May 25, 2021 • 39 mins
For too long, stigma, politics, and a powerful gun lobby have prevented us from addressing the public health crisis that is gun violence in America.
This week, Chelsea is sitting down with Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, March for Our Lives activist Bria Smith, and pediatric trauma surgeon Dr. Chethan Sathya to discuss what we can do to tackle gun violence, promote firearm injury prevention, and save lives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton, and this is in fact a
podcast about why public health matters even when we're not
in a pandemic. Today, we're looking at gun violence and
firearm injury prevention. So much public health attention has been
(00:21):
focused on the pandemic over the past year. Understandably, was
actually the deadliest year with respect to gun violence in
at least two decades. Four thousand Americans lost their lives
to gun violence, including twenty four thousand who died by
suicide with a gun. For too long, stigma and political
polarization have prevented us from addressing the public health crisis
(00:43):
that is gun violence in America. In fact, for twenty years,
federal agencies like the CDC and NIH were effectively barred
from even researching the issue. Thankfully, that has recently changed,
and the good news is there's no short ritage of
experts and activists who are working tirelessly to take on
our gun violence crisis and save lives, including pediatric trauma
(01:07):
surgeon Shathan Satia and Brian Smith, who was working to
mobilize young people through March for Our Lives. We'll hear
from both on this episode, but first I'm talking with
Shannon Watts, founder of Mom's Demand Action for gun since
in America. Before she founded Mom's Demand Action, Shannon was
a former communications executive and I stayed at home. Mom
(01:28):
of five. Her life change forever on December four the
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and that's where we started
our conversation when I was folding laundry. I lived in
Indiana at the time, and had the TV on in
the background and suddenly heard breaking news that there was
an active shooter in a place called Newtown, Connecticut. And so,
(01:49):
like so many Americans, I've stopped what I was doing.
I sat on the side of my bed and I
just watched this horrific tragedy unfold. And even now, over
eight years later, it's hard to fathom that twenty children
and six educators were murdered in the sanctity of an
American elementary school. And I was devastated, we all were.
But that devastation quickly turned to rage for me because
(02:15):
I was watching some politicians and pundits being interviewed saying
the solution was somehow more guns, that if only those
teachers had been armed, maybe there would have been fewer fatalities,
and I knew nothing about gun violence. I knew nothing
about gun laws. I really didn't know much about the
legislative process. I just knew that was not true. I
(02:36):
knew that was a lie. And the next day I
went into my kitchen, opened my laptop and looked for
an organization like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, something that had
been so pivotal to me as a teenager in the
nineteen eighties, just to watch how this group of women
in particular had changed the culture around drinking and driving.
We came to this issue in many ways, or or
(02:58):
I did because of the school shooting, but then learning
that really mass shootings. School shootings are about one percent
of the gun violence in this country, and that one
people are shot and killed every day. The gun homicides,
the gun suicides, the unintentional shootings, the domestic gun violence,
all of it is important. We must solve all of it.
There was nothing like that. I couldn't find anything that
(03:19):
that existed. I came to this issue as a white
suburban mom who was afraid her kids weren't safe in
their schools. Shame on me and other white women who
took so long to get off the sidelines because our
black and Brown sisters have been doing this work for
decades in their communities, mostly unseen. What have been some
of the successes that you've seen over the almost decade
(03:42):
of Mom's demand. We really work on this issue in
three buckets legislatively, electorally, and culturally. So when you look
at the work we've done at the legislative level, we
have now passed laws that disarmed domestic abusers in twenty
nine states. We now have background checks on every gun
sale in twenty one states. We've passed something called the
(04:04):
red flag law in nineteen states. So a red flag
law allows families or police to petition a judge for
a temporary restraining order to remove the guns from someone
who is at risk either to themselves or to others.
And data has shown these are are really effective. We've
also passed laws in nineteen states that close what's called
the Charleston loophole. So federal law requires license dealers to
(04:27):
perform a background check, but if those background checks haven't
been completed within three days, the license dealer is free
to sell the gun anyway. And that's how the Charleston
shooter got his gun used to kill black parishioners in
a church there. So this is really important life saving
legislation that we've passed, and data shows that they save
(04:47):
lives these laws. When we work on this electorally, it
is holding those law makers accountable who didn't do the
right thing legislatively. And our motto is, really, do the
right thing and we'll have your back. Do the wrong
thing and we'll have your job. And it takes several
election cycles to get to a point where you change
the dynamic of who's aligning either with a gun lobby
(05:07):
or with really angry moms. If you go back to
when Barack Obama was elected in two thousand and eight,
about a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an
A rating from the n r A. Today none do.
And I just think it's a matter of time before
everyone is really on the right side of history. And
then culturally, this is a big part of what we
do and whether it's putting pressure on companies. Hundreds have
(05:28):
changed their policies, particularly around open carry because of Mom's
demand action, everything from Wegmans to Walgreens to Walmart. And
then on top of that, we educate gun owners and
non gun owners about secure gun storage. About four point
six million children lived in homes with unsecured guns. That
means they're not locked, they're loaded, they're easy to access.
(05:50):
And so we have a program called be Smart where
we encourage parents to ask about guns and gun storage
when they send their kids to n and families homes,
but also sending these materials home through school boards and
city councils. Over a million families have received our secure
gun storage materials. As the parent of three kids, I
(06:11):
wouldn't just feel comfortable. I would feel like it was
my responsibility to ask those questions. So how do we
help other parents feel like that's just part of the
job of being a parent, is having those conversations, non judgmentally, openly, honestly,
because that is something we should know about where our
kids are spending time. That's absolutely true, especially in a
country where they're about four hundred million guns, and you
(06:33):
shouldn't assume whether someone is a gun owner or not.
And look, the vast majority of gun owners in this
country are responsible and they do securely store their firearms,
but there are too many who don't, and so having
that conversation is part of a parent's responsibility. I can't
tell you how many volunteers have had this conversation, they
decided to practice, for example, with their in laws and
(06:54):
have found out that their in laws in fact keep
a loaded gun in a shoe box under their kids
beds because they assume that's where burglars won't look, not
realizing the risks involved. If you want help understanding how
to have those conversations you may feel awkward or concerned,
you can go to be Smart for Kids dot org
and we make a lot of information and tools and
(07:16):
even videos available to spark those conversations. The purchase of
guns is actually surged over the last year plus of
the pandemic. Could you talk a little bit about how
COVID nineteen has impacted gun violence. Yes, it's so important
to understand that COVID has really exacerbated our nation's gun
(07:36):
violence crisis, which was out of control to begin with.
Gun violence is really an epidemic within a pandemic. When
you look at the different types of gun violence in
this country, for example, unintentional shootings, we know that's increased
in the last year. We are seeing gun violence rage
out of control in city centers across the country. That
(07:58):
is in part because of easy access to guns, but
also because there's so many gun violence intervention and interruption
programs that do such great work, but because of COVID,
they haven't been able to get out and create the
same kinds of relationships and get the same kind of
information that they had before about a potential gun violence
episode to interrupt it before it can begin. We know
(08:21):
that calls to hotlines have increased all over the world
and in America. And you know, Nicholas Kristof, the editorial
writer for The New York Times, has a really important saying.
He says, in other countries, brutish husbands put their wives
in the hospital. In America, they put them in graves.
And that is because domestic violence is made so much
(08:42):
more deadly when the abuser is armed. You spoke about
all that thankfully has happened at the state and city level,
although clearly a lot more needs to happen at the
state and city level. And yet we know that the
federal government does have real power here if Congress and
the President were to choose to do so. So what
(09:04):
would you like to see passed through Congress and ultimately
wind up on President Biden's desk for him to sign.
So we've been doing this work sort of state by state,
and that's fine and important, but we do need federal
laws around gun violence. We're all only as safe as
the closest state with the weakest gun laws. There are
so many loopholes in these laws that that really desperately
(09:27):
need to be modernized. We've spent a long time playing defense.
I mean, it is important to remember that the gun
lobby spent tens of millions of dollars on Donald Trump's campaign.
