Gun violence survivors and their families were left in terror Saturday at the March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., after a man close to the stage reportedly began shouting that he was armed. 

The disruption came during a moment of silence for the 21 lives lost in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting last month. To the shouts of ‘get down, get down,’ gun control activists and their supporters dropped to the ground as others began stampeding away from the stage.

The U.S. Park Police said an “individual was detained by officers” after the suspect’s screams pierced the silence, sending some of the tens of thousands of rally goers on the National Mall into a panic. “No weapons were involved and there is no risk to the public,” Park Police . 

For the families and survivors of mass shootings, the chaotic scene forced them to relive the most traumatic experiences of their lives. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed in the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was visibly shaken just moments after the commotion, remarking that it “took me back to the worst day of my life.” 

“Thankfully, there was no threat but it got everybody really frightened,” Guttenberg told ����Ӱ��. “The reality is, no matter where we are in America today, people do have a fear that a gun could be in the vicinity and that was an unfortunately horrifying and scary experience.” 

The disturbing scene, he said, gave him a deeper understanding of the horror that his daughter experienced at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a former student gunned down 17 people. That event sparked the March For Our Lives movement, which mobilized again this weekend to call for gun control regulations after the killings in Uvalde and a racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, 10 days earlier.

Saturday’s rally went on after frightened attendees were reassured that an active threat did not exist. But before that, there was intense fear among the crowd, including one Parkland woman who said she was immediately reminded of the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert that . Others from Parkland, like Guttenberg, said it brought back the terror their children experienced at Marjory Stoneman. 

Homer Harvey, who identified himself as a friend and neighbor of Parkland survivor and March For Our Lives leader David Hogg, was backstage during the chaos. Hogg had just finished speaking and Harvey was walking over to congratulate him when he saw the suspect. He said a man, threatening that he was armed, hopped a fence into a secured backstage area. The fear of the moment, he said, “is not a video game.” 

“There are a lot of kids back there that are now crying and can’t get their heart rates down because this is what they have lived through,” Harvey said. “This is something that they have seen, and it just triggers everything in their brain saying that they are going to die.”

Hours earlier, Hogg that he knew there were supporters who would have liked to attend the march, but were afraid to “because of the state of violence in our country.”

Guttenberg said the experience reinforced the advocacy that brought him to the U.S. Capital. 

“All I can tell you is I’m not going to stop fighting until we have legislation that solves this problem,” he said. 

“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told ����Ӱ��. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”

WASHINGTON — Survivors of two mass shootings in New York and Texas will appear before the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday to relate their experiences. (Watch live here after 10 a.m. ET)

The witnesses will include fourth grader Miah Cerrillo of Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were gunned down at Robb Elementary School on May 24. Her in order to appear dead to the 18-year-old gunman has gripped Americans, including lawmakers. 

Felix and Kimberly Rubio, parents of Lexi Rubio, in the mass shooting, will also speak before lawmakers.

Zeneta Everhart, a survivor of a mass shooting May 14 by a white supremacist in Buffalo, New York, will also testify. , Zaire Goodman, who was shot in the neck.

The hearing will be live-streamed here.��

“Our hearing will examine the terrible impact of gun violence and the urgent need to rein in the weapons of war used to perpetrate these crimes,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a statement.

“It is my hope that all my colleagues will listen with an open heart as gun violence survivors and loved ones recount one of the darkest days of their lives,” Maloney said. “This hearing is ultimately about saving lives, and I hope it will galvanize my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass legislation to do just that.”

Firearm related injuries are now the for children and adolescents in the United States, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

The House Judiciary Committee held an emergency meeting Thursday to mark up a legislative package that contains eight bills related to gun control. President Joe Biden also and urged Congress to move forward on passing gun control legislation. 

The hearing will be broken into two panels of witnesses. The first panel includes survivors and victims of gun violence, and the second panel will be made up of gun safety advocates, experts and law enforcement.

The only pediatrician in Uvalde, Dr. Roy Guerrero, , will testify. 

The second panel will include Greg Jackson Jr., the executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, which advocates to end gun violence; Joseph Gramaglia, a police commissioner in Buffalo; Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, a labor union representing public school teachers and staff; and Nick Suplina, the senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization that advocates for gun control formed a year after the Sandy Hook mass school shooting. 

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What do you say now? I think you must — we must — try to remind ourselves of the depth of the loss. To insist that we not lose sight of the stakes involved at Robb Elementary School.

When each of my children was born, I sat up late in the hospital, feeling the rushing currents of reality. It was as if the elemental aspects of life were magnified, every emotion twice as strong, gravity enhanced to make motion seem impossible, my leg muscles inexplicably strong enough to spring up whenever the baby cried out. Each time, I wrote it all down, trying to capture the feelings in the halo of that moment. “[Humans] are best when we are creators…” . “From time to time we produce such shining potential that the daily grind of human life becomes not just tolerable, but comprehensible. From time to time, we produce miracles.” 

