these people are going to keep fucking around until the government takes away their guns.
You've got it all wrong. It won't be solved until the government gives away guns, issued at birth like a social security number. Hospital staff will come into your recovery room with a catalog so you can select the weapon of choice for your new born child. To incentivize it, they'll give you a 50% off coupon for your first ER visit.
Mutually Assured Destruction for the Drunken Masses.
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That is the most depressing thread ever. Kids getting shot left and right.
It’s unreal I keep thinking was it like this when I was a teenager? Did I just no maybe just not having every shooting in our news feeds instantly is the difference.
That is the most depressing thread ever. Kids getting shot left and right.
It’s unreal I keep thinking was it like this when I was a teenager? Did I just no maybe just not having every shooting in our news feeds instantly is the difference.
That is the most depressing thread ever. Kids getting shot left and right.
It’s unreal I keep thinking was it like this when I was a teenager? Did I just no maybe just not having every shooting in our news feeds instantly is the difference.
Less guns , less violent gun culture, pre Columbine opening the gates.
At eight-fifteen on a pre-pandemic Friday morning, Shaina Harrison arrived at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers, one of seven specialized high schools in the massive Evander Childs Educational Campus building, in a northerly part of the borough. She had come from Red Hook, in Brooklyn, where she lives, to teach a weekly for-credit class on gun violence and how to prevent it. New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, or N.Y.A.G.V., the nonprofit organization of which she is one of three full-time employees, has been sending her to teach in New York City high schools for nine years, since she was in her mid-twenties. She is almost six feet tall, and she wears false eyelashes, bright-red lipstick, and striking clothes—on this day, a red fleece coat, a bold black-and-white-checked blouse, wide-leg trousers, and square eyeglasses with pink-and-black frames. Her black, wavy hair hung to below her shoulders.
The students in the class were ninth graders, some still not much more than little kids. She told them to call her Shaina. Some kids were paying attention, others had receded back into their hoodies like monks in cowls, and two or three laid their heads on their desks and closed their eyes. Harrison announced that this would be a safe space and also a brave space where everybody could say things that were hard to say, without being judged. Turning to some girls in hijabs who were talking, she picked up the rhythm, chatted with them, and said to the class, “I’ll always receive what you give, and hear it, and give you something back. I want to hear what you’re saying. Your voice is more important to me than mine.”
She told everybody to take out a pen and a piece of paper, because they were going to play a game. The kids groaned. She said the game was called Two Truths and a Lie. She told them to write down two things about themselves that were true, and one that was a lie. The rest of the class would then guess which two were true and which one was the lie. She went first: “One, I got in seventeen fights in high school.” The kids with their heads on their desks sat up. She did look as if she might be able to fight. Then she said, “Second, I am a singer. Third, I am famous on Instagram. Now you tell me which are the truths, and which is the lie.”
A boy raised his hand. “I think you are a singer, you did get in fights in high school, and you aren’t famous on Instagram.”
“Why am I a singer? Because I look like maybe I sing in a church choir?”
“Yeah. And I think you got in fights in high school because people bullied you.”
“Why did people bully me?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Nothing will bother me. This is a safe space and a brave space.”
“Because you’re overweight?
“O.K., I hear that. I receive that. And why don’t you think I’m famous on Instagram?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t think you are.”
Another kid said, “You’re a smart person. You don’t waste your time on social media.”
More discussion. Finally, Harrison said, “O.K., here’s my answer. I did get in seventeen fights in high school—that is true. I didn’t like to fight, but somehow I got a reputation as a fighter, and then people were always wanting to fight me. Just bumping up against someone in the hall, suddenly I’d be in a fight. When I applied to colleges I had all those suspensions on my record, so even though I got all A’s and my test scores were good, some colleges were afraid to take a chance on me. Bowling Green, a college way out in Ohio, did give me a full scholarship. But that’s something we’ll talk more about later in the year—how things you do in high school can stay with you and affect your life later.
“Second truth: Yes, I am Instagram famous. I am a plus-size fashion influencer and mommy blogger with my own blog that tens of thousands of people follow every day. My hashtags are #FatGirlsBeWinning and #MyBravestSpace. And why wouldn’t someone like me have a fashion blog? Look at how I dress. I promise you will never see me twice in the same pair of glasses. I have at least ninety-seven pairs.”
Now every student was paying attention. She continued, “So, what is my lie? I said I’m a singer. That is definitely not true. Not all large Black women can sing. Some of us can hardly sing a note. I wish I could sing, I like music, but I don’t have that gift. See, you made a decision about me based on how I look. But how we look might not be who we are.”
The kids went next. A girl said that she liked her English Language Arts class, she was nice, and she spoke four languages. Nobody believed she spoke four languages, but it turned out that she did: French, English, and two African languages, Fulani and Susu; it was not true that she liked her E.L.A. class. Then a boy said that he was from Canada, he liked to cook, and he liked to play basketball. The class decided he couldn’t be from Canada: “If you’re from Canada, why would you come here? Canada is way better than here.” The surmise was correct; he was not from Canada. Another boy said that he had a sister in school, he liked to laugh, and he was a bodybuilder. The class pointed out that he did not look like a bodybuilder; he wasn’t. A girl said she was good at video games, was born in a foreign country, and had two pet turtles. Someone said that it is illegal to own turtles in New York City. The girl happily admitted to having made up the turtles.
When the class began, most of the students were in one of two modes: poker-faced and shut down, or in groups of several kids locked on to one another with that kind of teen-age telepathy in which the slightest raised eyebrow can produce screams of laughter. By the end, they were like citizens of the classroom. “I’m pushing you guys to look at your stereotypes,” Harrison said. “I want you to notice how sometimes you don’t really see other people, how you stereotype them, and how they stereotype you. How does stereotyping lead to gun violence? Because it makes us feel that we’re unsafe, and that we don’t know each other. What we don’t know makes us afraid. People pick up guns because they feel afraid, and powerless. Being afraid is a part of life, and we can deal with it in better ways. And we are not powerless, as I will show you.”
That class took place before covid, when schools were still open. Harrison has taught Two Truths and a Lie, she says, “hundreds of times.” Right now, she is teaching it in Zoom classes, to even more kids. During the year that she has been teaching remotely, gun deaths in New York City increased by eighty-eight per cent. In the past several weeks, eighteen people were murdered in mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, and in Boulder, Colorado. In the former incident, the suspect used a gun that he had bought the same day.
New Yorkers Against Gun Violence began as the result of a shooting twenty-eight years ago. On a spring afternoon in Brooklyn in 1993, four teen-agers from Crown Heights tried to steal a new off-road bicycle from a man named Allyn Winslow on a hill in Prospect Park. Winslow resisted and pedalled away, and one of the boys shot him twice with a .22-calibre pistol. One of the bullets hit his heart, and at the bottom of the hill he fell off his bicycle and died.
The shooting frightened the neighborhoods around the park. A few days later, people from Park Slope arranged a memorial and an anti-gun rally near the crime scene, with city and state officials and community figures. Hundreds of local residents showed up—a much bigger turnout than expected. Following that encouraging experience, three of the rally’s organizers started a group called New Yorkers for Gun Control.
For its first act of protest, the group joined with an organization called Parents of Murdered Children and collected about a hundred pairs of shoes that represented some of the people killed by guns in the state in 1993. They lined up the shoes on the sidewalk in front of the office of Alfonse D’Amato, the Republican senator from New York, who always voted with the N.R.A. Afterward, Ellen Freudenheim, one of the group’s founders, did a more ambitious performance-art-like piece on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, this time with thirty-eight thousand pairs of shoes, representing the number of Americans who were dying from gun violence every year. The Silent March, as the event was called, received a lot of press coverage and remains one of the most powerful anti-gun protests ever.
New Yorkers for Gun Control, to broaden its mission, soon changed its name to New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. Two years after its founding, N.Y.A.G.V. started an education fund, to bring the anti-gun-violence message to schools.
I first met Harrison in 2013, when she had been with N.Y.A.G.V. for four years. Bowling Green College had not worked out. She was there less than a semester when her grandmother, who had raised her and her younger sister, died. Harrison returned to Brooklyn, back to her old bedroom in her grandmother’s apartment, in the Red Hook Houses, and got a job with AmeriCorps, which sent her to a conflict-mediation organization in Crown Heights called Save Our Streets. AmeriCorps paid her four hundred dollars a month, on which she supported herself and her sister. After she had been with AmeriCorps for two years, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence hired her away.
