Childhood Trauma, Gun Violence, and the Fight for Safe Spaces

What if we told you that the key to preventing gun violence in youth lies not just in legislation, but also in acknowledging and addressing the root causes of trauma? Kelly and JJ sit down with  Dr. Sonali Rajan ,  President of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms (and also, as you'll learn, about a million other things!).  Our conversation orbits around the interconnection between a child's environment, school health, and gun violence, with Dr. Rajan casting light on the findings from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System and the associated risk factors of gun carriage. Dr. Rajan unpacks how  Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have a profound impact on a child's development, and how we  — even if you're childfree, and don't work with children  — can be helping kids still reach positive outcomes.  

Further reading:
 Youth exposure to violence involving a gun: evidence for adverse childhood experience classification (Journal of Behavior Medicine)
 Fast Facts: Preventing Adverse Childhood Experiences (CDC)
 Shots that Echo for a Lifetime (Teacher's College Columbia University)
 Surviving a school shooting: Impacts on the mental health, education, and earnings of American youth (SIEPR)

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, blue 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 I am so excited that we are bringing you this episode with someone who I am just forcing to be my friend, dr Sonali Rajan. I first met Sonali through the National Research Conference for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, which has been put on by the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms Recently was just at the conference, but really I cannot thank Sonali, her colleagues at Columbia and the other folks that are really working to push the envelope on gun violence prevention research, especially as we'll talk about today on how it relates to children and adolescents.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Yeah, and I was delighted to meet Sonali through you, jj, because she is a professor at Teachers College at Columbia and that is where I actually study for the bar, so it's been a lot of days in that library in particular. So it was a lovely little connection to see all the great work that she's doing, just really diving into gun violence and how it impacts youth not just in the immediate moment but also throughout their lives. But it's not a downer, because she also her research has implications on how we can help children to sort of move to flourishing.

Speaker 1: 2:07

Oh, move to flourishing. I like that it can't be the title of this episode, but it's what you should all keep in mind as you're listening to it.

Speaker 3: 2:15

You guys are so kind and so lovely and thank you first of all for having me on today. So my name is Dr Sonali Rajan and I am an associate professor in the Department of Health and Behavior Studies at Teachers College, columbia University. I also have a faculty appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and I am currently the inaugural president of the Research Society for Firearm-Related Harms.

Speaker 1: 2:43

So many hats, maybe one head. How do you?

Speaker 1: 2:45

like that, Lots of hats, and I didn't even add in the part that I'm a mom to an eight-year-old maybe my most important title and we're going to dig into a lot of those titles and a lot of those departments and what they mean functionally when we're talking about gun violence and research. But I think Kelly and I are both always really curious how people ended up here of all places, especially considering obviously all of the health-related work kind of that these departments are. How did you end up focusing within that on gun violence and I'm for our listeners edification like on violence and childhood experiences more broadly?

Speaker 3: 3:19

That's such a good question and I think if you had said to me when I was in college or when I was in graduate school that this is what I would end up devoting my career to, I would have. This is not necessarily how I would have pictured it, but I love the field of gun violence prevention science and I'm very grateful and privileged to do the work that I do. And I did arrive here in a little bit of a roundabout way. So when I was a doctoral student and working in my dissertation and in the very early stages of my postdoctoral lifetime and early faculty lifetime, I was really broadly focused on an area that we call school health, and so all of my research was really interested in understanding connections between health and learning, and I was particularly interested and this was reflected in my dissertation work. But how does a school's climate and a school's environment shape a child's sense of well-being? And a lot of the work I did looked at health issues such as physical activity and sleep and nutrition and substance use and mental health and really trying to understand how do we support children so that they are motivated and ready to learn, and I think about everything I need every day to come to work and do my job well. I go running and I sleep and drink water and lots of coffees. I know what I need as an adult to do that, as a privileged adult. And so certainly for children, we need to make sure that they are also well-fed and cared for at home and at school, because I'm looking at all the things my eight-year-old is doing right now in school multiplication quizzes and the expectations that we hold for our children and so they need to be supported health-wise in all aspects to do that. So that kind of was the broad area of my research focus for a number of years and in 2014,.

