The Root Causes of Senseless Violence |
I write this from the front of a Columbia classroom in which about 60 first-year college students are taking the final exam for Frontiers of Science. Yes, it’s a Sunday, but the class is required of all Columbia College students and so having the exam on the weekend ensures that there won’t be conflicts with the exams for other courses they are taking. The 60 students in my classroom are a fraction of the nearly 740 taking the course this semester.
The exam began at 2 pm, less than 24 hours after the shooting at Brown University, and just hours after many of us learned about the shooting in Sydney, Australia. Given these devastating events, I offered this morning that anyone who was adversely affected could take the exam later in the week or take what at Columbia is called an incomplete, which means that they would take the final exam at the start of next semester and only then be assigned a grade. Only about two dozen students took this offer, some sharing personal stories about having close friends from childhood or high school among the victims at Brown. It makes sense that the high-achieving students that Columbia attracts would have high-achieving friends at Brown. Some also hail from Providence and have had impacted family members.
It's hard to process now, as my students are going through a 30-page exam (there are lots of figures and tables in it, plus spaces for them to add their answers, but yes, it’s a long exam) the senselessness of mass shootings in general, with the one in a classroom full of primarily first-year college students going through a Saturday afternoon final exam review for Principles of Economics weighing heavily as I sit here. Many of the students in Frontiers of Science also take a course here named Principles of Economics. The parallel is heartbreaking. I cannot imagine what I would have done had a shooter walked in on the review I held just a few days ago. I don’t think any of us can, except for those who have experienced mass shootings themselves. Sadly, it seems that at Brown there are two students with such prior experiences.
As I look at my students, still busily working on the exam, and recall the joys I’ve experienced teaching them and getting to know them this semester, I feel that we owe them so much more than what’s on offer at the moment.
As is typical in American society, there will be thoughts and prayers, and arguments about gun control and how we haven’t done enough to ensure that the incomprehensible violence does not happen again. I was in my final year of college when Columbine happened in 1999. I remember seeing the news in the townhouse near the Caltech campus that I shared with three housemates. We were devastated then. More than 25 years after Columbine, the feeling of devastation is sadly familiar, but also insidious.
The fact that the second shooting of the weekend took place in Australia, a country with strict gun laws, complicates the debate somewhat, demonstrating that this is not just about gun control. Sure, more gun control in the US would help; after all, our rate of mass shootings per capita is far higher than in all of the other developed countries. But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused........