Let’s look at each stage of a potential public shooting—see what makes it tick, and then try to prevent it.

First—I need to say something about guns.  You can’t have public shootings without guns.  So many solutions out there focus on cutting the gun out of the equation.  There’s nothing wrong with this logic—and there are lots of things we can do to reduce the number of guns out there—with and without passing legislation.  The other chapters of this Solving Guns project are full of those ideas—ideas that suggest ways to reduce the number of guns that people keep for home protection, hunting, and sport.  So I encourage you to look at those ideas—because if implemented, each one of them could make a mass shooting less likely to happen.

But I’m not going to repeat those ideas here—because here we are focusing in on active shooter incidents.  Which  provide unique opportunities for reducing violence.

So let’s dive in:

We’ll start where many active shootings start: with the forces that act on an individual to make them frustrated.  I say “make them frustrated” but I should say “make him frustrated”—because nearly all active shooter incidents are perpetrated by men.  Men perpetrate 97 percent of all active shooter incidents, in fact—so that over the FBI’s 15 year database, there were only seven incidents with women as the sole shooter.  For comparison, when it comes to overall murder, men make up 90 percent of offenders.  So active shootings are even more dominated by men than other forms of violent crime.

The age breakdown is fascinating, too.  Especially when you compare it to the U.S. population:

It’s clear here that from the teens through the fifties, the number of active shooters tracks very closely to the US population—with the only notable outlier being those in their 20s.  Those in their 20s are 36 percent more likely to become active shooters than population numbers would suggest.  At about age 60, people finally become less likely to commit active shootings as compared to population numbers.  And it just keeps declining from there.

This close tracking to the US population isn’t at all what we see when we look at other violent crimes like murder.  Look at how homicides compare to the US population:

Here, again, the thing to notice first is the 20s.  The 20s are off-the-charts dangerous compared to the overall US population—literally two and a half times more people commit homicide in their 20s than population numbers would suggest!  The teens and thirties track with population numbers, but once people get to their 40s, they become far less likely to commit homicide—and the numbers keep dropping from there.

So, the biggest takeaways here:

The twenties are the most dangerous decade—but in homicide this is even more true.  For regular murder, men become less dangerous by age 40—but for public shootings, the story is different.  Men don’t become less dangerous than their representation in the population until age 60.  Twenty years later!

To see this difference, here is active shooter percentages as compared to homicide percentages:

The numbers don’t really align that much at all—they’re only congruent for two decades: teens and 30s.

What does this comparison tell us?  Active shootings aren’t like other types of violent crime.  They stand alone.  And the forces that cause them affect men of almost all ages, from the teenage years right up to their 60s.  What happens after age 60 that makes them drop off?  Well, that’s when men generally drop out of the workforce.  Just look at workforce participation by age:

Just as mass familicide shootings were often caused by stress and anxiety within the family, mass public shootings are often caused by stress and anxiety within institutions like school and work.  Once men age out of those institutions and reach retirement, their risk of becoming an active shooter drops, too.

So, if we want to reduce active shootings, one thing we can try to do is reduce the distress that men feel at institutions like schools and workplaces.  These institutions, by the way, account for 37.5 percent of all active shooting locations.

FRUSTRATION IN SCHOOLS

We'll start with school.  If we look at school shooters, we see that they tend to be outsiders.  They either find themselves ostracized by their peers, ostracized by their teachers and the administration, or simply loners by choice.  Ostracism isn’t a fluke—school is kind of built for it.  It’s arranged in such a way that students are cut off from those they might find common interests with.  For example, siblings are pretty much always separated, in different classes, different lunch groups, different breaks, even.  And close friends can often be scattered to different teachers and periods set at random every semester.  Then there’s the issue of age. The stratification by age creates institutionally-enforced and sanctioned hierarchies of power.  Eighth graders are never in classes with second graders, so they think they are better than them.  Twelfth graders are never in classes with tenth graders—so these 10th graders aren't their peers and equals, they are by definition beneath them.  So we have division by age, division by period, and—there’s division of space.  The majority of school is taken up with time spent in the classroom—with limited opportunities to socialize.

The school day includes large portions of sitting at a desk, staring up at a blackboard while the teacher goes over the lesson.  Maybe there's busywork with worksheets and quizzes, and maybe there's the occasional group project.  But most of school is silent and sedentary.  What does social time look like in school?  It looks like the mad rush of lunchtime, the spare minutes between classes, and the pockets of time before and after school.  We don’t think about this that much.  In fact, we expect friendships, camaraderie, and a sense of belonging to "just happen” in these in-between moments.  But that’s kind of like expecting you to make friends while you wait in line at the grocery store or while you commute in the morning.  It’s like expecting you to make friends with the random person sitting next to you in the movie theater.  It’s no surprise that lots of kids find this daunting.  For these kids, it just doesn't happen.  Bullying, then, is reinforced not only by the stratification of older kids from younger kids, sibling from sibling and friend from friend, but by the transactional nature of free time.  The period between classes isn't enough time to get to know people as people, but it is enough time to pick on them.  This all conspires to create one of the most vulnerable inequalities in school: that between those who have lots of friends and those who have few.      