On our first meeting, she and I walked around the playgrounds and streets of Red Hook as she showed me places where people had been shot, and she described what it was like, in previous years, to hear gunshots all the time. At thirty-three, she still lives in the same neighborhood and now has a three-year-old son.
Rebecca Fischer, the executive director of N.Y.A.G.V., started with the organization in 2013. She is forty and grew up in Massachusetts. Her father is a professor of labor law at Western New England University; her mother taught at the law school. In high school, Fischer hung out with the skateboarders and kids with shaved heads and thought she was the only boring person. She also got good grades, led the school debate team, and played cello. She went to Tufts, where she majored in clinical psychology and comparative religion, and then to Benjamin Cardozo law school. She took a job at a New York boutique firm that advises nonprofits. At twenty-six, she married another lawyer; they have two sons and live in Park Slope, where N.Y.A.G.V. began.
One morning in December of 2012, Fischer was texting with a colleague at her firm when the school shooting occurred at Sandy Hook. The colleague had a six-year-old son in the school. Some time passed before she found out that her son was O.K.; he had sheltered in a classroom and had to walk past bodies to leave the building. Fischer told me that being part of that experience, even at one remove, felt “surreal and insane.” She changed her life—she got involved with social-justice groups at her synagogue, met anti-gun-violence activists across New York, became a volunteer for N.Y.A.G.V., and eventually joined its board. When it was looking for a new director, she applied for the job.
N.Y.A.G.V. has successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass major gun-safety measures. A law now requires that all guns in homes with children be under lock and key, thanks partly to the group. The ReACTION curriculum, developed by Harrison and scaled up by Fischer, is taught in nineteen schools and serves more than five hundred students. Fischer sees her job as bringing forward the young activists—Harrison and N.Y.A.G.V.’s other teachers—while she supervises, lobbies, and raises money.
The Evander Childs building sits on a major east-west Bronx thoroughfare called East Gun Hill Road. During the Revolutionary War, American troops stored cannons on high ground. One night, when the cannons were unguarded, two saboteurs pounded rat-tail files into the touchholes and broke them off so that the cannons could not be fired. The Americans brought the cannons to a local hill, farther behind the lines, to repair them—thus, East Gun Hill Road. The nation began in gunfire; at the surface of our consciousness and deep in our subconscious, guns are everywhere.
On another morning at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers, Harrison’s lesson took up the subject of “toxic masculinity.” She was wearing a red, green, and black plaid-flannel shirt, close-fitting black jeans, and shin-high faux-Timberland boots. She asked the students to make one list of the qualities that a “good man” might have, and another of the qualities of a “real man.” Then she and the kids talked about each category: a good man is caring, takes care of his family, works hard but doesn’t necessarily have a lot of money. A real man is tough, stands up for himself and his friends and family, doesn’t avoid conflict, doesn’t cry. “A real man can’t be a wussie,” one boy said, and Harrison replied, “Thank you for your answer, and you also didn’t use the word beginning with a ‘P,’ and I appreciate that.”
She told a story about how her son fell once while playing and began to cry, and the boy’s father told him to stop crying like a girl; she told him, “He’s hurt! Why can’t he cry? Crying is not a gender, it’s how human beings react to pain.” The class watched a short documentary about men and boys who are told to “man up” and keep their feelings to themselves. Harrison said that that kind of suppression is itself a form of violence. She asked the class what happens if you’re not supposed to say how you feel. A boy said, “If you can’t talk, you make your gun talk for you.”
The police department’s school-safety agents patrolling the halls sometimes stood outside the classroom door, the staticky bursts from their radios giving small jolts to the day. Between periods, the corridors filled up and feet thundered in the stairwells. Lots of kids knew Harrison from previous classes. She received hugs and greetings in the corridors; she always remembers names. Over the years, she has kept in touch with hundreds of kids, and she gets calls at all hours from those who need to talk or just want to say hi.
In June of 2019, I joined Harrison and Fischer at an anti-gun march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Youth Over Guns (Y.O.G.), an organization of city high-school students and recent graduates, had planned it as their second big public event. Y.O.G. had agreed to affiliate itself with N.Y.A.G.V. as its youth-outreach arm. Members of the group had been in classes Harrison taught; she had inspired them. Luis Hernandez, who was seventeen at the time, put the march together, along with fellow Y.O.G. members Alliyah Logan, also seventeen, and Andrea Gonzales, eighteen. Hernandez wore his hair in cornrows, and he sometimes wore a sharp powder-blue blazer. Gonzales described herself as “a queer Latinx mestiza,” and wanted to get some piercings to make herself look fierce, an effect her friends said she could never pull off, because of her warm, empathetic eyes. Logan’s parents are West Indian and “very protective,” she said; she watches the world from behind round, scholarly spectacles.
Hernandez had co-founded Y.O.G. after seventeen people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. He wanted to remind the public that Black and brown communities lose young people to gun violence every day. Word of the Brooklyn Bridge march spread on social media, and on that Saturday about ten thousand protesters joined with Youth Over Guns as they crossed the bridge. The large turnout completely astonished the young organizers. Today it looks like a precursor.
That October, I joined Harrison and Fischer and the three members of Y.O.G. at a national anti-gun conference in Las Vegas that was sponsored in part by March for Our Lives, an organization formed by survivors of the Parkland shooting. In the lobby of their hotel, I asked Harrison how she liked the accommodations. Dozens of anti-gun groups attended; the ones that included young people had been booked at this place near the airport because it was affordable and did not have slot machines. “Pfft—it’s not much,” Harrison said. “I was in Las Vegas last summer, and the experience was amazing. People were filming me for some fashion commercials, they got me a suite in a hotel on the Strip with a skating rink and an ice-cream bar on the roof, I was modelling these wild clothes, I went to the ‘Mindfreak’ magic show, the magician cut my body in half on the stage—it was all a hot mess.”
“Why did I assume that Shaina had never been to Las Vegas?” Fischer asked. “Of course Shaina has been to Las Vegas.”
Nevada’s governor, Steve Sisolak, welcomed everybody to the conference and wept all the way through his remarks. Two years before, almost to the day, a gunman firing rifles modified to shoot like automatic weapons had killed fifty-eight people and wounded four hundred and thirteen at an outdoor concert on the Strip. It was the worst mass shooting in the country’s history. Sisolak had spent the previous day remembering the occasion with parents who had lost children, and with other survivors. He told the audience that he had walked the site of the shooting the day after it occurred. “I saw the bodies, I saw the blood,” he said. “And there was an eerie silence, and you would hear a cell phone ring, someone hoping that their loved one would pick up that phone. . . . I’m never forgetting the sound of those cell phones ringing.”
As the spokesman for Y.O.G., Luis Hernandez was the first to ask an audience question. He asked the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, who was then running for President, how, if elected, he would help people in marginalized communities “who are enduring gun violence at disproportionate rates, and nobody is saying or doing anything about it.” Buttigieg gave a thoughtful response about building healthy neighborhoods, saying of certain areas that residents have been “redlined into them and are now being gentrified out.” N.Y.A.G.V. looks for nonviolent ways to overcome powerlessness. For Hernandez, that teaching became real. To stand up in front of the large crowd and the TV cameras and ask his question had required some nerving up. Afterward, he said he felt as if he were on top of the world.
What I mainly took away from the conference was statistics: about forty thousand Americans died that year from gun violence, about sixty per cent of them suicides; more Americans have died from guns in recent years than have died in car accidents; guns are the No. 1 cause of death for African-American children and young men; the mentally ill are more often the victims of gun violence than they are the perpetrators of it; ninety-six per cent of all mass shooters are male; there may be ten million assault rifles in private hands; and seventy-five per cent of gun owners say that owning a gun is essential to their sense of freedom.
Walking in the Bronx after Harrison’s classes one day, I learned the following: On the afternoon of November 27, 2019, the day before Thanksgiving, someone shot five people at the corner of East 151st Street and Courtlandt Avenue, in the Melrose section of the borough. The victims included a ten-year-old boy, a fourteen-year-old boy, and a young man of twenty who may have been the target. Had I not noticed a “Wanted” poster on a light pole with a photo of the suspect, I probably would never have heard about the shooting.