Speaker 3: 5:17

So my best friend, kelly Ruggles, is also a professor at NYU. She was my college roommate and we've known each other for many, many, many years and she's a bioinformatic scientist. We had a lot of fun again early on in our faculty careers writing papers together and when, in 2014, she and I just took 10 years worth of the CDC data. The CDC has a surveillance system, the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, and it's a national database that collects data on teenagers on all sorts of different health issues, and Kelly and I took I think it was data across 10 or 12 years worth of that data. And what precipitated this was the Sandy Hook shooting had happened just a couple years prior. But Kelly and I for both of us we were both in high school when Columbine happened. I'm dating myself now, but we'll just go with that. We were both in high school when Columbine happened. She and I were both in graduate school when Virginia Tech happened. We were both beginning our faculty careers when Sandy Hook happened.

Speaker 3: 6:26

So, like many of us and our listeners, gun violence and certain gun violence incidents have punctuated moments in our lifetime, and so one of the questions in this CDC survey is how frequently do you carry a gun? And lots of really excellent, compelling literature that describes the risk that just gun carriage alone places place right, and so that by itself is a risk factor. And Kelly and I were just interested in saying, if we employ some of her informatics methods and played with this data and tried to make sense of it and look for patterns, what are some of the behavioral correlates that might associate with gun possession? Like if we were just really just to think outside of the box. So you hear a lot of discourse around mental health and all of that, but we were like what else is going on. And so we wrote this paper that was published in plus one, and both of our moms, who are also scientists, had never been prouder.

Speaker 3: 7:27

And we wrote this paper and in it there were sort of many things that we found, but something that I thought was we both thought that was particularly compelling was and interesting was that, yes, indicators of poor mental health, substance use all of those things that you might expect correlate with gun carriage was there and present. But in our work we also clearly showed, year after year and across the sample of kids, that kids who had been previously exposed to gun violence or violence of any kind, kids who were reporting that they don't feel safe on the way to and from school, in school itself, at home, kids who had been previously exposed to violence of any kind or even threats of any kind, those kids whose perceptions of safety were not there, they were the kids more likely to report carrying a gun. And I know what I'm saying right now is so obvious Like this. What I'm describing doesn't even feel like rocket science, because it's not. It's very intuitive, but for me that was certainly a light bulb moment in that my whole work up until that point was focused on, like I was saying, physical activity and sleep and all these other outcomes.

Speaker 3: 8:37

But then I was like, well, if kids don't fundamentally feel safe at home or in school or wherever, they're not going to sleep well or eat well or, honestly, they're not going to have good mental health, how could they?

Speaker 3: 8:48

And it seemed so. I kind of had this moment where I was like what precedes all of these other positive health outcomes, you need a sense of safety and stability which again feels very intuitive. It's so something that we should all expect and hope for all children, but clearly is not the case for many, many kids across the country. And so that was around the time that I really just was starting to get more and more interested in this area of work and started to learn a lot more about the field and the gaps in funding and how little there was. A lot we knew, but also so much we didn't know and lots of opportunity for questions to be asked and answered, and there was just so much more we needed to do. And so that all came together and over the past several years I've been just delving right into that. And so here I am and the vast majority of the research I engage in is very much centered on this topic and in this area.

Speaker 2: 9:53

So, before we dive more into your work, I'm wondering if we can define the terms in a playing field. And so what is an adverse childhood experience, and is it an ACE or an ACE?

Speaker 3: 10:04

Great question, ok. So yes, I tend to use these terms and then I don't explain them up front. So thank you for asking. Ok, so an adverse childhood experience is essentially a potentially traumatic event that undermines a child's sense of safety and stability.

