The R3 Continuum Playbook SPECIAL: A Behavioral Threat Assessment of the Buffalo Mass Shooting

Intro: [00:00:00] Broadcasting from the Business RadioX studios, here is your R3 Continuum Playbook. Brought to you by Workplace MVP sponsor, R3 Continuum, a global leader in workplace behavioral health crisis and security solutions.

Shane McNally: [00:00:15] Hi, everyone, and welcome to this special live episode of the R3 Continuum Playbook. My name is Shane McNally, Digital Marketing Lead with R3 Continuum. And on today’s episode, we’ll be talking with R3 Continuum Medical Director, Dr. George Vergolias, about the recent mass shooting that occurred in Buffalo, New York. We’ll also be discussing the impact and trauma that this event caused throughout the country, what employers can do to mitigate potential violence in the workplace, what employers can do to support their employees and community after a traumatic event like this takes place, and more.

Shane McNally: [00:00:46] Dr. Vergolias oversees and leads the R3 Continuum’s clinical risk, threat of violence, and workplace violence programs, and has directly assessed over 1,000 cases related to threat of violence, or self-harm, sexual assault, stalking, and communicated threats. He brings over 20 years of experience as a forensic psychologist and certified threat manager to help leaders, organizations, employees, and communities heal and thrive before, during, and after a disruption. Dr. Vergolias, thank you for being with us today.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:01:19] My pleasure. It’s certainly not my pleasure to talk about what we’re going to talk about, but certainly, it’s nice to be able to leverage my expertise in a way that hopefully will be helpful.

Shane McNally: [00:01:30] Absolutely. And so, I think with that, we just kind of jump right into it. And can you kind of give us a brief talk through of the Buffalo shooting, the style of violence, and what occurred?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:01:44] Yes, certainly. And I will preface this with a disclaimer and say that, now, what’s interesting in this case is we’re a week out and we know a lot, and we know a lot, because one, the assailant, Payton Gendron, has been apprehended. He had a 180 or so-page manifesto. He was posting online. This is an assailant that, really, he was secretive in terms of the general public, but in select audiences, he really wanted his voice to be heard.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:02:21] And eventually, at the end of a gun, he wanted to be heard, his message. So, we know a lot about him, and sometimes, we don’t know a lot about the assailants this soon after, so we can make some assumptions and we can say some things that are informed at this point. So, what happened is on May 14th, just about a week ago, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old White male from Conklin, New York, walked into a Tops grocery store roughly about 200 miles from where he lived, and he opened fire.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:02:58] He actually began firing in the parking lot, and he proceeded then to walk into the grocery store and continued shooting people. It’s clear from the evidence that this was a racially motivated attack. I’m comfortable saying it was a hate crime, although to say that affirmatively is a legal process, but he’s being brought up certainly on charges of it being a hate crime.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:03:25] So, what’s interesting here is there’s evidence that going all the way back to late 2021, he was already planning this attack. He was going on websites like 4chan, and more recently, on Discord, and not only engaging in rhetoric that kind of met his ideological view of the great replacement or the major replacement theory of the White race being slowly wiped out, which is one of a number of theories that White nationalists and White nationalism subscribes to in believing that Whites, in general, are being somehow edged out or weeded out of the population, not just in the US, but globally.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:04:15] So, he was doing this online. He was engaging in online threats. He was engaging in planning. He, for a number of months, was selling off belongings, so he can have the money to buy tactical gear, and weapons, and ammunition, and so on. On March 8th, he went to—he drove the 200 or so miles to the Tops grocery store, and he basically cased the joint. He walked through up and down the aisles.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:04:44] He walked in and out a number of times. Eventually, he was confronted by a security guard that had basically said to him, “I’ve seen you go in and out a few times. What are you doing?” And basically, Payton said that he was collecting consensus—or rather census data, which could have been reasonable, right? And it was taken at face value. And then, he went home, and later that night, he chatted, and he basically said it was a close call, he almost got caught.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:05:16] What he was doing, it was, he’s looking at the patterns of people coming in and out. He was looking at the areas of the store that were busier and at what time of the day. He was no doubt looking at the security people and their movements, as well as looking at how they might respond. This is all very planned, what we call pre-attack planned behavior, and it is a pattern that we see a lot with predatory individuals. What he also did is he came in with several firearms in his person, certainly, in his car.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:05:56] He was suited up in tactical armor, including a tactical helmet. At one point, what they call Army-style or assault-style tactical gear. Several weapons he had, a Mossberg 500 shotgun. He had a hunting rifle that was given to him by his father when he was 16. And he had recently bought a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle in January from a local gun distributor. That weapon was purchased legally, and in between December 8th and January 19th, he actually visited roughly about 15 different gun stores in the greater, larger northern New York state area.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:06:42] He hid those weapons in his bedroom, and he wrote online that he was worried that his parents would find him, and he would get found out, and his plans would fall apart. That didn’t happen. Unfortunately, that did not happen. When he came on site and started shooting, there was a security guard and ex-law enforcement officer named Aaron Salter, who returned fire, shot Payton, and run, but due to the tactical armor he had on, he wasn’t able to subdue him or bring him down. Payton returned fire and killed Mr. Salter. I could go on about the details, but then he proceeded to work his way through.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:07:22] His plan, at least as written online, was to then go to other locations that day and continue his killing spree. Fortunately, police responded very quickly. I believe at one point, he turned the gun on himself, he didn’t fire, but he kind of pointed it in his own neck, and the law enforcement officers talked him out of self-harm, and they took him into custody. So, there’s a lot of details I didn’t cover. I wanted to give a little more flavor. And what I was highlighting with those facts are things that are very pertinent to the kind of violence that we’re seeing here. Would it be good for me to describe that now, Shane? I know you had several aspects to your question.

