An AK-47 transforms into a plow. Or an AR-15 turns into a spade. Gun barrels become mattocks, hoes and trowels. These garden tools will be sold to buy more guns by Guns to Gardens, a buyback program dedicated to creating a cycle of awareness around gun violence.
New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV), which hosts the program, is a nonprofit that works to reduce gun violence. The program started about two and a half years ago and was modeled off of a similar program called RAWtools. Guns to Gardens allows gun owners to anonymously turn in their weapons and receive gift cards in return. But the gun’s life doesn’t stop there. The guns are dismantled and brought to an artist, who reshapes them into gardening tools.
A program like this especially important in a state like New Mexico, which has higher firearm mortality rates than the country’s average — a rate that has increased nearly twice as fast in New Mexico than in the rest of the country.
NMPGV has hosted seven gun buybacks in the past two years and has collected over 400 guns.
To learn more about Guns to Gardens, watch the above video.
Tag: Gun Violence
New Mexico Is Awash in Guns. This Program Offers a Solution
Tiago Renê Torres Da Silva leaves details in every tool he forges. Details that have stories. Silva, a blacksmith by trade, takes disarmed guns and turns them into garden tools.
Maybe the detail is a scratch on the barrel or a front sight that will be incorporated into the garden tool he’ll soon reshape.
“You want them to know it [once] was a gun,” he said.
Silva might not know who the gun belonged to or the story behind it, but he knows the pain from gun violence. Growing up in a small town in Brazil, Silva had friends die by gunfire. “There’s a lot of things that happened with guns there that I don’t like,” he said.
Silva emigrated to the States in 2016, but he hardly left gun culture behind. That’s because he now lives in New Mexico, where gun ownership clocks in at about 50 percent, compared to the national average of 30 percent.
So it makes sense that New Mexico has higher firearm mortality rates than the country’s average — a rate that has increased nearly twice as fast in New Mexico than in the rest of the country. For Silva, speaking of his life in Brazil, “only the police and bad guys have guns.” But in New Mexico, “it feels like everyone has a gun.”
Silva now works for New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence (NMPGV), a nonprofit that works to reduce gun violence through programming and training. One program, called Guns to Gardens, buys back guns and transforms them into gardening tools.
“We take better care of our guns than our people here,” said Miranda Viscoli, the co-president of NMPGV.
About two and a half years ago, Viscoli was brainstorming with a friend, and they came up with Guns to Gardens, modeled off of a similar program called RAWtools, which we recently reported on. Guns to Gardens is a buyback program where gun owners anonymously turn in their weapons and receive gift cards in return.
After rates of gun violence spiked across the nation in the mid-1990s, nonprofits, police departments and communities turned to buyback programs in an attempt to lessen gun violence.
Research shows that buybacks might not be the best solution to ending gun violence. In general, households that participated in buybacks still retained ownership of at least one gun and the guns collected are usually the least likely to be used in crimes.
Sabrina Arredondo Mattson, a research associate at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, said although buybacks are ineffective when it comes to lowering violence, there may be potential for buybacks to raise awareness.
“It depends on what your goal is, if the goal is to build awareness, then that may be working,” Arredondo Mattson said. “If the goal and what you’re trying to do is reduce youth gun violence, that’s not an effective approach.”
Viscoli said she kept hearing similar criticisms, but when she saw pictures of a gun buyback in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and saw how many assault weapons and automatic handguns were turned in, she said, “We will do gun buybacks.”
Viscoli said a third of the weapons they receive are semiautomatic handguns and assault weapons, which are the most common guns used in crimes.
Buybacks paired with other NMPGV initiatives, like student pledge campaigns and public education, can have an impact. Gun buybacks might remove only a small percentage of a community’s weapons, but it provides a way for people to take action while showing support for victims, and also raise awareness of issues around gun violence.
Arredondo Mattson agreed that gun buybacks may work as supplemental programming. “Combined with other strategies that are aimed at and have been shown to reduce gun violence then it might be a good add on.” But she stressed that evidence-based prevention programs are the most successful strategy to lower violence.
The difference between NMPGV’s program and a typical buyback is that the gun’s life doesn’t stop there. The guns are dismantled and brought to Silva, who reshapes them into gardening tools. The money from the garden tools is used to purchase more gift cards for buybacks.
Which propels the cycle of awareness. NMPGV hosted seven gun buybacks in the past two years and collected over 400 guns.
“We see firsthand that these are objects that people really don’t want in their home, people don’t feel safe with them anymore,” Viscoli said. “And this gives them the opportunity to get rid of them.”
Viscoli said a majority of the guns are from parents who don’t want a gun in the house, widows who have no idea what to do with their partner’s guns and families with members who have suicidal thoughts or dementia. About 95 percent have brought guns in because of safety issues, Viscoli said.
“There’s a sense of relief on their face,” she said. “They’re so grateful we can take these guns.”
More: From Fatal Shots to Garden Plots: These Guns Are Given New Meaning
From Fatal Shots to Garden Plots: These Guns Are Given New Meaning
The gun that killed Tom Miller sat locked in an antique chest for 47 years, stashed underneath police reports, crime photos and autopsy documents from the homicide case.
