A 6-year-old in a first-grade class pointed a gun and shot his teacher on Jan. 6. A psychology expert says the case hits differently because it violates society's expectations for school shootings and childhood itself.
Even in a country where gun violence is 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 and mass grappling with deeply uncomfortable feelings. There are questions, too. How could something like this possibly happen? Where in the national consciousness do we put it? Police say the 6-year-old in a first-grade class in Newport News, Virginia, pointed a handgun at his teacher on Jan. 6 and then pulled the trigger. One psychology expert says the case hits differently because it violates society's expectations for both school shootings and childhood itself.
He was 6, in his first-grade class in Newport News, Virginia. He pointed a handgun at his teacher, police say, and then he pulled the trigger. And across the nation, people . didn t quite know how to react.
“However, this is exactly what our community is grappling with today.” “I never thought elementary students being the shooter was a possibility we would ever see,” says Kendra Newton, a first-grade teacher in Florida. Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, believes the case hits differently in part because it violates society’s expectations for both school shootings (of which there were two others elsewhere in the country that day) and childhood itself.