Shootings

 Late on Sunday night I got a text message from an old friend asking if I was ok. They had seen the news about a shooting in Charlottesville. Yes, I'm fine. In bed. I looked up the news and saw that three students had been shot on the UVA campus. Classes and everything else was canceled on Monday. And Tuesday. And as the news leaked out and details emerged we all learned more about yet another act of ridiculous gun violence in the United States. The following Monday four people were shot at University of Idaho. The past five years that I've been in China, I'd read about shootings in the States and over breakfast in the university cafeteria would watch coverage on CNN (until they stopped showing CNN in the cafeteria). As an American I'd feel embarrassed and sad. Also bewildered as the problem seemingly only got worse, gets worse. 

On Monday I received twelve text messages from different folks around the States asking if I was ok. I am grateful that people were thinking of me, though its a bit strange when I get more attention for being in the vicinity of shooting than when its my birthday, a week earlier. In 2013 when I was a PhD student there was a shooting at Purdue, one student shooting another. The campus was locked down or "sheltering in place" and I sat in the library reading until the all clear text was sent out. To my memory I don't remember being asked much about it by others. It didn't make the national news as this UVA shooting did, which I guess is partly because these men who got shot were on the football team. The Purdue student was a graduate student TA in physics. 

What struck me about the text messages, so much that I called a friend about it to confirm if what I was feeling/thinking/seeing was based in reality, was that they all seemed to follow a similar pattern. Something like, heard about the shooting, are you ok? Again, I am always happy when someone thinks of me out of the blue. Not complaining. Love my friends and family. But the similarity of messages was striking and it made me think about conventions, that all the shootings in the US, which seemed to get worse and more dramatic, especially during the peak Trump years (though of course they were there before and will be there after); that all the shootings have contributed to the emergence of mass shooting rituals, what one is supposed to do and say when these events happen.

I point this out not to be a cynical asshole, though perhaps I can be this too, but that being away for so long is occasionally disorientating. It's hard to say how much has changed here in the last five years but there are things I notice that seem new to me, which in this case is a form of care that I hadn't experienced previously. An outsider's perspective is a precious thing. It doesn't last long as one acclimates and normalizes whatever one encounters. On the bright side of novelty, I also hadn't experienced Fall in central Virginia before, which is amazing. All the colors. All the changes. 

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Post-script, December 1st: a few days after I wrote the above there was another shooting near where I'm living, this one in a Chesapeake Wal-Mart. Yet another man choosing to buy a gun and shoot people as a means to express his grievances. I read yesterday that the governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, is pushing for more funding into mental health services. Of course, that's what needs to happen. The privatization of the mental health industry across the US has been detrimental. When I lived in Indiana, another red state, a good friend of mine who is no longer with us had a psychotic break. This is a longer story, but the short version is that during the peak of his break he was wandering around the streets of Lafayette in bare feet yelling at others and himself as folks in this state sometimes do. Instead of being taken to a non-existent Indiana public mental health facility he was taken to jail for a week. Instead of helping him to find a way back from his break he had the shit beat out of him by both inmates and jailers and was put into solidary confinement. This is not how to treat those with mental illness. He was never the same since then and passed this last September. I miss my friend and am angry at how preventable all of this was. 

Youngkin's pledge to put more money into public mental health is a good thing. However, when asked about gun controls he spouted the typical Republican response, that now was not the time to be thinking about regulation but the time to mourn. Utter bullshit. The Chesapeake Wal-Mart shooting is a text book case as to why we need more gun control: the deeply repressed man who did the killing bought the gun hours before. It should not be that easy for someone who is having a bad day or week or month to obtain lethal weapons. It's as simple as that. For sure if there were more mental health services available or more generally, if there was more care (mental, physical, financial, educational, spiritual, etc.) available in the United States; for sure that could have made a difference. But there isn't because powerful Republican white Christians believe that people need Jesus more than they need government. In lieu of this fantasy, more laws on guns will save lives.