The impact of gun violence on children and communities across America
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You're listening to a podcast from Washington Post Live, bringing the newsroom to you live. Good morning. Thank you all so much for being here for this really critical conversation. My name is John Woodrow Cox. I am an enterprise reporter at the Washington Post. I am also the author of Children Under Fire and American Crisis. We are joined today by Kristen Song, president of the Ethan Miller Song Foundation, and

to discuss her son's story and also her persistent efforts to promote safer firearm storage. Kristen, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. On January 31st, 2018, Ethan was killed with an unsecured gun while visiting a friend's house. He was only 15 years old at the time. If he were still alive today, he would be 22.

So before anything else, before we get into much of this discussion, I'd like you to just tell us a little bit about who Ethan was. I think the trait that I loved the most about my son was he was an empath. He didn't need to be taught empathy or compassion. He was just really born with it. For instance, you know, when he was 10 years old, we put down our elderly dog and

I told him we weren't going to be adopting any more animals because it was just too painful. And so I was sweeping out the garage and he came in and he asked me if we could foster dogs that nobody wanted or cared about. And so I said, "That sounds like a great idea." And then he said, "Well, I want to do 100 dogs, Mom." And so the day Ethan died, we had his 95th dog.

And then the cards and the letters and the emails that came to me after my son was killed, sharing stories about how Ethan would gather up children in the lunchroom who had no one to sit with and make sure that they had a place at his table, or the girl who had no friends in school, and he made sure that she felt welcomed in the classes they shared.

So, you know, those are just a couple of examples of just my incredible child and his love for protecting the marginalized and vulnerable. The next day we were supposed to be

headed in to feed the homeless in new haven so that's just you know ethan was not motivated by being the captain of a football team or you know money he was motivated by making a difference in this world and making sure that people who felt marginalized and vulnerable were heard and seen i'm so sorry for your loss first since his death you and your husband mike have advocated

relentlessly for safer storage laws. And in 2019, you helped get Ethan's Law passed in the state of Connecticut. So I wonder if you could just explain what Ethan's Law is. Sure. Just a little backstory. When we sat across from the prosecutor after the investigation was completed,

And she told me that she would not be charging the father with anything and this man left three handguns and ammunition in a shoebox and taught my son how to shoot a gun two weeks before he was killed. His son had been accessing the guns for over six months and he actually kept his father's Glock under his bed. So when she told me that he was going to go scot-free and that she was going to charge the 14 year old boy with manslaughter, you know, that is when my fire was lit.

And I told her that I would change the law in Connecticut so that the accountability and responsibility falls on the shoulders of the adult in the home, the one who bought and brought the guns into the home, and not onto the children. Because as we know, if you continue to discharge children, there will be no behavioral shift in this country. There will be no cultural shift where, you know, my goal is to make sure that it becomes second nature to secure your weapons if there are children in your home.

So that's basically the law, is that if you have children in your home, you are mandated to make sure that those guns are secured unless they are on your immediate body and in your immediate control. And if they aren't, then they need to be locked up. Mm-hmm.

You know, I've covered this issue for many years, as you know, and I've come to understand that for a percentage of Americans, the only form of gun violence they really care about is school shootings. And when I'm talking about this issue of safe storage, what I will say to those people is that if after Columbine, the only thing we had changed as a country was to lock up our firearms to prevent them from falling into the hands of children, well more than half of the school shootings since Columbine would never have happened. 100%.

We also know, according to experts, that safe storage can reduce the number of unintentional deaths and suicides by as much as a third. You've now advocated for this at the federal level at least five times. You've brought this bill before Congress as recently as last week. I know you were back on Capitol Hill.

Given the life-saving effects of safe storage, we know that that's what the research shows us. Why has Ethan's Law not been passed at a national level? It's very simple. It's the Republicans. When we passed Ethan's Law in the House of Representatives in 2022, only two Democrats did not vote for it.

out of I think 223 Democrats. Three Republicans did step up and vote for it. Unfortunately, it was not picked up by the Senate. But I will tell you the powers that are fighting against this very, very life-saving legislation are the NRA, the NSSF, and the Republicans. And it's just really that simple.

And when my son was killed, almost the first person we reached out to was the president of the NSSF because my husband and I did not view this as a political issue. This was just, to me, this was as...

non-political as requiring us to put our children in car seats or make sure we have working smoke detectors or fences around the pool. This was not political to me. And, you know, the president basically told me straight out he will never support Ethan's law. He will never support a law that requires gun owners to store their weapons. And it's a non-starter for them.

Among the people who said they won't support this, have you been given an explanation? What's the reason? They don't want a mandate, period. So you've characterized this bill as, quote, a child safety measure, not gun control, and you've compared it to federal consumer safety laws around seatbelts. And I wonder why is that particular framing so important when you're trying to maybe engage somebody who is initially opposed to it?

Well, to me, these are just extensions of all the laws and ordinances that we have put in place to protect our children. So to me, this is no different than those laws. So the only reason why this law has not been passed is because it has the word gun in it, and that is it. It involves the guns, and so it is a non-starter.

In these conversations, you've done this for so many years, has there been a time where you saw someone change their mind?

In Connecticut, for sure. When we lobbied in Connecticut, it is obviously a blue state, but we do have lots of very, very conservative Republicans. And I will say one of the reasons why we were able to pass it with such a large bipartisan support is, number one, one of the most powerful Republicans had an incident the summer before Ethan was killed where a six-year-old came up the stairs with a loaded gun at a party and

He got lucky. His children got lucky. The kids were all playing in the basement. That's the difference between my son dying and his children living, really. So he understood that he got lucky that day and that there really should be some laws that require gun owners to store their weapons if children are in the home.

You know, an argument that I have often heard opposed to safe storage is this idea of people want quick access to their firearm, right? If there's a home break-in and they can't quickly reach for their gun to defend themselves and they feel like safe storage might impede their ability to do that. So I wonder to those people, I'm sure this is an argument you've heard, what do you say in response to that?

Well, in Connecticut, my husband just walked around when we were lobbying with a biometric safe. Before the person could actually finish their sentence, the safe was open, and we placed my son's photo in it. Because, you know, 10 years ago, I would have probably...

said yeah i i can appreciate that you know you have to go find your key but there's just no excuse now the technology is so advanced you know we have two of them in our home for our you know personal documents it is so advanced that you can really access your um your gun in a safe faster than you can get into your iphone and dial 9-1-1 so that argument to me is really

a myth at this point. - Have you seen that resonate when you've made that argument? - In Connecticut, it did. - Yeah, yeah. - It did. - You know, you've come back to Connecticut. I know where you had this immediate success.

What made that different, maybe? Was it the personal story there? What was different there than you've seen maybe elsewhere where you haven't had as much? - Honestly, I just think we have more moderate Republicans in Connecticut. And I think when I first started lobbying in DC, there was a lot more moderate Republicans in Congress. They were much more interested in chatting with me and listening to what I had to say. And honestly, a lot of them agreed that there should be a law.

There's probably one or two of those Republicans left right now in Congress. So it's really hard to have that conversation, although I continue to do so. I've spoken personally to over 130, 140 Republicans in Congress, and I continue to meet with them because, again, I don't see this as a partisan issue. I see this as life-saving measures to save our children from the number one cause of their death.