Speaker 3: 10:21

And historically so, the term ACE so we call them ACEs for short, the term ACE was introduced into the literature via a very famous, well-known study that was conducted in 1999. And in that work it was scientists from Kaiser Permanente and others and in that work they really operationalized this concept of an ACE. And historically the term has included household dysfunction and parents with mental illness or children who experience abuse of some kind. So really for a very long time ACEs really focused in on about eight or nine of those kinds of very particular experiences that happen at home. Interestingly, and over the past few years the types of ACEs have expanded to involve different kinds of experiences, partly as our scientific understanding of children and their well-being has evolved and also our recognition of real systemic factors racism, poverty that also drive these experiences, that do place children at high and risk. So the definition of what comprises an ACE has expanded, and a few years ago so I'm very fortunate to work with a number of wonderful colleagues, among them Charlie Brandes, who is the Epidemiology Department Chair here at Mailman, and he and I have been having this conversation around. Well, we have all of these ACEs, but exposure to gun violence during childhood is not considered an ACE. It had not been operationalized in the actual definition and data collection and surveillance of how we think about ACEs, and I think we, along with a couple of our colleagues Dr Nina Agrival, who's a pediatrician and just a brilliant leader in this field and one of our wonderful students all of us really said, well, let's review the literature, let's do a systematic review, let's sit down and understand what have historically been considered ACEs. What Does gun violence exposure look like in children and does it make sense, right from a truly from a conceptual perspective and how we understand ACEs to impact children and their brain and their development? Does it make sense to include youth exposure to gun violence as an ACE and can we make an argument for that? And we did, and so so, spoiler alert, gun violence is an ACE. So in the context of that, we wrote a paper in 2019 and really argued again, using the literature as a framework for our understanding, not only that gun violence during childhood should be considered an ACE, but why that's so important? So to get to your question about what an ACE is, an ACE has a very specific impact on children and their development.

Speaker 3: 13:17

So experiencing an ACE and I'll put probably says by saying also I was just talking about this in a meeting like right before this part of why I love studying kids is because as much as we as a society do to place kids at risk and we don't do nearly enough to consider their wellbeing on so many levels. But kids are amazing and when there is access to good support and interventions and resources, kids can thrive. And so what I love about kids is you can work with them and even if society has messed, has placed them at all this high risk and messed them up, we can do so much to try and undo that. There's like room for that hope and optimism which makes me feel a little bit better in the context of trying to do something in this space. And so when you have experience in ACE, if a child does not receive active intervention and support in the aftermath of that ACE, then what happens is that ACE actually disrupts the neurodevelopment in a child's brain and that then leads them to be far more likely to engage in other higher risk behaviors. It places them at higher risk for all sorts of things. I'll talk about this in one second. And then it actually then, without again, without any intervention or support, places them at such high risk that they're more likely to exhibit a range of poor health outcomes on a number of things.

Speaker 3: 14:44

In the process of writing this paper, I was just sharing my doctoral student who's a co-author on that paper, and just phenomenal, I remember this. We were working through our Thanksgiving break because we had a deadline for this paper, so I remember this really vividly. In our conversations around this work, we were all just continually amazed at how every poor health outcome you could possibly imagine in some form can be tied back to having had one or more ACEs, like cancer risk, chronic disease, heart disease, substance use, mental health, oral health, adhd I mean you name it. There is a paper out there that has linked some poor health outcome back to an ACE. So what we showed in our work is that it's really important to understand what comprises ACEs to begin with. We need to do that at a very minimum and then we need to enter if we know it's an ACE and we could intervene, right, we could intervene immediately in the aftermath of that experience so that we prevent. So this is the beautiful thing about kids, right? So if we don't do anything, kids in our place are at a higher risk for all the things I just described. But if we do intervene, then kids actually that those interventions mitigate the harms that ACEs then place on their short and long-term health outcomes.

Speaker 3: 16:01

And that was like so mind-blowing in some ways, because it's like well, gun violence is increasing, right, it has only increased in the past few years.

Speaker 3: 16:11

Some of the work that my colleagues and I did last year showed not only is it increasing, but if you look at the post-COVID trends, it has gotten so much worse for children across the US, and not just in the context of those who were shot and killed, although that obviously is horrific and a big portion of the tragedies we're trying to prevent but even for children who are survivors of gun violence, who hear gun shots as they walk to and from school, who are witnessing gunfire, who have lost friends or loved ones to gun violence.

