Offering Hope about Gun Violence Research with Sonali Rajan

Haeny Yoon:

Welcome to Pop Off, a little spinoff segment from Pop and Play, where we take a few minutes to chat about education, play, and pop culture as it's happening right now in the public conversation. As we work on season five, which is going to be a banger. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Woo! 

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm your host, Haeny Yoon. With me as always is the immeasurable, incomparable, most awesome ...

 

Nathan Holbert:

More, please. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Okay. Say your name. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yes, I'm Nathan Holbert. We're excited to have with us a special guest for this Pop Off. Today we have with us the inaugural president of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearms Related Harms. This is friend of the pod, Columbophile, neighbor down the hall, Sonali Rajan. 

Sonali, welcome to Pop Off. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Thank you. You forgot my most important title, which is biggest fan of all of your children. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Poppernaut! 

 

Sonali Rajan:

I am a poppernaut. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Sonali just got back from the third conference for this research society of which you are the inaugural, and then also outgoing president. Also, we have had once again, I feel like we sadly have to talk about this every few weeks it seems like, another school shooting. There's a lot to pop off about that I think. But also, I'm aware that there's so much happening in the research field that I think might give us some home, or at least some sense that there are things that we can do, actively do to make a difference on this insane issue that we're all dealing with.

I wonder if you could say a bit about where the research is at, where the action is currently at to help us solve this problem? 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Okay. I love it. Yes. Like all of my colleagues in the space, we are constantly walking that line of hope and hopelessness. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Which is doing the work we do every day, and then reading the news and seeing headlines of second-graders having to call 911 and report. It is absolutely insane, the world in which we live and the persistence of this issue which has been ... Gun violence has persisted in this country for now decades. There has been a pretty notable uptick since 2015, of gun violence, in many different forms but specifically in schools. And then post-COVID, there was a huge uptick in gun sales in April 2020. That contributed to this proliferation of violence around the country in lots of different forms. Then since then, we have seen gun violence persist in really tragic ways. In particular, it's now the single-leading cause of death among children and teens in the United States. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's insane. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

It is completely insane for so many reasons. It's insane for so many reasons. 

This part is just heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking as a human being, and as a parent, and as a parent who has to drop my kid off at school every day. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

I think that that reality in which we live, which is a very uniquely American phenomenon, it's awful. That is our reality and that is the world in which we live. 

I think if I think about that too much every day, I would lie in bed and not do anything else. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

If you were really to wrap your head around that all the time, it's dark. It's so tragic. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Okay. Can I interrupt you for a second? 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yeah, go ahead. Do it. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm just wondering how are young people even getting access to these guns? Because we think about all the ... I do research in childhood. We always think about surveillance, and borders, and boundaries, and how we make up all these rules to keep kids safe and to make sure the kids don't do things that I think sometimes are perfectly harmless. If those things also prohibit kids from doing or getting certain things, or having some agency, how are they even getting guns in the first place? 

 

Sonali Rajan:

The vast majority of firearms that get used in any type of violence perpetration like this have been legally purchased and are legally owned by-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Adults. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

By adults. The vast majority of school shooting perpetrators do obtain their firearms from either the home or their parent or caregiver, or the home of another loved one. There's lots of great solutions. We're going to pivot in a minute here to some ways in which we can feel better and hopeful about this. 

One very, very practical set of strategies that we know works, research is showing it works, it's being implemented in lots of different spaces and ways is to really normalize and promote the safe storage of firearms. Meaning responsible gun owners, who by the way, have been engaged in this research along with many colleagues and collaborators, agree that you should store your guns locked and unloaded. And by doing so, you're literally reducing harms, and you're reducing the likelihood of a child, either accidentally or intentionally, obtaining a loaded firearm and then using it. Either, again, accidentally or intentionally. 

It's something very practical. It's so practical. It doesn't infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners. It's very much what we would consider just very basic gun safety, and has a lot of buy-in from most families, from most individuals who are firearm owners. That's the, by-and-large, that piece of it. Then there's lots of other contributing factors. But certainly from the perspective of school shootings and from kids obtaining firearms, that's where we are seeing the mismatch in terms of what's happening. 

