as always follow the senate live here on c-span2. >> thank you for joining us here tonight. those of you who are your live and also those of you online, there's other talk with igcatherine schley, author of stop the killing. this event is hosted by the

chicago council and my name is chad riley. i'm a former president and current member of the american chicago council. for those of you unaware the chicago council is essentially a board of established professionals whose sole job is to be an ambassador and help raise awareness both locally and nationally and also raise asian critical funds for the museum and education initiatives so i'm excited to be here tonight with catherine orkate as most people call you . i wonder if you could give your background and a brief overview . kate is a former prosecutor, former fbi special agent and senior executive within the bureau. former director of global security for live nation entertainment. adjunct law professor for all, i could go on and on but why are you here and i think what brought it up his you were attacked by the fbi to create the active shooter program.

so i'm very excited to be speaking to you. just one quick housekeeping item before we start and there will be q&a after e our discussion so if you have any questions we will address them. so to start off the book is fascinating. it's more than just action steps on how to get out of a mass shooting crisis but stories t, anecdotes and a lot of dispelling common myths, preconceived notions that i have. we'regoing to start off kate , could you talk about your background with the fbi creating an active shooter program and want me to write the book? >> as an agent when i left the prosecutor's office in chicago and joined the fbi as an agent i was working national security matters but after the sandy book shooting and agents is an agent in the fbi and they said you're

doing this now and i said okay so i guess i'm kind of like maybe some people are listening to this now. i didn't have a massive background in this area when i started and what happened is i was pegged with joining the white house team, then vice president biden's team, department of education, health and human services, all the other three letters and my job was to stop these shootings that were going on and truthfully i think what happened very quickly is in our meetings with the vice president's office it became apparent nobody knew if the shootings were increasing and that's where the fbi started. are the shootings increasing and what can lawenforcement do to help ? we were focused as the only law enforcement agency on the team with thinking about law enforcement so i really spent nearly 5 years in the fbi

thinking how can the fbi help law enforcement? there's nearly 1 million law enforcement officers in the united states. how can the fbi help law enforcement do a better job when it comes to preventing or responding or recovering from these situations . but what i learned as i got further along is that there's hundreds of millions of people in the united states and 1 million law enforcement officers are not going to solve this problem so i think as i got to the end of my fbi career i felt and went into private industry i felt that answers needed to come from citizens, civilians and that civilians just didn't have the information they needed they didn't have the knowledge to know how they could the killing and that's really what compelled me to write the book. i just answered the same questions over and over again. i was running to opeople, i

could be at church somebody would ask me questions that a neighbor would ask me a question and they were all asking the same question so i kind of started out with tags of little post-it notes on my office that said what questions do i need to answer that peoplejust continually asked me . >> for the research esyou obviously fit's immense because there's so many studies. there's so much data a lot of that is a mutual existing research, existing studies and obviously a lot on your own. >> the one thing that i think we started that i didn't expect is that we got a lot of pushback. i got a lot of pushback from the department of education about is there an increase in shooting so i felt like for us as law enforcement agencies we needed to show. we needed to prove that there was an increase or disprove it. and i felt like that fell on the fbi's shoulders to resolve. so i took a tremendously talented group of analysts and agents and we asked local

law enforcement to provide to us their actual police reports from hundreds of shootings and we pushed all the information together and released a 14 year study. we released a 14 year study available online. that said indeed the shootings are increasing so that was kind of the beginning of us realizing i think in washington that these shootings are really increasing and we were validating that year after year. i know just a couple of years ago the fbi released a 20 year study that shows when we started i'll tell you this. i have too many numbers in my head. i'll tell you this is a horrible number. when we started the first seven years of the study was from 2000 to 2000 and six. 2000 to 2006. there were six incidents a year. by the time averaged six

incidents in a year. by the time i finished that 14 year study h, there were 16 incidents. by the time i left the fbi, there was one incident every eight weeks. by the time i left live nation one incident everyfour weeks . right now there's one incident at least every week. every week there's an incident. every week that falls where you said and analytical people in exact same methodology that we started with when we started back in 2002 looking at the numbers. so we thought exponentially higher last year the fbi releases these numbers every year and when i left the fbi, when we did our final study therewere 17 incidents at the highest number in a year . and the last two years there have been 30 30 and 40 and i can tell you the fbi hasn't released its numbers for this

