 So welcome everyone welcome to our conversation gun violence as public health crisis. I'm Michelle DeMarzo I'm the curator of education and academic engagement here at the Fairfield University Art Museum And we are excited to present this event as the keystone of the programming for the exhibition that is on right now in the Walsh Gallery Unload guns in the hands of artists if you hadn't had a chance to see this fantastic show yet It is closing on October 13th So make sure you get over to the Walsh Gallery and I'll throw out there that on Tuesday at 5 p.m We will be welcoming artist and social activist Bradley McCallum to the Walsh Gallery to talk about his art and his work So please join us for that if you can We'd also like to thank again our wonderful partner the unload foundation for helping us bring this timely and provocative show to Fairfield University and Now I am going to introduce our moderator for tonight's event the wonderful Melissa Kwan who is director of the Center for Faith and Public Life here at Fairfield University The center's work focuses on harnessing the academic resources of the university to affect positive social change in and with communities Melissa completed her master's degree in education at Fairfield University With a concentration in service learning and civic engagement in 2005 And she's currently pursuing a doctoral degree in higher education leadership at the University of Massachusetts Boston I'll hand it over to Melissa to take it from here Thank You Michelle and let me echo Michelle's welcome to Fairfield University tonight for this important and timely conversation on gun violence Tonight's panel is the second in a two-part series. So last week we focused on violent gun violence in Connecticut Discussing the policy landscape opportunities to work with manufacturers on gun safety and the role of street level Interventions that involve peer networks in reducing gun violence This week we're going to turn our focus to the national level Discussing gun violence through the lens of public health and we're incredibly fortunate to have guests that can speak from multiple angles And depth of experience addressing gun violence through research and evidence-backed interventions So the paperwork on your seats includes bios for each of our speakers I will share a few highlights as I introduce the panel as a whole Following the introductions I will invite each panelist to speak for five to eight minutes to lay a foundation for our ongoing discussion tonight and The following the opening remarks. I'll pose a few questions to the panel before opening it up to audience questions So also on your seats are comment cards We ask you please to write your questions on those cards and ushers will come around to collect them before the audience Q&A If you don't have a card just write it on on any old piece of paper If you don't have any old piece of paper, just raise your hand and we'll make sure to get one to you And we hope this will allow to make the most of our conversation tonight So to introduce our panel we have Dr. Patrick Kelly who has been working here at Fairfield University in the capacity of distinguished fellow in nursing and health sciences since 2006 During his brief period. He designed an interest disciplinary major in public health, which is currently enrolling students Prior to his time at Fairfield He was director of the board on global health and founded the forum on global violence prevention with the Institute of Medicine In this position he co-authored the 2013 report priorities for research to reduce the threat of firearm related violence We have Dr. Bradley Stolbach Who is a licensed clinical psychologist and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago School of Medicine Where his research and practice focuses on developing trauma-informed programs and services Among his many innovative roles he serves as clinical director of healing hurt people a violence intervention model in Chicago That aims to address the psychological trauma caused by gun violence And then last week we have Jim Himes Who represents Connecticut's fourth district in the United States House of Representatives where he serves on the House Committee on Financial Services and Permanent select committee on intelligence Creating vibrant safe and healthy communities for all children is a priority for representative Himes And so kicking us off tonight will be Dr. Patrick Kelly Thank You Melissa and thank you everyone for coming I appreciate the invitation Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times has noted that more Americans have died from gun violence since John Kennedy's assassination Then the number of Americans who have been killed in all wars since the Revolutionary War Every day an average of 96 Americans die of gun violence Typically about 34 are murdered and about 56 take their own lives Using firearms Despite this burden of death many don't see gun violence though as a public health problem However, public health contributes complimentary methods and solutions to the criminal justice approach in contrast to public health's achievements with Problems such as AIDS and tobacco the politics around firearms has blocked for over 20 years Almost all federally funded public health gun violence research Vast gaps exist in what we know about risk and protective factors about causes and potential interventions National data comparable to what we know for example about motor vehicles or about certain communicable diseases does not exist for firearms Several laws explicitly prevent the US government from having a nationwide system of registration for guns owners or gun related transactions in this Legislated ignorance handicaps scientific evidence-based policymaking at the expense of public health Misperception also distorts how we frame the problem For example while assault weapons dominate our fears 95% of firearm deaths are still due to handguns Among firearm deaths roughly two-thirds are due to suicides In the United States the annual number of gun related deaths hovers at about 35 or 36,000 in Connecticut in 2016 We could claim about a hundred and seventy-two of those The collateral psychosocial impacts though on society of gun violence go well beyond those who suffer the kinetic impact of injury a Public health approach puts the emphasis on preventing disease and injury through understanding the inter-relationship Between an armed perpetrator the victim and the environment The perpetrator may be dangerously psychotic or depressed or under the influence of drugs or alcohol or otherwise morally compromised While gun control may affect the hardware side of this deadly pairing the human side offers opportunities for public health to change this perfect storm a Victims susceptibility to the perpetrator's evil can be mitigated For example alcohol seems to make a person more susceptible to gun violence whether it's homicide Suicide or an unintentional injury This has led for example to impactful Efforts to close bars and other alcohol-serving establishments are early Other related behaviors such as gang membership social isolation Substance abuse or domestic disputes can all be addressed through systematic strategic public health engagement The direct burden of gun related mortality is actually similar To what we see with motor vehicle accidents with Parkinson's disease and with poisoning deaths yet Gun violence receives less than one-tenth the research funding of those conditions Consequently rather than the