Our desensitization to violence should be reconsidered
By Madelyn Braho · Staff Writer
There have been 11 school shootings in the United States in the past nine months. I originally intended to write on the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, but since then, there have been three more, including one the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
We expect school to be a place for learning, not shooter drills. Kids should be able to go to kindergarten without needing a bulletproof backpack. So why is it that we tell children they should not get light up shoes because it might put them in danger if there was an active shooter?
Of course, there are a variety of reasons why this is how things are now, as there are never simple answers, nor simple solutions. Human fallenness has a simple explanation — we all sin. But that does not explain why school shootings are happening, and why it seems to be such an American problem.
The American firearms industry has always had a very permeable boundary between what counts as a military weapon and what counts as a civilian one, and as weapons have gotten more lethal this has not really changed. There are, of course, reasons why people might want to own a gun, such as to hunt, but there are reasonable limits even with that context. An AR-15 may have some benefits when it comes to hunting, but there are also ethical concerns to consider, such as the idea of “fair chase” and not wanting the animal to suffer with an imprecise shot.
But what if the problem of school shootings is not just that we have more lethal guns? Why is it that our first impulse when we think of self-defense is to go to guns? Why is it that when students are angered, they decide to shoot fellow students? According to the Rockefeller Institute, between 2000 and 2022 there were 109 mass shootings in the United States, the next highest being Russia with 21.
Perhaps one reason is that gun violence is comfortable for us in America. We grow up playing first-person shooter games, watching Westerns and seeing the action movie of the month. The Army advertises on YouTube, and we determine time periods by which war we were fighting. Acquiring the land we live on involved pushing American Indians off, frequently by violent means. America has a long history of using violence for both good and ill.
This relationship to gun violence is not something we can change in an instant, and to some extent we might not even be able to change it at all. But maybe this is something to be taken into account — that we assume violence is the first recourse when we are upset. Instead of diplomacy or de-escalation, talking through disagreements or acknowledging that what we feel might not be accurate, we swing our fists, often with a gun in hand.
Perhaps some of this cannot be changed. But there was a time before school shootings, before kids needed to have active shooter drills, and there can be a time after it too. There can be a time when all of this is a distant memory, but for that to be real, we may first need to examine how we think about violence.
