Karen Gross: As school shootings continue, college students must ask if they're next

Scene at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, when heavily armed 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot to death 26 people, including 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. Before driving to the school, he shot to death his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In a matter of seconds, a student at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif., injured and killed a handful of his fellow students and then shot himself. He died shortly thereafter. We read about such incidents and lament their happening. We see television footage and peruse articles and social media postings. We mourn for the students injured and killed and worry about their families and friends.

And we wonder why this shooting happened. And we wonder why so many shootings happen.

Despite the usual outpouring of support for survivors and displays of empathy, those of us in higher education often don’t reflect on how all these K-12 shootings can and likely will affect us directly. We don’t consider how high school shootings will impact the college students we now have and the students we will have in the future—especially if we are geographically separated. It is as if we see the K-12 shootings as something that happens “over there” with “younger” students; meanwhile, we worry about a myriad of issues on our own campuses including potential shootings on campus, but also drug overdoses and sexual harassment.

The story that struck a chord

One particular story in the Los Angeles Times that got my attention. It was about how the shooting at the high school in Santa Clarita affected the students at a nearby elementary school. These younger students were preparing for a Thanksgiving pageant. The image of youngsters in their Pilgrim costumes crying upon learning of the shooting and being held in place at their school is fraught with irony: a supposed celebration of freedom and togetherness (even if sanitized by a retelling of our history with Native Americans) is disturbed by violence. No “Thanks” in this planned Thanksgiving pageant. While the emotions differed among the younger and somewhat older students at the elementary school, they were affected, as were their parents, according to the article and other reports.

Thinking about that story made me realize that many in higher education (with some exceptions of course) do not realize that trauma travels with a student forward in time. And it is as if trauma were in a suitcase and with the passage of time, that suitcase grows. As and when new traumas occur or there are new triggering events, the trauma suitcase expands and the holder of the suitcase experiences their autonomic nervous system on high alert.

As one author quoted in a recent article on student mental health stated, trauma sits in an invisible backpack that a student carries. What is in that suitcase/backpack affects not just the student him or herself; it affects those around the student, including those who teach them. That’s where secondary and vicarious trauma occur.

In sum, the reach of shootings is wide and deep and continuous.

Trauma and college students

The students who have experienced shootings will, one hopes, someday enter postsecondary education. But the institutions that will be serving them need to know that the trauma of the applicants, and later of enrolled students, does not get parked at the proverbial gate to higher education. And for those entering a residential college, with the transition into a dorm, the challenges are even greater: new roommate, new living situation, new location. For all new college students, there is a sense of disquiet when the new collegiate experience starts, and they are the “newbies,” even if they are enthusiastic, engaged and willing to learn.

We often use orientations at the start of college to inform students on a wide range of matters, including sexual policies, drug use, alcohol and mental health. We provide IDs, and paperwork is completed. We give out swipe cards. There are financial aid or bursar meetings. Residential assistants hold get-togethers. There are often placement tests.

And, sadly, we think students are absorbing all this, even when tempered with “get-to-know-you games.”

What is happening for many students is that their autonomic nervous systems are on high alert. They cannot really hear, absorb and process what they are being told. They are trying to find their way to the bathroom and are worried about their interpersonal and academic success. They may think they flunked the placement test. They didn’t really understand the financial aid repayment options. They wonder if there were people there who would like them. They may be lonely or feel separation anxiety.

While student life personnel may deal effectively with some of these issues, faculty tend to just launch right into their subjects as if being in college is anticipated, expected and everyone is ready to roll ahead in the disciplines of the courses they select. Then students receive a syllabus, which is often long and the name itself is off-putting for some. We assign massive reading and ask questions to which students don’t know the answers or are reluctant to answer.

And that’s just the first week.

Transitions are not our strong suit

Here’s my point: Going to college is a transition and if you have ever been traumatized in your past, that event was your first transition. You transitioned from not being traumatized to being traumatized. And, once traumatized, other transitions kick off negative signals since the first transition was bad, and tell the autonomic nervous system to be on high alert.

For students who have been traumatized in the past, who have experienced attachment disorders or other trauma symptomology, there is unease. Whether or not students recognize what is happening to them, something is happening inside of them. And those adults within the college (not the new students who are adults of which there are a growing number) are often unaware of or unable to recognize trauma symptomology. They attribute what they see to a myriad of other factors, including that the quality of students is declining with the need to have better high school preparation and the decline of values in a generation. Perhaps the students are too “snowflaky” and their parents too involved.

