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A Columbine survivor’s tragic battle to disclose the ‘ripple impact’ of gun violence: trauma, habit, suicide | Columbine


On 18 Might 2019, a 37-year-old man died of a heroin overdose in Colorado. Lots of the overdose deaths that 12 months – almost 200 every day – didn’t obtain a lot consideration, however his was marked by just a few information tales.

Austin Eubanks had struggled with habit since 1999, when he was shot and witnessed his finest good friend killed within the Columbine highschool library. A physician prescribed the 17-year-old opioids to assist cope with the ache from the bullet wounds in his hand and his knee, however the teenager discovered the medication extra useful for his emotional wounds, those he didn’t know methods to speak about. Inside months, he was manipulating docs for extra prescription medicine, then shifting on to different medication.

It took Eubanks 10 years, and a number of fights, arrests and broken relationships, earlier than he lastly moved by means of the levels of grief for his murdered good friend and obtained sober. In his 30s, he started to talk out nationally in regards to the connection between violence, trauma and the opioid epidemic, demanding a deeper reckoning in regards to the connections between habit and Individuals’ lack of ability to grieve.

By many counts, Eubanks’ dying wouldn’t be included as one of many casualties of the American gun violence epidemic. However he had argued that the toll of mass shootings in America was a lot bigger than a easy depend of the injured or the lifeless.

There have now been 377 college shootings since Columbine, in keeping with the Washington Publish, with almost 350,000 US college students uncovered to violence at their faculties since 1999.

Eubanks knew the complete weight of what every newly bereaved pupil must work by means of. The 2018 college capturing in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 individuals lifeless, appeared eerily acquainted to him: the pictures of “college students working out with their arms above them, the armored automobiles and the police automobiles and ambulances on the grass” all “hit actually near house”.

People visit a memorial on the 5th anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school mass shooting in February 2023.
Individuals go to a memorial on the fifth anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas highschool mass capturing in February 2023. {Photograph}: Saul Martinez/Getty Photographs

What number of college students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas highschool would cope with their trauma, as he did, by means of adverse coping strategies like habit, he questioned. What number of first responders, traumatized by their encounters with the carnage inside the college, would possibly do the identical?

“The first emotion for me nowadays is anger,” Eubanks instructed me the night of the Parkland capturing. “That’s as a result of I see the aftermath of what occurs.”

The harm may not cease with the individuals who witnessed the capturing and its aftermath, he famous, however might unfold to their members of the family and mates, even be handed alongside to their youngsters, as an inheritance of generational trauma.

Harm individuals typically damage different individuals: Eubanks noticed this clearly in his personal life. “I adversely affected tons of of individuals by means of the course of my 20s by means of my habit and the turmoil of my life,” he mentioned. “Clearly, that ripple impact goes on and on and on.”

A single mass capturing sends shockwaves by means of a whole group, he argued, and waves of trauma maintain shifting outwards lengthy after an assault is over.

“What would initially begin as just a few hundred straight affected will change into hundreds, and, in ten years, tens of hundreds simply from this one capturing,” he mentioned in 2018. “These are large, large traumas,” he mentioned. “It’s like an earthquake. It ripples.”


I have been considering of Eubanks, and about these ripples of trauma, typically prior to now few months, as we marked the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook elementary college capturing in Newtown Connecticut in December; after which the fifth anniversary of the Parkland capturing in February; as we lined three mass shootings in three days in California; and now as we’re watching protests sparked by a brand new college capturing on the Covenant college in Nashville, Tennessee, and a brand new mass capturing at a financial institution in Louisville, Kentucky, that claimed the lifetime of a detailed good friend of Kentucky’s governor.

Eubanks himself died a few month after the twentieth anniversary of the Columbine capturing, in what the native coroner mentioned was an unintended overdose. He “misplaced the battle with the very illness he fought so exhausting to assist others face”, his household instructed media shops.

“It’s a horrible, horrible scenario and we’re not going to repair it,” Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, mentioned the day after the Covenant college assault. “Criminals are gonna be criminals.”

