Giving Gun Violence a Face While Crusading for Community Health

Scott Charles, a trauma outreach manager at Temple University Hospital, joins hosts Kelly and JJ to share about his own experiences with gun violence and the impact it's had on his role in preventative care. We delve into the importance of personal narratives and the power they hold in humanizing statistics related to firearm injuries, while also uncovering the raw reality of the trauma bay, revealing its stark contrast to the dramatized portrayal often seen in mainstream media. Scott introduces us to the Cradle to Grave program, an initiative designed to educate young people about the harsh medical realities of firearm injuries.

Need a gun lock? Request one from Scott here.

Further reading:
‘Where is the outrage ... from everyone?’ The story behind this Temple trauma surgeon’s tweet. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Dying is Easy: Cradle 2 Grave (the Philadelphia Citizen)
These 11 Temple University violence reduction programs are enhancing safety in Philadelphia (Temple University)
Temple University Hospital's trauma advocates work to expand program to help gun violence victims (ABC)'
One man's mission to prevent gun deaths – one lock at a time (Metro)

Further reading:
‘Where is the outrage ... from everyone?’ The story behind this Temple trauma surgeon’s tweet. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Dying is Easy: Cradle 2 Grave (the Philadelphia Citizen)
These 11 Temple University violence reduction programs are enhancing safety in Philadelphia (Temple University)
Temple University Hospital's tra

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

This is the legal disclaimer, where I tell you that the views, thoughts and opinion shared on this podcast belong solely to our guests and hosts and not necessarily Brady or Brady's affiliates. Please note this podcast contains discussions of violence that some people may find disturbing. It's okay, we find it disturbing too. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Red Bull and Brady. I'm one of your hosts, jj.

Speaker 2: 0:47

And I'm Kelly, your other host.

Speaker 1: 0:49

And today, kelly and I are sitting down with Scott Charles, who's a trauma outreach manager at Temple University Hospital, and Scott is really answering a lot of questions, kelly, that I think you and I have both had, but the big one for me, which is how do we bridge this gap between medicine and gun violence on the street?

Speaker 2: 1:06

Yeah, and I mean for me too, he's kind of showing an example of what public health could be at its best. You know, we're sitting here recording having survived a pandemic that is still happening, and we've seen a lot of examples of services being provided but then being taken away, or what happens when people don't have access to things, and gun violence is a public health issue, and so one of the questions I constantly have is what would it look like if everything was sort of working together holistically? And what Scott does is really cool because he's bringing harm reduction to the bedside of people who have been shot, but also to their families and communities, and he's going to where people are. So I think it's a really cool program.

Speaker 1: 1:50

And listening to Scott too, as I hope I think our listeners probably will be I was like why is this not in every city? Why? Is this not across the US. You know if this is something that works and so I highly encourage our listeners. You know, right in at the end of this episode, if there's similar initiatives in your city that we just don't know about that we should be highlighting. Or if you want kind of this program, as Scott will detail it out, called Cradle to Grave, to be in your city.

Speaker 3: 2:18

I'm Scott Charles. I'm the trauma outreach manager at Temple University Hospital, where I oversee the health systems, violence prevention and intervention initiatives, something that I've been doing for almost the last 20 years now.

Speaker 1: 2:30

And I wonder kind of along those lines if you can kind of tease out what that position is to like. What does a trauma outreach manager so?

Speaker 3: 2:38

yeah, so it's interesting. One of the things that sets us apart, I think, at Temple is the way that we've defined the trauma outreach manager role. I started as a trauma outreach coordinator and for many hospitals what that looks like is somebody who might hand out bicycle helmets or might host like a bicycle rodeo to help teach kids about preventing injuries, or might go to a senior center and talk to senior citizens about pulling up their rugs or making sure that their cats don't become tripping hazards. For us at the hospital, what we recognize is that we are operating in a city in general and in the community in particular, with high rates of firearm injury, and what we were seeing a lot of probably even more than children being injured on bicycles were young people being injured by firearms, and so what my role as the trauma outreach professional looks like at my hospital is probably different than it looks at many hospitals.