These aren't the only pressures put on students, of course.  What do teachers and administrators do to solve anti-social behavior?  They send kids to detention or expel them.  Yes, they fix anti-social problems by removing kids from their social environment.  Of course, this only compounds the problem.  How could it not?  Then there’s the enormous weight of college preparation or career selection—that constant nagging which feels more like a curse than an encouragement: better get this grade or you’ll be doomed for life!  And add on top of that the hormonal swirl of puberty—of biological and psychological changes that are absolutely earth-shattering.  School becomes ground zero for stress—but school’s only the half of it.  There’s also the drama of home life, of parental expectations that every kid must negotiate…and then part-time work or child-care responsibilities, the need to watch younger siblings while also—supposedly—getting mountains of homework done before that 6 am alarm clock.  Science told us decades ago that kids need more sleep than adults, but we still insist on tearing them out of bed at earlier and earlier hours. Is it any mystery, when you add it all up, why some kids rebel violently against this social straight-jacket?

Some say that we can reduce school shootings by reducing bullying.  So they suggest anti-bullying campaigns and zero-tolerance policies for violence and intimidation.  Sure, these might make some difference.  But why don't we talk about changing the structure that breeds bullies, rather than punishing the bullies that structure creates?

This is actually really easy to do, and might actually save money and improve school performance.  One of the best ideas out there is by Salman Khan—the founder of the online learning site: Khan Academy.  He wrote a book on this idea called One World Schoolhouse.  The plan is this: first, don't stratify kids by age.  Different kids learn at different rates.  This is true not just of kids but of everyone.  No other social institution that humans engage in is stratified by age except education.  Think about it: the family get togethers you have—people of all ages.  Your workplace—people of all ages.  A day at the park—the movies—the beach: people of all ages are everywhere.  Getting along.  Sharing ideas, conversation, learning.  Khan's first priority is to break down the walls between the ages.  Imagine it: a 10th grader in the same class as an 8th grader.  A 12th grader helping a sixth grader with math homework.  Or vice-versa.  Now imagine some other kid is picking on or teasing that 8th grader.  You don't think that 12th grader is going to step in and protect them?  Mixed-age learning can help reduce bullying.  But more than that, it reduces the stress that students might feel about "falling behind" their cohort in a certain subject.  If all of your classes are full of old students and young students, the only measurement of progress is how you do on the work at hand.

Khan's other brilliant idea is to flip the learning experience on its head.  Today in traditional classrooms, students watch lectures in class and then apply that learning to homework and group projects after school.  But this is crazy!  Every study ever released shows that the best way to learn is to do, so why do we leave this most active side of learning to the home?  The home, where some students have computers and desks and engaged parents and siblings, and some students have chores and siblings to watch and parents who may or may not be at work until 9 pm, in households that may resemble a crowded subway car more than a library.  If learning the lesson is just a lecture that students are expected to listen to in silence—well, that's something they can do at home.  It's easy and it doesn't require anything but attention.

Yes, Khan's idea is to flip the script: make kids watch the lecture at home, and then, at school, apply that learning through experience.  Just imagine if you spent the majority of time at school working with fellow students on a problem, creating a story, or building a presentation?  All of that time would be social and all of it would make teachers available not as boring dictaphones on the other side of the room, but helpful guides there to assist you along the path of understanding.  Bullying would be reduced, socializing would increase and become not a side-effect of school where some students excel and others fail, socializing would be the point and purpose of school.  Every student would have a chance to hone those skills, to find common allies, and to build strong friend networks that included more than teachers and peers, but mentors and mentees.  Another upside is that it would make education more equitable—students wouldn’t need to watch the lecture of a bad teacher, they could watch the same engaging video content at home as the richest kids in the most elite schools.

Each year, 16 percent of high school students contemplate suicide seriously. One of the top indicators for suicide is a sense of powerlessness and the feeling of being a burden to others.  How do we combat this?  By empowering students to help fellow students. That's why one of the best things that can ever happen to someone is for them to be a mentor to someone else.  An environment like the One World Schoolhouse would knit students together of all age groups and skill levels.  This model of school empowers kids to take more control of their education, and, as Khan has suggested, could significantly improve outcomes.  It could also remove the inequalities that crop up in a system that puts so much learning pressure on the home environment and on the discipline to buckle down and do homework.

But Khan isn't alone—and his isn't the only model.  An even more dramatic example of student empowerment is outlined by developmental psychologist Peter Gray in Free to Learn.  Gray points out how stress levels have risen over the last few decades as kids have had more and more responsibilities piled on while parents have taken more and more of their power and autonomy away from them.  Kids are now expected to do community service, take AP classes, participate in sports, lead clubs, and pass one standardized test after another—all to become attractive prospects for college admission.  They've been told that failure to get into college means failure in life—elevating each mindless worksheet and book report to a matter of life and death.  At the same time, parents have restricted their children's autonomy at every opportunity.

