Changing the way we understand and talk about mass shootings can help us implement more effective gun policy. As National Gun Violence Awareness Month winds down, this episode of Policy Outsider presents a recorded Twitter Spaces conversation between the Rockefeller Institute’s Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium Interim Executive Director Jaclyn Schildkraut and New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center Executive Director Michael Anestis. The wide-ranging conversation covers many aspects of mass shootings: common misconceptions, frameworks for understanding how they unfold, and the role of policy in limiting their likelihood.
Guests
Jaclyn Schildkraut, interim executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium
Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center
Transcript was generated using AI software and may contain errors.
SPEAKERS
Alexander Morse, Jaclyn Schildkraut, Michael Anestis
Alexander Morse
Welcome to a special episode of Policy Outsider presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. I’m Alex Morse. June is national Gun Violence Awareness Month. And on June 3, 2022, Jaclyn Schildkraut, the interim executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, a team of firearm and gun violence researchers, which is housed at the Rockefeller Institute, had a Twitter spaces conversation with Mike Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. Their conversation focused on how changing the way we understand and talk about mass shootings can improve policy discussions and move the needle on enacting evidence-based policies to reduce gun violence. For this episode, we will be listening to their conversation, coming up next.
Michael Anestis
I’m Mike Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and associate professor in the School of Public Health at Rutgers. I’m excited to co-host today’s Twitter space, talking about how we should change the way we talk about mass shootings.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
I’m Jackie Schildkraut. I’m the interim executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium and an associate professor of criminal justice at SUNY Oswego. And I’m very excited to be joining Mike and the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center for this conversation.
Michael Anestis
We’ll go ahead and get started. And I will say as a preface to this, I sort of see myself primarily as a firearm suicide researcher. That’s how we come into the gun violence space and have been evolving that over the last couple of years. So I’m psyched to have Jackie here for this conversation, because she really is a content expert. So I’m excited to hear her thoughts on the topic that has been filling our headspace for a lot of us over the last couple of weeks. And so let’s just jump into it. And Jackie, obviously, it’s been a difficult couple of weeks. And before we get going with things, is there anything you’d like to reflect on about sort of what has happened and what we might expect next in terms of efforts to sort of stem the tide of mass shootings?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, I think, we’re in a really critical junction in our nation. Interestingly, Congress is actually out this week and they’re going to be coming back on Monday. And I think that we’re going to really see a lot of push for legislative action, which typically follows mass shootings. But I think we’re all going to be watching to see whether we actually can turn the tides, if we can actually garner the bipartisan support and put some policies into place. Or if it’s going to be what we’ve seen before where there’s sort of this flurry of legislative introduction and not a whole lot of movement.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, I know, that’s certainly been the question that’s been coming up for me a lot in any of the sort of media interactions I’ve done in this, sort of a combo of what policies might work and what do you think might actually happen? And I think those are two very different questions. And I’m curious, do you think Jackie does anything that might actually get across the finish line on a federal level that actually may be impactful with respect to this particular type of gun violence?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, I think the one thing that I’ve been seeing kind of in the conversation and of course, there’s a difference between saying you support something and actually supporting it. But the one thing that I’ve really seen kind of flurry is extreme risk protection orders. And those are something that we have in a few states, I think the last number was 11, I believe, when we looked. I may be wrong on that number. 19, DC, sorry, I knew I was mixing up my numbers. But I think our ERPOs are probably going to be one of the things that are really looked at because one of the things that we know about mass shooters is they don’t just wake up one morning and snap and go do this, that there’s a lot of planning. And so by understanding kind of those opportunities for intervention, you can potentially step in whether it’s through an extreme risk protection order, or something else, and hopefully by, I don’t want to say “buy us some time,” but create a window where we can focus on de-escalation and prevention ultimately of the threat.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, the beauty of extreme risk protection orders to me is sort of a couple things. One is that they also can be impactful across multiple forms of gun violence. The data on ERPOs with respect to suicide prevention is new but promising. But also the second thing I like is that we’ve seen movement on ERPOs in states that are not just blue governor mansion and blue legislatures. So there’s a precedent for by bipartisan collaboration on that.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah. And I love the point that you raised that when we think about gun violence, and when we even talk about gun violence in our country, we often focus on those most extreme examples like mass shootings. And certainly they’re horrible but the loss of any one life to gun violence is absolutely one too many. So to your point, ERPOs are really important because they’re not going to just deal with preventing mass shootings, but also potentially help intervene for other types of firearm violence that are far more common.
Michael Anestis
Yeah. And sort of building off that, the other thing I’ve heard bandied about a lot, and I don’t know what your thoughts are on the odds of this having any sort of bipartisan traction, but one that is a little bit more unique to these large scale public mass shootings is the idea of limiting access to high capacity magazines. And I’m curious, because I’m a little less familiar with the data on this point, how promising do you think would it be in terms of actually impacting the outcome of these types of events?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
So one of the reasons why I think there’s a push for limiting large capacity magazines is because in the event that one of these tragedies happens it effectively buys people time and, if a person is having to reload their firearm faster that creates more seconds on the clock for people who are in the space to potentially escape. One person that I think of, there was a little boy in Sandy Hook, his name’s Reagan Posey. And I can’t remember if the shooter’s gun jammed or if he was switching magazines, but in that moment, Reagan yelled, “run,” and he and a couple of his classmates escaped because they had those seconds. And that’s really kind of where the impetus for that comes from in this space.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. It’s one of those ones where I think a lot of. When I talk to journalists from outside the US, they come at it from a perspective of, “well, you solve this by not having the firearms.” And that’s not the way it works in the United States. The firearms are their incentive comes about mitigating the risk associated with this. And that seems like it is entirely consistent with that, which is, “look, if we come to a point of acceptance that this particular type of firearm exists, can we at least limit the amount of negative impact they can have in a situation like this?”
