Depth of Discussion; The Challenge in Doing the News Shows

My phone rings every time an active shooter strikes, and school shootings bring text messages asking for on-air discussion. I try very hard to add value each time I speak publicly and nowhere is this more challenging than doing live news shows after an active shooter strikes. I try to accommodate and recall doing live interviews from both a Disneyworld storage area and a church parking lot after a funeral. 

My trepidation comes not from stage fright or a lack of content. For me it is that there is so much to share about what we can do to stop active shooters and other gun violence. That is precisely why I wrote my book, Stop the Killing, and now have a podcast by the same name. There is so much to share and the opportunities to discuss this complex problem with the public are so limited.

I faced this challenge recently after a fistfight turned into a gunfight in a second-floor classroom of a Texas high school. School officials emptied the 1,700 students out of classrooms, bussing them to a location where their parents could retrieve them. We moved students the same way after active shooter attacked in other high schools. Parents came on camera to talk about how scared they were. My social media feed was flooded with calls for changes in gun laws.

And when I take those media calls, nearly every reporter asks, what is the solution to this gun violence? I rarely take the gun question bait because quite frankly I don’t have time in my five sentences for that well-worn discussion. Instead, I echo what I wrote in my book; the problem is complex, and the solutions must be too. I try to squeeze in discussions about behaviors of concern to watch out for, improved police response, and some of the scores of prevention strategies out there. But its difficult to have a valuable discussion for the public when we’re only covering the new headlines each time.

A discussion about guns in the heat of the moment inherently prevents so many other important discussions, including how we lose more children to gun violence in homes than in school, and how we lose hundreds annually to active shooter incidents, but we lose thousands to gun suicides.

I recognized the fear on the faces of those scared parents, and I wonder if they are actively looking for solutions in their own home, their school, their workplace, library, or house of worship.

Underlying causes, and how to prevent impulsive, reactive crimes like we saw in Texas, may be different than the causes that lead to planned and predatory crimes as we saw at Parkland, Columbine and Sandy Hook. Either way, prevention starts with taking responsibility.

I challenge all parents to become more engaged in preventing gun violence among those they love. The opportunities are many, whether that comes in suicide prevention efforts, gun safety training, red flag law calls, talking home safety planning, working on legislative efforts, or monitoring the social media activity of minor children.

Ten of the 14 chapters in my book are focused on prevention whether you are a…

• Parent

• Peer

• Employer

• Employee

• Security official

• Library director

• Cleric

If you need ideas, pick up a copy.