If you can imagine making split-second decisions in an environment that requires coping with challenging conditions such as time pressure, uncertainty and team coordination in the heat of the moment, then you have some insight about what it’s like for a first responder entering an active shooter situation on a campus somewhere. As for students and teachers caught in such horrific circumstances, deciding whether to run, hide, fight – or perhaps pray that first responders will arrive soon – are the only viable options from which to quickly choose.

Yet, learned experience that guides first responders in mass shootings – law enforcement and medical professionals alike – evolves with each incident, sometimes in significant ways. For example, the University of Texas shooting in 1969, in which a Marine-trained sniper indiscriminately killed 14 people and injured more than 30 others from an observation deck atop the Main Building tower on campus, led to the creation of SWAT teams. Lessons from the shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999 led to a massive tactical shift among all law enforcement: instead of delaying engagement out of fear increasing casualties in a gun battle, the first three to four officers who arrive immediately engage the situation with the goal of neutralizing the shooter(s).

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The purpose of the current study was to examine a dual-process model of reactivity to community violence exposure in African American male adolescents from urban communities. The model focused on desensitization and hypersensitization effects as well as desensitization and hypersensitization as predictors of aggressive behavior. Participants were 133 African American male high school students, mean age = 15.17 years, SD = 0.96. Participants completed measures of exposure to community violence, depressive symptoms, hyperarousal symptoms, aggressive beliefs, and aggressive behaviors at two time points. Community violence exposure predicted changes in aggression, β = .25, p = .004, and physiological arousal, β = .22, p = .010, over time, but not aggressive beliefs. The curvilinear association between community violence exposure and changes in depression over time was not significant, β = .42, p = .083, but there was a significant linear association between the exposure to community violence (ECV) and changes in levels of depression over time, β = .21, p = .014. Results indicated a significant mediation effect for hyperarousal on the association between community violence exposure and aggressive behavior, B = 0.20, 95% CI = [0.04, 0.54]. Results showed support for physiological hypersensitization, with hypersensitization increasing the risk for aggressive behavior. ...

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=658834805

Transcipt of podcast:

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

We're going to go now to a region of the country that's been labeled tragically the suicide belt. Suicide rates are high across rural America. In a new poll on rural life conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, more than half of those surveyed said they knew someone personally affected by suicide. But eight rural mountain west states are among the 10 U.S. states with the highest suicide rates. NPR's Kirk Siegler visited one town, Grand Junction, Colo., which is trying to do something about it.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: At the confluence of the Gunnison and Colorado rivers, Grand Junction sits in a bowl of a valley ringed by tall mountains, desert mesas and red rock cliffs. You can see how someone who is struggling could feel a little trapped here. ...

By Kate Morgan

On December 14, 2012, in the middle of reading a news report about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I threw up in my kitchen sink.

It was all so devastating — the victims so small and the act so heinous — and my reaction felt visceral, like a literal punch to the gut. I walked around in a stupor for days afterward. I could barely process what had happened, and my desire for an explanation I knew I likely wouldn’t get was haunting.

On Wednesday, when my iPhone buzzed with a report that dozens of young people and their teachers had been shot in a Parkland, Florida, school, I skimmed the news alert and then went out to dinner.

VIdeo: http://time.com/5116457/kentucky-marshall-county-shooting-desensitization/

By JAMIE DUCHARME January 24, 2018
It took only 23 days for the U.S. to witness its 11th school shooting of the year, during which a Marshall County High School student killed two of his classmates and wounded more than a dozen others. The Jan. 23 assault, in Benton, Kentucky, was the second school shooting of the week. It was only a Tuesday.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the recent frequency of such horrors, the story was somewhat lost in a news cycle dominated by Oscar nominations, the end of the government shutdown, and the impending sentencing of Larry Nassar. While the town of Benton was undoubtedly rocked by the incident, the rest of the country’s focus was largely elsewhere. “We have absolutely become numb to these kinds of shootings, and I think that will continue,” former senior FBI official Katherine Schweit told the New York Times in the wake of the shooting.

That numbness undoubtedly has an impact on policy, politics and news coverage of shootings. But...

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=658834805

Transcipt of podcast:

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

We're going to go now to a region of the country that's been labeled tragically the suicide belt. Suicide rates are high across rural America. In a new poll on rural life conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, more than half of those surveyed said they knew someone personally affected by suicide. But eight rural mountain west states are among the 10 U.S. states with the highest suicide rates. NPR's Kirk Siegler visited one town, Grand Junction, Colo., which is trying to do something about it.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: At the confluence of the Gunnison and Colorado rivers, Grand Junction sits in a bowl of a valley ringed by tall mountains, desert mesas and red rock cliffs. You can see how someone who is struggling could feel a little trapped here. ...