Shootings Should Not be Our Norm
Students leave flowers at the Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower for UNC faculty member Dr. Zijie Yan in honor of his death on August 28th, 2023. Source for photo: Jon Gardiner/ University Photographer for UNC-Chapel Hill
*Disclaimer: This article contains references to traumatic and violent events, including personal renderings of them. Some readers may find the discussion and recounting of these events triggering.
On Monday, August 28th, I sat with my peers for three hours in the basement of UNC’s Campus Y as a shooting took place in Caudill Laboratories with countless different emotions, reactions, and rumors floating up and down the halls until we were directed to leave the building and make our way home.
This is the second active shooting event where I've had to take cover for safety in the last two years. I was also at the Washington Nationals game in the summer of 2021 when shots were heard and someone yelled "Active shooter!"
We hid behind the seats in the stadium – I remember looking to my left and seeing swarms of people funneling out from the stadium and thinking the shooter must be amidst that mass. Not knowing what to do, I cried and called my mother to tell her what was happening.
The shooting turned out to be outside of the stadium, but no one knew that at the time.
I was at the game with a group of friends, many of whom are from outside the U.S. After the police cleared the area, a few of my international peers asked us Americans afterward: Was this the first shooting you'd experienced yourself?
They were surprised we said yes. They thought it was a common occurrence here, something everyone experiences at some point in America. I was unsettled that this was the perception they held of the U.S. , and even more unnerved that they weren’t entirely wrong in thinking so.
In spring of 2022, less than a year later, my then 14 year-old sister was shuffled into the back room of a Converse store at the Fashion Outlets of Chicago after shots were heard and a shooting took place in the food court. She and her friend were directed by store workers to exit out the back door and were picked up nearby.
On July 4th, 2022, I sat at home with my family, tuned into the news of a mass shooting at a parade in Highland Park, Illinois, thirty minutes away from where I lived. We received news of people we knew at the parade and waited to hear who was safe and whether the shooter had been caught.
I tell these stories not to recount horrifying experiences in order to stir up trauma or to victimize myself, but, rather, to answer the question I was asked two years ago as I again sat in lockdown – now on UNC’s campus: Was this the first shooting I've experienced myself?
This has been the day-to-day for me and so many Americans. Fans attending the Oakland Athletic’s and Chicago White Sox baseball game last Friday night in Chicago suffered through a similar experience to the Nationals game shooting. It's not normal. It's not okay. Yet, we’re sent back to these stadiums, malls, parades, and schools a few days later as if nothing ever happened. These instances are inevitably going to happen again if we don't do something about it.
As put by Max Fisher of The New York Times: "Every mass shooting is, in some sense, a fringe event, driven by one-off factors like the ideology or personal circumstances of the shooter. The risk is impossible to fully erase."
Each of these shootings resulted from separate motives, with different types of guns, and with different bystanders caught in the crossfire. However, I'm not here to dig into the weeds of these separate shootings and analyze why they happened – what matters is gun control.
The reason my international friends had never experienced these sorts of instances is not because their respective countries don't face violent crimes or are some alternate utopian societies that exist across the pond. As Fisher explains, "The record is clear, confirmed by reams of studies that have analyzed the effects of policies like Britain’s and Australia’s: When countries tighten gun control laws, it leads to fewer guns in private citizens’ hands, which leads to less gun violence — and to fewer mass shootings."
Multiple examples exist of historically conservative governments taking action after violence and effectively reducing their rates of gun violence. In Britain, steps were taken to implement some of the strictest bans on guns, subsequently resulting in Britain being amongst the places with the lowest rates of gun violence in the world.
Additionally, according to Fisher, "Australia has had similar cultural and political affinities for gun ownership" to the U.S. Yet, when a mass shooting took place in the '90s, their conservative government implemented sweeping bans, strict licensures, and an effective buyback program that virtually eliminated mass shootings.
We've heard it before, and I'll say it again: We need common sense gun laws. This is not an issue of partisanship. There are ways to appease people on both sides of the aisle without it being this easy to obtain a deadly weapon.
This is a plea to reinstate some sense of safety into the lives of all Americans. It's to make baseball games, malls, parades, and schools feel like places to enjoy instead of places to fear. It's to ensure that answering "yes" to the question of whether you've been in a shooting before is not a normalcy, but instead a horror of the past that is no longer faced today.
For anyone feeling emotionally distraught, there are resources and people in our community here to help and embrace you. Student Life and Leadership outlines where you can seek someone to talk to in their message: “Students, including graduate and professional students and postdocs, please contact the Dean of Students team or Counseling and Psychological Services. For urgent concerns, please call 919-966-3658, the emergency protocol line. Faculty and staff should reach out to the Employee Assistance Program.”