Shane McNally: [00:08:09] Yeah, if you would like. I think one question that we could go off of right now that just popped up from what you were saying is when he was going in and out of that store, now, correct me if I’m wrong, he was actually full-on planning and mapping out everything that he was going to do, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:08:25] Absolutely. Absolutely. So, one thing that we see with this type of violence, and there are two types—well, before I go into that, because that’s an explanation, but to answer your question, absolutely. This wasn’t a random, hey, let me just go check out this grocery store. He drove 200 miles in early March to specifically case and do surveillance on this store, partly to solidify it as a target.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:08:53] Sometimes, psychologically, we call this a hardening of targets. Another way we describe hardening of targets is if you are a target and you put certain security measures in place that toughens them or hardens them. After 9/11, even going as far back as after the Oklahoma City bombing by McVeigh, many federal buildings put large cement pylons in front, so you couldn’t get a truck right up to the door.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:09:20] That is a security hardening of target. But there’s a psychological principle where you also do something that I refer to as a hardening of the targets. You are no longer thinking of the targets as humans, as subjects, with lives, and goals, and dreams, and loved ones. You’re hardening them in your mind. You’re objectifying them. And when you walk through a site as an attacker, and you’re committed to the plan at this stage, you’re starting to just think of this almost like a cognitive exercise.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:09:52] You’re not thinking of these people as people. You’re thinking of them just as objects, as targets. And so, that’s part of the process of casing. It is partly, how do I get away with it? How do I inflict maximum damage? But it’s also that process, in your head kind, of steeling yourself, not steal, as in the metal, steel. You’re hardening yourself and hardening your mind psychologically to commit the act.

Shane McNally: [00:10:19] Wow. Yeah, it’s just crazy to think that somebody could do that and even go so far as to, like you said, harden themselves to do that in the planning.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:10:29] Let me just piggyback on that real quick. What’s interesting is assailants that are in this predatory mode, and I’ll talk about that just next, but they will go to other lengths. Like if you look at Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Eric Harris, these are the Columbine assailants, in the weeks leading up to the Columbine attack, Eric Harris specifically went off his antidepressant medication for two reasons. He didn’t want to feel emotionally subdued or mellowed. He wanted to feel the full rage that he was feeling as he went into that attack. He wanted the full, you almost can say it, he wanted to be emotionally amped, right? He wanted to be jacked up emotionally. He purposely did it. That wasn’t accidental.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:11:16] When you see these guys, and almost all guys, by the way, I think last data that I looked at from a couple of years ago, pre-pandemic, something like 3 or 4% of mass shootings have been committed by women, so this is almost predominantly a male game right now. And people will say, why do they get all this tactical armor? Well, one is maybe self-protection. But let’s be honest, in most of these attacks, I mean, if you look at the synagogue attack from two years ago, if you look at the Christchurch mosque attack from a few years back, none of these people had weapons.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:11:53] Why do they wear black? Why do they wear camouflage in the middle of the day? That doesn’t obscure you, that doesn’t hide you, it makes you stand out. They are psychologically gearing up. They’re psychologically putting on the uniform to be a commando, to be a soldier of their cause. That’s another aspect of them psychologically getting geared up and almost building up momentum to go out. The closest normative example for any of us that ever played football, and you’re in the locker room, you got your pads on, you got your helmet on, and you’re smashing helmets with your buddy, and you’re smashing their shoulder pads, what are you doing?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:12:31] You’re getting amped up for the game before you go out of the locker room and take the field. That’s fairly normative, right? We all see that. We all understand that. These attackers have similar individual rituals that they do to amp themselves up in preparation to go out out of the field of play, as they say it. So, yeah, so these are really good questions, but that’s what we see. It’s a very interesting psychological phenomenon.

Shane McNally: [00:12:56] Wow. And I know you mentioned you want to talk a little bit about the kind of act of violence that this really looked into, but kind of maybe wrap it in with this, my next question of like, does this shooting remind you of other events in history?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:13:10] Yeah, it absolutely does. So, before I go there, though, let me talk about affective versus predatory violence, and then I’ll talk about the reminders—or what it reminds me of, and then the linkage is between them, if that’s useful.

Shane McNally: [00:13:24] Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:13:25] So, a little bit of history lesson here, but psychological history lesson that hopefully is interesting. We know now that there are basically two biological or biophysiological modes of violence in the brain. They have different anatomical aspects of the brain that are in operation. They have different neurotransmitters. They operate with different neuronal pathways. And the way this was found out is about 70 years ago or so.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:13:55] I believe it was German or Austrian scientists, were doing research on cats, and they open their brains while they were obviously alive, and in case we have cat lovers out there, once you anesthetize the skull, the brain doesn’t have sensors, pain sensors, and they would put electrodes on the brain. And what they found out—and then they expose them to different environment stimuli to see how they reacted.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:14:22] And they weren’t necessarily trying to study violence, per se, but what they found out is that there were two kind of violent reactions that had two different patterns in the brain. One, they deemed affective violence or emotional violence, and the other, they called predatory violence. Sometimes, it’s also referred to as targeted. I don’t like that term. I like predatory, because it kind of shows you the mode. Affective violence is violence that most of us have seen, or if we’re ever going to be a victim of violence, most of us are going to be a victim of affective, reactive violence.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:14:57] It’s emotional. It has to do with hyperarousal, meaning you’re jacked up, you’re excited, you’re scared, you’re fearful, you’re shamed, you’re annoyed, you’re rageful, but there’s an emotion going on. It tends to be reactive and immediate. It tends to be in response to a perceived threat, somebody is threatening you or you feel threatened and you feel you need to react back at them. It is a fight or flight reaction. I need to fight the threat away, or I need to run away, or better yet, I need to posture in order to drive the threat away.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:15:32] How is posturing? Well, a quick example of affective posturing, we’ve all seen this. Certainly, boys have all seen this. Growing up in grade school, two kids get in a fight at recess, what often happens is they’re cracking their knuckles, right? They’re puffing their chest. They’re swaying side to side. They’re putting their chin out. And they’re taunting the other person to hit them. “Come on, hit me, man. No, you hit me. No, you hit me. No, you hit me. Do you want to fight? Let’s go.”