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, absolutely.
Michael Anestis
Yeah. I mentioned to you some other questions that aren’t policy specific. I’m curious, just because, as we’re talking about the specific policies, a lot of times were talking about ones that I think are proposed that focus specifically on the firearm. But a lot of the things that politicians are talking about are focused less on limiting access to the firearm or things like high capacity magazines that are a part of the firearm and more about the environment. And I wonder if we might want to take a couple of minutes to talk about things, whether that is things like the presence of armed guards or whether that is investing heavily in sort of the structural integrity of the school buildings themselves. And I certainly have a couple of thoughts, but I’d love to hear your thoughts first about those two to make sure we’re talking about sort of a broad range of policies that people are talking about in these larger conversations.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
And I think that that’s a great point, there’s sort of two separate but equal conversations that are running parallel to one another right now. And that is first, how do we prevent these tragedies from happening in the first place, but then second, understanding that as much as we might try, we’re never going to reduce that risk to zero. So if they do happen, how do we mitigate the loss of life in those moments? And, certainly we’ve heard policies from our legislators, like, I know that some of the folks in Texas have come out, obviously, with armed guards or arm teacher policies. There’s also been talk about reconfiguring buildings to only have a single access or single point access. And with regard to both of those, I think that there’s some challenges. Number one, Texas already currently has on the books two separate policies related to armed teachers. They have the School Marshal Program and the School Guardian Program, and I’m going to mix them up, because I usually do, one of them requires 16 hours of training to be able to carry your weapon solely for the purpose of responding to an active shooter. And then the other is 80 hours of training to be able to be more of civilian law enforcement in the school. So those policies were already on the books. And then if we talk about something like changing building design to only have a single access point, we have other challenges that have to be discussed in that space related to fire code. And challenges for schools that would be more common than active shooters.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, that last point really stuck out to me in conversations about single point entry in terms of that’s addressing one problem and potentially ignoring others that would be impacted by it. We make a change to one thing, we don’t only address the one outcome. We impact a whole host of other things and the fire code is what really jumped out to me on that. And in reflecting on the armed guards, one thing that that caught my attention the other day when someone sent it to me and I hadn’t been aware of this was a study. And maybe you’re already aware of this from JAMA Network Open from 2021 by Jillian Peterson and colleagues that looked at mass school shootings in the US from 1980 to 2019, and found that the presence of armed guards was actually not only not associated with a lower number of deaths when school shootings happen, but it’s actually associated with 2.83 greater amount of deaths relative to schools without. One of their thoughts was that oftentimes, mass school shooters are potentially also suicidal at the time that the presence of an armed guard might, in some ways pulls them in as it’s a chance for suicide by cop, essentially. A chance for a known way to accomplish one of the desired outcomes in this. So I’m sort of surprised by the data on that, because intuitively, it’s appealing the idea of you want somebody armed and trained to address the threat, the life threat of someone with a firearm in the building. And yet the data is telling a story that’s a little bit different.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, I think we have to be really, really cautious about how we interpret that because, obviously, certainly, we want to look at all angles but we have to show that we’re doing it in a really responsible way. And a challenge with that study is the fact that there’s so many factors not controlled for in that analysis. For instance, we have to think about it’s not just the presence of an armed SRO on campus but where they are on the campus. How much time does it take for them to respond? Do they engage the shooter? What is their firepower differential? A few things to consider that are all happening in a split second that usually cross-sectional studies really can’t capture. And so to kind of use two real world examples, with SROs, I grew up in the Parkland, Florida community. And anybody that knows anything about our tragedy probably won’t be surprised about my thoughts on that SRO. Because our SRO stood outside for 35 minutes. So not only did he not only not stop the shooting but the shooting was over in six minutes. So what was he doing for the other 29 minutes, while students and teachers were potentially bleeding out? That’s one instance of where it can go wrong. But if you also look at something like Columbine, for instance, and of course, police protocols were very different in 1999 than they are today. But if you look at Columbine, their SRO, Neil Gardner, actually engaged with the shooters, and he was outside. They were inside but he was still able to engage with them, even with having a very different firepower differential. And that amount of time that he was engaged with the two shooters undoubtedly allowed for so many people in that building to get locked down and effectively go home that day, because the only people that were physically injured or lost their lives during that shooting were the individuals in the library and a couple of people outside. And that’s not to diminish, again, the loss of life. But one of the things that doesn’t get talked about and actually when it does get talked about it sort of minimized in terms of effectiveness is the lockdown. And we know that the number one life saving device in a in a school shooting or an active shooter situation is a door lock.