year but they are going to shortly andit's probably going to be about 50 percent higher . so this problem is not going away. we have to find a way to fix it. we can't manage it we have to find a way to fix it. >> you bring up something interesting about the trends which you want to address but first i got asked which may be an inflection for a lot of people. it was for me when i first met you. whenever the subject matter the first thing that popped into my mind is how is she going to address the gun debate? which side does she fall on. there's a big entrenched gun culture in this country. and the second amendment of the constitution there's big antigovernment forces. which side of the fence are you going to sit on west and mark you don't. you everyone on that debate. >> absolutely because they guns, the first answer i hear

from everybody and i do a podcast now. the killing with my cohost was in london and the very first question that sarah asks me and she tracked me down and said i want to do a podcast and i told her no because i don't have time and she handed me. i only tell you that because that's how she woulddescribe it . so she said right away we can solve all this problem if we got rid of the guns in the united states. my job is to work on realistic problem solving and i actually here in chicago i teach a onclass on the culture of the second amendment so i'm very familiar with the issues that have to do with the second amendment. and how the and flow. this issue even though there are plenty of people who want to argue guns and want to argue politics, this issue is an apolitical issue. guns is an apolitical issue when it comes to mass shooting last year, year

before there were 47,000 firearms deaths in the united states. 47,000 roughly. two thirds of those were suicides. if 40 those were incidents like this, the second amendment and the gun issues is not aboutmass shootings . mass shootings make up a small amount of the shootings and deaths in the united states whether there by suicide or violence but mass shootings kill our psyche. that's the terrorism aspect of it. they are so damaging to us they make us afraid to go to school. they make us afraidto let our kids go to the movies . then every time something happens every time he shooting happens there's a shooting today at the middle school in south carolina.

greenville south carolina, 12-year-old came to school with a gun and killed a 12-year-old . it's not about whether or not we have guns in the united states. that is not about whether you support gun control or you oppose gun control or whether you support licensing or registering guns. that is about a 12-year-old getting a gun in their own hands oso that's about is the gunproperly secured ? i raise two wonderful kids. 20 years in the fbi, carried all kinds of firearms. long guns, rifles, handguns. i secured my gun. a third of the guns in the united states are not secured. that's not aboutwhether or not the second amendment supports , that's about guns is just about the gun aspect of it which is a chapter in the book and i was hesitant to write that because i didn't want people to think

it was all about guns but i did put a gun chapter in their as you need to understand the culture of guns in the united states. understand the history of why we have guns. it's easyfor people . a podcast has listeners in new zealand and the uk and other places and people say it's all about the guns. it isn't all about the guns i because in the united states we have a second amendment allows guns and if my solution is where going to get rid of the guns, then it's a nonstarter. that's really where i come from. there are so many other things that can be done and when you say it's just this or it's just that, you're not looking at the real solution. >> and in that same chapter, people look at gun violence i think it's mental health or its guns . it's a lot more multifaceted than that but you also talk about if you're going to harm someone and use guns there's if you're thinking about people who say i need to have a gun to protect myself from

this administration, that it's actually people who don't have guns tackle people who are getting more violent. >> the research we did the initial research we did with the fbi, one of the hreasons why i have these things here and i hold them up and one of the reasons why i wrote the book, you talked about that earlier. look at these publications. fbi, fbi american association of threat assessment professionals. journal for threat assessment management. you guys are hanging out with these at your table tops. these are not the things that you have and that youkeep with you . that's what i want to wrestle with them in the book because the book has all of these different things in it that you just can't find online. and when it comes to the stats that came out of it one of the things that i found most fascinating because i did co-authored the study for the fbi is that i hear the

guy with a gun and i never get rid of guns. people have a lot of opinions . they need to have some facts behind the opinions so when i wrote the chapters i wrote them thinking what are the facts and the things that i hear that are wrong. or and gave you the citations for where the research says so for example on the fbi study that i co-authored there were 160 incidents that we identified as those types of shootings and the same methodologies. 160 incidents and in 20 one of those i'm no mathematician that i have friends who are. accountants would tell you it's 13 percent . so in 20 one of the hundred 60 incidents unarmed civilians successfully stopped the sugar. so that's a huge percentage.

