Today, Explained - How to not give up on gun control

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Vox’s Marin Cogan, who lived through a school shooting herself, explains why she hasn’t given up on a solution to our gun problem yet. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Victoria Chamberlin edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm, and I wish I were shocked yesterday when I saw the news of a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. significant since Columbine, since Virginia Tech, since Sandy Hook, since Orlando, since Vegas, since Parkland, since El Paso, since Buffalo to stop this. This is a country where you have to wake up every day and go out into the world knowing there's a non-zero chance you might get murdered by a stranger for no reason at all. And most of us are resigned to that fact. And it's easy to just give up. But on the show today, one of my colleagues here at Vox, who has lived through a school shooting herself, is going to tell us why we shouldn't. Groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started.

Today Explained, I'm Sean Ramos for Merin Kogan. You are a senior correspondent here at Vox. It's regrettably easy to be cynical about the possibility of change in a moment like this, but you would argue against cynicism. I would for the simple reason that we can't afford to be cynical. The stakes are way too high. We have lost too many children, too many people in their places of worship, going to concerts in grocery stores. Too many people have faced this threat, have been killed by guns in mass shootings in America. Too many children have experienced these types of tragedies at their schools, the stakes are just too high to say that nothing is going to change because it hasn't changed already. So the notion that because it hasn't happened already means that it'll never happen is, to me, a form of sort of weary

defeatism that we simply cannot afford to have. We need to take care of each other and take care of each other's children so much better than we have in this country. I guess one of the reasons behind some of the cynicism is people see something that actually shocks them in a country where gun violence is so quotidian at this point. And they think, oh, something could happen, and then it doesn't. And two obvious examples are Sandy Hook, where children were murdered, followed by Parkland, where these high school students took their school shooting and turned it into a national movement, the March for Our Lives. I spoke to David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who was one of the chief organizers of that movement on this show back in 2018. And he remained optimistic. You know, midterm elections were

approaching. He was campaigning across the country. And I was a little more cynical and he scolded me for that. Just don't get it wrong like i know it's i know it's it's easy to stay focused on the negativity but there's a lot of positive shit that has come out of this the fact that youth voter registration in some districts has gone up that came out of the local people that were mobilized in part because of us and a lot of those areas people don't talk about that young people are tired of taking old people's shit. But then nothing happened, which only sort of reaffirmed, for me at least, this cyclical feeling that I have, which is shooting, attention, attention dissipates, nothing happens. Shooting, attention, attention dissipates, nothing happens. Do you feel the sort of dread of that

cycle? Oh, absolutely. I definitely feel it. And I want to say, Sean, that I think that your feeling is so understandable, right? It's completely understandable that we feel sad and that we do feel defeated after these events happen where they are truly shocking and they keep happening over and over and over again. And it can get to the point the Parkland survivors who went on to start a movement, they can't afford to be cynical either. They cannot afford to say, oh, well, this is going to keep happening to other kids. They actually lived through this. And that's why they're fighting for something different. And I think that if they are willing to put themselves out there and, you know, really become political actors and face all of the consequences and the vitriol that comes with that because they don't want other people to go through what they did, then we can't

afford to be cynical either. I think we owe it to them and we owe it to other kids to make sure that we're doing everything we can to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. And, you know, it is going to take a lot of time. I think it's easy to look back and say, well, nothing happened after Sandy Hook, so therefore nothing's going to happen. But we actually don't know that. It's really hard when you're living through a historical moment to know which events were the turning points. It's only in retrospect after those changes have happened that we're able to see, okay, that was a turning point. And I have to think and have to believe that we will look back on Sandy Hook as a turning point. And I have to think and have to believe that we will look back on Sandy Hook as a turning

point, that we will look back on the shooting that happened on Tuesday in Texas and say, this was a turning point. That these are moments of the American public coming together and saying, no more. We have to do better. We have to protect each other. And if you can believe that, what are you even hoping for at this point? What is the ideal legislation or scenario? Because as we well know, before the pandemic happened, there were more guns than there are people in this country. Then gun sales skyrocketed. So now we have even more, some intangible number of firearms floating around in this country. So how much are red flag laws and background checks, which we can't even all agree on as a country, going to do?

Well, so the reality is I don't know what they're going to do. I mean, I can't, you know, you could take any one particular proposed policy that's on the table and we can analyze them and we can project what we think that they will do. But the reality is we don't know because a lot of these things we haven't tried. This is something that I came across when interviewing other survivors of school shootings. A lot of them felt like, look, I'm not an expert on the policy in particular, but I will take anything that indicates that we think that this is a problem and we're trying to do something about it. So, I mean, I think about this in terms of something like climate change. This is a huge, massive problem. But we don't just say, well, nothing's going to

work, so we might as well not try, right? We think about the solutions. We propose the solutions. We look for legislators and lawmakers that are willing to try to pass something. But these big issues often rise and fall in a single person's vote. And that may mean that we're not quite as far away from change as we think we are. It's time to turn this pain into action for every parent, for every citizen in this country. We have to make it clear to every elected official in this country, it's time to act. What are we doing?