One shooting, many consequences for students

The students in Santa Clarita have been traumatized by the shooting; the impact of the shooting on each student will differ depending on their background in terms of family stability and family dysfunction, prior trauma from other events including death, illness, accidents and injuries. The degree of closeness to the deceased and injured and the shooter are all issues that will affect these students. How the trauma and its symptoms are handled by their school and within their community are issues too, particularly when the school reopens and the details of the events are disclosed.

And anniversaries will occur and recur. Those are inevitabilities.

I worry a lot about those students who will head off to college soon, whether from Santa Clarita or elsewhere. Will this tragedy change where they apply? Will it change how they feel about leaving home? And once they choose a school, how easy will it be to adjust? Do they need a year off to work and reflect and process? Will they feel safe in a new place and space? Will they feel cared about by some adult? Will they have an outlet in which to share how the memories of the shooting keep flooding back at different times of day and night? Will they want a seat at orientation near a door? Will they want a dorm room on a high floor or a low floor?

Then, consider these possible other reactions of the survivors. Will they not want to attend classes in the morning (around the time of the shooting)? Where will they sit in the classroom? Will they be looking for exits? How will they respond to dorm alarms and other loud sounds and future drills? Will these survivors be able to manage stress? What if a student on their new campus is injured or killed or becomes ill? When the shooting occurred, what were they doing actually and can they do whatever that was again? Will a quadrangle ever feel totally safe?

As to the elementary school students, they will proceed through the educational pipeline and hopefully, many will land in colleges at some point in the next decade or so. They will not have forgotten the shooting or if they have, they have only forgotten it in their conscious memory. What has happened to them in the decade between the shooting and entering college? Any more trauma? Yes, of course. There will be other school shootings and deaths and injuries and car accidents.

Our trauma suitcases travel with us

Here’s the point: The school shooting will eventually land on college campuses in the invisible backpacks of students. Regrettably, most colleges are not trauma-informed nor trauma-responsive. And folks will be shocked when these students struggle or barely stay in school or drop out or stop out. Their learning, their memories, their engagement can all be impacted.

It’s time to see the trauma around us and how it affects education. And we need educators who can and will be ready, willing and able to be trauma-responsive at the university level. Are you confident that will happen? I’m not. That’s why this shooting makes the need to address trauma across the educational pipeline not a luxury, but a necessity.

The time to start is now.

Karen Gross is former president of Southern Vermont College and senior policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape. Her new book, Educating for Trauma, will be released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press.

Don Pesci: Sandy Hook massacre revisited and reanalyzed

Roses featuring images of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

VERNON, Conn.

Documents just released years after a shooter murdered 20 students, 6 teachers and his mother, and then killed himself, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, have been made available to Connecticut politicians and the general public in answer to a legal action brought by a persistent Hartford Courant.

The documents had been carefully tucked away for five years and clearly point to the social and mental deficiencies of the shooter.

All reports should have been released soon after the shooter’s suicide, because none of the information contained therein could have prejudiced any legal action. It is impossible to put a dead mass-shooter on trial for murder. In the absence of the necessary data unearthed above, a public trial of sorts, some of it sprinkled with absurd speculations, was conducted entirely in the mass media, and eventually one of the weapons used in the mass slaughter, an AR15 semi-automatic rifle, was pronounced guilty and banned in Connecticut.

Arguing that “something must be done” to prevent such slaughters in the future, decision makers in Connecticut banned some weapons, aspersed the state with their emotional solidarity with the victims, passed hastily constructed anti-gun legislation and congratulated themselves on their moral acuity.

The released documents, the Los Angeles Times noted, “which had been kept from the public until now, were part of the mass of writings, records and computer files seized by detectives from the Lanza's home after the killings. The Courant mounted a five-year quest to obtain the unreleased documents, eventually winning an appeal before the Connecticut Supreme Court.”

Even though we know that the Devil resides in details, not everyone was thrilled with the release of the documentation. The story, one letter writer noted, could not be justified because it “exalted the killer” and the rest of the country, the writer mused, “are looking for articles that uplift, as well as inform and educate.” Another writer slammed the paper for “choosing the sensational low road to infamy by publishing on page one… the Newtown killer’s writings, thoughts and other tripe… The killer has no place in our collective memory – ever.” Yet another writer winced, “We do not need to know.”

