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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. It's good to have you with us because it's February 14th. Now my youngest is eight today. From the day she was born, we always thought it was so special to welcome new life on Valentine's Day, a day set aside for some special appreciation for our loved ones, which is also part of what made what happened four years ago today even more painful.

Sheriff: "17 people lost their lives, 12 people within the building."

Math teacher Jim Gard: "We heard the police coming down the hallway, banging on doors."

Parkland survivor: "I thought I was going to die."

Teacher Melissa Falkowski: "17 casualties, 17 people that aren't going to return to their families. To me, that's totally unacceptable."

Melissa Harris-Perry: For an entire generation of young people, this day is marred by the memory of what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14th, 2018.

Sheriff: "Just pray for this city, pray for this school, the parents, the folks that lost their lives. It's a horrific, horrific day."

Melissa Harris-Perry: After the initial shock of the deadly shooting, attention turned to the message being delivered with painful clarity by the Parkland survivors.

Student Emma Gonzalez: "All these people should be at home grieving, but instead we are up here, standing together, because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see."

Melissa Harris-Perry: It felt like maybe this could represent an actual turning point on gun violence legislation. If only lawmakers would listen to the voices of the students who saw their classmates murdered.

Student Cameron Kasky: "Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA?"

Sen. Rubio: "No. The answer to the question is that people buy into my agenda."

Melissa Harris-Perry: The parents who lost everything that day.

Parent Andrew Pollack: "It doesn't make sense. Fix it. There should've been one school shooting, and we should have fixed it, and I'm pissed, because my daughter, I'm not going to see her again."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Some local legislators were paying attention. According to Stateline, 50 laws were passed, restricting access to guns between February and August of 2018. Fourteen of the states where those laws were passed have Republican governors, but at the federal level, little changed.

In the first year of the Biden administration, with Democrats in control of Congress, no significant federal legislation on guns was passed. Data compiled by the gun safety advocacy organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, shows that nationwide, there were more than 200 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2021, led to 49 deaths and over a hundred injuries.

Now all this hour, we're going to be reflecting on what has changed and what has stayed distressingly the same in the aftermath of Parkland and other school shootings. We wanted to start by examining the psychological and emotional toll of these shootings, both on the survivors and really on all of us but especially on our young people who go to class every day, aware of the risks of gun violence in schools.

Prof. Laura Wilson: I'm Laura Wilson. I'm an associate professor at the University of Mary Washington.

Dave Cullen: I'm Dave Cullen. I'm the author of the books, Columbine and Parkland: Birth of a Movement.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I ask Dave, what is different in the aftermath of Parkland compared to Columbine?

Dave Cullen: With Columbine, it was just completely blindsided them. So many of them the day after talked about it being like a movie because that's all they could conceive of. They never saw this coming so that was the additional really shocking horror, this whole new thing to be afraid of in your life and to be terrified of like, oh, it's not safe to go to school. Whereas the Parkland kids, some of them told me they were expecting it, and all kids to some degree now, they know the monsters are real. It's still horrible when it does, but it's not also the blindsiding. Just so many of the Columbine kids went into the numb phase of PTSD, which a lot of the experts I talked to was that was really unusual, that high level because it was so staggering to them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I can remember so distinctly Columbine, every frame of every piece of film that we saw four weeks afterward. I could remember that sense almost like a post 911 sense of having entered into a new part of our nation and thinking things won't be the same after this. That as horrifying as each one has been, there's somehow been almost a diminishing shock to finding our schools as spaces of mass shootings.

Dave Cullen: After the one in Texas, Sutherland Springs, I think, I was with some friends who are also journalists, and a good friend of mine in the back seat was on her phone and said, "Oh, there's been another mass shooting." I was like, "Oh, God. Where?" She said, "Texas." I said, "Oh," and I changed the subject. I couldn't just go there. I just can't handle this again.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Wilson, tell me what we know about the effects on survivors in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.

Prof. Laura Wilson: To start, we know that exposure level is associated with the risk for post-trauma difficulties. What that means is that people who were physically injured or felt like their life was in danger are going to be at higher risk for long-term issues than an issue who maybe is more removed from the incident. Some of them were common reactions or things like recurrent thoughts about the shooting or nightmares or feeling on edge, whereas other people might experience depression or anxiety or substance abuse. In the hours or days after a mass shooting, almost every person who was directly exposed to the event is going to experience some level of difficulty.

The good news is that people are actually really resilient, and over time, you see most people's symptoms dissipate, but of course, we need to keep in mind that there is a subset of people that experience lingering difficulties. The impact of a mass shooting isn't just isolated to the people who were directly exposed. It definitely will trickle out into the larger community. What we see in the field of clinical psychology is that the community's level of well-being definitely decreases, and with the level of media of exposure that we get to these types of incidents, the community really is all of us.