I went to a protest rally on Courtlandt Avenue at the shooting site. Local leaders and teachers and girls from the nearby Immaculate Conception School were addressing a small crowd, saying that this should not be a regular part of life—people should not be getting shot on a busy sidewalk as neighbors are shopping and schools are letting out. There are three schools within a few blocks of that corner. The crowd stood quietly as a priest said a prayer. Night fell, and a cold wind blew. Kids lay down on the sidewalk while other kids traced the outlines of their splayed-out bodies with chalk. A man said hello to me and gave me his card. Eventually, the crowd dispersed, but the police vans stayed nearby, their lights still flashing blue and red.
The card said, “James Dobbins III, New York City Health and Hospitals.” I called the number, and a few days later I met Dobbins in his office on the second floor of Lincoln Hospital. He is the assistant director of community affairs for a nonprofit organization called Guns Down, Life Up (G.D.L.U.), which is a part of the hospital. He had a diamond stud in one ear, and he wore a V-neck sweater-vest, a tie, and a receptive expression. Listening to strangers is what he does. As someone who served two prison terms, he qualifies as a “credible messenger”—someone people on the street will pay attention to. He began by telling me two facts: Lincoln Hospital, located in the southwest Bronx, has the busiest emergency room in the city, and people who are shot and survive have a fifty-per-cent chance of being shot again within five years. Of every ten people who present at a hospital with gunshot wounds and don’t die, five will eventually be shot again, and, of those, two will die.
Dobbins and others from G.D.L.U. go to the scenes where violence has occurred and make conversation with bystanders. They visit hospital bedsides, talk to friends and family of victims, and try to find alternatives to retaliation. After victims are out of the hospital, Dobbins keeps up with them. At any one time he is in touch with dozens of people still at risk of violence. Former victims sometimes call him at 3 a.m. “I’ll be in bed, my cell phone rings, I’ll answer, and I’ll hear, ‘He’s right outside my building, and I’m ’on blow the mofo’s head off!’ Then I just stay on the line and keep the brother talking.”
Dobbins is one of three men and two women who work for G.D.L.U.; they all stay current in the program’s “catchment area,” which includes the Melrose and Morris Heights neighborhoods, offering their programs for kids. The group’s bright-green hoodies and T-shirts feature the slogan “Guns Down, Life Up,” designed by Marley Marl, the hip-hop producer. Dobbins wants everybody in the neighborhood and in the entire city to start wearing them. In spare office space at the hospital, he started classes in fashion design that take kids through the process of producing and mass-marketing these garments. He also leads kids on rides around the city, on bicycles provided by the hospital, and has found a pro-bono recording studio for aspiring rappers and musicians.
“Kids around here see that crime pays,” Dobbins said. “They see an eighteen-year-old making two thousand, three thousand a day, driving a Benz. But a drug-dealing person is not who most kids are. They might like the look of it, but who they are deep down is someone else. We’re trying to help them find out who that is. I got out of prison the second time and decided I did not want to go back to hustling drugs. Today, I own a house in Queens, and I have two kids. I found what I love to do. I save people’s lives. People ask me what I do for a living, and I say, ‘I stop people from shooting people.’ ”
Guns Down, Life Up, multiplied by three dozen or more, gives you an idea of the number of anti-gun-violence organizations in New York City. Through Fischer and Harrison, I met three other men, all of them formerly incarcerated, who do work like Dobbins’s; “violence interrupter” is the job description. As mayor, Michael Bloomberg made gun violence one of his big issues, but he dealt with it more through policing, using tactics like “stop-and-frisk,” while also funding some community-based anti-violence groups. Mayor Bill de Blasio emphasized and encouraged the latter. In 2017, he formed the Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. It oversees the city’s Crisis Management System, which coördinates and funds community-based anti-gun groups of all kinds. A lot of these, like G.D.L.U., follow a model known as Cure Violence, developed by a doctor in Chicago, which considers gun violence a disease and a public-health crisis curable by a multi-step treatment. The Kings Against Violence Initiative, which is part of Kings County Hospital, in Brooklyn, is another Cure Violence-based program; Kings County’s emergency room is the second busiest in the city.
There are faith-based anti-violence groups, such as the Sixty-seventh Precinct Clergy Council, also known as the God Squad, founded by ministers, one of whom hands out coupons for free funerals to active gang members he sees on the street. Smaller groups, sometimes called “mom-and-pop nonprofits,” include Harlem Mothers save (Stop Another Violent End), founded by Jackie Rowe-Adams, who lost two sons to shootings; Hip Hop 4 Life, which uses music and culture to promote a healthy, violence-free life style; life Camp (Love Ignites Freedom through Education), founded by Erica Ford, who uses yoga and mindfulness as tools for preventing violence; and g-macc (Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes), of Brooklyn, whose founder was arrested last year for threatening to have somebody killed (his former lawyer says he’s innocent).
As the Las Vegas conference showed, anti-gun nonprofits have grown all across the country. Forty thousand U.S. gun deaths in recent years work out to four or five an hour. Driven by grief, outrage, incalculable suffering, and a hope for peace, the anti-gun groups proliferate on one side, while on the other stands the amply funded and seemingly impregnable N.R.A.
In 2020, there were fifteen hundred and thirty-one shootings in New York City, almost twice as many as in 2019. The number of people hit by bullets was eighteen hundred and sixty-eight. Guns killed two hundred and ninety people in New York in 2020, an increase of eighty-eight per cent from 2019. Forty-eight people were shot in one day during the Fourth of July weekend, and nine of them died. Ninety-five per cent of the victims were Black or Hispanic. A man was shot and killed in the Bronx while crossing the street, holding his six-year-old daughter’s hand. A video showed a gun at the end of an arm emerging from the window of a passing car, the man falling, the little girl running away up the sidewalk.
Public-health studies have suggested some possible causes—the increase in unemployment, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol consumption, financial hardship, and firearm sales that came with the pandemic, along with the temporary shutdown of public support services.
In 1990 and 1991, nearly two thousand people were killed by gunfire in New York each year. Observers disagreed about why the numbers went down, to two hundred and ninety-seven, in 2016, but studies have shown that the more nonprofit organizations a neighborhood has, the fewer the shootings. Conservative critics blame the recent gun-violence surge on bail reform, decriminalization of minor offenses, and cuts in the police department’s budget. Replacement numbers of police officers have not kept up with retirements; fewer cops are on the streets. Dobbins thinks that shootings are up because everybody is at home and arguments start on the Internet. “Then, when people see each other on the street, the guns come out,” he said.
Dr. Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, dismisses explanations based on bail reform and the rest as “self-serving law-enforcement theories.” He told me, “Young men of color in the ages between fifteen and twenty-five, the group most affected by gun violence, are also very likely to have the kind of jobs that disappeared in the pandemic.” Summer-job programs were cancelled, too. “And, of course, the schools have been closed for a year,” he went on. “These young men are angry; they go out on the streets, where there now are fewer people, and they take the opportunity to go after their rivals.”
Since before the 2020 election, gun stores nationwide have been overwhelmed, with lines of customers sometimes waiting around the block. Gun collectors are making money selling extra ammunition online. The N.Y.P.D. now confiscates dozens of guns in arrests every day. An online nonprofit called the Gun Violence Archive lists shootings in the U.S. almost as they occur. More than a hundred shootings are recorded in a typical twenty-four-hour period. The violence spreads across the map—occurring in cities, rural places, Indian reservations. If we could somehow hear all those shots in real time, it would sound as if the U.S. were in the middle of a non-stop low-intensity war.
Harrison has been teaching at the High School for Public Service, in Crown Heights, longer than anywhere else. Before the city suspended on-site teaching, the class met Wednesdays at twelve-fifteen. By that hour, students were keyed up and extra lively, the way you often see kids acting on the subway in the afternoon. On a Wednesday in midwinter, they showed up doing things other teachers might have kicked them out for. Arguing, throwing fake punches at one another, making crinkling noises with their empty water bottles, tossing wadded-up paper, shouting, they briefly overwhelmed the classroom. At one point, Harrison was having animated conversations with three or four kids at once and started to go hoarse. But soon she got everybody settled down.
