A New Approach To Gun Violence

I'm only going to post a short excerpt here from a somewhat lengthy article that advocates a new way of reducing gun violence. Please don't let that "somewhat lengthy" bit dissuade you from reading it in its entirety. It's "somewhat lengthy" in Internet terms. In real life, that means it takes five minutes or less to read.

It highlights an approach that I've never heard of, but that seems to be producing promising results in limited trial runs. It's also an approach that should be agreeable to people on both sides of the gun-control argument. So pour yourself another cup of coffee, settle back, and click on the link.

This doctor says violence is contagious, and we should treat it like a disease

How can we prevent future tragedies like the shooting that took place in Roseburg, Ore., on Thursday?

Some doctors believe that the key to preventing this kind of violence is to literally treat it like disease. One is Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who spent a decade fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and cholera in Asia and Africa.

After returning to the U.S. in the 1990s, Slutkin had a realization. The patterns of violence he saw in U.S. cities looked eerily similar to how he had seen infectious disease spread in communities around the world. He went on to found a group called Cure Violence, which advocates treating violence with the same public health approaches that are widely used to fight disease.

This model is being used to prevent community violence in 15 U.S. cities and seven countries, the group says. But Slutkin believes that it has a much bigger role to play in helping to the U.S. address the tragedy of mass shootings, like the one that occurred in Roseburg.

. . .

If you go beyond thinking about violence as a moral problem and instead try to understand it as a health issue, many things that were previously unexplainable can be explained...

Arguably the most important thing that we do in public health is change behavior, such as eating, smoking, exercise, sex.

The end game here is really to understand and change the behaviors. And we’ve been able to show that you can drop the amount of shootings and killings very fast by using health-based detection and behavior change methods.

Go to the link and read the rest. My first impression was that this seemed a little touchy-feely, but if the reported results are valid it just might work.

Of course, it won't be easy, but what we're doing now sure as hell isn't working...