twitter’s new 4,500-word privacy policy. Okay, who are we kidding: No one has time for that. I applaud Twitter for putting effort into being more understandable. The same goes for Facebook, which last week rewrote its infamous privacy policy to a secondary-school reading level — but also tripled its length to 12,000 words.

 The deeper I dug into them, the clearer it became that understandability isn’t our biggest privacy problem. Being overwhelmed is. We the users shouldn’t be expected to read and consent to privacy policies. Instead, let’s use the law and technology to give us real privacy choices. And there are some very good ideas for how that could happen. There’s a big little lie at the center of how we use every website, app and gadget. We click “agree,” saying we’ve read the data policy and agree to the terms and conditions. 

Then, legally speaking, companies can say we’ve given them consent to use our data. In reality, almost nobody actually reads these things and almost nobody feels in control. A 2019 Pew survey found that only 9 percent of Americans say they always read privacy policies. It’s not like you have a choice, anyways. When you’re presented with one of these “agree” buttons, you usually can’t negotiate with their terms. 

You could decline to use apps or websites — but it’s increasingly hard to participate in the world without them. What’s the harm? You might be clicking away the right to mine the contents of your tax return. Your phone could collect evidence that you’ve sought an abortion in a state where it’s suddenly illegal. Or you could be sharing data that will be used to discriminate against you in job applications or buying a home. Still, I don’t blame anyone whose eyes glaze over when they see a privacy notice. As an experiment, I tallied up all of the privacy policies just for the apps on my phone. It totaled nearly 1 million words. “War and Peace” is about half as long…”

The linguistics search engine that overturned the federal mask mandate

The Verge: “The COVID-19 pandemic was still raging when a federal judge in Florida made the fateful decision to type “sanitation” into the search bar of the Corpus of Historical American English. 

Many parts of the country had already dropped mask requirements, but a federal mask mandate on planes and other public transportation was still in place. A lawsuit challenging the mandate had come before Judge Kathryn Mizelle, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas. The Biden administration said the mandate was valid, based on a law that authorizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to introduce rules around “sanitation” to prevent the spread of disease. 

Mizelle took a textualist approach to the question — looking specifically at the meaning of the words in the law. But along with consulting dictionaries, she consulted a database of language, called a corpus, built by a Brigham Young University linguistics professor for other linguists. Pulling every example of the word “sanitation” from 1930 to 1944, she concluded that “sanitation” was used to describe actively making something clean — not as a way to keep something clean. So, she decided, masks aren’t actually “sanitation.” The mask mandate was overturned, one of the final steps in the defanging of public health authorities, even as infectious disease ran rampant.

Using corpora to answer legal questions, a strategy often referred to as legal corpus linguistics, has grown increasingly popular in some legal circles within the past decade. It’s been used by judges on the Michigan Supreme Court and the Utah Supreme Court, and, this past March, was referenced by the US Supreme Court during oral arguments for the first time. “It’s been growing rapidly since 2018,” says Kevin Tobia, a professor at Georgetown Law. “And it’s only going to continue to grow.” It’s only going to continue to grow. A corpus is a vast database of written language that can include things like books, articles, speeches, and other texts, amounting to hundreds of millions of lines of text or more. Linguists usually use corpora for scholarly projects to break down how language is used and what words are used for…”