Let’s fight like Olympians to beat this mass shooting crisis

On the even of the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games in China, I recall a conversation I had with one of my daughters, asking how she manages to memorize the large amount of dialogue required of a main character in her stage appearances. Easy, she told me. It is all about the aggregate of marginal gains.

This theory of success - aggregation of marginal gains - was the brainchild of British cycling coach Dave Brailsford, who lead his UK team to 8 gold medals each at the 2008 and 2012 Beijing and London Olympics.

Brailsford focused his team on a 1% margin of improvement in nearly everything the team did --- whether it was the nutritional value of the food they ate or the quality of the mattresses they slept on. He believed that improving at least 1% in each area would give his team, in aggregate, a competitive advantage. He hired a surgeon to teach them how to keep their hands clean and taught them not to shake hands to avoid illness. His strategy paid off.

Can this theory be applied to end mass shootings? I believe it can. As a frequent lecturer and writer on the vexing dilemma of U.S. mass shootings, the most common question I am asked is, how can we end targeted violence? It doesn’t matter the audience: news reporters, security experts, even friends at the dinner table. Everyone eventually comes to this touchstone question.

No matter how you define mass shooting, whether it’s  the FBI, the media, or academics, mass shooting incidents continue to increase. I explain to those who ask me, my version of the Brailsfordian aggregate of marginal gains. If each of us makes it our business to improve matters even one percent in the space we occupy, these benefits can have a big impact.

We need incremental gains in critical areas like suicide prevention support, mental health care, active shooter drills, firearms laws, and in cultural approaches to religious and social inclusion. We need marginal gains in education, business, and religious-based organizations who need to evaluate their environments, policies, and practices to better incorporate violence prevention efforts into daily activities -- not just think of safety as a checkbox once a year.

We need gains in laws that meet out punishment and hold those accountable for firearms-related violence. We need gains in funding, more widely available counseling, and improved support for those mired in domestic violence situations. We need businesses to evaluate how they discipline and fire employees, the impetus for far too many workplace shooting incidents.

We need gains achieved when gun owners better secure their guns. Kids are more at risk in a home with firearms, and more likely to die from a gun in the home than in a shooting incident at a concert or school. We need parents to talk to their kids about firearms and firearms safety.

We need gains in building a culture of inclusion and in looking for and supporting those who are aggrieved, brittle, and suicidal. We need gains in saying something when we see something.

As Senator Chris Murphy so plainly says in his book, The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy,  we need gains in the number of people who choose to do something, anything.

If you want to help stop the killing, you only need look in the mirror. If each of us take personal responsibility to do 1% better in just one category, we can move the needle on gun violence in the right direction far more than 1%. Pick something and do it. Be part of the aggregate of marginal gains.