President Joe Biden: Parents who'll never see their child again, never have them jump in bed and cuddle with them, parents who'll never be the same. To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There's a hollowness in your chest, you feel like you're being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out. It's suffocating. It's never quite the same.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. That was President Joe Biden as he addressed the nation on Tuesday night following the grotesque slaughter of at least 2 adults and 19 children in the second, third, and fourth grade at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, allegedly by an 18-year-old gunman named Salvador Ramos, who was killed by police at the scene.

This violence comes just 10 days after a different 18-year-old killed 10 people, most of them senior citizens, in a neighborhood grocery on a Saturday morning in Buffalo, New York. Even as President Biden spoke with empathy about the parents whose children were so brutally taken from them, he also reminded us of the other victims of this horror.

President Biden: How many scores of little children who witnessed what happened, see their friends die as if they're on a battlefield, for God's sake?

Melissa Harris-Perry: According to Education Week, the Uvalde massacre is the 27th school shooting with injuries or deaths this year. 27 and we're only in the 21st week of the year. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and our team here at The Takeaway has been working to bring you a show today addressing the current mental health crisis among young people in our country. It's a crisis that began before the pandemic that has deepened with the isolations, disruptions, and loss caused by COVID-19, and which continues unabated due in part to the inaccessibility of mental health care and treatment.

Those were the stories we were planning when the news broke that yet another act of senseless, enraging, bloody violence by a young shooter has taken 19 children and 2 adults in a small Texas community. Our thoughts turned to the young survivors and how this trauma would affect them now that they had once again been called on to bear witness to the unthinkable in yet another school. Here with me now is Jonathan Metzl, director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, and a professor of sociology and psychiatry. Jonathan, thanks for coming back on The Takeaway.

Jonathan Metzl: I'm glad to talk to you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan, I want to start by letting President Biden actually ask the first question.

President Biden: Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we even keep letting this happen?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan, why?

Jonathan Metzl: There are two ways to think about that question at this early stage when we are in the shock period of trying to figure out just what happened in Texas. One, of course, is the obvious answer of the number of guns in our country versus other countries. We have roughly 393 million people in the country and over 400 million civilian-owned firearms, so we have more than one gun per person. I think there's another way to think about that question, which is also about polarization. When I think about times that other societies have faced this moment [unintelligible 00:04:14] and done something about it, I'm thinking about Australia, for example, and Scotland.

These are very different examples than the United States, but I think the important lesson of those global examples-- Australia, for example, is a country that through the mid-80s had a long history of firearm ownership, frontiersmanship. People owned guns and cared about them, and then there was a horrific mass shooting. What happened, it wasn't so much any one policy, it was that with great difficulty, people across the political divide came together and said, "Enough is enough. We have to work with people who disagree with us to come up with some common cause."

It's true people say what they did wouldn't work here because they did a gun buy-back program and regulated long guns and made it much harder to basically get a gun, and particularly to carry a gun in public. Some of those things might work here, some of those things might not work here, but what happened was, people particularly in the political center, formed a coalition, an unbreakable coalition, and said, "Look, let's come to the table and figure out what we can work with." They've had very few mass shootings in the aftermath of that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan, you were here just a week ago to talk about Buffalo. I'm wondering what the effect is of these seemingly unrelenting assaults on our well-being? You talk about the center getting disrupted as a political concept, but as soon as you said it, I felt it in my stomach, all of our centers keep getting disrupted.

Jonathan Metzl: I feel that way so much. I think everybody-- There's obviously a push and pull because on one hand, this is something you never want to habituate. You can't habituate when little second, third, fourth graders are getting killed in their own school. You don't want to have a response that is like a wartime response of being numb to it. You want every one of these events to fuel outrage. I thought Coach Steve Kerr was fantastic yesterday, you want to feel angry, you want to look people in the eye and say, "What can we do about this?" I don't think we want to habituate this.