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:15:58] And this may go on for minutes before a fight even breaks out. And sometimes, the fight doesn’t even break out. Looking at those two, the untrained eye would say, “Oh, well, those two kids really want to fight”, and the truth is, no, they don’t. They don’t want to fight. What they want is they want the other person to walk away, and they save face. They save kind of ego. If you look at prison attacks and you could pull up the Discovery Channel or A&E, and watch prison documentaries, you will see true predatory attacks.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:16:29] There’s no warning, there’s no posturing, there’s no verbal threats. Two inmates are sitting there looking like they’re best friends, and the next thing you know, one inmate explosively just starts attacking the other with no warning. It’s a very—and it’s almost unemotional. It’s almost cognitive in the way it’s done. So, affective on the one side. It’s also time-limited, meaning if you think of a fight or flight reaction, our bodies can’t stay in that mode for very long.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:17:00] Adrenaline is pumping to your major muscles. You have cortisol pumping. You have different things going on that is all designed to get away from an attack or subdue an attacker. And this has evolutionary value, right? If you needed 10 minutes to figure out how to get away from a lion, you didn’t live, right? It was an immediate reaction. You had to mobilize to deal with that. So, it’s time-limited. I’m going to add one more thing that’s kind of interesting.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:17:30] With affective violence, you will have a displacement of the target. Now, what does that mean? That means that if I’m in an affectively violent mode and someone attacks me, I’m going to attack anyone that comes into my circle. So, imagine, for example, that I have a cat tied to a corner of a room on maybe a six-foot leash, and I slowly walk a Rottweiler or a Doberman Pinscher up to that cat, what’s that cat going to be doing? Right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:18:00] Obviously, hissing. Its back’s arched. Its claws are extended. It’s showing its teeth. Even if that cat is looking at the dog, would any of us be willing to walk over and pick the cat up? And the answer should be no, right? Why? Because that cat’s attacking anything that comes into its circle, anything that comes into its sphere. One of the reasons that police officers, their most dangerous response in the field is domestic violence, not just because the abuser is in an amped-up state, which is almost not always, but usually, a man, but often, the victim is in a violent state, because she is defending herself.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:18:40] She is in a fight or flight arousal herself. And so, the whole environment is supercharged with emotion. And with that emotion comes fight or flight reactivity. Okay. That’s affective violence. Bar fights, fights at the Thanksgiving table, hopefully, we don’t have many of those, but some of us have seen that, right? Tailgate fights, fights at school, all that kind of thing. That’s usually affective violence.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:19:06] Now, let’s juxtapose that with predatory. Predatory violence is you have minimal arousal. First, let me give you an example. Let’s take that cat, and now, put that cat two days later in the backyard, and there’s a bird feeder maybe 30 feet away, and a bird lands on that bird feeder, and now, the cat sees the bird. Now, the cat isn’t on top of the bird yet. The cat’s 30 feet away. Now, what’s the cat doing? It’s super focused, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:19:31] It’s staring at the cat. It’s got a laser focus to its eyes. Its claws are pulled back, because it’s not ready to attack. It wants to move very stealthily, very quietly, and only at the last minute, when it gets close, might it then attack and get aggressive, but it’s in a very cognitive focused mode. The human correlate of that is an Army sniper. I remember seeing an interview of a sniper from the Serbian-Croatian war, obviously, a number of years ago. And this sniper, every night, would crawl, and he was sniping across what they called Sniper Alley.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:20:08] It was a division line of literally, roughly about one street that divided the forces, and he would crawl up a rubble-strewn staircase, and he would have to crawl across the room with rocks and rubble on it, and get into position, and then he would look throughout the night for people, frankly, to snipe. And they asked him, “When you get to the top of that staircase, how long does it take you to crawl into position, that 20 feet or so? And people would say an hour, 2 hours. It took him often 5 to 6 hours to crawl 20 feet. That’s how careful, and slow, and methodical he was.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:20:49] Think of that, though, for a minute. Think how cognitive you have to be to do that. There’s no emotion. There’s no reactivity, right? That is an example. Your Army sniper is a more socially sanctioned example of predatory attacks. So, when we see shooters like Payton Gendron, and everything I opened the podcast with and all his behaviors, this is a predatory attack, right? Minimal arousal, meaning he’s not emotional, he’s not jacked up at the time.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:21:21] It doesn’t mean that he’s not yelling things. There’s a certain bravado that they will show, but he’s not really feeling fear, anger, rage, panic. It’s purposeful and planned, violent. There’s no imminent perceived threat. What we mean by that is nobody in the Tops grocery store posed an existential threat to Payton Gendron. Nobody did. Now, in his mind, they did, because they represented a minority, a Black community that was taking over the White population by the proliferation of birth rates and all that, if you read his manifesto.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:21:59] But they didn’t actually pose a threat to him. There was also no displacement of the target. And what we mean by that is if you ever look at closed cam footage of these shooters, and there’s a little bit of this circulating with the Pulse nightclub shooting with Omar Mateen, you could see a little bit of this online with the Columbine shooters, you will notice that they’re not frantic as they walk through and shoot people. They’re very cold, and methodical, and calculated.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:22:34] Often, I talked about rituals of affective violence, you puff your chest up, because the signal is if it’s in you and me, Shane, it’s Shane, you don’t want any piece of me. I’m going to puff my chest. I’m going to crack my knuckles. I’m going to sway back and forth. I’m going to look tough. I’m going to look like a peacock, right? I’m going to extend my physical prowess, because I want you to walk away.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:22:55] I don’t really want to fight you, but I can’t admit that, because I’m a man, so I need you to walk away. The problem is you’re doing the same thing, and often, one of us crosses a line and it gets physical. In the predatory style, you don’t see the public displays, because it would give up your intention, right? If every mass shooter showed massive public displays of their intent, we would catch all of these guys.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:23:18] What they tend to do is they tend to show these displays in very focused communities or groups that they think mirror their ideology. That’s why he went on 4chan. That’s why he went on Discord. That’s why moments or hours before he went on the shooting, he invited a very select group of 15 people that we’re still investigating to visit him on the Discord Channel and look at his postings, and I think there were even links to the live feed that he showed when he went and committed the shooting.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:23:53] So, all of these are private rituals, and the goal is to fuel their own narcissism, and reduce their paranoia, and kind of gear them up psychologically for the attack. In Columbine, Harris and Klebold, they made basement tapes for weeks and months ahead of time, where they talked about the attacks and their intentions, and what they hope to get out of it, and what their intended outcome is going to be.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:24:18] So, why do I go into all this? It’s really important to understand these features, so you can understand what kind of violence are you trying to prevent? I can’t tell you after this shooting and after every shooting how many, and we’re going to hear this over the next few weeks, people that knew Payton Gendron come out and say, “Oh, I never saw this coming. He was such a quiet, mild-mannered kid.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:24:46] Now, he had some problems, no doubt, but I never saw him get all erratic. I never saw him explode in rage. I never saw him show high levels of emotion.” Well, of course, you didn’t. He’s a predatory attacker. It’s a very different kind of MO than what we would see. If you’re a psychopath, you’re going out to the bars every night and getting in bar fights. It’s a very different kind of psychology that goes behind this. I know that was long-winded, but I wanted to do that question justice.

