After consistently eclipsing all other countries in the number of mass shootings per year, why is America still so obsessed with guns? And in the face of such a polarizing issue, what can be done to stop the killing?
“A lot of people think we have a violence problem, but it doesn't seem to be the case; but where we are different is in terms of guns,” says Dr. David Hemenway of Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center. He makes the case for a public health approach which treats gun violence as an epidemic to be mitigated through practical long-term solutions. In addition, Professors Chris Hays and Carly Crouch of Fuller Theological Seminary discuss their book God and Guns, examining the presumed correlation between American Christianity and support of gun ownership. To close, Diane Latiker shares what peacemaking might look like on the ground in the face of such bleak realities.
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Transcript:
Lee Camp: [00:00:00] I am Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life. This week we're joined by Harvard Professor David Hemenway.
David Hemenway: A child in the United States is much more likely to be murdered with a firearm than children in these other high income countries. And it's not like we're 50% higher than average, or five times as high. We're 29 times higher.
Lee Camp: Plus, a Chicago mother who decided to do something about gun violence.
Diane Latiker: I'm still wondering why it's no outrage. Those young people belong to a family. They belong to somebody.
Lee Camp: And theologians who are challenging Christian presumptions.
Carly Crouch: Fear can lead us down some very dark paths.
Lee Camp: Today, Guns: A Nashville Commentary. Coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
For years, as I've heard the horrifying accounts of mass shootings in schools around the country, I've often found myself thinking, someday this will happen in Nashville. And when it did, it was in my neighborhood.
A 28-year-old, armed with two assault rifles and a pistol, gained access to the Covenant School by shooting through the glass side doors. Three 9-year-old students, Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney were shot and killed. Three staff members, Katherine Koonce, Mike Hill, Cynthia Peak were shot and killed. Within minutes the Metro Nashville Police arrived, and within minutes the perpetrator [00:02:00] was shot and killed.
Nashville is still, in particular ways, a small town. The weight of the grief has been palpable. Aristotle once said something to the effect that a virtuous person would be angry about the right things at the right time in the right way with the right intensity for the right length of time. Similarly, the Apostle Paul said, be angry - just don't sin in your anger.
There are all manner of reasons to be angry. The senseless loss of these three children. The senseless loss of these three adults who had given their careers to teach and care for children. The senseless, outrageous fact that if one defines a mass shooting as a shooting in which four or more people are injured or killed by gun violence, then the shooting at [00:03:00] Covenant School was only one of 38 U.S. mass shootings in the same month.
Or the senseless, horrific fact that guns are now the number one cause of death among children and teens in the United States, with other countries nowhere close with regard to deaths by guns. And then, there's what I see as senseless, outlandish, sometimes ignorant statements in legislation by some Tennessee state lawmakers, too often slathered over with a veneer of piety and Bible quoting.
There are good reasons to be angry for all this senselessness, and more besides. So anger most definitely has its rightful place in a good life, but I'm not so sure that I'm virtuous enough to be angry in the right [00:04:00] way, with the right intensity, for the right length of time, for the right purpose.
And I don't know that my own public expression of anger would comfort my grieving neighbors, nor am I sure that it would contribute to the good of our community. So instead, today we offer one Nashville commentary in a different key, by releasing segments of three interviews we've done in the past related to gun violence.
Each is remarkably different than the other. And by offering three such different accounts, I hope we might sow some seeds of justice and peace while contributing to a new imagination regarding what might be possible.
First, you'll hear from a Harvard public health expert trained as an economist, who is interested in neither blame nor idealism, but pragmatic solutions that can work.
Then, two theologians who are pushing Christians to rethink the [00:05:00] ease with which they might celebrate gun culture.
And last, a mother in a violence-riddled neighborhood in Chicago, who has helped save lives by opening her front door to kids who need hospitality.
First, the Harvard economist, who's a public health expert, David Hemenway.
David Hemenway: A lot of people think we have a violence problem, but it doesn't seem to be the case. We're sort of an average country, but where we are different is in terms of gun crime.
Lee Camp: That's Dr. David Hemenway of Harvard Injury Control Research Center. As a public health specialist, he's been observing trends of violence and injury for 50 years, dedicating much of his research efforts to the effect of guns on the health of the American public.
His findings are, put frankly, troubling.
David Hemenway: Guns are very lethal. So compared to these other high income countries, we have lots of guns, we have easy gun laws, and we have so [00:06:00] many more homicides. We have so many more gun related problems. We have so many more police killing civilians. We have so many more civilians killing police.
We are just an outlier and all these other countries just don't understand why we're not doing more to try to prevent these gun-related problems.