21 of 160 incidents. how many of people with guns are joe civilians did that? one. so right now the data doesn't support the concept of carrying a gun, run in and shoot somebody who's killing people. i'm telling you that i respect and i think we need the idea of law enforcement to be aware of what's going on. to train resource officers, trade. the officers owe have a lot more guns in the united states, more than we had that when sandy hook, lots more guns so there are a lot more risks involved but the data does not in any version support that is super wise to carry a gun so that you can get into a firefight because there are also as many more situations where people have been killed whbecause you don't have. i spent 20 years trained in

law enforcement and you can't imagine the cadrenaline that goes through your body as soon as you pull that gunfrom your holster . . somebody who's never been in that environment or hasn't trained as much of the fbi they are going to get tunnel vision right away. they're going to fire all over the place and we seen it happen. >> to go back to one of the things you started working through with this data and trends and how mass shooting despite all your efforts and hothe work that you've done around this what i thought was interesting is you referenced the trends for a violent crime decreasing. so why, how does that happen? why is one going down and the other going up ? >> i think to explain explain the trend now drawing on my knowledge . i'm not basing this on citrix but based on my working on

this for so many years. there are certain aspects. we do have a lot more guns in the united states. is not responsible for a trend going up? no because otherwise we see nmore violent crime goingup so it's not that we have more guns . it's not so much that we have people who are and your question isn't what is it not, your question is what is it so let me answerthat question . i think some of the things i think of when i think what are the trends going up or why can't 'we seem to grapple this. we live in a world where 50 years ago we read one newspaper wsand we knew everybody who lived around us. we knew all outhe kids we were in class with and our community and our world was so much smaller. now it's so much broader and because it's so much bigger, because there's all social media and 7000 panels that you can watch on your cable tv if you don'twant to watch one of the streaming services . and because we traverse a lot

more, what we have stopped doing is paying attention to the people right next to us.er because 80 to 90 percent of every shooter in this type of shooting category telegraphs their intent to shoot and generally 90 percent of the time they're verbally saying something to somebody. leakage, that's what we call it. so they're saying this is what's going on and they're saying it to people and people aren't hearing it and they're not hearing it because of a whole bunch of reasons. sometimes they're not hearing it because i don't want to hear it. you don't want to hear that your child is maybe going down the deep end of the tunnel or your boss is violent and people say all the time and i say this to any law enforcement officer will tell you. every prosecutor who's ever been in court will tell you when you were criminal cases will say you've never done anything like that before. i tdon't think you would ever do that.

you hear that all the time and you hear that whileyou're interviewing somebody after somebody's been shot . i can't believe he's done . he's never done that before. no kidding. if he done it before he be in jail. so think the logic of it but people want to believe the best in everyone. and i want to believe the best in my kids and my family and my neighbors but maybe people would think differently if they recognize that in these most violent situations two things. one is people who commit targeted violence like this, there on a trajectory towards violence. that's what they call it. they start out with the idea of this kind of violence and they start planning and preparing for the violence before the violent act occurs and in that stage we know from research that that planning and preparation can take days but more likely weeks and very often months and sometimes years.

so during that whole time but people who see them are around them those on the people can stop them. we can't. law enforcement 1 million law enforcement agents in the united states and the federal state and told local tribal lawenforcement agencies, law enforcement is the last one to know . t tears, teachers, family members friends. that's who has to get this message. hythat's why the book. that's why i do the podcast. because if you listen to the details of it you'll begin to hear i can see that. i can hear that. and you recognize the others back i want to tell you about this additional connector reports violence is that somewhere between depending on how far we look at the research 35 to 40 percent of es these shooters have the same characteristics, the same

behaviors of people who commit suicide because their intent is to commitsuicide . so when you think about i should maybe talk to the police or i should call in an anonymous tip line about my neighbor because i'm not really certain remember that 35 to 40 percent of these are suicidal and if i told you that you should call the police or a neighbor about a tip because you thought somebody was going to commit suicide t.you say i'll do that so culturally we've accepted the idea that even if they don't want us to turn them in or make a call, culturally we've accepted we would do that to save somebody from committing suicide. yet we don't do it for this. and 35 to 40 percent of these people commit suicide. they go out with the intent to commit suicide, same behaviors. >> when i read the book a lot of people might think the

action items and steps in this problem are at the federal level, state-level with my hr department, with my company. everyone. you see something, say something. >> absolutely. i was flying out i was reading this journal of threat assessment study and one of the things i was on a a study about leakage and i write all over, one of the things that i remember reading was that this is, they went through research coming in from oregon to see whether or not and how the tip lines, the anonymous tip lines were being recorded. is that hugeinvaluable source ou. you don't want to get involved, call it in. that's all we're asking you to do. because we don't know. and in this case 58 percent of the people who called in,