We see individuals live-tweeting when they're sheltering in place, and we're hearing the fear and hearing about their experiences, and it gives us a level of exposure that decades ago we didn't have. We certainly do see that the impact is much larger than just those directly physically impacted in the moment.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is this different than other kinds of traumas? In part of you're talking about this I'm thinking about the experience of 911 or even of an interpersonal trauma that might occur as a result of abuse or violence, is there something unique at all about the mass shooting experience, and maybe, particularly in the long term about that sense of vulnerability?

Prof. Laura Wilson: Yes, absolutely. There's a huge difference. Just as one example, the rates of chronic mental health difficulties after a mass shooting are much higher when we compare them to natural disasters like hurricanes. Now, that isn't to downplay the mental health impact of other forms of trauma. Those certainly are significant in and of themselves but instead, I think it actually highlights how substantial the psychological toll of mass shootings is. The reason that is, is mass shootings are a result of a person or people trying to inflict as much harm, pain, and death on a group of people as possible.

That form of violence is associated with more significant changes in thoughts, and so it's those thoughts driving the mental health impact. Mass shootings are going to disrupt how people think about the world or think about other people or themselves, and so it's that interpersonal malicious nature of the incident that's going to amplify the psychological consequences in survivors and the impacted community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dave, as you were talking earlier, you were saying the Columbine kids or the Parkland kids. Now, the Parkland young people are still largely young people, but the Columbine kids aren't kids anymore, and I'm wondering what we know about them as adults.

Dave Cullen: In the first year or two, I was most concerned about the kids who'd gone through it and seem so much shattered, and I wasn't paying as much attention perhaps to the adults, but they didn't seem as crushed by it. I'm talking about parents, teachers, and so forth. Those two lines in the graph crossed at some point, maybe five, eight years out, where the kids, by and large, got past it, and actually by the fifth anniversary, I know that, like I talked to a lot of kids, the news stories for the fifth year anniversary started to be about them getting past it.

Then I talked to some kids much later, like Val Schnurr. Ten years out, I was talking to her, and she said she started avoiding the media five years out, because she wasn't doing better and felt embarrassed. There was another contingent people who still took much longer about the 10 years she was. Really, the kids would tell me that in their own encounters with each other when they would come back for reunions or whatever, see each other again, totally like seven, eight, nine years, most of them had moved on, and it was really telling to them that they no longer even brought it up, and they actually didn't want to talk about it anymore. They were just done talking about it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering, Professor Wilson, what is the actual psychological process that isn't necessarily about our conscious minds thinking forward to it, but that triggers us to re-experience some aspects of that trauma?

Prof. Laura Wilson: I think there's a bit of a misconception that recovery after a trauma is linear, meaning that with every hour, every day, every couple of weeks, you should be improving whatever that means for that person, and that any improvements are then maintained, and you only get better, but in actuality, what we see is that symptoms come and go, new ones develop, you might get new sources of support and so some symptoms might go away.

One of the biggest triggers to use that word is the anniversary of the trauma, and so that is absolutely something that we see after a mass shooting that throughout the year and years to come, there will be moments where the individual's functioning is probably going to experience some changes, and so it's important that survivors know that because they often experience some shame around that thinking that, "I was doing better, what have I done wrong."

I think that that's first of all, just important for people to realize. I think it's important for the larger community to know that, that you really need to be patient with individuals while they're figuring out with their new normal is. I think that that's also an important thing to realize is that these individuals will never go back to their pre-shooting self, that they're going to need to figure out what life looks like for them moving forward, and that goes for any form of trauma. You never know truly who you were before it happened, and so it's figuring out how to navigate it in the future.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Based on you having gotten to know these young folks, and what you've learned in writing the books, what is that communities could do, and in fact, the broader nation to better support survivors of mass shootings?

Dave Cullen: One that I always come back to is don't rush the headlong. I think that the single best thing you could do is just be aware of how the things you're saying might be perceived. Believe me, they are drowning in advice. They don't want your "help", and which all they see is pushing them to like, why don't you get past this already.

Prof. Laura Wilson: Yes, really, I agree. I think the number one word needs to be patient. What I always hear from impacted communities is they're surprised how quickly everybody else moves on. In the hours and days after a mass shooting, they're at the forefront of media attention, but typically, that's when they want privacy. They want to grieve. They want to pause and figure out what happened. They don't want the attention.

It's in the weeks, the months, and the years later, when they've had a time to pause and catch their breath that they probably do want to have a dialogue and would appreciate some support then, and by then people have moved on to the next major news story. To me, it's patience and just making sure that we're in it for the long run to support them in whatever they need.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Dave Cullen is the author of the books, Columbine and Parkland, and Laura Wilson is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington and editor of The Wiley Handbook of the Psychology of Mass Shootings.

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