In an editor’s note, The Hartford Courant pointed out, “Understanding what a mass killer was thinking not only paints a clearer picture of the individual, it helps us identify and understand red flags that could be part of a prevention formula for future mass shootings.”

Several weeks after the shooting, Connecticut Commentary noted, “Everyone in Connecticut whose hearts have been bruised by the loss of life in Sandy Hook -- that is, everyone in Connecticut – is praying for solutions that solve the problems of people who have been bludgeoned by reality. A political milking of the crisis helps only the milkers.”

Those solutions were not forthcoming for a number of reasons: The Devil managed to hold the details close to his chest. Some politicians were, it turned out, very much interested in milking the Sandy Hook cow in such a way as to clamp restrictions on firearms, thus benefiting their future political prospects; and Connecticut’s media, though it tried mightily, had failed to wrest from the Devil the details upon which a real solution to a real problem might have been proposed. The so called “red flags” flourished by the Courant in its own attempt to uncover pertinent details were fluttering six years ago, when the psychotic shooter murdered the children and staff of Sandy Hook Elementary School.

We know now – and knew then – the red flags that signaled mental distress.

PsychDrugShooters.com provides a detailed list of school shootings connected to shooters who have taken drugs. Their brief report on the Sandy Hook shooter notes that “While Lanza’s toxicology report showed no traces of anti-psychotic medications, sources say he was prescribed the antidepressant Celexa by the Yale Child Study Center in his early teens. Lanza also took Lexapro for a short time as a teen, but stopped after his mother reported symptoms such as dizziness, sweating, slurred speech and the inability to open his cereal box.”

A piece in the New Yorker, which draws on an interview with the father of the shooter, asserts that the shooter took no further psychotropic drugs following his reaction to Lexapro. Indeed doctors and nurses who treated the shooter speculate that the shooter's psychosis worsened because of his refusal to take therapeutic drugs.

Clearly, the shooter was anti-social and mentally disturbed. The father believes that his son’s Asperger diagnosis, though it may have been correct, masked a more dangerous psychosis. Neither the father nor the mother of the shooter, who had retreated into an impenetrable shell, expected violence from their son.

They were wrong. But the data suggest an that people who thought that the myriad of gun restrictions imposed after the murders could prevent further instances of this kind were also wrong.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

Conn. gun crackdown seems to work

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

After a lunatic young gunman murdered 20 first graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, Nutmeg State legislators in  2013 broadened the definition of “assault rifle’’ and the sale of gun magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. State law also requires a permit to buy any gun or ammunition. And Connecticut has a registry of weapon offenders and a universal background check system.

Ron Piniciaro, executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, told WNPR that the state had 53 homicides with guns in 2016, way down from the 92 before the new law took effect.  But then, southern New England has long had among the lowest gun-death rates in America.

Interestingly, reports WNPR, gun sales are still rising in the state. But Mike Lawlor, Connecticut’s undersecretary for criminal-justice policy and planning, says the rigorous permitting process keeps down the violence.

There have been variants of the Connecticut legislation promoted in Congress but as long as the National Rifle Association, which acts as chief lobbyist for the gun-manufacturing industry, holds sway there, don’t expect anything. Polls suggest that most Americans want tougher gun laws, but that counts for little on Capitol Hill!

Gun-control advocates lack the lobbying and campaign-contribution money of the weapons industry and, whatever the opinion polls show, gun lovers vote more intensely than do gun-control folks. And the gun lobby and its servants in Congress and the White House are far more politically ruthless than are gun-control people. For that matter, on a range of issues from health care to taxes to the environment, the majority of the public seems to favor slightly left-of-center positions, if national opinion polls mean much. But they vote at considerably lower percentages than do people on the right. They get the government they deserve.

Chris Powell: The Alex Jones controversy: Too much deference to Sandy Hook families

Deference to the families of the schoolchildren and educators murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012 has gone much too far.

The latest manifestation of this deference was the decision of Connecticut's only NBC television affiliate, WVIT-TV30 in West Hartford, not to broadcast Megyn Kelly's Sunday night interview with Alex Jones, provocateur of Infowars and promoter of the brazen lie that the school massacre was a hoax. The families of the victims had urged both NBC and WVIT to cancel the broadcast, and according to an internal memorandum obtained by other news organizations, the station chose not to air the interview because "the wounds" of the massacre "have yet to heal."

