Young Americans Building Bridges to Eradicate Gun Violence

Sarah Clements is being honored as a Gun Violence Prevention Champion of Change.

I remember sitting in lockdown for hours, reading news that the shooting happened only miles away at Sandy Hook, my former elementary school. I remember waiting to hear whether my mother, a second grade teacher at the school, survived. She did. And I remember the feeling deep down, even hours after the shooting happened, that the only way I’d be able to move forward was if I advocated for things to change.

About a month later, my father and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to join 6,000 other Americans marching for gun reform. I was introduced to the vast, diverse, and courageous movement of individuals working for safer communities. Back home, I joined the Newtown Action Alliance (NAA), a grassroots non-profit working for legislative and cultural change to reduce gun violence. Yet, I was one of the only students getting involved, and this incredible, positive outlet helping me transform my pain into positive action was invisible to my peers. In response, I formed and continue to lead Jr. Newtown Action Alliance, a branch of NAA that gives students the opportunity to raise their voices and make change.

At first, Jr. Newtown Action Alliance only had outreach in Newtown. We held letter writing events in town and mostly focused on helping our town heal from the shooting. Soon, we started networking with other young people in the region and state, and we began travelling every three months to Washington, D.C. to lobby members of Congress. Members also travelled around the country to hold workshops to teach students how to break down the issue of gun violence prevention.

This year, the goal of Jr. NAA is to build bridges between urban, suburban, and rural youth to not only share our stories and experiences, but also to then use that knowledge, understanding, and source of empathy to strategize about how we can make our schools and communities safer together.

Last month, our members met with members of the group Harlem SNUG, a gang violence mediation and conflict resolution organization working for safer streets. Our stories were different, but at the same time, we all experienced gun violence, and that allows us to better understand the ground upon which the other walks.

Finally, I’m a Gun Violence Prevention Volunteer Lead at Generation Progress, the Millennial branch of the Center for American Progress. Our team facilitates a network of youth working on this and connected issues on the national level so that our movement is more efficient and so that the youth voice is front and center in this conversation. In February, we organized a national summit, and the three-day event brought more than 120 Millennials from 32 states to Washington, D.C. for intensive training on organizing and strategy for gun violence prevention. We are now creating the structure for this network and for a productive and efficient year of youth organizing.

As a Millennial, I will not back down. We are literally fighting for our lives; fighting for a most sacred and fundamental right: for children to grow up. Far too many of our friends' fates have teetered on the barrel of a gun, and America turns its back each time. We can no longer wait for the voice of a loved one to be muted before we exercise our own, for if I have learned anything since 12/14, it’s that the rights I have the privilege to possess are worthless unless I fight for others to have them, too; and that includes the right to living in a safe community.

Sarah Clements is a senior at Newtown High School and the Founder and Chairwoman of Jr. Newtown Action Alliance, a group of young people working to reduce gun violence through legislative action, cultural change, and bridge building between youth in different communities. She is also a Generation Progress Gun Violence Prevention Network Volunteer Lead.  

Gun Violence Prevention: Crisis Intervention Through Mental Health Support Services

Nosheen Hydari is being honored as a Gun Violence Prevention Champion of Change.

It’s 3 a.m. and I receive a call from our crisis line about an inner-city Chicago family with a teenage son who has threatened his mother with a weapon. It’s my job to assess the level of danger in the home. So, I immediately call the mother to understand her safety concerns. Next, I notify my on-call supervisor and together we develop a plan to reduce the level of threat and ensure the son gets to a safe place for a face-to-face assessment.

This is crisis intervention. And as a crisis therapist, I use my training to de-escalate the crisis and ensure the safety of all those involved. I go into some of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago to meet people where they’re at, such as hospitals, residential and group home treatment facilities, and the detention center. This means that I listen to people’s stories—the stories that have led them into crisis. I see people in their most difficult times and offer compassion, validation and solution-focused attention at moments of deep vulnerability.

I’m a crisis therapist at Community Counseling Centers of Chicago (C4), a leading community mental health agency in Illinois that provides a wide range of mental health services, crisis intervention, prevention services, parent education, and substance use treatment to at-risk children, adults and families.

In my role, I provide crisis assessments for hundreds of Chicago children and adults in severe psychiatric distress. I am trained to make an immediate decision about an appropriate level of care for the person in distress, which is either inpatient psychiatric hospitalization or outpatient services.

Through early crisis intervention, we have the opportunity to disrupt a potential threat of violence from escalating into a serious incident of harm to someone. The earlier people call to report a crisis—the better chance there is of stopping an act of violence.

