"Forget new gun laws. Here’s what could really keep people from shooting each other."
While they grab attention, justifiably, mass shootings remain outliers. Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. The tyranny of everyday shootings — the 12,000 homicides a year that happen so regularly that some people don’t even call 911 anymore — follow patterns completely divorced from the weapons used. These shootings have much more to do with the realities of life for the poor, the drug-addicted, the mentally ill and the criminal.
Gun violence is most acute among young black men. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency says the homicide rate per 100,000 of white males between 15 and 19 years old is 1.8. For Hispanic males, it’s 14.6.
For African American males, it’s a staggering 50.6 per 100,000.
Only recently, Richmond, Calif., had among America’s highest per capita rates of gun violence. In 2009, there were 47 homicides among 100,000 residents. Officials there theorized that a few bad actors caused most of the problem. As it turned out, 70 percent of their gun violence in 2008 was caused by fewer than 1 percent of the city’s residents. This isn’t unique: in Cincinnati, less than 1 percent of the city’s population was responsible for 74 percent of homicides in 2007.
Richmond developed an innovative, controversial program: They identified the 50 people most likely to shoot someone and engaged with them, even paying them to participate.
The city provided career help, training, resume writing and health care. It asked people what they feared and helped them create plans to mitigate those fears.
Critics called it “paying gang members not to shoot people.” It was more than that. And it worked.
From 2007 to 2012, the city experienced a 61 percent reduction in homicides. It turned out that the money was nowhere near as important as people had thought — people still show up to the meetings even though no one is paying them anymore. The interventions steered potential killers onto a better path.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/14/forget-new-gun-laws-heres-what-could-really-keep-people-from-shooting-each-other/
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