They expected to get a return on that investment, and
instead we had gotten so good at playing defense that
the n r A did not pass a single piece
of priority legislation in the two years they had both
(09:47):
the Republican president and Congress. But now our president is
Joe Biden, and we are seeing this legislation moved through
the House. A bill that would require a background check
on every gun sale inclosed federal loopholes, a bit that
would close the Charleston loophole, re authorizing the Violence Against
Women Act, which includes provisions around dating partners and stalkers,
(10:07):
and continuing to allocate funding for community gun violence intervention
programs and for research. This issue is not polarizing among
the American public. Nine of American support background checks eight
nine percent of gun owners, only one in ten, of
whom even belongs to the n R A percent of Republicans.
The only place where gun safety is a polarizing issue
(10:30):
right now is in the U. S. Senate. Have you
had any particularly memorable conversations as a gun safety advocate
with someone who maybe started out believing misconceptions about you
personally or about Mom's demand and what you hope to do.
My own dad when I started this work back in,
my dad is is a very conservative person. He comes
(10:53):
from a conservative family. He lives in Illinois, and he
really was not supportive of the work I was doing.
And I do think it's because he had a lot
of misconceptions about what I was trying to do. And
I think frankly, seeing shooting tragedies not just at a
national level but in his own community for him to
decide that the more he knew, the more he understood.
(11:15):
My dad is devoutly Catholic, that this was part of
his pro life agenda as a Catholic, that fighting gun
violence was an important way to save lives. And now
he shows up in his mom's de Man Action T
shirt at our events and we may not agree on
on a lot of issues, but we do now agree
on this one. What conversations do you think we're not
(11:35):
having enough of when it comes to gun violence? You know,
I think of of how many lies we lose to
suicide every year. I don't think many people understand that
is a huge part of our gun violence crisis in
this country. What comes to mind is areas where you
don't think we have enough public attention or focus. Absolutely,
I think suicide, you know, there's still stigma around that
(11:57):
issue in this country, or any mental health issue, and
talking about guns and access to guns with people who
may have suicidal aviation, particularly during a pandemic, and is
so incredibly important. Are our veterans in particular are a
very vulnerable segment of the population. I also think talking
(12:17):
about toxic masculinity and domestic violence and extremism and guns
is very important. And because women only make up about
of all the elected positions in this country, because women
are only about five percent of fortunate one c e
o s, there are only certain levels of power that
we can pull. Right, we're not making the laws and
(12:40):
the policies necessarily that protect our families in our community.
So it is important for us to look for other
ways to influence the conversation. As the saying goes, if
you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably
on the venue, and so often that is the case
with women in this country. Since your organization is called
Mom's Demand Action, I am curious what advice you would
have for moms or in parents is to how to
(13:01):
talk about this issue with our kids so that they're
hopefully empowered to advocate for the solutions we know work
that are really important to protect their lives too. I
really do think women and moms are the secret sauce
to advocacy in this country because, look, they know if
they lose their children, they have nothing left to lose.
(13:22):
That this issue is such high stakes, and so many
moms come into our organization because they've sent their kindergarteners
to school for the first time and they've had to
essentially rehearse their own deaths. My children started active shooter
or drills in preschool school, and look, we know that
these lockdown drills cause trauma and anxiety. We don't have
(13:43):
to live like this. Our children sure as hell shouldn't
die like this, So we all have to get off
the sidelines. There's this story that that resonates with me
as an activist that I read once, and there was
a woman who made sandwiches for people who are homeless
in her community, and and the newspapers decided to write
a story about her, and they asked her, you know,
what would you tell other people? And she said, I
(14:05):
get calls all the time thanking me for making sandwiches
or giving me money to make sandwiches, And what I
want to tell people is make your own damn sandwiches.
I'm glad that you appreciate the work I'm doing, but
you have to do the work too. We're all obbligated
as Americans in a democracy to use our voices and
our votes to not just protect our own families and communities,
(14:26):
but others, other Americans, And so I would just encourage
everyone again, we're not just moms, and we're not just
women were mothers and others to get involved and to
get off the sidelines and to use your voice and
your vote on this issue, because we have waited twenty
five years at a federal level for change, and now
is the time to be doing everything we can to
demand our lawmakers act Shannon, Thank you so much, Thank you,
(14:51):
thank you for bringing attention to this issue. Shannon Watts
is the author of Fight Like a Mother, How a
grassroots movement took on the gun lobby, and Why Women
Will Change the World. If you're interested in getting involved
with Mom's manned action, just text the word ready to
six four four three three to find a local group
near you. To start a conversation with your senator about
(15:12):
the importance of background checks, you can text checks to
that same number six four four three three. After shooting
at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a
new generation of gun violence prevention activists took center stage.
Parkland survivors, along with young people who have been working
(15:34):
on this issue in their own communities, captured national attention
with the March for Our Lives in Washington, d C.
They cris crossed the country on the Road to Change
tour to mobilize their peers and to register them to
vote to support candidates committed to gun violence prevention, and
they've been working hard ever since. One of those activists
is my next guest, Bria Smith. She's twenty years old,
(15:56):
grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and serves on the Youth
Board of director from March for Our Lives. She's deeply
involved in local organizing in her community and let a
fifty mile march from Milwaukee to Madison to demand that
local officials do more to protect black youth in Wisconsin.
It was great to talk with her about how she
came to this work and why it matters so much
to her. So, Bria, I think it would be a
(16:20):
really helpful place to start is for you to share
how you got involved. I always love being asked that
question because it's like, what radicalized you? What made you
like give a funk about politics or just getting rid
of the political apathy. That radicalization started when I was
six years old learning about slavery in a room full
of white people, learning about my history. But I think
(16:41):
what really got me into it was when Donald Trump
was elected in sixteen. My schools had a complete one eighty.
Like I know my school was racist, like, don't get
me wrong, but kids started wearing Maga hats, Maga shirts,
like telling on my Mexican friends to go back to Mexico,
calling me the in word da da da da, And like,
I think what really shifted for me. Then I quit track.
I cleared up all my offer school activities. I started
(17:03):
working in my community, and that's when I started doing
gun violence advocacy. I got involved with the Walking Youth
Council and really going out into my community and seeing
like how we can ask people questions, how we can
get people to strategize collectively. I do. Though, I want
to ask you to sort of return back a little
bit to the beginning of your story, is to why
when you started to really become an activist, as you said,
(17:25):
become radicalized, why gun violence prevention specifically was an issue
that you wanted to work on, that you wanted to
try to help. One thing that I noticed growing up
was the gun culture. It was this like hyper americanized
fantasy that people like in my community had if you
had a gun, you that dog, you know, like that's
(17:45):
an identity that people started to chase and desire because
having a gun mint protection and mint status. So gun
violence is what I was exposed to the most, Like
going to sleep, you would hear gunshots. Waking up, maybe
you hear gunshots. Walking on the street, you hear a
few pops, Like it was just it was just so
normalized that. I just didn't think that any other community
didn't have gun ones, you know, But when I started
going to school and I started seeing, like how other
(18:06):
communities that were mostly white, there was no gunshots. It
was peacefulness, it was quiet. Gun violence really sets that
precedent for lots of different things that goes afterwards, like
if it's mass incarceration, if it's mass shootings, if it's
suicide by firearm. And when I started to like really
research that when I was sixteen seventeen, everything had a
connection to a gun, you start asking yourself, why do
we need guns? Like, who are we afraid of? It
(18:28):
was each other in my community. We were afraid of
each other. How do we collectively get rid of that fear?
How do we collectively find the root of disorder, find
the route of where this fear is coming from? And
a lot of times it's poverty. A lot of times
it's not having adequate resources like mental health protection. All
these things people were being deprived of resulted them to
going to crime, resulted them to picking up a gun,
resulted them to finding that new identity, And this whole
(18:51):
continuous cycle just goes on and on and on and
That's what I would like always think about. You spoke
about the collective solution friends that can help change the
lived reality of kids and families in Milwaukee, in your community.
