Four months ago, Tallahassee was stunned by a cowardly assault committed by a man armed with a handgun and a dangerous amount of ammunition that claimed the lives of two women and injured five others inside.

Suddenly, this community was thrust into the national spotlight as the latest city shattered by gun violence, leaving its residents and more importantly, families of the victims, searching for answers.

It was a scenario that has been played out time and again in this country and in other parts of the world.

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How can these types of violent acts continue? What possesses someone to purposely open fire on innocent victims who have little to no chance of escaping?

And, now that further details have been released by the Tallahassee Police Department, more questions are raised about men like Scott Beierle, the involved shooter who long harbored an anger toward women that went from personal assaults to his final act of committing two murders that night before ending his own life.

On Monday, a newly established research initiative housed at Florida State University will be announced by President John Thrasher and Jeff Binkley, whose daughter, Maura, a student at FSU, was killed at Hot Yoga, along with faculty member, Dr. Nancy Van Vessem.

Binkley and his wife, Margaret Binkley, are the driving forces behind Maura’s Voice, a think tank focusing on research designed to break down barriers and address violence in our culture.

Among the areas to be examined include violence against women, the relationship between hate speech and violent behavior, the role of gun safety policy with violence, stalking behavior and the role of social media and the internet tied to gun violence.

It will bring together resources from within FSU – and from around the country – to examine these issues. Ultimately, the goal is to steer clear of politics and produce scientific findings that assist policymakers and, hopefully, effect change.

Directing the study is James Clark, dean of the College of Social Work and a professor.

Clark, who joined FSU in July 2015, is an expert in forensic mental health. He earned a doctorate in clinical social work from the University of Chicago, a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Kentucky and a bachelor of arts degree from Sienna College in New York.

In this question and answer segment with Democrat senior writer Byron Dobson, Clark discusses the research arm of Maura’s Voice.

How did the idea for this research center come about? What is it that FSU will be creating?

“Jeff and Margaret Binkley are extraordinary people who are motivated by love and concern for others in a way that I have rarely experienced. Their grace and intelligence are creating the foundation for what we will be doing.

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After Maura’s death, they approached President Thrasher with the desire to bring something good out of the terrible violence that they had experienced. With President Thrasher’s encouragement and (Florida TaxWatch President/CEO) Dominic Calabro’s help, Jeff approached me about creating a research fund to study the causes, effects, and possible remedies for gun violence against women.

Maura’s Voice Research Fund has been opened with Jeff and Margaret’s gifts and those from Maura’s extended family. This growing fund will underwrite research projects that directly concern violence against women, including gun violence. “

What are the goals of the project in the short term and long term?

“Jeff and Margaret decided to do something a bit different from other foundations that have been created by families harmed by violence.

Instead of solely developing an advocacy organization, they saw the need for research and knowledge development to help guide their long-term policy work. Our major aims are to curate the existing scientific knowledge about violence against women in its many forms and to conduct original empirical research as well.

This knowledge can then be used to improve clinical practice and inform policy development.

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Maura’s Voice will also support FSU’s development of an online training certification for behavioral health and law enforcement professionals interested in forensic behavioral health. That is an effort to provide educational opportunities and science-informed approaches for people in the trenches who are working to reduce and respond to violence in our communities.

You mentioned that your wife told you after the shootings that you had to do something? Can you recount that conversation and how did it strike you?

“Maura’s murder, as well as the killing of Dr. Nancy Van Vessem, inflicted deep emotional wounds on the FSU family. So many faculty, staff, and students who gathered for memorials here in Tallahassee experienced profound personal loss.

I think President Thrasher’s personal response and active involvement represents how the FSU community wants to see our society block this terrible unfolding of gun violence and hate crimes. The morning after Maura was killed, my wife Liz – who is also a clinical social worker – told me that she had spent a sleepless night thinking about Maura and said that we would need to take our responses to a much higher level of involvement.

Our youngest daughter is an FSU senior in the same academic program that Maura was in, so it was immediately clear to us that every young woman is potentially in danger from this kind of violence.

