{"id":53047,"date":"2012-12-16T12:30:51","date_gmt":"2012-12-16T17:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=53047"},"modified":"2012-12-15T20:16:24","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T01:16:24","slug":"the-existential-fall-out-after-newtown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/16\/the-existential-fall-out-after-newtown\/","title":{"rendered":"The Existential Fall Out after Newtown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Guns, Rap, and Crime<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have a heavy heart tonight. \u00a0My thoughts and prayers are with the families of Newtown.\u00a0 The Newtown shooting is a terrible tragedy. It has reminded me of lessons learned while studying the families of murder victims.<\/p>\n

For the past 2 years, I have been researching the everyday lives of families who lose someone in a murder.\u00a0 This has been difficult \u2014 and often heartbreaking \u2014 research.\u00a0 I have spent many nights thinking about how much I take my family, friends, and other people in my life for granted.\u00a0\u00a0 I think about the mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings whose first and last thoughts of each day are of the person they loved and lost. The things that I have seen and the stories that I have collected have left a deep and permanent mark on my soul.<\/p>\n

Amongst the many thoughts swirling around in my head, I keep returning to a troubling \u201cdouble standard\u201d that we often taken for granted when shootings happen.<\/p>\n

On one hand, the Newtown shooting reminds us that\u00a0fatal violence can happen at anytime to anyone<\/em>.\u00a0 It is a painful reminder that life is precious and that it can be snapped away from us at any moment.\u00a0 The Newtown shooting makes many of us feel an existential fall out. How could this happen?\u00a0 Why did this have to happen?\u00a0 And what does this mean for me?<\/p>\n

For many of us, these shootings cut a little too close to home.\u00a0 They happen in places to people who remind us of ourselves. \u00a0We begin to wonder: \u201cAre we ever really safe?\u201d \u201cWill our children come home from school today?\u201d \u201cWill this happen at my favorite movie theater?\u201d<\/p>\n

In turn, these ideas shape how we feel about families who mourn in the wake of such tragedies. \u00a0We feel deep empathy, compassion, and sadness for families and victims in Newtown.\u00a0 We talk about the victims here as innocent children who met a horrible death completely out of their hands. \u00a0We wonder how the families and friends of victims will cope with such a loss.<\/p>\n

But, the same kinds of sympathy and compassion are often not extended to families who lose their children in street shootings every day.\u00a0 These situations are treated very differently by the media, by our leaders, and by many of us.\u00a0 We see these shootings as events that only happen to people who are caught up in the wrong crowd.\u00a0 We assume that these victims \u2014 who are often children \u2014 must have been dealing drugs, in a gang, or doing something to meet such a horrible end.\u00a0 Everyday violence in our inner-cities helps us hold onto a precious myth:\u00a0Fatal violence only happens to people who bring it on themselves.<\/em>\u00a0 If we can believe this, or at least think it might be true, we can feel safe again.<\/p>\n

How do we reconcile these conflicting responses to tragedy?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m here to tell you that many of our popular assumptions about the second group of victims are deeply problematic and misinformed.\u00a0 Many of the people that I have followed over the years have been young men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.\u00a0 This is a powerful message that John Rich \u2014 a physician, scholar, and interventionist \u2014 teaches us in his powerful work on young black men\u2019s experiences with trauma.<\/p>\n

This is a theme that also resonates with my work: \u00a0One family I followed lost their youngest son in a street-style execution shooting.\u00a0 The mother and two older brothers of the victim faced an unsympathetic and sometimes cruel world.\u00a0 Newspaper articles talked about this case as an example of how families need to keep closer tabs on their children.\u00a0 Local community leaders and church pastors used this event to denounce drugs in the community.\u00a0 And, most hurtful of all, supervisors at the mother\u2019s work filed complaints about her work productivity slipping after her son\u2019s death.\u00a0 When she told them that she was in the bathroom wailing over the loss of her youngest child \u2014 she was fired and released with severance.<\/p>\n

This is only a small sample of the many tragedies that I followed in Philadelphia.\u00a0 I hope that this underscores the need to rethink how we process and make sense of gun violence across the board.\u00a0 The deep sympathy and pain that we all feel tonight for the victims of Newtown should be extended to families who lose sons, daughters, husbands, wives, grandparents, aunts, uncles, best friends, and siblings in our backyards everyday.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Jooyoung Lee<\/a> is a\u00a0professor of sociology at the University of Toronto<\/a>.\u00a0His research involves crime, gun violence, health, interaction, and culture. \u00a0You can follow him at his\u00a0blog,\u00a0Guns, Rap, Crime<\/a>,\u00a0and on twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Guns, Rap, and Crime. I have a heavy heart tonight. \u00a0My thoughts and prayers are with the families of Newtown.\u00a0 The Newtown shooting is a terrible tragedy. It has reminded me of lessons learned while studying the families of murder victims. For the past 2 years, I have been researching the everyday lives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2056,129,283,250,285,1760,1757,133],"class_list":["post-53047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crimelaw","tag-media","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-guns","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53047"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53049,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53047\/revisions\/53049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}