KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — On Monday, a person opened fire at Michigan State University. Three students died and five others were in critical condition as of Tuesday. Fifty days into 2023, the U.S. has seen 67 mass shooting incidents — more shootings than there have been days of the year.
According to the National Gun Violence Archive, a mass shooting is when four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not including the shooter themselves.
"Each time we see these instances occurring, we become more desensitized to them and we become almost accustomed to them happening. And so, I think that's playing into the reoccurring violence that we're seeing day-to-day," said Dr. Rachel Ponder, an assistant professor in criminal justice at Maryville College.
Over the last five years, the number of mass shootings in the U.S. has nearly doubled. In 2017, the Gun Violence Archive reported 349 mass shootings. In 2022, they reported 647 mass shootings.
They also said that so far in 2023, there have been 2,260 gun violence deaths that weren't suicides.
"I think we refuse to change the systems that are creating this gun violence," said Ponder. "We're in this moment where we think it's not going to happen to us, but we see it happening in other places and we want to be prepared. But instead of targeting poverty, unemployment, mental health — we're just going to give more people guns."
She said that the rise in poor mental health among young people in the U.S. could also be due to a lack of action regarding systemic problems.
"We may not pinpoint it back exactly to mass shootings, but just to the stress of living day-to-day life in America. We're being trained on how to address mass shootings on campus, we're being shown images and videos in the media all the time," she said.
She said that she believes the best way to prevent future mass shootings is to address large-scale issues across the U.S. that could contribute to gun violence.
"Tomorrow, a lot of people will forget what happened at MSU. We need to come together as a community and take that time to heal and have the hard conversations that we need to have about unemployment, about poverty ... to make sure we're taking care of not only our people in our community directly, but in our community across the U.S.," said Ponder. "People who are hurting, hurt people. So if we can heal people and reduce them of that hurt, then maybe we can reduce some of the pain on mass scales, like mass shootings."