Fewer kids are allowed to walk to school, stay out after dark, or play in the front yard for fear of being kidnapped.  As Steven Pinker notes, of course, a parent would have to leave their child unattended for 500,000 years for there to be a likely chance of them being kidnapped, so a few hours after school are probably safe.  When kids sit inside and play video games, parents groan—but what other option do they have when so much freedom has been restricted?  And even more so during the pandemic.  Gray writes that when kids were asked what they would rather do—play with friends outdoors or play video games, 86 percent chose hang with friends.  But they often can't.  Could this restriction, stress, and lack of autonomy lead to school shootings?  Of course it could—and it does.  Peter Gray's answer is a radically different model for education—one built on The Sudbury Valley school.  Here's what it looks like:

Imagine a big manor-like house, filled with home-like spaces—large parlors and living rooms, dining tables and common areas—no classrooms with blackboards, no desks aligned in rows, no locker-lined hallways.  Students wander in and out of the house and the wide lawn and they spend their day completely free to pursue their own course of learning.  If they're interested in music, they research music online, try out some instruments—study lyrics and get with other students to maybe make some music of their own.  Teachers aren't teachers so much as learning guides who can help students with any subject; so a teacher might gather information on music history, find videos of musical performances, or take some of the kids to the symphony for a backstage tour.  There are no limits placed on a student's curriculum—if they're 100% engaged in music at the moment, then they are allowed to pursue that interest as far as it takes them.  For a week, a month—a year!

How do kids learn about math?  Well, music is mathematical, isn't it?  How do they learn about language?  Classical music is inspired by the same forces as classical literature and popular music is filled with poetic technique.  Students at Sudbury schools aren't just taught by the teachers—they pursue their own learning, create their own projects, and learn from other students.  That's what Peter Gray means by "Free to Learn"—and it produces graduates who are more confident, more mature, and more self-sufficient.  This is the exact opposite of the rigid, structured environment of current schools.  It's a place where kids don't need to lash out violently to assert control over their lives—they already have control over their lives.  And they’re ready to take that experience of control and confidence to whatever they set their life to next—college, vocational training, the military or the job market.

This school model isn’t just preparing students for their next job—it’s preparing them to be responsible citizens.  Sudbury is built on a democratic foundation.  Decisions are made by debate and democratic vote—and just as in America, it’s a one person, one vote model.  Each student gets one vote.  Each teacher and staff member gets one vote.  What this means, of course, is that the students have more votes than the staff.  And these aren’t kiddie votes: the entire school is run by this process—from activities and events to budgeting and the hiring of landscapers.  Even the school's system for dealing with disputes and misbehavior—its judicial system—is built on rules and policies enacted democratically.  Students are empowered, then, in every way they can be empowered: from what they learn to how they spend their time, from who they socialize with to what they vote for.

One of the primary targets of school shootings today is teachers—because teachers represent authority and can be the bearers of bad news in a system designed to deliver bad news of all sorts: bad grades, bad progress reports, and write-ups for “bad behavior.”  In Gray's model—and even Khan's—teachers are there to foster student curiosity and help them learn more of what they care about.  Even if that's video games.  Or—in one of my favorite examples from the book—alcohol.  Yes, one student at the Sudbury Valley School spent months studying alcohol production and actually built his own distillery.  With teacher help!  Now tell me—are you going to shoot the teacher who helped you build your own distillery?  I don't think so.

The lesson here is that we can make schools less dangerous by making them less awful—which is good because it not only saves lives, it helps to enrich them, too.  We can apply the same thinking to the workplace.

FRUSTRATION IN THE WORKPLACE

Workplace shootings account for the largest share of all active shooter incidents—nearly 1 in 4 events.  Their prevalence is pretty steady in the data: there were 3 events in 2001 and 3 events in 2015.

The fascinating thing about the data here is that there are two types of workplace shootings.  Those that are perpetrated by employees and those that are perpetrated by the spouses or ex-boyfriends of employees.  This second type is sort of an extension of domestic violence—where a man is enraged by a woman who left or in some other way—in his mind—betrayed him.  The solutions that we talked about, then, around mass-familicide and domestic violence can be applied to this second type of workplace shooting.

Almost all of the shootings of the first type—the ones by employees—take place at factories, manufacturing plants, or other blue-collar workplaces.  And 60 percent of those killed by these incidents were killed because the shooter was fired or suspended.  Now, why is this?  People get fired all the time, from all sorts of industries—why do these specific people in these specific industries lash out with a gun when fired or suspended?

There are millions of Americans employed in manufacturing and other blue-collar workplaces—working hard, dedicated to their craft, providing for themselves and their loved ones.  Only the smallest fraction of a fraction of workers ever become violent at work—but these industries make up a large percentage of all workplace shootings.  Why?  If we find out what makes some of these factory jobs different, maybe we can change it and by changing it, reduce the chance of violence.

These workers tend to be in their jobs for a longer time.  Manufacturing workers have the longest tenure in their jobs—averaging at 5.3 years compared to the average for private-sector work in general, which is 3.7 years.  That’s 50 percent longer.  Longer time in a job might be significant.  Because it means a few things:

First, workers feel more invested in it.  They’ve put lots of years into this company, into its mission.  So they expect to be treated with respect for that level of commitment.

Second, these workers feel connected to the place—they’ve given some of themselves to the job, and the job’s given some of itself to them.  Their identities have become connected.  So, if they’ve invested all of this time, and they identify themselves in some way with this position, then to have that position taken away—there’s two things happening potentially in their view: all of this worker’s labor for years is being dishonored, and they are literally having a part of themselves ripped away.

