On Gun Violence, America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic, & Becoming a Suspect: A Conversation with Gina Tron
By Riah Hopkins
Content warning: This interview discusses gun violence and America’s mass shooting epidemic, which may be challenging topics for some. Please read with care.
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In 1999, Gina Tron was a high school student in the small town of Barre, Vermont. Tron’s artistic sensibilities, goth fashion sense, and alternative music tastes rendered her an outsider in conservative-minded Barre, whose residents regarded her with disgust and fascination. Tron, however, accepted her outsider status in the high school hierarchy, and understood that she had to endure her classmates’ bullying until she could graduate and, eventually, move away.
Photo by Arielle Thomas
Then, on April 20, 1999, two teenagers in Littleton, Colorado, perpetrated the Columbine High School Massacre, killing twelve of their classmates, one teacher, and, finally, themselves. The shooters were said to belong to a school clique called “The Trench Coat Mafia,” loners who hated the popular students that bullied them. Since Columbine, this narrative that the shooters were pushed to retaliate against their bullies has been challenged. However, at the time, this story was how a shocked nation justified an unthinkable act of violence. After Columbine, paranoia and suspicion of “weird” and “misfit” kids—like the shooters were purported to be—spread across the United States. Tron already fit this mold, and her status as the town pariah was compounded by a bad joke made in a split-second: Tron and a friend wrote a threatening note to a bully and signed it: “Love, The Trench Coat Mafia.”
After the threat was made public, mass hysteria erupted in Barre. The bullying worsened for Tron, she and her friend were labeled “would-be school shooters,” and they were eventually accused of planning to shoot up the upcoming high school prom.
Gina Tron’s new memoir, Suspect, is a contemplative account of the “before” and “after” of writing that threat. A former true crime journalist, Tron weaves research and interview into Suspect as she narrativizes her teenage struggle with extreme ostracization. The two threads in Suspect create a conversation between Tron’s life story and the groupthink that creates spaces for bullying and violence to flourish—in high schools and in the United States. In this interview, Broken Antler sits down with Gina Tron for a second time as we discuss Suspect, America’s relationship with violence, and the difficulty of writing about such challenging and ongoing subjects.
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You’ve previously explored the events of Suspect in a 2013 essay for VICE titled “I Was A Suspected School Shooter.” What motivated you to revisit this part of your life, and to expand the essay into a memoir?
Originally, I did not plan on writing about this as a memoir. I felt like I had written a condensed version of it for VICE, but I realized that it was not conducive to do this, to condense the nuances of topics like school shootings and gun violence. The VICE piece—which I’m really proud of—can only go into so much depth about it.
A part of the reason I was inspired to write Suspect is that I have never been able to find a book that fills this void for me. I have been searching since high school for another person’s story that was similar to mine for my own catharsis. I don’t feel like my story is one in a million, it’s not that unique. I know that, following Columbine, a lot of people were going through a situation similar to mine. Some of them, I’m sure, didn’t do anything to earn that. But there are so many people who went through this, who have been ostracized based on how they are perceived, but I’ve never been able to find that story for me, from this specific angle.
And, obviously, mass shootings keep happening in America. I went into writing Suspect hoping that I would get some kind of thesis statement from experts about why it keeps happening. What I found out was that they know no more than I knew when I was a teenager. There’s not a lot of research continuing to look into it. But these violent feelings and thoughts that people have need to be discussed more, because it can help deal with the core issues behind mass shootings, as well as give us insight into how people perceive and interpret them.
You’re the author of several memoirs, including Eat, Fuck, (Write About) Murder, which we’ve previously interviewed you about. What did the writing process for Suspect look like, and how did it differ from your other memoirs? Was this a difficult subject to return to?
This has been the hardest book for me to write for a lot of reasons. For one, I am the most embarrassed by the subject matter— but that’s also what makes Suspect the most important book for me to put out. I learned a lot about myself by writing Suspect, and I hope that others can learn a lot about themselves from reading it, too.
It was really hard—and it’s still hard—for me to know which parts of the story I should keep in, which I shouldn’t, and to try to determine if I’m overcorrecting or undercorrecting myself. Sometimes I worry that I’m being too harsh on people in this book, and other times I worry that I’m not being harsh enough. My husband—who was there for the events of Suspect, we were in the same class—tells me that I could have been harder on some people. Which feels good! I’m lucky that I can bounce my perception off some of the people who were there, and I can ask them if my perception is incorrect or incomplete. It’s also nice when acquaintances and old classmates read Suspect and say, “No, this sounds right,” about scenes they weren’t present for. While writing, I wanted to make sure that I was being truthful, that my recollections were correct, and that I wasn’t demonizing people. As a writer, I want to be as fair and objective as possible.
