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Tomorrow marks one year since a shooter killed 19 students and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school—the deadliest school shooting since the one at Sandy Hook a decade prior. Each of these grim American anniversaries raises the same question: Has the country made progress in curbing the likelihood of mass shootings since the tragedy? Today’s newsletter will check in on a few overlapping factors of America’s gun-violence crisis.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first social-media babies are growing up—and they’re horrified. The second generation of school shootings The Republican primary has entered its chaos phase.

Escalating Trauma

In a new essay, the writer Sarah Churchwell summarizes what America has begun to feel like in 2023: “We’re at a point of iterated, escalating trauma: the same people being affected by mass shootings across generations.” Churchwell writes about her brother, whose elementary school was targeted by a shooter when he was a child, and who, more recently, evaded a mass shooting at a nearby Fourth of July parade—and was then forced to explain the reality of such events to his preschooler.

This morbid mass-shooting tradition can seem particularly intractable because it involves overlapping conflicts in American policy, culture, and society. First, of course, is the matter of guns. As I wrote last month, a majority of Americans support gun-control measures such as universal background checks for gun purchases, but the nation’s political system fails to enact even these popular gun-control policies because of the intense political polarization over the issue and influence of the domestic gun industry.

In my story, I cited an Atlantic essay by the Stanford Law School professor John J. Donohue pointing out the disparity that exists even between National Rifle Association leaders and the organization’s own members. “Repeated surveys show that while the NRA membership consistently supports reasonable measures such as universal background checks,” he wrote, “NRA leaders stake out a much more extreme position.”

The role of the NRA is crucial to understanding America’s gun situation, but just as important is understanding how the Supreme Court has recently altered the lines of the debate. The Court’s decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen changed the framework that courts use when determining the constitutionality of firearm regulations, broadening interpretations of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to protect an American’s right to legally carry a handgun in public. Although the power of the NRA has long slowed the passage of new gun-reform measures in Congress, this Supreme Court ruling makes some existing modern laws that restrict firearms liable to being ruled unconstitutional in the future.

Setting aside Americans’ access to firearms, there’s also the question of how to address the emotional or psychological ills that could drive someone to turn to gun violence in the first place. My Atlantic Daily colleague Tom Nichols outlined his theory of the “Lost Boys” last month, in which he suggests that a scourge of male narcissism is likely to blame:

Yes, the country is awash in guns; yes, depression seems to be on the rise in young people; yes, extremists are using social media to fuse together atomized losers into explosive compounds. But the raw material for all of the violence is mostly a stream of lost young men.

Why is this happening? What are we missing? Guns and anomie and extremism are only facets of the problem. The real malady afflicting these men … is the deluge of narcissism in the modern world, especially among failed-to-launch young men whose injured grandiosity leads them to blame others for their own shortcomings and insecurities—and to seek revenge.

Other Atlantic writers have turned their attention to the social-media ecosystem waiting to capitalize on angry young men’s worst impulses. Last year, the writer Juliette Kayyem noted that “lone wolf” shooters may act alone but often have an “online pack” of peers who share their ideology.

Last week, the sociologist Eric Gordy pointed to a lesson America might learn from Serbia, a country shocked by two mass shootings in the course of a week earlier this month. Because semiautomatic weapons are illegal in Serbia, the government was able to respond quickly, Gordy explained: “It took only a day for President Aleksander Vučić to deliver a speech promising swift action to protect public safety and to reduce ownership of illegal firearms by 90 percent.” But for many Serbian observers, limiting gun access was only the first step in dealing with a larger problem—a country where “political elites and tabloid media continue to promote ethno-nationalist resentment and hatred.”

Gordy notes that many American gun-control advocates are reluctant to blame cultural or psychological causes, rather than the sheer number of guns in the country, for the persistence of mass shootings. But he argues that it’s worth paying attention to the residents of Serbia who are arguing that “eliminating the danger of violence will also require building institutions that are truthful and responsible, and building a culture that is, if not tolerant and understanding, then at least relatively nontoxic.”

This brings us back to Uvalde. On May 8, Republicans unexpectedly allowed a bill that would raise the purchase age for semiautomatic rifles to advance out of a House committee. A likely impetus for this sudden move is, by all definitions, the very opposite of progress: a mass shooting days prior, this time near Dallas at an outdoor mall, where nine people were killed.

Related:

A firearm-owning Republican’s solutions for gun violence Mass shootings are a problem America can’t fix

Today’s News

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis plans to announce his 2024 presidential campaign in a live audio conversation with Elon Musk on Twitter tomorrow. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a public advisory on the “profound risk of harm” that social media can have on young people. A man is in custody after crashing a U-Haul truck carrying a Nazi flag into a security barrier near the White House last night. Investigators are treating it as a potentially intentional incident.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ thoughts on the marijuana-legalization divide.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

In Ukraine, brutality lingers. Tim Keller’s critique of liberal secularism Photos: Extreme weather brings deadly flooding to northern Italy.

Culture Break

Tina Thorpe / HBO

Read. The Late Americans, the new novel by Brandon Taylor, which hits bookstores today. Or check out another title from The Atlantic’s summer reading guide, which includes 20 books you should grab this season.