The American Psychological Association has ranked the causes of American stress and found that money, work, and the economy rank higher than things like relationships, family, health and personal safety (though this was before the pandemic). And why is that so surprising—when it can feel so out of control and yet so necessary to have any sense of control over your life?  An act of firing is something like a death—or is it?  The company going bankrupt—that might be a death.  But being picked out of the lineup and told you’re fired—and everyone else get back to work?  That’s not a death so much as a murder.

Steven Pinker, in his massive book on violence, points out one of the biggest misconceptions about violent crime: most of it isn’t committed by people who trample on the idea of justice.  No—to the contrary, most people who commit crime are motivated by a supreme sense of justice. A firing, like a murder, is an injustice in this sense—one that demands immediate and swift justice.

So that’s one thing about these jobs—how long they tend to be.  But there’s another thing about factory workers that’s different from office workers: their jobs are physical.  Physical labor: whether it’s in a plastics factory, an assembly plant, a distribution center, lumber yard, mill, warehouse, or construction site. When physical labor is associated with a job, then job performance could very well be correlated with traits like strength, size, fitness, and endurance.  The stronger worker could be the better worker.  When these traditionally masculine traits are celebrated in the workplace, it reinforces behaviors that have historically gone along with them: like dominance, aggression, retaliation and a code of honor.  When men are in an environment that reinforces a code of honor, they act differently.  In one study, men who had a verbal disagreement were twice as likely to escalate to physical violence if other people were in the room to see it.  They feel like they have to defend that honor, rather than letting it go.  So tell me, how do you just let the injustice of a firing go?

This sense of injustice is amplified by the roots that these men have put down in their communities.  The longer the job, the more likely the worker is to have established deep connections to the local area.  Being fired could mean moving away from friends, family, and the home you’ve come to know.  The data tells us that nearly half of the workers in this demographic have never moved in their lives—not even once.  On average, those who haven’t moved have eight family members within an hour’s drive from their home.  That’s a lot of people to say goodbye to.  So being fired isn’t just a threat to one’s livelihood—but it could mean losing everyone and everything these men have known on a daily basis since birth.  That’s a massive threat.  In fact, family is the number one reason why people choose to stay put in an area, according to a Pew Research study.  The number one reason why they leave?  To find work.  I don’t know if I can overstate the power of place.  When the researchers asked people why they chose to stay in their town, six out of ten said: “because I belong here.”  This is at the very heart of an individual’s identity.  A firing is a threat on every possible level.

Which brings us to money.  Losing a job always means losing money—but for this group of workers it’s way more than that.  If these workers have a family, there’s about a 40 to 50 percent chance that their salary is the only salary in the household.  Lots of these jobs we’re talking about take a considerable amount of skill and know-how.  But most of them don’t require a college degree.  And the statistics tell us that men without college degrees tend to be married to women without college degrees.

The average age of factory shooters is 43.6 years old.  That’s prime-time for having a family.  And if they have a family, it’s far more likely for theirs to be the only salary in the household.  That’s because studies show that the less education a mother has, the less likely she is to work.  For example, about 80 percent of mothers with college degrees work, while just 50 percent with less than a high school diploma are in the workforce. This means that the loss of a job for a man at a factory is more likely than average to mean the loss of ALL family income.  It also means that these households are less likely to have large amounts of money saved.  The average household income for families with a stay-at-home home mom and a working dad is $55,000.  For families with both parents working, it’s $102,000.

To make matters even harder on these families—they are more likely to have more children.  Moms who lack a high school diploma have on average about 3 children, while moms with a college degree on average have about 2 children. So, even if factory workers make more money than some other industries, their household is more likely to make less money.  The family is less likely to have a second income to fall back on, they’re less likely to have savings, and more likely to have bigger families with more mouths to feed.  And they’re likely to have more roots in a place, making it that much harder to leave town to look for work.  Oh, and the men who just got fired—they are more likely to be working in a place that respects a male code of honor—where disrespect demands retribution.

You might say—okay, that makes a firing a bad thing.  A terrible fall—but there’s supposed to be a safety net to catch families in that fall.  Well, yeah—there’s unemployment insurance.  The first problem—the cosmetic problem—is a real one: nobody wants to be on unemployment, and to be on it can be a major blow to anyone’s pride.  But pride aside, it might be argued unemployment insurance is that safety net.  Problem is: there’s a gaping hole in this net: the widespread belief that you don’t qualify for unemployment if you’ve been fired.  The idea that you only get unemployment if you’ve been “laid off.”

This belief is true, actually—that in many states if you are fired for misconduct, you cannot receive unemployment.  Now, if you’re fired for other reasons, sometimes you can receive unemployment.  But the fact that this is unclear—and the fact that many people think every firing is disqualifying, has a really dangerous effect.  At the moment of firing, there’s a black feeling of falling with no safety net to catch you and those you love.  The policy of disqualifying people who are fired for misconduct is indefensible.  It’s mean-spirited and ultimately counter-productive.  People who are fired for misconduct are exactly the individuals that society should try to make less desperate, not more desperate.  What the hell?

