Mental Health at Gunpoint
Fighting through the mental health cracks of gun violence
WARNING: Some readers may find this story and its descriptions disturbing and triggering. If you need emotional support, dial 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which provides free and confidential emotional support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
This story is part of a year-long project produced with the support of The Carter Center and co-published with Los Ángeles Press.
Click here to read the story in Spanish.
As a college student, Monte-Angel Richardson channeled her personal experience with gun violence and mass shootings into an academic mission to understand their roots and find solutions to these urgent issues—particularly within Latino communities across the United States. Her academic journey has been one of deep exploration, driven by a commitment to addressing one of modern America’s most dire problems. However, as she delves into the topic of gun violence, Richardson continues to struggle with the lasting effects of trauma and nightmares—an indelible mark of how devastating shootings are to survivors and their communities.
Los Angeles, California – Monte-Angel Richardson grew up along San Diego’s sun-soaked coastline, where stunning sandy beaches and world-class tourist attractions meet the chaotic backdrop of Tijuana, a city across the U.S. southern border ruled by Mexican cartels and one of the world’s top drug trafficking jewels. Her childhood was deeply influenced by her Mexican-American grandfather, a gun-wielding drug dealer, who often exhibited erratic, aggressive behavior. At the time, however, she was too young to grasp how being around firearms and facing gun violence threats during her childhood and early adulthood, both at home and in school, would eventually define the rest of her life.
Richardson was still a little girl when she experienced her first shooting threat in 2006. A fellow student had brought a gun to Cajon Park Middle School in California with the intent to kill a friend of hers. Three years later, she faced a second gun violence threat at Santana High School in California, when a student brought a gun to school on the eighth anniversary of a shooting that killed two people and injured thirteen. The shooting occurred in 2001, and at the time, her cousin was a student there.
“In high school, I came to realize that guns could play a bigger role in escalating violence,” she says.
But it was the tragic Isla Vista killings in 2014 that would mark a turning point in Richardson’s journey. She was a senior at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB) when a 22-year-old British-born man killed six students and injured fourteen community members by shooting, stabbing and ramming them with a vehicle––before dying by suicide. Although the tragedy unfolded while she was backpacking at Sequoia National Park, the emotional scars and nightmares triggered by the incident persist to this day.
“When you're in a closed community like that, the impact––whether or not you directly saw what happened––is intense, especially in a school setting,” she says.
Richardson’s lived experiences mirror those of other youth across the country grappling with the traumatic and emotionally scarring consequences of school gun violence ––including the loss of fellow students and teachers. For survivors, it is often a long, unpredictable mental health recovery journey marked by an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS), depression and other psychological symptoms. But school gun violence is also such a hard reality to stomach that it often raises legitimate questions about gun ownership in the US, which has the highest per capita number of any nation in the world.
“The idea that everyone should have a gun is a very American idea. And even though the consequences are so harmful to all kinds of people, but especially to children, the lack of will to address it is also an American problem,” says Pedro Noguera, Dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California (USC).
For Hispanic youth and young adults, the cost of gun violence is alarming. According to a December 2023 report from the Violence Policy Center, homicide was the second-leading cause of death for Hispanics ages 15 to 24 in 2020, and most victims were killed with guns. For Black and white youth and young adults, homicide was the first and third leading cause of death, respectively. The report also states that, due to limited data collection, the full scope of gun violence’s effect on Hispanics remains unknown, though the numbers are certainly higher than the reported number suggests. In another report published the same year, the California Department of Justice warned that survivors of gun assault shootings are at very elevated risk of violent re-injury and death.
Although Richardson has never been shot nor directly witnessed an attack, she says that this series of traumatic experiences have profoundly shaped her life, changed her spirituality and motivated her to pursue an academic career in gun violence, particularly after the Isla Vista college attack. “That was a very catalyzing event for me,” she explains. “I consider working to reduce gun violence to be my calling.”
The brutal Isla Vista killings gave Richardson a firsthand understanding of the magnitude and pervasiveness of gun violence in the United States. She saw the devastation left behind in the small beachside town, which was primarily made up of undocumented immigrants and transient students who, as she puts it, “are not invested in the long-term growth of the place” because they leave after graduation. This lack of permanence, coupled with the town's limited resources and infrastructure, left the community ill-equipped to cope with the chaos that followed the tragedy.
The attack, she says, was met with increased police presence––a measure unilaterally made by local authorities without seeking input from the community. But she also worried that this decision could negatively impact the large undocumented population in the area and potentially lead to deportations.
