The Chicken, The Egg & Our Gun-Scrambled Brains
We’ve had a couple of days to process the massacre of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas. Response teams are in place: Grief counselors and mental health professionals, trauma experts and those who specialize in working with children who have witnessed unthinkable horrors — because that is now an in-demand occupation.
For those keeping count, Uvalde was the 213th mass shooting in a year that hasn’t even reached its halfway mark.
We’ve been through this so many times that we know what to expect in the days to come. The drill has become all-too predictable: Thoughts and prayers. Press briefings of uniformed officers and elected officials who congratulate one another on heroic efforts — ‘It could have been so much worse.’ A visit by the President and First Lady. Interviews with family members. Collages of victim photos displayed on the nightly news, along with tearful tributes. Candlelight vigils. Makeshift memorials of flowers, photos and teddy bears. Calls to ‘never forget.’ Louder, loutish calls that ‘now is not the time.’
And then, of course, another burgeoning professional field will be heard from: Men and women with advanced degrees and made-for-TV gravitas will opine on the motivation of the perpetrator. They will delve into social media posts and family dynamics, speak with classmates and neighbors. They may well surmise that the young man (because they are so often young men) was mentally ill.
No shit, Sherlock.
Aren’t we all, at this point? Aren’t we all sick and tired — aka physically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally ill — from the constant barrage? Whether you find yourself in tears yelling at the television or the Grub Hub delivery guy — or just numbly going through the paces — we are all affected by this constant assault on humanity.
Now, the NRA and right-wing Second Amendment extremists are going to respond that the U.S. doesn’t have a gun violence crisis, we have a mental health crisis. That it’s not the AR-15s or AK-47s blasting fourth graders to smithereens, it’s the sick teen whose finger pulled the trigger. A bad guy with a blameless gun.
No one’s going to argue that anyone who kills innocent children — or adults, or the neighborhood cat — is ill — and needed help long before the postmortem diagnosis.
But here’s my counterpoint: Mental illness isn’t the causal factor behind the gun violence epidemic. It is the lasting, lingering, endless loop result of gun violence.
When children grow up watching massacres unfold at elementary schools, churches, movie theaters, music festivals, churches and synagogues — and realize that the grownups in the room cannot or will not protect them — they are sickened in ways we don’t yet understand or know how to fix.
We are raising a generation of children who are scarred by what they’ve witnessed, day after day, year after year, week after week. The massacre barrage is unrelenting. Not all turn to violent extremes, certainly. There are other outcomes and symptoms: Anxiety. Depression. PTSD. Suicide and self-harm. Lack of empathy and compassion. Drug and alcohol abuse.
And it’s not just kids, of course. Adults are equally susceptible to feeling bereft, angry, helpless, distraught. The widening gulf between the values we hold dear and the policy priorities of a nation unwilling to uphold and safeguard those values leads to emotional dissonance, disaffectedness, desperation.
Think about how often this week you’ve uttered or heard the words ‘I am so sick and tired of this.’ More than I can count. We are grieving and exhausted by the onslaught.
Even those who seem ‘just fine’ — who seem to go on imperviously through life — are touched and tormented in different ways. Becoming inured to suffering and slaughter isn’t a badge of mental health courage. It’s a coping mechanism and a silent cry for help. Like rats who’ve been through this hellish maze many times, we’ve been trained to go through the motions without truly thinking or feeling. But there’s no bulletproof vest that can shield hearts from this kind of hurt.
In Governor Abbott’s press briefing from Texas, we heard the mantra of ‘evil’– and its oxymoronic partner ‘pure evil’ — invoked over and over again. I get it: When you’re looking for a scapegoat, the devil is as good, or evil, as it gets.
But I refuse to believe that children are born evil. Or that mental illness deserves even more stigmatizing. Or that any of us survive gun violence unscathed.
We may never grasp the why behind what happened in Uvalde, or Orlando, or Parkland, or Newtown. But we do know, with sharpshooter certainty, the how: Military-grade guns designed to shoot endless rounds and do grave harm — to all of us.
Because whether we’re directly in the line of fire or safely tucked in with our loved ones, we are all victims. Mental illness is not to blame for the spiraling toll of mass shootings. Unrestrained, unregulated access to assault weapons is. And it’s making us all sick.