Watch. A Black Lady Sketch Show (streaming on Max). It’s the perfect mix of random and hilarious.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This week is a good time to hear from America’s kids. I recommend this collection of reflections from students across the country, in their own handwriting, after the Uvalde shooting.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

My baby pictures and videos are the standard compendium of embarrassment. I was photographed waddling in nothing but a diaper, filmed smearing food all over my face instead of eating it. But I’m old enough that the kompromat is safe in the confines of physical photo albums and VHS tapes in my parents’ attic. Even my earliest digital activity—posting emotional MySpace photo captions and homemade music videos—took place in the new and unsophisticated internet of the early 2000s, and has, blissfully, been lost to time. I feel relief whenever I’m reminded of those vanished artifacts, and even more so when I see pictures and videos of children on the internet today, who won’t be so lucky.

In December, I watched a TikTok of two young sisters named Olivia and Millie opening Christmas presents. When the large boxes in front of them turned out to contain two suitcases, Millie, who appeared to be about 4 years old, burst into tears. (Luggage, unsurprisingly, was not what she wanted from Santa.) Her parents scrambled to explain that the real presents—tickets to a four-day Disney cruise—were actually inside the suitcases, but Millie was too far gone. She couldn’t stop screaming and crying. Nine million strangers watched her breakdown, and thousands of them commented on it. “This is a great ad for birth control,” one wrote. (The TikTok has since been deleted.)

Two decades ago, this tantrum would have been just another bit of family lore, or at worst, a home video trotted out for relatives every Christmas Eve. But now, thoughtless choices made years ago—a keg stand photographed, a grocery-store argument taped—can define our digital footprints, and a generation of parents like Millie’s are knowingly burdening their children with an even bigger online dossier.

The children of the Facebook era—which truly began in 2006, when the platform opened to everyone—are growing up, preparing to enter the workforce, and facing the consequences of their parents’ social-media use. Many are filling the shoes of a digital persona that’s already been created, and that they have no power to erase.

[Read: The perils of ‘sharenting’]

Caymi Barrett, now 24, grew up with a mom who posted Barrett’s personal moments—bath photos, her MRSA diagnosis, the fact that she was adopted, the time a drunk driver hit the car she was riding in—publicly on Facebook. (Barrett’s mother did not respond to requests for comment.) The distress this caused eventually motivated Barrett to become a vocal advocate for children’s internet privacy, including testifying in front of the Washington State House earlier this year. But before that, when Barrett was a teen and had just signed up for her first Twitter account, she followed her mom’s example, complaining about her siblings and talking candidly about her medical issues.

Barrett’s audience of younger users are the ones who pointed out the problem, she told me. Her internet friends started “reaching out to me, being like, ‘Hey, maybe you should take this down,’” she said. Today’s teens are similarly wary of oversharing. They joke on TikTok about the terror of their peers finding their parents’ Facebooks. Stephen Balkam, the CEO of the nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute, says that even younger children might experience a “digital coming-of-age” and the discomfort that comes with it. “What we’ve seen is very mature 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds sitting down with their parents, going, ‘Mom, what were you thinking?’” he told me.

In the United States, parental authority supersedes a child’s right to privacy, and socially, we’ve normalized sharing information about and images of children that we never would of adults. Parents regularly divulge diaper-changing mishaps, potty-training successes, and details about a child’s first menstrual period to an audience of hundreds or thousands of people. There are no real rules against it. Social-media platforms have guidelines for combatting truly inappropriate content—physical abuse of minors, child nudity, neglect, endangerment, and the like. But uploading non-abusive content can be damaging, too, according to kids whose lives have been painstakingly documented online.

[Read: When kids realize their whole life is already online]

For parents, posting can be hard to quit. Views, likes, and comments offer a form of positive reinforcement to parents, whose work is largely invisible and often thankless. “The most tangible proof of our work is children themselves,” Sara Petersen, the author of the book Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, told me. “And sometimes it’s really just nice to post a cute photo and have 10 or 12 people say, ‘So cute.’”

The likes and comments are one thing. Money is another. Families who document their lives intimately on YouTube or TikTok can amass large audiences, sponsorships, and ad revenue. Currently, no state or federal laws entitle the children of these family vloggers to any of the money earned, although, as The Washington Post recently reported, such legislation has been introduced in states including Washington and Illinois.

Some new parents feel there’s no excuse for subjecting children to invasive public scrutiny. Kristina, a 34-year-old mother from Los Angeles who asked to be identified by only her first name for privacy reasons, has posted just a handful of photos of her daughter, and covers her face in all of them. “We didn’t really want to share her image publicly, because she can’t consent to that,” she told me. Many other adults don’t respect Kristina’s decision. “I had someone basically insinuate, was there something wrong with my daughter? Because I wasn’t sharing her,” she said.

[Read: The bargain at the heart of the kid internet]

Even if parents have decided to keep their children off social media, they’re not the only ones with phones. Kristina says she’s had to ask friends and family to take down photos they’ve posted of her daughter online. Every person on the street, every parent at a birthday party, has their own camera in their pocket, and the potential to knowingly or unknowingly violate her family’s boundary.

Barrett says she’s still feeling the effects of her mother’s decade of oversharing. When Barrett was 12, she says she was once followed home by a man who she believes recognized her from the internet. She was later bullied by classmates who latched on to all the intimate details of her life that her mother had posted online, and she ultimately dropped out of high school.

She and her mom have no relationship now, in large part because of the wedge her mother’s social-media habits put between them. Even with other people, Barrett says, she’s extremely private and can be paranoid about interacting. “I get afraid to even tell my friends or my fiancé something, because in the back of my mind I’m constantly like, Is this gonna be weaponized against me on the internet?”