People gather to hold a vigil for the victims of Columbine high school shooting.
Individuals collect to carry a vigil for the victims of Columbine highschool capturing. {Photograph}: The Washington Publish/Getty Photographs

The identical day, Joe Biden instructed reporters he had exhausted the chief actions that he might take to stop gun violence. “I can’t do something besides plead with the Congress to behave fairly,” the president mentioned, reiterating his assist for a federal ban on assault weapons that won’t change into a actuality so long as congressional Republicans block the laws.

These sorts of responses from a rustic’s elected leaders are an invite to numbness. And numbness can really feel like a suitable manner of coping with the world we’re being requested to reside in. There’s all the time one other mass capturing coming after this one, and one other after that.

Eubanks talked so much in regards to the risks of numbness, in regards to the impossibility of therapeutic if we don’t transfer by means of our grief. He noticed a direct correlation between the rise in mass violence and the rise in habit in the US, the place drug overdose deaths have jumped from round 20,000 a 12 months in 1999 to greater than 100,000 a 12 months right now, about 5 instances as many deaths yearly because the variety of gun homicides.

Throughout the upheavals of 2020, the variety of gun homicides throughout the US elevated, with an extra 5,000 individuals killed. The variety of overdose deaths elevated much more: an extra 20,000 individuals misplaced.

“We have now this society that’s crammed with emotional ache and trauma, and we have now individuals prescribing narcotics which might be very efficient with treating emotional ache and trauma,” Eubanks had instructed me.

He additionally noticed a really shut connection between trauma, despair, habit and suicide. Suicides within the US, which outnumber homicides, rose about 35% between 1999 and 2018, and most suicides are dedicated with weapons. A cluster of suicides in March 2019, which included two pupil survivors of the Parkland capturing, and a dad or mum of a kid murdered in Newtown, briefly targeted consideration on the necessity to assist survivors of college shootings, together with the concern that media consideration to the suicides would possibly put extra individuals in danger.

“Our our bodies and our minds usually are not meant to undergo these sorts of tragedies,” a visibly shaken Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s governor, mentioned after Monday’s capturing at a financial institution in Louisville. “That’s my financial institution,” the governor added. He urged the police who responded to the scene and the financial institution’s staff to “all attain out and get the assistance that they want”.


Once I consider Eubanks, I additionally consider Darren Seals, a younger activist from Ferguson who was deeply concerned within the protests after the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

A memorial for Michael Brown, who was shot dead by a white policeman, in Ferguson in November 2014.
A memorial for Michael Brown, who was shot lifeless by a white policeman, in Ferguson in November 2014. {Photograph}: REUTERS/Alamy

Seals had grown up with gun violence as a continuing actuality: St Louis has had one of many nation’s highest murder charges, and Seals himself had been shot two separate instances. The second capturing, which left him significantly injured, impressed him to change into an anti-violence activist. As a “day one” protester in Ferguson, Seals grew to become shut with Michael Brown’s household, and was an influential and controversial presence on the bottom. When some native gang members had been teargassed for the primary time and needed to retaliate in opposition to regulation enforcement, it was Seals who had the credibility to show them methods to “battle again one other manner”, by sporting protecting gear as they continued to reveal, activist Tory Russell recalled.

Years later, when nationwide consideration had shifted elsewhere, Seals had continued engaged on group violence prevention efforts within the St Louis space, targeted on methods to intervene within the lives of younger individuals susceptible to gun violence, in addition to persevering with to talk out about police brutality and police surveillance.

On 6 September 2016, Seals was discovered lifeless, shot a number of instances and left in a burning automobile. He was 29. His homicide stays unsolved and St Louis county police mentioned that they had no updates on his case.

Two years later, in 2018, one of many grieving mates I had interviewed about Seals’ dying, Bassem Masri, additionally died, in what was dominated an overdose. Masri was simply 31, one in all a number of Ferguson protesters misplaced too younger.

Trauma, as Eubanks mentioned, retains rippling outwards, one form of harm turning into one other.