The day’s lesson concerned the school-to-prison pipeline that Black and brown young people so often fall victim to. On the blackboard, she had written out the rap sheet of someone named James B. It listed the charges: “Trespassing; Petit Larceny; Trespassing; Disorderly Conduct; Indecent Exposure; Trespassing; Fare Evasion.” Someone asked what petit larceny is. She explained that it’s the theft of something of small value, as compared with grand larceny, the theft of something pricier: “Petit larceny is if you steal a phone charger. Grand larceny is if you steal a phone.”
She told the students to split into groups of six and talk among themselves about who this James was and how he acquired his rap sheet. As they were working, Harrison hit a speed-dial number on her phone and ordered pizza and sodas. After five or ten minutes, she asked the kids how old they thought James was and what his family life was like. Every group said he was about their age—fifteen or sixteen—and lived with his mother. None said his father was in the picture. They all gave him sisters, mostly younger. Harrison asked, “So why does he have three arrests for trespassing?” A consensus said that he was kicked out of the house, maybe because he got in a fight with his mother’s boyfriend, and then went into nearby apartment buildings to sleep. Petit larceny? He shoplifted a honey bun from a bodega because he was hungry. Fare evasion? He had no money. Disorderly conduct? “His father is gone, and maybe James thinks he has to be the man of the family, and he got in a fight with somebody who said something mean about his sister,” a girl said.
A big stack of pizza boxes arrived, along with some thirty-two-ounce bottles of soda. The discussion continued as the kids ate. Harrison said, “So, once James has this rap sheet, maybe his school administration and the police think of him only as that—a kid with a rap sheet. So what do you think will happen if James is then arrested for something more serious, like getting caught with a gun?” The kids all said he would go to prison. “If you were the judge, what would you do?” A majority quickly answered that they would send him to prison, too.
“But do you remember what we learned about stereotyping?” Harrison said. “As you just discovered when you were talking about James, there is an actual person with a complicated life behind the rap sheet. Most of you thought only of giving him jail time, and there’s an even worse stereotype associated with having been in prison. James gets out, now he has a prison record—and, by the way, I know some very good men who have prison records—and he can’t get a job, so he starts selling drugs, and maybe at some point he again picks up a gun so he won’t get robbed. In the next class, we’re going to talk about restorative justice, and peer mediation, and anything we can come up with together that would change James’s story.”
As she often does in class, she returned to the theme “Guns do not make you safer,” and to the subject of fear amplified by racism. She said, “Our problem is that we are terrified of each other! The people at the takeout place where I used to go in Red Hook would hand you your food through a little window of bulletproof glass! I trusted them enough to eat the food they cooked, but they didn’t trust me, they felt a need to be protected against me.” The over-all message of her curriculum is that fear, racism, and powerlessness are at the root of gun violence. She believes that finding your ability to speak reduces both racism and powerlessness—the former by letting people know that the stereotypes are false, and the latter by creating the sense of strength that comes from speaking out. Her students learn who their city councilmen, state representatives, congressmen, and senators are, and at the end of the year she and her colleagues at New Yorkers Against Gun Violence take students on trips to Albany and Washington, D.C., to meet with and lobby some of these powerful people. For her students, the idea that they can participate in making laws that affect their own lives hadn’t crossed their minds.
In 2021, N.Y.A.G.V.’s classes have continued, although the school buildings have been closed. “In some ways the online classes are better, more personal,” Harrison said. “The kids can see my little son in the background while I talk to them and take care of him. But it’s also like being in the classroom, in that many of the kids are slow to participate at the start. At the beginning of the meetings, almost all of them have their screens turned off. But by the end of the first class everybody has their screens on. That’s important, because a big part of the curriculum is about making sure that they are seen.”
The organization has strengthened its connection with Youth Over Guns by hiring Luis Hernandez, Alliyah Logan, and Andrea Gonzales as part-time employees. Hernandez graduated in June, and Logan and Gonzales are in college. The three help in different areas—Logan in outreach, Hernandez in planning, and Gonzales with the online classes. “I taught a lot of classes with Andrea,” said Frank Teah, the program director for N.Y.A.G.V., who’s in his thirties. “She made a big difference. Andrea’s about the students’ age, and that made it easier for them to relate.”
“The beautiful part about being young is that you have this incredible amount of imagination,” Gonzales said. “We talked a lot about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, but the classes were also very hopeful. I said we can remake worlds in our head.”
As promised, the trips to Albany and Washington took place, but virtually. “In some ways, the trips were better, too,” Harrison said. “In a shorter amount of time we got to see more electeds and their staffs. A lot of our kids have never been out of New York City. They might walk on dangerous streets every day, but going to Albany, our state capital, that faraway place, scares them, and maybe their parents, also. We were having Zoom meetings with, like, the staff of Kirsten Gillibrand, in D.C., or with Jamaal T. Bailey, state senator from the Bronx. We were seeing them in their homes—one staff person was even sitting on the floor of a closet to get away from her family—and that really made them human.”
During a recent Zoom meeting of N.Y.A.G.V.’s seven-member staff, everyone agreed that policing and gun violence are not separate issues, and that the problem is racism, plus powerlessness, plus people being terrified of one another. “To reform the police, you need to build a healthier community where there’s less need to call the police,” Teah said. All seemed surprised by how many allies they discovered they had. Last summer, they taught their Anger to Advocacy program to twenty young anti-gun-violence activists, who are now teaching it to others throughout the country.
“Anger to Advocacy shows you how to take your anger and move it in a positive direction, by engaging with the state and local and national government, the people in power,” Logan said. “But a lot of it is also about changing yourself into an anti-gun activist, and how to be comfortable in that identity.”
“When I started working with N.Y.A.G.V., people in my neighborhood couldn’t understand what I was doing,” Harrison said. “Young Black activists were not getting accolades back then. Many people were looking at them like they were quote-unquote snitches. I had to tell them I wasn’t snitching, I was trying to build safe communities.”
“I’ve been an activist since I was fourteen,” Logan said. “In high school, I would always get up petitions, plan protests and whatnot, and nobody could understand what in the world I was doing, not even my mom and dad. Everybody thought I was just weird. Now I can teach other kids that it’s an O.K. identity to have. Everybody should be an anti-gun activist now.” ♦
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I don't understand why both sides can't get behind intense background checks, firearm training before buying a weapon for the first time and mag limits.
I don't understand why both sides can't get behind intense background checks, firearm training before buying a weapon for the first time and mag limits.
Except one side is already behind those reasonable gun control measures.
And that school in Knoxville, TN that had the shooting today where only one person was killed and a cop injured? Fifth shooting since the academic year started, according to CNN. ‘Murica, where school shootings are “Ho hum.”
I don't understand why both sides can't get behind intense background checks, firearm training before buying a weapon for the first time and mag limits.
both sides of the american people are behind this. but the politicians are not.
last poll i saw was 90% of americans support universal background checks on all guns sales/purchases.
if the politicians cannot get something passed that 90% of people support, it is a failure of a political system that is corrupted by money.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
After recent mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado, President Biden called America’s epidemic of gun violence “an international embarrassment” and promised to issue modest new regulations focused on “ghost guns,” firearms assembled from kits. More robust action, such as banning assault weapons or closing background-check loopholes, will be up to Congress.
Go behind the debate on gun regulations with the Lapham’s Quarterly special issue on the history of gun violence—order now and get $6 off the regular retail price.
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A History of Gun Violence
SPECIAL ISSUE
Beginning with poet Ludovico Ariosto’s epic account of the origins of firearms—a technology destined to “transform both society and war”—the issue offers engrossing and tragic glimpses of the gun as a technological wonder, an object of psychological fascination, a battlefield tool, and a relentless weapon of terror.
Among the texts in the issue, which span a millennium, is a fourteenth-century Taoist treatise on “fire weapons,” a letter from Thomas Jefferson on interchangeable gun parts, Félix Fénéon’s reports on gun violence in early twentieth-century France, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s eloquent description of two daughters watching their father melt lead into bullets, and radiologist Heather Sher’s clinical description of victims of the Parkland shooting. Additional texts come from Annie Oakley, Luther Standing Bear, Carl von Clausewitz, Alexander Hamilton, and others. The issue also features reproductions of paintings, sculpture, and photography; infographics; and an essay on the dramaturgy of gunplay by Lewis H. Lapham.