Lee Camp: Could you give us any particular examples that would help highlight that?
David Hemenway: Sure. So let me give you numbers for the 5 to 14-year-olds. And I just picked them - that's K-8 - because it's hard to blame the victim when you're talking about a fourth grader, and there's so much victim blaming in the area of guns.
Lee Camp: Note here, as we'll see, that Hemenway's public health approach is not interested in blaming. He sets aside the whole 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' argument by focusing on a different set of questions. More on that to come.
David Hemenway: So, compared to the other high-income countries - so this is, again, these are the other like [00:07:00] 30 countries, our peer countries - a child in the United States is much more likely to be murdered with a firearm than children in these other countries. And it's not like we're 50% higher than average, or twice as high, or five times as high. We are 29 times higher.
Lee Camp: Oh my.
David Hemenway: 29 times. If you took all the children in all the developed countries - Germany and France and Spain and Japan - and you lined up all the bodies of the 5 to 14-year-olds who have been murdered with guns, something like 95% of those would be American children.
Our, our non firearm homicide rate - we're an average country in terms of our children getting killed. Our unintentional firearm death rate is 20 [00:08:00] times higher--
Lee Camp: Mm.
David Hemenway: --for these children. And you look across the board, sort of every age group is, is very, very high firearm homicide victimization rates.
Lee Camp: Mm.
David Hemenway: And yeah, that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just the deaths.
Then it's all the non-fatals that you have to worry about.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
David Hemenway: Then it's all the intimidation with guns. We have a lot of, uh, intimate partner violence where guns really intimidate. And even in a public health issue, we have, you know, things like lead poisoning and people who shoot guns a lot get hearing problems and so forth.
But, but it's, uh, homicides, and just the deaths.
Lee Camp: Naturally, some will object at this point that these are the costs of having Second Amendment rights, that accidents are bound to happen, and that killers are going to find a way to kill regardless of their method. And these objections are often trotted out as conversation stoppers. But from the perspective of public health, it turns out that these objections [00:09:00] do not, after all, stop the conversation. The troubling arena of death by suicide illustrates this.
David Hemenway: In the United States, there's no question that a gun in the home was, as we mentioned, really increases the likelihood that someone will die in a suicide. And it's not only you, but it's your whole family is at risk.
Now, that doesn't mean that you bring the gun in the home, somebody's gonna commit suicide. It just means that on average, if there's a gun in your home, instead of, say, over the next 40 years that somebody in your family will die with suicide there's, so say, one half of 1% of a chance, now there's one and a half percent of a chance. It's three times higher. It's just because guns are so deadly.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
David Hemenway: And there's no going back.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
David Hemenway: The case fatality rate for guns is like 90%.
Lee Camp: Hmm. As opposed to other potential forms of suicide, which are much less fatal.
David Hemenway: Yeah.
Lee Camp: Just to be clear about the point here, when someone attempts to kill themselves and [00:10:00] a gun is available and used in that attempt, the odds are much greater that the person will, in fact, die.
Again:
David Hemenway: The case fatality rate for guns is like 90%.
Lee Camp: With other methods, Hemenway says:
David Hemenway: That's maybe 2 or 3%.
Lee Camp: This discrepancy in fatality rate, Hemenway says, explains the disturbing fact that at least half of all people who die by suicide in the United States do so with a gun...
David Hemenway: ...even though only a tiny percentage of suicide attempts are with guns. If you live in a home without a gun, you're not gonna try. Typically, almost nobody uses a gun, and as a suicide, if you live in a home with a gun, it's common to use a gun. And so you, when you attempt suicide, you die.
And, people don't understand that most suicides are not like all of these carefully planned suicides. You know, my life is terrible and I've known it for years and years, and I have mental health problems, and now I'm gonna kill it right now. So many suicides are, things are just, [00:11:00] right now, so bleak and so black, and I wake up and I just can't see any way out. There's nothing, there's no hope. All I can see is to stop the pain. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna kill myself.
Lee Camp: In other words, Professor Hemenway is pointing to the fact that most attempts at killing oneself, generally, result from a very difficult season, which ultimately passes. People can get help, the intense pain can pass and be mitigated.
And he says that researchers have talked to many who have made serious attempts at killing themselves, for whom their attempts did not in fact lead to their death.
David Hemenway: These people, most of them, are so happy that they didn't die.
Lee Camp: And when researchers have followed the lives of these individuals for more than 20 years, very few, in the end, kill themselves.
His point?
