He was 6, in his first-grade class in Newport News, Virginia. He pointed a handgun at his teacher, police say, and\u00a0then he pulled the trigger. And across the nation, people … didn\u2019t quite know how to react.
\nEven in a country where\u00a0gun violence\u00a0is sadly commonplace, the story of a small boy with a gun is reverberating in a big way. There has been finger-pointing. Confusion. Floundering for answers. Mass grappling with deeply uncomfortable feelings. And questions: How could something like this possibly happen? Where in the national consciousness do we put it?
\n\u201cIt is almost impossible to wrap our minds around the fact that a 6-year-old first-grader brought a loaded handgun to school and shot a\u00a0teacher,\u201d Mayor\u00a0Phillip Jones\u00a0said that day, Jan. 6. \u201cHowever, this is exactly what our community is grappling with today.\u201d
\nIt\u2019s not just his community, though, and it wasn\u2019t just that day. This is a country full of people who know exactly what they think about everything, and say so. Yet many are throwing their hands up at this. In a land awash in hot takes, it\u2019s a head-scratcher. A heart-scratcher, even.
\n\u201cI never thought elementary students being the shooter was a possibility we would ever see,\u201d says Kendra Newton, a first-grade teacher in Florida.
\nThat may be because it sits outside what people are accustomed to. Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, believes the case hits differently in part because it violates society\u2019s expectations for both school shootings (of which there were two others elsewhere in the country that day) and childhood itself.
\n\u201cSadly, we have schemas, we have rubrics, we have archetypes for school shootings in this country. We have a sort of script for these things,\u201d said Talarico, who has studied how people remember indirectly experienced events. \u201cUsing the phrase \u2018school shooting\u2019 as a shorthand leads us to develop that story in our heads, and when the facts of the case are so different … that is what is surprising.\u201d
\nAmericans typically view childhood as an encapsulation of the best of our society and values, Talarico says \u2014 innocence, fun, joy, love. Anything that challenges that deep-seated view unearths complicated questions about the culture and community in which a child is being raised \u2014 whether it be local culture and community or the entire nation.
\n\u201cThat\u2019s some hard self-reflection,\u201d she says. \u201cThat is why the story is resonating with people.\u201d
\nAmericans are left struggling with a scenario that doesn\u2019t fit into any bucket. But as jarring as that may feel, there\u2019s a danger in trying to force the incident into a familiar framework, says Marsha Levick, chief legal officer and co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center.
\nShe believes Americans have become \u201cso stuck in a place of punishment\u201d that they have lost the ability to have conversations outside those boundaries. By labeling the shooting with the loaded word \u201cintentional,\u201d Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew is inviting people to view it as a criminal act, Levick asserts.
\n\u201cThat is ludicrous. It is absurd. It is utterly inconsistent with science and what we know about human development and child development,\u201d she says. \u201cLet\u2019s own that. This was not a criminal act.\u201d
\nLevick would like law enforcement to acknowledge that \u201cthis is not our lane,\u201d as it did more than two decades ago in one of the few cases from the recent past that bears some resemblance to the Virginia shooting. When a 6-year-old boy\u00a0shot and killed a classmate in Michigan in 2000, Genesee County Prosecuting Attorney Arthur Busch didn\u2019t go after the boy, but after those who provided access to the gun.
\nIn an interview last week, Busch said he\u2019s been surprised by the repeated use of \u201cintentional\u201d by Newport News police.
\n\u201cIt was like fingernails on a chalkboard when I heard the police say it was intentional,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t call it intentional when it\u2019s a 6-year-old. … He\u2019s not old enough to have intent.\u201d<\/p>\n