Student reflects on recent gun violence and mass shootings

 

Free-Writing Response

On September 4th, a student was on the bus to school, with a rifle and a knife in his backpack. Within two hours of arriving at Apalachee High School, he committed the deadliest US school shootings since the March 2023 rampage at the Covenant school in Nashville. Two teachers and two students were dead and nine, one teacher and eight students, were injured. The shooter, Colt Gray missed nine days of classes before the shooting and was charged with four counts of felony murder, and could face life in prison. But how did he obtain the gun? His father bought the gun as a holiday present for his son. He was charged with two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children (CNN).

As of September, there have been at least 49 school shootings, thirteen on college campuses, 36 on K-12 schools. The have left 24 dead and 65 others victims injured (CNN). In September, a man shot his wife and mother-in-law, while two children were there. When the police came, the man turned himself in. The wife was found dead, the mother-in-law was shot, and died later in the hospital. The reason for the shooting was a domestic dispute.

In Dec 2023, a gunman killed three faculty members on a college campus, he died in a shootout with the police. The gunman was roaming the UNLV's Lee Business School and opened fire around noon on their fourth floor. Since it was around noon, if the police had not killed the attacker, there could have been many more (PBS NEWS).

In the United States gun laws vary from state to state (Statisca)

This assignment is to work on a reaction essay for an hour, and I’ve spent my hour reading about mass shootings, school shootings, and gun violence, and now I’m out of time.  I do recommend the powerful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5ykNZl9mTQ.  My sister showed it to me a couple years ago.  Naturally, this topic should (and does) provoke stroke emotions. One of the many thoughts I have is wonder and anger. Why can’t our society find a way to stop these events?

Yes, the reaction essay is an assignment to do a free-writing assignment for just an hour, and freely express your feelings about an issue in social work or social welfare policies.  I think some students exceed the time limits to write more polished reactions, but the point is to allow students to share their feelings and thoughts.  In this case, the thoughts you’re sharing are mainly paraphrases of recent reports on mass shootings and violence. This is one of the more horrible aspects of our culture and society.  In a huge country with hundreds of millions of persons, one can expect the occasional atrocity committed by a few of the worst people subjected to the worst circumstances, but America has way more mass shootings, school shootings, and acts of tremendous violence than one should expect.  There is clearly something in our culture that is creating this situation.  I know that some degree of reasonable gun control laws ought to have a slight impact on the situation, but the sort of total gun bans and strict regulation of guns that might work in other societies would not work here because of the Second Amendment, and my understanding is that cultural changes will be more effective than gun control laws (although both would help) in diminishing these acts of mass violence.

For the time being, gatekeepers (school teachers, coaches, school administrators, school social workers, etc.) who have contact with children are learning to recognize signs that might predict who will act like this.  In the case of the September 4th Georgia school shooting, it seems the family was aware that their son was troubled and potentially dangerous. The authorities seem to agree, since they have charged the boy’s father with crimes for providing the gun. Since I was a child, I’ve thought that middle schools and high schools ought to teach some basic psychology to students, and that such content is just as important as math, science, English, and so forth.  Children can learn about healthy relationships and unhealthy relationships, and learn about friendships and romantic relationships, with the lessons drawing from research on family dynamics, domestic violence, marital satisfaction, and friendship.  Academics have studied these things, and we have a lot of basic knowledge that is no more difficult to understand than quadratic equations and the laws of thermodynamics, which are still taught in high schools, I think. Clearly, children should learn how to recognize signs of persons who are maladjusted and potentially dangerous, and also learn how to create a social environment that diminishes the risk that such people emerge and go on to commit violent crimes and atrocities. There is no harm in learning about the darker side of human behavior if the emphasis is on learning how to recognize it and create a community that does not encourage it. 

Violence prevention is an important field, but the gains we’ve made in learning how to prevent violence are not given much attention.  On the other hand, we (as a society) do give lots of attention to specific acts of violence.  My impression is that the news about violence does not inform the citizenry about what is going on in society or psychologically, and so most people are left with an impression that people are just getting worse, or more people are randomly becoming crazy and violent.  Thus, narratives about the importance of law and order as a way to stop waves of crime are embraced by people hopeful that such a turn in policies will remedy the problem (that they don’t understand).