YSPH Unites Community Leaders and Scholars to Discuss Gun Violence

Dr. Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, welcomed U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and city, state, and community leaders, to YSPH on January 30th for a wide-ranging discussion about the continued need to fund firearm injury prevention research.

Dr. Ranney and DeLauro, who represents Connecticut’s 3rd Congressional District, discussed barriers and solutions to the country’s gun violence epidemic. Dr. Ranney, an emergency medicine physician, has treated firearm injuries and witnessed the devastation of gun suicide. She has elevated the discussion around firearm injury prevention nationwide as well as at YSPH since being named dean in 2023. She, DeLauro, and 15 other panelists – representing schools of public health and public policy, community groups, law enforcement, and survivors – discussed the importance of working together to share data, secure funding for firearm injury prevention research and community outreach programs, and to support survivors.

DeLauro recognized that firearm injury prevention has often been a survivor-led movement. “You are doing some of the hardest work that there is,” she said.

DeLauro, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, emphasized the need to mobilize diverse city, state, and community groups to secure federal funding as well as to preserve Medicaid, which provides some reimbursement for community outreach program work as well as health services to many of the people the programs serve, such as low-income children and their families, seniors, and individuals with disabilities.

The discussion at YSPH was the first step toward building partnerships, said Dr. Ranney, the C.-E. A. Winslow Professor of Public Health. “By working together on a project, by sitting in the same room, you come to trust each other's motives in a way that you might not have beforehand,” she said. “To the degree to which we can set up those projects that put us in a room with that same end goal and then create data together in partnership, that shows that what we're doing works and shows that our ecosystem approach is more likely to be successful.

“Here at YSPH we have declared that our vision is linking science and society, making public health foundational to communities everywhere,” Dr. Ranney said. “Part of linking science and society is linking the science on firearm injury prevention as a health problem to all of those in this room who have been personally impacted, and to all of us who are trying to keep our communities safe.”

Kristin Song, president of the Ethan Miller Song Foundation, worked with DeLauro on Ethan’s Law, a safe storage law named after her son.

January 31st, the day after the YSPH panel discussion, was the seventh anniversary of Ethan’s death. The Guilford teenager was killed at a friend’s house with an unsecured gun. “Tomorrow will be seven years since my son walked out of our home and out of our lives,” his mother said.

Gun violence survivor and advocate Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose daughter Ana Grace was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, is “a liaison, a connection, and a voice for all of those in this room to make sure that your voices are part of this work and that we’re doing this in true deep partnership,” Dr. Ranney said.

“In my formal capacity, I am the community scholar for the Yale School of Public Health,” Márquez-Greene said. “In my informal capacity, I'm here as a reminder that the distance between the [Sandy Hook] memorial in Newtown and New Haven is 45 minutes but a chasm of empathy. When someone dies from gun violence, it doesn't matter the circumstance – the pain is the same.”

Leonard Jahad, executive director of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program, suggested reframing how we think about victims, especially in brown and Black communities. “Every single person is the victim in the entire community,” Jahad emphasized.

Tirzah F. Kemp, director of the Department of Community Resilience for the City of New Haven, said the most active communities working to prevent gun violence are those that are the most traumatized by it.

According to research at the University of Connecticut, “every American has a non-trivial risk of gun injury or gun death, but we don’t think that way,” said Dr. Jennifer Dineen, PhD, associate director of UConn’s Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Violence Prevention. “And so, our legislators don’t think that all of their constituents need a solution.”

Gun violence and firearm injury take many forms and require different solutions, added Dineen, associate professor in-residence at UConn’s School of Public Policy. “Within each state we have different types of gun violence. We have family gun violence, and we have community gun violence. We have suicide, and we have intimate partner violence, and we have accidental or unintentional [firearm deaths],” she said.

Dr. James Dodington, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and medical director of the Center for Injury and Violence Prevention at Yale New Haven Hospital, noted that there are solutions, and “we are just seeing the glimmers of those solutions.”

The hospital program links people impacted by gun violence to the state’s victim services groups, including the Hope Family Justice Center in New Haven, which assists people who are impacted by intimate partner violence, and the Victim Services Support Network through the Clifford Beers Community Care Center that coordinates victim services organizations in Greater New Haven.

“None of this would be possible without really tectonic shifts that have happened in the last few years to make this ecosystem work,” Dodington said. Instead of searching for new solutions, “take what's working now, fund it, and support it,” he suggested.

Dr. Ranney emphasized the importance of data and funding. “It wasn’t until 2020 that we got federal funding reinstated, thanks in part to Congresswoman DeLauro, to fund firearm injury prevention research,” she said. “It wasn't until the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which our Senator Chris Murphy co-sponsored, that we were able to release large amounts of funding to many of the community-based violence intervention programs and mental health support groups, including people from communities in this room.”

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was the first federal gun legislation enacted in 28 years and was signed into law in 2022. It extended background checks for firearms purchasers under age 21, funded state red flag laws, crisis intervention programs, and partially closed the gun show and boyfriend loopholes.

• With a new grant to study Project Unloaded, YSPH will work with the Hispanic Health Council in Hartford to research how social media influences youth violence.

• YSPH is working with 4-H nationwide, primarily in rural communities to talk about preventing firearm injury. 4-H is the nation’s largest youth development organization.
• Dr. Ranney was among the gun violence experts, advocates, and policymakers who discussed ways to improve evidence-based approaches to prevent gun violence at the White House in December.
• The third annual meeting of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms drew over 800 people including those from schools of public health, criminal justice, and public policy; survivors; community groups; state offices of gun violence prevention; and police officers to share best practices.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC ) has funded a study on preventing youth violence through technology-enhanced outreach at the University of Connecticut.
• The U.S. Department of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics have supported firearm injury prevention, and police chiefs nationwide are collecting data and best practices for law enforcement.