So we know, of course, that in the mid-90s, the CDC, the federal government, effectively stopped funding gun violence research and that that lasted for over two decades.

I wonder if you could speak to the effects of that and then also sort of as a second question, how research, there is some money now going into research, some in the last few years around gun violence at the federal level, kind of what that could tell us. So if you could sort of speak to both of those things. You know, for me personally,

You know, I feel like there is a ton of research out there. You know, Brady, Gifford, every town, they do their own independent research. The problem with that is when you're sitting across the table from a Republican, they don't give any credibility to that research. So it is really important that we have an independent, nonpolitical, leading...

agency do the research because that is the data that we need to go and open the conversation with the other side really. So I wonder what it is that you think when you're when you're having these conversations, what needs to happen? Like what is in your view? What needs to happen to actually change a person's mind to say I voted this way or I've opposed this and now I'm going to support it. What do you think that is?

Well, I think the personal story does have a lot to do with it. We met with Senator Cruz and Cornyn maybe two weeks before Yuval Day.

and we had been meeting with those 15 republicans who voted for the bipartisan safer communities act for you know seven years and i think you know we continue to bring down uh survivors and i think that you know it does resonate with with them and honestly i think that the republican party does want to do right by our children and i think there are a lot of them who would vote for a law like this but they

Honestly, the three that voted for Ethan's Law, two got bullied out of Congress. So they want to get elected again. They want to stay in Congress. And so they're very careful about what they will sign on to and what they will vote for. But I think the personal stories have a lot to do with it. And I think just coming to the table, and I always start my conversation with a Republican is, I come in peace. I just want to save our children. That's it. I've gotten zero dollars from my lobbying over seven years.

This is not what I want to be doing with my life. I had a very lovely average life where I was raising my children and supporting my husband and his business and fostering dogs. That was my happy place. That was my joyful place. I do this because I want to honor my child, but I do this because I want to save your child and your grandchild. That's why I do it. This is not fun for me. I don't enjoy this, but I do it because I have this...

incredible desire to make sure that we create a cultural shift in this country. - You know, going back to what we talked about a little bit earlier, this idea of how hyper-focused people are on the idea of school shootings and why, you know, even though that makes up a tiny percentage of the number of children who are harmed by gun violence in this country,

you know, it's far more common, right, that the children are harmed the way that Ethan was. And so if you're talking to this room, people online, what would you say to them to broaden their interest in this issue, their care for this issue? What would sort of the argument be?

I'm not sure. I was talking to Greg Jackson, who was in the Gun Violence Prevention Office in Washington, D.C., and I was doing an interview, and I called him up real quickly, and I asked him, "What do you think the percentage is of children who die by suicide who use a gun?" And he said, "It's getting up to about 80 percent." Unintentional deaths, it's 100 percent. These children do not know—well, I shouldn't say 100 percent, because I know you did a story on a child who knew where the key was.

But the majority of the children who die unintentionally are because there's an unsecured gun in the home. So it is wreaking havoc in our children. And I don't know if you just saw that the football coach from the Georgia school shooting just retired because he says he's struggling with so much PTSD because his assistant coach was killed in that shooting. The ripple effects are intense, and they go out.

It's just incredible. It just doesn't end with the mother and the father and the siblings. It is just incredible. One of Ethan's friends who, probably a minute before Ethan was killed, saw one of the videos that Ethan and his best friend had posted and did not walk up the stairs and tell his parents. He ignored it.

And he still has not gone to college. He still lives with his parents. He's still suffering from deep, deep depression. For many years they were worried that he was going to take his life. It's just incredible what one death can do to an entire community. - So one last question. You've worked at this for so long, and as you said, this is not something you want to be doing. What gives you hope?

I know this law is going to get passed. There's no doubt in my mind because as I told Rosa DeLauro last week when we were introducing it, they're going to have to carry me out of this building because it is something that I made a commitment to. I've promised Ethan. I've promised other people. So, I mean, I don't really need hope. I...

I just create my own hope. And I know that it's going to get done. It passed in the House. It is now a priority for Chuck Schumer and the Democratic leadership and Representative Jeffries. You know, we are like, you know, I'm at their door, you know, all the time. And so they know that this is something that is a top priority. And honestly, my personal feeling is unsecure guns are the common denominator of why our children are dying from gun violence.

76% of all school shootings are done with an unsecured gun from home. That child in crisis has the ability to grab a lethal weapon from home and hunt and kill your children. If those guns were locked up, that child would not be able to do that damage. So, you know, we can fortify our schools,

We can make sure that there is nobody who can get into our schools. But once your child leaves the school, the shooter is just going to pick off your child when they leave that building because they will adapt. They are smart, they plan meticulously, and they're just going to come after your child a different way. So it's the access to guns.

I could talk to you for hours, but unfortunately we're out of time, so we're going to leave it there. Kristen, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Up next, my colleague Akilah Johnson will discuss gun violence through the lens of public health with some of the best experts in the country, so I hope you'll stay with us. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Akilah Johnson, a national health reporter here at The Washington Post.

I focus on health disparities. And this morning we are joined by a tremendous panel who are gonna talk to us about gun violence as a public health issue.

Megan Ranney is the Dean of Yale's School of Public Health. Joseph Richardson is a professor of African American Studies and Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology at the University of Maryland. Sonali Rajan is a professor of Health Promotion and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Good morning and welcome to you all. Good morning, Nikila.

So far more people die annually in the United States due to gun-related causes than in any other high-income country. The United States also has more civilian-owned gun deaths than anywhere else. Dr. Ranney, why do we need a public health approach to this issue?

So as I said in the clip that was shown as we were walking up, the reason for a public health approach is twofold. The first is that firearm injury is inherently a health problem. Yes, the criminal justice system gets involved. Yes, the political system gets involved. But at the end of the day, the reason that we care is because when a trigger is pulled, it hurts people.

It may hurt them physically because they are shot and survive because they experience disability or because they die. It may hurt them emotionally even if the bullet never touches them, sometimes even if they're not even standing in the place where the bullet was released. So that is the first reason that we care about it as a public health problem is because of its inherent health effects on the human body, the human mind, and on human society.

The second reason is because the public health approach allows us to prevent it before it happens. When I'm working as a physician, I am treating something that has already occurred. In contrast, when I take the public health approach, I'm going upstream to try to stop that trigger from ever being pulled.

And the amazing thing about the public health approach is that it is this standard discipline. It's a standard four-step scientific approach that when we apply it, it works. It's worked to decrease car crash deaths by over 70% across the United States over the last 50 odd years, despite there being more cars on the road.

It's worked to stop deaths from HIV and AIDS, despite the fact that we have not stopped people from having sex or using drugs, right? And it, of course, worked to decrease COVID deaths, although there was a lot of debate about some of the measures that we use, just as there is some debate around some of the measures that we use to reduce gun deaths. But again, the gorgeous thing about the public health approach is that it gives us tools to approach those questions, to assess those questions,

the accuracy of whether or not an intervention will work, and then to scale up the solutions that are most likely to make a difference in a particular community or state or culture. Dr. Richardson, just to piggyback off of that for a minute a little bit, what would a public health approach, what would it actually look like? In many respects, there are so many different approaches. So you have hospital-based violence intervention programs, which is one approach. Treating

predominantly young black men who have been injured by firearm injury by approaching them at bedside, establishing trust and rapport, and then providing psychosocial services with the intention that we will reduce, A, trauma recidivism, bringing them back to the hospital for repeat violent injury. And I just want to mention that that trauma recidivism rate right now stands at 65%.