they were calling in 50 percent of the people were calling in something that had to do with kind of bullying. but a small number of npeople call him about violence and they actually just in the first year of this research and oregon they have like 1000 tips, 50 percent were for bullying. that's atrajectory . that conduct those from saying mean words to being mean to bullying. that kind of conduct we know that people who commit this type of mass violence, targeted violence that is so horrific and terrifies whole neighborhoods that half of these people have some level of background that might not be criminal charges but it's going to be something like bullying or being bullied because the neighborly back. people have these items big ideas of who they think the shooter is they're all wrong. i think that's one of ngthings i tried to address is you're looking in the wrong

direction. >> you touched on. but myth of the masked shooter profile. the myth that you described was edexactly this preconceived notion i came into the book with. it's a white male, social outcast. very quiet. it's not. who is the masked shooter? >> that kid you just described is his dad upstairs . it's his dad upstairs watching television as he comes home from work. 35 years old is the average age of the masked shooterlike this . 32 years is the mean. half of these shootings occur in places of business,only a quarter in an educational environment . these are places that are not just packing houses and

offices but day salons and postal offices and all these other facilities where people go to work every day and they get disgruntled. they're called industry grievance collectors. i always say it's like you wear a backpack and every time you get mad at somebody to put another lock in your backpack and these guys are filling their backpacks up i say guys because that's the only demographic that so far, the only demographic. when we look at the demographics of the eyes research over 20 years had i can't give you the exact numbers because i don't remember it, there's so many numbers in my head but 200 something shooters, 13 were women so we know almost all these are male. that doesn't mean women don't do that. when they do it some of them

do it with a spouse the ones who are the shooters were female generally their shooting their place of employment for their former place of employment . think about the grievances you have when you talk about people who are disgruntled employees. when we did the research my analysts were so not happy with me when i told them i want you to divide the business shootings by into two groups and they're like well they are businesses, we can't. i said you can so you're going to do this. by him into places that are where the public circulates. kind of like think about a grocery store or a mall or a big box store. or a part. but it's a place of business. does the public transit do not generally or is it a place where it's not the public. so like a packing house which just the employeeson-site .

'and for all office. generally a dentist office and its normally common citizens walking through. when we divided those numbers it was like a light came on when it came to looking at the research which was fun for meto call that meant it was worth me asking them to do it . but the value was that it showed us that when they shooters when the shooting occurs in a place of business almost virtually every time it is a person who was is an employee or was recently employed so in the case of this fbi's research there were five people who were fire that day or the day before. so okay hr people, how can we talk the shooting if you don't have a policy in place to respectfully help a person oleave his employment or our employment?

thi know that you have a terrible employee and you decide i want this guy to go but all you're doing is passing up a problem to somebody else. when he picks up that rock and puts it in his backpack sometimes he goes to his car and gets a gun and comes back and we've seen it happen too many times . but sometimes it might mean that an employee takes a employee is taken off-line and they give them help you find another job. they give them a couple of extra weeks of pay. the average cost of the workers comp in this kind of situation is $500,000 for one shooting situation. her person. .this is a very expensive, costly endeavor just from a dollar standpoint for businesses so most of these shootings occur in businesses and their incredibly expensive vefrom a business standpoint. some instances some estimates i've read a third of the employees leave a place of

employment after shooting like this. imagine hiring and retraining a third of your employees. it's business sense. think about it and put time and effort into o it. >> that's not the way apartments let people go. it's abrupt and cold. >> that's okay because that's the way it was that the way it can't be done anymore. it can be done anymore because we're continuing to see shootings. >> ..

