Predicting School Shootings: The Controversial MOSAIC Threat Assessment System

After the shooting at Northern Illinois University on February 14--the analyzing will start all over again about why and how it happened. For some out there, they'll automatically blurt that it's violent media that plays a major part in shaping the mental attitudes of these shooters. Others will argue that it's more complicated than that and involves too many complex variables to get a true cut and dry picture. And then others will look to a controversial process that's been used for over 25 years in determining the potential dangers of public figures and schools: The MOSAIC Threat Assessment System. This system was designed to look into society itself and analyze the potential threats they may cause to a public official or to other people in an organization or school. It's supposedly helped us gain a better picture of violence in America's school since it started being used to analyze school shootings in 1999 after the horrific incident at Columbine High School.

Of course, you'd expect a process trying to stop violence via an artificially intuitive computer program to have its detractors. But the people who still support the system stand up for its merits--and it may still help form at least part of a complex picture of what's causing these school shootings to happen so often.

When the system was first introduced in 1980 by Gavin de Becker (a specialist in security of government and celebrities)--the American people were growing concerned with a new wave of violence from mentally-unstable individuals that had suddenly increased not long before. School shootings were virtually non-existent then (other than only half-a-dozen throughout the 60's and 70's)--but the threats to governmental officials and celebrities were on the rise, especially after John Lennon's murder and the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life in 1980 and '81. The creation of MOSAIC was almost too ironic in its timing considering it was created just right before those two events happened above. It nevertheless was used mostly to protect governmental officials in the beginning.