But wounds so profound never heal. It would be something else if the TV station decided not to broadcast the interview because Jones is just a huckster and, in interviewing him, Kelly became just a huckster, too, or because publicizing Jones even to debunk him would only glorify him with the perpetually deluded.

But instead the station decided that the Sandy Hook families should hold a veto on journalism and political discourse in Connecticut, or that the station should give them such a veto rather than risk criticism for offending them. Of course, nobody had to watch the interview, but the station denied most of Connecticut any choice. Canceling the broadcast, the station essentially decided that the school massacre was and remains proprietary, the exclusive property of the relatives of the victims.

But the massacre was and is not proprietary at all. To the contrary, it was the worst thing that has happened in Connecticut since the Hartford circus fire, in 1944, or, since the fire was an accident rather than a deliberate act, maybe the worst thing that has happened in Connecticut since the massacre of the Pequot tribe in Groton in 1637. The school massacre horrified and pained everyone in the state, and still pains everyone, even if no one can be pained as much as those who lost a loved one by it.

But no amount of pain necessarily vindicates the politics of the pained, and the politics of the Sandy Hook families has often been questionable. They persuaded the General Assembly and Gov. Dannel Malloy to weaken Connecticut's freedom-of-information law by obstructing access to official photos and videos of homicide victims, thereby facilitating official mistakes and misconduct and enabling hoaxers like Jones.

The litigation  that the families have brought to hold firearms manufacturers responsible for abuse of their products contradicts federal law and would nullify the right to bear arms. Now they want the appropriateness of journalism to be determined by hurt feelings, and a weak-kneed news organization has capitulated. Where does that end? 

Use 'a well-regulated militia'

Maybe something good apart from more civil political discourse will come from the shootings at the Republican congressional baseball team's practice in Alexandria, Va. For the incident demonstrated the shortcomings of even the most compelling gun-control proposals, such as requiring background checks for all gun purchases and exchanges, proposals that would have had no bearing on what happened in Alexandria.

So what policy response would be relevant here when guns are so pervasive in society and likely to remain so? How about that "well-regulated militia" cited by the Second Amendment -- trained and tested civilians to be armed in their everyday life and prepared to defend the innocent just as the Capitol Police officers on duty in Alexandria were?

 Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: 'The Talk' about cops, and enough Newtown already

MANCHESTER, Conn. Fathers of black teenage boys are writing resentfully about the formal talk they believe they must have with their sons about how to behave in the presence of police officers -- super-respectful and careful -- because police operate on hair triggers with young black men, considering them far more threatening than other people.

Call it a prejudice or a stereotype, but a visit to any criminal court or prison will show that it's not irrational. Young black men commit a hugely disproportionate amount of crime. Whatever is to blame for this, slavery or the welfare system, which denies fathers to children, it isn't the police. After teachers, police are just the first to get stuck with the consequences.

Any black boy who has a father to give him "The Talk" is luckier than most black boys -- indeed, luckier than most fatherless boys regardless of race. But necessary as it may be, "The Talk" should stress that while some police officers are racist, most are not, and that even those officers who are especially suspicious of young black men are responding to the racial disproportion in crime.

Of course this stereotyping of young black men isn't fair -- no fairer than the stereotyping of cops as racist predators.

But while there will always be misconduct by police, at least there is redress for it -- at police headquarters and in court -- and regardless of their occasional misconduct, the police are always more sinned against than sinning as nearly half the country's children grow up without two parents and without much idea about how they must behave.

* * *

About $45 million in government grants and charitable contributions, The Hartford Courant reports, have been bestowed on Newtown, social-service agencies, and survivors to remediate the consequences of the massacre of 20 students and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School two years ago. Can that astounding sum be questioned?

After all, it's hard to see how much more can be done by $45 million than could have been done by $26 million, which would have provided a million in compensation for every devastated family.

Meanwhile, murders and mayhem remain daily events in Connecticut's cities, particularly Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven, without any organized financial compensation of the survivors or concern about civic trauma. Why the difference?

Part of it is that Newtown's victims were mostly innocent children. But the victims in the cities are all somebody's children, too, some of them also innocent, and even those who were not so innocent shouldn't have been murdered.

Newtown also may get so much sympathy and financial aid because such horrible things aren't supposed to happen in white middle-class towns to people who lived productively and  away from the underclass. No, horrible things are supposed to happen only to underclass people in the cities. It's not that underclass people deserve it but rather that they should expect it -- and indeed the rest of Connecticut takes city mayhem for granted, part of the normal order of things, as it long has been.

