WHY A SINGLE WORD IS UNDERMINING THREAT ASSESSMENT, MISLEADING THE PUBLIC, AND COSTING LIVES
By Gregory M. Vecchi, Ph.D. Director of Training, SafeDefend LLC | Principal, Vecchi Group International, LLC | Retired Chief of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit.
On May 18, 2026, a deadly shooting happened at the Islamic Center in San Diego, California. The attack was described as “senseless”.
Every time a mass shooting occurs in America, a familiar ritual follows. Within hours of the first shots, officials step to a bank of microphones, offer condolences to the grieving, and describe what happened with a word that feels appropriate, compassionate, even righteous: senseless. It is the wrong word. And using it — reliably, reflexively, across every political landscape and every level of government — causes real harm to our capacity to prevent the next attack.
This is not a political argument. It is a behavioral science argument. And the distinction matters because the word we choose to describe targeted violence directly shapes the policies, resources, and practices we deploy in response.
Why Officials Say It — and Why That Makes It Worse
The use of “senseless” is not cynical. Officials reach for it because it communicates the right emotional content: this was wrong, this was evil, the victims deserved none of it. In a moment of public grief, it signals moral clarity without appearing to justify the perpetrator’s actions or imply that victims somehow contributed to their own fate.
Those are legitimate concerns. The problem is that good intentions do not neutralize analytical damage. When a mayor, a governor, senator, or government official calls a mass shooting “senseless,” they are — whether they realize it or not — encoding a false belief into the public record: that the violence had no discernible cause, no observable precursors, and no preventable trajectory. In behavioral science, that belief is not just inaccurate. It is the precise opposite of what the research shows.
What Research Actually Tells Us
Over the past three decades, behavioral scientists, threat assessment professionals, and federal researchers have systematically studied targeted violence. The findings are consistent and unambiguous: nearly every mass casualty attack leaves behavioral artifacts.
The seminal work of Fein, Vossekuil, and colleagues at the United States Secret Service established the foundation. The attackers in their research did not simply “snap.” They grieved. They planned. They communicated their intentions — to friends, in journals, online, through behavior. They followed what researchers now call the Pathway to Violence: a progression from grievance to ideation, to research and planning, to preparation, and finally to action.
The National Threat Assessment Center has replicated and extended those findings across school shootings, workplace attacks, and targeted assassinations. The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit has documented similar patterns. The conclusion is not subtle: targeted violence is a process, not an event.
This is the foundational insight that “senseless” destroys. If violence is senseless — random, inexplicable, beyond analysis — then there is no pathway to map, no leakage to detect, no warning behaviors to identify, and no threat management intervention point. The investigation becomes an autopsy rather than a blueprint for prevention.
The Five Things “Senseless” Prevents Us From Seeing
When we accept the “senseless” framing, we implicitly accept five claims that behavioral science has already refuted:
1. There was no grievance pathway to map.
False. Nearly every targeted attacker operates from a grievance — perceived injustice, humiliation, loss, or ideological mission. The nature and severity of that grievance, and whether it escalates into what I term a “fatal grievance” distinct from ordinary complaint, is precisely what behavioral threat assessment is designed to evaluate.
2. There was no leakage to detect.
False. Research consistently shows that many attackers communicated their intent in advance — directly or indirectly. Leakage appears in social media posts, journal entries, conversations with peers, and observable behavioral changes. The failure is not that there were no signals; the failure is that no one was trained to recognize and report them.
3. There were no warning behaviors.
False. Structured professional judgment tools like the WAVR-21 (Workplace Assessment of Violence Risk) exist precisely because behavioral warning signs are identifiable and documentable. Pathway behaviors — fixation, identification with previous attackers, weapons acquisition, target surveillance — are observable. They require trained eyes and a reporting system.
4. There was no intervention point.
False. Threat management is precisely the discipline of identifying and acting on opportunities for intervention before violence occurs. Behavioral Threat Assessment Teams — in schools, workplaces, and communities — exist to interrupt the pathway. They cannot do their work if the cultural presumption is that there is no pathway to interrupt.
