Illustration by Tim Cook
As the news of the Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, Florida, emerged on Valentine’s Day, I found myself once again glued to the TV and my phone.
Watching the coverage, I felt a profound sense of dread. I also felt attuned to the loss these students and families experienced, partly because I was feeling my own mortality a bit, thanks to a medical procedure earlier in the day, and partly because one of my sons had just lost a friend the day before in a tragic accident. I let myself absorb some of the pain these people endured, finally realizing that I could and should do something to honor the lives lost and try to prevent Richmond from experiencing the same. I also felt that if I were going to get involved in this issue, I wanted to help address the gun violence that affects our entire community, including young people of color.
Throughout my career, I had experienced firsthand the importance and impact of inclusiveness, collaboration and diversity of thought in solving problems, and, despite the magnitude of this particular problem, I believed this approach would still work. So I put myself out there — accountability via the public Facebook post. I asked friends and the community at large to join me in this journey and be willing to go about it a bit differently. I called for us to put aside our typical gun debate talking points, resist the urge to frame this only as a political debate and ask a different question: “How do we keep our kids from being shot to death?”
The feedback indicated I was onto something. I had several private messages encouraging me, wanting to be involved and looking to confirm that I sought diverse opinions leading to a nonpartisan solution. I welcomed these voices of community and collaboration and answered in the affirmative. From that call and response, The Solution Is Us was born.
We decided to solicit ideas on a dedicated website to avoid getting bogged down in social media debates, and we also scheduled kickoff conversations locally. We launched our online campaign the weekend after the Parkland shootings — with half of it focused on Virginia and half of it focused on other states that had experienced significant inner-city gun violence or widely covered school and mass shootings.
Within a few days, we had received 173 ideas on the website. Most of the submissions fell into the following buckets (ranked by popularity):
1. Additional restrictions on purchase/ownership of semiautomatic weapons (definitions varied widely, a point that several other submissions addressed)
2. Increased resources and programming to improve mental health treatment
3. Increased school security and safety measures (this did not include arming educators, which was one of the least popular ideas)
4. Increased/enforced background checks (coincided with support for raising the minimum age to purchase weapons)
5. Anti-bullying and mentoring initiatives (focused on reducing social isolation, especially for boys and young men)
Through three community dialogues, we got to meet and share the stories that shaped our perspectives. During the first meeting, we focused on what our role should be in helping the young people in our community who were organizing to address the issue. In the second, we focused on broadening our understanding of the problem to include gun violence in urban communities of color, in addition to largely suburban mass/school shootings. For the third, the group got into healthy, respectful conversations between people who characterized themselves as “Second Amendment advocates” and those who considered themselves “gun control advocates.”
We have a committed core group that will develop action plans based on the ideas we received online. At the same time, we’ll focus on addressing the community needs we heard (supporting organizing students, ensuring cross-community representation and including people on both sides of the gun control debate).
So far, we’ve learned two important things that will guide our work in the weeks, months and years to come: The breadth of the question leads to an abundance and diversity of answers; which enables the inclusion of multiple perspectives. Soon, I believe we’ll learn something else: that the inclusion of multiple perspectives will ultimately yield the innovative solutions we need to address the problem of gun violence.
Share your thoughts at thesolutionisus.com.
James Warren has called Richmond home for 14 years. He leads Johnson Marketing’s brand strategy group and founded the company’s storytelling startup, Share More Stories.