Youth in U.S., uniquely burdened by the threat of gun violence, are pushed to action
By Kaila Hu, Gianna Michel, Angel Treviño and Isra Yousif
Youthcast Media Group®
D’arin Floyd-Baldwin’s life flipped upside down when she lost her beloved cousin to gun violence in 2020. Her cousin, Tannie Burke 27, was hit in a drive-by shooting in Miami while attending a vigil for a friend who himself was killed by gun violence.
Burke’s death was only the latest, though, in a string of many such losses for Floyd-Baldwin, 18, who is a senior at Miami Lakes Educational Center. She’s lost seven family members to guns, she says. Those losses, coupled with the prevalence of guns in her community (classmates have been arrested carrying guns, she says) pushed her to act.
Tess Maloney, 17, a senior at Justice High School in Falls Church, Virginia, remembers the first time the topic of “escape plans” came up at school. She and her friends were chatting casually when someone mentioned it — where they’d hide and what they’d do if a school shooting happened.
“In each class, we'll have a little survival plan,” Tess said. “I honestly think it won't happen at our school, but it is always on my mind.”
Tess and her classmates, like Floyd-Baldwin, decided it was enough. They joined Students Demand Action, a youth-led initiative aimed at ending gun violence. Floyd-Baldwin is a member of a Florida chapter of the national nonprofit, which is part of Everytown for Gun Safety.
Across the country, students like them are joining efforts to combat the gun violence that has affected their generation more than any other age group in living memory.
In 2022 alone, there were 2,526 gun violence deaths among 1 to 17 year olds – averaging nearly seven deaths every day and marking the third year in a row that gun violence was the leading cause of death for young people, according to a September report from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Kids and teens are increasingly impacted by all types of gun violence, from school shootings to accidental shootings and homicide. But 2022, the latest year data is available, saw an all-time high for gun deaths by suicide, taking the lives of 27,032 young people. Homicide rates for older Black teenagers and young adults, age 15 to 19, also rose sharply.
“There isn’t a day that goes by in America where every newspaper, every media outlet reports an episode of gun violence,” said Dr. Woodie Kessel, co-director of the Progress Initiative at the University of Maryland. “Tragically, community-based gun violence has become a common occurrence in our country, and the idea also translates into going to school.”
As they've come of age, students and young adults have taken over the violence prevention space, joining nonprofits and activist groups. Robert Schentrup is a training and engagement manager at Brady’s Team ENOUGH, a youth-led initiative of the national anti-gun violence organization. Schentrup, like many of Brady’s leaders, knows all too well the devastating effects of school shootings. His sister, Carmen, was one of the 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killed in a mass shooting in 2018.
“For me, it was gun violence really hitting home, impacting my community, impacting my family that really put me on a path to want to take action,” Schentrup said. Though, like many young Americans, Schentrup was exposed to school shootings long before that day, too. “When I was born, in 1999, Columbine happened,” he said. “Since then, there’s been school shootings every single year.”
Such experience has given young activists a different perspective, and a sense of urgency. “For older generations, gun violence is something that often happens to other people in other places that they see on the news,” Schentrup said. “But for us, gun violence is something that we experience and see directly.”
Team ENOUGH is working to harness those lived experiences into action by educating young people on political advocacy, like how to approach a city council or school board to push for changes in policies. One policy that’s particularly important for Schentrup is investment in student mental health resources to combat both the teen suicide rate and impacts of gun violence on survivors.
Research from the Gun Violence Research Consortium and the Children’s Hospital of Chicago show that children exposed to shootings, either directly or through news stories, are at a heightened risk of negative mental health outcomes and developing post-traumatic stress disorder, including intrusive memories, nightmares, and hypervigilance.
“This threat has profound consequences on making us feel unsafe, insecure, sad, vulnerable, angry, threatened,” said Kessel, who worked with survivors of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. “Newtown stands out as an example to me, having gotten to know the folks. Not only did it affect the siblings and families… all the communities were affected. It was the first time ever recorded that the president of the United States shed a tear live on TV.”
Many of the survivors were old enough to vote in a presidential election for the first time in November, and have become activists in this space, where they’ve focused on safety.
Other policy recommendations, made by both Brady and the Johns Hopkins’ Center for Gun Violence Solutions study authors, include safe storage requirements and child access prevention laws.
Yet, advocates say they often face ingrained beliefs that guns make people safer.