At the same time, there is a feeling of learned helplessness, or PTSD, or pick any number of psychological terms for the fact that your first response is shock and horror and your second response often is resignation. It's not tied to concrete steps to change this. It really is a vicious cycle in so many ways for our country, and it's, of course, catastrophic for communities and families.

I thought President Biden articulated that very well, but the cycle is so catastrophic for our country and how we think about democracy and how we think about our ability to come together to solve problems that threaten shared humanity. It's all of those emotions at one time. I think it's understandable why people feel anger and fatigue and resignation and despair all at once.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan, I've been thinking about the catastrophe for this community. This massacre occurred just two days before the end of the school year, and it is completely reasonable that local leaders immediately said, "Okay, we're going into summer. School is now canceled." I know they're still going to make decisions about things like the high school graduation. Yet, there's also a part of me, knowing what we've learned over COVID, about the level of distress that young people felt when they didn't have their school to go to, when they didn't have their normal routine.

Can you talk to us about the meaning of the timing of this potentially for the psychological well-being, both of the children in that school, but also in schools in general, where the last event of the school year is going to be this elementary school massacre?

Jonathan Metzl: Yes. There's no right timing except for just not having more school shootings. As you've mentioned earlier, we're having more than a school shooting a week right now. The timing in part is it was a week since the last one. Part of the issue is just the steady drumbeat. Of course, this is also happening in the context of so many other things happening in the world that kids are dealing with right now, a pandemic, economic issues, war. In a way, I just feel like the need for support at any time for people who are--

What's the idea of school? It's that you become a better person, thinker, citizen. Then you enter into the adult world and school is also assumption of, "We're going to keep you safe while we teach you what you need to learn to then progress." In a way, school itself is unsafe for parents and children right now. Also, I see this with my students, it's like, "What world are you making for me to enter into?" The idea of the progression that school implies is also so abundant. In that sense, I think it's time to massively invest, of course, in different kinds of support structures, community conversations, mental health treatment, mental health support.

Then I think the other important point about the timing, of course, is this is something that happened a week after Buffalo, and we cannot forget that either. Part of that, I have no idea, I haven't seen anything about the shooter, but mass shootings are often escalatory and they often respond to one another. I think the timing is potentially not happenstance because it does, just to be crass about it, steal the headlines from the mass shooting that happened the week before.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You also drew our attention via your social media feed yesterday to a research piece written by Joshua Brown and Amy Gooden. The title of it is mass casualty shooting venues, types of firearms, and the age of perpetrators in the US, a very academic title. I think the key insight you were giving us here is that these researchers found that people aged 18 to 20 comprise a shockingly high percentage of shooters and victims. Even as we are astonished with the youth of these victims, turns out young adults are often right at the center of this. What does that mean? What does it tell us?

Jonathan Metzl: It's one of the many examples of how the debate that we have and that, just to be honest, the NRA wants us to have about, is this, Second Amendment, yes or no guns? It's not a yes or no issue. There are many things we can be doing as a society to keep people safe, to keep schools safe, to keep people alive that have nothing to do with yes or no guns and, in fact, reflect structures we put in place all the time.

One of those structures I think research is showing pretty compellingly is age. People between the ages of 14 and 24 are roughly 16% of the population of our country. They commit, usually, nearly half the murders. Most of those murders are guns and also rising rates of suicide. There are clear age-related patterns to different kinds of shootings. As we're seeing in these schools, also the victimization rates of people in that age bracket also are high as well.

Now, what does that tell you? It tells you, on one hand, that people who are coming into adulthood, just to be honest as a psychiatrist, their brains are still forming, they're still somewhat impulsive, they are at higher risk factor for certain kinds of psychological conditions that might be more prone to violence, and they're in social configurations that also might be at higher risk of violence. The reason I'm saying this is because that data is so important. Every piece of it I think points to the fact that we shouldn't lower the age at which people can, without any regulation, by or carry firearms.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan Metzl is director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, and a professor of sociology and psychiatry. Jonathan, thanks so much for being here.

Jonathan Metzl: Let's keep talking.

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