SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (WXYZ) — “It’s absolutely frightening,” said Abraham Anderson of the mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois after numerous mass shootings this year in America.
And Anderson is not someone who frightens easily. At 90 years old, the Southfield resident lived through World War II, served in the Korean War, witnessed the Civil Rights era in America and all that followed.
“It appears we are going backwards. We were making progress and then the pandemic came and things really changed,” Anderson said.
He is not the only one on edge that 7 Action News spoke to outside a grocery story in Southfield.
“You have to look around your shoulders and see what is going on,” Tony Black of Southfield said.
“It makes me want to stay in,” Denise McDonald of Southfield said.
“It makes me more cautious because I do a lot with my grandma. And I want to make sure we are safe and make it back home,” Noah Hopkins of Detroit said.
Patrick M. Carter, M.D., co-director of the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan said, “They have been increasing in frequency and in terms of the number of casualties per event.”
Carter says the data indicates we are seeing a concerning increase in mass shootings. So, what can be done? He and his colleagues say we could do what we did when we saw an increase in car crashes.
The National Transportation Safety Board studied it and looked for evidence-based solutions.
“When you think about car deaths in this country, we saw the peak in the 1950s. We focused our efforts as a country on how to we prevent these from occurring,” Carter said.
“Every time one of these happens, it is tragic. We shouldn’t have to accept this as a country. We can do better,” professor Javed Ali said.
Ali, who works with the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, has more than 20 years of experience in national security, holding during his career at the FBI senior roles with the National Intelligence Council and the National Counterterrorism Center, and the National Security Council under the President Donald Trump administration.
He says on top of national studies that could make effective laws possible, social media companies could make a difference.
“What I think is most practical in the near term is the role of social media companies enforcing their own terms of service or policing the content that is on their systems,” Javed said.
Javed says private companies could delete material that repeatedly is connected to violence against innocents.
“With the more recent attacks, time and time again, these shooters are active way more in the online world than they are in the physical,” Ali said.
“It really shook me up, you know. The Fourth of July,” Anderson said.
The man who served his country says we all have a responsibility to at least take a collective stand against hate.
“It appears we are going to have to try to gain our independence again from the haters,” Anderson said.