evidence-based debates that we've had for decades Concerning controversial aspects of AIDS or tobacco use gun violence prevention has been stifled And I believe the congressman is going to say a little bit about what's behind that the so-called Dickey amendment from 1996 In public health we care greatly about health disparities CDC defines health disparities as preventable differences in the burden of disease injury violence or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations Well, the United States is apparently a socially disadvantaged Population the rate of gun murders in our country is seven times that in Canada 23 times that in Australia 90 times that in the United Kingdom and 361 times that in Japan According to the Pew Research Center 42% of Americans keep a gun in their homes Now the vast majority of these folks are law-abiding persons who have a right to self-defense and to own a gun However, it's a shame that so many Americans perceive a need to have a deadly weapon nearby to feel safe As someone who spent 23 years in the military on active duty I find myself wondering how many of these Americans are actually Proficient to effectively use the weapons they possess and how many actually face a reasonable prospect of mortal danger Where a gun would give them the upper hand rather than being a net liability? Firearms have a deep root in our culture However, when it comes to preventing suicide or Femme side Household proximity to a gun is not particularly desirable since split-second impulses can have especially deadly consequences Merely having a handgun in the home Increases the odds of suicide by a factor of about six compared to homes with no guns Keeping a loaded weapon in the home increases the odds of suicide by a factor of about nine About 50 women a month are killed by a current or former intimate partner The partners access to a gun increased the odds of Femme side more than five fold Given the dynamic nature of suicidal ideation and intrafamilial violence in many homes the perception of increased safety Is a hundred and eighty degrees off? The emotional health in many homes is just too precarious to have a gun nearby Regarding gun violence journalist Steven Lurie has written Where we worry most we can help the least and where we could help the most we care the least Predicting a mass shooting Tests the limits of science However, urban violence is much more predictable Former mayor Landrieu of New Orleans has said this is not just a gun issue. It's an unemployment issue It's a poverty issue. It's a family issue. It's a culture of violence issue These upstream social determinants of health are at the root of what really needs to be controlled That's illuminating to note that of the roughly 34,000 Americans who died of gun violence in 2014 11,000 were suicides and 11,000 were homicides and of these 11,008 to be exact homicides only 14 people died in mass shootings Now since 2014 the death count in mass shootings has risen to as high as a hundred and twelve last year Though this still remained less than 1% of all non-suicide gun deaths The toll on black men stood out with a death rate about 13 fold higher than for white men in 2014 for every million young adult Americans 31 white men died of gun violence 646 black men died of gun violence Now this huge disparity should grossly offend our sense of human rights and social justice So where does this bring us? Well, some people do save their own lives by using a gun for self-defense. We can't deny that But others put themselves at higher risk by having a gun in their possession As a country we are awash in guns that can fall into the wrong hands at the wrong time To bring down gun deaths each community needs an evidence-based strategy Informed by local epidemiologic evidence This is basic applied health This is what public health practitioners do every day to address AIDS and motor vehicle trauma and teen pregnancy Now our Ignatian perspective reminds us of the equal dignity of all persons and the primacy of the common good In a society where each person has fundamental rights and duties with respect to his neighbors Or while our political and social priorities are subject to discernment The principle of solidarity with the disadvantage is core to Catholic social teaching There is a clear role for evidence-based laws regarding gun ownership possession storage and use However, without quality epidemiologic data, one can't competently debate rights benefits and risks and make informed decisions Our pluralistic society appears too ideologically diverse to accomplish all that is needed at the national level and this leaves Much work to be done at the state level The work is not simply governmental leadership or advocacy for new regulations that may or may not produce the desired result We need intellectual leadership Speaking only for myself, the diverse intellectual skills and energies consolidated in one place, like a university Can help harness for individual cities the many aspects of our multidisciplinary requirements for dealing with gun violence We need to draw upon the best insights from fields including public health Clinical health care, education, psychology, sociology, social work, criminal justice, law, political science, communications, informatics Mechanical engineering, mathematical modeling, applied ethics, and business. These are all relevant And we also have to highlight that the guns in the hands of artists exhibition Reaffirmed the value of the visual and performing arts in their ability to provoke us at many levels So that we can contribute to solutions to community problems Indeed without cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary partnerships the crisis of ignorance which sustains gun violence will continue as the death toll mounts Thank you Thank you Dr. Kelly You covered a lot of ground in a very short amount of time and this is of course an incredibly complex topic And you mentioned a lot of the ways in which it is complex I'm going to start by talking about how gun violence is not a single thing As you talked about there are all sorts of gun violence, there are all sorts of ways that people die from guns There's domestic violence, there's accidental death, there's suicide, there is mass killing And then there is the kind of violence that we are working with in Chicago Which is really interpersonal and identity based violence that's happening in racially and economically segregated communities Where the flow of guns is not stemmed ever at all And these are not legally purchased guns so when we talk about the gun control approaches It's not that those aren't important and relevant but they're not going to touch a lot of the violence that's happening where I'm working So the violence that is killing our children in Chicago is largely based on where people live, who they associate with, who they affiliate themselves with And so that people are killing their perceived enemies and people are perceived to be their enemies based on their perceived identity And so when people use the term gang a lot of different images come to mind And people maybe think about Chicago as gang land, you know, Al Capone, the city of Al Capone What we typically think of as gang violence, I don't think really captures a lot of what's going on in Chicago currently So there are many different factors that influence who's going to get shot, who's going to do the shooting And in terms of a public health approach we need to take any approach that could possibly help