Tell me then—is it easy to hear that you’ve been fired, put your jacket on, and just walk out the door?  Is it easy to head home and tell your family that depends on you that the paychecks will stop?  When we put all of the pieces together, the surprising thing isn’t that workplace shootings happen so much—but that they don’t happen more often.

So, what can we do to stop it?

The answers are all right here in front of us:

Financial Stress

First, let’s see if we can reduce the financial stress on these families in general.  One way to do that is to encourage more two-income households.  That could double a family’s financial well-being, because with two incomes a family is more likely to have enough money to save a little on the side.  Whether it’s savings for a vacation, a child’s college fund, or a home or vehicle purchase—it doesn’t matter.  Money in savings is money that can be used in the off chance of a firing or other misfortune.  We could do this by empowering and encouraging more women to go to college—since women with college degrees are more likely to work when they have children.  College enrollment among women is already higher than men—but there’s definitely progress that can be made in this area, particularly for younger women who have children before they have a chance to go to college.  Colleges everywhere should make it easier for first-time moms to access education.  This is more possible than ever thanks to online courses.  We just have to bridge the divide—to make colleges work harder at serving these potential students, and to change the narrative around college for young women who get pregnant in or right after high-school.  We need to make it clear that college coursework doesn’t have to mean commuting and juggling schedules.  It could simply mean watching videos on an iPad, chatting over Zoom, and reading and writing at the dining room table.  This isn’t to say that it’s easy to juggle school and taking care of a child, but it is possible—and we can make it easier and more within reach.

The reach part is actually already quite a reality.  Thirty-two percent—just about 1 in 3—women in undergraduate schooling today are raising children at the same time.  And most of those women are single parents—60 percent in fact. This isn’t easy—but they do it anyway.  This isn’t easy nearly any way you look at it.  The majority of student parents don’t have a single penny to contribute to college expenses—and among single parents with children, practically all of them—88 percent—have incomes at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level.  And their time for study is continually interrupted by family obligations—with more than half of single parents spending more than 30 hours a week on caring for their children.  A full time job—that doesn’t pay.  All of this adds up to the sad reality that the majority—67 percent—don’t graduate within 6 six years of enrollment.  So…these schools do open their doors for parents—but more often than not, those doors don’t lead anywhere at all.

Forget about getting more moms to enroll in college—what the hell does that matter if that schooling isn’t designed to help them graduate?  This is a huge problem.  Consider this: if 4-year colleges served students with children as well as they served the larger student population (a 64% graduation rate, rather than a 33% rate), we’d see 2.5 million more single parents graduate over the next 10 years.  That’s 1.8 million more women with college degrees than we have today.  Since women with college degrees are more likely to work than women with just a high-school diploma, we’d see 264,000 more women working than otherwise wouldn’t be.  A quarter-million more households—of the 4.6 million households with children where only the father worked—would suddenly have two incomes.  That’s hugely significant.  And all we have to do is get colleges to serve students who are already enrolled with children as well as they serve the rest of their students.  But why should we stop there?

In fact, helping women who never graduated high school to get their diploma can have an equally powerful effect.  Because women with a high school diploma are about 15 percent more likely to work.  There are about 1.65 million moms without a high school diploma.  About half of them don’t work.  If we could help those moms to get their high school diploma or GED equivalent, we would expect to see 264,000 more moms working than we have today.  Together, these two measures—helping more moms get their GED and helping more parents who are enrolled in college actually graduate from college—would reduce the number of households in the US where men are the only breadwinner by 11 percent.  That’s significant.  But it still doesn’t feel like enough, does it?  Shouldn’t educating every mom with a high school diploma and helping moms in college increase their graduation rate by 60 percent—shouldn’t that make a bigger difference?

Yes.  But it doesn’t.  There’s only so much that education can do here.  And that’s because there’s a significant number of women who—regardless of their education—choose not to work.  Sure, there are reasons of choice here, yes—but economics play a huge part.  Lots of moms don’t work because it simply seems useless when childcare is so expensive.  This is a huge problem.  The average cost to have two children in child care is nearly $18,000 a year.  That’s like buying a brand new car and paying for it out of pocket on every birthday. Daycare is so expensive that tons of families make the calculation that two parents working just isn’t worth it.  Unless you’re making significantly more than it would cost to put your kid in childcare, what’s the point?  There are good points, of course—like staying in the workforce to advance a career, building a rich life outside of the home, pursuing a passion, or serving the community in some special capacity—but for lots of families, the value of the job market isn’t enough to outweigh the perceived costs of childcare.  There are a few ways to tackle this: and the first is to dispel this myth in the first place.

Let’s get this straight—childcare is not affordable.  The cost to enroll two kids in child care costs more than rent in all 50 states right now.  And in the majority of states, it’s more than tuition and fees at an in-state university.  But even though childcare is ridiculously expensive, it’s still a better financial decision to keep both parents in the workforce than to have one drop out of it.  In fact, according to a detailed accounting by the Center for American Progress, each year a parent chooses not to work can cost a family more than three times that parent’s annual salary.