5. Nothing could have been done.
False. This is the most dangerous implication of all. Fatalism is the enemy of prevention. When communities believe that mass violence is random and inevitable, they do not invest in behavioral threat assessment infrastructure. They buy metal detectors. They run drills. They prepare to respond rather than to prevent.
Language Shapes Policy — And Policy Shapes Lives
This is not an abstract concern about word choice. The language officials use to describe violence directly determines the systems communities build in response to it.
“Senseless” violence gets addressed with reactive measures: hardened perimeters, armed resource officers, lockdown protocols, and after-action reviews. These have their place. But they are not prevention — they are damage control applied to a problem that has already materialized.
Intentional violence — violence that follows a behavioral pathway — gets addressed with behavioral threat assessment teams, anonymous tip lines, mental health intervention systems, case management protocols, and trained professionals who understand the difference between a student venting frustration and a student on a pathway to lethal action.
We have decades of evidence that prevention-focused approaches work. Threat assessment teams operating in schools and workplaces have interrupted dozens of planned attacks. Those interventions never make headlines because the outcome — an attack that did not happen — is invisible. The “senseless” framing makes those successes impossible to communicate and difficult to fund.
What Officials Should Say Instead
I am not suggesting that officials make cold, clinical statements in the immediate aftermath of a mass casualty event. Compassion and accuracy are not mutually exclusive. What I am suggesting is that the language of prevention be incorporated from the first statement. Consider the difference between these two approaches:
Current standard: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. This senseless act of violence has no place in our community.”
Prevention-oriented alternative: “Our hearts are with every victim and every family. But make no mistake — this was not inevitable, and it was not beyond understanding. We will find every warning sign that was missed, every moment where intervention was possible, and every failure that allowed this to happen.
Because that is how we stop the next one.”
The second statement honors victims. It signals accountability. And it communicates something essential to the public: that the community takes violence seriously enough to study it rather than simply mourn it.
A Note on Accountability Without Victim-Blaming
The concern I hear most often from officials is that analyzing an attacker’s pathway, grievance, or behavioral history somehow implies that victims were responsible or that the perpetrator had justifiable motives. This conflation is false and must be addressed directly.
Explaining the behavioral pathway that led to an attack is not the same as justifying it. Understanding that an attacker acted out of a fatal grievance, followed a documented pathway, and exhibited observable warning signs does not diminish the moral culpability for the act. It locates the analytical failure that allowed the process to run to completion. Behavioral threat assessment is built on this distinction. The attacker is responsible for the violence. The community is responsible for building the systems that might have intervened. Both things are simultaneously true. “Senseless” collapses that distinction and eliminates the second responsibility entirely.
The Word That Forecloses Prevention
Every targeted attacker has logic. It may be a distorted logic, a paranoid logic, a grievance-driven logic so removed from reality that it is incomprehensible to those around them. But it is a logic that can be studied, patterned, and — if detected early enough — interrupted.
The Pathway to Violence is not a metaphor. It is a documented behavioral progression with identifiable stages, observable indicators, and established intervention points. Threat assessment professionals use it every day to evaluate concerning individuals, manage cases, and prevent attacks that the public never hears about.
When an official steps to a microphone and calls a mass shooting “senseless,” they are not lying about the horror of what happened. They are unintentionally diminishing our capacity to prevent what comes next.
About the Author
Gregory M. Vecchi, Ph.D., is a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent and Unit Chief of the Behavioral Science Unit, U.S. Army veteran, and behavioral scientist specializing in threat assessment and conflict analysis. He is the Director of Training at SafeDefend LLC, a graduate-level instructor at Keiser University, and the founder of Vecchi Group International LLC (VGI), which provides behavioral threat assessment consulting and expert witness services. He provides commentary on behavioral and threat assessment topics for Fox News Digital and NewsNation.