"Mommy, where do facts come from?" Pt. 1
Well, it depends, honey, on what kind of facts you're talking about.
Shortly after the school shooting in Georgia earlier this month, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance referred to school shootings as “a fact of life.” His comment sparked outrage, especially among liberals, including a friend of mine who emailed me to say she had been “heart-broken & boggled by how it is possible that we could collectively act as if ‘it’s a fact of life’ on something like this.”
Her reaction comes after decades of school shootings following the first she can recall: the murder of 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in April 1999. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, in the 25 years since then, 417 school shootings have taken place—an average of almost 17 a year with a high of 46 in 2022. During that time, 383,000 children have experienced gun violence in their schools, forever altering their lives. Most go on to suffer absenteeism, reduced college enrollment, even lower earnings later in life.
That’s a lot of facts of life to swallow.
And it got me thinking about facts in general and where different kinds of “facts” come from, including:
Facts of life
Real versus alternative facts
Real but hard-to-find facts
This post and the next two examine where these different kinds of facts come from, how they affect us and our democracy, and what we the people can do about them.
The practical implications of this inquiry will likely surprise you.
Facts of life
Roughly 350 years ago, we began thinking of facts as existing out there in the world for people to see and agree upon as true regardless of their authority or ideology. People might differ over what facts to highlight, or how to interpret them, or what to do about them, but until recently, few would dispute the truth value of facts in and of themselves.1
In certain instances, that is still the case. On September 4, 2024, at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, a 14-year-old boy used an assault rifle given to him by his father to kill two children and two teachers and to injure nine others. These facts are not in dispute and never were. Indeed, facts like this have become so commonplace and so easily recognized that many people, like Vance, think of them as “a fact of life.”
That got me wondering:
How exactly did these particular facts become a fact of life?
In Vance’s full account of the incident, school shootings have no backstory, at least not one you could use to stop kids from killing people—or better yet, to stop them from wanting to kill people. The best you can do, according to Vance, is increase security at schools to protect us from what has become a fact of life, as if out of nowhere.
In reality, murders like the one undertaken by a 14-year old boy have a well-documented backstory.2 It is a story of isolation, loneliness, anger, and struggle experienced by kids overlooked and unseen by members of their communities, both in and outside of schools.
That’s why so few of us ever see these rampages coming. Too many of us don’t see these kids, really see them, for who they are and what they are experiencing. As a society, we may hover over their activities and accomplishments, but we have largely abandoned their emotional lives, while giving them easy access to assault weapons with which to kill as many people in as little time as possible.
Viewed in this light, what some call a “fact of life” might more aptly be called “an artifact of American life.”
It is a fact that we have together created as members of a culture grown so emotionally and socially disconnected that it serves as a breeding ground for (among other things) murders and suicides we rarely see coming.
Transforming facts of life
In the same year that two teens at Columbine High School killed thirteen people and took their own lives, a 14-year-old boy walked into the second-largest school in Provo, Utah, bequeathed his watch to a friend, then went home and killed himself that same afternoon.3
His suicide was part of a larger trend. Between 1998 and 2003, the Provo City School District averaged one to two suicides a year. Its largest school of 2,100 students saw four suicides in three years. As they later discovered, Provo was part of a “suicide belt” in the West that reached from New Mexico to Montana where the suicide rates for young people was double that of the national average.
No one understood why, though plenty of people had plenty of theories. One person took a different tack. Instead of speculating, Greg Hudnall, the associate superintendent with the Provo City School District, sat down with students who’d attempted suicide, asked them about their lives, and listened—really listened—to what they had to say. One girl had a question for Hudnall:
“Do you have any idea what it’s like, to attend a middle school
with 1,200 students, share a locker, play on the volleyball team
and not once in three weeks hear your name mentioned?”
After listening to these kids, Hudnall had a much better idea: For one reason or another, almost all of them felt as if they didn’t matter—a fact Hudnell was determined to change.
His first step was to research prevention programs at other schools, many of whom relied on their most popular students to be on the lookout for struggling kids. But Hudnall and Cathy Bledsoe, the school system’s prevention officer, went in a different direction:
. . . they asked every student at Timpview to name three classmates—not kids who were popular, but those they would turn to if they were in crisis. Out of 2,100 students, 40 names rose to the top. They came from all over the student body—athletes, nerds, drama kids, cowboys, gay, straight, LDS, non-LDS [Latter-day Saints]—but they shared a set of traits. They were known among their classmates to be good listeners, caring people, empaths.
Game to help, this freshly minted group named themselves “The Hope Squad.”
Working with local mental health experts, including Brigham Young University academics, Hudnall trained the Hope Squad members to recognize suicide warning signs, taught them what questions to ask and empowered them to guide their struggling classmates toward counselors and social workers. The Hope Squad wore special T-shirts to school, hosted a Hope Day and Hope Week, and met regularly for training and fellowship.
Their results are a testament to the power of people to change facts many consider immutable:
Things turned around so abruptly, it was startling. The year after the first Hope Squad was formed—after that devastating string of four suicides in three years—not a single Timpview student took their own life. Nor during the second year, nor the third, nor the fourth … nor, as of this year, the 20th. The program has been so successful that it was adopted in all 19 of the district’s schools, then approved by the Utah legislature as a recipient of funding for any school in the state wishing to start a Hope Squad.
After retiring from the school district, Hudnall went on to launch Hope Squad as a nonprofit, which now operates around the country in 2,000 schools, a few colleges and corporations, even some senior centers.
What can you and I do?
These kids who have already killed others, themselves, or both are canaries in the mine:
They are warning us of what is to come if we accept how they are feeling and what they are doing as “a fact of life.”
Fortunately, some among us like Hudnell, Bledsoe, and every single Hope Squad member are helping to transform those facts in communities across our nation.
You can follow their lead by doing what they do:
Not accepting facts of life as immutable
Getting the backstory behind facts of life (e.g., doing research; going to the source by asking suicidal kids to describe their experiences and what gives rise to them)
Recruiting or supporting those closest to the problem and best able to address it (e.g., empathetic peers versus the most popular kids)
Creating and capturing new facts (e.g., intervening to change “facts of life” and measuring the results)
Improving and scaling efforts (e.g., learning from and revising programs; launching new and better ones, so the best reach more people)
You can use some version of the same steps to transform almost every single “fact of life” troubling us today.
So let’s get going, get curious, and get creative. Time’s a wastin.
Footnotes
See David Wootton, “A Brief History of Facts,” in History Today, February 13, 2017.
For example, see U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s advisory on social connection and community in “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” and research cited in Mary Kekatos, “As U.S. reels from multiple mass shootings in California, can loneliness be a trigger for violence?” ABC News, January 26, 2023.
This account of teen suicide and the Hope Squads combatting it comes from Derek Burnett, “Plagued by a Youth Suicide Epidemic, Provo, Utah, Worked Together to Find a Remedy” in Reader’s Digest, September 25, 2024.