David Hemenway: Who's at most risk for suicide in the United States? Turns out it's people with guns. [00:12:00] There have been people who've done studies looking at a gun in the home. That increased the risk for suicide. We've been looking at what explains the wide differences in suicide rates across states. Some states have high suicide rates, some states have low suicide rates.
The rates are much different than say, the rates of heart disease death or motor vehicle deaths or cancer deaths. And it turns out it has virtually nothing to do with mental health. It's not really that people in the states with high suicide rates are more depressed or have more suicide ideation, or even have more suicide attempts.
Across the United States, non-suicide gun rates don't change very much. They're not that different from one state to another. What's really different is the gun suicide rates.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
David Hemenway: And where there's high rates of gun ownership, there's high rates of gun suicide, and there's high rates of overall suicide.
In New England, for example: There's three states we have, which have a lot of guns - Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire. There are three states which have very [00:13:00] few guns - Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. We, all six states, we have about the same non, non-gun suicide rates. Our gun suicide rates are very different. The three northern states of guns, they have a high gun suicide rate, so they have high overall suicide rates.
Lee Camp: One might summarize his argument this way: the population in one state may be no more likely to attempt suicide than the population in another state. However, rates of individuals actually dying by suicide are much higher in a given state, not because of variables related to mental health, but because of the wide availability of a method of killing, which is more potent and more fatal.
They're guns.
If you are struggling with a desire to harm yourself, please hear what Professor Hemenway just said. The vast majority of those who have tried to harm themselves [00:14:00] and lived are immensely glad they are living today. They needed help, resources, and time. If you need help, you may call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.
That's 800-273-8255.
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our episode on America's Gun Epidemic.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript.
More, coming right up.[00:15:00]
So far, we've heard Professor David Hemenway of Harvard University's Injury Control Research Center. As a public health specialist, he notes:
David Hemenway: A lot of people think we have a violence problem. But it doesn't seem to be the case. We're sort of an average country. But where we are different is in terms of gun crime.
We are just an outlier. And all these other countries just don't understand why we're not doing more to try to prevent these gun-related problems.
Lee Camp: So what does he suggest? Turns out he is surprisingly pragmatic.
David Hemenway: We're gonna have lots of guns. There's just, there's just no question. We have lots of guns and so many people are dying. So many people are being seriously injured. So many people are being intimidated. But how can we have lots of guns and still reduce the problem?
Lee Camp: The so-called culture war around guns might be broadly described as the conflict between those who are pro-gun and those who [00:16:00] are anti-gun. But David is trying to change the conversation and redefine the nature of first steps in finding solutions.
Instead of getting caught up in casting blame, or idealistic gun laws, he's invested his career and research into what is called a public health approach.
David Hemenway: Let's try to make it easy to be healthy, and let's make it difficult to be sick or injured or unhealthy.
So, for example, we have a big obesity problem in the United States. A public health approach says, let's make it easy for you to get really healthy foods. Uh, let's make it difficult for you to get junk foods. Let's make it really, really easy for you to exercise. Let's make it a little difficult for you just to be a couch potato.
In the United States, we do just the opposite. We make it easy to get junk food, easy to be a couch potato, hard for a lot of people to get good exercise, and then we have a big obesity problem and people are surprised.[00:17:00]
The public health approach really is about prevention. Rather-- we spend a lot of time trying to differentiate the public health approach, say, from the medical approach or the criminal justice approach, which is largely after the fact. Something bad happens and, you know, medicine jumps in and police come to the rescue. Uh, public health approaches, let's try to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
David Hemenway: And then, what we found is that, you know, there's so many ways to prevent problems, but typically, by far, the most cost effective way is to go upstream. Rather than waiting till the last second, trying to prevent somebody from shooting somebody just at the moment they're about to shoot, or just when they're about to do something stupid.
Uh, if you go upstream and change the product, if you change the environment, uh, you can very effectively reduce the problem, without really, sort of, blaming anybody.
Lee Camp: Making sense of [00:18:00] the field of public health is new to me. So I asked him to give an example of how this has played out in the past, practically speaking.
David Hemenway: So the example which we love to use and, and 'cause it seems to resonate with people, is motor vehicles. So when I was young, in the '50s and early '60s, we were told that virtually all motor vehicle crashes were due to, were caused by bad driving. If people never made mistakes, if they were never tired, there'd be virtually no accidents.
And that's true. If people always obeyed the law, if they never sped, if they never drive drunk, there'd be virtually, there's so few, uh, deaths, in terms of motor vehicles. So the motor vehicle lobby, they all said, it's the driver's fault. And see, one of the things we will talk about is, we try to get away from fault. But they said, it's the driver's fault. We ought to do something about drivers.