Michael Anestis
Yeah. And I think all that highlights how difficult this is to study because also with that same Peterson study I mentioned, they can’t assess how many shootings didn’t happen in the first place potentially.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Exactly.
Michael Anestis
And so it’s very difficult to interpret those data and it highlights how complicated this is, because, as we said earlier, mass shootings are too common, but they’re also a really small percentage of gun violence. So actually, having concrete data that lets us point towards what does or doesn’t work is hard in general. Especially if we’re getting down to the nuances of the specific situation that would help us evaluate the effectiveness of some of these things like having an armed guard presence.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
I’m so glad you said that. Because we don’t hear in our country enough about all of the shootings that don’t happen. We don’t even hear about all of the shootings that do happen, let alone the ones that don’t happen. And so, what really inspires me is the fact that we do have researchers, Eric Madfis, at the University of Washington-Tacoma is a great example of this. And also one of our consortium members, Jason Silva, from William Paterson in New Jersey. We’ve got researchers who are looking at why shootings don’t come to fruition, whether that’s because they’re averted in the first place, oftentimes, because individuals with information come forward. Or what about those that are failed? Meaning that, we have individuals who show up and attempt to commit one of these tragedies and don’t. And so I think, we don’t know enough about those, we don’t know how many there are, but really, we don’t know about the beyond the leakage element. What are the consistent things that are happening to prevent or break up these before they happen? And how can we use that to reform policy?
Michael Anestis
Yeah. And, Jackie, I’ve heard you recently, a couple of times, use that term leakage. And I wonder if some listeners might benefit from you giving a little bit more of an example of what that sort of offering might look like and how we can leverage that to stop things from happening in the first place.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, absolutely. So leakage is kind of the idea of broadcasting your intentions in advance. The way to explain it in sort of a crude way, I remember when I was a child and I would get like super excited about something and then I mean, I’m not going to lie, I still do this as an adult. You can’t keep it to yourself. You like feel this overwhelming need to tell somebody and mass shooters are no different. They’re incredibly consumed with their thoughts and their plans about what they’re going to do it, it becomes their whole life. And in essence, they kind of get sloppy and start posting or telling people what they’re going to do. And so, in some cases, it’s very directed threats. The perpetrator in our community was running around telling everyone he was going to shoot up the school, he was posting it all over social media. But if you would listen, he would tell you. And one of the interesting things about leakage, especially among school shooters, almost 100 percent of the time they leak. I think the information from the Secret Service report was like 94 percent. And then, you not only see that these individuals are sharing information but at least one person hears about it, but oftentimes, it’s multiple people.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, yeah, I think, again, I keep drawing back to parallels to things I think a lot about as a clinical psychologist in suicide interventions, people will talk about their thoughts, and people will dismiss that as other things. We say, always take that seriously, even though that expression have pretty poor predictor of behavior. And so I like the idea of look, when you see warning signs, something about that. I have a follow up question for you, though, is that, is there any concern that a lot of folks who say this don’t go on to do these things? Is there any, is there any way for folks to be able to sift through what is leakage of an actual intent versus what is probably unhealthy but not actually dangerous, sort of fantasizing by someone who’s maybe not doing so well, but isn’t likely to do this behavior?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. One thing that I’ve really kind of focused on, especially over the last 10 days in conversations about Uvalde and other shootings, is the general public, myself included, we’re not trained on threat assessment and we don’t have the resources to determine the credibility of the threat. And so when I talk about credibility, I mean, not only how likely is it that this person is going to sort of fulfill what they’re saying, but also do they have the means to be able to do so? And so one thing that I think is really important is we need to not only educate people on what leakage looks like, but we need to talk to them about how to report it to the appropriate channels, because a lot of communities, especially since Parkland, have community-based threat assessment teams, where individuals in the mental health sector, law enforcement, the courts, schools, and other vested stakeholders can kind of come together to the table, share their respective information, which is key, and I’ll kind of come back to that in a second, and assess the credibility of the threat. And if that threat proves to be credible, then they can put a plan into place to manage it in a way that is most appropriate. One of the challenges that we see with these events is that a lot of people have information but it’s kind of like bread crumbs. And so there’s a lot of existence in the sort of information silos. And so really kind of breaking those walls down and creating spaces where that information can be shared and the puzzle pieces can be put together is so important.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I’ve also heard you mention specifically community sort of anonymous tip lines, which I would imagine would sort of fit into that general infrastructure that you were just talking about.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
So there’s a lot of different programs, one of the ones that’s probably the most well-known is out in Colorado, it’s called Safe to Tell. It kind of started as like a nonprofit company after Columbine. And then it eventually grew to become sort of the resource in the state of Colorado. And with tip lines like that, it’s really great because you have a sort of centralized space where people can report information in. That subsequently becomes a mechanism to ensure that these steps are being followed up on and then you can also sort of forward that information to the relevant parties. And again, it provides an anonymous space, there’s a lot of reasons why people don’t come forward. Part of it may be fear of judgment, like how will somebody feel if I tell on them? Will they think I’m sort of narking on them? And by creating that anonymous space, it’s really beneficial to give them an outlet where they feel safe to report, they’re also getting the information in the hands of the people who need it. And again, these tip lines were not, you know, nests, they might have been put in response to a school shooting, but they were never designed to solely address or kind of identify school shooting plots. These are resources that can be used for students who may be considering self-harm, who are being abused, who are being bullied. There’s all sorts of different ways that students in crisis can benefit from these resources. And then again, kind of expanding up to the community level beyond just the school, which then would allow for these platforms to be used for other threats within the community not just those in the schools.