Can you talk about some of those solutions and what
you have seen to work over the last five years
(19:12):
since you've been engaged in this work. It's always hard
to tell people to re imagine things that they have
never experienced. I think what was more important for me
was letting people understand that it's possible to create a
definition of what reimagination looks like, as if it's something
that we all deserve. Like, how do you want to
see yourself in a society where all your needs are met,
(19:34):
where everything is equitable, where you don't fear your life
stepping out onto the hood into the block, you don't
have that fear. What does that look like to you?
What I've seen work a lot is really giving the
community that chance to answer the question. We'll be right
back to stay with us. I'm just really curious how
(20:05):
you have worked with older activists who have been really
trying to make progress on gun violence prevention for a
long time. Have you learned anything from them? And what
do you think you've taught them. When I was organizing
the march back Milwaukee, it was so hired to get
young people to prioritize the march, to prioritize the urgency
(20:28):
behind advocating. But then there's older generation activists, people who
work in nonprofiting, for example, people who know the game,
who have been movement building for you know, mad years,
but aren't in the front lines. Having the conversation between
these people those who working on profiting understand five oh
one see threes in religioustics behind nonprofit building, and also
(20:49):
talking to the young people who literally are the most
angry at the protests. They have really nothing to lose. Really,
having these conversations from all perspectives, you can see where
that the move it can take you, where that organizing
can take you. When I started to really talk to
older people, like I just felt at first just so mad,
I'm like, why don't y'all care? You know, why don't
(21:09):
Why aren't you as angry as me? Weren't you going
out into the front lines? But in reality, it's how
do you speak that language to create that urgency to
get people to care? And that was a big eye
opener for me. Organizing last year my communities, I thought
I knew everything. In reality, I just needed to listen
and observe and connect people, connect myself with people, and
UM had that multigenerational conversation. So I definitely learned patients
(21:32):
from older people. But patients and movement organizing looks like
because you know, a lot of times young people just
wanted to happen tomorrow, like tomorrow college is free, and
we didn't have homelessness, and you know, racism didn't exist.
That's how I fight, That's how I organized, But I
had people my parents had shown me. It takes time
to build a revolution. It takes time, it takes energy.
(21:53):
If you rush things too fast, you can lose that
step and lose people in your messaging UM, and I
think one thing that I also taught older people it
was to also understand priority, understand urgency. We can simultaneously
draft strategies with all types of people having this interconnected,
multigenerational you know, coalition of what revolution looks like like.
(22:13):
It doesn't always need to be like step by step
taking more time within that. Are there any initiatives that
you're especially proud of the things that you've worked on
in Milwaukee? Or at a national level with March for
Our Lives, where you can say yes, like I know
I made a difference here. The legacy of March of
(22:35):
Our Lives was created by this horrendous, sickening act of violence,
but it sparked a movement of youth creativity and leadership
in coalition building. And one thing that I would say
with my work with March for Our Lives is when
I first started off, I was just focusing on my community,
focusing on local national Milwaukee things, black people, police brutality.
(22:57):
But while working with March of Our Lives and creating
all these agenda asn't our national structure, and it's not
just people working within this organization. It's so many different
entities that are out there that are organizing the revolutionizing,
and from March we were able to have this discourse
with them. Now I can say that we're focusing on
that reimagination and really asking the community like, how do
we re imagine piece? How do we reimagine safety? So
(23:20):
on a national level, I think we're really moving in
that step. And it takes a couple of students to
really like put matters into their own hands and think
of progressive actions and where our politicians are lacking. Thank
you so much just for your time today, for sharing
why you're doing this work, how this work connects to
public health, to racial justice, to everything that we know
(23:44):
desperately needs to change. Thank you for having me. I
really appreciate you. Can keep up with Bria Smith by
following her on Twitter at Bria Smith. That's b R
I A A S M I T H H. As
I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, for a
long time, Congress effectively prohibited federal funding for being used
(24:07):
to study gun violence and what works to prevent firearm
injury and to save lives. But in December of twenty nineteen,
that changed, and thankfully research is now ramping that one's
urgent public health issue. One of the people at the
forefront of this work is Dr Chathan Satya Jathan is
a pediatric trauma surgeon and a National Insuits of Health
(24:27):
funded firearm entry prevention researcher. He serves as director of
the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health, the
largest health system in New York State. All of which
is to say he is deeply immersed in this issue
and I am delighted to be able to speak with.
Can you help share how your training and your work
as a pediatric trauma surgeon led you to the issues
(24:51):
of gun violence, prevention and safety. Yeah, you know. I
am originally Canadian, and I came to Chicago many years ago,
and when when I got to Chicago, I was pretty
blown away by the levels of gun monts that I
was seeing. As a pediatric trauma surgeon, I have the
unfortunate job of literally pulling bullets out of babies and
kids who are affected by gun violence. I did not
(25:11):
expect to have to pull bullets at a six month
olds in my first week on the job. And you
can imagine seeing that little lifeless baby on the table
over and over again, having to put your finger on
a bullet wound, watching them fade away, watching parents reactions
to that happening in front of your eyes, and then
having to break bad news to parents over and over
again that they've lost a loved one to a largely
(25:32):
preventable disease is horrendous. And so I think there is
nothing else to do but to be activated about this
issue from the healthcare lane, because I think there's a
lot that we can do to assist with the public
health approach. I understand that we're one small piece of
the puzzle, but I do think there's a lot we
can do. For many years, we didn't have and I
(25:53):
H funded research into higher arm injury prevention, and yet
thankfully now we do. And you are one of those
NIH funded researchers. Could you talk about what research you're
doing and also what other research is happening around the
country that you think may really help identify what could work.
(26:15):
I always like to say that gun violence prevention is
almost akin to a new disease. We have to research
everything from the most basic elements, and our research is
really focused on how do we have the conversation even
with our patients about firearm safety and firearm injury prevention.
In the health care industry, there are strategies we can
do to help. Most physicians clinical team members believe they
(26:37):
should counsel patients and families about firearm safety, and patients
themselves gun owning or not want their physicians to talk
to them about this. Only about eight percent of physicians
are clinical team members actually have these conversations with their patients.
So our research is geared towards implementing evidence based healthcare
strategies that can prevent gun violence into our hospitals. And
(26:57):
one of the most exciting elements of our research is
that it's universal, so similar to substance use. Right, we've
seen that universal screening asking every patient who comes into
our hospitals questions related to substance use can serve to
reduce stigma, remove judgment, normalize the conversation as part of
routine care. For example, ask about substance use no different
than you ask about sugar and take exercise or other
(27:18):
health risk factors. We want to do the same thing
with firearms, so we're hoping to really shift the paradigm
and change the conversation. I find that so encouraging because
we know from other areas in public health that universal
application is hugely important to destigmatizing exactly. And you know,
we are even that our health system noticing that the
(27:40):
large majority of healthcare workers are very uncomfortable having these
conversations as our patients. You would think that if you
talk about firearms in the context of just well being
safety from an a political standpoint, that folks might be
comfortable with this conversation, but they aren't. But again, I
think if we educate and we do it the right way,
and we be careful with the language that we use,
(28:00):
and we make it clear that this is not a
gun control issue, This is not a Second Amendment issue.
This is purely about safety and injury prevention. That we
can overcome these barriers and the lessons we learn, I
think we'll have implications for other sectors across the country.
And to your point, the universal aspect is so critical
because otherwise you have healthcare workers who have to literally
decide who to screen and who not to and that
(28:21):
in itself causes a lot of discomfort and then causes
bias in your research right exactly perceived risk. How do
you see your work in coordination with community organizations, with
faith leaders, schools, with other places that we know are
grappling with how to be really part of the solution,
(28:44):
again from a political but evidence based way of really
tackling the crisis of gun violence. I think it is
absolutely critical for that collaboration with the community. Our research study.
For example, when a patient comes into our emergency to artment,
we are going to ask questions in a confidential manner,
not about ownership, purely about firearm access, and then questions
(29:07):
directly related to gun violence risk in a community that
have nothing to do with access. So you can imagine
if someone screens positive for access, they get gun safety,
firearm safety, safe storage counseling, they get gun locks, they
get firearm courses. We have an active coalition of gun
owners who are engaged in that process as well. And
then if someone screens positive for violence risk, we have
a whole slew of community based organizations, violence interrupters, faith
(29:30):
based organizations that are on the ready to be able
to provide them with resources that they need, because you're right,
without that community bridge, what we do is not going
to make any difference. And so can I just ask
you now, like, what do you think we could be
doing or doing more effectively to prevent suicide by gun?