“It’s the sort of thing where you know it’s there… but you don’t know what to do with it,” Stephen Miller, Tom’s brother, told NationSwell.
The gun lay undisturbed for nearly five decades — out of sight, but never really out of mind — until Miller, now 62, cleaned out his childhood home. And with his mother focused on her transition into an assisted living center, it fell to Miller to decide what to do with it.
In the United States, there are limited options to dispose of unwanted firearms. Some police departments host gun buybacks, where people can bring weapons in exchange for cash. Other police departments will always accept people’s guns, no questions asked. But Miller didn’t necessarily want to give the gun away, despite the tragedy it brought into his family’s life. He suspected the weapon might find greater purpose beyond the reason it was built.
“I still want to have that connection to what happened,” he said. “But I want it to be turned towards positive action.”
And so, rather than dispose of the weapon through a police-sponsored program, Miller found his way to RAWtools, a faith-based gun nonviolence nonprofit that helps families like his recycle unwanted firearms. With their help, the gun that killed Tom Miller — a gun that brought so much anguish into the lives of Stephen and his family — will help something beautiful bloom. Literally.
Swords to Plowshares, the RAWtools program working to repurpose Miller’s weapon, draws its name from a notable verse from the Old Testament that says world peace is only possible when weapons are transformed into farming tools. Inspired by that passage, Swords to Plowshares breaks down unwanted guns and turns them into garden tools. It’s seen AR-15s become spades, AK-47s morph into plows and gun barrels experience new life as mattocks, hoes and trowels.
Mike Martin, executive director of the organization, cited the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 as the reason he took action to help end gun violence.
“It feels productive to be able to take something that was designed to take life and turn it into something that can give life,” Martin said of Swords to Plowshares’ methods.
In the United States, white Christians have one of the highest rates of gun ownership. Forty-one percent of white evangelicals and 33 percent of white protestant mainliners reported owning a gun, compared to the national gun ownership average of 30 percent. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans claim safety as the number one reason for gun ownership. But in October 2017, Scientific American cited dozens of studies that show the exact opposite is true: more guns actually lead to more violent crime, not less.
Martin, a former pastor, said he’s not there to judge his fellow Christians — rather, he hopes to use his organization to start a conversation that might change the narrative on gun ownership.
“It’s hard to carry a gun in one hand and a cross in the other,” he told NationSwell. “So we ask questions and we have a meaningful dialogue about that.”
Martin’s organization hosts events where gun violence survivors and allies meet in church parking lots to repurpose former weapons. As guns are sawed, metal sparks; so do conversations. People of all faiths — or no faith at all — are welcome to take part.
Here’s what those participating may see: a human whose life was impacted by gun violence speaks to their experience while a donated gun is disarmed. The weapon is heated thousands of degrees until the metal glows, signaling that it’s hot enough to reshape. Anyone impacted by gun violence can take a turn hitting the heated gun barrel against an anvil to begin its reshaping process.
A mother might strike the weapon 18 times to remember her 18-year-old child who died from suicide. Or a student might hit it in memory of a lost friend and classmate. Most recently, the barrel was struck in memory of the at least 50 victims who lost their lives in the March mass shooting at Christchurch in New Zealand.
After this shared ritual, the metal will be reforged into garden tools. Some of those tools end up in the homes of people who donated guns. Others will find their way to community gardens. The rest are sold to support RAWtools’ mission, with some of the proceeds helping the organization expand its outreach and create a national disarming network where people can bring a gun to be disarmed and donated.
“There’s a lot of grief, but there’s also something that happens at the anvil that pivots it towards hope,” Martin said. “We know that there’s a way out of it.”
For people who have experienced emotional and spiritual pain, there is powerful alchemy in welding together the symbolic and the literal. Though the organization doesn’t always do this, RAWTools set aside some of the pieces of the gun that killed Tom Miller to be reforged into a cross, a holy symbol from Miller’s faith emblematic of the church, the divine and the possibility of hope and healing from death.
Unlike the gun, that cross won’t be locked away for decades. Miller said he plans to carry it with him everywhere he goes.
More: 4 Low-Lift Ways You Can Help Fight Gun Violence
4 Low-Lift Ways You Can Help Fight Gun Violence
In the first six months of 2018, there were 150 mass shootings in America. And though the number of dead continues to climb — over 7,210 people have been killed by firearms this year, a figure that is rapidly rising — gun law reform hasn’t had much traction on Capitol Hill.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to get involved in shaping U.S. gun laws and regulations. From joining advocacy groups to buying lipstick (really), here are four ways you can take action on gun reform to help push it onto the congressional agenda.
ARM YOURSELF WITH KNOWLEDGE
Lobbyists and reporters are often at odds in how they can influence policy. Reporters expose, while lobbyists harangue and cajole. But despite their differences, both are effective in their own right — and they could use your help.
First, know your stuff: Read daily news from a source like The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that covers gun violence across the U.S. and is primarily financed through the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
Everytown, which is funded by $50 million of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s money, actively fights against the NRA’s lobbying with a coalition of their own — comprised of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, as well as survivors of gun violence — to help raise awareness and change legislation in the U.S.