Michael Anestis
So in thinking about this here, you mentioned those tip lines can be helpful for so many reasons, for people starting for all sorts of reasons. And it leads me to one of the parts of the narrative nationally on mass shootings that as a clinical psychologist gets me frustrated pretty often, which is sort of the way we speak about mental illness and its place in all of this. And here again, I’m curious, your thoughts on sort of the data but also just the topic in general, in terms of the role of mental illness in these mass school shootings, or mass shootings in general.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
I think there’s so many just with this. I don’t need to tell you this, Mike. But we know that individuals with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators of crime. But pretty much since Columbine, we’ve seen what my colleague, Glenn Musher, and I sort of termed the “usual suspects” are the three things that constantly get blamed for mass shootings, and that is guns, mental health, and violent media. And what ends up happening is you run into the issue of over prediction. And this was kind of, I use this as an example in a paper I wrote once, where I said, well, 40,000 people bought Call of Duty the first weekend that it came out, 40,000 people didn’t go commit mass shootings. And mental health is very similar. We see that there’s this push to point a finger at something. And obviously, we know that there’s so many people in our country right now, especially after COVID, who are struggling with mental health and mental wellness. But to continue to criminalize and restigmatize at a time when our country really has made strides with mental health, in terms of making it more acceptable to talk about it publicly, I think is so concerning.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, to me, it feels like targeting a marginalized population that gets othered very often. And so folks will say, well, mass shootings, it’s not about me or people I know, it’s this thing that these other folks do. And in doing so they take this already struggling group and make life more difficult. And I think it also has the effect of conflating a lot of things together. Mental illness means so many different things that so many folks struggle with in different ways. And some of which are more or less relevant to aggressive behavior. But by putting everything together into one thing in mental illness, it just makes it I think so much harder for folks already struggling to then feel comfortable in their own shoes and comfortable speaking about their struggles. And I find the conversation particularly frustrating when it’s within the context of folks that are not pivoting towards, well, what will we do to get people access to evidence-based mental health care? So again, it feels more about blaming than it is about solving situations.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
I’m so glad you said that. I think a lot about Sandy Hook in this respect. And I think I do want to kind of throw this caveat out there that it’s incredibly difficult to really study or assess the prevalence of psychiatric disorders or mental health issues among mass shooters. Because if you listen to the media, which is where a lot of us build our databases out of, the media will tell you that everybody’s mentally ill. And the challenge for formal diagnoses is certainly that everyone’s records are protected under HIPAA. So the only time we really find out that they’re in a psychiatric disorder is if there’s a trial, such as with Aurora, and that kind of information is presented as evidence, which then assumes that the perpetrator is still alive to go to trial. And so there’s all of these different challenges and nuances. So I don’t think really understand or can understand the prevalence of mental health issues among mass shooters. But as I said, I do think a lot about Sandy Hook in this respect, because it came out not too long after the shooting happened that the perpetrator had been diagnosed from a very young age with Asperger’s. And everybody started pointing their fingers at Asperger’s and saying, you know, this is not okay and these individuals are dangerous. And then I read an article and it sort of laid it out that individuals who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s are rarely violent. If they happen to have a violent episode, it’s never outside of their family. And in just about zero instances, do they ever pick up a weapon. And so I thought that that was really interesting to kind of see the sort of more clinical statistics about Asperger’s at a time where if you read anything, or talked to anybody, they would have told you these are the most violent individuals in the world.
Alexander Morse
I want to make a quick note that in late 2012, the American Psychiatric Association announced that Asperger’s would no longer be a standalone diagnosis, but would instead be considered part of a broader category of autism spectrum disorders. The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School was diagnosed with Asperger’s before this change and the reporting at that time referred that original diagnosis. Now back to the conversation.
