At an event organized by the Atlantic magazine in D.C. yesterday, I attended two back to back panels on seemingly disparate topics: the impact of social media on teenagers’ mental health and America’s gun crisis. In the first panel, a mental health researcher waxed eloquently about how social media has a lot to do with the rise in clinical depression and anxiety among our nation’s youth. Now, I’m sure that the pressure to look and act perfect on social media sites like Instagram and Tik Tok does indeed have much to do with our youngsters’ rising level of despair (clinical depression rates have doubled among 12 to 14-year-olds, and suicide rates among adolescents continue to climb). But it was the second panel, which featured Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and an author who spent 15 years working in the gun industry, that made me think speakers on both panels were missing the chance to connect some dots.
Mass shootings at schools have more than tripled since the early 2000s and according to this analysis, more people have died or been injured in school shootings in the US in the past 18 years than in the entire 20th century. So that made me wonder if such horrific events have had any effect on the mood of American teens. After all, if I was a youngster attending public school today, I’d be a tad anxious and depressed, especially after the horrific shootings in Sandy Hook, Parkland, Florida, or most recently Uvalde, Texas, when an 18-year-old armed with an assault weapon gunned down 19 children while police officers waited outside doing nothing.
The good news is that public attitudes toward lethal weapons and their ready accessibility appear to be shifting and the political climate with it, according to Senator Murphy. He noted that Republicans who voted for the recent watered-down legislation that expands some background checks on guns have not experienced significant backlash from their constituents. “That gives me hope we will have a chance to take another bite of the apple pretty soon,” he said. “The gun safety movement is like the civil rights movement — there were a lot of failures in the beginning but it will eventually prevail.”
An increasing number of Republicans, Murphy said, recognize that they’re voting against their own constituents when they side with the NRA, which wields less power than it used to. Murphy said he was hopeful that the next round of legislation would include an outright ban on assault weapons, such as the semi-automatic AR-15s used to kill so many people in Buffalo and Uvalde. From his lips to God’s ears!