The one that we're focused on is addressing the psychological traumatization that people are walking around with from the gun violence And the other violence that they experience in their lives So if you've heard of post-traumatic stress disorder raise your hand So post-traumatic stress disorder when people think about PTSD usually what comes to mind is someone in combat in war But actually there are far more people who have PTSD from domestic trauma that they've experienced than from being in combat in the military And Healing Her People Chicago is a program that we brought from Philadelphia It was developed at Drexel University at the School of Public Health there It's a center for non-violence and social justice We've been doing it in Chicago for about five years with young people under 19 My co-director did some research a few years ago at the Cook County Hospital trauma unit And they found that about 42% of trauma patients and their family members screened positive for PTSD If the patient was there for a gunshot wound they were 13 times more likely to screen positive for PTSD than people who were there from a fall or a motor vehicle crash So we know that these kinds of injuries carry a lot of invisible injury on top of the physical injury In most settings when somebody comes in with a physical injury that injury is treated and then they are released as soon as they possibly can be from the hospital Without any attention to the emotional, psychological, behavioral, spiritual impact of what they've experienced So the idea of Healing Her People is that when someone comes in with a violent injury we have an opportunity to intervene to address the psychological trauma And then to provide supports and services that could support their recovery from that trauma And I'll talk a little bit about how that traumatization drives violence But I wanted to give you just a few statistics before that So over one half of the patients identified by Healing Her People Chicago had experienced a violent injury prior to the one that brought them to the trauma center Almost 90% had experienced the loss of a family member or a close friend to homicide 90% Think about that And we're working with people under 19 Many of the people we work with have been losing people to this since as long as they can remember Over a third had witnessed a homicide and about two thirds had witnessed a shooting or a stabbing So when they come to the trauma unit with a gunshot wound it is very often not the most important thing that's happened to them It's not the worst thing that's happened to them from their perspective It's simply the last thing that happened to them And virtually no one that we see has ever been offered any kind of intervention support to recover Or any of the violence that they've been dealing with In addition to these exposures to violence they also are dealing with all kinds of other adversity Raise your hand if you've heard of something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study So somehow I knew your hand would go up Dr. Kelly This is a study that was done about 20 years ago and I'm not going to get into detail about it But it looked at 10 types of what they called household dysfunction Abuse, neglect, alcoholism or drug addiction in the home Someone in the home being incarcerated, parental separation of loss And what they found is that the more different types of adversity a person had experienced The higher their risk for all sorts of bad outcomes later in life Is that a fair summary? So in that original ACES study 20 years ago And there's just a study that came out recently that is showing that this is much more pronounced In ethnic minority communities or people with lower incomes But in that study about 13% of the people had experienced three or more ACES, Adverse Childhood Experiences By the time they were 18 years old Our Healing Heard People clients who are, as I said, under 19 So some of them haven't even got to 18 yet 87% have experienced three or more different types of childhood adversity Two thirds have had four or more and almost half have had five or more So when we encounter a patient in the hospital It's safe for us to assume that this is someone who's been dealing with trauma and adversity for a very long time And even though they are injured children That is not how they're viewed And the people who come in with the injuries are viewed assumed to be perpetrators of violence Whether they have been or not Many have The distinction between a victim and a perpetrator is In many cases meaningless distinction You've heard the expression hurt people hurt people So they're not viewed as children or adolescents They're not viewed as people with post-traumatic stress disorder They're viewed as criminals And one of the things that we've tried to do to help people understand them in a different way Is to think about how the United Nations defines a child soldier A child soldier is defined as any person under the age of 18 Who's affiliated with an armed force or armed group In any capacity So if our children were in Columbia Instead of Chicago They would be child soldiers In Chicago we locked them up The first age of affiliation for those who say they're affiliated Have been affiliated with a street organization or a gang Among our clients is age 10 They say the first time they held a gun was when they were 11 So instead of focusing on who's pulling the trigger Part of our public health approach needs to be Who's putting guns in the hands of children And when children are traumatized and also in fear for their lives It shouldn't surprise us when they fire the gun So that basic idea underlying the Healing Her People model Is that one of the main drivers and as I've said An ignored driver of the risk for re-injury And for involvement in violence retaliation Is untreated psychological trauma And the cycle is you experience trauma You have the reactions that any of us have after trauma Which is to develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder Or acute stress disorder And then do things to manage those symptoms Two things that very frequently are done to manage those symptoms are Carrying a weapon and using substances to manage how one is feeling Both of those things greatly increase the risk for injury So then you get injured again and it's a cycle that goes round and round and round And the idea of Healing Her People again is to intervene in that cycle When we have that opportunity, when people have just been hurt And oftentimes maybe they've never been offered any kind of help or support before But they're maybe open to it if they think maybe this will stop me from ever having to go through this again So that's the cycle that we're trying to interrupt The idea and you alluded to this Dr. Kelly That a gun is a form of protection Is a very powerful idea in our culture We believe this so strongly That we have people literally, your colleagues Proposing that what we need to do is arm our teachers Right? This is a crazy idea A gun does not protect you Unless you can shoot a bullet out of the air The people that are shooting our children Are not going to stop shooting because they see that they have a gun They're going to shoot faster because they see that they have a gun A gun does not deter anyone The only way it could protect you is if you kill the person who you think is going to kill you first Right? So this is a very powerful idea And it shouldn't surprise us that our children believe this idea When they are actually in