Speaker 3: 3:37

So what I'm tasked with doing is trying to prevent firearm injury in a variety of forms. So that includes trying to prevent unintentional shootings by children by distributing gunlocks. It means hosting programs that educate young people about the medical realities of firearm injuries in order to dispel a lot of the myths that exist out there. I do a program that teaches community first aid to individuals who my role has really been focused on victim advocacy and standing up a program in the hospital where we have a team of victim advocates who assist victims of violent injury and their families without a navigate the health care system, how to navigate the justice system, how to navigate victim services and that type of thing, and that's it.

Speaker 1: 4:28

It's real simple, small stuff.

Speaker 2: 4:31

Yeah, we're excited to kind of drill more down to the programs that you've been working on. But before we do that, we know that you're a survivor of gun violence yourself, and so if you're comfortable to the extent that you're comfortable I'm wondering if you can share how that impacts the work that you're doing every day when you're seeing gun violence. But it's also been a part of your own life.

Speaker 3: 4:52

So I want to be clear, when I myself have not been shot, but I grew up in a household where a couple of my siblings had been shot, my sister completed suicide with a firearm, and, as somebody who grew up in the neighborhood where I grew up, I lost some friends to gun violence growing up.

Speaker 3: 5:12

So in many ways I'm comfortable saying that I might be a co-victim of violence in the sense that the people close to me have been shot, but I personally have never been shot.

Speaker 3: 5:22

The way it impacts me is that I think for me I've reflected a lot on kind of how I approach conversations around gun violence and I tend to I come across as being kind of feisty when it comes to this issue and, some would argue, intolerant when it comes to this issue, and I think really the way that it's impacted me is it's made me passionate about this, because this is not an abstract idea as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 3: 5:45

This is something that holds real meaning for me, and so I tend not to give up a lot of ground when it comes to kind of the cliches and the tropes that exist around gun violence, because I see it every day, but it certainly, I think, humanizes the experience for me, and so that when I or members of my team are going into a family waiting room to talk to the family about their loved one who is probably 100 feet away fighting for their lives in a trauma bay, I'm able to put myself in their shoes and to think about what they must be experiencing. And then to work so closely with patients who are surviving gunshot patients or surviving gunshot injuries and, in many cases, actually potentially losing their lives, in front of me. This is something that's very real for me and it's hard, so it drives me, certainly, but it also, I think, gives me a level of empathy that I might not otherwise have, and I think that that's kind of the greatest influence that my personal experiences, the way that they really influence my work.

Speaker 1: 6:49

I think it's really good that you highlight that kind of like co-traumatization. I know, like one of the things I think that we all talk a lot about is like terms, right. So some folks want to be considered survivors of gun violence or don't want to be considered survivors of gun violence, or like what a survivor is is like a whole we had to do a whole podcast episode on it, right. But I think what you've identified is that, even if you yourself are not shot, when you lose people or if you live in a community where people are being lost regularly, like that has an impact too and just, I think you being able to go into those spaces ensure that experience or at least kind of know like what verbal pitfalls not to fall into is probably immensely helpful for the people that you're serving.

Speaker 3: 7:28

Right and it's one of the things that you know, those of us that are working in this space consider all the time is it's real easy to want to say things like I know it. You know, I know how you feel and you know, even if I have you know, I'm with somebody who, me, have just lost their sibling. It's not really for me to say I know exactly how they feel. My role is to be there to bear witness to their pain and to support them through that experience. But when it comes to that experience of that first hand traumatization, you know witnessing it I know that none of my experiences come close to what our patients are enduring. I simply know that, through the conversations that I'm having with them, I'm asking them to tell me what it's like and I'm trying to listen so that they know that they're being heard. And I can say with absolute confidence that nothing in my life leading up to that, this moment would prepare me for what they're experiencing.

Speaker 3: 8:26

It's really difficult Bye, that's not to dismiss those who are, who have lost loved ones to gun violence or who were, or even living with people who have survived a tremendously Brutal gunshot injury, because it's it's tough and one of the things that I say to the young people that come through the program is I Talk to them about the damage that is inflicted, not to just them physically or even, if they die, the loss, what the loss represents as on the individual level, but I talked to them about what's left in the wake and I explained that you know, when they die they have the easy part. Ultimately, it's the people that they leave behind who will die a little bit each and every day for the rest of their lives. And for young people who feel that loyalty is really important, I think it's it's helpful for them to recognize that there is a responsibility that they have to the people who love them, because they have the potential of making those individuals co-victims of homicide, which is something we wouldn't want to inflict on anybody that we love that's.

