Gun violence

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HealthWiki > Promoting Community Mental Health > Chapter 5: Violence and anger > Gun violence

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In this chapter:

 

In this chapter:

• Chapter 5: Violence and anger
• Gun violence
• Gender-based violence
• Violence in families
• Structural violence: Violence built in to our social systems
• Restorative justice to repair harm
• Anger

The number of people who die in the US from gun violence is shocking. Guns are now the leading cause of death for people under 19 years old in the US. Countries with fewer guns and with rules that make guns harder to get suffer far less gun violence.

While the need for mental health support for everyone affected by gun violence keeps increasing, health workers and community organizers also focus on prevention—advocating to limit access to guns and to watch for and help people who might use a gun to harm themselves or others. Sometimes community healing processes—bringing people together around grief, rage, and frustration—are combined with prevention efforts.

Taking back the streets from gun violence

There are more guns in the United States than cell phones! Our communities are flooded with cheap guns when they need to be flooded with quality jobs, services, and education.

In recent decades, several US cities have developed programs to identify, support, and provide alternatives for people drawn into violent crime and gun violence. In Oakland, California, upset by an alarming increase in gun murders, crime, and too many funerals, a group of ministers and community leaders formed Faith in Action East Bay to stop the violence.

Over a 10-year period, they put a 3-part Ceasefire Initiative into action:

• A Ceasefire march every Friday night, gathering at a different place of worship and then walking through a neighborhood experiencing violence to signal their concern to residents and show them they are not alone.
• “Call-ins,” meetings with ministers, community leaders, social service providers, police, and the people who are causing the violence in the neighborhood. Because they live there, the community leaders (called “violence interrupters”) know who is causing the violence and “call them in” to a meeting to discuss what is needed—jobs, housing, drug treatment, counseling, or something else—to make it stop.
• Follow-up to make sure that people can and do take advantage of the services and opportunities offered. If they instead continue causing violence in the community, the police follow up with legal enforcement.

Faith In Action’s leadership and role in the Ceasefire Initiative helped cut the East Oakland crime and murder rates in half until COVID stopped everything. Faith in Action East Bay has now restarted, confident in their efforts to reduce violence and promote uplift in their community.

Mass shootings

Although the number of people killed in mass shootings is only a tiny percentage of all deaths by gun violence in the US, their impact is enormous. A mass shooting is an attack on an entire community. When it targets a community of color, as they frequently do, it is a reminder of the racist violence that Native American, Black, Latinx, Asian, and other communities have endured for generations. It recalls past acts that were rarely acknowledged and almost never resulted in accountability or justice.

Following any type of gun violence, counseling for trauma is essential for survivors and the families of those murdered, as is organizing events that allow the broader community to grieve together. Ongoing programs and activities designed to strengthen and connect people within the community are a necessary and effective way to help repair and reset community mental health.

Temporary or permanent monuments and other public art honor the people lost to violence. These also provide a place to grieve and to renew community efforts to stop the loss of more lives.

Feed people, not violence

In May 2022, a white supremacist shot and killed 10 people at the Tops Market grocery store in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. In the aftermath of the mass shooting, residents pointed to how lack of investment in the Black community resulted in Tops being the only supermarket in the neighborhood. This structural violence helped sow the seeds for the mass shooting as the gunman chose the location precisely because it was the only supermarket in a Black neighborhood. Relatives and community members have taken many paths to honor those killed, specifically calling out the inequality and harm to the community caused by racism.

Community members have channeled their pain into activism by working to establish quality, affordable grocery stores to challenge “food apartheid” in Buffalo. Others give testimony in Congress, support efforts to limit gun access, and educate to highlight rather than erase African American history. People have also filed a lawsuit against the social media companies that fuel hate crimes and the online purchase of weapons.

This page was updated:18 Apr 2025