Our Narrative of Mass Shootings Is Killing Us
Civilization’s oldest stories are war stories. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Iliad and The Aeneid, our attractions to war and to storytelling have often been entwined. We tell ourselves stories to impose order on chaotic events in our lives, to force a narrative onto the inconceivable. And what’s more inconceivable than slaughter, whether it arrives in the form of the Trojan War, the Holocaust, or the murder of 19 children by a teenage gunman in Uvalde, Texas?
Mass shootings in America have started to adhere to a predictable—even ritualized—sequence of events. We see the headline; there’s an initial estimate of the dead, which creeps upward as more details emerge; and we learn the name of the devastated community. Perhaps a day passes, maybe two, or better mental health (as though the two are mutually exclusive). Simultaneously, we learn the grim details of the shooting itself, and at the center of those details is the protagonist: the shooter.