Just days after a shooter walked into a grocery store to gun down African-American patrons, we have another Sandy Hook on our hands. What are we doing? There have been more mass shootings than days in the year. Our kids are living in fear every single time they set foot in a classroom because they think they're going to be next. What are we doing? Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate? Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job,

of putting yourself in a position of authority, if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing. What are we doing? We're going to pause here for a moment. When we're back, Maren talks about her own experience with school shootings because she lived through one. It's Today Explained. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

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contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Maren, I know you report on gun violence here at Vox, but you are yourself someone who lived through a mass shooting in middle school? Yeah, So when I was 12, a classmate in eighth grade brought a gun to the eighth grade dinner dance. So I was too young to be in the dance hall where it happened, but I was standing right outside with some of my friends. So I didn't see what had happened, but I watched a bunch of eighth graders run out of the dance hall in their formal wear and their corsages, and they were crying and really upset. We had heard a noise that we all assumed was balloons popping, but which we later found out were bullets being fired. A few seconds later, someone had yelled

that the student had a gun and that he had shot one of our teachers in the leg. My friends and I hid and we were at this little sort of mini golf course next to this dance hall in my town. And we all ran and hid in the concession stand and got down on the ground. While that was happening, the parent of one of my classmates who owned this complex chased the student out and convinced him to give up the gun. But our teacher was killed in that shooting. And this was in what year again? This was 1998. Which was sort of before this became such a regular part of American life? Definitely. So I believe Jonesboro, that shooting had just happened. And then there was the shooting in my community. And then almost exactly a year later was Columbine. And that is kind of what I think of as the beginning of the modern school shooting era.

Did your school have any idea how to deal with this kind of thing in 1998? I think no one had any idea of how to deal with it. The thing that I always come back to is this notion that we just didn't have the language to discuss what had happened. Unfortunately, we're now so well-versed in talking about these things. But in 1998, it was a very different story. I do remember that all of us who were there were required to go to these group counseling sessions at school. And I just remember, more than anything else, the silence because no one really knew what to say. We just didn't have the language for it. How did you process it in light of the fact that your school

and your community didn't know how to help you, a middle schooler, process murder happening at your school? There were certain things I remember. There was a church service in the community that I went to, and there was the funeral, which were really important grieving moments. We planted trees outside the school and made a little garden for our teacher. But, you know, beyond that, I think, you know know everyone did their best all the teachers and parents you know they had lived through something horrific too and everyone was trying their best but because we didn't really have the resources and the language to talk about it there was just simply not a lot of discussion and I don't necessarily feel like I was traumatized by that experience, but I do feel like there's a reason why I've spent so much of my career thinking about these issues and talking to survivors of mass shootings.

It's because in some ways I'm sort of processing and untangling my own feelings about what happened in my community. Yeah, you've reported on what you call, I guess, the school shooting generation for Vox. What did you find when you spoke to people like you who had lived through these tragedies? I found that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people across the country who had these experiences at a time when the resources didn't exist for them to get the help that they needed. I found a lot of adults who spoke about feeling the need to behave like they were okay when they weren't necessarily because they didn't think that they were allowed to be victims. One survivor I spoke to, he was shot in the head, but the bullet only grazed him. And he said, I needed to get back to school right away

because I wasn't truly injured enough, which, you know, in retrospect, he said is just such a sad thing to think that I didn't think that I was injured enough, but I found tons of people who felt like they weren't affected or impacted enough to consider themselves victims. And what I found with those people was that much later in life, that trauma came back because they didn't have an outlet for it or a way of processing it as a kid. And then they see shooting after shooting after shooting, as do you, how do you respond when you see this pattern, this cycle? Is it just more and more trauma? Yeah, I think it can be. I think it can be triggering for a lot of survivors. One I spoke to

told me that before he went to get help, and he was shot when he was seven at another elementary school shooting in 1989. He didn't go to get help until he was in his 30s. But he said before he got help, he would hear about the shootings and he would just start sobbing. He'd be driving in his car and would just start sobbing because the reaction was so strong. It can also, though, be an opportunity to reconsider what happened to them. One of the survivors I heard from said, you know, I was silent for 20 years, and it kept happening, and I'm tired of it. And he became a really outspoken advocate as an adult. He was inspired by the Parkland survivors, actually. He said, this keeps happening again and again. I'm not going to be silent about it anymore. So I think it's certainly a double-edged sword. It can be very painful for survivors to have to live through this over and over and over again. But for some, you know, seeing these things happen again had been a moment for them to experience some resilience and decide that they were going to do something about it. You know, they were going to try to fight for a safer world for everyone else.

