We Need Violence Solutions, Not Just Gun Control

Columbine. Newtown. Orlando. Las Vegas. Parkland. To many people, these tragedies represent a growing problem in the United States. But they tell only a small part of the story. The story of mass shootings ignores the vast majority of violence in this country.

Early on the morning of March 31, four people were stabbed outside a nightclub in Boston’s Financial District. There was a fair amount of local coverage. But the AP story was seven sentences. The US News and World Report ran the story verbatim, but as far as I can tell, no other national news outlet picked up the story. Yet if the weapon had been a gun, it would have been a mass shooting (according to the definition used by the Gun Violence Archive - four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter), and the story almost certainly would have received more media coverage.

I’ve spent the last few months researching gun violence for a series of stories I’m writing to get my master’s degree in journalism. But my bachelor’s degree is in physics so I like to dig into the numbers to see what is really going on.  And what I’ve found is that media coverage of gun violence in the US often neglects the most common forms of gun violence and ignores solutions besides gun control.

The news media needs to improve how they frame the issue of gun violence in their coverage. A 2016 study by researchers from the University of Georgia and Brigham Young University showed that in 2013 news coverage in the wake of the Newtown shooting, 59% of all stories about guns in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post were focused on public mass shootings, even though mass shootings represent only a tiny portion of all gun violence. The same study showed that a majority of gun violence stories in those newspapers framed the solution to gun violence as one of legislation. Yet many of the gun violence researchers I’ve spoken with frame gun violence (and all violence) as a public health issue. The focus on gun control is detrimental to finding solutions to violence in general. 

Gary Kleck, Professor Emeritus of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, told me, “We shouldn’t be looking for solutions to gun violence specifically, we should be looking for solutions to violence, and that won’t be something as simple as gun control.” According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only about 8% of all violent crime is committed with firearms. Media coverage focusing on solutions involving only gun control ignores hundreds of thousands of violent crimes in the United States that might be prevented through other solutions.

I’m not trying to say that gun control will not help. It will. But gun control cannot solve the nation’s violence problem on its own. Deborah Azrael, the Director of Research at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told me, “I think there’s a public perception that if we pass background check laws, the gun violence problem in the United States is going to be fixed. It’s not. It’s going to be improved at the margins, and that’s important, but we shouldn’t oversell that.”

Different kinds of gun violence require different kinds of solutions. Universal background checks will do little to prevent gang and drug-related violence committed with firearms that are already illegally possessed. Large magazine and bumpstock bans might reduce the numbers of people killed in mass shootings, but mass shootings are only a tiny fraction of all gun violence in the country. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting database, in 2017, nearly 90% of all gun homicides (where the type of gun was known) were committed with handguns. And no form of gun control will prevent a stabbing like the one in Boston.

Research shows that violence behaves much like an epidemic, infecting and spreading among conditions of poverty and inequality and that the trauma experienced by violence victims actually make them more prone to violence themselves. Much like exposure to a flu virus causes more flus, exposure to violence causes more violence. Yet the news media rarely reports on programs based on this research that have been proven to be effective in reducing violence.

In the mid-nineties, the city of Boston implemented Operation Ceasefire in an effort to decrease youth homicide. Research had shown that most violence was spurred by disputes between street gangs. The program combined deterrence and intervention measures based on academic research. To deter violence, law enforcement reached out directly to gang members, told them that violence would not be tolerated, and if violence did occur, law enforcement would use every legal means necessary to bring those responsible to justice. At the same time, community workers offered assistance to the same gang members in the form of a summer jobs program, help getting back into school, or medical treatment for family members.

Operation Ceasefire worked. According to a 2008 study by Harvard, Youth homicides in Boston fell 63% from 1995 to 1997 after the program was implemented. Anthony A. Braga, a Senior Research Associate at Harvard, and his colleagues found that Operation Ceasefire effectively ended in 2000, when the commander of Boston Police Department’s Youth Violence Strike Force transferred to another unit, and the new commander stopped holding weekly Ceasefire meetings. After September 11, 2001, the BPD had new priorities and their focus on youth violence waned. By 2006, Boston’s youth homicides had nearly tripled.

While Boston abandoned the approach, the National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC) at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice carries on similar work today in cities like New York and Cincinnati. David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay and director of the NNSC, worked on Operation Ceasefire while he was a researcher at Harvard. While we were talking about mass shootings, he said, “When people talk about gun control, they’re talking about statutory changes. It’s a legal approach.” But he said that’s not the approach that works for most gun violence. Programs that work at a local level like Operation Ceasefire “are actually remarkably effective and do not get remotely the recognition and attention they deserve.”