82% of the people were the only ones who recorded on thehe incident. 82% of the time, there's only a single person reporting on a potential threat or bullying action. what i'm w saying is when you sy somebody else will call, you are wrong. when you think maybe i'll calll tomorrow, you're wrong. you should call right now and ulget off your shoulders and let the professionals handle it because we didn't have, years ago, we didn't have anonymous tip lines and now we do. p we have phone calls, texts, see something, say something on the east coast, colorado pioneered it after, mine, not a new thing anymore. you can text in the tip and they do. the biggest, the largest number of anonymous tips that come in or between 4:00 p.m. to midnigho when kids are home from school.

that's not just about school shootings but that's when people are active, active online and seeing pictures and hearingf things. >> it's a segue into the next question. >> like i said it up or something. >> exactly. >> i didn't. >> she didn't but you have a lot of space in the book to this and we talk about why the increase in shootings and in the last two or three decades,s there's an increase in media and the way we consume it. online content 24/7 news cycle, social media, it's hackers, almost entertainment in some way so youou talk about the contingt affect. there's a piece in your book, it makes a promise to those on the

edge of committing this. to talk about how that's driving things. >> when i started out doing the research, it takes a long time to write a book fact based and studies and research and it so i was working on the book, i didn't think about the contagion effect but even when i started, there were fewer shootings and by the time i finish, there were so many more and i want to know why and i was doing some digging and research and i found out there was a research project on western australia here in the united states, a research after the sandy hook shooting and this is what caught my interest. they decided to look at three and a half years of coverage on abc world news and it's not picking on abc, it's saying this

is a legitimate typical kind of way news coverage is, i live in the washington d.c. region engaged f with news media for a long time, well respected organization so three and a half years of coverage, researching the shootings when abc news would cover the shooting and researchers looked at when were shootings occurring after the coverage? they found in the fourth to ten days after the shooting, there were three more shootings. they conclude, there is there language, the back of the envelope calculation, 58% of all shootings that occurred in the three and half years to be attributable by cost to the news coverage. huge numbers. there was another study t done

earlier and that research said in the 13 days after the shooting is an increase in shooting in the 13 day. and when i was at the bureau we worked on asking law enforcement or the media to think about the way they cover and speak about that specific thing, i am headed out to springfield illinois to think about that very thing, that contagion factor is there and until we stop giving coverage and talking and telling the story of the shooter in a glorifying way, we will not gete a hold of that. >> and it seems kind of tough and the modern digital world, you can measure the w response o

coverage in real time so it's hard. >> i've had that conversation rs with producers and media and they say exactly that, some of them say we don't, i had a fascinating conversation with two friends, one was an editor m of paper and one who works for a major national newspaper that crosses the world so i guess you probably know. anyway, one of the newspaper editors said to me, we have long stood the test of time, we do not horrify for shooters. we tried to keep the picture of the front page, we use the name once and only once a must in trial. we believe we tell the story of the shooter, that will make other shooters shoot, perfectly logical and understandable. the other person said we are a paper of records, we have to use the shooter's name, we feel we

need to do that. i can tell d you the days of the columbine reeded documentary features on the shooters and time magazine has a shooter on the magazine cover, those days i think are over hopefully, i hope they are. i'll be the one out there talking think they are aware of this, they've written themselves about the research done and need to come up with a standard. i was strolling around today at holy name cathedral, so they have stuff in the basement that is historical and a story about a priest, a newspaper clipping on the wall, a story about a newspaper, they had seen a woman, a guy with a person that was unusual and asked the guy

about it 50s or something and the guy took off running and it turned out he was a person snatcher and police were there and happened to catch the guy. the newspaper story had the victims name and address and it which would never happen today. it would never happen today and the sameg. thing, i used to be a journalist 100 years ago and we wouldn't run the name of a victim of a crime or a rape victim, you don't run a child's name. i think the newspaper industry media industry, television, they are definitely beginning to get that they need t' cover is about the shooter, it's not about the story the shooter wants it to about themselves. i could talk about that for an hour, they write their own narrative and everybody covers it and the people whose stories we should tell are the people are dead who can't tell the story. >> a story you told the book

about the shooter, he collected whippings of previous shooters. >> not unusual. i think a great example is even sandy hook itself, the shooter had a chart on his wall, it took probably a couple of years for him to fill out, detailing the different shootings. these are not shootings thatr a occur on a moments notice, it's a different type of violence in a different solution we have to work on. that young man who did that at sandy hook was not unusual. there are other people we go in, we can track and have tracked behavioral people at the fbi, secret service has done a lot of work, analytical teams and track people fascinating by the columbine shooters and they keep a list and put up on their walls