And what does trauma recidivism mean? It means the cycle of coming back to the hospital for a repeat violent injury, either gunshot wound or stab. But we also have other approaches, for example, community violence and adventure street outreach, where you have credible messengers who are people

who have actually experienced or have the shared and lived experience of gun violence that are trained to provide conflict resolution and mediation as well as cognitive behavioral therapy. So even cognitive behavioral therapy can play out even on a street corner.

So those individuals who are trained as experts to provide community violence intervention, effectively engage with the target populations, often who are many are high risk, by providing street corner therapy. And so these are often very effective approaches. We have many. But as Megan mentioned, we cannot incarcerate our way out of this. And I just want to emphasize that.

We have tried that in the 80s and the 90s. It's been a failed experiment. Mass incarceration has disproportionately impacted black and brown communities. There is no way that we can incarcerate our way out of this with the law enforcement approach.

we're going to need to use more innovative public health strategies in order to address this issue. - And at the University of Maryland, you've studied the impact of gun violence in D.C. So I guess I'm curious as you're talking about some of these public health strategies, have you seen that in your own research in D.C. and elsewhere?

So the reason why I started with the Hospital Violence Intervention Program approach is I served as the co-director, founding co-director of the Hospital Violence Intervention Program at the University of Maryland Capital Region Health, which was actually the first HVIP to serve the DC Metro.

And we launched in 2017. And from 2017 to 2019, we had 116 participants. We had one person come back to the hospital for a violent injury. So again, do the math. The trauma recidivism rate is 65%. We had one person come back. That's less than 1%. And so I would also like to uplift

As the co-chair of DC Violence Fatality Review Committee, we use a public health approach by bringing together public health agencies, law enforcement,

to assess and analyze cases of homicides in DC and to determine upstream points of intervention as Megan has mentioned. And so what I've consistently even seen as the co-chair of that committee, particularly among young people who have died by firearm injury is one of the most consistent themes is a history of chronic absenteeism.

And so we know that in many schools in DC, particularly that are east of the river, in Ward 7 and 8, we have an absenteeism rate that can reach as high as 80%. And so if we really want to address why kids are ending up as fatality cases in our case reviews, we need to look at the upstream causes. And we can easily prevent these things, which is why this concept of structural violence is so important.

These are preventable harms. And if we're complicit, we're actually engaging in a form of social murder. Dr. Rajam, let's bring you into the conversation regarding school shootings. So we're gonna stay in education, slightly different realm, but let's talk about school shootings.

And while they're not as frequent as the violence that I think Dr. Richardson is referring to and that we've been discussing, they understandably consume a lot of media attention when they do happen. And so they really kind of pierce and strike in the nation's psyche. And so while much of the country tends to kind of move on to the next major news event after they happen, those affected by school shootings are not able to move on quite as quickly.

And so what is the mental and emotional toll on the communities where this violence has happened once the cameras leave? So when we think about, first of all, when we think about schools, these are kids, right? These are little kids, even into high school. I mean, these are young, young, young children. They are not fully developed yet. Their brains are slow. I mean, just think about that developmental period.

when a school shooting happens, and there are a lot of different ways we operationalize how we talk about school shootings. As Megan was saying,

a kid does not even have to be in the presence of, like in the room where a shooting took place to be impacted very profoundly, deeply profoundly by that violence. And so something that I think, and I think this was on the clip that was played earlier, but data from the Washington Post show that since the Columbine shooting in 1999, so that's 25 or so years ago,

over 400,000 children have been exposed to gun violence specifically in K-12 schools. So just to think for a moment about the scope of this crisis. So how many hundreds of thousands of children have been impacted just in that one setting? And then we're talking about the impacts on

their peers, on their friends, on their teachers, their basketball coach, their principals, their cafeteria worker, the school resource officer, all of the adults, teaching and non-teaching alike, who serve as part of their support system. This is what I'm about to say isn't rocket science, but this is well documented in the research and in our literature that there is devastating profound emotional impacts

on children and on their families, on their communities that reverberate for a lifetime. And there's actually work that has also talked through those intergenerational traumatic effects. And so when we think about our collective role here, from a public health perspective, we have two things. I want to be very clear, is to prevent this kind of violence from happening at all, do everything we can to reduce the likelihood of these harms from

occurring, but also do everything we can to support surviving communities in the aftermath of these experiences because the impacts are, it's overwhelming to even think about what those impacts are and the scope of those impacts because so many thousands of people and children in particular are impacted by gun violence in this country. At one point in time, I was an education reporter, and I remember

as it pertained to school shootings, a lot of the conversation was around the kind of one entrance approach and how to harden the school and fortify the school. And so as we're thinking about prevention but also treatment,

It sounds like what you're saying is we need to go beyond thinking about how to fortify school and work on how to fortify minds and hearts as well. So can you talk a little bit more about prevention in school and what does it take to, how do you prevent a school shooting? So I could talk for hours. So I'll just briefly summarize. I mean, just to hone in on what my colleagues here have said is this is where a public health approach works beautifully. So

We want to think about the prevention of a school shooting not in the moment of a violent act, which is where most of our funding and strategies are focused on right now. We think about what do we do in the moment that that shooting is happening. We want to think about what's happening months and years before. Often a student, a child, chooses to bring a firearm to a school with the intent to harm themselves or someone else.

At that moment, we have collectively failed that child, right? Systematically, collectively, we have failed them in so many profound ways. So what our responsibility is is to fundamentally change and ensure

change the places and spaces in which our children are living, learning, and playing. And by doing that, that involves everything, investing in green space, investing in affordable housing, in street lighting. All of the things I'm describing, by the way, have shown to have specific connections to reducing gun violence in communities. That we bring that same level of thinking into the school environment, really changing those pro-social behaviors among kids.

implementing universal violence prevention programming, implementing bystander intervention programs, establishing lines of communication between school nurses and parents and caregivers around firearm safety.

I think the inclination is that we would love to rely on one specific policy and call it a day and that would that'll fix this but we need to really use every tool in our proverbial toolbox which can and does include some level of reasonable emergency preparedness. I'm not saying that public health approaches don't include that but that can't be the only set of tools that we're talking about here.

- Dr. Ranning, in 2022, the CDC said more than 49,000 people in the United States died by suicide. In 2023, those numbers surpass 50,000 deaths by suicide.

What do we know about what's driving the disturbing increase in gun suicide in the United States? And who are we seeing it most occur amongst? - Thank you so much for asking that question because I think that gun suicide is something that so often gets overlooked when we talk about firearm injury and death in the United States. And to be very clear,

The vast majority of gun deaths in the U.S. every year for as long as we've been measuring are gun suicides. On average, it's about two-thirds of gun deaths in the last few years because of the disturbing increase in gun homicides during the COVID pandemic. It's been a little over 50%.

So what we know about guns, and I'll actually say my journey into working on gun violence as a public health problem was partly because of the everyday gun violence that we see in communities across this nation and that I take care of as an emergency physician. But the real kind of change point for me was the first time that I saw a firearm suicide in the emergency department.