It's it's heartbreaking the epidemic of suicide in this country.
(29:52):
COVID nineteen has only made that worse with isolation, anxiety, depression.
Mental health is a big part of all the conversations
we have around firearm injury, martellity preventions part of the
screening as well, And I think the most important thing
is that access to a firearm in or outside of
the household increases the lethality of suicide attempts so much.
That is the area to focus on. The more we
(30:14):
can educate and inform, our hope is that we can
then prevent those suicides from happening, because we know that
the majority of suicides happened in the heat of the moment,
and if you have a weapon in the household, chances
are that you are going to be successful in killing yourself.
Can you talk about how you've seen the pandemic interact
with your research or as it interrupted your research? How
(30:37):
has your work shifted over last not many months of
COVID nineteen, It feels like forever. It has changed things
quite a bit. We we've had to be pretty innovative
with how we do things. The importance of telehealth, virtual platforms,
technology based platforms, screening intervention has become even more important
in the healthcare setting, and I think we see, for example,
(31:01):
a big change in the number of patients that are
coming in with certain issues. So, for example, when it
comes to child abuse, we're seeing less and less child abuse,
and that kind of thing is very worrisome. We know
that kids are more isolated at the home, they have
less social supports, less interaction with schools. So we are seeing,
for example, more kids that are coming in with delayed
diagnoses of child abuse, and we are having to adapt
(31:24):
with virtual interventions to be able to keep contact in
a way that is appropriate with the pandemic. The same
could be said for other issues, such as domestic violence
that has led to a spike in gun violence in itself.
When it comes to homicide in the home, and then
we talked about suicide from increasing social stressors, unemployment, and
then we are also seeing personally a spike in accidental
(31:44):
injuries among children in the household, you know, who are
accidentally playing with a gun. We've seen a huge surgeon
gun buying among Americans because of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
many of whom are first time gun owners, so most
of them don't know much about firearms safety. And so
this really is providing an opportunity for us to ramp
up education and making it even more important. We're taking
(32:09):
a quick break stay with us. Say I'm a patient
and I'm coming to see you for the first time.
So say that my child has had some sort of injury.
Although thankfully, knock on wood, my kids haven't had anything
(32:29):
too serious happened to them, but say, like one of
them is injured. I come to see you. We're talking
about I don't know, a broken leg because one of
them fell climbing a tree. How do you segue from
that into talking to me about whether or not I
have a firearm in the house. The broad answer is
that we're still trying to figure it out. We don't
(32:50):
have the perfect recipe. But especially for children, families, parents,
patients who come and injured, it's a very nice segue
into firearm safety because you can imagine that I would
be talking to you about avoidance of that injury happening again,
playground safety, ways to avoid motor vehicle collisions, drowning. So
let's say we're talking about, Okay, you have a pool
(33:11):
in your backyard, take these precautions to make sure that
you don't have an accidental drowning, because we see an
uptick of that in the summer. By the same token,
do you have access inside or outside of the firearm?
And I'm only asking that question because there are ways
to safely store that firearm that could prevent accidental injury
of your children or yourselves and reduce risk of suicide.
(33:31):
Your hospital system is very committed to this there are
hundreds of other hospital systems around the country who are
similarly committed to this, and yet there are others who
are resistant. What do you think explains that resistance and
how do we help overcome it? That's spot on, you know.
I'm glad you bring that up, because if you look
at who is the most vocal on this subject, it
(33:54):
tends to be clinical team members. There are very few
healthcare executives, board members, and so on at the large
health systems that offer the bulk of care to Americans
that are vocal and say that gun violence is a
public health issue and this should be an institutional priority
for them. I've been a little surprised as to how
(34:14):
difficult it is to mobilize all those levels of the
health care industry, and unfortunately, the way that things are structured.
I'm not saying that this is intentionally done, but gun
violence is profitable for hospitals, right. What a horrific thing
to have to say. I know, I know. This kind
of speaks to how I think there has to be
(34:34):
a real push to incentivize hospitals, health systems, insurance companies,
just like there was a push for preventative care for
heart disease and diabetes. There needs to be a push
for preventative actions for firearm injury. But at the end
of the day, right if a firearm injury happens, that
patient comes into the emergence department, gets a surgery, has
a long hospital stay. Unfortunately, there isn't always top down
(34:56):
buying or organizational prioritization of this issue. And how do
you think we change them? I think it comes down
to collective action. Education. We are finding, even through our collaborative,
which is actually very unique, members hospital seal systems in
our collaborative have never done anything in this space. But
through education, they are becoming empowered to want to act.
(35:20):
They are further understanding the benefits of acting. So we're
trying to implore that education collectively and through that people's
minds are definitely shifting. What do you wish we're different
about the public conversation around gun violence in our country?
I personally wish that there was more of an understanding
(35:40):
that public health approaches can work. We've used them for decades.
People forget that it wasn't that long ago that it
was taboo for physicians to even talk about smoking cessation.
But we overcame all that. I also feel as though
if COVID nineteen has has has brought anything to the
forefront of my mind, it's it's that the need for
more federal over site of our public health issues is paramount.
(36:03):
I think one of the biggest issues right now is
that we are so divided across states as to what
is a priority, what is not, what approach to take
to certain things, and what approached not to take, and
that unfortunately leads to chaos. And I think if I
were to change or want to change anything, would be
more a federal coordination of issues like this, because in
(36:24):
my experience, even when I was in Canada, that type
of federal oversight really makes a difference. How important is
it Do you think that the people engaged in the
research and the implementation are coming from the communities that
are most affected by gun violence? It is critical. We
cannot do this without those voices, whether you're talking about
(36:47):
firearm safety and engaging gun owners, or whether or not
you're talking about community violence and engaging community based organizations,
community voices from black and brown communities. We can't do
any of this without them. So I think it is
our responsibility two support those organizations as much as we
can to be able to find out what works and
what doesn't. And you know in our own research, I
(37:08):
mean both those voices and community voices are a huge
part of how we shape our education. We're not taught
in medical school either how to have conversations around violence risk,
how to have culturally competent discussions with at risk communities.
So we need to be educated ourselves. We need to
be educated about our own biases, about how we can
overcome our own judgments and stigma, because that's a big
(37:30):
part of this as well. Chan. Thank you so much,
Thank you, Chelsea. I really appreciate you taking this issue on.
You can follow date that on Twitter at dr N
Satya that's c h E t h A and s
A t h y A. For a long time now,
(37:53):
we've known at least some of what works when it
comes to preventing gun violence, but sit in the way
where our politics and the powerful gun lobby. But if
there's ever been a time to feel hopeful about our
ability to finally address this crisis head on, it's now.
Earlier this month, the inter A suffered a serious setback
when a federal judge in Texas rejected their attempt to
avoid standing trial for financial abuses here in New York.
(38:16):
President Biden has rightly called the epidemic of gun violence
in the US and international embarrassment. He's also taking a
series of executive actions to strengthen common sense gun safety laws,
and he's called on Congress to pass comprehensive gun safety legislation.
And Chason and other doctors are having conversations every day
about gun violence prevention with their patients. All of this
(38:37):
is happening in a moment when more and more people
are finally talking about and acknowledging this issue for what
it is. Not just a personal tragedy, not just a
community tragedy, but a pressing public health issue we should
be taking on with our doctors, our friends, our family,
our fellow parents, our legislators, and anyone else we can reach.
(38:59):
I know I'm sir, ready to have this conversation, and
I hope you are too. In fact is brought to
you by iHeart Radio. We're produced by Erica Goodmanson, Lauren Peterson,
Kathy Russo, Julie Subrian, and Justin Wright, with help from
the Hidden Light team of Barry Lurie, Sarah Horowitz, Nikki Huggett,
(39:20):
Emily Young, and hum Abdeen, with additional support from Lindsay Hoffman.
