Year-end prognisticators and ruminators spent the last few weeks of 2023 compiling and discussing their “best of” lists in newspaper articles, podcasts, and news programs. An unfortunate record broken by early December 2023 was the record-breaking 636 mass shootings, resulting in at least 2500 deaths. As noted in The Daytona Beach Journal, 2023 was the second bloodiest year since 2021, when 690 mass shootings were reported. “Mass” shootings are defined as 4 or more people, which makes the “smaller” homicidal incidents (1 to 3 people) just more additions to the horribly violent year that was 2023.
Other records only serve to amplify the crisis state in which we find ourselves- still- with gun violence. Texas has 39 mass shootings by mid-December. Dr. James Alan Fox, Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern University, teamed up with USA TODAY and the Associated Press to launch the Mass Killings database – a public facing website that uses interactive graphics and visuals to break down data on incidences of mass killing in the United States. He notes:
“In the face of hyperbolic media coverage and public fear, we tend to embrace easy solutions and quick fixes that don’t necessarily work and sometimes make matters worse,” says Fox, “as opposed to some really important and fundamental changes that in the long run could make our nation safer.”
Add the December 21, 2023 mass shooting at a university in Prague, Czechoslovakia, resulting in the death of 14 and injury of at least 25, and the alarming nature of this violence becomes all the more apparent. Mass shootings are more common here in the USA, more routine, and perhaps more absorbed into the nature of American culture. Why?
It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the bombardment of news reports about gun violence these days. Headlines about mass shootings storm the page more frequently than we can keep up. While gun-related accidents and suicides bring attention to the issue of gun control and gun rights in the U.S., the question is brought up of what psychological wounds remain after the dead are laid to rest and those injured are cured. Whether directly involved in an incident of gun violence, witnessing a shooting, or reading about the horrific events on the news, one can develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or other mental illnesses.
Gun violence is a public health epidemic; Mass shootings are happening at an increasingly disturbing rate. Daily gun violence impacts people from all around the U.S., coming from every race, religion, and socioeconomic background. From the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s HCUPnet data, the most recent data compiled from 2013, 2014, and 2016 show that every day 327 people are shot in the United States.
“We cannot normalise people dying from gun violence every day”, says the Tennessee House of Representative Justin J. Pearson at the recent 2023 annual gala Community Heroes Celebration in Boston, Massachusetts.
Although U.S. gun suicide rates tend to get less attention than gun murder rates, suicides have been a leading cause of the majority of U.S. gun-related deaths. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 6 out of 10 firearm deaths in 2010 were accounted for by suicide.
There is no doubt that gun rights are a national issue, as the CDC has reported about 8 in 10 U.S. murders in 2021 involved a firearm. With the number of U.S. total gun deaths rapidly rising by 45% from 2019-2021 due to the pandemic, the U.S. is exceeding their highest number of total gun deaths every year.
“Don’t tell me there is no such thing as gun violence.” says the father of Jaime Guttenberg, who grieved for his daughter who was killed when former student Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida on February 14, 2018. Jaime Guttenberg’s mother says, “Every day I live with the fact that Jaime’s life was cut too short and that she was unable to show the world her fullest potential,” That day when 17 people were killed in the mass shooting on school grounds, an amass of parents empathized with Jaime’s parents when her father said, “Jaime will be forever 14, but it was not supposed to be that way…I couldn’t wait to teach her to drive. I couldn’t wait to throw her a Sweet 16 party. I couldn’t wait to see her have her first boyfriend, and yes, I had my dad’s speech all worked out for whoever that boy was gonna be.”
The rapid overall increase in gun deaths has raised an alarming concern for the children’s livelihood and well-being of the U.S. Since 2019-2021, these past two years that the CDC has been able to amount full data for, the number of gun deaths among children and teens under 18 rose 50% in just these two years, from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 gun deaths by the end of 2021. It is now the number of our children in the U.S.; the reports by the Pew Research Center have stated that homicide was the largest reason for gun deaths among children and teens in 2021, accounting for 60% of their deaths that year.
Survivors, victims, parents, children, teachers, and schools have spoken out that gun violence should not be a part of growing up. Hannah Dysinger, a survivor herself who lost her best friend to a gun shooting in Draffenville, Kentucky in 2018 voices, “My childhood was snatched from me in a way. I should have had the normal 15-year-old girl experience.”
It may come as a surprise that according to Quinnipiac University Poll Finds for U.S Support for Gun Control, more than 97% of Americans as well as gun owners, support universal and expanded background checks, including 80% of Republicans. The question remains then why the number of gun violence events and deaths continue to appear and increase drastically.
“There is no democracy when people are silenced, and unable to vote. These are choices that state legislators are making to do nothing…Gun violence happens in the most economically oppressed communities without access to healthcare, and these communities are all designed.”, declares Tennessee House of Representative Justin J. Pearson.