It was after I'd been in practice for many, many years. I had never even thought about gun suicide as a problem. And it turns out the reason why, of course, is because they so often die on the scene and never make their way to the doors of my emergency department. So what we know about gun suicide in the United States, outside of the fact that it is a big problem, is that the proximal risk factor is access to a firearm.

If someone is having suicidal thoughts or intention, those are usually, you know, people feel depressed, may have some thoughts, but the decision to try to harm oneself happens relatively quickly. If they have access to a firearm in that moment of desperation and hopelessness, they almost always die. 90% of suicide attempts with a gun end with a fatality.

If they don't have access to a firearm in that moment of desperation, they almost always live. Make it to the doors of my emergency department where I can save them. So the first and biggest thing is reducing access to a firearm in that moment of desperation. And so one of the big things that we've been working on is talking to, of course,

course, physicians and social workers and psychologists, but even more so talking to gun shops and ranges and family members and veterans and police, to folks living in communities where there are high numbers of firearms, about how to recognize those risk factors and temporarily separate someone from a firearm. The next thing, of course, is about getting treatment to reduce the chance that anyone's ever going to get to that point of desperation and hopelessness.

And there it is about thinking a little more deeply about risk factors. I just mentioned some of the groups that we know there are higher gun suicide rates in, police, veterans, physicians. But we're also seeing increasing rates of gun suicide amongst young black and brown children as there is increasing access to firearms, unsecured firearms in the home, and as there's increased hopelessness.

We see high rates of firearm suicide amongst Native American and Alaskan Native men. Each of those groups has a slightly different risk profile, but again, it's about identifying who's at risk and then engaging in educational outreach, not punitive, but educational outreach to both address the upstream factors and reduce that access to a firearm in a moment of crisis. Thank you.

Last year, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence as a public health crisis. And I want to hear more about public health. We have an audience question, sorry. And I want to hear more about what a public health response would look like. And so does our audience. Amy Hasley from D.C. asks, as a physician, I would like to know what the American Medical Association can do to take a direct stand against gun violence.

- That's rainy. - Can I, so AMA was one of my very first partners. So I've been working on this issue for almost my whole career. Back when I started working on it, there was no federal funding for firearm injury, right? That was stopped by the federal government in 1996 after the Dickey Amendment, which didn't actually ban funding, but effectively did.

And at the point when I started, I was basically told don't work on gun violence as a health problem. It will doom your career as an academic, as a kind of, you won't be able to work on it. We created a small nonprofit called Affirm and the AMA was one of our very first partners in that work and has actually been a leader for the last,

in talking about firearm injury as a public health problem, in having educational sessions for physicians, teaching us how to identify risk factors in council, and in supporting on a federal level the refunding of firearm injury as a public health problem, which occurred finally in 2020, after 20 years,

24 years of federal freeze of money during the first Trump administration. So the AMA has been a great partner and hopefully will continue to be so. Their voice matters deeply for physicians, but also for all other health professionals and for communities nationwide. - Dr. Richardson, let's continue that thread when we're talking about funding for research when it comes to gun violence as a public health issue.

Are there barriers to entry, so to speak, when it comes to getting this type of research funded? We were talking about this in the green room before. I won't go too far into the example that I gave my colleagues, but without question. I would also emphasize that it's particularly challenging for black and brown researchers.

who are less likely to get NIH and CDC funding. And so for myself and my colleagues, we recently launched an initiative called the Black and Brown Collective for Community Solutions to Gun Violence because far more black and brown researchers who actually come from those same communities are least likely to get funding.

And so I know from experience, from my own personal and professional experience in the very beginning of my career, I survived, as Megan mentioned, on very small seed grants. I think the largest grant I may have had during that period of time was $100,000. And so the ability to be able to access additional funding to, A, generate data that will be translational,

and solving problems in the community, but we also need to engage communities in the research. And we have a history of exploiting those same communities that have been impacted by gun violence, and researchers have engaged in that exploitation. And so the responsibility is on us to actually engage communities as partners, as domain experts, and in many respects to lead the community.

through a process that my colleague and I, Dr. Woody Kessel, we lead a gun violence research initiative at University of Maryland titled Progress Prevent Gun Violence.

research strategies and solutions where we use a design justice approach, bringing communities in and having conversations about what ethical and equitable research should look like. Because these are the communities that often have the solutions, but we need to engage them as equitable community partners in that work.

Dr. Rajan, when it comes to school shootings, there seems to be, they motivate a little bit of policy response. So as we're talking about struggles, there seems to be a little bit more action, a little bit, when it comes to school shootings. And would you mind explaining, as we were just talking a little bit more previously about hardening schools, right? That fortification of the school. What does

What does that mean for students and teachers involved and what are the trade-offs if you take that approach versus a public health approach? - So I don't think it's an either or, right? So I think what we need to think about is that there is a set of solutions. Think about essentially sort of a menu of options we wanna think through that include,

prioritizing a public health approach, prioritizing prevention, putting as much as we can into those efforts that we know work by the way, that we know contribute to reduce rates of aggressive behaviors, of reduced conflict that allow students to feel supported and nurtured that

provide them with a space at school where they feel like they can genuinely belong, that afford teachers and school staff and school nurses and guidance counselors to work together to identify symptoms of trauma or mental distress, that really think about the well-being of children, which, by the way, when we do this, it doesn't just contribute to reductions in potential gun violence. It improves safety.

test scores of their learning, their ability to focus, kids' ability to sleep and eat and do all of the things that we want for our children. When we think about it that way and we couple that alongside secondary and tertiary prevention efforts, so things where you might, for example, behavioral threat assessment. You bring together a group of thoughtful adults in a school community who when a kid is identified as

maybe posing a potential risk for something. Instead of responding in a punitive manner, you meet that kid where they are. You find out what's going on at home. You talk to their caregivers. You figure out how can we support this child in this moment to the best of our ability. If we can't as a school do that,

We connect them with local resources that can. Behavioral threat assessment I think is a really wonderful example of an evidence-informed practice that has a really rich evidence base, has been adapted in many schools around the country, and has been shown to work. But we can't rely on that by itself. I think that's the part that's challenging is that following a lot of very public mass shootings, especially ones that take place in schools,

there's an inclination to want to hone in on one specific tactic or strategy that would have prevented that from happening. As someone who explicitly studies intentional school gun violence in K-12 schools, of which there are hundreds, they're the proverbial tip of the gun violence iceberg, but they're still happening within a frequency we need to focus in on.

As someone who studies this, I think it's really important we balance those preventive efforts alongside emergency preparedness that actually weighs and accounts for the well-being of kids. So even something like lockdown drills, for example, doing that in a way that's thoughtful and not sensorial, for example. So lots of ways in which we could think about that.

- Absolutely. This has been an illuminating conversation and I feel like I could keep going through my card deck and asking questions and asking some that are not in here, but unfortunately we are out of time. So Dr. Rainey, Dr. Richardson, Dr. Rajan, thank you so much for being here with us today. - Thank you. - Thank you, Kim.

My colleague Jonathan Capehart will be up here next with a powerful roundtable with my Post colleagues who have covered gun violence. Again, I'm Akilah Johnson. Thank you so much for joining us. The following segment was produced and paid for by Washington Post Live event sponsor. The Washington Post newsroom was not involved in the production of this content. Good morning. I'm Lisa Sherman, the CEO of the Ad Council. I want to thank our partners, Joe and the Washington Post team for having us.

