How do we, as a country, learn about mass shootings and gun violence? The news media. How do we learn about the best approaches to prevent mass shootings and gun violence? The answer should be “the news media”, but it’s not. Yet.
People who know about the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences (PACEs)—that’s all of you in this community—understand that PACEs are at the root of violence. The news media is getting there. In the last couple of years of mass shootings, more articles examined the childhood of the shooter, but more could be done, as I pointed out in essays I wrote after the Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, shootings.
After last week’s mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, two new threads appeared:
- A deep look at the shooter’s family (and this) to address the question: Are the parents to blame?
- And the growing number of online communities of mostly male youth or young men that glorify violence and are obsessed with nihilism. “I’ve described this as sort of like a mass shooter creation machine,” said Alex Newhouse, deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in an interview with NPR’s Odette Yousef. “A lot of these communities are designed to spin out mass shooters over time, over and over and over.”
My take on examining shooter’s families: I think it’s great to report what happened in a…