Original music is by Justin Wright. If you liked this
episode of In Fact, please make sure to subscribe so
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help us out, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
Thanks again for listening, and see you next week.
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton, and this is in fact a
podcast about why public health matters even when we're not
in a pandemic. Today, we're looking at gun violence and
firearm injury prevention. So much public health attention has been
(00:21):
focused on the pandemic over the past year. Understandably, was
actually the deadliest year with respect to gun violence in
at least two decades. Four thousand Americans lost their lives
to gun violence, including twenty four thousand who died by
suicide with a gun. For too long, stigma and political
polarization have prevented us from addressing the public health crisis
(00:43):
that is gun violence in America. In fact, for twenty years,
federal agencies like the CDC and NIH were effectively barred
from even researching the issue. Thankfully, that has recently changed,
and the good news is there's no short ritage of
experts and activists who are working tirelessly to take on
our gun violence crisis and save lives, including pediatric trauma
(01:07):
surgeon Shathan Satia and Brian Smith, who was working to
mobilize young people through March for Our Lives. We'll hear
from both on this episode, but first I'm talking with
Shannon Watts, founder of Mom's Demand Action for gun since
in America. Before she founded Mom's Demand Action, Shannon was
a former communications executive and I stayed at home. Mom
(01:28):
of five. Her life change forever on December four the
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and that's where we started
our conversation when I was folding laundry. I lived in
Indiana at the time, and had the TV on in
the background and suddenly heard breaking news that there was
an active shooter in a place called Newtown, Connecticut. And so,
(01:49):
like so many Americans, I've stopped what I was doing.
I sat on the side of my bed and I
just watched this horrific tragedy unfold. And even now, over
eight years later, it's hard to fathom that twenty children
and six educators were murdered in the sanctity of an
American elementary school. And I was devastated, we all were.
But that devastation quickly turned to rage for me because
(02:15):
I was watching some politicians and pundits being interviewed saying
the solution was somehow more guns, that if only those
teachers had been armed, maybe there would have been fewer fatalities,
and I knew nothing about gun violence. I knew nothing
about gun laws. I really didn't know much about the
legislative process. I just knew that was not true. I
(02:36):
knew that was a lie. And the next day I
went into my kitchen, opened my laptop and looked for
an organization like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, something that had
been so pivotal to me as a teenager in the
nineteen eighties, just to watch how this group of women
in particular had changed the culture around drinking and driving.
We came to this issue in many ways, or or
(02:58):
I did because of the school shooting, but then learning
that really mass shootings. School shootings are about one percent
of the gun violence in this country, and that one
people are shot and killed every day. The gun homicides,
the gun suicides, the unintentional shootings, the domestic gun violence,
all of it is important. We must solve all of it.
There was nothing like that. I couldn't find anything that
(03:19):
that existed. I came to this issue as a white
suburban mom who was afraid her kids weren't safe in
their schools. Shame on me and other white women who
took so long to get off the sidelines because our
black and Brown sisters have been doing this work for
decades in their communities, mostly unseen. What have been some
of the successes that you've seen over the almost decade
(03:42):
of Mom's demand. We really work on this issue in
three buckets legislatively, electorally, and culturally. So when you look
at the work we've done at the legislative level, we
have now passed laws that disarmed domestic abusers in twenty
nine states. We now have background checks on every gun
sale in twenty one states. We've passed something called the
(04:04):
red flag law in nineteen states. So a red flag
law allows families or police to petition a judge for
a temporary restraining order to remove the guns from someone
who is at risk either to themselves or to others.
And data has shown these are are really effective. We've
also passed laws in nineteen states that close what's called
the Charleston loophole. So federal law requires license dealers to
(04:27):
perform a background check, but if those background checks haven't
been completed within three days, the license dealer is free
to sell the gun anyway. And that's how the Charleston
shooter got his gun used to kill black parishioners in
a church there. So this is really important life saving
legislation that we've passed, and data shows that they save
(04:47):
lives these laws. When we work on this electorally, it
is holding those law makers accountable who didn't do the
right thing legislatively. And our motto is, really, do the
right thing and we'll have your back. Do the wrong
thing and we'll have your job. And it takes several
election cycles to get to a point where you change
the dynamic of who's aligning either with a gun lobby
(05:07):
or with really angry moms. If you go back to
when Barack Obama was elected in two thousand and eight,
about a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an
A rating from the n r A. Today none do.
And I just think it's a matter of time before
everyone is really on the right side of history. And
then culturally, this is a big part of what we
do and whether it's putting pressure on companies. Hundreds have
(05:28):
changed their policies, particularly around open carry because of Mom's
demand action, everything from Wegmans to Walgreens to Walmart. And
then on top of that, we educate gun owners and
non gun owners about secure gun storage. About four point
six million children lived in homes with unsecured guns. That
means they're not locked, they're loaded, they're easy to access.
(05:50):
And so we have a program called be Smart where
we encourage parents to ask about guns and gun storage
when they send their kids to n and families homes,
but also sending these materials home through school boards and
city councils. Over a million families have received our secure
gun storage materials. As the parent of three kids, I
(06:11):
wouldn't just feel comfortable. I would feel like it was
my responsibility to ask those questions. So how do we
help other parents feel like that's just part of the
job of being a parent, is having those conversations, non judgmentally, openly, honestly,
because that is something we should know about where our
kids are spending time. That's absolutely true, especially in a
country where they're about four hundred million guns, and you
(06:33):
shouldn't assume whether someone is a gun owner or not.
And look, the vast majority of gun owners in this
country are responsible and they do securely store their firearms,
but there are too many who don't, and so having
that conversation is part of a parent's responsibility. I can't
tell you how many volunteers have had this conversation, they
decided to practice, for example, with their in laws and
(06:54):
have found out that their in laws in fact keep
a loaded gun in a shoe box under their kids
beds because they assume that's where burglars won't look, not
realizing the risks involved. If you want help understanding how
to have those conversations you may feel awkward or concerned,
you can go to be Smart for Kids dot org
and we make a lot of information and tools and
(07:16):
even videos available to spark those conversations. The purchase of
guns is actually surged over the last year plus of
the pandemic. Could you talk a little bit about how
COVID nineteen has impacted gun violence. Yes, it's so important
to understand that COVID has really exacerbated our nation's gun
(07:36):
violence crisis, which was out of control to begin with.
Gun violence is really an epidemic within a pandemic. When
you look at the different types of gun violence in
this country, for example, unintentional shootings, we know that's increased
in the last year. We are seeing gun violence rage
out of control in city centers across the country. That
(07:58):
is in part because of easy access to guns, but
also because there's so many gun violence intervention and interruption
programs that do such great work, but because of COVID,
they haven't been able to get out and create the
same kinds of relationships and get the same kind of
information that they had before about a potential gun violence
episode to interrupt it before it can begin. We know
(08:21):
that calls to hotlines have increased all over the world
and in America. And you know, Nicholas Kristof, the editorial
writer for The New York Times, has a really important saying.
He says, in other countries, brutish husbands put their wives
in the hospital. In America, they put them in graves.
And that is because domestic violence is made so much
(08:42):
more deadly when the abuser is armed. You spoke about
all that thankfully has happened at the state and city level,
although clearly a lot more needs to happen at the
state and city level. And yet we know that the
federal government does have real power here if Congress and
the President were to choose to do so. So what
(09:04):
would you like to see passed through Congress and ultimately
wind up on President Biden's desk for him to sign.
So we've been doing this work sort of state by state,
and that's fine and important, but we do need federal
laws around gun violence. We're all only as safe as
the closest state with the weakest gun laws. There are
so many loopholes in these laws that that really desperately
(09:27):
need to be modernized. We've spent a long time playing defense.
I mean, it is important to remember that the gun
lobby spent tens of millions of dollars on Donald Trump's campaign.
