The Violence of Amnesia
A gun sense advocate’s reflections on the Brown shooting
When the news broke of the shooting at Brown University on December 13, I wasn’t shocked.
Rhode Island has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation! I heard from my friends around me. Brown is such a peaceful place. How could this possibly have happened?
I myself had visited Brown’s tranquil campus to attend a conference only a few weeks before the shooting. I had run barefoot through College Hill in the pouring rain late at night after a gala, insensible heels in hand. In that moment, I remember feeling safe. Could I have imagined this sudden visitation of tragedy then?
A couple of days after the Brown shooting, The Columbia Daily Spectator published an article from the editorial board titled “The Ivy League viewed the Brown shooting as a surprise. It’s a wake-up call.” They claimed that “the University’s heightened response to the shooting at Brown lays bare an unspoken assumption that Ivy League institutions like Brown exist in a protected sphere by virtue of their status.”
According to an article from CNN they cited, the shooting at Brown was actually the 43rd college shooting last year. Spectator’s editorial board argued that the University has been lacking in its empathy towards other school shootings, and that the outpouring of grief on campus in reaction to the shooting at Brown exemplified some reification of hierarchy, some proof that the “elite” only care about an issue when other “elites” are harmed.
I mean no disrespect to Spectator’s editorial board, but I’d like to ask them the following question: Why hadn’t you published about the other 42 college shootings when they happened? What differentiates your coverage from the Columbia administration’s response?
By selectively publishing a letter from the editorial board only after the Brown shooting, Spectator falls victim to the same callousness regarding other shootings that they accuse the University of perpetuating.
It’s easy to point fingers. It’s easy to blame the University for not taking sufficient action. It’s easy to look at problems in the world and blame their persistence on hierarchy and structural ills. It’s easy to virtue-signal by admitting that you are attending an institution like Columbia that might uphold these structures while still benefiting from everything said institution has to offer.
It’s much harder to actually solve those problems.
In my view, the University’s sympathetic response to the shooting at Brown was perfectly justified.
The truth is that, unlike those 42 other colleges cited in that CNN article, Brown is our sister institution. Columbia’s relationship to Brown is fundamentally different from its relationship with any other non-Ivy League university, and it should be so.
A shooting at Brown eliciting a stronger reaction from Columbia’s community should not be extrapolated to mean that Columbia does not care, point-blank, about any other colleges experiencing gun violence. It is a matter of proximity, not of elitist sentiment. That much should have been obvious, and painting the anxiety and grief of the Columbia community as emblematic of some deeper structural issue in which other school shootings aren’t “taken seriously enough” is disingenuous and harmful.
Grief is personal. It can be political, but everyone should be entitled to process their feelings without the looming specter of always acknowledging everyone else who has also suffered. Personal grief is not, and should never be, a race to be standing on the correct side of power politics. When you try to piece together a scared and shattered community, the only correct decision is the one to be compassionate.
It isn’t necessary to intellectualize every tragedy for the sake of appearing more virtuous by proving one’s awareness of systematic oppression. Rarely does this sort of abstraction help the communities harmed; rather, in the aftermath of tragedy, the first and foremost priority should be to participate in mutual aid by offering material and emotional support. That is what the University and other peer institutions tried to do—whether they were successful in assuaging students’ pain is debatable, but their intentions at least seem to be good-faith efforts at providing the aforementioned support.
The real structural issue hindering the “deconstruction” of the “nationwide gun violence epidemic,” as Spectator advocates for, is not the University or our peers lacking compassion for each other. The actual culprit is the American political machine that is addicted to sensationalism and blind to data and pragmatism.
Gun violence is not a new epidemic for anyone living in America. Every year since 2020, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children and teens, taking more lives than car crashes and cancer. Sandy Hook, Parkland, Pulse Nightclub, Uvalde—these names are familiar to anyone with a passing memory of American tragedies in recent years. Several nonprofit organizations have arisen to lobby for gun violence prevention legislation, chief amongst them March for Our Lives, Giffords, and Everytown for Gun Safety.
I joined Everytown for Gun Safety as a student advocate in 2021, after the Atlanta spa shootings. I mostly did legislative legwork, trying to increase turnout amongst the youth voters who had grown up in the shadow of lockdown drills and the pervasive threat of gun violence. Much of the work included writing to representatives, phonebanking for certain bills to be passed, and showing up to town halls, press conferences, and various political fundraisers and events to push prophylactic bills—legislation that would hopefully prevent violence before tragedy struck. This was a painful and mostly thankless endeavor. Most politicians would sigh and say that they had no political momentum, which is really code for there hasn’t been a mass shooting in a while, so nobody will want to risk their necks and pass this. Before the 2023 shooting at Uvalde Elementary, not a single bill I had advocated for was passed.