That’s the real reason for doing right by kids. We talk, particularly in education policy, about the demographic imperative of preparing kids for the jobs of the future or of raising standards and achievement for participating in a global workforce. It’s not that those things are unimportant. It’s just that children already warrant our love, protection, and investment simply because they are children. They are uncertain promises made to a hazy future — we owe them the very best we can offer because children are the acme of human creativity, the greatest thing humans can make.

So: what do we do for them now? How do we escape this pattern before the next tragedy sounds? And why is it so hard? 

You should know by now, but just in case, it bears insisting: the United States is the only place in the developed world where events like these regularly happen. As part of a sobering analysis of gun violence data, The Washington Post’s , “In 2019, there were 29 kids under 5 shot and killed in the United States for every kid under 5 shot and killed in other high-income countries globally.” — more than car crashes, drug-related issues, illness, drowning or anything else. 

In the wake of the tragedy in Uvalde, as has become macabre custom, we are hearing some politicians suggest that the real American problem is that we lack sufficient weaponry to deter mass shooters, including those targeting schools. And yet, . What’s more, the United States is already awash in guns. . By far. 

Guns are barbarically easy to access in our country. That appears to be the key variable — that’s why your American child is more likely to die from a bullet than anything else. That’s the cause of this uniquely depraved, repetitive tide of violence in the United States. That’s why there will be another shooting in another school that is at least as bad as Uvalde’s, at least as bad as the horrific massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. If more — and more readily accessible — guns were going to solve the problem, it already would have happened. 

What are we going to do? What are we willing to do differently? 

A parable about American democracy and its recent past: my scientist father introduced me to politics and public policy through climate change. Throughout the 1990s, he got involved in various forms of local environmental activism and dashed off letters to our congressman. “The climate science is settled,” he’d tell me. “It’s now just a question of whether we humans want to actually run the global experiment [keeping emitting higher and higher levels of carbon] and test whether the science is right.” 

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) would send back form letters explaining that the congressman cared deeply about the environment, that he understood that there were strong views on this issue, but that he also believed it was important to “have the debate” about whether climate change was a real problem. 

My dad would shake his head as he read this to us. “We’ve already had the debate,” he’d exhale. “The science has been conclusive for years.”

This was the 1990s. It was right around the time that conservatives began lampooning Al Gore as “Ozone Man.” It was a solid 20 years before Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) of Congress to “prove” that climate change wasn’t a concern. More people and more politicians are paying attention now. But mostly, the country is floating along, some of us hoping that the data are wrong, others , and most of us acting as though somehow things will get better without us doing particularly much. 

The problem goes well beyond climate change.

I’ve written a few times in recent years that education reform’s receding political tide has left education policy adrift. Conservative politicians have largely retreated to a world where evolving versions of “school choice” are their only policy tool, even as . Liberals have coalesced around various proposals to invest more in public education, albeit usually without meaningful efforts to reform the inequities inherent in education systems. 

First: The point is not to equate the two positions like some . The point is that everyone in public education has on making the system fairer. There is little appetite for overhauling how schools are measured or run or improved. At this point, we’re acknowledging that our schools are fundamentally unfair but mostly just hoping that this will resolve itself without requiring any substantive, controversial effort from the rest of us. 

The flattening of education policy thinking is emblematic of our national governing sclerosis. Pick a major issue — climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, et al. The standard American response now is to muddle through, incapable of mounting a sustained push to overhaul our public policies. When was the last time the country faced a major social challenge and collectively acted to address it? . 

It’s fashionable to blame this on a dearth of civic education and correspondingly waning public spiritedness. Conservatives have an idea here: They are exploring whether faith in American representative government can be revived by banning books and instruction that teach children about the past sins of American representative government. The last Republican presidential administration converted this instinct into — censorship in the name of inculcating children with “patriotic history.”

And indeed, the flagging of faith in our democracy does stem from the presence of evidence, but it’s not the historical record that’s to blame. Americans feel as though nothing can be done because we have grown accustomed to nothing being done. We have learned that our social problems are insuperable. Never mind that other countries — essentially all of them — have solved the problem of mass shootings. Our public institutions keep teaching us that we must simply accept these crises, that their worsening is inevitable. So far, as with climate change, conservatives seem unwilling to do anything serious to address this problem. 

So perhaps conservatives can now expand their efforts to defend American children from information about American shortcomings — by banning any discussion of recent massacres in school. If this sounds far-fetched, note that, , the country prevented the federally funded National Center for Injury Prevention and Control from researching gun violence. 