Shane McNally: [00:25:15] Yeah, absolutely, and thank you for that. And I think that leads into the next one really well when you just mentioned kind of the psychology of it, but there’s a lot of talk, obviously, there’s a lot of media, and we’ll get into that in a second, around this shooting and everything, but there’s also a lot of talk about the attacker himself and being evaluated by mental health professionals the year prior to the attack. So, there’s this like idea out there that mental health treatment can or should play a role in preventing these types of attacks. And events like this, obviously, like the idea is that they show a crack in the system. Can you kind of like expand and speak a little bit more on that?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:25:52] Yeah, I can. So, we don’t know everything about that. What we know is roughly about a year, maybe a year-and-a-half, I don’t have the exact time frame, I believe he wrote a paper or he wrote something down, where he talked about or he made statements about committing a murder suicide at school. The school did what they needed to do. They flagged it and they sent him for a mental health evaluation. I don’t know where that occurred. I actually work locally here in North Carolina in hospitals, and I do these evaluations. Typically, when the school flags it, they’re like, we think this kid might be dangerous to themselves or others. They send them into the emergency department. They’re evaluated.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:26:34] And at that moment, it’s important to know that the evaluating clinician, typically, a doctor, could be a social worker, but typically, it’s a doctor of psychology or a psychiatrist, they have to adhere to an imminent risk standard, which means, are you imminently at risk of killing yourself or others? Not, are you kind of a bad person or might you do something a week from now, a month from now, a year from now? But are you so dangerous in the next 24 to 48, to 72 hours that I need to take away your rights and commit you to the hospital? There’s a few avenues to make that happen, but that’s the ultimate, is I’m literally going to commit you against your will.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:27:14] In order for that statute, that bar to be met in most jurisdictions across the country, there has to be a lot of data that shows that you’re thinking of hurting yourself, you have strong ideation of doing it, you have a plan, you have intent, and you lack certain impulse control to hold yourself back, and you lack certain protective factors. That’s a lot of checkboxes. What happened, as best we know, from what I can gather from second party sources, is that he went in. Again, by the way, most of these guys are fairly manipulative.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:27:52] Payton was bright. He actually, I think, won first prize in middle school at a chemistry contest. I think he was on the honor roll for most of his high school career until he dropped out. This was not a stupid kid. He went in basically, and said, “Oh, I was just trying to get out of school. I was bored and I knew that would get me out of school.” And the other checkboxes just weren’t there, and they released him. And that was a year ago, right? You can’t lock a kid up for a year, so—you can in some cases, but you have to be very severely mentally ill, which he wasn’t.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:28:26] So, I think there’s this misconception that a mental health evaluation is going to solve all these problems. There was a really wonderful op-ed piece by Mark Follman, F-O-L-L-M-A-N, who’s written for The New York Times. He’s written for Mother Jones. And most of his writing as a journalist has focused in the last five or so years on understanding mass shooting and mass attacks. And he’s worked with a lot of very well-known researchers on threat assessment and forensic psychologists.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:28:58] I’ve seen him talk. I’ve met him at conferences. Really great journalist. He just published an op-ed piece. I believe it was in The New York Times or The Washington Post. I can’t remember immediately off the top of my head. I’ve been digesting so much information on this. But he talks about how these individuals do have mental health issues, no doubt, but this is not a mental health problem at its core.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:29:22] The overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent. Mental illness doesn’t, otherwise, take a nonviolent person, and suddenly, make them violent. There are rare, and I mean very rare exceptions, where you might have somebody with severe mental illness, paranoid delusions, psychosis, where they believe people are after them and they feel they need to defend themselves.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:29:47] There’s almost no cases in which those individuals go on a shooting spree. There’s a few. There’s a few. I think it represents something like 3 to 4% of all mass shooting seem to be motivated by the nature of the psychotic, paranoid delusions that the person was having. The overwhelming majority of these cases, these people, they didn’t have a great sense of right and wrong, meaning their morality was a little bit skewed like a psychopath’s is, but they knew right and wrong.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:30:19] They knew what they were doing and they were making decisions to do these based on an ideology that they were subscribing to. So, that’s one of the factors, I think, that’s important to realize, is that mental health, we do need to improve our mental health system, no doubt. And I think we need to rethink some of the laws we have in order to try to keep people safe, but a lot of these shootings would not necessarily be prevented simply because somebody was hospitalized against their will. And in this case, that was well over a year ago. That probably wouldn’t have had a massive impact here.