It’s also been really hard to write about some of the people who I didn’t get along with, and who treated me poorly, in a way that doesn’t come off as angry. Because so much time has passed since the events of this book transpired, I don’t have any anger about anybody in this book—at all. But it is hard to write about people who I know probably don’t want to be written about. Still, there’s no way for me to tell this story without doing so! Even writing about my husband is weird, it can be very disorienting, and it’s been emotional. It feels like cutting the nerve endings open, the nerve endings of things that I have healed from and dealt with—but that I have to return to now. In order for me to write about this authentically and with emotion, I have to have feelings about it. But I can’t be as emotional as I was back then. And it’s interesting, to see things that seem so obvious to me now with my grown-up eyes, things that were not so obvious to me as a teenager with the (lack of) emotional tools and resources I had in the 90s.
This has been the hardest book for me to write […] It feels like cutting the nerve endings open, the nerve endings of things that I have healed from and dealt with—but that I have to return to now.
You demonstrate a lot of graciousness toward your younger self in Suspect, as well as toward your bullies and the people who hurt you. Like the individual referred to as Sarah in the book, for instance, who could have easily been depicted as a cartoonish mean girl. In Suspect, you take the time to let the reader know that this is a real person and there are reasons why she behaved and bullied you the way that she did. Do you still have any feelings of frustration toward people like Sarah? What is your relationship to forgiveness?
No, I don’t know how I could be an emotionally healthy person and hold onto that anger. I’ve had to forgive basically everyone for the most part. I don’t have any anger toward things that people did when they were kids, especially. Part of that is understanding that nothing is personal, that things are more complex than cookie-cutter versions of bullies and bad people.
The only people I still feel some hurt from are individuals who had more administrative roles, like the teacher I write about in the memoir who wouldn’t talk to me because I was dressed goth—and that was before I was ever accused of doing something terrible! I just dressed and looked differently, and so she wouldn’t talk to me. That hurt for a long time, and I think about her when I’m teaching sometimes. If I don’t understand a student, I go out of my way to try and let them know that they can open up to me if they want or need to. I’ve learned how not to teach from the teacher who hurt me—but there’s still some pain there. At one point, this teacher was someone important to me.
Cover art by Constance Lizati
School shootings are tragically common in America. At the time of this conversation, the Apalachee High School shooting in Winder, Georgia, happened less than a week ago, and a second mass shooting has occurred on Interstate 75 in Kentucky. With these incidents still so fresh in our minds, do you think there’s a possibility of completely ending mass shootings in America?
I honestly don’t know. I think mass shootings are a very American disease. They’re so common here that we can’t even keep up with what’s going on. Columbine—because it was so rare at the time—scarred America’s psyche, but now there have been more extreme versions of Columbine occurring for years, and our brains can’t even retain it because it’s just too much. I think that with the right steps, you can shrink this form of violence down, bit by bit, like a cancer. But, like a cancer, you have to attack all aspects of it: not just guns, not just bullying, not just the shooter’s desire for infamy.
I don’t know if mass shootings will ever go away in the United States, although I certainly hope they do. We are—as a nation—becoming more sophisticated and aware of what can contribute to mass shootings. For example, the infamy angle wasn’t really talked about until a few years ago. In fact, I got the opportunity to help in some of the efforts to eliminate making mass shooters infamous, and I interviewed people who were doing the No Name, No Notoriety campaign with the FBI. As a result, now it’s more commonplace—where if somebody does incite gun violence—to not name them in the press, to not put their picture up. And that, in turn, tells other people who might be thinking about doing something like this that they’re not going to get the infamy they might want out of it. They’re not going to get their manifesto printed or circulated, like they might have a few years ago.
Increasing support for efforts like this, plus gun control, as well as continuing to research the mental and social issues that contribute to mass shootings, all can help reduce the rate at which these things happen.
I think that with the right steps, you can shrink this form of violence down, bit by bit, like a cancer. But, like a cancer, you have to attack all aspects of it […]
Are there any other ways that conversations about mass shootings have changed or evolved since the events of Suspect?
Yes, absolutely! Thinking about Columbine, it’s wild to think about how much news coverage has changed. Even how we talk about alternative kids has changed. In Suspect, I quote a TIME article that includes an interview with a Columbine High School student. The student being interviewed is meant to be perceived as a “normal” student and a “good” kid—and yet, he uses homophobic slurs when talking about his classmates, the school shooters. That fear of goth and alternative kids isn’t there to the same extent anymore, so I think that perceptions and snap judgments of this nature have started to change. That said, I do think more sensational news media outlets have found other scapegoats.
Like I said, I think news coverage has changed drastically, too. Most outlets are a lot more careful when covering mass shootings, attempting to not give shooters the attention they might be seeking. Of course, this can vary, because some outlets unfortunately like to maximize their coverage, and they still will lean into sensationalist coverage tactics. In general, though, I think there are more outlets taking precautions to minimize this. When I worked at Oxygen, I would talk to my editors about these kinds of things—and they seemed to listen. You want people to know what happened, to receive timely information, to be aware of how to respond or support communities or help efforts to stop this violence—but you don’t want to emphasize who the shooters are as a part of the story. You want to minimize it as much as possible, because there is a contagion effect, where the more you report and glamorize it, the more it can push people to copy others.