Everytown recently had success in pushing gun reform in New Jersey, which just passed a “red flag” bill that allows law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns from people they determine a risk to society or themselves. According to Axios, the group convened 10 times with state leaders and had a day of advocacy in support for the bill in order to help pass it.
Other organizations to learn about and support: The Brady Campaign, The Violence Policy Center and The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
INFLUENCE POLICY FROM YOUR LAPTOP
Have an opinion on gun reform? Outside of voting, social media is the easiest way to send a message to your congressional leaders.
Not only does Facebook’s Town Hall Project make it simple to find out who your local representatives are and to message them directly, websites like Countable help you navigate all the bills currently being considered in D.C., and to take action by letting representatives know what you think of the bills.
SideReel founders Peter Arzhintar and Bart Myers launched Countable in 2014, when there were few ways to engage politicians on the internet. “We were talking about what to do next, and we’re both passionate about politics,” Myers told Wired. “We were interested in what happened with campaign finance reform and [the Stop Online Piracy Act], but we were disappointed with the tools that were out there to drive advocacy and let the average voter to get involved.”
Countable now has news and a social component that allows users to interact with others’ opinions, and vote on them too.
STAY FLY
If you’re fired up about the lack of gun regulation in this country, buy some lipstick.
No, really. The Lipstick Lobby is a social movement e-commerce beauty website that is dedicating 100 percent of net profits from their “Fired Up” lipstick color — a fiery orange-red — to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The Brady Center aims to cut gun deaths in half by 2025.
If you’re feeling especially generous — or just need to stock up on cosmetics — you can also support Planned Parenthood or the American Civil Liberties Union by buying other products from The Lipstick Lobby that contribute to those organizations’ campaigns.
For those with extra deep pockets, supporting high-end brands that align with gun reform is another way to maintain your activism-glam game. As one example, Gucci donated $500,000 to the March for Our Lives rally this year. And if you’re a jet-setter, flying Delta and staying at a Wyndham hotel is yet another way to stick it to the NRA. Those are just a few of the brands that have cut ties with the gun lobby.
MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD, EVEN IF YOU’RE UNDERAGE
With the website WeCan.Vote, you can see how your state representatives rank with the NRA’s scorecard (A+ being the most friendly toward the gun lobby and F the least). If you’re not yet voting age, you can sign up on the website and then cast your vote to keep those members in or out of office. The vote is purely ceremonial and doesn’t actually influence election results, but it does send a message to leaders that the next wave of voters is coming.
Another way to make a difference? Join or form your own activist group, much like students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did when 17 students and staff members were shot and killed this past February. If you need some inspiration, here are just a few examples of young activists demanding change.
10 Outstanding Solutions of 2017
Across the country, changemakers are operating behind the scenes, working to solve some of America’s most daunting problems. They do so humbly, without seeking praise or notoriety. At NationSwell, we’ve always sought to elevate the innovation and tenacity of their efforts in the hopes of inspiring more people to action. Here, a celebration of the top work in 2017.
My Final Act of Service
Before Marine Corps veteran Anthony Egan dies, he has several lessons he wants to teach his son.
Disarmed: The Reclaiming of a City From Epic Gun Violence
In a community that’s experienced a 200 percent increase in the number of shootings in the past three years alone, ordinary residents are becoming peacekeepers.
The Rx for Better Birth Control
Colorado attempts to end the cycle of poverty by preventing unplanned pregnancy.
When Liberals and Conservatives Came Together on the Environment
Today’s politicians should look to the past for inspiration on how to achieve bipartisan legislation for the good of the planet.
From Blight to Beauty in the Motor City
It started with a dad protecting his family from drug dealers. Thirty years later, his revitalization efforts are still going strong.
3 Ways to Show Empathy When Talking About Sexual Assault
The words used when speaking about sexual assault can have an impact on what others view as acceptable.
Neo-Nazi Music Is on the Rise. These Companies and People Are Taking It On
A former white supremacist fights back against the alt-right’s use of music to spread a message of hate.
A Prison With No Walls
Can a facility that relies on strict discipline instead of barbed wire and bars result in lower recidivism rates?
6 Stunning Art Projects That Are Making Cities Healthier
Cities across the nation recognize the revitalizing powers of beautiful community art.
The School Where Only Addicts Roam the Hallways
A cohort of sober youth confronts the realities of living drug free.
The 10 Most Powerful Documentaries of 2017
To say the year in politics has been a whirlwind would be an understatement. Expensive natural disasters ravaged great swaths of the country, immigration and tax reform provoked wicked political attacks from both the right and the left, and stark revelations from women exposed a culture of sexual assault that touches almost every industry. And that’s just been the last four months.
In film, though, it was a year of fantastic documentaries that moved, inspired and challenged us. Here, our top perspective-changing films of 2017.
