In wake of Stockton mass shooting, how will a community process grief?
As Stockton’s grief-stricken community reckons with one of the largest mass shootings in the city’s history, the incident brings focus to the growing problem of gun violence in the United States, a local violence prevention expert said.
Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research program at the University of California, Davis, said there is “no dispute” that ready access to guns is contributing to these sorts of incidents.
“(Americans) are not uniquely violent,” Wintemute said. “What sets the United States apart is our level of access to a technology that changes the outcome of violence.”
Processing grief after a mass shooting
Wintermute said a “circle of sadness” surrounds a community after a mass shooting like the one in Stockton on Saturday that resulted in the deaths of four people, including three children, and injuries to 11 others. It is not only prevalent for the victims’ loved ones, but it's felt in the neighborhood, and by those in the broader community.
Of the Stockton incident, “there are details we still need to learn, but we know that lives have been lost,” he said. “Those children, that young adult, will not experience all that comes with growing up and growing older.”
After a mass shooting, communities grieve first, a process that is followed by feelings of denial and fear, Wintemute said.
To move forward as a community, Wintemute said it’s important to let a community grieve properly and not brush it under the rug. Next, community members need to understand how to transmute the tragedy into “some kind of good.”
That can include helping others and finding ways to reduce the underlying risks that may have caused the shooting. One example of that is a community-oriented violence prevention program, he said.
“A community can work on ways to identify disputes, and see if they can be mediated and resolved without ... resort to violence,” Wintemute said.
Violent crime rates in California have increased since 2022, data from the Public Policy Institute of California showed. According to the most recent data, California’s violent crime rate rose 1.7% from 495 crimes per 100,000 residents in 2022 to 503 per 100,000 residents in 2023. Those numbers are indicative of a national trend since the first year of the pandemic.
Violent crime in Stockton
The city of Stockton has a crime rate that is 67.9% higher than the national average, according to regional data. In 2024, the Federal Bureau of Investigations reported that Stockton, with a population of around 320,000, had more than 3,000 violent crimes. But the city has seen a 16% decrease in overall crime in 2025, according to the Stocktonia.
Wintemute said there are more mass shootings in the United States than in other industrialized countries because it’s so much easier to acquire firearms here. While mass shootings are not increasing in the country, he said, the access to guns is on the rise.
In his research, Wintemute said fear drives gun purchases. When individuals are afraid they’ll be attacked, they’re more likely to arm themselves. That leads to a “subsequent increase” in gun violence, he said.
“It’s been shown at the individual level that when a gun comes into a home that didn’t have guns before, for the people living in that home, the risk of homicide, the risk of suicide, skyrockets,” Wintemute said.
There have been more than 1,700 mass shooting deaths in the United States since 1966, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. The Institute defined a mass shooting as an “incident of targeted violence carried out by one or more shooters at one or more public or populated locations,” its website stated. Wintemute said a violent crime is deemed a mass shooting when four or more people, besides the shooter, are killed.
