In my online classes with people from across the country and beyond it, I have participants check in by mentioning “What ‘s Up?” for them, what’s top-of-mind? Could be a snowstorm headed their way, celebratory feelings of a project going well, or a mishap that caused a sleepless night. But this week, several women mentioned the aftermath in their communities from the latest school shooting at Michigan State University, 3 people killed, 5 injured.
Since I hadn’t heard about this shooting, their words ignited a feeling of disgust and extreme tiredness in my limbs, “Not another one! When will this nightmare end?” Instantaneously, I got an image of the male high school student at Margorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018. Looking straight into the camera shortly after that school shooting, he said to the media and to us, “We’re just kids. Somebody DO something!”
Later I reviewed an article I had written about the Stoneman-Douglas shooting shortly after it happened. I admitted at that time to what we mental health professionals call “compassion fatigue,” but seeing these kids, who had not been born yet when the Columbine School shooting happened in 1999, move so quickly to anger and social action– I felt a glimmer of hope that the outcome of this shooting would be different. When their protest signs indicated their sophistication with the issue, “Guns don’t kill people, legislators do!” I was encouraged that they weren’t going to go along with the usual “this isn’t the time to talk about it” message that had prevailed after previous mass shootings. I’ve followed their national efforts to end gun violence through their March for Our Lives organization these past 5 years, and in a recent interview with one of the leaders, now about to graduate college, learned that they too are extremely tired.
There have been 70 mass shootings so far this year according to the Gun Violence Archive, as reported by Jula Ledur in the Washington Post, only 8 days in January without one. No wonder we’re exhausted and in despair. As Emily Dickenson put it, “The dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my heart from one another has come.” We have an epidemic on our hands.
By now it’s clear that the somethings we’ve been doing have not been enough. Looking through the lens of fear we have purchased scanners and locks, armed guards, and cameras, ignoring the fact that most often the threat comes from an insider. The father of the Michigan State shooter said that his son had become increasingly angry since his mother’s death in September 2020, rarely leaving his bedroom. It sounds like he fits the profile of despair, isolation, and most likely self-loathing that authors Julian Peterson and Hames Densley developed from their database of every mass shooting since 1966, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces, and places of worship since 1999. In their book The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, they conclude that mass shootings are violent suicides, designed to be the final act of a person whose self-hatred turns against a group, often in a quest for vengeance, fame, and notoriety. Mass shooting are contagious because troubled people study and copy from others what they observe on social media and learn through news reports.
So, what can we do? What are the actions we can take, “the actions we owe to those grieving” as President Biden put it. We want to act but we want our actions to be effective, to restore a sense of safety for ourselves and our children as we go about our lives in public spaces, schools, shopping malls, group gatherings and public spaces of celebrations.
Actions suggested by Peterson and Densley related to firearms include:
- safe storage of firearms,
- background checks and waiting periods to purchase firearms,
- closing the loopholes that exempt sales at gun shows
- State red flag laws that remove firearms temporarily from people when they are in danger of harming themselves or someone else,
- training and resources needed to implement these procedures
Actions that more directly involve all of us, parents, teachers, friends, and neighbors, are the need to reach out to kids in crisis, linking them to mental health services, ideally in their school settings. If potential shooters telegraph to those around them their misery and sometimes even their intensions, as Peterson and Densley maintain they do, we need some version of– “if you see something, do or say something.” As grief coach and author Hope Edelman suggests, “Validating and supporting the bereaved at the time of loss is not just the compassionate thing to do, it’s a necessary investment in the collective good.”
