The 2018 mass shooting at Marshall High School in Kentucky claimed the lives of two students and injured 14 others. Three weeks later, another shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida claimed the lives of 17 and injured another 17.

Tom Beamish, a professor of sociology at UC Davis, makes an important distinction between the two shootings. Though both were tragedies, he said, only one rose to the level of what he calls a “public tragedy.” This kind of tragedy becomes a national political crisis because it increases conflict between people who disagree with each other’s politics. 

“Public tragedies actually promote polarization because they involve a story that pivots on social blame,” said Beamish. “Social blame attributes harm to societal institutions, social groups or even aspects of American culture rather than blaming individuals or forces like fate or bad luck.”

In April, Beamish published his book on the subject, “After Tragedy Strikes: Why Claims to Trauma and Loss Promote Public Outrage and Encourage Political Polarization,” (UC Press, 2024). The book compares the national discourses about a number of similar tragedies to understand why only some take on national proportions and further political divisions in society.

Building out the trauma script

A “social script” is a term sociologists use to describe the way people take actions based on cultural understanding that fits a recognizable pattern without anyone having to tell them what to do. In his research, Beamish has identified a social script in the way that people have recently been responding to tragedies. These responses have been very uniform, regardless of the type of tragic event, its causes or who was hurt by it.

It doesn’t matter if the crisis is a natural disaster like Hurricane Maria’s destruction of Puerto Rico in 2017 or George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020. The “scripted” responses to these and other events appear almost choreographed. It begins with public expressions of shock and outrage, then shifts to accusation and social blame, claims of victimization, protest, and memorialization. 

Beamish suggests this pattern in public reaction reflects what he calls the “trauma script.” The script centers the story of innocent victims harmed by unforeseeable, uncontrollable and unwarranted circumstances socially blamed on “society” or some aspect of it rather than an individual or other outside force like fate.

“The trauma script is often used by political elites, news media and social movements to explain tragic events, often to gin up support for their position by provoking moral panic, and this is both on the right and the left,” said Beamish. “Public reaction to tragedies has become almost a formula at this point.”

Looking deeper than the stories people tell

There is no shortage of tragedies. Right now, war rages in Ukraine, joining conflicts in Haiti, Sudan, Myanmar, Palestine and many other places around the world. Each of these crises clearly involves horrific tragedy, said Beamish, but among them only war in Ukraine and Palestine have galvanized the American public, making them notorious hyper-politicized public tragedies. 

This is largely because of the stories being told about these conflicts, he said. While these stories may be fashioned from the events themselves, a story does more than simply restate everything that happened. A story transforms those events into an idea that makes sense to people.

“A story isn’t a lie, but it’s not the same as a set of facts either,” Beamish said. “Stories that involve real events also involve a lot of promotion. Social movements, political elites and news media are all trying to create a context that serves their purpose, where they tell a stylized story of the tragedy in a way that's advantageous to what they're trying to get across and get done.”

Beamish cites as an example what happened in the wake of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Soon after the shooting, students at the school organized to protest what they saw as the cause: permissive gun laws, politicians and the gun lobby. 

Immediately afterward, the children’s families—even the victims themselves—were attacked by gun rights supporters and media pundits who accused them of being inauthentic and even of being actors. What was especially exceptional, said Beamish, is that these attacks weren’t relegated to fringe media as they were in past shootings. They happened on national news channels.

“Just the ability to turn a horrific event like that into a political contest,” said Beamish. “I use that as an example just because it's so tragic, and yet it became immediately and absolutely hyper-politicized.”

From individual loss to collective outrage

We didn’t used to so readily respond to tragedies like this, according to Beamish. In his book, he describes how tragedy itself used to be thought of as an internal struggle, something we dealt with internally and often not publicly. Increasingly, that same sense of trauma and loss is focused outward on social institutions and other groups, and people do this regardless of their personal politics. 

Public tragedies, said Beamish, always involve political conflict over who or what is to blame for the harm done. Even the COVID-19 pandemic, seemingly a “natural disaster” that might have promoted consensus, quickly became a polarizing public tragedy as deaths mounted and a pervasive sense of mismanagement, distrust and blame galvanized the public on the political left and right.

“Americans feel like the world is out of control,” said Beamish. “They feel like the deck is stacked against them. It doesn't matter what side of the political divide you're on. We have this super-aggrieved outlook and that provides a context for public tragedies and the political conflict they represent.”

Beamish said one way to reduce the damage these stories cause is to understand the complexity they can easily hide. A story that involves a good guy and bad guy or a victim and perpetrator who are both easy to identify—roles at the heart of the trauma script—is almost built to prevent any future compromise. 

“How do you negotiate good versus bad?” said Beamish. “As a society, if we want to move forward together, we really have to deal with the way we currently do politics and the way we respond to crisis events of all sorts. Right now, we almost immediately politicize tragedy, often turning them into pretty unresolvable scenarios. We have to realize that oversimplification is our worst enemy.”