They expected to get a return on that investment, and
instead we had gotten so good at playing defense that
the n r A did not pass a single piece
of priority legislation in the two years they had both
(09:47):
the Republican president and Congress. But now our president is
Joe Biden, and we are seeing this legislation moved through
the House. A bill that would require a background check
on every gun sale inclosed federal loopholes, a bit that
would close the Charleston loophole, re authorizing the Violence Against
Women Act, which includes provisions around dating partners and stalkers,
(10:07):
and continuing to allocate funding for community gun violence intervention
programs and for research. This issue is not polarizing among
the American public. Nine of American support background checks eight
nine percent of gun owners, only one in ten, of
whom even belongs to the n R A percent of Republicans.
The only place where gun safety is a polarizing issue
(10:30):
right now is in the U. S. Senate. Have you
had any particularly memorable conversations as a gun safety advocate
with someone who maybe started out believing misconceptions about you
personally or about Mom's demand and what you hope to do.
My own dad when I started this work back in,
my dad is is a very conservative person. He comes
(10:53):
from a conservative family. He lives in Illinois, and he
really was not supportive of the work I was doing.
And I do think it's because he had a lot
of misconceptions about what I was trying to do. And
I think frankly, seeing shooting tragedies not just at a
national level but in his own community for him to
decide that the more he knew, the more he understood.
(11:15):
My dad is devoutly Catholic, that this was part of
his pro life agenda as a Catholic, that fighting gun
violence was an important way to save lives. And now
he shows up in his mom's de Man Action T
shirt at our events and we may not agree on
on a lot of issues, but we do now agree
on this one. What conversations do you think we're not
(11:35):
having enough of when it comes to gun violence? You know,
I think of of how many lies we lose to
suicide every year. I don't think many people understand that
is a huge part of our gun violence crisis in
this country. What comes to mind is areas where you
don't think we have enough public attention or focus. Absolutely,
I think suicide, you know, there's still stigma around that
(11:57):
issue in this country, or any mental health issue, and
talking about guns and access to guns with people who
may have suicidal aviation, particularly during a pandemic, and is
so incredibly important. Are our veterans in particular are a
very vulnerable segment of the population. I also think talking
(12:17):
about toxic masculinity and domestic violence and extremism and guns
is very important. And because women only make up about
of all the elected positions in this country, because women
are only about five percent of fortunate one c e
o s, there are only certain levels of power that
we can pull. Right, we're not making the laws and
(12:40):
the policies necessarily that protect our families in our community.
So it is important for us to look for other
ways to influence the conversation. As the saying goes, if
you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably
on the venue, and so often that is the case
with women in this country. Since your organization is called
Mom's Demand Action, I am curious what advice you would
have for moms or in parents is to how to
(13:01):
talk about this issue with our kids so that they're
hopefully empowered to advocate for the solutions we know work
that are really important to protect their lives too. I
really do think women and moms are the secret sauce
to advocacy in this country because, look, they know if
they lose their children, they have nothing left to lose.
(13:22):
That this issue is such high stakes, and so many
moms come into our organization because they've sent their kindergarteners
to school for the first time and they've had to
essentially rehearse their own deaths. My children started active shooter
or drills in preschool school, and look, we know that
these lockdown drills cause trauma and anxiety. We don't have
(13:43):
to live like this. Our children sure as hell shouldn't
die like this, So we all have to get off
the sidelines. There's this story that that resonates with me
as an activist that I read once, and there was
a woman who made sandwiches for people who are homeless
in her community, and and the newspapers decided to write
a story about her, and they asked her, you know,
what would you tell other people? And she said, I
(14:05):
get calls all the time thanking me for making sandwiches
or giving me money to make sandwiches, And what I
want to tell people is make your own damn sandwiches.
I'm glad that you appreciate the work I'm doing, but
you have to do the work too. We're all obbligated
as Americans in a democracy to use our voices and
our votes to not just protect our own families and communities,
(14:26):
but others, other Americans, And so I would just encourage
everyone again, we're not just moms, and we're not just
women were mothers and others to get involved and to
get off the sidelines and to use your voice and
your vote on this issue, because we have waited twenty
five years at a federal level for change, and now
is the time to be doing everything we can to
demand our lawmakers act Shannon, Thank you so much, Thank you,
(14:51):
thank you for bringing attention to this issue. Shannon Watts
is the author of Fight Like a Mother, How a
grassroots movement took on the gun lobby, and Why Women
Will Change the World. If you're interested in getting involved
with Mom's manned action, just text the word ready to
six four four three three to find a local group
near you. To start a conversation with your senator about
(15:12):
the importance of background checks, you can text checks to
that same number six four four three three. After shooting
at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a
new generation of gun violence prevention activists took center stage.
Parkland survivors, along with young people who have been working
(15:34):
on this issue in their own communities, captured national attention
with the March for Our Lives in Washington, d C.
They cris crossed the country on the Road to Change
tour to mobilize their peers and to register them to
vote to support candidates committed to gun violence prevention, and
they've been working hard ever since. One of those activists
is my next guest, Bria Smith. She's twenty years old,
(15:56):
grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and serves on the Youth
Board of director from March for Our Lives. She's deeply
involved in local organizing in her community and let a
fifty mile march from Milwaukee to Madison to demand that
local officials do more to protect black youth in Wisconsin.
It was great to talk with her about how she
came to this work and why it matters so much
to her. So, Bria, I think it would be a
(16:20):
really helpful place to start is for you to share
how you got involved. I always love being asked that
question because it's like, what radicalized you? What made you
like give a funk about politics or just getting rid
of the political apathy. That radicalization started when I was
six years old learning about slavery in a room full
of white people, learning about my history. But I think
(16:41):
what really got me into it was when Donald Trump
was elected in sixteen. My schools had a complete one eighty.
Like I know my school was racist, like, don't get
me wrong, but kids started wearing Maga hats, Maga shirts,
like telling on my Mexican friends to go back to Mexico,
calling me the in word da da da da, And like,
I think what really shifted for me. Then I quit track.
I cleared up all my offer school activities. I started
(17:03):
working in my community, and that's when I started doing
gun violence advocacy. I got involved with the Walking Youth
Council and really going out into my community and seeing
like how we can ask people questions, how we can
get people to strategize collectively. I do. Though, I want
to ask you to sort of return back a little
bit to the beginning of your story, is to why
when you started to really become an activist, as you said,
(17:25):
become radicalized, why gun violence prevention specifically was an issue
that you wanted to work on, that you wanted to
try to help. One thing that I noticed growing up
was the gun culture. It was this like hyper americanized
fantasy that people like in my community had if you
had a gun, you that dog, you know, like that's
(17:45):
an identity that people started to chase and desire because
having a gun mint protection and mint status. So gun
violence is what I was exposed to the most, Like
going to sleep, you would hear gunshots. Waking up, maybe
you hear gunshots. Walking on the street, you hear a
few pops, Like it was just it was just so
normalized that. I just didn't think that any other community
didn't have gun ones, you know, But when I started
going to school and I started seeing, like how other
(18:06):
communities that were mostly white, there was no gunshots. It
was peacefulness, it was quiet. Gun violence really sets that
precedent for lots of different things that goes afterwards, like
if it's mass incarceration, if it's mass shootings, if it's
suicide by firearm. And when I started to like really
research that when I was sixteen seventeen, everything had a
connection to a gun, you start asking yourself, why do
we need guns? Like, who are we afraid of? It
(18:28):
was each other in my community. We were afraid of
each other. How do we collectively get rid of that fear?
How do we collectively find the root of disorder, find
the route of where this fear is coming from? And
a lot of times it's poverty. A lot of times
it's not having adequate resources like mental health protection. All
these things people were being deprived of resulted them to
going to crime, resulted them to picking up a gun,
resulted them to finding that new identity, And this whole
(18:51):
continuous cycle just goes on and on and on and
That's what I would like always think about. You spoke
about the collective solution friends that can help change the
lived reality of kids and families in Milwaukee, in your community.
Can you talk about some of those solutions and what
you have seen to work over the last five years
(19:12):
since you've been engaged in this work. It's always hard
to tell people to re imagine things that they have
never experienced. I think what was more important for me
was letting people understand that it's possible to create a
definition of what reimagination looks like, as if it's something
that we all deserve. Like, how do you want to
see yourself in a society where all your needs are met,
(19:34):
where everything is equitable, where you don't fear your life
stepping out onto the hood into the block, you don't
have that fear. What does that look like to you?