Speaker 1: 9:33

I mean that I think is incredibly powerful and we're gonna, I think, dive into some of the work that you're doing to, I think of like meeting people where they are, which medicine doesn't always do and and the gun violence prevention movement doesn't always do, but we're hoping gets better at. But you said something earlier about kind of educating folks about the medical realities of gun violence and I'm wondering if we can, if we can, tease that out of what that Even is, because I think, kelly, you and I have talked on this podcast now so many times about how, like, what you see on TV Isn't true.

Speaker 1: 10:04

I think, even even what people who read a lot, or or do I think if you're not in the medical field, you probably just don't know what those realities are.

Speaker 3: 10:12

Yeah, you know it's. It's interesting, given all the experiences I've had Growing up around gun violence. When I came to the hospital in 2005 I had no idea what goes on in an emergency department, in a trauma bay. I just I had no point of reference. It really everything I knew came from television and movies.

Speaker 3: 10:33

And you know, I really credit Dr Amy Goldberg, who is now the dean of the medical school at at Temple and is has really been my Partnering in crime or non crime since since 2005, who recruited me to come to Temple Because she wanted to think outside the box and to push the envelope and think of some some really provocative and innovative ways to address this issue from Multiple angles. But one of the things that she did very early on was say you, you should probably come see what we do. And I was like fine, you know, it seems like a snooze fest. You guys are all scrubbed in and you know, based on what I've seen on ER, just it seems very sterile. And then when I first got in, that's in that room, I just remember thinking, oh my god, this is, this is incredible. I mean it's. There's nothing. I've yet to really see anything that Resembles what goes on in a trauma.

Speaker 3: 11:27

But it's just because, you know, I go back to this experience we had with a news organization that wanted to film and and there was a lot of pushback from the institution, understandably, because we do such great work at our hospital, you know, in terms of transplants and delivering babies and we do all this other great stuff, but people really are fixated on violence, and understandably. But you know, it was hard for the hospital to really reconcile that it's important to show this other side of what we do at the hospital in terms of addressing violence, because we didn't want to be seen as a gun and knife club. We wanted to be seen kind of as this really high-level institution which we are. So there was these conversations and it was interesting because the Media outlets said to us look, we're not going to show, you know, blood and gore at 6 pm Because people are gonna be eating dinner and they don't want to see that. And it really what it really spoke to was the fact that there's this natural disconnect between our what we're willing to, you know, look at in terms of gun violence and what it really looks like, and so that's a Particularly hazardous thing when you're talking about young people, young people who have been raised to think that they can solve their problems by pointing a gun at those problems and pulling the trigger and that with five pounds of pressure that they can alleviate all their issues without Really having to face what's on the other side of that.

Speaker 3: 12:58

And so you know that's how I was raised. You know movies and I, to this day, I still love action movies. But when you're in the trauma bay and you're seeing what doctors have to do in an effort to save lives the fact that they inflict their own trauma on the body To get to the bleeding, to open up you know a chest, to try to cross, clamping aorta to prevent blood from Flowing out of places where blood shouldn't be flowing out of as a result of bullets Traveling through those places that's just not something we've ever seen on television, really, with the exception Maybe of Grey's Anatomy here and there. But when we're talking about a city like Philadelphia, where a couple thousand people will be shot every year this is happening day after day and when we talk about the numbers, it really avoids what those numbers represent, and so I think it's important for A young person who may ultimately want to pick up a firearm to understand what what he or she may ultimately be inflicting on to another person.

Speaker 2: 14:03

Thanks for kind of sharing that, because I know it's something when we've had individuals who've been shot and survived come on the podcast. They often talk about how, rightfully, we focus a lot on people who are killed by gun violence, but we also don't necessarily talk about what it means for you to have that trauma on your body and still have to live with it. So I think what you're saying is really important and want to drill down a little bit on the Cradle to Grave program, because that's a place where you're confronting some of these issues. So I'm wondering if you could tell listeners what that program is and what it looks like.