“Chasing Coral”
Years of overfishing and boating have caused coral reefs around the world to vanish, as they transform from once-vibrant homes for a diverse array of wildlife to colorless rock devoid of life. “Chasing Coral” follows a team of scientists, photographers and divers as they try to answer the question: Why are the world’s coral reefs are disappearing, and what we can do about slowing their untimely death?
“The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson”
The rise of the LGBTQ movement is often talked about through the lens of gays and lesbians, but very little ink has been given to how the drag and transgender communities played an equally significant role. One of the most prominent names in the fight for equality was Marsha P. Johnson, a transwoman and activist who was well known in New York City’s gay scene for decades, beginning with her role in the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969. But her mysterious death in 1992 has been debated for years. Was it an inside job by the mob? The NYPD? Or was it all just a tragic accident?
“Heroin(e)”
In Huntington, W. Va., the opioid epidemic is killing people at a rapid pace. The small city’s fire department fields dozens of calls a day relating to overdoses, but it has few resources to help everyone who needs it. This short documentary follows three local women as they battle the crisis in the city known as the “overdose capital of America”: the fire chief who dispenses life-saving drugs, the church leader who helps get women off the streets, and the judge who keeps addicts out of jail and with their families.
“I Am Evidence”
Mariska Hargitay, best known for her role as Detective Olivia Benson on “Law & Order: SVU,” has been one of the most vocal activists for getting rape kits tested and prosecutions made across the nation. Her film, “I Am Evidence,” explores the widespread problem of untested, backlogged rape kits, and the thousands of women each year who don’t get to see justice because of it.
“I Am Not Your Negro”
This Rotten Tomatoes certified-fresh movie is wholly inspired by the unfinished work of writer and social critic James Baldwin, an openly gay black man and civil rights activist famously known for his debate in Cambridge against William F. Buckley in 1965. The movie, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, is an intensely sobering look at race in America, and how far we haven’t come in mending racial wounds.
“Nobody Speak”
We all had our love/hate relationship with Gawker, the now-defunct website known for its dogged, and sometimes unapologetic, journalism covering (and skewering) anything celebrity- and media-related. But the company’s brash take on free speech was challenged in a lawsuit brought by Terry Gene Bollea, aka Hulk Hogan, after Gawker published a sex tape starring the former wrestler. The court case was a mix of jaw-dropping legal tap-dancing and dark money that traced back to Peter Thiel, one of President Trump’s earliest endorsers in Silicon Valley that had some major beef of his own with the website.
“Quest”
Filmed over the course of 10 years, “Quest” looks at the life of one family in North Philadelphia and juxtaposes the question of what it means to be a typical American family when gun violence and danger lurk everywhere in the neighborhood you call home.
“Rat Film”
Like it or not, rats are very similar to humans. Beyond genetics, we are just as filthy and opportunistic as the rodents that ravage our cities. In Baltimore, there’s not just a rat problem, “there’s a people problem,” as one of the film’s subjects points out. The documentary examines the rodent infestation in one small area of Baltimore — a city plagued by poverty and high crime rates — and how the issue speaks more to the divide in quality of life between white and black communities than adequate pest control.
“Strong Island”
In 1992, Yance Ford’s brother, William Ford Jr., was shot and killed in New York. Ford Jr. was black, the shooter white, and the jury refused to indict. Decades later, Ford has channeled his frustrations into a true crime documentary that questions the investigation into whether his brother’s death was a murder or an act of self defense.
“The Work”
Imagine being put into a prison for four days with hardened criminals. What would you learn about them? About yourself? “The Work” profiles three men from the outside who join a days-long group therapy event at California’s Folsom State Prison. The men get an inside glimpse into what it really means to be incarcerated in America, and the challenges inherent with rehabilitating oneself.
Disarmed: The Reclaiming of a City From Gun Violence
At every stop during a drive through the Greenville section of Jersey City, N.J., John “Jay” Gilmore recounts exactly what happened and who was involved — including the name of the person who pulled the trigger.
That’s something unique about all the murders in Jersey City: Everyone knows who killed whom. In some instances, the murderer lives right next door to the victim, but no one will talk.
“Nobody’s gonna tell the police because nobody’s gonna snitch,” Gilmore, a former member of the local East Coast Bloods gang Sex, Money, Murda, tells NationSwell. “You snitch and you could get killed.”
So instead of snitching, Gilmore’s one of many Jersey City residents trying to fix the problem from within.
Life on the Hill
Power players in government (including Florida Man’s son-in-law Jared Kushner) and finance have turned once-barren Jersey City into a metropolis of 264,000 people living in the shadow of Manhattan, just across the Hudson River. But as of October this year, there have been 16 homicides and 98 total shootings in Jersey City. Most have occurred around the Greenville neighborhood, an area referred to locally as “The Hill.” Almost all of the deaths were caused by guns, according to an independent analysis conducted by NationSwell.
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop says that additional law enforcement patrols and proactive policing in high-crime areas are addressing the problem, but NationSwell’s analysis — which only includes reported shootings published in local papers and cross referenced with reported shootings via the Gun Violence Archive — reveals that Jersey City has seen a 200 percent increase in the number of shootings in the past three years.