How is this possible?  Because parents who stop working also stop their career advancement.  So they tend to earn less when they go back to get a job.  This also means that they’re not accumulating social security benefits or retirement savings during their break.  So, for example—let’s say a young woman chooses to leave the workforce for five years.  Before she left she was making the median salary for a full-time 26 year old—$30,000 a year.  That five years out of the workforce—you might think—would cost her five years of earning $30,000 a year—or $150,000 total.  But by pausing her career and stopping all benefits from accumulating, the actual cost to her and her family, when you add it all up, is $467,000.  Most families, of course, don’t add it all up.  They just have this terrible sense that they’re working like crazy and all of their salary is pouring into childcare.  But the U.S. Department of Labor did add it up.  And they found that expensive childcare and poor work-family policies cost the United States $500 billion a year.  And it keeps 5 million women out of the workforce.

We can make a difference in the lives of these families—reduce their financial distress and by so doing, reduce the chance of a stressed man opening fire—by improving work-family policies.  And by helping families understand that it isn’t worth it to have a parent drop out of the workforce.  The Center for American Progress has already developed a calculator that does just that—but we can do more to spread the word.

We can reach out directly to these families.  But how do we truly reach them?  Well, we’re not the only ones trying to reach these families.  There’s actually an entire industry pouring money into marketing to them.  We just have to enlist its help—piggy back on this industry’s messaging and maybe even partner up with them.

The industry for baby goods and services like cribs, toys and formula is estimated at $23 billion a year.  Every single business in that industry wants to make more money off of young families.  And one of the best ways for them to do so is to double the income of those families.  More income, more spending on goods and services.  We need only ask these companies to imagine their customer base flooded with more disposable income.

We can convince every one of these companies to communicate the real cost to a family of a parent leaving the workforce.  Through advertising dollars, events, promotions, and packaging design they can help their customers weigh the options.  And the companies could even get involved in making it easier for parents to locate affordable child care.

At the corporate level, we should push these companies to band together to advocate for better paid family leave at their offices and in other industries.  Because if parents are able to take time off to care for a newborn—getting paid all the while and with a guaranteed job when they return—parents are far more likely to stay in the workforce.    

So—that’s one option to reduce the financial stress that leads to gun violence at work.  Focusing on the financial stress of a job loss.  But what about the emotional stress of work in general?

Emotional Stress

A stressful and hostile workplace can lead to violence directly.  But it can also fuel violence when triggered by a firing or suspension.  Too many workplaces still suffer from the manager problem.  The manager problem is simple:

Managers can come from one of two places—they can be promoted from within the organization.  Or—they can come from outside the job they’re managing.  In both instances, this can be the reason for bad management.

First—those who are promoted from within might not get the training they need to manage people.  For example: if you’re a great welder advancing through your career, you might eventually be promoted to manage other welders.  That’s great.  You know a lot about welding—but that doesn’t mean you know how to manage people.  How to help them get their job done better, how to remove barriers and serve their professional needs.

Those from outside might have the opposite problem.  If you’re some hot-shot manager from an MBA program and are brought in to manage a division of welders, you might know everything there is to know about minding the finances—but you probably don’t have the slightest clue what it takes to actually do the job of welding.  And what’s worse, your boss probably doesn’t require you to learn.  You just have to meet the next profit target.

The answer, of course, is better training for managers.  Some of them need just some basic tips for the messiness of managing actual people—while others need to gain the trust and respect of those they are managing by getting a basic understanding of the work they’re doing.

The management problem afflicts pretty much every industry—because every industry wants to promote people but doesn’t want to go through the trouble of training them to manage.  And every industry wants to get professional management thinking at some level—but considers that separate and divided from the work of actual workers.

This sets everyone up for failure.  Most managers don’t know the first thing about managing people, and they can very quickly find their goals in conflict with those they manage.  They make small mistakes that leave a big impression in the minds of their workers.  A report in Harvard Business Review talks about how managers and direct supervisors keep denying their workers freedom to choose their own hours and make their own schedule—even denying work from home.  And yet, mountains of research show that flexibility in the where and when of work actually improves productivity.

Bottom line: bad management leads to hostility in the workplace.  Pretty much every time.  And hostility can build and build and build and build—until one spark sets it off.  So—what’s a great way to reduce the incidence of workplace shootings in factories?  Stop that hostility from building up.  By improving basic management practices at these companies.  Better management means a happier workforce—and happy workplaces don’t tend to erupt into violence. They’re at least less likely to erupt in violence than a hostile workplace.

Golden Parachutes for Workers

There’s another thing companies can do to cut down on the causes of mass shootings: make golden parachutes standard for everyone.  What’s a golden parachute?  It’s a boatload of money that companies pay to executives for failing at their jobs.  Usually it’s used to get out of a contract early, or as an incentive for CEOs to go quietly into the night without making a fuss.  Now, when it comes to CEOs these things really are boat-sized blocks of money.  When North Fork Bank was sold to Capital One, the CEO of North Fork was suddenly without a job.  So, he received a package worth $214.3 million.

These rich company leaders don’t have quite as dangerous of a fall if they get let go—not nearly the fall that the average family can experience on a firing.  And yet—the concept of golden parachutes has only been reserved for these high-flying executives.  What if we made parachutes available to everyone?