danger Right? I mean a lot of them know they're in danger because they've been hurt So I think that might be a good place for me to turn it over to you Congressman Hollings And I look forward to the additional conversation Well thank you, that's from the wise to the unwise What I can bring to the table is not expertise in any particular academic discipline or research But a sense for the challenge, the political challenge that we have In dealing with the unbelievable problem of gun violence And let me restate a couple of things that both professors said very very clearly We have a severe and underappreciated problem in this country What do I mean by that? 33, 34,000 dead Americans every single year Underappreciated, every 18 months we lose as many people to gun violence in this country As we lost in the 12 years of the Vietnam War A thing that split our country and was generational in its impact We just went through the anniversary of 9-11 in which we lost 3,000 Americans We lose that every single month to gun violence And we have known for about 700 years since about 1400 And I say this at Fairfield University, a place of inquiry In about 1400 we figured out that if you had a problem Rather than necessarily just praying to the gods One good way to deal with that problem was to study it and understand it And once you understood it you could come to conclusions about its causes And address the problem And we've put that scientific method and that spirit of inquiry To work against our problems for a very very long time We did it in a somewhat analogous world in automobile deaths When I was a kid we had massive numbers of automobile deaths Because the kids were in the back seat without seat belts And there weren't child seats and we studied it And we saved literally hundreds of thousands of lives over time The political situation is such that there are those who have a very deliberate interest In stopping us from studying this problem And in fact, as Dr. Kelly alluded to The Congress in 1996 in a colorfully named amendment, the Dickey amendment Ruled that the CDC could not advocate for gun safety or gun control And that was interpreted, it didn't forbid research But helpfully Congress, every time the CDC, the Center for Disease Control This is the federal agency that is very very good on things that kill people Whether it's Zika or HIV or other issues that kill a lot of people When they undertook research around gun violence Congress unhelpfully would cut their budget by the exact amount of money that they spent on that gun violence And I would suggest that in addition to the 700-year lesson of studying something to understand it And to help solve the problem, just because you understand a problem Doesn't necessarily mean you need to wade into a political firestorm For example, let me give you an example to illustrate what I mean If it turns out, as I suspected it would, that a very substantial number of gun deaths Happened when an individual who is not the owner of a gun uses that gun Policemen die because in a scuffle a criminal takes the policeman's gun and kills the policeman Son or daughter commits suicide with dad's gun Guns get stolen If it turns out, as I imagine it might, that an awful lot of Americans die When a non-owner uses a gun Why don't we have the technology that allows me to use my thumbprint to open this phone If I leave this phone here, there's not one of you who can get into my phone And yet if I leave a gun here, all of you can use it My point being obviously that we don't need to get into the absurd debate Over the Second Amendment, over whether you're pro-gun or anti-gun To say, hey, if the facts show that non-gun owners are actually committing a lot of violence Let's address that That's just an example to illustrate So the good news is, and I clutch at these little examples of good news Little though they may be in terms of federal action around gun violence In the 2018 Appropriations Act, what was known as the Omnibus Congress made it clear that the CDC could study the problem Okay, good, that's a wisdom of 700 years ago And my hope is that as a result, we will come to learn those things that drive violence And once we know the facts, we can apply the norms, the thinking I suspect that a country with a history of the Second Amendment and our gun culture Will arrive at a different place than the British or the Canadians Or the Germans or the Japanese arrive at And as a result, we will probably always have more gun violence than those countries But the point is, we can choose once we have the facts and we can choose wisely There's two problems here, and this is where I will wrap up One is, even though there was this tiny little bit of progress We have a lot of work to do to really understand this problem And even if we understand this problem The human species is not very good at evaluating and feeling risk So the examples, I feel better with a gun in my bedside table Look, at some visceral level, I can feel that But of course the facts show that a gun in my bedside table actually puts me in a position of risk And we see this in plenty of other areas, right? Nobody fears jumping into their car and driving down to get a gallon of milk And everybody fears getting on an airplane You're not going to die in an airplane, you are going to die in your automobile That is the reality Nobody fears the kinds of diets that most assuredly will kill you And yet you fear lightning and bugs and snakes So we don't evaluate risk viscerally very well We don't feel it well, and so just having the facts doesn't necessarily say That we will move in the right direction legislatively or as a matter of policy One of the big surprises of my ten years in public policy is that it's pretty easy to deny inconvenient facts And to set aside truth for some period of time If it conflicts with your faith, if it conflicts with your sense of meaning If you're going to be pretty hard to persuade some people That they won't be the one that stops that robber or the rapist that is coming up the stairs at one in the morning Now there's been some fascinating studies about how good trained law enforcement is When they discharge their weapons in stressful situations And I don't remember the exact numbers, but suffice it to say that when trained law enforcement officers In moments of stress discharge their weapons shooting at somebody in a presumably mortal situation They hit their intended target about 12% of the time So you can imagine what untrained Jim Himes, what his rate of success is going to be Protecting himself with that assailant who's coming up the stairs But nonetheless, it's in the political world, the one thing I have to add to this debate It's often as much feeling and visceral and bias as it is fact and truth Especially in a world where, and this is really the sort of interesting public policy thing Those who oppose reasonable gun safety policies Understand that at all costs they must stop a reasonable debate Because a reasonable debate will surface the fact that, and I work in a representative body That 90% of Americans support universal background check This is not a complicated idea, this is the idea that we're, yeah It's not a complicated idea Everybody regardless of when or where you buy a weapon should be Undergo a background check to make sure you're not a violent felon or a terrorist or anything else The reason that is opposed is because once you start down that track of things that make sense You might take up other ideas that make sense