The total number of homicides recorded by Jersey City police in monthly CompStat reports — the system that logs city crimes — does not specify the number of murders by gun deaths, nor does it record number of shootings without injury.
Multiple requests for more accurate records to the Jersey City Police Department on shooting data were not made available to NationSwell.
With gunshots being heard almost every night, a neighborhood resident says the area is tantamount to a war zone.
“It’s kill or be killed in Greenville,” says Hessie Williams, a Jersey City mother whose 17-year-old son was murdered in 2016. When there’s a shooting, more kids take up guns to protect themselves, an issue that the Mayor’s office has said is part of the problem. “I get why they carry [guns]. When you’re running from bullets almost every week, it makes sense,” Williams says.
Fulop, a Democrat that recently won re-election, has consistently made gun violence part of his campaign, but even he’s admitted that the problem can’t be solved through changes to policing or legislation alone.
“These situations did not develop overnight and we know it will take time, dedication and long-term efforts to bring lasting change…There are many factors that impact public safety and violence,” says Fulop. “While we have hired more police and increased walking tours and community policing — and have found that to be positive — we have also more than doubled the number of recreation programs, created a partnership with the [Board of Education] for more youth activities after school and have hired over 4,000 youth over the past four summers.”
Additionally, 8,000 jobs have also been created and other community programs have been launched during Fulop’s administration.
But families of gun violence victims don’t feel that City Hall’s actions are sufficient. “If the kids being killed were white kids, the city would be doing everything in their power to stop this. Nobody cares about my son. They think my son isn’t important,” says Theresa Franklin, a Jersey City mother whose child was killed in May 2016.
To stop the shooting, regular citizens are borrowing a technique from the gangs ravaging their streets. They’re taking matters into their own hands.
A Cure for Jersey City
Jersey City’s Booker T. Washington Apartments, just one mile north of Greenville, have a long-standing reputation for being lethal. For the better part of the 1990s, the housing project was known for its gun violence and drug trade.
In the past five years, crime has decreased, shootings are rare (though they still happen) and residents are starting to feel safe in their own homes.
Though the city has deployed a significant number of uniformed police officers to the area, the drop in crime has much more to do with a cultural change brought about by a group of young men who live there.
One of those residents, Courtney Hemingway, 30, sits in the project’s recreation center every Thursday with at least 15 of his peers and a motley crew of career professionals, including a volunteer lawyer, a jobs mentor, a social service counselor and a motivational speaker. Dwayne Baskerville, a longtime Booker T. Washington resident, is also there.
“One thing that Courtney probably won’t tell you is that he put a hit out on me,” says the 55-year-old Baskerville. “So I went to him and told him my life’s story and at the end of it, I said, ‘So do you wanna do this? Or do you wanna play some basketball?’”
They ended up shooting hoops.
(Today, both guys refer to the incident as “a misunderstanding.”)
That was back in 2006. Their initial interaction inspired Hemingway to form a de facto peace treaty between rivaling groups in the Booker T. Apartments and nearby Marion Gardens houses that resulted in 104 days of no shootings.
Ever since, Baskerville has been leading a program that’s unofficially replicating the Cure Violence model, which takes a public-health approach by identifying those that have personally committed violent crimes and using their influence within their community to cool tensions. His group encourages youth to shed their lives of violence and crime by holding weekly sessions to talk about frustrations (they want to be less policed) and troubles they’re facing (they want careers, not just jobs). As a result, a handful have been able to hold down steady career jobs or go to school.
Cure Violence has proven successful in some of America’s most economically- and socially-depressed neighborhoods, including Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, where gun injury rates declined by 50 percent, and the South Bronx, which experienced a 63 percent reduction in shootings, according to a study by CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.
Last year, Camden, N.J., one of America’s 100 most dangerous cities, adopted the model. Maalik Jackson, an outreach supervisor for the local chapter Cure4Camden, says that homicides, shootings, and stabbings have significantly decreased in the four neighborhoods they’re focusing on.
Jackson recently visited Jersey City to learn why Baskerville’s group is so successful.
“The thing that I noticed from the beginning was that there were a lot of similarities in what they want to do to what we’re doing, but they lack the backing,” he says, referring to the fact that Cure models are typically set up through government channels and are heavily financed. “They were able to apply our model within this one area — with no funding, with no help — and [are] still achieving a high level of success.”
“Put down your guns, y’all.”
The Booker T. group empathizes with residents in Greenville. They know people from the neighborhood who have been murdered, or at least hear the stories. But they’re far removed from it.
“We don’t have the same kind of issues that the people up on The Hill have. Not anymore,” Hemingway says. “They’re shooting at each other like crazy up there.”
Gilmore, the former gang member, has first-hand knowledge of the struggles faced by Greenville youth. Convicted of drug possession, he served a six-year-long prison stint before making his way back to his hometown in 2017 to find that many of the people he raised in the gang had been killed.
Upon his return, Gilmore began talking to kids who may have beef with others, using his connections on the street and “working the chirp,” — listening in on a gang communication network — in an effort to mitigate gun violence. His efforts are similar to the work being done at the Booker T. Apartments.