Experiencing a mass shooting can be incredibly traumatic, and lead to emotional states of shock, despair, and distress. Those immediate feelings never fully fade away after the event, and may develop into major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as they were observed to be the most common psychiatric conditions seen in a study led by the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health Sandro Galea, and Assistant Professor Sarah Lowe of Yale University. In their interview with Scientific American, victims were also found to sometimes develop anxiety disorders, panic attacks, substance use disorders, phobias and other issues.
Due to the increasingly common occurrence of mass shootings, about 96% of U.S. public schools have “active shooter” or “lockdown” drills, however, it is found in a survey published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2020 that 60% of young people reported feeling unsafe, scared, helpless, or sad as a result from these drills. After engaging in such drills, students showed higher increases in anxiety, stress and depression.
Survivor and 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo, of the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas, feared that the gunman would return for her so she smeared her friend’s blood on herself and played dead to stay alive. Her mother explains her daughter’s psychological scars from the event, “Miah was too scared to speak on camera, or to a man, because of what she experienced, but she told CNN she wanted to share her story so people can know what it’s like to live through a school shooting. She says hopefully it can help prevent a tragedy like this from happening to other children.”
With mass shooting events imprinting psychological wounds on the survivors, devastations like the ones in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, can lead to other lingering mental distress among the survivors. Some studies look at what Assistant Professor and psychologist Sarah Lowe at Yale University calls “nonspecific psychological distress”, such as feelings of fear and unease.
With survivors struggling to find ways to deal with the trauma, the use of antidepressants is on the rise. According to a recent study in 2020 led by Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor of health policy at Stanford University, there is a 21.4% increase in antidepressant prescriptions for people under the age of 20 in the local area of a school shooting compared to areas 10-15 miles away. This study, which included prescription data from 44 communities impacted by school shootings, found an inflated use of antidepressants over the 2 years after the incident.
According to the National Center for PTSD, 28% of people who witnessed a mass shooting develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and roughly a third develop acute stress disorder. Researchers have discovered that people most vulnerable to long-term psychological effects are the ones who already are battling preexisting mental health problems and then experience a traumatic experience like a mass shooting.
Although the adverse effects of the event can overwhelm the survivors, there are resources and things that the survivors can do in order to gain some sort of closure and heal from the detrimental effects of their mental health. “Emotional support (feeling like people are there for you), informational support (knowing what resources are out there) and tangible support (such as money and physical assistance) are things that can really matter,” associate professor Sarah Lowe at Yale University says. After the event, mental health professionals suggest a recommended approach called “psychological first aid” to deal with the immediate effects of denial, shock, and disbelief. This aids in educating those impacted with possible mental health symptoms, and providing information and access to care.
A shared grief process often leads to healthy mourning and coping. “Bringing people together to promote connections and collective healing after a tragedy is often what strengthens families and communities the most,” says the assistant psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara Erika Felix.
Community connections and continuing access to mental health support can help survivors recover from experiencing a traumatic event like a mass shooting. “There’s nothing more powerful than people power.”, emphasizes state representative Justin J. Pearson at the Gala.
Memorial events that are student and community-led are helpful in recovering after a mass violence event, explains a study conducted after a killer started firing his gun, stabbing people passing by, and then struck his car into a crowd near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014, murdering 6 people and injuring 14 others. The memorial “paddle-out” the night after the devastation let thousands of people remember the victims of the event and help the community heal together, says Erika Felix, who led the study.
These mass shootings do not only directly affect the victims and survivors, but they also impact people watching from afar through news coverage. People have reported symptoms of mental illness from watching television or from social media, Sandro Galea emphasizes, “the baseline rate of depression is already quite high now, with the prolonged impact of the COVID pandemic. This is not a good time to have more traumatizing events.”
In the long term, some survivors enter periods of adjustment and relapse, or will no longer need continuous mental health support. Some survivors have even reported that they feel a greater sense of gratitude for life and having survived the shooting, only to have missed a crucial normality of childhood. But for others, flashbacks, debilitating anxiety, or self-medication can grow into larger problems of mental health or substance use disorders.
These news reports of mass shootings have become too familiar and allowed viewers to become desensitized to the public outcry over the issue of gun violence in the U.S. With the growing frequency of mass shootings and gun-related deaths, how many more bodies, particularly children will it take for something to change, and allow those haunted by the psychological traumas to finally rest?
While this news of mass shootings is certainly grim, readers can take some solace in the news that in general, as reported in a January 11, 2024 New York Times newsletter, “The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent — which would be the biggest national decline on record. The spike that started in 2020 now looks more like a blip, and the murder rate is lower than it was during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.” The article concludes that “during Covid, murders increased. As life has returned to normal, they have decreased.”
Massachusetts residents can also take some relief knowing that stricter gun laws in this state have resulted in an absence of mass murders and a 3.4% ranking of gun violence in 2023 (compared with Mississippi, with a high of 33.9%.
As we settle into 2024, the question posed regarding how many more bodies will it take for something to change may soon be replaced (logic willing) by more consistent, strong, and permanent gun control legislation, in Massachusetts and nationwide.
