Photo by Eliesa Johnson
Jillian Peterson for Evereve
St. Paul native Jillian Peterson first landed on our radar in 2009 when her wedding processional to Chris Brown’s “Forever” went viral, eventually inspiring Jim and Pam’s wedding in The Office. Now a professor at Hamline, she’s in the spotlight for a very different reason: confronting the mounting epidemic of mass shootings.
Peterson got her start working on national death penalty cases in college, then landed her first job with the New York City Capital Defender Office, focusing on inmates at Rikers Island. Three years ago, Peterson and research partner James Densley started The Violence Project, a nonprofit research center that catalogs the lives of mass shooters in the hopes of illuminating solutions. Peterson talked with us about the surprising dualities of her life.
Your book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, won the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for nonfiction and is based on your research of the lives of mass shooting perpetrators. Tell me about that work.
When mass shootings were really escalating several years ago, a lot of people were saying, “It’s mental illness,” or, “It’s violent video games,” but there was no data about any of it. And I thought, If you don’t understand what that pathway to violence looks like, then you can’t intervene and prevent it from happening. We didn’t know who these people were; we didn’t know why we were seeing this massive increase in mass shootings in this country.
What is the most striking commonality you’ve seen in your research?
Basically, mass shooters have four things in common, which is a really oversimplified version. But it’s early childhood trauma, a slow build to a crisis point—when they’re typically actively suicidal. Third is they study each other: When one happens, you tend to see more right after because they kind of inspire others. And then fourth is access to guns. We talk about that you can intervene at any of those four spots, either as an individual, as an institution, or as a society.
When you are willing to delve into these topics and say, This is complicated and messy, you welcome people in in a different way. The whole idea is this is a long pathway to violence. These aren’t just monsters that appear out of nowhere; they’re human beings that we watched develop over time.
How do you wake up every day and face such a daunting problem?
When people start talking about it and noticing it, it feels like we’re having a real impact. But sometimes, it just seems like the problem of gun violence is so massive, and there’s so much research to be done. I go in waves around, This is really inspiring, and then, I need a break.
How do you keep from getting discouraged?
I have three young kids, and people are like, “Oh, my God, that must be so much.” But it’s not, because kids are so good. They just assume the best about the world, and they’re funny, and they’re sweet, and being able to come home to that is what gets me through. You can’t be thinking about mass shootings when you’re playing with a 5-year-old.
Your wedding story is so fun. With such stressful jobs, how do you and your husband decompress?
We throw a lot of parties, honestly. Costume parties are our thing. We throw a Halloween party; we throw a Christmas party. We threw a prom last spring that was full-on formal. We both love that stuff, which is funny. We have the heaviest jobs—he’s an immigration attorney—and we’re like, “Come to our adult prom party.” But I feel like that’s why it works, really. Because we also have a lot of fun.
Tell me about your Evereve experience.
I’m not a fashion person. In fact, I feel very uncomfortable and overwhelmed in stores. But the stylist was like, “Wander around the store and pick out anything that you’re just drawn to. Don’t even think about it.” The jacket I’m wearing in that picture is actually the first thing that I walked toward.
On Peterson: Evereve “Alexa” blazer ($158), Evereve “Kyle” cami ($48), Citizens of Humanity “Isola” cropped boot jeans ($228), and Swedish Hasbeens "Merci" sandals ($290) from EVEREVE, evereve.com
This article originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine as part of our series, The Foreword, presented by Evereve.
