There is a reel that plays in my head.
I have walked the classroom in Uvalde where children were slaughtered. I have talked to the people who were there. I have seen the body cam footage and the crime scene photos. What a high-powered rifle does to a human body is not something language was built to hold. It obliterates. It does not wound. It erases.
The reel plays anyway. Over and over.
After my keynote yesterday, a woman waited in line to speak to me. I had mentioned the mass shooting in my own city, one sentence, maybe two, about what it taught me about vulnerability and showing up for one another. That was enough. She stood in that line until everyone else had gone, and then she told me she was a survivor. She had been shot in both legs. She was there.
I will not forget her face.
I tell you this because what I am about to say is not abstract to me. It is not a policy position or a public safety message. It is the thing I carry, and I need you to carry some of it too, because the weight of it is the point.
This month, researchers at the Rockefeller Institute published findings from a study of mass shootings. They read through more than 150,000 pages of police records, court transcripts, and after-action reports. What they found is this: the people who commit these attacks almost always tell us first. Nearly half had talked openly about killing others. More than forty percent had talked about harming themselves. The signs were there.
They have a name for it. Leakage. The violent intent a person broadcasts before they act, in a text, a post, a sentence said out loud. And it does not hide where we assume it hides. We picture radicalization happening in dark corners of the internet. In reality, it shows up more often on Facebook and Instagram than on any fringe forum. Just as often in a plain conversation with someone who knows the person well.
The signal is not buried. It is sitting in the open, in front of people who could do something about it.
Here is the part I cannot stop thinking about.
While the researchers were tracking one credible threat online, they watched more than a hundred other people interact with the same post. They saw it. They commented on it. Some told the young man it sounded bad and suggested he talk to his mother. And then they went on with their day.
The researchers picked up the phone. Everyone else picked up their armchair.
I want to talk to the everyone else. Because that is most of us, most of the time. And I say that without contempt. I understand exactly how it happens.
You almost always feel it before you can prove it. Something snags. A comment sits wrong. A person you have known for years says a thing that does not fit, and a small alarm goes off somewhere behind your ribs. The moment that alarm sounds is one of the most important moments you will ever get. Because it is the moment you still have a choice.
Most of us don’t move. Not because we are cowards. Because two very human things happen at once.
The first is disbelief. There is no way they actually mean that. We talk ourselves out of what we just saw because the alternative is too big and too heavy to hold. The second is the quiet assumption that someone else has it handled. If I heard it, surely other people did too, and surely one of them is already making the call. So I don’t have to. Multiply that across a hundred people on a thread, and you get a hundred witnesses and zero phone calls.
That is how the unthinkable happens. Not in the dark. In a crowd of people who each decided it was someone else’s reckoning.
There are classrooms in this country that became crime scenes while someone nearby felt something snag and said nothing.
I have stood in one of them.
Your job is not to investigate. Not to diagnose or confront or decide whether the threat is real. You are not expected to be the judge, the jury, and the SWAT team all at once. Your job is exactly one thing: get the information to someone who can act on it. Local police. The FBI tip line. A school administrator. An employer. You hand it off. You document what you saw. Screenshot the post, save the text, note the date and time. And you hand it off.
That is the whole ask.
I understand the hesitation because I have felt it. You are afraid of being wrong. Of overreacting. Of getting someone in trouble over nothing. I would rather be wrong a hundred times than silent once and right. Being wrong costs you an awkward afternoon. Staying silent can cost someone everything.
The woman who waited in line is why I keep getting on stages. Why I say this out loud, again and again, to rooms full of people who can change what happens next.
The researchers ended their work with something that sounds like hope: these attacks are not just preventable. They are predictable. But underneath that hope is a harder truth.
We are rarely blind. The signs reach us. They reached a hundred people on that thread, and they will reach you. If they haven’t already.
This is not a call to see more. You already see.
It is a call to move when you do.
The next time something snags, and it will, about something, someday, do not wait for the crowd. Do not assume the call has already been made.
That alarm behind your ribs is not noise.
Make the call.