The issue also includes:
—A history of the “ghost guns” targeted by the Biden administration
—Texts exploring America’s obsession with guns in dialogue with debates over the Second Amendment
—Riveting and heartbreaking narratives about the consequences of gun violence, which causes the deaths and injuries of more than 110,000 Americans annually
—Illustrated features tracing the origins of firearms, a breakdown of gun ownership in the United States, rates of firearm rounds through the ages, the intersection of technology and concealed weapons, bespoke bulletproof clothing, and the body counts in the Rambo films
—Forty-five texts and excerpts
Throughout the issue, essays on America’s obsession with guns and debates over the Second Amendment are placed in dialogue with the consequences of gun violence, which causes the deaths and injuries of more than 110,000 Americans annually.
well..i guess its another regular day in usa seriously..i saw tons of times in usa,,u guys go march for every god damn stupid thing but for ban guns...nope never go on streets for this to change.. ...its ok..lets have another bunch of people dead from a madman with a gun,... as long as a stupid shit from 1776 constitution doesnt change..we are good to go.. the land of the free,,,till u arent free anymore cos u got shot for a random lunitic
"...Dimitri...He talks to me...'.."The Ghost of Greece..".
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
All of them. They're willing to accept all of them, because they care about nothing but themselves.
There's no number of dead Americans too high for the gun nuts to realize something needs to be done. The majority of this country is being held hostage by a minority of selfish fucking babies.
This doesn't happen in any other developed country, but Americans are too fucking stupid to look outside their own borders and realize this and too selfish to care.
So was it Covid that stopped these incidents for a period of time? Cause it sure seems like that was a lull and now it's back full force. Or was it just media reporting?
So was it Covid that stopped these incidents for a period of time? Cause it sure seems like that was a lull and now it's back full force. Or was it just media reporting?
It's not media. Today's was big. It's so sad. Christ.
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Mutually Assured Destruction for the Drunken Masses.
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Great leadership ha.
Uhmmm
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
At eight-fifteen on a pre-pandemic Friday morning, Shaina Harrison arrived at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers, one of seven specialized high schools in the massive Evander Childs Educational Campus building, in a northerly part of the borough. She had come from Red Hook, in Brooklyn, where she lives, to teach a weekly for-credit class on gun violence and how to prevent it. New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, or N.Y.A.G.V., the nonprofit organization of which she is one of three full-time employees, has been sending her to teach in New York City high schools for nine years, since she was in her mid-twenties. She is almost six feet tall, and she wears false eyelashes, bright-red lipstick, and striking clothes—on this day, a red fleece coat, a bold black-and-white-checked blouse, wide-leg trousers, and square eyeglasses with pink-and-black frames. Her black, wavy hair hung to below her shoulders.
The students in the class were ninth graders, some still not much more than little kids. She told them to call her Shaina. Some kids were paying attention, others had receded back into their hoodies like monks in cowls, and two or three laid their heads on their desks and closed their eyes. Harrison announced that this would be a safe space and also a brave space where everybody could say things that were hard to say, without being judged. Turning to some girls in hijabs who were talking, she picked up the rhythm, chatted with them, and said to the class, “I’ll always receive what you give, and hear it, and give you something back. I want to hear what you’re saying. Your voice is more important to me than mine.”
She told everybody to take out a pen and a piece of paper, because they were going to play a game. The kids groaned. She said the game was called Two Truths and a Lie. She told them to write down two things about themselves that were true, and one that was a lie. The rest of the class would then guess which two were true and which one was the lie. She went first: “One, I got in seventeen fights in high school.” The kids with their heads on their desks sat up. She did look as if she might be able to fight. Then she said, “Second, I am a singer. Third, I am famous on Instagram. Now you tell me which are the truths, and which is the lie.”
A boy raised his hand. “I think you are a singer, you did get in fights in high school, and you aren’t famous on Instagram.”
“Why am I a singer? Because I look like maybe I sing in a church choir?”
“Yeah. And I think you got in fights in high school because people bullied you.”
“Why did people bully me?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Nothing will bother me. This is a safe space and a brave space.”
“Because you’re overweight?
“O.K., I hear that. I receive that. And why don’t you think I’m famous on Instagram?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t think you are.”
Another kid said, “You’re a smart person. You don’t waste your time on social media.”
More discussion. Finally, Harrison said, “O.K., here’s my answer. I did get in seventeen fights in high school—that is true. I didn’t like to fight, but somehow I got a reputation as a fighter, and then people were always wanting to fight me. Just bumping up against someone in the hall, suddenly I’d be in a fight. When I applied to colleges I had all those suspensions on my record, so even though I got all A’s and my test scores were good, some colleges were afraid to take a chance on me. Bowling Green, a college way out in Ohio, did give me a full scholarship. But that’s something we’ll talk more about later in the year—how things you do in high school can stay with you and affect your life later.
“Second truth: Yes, I am Instagram famous. I am a plus-size fashion influencer and mommy blogger with my own blog that tens of thousands of people follow every day. My hashtags are #FatGirlsBeWinning and #MyBravestSpace. And why wouldn’t someone like me have a fashion blog? Look at how I dress. I promise you will never see me twice in the same pair of glasses. I have at least ninety-seven pairs.”
Now every student was paying attention. She continued, “So, what is my lie? I said I’m a singer. That is definitely not true. Not all large Black women can sing. Some of us can hardly sing a note. I wish I could sing, I like music, but I don’t have that gift. See, you made a decision about me based on how I look. But how we look might not be who we are.”
The kids went next. A girl said that she liked her English Language Arts class, she was nice, and she spoke four languages. Nobody believed she spoke four languages, but it turned out that she did: French, English, and two African languages, Fulani and Susu; it was not true that she liked her E.L.A. class. Then a boy said that he was from Canada, he liked to cook, and he liked to play basketball. The class decided he couldn’t be from Canada: “If you’re from Canada, why would you come here? Canada is way better than here.” The surmise was correct; he was not from Canada. Another boy said that he had a sister in school, he liked to laugh, and he was a bodybuilder. The class pointed out that he did not look like a bodybuilder; he wasn’t. A girl said she was good at video games, was born in a foreign country, and had two pet turtles. Someone said that it is illegal to own turtles in New York City. The girl happily admitted to having made up the turtles.
When the class began, most of the students were in one of two modes: poker-faced and shut down, or in groups of several kids locked on to one another with that kind of teen-age telepathy in which the slightest raised eyebrow can produce screams of laughter. By the end, they were like citizens of the classroom. “I’m pushing you guys to look at your stereotypes,” Harrison said. “I want you to notice how sometimes you don’t really see other people, how you stereotype them, and how they stereotype you. How does stereotyping lead to gun violence? Because it makes us feel that we’re unsafe, and that we don’t know each other. What we don’t know makes us afraid. People pick up guns because they feel afraid, and powerless. Being afraid is a part of life, and we can deal with it in better ways. And we are not powerless, as I will show you.”
That class took place before covid, when schools were still open. Harrison has taught Two Truths and a Lie, she says, “hundreds of times.” Right now, she is teaching it in Zoom classes, to even more kids. During the year that she has been teaching remotely, gun deaths in New York City increased by eighty-eight per cent. In the past several weeks, eighteen people were murdered in mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, and in Boulder, Colorado. In the former incident, the suspect used a gun that he had bought the same day.
New Yorkers Against Gun Violence began as the result of a shooting twenty-eight years ago. On a spring afternoon in Brooklyn in 1993, four teen-agers from Crown Heights tried to steal a new off-road bicycle from a man named Allyn Winslow on a hill in Prospect Park. Winslow resisted and pedalled away, and one of the boys shot him twice with a .22-calibre pistol. One of the bullets hit his heart, and at the bottom of the hill he fell off his bicycle and died.
The shooting frightened the neighborhoods around the park. A few days later, people from Park Slope arranged a memorial and an anti-gun rally near the crime scene, with city and state officials and community figures. Hundreds of local residents showed up—a much bigger turnout than expected. Following that encouraging experience, three of the rally’s organizers started a group called New Yorkers for Gun Control.
For its first act of protest, the group joined with an organization called Parents of Murdered Children and collected about a hundred pairs of shoes that represented some of the people killed by guns in the state in 1993. They lined up the shoes on the sidewalk in front of the office of Alfonse D’Amato, the Republican senator from New York, who always voted with the N.R.A. Afterward, Ellen Freudenheim, one of the group’s founders, did a more ambitious performance-art-like piece on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, this time with thirty-eight thousand pairs of shoes, representing the number of Americans who were dying from gun violence every year. The Silent March, as the event was called, received a lot of press coverage and remains one of the most powerful anti-gun protests ever.
