American Violence Is Becoming Too Much for Families

As often noted, the current nightmare political reality that is gripping the United States is something I could never have envisioned growing up or when I was an active Republican now decades ago.  Gun violence is off the charts with Republicans putting gun sales for the gun industry ahead of the lives and safety of their constituents.  Now, with ICE acting as the Felon's own fascist police force, unfettered by any desire to act humanely and decently - a marked change from ICE under the Bush presidents, Obama and Biden - more and more American's especially younger woman are thinking about leaving the United States for somewhere they deem safer for themselves and their children. Indeed, as noted in a column in the New York Times, 40% of women ages 15-44 are interested in leaving the USA. Yes, each presidential election is seen by those saying they will leave the USA, but as a piece in the New Yorker explores, this time around, more people are actually leaving. I have both blogger friends and former local residents who have now actually made the move out of the country and who, so far are very happy with their decisions.  With grandchildren of my own, I worry about what this country is becoming and what my grandchildren's' futures will be in a nation seemingly spinning towards autocracy with policies that mainly benefit billionaires and oligarchs and where masked  ICE agents can invade one's neighborhood.   Here are highlights from the Times column:  

The one group in the United States most interested in leaving the country and permanently living somewhere else is American women ages 15 to 44. According to Gallup, 40 percent of women polled in my age bracket expressed this desire, double the rate of all U.S. adults. That tells me that the women who are building their lives and the lives of the next generation are looking for the exit.

Women in other, similar nations do not share this desire to relocate. In November, I asked readers who were considering moving what was driving them out.

While the responses were varied (the rollback of rights for women, immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people was mentioned by several), the most common reason cited was gun violence in the United States. Whether at the hands of fellow citizens or militarized law enforcement officers, this particular form of violence and its unremitting nature is just not a significant problem in our peer nations.

In 2025, there were more mass shootings in the United States than days in the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive (which uses a broader definition than The Times). There were 75 school shootings. According to The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit focused on health equity, “The U.S. has among the highest overall firearm mortality rates, as well as among the highest firearm mortality rates for children, adolescents and women, both globally and among high-income countries”; Black Americans and American Indians are particularly likely to die from gun violence.

It feels as though we have hit a particularly horrifying patch of violence in the last month. A shooting at Brown University and the death of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, who was shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis, were beyond disturbing. Some elected officials seem more interested in spreading disinformation about killings like these while gaslighting and smearing victims than doing anything to stop it.

As Adam Serwer pointed out about Good’s death, the administration’s victim-blaming playbook — Vice President JD Vance called her “a deranged leftist” — is shopworn, and has been used to defend police killings for a long time. In 2020, I commissioned a personal essay by the writer Imani Bashir, who purchased a one-way ticket out of the United States in 2015 after the death of Sandra Bland while in police custody, and who felt that living abroad was the only way to keep her Black son safe.  “For my husband and me, the conversation was: Where could we safely raise a family? Where could we feel like we didn’t have a constant threat or target on our backs?” Bashir wrote.

When I spoke to readers who were considering moving abroad, they expressed similar sentiments. For a variety of reasons, they described the feeling that violence was closing in on them, and that they needed to get out of the country. Emma Stamper, who has dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States and lives in the suburbs of Denver, said that multiple high-profile mass shootings in Colorado played into her thoughts of leaving. Stamper, who has a 3-year-old son and a 15-month-old daughter, works for a nonprofit and her husband is a programmer. They both work remotely, so relocation is more possible for them than it is for many families. . . . She also talked about feeling a less tangible shift, a sense that there’s “a cultural aggression that continues to spiral,” in the United States.

I also spoke to a couple — the husband is a veteran who works for the federal government and the wife is a professor — who live outside a major West Coast city. (They asked that I not use their names for fear of retaliation.)The family, which includes a school-age child, spent several months of a sabbatical living in Europe. The wife described the “underlying hum of anxiety” that just went away when they were living outside the United States.

The lack of threat from gun violence was part of that. But it was bigger than just the guns. . . . His wife said it wasn’t just the absence of fear she felt when living abroad; it was also the presence of care. “I realized that I felt held there by the culture, by the society, by people.”

But over the years, as these violent incidents have piled up, it has become harder to soothe myself with cold rationality. The hour after I heard about the shooting at Brown, where I went to college, I was Googling “going to university in Europe” for the first time. For a few days, I considered the idea that the future might be brighter for my daughters elsewhere.

For now, it’s just a passing thought, one that’s already in the rearview. But I can’t predict what is coming next.