So they said, what we ought to do is enforce the traffic laws. Let's have lots of police out there and, and [00:19:00] also let's have driver's ed. I was in a cohort where everybody in my cohort had to take driver's ed, and the evidence now shows that taking driver's ed doesn't help at all in terms of fatalities, and let us drive younger and die sooner.
It wasn't until in the '50s that public health physicians asked a different question.
Lee Camp: Please allow me the liberty to insert a parenthetical here. For years, one of my favorite, my favorite soapbox lectures to give my college students is the one about how they ought not construe their education primarily in terms of getting answers to their currently unanswered questions.
Instead, I then suggest - and I do so, as you might guess, with a dramatic crescendo - I suggest that they might learn a lot more in life and have a much more interesting life if they were to learn new and better questions to ask. Being more curious about the [00:20:00] questions we are carrying around - this might make for more fascinating lives and may make us of more useful service to the world.
So I was fascinated to learn here from Professor Hemenway that many thousands of lives had been saved by asking different questions.
David Hemenway: It wasn't until in the '50s that public health physicians asked a different question, rather than 'who caused the accident?', they said, 'what caused the injury?' Just asking that different question, 'what caused the injury?', it was like, alright, a lot of drivers are being speared by steering columns, which go right through their chest in head-on collisions.
A lot of people in the front seat were being, their faces were being lacerated and they would die, by windshields, uh, which weren't, weren't made of safety glass. Many, many people were being thrown from the car during the crash, and they would hit their heads on the cement or on the car and they would die. People were leaving the road for [00:21:00] just one second and they were hitting trees and lampposts, which had been planted right along the sides of major highways.
And public health physicians were saying, well, couldn't we make the roads safer? Couldn't we make the cars safer? Couldn't we make the emergency medical system safer? So fast forward, say, 60 years. Nobody thinks drivers are any better than they were when I was young. On average, drivers today are much worse in terms of distracted driving. They're much better in terms of alcohol and driving, but overall, they're sort of the same as we were.
But fatalities per mile driven have fallen over 85%.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
David Hemenway: So for every 20 of my contemporaries who would've died, now only three die.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
David Hemenway: Why? Because we changed the system. We made it much harder to make mistakes.
So here's an example. It used to be, if I was driving along the highway and I was sort of so tired and I'd fell asleep, you know, the car would go off the road or [00:22:00] hit another car and crash into a tree planted along the side of the highway, and I would die. And people would say, it's your fault. You shouldn't have, why did you drive? It's your fault. It's your fault.
Now, what's happened, we make it hard to do that. We have, in California, you have these Botts' dots along the sides of the road. And so you start getting out of your lane and it goes, bum-bum-bum-bum-bum, and it wakes you up and you say, oh, okay. And nothing bad happens.
So now in a lot of new cars, you go, beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. And it says, wake up stupid. And you wake up, you go back in the lane, and nothing bad happens. And there's nobody to blame, because the system worked. You made it hard to make mistakes. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to also make it hard to behave inappropriately.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
David Hemenway: All you have to do is change the road design.
You can put in these little speed bumps, you can change the road - little changes in configurations of the road - neckdowns, and, and, there's I don't know, there's two dozen ways of just making tiny changes in the road, which automatically...
Lee Camp: This approach fascinates me. [00:23:00] Pragmatic, practical, cost-effective changes to keep people safe.
No arguments over who's to blame. Just simple, relatively inexpensive, cost-effective solutions, of which he had loads of examples. It's the sort of approach that seems so relatively non-controversial, which is why it seems so helpful when we turn back to the topic of the American gun epidemic. And in the midst of my realizing the constructive nature of this approach and the polarized debates around guns and American culture, this counterintuitive observation hit me.
The argument you're making is basically fiscal conservatism, right? It's a sort of, you're taking seriously return on investment and reducing costs affiliated with guns.
David Hemenway: Yep. I'm an economist, [both laugh] so I always do that.
Lee Camp: And, and so I don't hear you-- I hear you being very pragmatic about the fact that there are lots of guns and they're not going away anytime soon.
David Hemenway: Yeah. Public health is all about [00:24:00] pragmatism. Public health's not a discipline. It's not like public healthology, it's not-- What public health really, really cares about is people's health. You wanna change people if you can, but changing people is the hardest thing to do. It's typically the least cost-effective.
So yes, you wanna try to do that, but there are so many other ways which are so much more cost-effective. That's basically the first law of economics, it's the first law of psychology. You know, make it a little harder to do things, fewer people do it. Make it a little easier, more people do it.