I have also found that there’s a contagion effect for my situation in Suspect—for threats. Anytime there’s a mass shooting, there’s an increased number of copycat threats, an increased number of people getting arrested. Based on my experiences, I don’t think all of those people are trying to imitate and emulate what happened. I think some of them might even be jokes taken out of context from people not thinking straight, from people who have been surrounded by gun violence their entire lives and don’t know how to deal with such widespread violence. This doesn’t make it right or okay—it just means this issue is a societal one, not an individual one. It’s kind of like witnessing a fight in the hall, where you see something happen, people getting attention for it, and there’s a bloodlust. If people are already on the edge, that amount of attention can make people think that they can get attention, too.
You incorporate research about mass shootings—their frequency, potential causes, and potential solutions—into Suspect. The book has educated me in many ways, but the problem of mass shootings is so anomalous that a single answer as to why they happen can’t be offered. Do you feel frustrated by that?
Yeah, I have definitely felt that frustration. When I started writing Suspect, I really thought that I could get some definitive answers, but I had to cut down my expectations about what I could provide myself through writing Suspect, as well as what I might be able to offer to others.
What I have been able to find out, though, is increased clarification about the commonality of copycat threats and what that signifies. For example, I talked to the FBI, and they sent me the threat assessments that they created after Columbine—which may offer another angle for many readers. I also talked to mass shooting experts—and I’m very grateful that they talked to me—but I remain frustrated and shocked that we don’t understand things beyond a black and white level. It seems like we, as a country, have become complicit and numb to shootings. I know that so many people want to fix this issue and enact change, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a real effort to understand the complexities of it. I want to. I want all of us to.
It seems like we, as a country, have become complicit and numb […] I know that so many people want to fix this issue and enact change, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a real effort to understand the complexities of it. I want to. I want all of us to.
Photo courtesy of Gina Tron
In Suspect, you discuss the Columbine High School Massacre as a point of fascination for your younger self, and you even describe having feelings of sympathy for the students who carried out the shooting. I was impressed by the honesty of this, considering that Columbine has two legacies. One, as one of the most infamous mass shootings in the United States. Second, as a pop culture phenomenon—largely concentrated on the internet—that has engendered fans and groupies. What do you think has contributed to Columbine’s enduring impact as national tragedy and cultural fixation?
It was very much a perfect storm of the media projecting misperceptions of the situation and the cultural milieu of America at the time. There was so much saturation in the media, and I remember—I write about this in the book, too—sitting in my room, watching the news with my mouth open, thinking: “What is going on?”
The way the media was attacking goth subculture and demonizing it was so bizarre. But so was creating the narrative that the shooters were just two bullied, goth kids taking revenge on their school. Even if they were bullied, it’s not that simple. As a teenager, I remember hearing a version of the story that was a kind of underdog story, one that I think misfit teenagers in particular really soaked in—perhaps in an attempt to find experiences that looked like their own. And even though that narrative has since been proven incorrect, it sticks to this day. As an adult, I find myself wanting to push back against the black and white narratives that were propagated by the media and, instead, open up the issue with more nuance. We should be asking ourselves why kids who were born in the 2000s, kids who feel isolated, continue to look back at Columbine and feel inspired.
Columbine wasn’t the first of its kind, but it was one of the most exploited. Since it happened, we’ve been oversaturated with mass shootings in the media we consume. I interviewed an FBI agent, and she was perplexed by why Columbine remains the one event that shooters, going forward, always seem to reference. Based on my experiences, the research I’ve done, and the conversations I’ve had, I’d say that one big part behind why Columbine remains in individual and collective memory is that there was so much energy dedicated to gaining consensus or clarification regarding why. Media constantly asked: why did they do this? What happened to them? And people so desperately wanted to understand, to place blame elsewhere, and on everything: video games, clothing, music, bullying. People went down this huge checklist trying to understand why they did what they did—instead of just acknowledging the violence they committed.
I remember—I write about this in the book, too—sitting in my room, watching the news with my mouth open, thinking: “What is going on?”
What do you hope readers take away from Suspect?
A few things, though I think it depends on the reader’s perspective, past experiences, and current situation. I want people who have been through some of the same things that I went through to find some catharsis in this. And I want people who don’t understand this mindset, people who may feel compelled to make snap judgments about people who look a certain way, to gain some understanding, to better understand why some people might feel this way.
In no way am I ever saying it’s okay or right to sympathize with school shooters, but I’d like to speak from the perspective of someone who was never at risk of becoming a school shooter but who was given that label after making a bad, ill-informed joke; who was a struggling teenager; who wrongly identified with people like that solely because I felt like I was in their social group; who grew up and continues to struggle with the labels I was once given by others. In conversations about school shootings, there’s always the question of why—why would anyone do that? It’s a question I can’t answer because I don’t know. But then there’s the question just underneath that—why would anyone ever sympathize with school shooters? And this question is the one that I think isn’t getting enough attention. At what point do people go from feeling isolated to becoming dangerous? It’s a question that Suspect begins to open up.
Gina Tron (@ _GinaTron) is the author of Suspect; Eat, Fuck, (Write About) Murder; A Blurry Photograph of Home and others. Suspect is the 2020 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award winner and is available for purchase from Whisk(e)y Tit.
Interview conducted by Riah Hopkins.