For anyone worried about how children handle mass shootings like the one in Monterey Park, I have an answer: Probably better than American children of any previous generation.
That shooting, like those recently in Goshen and Half Moon Bay, wasn’t at a school. Using the grim calculus of American gun culture, that fact might put them a notch below Uvalde and Newtown on the mass shooting horror scale. This may be callous, but it’s the kind of assessment that happens in a country where there are more mass shootings in a year than days.
For those of us who live in the neighborhood, the Lunar New Year’s Eve killings affected every institution in the community. My children attend school in the Alhambra Unified School District, which also serves Monterey Park, the city to Alhambra’s south — and is also working-class and majority Asian.