Speaker 3: 14:35

Yeah, so it really began with how Dr Goldberg and I met back in 2004. At the time, a lot of young kids were being shot in the city and we hadn't seen anything like it before. And I was doing a project. You know, my background is in education and I was doing a project with some young people in North Philly. I was introduced to Dr Goldberg. She arranged a visit and we brought some kids up there to the hospital.

Speaker 3: 14:59

They had this exchange of ideas with surgeons and medical professionals and it was powerful, you know, for the physicians. It allowed them to look at a teenager who hadn't been shot, who wasn't staring up at them and saying I'm not going to die, am I? To ask them questions about their life, what it's like to go to school in a neighborhood where they hear gunshots and where they feel that conflict may lead to their deaths, and then, conversely, to have kids be able to talk to a surgeon some of surgeons look like them and to ask them. You know, what is it like to pronounce a child dead and then go home at the end of the day. How do you come back every day and do this, day after day? And so that was the genesis of what would become the Cradle to Grave program. So we thought it was powerful to bring kids in as learners rather than as patients. And in 2006, we began the program after I joined Temple University Hospital, and what we do is we bring a group of young people into the hospital. A lot of times they are from traditional, you know, public schools, sometimes they're from alternative schools, sometimes they're from juvenile justice programs or diversion programs and they might be court mandated to be a part of that diversion program. But the diversion program sees Cradle to Grave as an important tool and we'll bring them in for a two hour experience and during that experience what we do is we use a real case study of a 16 year old who was shot several years ago here in North Philadelphia, a kid who was so much like these kids.

Speaker 3: 16:28

He was exceptional in how normal and average he was. He was just a sweet kid, a funny kid, a kid who had a. You know his life was really ordinary. You know he had friends, he liked to tell jokes, he was an okay student, he never got in trouble. He was just that kid. He was that every kid and as a result of a misunderstanding he would ultimately be shot 14 times about a block from his house.

Speaker 3: 16:58

And what we do is we narrate all of the events that led up to that moment so that you can see how the most mundane things can result in tragedy when you introduce a gun into that equation. And we pick up the story after the kid is transported to the hospital and we use his medical record, which was something that his grandmother allowed us to do and I want to say his name, because so often we talk about individuals as almost being movie characters or just numbers and his name is Lamont Adams, and I think about Lamont all the time. He was 16 at the time of the shooting and 16 at the time of his death. And his grandmother, jenny Clark. When I spoke to her afterwards, she wanted something good to come out of this, so that it wasn't just about loss, and she hoped that she could save other kids. So she granted us permission to basically open up his medical record so that we could talk about what doctors do, and that's what we've done, for you know, the better part of 17 years is to us to talk about his case in vivid detail and we bring kids into the clinical area, into the trauma bay Again, we don't want them.

Speaker 3: 18:09

We don't want to meet them there as victims. We want to see them there as learners and we have medical staff, surgeons and attendings and residents, nurses, who will come in and talk about their role and what they do and using. They all know his case, they all know Lamont's case so that it can recite kind of all the steps that were done and it's very straightforward. The procedures are just described. We show them the equipment that is used, but we just talk in medical terms about why, for instance, they would cross clamp A or an Aorta. You know, why would they want to prevent blood flow going throughout the body when a patient is bleeding to death? And then, you know, after we explained that after 14 minutes in the trauma bay he was pronounced dead, we take a moment and we reflect kind of what that must have been like for the surgeons, what we know it's going to be like when somebody walks out and tells his grandmother and all of the things that a 16-year-old who's cut down in the prime of their life will miss out on. And it's a conversation A lot of times.

Speaker 3: 19:13

One of the labels that has kind of been put on cradle to grave is that it's a scared straight program, and I think we do that because we just don't know what else to call it. It's kind of a shorthand for talking about difficult things, but this is the leading cause of death for young black men in Philadelphia, and I have to believe that if heart disease was the number one killer of young black men in Philadelphia, no one would really take issue with me talking about what a diseased heart looks like or the medical procedures that are undertaken to try to save a person with heart disease. But for some reason, we're very squeamish when it comes to talking about saving lives. We'll show endless hours of people being killed.