and bedroom, they want to b be part of that narrative even if they don't fit in, they want to fit into something because they want to be in a gang but in the process of wanting to be in the gang, the guy who runs security, guy? good midwestern term, the guy who runs security at the jefferson county sheriff's office, where columbine high school is, a longtime friend oft mine and their budget last year i think was $6 million for security at the school system, 6 million and local law enforcement security support of the was four and a half million. $10 million security, people who admire the columbine killers come to columbine to tell a story, they want to be part of that story even though if you listen to the podcast but if you listen to the podcast, there's so much more detail, the

columbine killers, everything you think you know about the columbine killing is wrong, i'm telling you. killers were not bully, not part of a trenchcoat mafia group and i think that's the thing about the book, there's so much people don't know or understand and in some ways, this is really simple. in some ways the answer is look at the people around you. be prepared to see something and say something right now. look for these behavioral characteristics, they are listed in the book, online, you can buy them on my website. you don't even have to buy the book although if that's okay. [laughter] but there is so much information out there but we don't look for it or listen for it and re-create narratives of people who think they are the shooters and they want to be like these other shooters. >> we talk about trends and the data in those things but talk

about actionable steps people can take you broken down into three names and then comes the third and stop the bleeding. >> i think everybody should be trying to talk to stop bleeding, that is lifesaving whether the shooting or a car accident or fall offno the roof. if you are going to bleed out, everybody can now be trained in that. it's available online, stop the bleed.gov, it's available and you can use turner kids, all the miss you shouldn't use a tourniquet, unless you can't get to anybody for a long time, if you're in the wild and bleeding out, better to lose a leg, better to lose an arm so nowadays tourniquet are recommended by the surgeons which it wasn't previously so

that is for if it happens, everybody should be trained, and understand what that means. basic human nature when something bad happens, fight or flight, advising that right? you run, hide or fight, that's why the federal government, why i pushed that through over the department of education next objectionns and questions abouts that the right way to teach people in this country? is the right way to teach people in every country. in england, the uk, they think fight it sounds mean but that's okay, the idea, the most important things.e some bible fight with their words, i interviewed a woman who spent an hour and a half talking to middle school students into putting the guns down that she carried into her office on a school day because he was going to shoot up the school and she used her fight with her words to

talk him out of, to put the gun down. it can be a lot of different ways and virginia tech, ton ten people barricaded the door and hid behind the door the shooter was going after and never got through. virginia tech, a survivor of the holocaust teaching in the engineering program and held the door shut, no locks on the doors at virginia tech in the north hall, he held the door and held the c door so they can get through, that was the way he fought and told his students to jump off the second-story window and every student except one got out the window before he was shot to death. he chose to fight, you can run and hide and fight and do all those things. at columbine, sandy hook, at the sandy hook horrible shooting, all the 20 little first-graders were killed, a horrible

situation in the united states, a teacher in one of the classrooms stood between herself and thed students and six students were able to escape from a side door into another area and survive. six students, six kids alive today who would notn have been alive but the fact that the seizure stepped in front and distracted and continued to distract. you have to know are going to do it and no other options. i know i ramble on but i am passionate sometimes about this, i just know there are so many solutions and people don't stop and think about how i can do that. i didn't get how you prevented which is the most important part so if ih. can jump. >> please do. >> the book has 14 chapters, teu are about prevention because it really is about what my looking afor?

and how do i report it? that is the part, i think that is the part we fail in miserably in the united states. we don't know the simple things to look for about people, when you look for when somebody is under stress because they might commit suicide, you're already halfway there, you know a lot of those things already. those are things like the biggest issues, financial troubles,yo mental stress, mentl health issues, not mental diagnosis, it doesn't have to be a diagnosis of a mental disorder, you have mental stressors, financial troubles, interpersonal problems, problems that work, the four biggest factors. we all live with them and deal with those all the time. when we find shooter, when behavioral people research, they found every person had at least three or four of the stressors they were dealing with on a daily basis.