And the NRA and other gun groups at all costs need to stop that it might make sense argument Because again it's hard to penetrate when we're talking about risk Again we fear the flying that won't kill us against the bacon double cheeseburger that will kill us But if you start down that path of rational inquiry you move in directions that aren't convenient And by the way, and this is my last point, we're not even to the point where we can get to good answers We're not asking the right questions and that's not an accident What's the question I get asked and you get asked most I bet out there Are you pro gun or anti gun? That's an insane question, we don't ask that about any other technology Are you pro car or anti car? Are you pro opiates or anti opiates? I use those examples because most people would say well I'm anti opiates Yeah but opiates are an important part of pain management for a lot of people Cars, yeah cars kill a lot more people than guns do But you know we don't say we're anti car So even accepting the language of are you pro gun or anti gun is a useful way By asking the wrong question of stopping inquiry evidence and arriving at smart consensus answers Whenever somebody asks me that are you pro gun or anti gun You know we got a second amendment I actually respect hunters I'm even going to give up on the fight of that individual who thinks that a weapon is good for self protection All I want to do is make sure that individual is storing that weapon safely So that's a reasonable discussion but it's not one you can have if we start with the question of are you pro gun or anti gun So the forces who would stop us from understanding this problem This unique problem in the United States have gone further than just stopping us from the inquiry And again there was that little bit of progress we made last year They've got us asking the wrong questions So our challenge is how do we start asking the right questions If we take it for granted that we have a second amendment and we do And if we take it for granted there are a lot of people who like hunting and we do How can we focus on those things easy things like I was talking about you know safe gun technology Maybe slightly harder things like the conversation about what kinds of weapons are appropriate For hunting and for personal protection Again we're going to draw the line somewhere We can have those conversations if we reject the refusal to enter into a reason discussion To ask the questions that make sense and reject the fear and reject the kind of anger and emotionality And division that stops the right questions from being asked And ultimately the right questions from being answered So if I might I know that you're going to ask some questions But this is one question that I think is probably a right question to ask That none of us mentioned and that is money So there are economic drivers to some of this And there is money being spent to perpetuate the problem So if we're not spending anywhere close to that to try to prevent the problem How do we ever think that we have any chance of succeeding Yeah that's a great question Sometimes I have to get in front of the argument that the NRA Because they spend a ton of money lobbying that that's the problem It's actually a bigger problem than that Look the NRA like every other organization is limited in the amount of money they can give to federal candidates anyway And it's not a big number relative to the cost of a campaign The NRA I guess can give somebody $5,000 but in a world where campaigns cost $3 million That's not a hugely significant thing What the NRA has done and I realized this when I finally had two glasses of wine And watched 45 minutes of NRA videos What they're doing is they are it's a very sophisticated and dark thing They are using the culture war to move people in a way that they could never move people with $5,000 contributions to do it Again have a glass of wine but watch a bunch of NRA videos Those coastal elitist Hollywood, Manhattan, San Francisco types Hate your way of life and want to take away your guns If you notice the word gun only came up once in that sort of summary of a lot of these videos We are in a very divided society today Oftentimes those lines are drawn between more urban coastal areas and more rural areas And the NRA has really capitalized on this sense of societal and even cultural division To create a sense of those anti-gun people And again notice the language anti-gun, are you anti-car? They hate your way of life and they want to change it So in some ways yes the money matters But the extent to which they've been able to harness the cultural divisions and the culture war in this country To their own ends is really dramatic to see I was also thinking about other ways that corporations may profit from our gun problem And I don't just think about gun manufacturers but also about the incarceration industry Yeah that's unquestionably part of it I mean look the NRA gets its operating budget from a lot of gun companies There's no question about that And so yes that is also a driver here that we should be cognizant of And look the automobile companies resisted like mad the introduction of seat belts But over time if you do the inquiries if you get the answers and if you push people And do it in a way that brings people on board rather than exacerbating the split The auto companies eventually make airbags and seat belts standard equipment Thank you so now's the time to write those questions down And there are folks coming around to collect them I guess one question I had is let's assume funding is restored to the CDC What are some of the key research questions? What are the top few that you would want to see explored? I guess one assumption that I would wonder if the congressman would comment about Is the omnibus bill allowed the CDC if I remember the verbiage right To investigate the causes of gun violence I'm not sure, correct me if I'm wrong, that any money was appropriated to go along With that allowance to investigate the causes And in the gun violence research community there's a little bit of angst About the way that was worded because we not only want to understand the causes But we want to understand the interventions that may be effective against gun violence And so some of the folks like Daniel Webster at Johns Hopkins Or Gary and Wintemoot at the University of California are not exactly jumping for joy These are national leaders in this type of research Because they think that the money is not going to show up basically And that in fact if it does show up They will be held to only doing research on causes Now to continue with your answering your question When I was introduced it was noted that I was involved with a study That was entitled priorities for research to reduce the threat of firearm related violence This was a study requested by President Obama in the aftermath of Sandy Hook President Obama basically said that the CDC was misinterpreting the Dickey amendment verbiage And that in fact they could do gun violence related research And the question was what should that research be And they came to the National Academy of Science and we gave them an expert committee's rendition And what the research could be so I could give you a whole long list of that But what was frustrating for me is we gave them this wonderful list of research And no money ever showed up to actually conduct it So we kind of felt we were spinning our wheels Yeah that's exactly right The Dickey amendment never said