Hello world!

o.k., so my girlfriend, the scholar, has been sweatin’ me to get a blog. she says i’ll love it. Well, we shall see.

It’s a little dated now, but one thing i want to write about is Virginia Tech. After it happened, i kept hearing folks saying, how can we tell, what could we do in a similar situation, etc., etc. Well, i don’t pretend to have all the answers, but i can say that there is some very definitive research out there on this topic. I’m specifically thinking of Gavin DeBeck, the nation’s foremost expert on violence prediction. (Well, that’s what it says on the bookjacket, anyway.)

In his book, The Gift of Fear, he talks about warning signs. His main point is that we can tell. We have an excellent internal warning system about real danger. We just need to listen to it.

But, perhaps more pertinent to today’s blog, is his acronym, JAICO — Justification, Access, I forget what this one is, Consequences, and Options. Basically, this is useful in helping you remember the key things to look for / find out about a person when we are trying to decide how dangerous s’he is.

I’ll write more on this later.