8.
That is how many attackers, since 2024, were active on a single online gore forum before they went on to hurt people at a school or at home.
8 is also how many times, since January 2025, the ADL has sent law enforcement a warning about someone active in these same online spaces. All 8 of those people were arrested.
Same number. One list is funerals. The other is a list of people who were stopped.
What separates those 2 lists is something every parent, teacher and officer can learn to do. I want to spend this week on it, because the research that just landed on my desk makes it clearer than anything I have seen.
Last month I asked the ADL whether they had data on how often this online subculture shows up behind real violence. On September 23, their Center on Extremism answered with a new resource hub, Understanding Targeted and Mass Violence Involving Youth.
The centerpiece is a map. Since 2024, the ADL has identified at least 51 attacks, plots and other activities around the world linked to the True Crime Community, or TCC. Red dots are attacks. Yellow dots are plots. They run from Iowa to Finland, from Canada to Chile to Indonesia.
If the TCC is new to you, I wrote about it this summer in They Made a Celebrity of the Man Who Killed My Son. The short version: it is an online fandom that treats mass killers like celebrities, its members are overwhelmingly young, and its currency is notoriety. That is why you will not find a single attacker's name in this newsletter, today or any other day.
The first red dot on the map is January 4, 2024, in Perry, Iowa. A 17 year old opened fire inside his high school. He killed Ahmir Jolliff, an 11 year old sixth grader, and wounded 7 others. One of them was Principal Dan Marburger, who was shot trying to draw the gunman's attention so his students could get away. He died of his injuries 10 days later.
According to the ADL's entry, minutes before the attack the shooter told an online chat he was "gearing up." He posted a video of himself from what appeared to be a school bathroom. He reportedly started a livestream a minute before he began firing.
He told strangers first.
That is the pattern the ADL keeps finding. The gore forum at the center of its new research has more than 5.5 million registered users, and its TCC group alone has more than 2,300 members. At least 8 attackers since 2024 were active there before their violence, and some posted hints that they would soon show up on the site themselves.
None of this is new, exactly. When the Secret Service studied 41 attacks on K-12 schools, every single attacker had shown concerning behavior beforehand, and most had communicated their intent to attack. What has changed is the audience. The warning used to go to a friend in the cafeteria. Now it often goes to a chat full of strangers who cheer.
The ADL says it plainly in its new hub: this kind of violence is planned. It moves along a pathway, from a grievance, to the idea of violence, to research, to planning, to preparation. Every step leaves marks. Online, it leaves a lot of them.
For 8 years, people have told me that the Parkland shooting came out of nowhere. It did not. The signs were there, and they were reported, and the system did not act. The difference now is that the signs are searchable, and organizations like the ADL are searching.
Go back to the second 8. Since January 2025, the ADL flagged 8 people in these communities to law enforcement, and all 8 were arrested. Somebody was watching, knew what they were looking at, and passed it to people who could act.
That lines up with the most hopeful research I know. The Secret Service looked at 67 disrupted plots against K-12 schools. Every one of them was stopped because a bystander, very often another student, noticed something concerning and told someone who could help.
That is what proactive safety looks like. It is a person who notices, a way to report it, and a team on the other end that knows what it is looking at.
51 is the number of cases the ADL could link to this subculture. It is a floor, and it covers the whole world. It does not measure all school violence, and one map cannot tell us whether this is growing or shrinking.
Most young people who drift into these spaces never hurt anyone, and many of them push back against the ones who cheer for violence. If we treat every kid who watches a true crime video as a suspect, we lose the trust of the very students most likely to tell us when something is wrong.
And not every attacker announces it where anyone can see. Some warnings are private, some are deleted, and no parent can read everything.
What I will claim is this: more often than not, the warning comes first. People who know what they are looking at can act on it.
Threat assessment teams need to know the online side. The ADL's new hub includes a Memetic Violence Field Guide that decodes the terms, symbols and phrases used in these communities. It is written for professionals. Send it to whoever runs behavioral threat assessment in your district, so the adults reviewing a concerning post know what they are reading.
Make reporting feel like protecting. Every one of those 67 plots ended because someone spoke up. Students need an anonymous way to report, and they need to hear from adults they trust that telling is how you keep a friend from doing something that cannot be undone.
Parents, ask who they are with online. Ask about the people your child spends time with online the same way you would ask about friends at school. You do not need to become an investigator. You need to be the person your child comes to when something they saw bothers them.
Use the resources that already exist. The ADL hub has guides for parents, educators and law enforcement, and the ADL plans to translate some of them into Spanish and Portuguese in the coming months.
If you are a parent, ask your child one calm question: "Have you ever seen someone online joke about a school shooter, or say they want to be famous for something like that?" Then listen, and do not panic at the answer. If you work in a school, send the ADL hub to your threat assessment team and ask one question at your next meeting: does our warning sign training cover what students do online?
For Alex. And for all of them.
Max Schachter
Immediate danger: call 911.
Report a threat to the FBI: tips.fbi.gov
Anonymous tips for students and adults: Sandy Hook Promise Say Something, 1-844-572-9669
If a young person is struggling: call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Map and data: ADL Center on Extremism. Attackers are not named here. Learn more at schoolsafetydashboard.org.