Usually after a mass shooting, Ieva Jusionyte has something to say.
Jusionyte is a scholar of gun violence at Brown University and is no stranger to the terrible power of firearms. But when a mass shooting took place at her place of work, in a building where she teaches, the words fell away. This week on “Say More,” Jusionyte talks to Globe Opinion editor Jim Dao about why solutions need to go beyond policy and address the deeper culture.
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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 20 episode of the “Say More” podcast.
Jim Dao: Welcome to “Say More” from Boston Globe Opinion. I’m Jim Dao, the Opinion editor.
We had planned this week to play a rerun and take a few days off for the holiday, but then some news happened and we felt the need to take stock of it and connect with somebody about it.
It’s a story so common in this country. It practically writes itself. On December 13, a man with a gun walked into a building on Brown University campus and started shooting.
Two young people were killed. Nine more were seriously injured and a community is in pieces. Ieva Jusionyte is with me in the Globe studios. Ieva is a professor of international security and anthropology at Brown.
She writes and thinks a lot about gun violence, and last year she won a MacArthur “Genius” award for her work. After the Brown shootings, she wrote a powerful essay for Globe Opinion about the futility she feels in moments like this, when innocent people are killed with guns in the most senseless ways.
Thank you, Ieva, for coming in on such short notice.
Ieva Jusionyte: Thank you so much for having me, Jim.
Dao: Can you start by taking me through your day on December 13th? When did you hear something had happened on campus?
Jusionyte: I was at home. I was packing, wrapping presents to go home to visit my family for the holidays, and also preparing to go to a party by some colleagues, also Brown professors on the edge of campus.
When I checked my phone, I didn’t even hear the original notification come in. I think my phone was on silent. I think I first saw the text message, and then I listened to the voicemail, and then I saw the email and these notifications. They kept coming in threes, telling us there was an active shooter and reminding us of the order in which we should run, and if we can’t, then hide, and if we can’t hide, then fight.
At first I didn’t take it very seriously. I thought it’s a precaution. But when it turned out not to be, I became very worried about my students who were on campus.
Dao: It’s hard for most people to imagine what it’s like to be in that situation.
How did it make you feel at that moment?
Jusionyte: I’ve worked with people who were injured and killed by gun violence, so violence itself is not new to me. What shocked me was how close to, or that it happened in my community and that it affected my students. I think there was disbelief at first and shock and maybe terror not knowing what’s going on.
The anger of being powerless, not being able to do anything but just follow the news, scroll the news, and check what’s going on. And that’s it. I couldn’t do anything else.
Dao: After the shooting, you wrote a piece for Globe Opinion that captured some of your feelings of powerlessness that you just mentioned.
In that piece, you said that “after every school shooting, I can remember, my anger about what happened is found expression and straightforward, unequivocal calls for change.”
But in this case where the killing happened so close to home, you say you had lost that conviction, that clarity of vision as you put it.
Help us understand what you meant by that.
Jusionyte: Because I study gun violence in a way I feel like it’s my duty and my obligation to be able to explain and comment on what happened. And in previous mass casualty incidents, it’s always that gut reaction that this is terror we could prevent by having better laws, by having better mental health services. And this time I didn’t know why this happened. I think we are still only beginning to piece things together, so there was no clear culprit.
But it was also a shock, I think, because this is my community. These are my students. This is the building where I regularly teach.
I think in the early draft I might have used the term “hit close to home,” but the hit is really an inappropriate verb for this.
Dao: I think that one of the reasons this essay of yours really affected me is that because earlier in my career, I wrote a fair bit about what we called “gun control policy” back in the day. I later became an editor and I oversaw news coverage of many mass shootings.
There were so many, and it seemed to me that every time one of these incidents happened, gun safety advocates would come out and call for a variety of rules and restrictions. Then gun rights advocates would come out and argue that it wouldn’t have mattered if you had all those things in place [because] bad people would still get guns and still kill people.
And of course, nothing ever gets done. Things don’t pass in legislatures. But I often came away feeling that in a way, both sides were right. I’m wondering if you think I’m wrong-headed about that or is there a way to move the needle on gun safety that we’re not really wrestling with?
Jusionyte: I hear you. I recognize what you are saying in a lot of what I’ve observed.
I think we all want to act and do something, therefore these two sides that we have, whether it’s an assault weapons ban, more background checks, or red flag laws, or whatever else we can do, seems very tangible.
From the other side of the aisle, people also think, “We can install better doors and we can have cameras and we can have metal detectors, and we can sell students these backpacks they can use to shield themselves from bullets.”
