By Sydney Goitia-Doran, The Seattle Medium
For National Gun Violence Awareness Day last Friday, Public Health – Seattle & King County joined forces with local nonprofits and municipalities to distribute free gun lockboxes. The annual event aims to promote secure firearm storage as a step toward preventing gun-related injuries and deaths. This year’s partners included Community Passageways, Freedom Project, Urban Family, Progress Pushers, the Federal Way Community Center and the City of Auburn.
According to the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, during the first three months of 2025, firearm-related homicides and injuries in King County were down – reaching a five-year low. Also, South King County saw a 37% drop in shot-fired incidents compared to the same time period last year.
While officials haven’t directly credited the decline to any single circumstance, Friday’s lockbox event is one part of growing community efforts to curb gun violence.
“In partnership with all the other public safety work that happens, these organizations are contributing to the increased public safety that we saw in the first quarter of 2025. We’re nowhere near there, but it’s promising,” said Eleuthera Lisch, director of the King County Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention, who attended the Jackson Street event.
“There’s something that is starting to root and we know that putting the public in public safety contributes to all of us feeling a part of something, all of us recognizing that we have to care for each other, care for ourselves,” Lisch added.
The event at Jackson Street, co-hosted by Community Passageways, a nonprofit that works with youth to interrupt cycles of violence and incarceration, attracted a small crowd of community members wearing bright orange – the color adopted nationally to symbolize the gun violence prevention movement.
Lisch explained that the tradition began after the 2013 shooting of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton in Chicago. To honor her, her friends wore orange because it is the same color hunters wear to avoid being mistaken for targets, calling for safety and visibility in the face of gun violence.
“That’s a pretty heavy weight for young people to have to consider that they feel hunted in the streets and that they are the victims of accidental shootings because people don’t realize their right to be safe and free,” Lisch said in her speech.
Mark Rivers, deputy director of community safety teams at Community Passageways, emceed the Jackson Street event and spoke to the crowd about the personal toll of gun violence.
“Lives are lost. And it’s not just the victim, but it’s also the perpetrator, because once they commit that crime they got to go do the time,” he said. “So that’s two lives lost when we could have just done something by storing a gun the right way, putting it in the lockbox.”
Marcus Ellis, deputy of impact for Cities United, national nonprofit dedicated to reducing gun violence, said he believes in investing in the communities most impacted by gun violence, particularly Black men and youth.
“While we have these preventive measures, it’s also important to have measures that are involved investment,” Ellis said. “Like providing resources, comprehensive strategies to prevent gun violence and community gun violence and ensuring that we have a public safety ecosystem there to build understanding that violence is a public health approach and it’s important we address it that way.”
Following speeches from Rivers, Lisch, Ellis and Keisha Credit of A 4 Apple Learning Center, there was a moment of silence for gun violence victims and a brief demonstration on how to use the lockboxes. To receive one, attendees had to fill out a brief survey.
Raven Smith, a firearm owner from West Seattle, learned about the event through social media and came to retrieve a free lockbox because gun safety hits close to home for her.
“Gun safety is so important. It’s personal to me because for my family member, I lost them due to gun violence,” Smith said. “If we were able to lock away people’s firearms for people that don’t need them or need to have possession of them we could protect people like my family member.”
Lisch said that community partnerships are important when aiming to tackle deep-rooted problems like gun violence, and centering the public allows people to connect and care for each other.
“The narrative has to shift, because young people who are suffering the affliction and experiences of gun violence aren’t thugs. They aren’t bad people. They’re somebody’s brother, cousin, uncle or daddy,” Lisch said. “They need to be recognized, valued, supported and held accountable when they’re involved in things that infringe on other people’s well-being and safety.”
