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Although no profile exists, warning signs may precede violent or threatening behavior. Warning behaviors include but are not limited to the following:
- Making direct or veiled threats of violence
- Having hostile and sustained grievances
- Increasingly erratic, desperate, or aggressive behaviors
- Identifying with violent individuals, ideologies, or events
- Preparatory actions for a violent act including research, planning, and/or acquiring & practicing with weapons
- Communications to third parties about a desire or intention to be violent
- Statements that violence is justified because of one's grievance
- Non-compliance with restrictions, boundaries, or laws
- Increasing preoccupation with a person or a cause
- Dehumanizing people of a differing identity group
- Persistent unwanted romantic pursuit
- Recent or impending losses including employment, academic, relationship, financial, or status in conjunction with denial and/or limited coping mechanisms
- A criminal or personal history suggestive of a propensity to use violence to project power and to control others
- Statements about desires to die, to kill oneself, or to be killed
- Unusual goodbyes or post death instructions