Almost every attacker in a mass shooting incident communicated their intentions to others, whether online or in person, and that should have brought attention to them and made their actions "preventable," Dr. Lina Alathari, chief of the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, said Monday in response to deadly shootings that claimed several lives in El Paso, Texas, and in Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend.
"In the last two years, we have started studying mass attacks, because what we are seeing about this, it is a trend," Alathari told Fox News' "America's Newsroom."
There are "concerning behaviors" noted for most perpetrators, she said, pointing to the agency's report for July.
Most were noted "from people who are intimate with them, family and friends, co-workers, all the way to strangers in the community," Alathari said. "What that tells us is that there are avenues for intervention because these people are on the radar."
She added she could not comment on the ongoing investigations, but she does know that with most perpetrators, "these incidents are preventable. Maybe we won't be able to prevent every single one of them, but there are avenues in terms of identifying these individuals so that we can take care of it, even legal remedies."
President Donald Trump on Monday said he is open to "red flag" laws, which would allow family members to petition authorities to restrict a mentally ill person's access to firearms.