Speaker 3: 19:57

I just watched John Wick 4 because I can't help myself. I was hoping Halle Berry would make a cameo. I was a disappointed spoiler alert, but it was amazing to me that we can watch somebody just like kill person after person after person. Nobody goes to the hospital. Nobody talks about the fact that, in reality, we save about 80% of shooting victims. Admittedly are shooting victims aren't being shot by John Wick, but in reality, in a city like Philadelphia, we're saving more than 80% of shooting victims, and so the issue of gun violence isn't so much about life and death as much as it is. How are you going to cope with living with this devastating injury?

Speaker 1: 20:36

And it's not. I mean, I know and I don't want to speak poorly of the amazing medical folks in Philadelphia, but it's also not that folks are getting shot and they go home the next day and, because they weren't killed, that their recovery is a linear, quick, painless, inexpensive process. It's more folks are living now, but they're living with very severe, not just trauma but like physical issues too right.

Speaker 3: 21:02

I say it all the time. You know I can drive through. I don't live far from from where I work. I can drive through the neighborhoods to get to my home and I see former patients in the streets, you know, in the neighborhoods. You know one of the things that we don't talk about is how geographically limiting poverty is and gun violence is, and so so often the individuals who get shot will be stuck in the neighborhoods where they were shot. So you know there's nobody who's gonna give you a golden ticket and you get out of the neighborhood because you got shot. But when I'm driving through those neighborhoods it really is, it reminds me of war zones and you know, you see the people who are victims, who are in wheelchairs or who have amputations or who are on crutches, and that's probably gonna be there a lot, for quite some time, and it's pervasive, and so not only do they have the physical injuries to deal with, but they're constantly reminded of what they've endured, and everywhere they look, there are people like them who have gone through something similar, and I think that it ultimately you know it ultimately shapes the way that people respond to conflict.

Speaker 3: 22:19

If you live in a neighborhood where there are all these kind of visual, visible reminders of how lethal things are, things that are made lethal by the prevalence of firearms. You're gonna hope for the best, but you're gonna prepare for the worst. And you know you may not necessarily be somebody that would consider themselves an evil person, but when it comes to your own salvation, what you may want to do is pick up a gun and you're not gonna wait for the other person to pull their gun out if you think that they need to do you harm. So there are all these, you know all these different ways that us getting better at medicine has, in some ways, unintended consequences. And that's not to suggest by any means that I hope I wish more people would die. No, I mean, I want everybody to survive. But what it also means is that there will be, there's gonna be something happening as a result of that, and I think it's it's that constant reminder of how violent the community can become.

Speaker 1: 23:18

I was going to ask if you think, if that ties into what you're talking about earlier, with that kind of people's senses of what my life path can even look like, will look like.

Speaker 3: 23:25

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 23:26

I mean, and there's a level of fatalism if you, if you know more kids that have been shot than have gotten accepted to college, that may be how you see your future in terms of that inevitability, but also in terms of just you.

Speaker 3: 23:42

Again, you know, if I, if I do convince a young person that they don't want their mama to grieve, to grieve their loss, then another way of looking at it is, if I haven't given that young person an out or some solution to their issue, then they're stuck there and they're thinking well, okay.

Speaker 3: 24:00

Well then my solution is to pick up a gun and do the person harm. That means to do me harm and so, yeah, I think it feeds into this in in many ways. So the solution to gun violence has to take many forms and part of it, you know, is not just turning off the the tap in terms of the flow of guns into the neighborhood. We absolutely have to do that. But if we don't replace that with something meaningful, something powerful and immediate, you know folks are gonna still feel that level of fatalism, and so we have to tackle this in a variety of ways and I think hopelessness is really the greatest precursor there is to the violence that we're seeing. If we give you know kids something to live for, they're gonna be less willing to die for for other things.

Speaker 2: 24:49

I'm wondering you know you talked about how the posture of the, the kids who do this program, is there in the hospital as learners, and I'm wondering has anyone have you heard stories of people perhaps being inspired themselves to become healers or to get into medicine from what they saw? Because I can imagine, you know, contrary to like you said, it's not scare straight, they're learning. So I'm wondering that sort of had an impact in that way?