Speaker 3: 16:45

This range of experiences needs to be understood. It needs to be prevented, most importantly, but if it happens we need to intervene, particularly for children, in the aftermath of and part of our argument in this work. And the reason I'm interested in ACEs as a general area is because, well, yeah, gun violence is a we'll talk about it. I'm sure today it's a controversial topic and there's lots of perspectives on what solutions look like, but ACEs are something that we can all agree. We should be preventing, right ACEs? Gun violence as a child health and child wellbeing issue should hopefully be something that we can all come to agreement on, and so I think that's where a lot of my interest in ACEs specifically has come from, because I do see it as an avenue to think more creatively about meaningful advocacy and progress in a space that has often been mired with politics and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 17:43

No, and I think it's the yeah, how can you not get behind helping children? And one of the things that I think that you're really articulating well here, too, is that we need research in these areas, because it seems, once you connect those dots, it appears obvious, but you have to connect those dots first. Someone has to put that together and correlate all this information, and so I'm wondering it may seem like a really simplistic question, but I know it doesn't have a simple answer Like what is the role of research playing, then in gun violence prevention? That is an helpful you know how do we take things out of Columbia and into the wider world?

Speaker 3: 18:16

Yes, Well, I am biased as a gun violence researcher. Obviously, I think research in this space is really important and in leading this research society now I am having the opportunity to get a real bird's eye view of the field, which is just this extraordinary field of just completely devoted, collaborative, phenomenal individuals at all career levels, I might add, who are just all hands on deck on this, and I love and appreciate so much the energy and the collaborative nature of that. You know, I know it feels silly sometimes to say have to say things like health and learning are connected or guns are an adverse child, gun violence is an adverse childhood experience. But here's what I will say, and I do think this is really important Gun violence as just a phenomenon is politicized, whether we like to, whether we can't change that right now. The politic I mean maybe we can change it down the line, but at the moment it just is and it has been for many, many years. So we want to move forward with solutions and the best way to do that is to move forward with evidence, informed solutions.

Speaker 3: 19:23

I do a lot of as I know we've talked about, I do a lot of interviews with journalists and media, usually in the aftermath of different shootings and in talking through this issue with the public. And something that I always think is really important is yeah, people know, for example, I'm a parent, I talk about my kid all the time. I can't help it, okay, I'm crazy about him, but I say that to say I want people to know. I want reporters in the public or whoever I'm talking to schools, principals, I want them to know that whatever I'm bringing to the table, I'm bringing to the table as a scientist, that what I'm sharing, what we're and it's not just me, it's all of us in this field that the solutions we're putting forth are not driven by personal preference or personal experiences or political affiliation. These are nonpartisan, data-driven, evidence-informed solutions that are driving what we should or should not be doing, and I think it's really critical that in order to do that well and this is, I think, so important in fields like this, to do that well we need to have really good quality data informing those solutions.

Speaker 3: 20:28

So I think, from just like a how do we move forward together perspective, the research piece is key because we want to look to the research for the solutions. You don't want to talk to me as a mom and ask me my opinion. That's not appropriate. It doesn't even make sense, right? How could I speak to a solution in that context without any bias? That's just not possible. But if you talk to me as a scientist, you talk to my colleagues or my students as scientists. We are all saying, well, this is what the data are telling us, right? This is what we know and maybe what we? Maybe the answer is we don't know, right. So I get a lot of questions about certain types of solutions in schools or otherwise, and sometimes my answer to folks is well, we don't actually know if that works or not, but this is something that warrants study or warrants more evaluation, and I think that's something that the field as a whole is really committed to doing and that feels particularly important in this piece, I think, to answer your question sort of.

Speaker 3: 21:26

The other component of that is also, I think, that the public discourse around solutions to gun violence tends to be very myopic in nature, in that we are focused often on debate and discourse around very specific policies that speak explicitly to access to firearms for prescribed users in different contexts. And what have you Now? That absolutely ought to be and should be a part of the public discourse. It should be something that our elected officials are thinking through in thoughtful ways. Again, there's an extraordinary level of excellent research driving what we know and don't know about lots of different policies, but that's like one component of what the range of solutions look like.

Speaker 3: 22:14

It turns out and again the research shows this that there is a very wide range of actual investments in our communities and in our schools that goes way beyond specific firearm policies.

