IDEOLOGY IN ACTION:

[E]liminating this kind of violence requires more than a single-minded approach, according to Ron Avi Astor, professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime expert on school violence. 

Grid: I feel like we are constantly witnessing mass shootings, and mass shootings at schools, and nothing seems to change to prevent them. Why? What could we do?

Ron Avi Astor: There have been shootings in the United States for a long time. There's been school shootings for decades as well -- not all of them were covered by the media. They were framed as gang killings, or as being in the inner city.

What's happening now is that the media is covering it in a very, very intense way. Everyone in the world -- not just the U.S. -- knows this is happening just a few minutes after it happens, so there's a worldwide consciousness now that never existed before. And that's where we should be -- we should be in a place where we're aware. But with a lot of forms of violence in America, we've had a pretty violent past. The world was not more peaceful 50 years ago or 100 years ago. That's just a myth. It's not true.

The second big piece of this that's obvious is that firearms have progressed to the degree where you can kill a whole lot of people, very fast. And they're mass-produced, and in the U.S. almost anyone who wants one can have one. You have access and availability. In the past if someone wanted to do this, it would be difficult. You'd have a knife, or club, or other weapons that aren't as lethal. So that's the second big piece.

There's a third piece that the media isn't really talking about: We've framed it as deranged individuals [shooting people]; people with mental health problems, people with hate. But we haven't really looked at this as a form of suicide or homicide in the way that we should. The reason why it's important is because the individuals who are trying to do this want exactly what you and I are doing now: They want to shake the world, and they want to have their names live forever.

How we cover shooters and how we talk about the victims is a big piece. The research shows us we should be talking about the victims, and not even say the shooter's name or who they are. Because that actually encourages [shooters] to keep doing it.

The last piece is ideology. If you look at other countries, mass atrocities do happen -- namely for political reasons. They happen all over in South America, in parts of the Middle East, where people feel justified for political, social, economic or other reasons to kill innocent people.

Here in the U.S., we don't talk about this last component very strongly. The fact is that we have a lot of people in this country with ideologies that they believe are true. It could be QAnon, or Aryan Nation stuff -- it could be a lot of different things. And I think we haven't really as a country confronted that last piece as much as we could.

Taking away guns alone wouldn't do it all. It would make a big difference, but we have to do a very deep moment of self-reflection. All of these issues require deep discussion and reflection about our country and who we want to be. Does being free mean that you are free to take a gun and shoot up an elementary school?

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