Presenter: Emmi Morton – Marine Biology
Faculty Mentor(s): Corbett Upton
Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—The More You Know (in depth looks and prevention)
In this paper, I analyze how different childhood traumas will affect children as they grow older, and how this can affect their relationship with guns and the community around them. After secondary exposure to the trauma that gun violence can have, I became curious as to how it will affect those who did experience it firsthand. Throughout this essay, I explore how traumatic events(specifically those relating to gun violence) in childhood during the formative years of one’s psyche, affect the way that they interact with society as they age and gain independence. I decided to go even deeper, to explore how whether being a victim of violence firsthand or just exposed to it, impacted the chances for these people to become either a victim or a perpetrator when it comes to violent crimes such as gun violence. In a world with increasing gun violence and rapidly declining mental health, the risk for tragedies of this nature is higher than ever.
Research done by C.S. Widom in 1989 regarding the cycle of violence was absolutely crucial and remains a central root in the research that I’ve conducted. This cycle of violence reveals the keys to at least implementing some sort of intervention or crisis outreach programs to really make a difference. In this paper I argue that gun violence, which is usually done by mentally disturbed individuals with relations to childhood trauma, passes it on to the next generation of children which in turn creates a loop of violence that must be stopped.