Lee Camp: In a bit, you'll hear more of his sense of possible public health solutions to gun violence, but I could not not ask this question:
So given the common-sensical nature of these things, and the pragmatic nature of them, the non-ideological, and even nonpartisan approach to the question about guns, are you finding that, to use your term, 'gunners', [00:25:00] or the gun lobby or gun manufacturers are supportive of these efforts?
David Hemenway: Not as much as one would hope. Unfortunately, you know, the whole gun area is part of the culture wars in the United States.
Lee Camp: And the culture wars, well those inevitably bring us back, I hate to admit it, to arguments about theology, which is one of the reasons, it seems to me, that we must have more public conversations about theology - because of the profound public consequences of theology, whether good or bad.
Chris Hays: Gun ownership has become, in many people's minds, closely associated with Christianity.
Lee Camp: That's Professor Chris Hays. He and Professor Carly Crouch are faculty at Fuller Theological Seminary. They recently co-edited a book of essays on the intersection of American Christianity and the gun epidemic, [00:26:00] entitled, 'God and Guns: The Bible Against American Gun Culture'.
Chris Hays: So this is a book that comes out of a longstanding unease that I've had with the role that Christianity plays in supporting gun ownership and thus gun violence in the U.S.
And it always seemed, coming out of my background, at least, it always seemed clear that, uh, relying for your sense of security on a gun was antithetical to Christian life and Christian ethics. And so I have been, for some time, searching for ways to, to express that. And I had not seen this case made in a very careful way, or certainly from the perspective of Bible.
So what, what we were trying to do was to call together a group of scholars who could come and speak to the issue out of real expertise in biblical studies.
Lee Camp: [00:27:00] And yet for them, their concern is not merely academic.
Carly Crouch: Owning a gun is increasingly being recognized as a public health crisis, that you are actually more likely to die from gun violence if you own a gun than if you do not. And the statistical odds are quite high.
I think it's worth being explicit that the risks and the dangers and the consequences of gun ownership and gun violence cuts across American society. So, particular manifestations of gun violence are often associated with the inner cities, or we talk about mass shootings in workplaces or in schools. Much less talked about, but nevertheless, a very significant proportion of gun deaths each year are suicides.
Because of the prevalence of guns in American culture, their consequences are absolutely pervasive throughout the entire [00:28:00] society, regardless of class, of race, of social context. And so this is really an issue where community and our responsibility to each other as members of a community is absolutely central to the question.
As Americans, we tend to be raised in a highly individualistic way of thinking and way of being. One of the things that the biblical tradition presses us against is that kind of individualism, and it can often in fact be one of the more challenging things for students of the Bible to wrap their heads around, especially those raised in these Western traditions of heightened individualism.
One of the things we were hoping to do with this volume, in bringing together these biblical experts who, who are accustomed to thinking creatively about how we translate ancient texts into modern contexts, how we help [00:29:00] the church and Christians to bridge some of those gaps as we think about how the Bible might be a resource for thinking about the way we live today in the 21st century.
Chris Hays: It's a real challenge, because not only does the Bible not talk about guns, but the Bible is a diverse collection of literature. And so it doesn't have just one perspective on things and it, and I think that there's a fair amount of, sort of, prooftexting out there - aha, here, here's the verse that shows that, you know, I should do this.
And it's almost never the right approach [laughs] to interpreting the Bible.
Lee Camp: Their work tackles many of the common arguments offered by ardent Christian proponents of gun ownership. One such argument is this: that owning a gun is simply an extension of a supposed God-given right to self-defense.
Chris Hays: Self-defense is by far, especially among women, the highest reason, uh, given in polls for why people own a gun or, or want to own a gun and, and it's been a powerful motivator.
My essay is about this [00:30:00] case in the year 701 BC in Judah, where the king, Hezekiah, is trying to...
Lee Camp: It's a fascinating story in which a king, named Hezekiah, threatened by an oppressing army, does what he thinks he has to do to defend his people. He builds a new city wall.
Chris Hays: ...protected. It's, it's this act of self-defense.
Lee Camp: But the prophet Isaiah, who certainly wanted the people not to be defeated or taken into captivity by the oppressing army, nonetheless did not see self-defense as a value that trumped all other values or commitments.
Chris Hays: He condemns Hezekiah, because in the process he, he's torn down some people's houses to build the new wall, which he views as a, as a violation of, of social justice and thinks that Hezekiah has gotten himself into this position through mismanagement.
So, what I'm trying to combat there is this notion that self-defense means that God always wants us to do every single practical thing, whether or not it's just for the [00:31:00] sake of our own self-defense.