Michael Anestis
And I think that parallels the way people talk about things like schizophrenia too. Where it’s diagnosed with a psychotic disorder or schizophrenia, for instance, does engage in violence, it’s most often going to happen during the first episode of psychosis. And people will spin that to think of psychosis as someone who is angry and mean and murderous, as opposed to if you’ve interacted with someone, what they are is confused and scared and unable to trust their own senses. You’re literally getting sensory input that’s inaccurate. And so I think it becomes easy again for folks to take something they don’t understand, whether that be an autism spectrum disorder or psychotic disorder, and misconstrue it as something evil as opposed to something that is extraordinarily scary and overwhelming for the individual experiencing it. And also, it’s something that really isn’t connected to being violent or hateful at all. Hey, I don’t want to pivot too hard. But one of the things that we’re doing is we’re spending a lot of time talking about the perpetrators and a point effort, you make a very salient one for me that I spent a lot of time thinking about as I’m having these conversations to make sure I don’t fall into this trap is that it’s maybe something we do a little bit too much. And that maybe one of the things we need to be doing is instead of giving a large amount of fame or infamy to the perpetrator, we need to lift up the stories of the victims. And I’m wondering if you might want to speak to that?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Oh, absolutely. And it’s interesting timing. When I woke up this morning, I actually had an email from somebody who lost a relative, a very close relative, in a mass shooting. And she was sort of thinking me, I guess she had seen something I said in one of the interviews I’ve done over the last 10 days. Just that she really appreciated that I was having that conversation when so many people wouldn’t. I think I there’s so many layers to this. And to kind of give listeners a little bit of context for my background, I started working with survivors back in 2014. I sort of took a chance, I knew I really wanted to help and support these individuals. And I happen to see Michelle Gay, whose daughter Josephine was killed at Sandy Hook, I saw her on a CNN special with Anderson Cooper, about the one year mark of the shooting. And she was just so eloquent and so inspiring and insightful. And I was like, I just want to talk to her. And I actually, like reached out and just kind of explained who I was and what I did. And we were able to connect. And I mean, I’ll never forget that first conversation and just sort of my nervousness of going in it, not wanting to say the wrong thing. And Michelle has become a person that’s incredibly close to me. And in an ironic twist of fate, Joey and I actually have the same birthday. So we constantly say that we were meant to always meet each other and work together. But since Michelle opened the door for me, I’ve had the opportunity to meet so many incredible survivors and support them in different ways. And I think one challenge for our nation is that we’re so used to hearing these individuals talked about talked about as a number. Certainly with Uvalde, we’ve heard about 19 children, not Amory and all of these other individuals who had personalities and had lives and stories. And that was something I personally really struggled with after Parkland because people just kept saying, it was 17. And I’m like, no, no, no, they’re, you know, they’re Nick. And they’re Jamie. And they’re Chris. And they have these families and these lives and the stories. And so one thing that I’ve really tried to promote is learning about these individuals because they didn’t have a choice in all of this. Their choice was made for them. And I think honoring their legacies is one of the most important and powerful things that we can do. But it’s also a way in which we take some of the power away from the perpetrators.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, and offer just an immense amount of support for folks who are suffering such immeasurable, unspeakable loss in a really public way.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Survivors that I talked to, and I’ve done some research, I was so fortunate that 40 survivors came on the record with me, not with their identities, but they opened up and allowed me to interview them for the purpose of research because one of the things that was really important was that they really wanted to have their stories told and have their voices heard. And I just don’t think we do that enough.
Michael Anestis
I agree too and I think it’s interesting, a lot of people are not politicizing these events when they happen. Which you can, I guess, understand on some level but I hear that in the context of books, then who say that not the theme of these stories. And I think if we truly want to honor folks, the way to do that is to make sure people know about them and understand who they were. Because I agree, I think for me sometimes, I avoid knowing as much about the victims because it’s hard to hear about and we need to do hard things, we need to confront difficult things and hear that. I know, as a parent, it’s so difficult to even read the stories of, for instance, these children in Uvalde. But maybe that’s a difficult thing we all need to do in order to better connect with the magnitude of the problem and the urgency perceptions.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
I hate to use this word because I know the word is so stigmatized but I talk about it sometimes as privilege. It’s a privilege to be able to change the channel or to block out the things that you don’t want to hear about anymore. These individuals no longer have that. Their roles are forever changed. And I often hear people outside of the mass shooting survivor world talk about, “well, you know, we’re going to get them all back to normal.” And the reality is, is that their normal is gone. Now it is trying to figure out how to exist in the new normal. And so I think taking the time and forcing us to confront this issue is the very least that we could do. I think we have to think about it like this, I’ve talked to a number of survivors who talk about this idea of grieving in a fishbowl. And right now, we’ve got very intensive media attention on this community. To the point of where it’s almost like we’re not even talking about Buffalo anymore, which happened just 10 days before that. The shooting in Tulsa barely made a blip on the radar, but the media sort of swoop in and get their story. And we’re all sort of sitting here watching it round the clock 24/7, which I think it’s very easy to disengage when we’re on the opposite side of the TV from the lens, because these individuals are, they don’t to just turn off the TV when they’ve had enough. And then the media go away and we all go away. And everybody sort of moves on but they don’t ever really get to you. And there’s so much added trauma and pressure that that causes. That’s incredibly difficult.
Michael Anestis
It makes you appreciate the difficulty of the efforts that folks, like Fred Guttenberg or David Hogg, have put in in terms of coming through either having lost a child or being a survivor within the school, and yet, really sort of publicly called attention repeatedly after that. How difficult that must be when you think about it within the context of everything you just said.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, you know, I know, Fred, actually. My stepmom and his wife used to work together. I just actually recently connected with David through Twitter and have spoken to a number of other people. I have always been so in just incredibly an awe of people who endure such a public tragedy. And try to create something better for others as a result of it. There’s certainly survivors that are more private, who don’t necessarily share their story or their pain in such a vulnerable way. And that’s okay too. Everybody grieves these tragedies differently. But I think it’s just so powerful to see somebody who’s lost so much want so much better for everyone else and is willing to do the work to have that. And it makes you really start to question, here’s somebody who sent His 14-year-old daughter to school one day and she didn’t come home. So he doesn’t have his daughter anymore but he’s fighting for your daughter or your son to come home. It almost sort of throws down the gauntlet, if you will. Why is Fred willing to do that but so many others aren’t, who still can consider child come home at the end of the day?