“Sometimes these kids listen, but they really only listen to people their age or those they look up to,” Gilmore says. “They’re not gonna be listening to the police or their elders. So I talk with them because they know me.”
He’s also involved with A Mother’s Pain, a group of dogged mothers of fallen children that was started by Williams. In August 2016, her son, Leander “Nunie” Williams, was killed, shot twice in the back of the head at a school event.
Williams was devastated — but not shocked — by Nunie’s death, who she says was “no angel.” He had been running around with troubled neighborhood kids and a year prior, had been expelled from school for carrying a gun, which he had bought illegally.
Williams and A Mother’s Pain have been working Greenville’s streets at least once a month, carrying posters plastered with the pictures of local kids who have been killed. They meet with city council members and the mayor’s office in hopes of elevating their profile and highlighting their work. They lead caravans where dozens of cars block traffic and have sit-ins with gun-toting gang members.
On the one-year anniversary of Nunie’s death, NationSwell participated in one of those caravans, which visited seven locations where mothers in the group had lost loved ones and Nunie’s gravesite. A handful of his friends had gathered to show their respect.
“Come on, y’all,” Williams pleaded with the group of six boys. “If you really loved Nunie, you’d stop shooting. Put down your guns, y’all. Put ’em down.”
Just a week later, she’d be doing the same thing after another teenager was murdered.
A Mother’s Pain also counts the rebellious religious leader Dr. Rev. Herbert Daughtry among its ranks.
Daughtry, 86, has mastered the art of protesting against neighborhood violence within black communities. He’s been using his experience and connections to a national network of black leaders to help the mothers in Williams’s group, whom he refers to as “wounded healers.”
Growing up in Jersey City and nearby Brooklyn, N.Y., Daughtry used to run with local gangs and the mafia before he was incarcerated for armed robbery and assault — a crime that led him to becoming a fourth-generation preacher. Since then, Daughtry (dubbed “The People’s Preacher”) has been successful at elevating human rights alongside Rev. Jesse Jackson and former Mayor David Dinkins. He was also Tupac Shakur’s spiritual advisor, according to Jet Magazine.
The action that A Mother’s Pain is taking now, Daughtry did 30 years ago in the notoriously violent neighborhoods of Brooklyn. “We’re taking to the streets, kinda like how we did in the radical days. That’s how we raise awareness and try to stop these kids from shooting [each other].”
Killed Over a Dice Game
But gangs and the problems within their communities have changed since the 1980s, as social media has made people excitable and even tiny issues get out of hand.
“Every other day we hear about another kid getting shot,” says Dennis Febo, an advisor at the Booker T. Apartments’ weekly meetings, in reference to a two-month period this past summer when two people were killed by gunfire and another 26 people were shot. One of those shootings erupted from a dice game.
“I mean, how do you even address that?”
The problem is particularly vexing in Jersey City. Dozens of residents from The Hill point to the demolition Montgomery Gardens, a public housing project just a block away from the Booker T. Apartments that was once home to 434 families, as stirring up long-standing geographic boundaries between feuding rivals, some of whom were kicked out of their apartments and forced to relocate to areas that weren’t necessarily welcoming.
“The people who lived in the Montgomery houses may have had issues with people up on The Hill,” says Pamela Johnson, executive director of the New Jersey Anti-Violence Coalition Movement. “That beef between families has been transferred down from generation to generation. Now with the displacement, they live next door to an arch enemy they had their entire life.”
Public Safety Director James Shea tells NationSwell in an email that preventing these crimes is much more than just mitigating generational rivalries and requires smarter policing practices.
“Eye-for-an-eye justice is a definite problem and the cause of many instances where one incident sparks a series of retaliatory actions,” he says. “While there are definitely long-standing differences between groups related to specific public housing locations, and that is part of the investigation strategy, it is not the sole cause.”
In January of this year, Mayor Fulop vowed to reduce gun violence by hiring more police, increasing the Jersey City force from under 800 to 922 officers in the past two years, the largest it’s been in 20 years.
The city has also put into place new procedures when a shooting occurs, including swarming the area with plainclothes officers who build relationships with community members that can lead to arrests. It’s believed that a larger, and more visible police force, helps deter crimes.
An overnight solution isn’t possible, Fulop and Shea say, because the issues facing Jersey City are so deeply rooted. Even policing won’t solve it, completely.
“Any number of shooting deaths is too many but these issues aren’t issues that are unique to jersey city [sic] and the reality is they are issues that no city can only police their way to a solution on,” Fulop wrote in a Facebook post in June 2015. “Many of the issues have taken decades to get here and they won’t be solved by pure police.”
Many residents and volunteer advocates praise the mayor’s work, but stop short of saying the administration has helped reduce violence or shootings on their streets.
A Community, Together
A Mother’s Pain has yet to see the significant drop in violence that’s been achieved by the group in the Booker T. apartments. The mothers, however, do take credit for a two-week period of no shootings in Greenville — a significant moment considering residents complain about gun violence virtually every day.
Mayor Fulop says that conversations with the group have helped inform the city’s newest anti-violence strategies.
