Stopping The Killing

Stop the Killing offers insight into what each of us can do to end the active shooter crisis plaguing America. Written by the former head of the FBI’s active shooter program, Katherine Schweit, shares an insider look at what we’ve learned, and failed to learn, about protecting our businesses, houses of worship, and schools. The book demystifies the language around active shooters, mass killings, threat assessment teams, and more. Never gathered before into one place, readers gain access to evidence-based research and the most up-to-date information as they travel step-by-step through shooting prevention efforts and shooting aftermaths. Beginning with an understanding of how to spot potential shooters, readers learn the many ways to prevent shootings and the role threat assessment teams play. Threat assessment experts provide insight on what kind of information they need, and how they use it to intercept a person on a pathway to violence. The book guides readers through the process of assessing building security weaknesses and shows how to find vulnerabilities in people, programs, and policies. Packed with practical advice for training every age, from preschoolers, to elementary school children, to adults, the book also includes the author’s own teaching outline on how to train people to run, hide, fight. The book gathers together examples to help build individualized emergency operations plans and shows how to tap vast government resources to cover costs to your office and employees, districts and students, and survivors and victim’s families. Hear sober advice gathered from those who have survived and responded to shootings at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Aurora theater, Los Angeles International Airport, and more. Their common theme is that it can happen anywhere and has. All the more reason to accept that as each of us better understand what happens and how to prevent it, we can be the ones to stop the killing. The book also features a new preface exploring the 2021 school shooting tragedy in Michigan, especially the groundbreaking use of a domestic terrorism charge filed against the shooter and involuntary manslaughter charges filed against his parents.

Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia, Azerbaijan, El Salvador, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Cambodia -- all provide bloody evidence that civil wars continue to have a powerful impact on the international scene. Because they tear at the very fabric of a society and pit countryman against countryman, civil wars are often the most brutal and difficult to extinguish -- witness the American Revolution. And yet, civil wars do inevitably end. England is no longer criss-crossed by warring armies representing York and Lancaster or King and Parliament. The French no longer kill one another over the divine right of kings. Argentines seem reconciled to living in a single state, rather than several. The ideologies of the Spanish Civil War now seem largely irrelevant. And the possibility of Southern secession is an issue long-buried in the American past. The question then begs itself: how do people who have been killing one another with considerable enthusiasm and success come together to form a common government? How can individuals and factions work together, politically and economically, with others who have killed their friends, parents, children and lovers? How are armed societies disarmed? What effect does a total military victory have on a lasting peace? In sum, how are civil societies constructed from civil violence and chaos? This is the central concern of Stopping the Killing. In this highly original and much needed volume, a distinguished group of experts on civil wars discuss both specific conflicts and broader theoretical issues. Individual chapters examine civil wars in Colombia, the Sudan, Yemen, America, Greece, and Nigeria, and analyze the causes of peace, the relationship between the battlefield and the negotiating table, and issues of settlement. An introduction and conclusion by the editor unify the volume. Contributors include: Jonathan Hartlyn (Univ. of North Carolina), Caroline Hartzell (Univ. of California, Davis), Jane E. Holl (U.S. Military Academy), John Iatrides (Southern Connecticut State University), James O'Connell (University of Bradford), Donald Rothchild (Univ. of California, Davis), Stephen John Stedman (Johns Hopkins Univ.), Robert Harrison Wagner (Univ. of Texas, Austin), Harvey Waterman (Rutgers Univ.), Manfred Wenner (Northern Illinois Univ.), and I. William Zartman (Johns Hopkins Univ.).

STOPPING THE KILLING travels from Latin America and the United States to Africa and the Middle East to grapple with the critical issue of civil wars and their powerful impact on the international scene.

This book tackles the important question of how we can understand and learn from the school rampage killings that have been prevented. In the flood of recent accounts and analyses of deadly school rampage killings that plague society and inspire widespread public fear, very little attention has been given to the incidents that almost were. Building on Madfis’ previous book, The Risk of School Rampage: Assessing and Preventing Threats of School Violence (2014), this vital work addresses key gaps in school violence scholarship through the examination of averted school rampage incidents in the United States and advances existing knowledge through ground-breaking insights from the latest research on mass murder, violence prevention, bystander intervention, disciplinary policy, and threat assessment in school contexts. This empirical study utilizes in-depth interviews conducted with school and police officials (administrators, counselors, security guards, police officers, and teachers) directly involved in averting potential school rampages to explore the processes by which threats are assessed and school rampage plots are thwarted. Madfis finds that many common contemporary school violence prevention policies and practices are ineffective at preventing rampage attacks and may actually increase the likelihood of their occurrence. Rather than uncritically adopting such problematic approaches, Madfis argues that schools must model prevention practices upon what has proven successful in averting potentially deadly incidents.

The obesity epidemic of American children is out of control. The cancer rate in children is exploding and diabetes is on the rise. Navigating the complex landscape of food choices, expert advice, and contradictory health reports is becoming harder than ever. It’s time to step back and look at things clearly. In Stop Killing Your Kids, David W. Brown presents eye-opening data on the role of food in a child’s healthy development. The culmination of fifteen years of research into children’s health, he uses a holistic health approach to discuss both a clear theoretical framework and practical advice on what foods to promote and which to avoid when creating a balanced diet for your kids. Learn the importance of amino acids, the role of fruit and vegetables to long-term health, the dangers of toxins and dyes in our food, and more. This is a must-read book for anyone raising young children. Learn to take control of your children’s health and promote a lifetime of wellness from an early age.