What I've seen work a lot is really giving the
community that chance to answer the question. We'll be right
back to stay with us. I'm just really curious how
(20:05):
you have worked with older activists who have been really
trying to make progress on gun violence prevention for a
long time. Have you learned anything from them? And what
do you think you've taught them. When I was organizing
the march back Milwaukee, it was so hired to get
young people to prioritize the march, to prioritize the urgency
(20:28):
behind advocating. But then there's older generation activists, people who
work in nonprofiting, for example, people who know the game,
who have been movement building for you know, mad years,
but aren't in the front lines. Having the conversation between
these people those who working on profiting understand five oh
one see threes in religioustics behind nonprofit building, and also
(20:49):
talking to the young people who literally are the most
angry at the protests. They have really nothing to lose. Really,
having these conversations from all perspectives, you can see where
that the move it can take you, where that organizing
can take you. When I started to really talk to
older people, like I just felt at first just so mad,
I'm like, why don't y'all care? You know, why don't
(21:09):
Why aren't you as angry as me? Weren't you going
out into the front lines? But in reality, it's how
do you speak that language to create that urgency to
get people to care? And that was a big eye
opener for me. Organizing last year my communities, I thought
I knew everything. In reality, I just needed to listen
and observe and connect people, connect myself with people, and
UM had that multigenerational conversation. So I definitely learned patients
(21:32):
from older people. But patients and movement organizing looks like
because you know, a lot of times young people just
wanted to happen tomorrow, like tomorrow college is free, and
we didn't have homelessness, and you know, racism didn't exist.
That's how I fight, That's how I organized, But I
had people my parents had shown me. It takes time
to build a revolution. It takes time, it takes energy.
(21:53):
If you rush things too fast, you can lose that
step and lose people in your messaging UM, and I
think one thing that I also taught older people it
was to also understand priority, understand urgency. We can simultaneously
draft strategies with all types of people having this interconnected,
multigenerational you know, coalition of what revolution looks like like.
(22:13):
It doesn't always need to be like step by step
taking more time within that. Are there any initiatives that
you're especially proud of the things that you've worked on
in Milwaukee? Or at a national level with March for
Our Lives, where you can say yes, like I know
I made a difference here. The legacy of March of
(22:35):
Our Lives was created by this horrendous, sickening act of violence,
but it sparked a movement of youth creativity and leadership
in coalition building. And one thing that I would say
with my work with March for Our Lives is when
I first started off, I was just focusing on my community,
focusing on local national Milwaukee things, black people, police brutality.
(22:57):
But while working with March of Our Lives and creating
all these agenda asn't our national structure, and it's not
just people working within this organization. It's so many different
entities that are out there that are organizing the revolutionizing,
and from March we were able to have this discourse
with them. Now I can say that we're focusing on
that reimagination and really asking the community like, how do
we re imagine piece? How do we reimagine safety? So
(23:20):
on a national level, I think we're really moving in
that step. And it takes a couple of students to
really like put matters into their own hands and think
of progressive actions and where our politicians are lacking. Thank
you so much just for your time today, for sharing
why you're doing this work, how this work connects to
public health, to racial justice, to everything that we know
(23:44):
desperately needs to change. Thank you for having me. I
really appreciate you. Can keep up with Bria Smith by
following her on Twitter at Bria Smith. That's b R
I A A S M I T H H. As
I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, for a
long time, Congress effectively prohibited federal funding for being used
(24:07):
to study gun violence and what works to prevent firearm
injury and to save lives. But in December of twenty nineteen,
that changed, and thankfully research is now ramping that one's
urgent public health issue. One of the people at the
forefront of this work is Dr Chathan Satya Jathan is
a pediatric trauma surgeon and a National Insuits of Health
(24:27):
funded firearm entry prevention researcher. He serves as director of
the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Northwell Health, the
largest health system in New York State. All of which
is to say he is deeply immersed in this issue
and I am delighted to be able to speak with.
Can you help share how your training and your work
as a pediatric trauma surgeon led you to the issues
(24:51):
of gun violence, prevention and safety. Yeah, you know. I
am originally Canadian, and I came to Chicago many years ago,
and when when I got to Chicago, I was pretty
blown away by the levels of gun monts that I
was seeing. As a pediatric trauma surgeon, I have the
unfortunate job of literally pulling bullets out of babies and
kids who are affected by gun violence. I did not
(25:11):
expect to have to pull bullets at a six month
olds in my first week on the job. And you
can imagine seeing that little lifeless baby on the table
over and over again, having to put your finger on
a bullet wound, watching them fade away, watching parents reactions
to that happening in front of your eyes, and then
having to break bad news to parents over and over
again that they've lost a loved one to a largely
(25:32):
preventable disease is horrendous. And so I think there is
nothing else to do but to be activated about this
issue from the healthcare lane, because I think there's a
lot that we can do to assist with the public
health approach. I understand that we're one small piece of
the puzzle, but I do think there's a lot we
can do. For many years, we didn't have and I
(25:53):
H funded research into higher arm injury prevention, and yet
thankfully now we do. And you are one of those
NIH funded researchers. Could you talk about what research you're
doing and also what other research is happening around the
country that you think may really help identify what could work.
(26:15):
I always like to say that gun violence prevention is
almost akin to a new disease. We have to research
everything from the most basic elements, and our research is
really focused on how do we have the conversation even
with our patients about firearm safety and firearm injury prevention.
In the health care industry, there are strategies we can
do to help. Most physicians clinical team members believe they
(26:37):
should counsel patients and families about firearm safety, and patients
themselves gun owning or not want their physicians to talk
to them about this. Only about eight percent of physicians
are clinical team members actually have these conversations with their patients.
So our research is geared towards implementing evidence based healthcare
strategies that can prevent gun violence into our hospitals. And
(26:57):
one of the most exciting elements of our research is
that it's universal, so similar to substance use. Right, we've
seen that universal screening asking every patient who comes into
our hospitals questions related to substance use can serve to
reduce stigma, remove judgment, normalize the conversation as part of
routine care. For example, ask about substance use no different
than you ask about sugar and take exercise or other
(27:18):
health risk factors. We want to do the same thing
with firearms, so we're hoping to really shift the paradigm
and change the conversation. I find that so encouraging because
we know from other areas in public health that universal
application is hugely important to destigmatizing exactly. And you know,
we are even that our health system noticing that the
(27:40):
large majority of healthcare workers are very uncomfortable having these
conversations as our patients. You would think that if you
talk about firearms in the context of just well being
safety from an a political standpoint, that folks might be
comfortable with this conversation, but they aren't. But again, I
think if we educate and we do it the right way,
and we be careful with the language that we use,
(28:00):
and we make it clear that this is not a
gun control issue, This is not a Second Amendment issue.
This is purely about safety and injury prevention. That we
can overcome these barriers and the lessons we learn, I
think we'll have implications for other sectors across the country.
And to your point, the universal aspect is so critical
because otherwise you have healthcare workers who have to literally
decide who to screen and who not to and that
(28:21):
in itself causes a lot of discomfort and then causes
bias in your research right exactly perceived risk. How do
you see your work in coordination with community organizations, with
faith leaders, schools, with other places that we know are
grappling with how to be really part of the solution,
(28:44):
again from a political but evidence based way of really
tackling the crisis of gun violence. I think it is
absolutely critical for that collaboration with the community. Our research study.
For example, when a patient comes into our emergency to artment,
we are going to ask questions in a confidential manner,
not about ownership, purely about firearm access, and then questions
(29:07):
directly related to gun violence risk in a community that
have nothing to do with access. So you can imagine
if someone screens positive for access, they get gun safety,
firearm safety, safe storage counseling, they get gun locks, they
get firearm courses. We have an active coalition of gun
owners who are engaged in that process as well. And
then if someone screens positive for violence risk, we have
a whole slew of community based organizations, violence interrupters, faith
(29:30):
based organizations that are on the ready to be able
to provide them with resources that they need, because you're right,
without that community bridge, what we do is not going
to make any difference. And so can I just ask
you now, like, what do you think we could be
doing or doing more effectively to prevent suicide by gun?
