Thinking about Tucson

The shootings in Tucson occurred two weeks ago. They continue to haunt me and I know from talking with friends and colleagues that I am not alone. This is my first attempt to sit down and put my thoughts on paper. I have to work at being coherent and making sense. I will do my best. My thinking takes me in two directions. The first is to think about how such an event, that touched so many lives in Tucson and in the United States, is dealt with by children who are affected by this act of violence. Then I begin to think about prevention. What can be done to see that this kind of act is not likely to happen yet again.

It is not that in my small way I haven't been involved. I was asked for some ideas about how to help children in a pre-school in Tucson deal with what happened. I have talked in the past about grieving parents need to be as open as possible with their child in language that the child can understand. Could I generalize from what I know? What follows are some of my suggestions that parents in this school found useful.

Given that the news of the shooting was on every TV station and that people were talking about what happened it would be impossible to try to keep this news from the children. Their parents needed to recognize that their children knew something happened. The children needed to be able to ask questions. The parents learned that it is important to follow their children's lead and answer the question asked. For young children it is not a good idea to provide additional explanations or information that has not been asked for. However, the children felt safer when the adults were honest with them, even to admitting that they too did not understand what happened.

Parents were tempted to say that everything will be okay, but it may not be a good idea to tell this to children if it is a promise we can't keep. The children felt reassured when they were told that they will be safe in school. Children felt better when they knew what their parents were upset about and when the parents could give their own feelings a name, as for example, "I am sad"; "I am worried about the people who were hurt". Parents felt it was good advice to remind them to talk to their children when they could give their children their full attention, and that it was okay to not have all the answers.

Parents found it useful to see this as a time when they could begin a discussion of how to deal with other ways of resolving conflicts and dealing with differences of opinion.

Once we open the discussion about finding more peaceful ways of dealing with feelings, we open the door to seeking ways of preventing this kind of slaughter from happening again. Maybe a more honest question is: can we really prevent this kind of behavior? We can't ignore the fact that mental health services in Arizona are not adequate and at this point I don't know if the perpetrator had received any help of this kind. I don't know if any of this would have made a difference but I like to think it might Have helped him control his impulses and find other ways of coping with them.

What I am sure of is that we also need to ask if constitutionally acceptable ways of controlling the availability of guns or their accessories , such as high capacity magazines, in this country would help? I have written on several occasions in this blog about families whose loved one died from gunshot wounds. In countries where guns are less available there are fewer acts of murder than we see here in the United States. In this blog I usually focus on the grieving family in the context of their own personal lives and experience. As I talk about prevention, the focus, for me, shifts to include the broader picture of what influences our lives . For many issues it means getting involved in the political process, in this instance, to look at the laws about who can own a gun and under what circumstances. We need to look at what people who are advocates of gun control are asking for and why. For example, Congress woman Carolyn McCarthy from N.Y. introduced a bill in the House of Representative to ban high capacity ammunition clips such as was used in Tucson. Her husband was killed by a man carrying a gun with the same kind of clip. A first small step in prevention for me involves calling my representatives in Washington to bring this bill and similar bills to a vote.