Speaker 3: 25:15

So it's interesting, we've not. I would love to say that a lot of the kids that have come through the program ended up being doctors, and if they have, please contact me immediately. But but you know, we can look at the, we can look at the medical schools and we can look at the industry and know that there's not this abundance of kids coming from the neighborhood filling those, those spots. But I but it looks like things are changing slowly but surely with regard to that, but it's certainly not as a result of my program. What I will tell you that we do see periodically are individuals who came through the program as teams. This really makes me feel old, but they came through as kids because they had gotten in trouble. And then they come back bringing a group of kids because they're now counselors and they're now running their own program, and that's, you know, that's heartwarming.

Speaker 3: 26:06

I also had a police officer who pointed out to me when he was, you know, he had a group of kids that were coming through a PAL program. He was a police officer now he pointed out to me that he had come through when he was in high school because he had gotten in trouble and he had turned his life around and and had become a police officer. So you know, those things are out there and one of the things that will happen that happens quite frequently is if I am out to eat or I stop to get something to eat on the way home. I've gone into fast food spots and there'll be a group of kids in there and you know I'm not intimidated.

Speaker 3: 26:39

These are kids that I probably have had through my program and sure enough one of the kids will be like yo, oh, hey, you, the dude that you know taught us about the AK-47, and you, the kid, you know, the guy that showed us, you know what bullets do to bodies, or you know, and, and you know they'll start talking to the friends who haven't gone through the program Yo, you got to see this program, you know I learned a lot. So you know, the goal of the program is just to educate as many kids as we can. You know, I would love to think that a kid, because he had gone or she had gone through the program, ends up in college. But that's really not where the bar is for me. You know, that's the icing on the cake, to mix metaphors. But the you know, the goal for me is just to have young people making informed decisions, and the only way that I can guarantee that is by getting this information out there.

Speaker 2: 27:25

And you mentioned, some people have mischaracterized the program as aired straight. I'm wondering if other people have said well, this is overreach, a hospital shouldn't be doing this. You know this isn't appropriate. And if, if you have gotten that sort of critique, what do you say to people who think that this is outside of the range of what you know a hospital?

Speaker 1: 27:47

I don't want my tax dollars going through this yeah, that one.

Speaker 3: 27:52

That's the good news. The program is not funded by cradle of grave has never had funding from anybody. It's really part of you know, it's what I do with my spare time. It's what my, our nurses and doctors do when they can commit the time to doing it. So that's the good news to the person who doesn't want their tax dollars going to it. But for those who do want the tax dollars going to it, please reach out to your local representative.

Speaker 3: 28:17

And the truth is, when Dr Goldberg and I started doing this, you know, 18 years ago, what we were seeing as heretics. You know and it wasn't just from outside of medicine, people within medicine, kind of like why this is not what we do. But again, to go back to the point, that this is the number one killer of the significant portion of our community. This absolutely has to be what we're, what we should do. This is not a political issue. When you're inside the hospital, nobody's asking them how they voted, nobody's asking the doctors how they voted. We don't care even what they were doing prior to getting shot. This is one of the. This is part of the culture of Temple in particular, that Dr Goldberg was, was keen on it, and it's, and it continues to this day. We do not care about what the individual is involved in. For us, it's about saving lives, and I'm not, I don't want to. I said us because I see those guys as my family. But for the hospital, it's about saving lives, it's not about politicizing this issue, and so for us, the notion of overreaches is just silly. This is what we're meant to do. It looks. It looks different depending on what area of the hospital you're in.

Speaker 3: 29:27

Nobody would say that the X-ray technician I don't want somebody taking pictures of how's that medicine? It's all medicine, it's all community health and that's what we're here for. And, honestly, all that goes out the window. When it's your loved one who's shot, it absolutely goes out the window. And people have said for years bullets have no names and we see people from all walks of life being shot.