Firearms-related incidents kill more than 45,000 people in the US every year and are the leading cause of death for US children and adolescents. But school shootings are different than suicides, and suicides are different than street gang fights. In this groundbreaking book, former FBI agent and mass shooting expert Katherine Schweit reveals the secrets to reducing gun violence in our communities. Drawing on her insider knowledge and extensive research, she debunks the myths and misconceptions about mass shooters and shows us how to spot warning signs and assess and improve our security and training in schools, businesses, and houses of worship. Easy-to-read and politics free, this book offers novices and gun experts alike facts and strategies to calmly discuss firearms laws, firearms ownership, court decisions, and the Founding Fathers' thinking behind the Second Amendment. Get the details on red flag laws, background checks, semi-automatic weapons, AR-15s, ghost guns, firearms training, mental health matters, and the role domestic violence plays.

In their isolated country house, a mother and her two children prepare to wait out a blinding snowstorm. Two violent predators walk through the door. Nothing will ever be the same.

“An urgent read that illuminates real possibility for change.” —John Carreyrou, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood For the first time, a story about the specialized teams of forensic psychologists, FBI agents, and other experts who are successfully stopping mass shootings—a hopeful, myth-busting narrative built on new details of infamous attacks, never-before-told accounts from perpetrators and survivors, and real-time immersion in confidential threat cases, casting a whole new light on how to solve an ongoing national crisis. It’s time to go beyond all the thoughts and prayers, misguided blame on mental illness, and dug-in disputes over the Second Amendment. Through meticulous reporting and panoramic storytelling, award-winning journalist Mark Follman chronicles the decades-long search for identifiable profiles of mass shooters and brings readers inside a groundbreaking method for preventing devastating attacks. The emerging field of behavioral threat assessment, with its synergy of mental health and law enforcement expertise, focuses on circumstances and behaviors leading up to planned acts of violence—warning signs that offer a chance for constructive intervention before it’s too late. Beginning with the pioneering study in the late 1970s of “criminally insane” assassins and the stalking behaviors discovered after the murder of John Lennon and the shooting of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Follman traces how the field of behavioral threat assessment first grew out of Secret Service investigations and FBI serial-killer hunting. Soon to be revolutionized after the tragedies at Columbine and Virginia Tech, and expanded further after Sandy Hook and Parkland, the method is used increasingly today to thwart attacks brewing within American communities. As Follman examines threat-assessment work throughout the country, he goes inside the FBI’s elite Behavioral Analysis Unit and immerses in an Oregon school district’s innovative violence-prevention program, the first such comprehensive system to prioritize helping kids and avoid relying on punitive measures. With its focus squarely on progress, the story delves into consequential tragedies and others averted, revealing the dangers of cultural misunderstanding and media sensationalism along the way. Ultimately, Follman shows how the nation could adopt the techniques of behavioral threat assessment more broadly, with powerful potential to save lives. Eight years in the making, Trigger Points illuminates a way forward at a time when the failure to prevent mass shootings has never been more costly—and the prospects for stopping them never more promising.

'How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I'll be civil when the killing's done.' The island of Anacapa, off the coast of California, is overrun with black rats which are threatening the ancient population of ground-nesting birds. Alma Boyd Takesue of the National Park Service is the spokesperson for a campaign to exterminate these man-introduced rodents once and for all. Alma, highly self-disciplined with a stubborn streak, speaks as a conservationist, though the fact that her grandmother was once stranded on Anacapa for three weeks with nothing but thousands of crawling rats for company might explain some of her zeal. With days to go before the aerial rat-poisoning, Alma's plan is in danger of sabotage. Dave LaJoy and Anise Reed, a pair of notorious environmental activists, are recognisable from a distance by his knotted dreadlocks and her flame-red cyclone of hair. Dave is an electronics salesman with barely-controlled rages, for whom the plight of the rats is yet another of life's many injustices, along with lazy tramps and second-rate wine. Anise is a struggling folk singer with her own, terrible reasons for getting involved in 'the cause'. From the outset, Alma, Dave and Anise are at ideological loggerheads. But when Alma's sights turn to the infestation of non-native pigs on Santa Cruz - where Anise was brought up by her single mother and a clan of ranchers - the stakes are raised, and the debate threatens to boil over into something much more real... When the Killing's Done is T.C. Boyle's blistering new novel, a sweeping epic of family, ecology and the right to life - no matter what the fallout.

"Groundbreaking." ―Rachel Louise Snyder, bestselling author of No Visible Bruises An examination of the phenomenon of mass shootings in America and an urgent call to implement evidence-based strategies to stop these tragedies Winner of the 2022 Minnesota Book Award Using data from the writers’ groundbreaking research on mass shooters, including first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, The Violence Project charts new pathways to prevention and innovative ways to stop the social contagion of violence. Frustrated by reactionary policy conversations that never seemed to convert into meaningful action, special investigator and psychologist Jill Peterson and sociologist James Densley built The Violence Project, the first comprehensive database of mass shooters. Their goal was to establish the root causes of mass shootings and figure out how to stop them by examining hundreds of data points in the life histories of more than 170 mass shooters—from their childhood and adolescence to their mental health and motives. They’ve also interviewed the living perpetrators of mass shootings and people who knew them, shooting survivors, victims’ families, first responders, and leading experts to gain a comprehensive firsthand understanding of the real stories behind them, rather than the sensationalized media narratives that too often prevail. For the first time, instead of offering thoughts and prayers for the victims of these crimes, Peterson and Densley share their data-driven solutions for exactly what we must do, at the individual level, in our communities, and as a country, to put an end to these tragedies that have defined our modern era.