Go ahead. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

You looked like you were going to say something. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

No, no. Tell us how and why you started this conference and society, because I do feel like that's the pivot. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yes. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm sure that there is this problem that happened and this is why you're at this space where you're like, "Okay, I got to do something that leads us to hope." 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yes. I'll say I didn't start the society by itself. This has been the culmination of years of work by a whole group of colleagues who are in this research field. And something I just think that is really interesting about this research field is that it's not any one discipline. It's not just public health or just education. It's literally, at this conference, this year and in previous years, we had almost 24 different academic disciplines represented. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wow. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Law scholars, and criminologists, and social workers, and literally everything in between. What I love and appreciate about that, and even about the genesis of the society originally was people coming together, scholars coming together saying, "We care about this problem. This is an all hands on deck issue. Our work, our research is better if we put our heads together." That is completely true. That ethos has been really important to me in the past two years since leading this and thinking through how, in my two-year tenure, how to set this up moving forward. 

A couple years ago, the society started. I had been part of, in the year before this, the executive planning committee that had, again, been comprised of many, many scholars from lots of different institutions across the country. I ended up being voted into this role. It's been honestly one of the most rewarding and also most challenging, and I think for me most meaningful things I've ever done in my career. Just in the terms of being able to understand the challenges of what it means to do research in this field. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

What it means to bring people together who have very disparate views on this issue who don't necessarily agree politically. And also, to just recognize that gun violence isn't a monolith. I think we tend to group all gun violence into one bucket. But the analogy I often share is we don't think about all types of cancer in the same way. There's certainly overlap in how we might screen or do things.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

But there is lots of nuance. I do feel like that, really just creating space for talking about solutions in a very thoughtful way that's evidence-informed, that's non-partisan, that's very inclusive. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wow. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

All of those were components of this. 

Nathan, in suggesting that we have this conversation, knowing me very well, was like, "Sonali's going to come back from this conference, and she is going to feel inspired and amped, and I want to tap into that mode." 

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's exactly right. Knowing you is always this amazing confusion of how you can do what you do and also be one of the most positive people-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Optimistic people I've ever seen. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

That I've ever known, yeah. I wonder, maybe as a way to tee you up here, I think I spend most of my time just being furious about this. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yes. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

And getting disgusted-

 

Sonali Rajan:

As you should be. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

And depressed and angry about it. It doesn't make me feel better, but it feels justified. You are somebody who thankfully, yes gets angry, yes gets very sad, but you translate that into action. I think that your society that you all have gathered together does this well. I'm wondering if you could for our listeners, who are people who really care about children, who care about education, who care about society, what are some things that you can tell us about what's happening in this space, the research that's being done, or actions that we can all take to further your work and the work of the field? 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Okay. I will say that something that I think is ... A little just two-second history of our research field is that, I think some people know this, I don't know that this is widely common knowledge per se. For over 25 years, so starting in about 1996, this was through something called the Dickie Amendment, there was an essential ban, I'll use that term loosely, on federal funding for the scientific study of gun violence as a scientific issue. To say that there was no federal funding for research in this field for so long literally meant that there was, and this is a term that my colleagues have used in their writing, but we refer to it as the lost generation of research. 

To say and know during that time, and that's the time period in which we were all growing up so I think about Columbine, and Virginia Tech, and all of these very public mass shootings that certainly punctuated that period, coupled with all of the other types of firearm violence that were certainly continuing to persist. Imagine not being able to fund students, or post docs, or have a research lab, or do any kind of work, imagine if we did that for cancer prevention, or literally any issue that matters. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

It's wild to me that for very politicized reasons, that infrastructure just wasn't there. 

But what's been amazing is that, about four years ago, there's a long history behind this, but basically four years ago, Congress decided to start appropriating funds for research in this field. That has been just absolutely amazing. To be clear, it's no very much funding. It's a very small amount of funding compared to the scope of the problem. What I'm personally very proud of, and I think most of my colleagues would agree with this, is that the field has done a lot with very little. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Basically, Congress has been, over the last four years, financing this very rapidly growing field. I always use this, but I just think this is important. I would say six, seven years ago, every career gun violence scientist could fit around a conference room table, and now we have an entire conference. This past conference we had 800-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wow. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

... researchers and funders in the space who were all ... And some policymakers and other practitioners. But literally, to have a research community of that size grow so rapidly, that's remarkable. And every single person there, including the 250 early career scientists and students who were choosing to make this a career, means that we now have literally a pipeline of research. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

I made a couple notes here of examples. I think when people think about solutions to gun violence, they probably think about maybe some law, or maybe something to do with law enforcement. Which is fine, that is certainly part and parcel of what we think of as our solutions. But the spectrum of solutions is so much bigger than that. The fact that we have people studying the impacts of public libraries and other play space interventions, or evaluating economic security policies, thinking about it from an economic perspective. Or actually thinking about firearm storage in the context of older aging adults who might have dementia, and you don't want them to have access to firearms. Literally thinking about the spectrum of solutions across the life course, across geography, in very non-partisan ways. 