look for people i' financial trouble, look for people struggling with depression and mental health issues not because you think they're going to be shooters because they need help and if they happen to be a collector, they will be putting rocks in their backpack, those aren't necessarily legitimateu lesions. i'm mad because you took my parking spot, you're like i was just parking, i didn't know you are looking for that parking spot but that guy putting that rock in his backpack saying that's the person i want to get to. same thing, you don't get promoted, you go home ando c complain about it and have a beer with your friends. the other guy doesn't get promoted, he he gets a gun and comes back in so the people you are around, the people around you are the ones were going to say things and you have to listen for those things in that conduct, you have to trust your

senses, that's what it comes down to. you know your kids in the other room and it gets quiet? you are like some things up, something is ups. when you're standing and working in the office and all of ' sudden what's going on? you look around and somebody is down the room, that spidey sense is the same thing, you've got to report those things right now. if you report, people say i don't want to get anybody in trouble, i want to get involved. i don't think he's going to do anything, he's never done that before. i'm telling you when it's life and death, those are crappy reasons. take the information off the burden of your shoulders and put it in the hands of the professionals who hear tips, 1000 tips a day, 100 tips at the police department everyday. they listen, they can weigh it, athe school threat assessment team, they can weigh the

information and they may have information you don't know anything about that is along time fbi agent, one tiny piece of information and a stable piece of the puzzle we didn't know anything about. you don't know what of the piece around the table so if you don't call, you're not being a good citizen, a good personhe interested in saving the lives of people even though you want to be. it's okay to call, law enforcement is not going to knock on somebody store and arrest them because somebodyt called and said i think this guy is acting hanky, itt doesn't wok that way. it doesn't work in the united states, i'll tell you that. >> we have to create this culture of feeling free enough to do that and breaking barriers and a former attorney, a legal technology space, privacy and

that was one thing i was thinking about reading that you touched on h addressing thes laws. >> when you thinkou t about stae privacy laws, hit the most for education privacy laws, every state has privacy laws, you have standards in your own business, schools havee standards, what is the safest way to protect you when you provide information to somebody from assault on your privacy, he violated by privacy rights? the safest ways to report to the police because there are law enforcement exceptions and every one of those laws. there is a belief law enforcement based on information they receive that the could be a threat to life, privacy goes out the window. and it should.

i'm going to gohr through the dr because i would rather as an agent, an fbiy agent, i rather you assume ethan somebody behind the door get killed. >> can you think of examples of the school or businesses who implement it a system that isor effective, have you seen that happen or is nobody quite there eryet? >> here's what i would say, there's no question safe to tell and colorado stepped up at the center of attention for how toan do that. it's safe with a number two, an anonymous reporting system but there are reporting systems all over the united states now that fall in to place, a friend of mine runs see something, say something anonymous reporting system supported by efforts that

happenede after sandy hook in te state of pennsylvania signed on. this study i was reading is because they created a tip line. there are two blinds available all over the united states, there's a phone number you can call that i don't have memorized but it's 1877 something something something something and that's a phone number you can call for an anonymous tip, every state has them, you just have to look up and in a backup category, every person can call the tip line and talk to a real person or fill out something online and get the information and at the fbi gets a tip and i can hear them,i it's not a perfect system, there are balls that have been dropped and i recognize what happened in florida but if you called the tip line because you are in

connecticut and heard about something, you saw a picture your cousin posted on facebook or something, i'm making it up.i you are afraid there was a threat on the school in san francisco, the fbi would get on the phone and talk to the school, they would pass the information along if they call the local law enforcement, they do the same thing, law enforcement can call to law enforcement all the time in colorado has done a great job, they are at the forefront of teaching kids at the forefront of teaching kids sensitively, not scaring kids. they have suffered so many shootings and they are in a concentrated area. >> i have tons of questions i could talk to you o for hours te given we have ten to 15 minutes left, who open up to questions for anybody in the room were anyone online. >> if you have a question online

and the general public, this heavy subject with the kids. >> that's a great question, i'm embarrassed i didn't answer that, i do write in the book, i write about my shooting in michigan near detroit, she called me, should i send kids to school? i think it's a greatonve questi, they have to have the answer to, i think the answers are furthermore, we should know the schools policies and ask the kids, you should talk to the kids once you know your schools policies and shouldn't be afraid to ask the kids what the policies are on how to handle emergency response, do they have

a plan in case there's a shooting at the school? what if there's a shooting in the neighborhood? you know what your kids my face and second of all, most kids in school, i hear people say all the time i want to talk to my kids about that, it's scary. ask a fifth-grader if they know about school shootings. they do so don't pretend my daughter a middle school teacher and she said to me once when i asked her this question, she said tell parents don't put your seat on your kids, your afraid of it, your kid is not afraid of it. just give them the information they need. every teacher is trained to teach at the level of the child age. i think parents, they cut their own knowledge short when they don't realize as they raise a child, they raise their own children, they know how to talk to them in an age-appropriate way, just like youu teach them not to run down stairs or run in