But it is hard to produce patriotic love for a country by hiding facts about it. Mass shootings keep happening. keep becoming inconveniently more common. Hyper unequal schools keep producing unfair opportunities and unequal outcomes for American children. All of this is hard to hide. At some point, our collective failure to do anything to change the rhythm of our social problems becomes a norm too obvious to deny. 

How does representative government fail? One way is when it repeatedly proves to the public that it cannot adequately represent their preferences and address their common problems. 

What are we going to do? Will we really just meander on, aimlessly trudging towards — and through — our next collective failure?

We won’t make it harder to get access to guns. Not for young adults, not for people who can’t pass a background check, not for anyone. We won’t impose limits on who has access to guns designed specifically for massacring humans. We won’t impose new limits on where people can legally carry guns. We’ll just float along, hoping that this was the last time that this pattern will repeat, that the drumbeat will stop in this latest bloodstained classroom. 

To bring a child into this world is to celebrate the full promise of human possibility. But it is also to accept a host of duties — to be vulnerable enough to take charge of a lived project that is not your own, even if it is in your care for a while. For this project requires you to risk your future comfort, happiness and safety by placing some piece of it in your child’s hands. Sometimes their lives will validate all of your work and suffering and love, but other times, they will hurt and you will be powerless to protect them — or you — from that pain. 

It’s beyond tragic that we have failed to protect families from these crushing losses in Uvalde and before them, Oxford Township in Michigan and Parkland, Florida and Newtown, Connecticut (and, and, and). But it’s somehow even worse that we appear willing to keep adding to our tally, waiting for the next time, accepting that nothing is the very best we can do. 

The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of at least 19 children and two teachers, unfolded just 10 days after the nation was shocked by a mass shooting that left 10 people dead at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. 

It could be more than a coincidence: A growing body of research suggests these assaults have a tendency to spread like a viral disease. A research theory called the contagion effect suggests that mass shootings often happen in clusters, with intense media coverage playing a significant role in subsequent attacks. About a dozen studies, dating to the 1970s, suggest this is the case.

The U.S. has experienced 16 mass shootings in just 10 days, including the carnage in Buffalo and Uvalde. That’s according to , which tracks shootings that result in at least four injuries or deaths. So far this year, the U.S. has endured 212 mass shootings in which four or more people were shot or killed, according to the archive. 

The tragedy in Texas has reignited the country’s divisive and cyclical debate over gun laws, with President Joe Biden asking in an emotional White House address Tuesday night, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York Oswego, said shooters are often motivated by a desire for fame. She’s a proponent of the “, which urges media outlets to limit the frequency with which they publish a shooting suspect’s name and photograph.

Attackers “want people to know who they are, they want their name recognition, and so when we remove that incentive and we don’t report their names, we aren’t rewarding people for killing other people by making them celebrities,” Schildkraut said. “It’s also removing the incentive for other like-minded individuals who may be seeing the amount of coverage that a case is getting and want similar attention.”

A day after the May 14 Buffalo supermarket assault, four people were killed and 23 were injured in five mass shootings: two in Texas, two in North Carolina and one in California. In one incident, a at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California, resulting in one death and five injuries. In another, two people were killed and three injured after in Houston. More recently, on Monday, in a shooting at a club in North Charleston, South Carolina. 

While the Buffalo and Uvalde suspects are both 18-year-old men, a motive for the Texas school shooting remains unknown, as does the degree to which the perpetrator studied or was inspired by the incident in upstate New York or elsewhere. But Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, noted that the Texas suspect was active on social media and reportedly outlined plans on Facebook prior to the attack. The suspect and communicated with a stranger online before the shooting, offering a cryptic message about what would soon unfold. Lankford said the suspect appeared to portray himself “as a mysterious, dangerous man who might do something like this.” 

“He was dancing around the possibility that seemed likely that he would do something dramatic, perhaps dangerous, and perhaps a mass shooting,” Lankford said. “You can only dance around or imply that in a culture in which people are aware that young men with firearms too often do that.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators. 

In one 2015 study on the contagion effect, researchers at Arizona State University found a in the immediate aftermath of a similar attack with four or more victims. A second incident was statistically more likely to occur within 13 days, on average, researchers found.

Yet a similar contagion effect doesn’t appear to exist in the wake of attacks with just a few victims, “possibly indicating that the much higher frequency of such events compared with mass killings and school shootings reduces their relative sensationalism, and thus reduces their contagiousness,” according to the researchers.  

So far this year, 27 shootings at K-12 schools have resulted in 67 injuries or deaths, according to , which has tracked such attacks since 2018. Prior to the shooting in Uvalde, the most recent campus attack unfolded just last week in Kentwood, Michigan. In that May 19 tragedy, after a Crossroads Alternative High School graduation ceremony.

