After the tragedy: How people experience mass executions
Yesterday at the Kerch Polytechnic College a massacre occurred. According to investigators, an explosion occurred in the school building, the suspect in the crime began to shoot people who were in college, and then committed suicide. As a result of the shooting, according to the latest data, twenty people died.
Those who survived the mass executions, as a rule, are remembered on the anniversary of the tragedy. The rest of the time, they are left to themselves and most often have to independently find ways to “move on” and find the answer to the question “Why did this happen to me?”. Despite the fact that incidents with the use of firearms are multiplying exponentially, modern society has not yet decided on how to cover them without an unhealthy hype, or on methods of psychological rehabilitation for those who survived. What happens to these people after the media loses interest in their tragedy?
Dmitry Kurkin
alexander savina
Nightclub "Pulse" in Orlando, which killed 49 people
Search guilty
Mass slaughter is always a failure of a specific security system: commentators discussing the shooting like to argue that the shooter “too easily” carried a weapon into the building where the incident occurred. And because one of the questions that sooner or later the survivors are asked is: "How was this possible and who allowed it?" The answers to it can be very different, and often they are highly dependent on the background information that is created around the tragedy.
Post-traumatic stress is often accompanied by a feeling of disturbed justice. And since it is most often impossible to seek compensation from the shooter or the terrorist organization that he represented, the unwitting participants in the incident are beginning to look elsewhere for those responsible. The list of people who survived the slaughter is being sued, usually begins with the institutions where the incident occurred: the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Jacksonville game bar that hosted the Madden game tournament, and the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas received such lawsuits (the hotel owners even managed to file counter and preventive lawsuits against thousands of survivors, in order to absolve themselves of financial responsibility). But the search for justice - and those who are guilty - can lead far, especially in cases where various theories of conspiracy arise around the tragedy.
In this sense, the most indicative are reactions to a series of terrorist attacks that took place in Paris in November 2015. Jesse Hughes, the vocalist of the Eagles of Death Metal group, who performed at the Bataclan club that ill-starred evening, suspected the institution’s guard that she knew about the attack, and therefore did not appear at the scene on time. Some of the survivors and members of the families of the victims united for a collective action against the state, saying that if the soldiers of the national army intervened, there would be far fewer casualties. Finally, a woman from Chicago, who happened to be in Paris on the day of the terrorist attacks, tried to sue Google, Twitter and Facebook, calling them accomplices of ISIS (the organization’s activities are banned in the Russian Federation).
Rally for tightening arms trafficking in the United States
Legislation and protests
Many of those affected by the mass shootings demand to change the situation already at the state level - to tighten the laws on the proliferation of weapons. So did, for example, Sarah Walker Karon - the mother of a child, in whose elementary school "Sandy Hook" in Connecticut there was a massive shooting (twenty-six and seven-year-old children and six adults died in the 2012 incident). Five years after the tragedy, she wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune, where she told about the event and how she and her family coped - and continue to cope with the consequences so far: "As a mother of a child who survived a mass execution, I can no longer blindly believe that such a tragedy may not touch us. Or our city. Or those we love. I’ve been living proof that this is possible. "
She believes that the only answer to the problem is new laws. “I, as a parent, learned that no locked doors, armored glass and shelters will protect us from a dangerous and seriously armed man,” the woman said. “Moreover, our country decided that the word of condolence is an adequate response to the tragedy in Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, and now in Sutherland Springs, Texas. And although they are well-intentioned, only compassion and prayer will not change the situation. Only a sharp turn in the national debate about weapons and who it is available to help make a difference. "
About a dozen students from the school in Santa Fe participated in a protest march on the anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine. A month later, ten students of the same school died in a mass execution.
Hardest movement against the proliferation of weapons unfolded in the United States, and not surprising. Enough to see the latest news: last weekend in New York were the first in twenty-five years without shooting - the last time this happened in the city was already in 1993. To get weapons in the United States is really easier than in many other countries: it is believed that the right to it is enshrined in the country's constitution, and a passport and a completed application form are enough to buy weapons; database checking takes only a few minutes. Statistics on the number of mass executions in the United States varies from research to research - from one hundred and fifty to more than one and a half thousand in the last six years, depending on which weapon incidents fall under the definition of mass shooting. Both the biggest and the most modest figure bring to one result: change is necessary, and as soon as possible.
In March of this year, mass protests unfolded in the United States, which took place at eight hundred points in America and other countries. The March for Our Lives campaign, the organization of the same name and the #NeverAgain movement were launched by school students in Parkland, where seventeen students died in February due to shooting. The 18-year-old Emma González became the face of the protest, but during her speech on the march in Washington, she was silent for six minutes twenty seconds - just so it took the murderer to kill seventeen people, and fifteen more were injured. In the summer, several dozen teenagers (including fourteen students from Parkland) went on a tour of the country, urging Americans to vote and choose politicians who will tighten control over the circulation of arms.
True, until change is far away. About a dozen school students in Santa Fe, Texas, participated in a protest march in April, on the anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine. A month later, ten students of the same school died in a mass execution.