Shane McNally: [00:30:55] Yeah, those are some excellent points to bring up around that, so I appreciate you taking that question there, too. And so, like I mentioned at the beginning of that question, of going back to it a little bit here, you did mention earlier that there was a massive amount of media presence around this shooting, and understandably so, with news outlets and everything like that, and can you tell us about the impact that having so much media presence has with this level of violence?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:31:25] Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s this thing in the field that we call the contagion effect. There’s also the copycat effect. The copycat effect is simply—and actually, we saw this, and I’m actually going to dovetail this with an answer to a question you asked earlier that I got away from, where you ask simply, does the shooting remind me of other things? And it absolutely does, and just in recent memory, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:31:50] So, we know, for example, on, I think it was October 27, 2018, in Pittsburgh, the Tree of Life synagogue, Robert Gregory Bowers, 46-year-old male, went in and shot 11 people in the synagogue. And his thing was very similar to the whole White replacement theory, and he was blaming Jewish people for being responsible for—being the immigrant invaders and being responsible for promulgating the immigrant invaders. We all have heard of March 2019, the Christchurch New Zealand shooting.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:32:30] 51 people shot by Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 28-year-old White male from Australia, and he clearly was responding in a very similar way to what he perceived was the great replacement. He actually called his manifesto The Great Replacement, and it was the same ideation that Payton Gendron was replying to. In fact, in August of 2019, Patrick Wood Crusius at the Walmart shooting in El Paso shot 20 people. Same thing. His manifesto, he called The Inconvenient Truth, but it was the same thing he was railing against, is that this attack is the responsible for Hispanics, in this case, invading Texas, and he felt like people needed to come after or he needed to go after that contingent of society to defend the White race.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:33:26] So, there’s clearly a plan here, and what’s interesting is Patrick Crusius, the shooting at the Walmart, he got his inspiration from Harrison Tarrant of the Christchurch shooting. And we know there are indications from the manifesto that Payton Gendron also got his influence, or motivation, or inspiration from prior shootings as well. So, what we see is there’s a certain copycat effect of people see earlier shootings, where people have similar or closely aligned ideologies, and they use that to fuel their own ideation, and they almost see it as their hero, and they further commit an act. What we also know that—that’s the copycat effect.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:34:12] What we also know is there is something called the contagion effect. And what we’ve known, and we’ve known this for 30 years, and that is when there is a mass televised or massively publicized shooting of a mass shooting or a widely publicized story of a mass shooting, there is a significant increase, usually, it’s been measured at 10 to 13X increase of another unrelated mass attack occurring within about two weeks of that publicized event. Now, that used to be regional if you go back 30 years ago, basically, if you go back before social media and mobile phones.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:34:57] It used to be—I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. Shane, I know you’re in Minneapolis. If there was widely publicized in the newspaper, there would be a certain geographic barrier to the publication of that where that risk would increase. Now that we are truly a globalized news kind of feeder source, that regional barrier just doesn’t exist. It doesn’t really matter, right? You could have a shooting in New Zealand, and it’s covered all over the news globally, and it’s on CNN and Fox News every night, and it motivates some guy in Albuquerque, right? But what’s behind this psychologically?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:35:40] In a weird way, it’s a really understandable dynamic, aside from the heinousness of the violence. What’s behind it is someone sitting at home right now as we’re talking, and they got a lot of hate, a lot of anger, whatever their ideology is, it could be right wing, which a lot of it right now is right wing, it could be left wing, right? It could be radical, violent Islamist. A lot of directions, but they’re thinking somebody should do something, somebody should do something.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:36:13] And then, they watch a shooting like this, and maybe they start saying in their head, God, this Payton guy was kind of a loser, if he could carry this out, certainly, I can, right? I could pull this off if he can. Why wouldn’t I? Maybe I should step up and take arms for the cause, fill in the blank of whatever the cause is, right? Because it could be on different levels of the political spectrum.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:36:36] And then, it emboldens them to start—it’s almost like the light bulb goes off and it emboldens them to move forward with a plan. The other thing is there’s people that have already been incubating in that for months or years, and what they needed in a way psychologically is that model, that last inspirational push over the edge to move into planning or to take things to the next level and go into planning mode. Now, when I said earlier, this is normative psychologically, you’re like, what?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:37:07] Well, here’s my explanation, and I’m going to give you my personal story, almost every year, I sit down sometimes with my wife, she’ll watch it, other times, she doesn’t, but almost every year, when the Iron Man, the Kona Iron Man is on TV, I watch it from beginning to end. And I love watching the athletes that finish in X number of hours, but I also love watching the people that are doing it all day long and they make it in with 5 minutes to go before they shut the race down, right? And there’s also that one guy, I forget his name, whose son has cerebral palsy, and he finishes the whole race every year, or used to. I don’t know how old he is now, but it’s very inspirational, and he does it with his son.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:37:48] He like pulls the son on a small raft, and then he rides the son on the bike, and then he pushes the son on a stroller through the marathon, and it’s the most inspirational thing in the world. And what do I do in the next morning? I wake up early, and I go and buy groceries, and I buy spinach, and I buy protein drinks, and I buy all kinds of stuff, and for about two days, I work out, and then I go back to eating nachos, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:38:11] But for a short period of time, I’m looking at these images, and saying, damn, I can do that, I should do that. It’s the same psychological principle with the contagion effect, we’re just seeing it directed in a really heinous, violent avenue. So, yes, these events do have precursors and they do piggyback off one another in the mindset of certain numbers of assailants. But let me say one more thing, because it’s important to know.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:38:42] Positive interactions could have the opposite effect as well. I remember listening to a famous security expert threat manager, Joel Dvoskin. He was doing a post-mortem autopsy, a psychological autopsy, as we call it, on the Columbine assailants. And Eric Harris was set, he applied to the Marines, and about three weeks before the shooting, he got his rejection letter. And he got rejected, I think he had an ear or a foot issue.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:39:13] I don’t remember the exact issue, but there was some issue medically, and they just said, we can’t accept you. And somebody asked him, if Eric Harris would have gotten into the Marines, do you think he would have backed away from the shooting? And Joel Dvoskin said, and I agree with him, absolutely. Absolutely. That gave him something to look forward to. That was his whole life. It gave him motivation towards something better and more prosocial. There’s no way he would have gone through that shooting, and I’m inclined to agree.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:39:40] So, what’s interesting is there are people on this trajectory that haven’t committed yet but are inching towards committing, and something positive happens. They find a girlfriend. They get that job that they didn’t think they’d get. An old mentor calls them. I mean, a million little things, and it just turns them off a trajectory, and it’s just enough to nudge them off the pathway. Now, some kid get nudged back on the pathway, but sometimes, it’s just enough to nudge them off the pathway. So, there are some really interesting dynamics that play as people are navigating through this process of trying to decide, do I take this to the next step and continue on that path?