“Young people, more than ever, are believing that guns make them safer, where we know that through research, through experience, that that's not true,” said Olivia Brown, a member of Gen Z and project manager at Project Unloaded, a national gun violence prevention organization also aimed at educating young people.
“Our overarching vision for the work that we do is hoping to inspire a generational shift among young people choosing, to choose for themselves, not to own or use guns,” Brown said.
While Brown works towards a community less reliant on guns, she also understands that people can feel the need to buy one. “Every person who wants to own a gun isn't a bad person. It's not an unrealistic thought to think,” Brown said.
Floyd-Baldwin, the senior in Miami, said from her experience, gun violence is a learned behavior.
“There’s no way you’re just coming out the womb with a killer’s mindset,” she said. “Their surroundings are really taking a hold on them, influencing their decisions.”
That’s where role models, including violence interrupters, can come into play. Joseph Richardson, professor of African-American studies, medical anthropology and epidemiology at University of Maryland, wrote his dissertation on a study that had him follow a group of boys in Harlem for three years to understand the social context of adolescent violence. He found that African American uncles, or “social fathers,” played a critical role in preventing boys from engaging in gun violence. A literature review turned up few examples for him to draw on, so Richardson used the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and “The Bernie Mac Show.”
Since then, Richardson has studied violence intervention programs in hospitals, and created and implemented his own. Along with Kessel, Richardson was appointed by the University of Maryland’s president to lead Prevent Gun Violence: Research, Empowerment, Strategies and Solutions (PROGRESS). One solution he finds particularly promising is street outreach, “which trains credible messengers from the neighborhoods where there are high rates of gun violence to engage in conflict mediation, conflict resolution and using trauma-informed care approaches to reduce conflict,” he said.
Peace for DC, a community-based organization in Washington, D.C., trains such violence interventionists. The organization launched a new program in 2023 with funding from the Department of Justice geared towards young adults, aged 18 to 24, and geographic areas where the district sees higher concentrations of gun violence, particularly rival neighborhoods, said Chandra Dawson, chief of staff for Peace for DC.
“We are going into the community, engaging the individuals who are actively involved in this, and providing them a variety of wraparound services that are incentivized. They are compensated,” Dawson said. “The goal is to provide that individual support, but also de-escalate, if not mediate, this territorial conflict.”
What they realized was that the young adults have significant influence over younger teens who have been impacted by or are perpetrating armed robberies, carjackings and other gun violence.
“We're talking about youth who don't have family and don't have cohesive families. So this older individual or community of brothers and sisters who protect me ensure I'mma eat. Give me some of the maternal and paternal things that I'm not readily getting, safely getting or adequately getting in the home,” Dawson said.
The young adults can perpetuate the cycle, or, they can help break it. But programs and funding are often siloed between adults and children. “We're going to have to look at what I call cross-generational approaches to addressing gun violence. These are not isolated groups,” Dawson said. In reality, “you'll see the 14 and 15-year-old standing or hanging with the 25-year-old, and they're all one big family, and they're very cohesive.”
Issues at the root of violence that organizations like Peace for DC combat aren’t as easy to solve as mandating gun locks. Experts say it’s fueled by poverty, generational trauma and structural racism. But the young people bearing the brunt of the fallout also have ideas on who can help fix it.
“Teachers,” said Floyd-Baldwin. Kids and teens are “with their teachers eight hours of the day. They sleep for eight hours, they’re home for another eight hours, but most students have chores and working parents so they interact with their teachers more than anyone else in their lives.”
And, of course, themselves.
Whispers about multiple shooting threats at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia were a wake-up call for Will Thomas. In his junior year of high school he joined Team ENOUGH.
“I saw these dangerous situations right around the corner from my house,” said Thomas, who is now a freshman at Brown University studying economics and international affairs. “I realized this issue is so pervasive and affects so many people. As a member of Gen Z, we say at Team Enough that we’re the generation that will end gun violence. I have the power to use my voice to make change, and that’s something I should be doing.”
Kaila Hu is a senior at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Virginia, Gianna Michel is a junior at Miami Lakes Educational Center in Miami, Angel Treviño is a senior at Jimmy Carter Early College High School in Mission, Texas, and Isra Yousif is a senior at Justice High School in Falls Church, Virginia. They were participants in Youthcast Media Group’s fall 2024 reporting workshop and worked with YMG Mentor-Editor Cara Kelly.
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