Barack Obama visits the girls who survived the shooting in Aurora
Over the counter
Speaking about how people who survived mass executions cope with post-traumatic stress, one should keep in mind that the "correct" - or at least generally accepted - reaction to such events does not exist. As there is no instruction "What to do if you almost died in the incident with the use of firearms." The person who has been subjected to such a test, in a sense, is thrown out in the middle of the desert without a map. This is also due to the fact that, when covering such tragedies, the survivors almost always find themselves behind the scenes: the main focus is on those who put up the slaughter. This unhealthy imbalance is still not properly reflected - and it certainly does not help to overcome psychological trauma.
Louis Xavier Ruiz, one of those who survived the slaughter in the club "Pulse", embarked on the path of Christianity, "abandoned" his homosexuality as "sinful" and joined an organization that protects the rights of "former gays and transgender people." Six months ago, he stated that tragedy was the event that turned him into faith.
American Austin Yubanks, injured during a shooting at the Columbine school in 1999, doctors prescribed a thirty-day course of treatment with opiates, as a result of which he acquired pharmacological dependence. (Which is significant: Eubanks's parents noticed that the behavior changed, however they attributed it to post-traumatic stress and did not intervene.) It took him twelve years to get rid of the addiction, after which he became an employee of the program for the rehabilitation of drug addicts and ardent opponent of the treatment of emotional disorders with the help of potent drugs.
Luis Javier Ruiz, one of those who survived the slaughter in the club "Pulse", embarked on the path of Christianity and "refused" from his "sinful" homosexuality
Karen Tevez, the mother of Alex Tevez, who died while shooting at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, was shocked not only by the death of her son, but also by how the media covered the tragedy: according to her, for twelve hours the news channels did nothing but talked about a man who had slaughtered, thus turning her son’s killer into a celebrity. This convinced the woman to start a public campaign "No Notoriety", the purpose of which is to change the way mass media talk about mass executions.
Sensationalism is another symptom of the fact that society still does not understand how to respond to such tragedies. This is not an abstract problem, and concrete people are often its victims: seven years after the shooting on Utoya Island, the Norwegian Aftenposten spoke to several survivors of the incident and found out that all these years they had been subjected to cyberbullying, while the man who had killed the massacre becoming a celebrity.
Student action for toughening arms trade rules
Overall experience
In the public mind, every incident with mass shooting goes through several stages - from increased attention, when every action of a criminal is closely considered, and the victims are repeatedly asked to tell about the details of the tragedy, to gradual ousting from the information space. But the fact that an event is gradually starting to be forgotten does not mean that it becomes easier for those who survive it. Support groups come to the rescue, the number of whose members is growing every year. It is here that victims can talk about what happened and talk about hard experiences - at the same time common and very different, often inaccessible to anyone who has never encountered anything like that.
One of the largest and most famous support groups for the victims of the shooting of the Rebels Project was founded by former students of Columbine. All of them experienced the consequences of the injury: for example, Heather Martin, a graduate of 1999, suffered from panic attacks for many years, was afraid to go to study or work in another state and did not know how to leave the tragedy in the past, because new stories about shooting. In 2012, after a massacre at a cinema in the city of Aurora, which is thirty kilometers from Columbine, graduates of the school founded the Rebels Project to support people with similar experiences. At first, there were not so many participants (“Immediately after everything happened, you want to be simply left alone,” says Heather Martin), but later they became more. Today there are several hundred participants in the group, they communicate live and online, and once a year they organize a joint field trip. Martin says that he wants people in the group to communicate with people with similar experiences (she recalls three pregnant women who were shot during attacks, but they and their children survived), and people with different stories - for example, he suggests who lost relatives, talk to those who survived the attack.
The organization is in favor of the policy “Don't name them” in the coverage of the shooting - that is, it calls for not making the criminal famous
The Everytown Survivor Network - a division of the organization that advocates toughening the circulation of weapons - helps not only the victims of mass executions, but also their witnesses, and those who lost loved ones in any shooting-related incidents. Another organization that emerged after the shooting in Aurora, Survivors Empowered, has a “rapid response team”. She works with politicians, the press and tragedy specialists to minimize the harm to victims of mass executions. “We are a team of those who survived the mass violence and who were even more traumatized by the fact that the actions of the specialists were not coordinated. They did not understand what people needed to recover from the primary shock,” the message says on the organization’s website. Its founders advocate for the policy of "Don't name them" in the coverage of the shooting - that is, they call for not making the perpetrator famous.
Groups help victims understand that they are not alone in their experiences, and talk about what is incomprehensible to a person from the outside. For example, one of the founders of the Rebels Project says that traditional fireworks for July 4 were a very serious trigger for him - and only a conversation with other people with similar experiences helped him to understand that he is not alone, does not lose touch with reality, and such emotions are absolutely are natural.
“Mass executions deeply affect a person, changing his life,” says Ashley Chek, who works at the Everytown Survivor Network. Her mother survived the shooting at Sandy Hook. “You can't really understand what a person goes through, he didn’t go through it himself. The opportunity to establish contact with those who have experienced something like that really changes lives and strongly supports many victims. " The fact that support groups continue to grow at the same time makes Ashley happy and torments her: “You don’t want them to become even bigger. But such is life.”
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3), Wikipedia