[Foundation-l] School shooting threats

[Delirium]

George Herbert wrote:
> 1. Most people aren't nearly as good at detecting credible threats as
> they (or you) think.  Police and other authorities are - there are
> specific training and analysis methods involved, including psych
> consults if there are certain warning flags, etc.  Ask any
> crisis-trained psychiatrist, law enforcement officer who investigates
> these, etc.
Police and other authorities are actually quite poor at it as well. The 
fundamental problem is that there are not credible "warning signs" that 
don't have extremely high rates of false positives, to the point where 
around 100% of individuals distinguished by the criteria are false 
positives. That's to be expected, of course, since school shootings are 
extremely rare, so in statistical terms, the number of future school 
shooters in any population you care to distinguish is effectively 
0---you'd have to track down not 100 false positives, but hundreds of 
thousands, and still might not find any legitimate positives (the number 
of actual school shooters in the history of schooling is below 200). In 
fact there is not a single documented case in which a report from the 
public averted a school shooting. I could think of some cases where it 
might at least have a nonzero chance, such as gun-shop owners reporting 
suspicious attempts to purchase weapons, but Wikipedia posts aren't 
among them.

-Mark, who probably fulfills a bunch of the "warning signs" himself but 
discourages harrassment-via-cop, please