Violence has Changed. Personal Safety Must Too

Violence has changed. Especially violence targeting professionals and business owners. To effectively counter this change, personal safety must change too.

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente took his own life. So we may never know the why behind his shooting spree at Brown University in Rhode Island and in Massachusetts.

But there’s little doubt that his violent attacks on university students and a university professor were driven by grievance.

And not just any old grievances, but grievances that stayed with him for decades. 

His connection to Brown University as a PHD student goes back to 2001. And his connection to the MIT professor he shot dead in Massachusetts was from even earlier.

A violence switch has been flipped. Few people give any thought to being violently attacked over something that supposedly happened almost 3 decades ago.

It just hasn’t worked that way. Until now.

And the grievance driving today’s violence doesn’t even have to relate to you. Neves Valente shot innocent students who had no connection to him. They were simply in a building that he frequented decades ago, that somehow became central to his grievance. (We don’t know if he went there looking for a specific person, such as a professor, but the students he shot had not connection to him).

And the MIT professor, and one time classmate in Portugal that he killed in Massachusetts? It’s plausible that Neves Valente’s grievance towards him developed simply because the professor succeeded in his field and Neves Valente did not.

Grievance is typically driven by emotion. But when grievance turns to violence, instead of running on emotion, it’s methodically, and cold bloodily planned and carried out. 

And that makes it both inherently contradictory, and much more difficult to prevent.

As violence goes this is different. 

I know because I spent 30 years investigating violent incidents, including how they happened, and how they could have been prevented. I also spent over a decade providing personal safety training and consulting to business owners, professionals, and government officials. 

With the rise of grievance driven violence, I’ve adjusted my approach to personal safety training and consulting.

I created a personal safety check for business owners and professionals who want to keep themselves safe from violence including grievance driven violence. You can download it here. 

Let’s dive in and explore why grievance driven violence is more difficult to prevent, and the most important way in which your personal safety must adapt in order to help you stay safe from violence.

Grievance driven attackers tend to be smart. Neves Valente attended Brown University. An Ivy League School. Before that he was THE top student at Portugal’s top engineering school.  

Luigi Mangione attended University of Pennsylvania, also an Ivy League school, where he obtained both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. 

Obviously, not every grievance driven attacker attended an Ivy League school. But, most grievance driven attackers possess a level of intelligence that allows them to dispassionately and methodically plan and carry out their attacks.  

Grievance driven attackers research their victims, the locations where they’ll commit their attacks, and use that in depth information to carry out their attacks. They will conduct a dry run, which they use to ensure that their attacks are carried out effectively and reach their grievance driven objectives. 

Achieving their objectives requires a level of intelligence that you just don’t see with other types of violence. 

Grievance driven attackers don’t telegraph their actions. Social media is filled with threats of violence. So much so that it’s become normalized. Just ask anyone serving in a public capacity.  

But, seldom are those threats carried out. 

And that’s for two reasons. Those making the threats have not personally experienced the perceived harm they threaten people over. So it’s not actually personal.

Instead, they’re lashing out over a more generalized sense of anger. Just one voice in an online army of people angry at a policy or a political position.

For many of those who publicly threaten violence, their actual goal isn’t physical harm, but is to intimidate instead. Their goal is to use their threats to get people to back away from some type of action.

But grievance driven attackers aren’t focused on intimidation. They are looking to settle a score by harming those they believe have harmed them. 

It’s kind of like the line in Goodfellows, “But, when I heard all the noise, I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If they'd been wiseguys, I wouldn't have heard a thing. I would've been dead.”

Those committing grievance driven violence just get right to it. Without telegraphing their actions.

In part that’s because they know making public threats will draw the attention of law enforcement. And that type of attention often leads to an arrest BEFORE an attack can be carried out. 

And that prevents them from achieving their goal, to settle the score they want to settle.

So they operate on the principle that “loose lips sink ships”. And doing so allows them to succeed with their attack.

Further, since grievance driven attackers undergo extensive preparations before launching their attacks that type of preparation requires operating in secrecy.

And finally, grievance driven attackers’s actions are rooted in the belief that actions speak louder than words. It’s the attack itself that speaks for them. Not their words. 

In fact, words have failed them. Or they wouldn’t be launching violent attacks.

Grievance driven attackers extensively plan their attacks. Neves Valente traveled from Florida a few weeks before his attacks. 

He rented a car, a storage space, and purchased specific types of weapons. He located a home address for the MIT professor instead of killing him at MIT. Although he had attended Brown 25 years earlier, video shows that he conducted recon of the building, before going through with the shooting. 

Mangione didn’t just plan out his shooting of the CEO of United Healthcare. He worked out escape routes. He managed to make it out of Manhattan, an island, with limited means of egress, despite cameras being everywhere, and NYPD almost 35,000 officers looking for him. 

You can see similarities with these attacks to the planning and carrying out of the grievance driven attacks on the current and former Minnesota state legislators, and their families, and the attack on Charlie Kirk.

Grievance driven attackers seldom have a criminal history. Violent conduct is often a learned behavior. People who engage in violence often have a history of violence that escalated over time. 

But not grievance driven attackers. 

After they’ve committed their attacks, and their identities are learned, the news media almost always reports that they had no criminal record.  

In part, that makes the process easier for them to purchase firearms. But the reality is that crime is not their thing.

Grievance based attackers act in retribution, and to make a statement. They don’t engage in violence for financial reasons, or even for violence’s sake. They also don’t commit crimes that are typical of other violent criminals do.

All of these factors makes grievance driven violence much more difficult to prevent than the more typical violence driven by impulse or for monetary gain.

The one mindset shift needed to improve your personal safety from a grievance based attack. Because grievance driven violence is so difficult to predict and to prevent, you’ve got to adjust your personal safety mindset in order to keep yourself safe from it.

And the single most important change for you to embrace is to recognize that grievance driven violence can happen at any time, at any place, and to anyone.

Even to those who have no connection to the attacker.

And as a result, the only way to keep yourself safe from grievance driven violence is to develop the mindset that it can happen at any time, and any place, and to do so without warning. 

Sounds a bit paranoid. But it’s not. 

The boy scouts motto “always be prepared” is about encouraging scouts to maintain a state of readiness. To be proactive through using foresight.

To use a sports analogy, in pickleball you must “always expect a speed up”, as that is the only way to be truly ready for when someone hits the ball much harder and faster than dink shots and drop shops.

In either case, expecting that something can occur gives you the ability to recognize it when it starts to happen, and to respond to it before the violence succeeds.

This mindset shift, accompanied by some skills development, such as situational awareness and taking away an attacker’s initial advantage, is far MORE important than engaging in active shooter and other AFTER the fact drills.

Shifting your mindset to a state of readiness takes away the deer in the headlights feeling that occurs from the stress of the unexpected happening. 

It also allows you to act faster. And when it comes to personal safety, acting quickly, can make all of the difference between coming out of it okay and not.

And when it comes to avoiding harm by recognizing the threat before it becomes a threat, the best way to do that is to be mentally prepared in advance that something just might happen.

This mind-shift will give you the best opportunity to stay safe in the face of a well planned out grievance based attack.

I created a personal safety check for business owners and professionals who want to keep themselves safe from violence including grievance driven violence. You can download it here.