Michael Anestis
A lot of the work that my team has been doing lately has been an idea of credible messengers. And I think folks like that fit the bill of credible messenger in such a compelling way in and obviously, I think it depends on who the audience is, who the folks have credibility with, and for what purpose. But I think that sort of experience of having been involved and survived or lost someone or something like this makes it more difficult for somebody to dismiss what you’re saying as political for the same old sort of tropes to derail the conversation. And so I think that it makes me want to think about ways for folks who like us work with data to join forces with those with that lived experience to make sure that, a) what we’re doing is grounded in the lens that they see things through, but also, b) that when we be have data and we have drawn conclusions from studies, that their voices can help speak to those results in a way that’s more compelling than mine. For instance, where there’s no reason for talking about this to be particularly compelling to someone.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
And that’s kind of one of the reasons I set out to do that research. Because I’ve spent a lot of time out in the Denver area, which the Denver area has had more share of tragedy than almost anybody, except for maybe Texas at this point. With regards to Columbine, and then there was Aurora, and more recently Boulder STEM school. I mean, the list goes on and on. And having sort of these more informal conversations with individuals, one thing that really dawned on me is that our policymakers and, frankly, our country are telling these individuals what they need and how they should respond and react to the aftermath of their tragedy. And for me, the research really started as kind of a simple idea, which is that if you want to know what people need just ask them. And so like I said, I’ve had these conversations, both formally and informally, and one of the things I constantly hear is thank you for letting us have a voice or listening to us because so many people don’t. And I think that’s something very easy that we could do is not only listen but amplify their message. One person that I’ve noticed that I am just so incredibly in awe of right now is Nelba Marquez-Greene whose daughter, Ana Grace, was killed at Sandy Hook. And one thing that she’s really been pushing for after Uvalde is that anytime she does an interview, she wants to make sure that there is a parent of a child that was lost to every day gun murder, not just school shootings. Because she said, you guys are focusing so much on us but you’re not focusing on everybody else. And I thought that was just so incredibly powerful. And again, something very simple we can do to retweet a message like that or help to push and promote and amplify it.
Michael Anestis
Again, folks like us in the scientific community have done a really poor job of conveying the data to the community more broadly in general. And so I think that the understanding of the form and scope and structure of gun violence in America is very skewed in the public in general. So many of our conversations are about these mass shootings. And I’m not arguing to talk about unless we should talk about him more. The problem is that we talk about them too much is that we don’t talk about everything else nearly enough. And so it’s powerful to me to hear somebody in in her position raise that point. And again, to me, it speaks to a feeling of communication on our part to empower people with the knowledge that we create a demand that that conversation take place. That people don’t realize the reality of what day-to-day gun violence is. How common firearm suicide is. Why would they demand that the conversation be different? If people don’t have the information in the first place, how could they possibly know to push things in that direction?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s such a great point.
Michael Anestis
So I want to make sure that, I know we’re inching closer to the hour and I want to make sure that as we’re moving the conversation forward, we’re hopefully we’re leading things before we get to Q&A in the direction of solutions and next best steps. And so I’m curious, in ways we haven’t talked about already, are there ways that you feel like our national conversation, sure about gun violence more broadly, but also in particularly about these types of gun violence events, are there ways the conversation needs to change in order to facilitate better outcomes? Whether that means new policies or more research or whatever that might be?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there’s sort of two challenges, if you will. One is that we as a society, not any one particular individual, but as a society, we tend to be very reactive and not very proactive. And obviously, we should absolutely support the community of Uvalde and lift them up as they mourn and grieve with them. But also, we have to look forward because there’s somebody somewhere in America is planning the exact same thing. And so, we can’t only focus on responding to yesterday, we have to work towards preventing tomorrow. So that’s one thing. I think the other thing is that we have to stop looking for the shiny object. One of the challenges that I’ve kind of run into over the last week is that it kind of feels like metaphorically speaking, that everybody’s looking at a tree and willing it to be a forest. Mass shootings are incredibly, incredibly complex phenomenon. And there’s not going to be one solution, we need to take a layered approach. As I said, when kind of when we started off, there’s sort of these two divergent parallel conversations, the need to prevent them and the need to mitigate the loss of life when they happen. There’s not going to be one thing that does either or both of those, it’s going to be multiple things layer upon layer upon layer. And so the continual desire to only have one solution is really misguided. Let’s say Congress comes back next week and they give us every single piece of legislation that everybody’s asked for. They pass universal background checks, they pass ERPOs, they pass an assault weapons ban, and limiting high-capacity magazines, that’s not going to make it so that a mass shooting or any gun violence never happens again, because we know that there are still going to be ways that individuals can get firearms. And, and also, they could, frankly, use other weapons. And so what is the next layer that we have to put in and the layer in front of that and the layer in front of that?
