Back in 2020, a man with a rifle killed 22 people in a rural community north of Nova Scotia, Canada, way up in the Maritime provinces. What made the crime especially troubling for the community was the fact that he was dressed in an RCMP uniform and drove around the community in a surplus police Crown Vic while shooting random people and setting fires. Now, 3 years later, the Mass Casualty Commission released its final report on the incident. On the day before the release of the report, we were driving through Quebec listening to the Current show on CBC, and the March 30 episode was focused on the shooting. One of the people featured in the episode was Serena Lewis, a community resident and counselor who spoke about the widening impact of trauma on the small community, in the wake of both the mass shooting and the destruction of hurricane Fiona last year.
It was a compelling segment that I later listened to again, Ms. Lewis was smart at articulating the unseen damage caused by trauma in us humans. It was a great conversation:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/nova-scotia-mass-killings-portapique-grief-1.6796471
This jumped out at me:
SERENA LEWIS: Somebody said, at least we're not like the United States. And I said, one thing I commend about the United States I said is they're actually naming the problem. And in Canada, we need to do this. We need to stop looking at this in isolated events. Violence is growing. Violence is disturbing our schools, our homes, our workplaces. It's changing how safe we feel. Are we going to look at this and look at what are our values? In 10 years time, do we want to look back and think we could have circumvented something right now with what we know about trauma? I think this is a really big paradigm shift that we need to be thinking about in Canada. Why don't we go back and start looking at emotional health first? And how do we get people through things like this? How do we process trauma and grief? How do we talk about things? So I don't know. From what I've seen, I don't think it should take a report for us to do What evidence tells us should have been done in the first place.
What I found so striking was the fact that a single mass shooting would cause the Canadian government to form a commission, do a three-year inquiry and issue a 4000 page report, against a backdrop of someone talking at length on the radio about the need to recognize and treat the trauma associated with violence and loss. That to me was interesting as an outsider passing through listening to the radio.
A few days ago, Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on the impact of gun violence in our county. Using a telephone survey with what appears to be decent methodology, they asked a representative sample of people about their experiences with gun violence. What did we learn?
Nearly one in five Americans have been threatened with a gun
Close to 20% have a family member who has been killed by gun homicide or suicide
17% have witnessed someone being killed by a gun. For black people, this number was nearly one-third of all respondents.
20% of blacks felt that gun violence was something they worried about every day, compared to 8% for whites.
About one-third went out and bought a gun as protection.
All of which got me thinking about our great nation and the application of those sterile percents against the denominator of our population. We walk every day among the traumatized people, those who cannot unsee what happened that night. Those who found a child or loved one that did not answer when their name was called. Those who will never find peace in dreams again. For some, that trauma will dissolve a marriage, or lead to drinking, or more violence, chronic health problems, loss of a job. And for those whose life was marred by this proximity to violence, still more lives are impacted because a parent is not at the sideline cheering a goal, or holding a hand at a memorial, or just calling to check in. In the movies, we see the application of gun violence as a solution to a problem, and then the plot moves on. It seems that in real life, the stain of violence and the attendant trauma spreads slowly across the water of so many lives like oil.
In our own community, the remembrance of the May 14 Tops shootings is fast approaching. In a community that was also touched by the deaths caused by the December blizzard. Serena Lewis nails it again:
Enduring a tremendous amount of damage in this hurricane has taught me something very wise that there's not a cap on the amount of tragedies we'll go through in our life. So there's a humbleness to this to understand that this is exhausting. And that is our own healing process too of paying attention to what we can do.
We are in a place as a country where we walk with so many of our fellow Americans who pack away some sort of trauma from violence. We don’t have a healthy way of talking about it, so the salve we apply is this continual outrage and division. Nearly one-fifth of us have seen someone dead from a gunshot wound, and we get outraged over a can of beer with a rainbow logo, or cheer a state banning transgender children (n=3) from playing a high school sport. And every single week, we seem to wake up to another community that will never be the same, and the stain of violence spreads wider across the city streets and the rolling, verdant lands of our great nation. And our anger is impotent lashing, looking for someone to blame, some political figure, or some person who doesn’t look like us. And still, the stain spreads to another family as the sun comes up today, and more lives will be forever changed. And we have done nothing.
Good read here John, all of us should be more pro-active and visionary to seeking solutions to these mounting mass shootings in the world. But yet we allow sales of military grade full automatic weapons, and we mass produce Video games that are all about blowing things up and killing? Where the hell are we going? Have you seen the Ted Talk "I was almost a Mass Shooter"?