Why is the Secret Service studying school shootings?
The Service once believed in profiles. Assassins were presumed to be male, loners, insane. That profile was changed by Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who each tried to kill President Gerald R. Ford in San Francisco in 1975. The night before Moore’s attack, the Secret Service had taken away her gun, but she bought another gun and was allowed to approach Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel. She didn’t know that her new gun fired high and to the right. In that same hotel last year, Secret Service agents were briefed on the results of a study by the Service’s Protective Intelligence Division. The Service studied all 83 people who tried to kill a public official or celebrity in the United States in the last 50 years. Assassins, the team found, fit no profile. They rarely threaten. They often change targets. Even if mentally ill, they plan rationally. But because they follow a path toward violence–stalking, acquiring weapons, communicating, acting in ways that concern those around them-