And I end with, with the story of Christian de Cherge, who's the monk in Algeria, who is living in a, a majority Muslim country in a time of strife and unrest. And he foresees that he's going to get killed in this situation. And so, about two years before he dies, he writes this letter to the unknown man who will kill him.
And he says, you know, basically, 'I forgive you, my brother'.
But he still, uh, lives there to the end, in his monastery, knowing that he'll die as a form of Christian witness. And, and that to me is, is a kind of Christ-like example for those who really want to know what, what kind of Christian witness God wants vis-a-vis violence. It's a very hard standard, just like Christ himself was to live up to.
Um, but I, I think that the idea that we're called to self-defense in all [00:32:00] situations is perhaps misguided.
Carly Crouch: One of the through lines that strikes me has to do with the use and misuse of power and the various ways in which different parts of the scriptural tradition draw our attention to the danger that comes with, whether as an individual or as a community, we abuse the power that comes available to us.
So, so, um, for example, in the book of Isaiah, where the prophet castigates the king in Jerusalem for trusting in his own power and in human power rather than in faith and trust in God, that biblical tradition draws attention to and then often undermines or calls into question attempts to rely on military strength [00:33:00] as the end-all and be-all of what it means to be human. This biblical tradition of mindfulness to the danger of power can help us think carefully about the kind of power that is arrogated to us if we own a gun.
Lee Camp: I mean, I, I, I would speculate that many people would hear what both of you have said about the Hebrew prophets and would say, well, that's all nice and quaint, but that's just completely irrelevant. You know, th-- this notion that we would trust God in this way for our defense seems completely irrelevant to the real world.
So what, what do you, what might you do with that sort of pushback?
Chris Hays: Well, I would say two things. I would say first that the Bible comes out of the real world. And so stories like the ones that we're, uh, working with were in fact existential for real people at a certain time. And human nature and human circumstances haven't actually changed that much over 3,000 years, so-- [00:34:00] by telling a story like the one of of the Algerian monk, this is something that happened in the last few decades, so it's not from a, a different world from ours.
And there are in fact people who live this way all the time. I mean, I'm sure that we can all think of people who live in parts of, even this country, in, in cities or areas that have more gun violence than some, who choose not to own guns in their house. Just simply by not having a gun, I think that's a, a statement of faith in a case where you, you can imagine in some scenario wanting one.
Lee Camp: What is your take on the relationship between various forms of American Christianity and the support of right to bear arms?
Chris Hays: Yeah, this was one of the fascinating, and to me actually more hopeful pieces of information that we learned in the process of reading around this topic for the book.
There's sociological [00:35:00] research that shows that actually it's not so much that serious practicing Christians are more likely to own or believe in the importance of guns. That in fact, people who are sort of, you know, weekly regular parishioners or who, who are involved in their churches in significant ways are actually no more likely or, or, or less likely than other people to share in this sort of gun ideology.
And you, so what you have are, instead, I think, are sort of self-identified cultural Christians who are perhaps less engaged with the actual church on the ground in the pews, but who, who would call themselves, usually evangelical Christians, but for whom their real self-identity is, is based around this culture of hyper-masculine violence.
And it's, white men are the most prominent in this group. So it was nice to know that the, you know, the correlation between actual Christian practice and [00:36:00] gun ideology was not quite so strong.
Lee Camp: We'll be right back after this break.
Previously we heard from Harvard Professor David Hemenway, who has done extensive research on the issue of gun violence in the United States.
David Hemenway: We're gonna have lots of guns. That's just, there's just no question. You wanna change people if you can, but changing people is the hardest thing to do.
Lee Camp: Instead, David suggests that one array of solutions to the gun epidemic lies in the so-called public health approach, which he summarizes this way.
David Hemenway: Let's try to make it easy to be healthy, and let's make it difficult to be sick or injured or unhealthy.
Lee Camp: So what about some examples of possible public [00:37:00] health solutions to gun violence?
David Hemenway: One of the things we find is that we're looking at children, and this is not the only problem in gun violence or the biggest problem, but it is an important problem, is that most children were killed by either themselves or other children. That's who was killing them.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
David Hemenway: So we're looking at kids 0-14. This is unintentional. So one of the things we noticed is that two-thirds of the time, the kids who were killed were shot by somebody else, but in the third of the time, they shot themselves unintentionally. And a group that was very common to do this were the 2 to 4-year-olds, and still are.