you can't do research The Dickey amendment said you can't do advocacy But as I said Congress also unhelpfully every time the CDC undertook or sponsored some research Congress kept track of it and reduced the funding for the CDC And look I think if there's a lesson here If we can get our friends who are skittish about all the anti-gun people out there Look options, we live in a democracy Developing options isn't determinative If we have 12 things that you through your research tell us will dramatically reduce gun violence We're not compelled to do them and in fact if four of them are politically unviable Let's do the other eight You're a reasonable man I think there are just some who are even scared at the CDC to do this research I feel that the words advocate or promote gun control are kind of fuzzy ambiguous words And that the generation of knowledge might lead to an obvious conclusion of something you should do And that would be the equivalent of promoting gun control I think in the first place my recollection is that when Congressman Dickey proposed that amendment It was in reaction to some of the research I shared with us tonight on the dangers of having a gun in the home People like Art Kellerman showed that if you have a gun in the home it increases the risk of suicide and intrafamilial killing And those facts which I think were presented as facts were interpreted almost as part of advocacy And that's what scares some people at CDC They're afraid that if they do anything that has a whiff of supporting something like gun control they'll be punished for it Yeah but look it's a political management problem I'm the only person up here without a PhD But I suspect it's true that gun violence involves guns And I suspect it's true that if we had fewer guns we'd have less gun violence But I'm just guessing So okay that makes the, and again I hate the language, but that makes the pro-gun people pretty uncomfortable Maybe it's not politically viable to say we should have fewer guns And the Congress and its infinite wisdom passed a bill two years ago Which protected the Second Amendment rights of people who had been adjudicated mentally incompetent through the social security system And so that is at least for the very near term fewer guns in people's hands Probably off the table but there's a vast array of other recommendations Again I talked about safe gun technology Can we be thoughtful about particular contexts that are dense with violence? Is it true as this non-PhD might surmise that in bars that allow guns there's probably a disproportionate share of violence There are other things that we can do I'm going to get in some questions from our audience now And kind of take it back to the social-emotional question So one of the questions we have is do social-emotional education and anger management approaches in public schools Have the potential for reducing gun violence and maybe that's a question for you Bradley to start with Yes I love the brevity The better people are able to regulate their emotions and their behavior in response to those emotions The less violent they will be And now if their dysregulation is related to how traumatized they are Then those kinds of techniques are not necessarily going to get to them Right because they're not aimed at the right part of the brain But there are a lot of things that are done in those social-emotional learning types of approaches That just have to do with self-regulation There's meditation in schools, there's yoga in schools And those sorts of things absolutely could help people to not be as violent Most violence is reactive That is it is in response to some perceived threat or slight So if people had a better way to regulate when they feel afraid or disrespected Then they probably would be less likely to act violently Thank you And we have a question here that I assume came from one of our students in the audience I want to get involved so I went to the march for our lives, but what is next? How effective are things like the march for our lives? And what are some other proactive activities that students can do to enact change? Let me start on that one since I'm sort of the recipient of advocacy and watch this closely Number one, don't let it fade This is a problem that is going to be solved very sadly over a long period of time Some change in our society happens dramatically rapidly I would point to the speed with which our gay friends acquired marriage equality rights Some things really happened painfully over a long period of time Civil rights in the 1960s with all the associated violence and steps back Gun violence is more in the second category So keep the faith, keep working hard, don't assume that it doesn't make a difference Florida of all places, the state that has stand your ground gun laws After Parkland actually raised the age, and I know this is a small thing But let's celebrate what little progress we see So keep it up, keep up the advocacy, really remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint And secondarily, and this is something I talked to my wife, Mary, is very involved in unload And really thinking through how we get people to have a conversation That gets to the right questions and gets to a reasonable solution Remember, a reasonable solution is a good solution for those of us who are concerned about gun violence And I would offer this, again, I don't have a lot of expertise, but this is one of them This is an area in which, like in politics and in marriage, it's actually better to be persuasive than to be right And if the objective is to change people's minds, we need to be careful about how we engage them So I can't tell you the thousands of times every year that I see a, and again I hate the language, an anti-gun and a pro-gun person Just going at it, you're stupid, that's the dumbest thing, don't you understand, you're a lot less safe with a gun Yeah, but you're anti-gun, you don't care about the second, that is not a persuasive conversation And so I would suggest that if you want to be a black belt in changing people's minds You got to go to where they are, you got to try to get inside their heads and understand why they're coming from where they are And in some cases it's actually a maybe slightly foreign but legitimate place You know, if you grew up in Pennsylvania, like in rural Pennsylvania, like I did not That moment when you go out, deer hunting for the first time is the rural Pennsylvania equivalent of a bar mitzvah, right? I mean, it is a seminal moment, and that is intricately linked to guns How do they get the Torah out? I'm being a little loose in my language here, aren't I? My point is that if we're going to try to be persuasive with people Fighting with them is a step backwards, not a step forward This is a question for Dr. Stolbach Gun rights advocates point to the fact that Chicago is called a gun-free city Yet thousands of Chicagoans are wounded and hundreds killed by guns every year Where are the guns coming from and who is profiting from smuggling guns into the city? I wish I knew the answer to that question It's a question that never gets asked It's not about how do we stop the guns from coming in It's about what do we do to the person who we think is going to pull the trigger or who pulled it And then we don't even follow up on that The clearance rate of homicides in Chicago is 17% The clearance rate of shootings is lower than that But I do know that I haven't yet met the 12-year-old with the gun factory in his basement So it depends