The town’s attempt to make the community safer “was not safe for everybody,” she says. “(The community) was very disempowered.”
Unlike other students, Richardson felt the urge to stay in town after graduation to further assist residents and her community. Before the incident, she’d volunteered to clean up street trash and participated in sexual assault awareness campaigns, in addition to serving as a UCSB student government community liaison. Following the attack, she continued her work as an activist, helped lay the foundation for a community center, created an online resource guide listing all local businesses and community-based organizations, and served on the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District board.
It was “very inspiring,” she says, to see the community come together, make each other feel safe and do public memorials in the attack’s aftermath. “We did it on our own,” she states.
The Isla Vista attack and community advocacy also led to legislative efforts and the passing in 2014 of state Senate Bill 505, requiring local law enforcement to develop policies encouraging agents to confirm whether a person is potentially a danger to themselves or others, and subject to a welfare check, has registered a firearm with the federal Department of Justice’s Automated Firearms System. SB 505 is just another example of California’s efforts to adopt new legislation and gun prevention programs over the past three decades. The results have been quantifiable: By 2022, CA had the nation’s seventh-lowest gun death rate, according to the CA Department of Justice.
Yet, in Isla Vista, some continued stressors were out of Richardson’s––and the community’s––control, such as what she calls the “unwanted” and “unhelpful” media frenzy.
“This is a really small community, and then, to be inundated by the press right after, it was very re-traumatizing so that people began creating signs (saying) ‘let us heal,’” she recounts.
Experts warn that, among the myriad dire obstacles and social barriers facing communities impacted by mass shootings, both in the short and long term, is the fact that, by the first-anniversary mark, almost every community is left to fend for itself.
“Organizations come in, they provide some level of support and resource or relief, and then folks move on to the next big thing,” says José Alfaro, Director of Latinx Leadership and Community Engagement at the nationwide nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
Access to resources and mental health care was also an issue Isla Vista’s community struggled with. Richardson recalls that mental health and social service providers at the school were frustrated that mental health support was not “extended to people who weren't affiliated with the university,” leaving them to fend for themselves. Furthermore, four years after the killings, Richardson observed that many community members she spoke with––even those not directly impacted––were still struggling with post-traumatic stress, avoidance and hypervigilance and needed more long-term care and cohesiveness.
How survivors will cope can also be difficult to predict. About six months after the Isla Vista tragedy, being so heavily invested in the community proved to be too much for Richardson, who had struggled with feelings of self-harm and suicidal thoughts in high school and had then feared that being around guns could have potentially escalated those feelings. At Isla Vista, she reached her “point of saturation,” suffered an emotional setback, decided to temporarily move in with her parents, and ultimately relocated to Portland, Oregon, for three years.
“I was getting too traumatized being in this small community and seeing, remembering traumatic memories of all the things that had happened,” she recalls. “My experiences with gun violence impacted my mental health and still do to this day. I often have nightmares about mass shootings and violence.”
But that Richardson, unlike many non-students, had a therapist before and after the attack has significantly facilitated her recovery journey. She believes, however, that one-on-one mental health support is not a one-size-fits-all model and other types of healing, like communal healing––which may include attending mass, and participating in religious gatherings, candlelight vigils or community events––resonate more with Latinos in Isla Vista.
In a 2018 study, university students indicated that student-initiated and -led memorial services were the most helpful following a shooting. Those with childhood trauma or prior exposure to trauma and symptoms of depression reported higher levels of post-tragedy distress. Other predictors of post-shooting psychological adversity include being female, having a lower income, being unemployed, having a lower level of education, direct exposure to the incident, and even spending more time discussing the shooting with friends and family.
Gun violence experts also warn that the stigma attached to mental health care impedes communities from receiving the care they need after mass shootings, particularly for Latinos, who often view it negatively, as a sign of weakness and even equate it with pejorative terms such as insanity or being unstable. "We aren’t culturally ready to seek those services,” says Silvia Villarreal, a researcher with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
For Richardson, understanding the key cultural and social factors that either facilitated or hindered the Isla Vista community’s recovery was essential. As she surveyed the aftermath of the attack, she found herself pondering why some individuals felt motivated, developed a stronger sense of community, and contributed to the healing process, while others distanced themselves or left. She was also curious about why some survivors and community members experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while she and several of her university colleagues seemed to experience post-traumatic growth (PTG) instead.
First developed by R. G. Tedeschi and L. G. Calhoun in 1995, the theory of post-traumatic growth found that individuals may experience positive psychological changes as a result of struggles with trauma.