Speaker 3: 22:28

That would allow us to understand and be creative in thinking about what solutions to this look like Greenspace and affordable housing and universal school-based violence prevention programming and really thinking about the role of basic infrastructure as public libraries and all sorts of things that have been shown in the research to have connections to gun violence, that disrupt those cycles of disenfranchisement.

Speaker 3: 22:56

I mean, those are really like we need to be. The problem is so vast and we need to be thinking about solutions that encompass the vastness of the problem. It's such a big problem, so how do we actually intervene and prevent that? And I think this is where that all hands on deck, interdisciplinary, creative way of being is so needed, and that's what I, among many aspects of the research community in this space that I love and appreciate, but that has been so heartening to see just the again, the real creativity and sharing of ideas and coming together of new methods and disciplines to be like all right, how could we think about this differently? And that's where I feel like the research community can play a really and is playing a very big role in progress on this issue.

Speaker 2: 23:49

You touched on something that I've personally experienced working in this area, which is like there's this weird tension where some of the truths that we deal with are to your point, they're so obvious right, we still need the data, but they're imminently obvious, like if you're a six year old and you see a shooting that's going to do something to you. But then there's also the other thing you touched on, which is that gun violence is complex. It interacts with different communities in different ways. It has intersections with infrastructure and all these things, and so sometimes, whether someone is feeling stuck because they are disillusioned and sad, or they're feeling stuck because they just don't want to deal with it and it seems complicated, how would you break down for someone that, yes, there are angles and dimensions to gun violence that require a multifaceted approach, but also it doesn't mean that we can't do anything and that it's impossible to solve?

Speaker 1: 24:46

That's like the million dollar question that is the fundamental problems at the heart of our movement.

Speaker 3: 24:54

Just yes, yes, that is the tension I think all of us in this field and in this space are wrestling with day in and day out. I've used this line in different contexts, but I'll share it here, which is, I think, all of us probably feel. I certainly feel this way. I am often walking that line between hope and hopelessness, right. So it's devastating to see the shootings, the prevalence of this issue, the way it impacts families and communities, and also then to go to work every day and to think about how can we do better. And I think the thing that gives me a lot of hope is, again, the community of scholars and partners that we work with to do this. Now, that being said, I think I try to answer the first part of your question. So I try to think about describing the nuance of gun violence, kind of like we would consider the nuance for other health issues or conditions. So, for example, if I just said chronic disease, well, there's lots of types of chronic disease, right, and within that, there's lots of different variations. Or even if I said diabetes more broadly, right, within the context of diabetes, there's type one, there's type two, they, depending on when in your lifetime you develop this, it might impact how you treat it or how you respond to it, or if we think about cancer prevention. You know, cancer prevention is actually a great example in some ways, because lots of different types of cancer, they affect different populations differently, different groups might be at higher risk or not. Our screening and prevention looks different given the type of cancer. So, in that same way that we know and understand and have normalized the nuance of other types of diseases and health conditions, by that same token, gun violence is also equally complex. We have suicide, right. We have mass shootings, school shootings, with which can be a subset of that, but also other types of school shootings that happen, unintentional or accidental shootings that take place, community based violence, gun violence and everything in between, interpersonal violence that involves firearms and, as I was saying earlier, ace is the, the idea of an ACE, which is that there's other types of just the exposure to gun violence, the indirect experiences that are so critical to understanding and then preventing.

Speaker 3: 27:13

So part of what I think is really important is, you know, as we all know far too well, you know, the vast majority of media coverage typically focuses on the very public mass shootings that tragically happen and those are so important to prevent and to respond to and we need to attend to those absolutely. But, to quote my colleagues, that is the proverbial tip of a much larger iceberg of gun violence. Right, and we most. Gun violence in this country doesn't make the daily news, it doesn't make often forget, the national news, may not even make your local news. Right, because it is that prevalent and happens so frequently and sometimes to whom it happens to also impacts. Right, how, as you can, you both know better than me how the public consumes that information. And so I think that piece of this is to sit back and say listen, we need to understand the nuance here. We need to recognize that preventing suicide there might be overlap, right, with preventing school shootings. You know we think about firearm storage and other efforts that we all know work really well that could play out and have impact on different kinds of gun violence. But there's also nuance, right, very specific nuance. I mean I specifically study school gun violence prevention. I have colleagues who are also gun violence researchers but specifically study suicide prevention and it varies across geography, across the life course, across different communities. It just looks different and so part of our individual expertise and experiences to try and understand the nuance here.