Cure Violence is a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that treats violence as an epidemic and contagious disease. Gary Slutkin, Cure Violence’s founder and Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, noticed that maps of the location and frequency of violence were very similar to the maps that showed how epidemics spread. The Cure Violence program is designed to deal with violence the same way that doctors deal with epidemics of other contagious diseases like HIV or Cholera.

Much like Operation Ceasefire, Cure Violence workers identify the individuals most at risk of committing violence. However, Cure Violence does not work with law enforcement - their focus is entirely on providing at-risk individuals with the resources they need to break the cycle of violence. Workers are members of the community in which they work, so that they can gain access to and the trust of those most at risk. They interrupt the transmission of violence by mediating conflicts to prevent retaliation, and they work within the community to spread the word that violence is not the answer to their problems. Charlie Ransford, Cure Violence’s Director of Science and Policy, told me, “That’s what really gets behavior changed. Not threats, not doomsday scenarios telling people they’re going to die, or threatening people with what the outcomes are going to be. It’s coming to people where they’re at and coming to them with understanding and really trying to guide them in a way that’s caring about them.”

But even if you’re not convinced that violence is a contagious disease, Cure Violence’s record shows that their approach gets results. The program has been implemented not only in the United States, but all over the world. Independent studies have consistently shown that violent crime is reduced in areas where Cure Violence operates. For instance, a 2008 study by researchers at Northwestern University found that in Chicago from 2003 to 2006 gun violence decreased 17-24% in most areas where Cure Violence operated. And a report funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance of the US Department of Justice found that a program in a Brooklyn neighborhood reduced shootings by 20% compared to several other neighborhoods with similar shooting rates before the program started.

These programs are not panaceas, but they do save lives. And a public health approach has several advantages over relying solely on gun control. They can be implemented on a local level, bypassing federal and state governments that might be gridlocked over gun control. And they can reduce all forms of violence, not just gun violence. If guns are taken away from people prone to violence, lives will be saved because guns are so deadly, but those people might still resort to violence through other means. Programs like Cure Violence, however, aim at making people not violent. They prevent violence instead of just making it less deadly.

But while these programs have been around for decades, the media doesn’t talk about them often. The study I mentioned earlier about the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post found that gun-violence stories framed around a public health approach were too rare to measure accurately. For instance, youth mentoring was mentioned in only 2 of 375 stories. But 46% mentioned background checks. In the process of researching this story, I spoke with about twenty people I knew. Some in the Boston area had heard about Operation Ceasefire, but no one had heard of the NNSC or Cure Violence. All of them could name at least three mass shootings.

According to the CDC, about 19,500 people were murdered in the United States in 2017. Over a quarter of them were not killed by guns. As long as the national news media focuses on gun control, those lost lives are ignored. Many people in this country are rightly outraged the gun violence they see in newspapers and on television.

Until more stories are written and filmed about violence other than mass shootings and about potential solutions to violence other than gun control, news consumers will remain uninformed and unable to translate that outrage into action that can make a real difference. The tools are at their fingertips, they just don’t realize it. The news media needs to reflect on and change the way it covers violence so that they do.

Source List

Azrael, Deborah. Phone Interview, February 21, 2019.

Braga, Anthony A.; Hureau, David; Winship, Christopher. “Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: Losing Faith? Police, Black Churches, and the Resurgence of Youth Violence in Boston.” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, vol. 6, 2008, pp. 141–803.

Cerniglia, Lenore, and Sarah Picard-Fritsche. “Testing a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence: An Evaluation of Crown Heights Save Our Streets, a Replication of the Cure Violence Model.” U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2013. http://cureviolence.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SOS_Evaluation.pdf

“Crime in the US, 2017,” Federal Bureau of Investigation: Uniform Crime Reporting Program. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017

“Fatal Injury Reports, National, Regional and State, 1981 - 2017.” CDC’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS). https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html

“Gary Slutkin, M.D.” Cure Violence website, accessed April 29, 2019. http://cureviolence.org/post/staff/gary-slutkin/

“General Methodology.” Gun Violence Archive, accessed April 29, 2019. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/methodology

Jashinsky, Jared Michael, et al. “Media Agenda Setting Regarding Gun Violence before and after a Mass Shooting.” Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 4, 2016, p. 291.

Kleck, Gary. Phone Interview, March 14, 2019.

Kennedy, David. Phone Interview, March 28, 2019.

“Nonfatal Firearm Violence, 1993-2011,” Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf

“Reducing gun violence: The Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire.” U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, 2001. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/188741.pdf

Wesley G. Skogan, et al. “Evaluation of Cease-Fire Chicago.” U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. 2008. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/227181.pdf

“4 injured in stabbing outside Boston nightclub.” AP, March 31, 2019. https://www.apnews.com/c5753ee0411f4656a19b1506a9fad7dc