Speaker 3: 29:57

Today In Philadelphia, there's a lot of outrage and uproar when, when that gun violence seeps out of the neighborhoods where we expect to find it and ends up in places where the folks who've been protected from it, you know, go about their business. I would like to think that the people that live in the suburbs, who visit the city, are grateful that that somebody is trying to talk to young people who might pick up a gun before they pick up a gun, because, as I said, sometimes that violence seeps out of those neighborhoods where those people are comfortable with it existing in those you know, quote unquote neighborhoods, but there's no guarantees not going to find its way into center city and and I would hope that you'd be grateful that we're trying to stop it before it gets there.

Speaker 1: 30:43

Well, I think, to use your metaphor before, like I don't have heart disease, but I'm really thankful that people do research into it and are trying to keep other people from getting it. You know one, because we not having heart disease doesn't make me care less about people who have it.

Speaker 3: 30:57

Well, in the argument, right is you know. You know every, every time we talk about how insane the numbers are, that this many Americans suffer a gunshot injury every day, and then inevitably somebody says, we'll now do do heart attacks or now do this. And I always think it's such a weird argument because it suggests that we only have the capacity to do one thing. And I think you know we can walk and shoot gun, and never have I seen somebody suffering a heart attack and then have you know somebody in the in the hospital announced well, hold on, let's not, let's not try to save that guy. Do you know how many people you know die from cancer every year? I mean, we don't do that in the hospital. We don't say like, let's prioritize who gets treatment based on the ranking in terms of its frequency in the population. We just don't do that. So we, you know we divide our time and we have people who specialize in a certain thing, and this just happens to be the thing that I specialize in.

Speaker 2: 31:55

And kind of continuing to think about this holistic approach. For example, when you're talking about something like heart disease, a lot of times doctors will do preventative things. They'll think about your diet and you know your cholesterol, things like that. And we know, for gun violence prevention, one of those things deals with access and so your program you hand out gun locks and safes, and so I'm wondering how that developed and what that looks like in a hospital setting, because we've seen examples in, you know, law enforcement settings. But I'm wondering what it looks like for for healthcare settings.

Speaker 3: 32:27

Yeah, the way it started really was me being on social media and there's an individual, tagrox's handle, who would talk. He had a hashtag that he really helped create called gunfail, and I would see these stories of these kids being shot by other children or unintentionally shooting themselves, which was just heartbreaking for me. It's just like such a preventable thing, and I'd also see kids who were coming up to visit their parents, and so I would have a gunshot victim in a room that I'd been working with or talking with, and I'd see his girlfriend or wife and their child downstairs, and so I knew that this is an individual who, based on our conversation, may very well have a firearm at home, and I would think about the fact that the way that most people are able to get gunlocks if they're not getting their guns from like since gun dealer is that they'd have to go to law enforcement to get those gunlocks. And so, thinking about that kid, that young man or that man who's laying in the bed, who's wrestling with whether or not he should retaliate or maybe he's not even thinking about retaliation, but maybe he's thinking simply about his own protection and he may have a gun at home, especially now that he's been shot. Where is he going to get that gun? He's going to get that gunlock if he's a prohibited individual, and so the answer traditionally has been from law enforcement and he's not going to do that If he's not going to go ask for a gunlock for the gun that he's not supposed to have.

Speaker 3: 34:07

In having conversations on social media about this, I'll get people who will criticize the fact that I'm giving gunlocks to prohibited individuals, and all I can think of is those are the people who need them the most. I don't want any child to suffer for the mistakes that their parents have made or the bad decisions that their parents have made. I want to have a conversation with that individual about one not keeping a gun in the house, not having a gun as a prohibited individual. But if I can't dissuade him from that, what I am going to do is encourage him to safely secure that gun. I'm going to have conversations with him about how often kids are being shot, how dangerous it is to keep a gun up on a closet shelf because you think that your four-year-old isn't going to find it there, and not only have that talk with him, but to give him the tools and give him the implement necessary to make his child safer. And that's really where it started, by having conversations at the bedside and then saying yo, do you want a gunlock? And after that conversation not everybody would want a gunlock but for those who do, like yeah, absolutely, I'd be able to physically give them a gunlock while he's still in the hospital.