It was only after the Uvalde shooting that the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was passed. I was on a celebratory Zoom call with Everytown advocates, legislative leads, and other student volunteers. The sense among us at the time was a mix of excitement and trepidation. The first new major federal gun safety law to pass in over 30 years felt like a hard-won victory. Yet, the concessions that had been made to squeeze the bill past a narrow vote had essentially declawed it of anything even remotely controversial. It did not, for example, fully close the Charleston loophole or ban interstate gun trafficking among other important preventative measures.
Several days later, I had coffee with one of my close friends who was also a part of the gun violence prevention movement. She told me that she’d spoken to Rob Wilcox, Everytown’s Federal Legal Director at the time. “He was so happy,” she recalled, “and then he cried, saying there wouldn’t be anything serious on the table again for at least another ten years.”
Meanwhile, criminals would slip past, unhindered by the bill’s unwieldy compromises, and people whose deaths might have been prevented would continue to die. People advocating against gun safety legislation would wave signs and protest: See! Gun control never works!, having been presented only with the unconvincing results of a half-baked bill. It was a victory in name only.
I grew increasingly frustrated. It wasn’t that I stopped caring about the gun violence prevention movement—I saw the data. I saw the unfathomable number of children and teens dying every year from gun violence. I saw the issue’s connections to domestic violence, suicide fatalities, and organized crime. But we were up against the immovable object that was Congress, fueled by America’s unique political cocktail of patchwork defederalization, Biden’s over-reliance on repealable executive orders, and intransigent party-line polarization of common-sense issues.
After the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021, I tried to push Everytown to put its heft behind a federal Disarm Hate bill, which would have barred people convicted of hate crimes from owning guns. It has been proposed almost every year since 2017 and has never been passed. In Oregon, Measure 114—which would expand local permitting jurisdiction, enhance background check enforcement, and ban high-capacity magazines—was passed in 2022 and, facing intractable challenges in court, has yet to be implemented.
How many bodies does it take for a bill to be passed? The answer will always be too many. The answer will always be the younger the bodies, the better. That’s why the Bipartisan Safer Communities Bill was enacted when it was—not after the Pulse nightclub shooting, the Parkland High School shooting, or even the Las Vegas music festival shooting, where 60 people died—but only after 19 elementary-schoolers died at Uvalde.
I didn’t know that the passage of the bill could leave such a bitter taste in my mouth. I didn’t quite have words for what I’d felt, then, the sense that we had paid for its passage in blood. I can name it now: a deep-seated resentment that it had taken so long; a total disillusionment with the state of our government; a unique despair that, if we were to try and close the loopholes that had been carved in, it would require another tragedy to happen and more innocent people to die. Too many bodies.
After Uvalde and the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Bill, I took a hiatus from my role at Everytown and decided to stop reading the news for a while. When I returned, I distanced myself from the legislative work and focused on fundraising for community partners and training new volunteers. The cautious optimism they voiced while I went through the orientation decks meant everything to me. I put on a cherry-red Students Demand Action shirt and false bravado; I said, “We can change the way things are,” and hoped they would believe me. More than that, I hoped, one day, I’d actually believe it again myself.
The reality is that gun violence is not anomalous. Mass shootings only comprise 1 percent of all gun deaths in America, but policymakers don’t care about gun violence prevention until there’s a headline lethal enough for them to justify using their political capital. We are all susceptible to the hunger for novelty, for sensationalism. When news breaks of a shooting, I immediately weigh the number dead and the number injured, and my immediate reaction is usually one of relief—“at least it wasn’t worse.”
In this desensitized environment, is it any wonder why we have not managed to solve this deadly, endemic problem?
We should be pointing fingers at ourselves—not at the University or at each other. That gun violence continues to plague the U.S. is not because our individual communities do not care enough, or because we have collectively not experienced enough “wake-up calls.” We have experienced too many of them and learned to tune them out while our politicians continue to ignore the issue as long as their stasis doesn’t tangibly affect their odds of re-election. The only way to make them listen is to make them afraid of the collective bargaining power of the American voting public: to put our ballots where our grief leads us. Until that happens, no amount of thoughts, prayers, or self-conscious hand-wringing will save us.
Ms. Chen is a sophomore at Columbia College studying linguistics, economics, and East Asian languages & cultures. She is a staff editor and the incoming Deputy Editor for Sundial.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.
What fraction of perpetrators of gun violence - or any violence, really - already have a pretty serious rap sheet? Longer sentences will keep them out of society longer.