After every mass shooting, we're subjected to the same litany of demands for more gun control laws, though the politicians and gun control advocates making those demands rarely offer up any specific policy recommendations. These demands are usually paired with accusations that anyone who opposes their unnamed "gun safety laws" doesn't care about the loss of innocent lives, or that we love our guns more than we love our children.
Mass shootings are rare events, and restricting the rights of peaceable citizens with an aim towards stopping mass shooters is kind of like using an RPG to deal with a pesky fly at the kitchen table. We should be looking for targeted approaches, and new research from criminal justice professors Jason Silva at William Paterson University and Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama suggests that one of those approaches is to pay more attention to what these killers are saying ahead of time.
Silva and Lankford found that a large number of mass shooters telegraphed their violent intentions before carrying out their attacks. Sometimes those warnings were explicit threats. Other times, they were troubling statements or communications that hinted at the violence to come. But in more than 70 percent of public mass shootings, warning signs of some kind were present.
This is consistent with what the Secret Service discovered when it looked at active shootings in schools. A 2019 report found that 83 percent of school shooters they examined shared "verbal, written, visual, or video communications that referenced their intent to carry out an attack, threatened the target, and/or threatened others."
Silva and Lankford ask why these communications (which they label "leakage") are so common. In their view they're "generally not an attempt to acquire advice, weapons, or assistance." So why do so many of these individuals reveal information that could be used to prevent them from carrying out their attacks?
Several theories may provide an answer. First, it is possible that some mass shooters with criminal propensities do not care about the risks. If they have prior arrests or violent histories, for instance, merely talking about harming others might seem minor by comparison. This would fit with Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) general theory of crime, which suggests individuals differ in how prone they are to risk-taking, regardless of the long-term consequences. In general, a similar propensity seems to explain public cursing (Reisig & Pratt, 2011), negative social media posting (Intravia, 2023), and more common forms of crime (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990). Accordingly, some mass shooters have prior arrest records or histories of violence that suggest they may have a criminal propensity as well (Silva, 2022; Silver & Silva, 2022).
A second possibility is that some mass shooters engage in leakage or threats as a “cry for help” (Lankford et al., 2019; Peterson et al., 2021). This would be an extension of the cry for help theory of suicidality, which posits that before people take their own lives, they often make suicidal threats or non-lethal suicide attempts to signal that they are experiencing psychological pain and will do something drastic if nothing changes (Farberow & Shneidman, 1961). Some may do this because they wish to be stopped or rescued. This could apply to mass shooters because some are similarly suicidal or struggling with mental health problems, and they may have a conscious or unconscious desire to be stopped or saved before they commit crimes that will almost certainly end in their death or life imprisonment (Lankford et al., 2019; Peterson et al., 2021). In perhaps the first empirical confirmation of the relationship between suicidality and leakage, Peterson et al. (2021) found evidence of a statistically significant association among public mass shooters.
A third possibility is that some mass shooters’ leakage is motivated by attention-seeking. This fits with Merton’s (1938) anomie theory, which suggests that when individuals lack legitimate means to accomplish their goals, they may use deviant means instead. In modern societies, attention-seeking is widely considered a legitimate goal, but some people resort to making extreme, provocative, or aggressive statements for attention (Silva, 2023). Accordingly, it is well established that a subset of mass shooters seek fame for themselves or attention for their ideological cause (Lankford & Silva, 2025; Silva & Greene-Colozzi, 2019). Before they attack, some perpetrators may also try to attract attention by talking or posting about their violent intentions. To date, it appears only two studies have examined this relationship statistically, and both focused on public mass shooters. The first found fame-seeking was twice as common among shooters who leaked as those who did not, but it was not statistically significant using their method (Peterson et al., 2021). The second found shooters who had extreme ideological interests (and were often seeking attention for their cause) leaked significantly more than other shooters (Lankford & Silva, 2025). These associations would benefit from further exploration.
Of course, there may be more than one answer because these killers may have different motivations.
The pair note that, despite the prevalence of these communications, they're often not reported to authorities. Again, there are multiple reasons why: some people don't take the threats seriously, others believe that police won't take their reporting seriously, or worry that alerting authorities will spark a violent attack before law enforcement can respond.
There is some evidence that reporting is only half the challenge. Silva and Lankford say that research into the deadliest public mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years" suggests that in approximately half of cases, perpetrators had been reported to law enforcement for their leakage or threats about killing," but were still able to carry out their attacks. In their own study, Silva and Lankford found that in 45 percent of cases with leakage or threats, there was a formal response from law enforcement.
That response usually involved law enforcement being dispatched to the scene and/or interviews or investigations of the eventual perpetrator. That information led to the perpetrator’s arrest only 21% of the time, and to their incarceration only 6% of the time.
So, we need more reporting, but we also need a better response to those reports.
Silva and Lankford theorize that one of the main barriers to reporting is uncertainty over someone's actual dangerousness, which makes sense. A clear threat is one thing, but when an individual makes vague comments suggesting they're capable of violence or want to hurt others, family and friends may hesitate to get law enforcement involved. And depending on how far along perpetrators are in planning their attacks, there might not be much that police can do absent a specific, identifiable threat to others.
We can't arrest everyone who makes an ugly comment online or says something disturbing to a friend. The First Amendment protects speech that we might find offensive or alarming, just as the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. And even when someone's behavior raises legitimate concerns, distinguishing an actual threat from an angry outburst or a desperate cry for help can be incredibly difficult.
But that doesn't mean we're powerless to act. Better communication between schools, families, mental health professionals, and law enforcement, along with more effective threat assessments and appropriate interventions, could make a real difference. Not every warning sign will lead to an arrest, either. Sometimes the right response may be getting someone help before their violent fantasies become a deadly reality.
Silva and Lankford's research doesn't offer a foolproof way to prevent mass shootings, because there isn't one. What it does offer is evidence that, in many cases, these killers give us an opportunity to intervene before they act.
Instead of treating millions of peaceable gun owners as potential mass murderers, perhaps we should devote more attention to the incredibly small number of individuals who are actually telling us they want to become one.
We can't stop every mass shooting, but we are capable doing a better job of stopping the ones where the killer has already given us a warning.