So 2 to 4-year-olds have higher rates of unintentional firearm deaths than 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10-year-olds.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
David Hemenway: And they're shooting themselves. So what can be done? Well, we had a public health problem 30 years ago that, uh, a lot of little kids, 2 to 4-year-olds, were finding aspirin [00:38:00] bottles and opening the aspirin bottles and taking 30 aspirin pills and dying.
And so what to do? Well, the approach that public health doesn't like is let's blame somebody. Let's blame the kids. They weren't trained right. They were 3 years old, their parents didn't-- let's blame the parents. Why did they leave? Why wasn't the mom watching the kid 24/7, every second of the day, to make sure he didn't crawl into–
And it's like, come on. What is the most cost-effective way? And we figured it out, which is, let's make childproof aspirin bottles. And the numbers of kids dying, you know, fell what, 80, 90%. It was an incredible success story.
We can make childproof guns. Smith and Wesson - Wesson, of Smith and Wesson fame - like 130 years ago, something like that, said they're worried, we're worried about kids. Kids, you know, they can shoot these guns. We don't want 3-year-olds finding their dad's guns and killing themselves or killing s--
So he made a childproof gun. It was really easy to do. We can do much better now, the way he did it. [00:39:00] But this-- much better technology.
The way he did it, he just said, in order for the gun to fire, I'm gonna make it so you have to do two things. You have to not only pull the trigger, but you have to put a little pressure on the handle of the gun. That's all you have to do. And 3-year-olds can't figure out how to do that, the same way they can't figure out how to push down on the aspirin bottle and turn it.
Lee Camp: Remarkable.
David Hemenway: We find that a whole lot of, the most common way that these kids are dying, unintentionally, the 0 to 14-year-olds, is that a lot of people are killed by their older brothers, who are, say, 14, you're killed, 10 year old.
You find your dad's semi-automatic pistol. You take out the magazine. You have all the bullets, here's the magazine, you have all the bullets. You think the gun is unloaded. You have all the bullets. And then you play with the gun. But there's a bullet left in the chamber, and in most of these semi-automatics, you pull the trigger, then it fires, and the bullet goes, and you can kill somebody.
Now, again, what can we do? Let's blame the kid. He's [00:40:00] 13 years old, doesn't he know? Why didn't anybody train him? Let's blame the parent. Why didn't the parent? And the answer is, yeah, we can do that. And the parent should have locked up their gun. Maybe the parent shouldn't have had a gun, but-- they're gonna have a gun, they probably should have locked it up. But it's hard to do.
What's a better way to do it? Make it so it's easy to stay healthy, hard to get injured. Make it so when you take out the magazine, whether or not there's a bullet left in the chamber, the gun will not fire.
This is the approach that public health wants to do. Make it hard to behave inappropriately and make it hard to make mistakes.
Lee Camp: If you would like to hear more of this conversation, including more possible solutions to gun violence from a public health perspective, you can hear the unabridged interview with Professor Hemenway on our podcast, available wherever you listen.
But before we close, we share [00:41:00] one more brief interview, illustrating one more practical, though inspiring example of on-the-ground peacemaking in response to American gun violence.
At one of our live shows at the Ryman, we welcomed Diane Latiker to tell her story of bringing peace to a Chicago neighborhood wracked by gun violence. Diane is the founder of Kids Off The Block, an organization which seeks to give refuge to inner city youths against rampant gang activity and violence, serving 3,000 children to date.
Diane, tell us, how did you get started in doing this work that you've been doing for 13 years, right?
Diane Latiker: 15. 15 years.
Lee Camp: 15 years, yeah. How'd you get started with that?
Diane Latiker: So my husband and I have eight kids. We have four boys and four girls.
[Audience member cheers]
We had, [laughs] that's what I said. No. Anyway. We had one at home, Aisha. She was 13 years old.
I didn't want her to, um-- my, my other kids were grown and they were gone, so I wanted Aisha to graduate from high school and go to college, and I wanted to keep up with her. So I took her and [00:42:00] her nine friends skating and swimming and all that stuff, to keep them occupied.
My mom said, 'Diane, you should do something with those kids. They like you and respect you.' And in my mind I'm going, no, I don't wanna do this. I'm gonna be able to go fishing and be free when Aisha's gone. But I prayed about it for three days, and I just asked them to come into my home. So that's how it started, with nine kids from my neighborhood.
Lee Camp: And 3,000 kids later, you've, uh, ministered to, these years.
Diane Latiker: Yeah. Yes.
Lee Camp: Um--
[Audience cheers]
Diane Latiker: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Lee Camp: So tell us more about the neighborhood that you're a part of.
