With Six Dead, Including Three Children, Nashville School Shootings Again Raise Questions Around Talking to Children About Gun Violence
Four BU experts on gun legislation, and what to do next after the Nashville school shooting, including how to support traumatized children
Authorities guided students from The Covenant School to a reunification center after three peers and three staffers died in a Monday shootings at the Christian elementary school. Photo by AP/Jonathan Mattise
Once Again, Our Nation Is Forced to Talk to Children about Guns, Deaths
Four BU experts on gun legislation, and what to do next after the Nashville school shooting, including how to support traumatized children
Numbing fatalism surrounds the relentless repetition of US school shootings. There have been 376 since 1999, killing 175 people and exposing a staggering 348,000 children to gun violence. The cycle continued Monday with six murders, including three children, at the Covenant School, a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Police say Audrey E. Hale, a former student at the Covenant School, launched a shooting spree with two assault-style rifles and a handgun that left three 9-year-olds and three staffers dead. (Investigators said Hale used male pronouns in social media posts.) Hale, who police shot and killed, had maps of the school, bought the guns legally, and was being treated for an emotional disorder, police said. After the grim news, President Biden reiterated his demand for a ban on assault weapons, which has stalled in Congress.
On an individual level, parents should reassure their schoolchildren that adults try to keep kids safe, says Neena McConnico. She’s a Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine assistant professor of pediatrics who directs the outpatient Child Witness to Violence Project at MED’s teaching hospital, Boston Medical Center. McConnico told the Boston Globe, “Maybe families have had complicated relationships with law enforcement. In our work with kids, we don’t rule them out as helpers, either. … We have conversations with caregivers around how to talk about that, what feels safe, helping kids and families to understand that there are helpers, even in law enforcement,” along with teachers, coaches, extended family, and others.
Here we are again as a nation: A little more than a decade after 20 children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, BU Today reached out this week to BU experts to revisit questions around talking to traumatized children about gun violence.
Ziming Xuan is professor of community health services at the School of Public Health and has appointments at MED and its teaching hospital, Boston Medical Center. He is a social epidemiologist whose research includes gun policy. Jonathan Jay is an SPH assistant professor of community health services who studies youth exposure to gun violence. He studied the surge in gun violence during the first year of the pandemic. Rachel Martin (SAR’22, SPH’23) is project manager for SPH’s Research on Innovations for Safety and Equity (RISE) Lab (which Jay leads) and studied racial disparities among children who experienced gun violence. David J. Schonfeld (CAS’83, MED’83) directs the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement.
Q&A
with Ziming Xuan, Jonathan Jay, Rachel Martin, and David Schonfeld
BU Today: Given the rarity of a biological woman shooter, is it likely the killer here had a different motive than the usual male shooter?
Xuan: It is difficult to comment on the killer’s motive and whether gender has played a role in this tragedy. The police have not released information about the motives.
BU Today: How do children traumatized by gun violence ever recover? How do we help them?
Jay: It’s shocking when gun violence happens at schools, because these are typically safe spaces, even in communities that experience a higher burden of “everyday” gun violence.
Every shooting, wherever it happens, has a ripple effect through families and communities. Exposure to gun violence has lasting mental and physical health effects for children, including problems like anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It also affects other outcomes, like educational performance. Child gun victimization has gone up during the pandemic, and racial disparities have gotten even larger—see our recent work. School shootings show that even though some communities bear a disproportionate burden of gun violence, no community is immune.
Martin: Our main finding from our study was that non-White children experienced greater exposure to gun violence than White children, with these racial disparities widening even further during the pandemic. Black children in particular experienced the greatest increase in gun violence exposure throughout the pandemic.
We know that gun violence exposure has mental health impacts on children, whether this be through indirect exposure of witnessing violence or hearing gunshots, or direct exposure of being injured.
Schonfeld: Children generally don’t ever forget these major experiences; as life-changing events, they change who these children are. But they aren’t necessarily “damaged” for life. Some individuals who cope effectively with their reactions, particularly if they have sufficient internal resiliency and external support, can develop coping skills to deal with future adversity, more empathy for the needs of others, a greater sense of a calling to help others in need, or an increase in their spirituality. We call this post-traumatic growth. In fact, many people who enter helping professions–pediatrics, children’s mental health, educators, etc.–do so because of a difficult experience in their own childhood. They recognize the importance of the support they received, or the support they didn’t but should have received, and devote their lives to helping other children.
When they then help children in similar contexts, they may resurface some of their persistent feelings and memories about their own crisis and loss, which is why professional self-care becomes particularly important for those in these helping professions. Those who devote their lives to helping others and who have compassion for children in distress are most apt to feel distress and experience compassion fatigue from providing this support.
Children who are not directly involved in these crises are still impacted by learning about these events in the news. The National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement has a guidance document for parents/caregivers and educators on how to talk with children about shootings in the news that can be freely accessed in English and Spanish. The Coalition has developed a wide range of free video-based and print resources on how to support grieving children. This includes a booklet for parents and other caregivers on how to talk to and support grieving children that is now available for free download in 9 languages.
“Exposure to gun violence has lasting mental and physical health effects for children, including problems like anxiety, depression, and PTSD.”
BU Today: How strict are Tennessee’s gun safety laws? Or does that even matter today, given that people can get guns across state lines?
Xuan: The stringency of Tennessee’s gun control environment was ranked around 29th in one of our prior studies. So, it was not considered among those that have the strongest gun control environment.
Gun control environment does matter in affecting overall gun violence, and also youth access to guns, even if people can get guns across state lines. Tennessee used to be a “shall-issue” state when it comes to concealed firearm permits [meaning authorities must give permits to whomever passes the state’s basic requirements]. Our studies found that “shall-issue” gun policies are associated with significantly higher rates of firearm homicide as compared to “may-issue” states, where enforcement officials may use their judgment in making decisions about whether to approve or deny a permit application. In 2021, Tennessee became a state that required no permit for concealed carry, becoming more lax with its firearm policy environment.
BU Today: If congressional opposition to more federal gun laws is insurmountable, is there any viable strategy—by states, presidential executive order, something else—that should be looked at now?
Xuan: Many legislative efforts are done at the state level, and the many states vary considerably in their firearm control environment, which is characterized by many gun policies as a whole. So, we should work from here. Many advocacy organizations and community groups are instrumental stakeholders in changing the norm and raising awareness in order to convince the lawmakers at the local level.
Jay: We’ve got to respond by expanding access to mental health services, like psychological first aid and cognitive behavioral therapy, in a way that makes them accessible to all children impacted by gun violence, including those who are exposed to it in disinvested urban neighborhoods.
Martin: Because of how broadly firearm violence exposure can impact children, strategies to mitigate trauma can come from a variety of places. After-school programming is a good place to start in both identifying children who have been impacted by gun violence and providing subsequent support in the aftermath of enduring a traumatic event. Psychological first aid is another intervention delivered directly after experiencing an incident of gun violence that can help to direct individuals to resources and further support. Bottom line though: If we don’t address the impacts that structural racism plays in this conversation, or implement any sort of large-scale reforms through common-sense gun regulations, these events will continue to happen and resulting trauma will continue to occur.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.