Speaker 3: 28:54

Now, what I have said often and this is where I just think is so important to share is that, yes, there's a lot we still need to know and to understand, but there is so much we already know works. That would not necessarily require Congress coming together and agreeing on a specific policy. It could require us to be more creative with how our budgets look like at the federal, state and more municipal levels. It could. It would require us to rethink how we structure schools or where our financial priorities go. There are lots of things that we could do, and I'm happy to give examples, but there's lots of things we could do now that we could say well, right now schools are doing XYZ and that's expensive and we don't even know if it works, and instead maybe we could do.

Speaker 3: 29:42

These three things that we do know have an impact and even if they don't fix gun violence altogether, they would reduce its harm, and I think that's where we want to go right. We're not. Listen, I'm a real. I'm an optimist 90% of the time, but also a realist in the sense of I understand that we are limited in making progress here and there. So any reduction in harm is a positive step forward, and I think that's where I don't know if you both feel our listeners maybe feel frustrated in this way, but I do sometimes feel like, yeah, if the federal government came to me and said we need a plan for preventing school shootings, we have one. We have lots of ideas and published papers that have literally documented a framework for actually doing this.

Speaker 3: 30:29

But it requires leadership, it requires reprioritizing budgets. It also requires reimagining the possibilities here, and I think that's where, if nothing else, I would love the public framing and there's journalists who are absolutely doing this beautifully and I'm so grateful to them for sharing and amplifying these stories but we need to just flip the lid on how we talk about it. So how do we start to associate other active solutions with moving progress forward and how do we bring that to the ballot box and how do we actually think about engaging our elected officials on those components? And so, yeah, you're hearing, I guess, both but my optimism and maybe frustration as we think about what solutions look like, but I do feel like that. The encouraging thing to me is that there's a lot we know and that makes me feel better.

Speaker 1: 31:25

That makes me feel better too. So you're not alone. You're not alone in that boat of like cautious optimism or like happiness, but couched. But one of the things, though, that is present here within this is that then the public, or the our elected officials, have to then trust researchers. And I think about this a lot, especially kind of in the post COVID world, where I used to think honestly, going into COVID, that public health officials were a trusted source, right, that people kind of just went, okay, yeah, exactly, dr So-and-so said it. I must do. We learned I think the country learned that's actually not the case that there actually is a lot of skepticism or a lot of distrust of kind of medical or public health officials. And so I wonder how, if you have any thoughts on how we bridge that gap to of one, establishing very firmly that gun violence prevention is a piece of public health work that can't be up for debate, and then two, and within that, the prescription that is being given then by public health officials needs to be followed.

Speaker 3: 32:23

You are tapping into something I have thought there is. Another day has gone by where I have not thought about exactly this in the past three years. I think we all have. I've nothing else has been heartbroken by some of the public health leadership and sort of public response to the public health asks during COVID and the divisions that ensued on everything from how mask efficacy was communicated to why it's important to ensure schools are safe and what clean air should look like and how that connects to learning and, you know, vaccine uptake and the systemic factors driving a lot of that as well. I mean just so many aspects to our collective COVID response.

Speaker 3: 33:13

You know I wrote this little thing last year drawing a lot of connections between the US, the US's response to COVID and its response to gun violence, which is a reliance on tertiary strategies very reactive, very little on the context of prevention, very little that considers why prevention is so important and how to message that. I think that I see a lot of parallels there and, to be clear, these are not easy decisions or easy leadership choices to make and so much of COVID. What we know now was very different two, three years ago and a lot of things and mistakes get learned in hindsight. So I understand that the complexity there, but I also think the good leadership then needs to own and redirect and re-correct. When we see children who are getting repeated infections, and schools yes, private schools with lots of resources, very well protected from COVID, versus public schools that have 32 kids in a classroom and no windows or working AC to keep that air clean. So lots of just real opportunity for investment that we didn't do as a nation and I think that has been extraordinarily disappointing and it's been a feeling that I think has reverberated in the gun violence world too. I mean, that's just that's where. I mean gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and teens in the US and we, frankly, have allowed it to get to that point. So that is a failure of our. That is a failure that as a nation we have to own. And now we have to say what are we doing to move forward on this, you know, I think in the context of how do we garner that trust back. So I think there's lots of lessons learned, what worked well, but what have we done right? What have we done less correctly?