Michael Anestis
Yeah, it’s so difficult to sell the idea on a problem so urgent that the solutions are all imperfect. But when sort of folded together can represent a path towards meaningful progress. And that’s not as simple as, here’s the problem, here’s the answer is. Here’s this problem that’s a horrific problem and here are these different sort of nuanced solutions. All of which are insufficient on their own but together can be helpful and that’s not a satisfying answer to such an emotional event.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, I think our challenge is, how do we balance the emotionality with the evidence. And this is certainly something I’ve run into and I have yet to figure out, sort of the magic way around this. Because for the better part of the last four years, I’ve studied lockdown drills and their effects in terms of both building muscle memory and also the effects that they have on students and staff. Sort of psychologically or any sort of related outcomes. It’s interesting because it doesn’t matter how much evidence I put in front of people like, “no look, we can do this in a really trauma informed way, where we’re not scarring kids the rest of their lives, but we’re just giving them tools to stay safe.” And it’s literally like people almost put their hands over their ears and say, “I’m not going to listen to that, because this is an emotional topic that I just want to feel the way I feel about.” I don’t really know how to get around that except to keep having open dialogue, where at some point, maybe, we can find a more balanced approach to having emotional conversations in evidence-based ways.
Michael Anestis
That makes a lot of sense. And I wonder if this is an opportunity, on that note, to provide people with a little bit of practical knowledge on this, which is what might the informed age appropriate drills even look like? I’m not sure you as a parent, I don’t know that I fully know what’s happening in my kids schools. And I suspect it’s different than what was happening when I came from Mississippi. And I suspect that a lot of parents share a similar sense of I don’t know what is happening, and I don’t know what should be happening. And I wonder if you have some thoughts on that.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
So the challenge is, we don’t really have any federal guidance on what drills should look like. There hasn’t been anything put out by the US Department of Education since 2003. And it was very limited in what it was. It was sort of couched in this bigger, how to create a sort of A to Z comprehensive emergency operations plan. There is really great resources out there from groups like the National Association of School Psychologists, National Association of School Resource Officers, and then Michelle’s organization, Safe and Sound Schools, they’ve all worked together to produce documents about how drills can be conducted in a trauma informed way. And there’s some very sort of simple, low-hanging fruit that you can grab in that. Things like, of course, making sure that we’re always calling drills as drills, we don’t ever want to give the impression that we’re actually in a real situation. I’ve to date conducted more than 300 of them. And I’ve only had one instance where somebody forgot to say the part of the drill call that says this is a drill. And I immediately shut it down and said, “No, no, you’ve got to get back on that loudspeaker and tell them this is a drill. We can’t have them thinking that it’s real.” So that’s really important. It’s incredibly important for adults to be modeling calm behavior, which I think is really kind of a challenge. Not that adults can’t model calm behavior, but there’s such a disparity in experiences in the sense that kids today have never known a world without active shooter or lockdown drills in it and all the adults in the room do. So we’re trying to shift one group’s mindset while maintaining the others ability to be okay in that. A third thing is, is that we don’t need the theatrics. There have been news stories of drills gone incredibly poor, where teachers have been shot with pellet guns. And students have been exposed to the sounds of simulated gunfire of their principal or another adult in the building dressing up as a shooter and yelling, “I’m going to kill you.” There’s actually a video on that. And then seeing crisis actors covered in fake blood. None of that is necessary to achieve the outcome of a drill, which is drills are designed to build muscle memory so that if you were to find yourself in a situation like Uvalde or other high stressful situation, if your cognitive functioning is impaired by stress and your mind sort of goes blank, your body will kind of take over and do what it’s trained to do. And so when we talk about drills, what we’re talking about is practicing our steps to reinforce our muscle memory. And the same way that we don’t light schools on fire to practice a fire drill, we don’t need to create simulated active shooter situations to practice a lockdown drill.
Michael Anestis
So it’s actually really helpful for me, from my perspective, as a parent to hear you sort of describe that. And the thought you raised to me that I hadn’t thought about but was really salient was that folks from our generation or older, who were raised at a time without these drills, to some extent, it almost feels like mourning to have to have our kids not be able to be ignorant of that. And at the same time, that’s a valid thing to feel you kind of have to shake yourself past it and say this is their reality and help them deal with it. But I appreciate the practical pragmatic tips on ways to do that in a way that is not traumatizing or destructive at all. So thanks for that.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, and I will say this, if I can just add something to that. I don’t actually really enjoy going out and putting kids in lockdown. It’s really not the funnest thing to do. I try to, obviously, stay as upbeat as I can for them. But the challenge is that we don’t live in a world where we don’t need to have these practices. And so my perspective and the way I’ve approached it, is until we live in that world, which may never come, how can we do this in a way that empowers students and makes them feel prepared without making them feel scared. And that’s just sort of where I think, at least my research has gone.
