We have denied the pain of gun violence survivors for far too long.
Nelba Márquez-Greene, YSPH Activist in Residence
The Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) held a panel discussion on The Use of Arts & Storytelling to Prevent Firearm Injury on November 7th. The event featured several researchers and trauma specialists who are working to reduce firearm injuries and deaths in the United States.
The featured panelists were YSPH Activist in Residence Nelba Márquez-Greene, LMFT; Dr. Joseph Richardson Jr., PhD, the MPower Professor of African-American Studies, Medical Anthropology, and Epidemiology at the University of Maryland; and Dr. Chana Sacks, MD, MPH, a general internist at Massachusetts General Hospital. YSPH Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, a national leader in firearm injury prevention research, served as moderator.
During the hour-long discussion, the panelists aimed to shine a light on the stories behind gun violence, explaining how storytelling can enhance our understanding of the complexity of these incidents and humanize them while maintaining respect for the victims and survivors.
Several of the panelists spoke from personal experience. Márquez-Greene’s daughter, Ana Grace, 6, was one of 20 students, and six administrators and teachers who were killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. The incident remains the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school in American history. Sachs lost her cousin in the same shooting.
“I came to understand this world of grief and trauma and gun violence a little bit differently when we became a part of the story,” said Márquez-Greene, a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in grief, loss, and trauma. “I grew up in a cocoon of this American mythology that you can largely avoid gun violence if you make good choices, and if you're good enough people. It wasn't like that for us.”
Márquez-Greene is also host of the Shared Humanity podcast, which highlights the stories of gun violence survivors with a focus on community, caring, and empowering listeners to take action toward positive change.
The trio also discussed gun violence as a frequently overlooked aspect of public health. Many people, they said, do not draw a connection between firearm injuries and public health.
The panel highlighted the importance of understanding the social determinants of health underlying America’s violence epidemic, and not just focusing on statistics about gun violence. Social determinants of health are the non-medical factors that influence health such as poverty, racism, and economic policies. Richardson, founding co-director of Prevent Gun Violence: Research Empowerment Strategies and Solutions (PROGRESS) and founding program and research director of the Capital Region Violence Intervention Program (CAP-VIP), drew upon a life expectancy example to illustrate his point. In a white-majority neighborhood in Washington D.C., life expectancy is 89, Richardson said. Twenty minutes away from that area, in a Black-majority neighborhood, life expectancy is 68. A 20-year drop in just 20 minutes of travel time.
Richardson said this is just one example of how race is intertwined with health outcomes, which includes a disproportionate number of young Black men losing their lives to gun violence. It is impossible to separate the complexity of public health and guns, the speakers stressed. Understanding how social inequalities and other factors contribute to America’s public health issues is a priority of YSPH for they are often the root, the driving factor of many pressing public health concerns, including gun violence, the panelists said.
And yet, many continue to overlook this, the speakers said. “If it bleeds, it leads,” said Sacks, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the MGH Center for Gun Violence Prevention. Gun violence stories, said Sacks, are often sensationalized in the news media for their gory details, with no deeper reporting on the personal stories and social factors behind the tragedy. She raised the point that everyone knows statistics surrounding gun-related deaths, and yet few can name the number of survivors.
To help raise awareness, the trio discussed the importance of both written and digital storytelling and stories co-created with survivors to humanize incidents rather than simply quantifying them by their numbers. Such stories drive people to the data, Richardson explained, melding humanism and data to highlight the real stories of the public health complexities behind gun violence statistics.
As a Harvard professor, Sacks said she highlights the importance of survivor stories when she teaches a class on transforming the narratives of gun violence. She invites survivors to speak to her students about their experiences.
The panelists discussed the power of bringing survivor experiences to light, whether through in-person discussions, filmed interviews, or written stories.
“We have denied the pain of gun violence survivors for far too long,” Márquez-Greene said.
The full panel discussion can be found on the YSPH YouTube channel.