In recent years, mass shootings in the U.S. have become “substantially more deadly over time,” by Lankford. Shooters often take inspiration from previous attacks and apply the lessons learned to their own. In fact, the number of mass shootings where eight or more people were killed since 2010, compared with the previous four decades.

The number of shooters who were inspired by previous attackers has also doubled, Lankford found. Between 1966 and 2009, a quarter of the deadliest shootings were perpetrated by someone who directly cited, referenced or studied a previous mass killer. Such direct influence was observed in half of the deadliest shootings between 2010 and 2019. 

Older attacks seem to have a stronger direct influence than more recent events, Lankford said. The Buffalo suspect, for example, reportedly referenced the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in writing. Lankford noted that mass shooters often conduct extensive research and planning before carrying out their attacks and are unlikely to act impulsively after learning about the most recent shooting on the news. Rather, at-risk individuals who have already been considering violence could see the latest headline and decide that now is the time to act. 

The rise of social media, Lankford said, has helped researchers understand how transmission occurs. 

“We’re increasingly able to study the social media and internet searches of the perpetrators themselves, so what was in previous decades mere speculation about transmission can now be confirmed,” he said. “So, as just one example, we know what the Parkland shooter was googling and that he was looking up both things like the Virginia Tech shooting or the Columbine shooters, but then also a shooting that had just occurred several weeks earlier.”

While many questions about the Texas shooter remain unanswered, Schildkraut said it’s important to focus attention on the victims and their needs. 

“There are so many people in years past who can tell you the names of shooters and not one of their victims, let alone all of their victims,” she said. “We just really need to refocus the attention on who matters in this, and it’s not the person who did the killing.” 

According to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, speaking Monday morning on a Buffalo radio station, a teacher asked Payton Gendron what his plans were for after his upcoming graduation last year from Susquehanna Valley High School, located near Binghamton.

“He said, ‘I want to murder and commit suicide,’” Hochul said. “So they immediately took action.”

On June 8, 2021, state police took Gendron to a hospital, where he underwent a psychiatric evaluation but was released — possibly because he had not made a specific threat against any individual.

“The state police responded,” National Public Radio as saying. “They investigated. They interviewed the subject. And they felt at the time it was appropriate to have that individual brought in for a mental health evaluation.” 

After he graduated two weeks later, , Gendron “fell off investigators’ radar.” It’s not clear why he was not on a so-called red flag list of people whose threats of violence bar them from owning or purchasing weapons when he recently bought a Bushmaster semiautomatic from a dealer in Endicott, New York.

she had ordered an investigation into how the 18-year-old was able to purchase an assault rifle despite the interaction with state police. In 2019, New York state enacted a law that allows a judge to issue an “extreme risk protection order” preventing a person suspected of being a threat to themselves or others from buying a gun.

The District of Columbia and 19 states have red-flag laws, 14 of them enacted in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. The laws enable courts to intervene, typically when relatives or law enforcement present evidence a person has exhibited warning signs of possible future violence. 

According to a 2020 examination of the new laws by ����Ӱ��, New York’s law goes a step further than most, allowing educators to petition a judge directly, rather than attempt to get a parent or law enforcement agency to do so. Hawaii and California have since adopted similar provisions. Research into the laws’ is mixed. 

Last fall, The Pew Charitable Trusts examined the laws’ implementation and found a lack of public education about them, including among the agencies that are most likely to receive reports about troublesome behavior.

“You pass the law and then nothing happens,” Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine and a leading researcher on red flag laws, . “There’s no real systematic efforts to invest in letting people know about it, educating the stakeholder groups who need to know about it, setting up the infrastructure and protocol to do it.”

According to former classmates , the remarks that alarmed Gendron’s teacher followed a pattern of odd behavior that included showing up at school in hazmat gear after COVID restrictions ended. “He wore the entire suit, boots, gloves, everything,” Nathan Twitchell, 19, told the newspaper. “Everyone was just staring at him.”

Former classmates said they knew that Gendron was interested in guns but didn’t find that unusual in their rural community. In a 180-page online “manifesto” filled with racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant theories, the suspect wrote at length about different kinds of firearms as well as his admiration for past mass murderers. 

Gendron said he was while “bored” during the pandemic, a phenomenon experts on extremism say is increasingly common. “A lot of it is happening in plain sight,” Jinnie Spiegler, director of curriculum and training at the Anti-Defamation League, told ����Ӱ��. “There’s the concern on a personal level that young people are getting sucked into it, frankly,” she said, adding that a growing proliferation of hate speech online “sets the stage for that next level of literal white supremacist ideology.”