Shane McNally: [00:40:24] Well, yeah, and like you said, we’ve seen this everywhere in the news and everything like that, and additionally, this one was a little, I think, different, because it was also live-streamed. He had a live stream up as well. And I think kind of going into how this can actually impact people that were there, but also, people across the country that have seen some of these videos or are just upset and traumatized, honestly, about the whole thing, and understandably so. How did live-streaming this online really have an effect on people that may have seen it? Is it likely to increase fear and trauma to people that weren’t there, but did see this shooting play out?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:41:07] Yeah, I think there’s a few ways in which it could significantly impact people. By no means am I going to say that it’s going to cause trauma. That’s prescriptive and different people react differently to that. What I will say is for those people that have been subjected to violence, those people that have been involved in a shooting, lived through a shooting, have had loved ones involved in a shooting, it almost brings a—can, I should say, bring back the experience very viscerally.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:41:39] So, there’s that subgroup. That’s still a pretty small subgroup of the population. But even those people that may have not been subjected to it, but saw it, it’s disturbing. These are disturbing things. I have been allowed, given my background as a threat manager and a forensic psychologist, I have had aspects—or I’m sorry, access to seeing aspects of closed cam footage shooting or even direct shooter footage when they had a body cam or they had a GoPro, and it’s disturbing. These are disturbing things to see without a doubt. So, certainly, there’s the risk of it being traumatizing.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:42:16] There’s a flip side to it, and that is for those individuals that are on a trajectory and maybe just a little more upstream from where Payton was at the process, it could also be emboldening to them, right? It could be an image for them of almost reinforcing their own sense of belief of going through something like this. Fortunately, and this is where social media has come a long way, this thing was taken down, I think, within minutes, and scrubbed, which is good.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:42:50] But yeah, I mean, these are traumatic things. I think if I recall right, the first, there actually were other captured shootings that occurred. There was a shooting from the late ’80s where there was a gentleman whose son had been molested, and the molester had fled the state and was being extradited back into the state, flown in to a certain airport, I forget the name off the top of my head here, and the assailant was at a payphone. I mean, you’re nodding. I guess you’re nodding, right?

Shane McNally: [00:43:31] Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:43:32] And he just said, “Why? Why did you do this to my son?”, and opened fire. That was on TV, right? Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald was on TV. The difference here is that was passively captured. The first time, I think, we saw it by the assailant, to my knowledge, was I think it was Vester Flanagan, the Virginia news anchor, who shot a cameraman and he shot a female anchor, because he lost his job at OWN-something or other in Virginia.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:44:10] Again, usually, I know these off the top of my head. And he live-streamed and videotaped approaching them during an external video shoot, and he shot the cameraman, and he shot the female anchor. We saw this a few other times. I fear that we’re going to continue to see this a little more often. It is, if you get out of the moral aspect of this, and this is part of a podcast that where if someone takes this next statement out of context, I’m going to look like a monster, so I’ll preface it, if you get out of the moral overlay, and you approach this from a perspective of, boy, how do you really want your message to be heard? How do you want to get out your message to the world?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:44:55] If you really think you’re a soldier of X cause, X, Y, Z cause, boy, taking a gun, and strapping a camera to you, and shooting a bunch of people in service of a cause, being a martyr, being a soldier of the cause, great way to get your message out, right? In other words, that’s the problem, is it can have real important meaning—not important, visceral impact from the perspective of getting your voice out. Now, it’s a voice of hate. It’s a voice of violence. It’s not a voice—I think anyone in a pro-social democratic society wants to support, but it is a way to get your voice out, yeah.