If you're not that familiar with the Ad Council, we are a national nonprofit who for 80 plus years has been tackling big important issues we face in our country through public education.

And today we've come together to talk about the issue at hand and to really focus in on that devastating reality of the stat that you've heard a lot about this morning, which is that firearm injuries are the number one cause of death for kids in our country. This is a public health crisis that impacts absolutely everyone. It's an issue we've been dealing with for over 20 years, and most recently we have been partnering with Brady,

on safe gun storage education as well as extreme risk protection laws. We just launched a new campaign last week and that's what we want to talk about this morning. It's called Agree to Agree.

And any of the work that we do, a very critical component of it is to build a big tent of partners across a variety of sectors to help us do our work. And I'm delighted to share the stage with a couple of our closest partners here this morning. Each one of them, I can tell you, is deeply committed to helping us bend the curve on this critical topic.

What I'd like to do is have them jump in and quickly take a moment to introduce themselves and share a bit about what brought them to this issue. So let's start with you, Dr. Suk. - Lisa, first thank you for the partnership on this fantastic campaign on Agree to Agree. My name is Michael Suk. I'm the chairman of the board of trustees for the American Medical Association.

I'm also a practicing orthopedic trauma surgeon, so work in level one trauma surgeons across the country and currently live in central Pennsylvania. And part of what brings us, not only as an organization, but myself to the table here is recognition of the devastating epidemic of gun violence in this country, particularly as it affects kids, children, and teenagers. I think one of the most important things that I think is part of this dialogue is this coalition that you're building around having a conversation.

And as one is on the front line who sees the devastating impact not only of death but also of long-term injury, but it's the halo that goes beyond that, beyond the effect of the immediate family to the larger community at large I think is really critically important to discuss. And so that's why I, on behalf of the American Medical Association, are here to represent the physician's point of view but also as a front line provider of this care. - Wonderful, thank you. Juan.

Thank you, Lisa, for having me and for having us. I'm Juan Javier Pena. I am the Chief Creative Officer for GodMiami, the creative agency that worked on the Agree to Agree campaign. And when the opportunity came to collaborate with Ad Council on this very important subject, as the dad of a three-year-old and a six-year-old, personally, it was very important for me and for the agency to tackle this and to work on this. And it's some of the most important work we can do from now on.

the agency standpoint. Thank you. Great. Excited to talk more about that in a moment. Ramon. Lisa, so thank you for inviting us on the stage, such an important topic. My name is Ramon Soto. I'm a senior vice president with an organization called Northwell Health. Northwell is the largest healthcare provider in the metro New York market. We have about 100,000 employees. We service 6 million New Yorkers a year.

We too consider ourselves part of the front line who sees the devastation of this every day. When you look at that statistic, 2019 when guns became the leading cause of death of children in the country,

You've heard that statistic, but moving that from a rational perspective on that statistic, watching that graph increase, to this emotional construct. For us, we knew we needed to mobilize when two years ago we saw a 300% rise in the kids presenting with gun violence in our institution.

and we represent the fabric of the communities we serve. Our doctors live in our communities. They feel this every day. They feel the impact of it to their jobs. So we knew we needed to act in a really aggressive fashion. Well, thank you. Dr. Suk, let's start with the perspective that you take from a public health point of view, and maybe you could help ground us in some of the numbers. But beyond the numbers, and I think Kristen referenced this earlier in our first session,

what are some of the lasting impacts that maybe some of us have not yet considered of this devastating issue? - Yeah, I think this group of panelists that you have here have already talked about, I think, the impact from a numbers standpoint. The simple statement that gun violence is the number one killer of kids and teenagers should be impactful enough.

I think that when we think about that, having surpassed car accidents and other forms of injury that affect our younger populations, that should be enough of an epidemiological call to action. From a physician standpoint, you know, we represent physicians who are dealing with this on the front line, meaning the moment they come in,

to the moment they either survive, they die, or they experience long-term injury. And that's the physician's perspective on dealing with patients. But what happens beyond the numbers, as you say, is the devastating impact that occurs outside. So dealing with families, dealing with communities, dealing with business leaders within communities, I think every single time an injury of that nature occurs, you have a halo effect that affects an entire population of people.

And it's from that perspective that we take the public health approach. Not only are we dealing with acute injury and the immediate harm afterwards, but we need to be able to take a stand in order to help, I think as Megan earlier said, look upstream and work with partners like those on the stage today and others in order to help us address and at least have the conversation

about what we can do about gun violence in a way that is not partisan and in a way that's less controversial, but looking at an outcome where one day gun violence won't be the number one killer of kids and teenagers. Amen to that.

Juan, we were so lucky to have you and your agency at Gut Miami take on this issue for us and really develop this incredible agree to agree campaign. You really went after the existing common ground that you knew sort of was there on what is often a very divisive issue where we think maybe we can't see eye to eye on anything. Can you talk about the specific insights that drove you to land there in the work?

Yes, of course. I think there's two main points of data and insights that led us to the Agree2Agree platform. The first one is whenever we tackle a project, we do historical research of campaigns tackling the same subject. And we found that most of them point fingers or choose sides. And that detracts from finding common ground. That divides people more.

And then from the surveys from the Ad Council, we found this stat that unlocked everything. That was 80% of both gun owners and non-gun owners agree that having more productive conversations can reduce gun-related injuries. So there is an agreement, and there is the agreement that having a conversation can help, but people are not having these conversations. Yes?

So that's when the idea of what we just saw of staging this intervention for parents from both sides, this guy starts a debate from real debate kids and kids from different schools that are part of real debate teams and sort of like have this debate and do this sort of intervention to their parents to let them know the fact

And it was shot beautifully by Lauren Greenfield, an amazing director that brought that raw and real emotion of what happens and how parents on both sides of the spectrum, how they react to when they find that, when they hear that statistic. And the shock that comes with that and the realization that we need to come together. We need to find common ground and we need to start having these conversations because it's the only way that's gonna help move this forward and help find solutions so we can get unstuck from that division.

I mean, I think it was so smart because, you know, we always say we'll have to agree to disagree, which I think ends a conversation. But agree to agree, I think, extends a conversation. And so it was really such a great insight and a great execution. So thank you.

Ramon, you, I think it's fair to say, you and Northwell have played an outsized role on this issue for a long period of time, and we've been lucky enough to have you partnering with us. And Ramon, from my perspective, happily is on our board, so thank you for that. You know, you've spent years on this issue, and I want to have you sort of share the perspective of why healthcare leaders coming together is so critical and how Northwell is really focusing on it. Sure.

We're in a tough place. I'm an optimist by nature. Maybe I'm naive, but I do think our better days are ahead of us. But we have to get through this place where we just can't seem to agree on so many issues. Part of that is cultural. I think we're in a time of distrust of large institutions.

whether it's the federal government or even institutions in society. And as a marketer, we represent the value creators, the physicians in our communities that work so hard to keep us all well. There's this brand permission that healthcare has to step forward and depoliticize this conversation. Let's take it away from a Second Amendment debate and

Guns are here. There's 400 million of them. There's more guns than people. They're not going away. It's codified in the Constitution. How do we change the narrative and occupy a space, a lane where we're already represented, but then use our voices to turn this into much more of a rational, emotional conversation?

the fact that guns are now the leading cause of death of children, the reality is society doesn't know that statistic. Only 20% of parents know that. So as a healthcare messenger, I think we have the power to unleash this brand permission and get this to a much more rational place. And then also tap into this emotional equity, like we all love our children, right? So we would do extraordinary things to protect them.