What if, when you’re let go from your company, you get $5,000 to $10,000—no questions asked?  Wouldn’t it put your mind at ease?  Wouldn’t it make you feel like—okay, I know how I’m going to pay rent this month?  Okay, I have some time to find a new job—even if that job’s in another place.  Something like this could really reduce the pain of a firing—and even the offensiveness of it.  The sense that it’s an injustice.  Just as courts award civil renumeration to the injured parties in a  lawsuit—this money might serve as some form of retribution for that sense of being wronged.

Paying for this is not as crazy as it sounds.  First of all—severance pay is already a standard practice across many industries.  Even when employees don’t sign and negotiate their contracts before employment, severance pay is worth it for the employer because it’s a way to get departing employees to sign a release of claims—so they don’t sue in the future.  It’s just good, prudent legal practice to mitigate the risk of litigation.

And—many companies provide sign-on bonuses in this exact same $5,000 to $10,000 range.  New engineers, new nurses, new skilled laborers—$5,000 sign on bonuses are industry standard for hard-to-fill positions.  And the annual cost of health insurance is far more than this.  So it’s certainly do-able.  And it would have a broad impact on the business, benefitting the workforce in all sorts of ways.  Obviously it would help all workers, not just those prone to violence.  Fewer families would fall through the cracks.  More families might feel empowered to move to find more work, rather than feeling stuck in a region suffering decline.  It could also reduce reliance on unemployment insurance.  And there’d be effects on business as well.

Companies would have to think carefully about the next round of layoffs.  Maybe rather than firing a difficult employee, companies might think about ways to work with them—to improve disagreements, resolve disputes, mediate conflict, or provide more job training to keep employees at work.  Yes—in a world where every firing costs a company 10 grand, it might make more sense to retrain an existing worker to do a new job rather than fire them and hire someone else to do it.  Corporations could get far more serious about providing real job training and fostering professional advancement.  It would be cheaper, then, to hire from within than to outsource jobs.  Of course, hirings would become more selective too.  Companies would look for employees with broader skills, rather than specialties in a single area—because in a changing economy, you need a workforce that can change with it.  This could bode well for workers who haven’t spent years and years in schooling for one particular skill.

Of course, it all sounds great.  But how are we going to get companies to do it?  A few ways:

First, it attracts talent.  It’s another job benefit—one that looks bigger on its face than it will ultimately cost the company.  What do I mean by this?  Well, consider that if I tell you that you don’t have to worry about getting fired, because if you do you’ll get $10,000.  Well, that certainly makes you feel like your salary just went up $10,000—right?  That’s a $10,000 bonus.  Pretty cool, yeah?  And it would help assure you to take the job if you were worried that the job came with the risk of being laid off.  And it would tip the scales, wouldn’t it—if you were considering another job that didn’t have this benefit.  That’s great!  But the great thing for the company in this situation is that it doesn’t cost them $10,000 a year.  If you work two years, that doesn’t mean you get $20,000 if you’re fired.  It’s still the same $10,000.  It also doesn’t cost them for every employee—because most employees aren’t fired or laid off.  They retire, quit, or leave for some other reason.  In these instances, the company doesn’t have to pay.  So that $10,000 benefit could just be on paper—something that cost the company absolutely nothing at all, but still attracted workers to the job and made them feel good about it.  Maybe even good about taking this job over one that paid a little bit more.  In the end, this hidden value for the company might pay for itself.

We could also make a human rights and fairness case here.  You gotta be fair to your workers—and offering golden parachutes to rich executives and not to the bulk of employees is just plain wrong.  Every time a company provides a golden parachute to a failed leader, we can make a fuss about it.

We could get unions involved—since on the whole a program like this would not only serve to protect those who are fired…it could protect the vast majority of employees from being fired.  A mechanism like this sounds right up their ally.

Companies might also benefit in another way—by offering this type of golden parachute as an option that workers could choose amongst other benefit packages.  For those worried about being fired or let go, they could choose this rather than a bonus or some other form of benefit.  By making it an option and subtracting benefits for those who choose it, companies could save money. Because—again—remember that most employees who choose it will never be fired or suspended.  In this way, companies can reduce their overall benefits expenses while providing more flexibility to their employees and putting more minds at ease.

Finally—there’s the positive perception of a program like this.  Companies can come out looking progressive and caring by unveiling parachutes for all employees.  It won’t cost them much, but they could get a big bang of good press coverage for implementing it.  At a time when the whole country is skeptical of big business, here’s a way to counter that narrative and come out looking better than your competitors.

This kind of program isn’t unprecedented.  The newspaper industry has used it since the 1970s.  They just have a different name for it: buyouts.  Here’s how it works: a newspaper finds itself in a situation where it needs to cut expenses.  What’s the biggest expense?  The people.  Historically, companies have chosen to layoff workers.  But there are problems with this.  It scares the hell out of the workforce, for one.  It isn’t voluntary.  And it targets the newest workers—who are often the youngest, and most diverse.  The freshest-faced.  Buyouts are different.  The company offers between 6 months and 2 years of an employee’s salary for them to leave.  Usually employees with more seniority find it more appealing—and choose to take it more often.  In this way, buyouts are an informal way to usher in a new generation and to do so without as much disruption.