New Yorkers for Gun Control, to broaden its mission, soon changed its name to New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. Two years after its founding, N.Y.A.G.V. started an education fund, to bring the anti-gun-violence message to schools.
I first met Harrison in 2013, when she had been with N.Y.A.G.V. for four years. Bowling Green College had not worked out. She was there less than a semester when her grandmother, who had raised her and her younger sister, died. Harrison returned to Brooklyn, back to her old bedroom in her grandmother’s apartment, in the Red Hook Houses, and got a job with AmeriCorps, which sent her to a conflict-mediation organization in Crown Heights called Save Our Streets. AmeriCorps paid her four hundred dollars a month, on which she supported herself and her sister. After she had been with AmeriCorps for two years, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence hired her away.
On our first meeting, she and I walked around the playgrounds and streets of Red Hook as she showed me places where people had been shot, and she described what it was like, in previous years, to hear gunshots all the time. At thirty-three, she still lives in the same neighborhood and now has a three-year-old son.
Rebecca Fischer, the executive director of N.Y.A.G.V., started with the organization in 2013. She is forty and grew up in Massachusetts. Her father is a professor of labor law at Western New England University; her mother taught at the law school. In high school, Fischer hung out with the skateboarders and kids with shaved heads and thought she was the only boring person. She also got good grades, led the school debate team, and played cello. She went to Tufts, where she majored in clinical psychology and comparative religion, and then to Benjamin Cardozo law school. She took a job at a New York boutique firm that advises nonprofits. At twenty-six, she married another lawyer; they have two sons and live in Park Slope, where N.Y.A.G.V. began.
One morning in December of 2012, Fischer was texting with a colleague at her firm when the school shooting occurred at Sandy Hook. The colleague had a six-year-old son in the school. Some time passed before she found out that her son was O.K.; he had sheltered in a classroom and had to walk past bodies to leave the building. Fischer told me that being part of that experience, even at one remove, felt “surreal and insane.” She changed her life—she got involved with social-justice groups at her synagogue, met anti-gun-violence activists across New York, became a volunteer for N.Y.A.G.V., and eventually joined its board. When it was looking for a new director, she applied for the job.
N.Y.A.G.V. has successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass major gun-safety measures. A law now requires that all guns in homes with children be under lock and key, thanks partly to the group. The ReACTION curriculum, developed by Harrison and scaled up by Fischer, is taught in nineteen schools and serves more than five hundred students. Fischer sees her job as bringing forward the young activists—Harrison and N.Y.A.G.V.’s other teachers—while she supervises, lobbies, and raises money.
The Evander Childs building sits on a major east-west Bronx thoroughfare called East Gun Hill Road. During the Revolutionary War, American troops stored cannons on high ground. One night, when the cannons were unguarded, two saboteurs pounded rat-tail files into the touchholes and broke them off so that the cannons could not be fired. The Americans brought the cannons to a local hill, farther behind the lines, to repair them—thus, East Gun Hill Road. The nation began in gunfire; at the surface of our consciousness and deep in our subconscious, guns are everywhere.
On another morning at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers, Harrison’s lesson took up the subject of “toxic masculinity.” She was wearing a red, green, and black plaid-flannel shirt, close-fitting black jeans, and shin-high faux-Timberland boots. She asked the students to make one list of the qualities that a “good man” might have, and another of the qualities of a “real man.” Then she and the kids talked about each category: a good man is caring, takes care of his family, works hard but doesn’t necessarily have a lot of money. A real man is tough, stands up for himself and his friends and family, doesn’t avoid conflict, doesn’t cry. “A real man can’t be a wussie,” one boy said, and Harrison replied, “Thank you for your answer, and you also didn’t use the word beginning with a ‘P,’ and I appreciate that.”
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Continued from previous post
She told a story about how her son fell once while playing and began to cry, and the boy’s father told him to stop crying like a girl; she told him, “He’s hurt! Why can’t he cry? Crying is not a gender, it’s how human beings react to pain.” The class watched a short documentary about men and boys who are told to “man up” and keep their feelings to themselves. Harrison said that that kind of suppression is itself a form of violence. She asked the class what happens if you’re not supposed to say how you feel. A boy said, “If you can’t talk, you make your gun talk for you.”
The police department’s school-safety agents patrolling the halls sometimes stood outside the classroom door, the staticky bursts from their radios giving small jolts to the day. Between periods, the corridors filled up and feet thundered in the stairwells. Lots of kids knew Harrison from previous classes. She received hugs and greetings in the corridors; she always remembers names. Over the years, she has kept in touch with hundreds of kids, and she gets calls at all hours from those who need to talk or just want to say hi.
In June of 2019, I joined Harrison and Fischer at an anti-gun march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Youth Over Guns (Y.O.G.), an organization of city high-school students and recent graduates, had planned it as their second big public event. Y.O.G. had agreed to affiliate itself with N.Y.A.G.V. as its youth-outreach arm. Members of the group had been in classes Harrison taught; she had inspired them. Luis Hernandez, who was seventeen at the time, put the march together, along with fellow Y.O.G. members Alliyah Logan, also seventeen, and Andrea Gonzales, eighteen. Hernandez wore his hair in cornrows, and he sometimes wore a sharp powder-blue blazer. Gonzales described herself as “a queer Latinx mestiza,” and wanted to get some piercings to make herself look fierce, an effect her friends said she could never pull off, because of her warm, empathetic eyes. Logan’s parents are West Indian and “very protective,” she said; she watches the world from behind round, scholarly spectacles.
Hernandez had co-founded Y.O.G. after seventeen people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. He wanted to remind the public that Black and brown communities lose young people to gun violence every day. Word of the Brooklyn Bridge march spread on social media, and on that Saturday about ten thousand protesters joined with Youth Over Guns as they crossed the bridge. The large turnout completely astonished the young organizers. Today it looks like a precursor.
That October, I joined Harrison and Fischer and the three members of Y.O.G. at a national anti-gun conference in Las Vegas that was sponsored in part by March for Our Lives, an organization formed by survivors of the Parkland shooting. In the lobby of their hotel, I asked Harrison how she liked the accommodations. Dozens of anti-gun groups attended; the ones that included young people had been booked at this place near the airport because it was affordable and did not have slot machines. “Pfft—it’s not much,” Harrison said. “I was in Las Vegas last summer, and the experience was amazing. People were filming me for some fashion commercials, they got me a suite in a hotel on the Strip with a skating rink and an ice-cream bar on the roof, I was modelling these wild clothes, I went to the ‘Mindfreak’ magic show, the magician cut my body in half on the stage—it was all a hot mess.”
“Why did I assume that Shaina had never been to Las Vegas?” Fischer asked. “Of course Shaina has been to Las Vegas.”
Nevada’s governor, Steve Sisolak, welcomed everybody to the conference and wept all the way through his remarks. Two years before, almost to the day, a gunman firing rifles modified to shoot like automatic weapons had killed fifty-eight people and wounded four hundred and thirteen at an outdoor concert on the Strip. It was the worst mass shooting in the country’s history. Sisolak had spent the previous day remembering the occasion with parents who had lost children, and with other survivors. He told the audience that he had walked the site of the shooting the day after it occurred. “I saw the bodies, I saw the blood,” he said. “And there was an eerie silence, and you would hear a cell phone ring, someone hoping that their loved one would pick up that phone. . . . I’m never forgetting the sound of those cell phones ringing.”
As the spokesman for Y.O.G., Luis Hernandez was the first to ask an audience question. He asked the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, who was then running for President, how, if elected, he would help people in marginalized communities “who are enduring gun violence at disproportionate rates, and nobody is saying or doing anything about it.” Buttigieg gave a thoughtful response about building healthy neighborhoods, saying of certain areas that residents have been “redlined into them and are now being gentrified out.” N.Y.A.G.V. looks for nonviolent ways to overcome powerlessness. For Hernandez, that teaching became real. To stand up in front of the large crowd and the TV cameras and ask his question had required some nerving up. Afterward, he said he felt as if he were on top of the world.
What I mainly took away from the conference was statistics: about forty thousand Americans died that year from gun violence, about sixty per cent of them suicides; more Americans have died from guns in recent years than have died in car accidents; guns are the No. 1 cause of death for African-American children and young men; the mentally ill are more often the victims of gun violence than they are the perpetrators of it; ninety-six per cent of all mass shooters are male; there may be ten million assault rifles in private hands; and seventy-five per cent of gun owners say that owning a gun is essential to their sense of freedom.
