Earlier this week I posted a story about a terrific new video produced by the Engagement Lab at Emerson College which featured a group of parents and friends who spent some terrible hours waiting to be told whether their child or their friend would survive a gunshot wound.

              What I am now going to say is in no way to be taken as a criticism of the Engagement Lab’s work. To the contrary, the video is awesome and if you haven’t watched it, you should watch it now. Or even if you have watched it, take 20 minutes or so out of your very busy day and watch it again.

              That being said, what also needs to be said is that the messaging about gun violence in this video is the usual way in which we frame the discussion about a type of behavior which kills and seriously injures more than 125,000 Americans every year, namely, the discussion invariably turns on the victims, their families, and their friends.

              But if we are ever going to do something meaningful and substantive about reducing gun violence, we have to approach the issue proactively, which means looking first and foremost at the individuals who commit gun violence and figure out ways to get to them before they pull out a Glock or a Sig and go – bang!

              And I’m not talking about all those wonderful and compassionate programs which give some inner-city kids a job, or some mentoring about a career, or any other life-fulfilling activity like that. Those gigs are all fine and well but by the time an adolescent connects up to them it’s usually too late.

              When do boys get interested in guns? According to Al Lizotte’s research, in their early teens. When do some of these kids start behaving in a way which eventually leads them to become the young men who commit the most violent crimes? Thanks to the research published by Marvin Wolfgang fifty years ago, in their early teens. So, the point is that when some distraught mother starts talking about how her son would have grown up to be a decent and dependable adult if he hadn’t gotten shot, there’s another mother out there who could also be asked to talk about what she did or didn’t do with her son before he became the boy who shot and killed the other kid.

              What I’m saying is that in the discussion about gun violence, we focus our attention on the victims, not on the ones whose behavior is the reason that gun violence exists. Because the simple fact is that you can’t commit gun violence without a gun. And getting to the point where you pull out a gun, load it, then point it at yourself or someone else and pull the trigger is not something which happens overnight.  It’s not like some kid who goes into the corner deli and swipes a little package of M&M’s.

              Back in 2015, a 13-year old was shot and killed in St. Louis because a man thought that the kid was going to assault him. The shooter got off because what he did was legal under Missouri’s Stand Your Ground (SYG) law. Why did the shooter believe that a 13-year old kid who had broken into the man’s car was going to attack him instead of running away from the scene? Because the shooting occurred at 1 A.M. and the man couldn’t see because there was no street light.

              The media lit up when the shooter was found innocent of the murder charge because how often does a 13-year old get shot and the shooter walks away scot-free? Then we were treated to the requisite interview with the poor, overwhelmed mother of the victim who acknowledged that her son was committing a crime by trying to break into the man’s car but even so, he shouldn’t have paid for his crime with his life.

              Did anyone bother to ask this woman why her son was riding around in the back alleys of St. Louis looking for a car to break into at 1 A.M?

              So, even when we focus on the victims of gun violence, we often don’t ask the questions we need to ask because in half of all fatal shootings, it was something done by the victim which precipitated the gun being pulled out and used.

              This kid in St. Louis was committing serious crimes when he was 13 years old. And what do you think he would have ended up doing if he had lived through that incident. He probably would have decided to get himself a gun.

              Either we start thinking about how gun violence affects the families and friends of both the shooters and the victims, or we don’t. And if we don’t, we can talk about gun violence all day long and that’s just what it is – talk.