[The number of mass shootings continues to soar in the US — not
just costing lives, but traumatizing our youth and undermining the
basis for a free society. To stop the epidemic, we need a truly
democratic transformation...]
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OUR EPIDEMIC OF MASS SHOOTINGS IS TRAUMATIZING A GENERATION AND
THREATENING DEMOCRACY  
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Firmin DeBrabander
June 6, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The number of mass shootings continues to soar in the US — not
just costing lives, but traumatizing our youth and undermining the
basis for a free society. To stop the epidemic, we need a truly
democratic transformation... _

Signs and flowers by the fence surrounding Stoneman Douglas High
School in Parkland, Florida, after the shooting in 2018., Giles Clarke
/ Getty Images

 

At the gleaming new Fruitport High School in Michigan, the entrance
opens to a spacious atrium, with floating rows of lockers arrayed
diagonally from the front door. They are noticeably short so students
can peer over them. Overlooking the atrium is a walkway fenced with
metal sheets and pockmarked with slits through which you can survey
the space below if you were to crouch. Hallways bear
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“wing walls . . . to provide barriers for school children to hide
behind.” Classrooms, meanwhile, each have a single window at the
door and are designed so that exactly thirty-two students plus a
teacher can be concealed from view if they huddle in the corner.

This is school design for the depressing reality of
twenty-first-century America, where gun violence has become
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the leading cause of death for youths, and the number of mass
shootings continues to soar
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— to more than one a day in 2023 so far. Among the most horrifying
massacres are those at schools.

Reasonable societies would respond to these trends by curtailing
access to guns and making it harder to carry them in public. We have
decided instead to make it easier to access and carry guns — and use
them — in public and to transform our schools into fortresses,
traumatizing an entire generation in the process.

Gun rights advocates recommend “hardening” our schools: denying
them windows, limiting the number of entrances, cutting down all
trees, and erecting large fences. For those who deem these measures
too jarring or bleak, Fruitport High is intended to soften or smooth
over the defensive features. Hallways are gracefully curved; this is
to “cut off a shooter’s line of sight.” There will be large
windows all around the building, especially across the atrium — so
you can see the shooter approach — which will be covered in
bulletproof film. The entrance features an “educational entry
panopticon” and a “sally port,” common in prisons, which is
essentially two sets of doors that can lock someone within. It’s no
surprise the school borrows features from prisons; the latter are the
specialty of TowerPinkster, the firm hired to design Fruitport High
School.

Defense-industry firms are pivoting to address the scourge of
shootings. A manufacturer of “bomb resistant vehicle armor” now
makes bulletproof doors for schools and boasts
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that it incorporates “the experience we gleaned from protecting the
war fighter.” Military consultants have helped draw up plans for how
school communities should act in the event of a shooting. Teachers
have been outfitted with sharpies “to write the time they applied a
tourniquet to a bleeding student,” and trained to use litter buckets
for makeshift toilets in the case of a lockdown.

In training exercises, students are instructed to crouch along the
wall in perfect silence, with lights turned off and shades drawn, as
someone walks the hall jostling door handles. In one case, an
unannounced exercise was taken
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for the real thing, prompting students to call family members to say
goodbye.

Critics say these trainings do more harm than good, terrifying youths
for incidents that are still rare. It’s all performative and hardly
effective. The training and protective features make it seem like
schools are being proactive, which is all we are allowed to do while
gun control is blocked. And most school shootings are perpetrated by
members of the community, who likely know the protective measures and
how to circumvent them.

The Long Reach of Violence

“Violence has a long reach,” sociologist Patrick Sharkey says
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Its impact is felt far beyond those who bear its brunt; its effects
are seen in how we change our behavior, adapt, cower, and design our
world accordingly, where its damage is reinforced and repeated.

In schoolchildren, researchers note
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a “constant back-of-the-mind stress,” which peaks with training
drills that increase anxiety and depression. The terror is amplified
by “media exposure to mass violence” — a special concern for
teens glued to their cell phones — which fuels a “cycle of
distress where persistent worry about future violence predicts more
media consumption and more stress.” Researchers observe a higher
incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in people whose social
networks have been impacted by gun violence, and they are worried by
studies that report the same for people exposed to repeated media
coverage of traumatic events like mass shootings.

The stress and anxiety wrought by gun violence undermines the purpose
of our schools. It impairs children’s ability to focus, listen,
reflect, negotiate differences, collaborate, and get along. A study
reports
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that the “heightened worry over safety even in the absence of gun
violence rewires the brain at its most sensitive periods of
development” because it compromises the prefrontal cortex, which
“coordinates higher cognitive functions including working memory,
attention shifting and executive skills . . . [and] also mediates
empathy and self-regulation.”

