One Secret to Ending Gun Violence Lies in Community & Diffusion of Responsibility
Trigger Warning: This mentions a school shooting that happened at Michigan State University and it mentions the names of those whose lives were tragically taken.
Lately I've been really negative. Sometimes it feels impossible to accept all the bad that happens in the world. Hope seems so far away when it comes to trying to create change. We have plenty of people in the world who can all make things happen, but yet we end up living a sedentary life of inaction, watching the news behind an immobile screen. A news screen in our living room is the one kind of screen we can actually teleport through, if we dare to; we can go to the people and places that need help, but do we? No. We're fascinated in fictional worlds where we time travel and we imagine a day where time travel will be here in our time, not even realizing that it is here in 2023, right under our noses. We're consumers who don't produce, even though we have the freedom to.
I was watching American Idol, and one of the singers was talking about a Texas shooting he survived, and then it made me think about the MSU shooting all over again and about how things seem back to normal already. It seems like part of the problem is diffusion of responsibility. There's so many people in the center of gun violence that people assume they're dismissed of the responsibility. They assume someone else will do something. I myself have been guilty of this. We all have. And as a result, with everyone thinking in this way, no one actually ends up taking the responsibility. We don't do anything.
I think we need to find a way to come together, and it starts with communities. It starts with being friendly to our neighbors, and then, after that, it's a lot easier to gather in the meso and macro levels.
There's no excuse for someone who shoots innocent people, there's no excuse. However, I see a common theme in the MSU shooter that people have seen in a lot of the other ones. And that is that they were victims at one point themselves. They were bullied, they were discriminated against. There's blatant bias, and it's known that people who hate a particular out-group are known to hate everyone in that group and stereotype that entire group, as well as hate other out-groups. The MSU shooter wrote in his note that people had been racist to him and so he believed everyone to be racist, thus why he shot random people; in his eyes, he was shooting the system of racism that night, not college kids. He shot innocents for nothing, because racism still exists even after his death.
In our society, there's too much hate for groups that aren't our own in-group. We need to be welcoming of all kinds of people, so people like the shooters aren't isolated in the first place. Yes, stricter mental health checks and all that other stuff can help too. I'm personally not super political, so I don't want to get into a solution. All I know is there needs to be some kind of solution. And what I know best is kindness and community, and I really think it could make a difference.
I also think stigma of mental illness plays a role. It's easy to look to the shooter and say he was just crazy. While it was his fault for not being on his meds, there are also environmental stressors that amplify his mental illness. And his community saw him acting off and said nothing. It's no one's fault but the shooter's, do not get me wrong, but next time you see someone under stress like people saw the MSU shooter (who doesn't deserve to be named), please say something. While it isn't required, while it could never be your fault either way, it could prevent something. And it could help, and so many families would feel so grateful. Mental illnesses do have a genetic component, and I'm not saying environmentally treating them nicer will cure everything. But it can make some sort of a difference. More than we think.
It isn't just a shooter and their gun that have caused all this tragedy, that have caused parents to have to bury their own kids, that have caused schools to feel unsafe. It's loneliness, isolation, racism, bias, stereotypes, discrimination, hate, bullying, mental illness that is still a stigma and treated as such, it's all these other things that are the prerequisite of that shooter and gun. I can't say for sure what causes it exactly, but they definitely all play a role.
Without getting political, I doubt anyone can argue against simply being kinder to our neighbors and to each other. I don't see any reason why we can't all try to start this. I know there's enough of us, and that it is all of our responsibilities.
I'm putting the pictures of those who were killed in the MSU shooting as the photo for this blog post, because MSU is my community, and they shouldn't be remembered for the human-made society that birthed the hate in one man who made an unforgivable, evil decision February 13th. They should be remembered for love and for the community who loves them; they should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them and what's happening to others just like them right now.
Alexandria, Brian, & Arielle
Their names are what matter, not the shooter's. I urge you not to look up the shooter's name or anything about him. Look up the stories of the amazing people above, as they were a part of the MSU community, and you can learn more from them than you ever could from the shooter.
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