I pulled into the parking lot at the Utah State University Extension Center in Brigham City the evening of the Columbine High School shooting.
I was 20 years old and nearly graduated with a bachelor of science in Psychology. I wondered, alongside all the others in the windowless room, how the professor was going to address the elephant in the room amid our Childhood Abuse and Neglect curriculum discussion planned for the class. Rather than avoid the conversation, our professor allowed us to speak openly and freely for the next three hours. We were gifted a conversation of our fear, heartbreak, confusion and despair. At the time, I also worked as a counselor for the Division of Youth Corrections in a maximum-security environment. The vulnerable conversations with those incarcerated young people discerning their past choices and future hopes provided me a unique perspective to aggression and decision making. The combination of the two conversations lead me to a directive path of purpose devoted to prevention of future tragedies.
I opened my social media feed recently to the photo of the young couple who died in the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting while shielding their infant from the stream of bullets firing around them; the blurriness in my eyes no longer the result of an abrupt awakening. With tears streaming, I imagined myself as the mother in the photo and I soaked in instinctual protection; her baby became my baby. Twenty years post-Columbine, I’d like to think I have attempted to use my life to help prevent such things from occurring, though much of my focus has been individually based. Yet, I could not help but feel momentarily defeated as I imagined falling to the ground with that beautiful baby in my arms.
Research and experience tell us that those who act as the aggressors in mass shootings are often secretive, isolative and intelligent. They generally have a history of impulsive behavior matched with a callous regard for others. They have a difficult time connecting to others and find a sense of belonging inside a fantastical body of intolerance and hate, often behind a computer screen. They seek community, as we all do, accessible by a few keyboard taps. Research also clearly states that mental health disorders do not cause aggression. It is human to feel emotion and it is human to feel anger, even rage. It is human to react on those emotions, even inappropriately at times. We are all triggered by precipitating events and we all have weakness. Yet, we all don’t choose to become aggressive and/or murderous. There are clinical approaches geared specifically to the emotional regulatory process and people can develop the skills to improve in emotional reactions.
Research also tells us that we can identify traits of callousness, impulsivity and aggression in children as young as 5. We can begin teaching emotional regulation skills, modifying settings and creating empathic language in elementary school students that will create other options for belonging, rather than the avoidant and easily accessible routes groomed for hate. We can prevent.
In 2013, six months after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I presented at a national conference on school safety in Las Vegas. The administrators from Sandy Hook were in attendance. I watched them talk with marketing staff about purchasing bullet proof doors and windows, their sorrow palpable and moving. My mind was driven to concern as much of the discussion that conference continued (and continues) to focus on imminent risk, rather than prevention. Safety feels like something we can control; we create procedural safeguards to reassure our anxiety, but those precautions, however necessary, do not stop the killing, much like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. Prevention begins early. We can intervene and we must hold ourselves accountable for doing so.
Our hearts are breaking in this country and we are afraid. We feel a loss of control, so we take our neurological bias and search for meaning, sometimes ending in justification, blame and projection of fear. When we are afraid, the most primal parts of our human spirit rise to protect us; our brain recognizes the threat and shuts down what it considers to be non-essential process. This includes a shutdown of our executive functioning system and basic sense of cognitive reasoning. Therefore, it makes sense, neurologically, that we are reactionary rather than responsive, irrational rather than reasoned with and attack oriented rather than cohesive.
Yet, I stand as witness to change — cohesive, collective change. First as a young child witnessing her father gain sobriety, to a clinician driven to challenging fixed mindsets and encouraging values driven growth. We can allow our fears or our values to drive our decisions, regardless of predisposition. We can talk about how we feel and use that emotional energy to act with assertion and purpose. We can encourage solution-oriented dialogue from all perspectives with focus on values driven solutions rather than political talking points. We can prevent. We can change.