We live in an age where we have no problem saying, "Johnny has peanut allergies and Susie can't swim." Now this is new hidden danger lurking in society that we need to have a conversation around.

How do we give society the tools to have that conversation, the comfort to have that conversation? It really is social change and healthcare just feels like one of the few messengers that can lend some neutrality to the conversation and move the needle. Very credible messengers too, I think. Thank you. So thank you. I mean, there's no doubt that this issue is massive and it's nuanced and it can be and often feel overwhelming.

I'm reminded as I listen to each of you and the broader coalition that we have the importance of collaboration. I mean, this issue is way bigger than any single organization can take on alone. And it also reminds me of the importance of maintaining optimism and hope.

So for the last few minutes that we have, I'd really like to hear from each of you on what does give you hope and optimism as we think about how to tackle this. - Sure, well from my perspective, I think the Agree to Agree campaign, as you pointed out, is rather genius. I should disclose the fact that I'm a registered gun owner, but I'm also on the front line treating patients who are injured by gun violence.

And the agree to agree means you can take people who are on both sides of me and put them in a room and have a conversation about responsible go-and-ownership and the epidemiology about injury. And so what I think is hopeful for the future is more collaboration of this nature where physicians, public health researchers, public health entities, health systems, and even the Ad Council and people in marketing get together and bring the conversation to a level where we can ultimately find a solution. And I'm optimistic that we're going to get there.

Thank you. Juan? For me, what gives me optimism was one of the real testimonials that happened after we saw the campaign, after we did the stunt, which was one parent, and he said, we need to stop fighting about who's right and wrong, and we need to find solutions. And I think that's very important because they think that the world is so focused on being right versus wrong.

like solving the problem. And I think we, once we get beyond the fighting over who's right, we can get to the real solutions that can help us, uh, uh, create a better world for our kids. Like we're saying, and we're talking backstage. So that, that gives me hope that we can get there. You know, what gives me hope, um, is really the journey that I personally have been, uh, in the last year with the ad council, the, um,

What the public sees is a 60-second spot. Behind that, there's really an industry of work and this collaboration of partners with incredible creative skills, funders who help build the pathway to execution. And I sat in on almost every funding call to build the baseline of grants that really enable this work.

And it was a really nice collaboration with the Ag Council on developing the pitch, asking the funder to collaborate, and it was mostly healthcare that's doing the first round of funding. I was just struck at how everybody was nodding their head yes as we were going through the conversation, that they immediately saw kind of the rational nature of this and were vested in trying to find a way. By the way, we were asking for money in a post-COVID world where half of healthcare lost money

So these were not easy decisions. These were tough decisions for enterprises to make. And I honestly think we've started to pierce the fear, the balloon of fear, and we're allowing ourselves and enabling a conversation that's just going to drive more momentum and more action and really start to see that curve start to bend.

Thank you. I think that is really the power of education. And I'm going to wrap up our session by reiterating the stat that we've repeated a number of times already in the last 90 minutes, and that is

that gun injuries are the number one cause of death for our kids in this country, not just this past year, but for the past three years. And I think we can all agree that that is just not okay. You know, Ramon likes to say that this issue is one that's going to take a thousand actions, both large and small. And with that, I really want to challenge all of you to think about how you might want to get involved in this issue because we really need everyone. And so...

If you're interested, come see us after the session. We're the folks wearing these pins, and we would love, love, love to chat with you. So thank you all so much for being here today, sharing your perspective and for your incredible partnership. And we're going to turn it back over to The Washington Post.

And now, back to Washington Post Live. JONATHAN CAPEHART: Good morning and welcome. I'm Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. Joining me on stage are three of my post colleagues, John Woodrow Cox. He's an enterprise reporter and author of "Children Under Fire: An American Crisis."

Sylvia Foster-Frau is a national investigative reporter and Alex Horton covers national security for The Post. Thank you all very much for being here this morning. John, I'll start with you. You've been covering gun violence since 2017 and you wrote Children Under Fire in 2022. How were you drawn initially to this challenging subject?

You know, I had covered in my first couple of years at the Post, I'd written a little bit about children and trauma. And I had a comfort interviewing children who'd gone through difficult things. And in 2017, I launched on this project on, really initially, it was about just children and violence. And

trying to tell those stories through their eyes, because so often we see children depicted in really kind of one-dimensional terms, even if the story's about them. And very, very quickly it became clear to me that this had to be only about gun violence. And I had this moment, the first story that I wrote that year was about a little boy in Southeast D.C. who was in second grade when his father was killed. In the middle of the day, outside of his school, he could see the police lights from the lobby of the school.

And I remember still standing in the auditorium in this preschool or this elementary school. And on the wall, they had asked children to draw what made them sad in their neighborhood. And these are children as young as four and five years old had depicted scenes of funerals and of shootings and of people dead on the street. And these weren't images from

These were their lived experiences. And it dawned on me that not a single child in that school was considered a victim of gun violence legally. They weren't. But every aspect of their lives were shaped by it. So it was this kind of awakening for me. And I've just stuck with it since. I'm struck by something saying that you found that you have a...

away with talking to children who have endured violence. Do you have children? I have an 18-month-old, so most of my career I didn't when I was covering this, and I'll say it's reframed the way that I think about this work. And how, I mean, it's already difficult. Yeah. How do you, how do you do it?

You know, I try to remind myself what a privilege it is, you know, the fact that someone will allow you that sort of access to their child and then the fact that the child also agrees to speak with you about the worst moment of their lives. It is the worst moment of their lives and, you know, it's a burden that I embrace, really, and...

To see the effect of a story, to see the way that that family feels seen, it has always been something that I just find to be so meaningful and it's kept me going. - Sylvia, you were a reporter for the San Antonio Express back in 2017, working on a story about an annual fair when your editor called to ask you to cover a shooting. What happened after that?

- Yeah, I was two years out of college, so still kind of a cub reporter and was working on a Sunday doing like this kind of annual festival in San Antonio. And there was a report about an active shooting scenario and my editor asked me to race down there and see what was going on. We didn't know if anyone had died or if people had died. We didn't know anything about it beyond that.

And so I got in my car. I remember I stopped to get Whataburger on the way, which now, in retrospect, bothers me because I was 15 minutes later than I should have been. And then arrived there and ended up having this experience that really changed the trajectory of my career and also my life.

By the time I got there, they were pulling bodies out of a small church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where 26 people and more than 20 had been killed and more than 20 others had been injured. It was like the deadliest shooting at the time. And it was a really close knit community. So you had these scenarios like one of the men I got to know really well, John Holcomb, who had lost

his three children, his pregnant wife, his parents, his brother, his niece. Like, it was a really close-knit community, and so the effects were just absolutely devastating.

