After Uvalde, What Now?

Criminology professor Adam Lankford has spent his career studying acts of mass violence. He shares his insight in a Q&A.

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Every time, it’s the same.

Innocent people are shot and killed in a senseless act of violence. Uvalde. Buffalo. Parkland. El Paso. Newtown. Blacksburg. Orlando. Las Vegas. Before the blood is dry and victims are identified, politicians on one side of the gun debate rush to microphones, urging implementation of possibly unconstitutional new firearm restrictions that may or may not have prevented the barbarity that just transpired. Their opponents, meanwhile, have sweeping thoughts on every aspect of the massacre—except the weapon with which it was committed. In Uvalde, they seem to have settled on the school having too many doors.

The public debates are now mind-numbing and infuriating. Partisans oversimplify the issue and strip it of all context. Everyone involved performs their perceived role in 30-second cable news soundbites, for as many days as it takes news crews to pack up and leave the small town that will never be the same—a town that will become only an afterthought when another community joins its unenviable club.

But some people consider these crimes far longer than three days at a time. Some people study them. Dr. Adam Lankford is one of those people. A professor of criminology at the University of Alabama, Lankford began his career studying how ordinary people are manipulated into violence by Islamic terror groups and authoritarian and fascist regimes. In recent years, he’s shifted his focus to people who are manipulated into violence by their own, warped minds.

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  1. Roger Chylla

    We need to think outside the box. Image processing has come a long way and is it unthinkable to start to propose that schools have entrances where facial recognition excludes individuals on "red flag" lists? Yes a person can breach any system but that leads to much earlier activation of first responders and provides the ability for auto lockdown and active tracking of the shooter in the building. Again, I think we really need to think out of the box.

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  2. Clark Monson

    Good discussion. There are a number of suggestions in the comments that I'm broadly in favor of (raising the gun-purchasing age, red-flag laws, more and better spending on mental health, etc.). But having been born and raised in the US but now living outside of it, I've noticed that part of the problem with violence, including random mass violence, in the US is cultural. Americans in general are angrier, lonelier, and more prone to take slights personally than people in many, perhaps most, other developed countries. Easy access to guns certainly means our gun homicide rate is higher than other developed countries, but as Kevin Williamson is fond of pointing out, we also kill more people with knives, fists, and other weapons than other countries. We're just angrier, more violent people, and we don't talk enough about that. It's an interesting and sad quirk about us, one that I think deserves to be addressed. But there's no quick fix for cultural problems.

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    Ben Connelly

    This was better than any other interview I’ve heard or article I’ve read on this subject. Measured, substantive, focused on solutions rather than incoherent rage. Good work, Declan.

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    Ed P

    I object to the framing and didn’t even read the rest because you lost me in anger.

    0.2% of the gun deaths is not to be written off just because it is 0.2%. Even the 0.2% is totally unacceptable and yet its used as a statistic to rationalize and justify this abject insanity. These are our children slaughtered unnecessarily for heavens sakes.

    The gun violence problem in our nation is so far beyond the pale as to be a really cruel joke. And its no secret the nra has bought this irrational loyalty. You should all be really fucking ashamed, all of you that have caucused with these greedy fucks. And you humor them with these pieces. You have the blood of our children on your hands. So be better humans please.

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  5. LucyTrice

    Thank you for this thoughtful interview. However, I am troubled by the suggestions in the comments to address gun violence by young people by raising the legal age for various activities. There is something wrong with creating a culture that produces children that mature later and later, and then slapping a law on the books to protect society from what it has created.

    If you consider the fact that, for most young people, a young person's first interaction with civic life is as a student in a public school, then the fact that school is the chosen site for their shooting carries a significance beyond familiarity or convenience. Does it have to do with the fact that, for some students, this place that is supposed to be safe is anything but safe?

    Does it matter that the adults go for the easy fixes, rules that apply to everyone - in "fairness" ? Rather than teaching a child to use a sharp tool safely AND responsibly and so developing trustworthiness, the tool is forbidden.: easier to serve food in the cafeteria that doesn't require knives than it is to deal with even plastic knives on campus.

    I would really like to hear some discussion on research into these areas of interaction, assuming it exists.

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  6. M M (Lee)

    Here are some specific ideas for dealing with mass shooters:

    - Develop a national guard type service in which citizens are trained in handling weapons and they float around the community going about their daily lives as normal except that they are armed and prepared to defend against a mass shooter or criminal at any moment. They would be sort of like Air Marshals, silently present and able to take action at any moment.

    If say 1% of the population were part of this initiative, that would dramatically increase the chances that someone in a Wal Mart or at an elementary school would be one of those people and in the case of a mass shooter they would be armed and fully trained to dispatch the shooter. Even better maybe have 5% or 10% of the population get trained up and then we'd be defended similar to Israel.

    - Second idea: Transform the public schools to be more like those tiny religious schools in which parents are intimately involved and where the schools know each child intimately.

    If a problem arises, the schools can intervene via the parents accordingly, whether through family therapy or other interventions that could involve mental health, educational, or social and emotional problems.

    If we need to double expenditures on schools to staff them appropriately for this level of intimate knowledge of each child, we could have states raise their sales taxes (so that business growth is not impacted) and also offer public schools the opportunity to offer tuition-supported classrooms for parents who want a classroom in which the extra tuition allows them to get a teacher with extremely high cognitive abilities or other types of supports.

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    Paul Hoover

    Very useful and thought-provoking, and much more useful than a two-minute segment of people on opposing sides just reciting their talking points.

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  8. Jason Y

    This is by far the best thing I've read on this issue for years. Can we get Lankford to head the national policy response and Declan to be his megaphone?

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    rlritt

    Tax bullets and ammunition. Like the way cigarettes were taxed that raised the price by 200%

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    rlritt

    Somebody tell me, please, why they kill little children? I get that a racist might go after Black's or in the recent shooting CA, Taiwanese church goers. But why little kids?

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