the streets. a potential school shootings that might not ever happen in your school or somebody who runs over because they run into the street, you know how dangerous it is, you teach your child not to run into the street but your afraid of shootings so you won't talk to your kids about safety in schools. he talk about stranger danger i'd hope, he talked to themm about kids, you're worried about somebody picking up your kids when there is a bus stop. those are equally frightening subjects but as a parent, you talk to your kids, invite the conversation and hear what they say, that's what i think most often i feel like if a parent listens, asks open-ended questions and bits of the kids say, he will know how much they know. most of the schools, almost alla schools run essentially active

shooter drills. if you don't know what your kids are doing for aniv active shootr drill, you're the one behind, is not the parent, the kids are aware. in colorado, i've been in colorado make it training to second graders and the kids are matter-of-fact about it which is great. they don't think of it as this will happen all the time and i am afraid, they think of it as a tornado drill or fire drill, one more thing they have to pay attention to what the teacher does it is the teacher tells them to be quiet, they have to be quiet. >> is there a question? >> outstanding presentation. you have thoughts on active shooters? >> i think for the audience, it is an individual that's one of the many demographics of people, concerned about somebody who feels they are involuntary

celibate and therefore they will strike out at people and you would have to look up the details but i would say, thanks for that question, they are certainly somebody who could and have committed this type of crime but i don't think we would categorize it by their motivation as much as we think about what we can do to preventl it because motivation a lot of times people get tripped up about what the motivation is in the shooting and we will say when it's just this kind of person, then you exclude everybody else and that is a' bd way to think about it because you can't exclude anybody is like saying it's only a boy playing video games in his basement, 97% of the teens in the united states play video games. that is not a good predictor of who will commit a crime. somebody whoho might involved ia

particular group that may be more antisocial or politically motivated, that me the motivation for why they are still going to commit the same planning and preparation that is predicable that we can look for, they will make the same leakage and hear the same leakage see the same planning and preparation, they do things like stop taking their medication, they give their positions away, they change their appearance. nobody when they are tensing i want to be a mask shooter so they are the kid with nice haircut and glasses and collared shirt tennis shoes and when they decide they want toh be a mask shooter, they have to reinvent themselves and that's when you see pictures of people with black shirt on holding guns up taking their picture holding a gun in thehe bathroom taking a picture of themselves to look will and make a different person

out of themselves so look for the behaviors and how somebody is changing their behavior. i don't care if you have a gun or ten guns and you shoot the guns. if you suddenly start shooting the guns and by, stockpiling ammunition in a way that is a difficult fors you, that's what we are looking for, atypical behavior.. i get the idea somebody might have a political ideology or something like that but it's not politics. your political opinion is not actionable. what you believe about things is the essence of the first amendment, you are allowed to do that but not allowed to plan and prepare and commit an act of violence and that's what we are looking for, planning andat preparation and that's what people can report, planning and preparation. >> motivation is a larger problem, it is people playing video games, you have to take the video industry and change

it. >> i know people want it to be video games because you want to blame somebody, something but there's just as many video games that don't have anything to do with violence and people play them. >> thank you very much for being here, the mass shooting prices and thank you for being here. >> my pleasure, appreciate the opportunity. [applause] ♪♪ >> sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen. to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, other discussions, festivals and more, book tv every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at booktv.org. television for serious readers. ♪♪

>> at least six presidents recorded conversations while in office. here are many of the conversations on c-span's new podcast. presidential recordings. >> season one focuses on lyndon johnson presidency. in 1964 civil rights act, 1964 presidential campaign, gulf of tonkin incident, marked on, and the war in vietnam. not everyone knew they were being reported. >> certainly johnson's secretary is new because they are cast with transcribing those conversations. they were the ones who made sure the conversations were taped as johnson would signal to them through an open door between his office and there's. >> you will hear blunt talk. >> i want to report the number of people assigned to kennedy the day he died. if i can't go to the bathroom, i won't go. i won't go anywhere, i will stay

behind these gates. >> presidential recordings. the c-span now mobile app or wherever you get your podcast. ♪♪ >> there are a lot of places to get information but only at c-span you get it straight from the source. no matter where you're from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. if it happened here or here or here or anywhere that matters. america is watching on c-span. powered by cable. >> tonight i am very excited to welcome elizabeth williamson, celebrating the relief i of s