And so basically I went through kind of this whole process of being a local reporter covering breaking news and seeing what it was like when national media like descends upon a place and how that can transform the entire environment that you're working with.

to being able to continue to tell their story even after everyone had left and spending over a year going back to that church and telling the stories about their road to recovery, the conspiracy theories that developed, just all of the court process, all of the ins and outs of that, which ended up kind of carrying my...

my reporting forward to when I came at the Post and we launched on this big AR-15 and mass shooting series that I was able to take a lot of what I had learned from that experience, including even going back to that community at that time. It had been over five years since the shooting had happened. - What did you learn when you went back five years later?

- Well, first of all, I should say I was very grateful to get the opportunity to do that because so I kind of was really sad when I moved to the post that I kind of felt like I was going to be leaving that community behind and I had grown so close to them and shared so many moments with them and I was sad.

you know, why would a national paper care about this really tiny town in Texas that, you know, at this point there had been so many mass shootings since then. But what I, what we did for the series is we went back to see like what happens to a community that's been affected, you know, what are the ripple effects, you know, years and years after a shooting occurs. And I learned a lot of things that I, I did not know about.

I learned that the fragments from the bullets, they kind of explode in people's bodies, right? And you get these really minuscule fragments. They look like almost freckles on people's skin. They're like purple and small. But imagine that also internally, right? Like in the organs. So you can see some of it, and then some of it is internal. And it's not something a doctor can just remove. And that those fragments leach lead, right?

And so there were women who suffered from infertility and were unable to have children because they were suffering from lead toxicity. And there are men that had it too and had all these kind of chronic conditions. People were still going to the hospital. And a lot of people still lived very low income lives. It was a low income community and they really did not, you know, they did win a court settlement, but in the end it did not seem to be

um, really have had a big effect in making their lives better. I'm going to ask you a personal question along the lines of what I asked John. And I'm struck by the, when you went to Sutherland, you were a brand new reporter, cub reporter, and you go to what I would assume is your, your very first sort of

Mass shooting story, violent story. How did, real quickly, how did that impact you? Not you as a reporter, but you? Oh, man. Yeah, it definitely changed me as a person. I had never experienced, like, grief and death so intimately before, and I think it gave me, sometimes, to my detriment, like a very...

clear sense of the vulnerability of people's lives, you know? I think we all kind of walk around not really realizing it, but feeling like we're kind of protected from the problems that other people have. Like, we think that we won't...

that won't happen to me. It happens to others and it's really sad, but that won't happen to me. And I think through the course of that reporting, it really broke down that wall for me when I realized that like, you know, we are all vulnerable to this kind of tragedy happening to us. And we all have a reason to make sure that they don't happen.

Alex, your background is a little different than your colleagues. You served in Iraq as an Army infantryman. Given your experience and your service and the reporting you've done, what do you think is missing in the national conversation about guns and gun violence? And also, as being a part of the AR-15 group, as a veteran, what's it been like to see

a weapon of war, one that you might have carried or a soldier might carry in Iraq, made available in a local gun store? Yeah, I think gun advocates have been part of this very deep and long misinformation campaign about what the AR-15 is and isn't when it's compared to something like an M16 or like an M4 carbine that I carried for the longest time.

Certainly the last couple decades, there's been this push to say you can't fire a three-round burst or a fully automatic. Therefore, this is totally different than what soldiers carry. That's untrue, and they know that's not true. Functionally, yes, they are correct, but...

The idea of how you carry a weapon and use a weapon in combat, you're trained to use accuracy, you're trained to use marksmanship to not spray bullets like in an action movie. There is no functional difference between what happens in actual combat and what a mass shooter using an AR-15 like in Southern Springs taking controlled single shots.

No difference. It's the same caliber. There's some minute differences in barrel pressure and PSI, but they use the same magazines, use the same accessories. So there is no actual difference by what I did in Iraq with my rifle and then what you can do with an AR-15.

So that's sort of like a longstanding gun advocate, Brett Herring, that luckily we've been able to combat lately. But that was, that only,

Let me rephrase that. That hasn't been the case all the time. The AR-15 series, we had a thing about gun advertisements going back all the way to the 60s when the AR-15 was introduced to civilian markets. And for a long time, Colt and other companies trumpeted the connection with

with M16s and AR-15s saying, this is about what you can get in the military. So we have seen that sort of public affairs and kind of lobbyist swing of like, this is, don't worry, this is a different kind of gun entirely and just not the case. Okay, I'm going to do to you what I did to your two colleagues because I'm really intrigued, you know,

You've served in the military. You have fired a weapon of war. And just as, not as a reporter, but as a veteran who has seen war personally, how has it impacted you and certainly your reporting to see those weapons being used to hurt veterans

unarmed civilians to hurt people here at home? It's been difficult, but I can kind of see through, and it's sort of like a morbid thing, but when I see how gunmen set up their weapons, I can kind of understand their intent when you put it together with other reporting. For example, after the Las Vegas shooting, there was pictures of different rifles that have

used by the same gunman, but they had different optics on them. They had different accessories that would help you take controlled shots or take a lot of spray of other like kind of more chaotic, you know, shots with like a bump stock, for instance. So from my experience, I can just look at those pictures and say, I know exactly what he was trying to do with that gun and what he was trying to do with this gun.

in different places of that shooting, right? So that's sort of been like a morbid insight into, I can sort of, you know, helps me get into the rational preparation of some of these shooters. But also it helps me understand like what is happening in my community with suicide and firearm suicide. Because when we talk about veteran suicide, we're actually talking about guns.

about 75% of veterans who take their lives use firearms. And I got some still crazy stats here that compared to veteran men, compared to non-veteran men, they use firearms and suicide 70% more. When it comes to women, it's 144%. By and large, women don't use firearms to take their own lives in society. But if you served in the military,

the reverse is true. You're more likely, you're more, you know, guns aren't exotic. You are more likely to have them in your home and you know how to use them. So it is a uniquely persistent problem in the veteran community. And this is something that VA and others have tried to address. But you can imagine it's the third rail when it comes to, you know, I've gone to VA appointments, you know, just for normal stuff. And one of the questions they asked me is, do you have a firearm at home and is it safely stored?

And you can imagine some people would be upset of the government asking them this stuff. You know, where does this data go? So it's been a really hard conversation for those folks. But the data shows that VA is not really having an impact. In a lot of ways, it's getting worse.

John, Alex just cited some stats that he's got on that card there. You spearhead a database maintained by the Washington Post of the number of schoolchildren impacted by gun violence. Tell us about this initiative, the methodology, and why the government hasn't done something like this.

Yeah, I mean, the origin of that was a story. I went to South Carolina where there was a shooting in a rural community. One child was killed, which is why almost no one had ever heard of this shooting, why the world just quickly moved on from it. But, you know, I saw this community, this elementary school where the six-year-old boy had been killed, and every child had been affected. Their lives had fundamentally changed by a shooting that lasted 12 seconds before the shooter's gun jammed.

And naively, this was also in 2017, naively I came back from that reporting thinking, goodness, this is, I can't believe the effect that this incident had on all these different children who were dealing with PTSD and guilt and all sorts of fear. You know, it was consuming every aspect of their lives. And I thought, well, surely the government tracks this. So I'm going to find out, I'm going to look this up and find out how many shootings there have been so I can figure out how many children were in schools at the time that these shootings occurred.

and quickly learned that there was no such database. And, you know, as to why the government hasn't built their own, I don't think they have much of an incentive. I mean, it's a representation of failure. It's a societal failure that we continue to allow children in the places they go to learn and grow to live in a state of fear all the time, that someone could show up with a gun and kill them.