But I want to add that almost every parent and grandparent that I meet – no matter political party, social class, or religious identification – is extremely worried about the epidemic of gun violence in America.”

Why is Florida State uniquely qualified to carry this out?

“FSU is a center of education, service, and research with experts in social work, criminology, law, psychology, medicine, social policy and other relevant disciplines.

Maura’s Voice will seek partnerships across campus, and also call upon our research colleagues across the nation who can help advance our mission. Very importantly, we also plan to have FSU students join us in our work; many have already expressed strong interest in doing so.”

What are the issues or behaviors you want to explore?

Maura’s Voice will work primarily on research questions at the intersection of hate and violence against girls and women. For example, we suspect that there are strong connections between offenders' self-hate and anger, online hate speech, sexual offending, and interpersonal violence when considering the subculture known as Incels— involuntary celibates; Maura’s killer identified himself with that group.

Dr. Amy Coren (FSU Department of Psychology) is doing innovative work in this area. We also know that social media networking has made it possible for such subcultures to develop, and we are interested in how that might work to ‘radicalize’ individuals who would otherwise remain socially isolated and non-lethal in behavior.

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Dr. TK Logan (University of Kentucky College of Medicine) has completed a groundbreaking study of court-ordered violent stalking and the important role of court-issued protective orders funded by the National Institute of Justice that has crucial public policy implications.

Mass shooting events will also be important to study. Dr. Jill Turanovic (FSU College of Criminology) has recently been awarded a National Institute of Justice grant to build a mass shooting events database that will significantly advance empirical research in the field. We want to seek guidance from these talented researchers and support them and the work of others that we identify as advancing the mission. This is a very preliminary list, and we expect to enlarge and refine this list over time.”

What are examples of other social behaviors that have been addressed in similar fashion through the years?

There has been a great deal of research in the area of intimate partner violence and violence against women, including criminal offenses like rape and intimate partner assault. We will draw upon that work. What remains extremely challenging is creating tools that professionals can use as they face public safety dilemmas.

For example, when we re-construct the shooters’ lives, we see all kinds of warning signs and we wonder why someone didn’t do something early on to prevent the shooting events.

Warning signs:

Because of the shocking nature of the crimes, we immediately think that the shooters must be severely mentally ill. But they’re usually not. Many were evaluated at some point by a mental health professional, but very few actually met criteria for any mental disorder. The shooters do share many characteristics – patterns of personal inadequacy, under- or unemployment, social isolation, heavy use of social media, participation in hate groups online, and either violence toward women, dominance over them, or incapacity to have any relationships with women.

But these traits also belong to thousands of men who will never commit a shooting.

Risk assessment used to predict future violence is notoriously unreliable – replete with both false positive and false negatives. On the other hand, we can develop and study approaches for more effectively responding to persons who are actively making threats, creating hate speech, and engaging in patterns of illegal behaviors, such as incorrigible sexual offending.

We can also study how social media escalates violent behaviors – this is a brand-new line of research that needs attention.

It is time to develop and use research-informed approaches for addressing highly problematic and violent behaviors as they unfold, rather than trying to predict it or waiting for it to escalate into homicidal behavior. Again, all of this must be done in a manner that meets the evidentiary and constitutional standards of the criminal justice system.

Maura's Voice believes that multidisciplinary research and education can help make this happen.”

Contact senior writer Byron Dobson at bdobson@tallahassee.com or on Twitter @byrondobson.

Maura’s Voice Launch

The official launch of Maura’s Voice will be held at 10 am. Monday, March 4, on the steps of Historic Old Capitol, 400 S. Monroe St.

Speakers include:

Sen. Bill Montford

President John Thrasher, Florida State University

Audrey Benson, Maura’s life-long best friend

Jeff Binkley, Maura’s father and founder of Maura’s Voice

Dominic M. Calabro, President & CEO, TaxWatch

Jim Clark, dean and professor, College of Social Work, Florida State University, who is leading Maura’s Voice research.

In case of rain, the launch will be held in the Capitol Rotunda.

Additional gatherings will take place in Atlanta and San Francisco.

To learn more about Maura’s Voice and to donate to the cause, visit https://maurasvoice.org/