Editor, Gazette-Journal:
Five years ago, Dr. Mary Ellen O’Toole (a former FBI agent, she consulted on the Columbine High School shooting as well as the shooting at Red Lake, Minnesota, and the mass school killings in Finland. Dr. O’Toole was the lead researcher and author of the FBI’s seminal work in school violence, “The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective”) wrote these words, regarding school shootings: “On the news, people are saying we should be concerned about this and that. And I thought, ‘We identified that 20 years ago. Did you not read this stuff 20 years ago?’ It’s fatiguing. I just feel a sense of fatigue.”
As a researcher of school shootings for almost 25 years myself, I echo her sentiments. It is fatiguing. After yet another school shooting, this time in Nashville, the same lineup of “experts” went on TV and did podcasts and newspaper interviews, saying the same things they said the time before and the time before that. I had the thought “How long are we going ...