So, you know, I don't think the government has an incentive. We did a really painstaking effort going back to Columbine to track every single school shooting.

the number of victims the weapon used, all those things, but it was really important to me, and that's why the big number on that is the number of children who were present when those incidents occurred. Because I think as so many conversations we have around gun violence, we never actually capture the scope, right? It's the women who can't have children now, right? Who they weren't killed, they're still alive,

So they're not on that number at the top of the headline, right? They're not in that number. They're not captured there. So, you know, this is an issue in my experience that it's affecting tens of millions of children, not just the 30 or 40,000 who are killed each year. And Sylvia, you may have touched on this earlier, but when you're talking to members of the community impacted by gun violence, what are those conversations like and what do they tell you needs to be done? Hmm.

- Yeah, this was really interesting for me because I think a lot of times, sometimes to the media's detriment, we often will focus on the case of that one person who was in the community of a mass shooting and then they changed their mind and they want more gun control and we do a big story about that person. But in my kind of anecdotal experience, I've found that a lot of times in communities that have been affected by gun violence, their positions and their politics don't change that much.

If they were Second Amendment supporters who really believed in gun rights, the mass shooting, actually like in Sutherland Springs, more people chose to arm themselves. They got permits to conceal carry more in that county. There was a huge spike in the data after that time. The entire church became completely disarmed.

like militarized basically with cameras and a security team and everyone's carrying. It was a reaction for people who believe that that is the solution. But that said, I also have found that there is a lot of consensus. And when you look at polling, that's the case too. Like a lot of Americans, the majority of Americans do want more gun laws in place. They do want to make it harder to access guns. So you really see also a...

a big gap between what people can agree on and want to happen and then what our politicians have done. And I've found that a lot of times that comes down to kind of the

the weaponization of words, right? Like the language that you choose to use. And there are certain buzzwords that elicit a reaction from both sides of the gun rights debate. But that when you actually like talk to people like in Sutherland Springs who are very much in favor of gun rights, like they, they don't have an issue with having more background checks for people who get guns or maybe raising the age to 21. Like that's,

There's a lot more in common than I think our politics has reflected. And kind of to John's point, like what we need to do is obviously convince, you know, it's the goal that we all want, which is that what the people want and believe is reflected in the politics and the policies that the elected leaders do. And that there's a complete breakdown there. And Jonathan, what you mentioned about, you know, what do we miss is like,

what Sylvia's describing as like this sort of large middle of people who want to keep or expand gun rights, but also have common sense ways that they're regulated, that you do background checks. The gunman in Southerton Springs, for instance, committed domestic violence against his child and his wife, and the Air Force did not submit that information to the FBI, which allowed him to buy the guns, right? So it's just the systems don't work the way they should.

But also, you know, the gun debate is so politicized that there are these extremes that where people want to completely ban all kinds of stuff and limit magazine size to the point where, you know, it's non-functional. Or there's people who just want to be maximalist and like AR-15 for every child, you know. And most people are in that middle that need to be reached because I just think that there's, you know, the individualism, like the frontier mindset, like,

People ask, why can't we be more like New Zealand? Because we're not New Zealand, right? You can't put the cultural toothpaste back into the tube. We are a nation that believes in guns and gun rights largely, and you can't wind it back. So you have to work within those cultural confines unless there's some magic solution that comes. But politicians tend to sort of

retreat to their sides and never kind of tackle that reality. So the clock says we have less than 90 seconds, but obviously we're going to go over with this last question. And this is for each of you. I'm going to start with you, John. What do you want people here in the room, but who might also be watching on the live stream, what do you want people to take away from this conversation, from your reporting going forward?

You know, I'm going to repeat myself, but it really is the scope of this issue. You know, so much of my work is focused on children who survive and in many cases weren't physically harmed at all. You know, I spent a summer in Uvalde with fourth graders there and, you know, the things I heard there I'll never forget. And, you know, these were children who survived, who weren't going to get some big payout from a lawsuit.

but who lost all their friends, who in some cases were hiding underneath a table, listening to their friends and their teachers die. So I think the thing I hope people realize is that the issue, the ripple effect of this is enormous. It is not just the people who are physically harmed.

It is their families, their children. There are so many other lives. And all of our children, every child in this country after first grade is aware of the possibility that someone could walk into their classroom and harm them. And so I guess don't look away. These are hard stories to read, but stick with them.

I just want to make sure, is this Caitlin? This is Caitlin. Caitlin Gonzalez, who you've written about, you've chronicled her story. Sylvia. You know, I think my takeaway, speaking as a journalist, is more for other journalists and other news outlets, which is that, you know,

we get into these patterns of covering these stories the same way again and again. Like we basically have a template for every time a mass shooting happens. And I think

It's so important to find new and innovative ways to continue to tell this story, to reveal that fact that history is repeating itself, that we are telling those same stories. That was what I found so novel about the AR-15 series that we did because we weren't just recounting another shooting, we were taking the scope of 11 mass shootings and putting them together and finding out what new things we could learn from that.

And so I would, two parts, like call out to the journalistic community to try to find new ways to tell these stories, new ways to do accountability journalism, to hold the powerful forces accountable that have been contributing to the breakdown and what the people want and what politicians want. And then I also think these,

these instances reveal in some cases some of the flaws in our journalism and in our competitiveness between outlets. A lot of times you see communities that are completely inundated by reporters that get asked again and again the same questions from different outlets who want their independent verification, their independent quote.

in these moments when these people are not politicians, they are people who just experienced the worst thing that has ever happened to them. They're victims of a horrible crime that we could also do better about re-imagining the ways that we report on that.

and maybe ways that news outlets can work together to provide the information that we're all looking for, which is the stories of the victims, the suffering of the survivors, the new advocacy groups that are rising up afterwards. And so if there is a way to better cover those communities, to really minimize harm, I think that would be an amazing thing, not just for journalism, but for a society that's consuming it. And Alex, I'll give you the last word.

So I think, you know, when it comes to our industry, too, like, I think we have to remove, like...

exotic sizing just like the gun community because I think a lot of people in our profession are sort of approach of this sort of alien other group and you know gun culture is American culture and vice versa and You know some of these unique problems are outcroppings of that, you know access to guns You know sort of flippant attitudes about gun safety and gun storage certainly with with John's series shows that but I think that

When I talk to colleagues here and other places, people are so precise with their language of obscure congressional minutiae, but they don't want to get a semi-automatic versus a fully automatic, right? Because what does it matter? They're all guns, right? So I think we need to go back and really understand it and show respect and understanding to this complex cultural thing that a large part of the country has absolutely no second thought of. It's just part of their daily life.

You know, I go to the gun range, I follow the gun laws, and when I'm there, I'm like, why am I shooting these 10-round magazines that make it so inconvenient at the range? This is how people practically think about gun rights, you know, and we need to get closer to that and not just, like, sort of jump in the waters of the political stuff, but actually approach these people as members of an actual community.

Alex Horton, Sylvia Foster-Fraud, John Woodrow Cox, thank you both. Thank you all very much for, one, for your reporting, but also for this very powerful conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening. For more information on our upcoming programs, go to WashingtonPostLive.com.

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