I pondered many things before deciding to come to the United States for my undergraduate education, but something that I didn’t really think about was the violence. I come from Brazil, a country in which we can’t walk on the road wearing jewelry, or anything of value for fear of robbery, where most cars have bullet-proof windows, and where the ex-president who governed for eight years has been condemned to prison for corruption. In short, I imagined it would be hard to find myself in a situation in which I had to worry more about my security than I already did growing up.

But during a Sunday lunch with my family, after I had been accepted to Emory and decided to attend, my grandmother told me she didn’t think I should study in the US. When I asked her why she simply answered “the violence.” I was stunned but decided not to press the issue as my mind was already made up to come here anyway, and I didn’t want to disrupt our family lunch with a pointless discussion.

It was only recently that I begun to understand what my grandmother meant, as after the Florida shooting she explained to me on a phone call how what worried her wasn’t that there would be more violence in the US, but rather that it is a type of violence that we aren’t used to, and thus don’t know how to defend ourselves from. And I realized that although in no way this would prevent me from pursuing an undergraduate education here, she did have a point.

While in my home country crimes are committed greatly due to the huge economic gap between the lower and upper classes, here the crimes that get the most media attention are shootings who seem to be committed by people motivated by nothing other than their own insanity. It is not that in Brazil there aren’t crimes committed by psychopaths, or that there aren’t robberies in the US, it’s a question of which is more common.

Could it be correlated with the fact that the US is ranked among the countries in which there are most instances of mental among the countries in which there are most instances of mental disorders? Could it have to do with the fact that it is legal to own guns in many states of the US? Questions of this nature are asked and investigated by specialists in psychology and other relevant areas, but I rarely see the comparison between types of violence in different countries, and what this says about the country in question.

And I had never thought about the concept of being prepared to deal with one type of violence and hence being more vulnerable to another type, I never thought of their being different types of violence at all.

So what do I want to get across by writing this article? That there are many angles of the problems of our world that we haven’t pondered, different ways towards approaching a problem that we haven’t yet discovered, and how because of this great unknown, there is hope to find new solutions or at least improvements to our current situation.