An argument in which three Lansing teens get shot generates social-media rumors that a random mass shooter is roaming the city.
A team-building exercise with popping balloons turns into an active-shooter scare that shuts down part of University of Michigan.
A Michigan police agency is alerted about an Instagram photo of a teen with a crossbow. Could the youth be plotting a school attack?
In today’s climate, it doesn’t take much to raise fears that a mass shooting is underway or imminent.
In the Lansing example, which occurred Monday night, “people are likely more on edge" due to the weekened shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Lansing Mayor Andy Schor said.
“Unfortunately, rumors can spread through social media very quickly, to many people, and this was not a mass shooting," Schor said. “This was an argument that turned deadly.”
But there’s good reason the Lansing homicide caused panic on social media, experts say.
“I am not at all surprised that people are reacting this way,” said Sandra Graham-Bermann, psychology professor at University of Michigan.
“When we have been exposed to horrific and traumatic events, such as mass shootings, we become primed to be alert for other, similar dangerous events,” she said. “This is a defense mechanism that is very powerful and very important. It keeps us from being hurt or killed.”
Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist at Wayne State University, said he recently went to a movie, and “for a second I imagined, what if a shooter came in? What door would they enter?”
It was not an unreasonable thought, he said. “Such a thing happened. There was precedence for it.”
Like Graham-Bermann, Javanbakht said he’s not surprised that Monday night’s shooting in Lansing sparked rumors of a mass shooter. “You have to remember the context,” he said, in which people hear gunshots at the end of a day when the news coverage is all about mass shootings.
“Let’s say you just watched a horror movie," he said. "When you come out and if you hear a loud noise near you, you’ll startle much worse than if you just came out of a comedy show.”
Javanbakht, whose specializes in treating trauma and anxiety, said it shows how mass shootings can affect the national psyche, including people relatively far removed from the tragedy.
Every time there is a mass shooting, "we learn that kind of place is now on the not-very-safe list,” Javanbakht said. “There’s a shooting in a mall and you feel malls aren’t safe anymore. ... When there’s a shooting in a synagogue, people become afraid to go to temple.”
Even beyond creating general anxiety, Javanbakht and other experts say a mass shooting can result in secondary traumatic stress.
That occurs when someone hears about the trauma of others or sees images related to the tragedy. Javanbakht said it’s not uncommon among first-responders or, as another example, people working with war refugees.
It also can happen to people watching saturation news coverage of a mass shooting, he said.
“Even indirect exposure to a trauma can result in trauma related symptoms, or even PTSD," Javanbakht said, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder. “Just hearing the stories can be traumatizing, because we are humans and we are social creatures.”
Just by raising people’s stress level, mass shootings have an impact on the general population, said Marc Zimmerman, a professor at U-M’s School of Public Health and director of the CDC-funded Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center.
He pointed to research that shows stress “plays out in the health of our bodies in many different ways.”
“The long and short of it is, we know that these kinds of experiences can be traumatic, and can have long-lasting effects,” he said.
Zimmerman said it’s important for people to put mass shootings in context.
On one hand, mass shootings are a “horrific and heinous act" that shock the national conscience, he said.
But it’s a fraction of those who die of gun violence, he said. Most gun deaths involve suicide or disputes between people known to each other.
“Every day, eight kids under the age of 18 die in this country from gunshot wounds," he said.
So what can people do about their anxiety and fears?
Javanbakht said he tells his psychiatric patients "to stop watching CNN and Fox. Go to the gym, hang out with friends. Read books.”
Another way to manage the stress from mass shootings is to work for change, he said.
“Action and taking control is a great way of dealing with fear,” Javanbakht said. “One way is to be active in challenging and forcing political decision-makers to take action.”
Zimmerman said it’s time to look at gun deaths and injuries from a public-health perspective vs. a political lens.
“We can do something to make this better,” he said. “And we deserve the political will to do better. And It doesn’t mean taking people’s guns away, for goodness sake. We haven’t take cars away."
He pointed to the steady decline in deaths over the decades from vehicle crashes as a result of improvements in vehicle design, as well as road design and changes in the law, such as reforms in licensing teen-age drivers.
Zimmerman said the same approach could be taken with guns, starting with research to develop evidence-based strategies on gun safety and prevention efforts.
Current federal laws that restrict funding of research on gun safety mean “we don’t know enough" about what works and what doesn’t.
“We hear people talking about all these strategies to implement,” he said. “Maybe they’re good ideas. Maybe they are the silver bullet. The bottom line is, we don’t know.”
Lansing Mayor Schor agrees.
“We must come together as a community to not just talk about change, but take action,” Schor said.
“Local officials are preempted by the state from doing anything on guns,” he said. “Cities either need to be given the authority to do something or we need the state or federal government to actually act against gun violence and proliferation of illegal guns.”
It’s also important that people not become paralyzed by fear, Zimmerman said.
“On one hand, gun violence is an epidemic and we need to deal with it,” he said. “On the other hand, we need to live our lives. It’s not like we’re in a war zone. Mass shootings are relatively rare events.
“The advice I give to people is to be careful. Be smart. And don’t be afraid.”