Walking in the Bronx after Harrison’s classes one day, I learned the following: On the afternoon of November 27, 2019, the day before Thanksgiving, someone shot five people at the corner of East 151st Street and Courtlandt Avenue, in the Melrose section of the borough. The victims included a ten-year-old boy, a fourteen-year-old boy, and a young man of twenty who may have been the target. Had I not noticed a “Wanted” poster on a light pole with a photo of the suspect, I probably would never have heard about the shooting.
I went to a protest rally on Courtlandt Avenue at the shooting site. Local leaders and teachers and girls from the nearby Immaculate Conception School were addressing a small crowd, saying that this should not be a regular part of life—people should not be getting shot on a busy sidewalk as neighbors are shopping and schools are letting out. There are three schools within a few blocks of that corner. The crowd stood quietly as a priest said a prayer. Night fell, and a cold wind blew. Kids lay down on the sidewalk while other kids traced the outlines of their splayed-out bodies with chalk. A man said hello to me and gave me his card. Eventually, the crowd dispersed, but the police vans stayed nearby, their lights still flashing blue and red.
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Fighting America’s Gun Plague | The New Yorker
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The card said, “James Dobbins III, New York City Health and Hospitals.” I called the number, and a few days later I met Dobbins in his office on the second floor of Lincoln Hospital. He is the assistant director of community affairs for a nonprofit organization called Guns Down, Life Up (G.D.L.U.), which is a part of the hospital. He had a diamond stud in one ear, and he wore a V-neck sweater-vest, a tie, and a receptive expression. Listening to strangers is what he does. As someone who served two prison terms, he qualifies as a “credible messenger”—someone people on the street will pay attention to. He began by telling me two facts: Lincoln Hospital, located in the southwest Bronx, has the busiest emergency room in the city, and people who are shot and survive have a fifty-per-cent chance of being shot again within five years. Of every ten people who present at a hospital with gunshot wounds and don’t die, five will eventually be shot again, and, of those, two will die.
Dobbins and others from G.D.L.U. go to the scenes where violence has occurred and make conversation with bystanders. They visit hospital bedsides, talk to friends and family of victims, and try to find alternatives to retaliation. After victims are out of the hospital, Dobbins keeps up with them. At any one time he is in touch with dozens of people still at risk of violence. Former victims sometimes call him at 3 a.m. “I’ll be in bed, my cell phone rings, I’ll answer, and I’ll hear, ‘He’s right outside my building, and I’m ’on blow the mofo’s head off!’ Then I just stay on the line and keep the brother talking.”
Dobbins is one of three men and two women who work for G.D.L.U.; they all stay current in the program’s “catchment area,” which includes the Melrose and Morris Heights neighborhoods, offering their programs for kids. The group’s bright-green hoodies and T-shirts feature the slogan “Guns Down, Life Up,” designed by Marley Marl, the hip-hop producer. Dobbins wants everybody in the neighborhood and in the entire city to start wearing them. In spare office space at the hospital, he started classes in fashion design that take kids through the process of producing and mass-marketing these garments. He also leads kids on rides around the city, on bicycles provided by the hospital, and has found a pro-bono recording studio for aspiring rappers and musicians.
“Kids around here see that crime pays,” Dobbins said. “They see an eighteen-year-old making two thousand, three thousand a day, driving a Benz. But a drug-dealing person is not who most kids are. They might like the look of it, but who they are deep down is someone else. We’re trying to help them find out who that is. I got out of prison the second time and decided I did not want to go back to hustling drugs. Today, I own a house in Queens, and I have two kids. I found what I love to do. I save people’s lives. People ask me what I do for a living, and I say, ‘I stop people from shooting people.’ ”
Guns Down, Life Up, multiplied by three dozen or more, gives you an idea of the number of anti-gun-violence organizations in New York City. Through Fischer and Harrison, I met three other men, all of them formerly incarcerated, who do work like Dobbins’s; “violence interrupter” is the job description. As mayor, Michael Bloomberg made gun violence one of his big issues, but he dealt with it more through policing, using tactics like “stop-and-frisk,” while also funding some community-based anti-violence groups. Mayor Bill de Blasio emphasized and encouraged the latter. In 2017, he formed the Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. It oversees the city’s Crisis Management System, which coördinates and funds community-based anti-gun groups of all kinds. A lot of these, like G.D.L.U., follow a model known as Cure Violence, developed by a doctor in Chicago, which considers gun violence a disease and a public-health crisis curable by a multi-step treatment. The Kings Against Violence Initiative, which is part of Kings County Hospital, in Brooklyn, is another Cure Violence-based program; Kings County’s emergency room is the second busiest in the city.
There are faith-based anti-violence groups, such as the Sixty-seventh Precinct Clergy Council, also known as the God Squad, founded by ministers, one of whom hands out coupons for free funerals to active gang members he sees on the street. Smaller groups, sometimes called “mom-and-pop nonprofits,” include Harlem Mothers save (Stop Another Violent End), founded by Jackie Rowe-Adams, who lost two sons to shootings; Hip Hop 4 Life, which uses music and culture to promote a healthy, violence-free life style; life Camp (Love Ignites Freedom through Education), founded by Erica Ford, who uses yoga and mindfulness as tools for preventing violence; and g-macc (Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes), of Brooklyn, whose founder was arrested last year for threatening to have somebody killed (his former lawyer says he’s innocent).
As the Las Vegas conference showed, anti-gun nonprofits have grown all across the country. Forty thousand U.S. gun deaths in recent years work out to four or five an hour. Driven by grief, outrage, incalculable suffering, and a hope for peace, the anti-gun groups proliferate on one side, while on the other stands the amply funded and seemingly impregnable N.R.A.
In 2020, there were fifteen hundred and thirty-one shootings in New York City, almost twice as many as in 2019. The number of people hit by bullets was eighteen hundred and sixty-eight. Guns killed two hundred and ninety people in New York in 2020, an increase of eighty-eight per cent from 2019. Forty-eight people were shot in one day during the Fourth of July weekend, and nine of them died. Ninety-five per cent of the victims were Black or Hispanic. A man was shot and killed in the Bronx while crossing the street, holding his six-year-old daughter’s hand. A video showed a gun at the end of an arm emerging from the window of a passing car, the man falling, the little girl running away up the sidewalk.
Public-health studies have suggested some possible causes—the increase in unemployment, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol consumption, financial hardship, and firearm sales that came with the pandemic, along with the temporary shutdown of public support services.
In 1990 and 1991, nearly two thousand people were killed by gunfire in New York each year. Observers disagreed about why the numbers went down, to two hundred and ninety-seven, in 2016, but studies have shown that the more nonprofit organizations a neighborhood has, the fewer the shootings. Conservative critics blame the recent gun-violence surge on bail reform, decriminalization of minor offenses, and cuts in the police department’s budget. Replacement numbers of police officers have not kept up with retirements; fewer cops are on the streets. Dobbins thinks that shootings are up because everybody is at home and arguments start on the Internet. “Then, when people see each other on the street, the guns come out,” he said.
Dr. Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, dismisses explanations based on bail reform and the rest as “self-serving law-enforcement theories.” He told me, “Young men of color in the ages between fifteen and twenty-five, the group most affected by gun violence, are also very likely to have the kind of jobs that disappeared in the pandemic.” Summer-job programs were cancelled, too. “And, of course, the schools have been closed for a year,” he went on. “These young men are angry; they go out on the streets, where there now are fewer people, and they take the opportunity to go after their rivals.”
Since before the 2020 election, gun stores nationwide have been overwhelmed, with lines of customers sometimes waiting around the block. Gun collectors are making money selling extra ammunition online. The N.Y.P.D. now confiscates dozens of guns in arrests every day. An online nonprofit called the Gun Violence Archive lists shootings in the U.S. almost as they occur. More than a hundred shootings are recorded in a typical twenty-four-hour period. The violence spreads across the map—occurring in cities, rural places, Indian reservations. If we could somehow hear all those shots in real time, it would sound as if the U.S. were in the middle of a non-stop low-intensity war.