Then what are all of those levers ... Levers, levers? 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Both. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Both, okay. What are all those levers, levers that we are pulling to fix this? I think we do see this a lot after very public mass shootings, that there will be calls for one particular policy or practice, but there isn't actually one solution. A lot of what I spend my time trying to articulate is that the solutions here, like any set of solutions, are going to rely on a multitude of evidence-informed practices. 

We have, again, in the last four years, there has been true life-saving insights that have been generated and published, and are being shared and taken up by policymakers at the local, state, and actually most recently at the federal level. While we don't know what will happen in the next few years at the federal level, certainly my hope is that at the more granular levels, we will see attention given to the solutions that have been implemented more recently and where we're seeing effect and progress happening. 

Every shooting does feel like, oh, we're not making progress, but when we actually look thoughtfully, there are better practices being put forth. There's so much more work to do, but I do feel like the thing that gives me hope is that knowing how many people are literally working on this issue, come to work every day to do this. That's remarkable. On the days that I don't feel like doing this work, I'm like, "Well, everyone else is showing up. Yeah, I need to show up, too." I think that, it's a little cheesy, but I think that's true. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

What I hear you say too is that the researchers at the conference are definitely taking a proactive approach to gun violence rather than a reactive approach. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, yeah. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

I think that has so many implications to larger issues that all of us are studying. That sometimes we are so prone to take a reactive approach to things, but maybe to zoom out a little larger and think about what the larger solutions or proactive steps might be. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, that's super important. I say this a lot about other issues whenever I'm giving talks, about how we think about challenges in our society and people not getting along, and misinformation, and all these kinds of things. It's easy for us to say, "That's somebody else's issue," and I think gun violence is another one of those things where it's like, "That's Sonali's deal, Sonali's got this." But it's people who care about education, it's an education issue as well. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Totally. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

So much of that proactive approach is thinking about how do we build better societies? 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

How do we build communities that care about one another, that protect one another? 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yeah. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

How can we think collectively about proactive steps? I really love that. I think that's a great way to put it. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. And simultaneously thinking about the wellbeing of children. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

It turns out, we should care about kids. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

We should. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes, we should. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

For kids' sake, am I right? 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

For kids' sake. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

We can't leave without talking about Sonali's podcast-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yes. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

... Research For Solutions. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Oh, yeah. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Which has already had a season, and is upcoming season two, right? 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yes. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

But in the meantime, you should check out season one. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Check out Research For Solutions. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yes, please. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

You can find it on the TC feed, I'm sure. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Or wherever you get podcasts. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wherever you get your pods. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

It's on Spotify. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Excellent.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Nice. Sonali, an opportunity for you to make any other plugs. In addition to the society, the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm Related Harms, are there any other? 

 

Sonali Rajan:

There's so many organizations doing good evidence-informed advocacy. There's organizations, they're not, again, anti-gun, they're anti-gun violence. I just think that that's really important. 

I will say, I'll plug two things. One is, and I'm biased because I'm on their board, but there's a group called Teachers Unify. It was co-founded by my friend and colleague Abby Clements, who is just the most remarkable person. And an educator herself, and survived the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. I've known her for a few years. She is just phenomenal. They do really amazing work that it certainly centers school communities, but also the specific needs of teachers and educator. I just think that's so important. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

I'm going to plug Abby, and that organization and their work. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Teachers United? 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Unify. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Teachers Unify, Teachers Unify. They are on all the socials, so you can find them there. That's great. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, we'll also add them to our show notes. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yeah. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

So people can find them. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're amazing. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

We'll also add some op eds that Sonali wrote that you might want to check out during these times. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

They're all versions on a theme of think of the children. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Think of the kids. 

Well, Sonali, thank you very much for being here with us. We really appreciate it. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Thanks, guys. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

We are so super thankful that you're out there doing this work. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Thanks, guys. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

You make me feel good about an issue that I feel very bad about, so thank you. 

 

Haeny Yoon:

Thank you. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Thanks, guys. 

 

Nathan Holbert:

Bye. 

 

Sonali Rajan:

Bye.