However trauma and violence don’t solely result in hurt. Each Eubanks and Seals had been gun violence survivors whose shootings had turned them into activists. Their experiences had been, in some methods, very totally different. Eubanks was white, and as a pupil at a comparatively rich, suburban highschool, he had an expectation of security. Gun violence in a spot like that was handled as an aberration. Seals, who was Black, had grown up in an space the place violence was endemic and gunshots had been widespread and younger males like him had no expectation of being protected.

Daren Seals, top center, awaits the decision by a grand jury on whether to indict Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown in 2016.
Daren Seals, high middle, awaits the choice by a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson within the dying of Michael Brown in 2016. {Photograph}: Robert Cohen/AP

However Seals and Eubanks, coming from very totally different contexts, responded to the trauma they skilled in related methods. Each of them developed a broad evaluation of the violence and hurt they skilled. Neither one selected to focus, as many American activists do, on gun entry and gun management legal guidelines. Seals talked about violence by means of the lens of racism, systemic deprivation, poverty, incarceration and police brutality. Eubanks targeted on the connections between trauma, habit and the alternatives and earnings of the American medical and pharmaceutical industries.

Each of them spoke out in protection of people that had been damage in the best way that they had been and who had been typically dismissed and demeaned, even in dying.


I consider Eubanks and Seals collectively partially as a result of each of them targeted on serving to different individuals at a neighborhood degree, whilst their activism gained nationwide consideration. After his dying, mates instructed the Washington Publish about Seals’ efforts to throw a Thanksgiving dinner for low-income households and provides out Christmas presents to youngsters who may not get many, all whereas working 12-hour shifts at a neighborhood manufacturing facility.

In his 30s, Eubanks served because the chief working officer for a long-term residential remedy program in Steamboat Springs, Colorado and mentioned that about 80% of the purchasers in restoration he had labored with might determine the traumatic occasion on the root of their habit.

Austin Eubanks served as the COO for a long-term residential treatment program in Colorado.
Austin Eubanks served because the COO for a long-term residential remedy program in Colorado. {Photograph}: courtesy of Austin Eubanks

After each high-profile capturing, there’s no scarcity of commenters prepared to embrace cynicism or despair, to re-share a British journalist’s tweet from 2015 that argued: “Sandy Hook marked the top of the US gun management debate.As soon as America determined killing youngsters was bearable, it was over.” It typically appears to be the most secure individuals, those who haven’t but been touched by gun violence, who’re essentially the most prepared to declare that nothing might be completed, that the talk is already over.

Individuals who have misplaced their youngsters or dad and mom, who’re nonetheless coping with gunshot accidents and have bullet fragments of their physique, usually tend to ignore the chances, and maintain working.

Over the previous few months, I’ve been opening up the previous recordsdata of my interviews with Eubanks, and studying them once more. Each time I do that, I really feel so unhappy for his household, his youngsters, not attending to be with him in his 40s and 60s and 70s. He had simply been getting began. He had a lot extra work he needed to do.

However, studying his phrases, I additionally know that the work Eubanks did shouldn’t be over. In his few brief years as an activist, he deeply influenced many individuals, offering a perspective on the nationwide gun violence debate that nobody else was providing. His speak on trauma and habit remains to be being seen. To honor his reminiscence, his household created a retreat program the place mass capturing survivors may also help one another heal.

A visitor walks around the pool at the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial.
A customer walks across the pool on the Sandy Hook Everlasting Memorial. {Photograph}: Boston Globe/Getty Photographs

Trauma shouldn’t be the one drive that ripples outwards, affecting first tons of, then hundreds, then hundreds of thousands of individuals, that retains shifting years after the preliminary occasion has ended.

I would really like my physique to cease reacting the best way it does now after every new mass capturing. Perhaps you’d, too. However I attempt to remind myself that these emotions – the grief, the anger, the panic, the nausea – are a refusal to simply accept this sort of mass dying as regular.

I learn Eubanks’ quotes once more, and I inform myself that feeling this ache is healthier than not feeling it. Ache is how our our bodies inform us to cease doing what we’re doing. Our our bodies, a lot much less intelligent than our minds, simply saying, transfer, transfer.





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