As for Gilmore, he’s taken kids off the street to teach them boxing in Williams’s backyard.
“I do it as a way to keep them from being bored. Keep ’em busy,” he says. “I’d much rather these kids — if they’re gonna beef — learn to use their fists than some guns.”
Back in August, Gilmore noticed a boy, no older than 12 years old, carrying a gun in his waistband. Gilmore demanded that he hand it over. The tween argued back, claiming that he needed it for protection from guys outside his school, waiting for him.
“From now on, I’m walking you to and from school,” Gilmore told the boy.
The situation, Gilmore acknowledges, is complicated for black communities, where more policing might reduce crime but increases distrust among the community it serves.
He is confident, though, that one thing will work: Getting the entire community to come together to take a stand for a better quality of life.
Visit Joseph Darius Jaafari’s GitHub page to learn how the data in this article was captured and analyzed.
Update: Since the reporting of this article, Courtney Hemingway pled guilty to several counts, including aggravated assault on a police officer.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Hessie Williams’s son was killed at age 19. He was 17. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
Could Field Trips Push Kids Past Their Violent Realities?
Many first heard of Chicago’s Harper High School in 2013 on “This American Life“. The radio show devoted two episodes to the school after a whopping 29 of its current and recent students were shot in a single year.
But Imran Khan first got to know the students there, on a much deeper level, when he began teaching at Harper in 2008. He saw firsthand the impact that poverty, gangs and violence had on his students. He also noticed that, despite living in the country’s third-largest city, the kids he taught rarely ventured beyond a several-block radius; it was simply too dangerous.
In essence, the students were isolated, leaving them without exposure to the people and experiences that could inspire them to go to college and then on to rewarding careers.
So Khan began taking some of the students on nearby trips — to restaurants, universities, grocery stores and museums. The journeys, he says, opened their eyes to possible career paths, like becoming a cook, a chef, even a restaurateur. Other students became more interested in the arts, or intrigued by fresh produce they had never before seen, let alone tasted.
“They had a distorted sense of self-efficacy and were not quite grasping [that it was up to them] to change their situation,” says Khan, who took what he learned leading these journeys and created a three-year extracurricular program, called Embarc, in 2010.
In the seven years since, Embarc has focused on providing real-world “experiences,” partnering with more than 250 local organizations and companies willing to open their doors to the low-income students who participate. Nearly 40 teachers at 20 schools have signed on to the program, which has been integrated into Chicago Public Schools’ course catalog, and Embarc is pushing to expand its impact both in Chicago and other cities across the U.S.
“It is imminently scalable,” says Eboo Patel, a mentor and founding president of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based nonprofit. “It’s a great three-pointer in a broader set of plays that America needs to have in order to level the playing field.”
Khan is quick to point out, however, that Embarc “isn’t a pity party” focused on society’s haves and have-nots. The journeys and experiences instead are built on fostering trust, goodwill and confidence.
For one team activity, students meet on neutral territory in downtown Chicago and separate into pairs. With adult supervision, they have about 90 minutes to find and check off a list of city landmarks. The rules? The pair of students must take two forms of transportation, and one of the them has to remain blindfolded.
“The fear level is so high, but everyone has to do it,” says Khan, 37. “After that, you learn massive amounts of trust and how to ask other people for help. That kind of journey can happen in any city.”
During restaurant visits, students can shadow employees on the job, chip in to help and taste a few dishes while learning about their ingredients. “There’s a sense of belonging and accomplishment,” says Khan.
Through these kinds of activities and tours, Khan is proving that experiential development has as much a role to play as cognitive development when it comes to education. Ninety-seven percent of Embarc’s participants have graduated high school, Khan says, and 93 percent have enrolled in college, including both two- and four-year programs.
“Oftentimes you hear complaints that young people are throwing away this education that’s been gifted or given to them,” says Simon Stumpf, director of venture and fellowship for Ashoka, a nonprofit that supports social entrepreneurs. But, he adds, Khan’s “sense is that they don’t know what door that key opens — we need to help them unlock intrinsic motivation so they can use that key.” Last year, Khan was selected as an Ashoka Fellow to help scale Embarc’s work.
Ultimately, foundations and grants may drive Embarc’s expansion outside Chicago. But Khan envisions a model that could move beyond donations — where cities, schools or partner organizations access an Embarc “blueprint,” and then scale the program in their own districts. Patel admits that finding long-term funding to support Embarc’s core mission will be tricky.
“You have to get lucky, and you have to be strategic,” he says.
5 Policies That States Are Using to Curb Gun Violence, With Encouraging Results
On average, nearly 34,000 people are killed in the U.S. each year due to gun homicide, suicide or accidents, with another 81,000 who are shot but survive. But zeroing in on the causes of gun violence, in order to thwart them, is no easy task. It’s not just about a glut of available firearms or how easy it is to obtain one. As the Center for American Progress pointed out in its 2016 Progress Index, there is a connected web of social and economic issues that can impact rates of violence in a community — persistent poverty and a lack of employment, to name a few.
