“I research school shootings,” I tell people when they ask me about my PhD. “Oh, wow, that’s rough,” they respond after a slightly awkward pause. If they ask me any follow-up questions, one of them is always along the lines of “have you figured out how to stop them?” In the moments between when they ask and when I try to answer, several thoughts flash through my mind. One of them is about a 45,000-year-old skeleton, called Shanidar 1, found deep inside a mountain cave.
In 1957, archaeologists found the remains of an adult Neanderthal man who lived well into his 40s, having survived a crushing blow to the left side of his face, blinding him in one eye. His right arm was atrophied, and his hand was either lost to injury or amputation. Bone growths in his ear canals likely caused significant hearing loss, and his right leg showed injuries that would have caused a significant limp. Any one of these conditions, by itself, would have been a death sentence if he had lived alone. However, the physical evidence shows that he lived long past when these injuries should have killed him, meaning that a community of people took care of this one-armed, half blind, partially deaf man who couldn’t hunt or defend himself effectively. It is a profound rejection of the survival-at-all-costs story we tell about our pre-history. Shanidar 1 is proof that his community took responsibility for the safety of others who could not care for themselves.
The crux of the “how do we stop school shootings” conversation depends on how you answer two questions: what is the problem, and who is responsible for fixing it? Everything else stems from there. School shootings are a type of social issue where everyone agrees that there is a problem (no one is pro-school shootings), but no one agrees about the deep structure of the problem and what tools could solve it. There is also a uniquely American disposition to frame gun violence as an individual-level problem that can only be solved with individual solutions. A good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. Bullet-proof backpacks are sold more often than gun regulation laws are passed.
Individual safety is prioritized over collective safety, often because, to the American mind conditioned on hyper-individualism, collective safety mechanisms are perceived as an attack on the primacy of individual freedoms. These framings shape what solutions we can imagine. Proponents of the individualistic approach to social problems like gun violence sometimes suggest they are more pragmatic because it aligns with our human nature. They claim our species is conditioned to prioritize our own survival at the expense of others, and that fighting this nature is not just bad policy but doomed to fail.
If that were true, Shanidar 1 should not exist. He would have died long before he made it to that cave. Instead, he lived into old age. The evidence for that kind of care is everywhere once you start looking, and it reaches well beyond grown men to children and infants. Over 3,200 years ago, in what is modern-day Germany, people crafted ceramic bottles to feed animal milk to babies who struggled to breastfeed, sometimes molding them into whimsical animal shapes. About 2,000 years ago, a child in what is modern-day France died and was buried with his handmade toys; his pet dog lay next to his body in death. 10,000 years ago, a female infant was buried with more than 60 shell beads, pendants, and eagle talons elaborately decorated around her body.
Sometimes when I feel hopeless about America’s seeming inability or lack of interest in protecting children from harm, I imagine Shanidar 1 having his injuries tended to by a friend and the infants being bottle-fed until they were strong enough to eat. I imagine the boy’s father gently placing his son’s favorite toys next to him. I imagine the baby’s mother gathering only the most beautiful shells she could find to ornament her daughter’s body like a shrine. The tenderness and loss and grief and extravagant display of love in each one wreck me.
I think of all of this as I try to answer the question, “Have you figured out how to stop them?” The best answer I can think of is “Yes, and it’s that we have to decide that we are responsible for taking care of each other.”
Or rather, we have to remember that we decided this a long time ago. We have to keep deciding this in the face of everything that makes it feel impossible.