Michael Anestis
It makes a lot of sense. One of the conversations I’ve been having a lot with media over the last couple of weeks is the idea of I think, and I lived in Mississippi for a long time. And a lot of my work is with the military. And I’ve come to know and respect and care for a lot of firearm owners. And so when I do my work and I talk about this, I’m not coming from a perspective of of vilifying firearm owners and say we need to overturn the Second Amendment. But within that context, the reality is we are a society that has decided to be okay with the risk that comes with having firearms readily available. And some that might because of a skewed perception of what risk is there and is not there. But when we’ve made that decision to protect those rights and those needs, it’s important to look at what we’re doing to facilitate that and how that impacts other folks. And in this case, one of the ways we’re facilitating that lifestyle is by having kids have to go through that. And that’s something we’ve decided is okay in society. But in doing that, it’s so important to make sure we’re doing it in a way that is not hurting people. So that if we want to maintain this other aspect of our culture and our rights and our lifestyle, we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t come at unacceptable expense to the most vulnerable among us.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Yeah, I don’t think I could have said that any better Mike.
Michael Anestis
Don’t make me try to repeat it because I’ll stumble over it. But so I’ll tell you what, Jackie, you talked about us made open this up to some Q&A. And that’s a mechanic I have not done with Twitter spaces. So hopefully, this idea doesn’t send us off the rails. But I’m wondering if there’s anything you want to talk about before we do that?
Jaclyn Schildkraut
I think the only thing I would really say to everybody who has joined us, and thank you for doing that, because it obviously is going to take a lot of us to help make a difference, it’s not helpless. And like I said, there’s so many cases of prevented mass shootings, of prevented suicide, of prevented domestic violence, of a lot of other things, there’s so many different things that I want to just caution, it’s not hopeless. We may not be making strides as fast as we would like to be or as widespread as we want to, but we are making differences. And we are saving lives with the work that’s being done in the gun violence prevention space. And so I would just encourage, just don’t lose hope, because there is work being done. And we are making steps. And we are going in the right direction, albeit slowly.
Michael Anestis
And the only thing I’d add to before we switch over to Q&A is that I think folks are out there listening and sort of feeling pretty wrapped up and emotional about the stories they’ve been hearing but unsure how they can contribute, I would encourage you to just to reach out to somebody who is involved. Whether that’s someone who’s involved in advocacy, or someone who’s involved in research, or someone who’s involved in policy or whatever it is, but have conversations with folks to find what your space is because I think a good way to not feel hopeless is to get involved one way or the other. And so I encourage folks to leverage whatever it is you’re feeling and turn it into action, without putting the pressure on you to make it sound like your action needs to be the thing that solves this huge problem for society. I think we can all contribute in a way that fits the scale of our own personal circumstances and any contribution you make is great. So yeah, I think I that’s what I want to get into the last second. So I don’t know, Patrice, the mechanics of this, but I wonder if we want to open this up for listeners to be able to ask questions, and if I heard Jackie right, it sounds like that involves people raising their hand and then you sort of switching? Let them speak. So questions, likely for the much more informed Jackie than for me. Let’s hear them.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Looks like we might have dropped a lot of knowledge on people and they’re still digesting.
Michael Anestis
Yes.
Jaclyn Schildkraut
Well, one thing I will say to the point that Mike raised, for anybody who’s listening, my email, my Twitter, DMs, everything is always open. I’m certainly happy to have conversations with anybody who’s interested in making a difference. One thing that I’ve tried to my work, which I know is an underlying principle of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, and also, the Gun Violence Research Center in New Jersey with Mike is, gun violence solutions don’t have to be political and they don’t have to be embroiled. We’re really trying to approach this from a very nonpartisan perspective where we can just say, “How can we make a difference collectively as Americans.” So I would encourage, we could have more of those types of conversations and more of that thinking I think we’d get pretty far.
Michael Anestis
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, Jackie. I agree. And the two things I’d say that echo that is one is the outlook. But one of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Centers’ core principles is its engaging and communicating broadly. And so if folks want to reach out, again, my Twitter handle the GBRC, Twitter’s handle, my email, whatever, we want to talk with folks. And the second thing just sort of built off of that is, we’re not going to solve gun violence about gun owners. And so most of the folks I interact with on this topic are folks who, like me, don’t own a firearm and maybe see the world through a political lens and it’s very similar to mine. And that’s great. I love talking to those folks. But I think I’m going to emphasize, again, we can’t talk about gun owners. And this doesn’t need to be a political issue. And so I’d love to hear from it. I’m always excited to hear from folks within the gun owner community to figure out how we can work together to find solutions that match on to everybody’s ideals and everyone’s values. So that isn’t a us versus them polarized political battle but instead a collaborative effort to say, this is the society we live in. These are the things we value and how within that context, can we make sure we’re keeping people safe?
Alexander Morse
That was Mike Anestis of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and Jaclyn Schildkraut of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium housed at the Rockefeller Institute. If you’d like to learn more about gun violence and the latest in public policy research, please visit Consortium’s website by visiting rockinst.org/gun-violence. If you liked this episode, please rate, subscribe, and share. It will help others find the podcast and help us deliver the latest in public policy research. All of our episodes are available for free wherever you stream your podcasts. Special thanks to the Rockefeller Institute staff, Joel Tirado, Heather Trela, and Laura Schultz for their contributions to this episode. Thanks for listening. I’m Alex Morse. Until next time.
Policy Outsider is presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. The Institute conducts cutting edge nonpartisan public policy research and analysis to inform lasting solutions to the challenges facing New York State and the nation. Learn more at Rockinst.org or by following at RockefellerInst on social media. Have a question, comment, or idea? Email us at [email protected].
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