It's it's heartbreaking the epidemic of suicide in this country.
(29:52):
COVID nineteen has only made that worse with isolation, anxiety, depression.
Mental health is a big part of all the conversations
we have around firearm injury, martellity preventions part of the
screening as well, And I think the most important thing
is that access to a firearm in or outside of
the household increases the lethality of suicide attempts so much.
That is the area to focus on. The more we
(30:14):
can educate and inform, our hope is that we can
then prevent those suicides from happening, because we know that
the majority of suicides happened in the heat of the moment,
and if you have a weapon in the household, chances
are that you are going to be successful in killing yourself.
Can you talk about how you've seen the pandemic interact
with your research or as it interrupted your research? How
(30:37):
has your work shifted over last not many months of
COVID nineteen, It feels like forever. It has changed things
quite a bit. We we've had to be pretty innovative
with how we do things. The importance of telehealth, virtual platforms,
technology based platforms, screening intervention has become even more important
in the healthcare setting, and I think we see, for example,
(31:01):
a big change in the number of patients that are
coming in with certain issues. So, for example, when it
comes to child abuse, we're seeing less and less child abuse,
and that kind of thing is very worrisome. We know
that kids are more isolated at the home, they have
less social supports, less interaction with schools. So we are seeing,
for example, more kids that are coming in with delayed
diagnoses of child abuse, and we are having to adapt
(31:24):
with virtual interventions to be able to keep contact in
a way that is appropriate with the pandemic. The same
could be said for other issues, such as domestic violence
that has led to a spike in gun violence in itself.
When it comes to homicide in the home, and then
we talked about suicide from increasing social stressors, unemployment, and
then we are also seeing personally a spike in accidental
(31:44):
injuries among children in the household, you know, who are
accidentally playing with a gun. We've seen a huge surgeon
gun buying among Americans because of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
many of whom are first time gun owners, so most
of them don't know much about firearms safety. And so
this really is providing an opportunity for us to ramp
up education and making it even more important. We're taking
(32:09):
a quick break stay with us. Say I'm a patient
and I'm coming to see you for the first time.
So say that my child has had some sort of injury.
Although thankfully, knock on wood, my kids haven't had anything
(32:29):
too serious happened to them, but say, like one of
them is injured. I come to see you. We're talking
about I don't know, a broken leg because one of
them fell climbing a tree. How do you segue from
that into talking to me about whether or not I
have a firearm in the house. The broad answer is
that we're still trying to figure it out. We don't
(32:50):
have the perfect recipe. But especially for children, families, parents,
patients who come and injured, it's a very nice segue
into firearm safety because you can imagine that I would
be talking to you about avoidance of that injury happening again,
playground safety, ways to avoid motor vehicle collisions, drowning. So
let's say we're talking about, Okay, you have a pool
(33:11):
in your backyard, take these precautions to make sure that
you don't have an accidental drowning, because we see an
uptick of that in the summer. By the same token,
do you have access inside or outside of the firearm?
And I'm only asking that question because there are ways
to safely store that firearm that could prevent accidental injury
of your children or yourselves and reduce risk of suicide.
(33:31):
Your hospital system is very committed to this there are
hundreds of other hospital systems around the country who are
similarly committed to this, and yet there are others who
are resistant. What do you think explains that resistance and
how do we help overcome it? That's spot on, you know.
I'm glad you bring that up, because if you look
at who is the most vocal on this subject, it
(33:54):
tends to be clinical team members. There are very few
healthcare executives, board members, and so on at the large
health systems that offer the bulk of care to Americans
that are vocal and say that gun violence is a
public health issue and this should be an institutional priority
for them. I've been a little surprised as to how
(34:14):
difficult it is to mobilize all those levels of the
health care industry, and unfortunately, the way that things are structured.
I'm not saying that this is intentionally done, but gun
violence is profitable for hospitals, right. What a horrific thing
to have to say. I know, I know. This kind
of speaks to how I think there has to be
(34:34):
a real push to incentivize hospitals, health systems, insurance companies,
just like there was a push for preventative care for
heart disease and diabetes. There needs to be a push
for preventative actions for firearm injury. But at the end
of the day, right if a firearm injury happens, that
patient comes into the emergence department, gets a surgery, has
a long hospital stay. Unfortunately, there isn't always top down
(34:56):
buying or organizational prioritization of this issue. And how do
you think we change them? I think it comes down
to collective action. Education. We are finding, even through our collaborative,
which is actually very unique, members hospital seal systems in
our collaborative have never done anything in this space. But
through education, they are becoming empowered to want to act.
(35:20):
They are further understanding the benefits of acting. So we're
trying to implore that education collectively and through that people's
minds are definitely shifting. What do you wish we're different
about the public conversation around gun violence in our country?
I personally wish that there was more of an understanding
(35:40):
that public health approaches can work. We've used them for decades.
People forget that it wasn't that long ago that it
was taboo for physicians to even talk about smoking cessation.
But we overcame all that. I also feel as though
if COVID nineteen has has has brought anything to the
forefront of my mind, it's it's that the need for
more federal over site of our public health issues is paramount.
(36:03):
I think one of the biggest issues right now is
that we are so divided across states as to what
is a priority, what is not, what approach to take
to certain things, and what approached not to take, and
that unfortunately leads to chaos. And I think if I
were to change or want to change anything, would be
more a federal coordination of issues like this, because in
(36:24):
my experience, even when I was in Canada, that type
of federal oversight really makes a difference. How important is
it Do you think that the people engaged in the
research and the implementation are coming from the communities that
are most affected by gun violence? It is critical. We
cannot do this without those voices, whether you're talking about
(36:47):
firearm safety and engaging gun owners, or whether or not
you're talking about community violence and engaging community based organizations,
community voices from black and brown communities. We can't do
any of this without them. So I think it is
our responsibility two support those organizations as much as we
can to be able to find out what works and
what doesn't. And you know in our own research, I
(37:08):
mean both those voices and community voices are a huge
part of how we shape our education. We're not taught
in medical school either how to have conversations around violence risk,
how to have culturally competent discussions with at risk communities.
So we need to be educated ourselves. We need to
be educated about our own biases, about how we can
overcome our own judgments and stigma, because that's a big
(37:30):
part of this as well. Chan. Thank you so much,
Thank you, Chelsea. I really appreciate you taking this issue on.
You can follow date that on Twitter at dr N
Satya that's c h E t h A and s
A t h y A. For a long time now,
(37:53):
we've known at least some of what works when it
comes to preventing gun violence, but sit in the way
where our politics and the powerful gun lobby. But if
there's ever been a time to feel hopeful about our
ability to finally address this crisis head on, it's now.
Earlier this month, the inter A suffered a serious setback
when a federal judge in Texas rejected their attempt to
avoid standing trial for financial abuses here in New York.
(38:16):
President Biden has rightly called the epidemic of gun violence
in the US and international embarrassment. He's also taking a
series of executive actions to strengthen common sense gun safety laws,
and he's called on Congress to pass comprehensive gun safety legislation.
And Chason and other doctors are having conversations every day
about gun violence prevention with their patients. All of this
(38:37):
is happening in a moment when more and more people
are finally talking about and acknowledging this issue for what
it is. Not just a personal tragedy, not just a
community tragedy, but a pressing public health issue we should
be taking on with our doctors, our friends, our family,
our fellow parents, our legislators, and anyone else we can reach.
(38:59):
I know I'm sir, ready to have this conversation, and
I hope you are too. In fact is brought to
you by iHeart Radio. We're produced by Erica Goodmanson, Lauren Peterson,
Kathy Russo, Julie Subrian, and Justin Wright, with help from
the Hidden Light team of Barry Lurie, Sarah Horowitz, Nikki Huggett,
(39:20):
Emily Young, and hum Abdeen, with additional support from Lindsay Hoffman.
Original music is by Justin Wright. If you liked this
episode of In Fact, please make sure to subscribe so
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Thanks again for listening, and see you next week.
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