And I think both do prevent some gun violence. We don’t hear about the mass shootings that don’t occur because of the laws we have.
We live in the part of the country in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where gun laws are very strong and we do have much lower rates of gun violence. But the people on the other side are right as well, because if there is a will, there will be a way.
This country has more guns than people already, and I do not see us in any decades doing anything like Australia, like considering a more comprehensive ban of certain kinds of weapons.
Even that might not matter because most gun violence, most gun homicides are committed by handguns.
Dao: As we speak, authorities have been saying that the suspected Brown shooter killed himself in New Hampshire, and they are also linking him to the killing of an MIT physicist in Brookline, Massachusetts.
We don’t want to theorize about what may have motivated the killer since who knows what we’re gonna learn, but I am interested in your reaction to the news of what’s happened. They know who the shooter was and that he’s killed himself. Does motive matter to you in these cases?
Jusionyte: Motive matters because it helps understand what happened.
And also, it provides some closure for students who are injured and the families and sort of the bigger community. Otherwise, it just remains senseless. Like, “Why did this happen?”
So I think knowing the motive is important.
Also, I am surprised, no, maybe not surprised on how this story is linking so many forms of gun violence in this country.
We have a school shooting, which seems a very sad American part of life. We have a targeted killing of the professor. Now we have a suicide.
In the US, suicides outnumber gun homicides, and now we have all three. We have various states involved. It happened in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The person was caught in New Hampshire, he lived in Florida.
When we’re even thinking about gun laws, we often think about specific states, but it’s not like states have borders between them.
So I think it will be important for everyone to understand in order to move forward, but at the same time, some of these, like the gun mass shooting in Las Vegas, we still don’t really understand why they happen and we live with these questions.
There are two things, I think, or two steps.
One is that someone has to even think to do such a thing. It has to be conceivable.
The next step is it has to be possible. We too often focus on that second step that it’s possible for someone to obtain a gun, enter the building that’s unlocked and escape because there are no cameras.
But that first part of how someone can even conceive of an idea of going and shooting students who are preparing it for an exam. I think that’s the more difficult part to address. The motive will help, but I don’t know whether it will give us many answers for how to move forward.
Dao: Do you think that having a mass shooting happen in your backyard might change the way you think about this topic?
Jusionyte: Unfortunately not. I think I’ve lived with this for too long and I’ve never seen a mass shooting before at a school, but I’ve seen people die from gunshot injuries. I had people in vicinity to me who committed suicides. I study gun violence in Mexico, which is also caused by US guns. I’ve been too exposed to this. This will not be a rupture for me.
I am more concerned about the broader community, and I think with time passing, maybe I can think more about this in terms of research and scholarship. But right now, I feel like my attempt to analyze it is mixed up with emotional reaction.
Dao: It’s got to be difficult for you as an expert to feel this pressure to explain what’s happened, right? It’s something that may be unexplainable. Is that how you feel?
Jusionyte: Yes, and people look up to me, and look up to other gun scholars as well, to try to understand. They want reassurances that this can be prevented, that we can do something.
I think it’s a very tall order, especially in the first days. I could only worry about the wellbeing and safety and whereabouts of my students. There’s also the kind of collective trauma that will take time for the community.
Trying to put on the expert hat, sometimes, it can be seen — it can also really be — insensitive.
The day after the shooting, you don’t want to come and say, “Yeah, there’s nothing we can do about this. We’ll just learn to live with it.”
Unfortunately, that’s what will probably happen in a few months, but it’s not the time to accept this.
It’s a time when we want to believe and we want to hope, and I honestly do hope that the students in the long run will help us find a way out of this because we have to. That motivation, that will, to believe that this can change, I think is stronger than that pessimistic, nihilistic instinct that I sometimes have as a scholar who’s seen too much of this.
Dao: In your recent essay for Globe Opinion, you wrote that the mass shootings of today are different from the systemic violence of America’s past because it “doesn’t serve any ideology, any master narrative.”
And then you go on to say that more than changing our laws, we need to change our culture.
Talk about what you meant by that.
Jusionyte: This is unfortunately a very violent country. This is the country that was built on land taken from indigenous peoples. We brought enslaved people from Africa to work in plantations to build all this wealth. So, this is part of who we are. This is part of our culture.
Guns were also always part of that conquest of the frontier, and self-defense.
But it has been, also, popularized by the gun industry that began creating, building, and making so many rifles that we didn’t need because we didn’t go to wars. So they also, in the 19th century, used the narrative of American freedom and power to sell those guns.