We can all make an impact in our communities by helping to increase the availability of mental health services and public education programs, and raising overall awareness. C4 offers a public-education program called Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). MHFA is an evidence-based, in-person training program that provides individuals and groups with the skills necessary to identify, understand and respond to someone who is experiencing a mental health problem or mental health crisis.

Gun violence prevention happens through early crisis intervention, access to mental health services and public education programs. Anyone who cares to get involved can be part of the solution to help people who are at the front lines of violence. Those who volunteer time to mentor at-risk youth are part of the solution. Those who support programs that lower violence and positively impact the communities are part of the solution. Direct service workers—counselors, teachers, mentors, coaches, organizers and advocates are all part of the solution.

All of these efforts continue to create positive change in our communities, starting from the foundation and building up.

Nosheen Hydari, AMFT, is a Crisis Therapist for the Emergency Services On-Call team at Community Counseling Centers of Chicago (C4). C4 is a leading community mental health agency in Illinois, providing a comprehensive range of mental health services, crisis intervention and substance use treatment to more than 10,000 low-income children, adults, and families each year.

Texas Gun Sense: Firearms Policy and Advocacy in the Wild West

John Woods is being honored as a Gun Violence Prevention Champion of Change.

Prior to April 16, 2007, gun violence was—for me—something that happened on the pages of a newspaper or behind the television screen. That Monday morning, however, I discovered first-hand the cost of America’s moral failure on firearms policy. I lost Maxine Turner, the girl I loved.

I moved to Austin a handful of weeks later to begin a biology doctoral program. My involvement with the gun violence prevention movement began when lawmakers started discussing how to “prevent another Virginia Tech,” which they argued was best accomplished by forcing colleges to allow guns in classrooms—an ideological agenda having nothing to do with campus safety.

Scientists love to believe that people make decisions rationally—that 32 innocent people dying in an act of terrorism should be sufficient justification for significant reform, particularly when there is so little downside to something as simple as expanding background checks.

Unfortunately, rational decision-making is rarely a part of the gun debate in America. Texas lawmakers had no interest in talking to the Virginia Tech survivors, nor in reading the VT Review Panel Report, nor in learning that workplaces allowing firearms are 5–7 times more likely to experience homicides.

Indeed, the gun debate in Texas has been filled with manufactured misinformation. The NRA has done an admirable job, for example, of supplying the public with an alternate history—that the University of Texas shooting was mitigated by armed civilians. Survivors and law enforcement remember it quite differently: armed civilians needlessly complicated the police response.

We founded Texas Gun Sense to counter gun lobby disinformation with an objective, fact-based perspective. After the inconceivable events at Sandy Hook, America seemed ready to talk about guns again; and we knew already that Texas was prepared, its legislature having twice rejected the “campus carry” bills—which many observers viewed as sure to pass in an overwhelmingly conservative Texas legislature.

Like Texas Gun Sense, the vast majority of Texans support the right to bear arms but also—perhaps contrary to stereotypes—believe that with rights come responsibilities. So it is unsurprising that the term “gun sense” was invented in Texas by Texans. We want what nearly every other American wants: the freedom to live and raise our families in safety.

Texas Gun Sense has already found some success pursuing a fact-based dialogue. In February, the Travis County commissioners voted against renewing gun show contracts for county property absent guarantees of background checks on private sales. Organizers successfully defeated the guns-in-classrooms legislation for the third session in a row using white papers we prepared. We offered Texas a trustworthy source of information on firearms policy for the first time in years.

Texas has a history of good gun sense, a legacy which Texas Gun Sense hopes to solidify. In 1994, when it was still legal for domestic violence offenders to purchase firearms, a local constable suggested that Austin Police Department simply fax relevant arrest records to any gun dealer requesting a background check. It worked, and a short time later the legislature codified such offenders as prohibited purchasers—long before it became federal law. By 2009, Texas had closed the mental health reporting loophole which enabled Maxine’s killer to buy his firearms—under unanimous consent and signed by Governor Perry.

What we do in Texas has broader implications—36 Congressional seats and several native sons in the White House. Many federal officeholders spend time in the legislature—where we are on the front lines, discussing universal background checks. The work Texas Gun Sense does has national impact, and on everyone's behalf, I thank the White House for the recognition.

John Woods, Ph.D., graduated from Virginia Tech and helped found Texas Gun Sense, a state-focused educational charity which promotes a fact-based dialogue on gun policy and works to educate lawmakers and the public on universal background checks in Texas. Dr. Woods now serves on Texas Gun Sense’s advisory board and is a post-doctoral fellow at West Virginia University’s Applied Space Exploration Laboratory and the West Virginia Robotic Technology Center.