Eight children and three adults were killed and two adults were seriously injured in two high-profile shootings earlier this month. Yet experts in injury and violence prevention were dismayed at how quickly they faded from public consciousness, perhaps because they were deemed family matters.

“We’ve become so numb to these tragedies that we are now even skipping the TV ritual part,” wrote Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health.

In response to the children’s deaths, Dr. Jeremy Faust, a Boston emergency physician and author of Inside Medicine, observed, “Just because the event wasn’t a series of random killings at a school, a theater, a bar, a church, a synagogue, or some other public place doesn’t mean it's not the largest mass shooting in the U.S. since January 2024. It is.”

They were reacting to police reports that Shamar Elkins of Shreveport, Louisiana, fatally shot eight children aged 3 to 11, including seven of his own, and wounded his wife and another woman, before being killed in an armed confrontation with police. Most accounts described the shootings as the result of a “domestic dispute.”

Days earlier, former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax fatally shot his wife, Cerina, before shooting himself, according to police. County Police Chief Kevin Davis described the apparent murder-suicide as the product of a “domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce,” according to NBC News.

Rather than dismiss these tragedies as private family matters, we should approach them the way other fields, such as aviation and healthcare, do. They conduct critical incident reviews to learn what went wrong, determine root causes and develop strategies to improve everyone’s........

© Forbes