Yes, for the last half century government has appropriated billions in the name of remediating poverty in Connecticut's cities, far more than has been appropriated for Newtown. But little has been remediated. The cities are more of a mess than when that remediation began and as traumatized as Newtown, just less articulate about it.

But Newtown keeps getting not only cash it really doesn't need but also government studies that will never be able to track the massacre beyond the peculiar circumstances of a disturbed young man who in a few years had already gotten more professional attention than most city residents get in a lifetime.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: Conn. GOP losses will lead to more corruption

You don’t have to love me. I’m a porcupine

--Conn. Gov.  Dannel Malloy

VERNON, Conn.

There are two ways to lose an argument: by not saying enough or by saying too much. Likewise, there are two ways to lose an election. The Republican nominee for Connecticut governor, Tom Foley, cannot be accused of having said too much in his attempt to wrest the gubernatorial office from Democratic Governor Malloy. Mr. Malloy, on the other hand, has never in his long political career said too little.

Mr. Malloy’s second gubernatorial campaign and President Obama’s second presidential campaign were remarkably similar. Of the two, fortune -- as well as lots of money, a great  ground game, sharper demagoguery, a media used to genuflecting before incumbents and a progressive ideology that has not yet wearied the general public in Connecticut – smiled broadly on Mr. Malloy, while baring its teeth towards Mr. Obama. National progressives lost the Senate and sent Joni Ernst to the chamber where she will no doubt “make the pigs squeal.”

The headline on the Drudge Report early the morning after was celebratory: “REPUBLICANS TAKE CONGRESS +7 +8? +9? SENATE, THE DEM DISASTER.”

In South Carolina, Tim Scott was appointed by Governor Nikki Haley to the U.S. Senate after Republican Jim DeMint resigned to join the Heritage Foundation. Now returned to the Senate, Mr. Scott is the first black candidate to win a race in South Carolina since just after the Civil War and the first African-American senator from the South since Reconstruction.

Governor Haley more than a year ago warmly embraced PTR, formerly a Bristol, Conn.-based semi-automatic weapons manufacturer fleeing Mr. Malloy’s thrown quills. Malloy said, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass murder that gun manufacturers want “to sell as many guns to as many people as possible—even if they are deranged, even if they are mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background. They don’t care. They want to sell guns.” Sturm Ruger, of Southport Conn.,  had at the same time begun t expanding its business in Mayodan, bringing 500 new jobs to North Carolina over the next five years.

 

Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Malloy are progressive politicians, which is to say both tend to yield to autocratic leftist impulses. To put it another way, progressives, as a rule, do not fancy trickle-up democracy. In Mr. Obama’s case, the chief executive, faced with a legislature one house of which was dominated by the opposition party, simply misused the constitutional prerogatives of his office to redraft legislation by choosing which portions of bills passed into law he would or would not execute.

Mr. Malloy does not have this problem, both houses of Connecticut’s General Assembly having been dominated for decades by members of his own party. Under the Malloy administration, Connecticut has what might be termed unitary party problems.

In a governing system in which power is shared between the two major parties, political corruption is more easily rooted out. In a tripartite system in which the balance of power is evenly distributed between the three departments of government – the executive, the legislative and the judiciary – corruption is more visible because there are more competitive eyes on the ground to report such indelicate corrupt activities that political flesh is heir to.

A legislative branch in which both parties share power is more keenly aware of corruption and more ethically ordered. Disclosure is the most formidable enemy of corruption, and disclosure is more likely in a legislature in which power and authority is shared between the parties. In a political system in which the legislative and executive power is vested in a single party, corruption – politically defined as non-democratic, authoritarian governance – tends to become the well hidden rule rather than the exception.

In Connecticut, where Democrats once again have swept the boards, back room deals, questionable elections, opacity in government and the arrogance of unchecked power – Mr. Malloy is expert in throwing his quills at those who presume to question him – will be the rule for the next few years. Connecticut’s  congressional Delegation, all Democrats, will be returning to a Congress masterfully captured by Republicans. The raucous voices of Connecticut’s two U.S. senators and their influence over congressional events will be muted for the last two years of Mr. Obama’s lame-duck presidency; the media influence on the Malloy administration will be similarly ineffectual. The few contrarians in the state’s largely pro-status quo Media conglomerate -- those few, that brave band of brothers – had better be on the lookout for the sharp quills.

Don Pesci  (donpesci@att.net) is a  political writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.