In the early 1990s, the LA Times accepted 668 buyouts in one go.  It was huge—some called it disruptive.  But the company capped buyouts by department and granted them by seniority.  One reporter at the Baltimore Sun, which granted nearly 300 buyouts around the same time, talked about the sense of possibility that swept through the newsroom.  “Suddenly all bets were off; all options were available and people who I thought would never consider it did consider it.”  Some reporters at the time took a year off to write a novel.  One design editor invested in a coffee shop that stayed open something like 20 years.  Others went on trips or changed industries.

Buyouts, of course, aren’t golden parachutes.  But they’re kind of similar.  It’s money given to someone who is leaving. And if it can work for one industry, why can’t it work for another?

Now, there are problems with universal golden parachutes.  The biggest one is the moral hazard.  We don’t want to encourage people to try to provoke their own firing.  The parachutes introduce some interesting dynamics into the employer-employee relationship.  A lot of what-ifs need to be ironed out and made crystal clear.

For example, businesses could abuse the system, too.  Promising benefits at the start of employment and then finding clever ways around paying up.  Like suspending people indefinitely without pay rather than outright firing them.  That would suck.  Or putting in some conditions and laying those conditions like traps for all employees to fall into.  Or maybe more likely than this is the business that rather than fire an employee and pay up, chooses to make their work life a living Hell in the hopes of them quitting.

But some common-sense rules and codes of conduct could—I think—mitigate the worst abuses.  And just imagine what a difference it could make.  Literally 60 percent of all deaths associated with factory mass shootings were precipitated by a firing.  Half of those killed were killed by an employee who had been fired on that day.  The other half—the employees came back weeks or months later for revenge.  If you’ve got $10,000 in your pocket, I don’t think you’re taking a gun from your other pocket.  And if you’ve got what you need to help transition to something new, then months later you’ll be doing that something new.  And not thinking about the slights of your old workplace.

It could make a real difference.  Particularly in this first area we’re looking at—reducing stress.  But let’s talk about that a minute.  The stress part.  We’ve talked about relieving the weight of that stress, but what about improving the strength of the person in distress?  What about empowering more people to deal with even the worst of circumstances?  What about health and strength not of the body, but of the spirit?

Mental Health

I’m talking about mental health.  We have a mental health crisis in this country—18 percent of adults report having a mental, behavioral or emotional disorder.  And yet—and yet, answer me this: think back to the last time you saw a doctor, whether for a check-up or an X-ray or a more serious procedure.  To get your tonsils out, even.  Think back.  When was that?  A month ago?  A few months?  Maybe a year or two?  Okay—now think back to the last time you saw someone who specialized in mental health.  44 million Americans get physicals every year.  But regular mental health screenings are practically unheard of.  Even among those suffering from mental illnesses, less than half actually received any kind of treatment.  Why?

There’s a million answers why—from stigma against mental health to a lack of providers.  But at the heart of it I think it’s just inconvenience.  Primary care doctors rarely broach the subject of mental health, the services seem far away and the benefits even vaguer.  And yet—mental health services can rescue lives.  Whether it’s battling addiction or overcoming anxiety—or simply managing stress.  Everyone needs a mental health checkup—just as much as they need a physical one.  So—why don’t we combine these two?  Rather than having to seek out a different provider, make another appointment and on some other day go to another office—why couldn’t your regular doctor give you mental health services?  And if you needed more, why couldn’t a mental health professional practice right there in that same doctor’s office?

This could help people struggling with depression, anxiety, addiction.  It could reduce the chance of violence.  It could even help other health conditions where mental health plays a major role.  I think it could happen, too—because it’s been proven to save huge amounts of money.  An analysis by the Milliman actuarial firm estimated that combining mental and physical health could reduce US health care costs by as much as $48 billion a year.  The federal government has already granted a billion dollars to promote behavioral health and Medicare recently got on board.  But still, there’s a long way to go for mental health to become a regular part of every medical visit.  By accelerating this trend, we could ease the tensions that lead to gun violence.  Just look at the example of Southcentral—a health center in Anchorage that serves Alaska natives.  By integrating mental and physical health services under one roof, they’ve seen extraordinary results.  Between 2000 and 2015, hospital admissions and emergency room visits dropped by a third.  Patient satisfaction is at 97 percent—and some credit it with literally saving them from suicide.

How do we do that, then?  How do we accelerate this?  A few things:

• Improve adoption and usage of new billing codes for doctors

• Lobby the American Medical Association to get on board in a big way

• Lobby mental health provider associations to get on board

• Work with mental health providers directly

• Work with physician’s offices directly

• Work with large primary care providers

• Consider setting up a new association that is focused strictly on combining these two domains.

• Work with medical schools to build this into the curriculum

• Find out what resources doctors use to set up the business-side of their practices — and work with those who provide these resources.

• Work with practice managers (and practice manager groups)

All right—so we’ve tried to stop the stress that can lead to a shooting.  But what if we fail at that effort.  What if—imagine that—someone is stressed.  So stressed they feel the need to do something about it.  Why do they choose violence?  Why—yes, why do they want to become a mass shooter?  Where do they even get that idea? The answer—of course—is the media. And that’s the focus of our next chapter.