That’s led several communities to take novel approaches to curb the bloodshed, either by expanding existing federal law or implementing new ideas altogether. Below, five policies put in place by cities and states around the country whose smart governance on guns is changing the landscape for the better.
THE POLICY: A BETTER BACKGROUND CHECK
Federal law already requires licensed firearms dealers to perform criminal background checks on prospective buyers. But unlicensed private sellers — who are responsible for about 40 percent of all gun sales in “no questions asked” transactions — are not legally bound to follow the same rules.
Since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., six states (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Oregon and Washington) have successfully closed this gap by passing and implementing these so-called universal background checks on every sale and transfer within their borders (including those purchased at gun shows and online) for all classes of firearms, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Nevada could soon be the seventh, but the state is currently undergoing a procedural dispute over the implementation of the measure.
THE POLICY: DENYING GUNS TO DOMESTIC ABUSERS
Research has repeatedly shown a lethal link between domestic violence and gun violence in the U.S. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of women who were murdered were shot and killed by their intimate partners. “It’s a huge epidemic,” says Hannah Shearer, staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Under federal law, people convicted of a felony or domestic abuse cannot buy or own a gun. But there are some limitations to that measure, like defining a domestic abuser only as a spouse. To protect more women, some states, including six in 2017 alone, have strengthened federal law by expanding that definition to also encompass former dating partners.
THE POLICY: LICENSING AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives requires a federal license for those in the business of selling guns. But the law doesn’t mandate that dealers perform background checks on their employees, says Avery Gardiner, co-president at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “They also don’t train them to recognize signs of illegal gun trafficking, nor is a gun store even required to lock up its inventory at night,” she says.
In response, 15 states, along with Washington, D.C., have made state-issued licenses mandatory for gun dealers. Additionally, six states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington — now require gun stores to do background checks on employees.
THE POLICY: A FOCUS ON INNER CITIES
“Sometimes gun deaths in cities that are ethnically diverse get overlooked,” Shearer says, adding that instead, there’s a tendency to focus on mass shootings and rare events. But the reality is that deaths by guns happen every day across the country.
The Law Center published a report last year on promising approaches being implemented nationwide to reduce urban gun violence. One such city that’s seen success: Richmond, Calif.
In 2007, the Bay Area city was considered one of the country’s most dangerous. So officials there enacted intervention programs and policy reforms in response. They created a new agency, the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), to treat violence as a communicable disease and connected vulnerable residents to social services. As ONS’s director DeVone Boggan, a 2015 NationSwell AllStar, described the agency’s mission: “You’ve got to understand the nature of [violence], and you’ve got to understand the drivers of it” in order to combat it.
The results were impressive, with homicides in Richmond dipping by 2010. Three years later the city saw its murder rate fall from more than 40 homicides a year to 16, its lowest number in more than three decades.
THE POLICY: DETERMINING WHO’S TOO DANGEROUS TO HAVE A GUN
A measure designed to keep guns away from people perceived at risk of harming themselves or others allows police, and sometimes family members, to ask the courts to intervene. Provided with enough evidence, a judge might temporarily deny a person’s access to guns if he or she is deemed to be a significant danger.
Connecticut was the first state to enact a version of this order in 1999, followed later by Indiana, California and Washington State. Others, including Oregon, are considering adopting similar bills. In 2016, researchers from Duke University led a study that found a measurable reduction in Connecticut’s suicide rate as a result of its risk-warrant policy.
“These laws have a huge potential for saving lives,” Shearer says, “because family members often notice warning signs that somebody is suicidal or homicidal before something really bad happens.”
Homepage photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
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Solar Trumps Coal When It Comes to Jobs, Cash Handouts Deter Crime in California and More
Solar Now Provides Twice As Many Jobs As the Coal Industry, Co.Exist
While the coal industry faces a sharp decline, solar power is growing at record levels — adding jobs at a rate 17 times faster than the overall workforce. The industry is also a more lucrative option for people without higher education. As one advocate puts it, “This is just an incredible example of the opportunities that exist for people that need these opportunities the most.”
Building Trust Cuts Violence. Cash Also Helps. The New York Times
A radical approach to gun violence has helped reduce the homicide rate by nearly 60 percent in Richmond, Calif., formerly one of the nation’s most dangerous cities. Spearheaded by DeVone Boggan, a NationSwell Council member, the program identifies those most likely to be involved in violent crimes and pays them a stipend to turn their lives around. Aside from the cash benefits, participants receive mentoring from “neighborhood change agents” who have come out of lives of crime themselves.
Iceland Knows How to Stop Teen Substance Abuse but the Rest of the World Isn’t Listening, Mosaic Science
In the last two decades, Iceland has implemented an ambitious social program that’s nearly eliminated substance abuse among teens. After research showed that young people were becoming addicted to the changes in brain chemistry brought on by drugs and alcohol, experts decided to “orchestrate a social movement around natural highs,” offering extensive after-school programs in sports, dance, music — anything that could replicate the rush of drugs. This, coupled with stricter laws and closer ties between parents and schools, led to a huge societal makeover. Proponents of the program hope to recreate it in the U.S., but funding and public opinion remain obstacles.
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