Harrison has been teaching at the High School for Public Service, in Crown Heights, longer than anywhere else. Before the city suspended on-site teaching, the class met Wednesdays at twelve-fifteen. By that hour, students were keyed up and extra lively, the way you often see kids acting on the subway in the afternoon. On a Wednesday in midwinter, they showed up doing things other teachers might have kicked them out for. Arguing, throwing fake punches at one another, making crinkling noises with their empty water bottles, tossing wadded-up paper, shouting, they briefly overwhelmed the classroom. At one point, Harrison was having animated conversations with three or four kids at once and started to go hoarse. But soon she got everybody settled down.
The day’s lesson concerned the school-to-prison pipeline that Black and brown young people so often fall victim to. On the blackboard, she had written out the rap sheet of someone named James B. It listed the charges: “Trespassing; Petit Larceny; Trespassing; Disorderly Conduct; Indecent Exposure; Trespassing; Fare Evasion.” Someone asked what petit larceny is. She explained that it’s the theft of something of small value, as compared with grand larceny, the theft of something pricier: “Petit larceny is if you steal a phone charger. Grand larceny is if you steal a phone.”
She told the students to split into groups of six and talk among themselves about who this James was and how he acquired his rap sheet. As they were working, Harrison hit a speed-dial number on her phone and ordered pizza and sodas. After five or ten minutes, she asked the kids how old they thought James was and what his family life was like. Every group said he was about their age—fifteen or sixteen—and lived with his mother. None said his father was in the picture. They all gave him sisters, mostly younger. Harrison asked, “So why does he have three arrests for trespassing?” A consensus said that he was kicked out of the house, maybe because he got in a fight with his mother’s boyfriend, and then went into nearby apartment buildings to sleep. Petit larceny? He shoplifted a honey bun from a bodega because he was hungry. Fare evasion? He had no money. Disorderly conduct? “His father is gone, and maybe James thinks he has to be the man of the family, and he got in a fight with somebody who said something mean about his sister,” a girl said.
A big stack of pizza boxes arrived, along with some thirty-two-ounce bottles of soda. The discussion continued as the kids ate. Harrison said, “So, once James has this rap sheet, maybe his school administration and the police think of him only as that—a kid with a rap sheet. So what do you think will happen if James is then arrested for something more serious, like getting caught with a gun?” The kids all said he would go to prison. “If you were the judge, what would you do?” A majority quickly answered that they would send him to prison, too.
“But do you remember what we learned about stereotyping?” Harrison said. “As you just discovered when you were talking about James, there is an actual person with a complicated life behind the rap sheet. Most of you thought only of giving him jail time, and there’s an even worse stereotype associated with having been in prison. James gets out, now he has a prison record—and, by the way, I know some very good men who have prison records—and he can’t get a job, so he starts selling drugs, and maybe at some point he again picks up a gun so he won’t get robbed. In the next class, we’re going to talk about restorative justice, and peer mediation, and anything we can come up with together that would change James’s story.”
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As she often does in class, she returned to the theme “Guns do not make you safer,” and to the subject of fear amplified by racism. She said, “Our problem is that we are terrified of each other! The people at the takeout place where I used to go in Red Hook would hand you your food through a little window of bulletproof glass! I trusted them enough to eat the food they cooked, but they didn’t trust me, they felt a need to be protected against me.” The over-all message of her curriculum is that fear, racism, and powerlessness are at the root of gun violence. She believes that finding your ability to speak reduces both racism and powerlessness—the former by letting people know that the stereotypes are false, and the latter by creating the sense of strength that comes from speaking out. Her students learn who their city councilmen, state representatives, congressmen, and senators are, and at the end of the year she and her colleagues at New Yorkers Against Gun Violence take students on trips to Albany and Washington, D.C., to meet with and lobby some of these powerful people. For her students, the idea that they can participate in making laws that affect their own lives hadn’t crossed their minds.
In 2021, N.Y.A.G.V.’s classes have continued, although the school buildings have been closed. “In some ways the online classes are better, more personal,” Harrison said. “The kids can see my little son in the background while I talk to them and take care of him. But it’s also like being in the classroom, in that many of the kids are slow to participate at the start. At the beginning of the meetings, almost all of them have their screens turned off. But by the end of the first class everybody has their screens on. That’s important, because a big part of the curriculum is about making sure that they are seen.”
The organization has strengthened its connection with Youth Over Guns by hiring Luis Hernandez, Alliyah Logan, and Andrea Gonzales as part-time employees. Hernandez graduated in June, and Logan and Gonzales are in college. The three help in different areas—Logan in outreach, Hernandez in planning, and Gonzales with the online classes. “I taught a lot of classes with Andrea,” said Frank Teah, the program director for N.Y.A.G.V., who’s in his thirties. “She made a big difference. Andrea’s about the students’ age, and that made it easier for them to relate.”
“The beautiful part about being young is that you have this incredible amount of imagination,” Gonzales said. “We talked a lot about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, but the classes were also very hopeful. I said we can remake worlds in our head.”
As promised, the trips to Albany and Washington took place, but virtually. “In some ways, the trips were better, too,” Harrison said. “In a shorter amount of time we got to see more electeds and their staffs. A lot of our kids have never been out of New York City. They might walk on dangerous streets every day, but going to Albany, our state capital, that faraway place, scares them, and maybe their parents, also. We were having Zoom meetings with, like, the staff of Kirsten Gillibrand, in D.C., or with Jamaal T. Bailey, state senator from the Bronx. We were seeing them in their homes—one staff person was even sitting on the floor of a closet to get away from her family—and that really made them human.”
During a recent Zoom meeting of N.Y.A.G.V.’s seven-member staff, everyone agreed that policing and gun violence are not separate issues, and that the problem is racism, plus powerlessness, plus people being terrified of one another. “To reform the police, you need to build a healthier community where there’s less need to call the police,” Teah said. All seemed surprised by how many allies they discovered they had. Last summer, they taught their Anger to Advocacy program to twenty young anti-gun-violence activists, who are now teaching it to others throughout the country.
“Anger to Advocacy shows you how to take your anger and move it in a positive direction, by engaging with the state and local and national government, the people in power,” Logan said. “But a lot of it is also about changing yourself into an anti-gun activist, and how to be comfortable in that identity.”
“When I started working with N.Y.A.G.V., people in my neighborhood couldn’t understand what I was doing,” Harrison said. “Young Black activists were not getting accolades back then. Many people were looking at them like they were quote-unquote snitches. I had to tell them I wasn’t snitching, I was trying to build safe communities.”
“I’ve been an activist since I was fourteen,” Logan said. “In high school, I would always get up petitions, plan protests and whatnot, and nobody could understand what in the world I was doing, not even my mom and dad. Everybody thought I was just weird. Now I can teach other kids that it’s an O.K. identity to have. Everybody should be an anti-gun activist now.” ♦
Fighting America’s Gun Plague | The New Yorker
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
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last poll i saw was 90% of americans support universal background checks on all guns sales/purchases.
if the politicians cannot get something passed that 90% of people support, it is a failure of a political system that is corrupted by money.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
After recent mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado, President Biden called America’s epidemic of gun violence “an international embarrassment” and promised to issue modest new regulations focused on “ghost guns,” firearms assembled from kits. More robust action, such as banning assault weapons or closing background-check loopholes, will be up to Congress.
Throughout the issue, essays on America’s obsession with guns and debates over the Second Amendment are placed in dialogue with the consequences of gun violence, which causes the deaths and injuries of more than 110,000 Americans annually.
https://store.laphamsquarterly.us/merchandise/guns/?ca_key_code=JB4LGV1
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seriously..i saw tons of times in usa,,u guys go march for every god damn stupid thing
but for ban guns...nope never go on streets for this to change..
...its ok..lets have another bunch of people dead from a madman with a gun,...
as long as a stupid shit from 1776 constitution doesnt change..we are good to go..
the land of the free,,,till u arent free anymore cos u got shot for a random lunitic
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
How many more massacres are you willing to swallow to protect your precious A2, you know us the folks who’ve had enough want something done! It’s up to you the A2 defender to speak out..
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All of them. They're willing to accept all of them, because they care about nothing but themselves.
There's no number of dead Americans too high for the gun nuts to realize something needs to be done. The majority of this country is being held hostage by a minority of selfish fucking babies.
This doesn't happen in any other developed country, but Americans are too fucking stupid to look outside their own borders and realize this and too selfish to care.
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