Shane McNally: [00:45:39] Yeah, absolutely. And like you mentioned, I mean, this can impact people all over the place, and I think that it’s important to kind of take it into like the workplace context. So, say, if you’re an employer and you have employees that have seen this or maybe this hate crime has really—they’re scared now to go kind of out and about. They weren’t there, they weren’t at this Tops, they just feel they weren’t directly impacted, but they do feel some major emotional connection to this. What should employers be doing to kind of help out their employees after this?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:46:17] There’s a few things that I would keep in mind. One is be careful not to prescribe trauma. In other words, just because people are upset doesn’t mean they’re traumatized, right? There’s an old saying that every time you said you couldn’t go on, you did, right? What’s interesting about the research on trauma is the overwhelming majority of people that have been traumatized don’t actually experience ongoing traumatic symptoms.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:46:42] In other words, they absorb it. They absorb the punch, is how I describe it, psychologically. It may take a few weeks, but they settle back into their life. They pull up their natural resilience. They pull up their loved ones, their friends, their hobbies, their coworkers, their faith-based groups, whatever it is, and they basically just kind of get back to their life. It doesn’t mean it didn’t impact them. Some walk away with a deep sense of meaning as a result of what they went through, but they kind of get back.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:47:10] There are other people that for any number of reasons, and no judgment and it’s not a sign of weakness, they can’t quite get over it, and they might need treatment. They might need medications. They might need therapy. All good. We want to get them that if we can. So, as employers, I think it’s really important to not necessarily assume, oh, everyone is fine, or assume everyone’s totally traumatized. It’s important to have resources for that whole gamut and allow people to tap into their natural resources and their natural resilience.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:47:41] So, that’s the first step. The other thing is to be mindful of these are high-impact events, but they’re extremely low risk in terms of statistical likelihood, right? So, they’re low-frequency, high-impact, no doubt, right? Most of us, many of us have been involved in very bad severe weather, maybe even some of us in a tornado, but every time it rains or thunders, we don’t immediately freak out about a tornado occurring, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:48:14] So, it’s important to educate ourselves on the likelihood of any one of us being involved in a mass shooting as a victim is really, really, really low. What you can do, though, is be mindful of where you are, have awareness. To this day—well, it’s funny. After Sandy Hook, one of the biggest fights my wife and I ever had, but she agreed with me, to her benefit, so I’ll give her props, my kids must have been—boy, there must have been like seven and nine, maybe even six and eight.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:48:51] And after Sandy Hook, I sat them down and I had a talk with them about mass shooting. I explained how predators think in these attacks. I explained how they look for a kill zone. I explained run, hide, fight. I literally explained, if you have to run away, run away holding your book bag in front of you, reverse it on your chest. And now, some people are going to be laughing at this. None of that’s going to stop an AR-15.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:49:20] And my wife was mad at first until I convinced her, we’re either going to have a hard discussion now—by the way, I’m also a forensic psychologist. I’m also a child psychologist. I kind of know how to have these discussions. I’m not saying this is for every parent and I’m not saying everyone has a tolerance for this, so I’m not prescribing it, right? But I said, we’re either going to have this hard discussion now, and it’s a low risk, a very low risk, but we might have to have a hard discussion over a funeral casket, and I’m not having that discussion.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:49:51] And if I do have that discussion, I’m going to have it knowing I tried everything I can to educate my kids on resilience and being aware. Really interesting, fast-forward two years, my daughter had a school shooting, a significant scare. Turned out it was a false claim, but they locked everything down. And there was allegedly somebody on site that might have had a gun. What was interesting is they were barricaded in her room, and it’s hard to visualize on a podcast, but imagine that there’s the door to the classroom, and as soon as you open the door, she was directly in line of that doorway.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:50:30] And there was a kid in the totally adjacent corner that got up to go get his book bag, now, whether you agree with my daughter’s morality, you could you could debate, but when he did that, she knew, based on what I taught her, that as soon as that gunman comes in, he’s likely to start firing, and he’s likely to spray to one side or the other, and usually, they spray, and they pull out, and they go to the next room, because that’s what they’re doing.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:50:54] They’re moving on. They’re moving on. Almost like an urban assault. You clear a room, you move on. You clear a room, you move on. And I know that in large classrooms, like Columbine, and this is tough to talk about, but it’s rare that everyone in the classroom is shot unless the assailants come back and they look for victims to pick off. I won’t go way down into that detail. But she knew all this.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:51:19] So, when that kid got up, she scurried across the room and she took his spot knowing that she was in a better position based on what I taught her. Now, I’m not saying anyone listening to this go out and teach their kids this, what I’m saying, though, is as employers, decide, what do you want to impart to your employees just about physical security awareness, awareness of your space? Right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:51:44] If somebody does come in with a gun, where are you going to hide? What can you use as a barricade? If it does come down to a last ditch effort, what can you use as a weapon to fight? Right? Understand the concepts of run, hide, fight, and understand that it’s not a sequence. You don’t always have the luxury of going from running to hiding, to fighting. There are moments where it’s like you turn a corner, and it’s like, damn, there’s a gunman and he’s two feet from me, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:52:11] If you psychologically try to, at least, at least, to some degree, get in the mental space for this, you’re going to be just a little more prepared than somebody that is completely ignorant of understanding these concepts. Now, I’m not saying all employers just start a dialogue. I really believe it’s important to get experts that know how to do this, and whether they coach you on having that dialogue, whether they do the dialogue with you or maybe they do the dialogue themselves as the experts, it’s important to have dialogues and discussions around these things so that people are forewarned with information, and that way, they can be somewhat forearmed to be ready if and when these things start to occur.

Shane McNally: [00:52:56] That’s a great point. And I want to ask, too, as a follow-up, whether you are an employer or a leader in a corporate setting, where you’re going into the office every day or you manage like, for example, a grocery store, is it equally important for both sides to teach their employees and provide resources to be proactive and understand that ahead of time?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:53:21] I think it is. I think what we see from the data, and unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of it, is from an industry perspective or a location perspective, these are equal opportunity attacks. We see them in manufacturing plants. We see them in churches. We see them in grade schools. We see them in daycares. We see them in grocery stores. We see them in a number of different types of environments.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:53:48] And whether it is an unassociated attacker, Gendron was not associated with Topps. He picked it, there was a racial profiling, was what he did, and he chose it for that reason, just like the mosque attack in New Zealand, just like the Walmart attack, or it’s an ex-employee that’s disgruntled, and that is an associated, that’s a more personal attack, the company aggrieved me in some way, even if you feel like, well, we’re super low risk, we’re not a minority group, right wing groups aren’t going to attack us, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:54:22] Okay. You’re some White church in the South, right? I’m being cliche here on purpose. Yeah. My guess is maybe White nationalist groups may not want to target you, if we’re using the right wing extremism, jihadist groups might. The point is, you can always have that disgruntled ex-parishioner, that disgruntled ex-worker that, for a number of reasons, decides at some point that they need to be heard and they’re going to be heard at the end of a gun. So, I think, yes, to your point, all employers need to be thinking, not panicking. Again, I want to give voice of caution and voice of cool heads here, but at least being forewarned and forearmed with information is really important in this day and age.

