Jewel:
“The root cause of gun violence stems from profit. I believe that the resource that is guns brings profit to America; that’s the issue. The problem that it produced is gun violence, and now it’s out of control. Why do we invest so much money in gun control? You can control it; it’s a resource that we are making a profit off of. So, that’s the long-term trade-off. Addressing it, it goes back to profit. No profit, no problems. The community needs to get together and start asking the right questions like, ‘How do we benefit from this resource, and how important is the resource to our community?’ Our community needs to stand up and start getting involved and asking better questions.”
Payton:
“Gun violence is such a critical public health problem, and certain parts of town may experience higher levels of gun violence based on different potential socioeconomic factors like poverty, but I would not say there is one root cause of it. I do think it needs to be harder to get access to a gun because children these days are bringing guns to school or carrying them around, which also ties into making sure guns are safe and secure in households, so kids are not getting them in their hands. The community needs to do a better job of owning firearms by storing them safely and out of reach of younger children or someone not licensed.”
Sheila:
“For the good of humanity as a whole, my people must go through a metamorphosis process to understand the width, length, height, and depth of the solutions to be implemented related to the true morality of our consciousness in dealing with gun violence.”
Bennie:
“To control the gun violence in our community, the community has to get involved. We have to go back and do the things that we used to do, and that is, as a community, check on each one of our children. I have 25 grandchildren, and I am all in for this. Gun violence is a no, no.”
Lovelee:
“Gun violence can be caused by a bunch of different things, but one thing I would say is that buying a firearm is too easy if we are continuously seeing shootings within schools. As a community, we could hold the gun industry accountable and make sure that they are responsible when selling guns.”
Deionte:
“Gun violence is one of the most misunderstood, increasingly common phenomena we see in communities today. I’ll never blame guns for gun violence. I blame violence on violent culture. I’ve lost countless friends to gun violence, probably in the 20s if I were to count and I’m 30 years old. We can blame the media, gangs, poverty, drugs, mental health and so on, but how do we reinforce these factors as a community? The shows we watch, music we listen to, how we react in certain situations. We have been subconsciously trained so imagine our youth.”