When I say the current school shootings rarely have — well probably never have — an ideological component to them, some mass shootings do, and therefore they seem senseless. In addition to thinking about laws or about the safety of buildings, we need to think how to change this culture that makes this imaginable. In other cultures of the world, we don’t see people going into schools and shooting children or students.
This is American. How did we get here and how can we create a movement through the film industry and music industry and writing that would make gun safety cool and make school shootings really abhorrent, which they are, but I don’t think our culture is contributing enough to just show us how we need to stop doing this.
I don’t know how to end the sentence because that’s exactly how, I didn’t know how to end the essay. I point to my students, hoping that they will find a way because we clearly haven’t.
Dao: About two years ago, you wrote another piece for Global Opinion about your own decision to buy a gun.
You bought that gun in Massachusetts, which has strict gun laws. Can you talk about why you decided to do that?
Jusionyte: I bought a gun primarily because I was curious. I wanted to see how the process works. But even more than that, I wanted to see what it would do to me.
I’m a naturalized US citizen. I swore an oath to this country and this country has a very long history and very strong attachment to the Second Amendment.
I thought having a gun would make me more reluctant to advocate for gun safety measures or gun laws. “Would it make me more pro gun rights? What would it do to me?”
I wrote that essay because I didn’t know how to think about what just happened, why I bought the gun.
A lot of people during the pandemic who bought guns were women and people of color. A lot of gun clubs opened for LGBTQ+ people. There was the sense that if we can’t disarm, then we need to arm.
I don’t think I did that for that reason, but it was more kind of fear that was very at the edges of my thinking that maybe I should have a gun. I was living alone. Earlier, during my undergraduate studies, I had a very difficult encounter with someone who tried to break into an apartment. I didn’t have anyone to turn to. I was very scared and I thought about having a gun for my own safety, in a home where nobody can pick it up.
But then, it has been lying there in, in the gun safe because I would, in all likelihood, be too scared to pick it up if I ever needed to.
Dao: Did it at the end of the day help you understand why people buy guns or why perhaps there’s an attraction to owning a gun?
Jusionyte: I have a lot of friends who are real gun enthusiasts, so I think I understood, even before, that a gun can be a really important, not only tool of safety but also, a hobby. People take them to the range.
At first I took a couple of gun safety courses just to feel better around people who have guns, to know how to make sure the gun is unloaded and things like that. I think it made me a little bit more comfortable to be around guns, but I’m still repulsed by certain types of weapons that I think are suited for the battlefield, but not for civilian life, like assault style weapons, assault style rifles. I’m still not comfortable around them.
Dao: Well, you’re about to go away for the holidays, and you’ll be returning to teach at Brown in the new semester.
Hopefully we’ll know more about this particular shooting by then, although we might not. What do you expect to be thinking about in your weeks away? What will you be reflecting on, do you think?
Jusionyte: I think I will probably be thinking about my students because the timing is very — I don’t know whether it’s good or bad because we all scattered immediately after this.
A lot of students left home as well, and we didn’t have time or an opportunity to heal as a community. I am thinking about how we will do that once we all return to campus and how to think about the future for the students who are already concerned that the world is moving on and they have forgotten Brown almost as soon as it happens.
It is true. It is in the news now because they think of the conclusion of this drama. But people are going to talk about Brown less and less, but the wounds the students will carry, this collective trauma, will be ongoing.
So how do we live with it? How do we teach classes but also acknowledge that something unspeakable has happened?
I think I will be spending time over the holidays to think how to do that, how to move forward with both hope and acknowledgement of what happened and some constructive efforts.
I can’t believe it, but last month — I’m also the director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at Brown — we held this weekend-long event on addressing global gun violence.
We had student teams from Brown graduate and undergraduate competing for solutions to gun violence globally.
There were ideas for school education programs in Rhode Island, but there was also a student team, who are engineers, that designed this 3D printer that would recognize when someone is trying to print a gun part. With just software, it would prevent the printer from printing. There were apps to report domestic violence that are disguised as period tracking apps.
Students came up with amazing ideas and solutions and some of them will be working on these projects because we awarded them with grants to do that.
I’m thinking about how to maybe expand this in some way or form, but only after we are ready to do that, because I know that trauma might linger. To find that way when you are finished grieving and you can act might be difficult.
But we will find that.
Dao: Ieva Jusionyte is a professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. She was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in October. Thanks so much for talking with us.
Jusionyte: Thank you for having me
Listen to more “Say More” episodes at globe.com/saymore and wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please follow us and leave us a review. You can email us at saymore@globe.com.
Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
James Dao is the editor of the editorial page. He can be reached at jim.dao@globe.com.