February was a month of silent violence. On the 11th, an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot nine people, including herself and her 11-year-old brother, in Tumbler Ridge, Canada. On the 13th, two teenagers were killed in a South Carolina State University housing complex. On the 15th, a gunman killed three people, including herself and her teenage son, at a high school hockey game in Rhode Island.
As of writing this, I have not heard a single friend or peer mention any of these tragedies. When I texted five random friends a list of questions about the events, none had heard of any of the shootings, nor could they describe any incidents of mass violence in the past month. For me, the pain of learning about these events was compounded by this silence. We should all be alarmed by the silence that is the product and result of this information vacuum. We cannot heal without discussing what has occurred.
Once, school-related shootings captured national attention. One of these first such events was Columbine, which occurred in April 1999, on my mom’s twenty-seventh birthday. On a recent call, she told me how, for weeks afterwards, she and her friends were “consumed” with discussing and researching the event.
“At the time, there was a sense that it was a crazy one-off incident,” she said. “Everybody was trying to get their angle on [what] went wrong so that it never happens again.”
More people died in this February’s four-day stretch than in the Columbine shooting. Yet when I mention these recent events, people’s eyes glaze over and their interest falters. Not only do many students not follow current events, but they also don’t want to hear them discussed.
Gen Z seems to find a certain masochism in opening one’s ears and hearts to the violence of the monthly news cycle. This is partially caused by the difficulty of keeping up in a media landscape oversaturated with negativity. However, it has also been shown that young adults are the least likely generation to read the news, and much of the news we do follow centers on sports and entertainment, rather than the depressing fields of business, economics and national news. We all know shootings are increasingly common and unlikely to go away, the thought runs, so what else is there to say?
I understand this reaction. After Columbine, people thought change was possible. Now, school-related shootings are a fact of life. Apathy is a loaded term, implying a lack of empathy, yet it is also used as an effective and common coping mechanism. In modern psychological terms, apathy acts as “a protective numbness that can develop when life feels overwhelming or when we’ve experienced repeated disappointments.” I would entertain the idea of positive apathy if my friends who had never heard of Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, South Carolina State University and North Smithfield High School were living with blissful equanimity. But as surveys of youth mental health show, this isn’t the case. Because I read the news, I know the names and ages of the victims and perpetrators, and the clues being uncovered, too late, as to what went wrong. While this is upsetting, it is a horror I can name, comprehend and confront. I imagine that people who shut out these events to preempt pain are living in a state of equal hopelessness and confusion, only without understanding why.
This confusion creates a false sense of security when no community is entirely protected. The stock figure of a school shooter is a white, straight, conservative, cisgender Southerner, yet February revealed a more complicated truth. While the role of gun laws and cultural factors in mass shootings cannot be overstated, we should not feel detached as students in liberal California: Two of last month’s shootings were carried out by trans women in Rhode Island
and British Columbia, respectively — identities and regions that break the cultural narrative around school shooters.
It is scary to confront our own vulnerability, especially when college is meant to be a sacrosanct place. However, if we avoid discussing these incidents of violence, we will not be emotionally equipped should a similar event occur in our community.
All this reinforces the need to begin a campus dialogue sooner, rather than later. Sequestered in our solitary realities, we cannot properly grieve shootings, nor outrun the fear of suffering that makes us avoid depressing news. Silence merely fuels the isolation that created our present culture of loneliness, radicalism and violence.
After Columbine, my mom healed by talking. At the time, she taught deaf children who could not communicate with their families about the events on television. She and her students spoke to grief counselors, created art and wrote letters to the victims’ families. Perhaps most importantly, they spoke to one another. Conversation helped them find strength and community in an event designed to create fear and isolation.
Of course, it is difficult to argue for individual action when the problem is societal. Columbine occurred when most people got their media from the same trusted sources, and the event’s recognition as a national tragedy enabled people to make time for conversation in their hectic lives. For lasting change, we must work to rebuild faith in mainstream media, restrict gun access as much as possible and address our growing mental health epidemic. For today, however, it is enough to spend five minutes checking in with someone we know — asking how they are doing, educating them on the events, if appropriate, and giving and receiving whatever support is possible.
School shootings are a depressing and growing reality, a reality that decades ago felt preventable and now no longer does. Yet we have all coped with many such situations before, and together, we have the skills and strength to cope again. For better or worse, we are experienced at grieving these tragedies. Let us not grow experienced in having these incidents fail to register as tragedies at all.
Jessy Wallach PO ’29 is excited to have written her first op-ed.
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