Donald Trump and maga Republicans can help to end gun violence. But GOP cruel medical care cuts reduce access to mental health care

I'm a scholar of gun violence. Not even I can process what happened at Brown University. Rather, my typical response to school shootings is to call for policy changes. But I’m afraid the task ahead is bigger than that. Echo opinion by Leva Jusionyte published in the Boston Globe.

Ieva Jusionyte, a professor of international security and anthropology at Brown University, was awarded a MacArthur genius grant in October.

I write and then delete what I’ve written. I have too much to say and nothing that should need saying. A man brought a gun into a classroom in a Brown University building where I regularly teach, killed two students, and injured nine others. Many more spent the night barricaded in their dorms, hiding in bathrooms and basements, escorted from building to building by SWAT teams armed with assault rifles.

When alerts of an active shooter started coming in, with a reminder of the order in which we should act — RUN, and if that’s not possible, HIDE, and as a last resort, FIGHT — I was at home, wrapping presents, getting ready for a holiday party at a friend’s house on the edge of campus. I read the alerts but brushed them off. Must be a precaution. A false alarm. But the alerts kept coming: calls, messages, emails. I texted my students and worried about those who did not respond.

As an anthropologist who studies gun violence, I work in proximity to death and injury. I teach classes and write books about the wounds that firearms leave on our bodies and communities. I am expected to step back from raw emotions and explain. Provide analysis. Have answers. Offer policy solutions. Some friends and colleagues who reached out to check on me as soon as they heard about the shooting said they were sorry that this one hit (what a verb!) so close to home. While this horrible event was still unfolding, they already told me I should write about it, the way I wrote about gun violence I witnessed as a paramedic and EMT, the way I wrote about the gun violence I researched on the other side of the Mexican border. Some asked me what policy changes I would advocate for.

I didn’t even know whether my students were safe, whether they were still alive. Policy was the last thing on my mind. 

Frankly, I was angry at people asking me to write about gun laws. I needed time to cry, to grieve. I still feel it isn’t the right time to analyze and offer policy solutions. As I watch other scholars comment on the shooting, I realize that my aversion to addressing what’s happened must seem like the reactions of politicians who, in the aftermath of school shootings, offer thoughts and prayers instead of calling for reforms that would end this violence. But I am still struggling to find the right words.

Our community came together. Students offered one another food and shelter. Alumni volunteered to buy train tickets home for those who needed them. People rushed to donate blood. In the face of this horror, many of us wanted to do something, to be useful. Many also sought company to share the pain, to mourn, to start healing. Community members gathered at what had been originally scheduled to be a menorah- and tree-lighting ceremony to mark the start of Hanukkah. The candlelight vigil honored both those killed and wounded at Brown and the people who, just hours later, were slaughtered on Bondi Beach in Australia. Gun violence is global, and so is solidarity forged in its wake. But ours is a tragedy uniquely familiar to Americans these days. This ritual — of survivors and community members coming together — was real, and heartfelt, and necessary. It was also so recognizable that it felt rehearsed. Because it was. We’ve seen this before. Survivors and community members do this again and again. 

At least two of the students on Brown’s campus last weekend had survived school shootings before. It’s become a national tradition. A national shame.

After every school shooting I can remember, my anger about what happened has found expression in straightforward, unequivocal calls for change. Yes, we need better mental health services and access to them, but the focus of my attention has always been the guns. 

I supported gun safety regulations: background checks, waiting periods, restrictions of the types of weapons that we as civilians could buy. There was something empowering about being able to offer these tangible solutions, about believing that those atrocities could be prevented from ever happening again if only we as a nation took gun safety more seriously.

I have none of that conviction, that clarity of vision, now. 

Perhaps this is not surprising because this is my community and the frustration of not being able to do anything to prevent this is too strong, the pain too raw. All I could do the day after was walk, furiously, aimlessly, on the freshly fallen snow, cycling through rage and numbness. My world contracted and the only people who mattered, the only ones I wanted to talk to, were my students. But even now, as I am slowly beginning to think about what happened not only as a member of the community of survivors but as a scholar of gun violence, I still don’t have anything to offer. Not an explanation. Not a solution.

Rhode Island already has strong gun laws and one of the lowest rates of gun ownership in the country. As far as we know, the weapon used in the shooting may have been a 9mm handgun. In fact, handguns are the weapons most commonly implicated in mass shootings in the United States. In Rhode Island, you need to be at least 21 years old and wait seven days before you can purchase one from a federally licensed dealer. Rhode Island also recently outlawed large-capacity magazines. But it’s not as if there are borders and checkpoints between states. We don’t know where or how the killer acquired the gun or whether it was purchased legally. And even when we have more details and we can point to the existing limitations of the laws, tweaking regulations will only do so much. Too little, too late. Until there is another mass shooting and we rally for another Band-Aid we put on our gun violence problem.

This is where I usually stop, draft after draft. I don’t know how to proceed. I believe in strong gun laws. I am for gun safety. What I am tired of is putting so much faith in policy solutions. But what is the alternative? Admit that this is it, that we should accept gun violence as a normal part of our lives; adapt to it, the way we are adapting to climate change reengineering our cities to survive rising sea levels because we can’t come together to stop heating the planet? As a scholar of gun violence, I know there are practical steps we can take — technological, policy, legal solutions — that would make us safer and less likely to die from guns. But as an anthropologist, I also understand that mass shootings in the United States are embedded in our long history of violence, inseparable from our economy, politics, and popular culture that enable this violence to continue in forms both visible and unrecognized.

Ours has always been a violent country. Perhaps the difference is that those earlier forms of violence — the genocide of the indigenous people, slavery, anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese violence — had a grammar, a vile logic that explained, to the perpetrators and those masses who enabled and justified them, why some people were lesser than others and so they could be killed. There is no such logic, no such explanation in school shootings. 

This violence is senseless❗ It doesn’t serve any ideology, any master narrative. We attribute it to mental health struggles of people turned killers. We blame unlocked doors. We blame powerful weapons and the greedy gun industry that profits from selling them. We blame politicians who fail to regulate them. Survivors, family members, activists work tirelessly, in a Sisyphean effort, to pass new laws, to make it safer for us to live in our communities. I admire, respect, celebrate their work: Students Demand Action, Moms Demand Action, Everytown for Gun Safety. They’ve started a movement, which is growing. Our first thought is always about the laws and the infrastructure — doors, cameras — because those are simple, tangible things. 

But, I’m afraid the task ahead is bigger than that. We won’t legislate our way out of this. We need to change our culture and our society — a society where it is, first of all, conceivable, and only then possible, that someone would walk into a classroom and open fire at students preparing for an exam.

What matters right now is the wounded community, the shattered sense of safety. Guns injure and kill people we care about — our family, friends, students — each and every one a very special person whose absence leaves a hole in our hearts and our lives. But guns also hurt the community, tear the social fabric. Trauma is a shape-shifter. It will take time for the wounds to heal. And yet some of the students I know already come from communities with frayed social fabric. From Columbine, from Palestine, from families torn apart by border walls and suicides. They have already survived school shootings and wars. Right now, our students are shocked and hurt and grieving. And they are strong and resilient and hopeful. If I don’t know how to end this essay, it’s because it is not mine to end. It is theirs. In the weeks, months, years ahead, I will follow their lead.