who you ask and how much they buy into conspiracy theories and things like that But the guns that are ending up in our children's hands are not legally acquired guns for the most part So that's why having the gun laws that we have in Chicago doesn't really affect this problem And the problem that you're highlighting that we don't know how the guns got there reflects the lack of data that we have about being able to track how guns move around Referring back to the data vacuum I mentioned before There are just so many basic questions that we can't attempt to answer Because we don't have the databases, certainly at the national level Now there are a number of states that have moved beyond what you can do at the national level And I really think the future of progress in the short term is going to be at the state level And I think university students can really mobilize to create interest groups That through service learning could help communities understand the epidemiology of gun-related violence in their communities I'm not sure that many mayors in Connecticut really understand what the full characteristics of gun violence are in their communities What the risk factors are, what the protective factors are and that kind of thing And I think students from all kinds of disciplines could contribute And I'd be happy to talk to any of you about that But you represent in one room an incredible diversity of expertise And your faculty represents an incredible diversity And I think the ultimate solution is not going to come from one discipline Whether it's criminal justice or public health But it really takes all the disciplines to work together And that's just something that's kind of unique about a university You know, we have here people who are in public health We have people who are in mechanical engineering We have people who are in visual and performing arts And they all have a role And I think the ultimate solutions have to be somewhat customized to the problem in the community We talk about gun violence at times the same way we talk about cancer But cancer is really a whole collection of very different diseases that have different risk factors and different treatments And you could say the same thing about gun violence If I want to deal with a suicide problem, which as we noted accounts for about two-thirds of the problem You know, that's a different solution than if we're trying to prevent violence within the family that leads to fatalities Thank you This picks up on our conversation from last week and some of the things that you mentioned, Representative Himes But Connecticut has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, which is commendable But our state also has a long history of weapons manufacturing Where are we on conversations with gun manufacturers about their responsibilities to the public good on this issue? We're not, as you might imagine, in the current political configuration making any meaningful progress There are at least two fruitful avenues one might go here One is to hold, I used the automobile example, right? We started holding automobile companies responsible for the safety of their product We started going after tobacco companies about the way in which they advertised And I could go on liquor companies, you name it We are not doing that with the gun industry right now in any meaningful way And if we shifted some of the liability for the mayhem that comes from firearms onto the firearm companies We would probably make some progress And the other person we shouldn't forget is the gun owner You know, again, if we start from the premise that Americans are going to have guns Because it's guaranteed in the Second Amendment What can we do to make sure that they are smarter about storing those weapons? And again, I keep going back to gun safety technology Making sure that the owner of that weapon exercising their Second Amendment rights Isn't also enabling somebody else to commit a terribly violent act Thank you So one of our questions is why do school shootings happen in suburban areas and not urban areas? That's why we need data to answer the question Can I make a quick observation? Sure And this introduces the most uncomfortable conversation we have in this country Which is a race conversation Which is that when a lot of young children, white children are murdered in affluent suburban parts of our country It attracts a lot more attention than the daily murder of lots of children of color in our urban environments Well, the statistics I shared, I think, you know, bear that out very very much I mean, the disparity is obscene But in the inner city communities, it's kind of accepted as the price of being in the inner city day-to-day business And even, you're right, it just doesn't collect the same attention Maybe most of us can't identify with people in those situations They don't occur in as large numbers So they fly under the radar But if you look at it cumulatively, it vastly exceeds what happens in mass shootings Whether they're, you know, in schools or other kinds of settings And I'm hoping that events like this can sensitize us to that You're seeing a lot of money put into making institutions for well-off people more secure I can say, and we're not embarrassed by this, but Fairfield is more secure than it used to be I'd love to see the same amount of energy put into trying to make inner cities more secure This is a question for Dr. Stolbeck What are some of the challenges you face in, I guess, getting young people to take advantage of the services that you have to offer? What is that conversation like? The challenges actually are more in having adequate resources to be able to really work at engaging everyone So because our resources are limited, we aren't able to offer everyone a timely service Right? We don't always have someone available right away to work with somebody who might be open to it A lot of the young people who get involved in the program There may be another family member who wants them to do it Or someone who cares about them, who doesn't want them to get shot again Sometimes they're interested in the idea that we could help them get a job Most young people, if you ask them, do you want some therapy, they will say no Because there's nothing wrong with them, and they're usually right about that But if you ask them if they would like a job, they would say yes immediately So some of the work that we do is trying to create opportunities for our young people to work with us And we have a variety of different ways that they do that One is a glass blowing program, and then we have young people who are employed running psychoeducation groups Co-facilitating them, we have young people who are employed training medical professionals about how to provide trauma-informed care So letting people know that we might be able to help them get a job is one way The truth is most of the young people that we work with, if they actually believed that there was another way for them to live safely They would be very, very happy to go along with whatever that is They don't like being in fear for their lives all the time But we really don't know what would the uptake be if we had the adequate resources to provide the services So a question we have is in lieu of federal action, what can we be doing at the state level and the local level To address some of the root causes of gun violence, such as gun safety programs, other emotional and social well-being programs And how do we bring those to scale? Again, the non-PhD