Commentary
What if the epidemic of mass shootings has less to do with guns and more to do with microbes? It sounds crazy at first, but hear me out.
Inside our guts live trillions of tiny organisms that make up the microbiome. They don’t just help us digest food; they help shape our moods, our resilience, even our ability to feel connected to one another. Scientists call it the “second brain.” And for good reason—about 90 percent of serotonin, the chemical that helps regulate how we feel, is made in the gut, not the head.
The gut and the brain are tied together from the beginning. Early in the womb, the same kind of cells that go on to form the brain also migrate into the gut and wire up what’s called the enteric nervous system. It’s why your stomach drops when you’re nervous, or why you can feel heartbroken down in your belly. We all know this instinctively—we talk about having “butterflies,” a “gut feeling,” or feeling “sick to our stomach” when life falls apart. These aren’t just figures of speech. The gut and the brain talk constantly, and the microbes living inside of us help carry the conversation.
But here’s the problem: As a Western society, we’ve starved that system. Our microbiomes are thin, fragile, industrial. Decades of processed food, antibiotics, chemical exposure, too much sterilization and too little dirt have stripped us of whole species of microbes. Compare the average American gut to an indigenous person still living close to the land and the difference is staggering. Some tribes, like the Yanomami in the Amazon, carry the richest microbial diversity ever recorded. Meanwhile, ours has been hollowed out.
That loss isn’t just biological—it’s spiritual. Without the microbiology, we feel lonely. Not only the kind of loneliness you notice when you’re left out or disconnected from friends, but a deeper kind: cellular loneliness. Every cell in our body is missing the presence of microbes that were always meant to live with us. Those tiny beings are part of God’s creation, and when they’re inside us, they remind us we belong to the Whole. Without them, our cells forget that belonging. And when our cells forget, we feel it as depression, anxiety, disconnection, confusion. What we call mental illness may, at its root, be the body’s way of saying, “I am lonely because I’ve lost my partners in life.”
It’s not only mental health that suffers. The loss of microbes has been tied to rising rates of asthma, autoimmune disorders, food allergies, and inflammatory diseases that were almost unheard of in earlier generations. We’ve scrubbed away not only the germs that cause harm but also the microbial life that helps keep us whole.
So what happens next? We try to patch the gap with medications like SSRIs, boosting serotonin artificially. But what if the real issue isn’t a lack of serotonin in the brain, but a lack of microbes in the gut to regulate it in the first place? In animal studies, when scientists transplant microbes from depressed humans into germ-free mice, the mice begin to act depressed. Other studies keep showing the same thing: People struggling with mental illness often have fewer and less diverse microbes than healthy people.
If that’s true, then it raises a difficult but honest question: Could the young men who carry out mass shootings—so often isolated, unstable, and unmoored—also be missing the microbial ecosystems that once kept humans grounded and resilient? Could their violence be, in part, the final expression of a society stripped of the invisible life that once bound us to the earth, to each other, and to God?
For most of history, people were surrounded by microbes. We ate vegetables straight from the dirt. We fermented food because we didn’t have refrigerators. We swam in rivers and lakes. Babies were born vaginally, breastfed, and rarely exposed to antibiotics. We weren’t sterile. We were dirtier—but maybe we were stronger too. And maybe we were less lonely, because our bodies still carried the company of the microbial communities we were created to live with.
I’m not saying we should give up medicine or start living in caves. But I am saying we need to go back a little. Eat a berry right off the bush. Dig your hands in the soil. Take your shoes off and walk on the earth. Swim in the ocean. Eat fermented foods. Hug your child after they’ve played in the dirt without rushing to sanitize them. Breathe deeply when you’re in the forest. These simple things reconnect us with the half of ourselves that we’ve forgotten: the microbial half.
For generations, people have said, “trust your gut” or “follow your gut instinct.” I believe that’s not just a figure of speech but the place where we feel God nudging us in one direction or another. It would make sense: If God created this perfect ecosystem of life inside each of us, then perhaps the still, small voice of discernment is felt most clearly there. And just as Adam and Eve were asked to tend the garden in the beginning, maybe in this moment of history the garden we most need to tend is the one in our guts.
That’s why I’ll say this plainly. I don’t believe mass shootings are simply a gun problem. I believe they’re a microbe problem. A people cut off from the microbial life that sustained us for millennia are a people who no longer know who they are. They are anxious, depressed, disconnected, and desperate.
If we want to heal, if we want to raise resilient children, if we want to prevent the next generation from collapsing into violence, we have to start with the soil, the food, and the microbes God gave us as unseen companions in this life. Without them, we are only half alive.