For Richardson, post-traumatic growth has been profoundly transformative. Despite facing personal setbacks, it has led her to earn a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Michigan and to build a flourishing academic career, with nearly ten scholarly papers focused on mass shootings, community gun violence, and violent extremism.
Now, at 32, she is expanding her research as a doctoral student in Social Work and Public Health Policy at the University of Toronto. Her current work focuses on gun violence in marginalized Latino communities in New Mexico—a region close to her heart, where her grandparents once lived. Since 2019, she has also held a position at the University of New Mexico, though unrelated to gun violence.
Drawing from her personal experiences, Richardson’s research explores PTG and collective efficacy––the concept that an individual’s belief in a group’s capabilities can influence the group’s success in overcoming a traumatic event. Through field interviews conducted in Isla Vista over recent years, Richardson examined how residents responded to violence and trauma and how residents came together to create community-building initiatives, mourn, heal from the killings and advocate for changes.
“Do people feel empowered to come together to make a change in their community despite or in cohesion with structural barriers that they face?” she wondered. “The ability to feel that you have agency in your community was very important to develop that (growth).”
Richardson’s PhD dissertation is also looking at the barriers and facilitators in gun violence prevention, community-based solutions to firearm violence and the ways marginalized Latino communities in South Valley, New Mexico, can empower themselves to reduce gun violence. The Southwestern state has experienced a rise in gun violence among Latinos––with no end in sight. According to data analyzed by the Giffords Law Center, 63% of gun violence homicide victims in the state were Hispanic.
In a 2023 conceptual paper produced during her doctoral program, she explained that, in response to firearm-related deaths nearly doubling over the last decade in NM, state legislators were pressured to implement gun violence prevention strategies. But, while well-intended, these policies often fail to address the structural inequities––such as education, income, occupation and health services availability––that underlie the rise of gun violence in Latino communities, she argues.
Richardson contends that there is an urgent need to better understand how these forces and factors may be driving the rise in gun violence so that culturally sensitive measures and interventions can be developed in NM. To this end, she calls for further research and says that the “most dire research gap” identified by her analysis is the lack of nuanced data relevant to how Latino individuals experience gun violence.
She also expresses concern that most research on gun violence within Latino communities has been conducted in comparison to other racial or ethnic groups, providing limited insight into how the diverse Latino community is uniquely affected.
“This is concerning given the overwhelming representation of Latinos among those who are fatally and non-fatally injured due to gun violence,” she concludes.
Similarly, Richardson contends that Latinos should not be considered a monolith group because gun violence prevention efforts, interventions and perceptions may widely vary across different communities, and ethnic and cultural groups, such as Mexicans, Peruvians and Guatemalans, among others.
This aligns with Alfaro’s prior observations. Through his work, he has noticed that community responses to mass shootings vary vastly both at the individual and communal level, as needs, cultural values and language barriers may differ among and within communities. In the 2022 Uvalde school mass shooting that killed 21 people, the community was mostly Mexican-American, rural, vulnerable to mental health stigma and kept to itself.
“Mexican cultural heritage is distinct and different, and so they are not engaging in the same healing practices, as you know, Puerto Rican and Dominican communities,” which are more celebratory and include ancestral songs and dances, he explains. A similar response has also been observed among LGBTQ+ survivors in Florida.
Though still a work in progress, Professor Carmen Logie, Richardson’s PhD dissertation advisor at the University of Toronto, sees great value in Richardson’s work, because it is “a largely unexplored field,” she says.
Logie adds that her mentee’s research approach is also “old school,” as Richardson embeds herself in the South Valley community, builds relationships and trust with members, and invites them to participate in her research and complete online surveys.
“When you have a personal and professional connection to communities, it can make your work much more sustainable,” Logie says.
Richardson will present her findings alongside recommendations for future gun violence prevention interventions at South Valley community spaces, where she has been recruiting participants. The results will also be shared with the region’s community centers, police departments, neighborhood association meetings, senior centers and grassroots organizations.
By the time she earns her PhD in 2026, she may have contributed to a deeper understanding of how some of the country’s Latino communities––often overlooked in national conversations––are grappling with an issue that costs thousands of lives, tears families apart, and leaves empty seats in classrooms across the nation each year.
“This does feel spiritual in a sense because I feel that I am working to address something that is bigger than me,” she says.
*Monte-Angel Richardson also goes by they/them and uses the gender-neutral term Latine to refer to Latinos in her academic work. By Latinos and Hispanics, she means people of Latin American descent.
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