will make the obvious comment which is Let's identify those communities that have bizarrely low incidence of gun violence and figure out why it is I'm not sure that today, and I'll look at the PhDs I'm not sure today, we have a really good sense of what communities are doing a great job reducing gun violence You hear anecdotally, there's wonderful programs in Bridgeport and elsewhere where you have ex-offenders working with gangs So you anecdotally hear things that purport to be reducing violence But I think you just posed the question that illustrates why we need to know a lot more than we know about the nature of the violence I would love to partner with a small number of communities around here and really try to describe Or try to learn what we can about the distribution of violence in that community Geographically, I know in Bridgeport for example, they have used geographic information systems to look at where violence occurs And it's not exactly spread homogeneously across the city of Bridgeport And then looking at what are the correlates of that distribution so that you can target interventions I think we need to learn a whole lot more about that targeting And I know the Bridgeport Police Department appreciates that I'd love to give them some help though to do it at a more sophisticated level You know, I think every community is going to need a bit of a customized solution You know, in some communities the problem is probably more suicide And how we approach that, that may, we need to work with providers in the emergency rooms and in private practitioner offices To better screen for, or help them screen better for patients who are at risk I think if we learned a lot, we could identify programs that would be worthy of scaling up Right now, I'm not sure that we know enough to necessarily scale up a lot of things I think, you know, again, as your answer suggests, it's a very complicated problem and there isn't a one answer So it really depends in what context does what approach work But I would say in general for the communities that I'm serving Taking care of people would be the intervention Right? So people are sick, they need medical care Having people living in communities where there's enough food for everyone to actually eat And that there's a livable wage that people can survive on the money that they earn Those kinds of interventions would make a big difference And there's certainly less violence in communities where people know where their next meal is coming from So this question is, during the three opening statements, no one mentioned gun violence is perpetuated by law enforcement Where does this come into play and how can we be working with law enforcement on this issue? I would just say that everything I said about the young people we work with being traumatized And how that may drive their, the likelihood that they will react violently applies to anyone with a gun in their hand So the idea that police who kill black people are doing it because they're racist Right? Which is, I mean that's usually the question, is a racist, was he a racist? Right now we have Jason Van Dyke on trial in Chicago, this is the first trial, a murder case for an on duty police officer Killed a child in decades in the city of Chicago And they want to say is he racist, he's not a racist, it doesn't matter That police department has a long history of torturing and killing black people And this is documented, I'm not saying anything that's not known But if you have people working in an institution like that and they're also traumatized And you don't want them to shoot people who don't need to be shot, which is just about everyone Then you should probably try to address their trauma, but the police are not allowed to acknowledge any kind of emotional difficulty Any difficulty with their work, so that's one factor Thank you So I'm conscious we're coming to a close here and a lot of the questions that are coming in are pretty much, what can we do? And so I wonder in closing if each of you could share in a brief sentence or two What would you recommend for the people walking out of the room today who want to take some action to be involved? What can they do? Well, I think, I hate to keep beating a dead horse, but one thing that we need is solid quality information that fully allows communities to understand their problem We are hopeful that the CDC can do what they've done for other forms of injury and AIDS and communicable diseases And fully describe the distribution and determinants of gun violence as well as they do for these other things They have been embarrassingly stifled from doing that for about 20 years If each state can follow on, we're not talking huge amounts of money The CDC is only looking for, I think, $10 million, which in the grander scheme of things is pretty modest But that would go far in building the databases so that we were acting not only from our hearts, but also in an evidence-based way I think we have to not only advocate in a general way, a lot of people are advocating in a general way, but advocate for some very specific things like that at the national level And hopefully also investments at the state level to replicate that. I think we'll be able to move faster at the state level So the answer for me is it depends. Depends who you are, what resources you have, who you're connected to and who will listen to you But one thing that you all can do is vote And it's really not adequate to vote just yourself You need to get everyone that you know to vote The biggest problem with our democracy is that the majority of people are not participating in it So things would look a lot different if they did That was my line Let me throw out a... I don't want to say what I said before, which is not just vote, but continue the advocacy, keep pushing, don't lose heart Be energized by the park line students, just don't lose heart But let me say something a little different I have to say it carefully because it is dangerous to trade in gender stereotypes But the issue of gender hasn't come up tonight, and yet it is there One gender is perpetrating the vast bulk of gun violence And for better or for worse in our society, one gender is still overrepresented in raising children and that sort of thing And so I really do believe that women have a particularly powerful role to play today Let me just give two examples. One is one that you've heard before, which is If every single, and again, I don't mean to trade in gender stereotypes, so let me just use parent Every parent were to say, as their child went off to a play date at the neighbors, is there a gun in the house? And if the answer to that question is yes, to have a conversation that whatever follows based on your... The notion of guns as a public safety risk would permeate our society more than it does today Again, if I can go back to the dangerous realm of gender, but gender is there You know, their guns are inevitably associated with a sense of power and machismo And I think if women would begin to reject that, and young women, when they get invited down on a date with a guy who wants to show the gun Get out of the darn car. You know, reject the notion that a man is somehow more manly if he is armed But again, I'm conscious as I am of how dangerous ground that is to trade I do think that women have a unique role here in changing the way our culture thinks about firearms So that brings us to a close tonight. Thank you all for coming, and please join me in thanking our panelists one more time