Speaker 3: 35:17

That kind of evolved from me giving out gunlocks at the bedside to me making them, offering them on social media, saying you know I'm going to be at the hospital if you want to come by and pick up a gunlock, and people would reach out to me and call me, say can I come through and get one? That then further evolved to me working with community groups going out to very busy intersections, places that are close to the subway, and announcing I'm going to be out there giving out gunlocks and hitting commuters and having conversations and I've had brief conversations with them to talk to them about how important it is to safely secure the guns and giving them out there and that way. And then that just expanded further to our hospital now has signs up in the emergency department that notifies visitors and patients that if they're interested in receiving a gunlock they can get one from any nurse, any tech, any doctor, no questions asked. And so, you know, we just see this in the same way that, I'm sure, dentists see giving out toothbrushes, and it's hard to see where the harm is. We only really see an upside to that, and so we are grateful that it's something that the city is really embraced. There are a lot of partners in the city that are giving out gunlocks, and other hospitals are now giving out gunlocks as well, so it's really become quite a movement.

Speaker 3: 36:35

I absolutely do not get why anybody would be opposed to saving somebody's life. I just, you know, we can have our political differences, we absolutely can, but it just still boggles the mind that we can't find common ground around saving individuals' lives, and one of the things that, one of the interesting things that will happen, is, oftentimes I have these positions that are completely different from another person who's really a staunch gun rights person, and a lot of it is just because of how wound up everybody gets. But then I'll invite them, you know, they'll challenge me. Well, you know, you should be listening to this person or this person. I'll say, well, come meet with me, you know, and I'll drop my email.

Speaker 3: 37:18

I'll drop my email, you know, in the chat and I don't mean that, as you know, calling somebody's bluff, I really mean reach out, let's have this conversation. And it hasn't really happened yet until recently. And I met an individual who is a staunch gun rights guy and I mean his Jeep is covered in all of the stickers, all the second amendment stickers and all of that, and I don't think he and I could be more diametrically opposed when it comes to a lot of issues around guns. But I think, as cliche as it sounds, he and I have a lot more in common and he and I are meeting and he and I are having conversations, in particular about protecting children from unintentional gun injury. And I'll admit I've learned a lot in having these conversations. I've been to his home, we've sat out on the deck.

Speaker 3: 38:12

Again, he looks at it through a very different lens than I do. I look at it through a different lens, obviously, but we find a lot of common ground and we put our differences aside to say what are the things that we can do? Where do our interests overlap? Well, we don't feel like we're infringing on each other's rights and let's work in that space and let's see where we go from there. And so you know I don't mean to tease this for something that is going to come later, but I'm excited to say that I think that this is going to lead to a really important project in the coming months. That's wonderful.

Speaker 2: 38:46

I'm looking forward to hearing about it because I think that is the sort of place that we need to get to when, as you said, it's the number one cause of death for Black men and we saw recently, gun violence is the number one cause of death for American children period and so there are places where, to your point, who is opposed to keeping kids alive? I hope no one.

Speaker 3: 39:06

And so we have to stop moralizing this issue. It's incredibly racialized. Obviously, we want to believe the folks in the neighborhood who are dying from gun violence are less than and are deserving of that peril, you know. I think that we have to be honest about where that motivation is to look at them as other. It's rooted in racism, if we are.

Speaker 3: 39:29

You know, when people talk about Chicago and Chicago has become this punching bag, I'm always like Philadelphia's way worse gun violence rate than Chicago. But the reason it's become a punching bag is obviously because, you know, it's a city that has a large minority population and we say, well, look at Chicago. And I always think is Chicago not in America At last? I checked Chicago is in America At last. I checked Chicagoans, regardless of their color. We're Americans. Why are we OK, if you're OK, saying like they shouldn't be counted as the Americans who were dying of gun violence? What you're saying is that they're not really Americans, that they're black and Latino and as a result of that, they're not like the rest of us. That's the definition of racism and let's just be honest about it.

Speaker 1: 40:21

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Speaker 2: 40:37

Thanks for listening. As always, brady's lifesaving work in Congress, the courts and communities across the country is made possible thanks to you. For more information on Brady or how to get involved in the fight against gun violence, please like and subscribe to the podcast. Get in touch with us at bradyunitedorg or on social at BradyBuzz. Be brave and remember. Take action, not sags MUSIC.