© Tony Gutierrez/AP
Jeremy Hammer was at a crowded college party in Virginia last month when he heard a loud bang. There were gasps, followed by a scream. Then everyone began rushing toward the exits.
Hammer remembers feeling terrified. “It was one of those moments where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, it’s my turn.’” It took a minute to grasp that the noise was not a gunshot, but a burst balloon.
Check out the things this bear does while fishermen save her cubs
Jen Panos is a mother of three in California. She finds herself noting what her kids are wearing to school. If there is a shooting, she thinks, she needs to be able to identify their bodies. “I walk myself through it: What am I going to do if this comes for us?” she said.
Kat Vargas and her husband, a firefighter, live in Texas. They too have a plan for what to do in the event of a shooting: Vargas would cover their youngest, while her husband would shield their middle son. Their eldest, who is 9, might have to run.
Last weekend, Vargas’s husband was one of the first responders to the attack on a mall in Allen, Tex., that killed eight people. Vargas can’t talk about the shooting without crying, but she is not surprised. “It’s surreal, not shocking,” she said.
Hypervigilance. Numbness. Anxiety. Exhaustion. As the country confronts a fresh string of mass killings — in a mall, in a home, at a bank, a birthday party, a school — the unrelenting violence is exacting a psychological toll.
© Jeffrey McWhorter for The Washington Post
Experts say that even people far away from the scene of such events can experience increased stress and anxiety. At the same time, the frequency of mass killings means that in some cases, they are losing their capacity to stun and horrify.
This year alone, the country has witnessed 22 mass killings by gunfire, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University that includes incidents where four or more people were killed, not including the shooter. That represents a marked increase from 2022: At this time last year, there had been eight such events.
While mass killings draw the media spotlight, they are a small fraction of the country’s gun deaths, which include tens of thousands of homicides and suicides each year. Researchers at Boston University concluded that over the course of an American’s lifetime, the likelihood of knowing someone killed or injured by gunfire is nearly 100 percent.
© Johnnie Izquierdo/for The Washington Post
The burden comes atop an already acute sense of emotional exhaustion after a years-long period marked by a deadly pandemic, climate-related disasters and a belated racial reckoning, said Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine who studies trauma.
“There’s a broader context here of many years of stress and anxiety and uncontrollable events that have felt really almost too much to bear,” she said.
Silver’s research has shown how media exposure can transmit the psychological impact of traumatic events well beyond their immediate area. One study found that after the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, people who immersed themselves in media coverage of the attack experienced more acute stress than people in Boston.
“When you’re at an event, there is a beginning, middle and end,” Silver said. But when you’re absorbed in the coverage, “you’re seeing a loop over and over again of the tragedy.”
Meghan Alessi, a project manager in Louisville, knows how that feels. When she was 20, she was at a premiere of the movie “The Dark Knight Rises” the same day a shooter opened fire during a showing of the film in Aurora, Colo., killing 12. She became fixated on the coverage, grieving over the victims, learning about their families and trying to find ways to protect herself in the future.
In more recent years, however, she has found herself tuning out the coverage of shootings. It’s a form of self-preservation, she said. The prevalence of such incidents “just leads you to become numb to it,” said Alessi, 30. “It’s such a normal thing at this point that everyone moves on, whether you’re ready to or not.”