Speaker 3: 35:10

But I think, importantly understanding a couple of things. One is yes, gun violence is a public health issue, but that doesn't mean that only those in public health should be involved in its solution. So this is something I think is really important, again, as from my vantage point of leading this research society. You guys know we have 700 people coming to Chicago for the largest national conference on gun violence prevention science ever, and we have close to two dozen academic disciplines represented. Right, that means we are working with social workers and school nurses and medical doctors and epidemiologists and criminologists and law enforcement and everyone in between to really generate good quality, evidence driven solutions. So I want to also.

Speaker 3: 35:56

So part of this, I think, is us as a field being very clear that we are working together all of us because no community is immune to gun violence in the US and it's important and imperative that we are working together on all and pulling all the possible levers to move this forward. And I think that's an important trust piece here, because it's not just public health as this otherized entity. It is all of us together in this. In fact, even me myself. I'm not pure public health. I'm someone who really sits at the intersection of education and public health. So it's even I don't reflect public health purely. So I think that's really important, but I will also say that part of I think that something that I think is really important for us to connect with publicly and as we talk about this, is that solutions are go beyond policy. They involve, by the way, input and and reflections and support from gun owners, that they are not. It is not about a red state, blue state issue. This is that these are investments.

Speaker 3: 36:58

What are we asking for in the context of gun violence prevention? We are saying, before, years and years before a child feels so isolated and or let down and or whatever, we play well before they, even well before a child chooses to pick up a firearm and bring it to school to hurt themselves or someone else, that is a last resort and we have failed a child over and over and over again. If that is where they are at at the age of 16, 17, 18, we have failed that child, not just in the context of where they got that gun although that is also something that has to be part of the conversation but what brought them to a point where they needed to, they felt compelled to commit that kind of violence. So when I talk, we talk about school shooters and all of that understanding prevention is like what's happening way, way, way before. That feels so critical and so important. So like this idea that mental health only gets talked about after a mass shooting.

Speaker 3: 37:57

And then last year, yeah, okay. So, as many of us know, of course, the mass shooting in Ubalde, texas, at Rob elementary school, happened and lots of calls by elected officials all over for investments, increased investments in mental health. And you know what? There was a school safety bill a few months later that would have increased state level resources for mental health services and access to like just increasing the number of social workers and guidance counselors. And how many elected officials just didn't didn't vote for that. That is a choice to say. We are choosing at this point to not invest in the thing we said mattered four months ago and that, frankly, is unacceptable. That's not a red or blue issue. That is failing to meet the needs of what your constituents need and are asking for, and I think this is where I'm going a little off, I realize, but this is just no.

Speaker 1: 38:50

I'm literally about to just start saying like amen, yeah, I'm enjoying this deeply.

Speaker 3: 38:55

I just feel like you know we need to, we. I just feel like we really need to think about where the field is. Yes, we need to grow the, we need to grow that trust, but we also then need to not be okay when our like elected officials, who do have privilege and power and resources, when they are not making the choices that best represent what the data say, what the science is, and we as researchers, scholars, those of us in the public health leadership, need to then step up and say this is not okay. And I think that is a very difficult thing, a very difficult line to walk. I think that's challenging on lots of levels. It's not always easy to do that, but I would like to see more of that and, frankly, not just among public health. I will say this also I think public health as a field is phenomenal, has done so much good for so many parts of the world. We have so much, there's so much good that comes out of the field of public health. So I am not a critic of the public health field because I think it is an extraordinary field, full of dedicated scholars and partners who make so much of the world better and safer and more tenable.