We know about the Parkland kids. We know there are kids out there who want to fight. But did you talk to anyone or come across anyone who had given up, who had said, I'm moving to Mexico, I can't deal with this? Or even just simply, I have no faith in this country. I carry a firearm with me to protect myself. I don't think gun control laws are going to do anything. Yeah. So I definitely, I wouldn't say I met anyone who wanted to give up and move to Mexico, but I definitely met people who did not necessarily think that gun

control was the answer. People who have survived are not, it's not a given that they're going to be pro-gun control. That is more determined by like where someone grew up, by the sort of political and cultural leanings of their environment and their family. And even some of the people I spoke to who had been through these experiences and had been shot did favor gun control, but also owned guns themselves. Some of them owned assault rifles, which is not a casual gun owner's gun. Some of them had concealed carry permits. So I think one of the things that I have noticed is that we tend to think of these sides as very black and white. You either absolutely love guns, 100%, NRA member, total ideologue, or you're sort of like a city liberal who would never own a gun and thinks the whole concept is horrifying. But actually, there's a ton of people between those two poles. And this is another reason why I think people shouldn't be completely hopeless. There are a lot of people who have complex and conflicted feelings about guns. There are a lot of people who own guns but think that the current situation

that we have is not sustainable or tenable. So it's not necessarily one or the other. And that includes people who have been shot in school shootings. There are people who have been shot in school shootings who think that we need better gun control and universal background checks and also carry firearms themselves and use them themselves. But I will say, just to add on to that, I do think that when we talk about it as completely black or white, which I understand why that happens, but I do think like we start to drift away from the possibility of change when we assume that these sides are this and that and that they're completely entrenched. I think that might be true on a sort of legislative and political level, but among the public, I think there's quite a bit of

nuance. Right. Because whatever your politics are, there's no one who's pro-kids getting shot at school. One would hope that that's the case, yes. Though kids now are trained to expect this kind of thing. They're drilled to expect this kind of thing. Every school-aged child in America goes to school and is told that this kind of thing. Every school-aged child in America goes to school and is told that this kind of thing could happen, which is a difference, I imagine, between the era in which you and I went to school in this country. Yeah, that's definitely true. I mean, this is something I heard from the survivors as well, is that most of them now have kids and the kids have gone through these drills in large part

because of what their parents had gone through and the fact that nothing had changed after their parents had been involved in school shootings. So certainly the research that's out there suggests that these drills increase anxiety and fear among children who experience them and sometimes cause more harm than good. And so we clearly need some sort of training, I think, or awareness for kids, but I'm not sure that the way that we've gone about it is helpful to their overall well-being. Yeah. Yeah. What do the parents who survived school shootings tell their kids when they send them to school in the morning? Yeah. So different parents had different ways of dealing with it, but I think all of them

really struggled with this question of what to say. Most of them had told their kids about what had happened to them. Most of them tried to do kids about what had happened to them. Most of them tried to do it in a way that it wouldn't traumatize their children. They wanted them to know that this is something that happened to mom or this is something that happened to dad, but they shouldn't be afraid. They should go to school and that they would be safe there. But I do know that one of the survivors I spoke to talked about his daughter coming home from kindergarten and talking about having to turn off all the lights and hide from the bad man for a drill was the moment that he sort of decided enough was enough and that he wanted to work for a world in which his child wouldn't need to go through those drills and, you know, would never experience something like he had experienced as a kid. Because the other version of those parents you talked about, I mean, I'm not trying to call anyone out here, but it's kind of a lie that we tell our kids and we tell ourselves that you're going to go out in the world and everything's going to be okay.

Because that's just not guaranteed. It's not guaranteed. And I think that the only thing we can do on a day-to-day basis to not completely lose our minds about the situation is to kind of live with that white lie. But it's not okay. You know, it sits with us wrong for a reason. And the reason is that this is not normal and it's not okay. And this isn't something that parents in every country on earth deal with. They don't worry about whether their kids are going to be safe in school every day. So I think, yeah, we do tell them that and we tell ourselves that because we have a hard time

acknowledging the reality, which is that we have done way too little to keep our children safe and to keep all of us safe in public spaces. And I think we need to have a real conversation about that and what we need to do and what we're going to do to take care of each other. Maren Kogan, that piece she wrote earlier this year that we talked about is titled The School Shooting Generation Grows Up. You can find it at Vox.com. If you have questions about gun control or the Second Amendment or if you just want to vent, we have a listener hotline you can call.

The number is 202-688-5944. You can leave us a message. We will listen. 202-688-5944. I'm Sean Ramos for him. The show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi and Victoria Chamberlain. Edited by Matthew Collette. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard.

Mixed and mastered by Afim Shapiro. Our team is led by Amina Alsadi and includes Halima Shah, Avishai Artsy, Miles Bryan, Paul Mounsey, and my co-host, Noelle King. Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of audio at Vox, and our audio fellow is Tori Dominguez. We use music from Breakmaster Cylinder and sometimes Noam Hassenfeld. We're on the radio in partnership with WNYC. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.