With kids forced to contemplate the worst at any moment, mapping out
their escape, or pondering death and final goodbyes, this is no way to
liberate young minds. It is a surer way to crush them. Free and
boundless thought is the seed and staple of autonomy. Our culture of
mass shootings is rooting this out of future generations, who are left
instead to think of mere survival.

Guns v. Democracy

The radical gun rights agenda enabling all of this is not the product
of popular will; it is ascendent because its proponents are
successfully subverting democracy. Majorities of voters favor
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stronger gun control measures; upward of 70 percent from both parties
want
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universal background checks, for instance. But Congress ignores their
views. It is in thrall to the powerful gun lobby, which commands a
small but impassioned army of supporters who go to great lengths to
advance their cause, even marching in public with assault rifles to
intimidate opponents.

Many politicians are reliant on the National Rifle Association
(NRA)’s financial generosity. The NRA was the biggest donor to
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, and it reaped the
rewards, including three Supreme Court justices who would faithfully
advance the gun lobby’s cause. In its landmark decision _New York
State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen_, the Supreme Court
majority declared concealed carry restrictions enacted by New York
State unconstitutional.

More alarming, the justices asserted a new originalist standard that
threatens what gun control regulations remain. The court now says we
must look to the period between 1791 and 1868 (the years that the
Second and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified respectively) to
determine if gun regulations are constitutional — a period when
there were basically none. A Texas judge subsequently determined on
that basis that “red flag” laws, which many voters support and
have approved across the country, and which prohibit domestic abusers
from accessing guns, are unconstitutional.

In short, when it comes to guns, the Supreme Court doesn’t care what
voters want. (This diverges notably from its position on abortion and
environmental regulations, which, the justices say, should be up to
the will of voters in each state.)

The ascendant gun rights movement is symptomatic of the problems with
American democracy, in which anti-majoritarian institutions
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like the Supreme Court
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and the Senate
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allow the will of the few to be foisted on the many. To have a chance
at stemming our runaway gun culture, we must organize to dismantle
these institutions and build a genuinely democratic state.

American Carnage

This task is urgent because our hyperarmed society, enabled by our
antidemocratic Constitution, undermines the basis for what little
democracy we do have. Terror is an inherently undemocratic emotion and
outlook. It does not dispose people to work together, communicate,
collaborate, and compromise, as democratic deliberation demands.
Thanks to the trauma of our armed culture, we are raising a generation
of children to be instinctively mistrustful. They will be less
inclined to reach out to neighbors and fellow citizens and more likely
to retreat inward into private, fortified lairs.

The paranoia to which our children are being reduced sounds similar to
the mindset Hannah Arendt described under totalitarian regimes.
Authoritarian governments that aim for total domination, she writes,
cannot suffer human freedom; they cannot tolerate citizens that are
autonomous and unpredictable. They must be made uniform, as if part of
a single body, immediately responsive to government demands. Reduce
people to worrying over survival and you greatly limit the scope of
their aspirations and expectations. You also make them easy to
manipulate, prod, and shape at will.

Our armed society is nurturing an “authoritarian predisposition,”
as political psychologist Karen Stenner puts it
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This predisposition is “stable and enduring but normally latent —
[and] is activated and expressed when triggered by perceived political
and social disorder.” Future generations, weaned on trauma and
buffeted by anxiety, will crave security. They will be unsympathetic
to difference and intolerant of indecision when terror might strike.
There is no shortage of “American carnage” for authoritarians like
Donald Trump to cite to justify dispensing with the democratic
traditions and institutions that we do have. If society becomes a war
zone, we can hardly sit around while voters and elected officials
dither and debate.

Reversing these trends will require challenging the individualism,
atomization, and passivity that the culture of violence encourages. It
will require collectively organizing and mobilizing en masse to demand
a transformation of our government’s institutions, so that the
majority’s preference for reasonable gun control laws may prevail
over the preferences of the NRA, gun rights fanatics, and unelected
judges. We can take inspiration from large-scale protests like the
2018 March for Our Lives, led by teenagers who survived the Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, or the
tentative moves
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toward gun control in deep-red Texas, provoked by popular outrage over
the recent school shooting in Uvalde.

The task is not easy. But ending the epidemic of mass death, and the
threat to democracy it poses, demands a radical, collective response,
one that fights to make our country’s political institutions truly
democratic — more than they were before.

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* School Shootings; Guns vs Democracy; Originalism;
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