Diane Latiker: The neighborhood is, um, fighting against itself with violence. Um, there's a lot of hopelessness. Um, that's one of my biggest things though, is giving kids hope and making them believe that they are worth living past 21, because they don't believe that.
And the neighborhood itself is, um, economically [00:43:00] depressed, poverty. Um, but that still, that still is not a reason to give people hope.
Lee Camp: Hmm.
Diane Latiker: So that's what we do.
Lee Camp: Yeah.
Diane Latiker: That's what we try to do.
Lee Camp: In the midst of that, I was, I'm very moved by some of the stories from a CNN story, who's, uh, recognized you as one of their top heroes.
Diane Latiker: Yes.
Lee Camp: Um, but the, the story about the monument that you've done.
Diane Latiker: Yeah.
Lee Camp: Tell us about that.
Diane Latiker: There's a memorial for young people killed by violence across the street from my house. Uh, started in May of 2007 for Blair Holt, he was a 16-year-old honor roll student. He was on his way home, on, on CTA bus, and a young man, a 14-year-old, got on the bus and sprayed the bus, kept trying to kill somebody else, and they killed Blair.
Well my daughter had went to school with Blair and I knew his father. I was angry. I was tired of marching and rallying and meeting. It wasn't working. And I was at Home Depot and I saw these stones, and they looked like little headstones. And I bought 30 of 'em. [00:44:00] That's all the money I had. I bought 30. And I put up this memorial about this high, and I said, I wanna shock my community and I wanna shock the young people.
We, we're losing generations to violence. That memorial, we've rebuilt it now 15 times. It has almost 800 stones in it. We are behind 400. We can never catch up. These young people are 24 years and down. We don't go over 24 years.
The youngest is the 1-year-old who was getting her diaper changed-- [chokes up] Sorry.
She was getting her diaper changed, and they were trying to kill her father. So, that's-- the memorial is just to shock my commun-- I had no idea it would grow the way it has, but I'm still wondering why it's no outrage. Those young people belong to a family. They, they belong to somebody. Somebody loved them.
Lee Camp: What happens when you see young people come see that memorial, that monument?
Diane Latiker: I've seen, I've seen so many of them go and get a job, go back to school. It, it literally, [00:45:00] like-- 'cause most of their friends are in it. So it literally, I've seen them change their lives in front of it.
Lee Camp: Tell us a story about a challenge that one of the kids, uh, transcended, that you hold onto as a reminder of the possibilities.
Diane Latiker: There was a 13-year-old named Maurice. 13 years old, seventh grade. Knocked on my door one day and said, 'Are you Miss Diane?' I said, 'Yes, I am'. He said, 'Well, I want to change my life'. I said, excuse me, you had no life. You, you said you're 13. What are you talking about? He said he was robbing people and he was beating up other kids. And I let him into my house, and come to find out, the school hated-- the teachers didn't like Maurice.
Nobody liked Maurice. But his mom was a drug addict. And he slept on concrete floors as a kid. And when I found all that out, I said, what do you want, Maurice? What, what, what would make you happy? He wanted to play football. [00:46:00] He was angry because his mom couldn't take him to football practice, he couldn't get in football.
His grades were terrible because he was acting up. So he got his grades up. He graduated eighth grade, mentored three third graders, and then he got on the football team as a starter and he went on to do great things. And the last time I talked to him, he thanked me, on CNN. We, we, CNN came out and did a piece, and he actually said, 'thank you'...because I opened my front door.
Lee Camp: So, um, this weekend, uh, this past weekend, you had your 12th annual Thanksgiving dinner. Yes. With kids coming in from different gangs, in peace around a table.
Diane Latiker: Six gangs at one time have been at this dinner. Just, do I have a minute just to tell how that started?
Three-- no, two kids came to my house the first year. 'Miss Diane, can we eat dinner with you on Thanksgiving?'
[00:47:00] 'Yeah, come on in!'
The second year was five. Me and my mom said, oh, okay. Come on. The third year was over 20. My-- me and my mom said, no, we gotta do something. We got a nice donor to donate a tent. We put it on a vacant lot across the street. We got a caterer to donate a real Thanksgiving meal, and we had a over a hundred kids and their families come out that year.
In 2016, we had over 800. We just sat-- yesterday, we had our 12th annual. Chicago kicked our butt with the weather, [laughs] so it wasn't 800, but it was over 400 that came out yesterday and enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal with their family.
Lee Camp: Marvelous. Please thank Diane Latiker.
[Audience applauds]
Diane Latiker: Thank you all.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our episode on America's Gun Epidemic.[00:48:00]
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Cariad Harmon, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media, LLC, [00:49:00] and Great Feeling Studio.