Speaker 3: 40:05

I think what the expectation we are holding the public health field to needs to be held, frankly, to other fields too education, right, our, our criminal justice system, thinking about all the facets of our federal government all the way on down to our local municipalities. We need to be looking and saying what, how are what? Where is this funding going right? Like, why does New York City spend over half of its school safety budget on police in schools, when that is an example of an quote intervention that has no evidence guiding its effectiveness. Right, there's 32 kids in a class, we have underpaid teachers, but we have police in schools. I'm not opposed to some baby police being in schools and very specific roles, and maybe that's something that we need to look more closely at the literature to better understand. But that's an example right of where are we putting our resources? That's not on public health, that's on leadership. Right, that's on other systems. To also speak up and understand, what should we be investing in?

Speaker 1: 41:05

I know public health is saying no, but politicians are saying yes.

Speaker 3: 41:12

And that's happening. And this is where I will say exactly like, what are we trying to do here? You know, gun violence is a public health issue, but something I often talk about in my work is it's a child health issue. As we talked about before, it's a learning issue. So lots of conversation and discourse around learning loss and all of that. Well, gun violence is a learning issue. You want kids to learn and take tests and do well and learn to read. They need to feel safe at school in all aspects, right. We want families to feel engaged and supported. Well, we need to make sure that they and their families are safe from firearm violence.

Speaker 3: 41:47

There's lots of ways to reframe gun violence. So, yes, it's a public health issue and it is also an issue that needs to be taken up by other areas. In fact, if we think about it right, we've organized our lives around the inevitability of gun violence in many ways Shooter drills and bystander programs that teach people how to tie a tourniquet in the case of a shooting, and just thinking about, you know, real estate costs in different neighborhoods and thinking about the systemic factors, right? So just thinking about all the ways that gun violence in this country impacts our day to day. We need to. Then that's where it goes back to kind of my initial piece here we need to think about what do those solutions really really look like at all levels? So again, pulling all the levers.

Speaker 2: 42:33

Hey man, and she's just saying you know something you're up in Detroit and I get so annoyed even now in the discourse where, if you're talking about, you know, black and brown people in a city, oftentimes politicians will say, well, some politicians who don't want to do anything will just say, well, you need to just study hard and stay in school and get a job and ignore. You're asking, like children, to study and focus and do all these things when they have PTSD. You're not doing anything about it. You're just saying like I don't know, kid, like figure it out, and if you don't, that's not. I have no responsibility to you so everything you're saying certainly resonates for sure.

Speaker 3: 43:13

That's a perfect example, exactly Like how could a traumatized kid now needs to go take a standardized test without any resources, support or understanding of what is happening at home, outside of school or during, even during, the day, like why are they not focusing or why are they not paying attention?

Speaker 3: 43:30

And you know what? That is a failure, right, that's a failure of our systems, right, collective systems and the onus, by the way, in that case isn't on the teachers, who are underpaid and overworked, it is on the collective ed system that has been, frankly, underfunded for years and years and years. So it requires and this is where I know that the problem can feel too vast and too overwhelming for folks to really wrap their head around. So, you know, I do feel like it's important for us collectively to step back and say okay, let's take it one step at a time. Here, here are the things we could start with. Right? Here is the way we're not even asking for more money. We're saying can we reallocate existing funds to be used in a more reasonable and effective manner? That might be, in and of itself, like a great place to start.

Speaker 1: 44:14

And for folks who are interested in doing the right thing or learning more. Where did they find all of the fabulous work that you're doing? Oh, that's so nice.

Speaker 3: 44:22

Okay, so on my website I type a website my own, sonali Rajan. You can just Google. I come up as my faculty website is right there. But our research society, the National Research Conference for the Prevention of Firearm Related Harms, has a website firearmresearchsocietyorg. Those of you who may not be able to join us this year, we will be hosting this conference again in 2024 and every year subsequent to that, and we very much look forward to hoping to have you and your colleagues join us in these conversations and in the space and so folks can check that out. Yeah, those would be a good two places to start and appreciate so much the opportunity to be here today and talk. Well, thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 45:06

Thank you for your time. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 45:10

Hey want to share with the podcast. Listeners can now get in touch with us here at Red Blue and Brady via phone or text message. Simply call or text us at 480-744-3452 with your thoughts. Questions concerns ideas, cat pictures, whatever.

Speaker 2: 45:26

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 sides.