“The ubiquity of guns makes preventing a mass shooting extremely difficult. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to prevent mass shootings. “One of the big stereotypes, or myths we have about mass shootings in general, is that perpetrators who do this go crazy and just snap,” says Mark Follman, author of the book Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, and an editor at Mother Jones. “That’s not the reality at all of how this works.”
There are two broad approaches that can help mitigate the threat of mass shootings: proactive efforts to identify threats in advance, performed by behavioral threat assessment teams; and targeted gun regulations like red flag laws and bump stock bans.”
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“a country with over 400 million guns in it, and with gun regulation so lax that almost anyone can carry a gun in public whenever they want, makes the work of preventing mass shootings much more difficult.
Georgia doesn’t have safe storage laws, which in other states require guns to be locked up and kept away from children. The shooter’s father, when questioned by police in 2023, said that his son didn’t have “unfettered” access to his guns. A law requiring guns to be secured in the state might have made it harder for the shooter to have access to the weapon he used.
There are other specific gun policies that can help prevent mass shootings and might be more politically feasible. Lawmakers and voters who care about reducing mass shootings have already helped push for their passage in states like New York, Florida, and California. For advocates who care about reducing mass shooting, they are a good place to start.
One of the most important legal tools available to prevent mass shootings is extreme risk laws, commonly referred to as red flag laws. The laws, currently in place in 21 states, including several after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018, allow both family members and law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily confiscate someone’s firearms if they believe the owner is at a risk of committing harm either to themselves or others. Red flag laws, Follman says, are “a relatively new gun policy that is very important and very useful to the field of threat assessment.” Though critics have challenged the constitutionality of the laws, they have so far withstood legal challenges.
Another common factor among mass shooters is their use of assault-style rifles, known for their capacity to rapidly fire bullets and to kill or injure large numbers of people in a short amount of time. Though research has shown that assault weapons bans can meaningfully reduce mass shooting deaths when they’re in effect, Republicans blocked an assault weapons ban when it came before Congress in December 2023, and polls show that while Americans generally favor more strict gun regulation, they are more divided on the question of whether to ban assault weapons outright.
In part because of Republican opposition to regulating assault rifles, gun safety advocates have turned their focus to banning bump stocks as a more targeted and effective means of reducing mass shootings, and in 2018 the Trump administration took the rare step, for a GOP administration, of banning bump stocks following a Las Vegas mass shooting. But the Supreme Court struck down the regulation in June 2024.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/370004/mass-shooting-prevention-behavioral-threat-assessment