Witnesses, community members reflect on mass shootings
Witnesses from the Boulder and Las Vegas shootings recount their lived experiences with The Panther. Unsplash
It was just an average Wednesday night. Until it wasn’t.
How did you react when you heard there was a mass shooting in Orange? For Chapman University freshman Rachel Berns, the shock wasn’t instant.
“When I first heard the news, I definitely went through a unique process of feeling almost desensitized, to finally being hit with understanding how surreal the reality is,” said Berns, who serves as the Student Government Association’s underclassmen senator.
Eight people were killed on March 16 in Atlanta, Georgia, 10 people were killed on March 22 in Boulder, Colorado, and four people were killed on March 31 in Orange, California — the latter event of which happened only four miles away from Chapman University’s campus. That’s 22 people lost to gun violence in mass shootings from three separate events.
Between March 16 and March 31, there have been at least 20 mass shootings.
The view of the King Soopers supermarket from Anna Haynes' apartment in Colorado, Boulder. Photo courtesy of Haynes
Anna Haynes, a junior journalism and political science double major at the University of Colorado Boulder, witnessed the March 22 shooting from her apartment window across the street from a King Soopers grocery store, where the gunman killed 10 people in broad daylight.
Haynes was eating lunch when she heard gunshots, a noise she originally thought was either fireworks or a failing car engine.
Standing at her apartment window, Haynes saw the gunman firing outside the store before he entered, hearing screams from dozens of people. Minutes later, Haynes said approximately 25 police cars arrived and the scene devolved into chaos.
“Initially I didn't think much of anything to do; I was just frozen there,” Haynes told The Panther. “It took me a couple minutes to really recognize what was really going on … I was just in a state of denial.”
“Initially I didn’t think much of anything to do; I was just frozen there. It took me a couple minutes to really recognize what was really going on … I was just in a state of denial.”
Haynes pulled her roommate out of her online class, and they stared at the window for the rest of the day. She estimated they watched the supermarket lot for six or seven hours.
“That’s the hard part of it too, just knowing that there’s nothing you can do,” Haynes said. “Since Boulder is considered such a safe city … I think there was a part of me that just believed that my community was somehow immune to something like that.”
Haynes was born in Australia and moved to the United States in middle school. Two weeks after she arrived in Aurora, Colorado, the 2012 theater shooting — which resulted in 12 deaths — occurred just a few miles from Haynes’ home.
“During this quarantine, I sort of forgot that mass shootings were so common in the United States,” Haynes said. “In addition to rattling my sense of safety, this shooting and the shooting in Atlanta the week before reminded me that that’s another awful thing that we have to deal with on top of (the pandemic).”
Australia has had almost no mass shootings since 1996, when a massacre that left 35 people dead and 23 wounded sparked strict gun control laws.
Mark Medford, a Southern California resident who survived the Las Vegas shooting in 2017, has had difficulty recovering from the incident.
“I relive my moments from the Vegas shooting through other shootings on the news when I hear about them,” Medford told The Panther. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened. I try to carry on a normal life knowing life is way too short and can be taken away at any moment.”
“I relive my moments from the Vegas shooting through other shootings on the news when I hear about them. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened. I try to carry on a normal life knowing life is way too short and can be taken away at any moment.”
Mass shooting occurrences have increased during the pandemic despite many spending more time indoors, rising by 50% during 2020. Pete Simi, a Chapman sociology professor who studies violence and hate crimes, attributes this increase to the complicated social dynamics during the pandemic that can result in a toll on mental health.
“In terms of a crisis like this, it's normal for people to respond emotionally and have heightened levels of negative emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, despair, depression, anxiety and a sense of uncertainty,” Simi said. “When you think about it, a lot of the social aspects of what’s happening during the pandemic are recipes for disaster.”
The last mass shooting in Orange took place in 1997, when Arturo Reyes Torres returned to a Caltrans yard — where he had been fired weeks earlier — and fatally shot four men. He also wounded a police officer during a shootout that ended with Torres being shot and killed.
On an international level, the U.S. is ranked 32nd in gun violence among the world’s countries. At 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people as of 2019, the U.S. rate was eight times higher than that of Canada and nearly 100 times higher than that of the United Kingdom. Additionally, mass shootings in 2020 increased from 2019; there were 611 mass shootings in 2020, compared to 417 in 2019.
Simi said easy access to firearms in the U.S. is to blame for the rise in violence.
“Whether the pandemic is here or not here, it's super easy to get a hold of firearms in the United States, which makes our violence far more lethal,” Simi said. “When people act violently, they are using literally military-grade weapons … and that doesn't seem to be changing any time soon.”
With multiple communities across the country grieving, Berns emphasized the importance of remembering the victims and reevaluating priorities to fix a broken system of gun laws.
“I definitely don’t have all the right answers as to how this problem should be solved, but it serves as a cruel reminder that whatever system is in place to keep us safe is flawed,” Berns said. “I hope as the Orange County community mourns the loss of our own neighbors, we think critically about what our next steps are in fighting for tangible change.”