Shane McNally: [00:55:15] Yeah. And you mentioned, too, that experts are able to help out. Can you kind of just give a little bit of some insight into like what you mean by experts or what resources people should be utilizing?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:55:26] Yeah. So, I’m going to talk, specifically, I’m a certified threat manager, I’m a forensic psychologist, so I have consulted with companies where I have trained the trainer, or I have trained HR or managers to have these discussions or to train their people on situational awareness. Other times, I’ve co-presented with them, and other times, we’ve just come in as experts and we’ve done the training ourselves.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:55:50] There are other times we’ve facilitated roundtables, where people might get a training, and then they could come in for several weeks, and just have open discussion about their worries, or concerns, or even scenarios, right? Just have an open dialogue about these things. There are different ways that you can manage this in different organizations. Many organizations have their own security departments, and they might have their own trained people that understand threat management and threat assessment, and they don’t need outside experts, but a lot of them don’t have that, right? A lot of employers don’t have that access. And so, they do need that available.

Shane McNally: [00:56:25] Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:56:26] And by the way, Shane, let me just add real quick, I also do this at the individual level, right? This doesn’t have to be at the employer level. To this day, every time—my kids hate it, to this day, every time I go to a movie theater, and before the lights go down and before the previews start, I will say to them, “Alright. Where are the exits? If a guy comes in from-” and again, I always say a guy, because it tends to always be. “If a guy comes in from here, where are you going? If a guy comes in from there, where are you going?”

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:56:54] And it’s to the point that as soon as they start their sentence, “Yeah, Dad, we know. If a guy comes in from the left, we’re going over this seat and we’re going down to the exit down there. We’re going to keep a low profile and we’re going to duck behind the-“, and it’s almost a game now, but again, it’s ingrained in their head now. It’s ingrained in their head, and I just try to do that at the individual level as well.

Shane McNally: [00:57:14] I will also say, I can attest to that. Since working at R3, I have actually started to do that same thing, and I am not a certified threat manager or anything like that, but just kind of hearing those stories and and ways to do that, I will literally, like especially going to a movie theater or things like that, I do the exact same thing. So, yeah, it’s come to me, too. So, looking at like—we’ve talked about kind of preparing, and before, how you can help mitigate this as an employer. Looking at after the fact, if an event occurs, so say this shooting happens at your organization, what resources or what should leaders be doing to help this recovery process after the fact?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:58:02] Few things off the top of my head that come to mind. One is, I think it’s important to give them access to counseling support resources. Now, what I mean by counseling is not necessarily formal therapy, right? Some people may need that, right? But if you remember what I said earlier, the majority of people adjust to trauma. They’re affected for a few weeks, but then they kind of get their life back, right?

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:58:27] They adjust, just like we adjust to grief, the loss of a loved one. Most of us, we absorb the blow and we get our life back slowly. We still are impacted, but we get our life back at a relatively functional level. Make resources available. One of the best resources is disruptive event management consulting and counseling, where clinical professionals come in, and they help people, totally voluntary for the individuals receiving it, but they help them process, talk through, make sense of, digest, if you will, the events and the impact on them.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:59:04] A subset of those people, of those recipients, of those employees, they might need referral for more ongoing therapy. Nothing wrong there. That happens. But a lot of them, that initial impact or the impact of that intervention, I should say, can be very, very powerful, and you usually want to impact that within 24 to 48 hours. You don’t want to wait 10 days, two weeks, because what happens is what we know, even from a traumatic angle of the impact on the brain and your body, things start seeping in, and you start developing fear patterns and thought patterns, usually, already within 6 hours after an event, you can short-circuit those and reverse them if you have certain types of interventions within 12, 24, 36 hours.

Dr. George Vergolias: [00:59:49] You start going further out, there’s a risk that we start developing maladaptive habits and patterns. So, that’s why that kind of intervention, you want it very quickly and the goal is to build up their resilience, right? So, that’s one level. The other level and part of that service should also be management consulting. How does management handle the messaging? Right? If certain people are killed, do you share that openly in a message? Do you not share that? Do you give bereavement time to everybody to attend funerals? Do you not?

Dr. George Vergolias: [01:00:28] We literally have had questions where there’s blood at the work site. Do you clean it up before people come back and risk people feeling like you’re whitewashing over the event, or do you leave it and risk retraumatizing people when they come back? These are delicate questions—and these are delicate questions. Sorry about that, guys. There was a tornado warning, of all things, we were joking about on my phone.

Dr. George Vergolias: [01:00:57] And these are delicate questions that managers have to think about, and they have no experience, right? Because very rarely have you been through this before. Most employment locations, happens one time if—well, not most. Most, it never happens to. If it happens to any of them, the overwhelming majority of them have not had these large scale traumatic events occur at all. So, managers, it’s new to them, whereas folks like us, like R3, folks like threat managers like myself, this is what we do. This is the kind of crisis management, threat management work that we do.

Shane McNally: [01:01:35] Yeah, absolutely. And I think we’ve gone through, we’ve discussed the shooting in Buffalo. We’ve kind of gone through what employers and organizations should be doing beforehand, and following that event, and what resources are available out there, so thank you, Dr. Vergolias, for going from A to B on that. If the guests would like to hear more from you, or to get a hold of you, or anything like that, how would they be able to do that?

Dr. George Vergolias: [01:02:03] So, probably, the two best ways is my email at R3 is george.vergolias, V as in Victor-E-R-G-O-L-I-A-S as in Sam, @R-the number 3-the letter C as in Charlie-.com, or you can go to LinkedIn, and I won’t give you my whole actual address. If you type in George Vergolias, I’m the only one that pops up. Fortunately, I have a very uncommon name, so you should be able—a medical director at R3 and you should see me pretty readily.

Shane McNally: [01:02:38] Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for being with us today, Dr. Vergolias, and thank you, everybody, for listening.

Shane McNally: [01:02:45] R3 Continuum offers a plethora of services that can help organizations with disruptive event management, violence mitigation, disruption response and recovery, threats of violence, and behavioral health solutions that can help ensure the psychological and physical well-being of organizations and their employees. We make tomorrow better than today by helping people thrive. Connect with us and learn about our services at wwww.r3c.com or email us directly at info@r3c.com.