Cross-Cutting Themes

This chapter provides a pause and the opportunity to integrate case illustration insights with the vast literature on urban gun violence. Bringing together these two worlds—practice and theory—allows the ability to garner lessons for moving forward in crafting urban interventions addressing this key issue. Those who are practice oriented can take these lessons and craft interventions that take into account local circumstances, which is a key element in best practices. Academics can take marching orders for furthering scholarship on this violence. Readers can see cross-cutting themes that emerged with implications for how academic disciplines and helping professions can collaborate with urban self-help organizations in helping them, and readers, carry out their respective missions. Opportunities for youth to connect with caring adults is also important in efforts to interrupt gun-carrying behavior, and they must also be part of the equation within self-help organizations, as seen in these case illustrations and throughout the book. Changing youth attitudes and behaviors influences future gun use by these individuals as they survive youth-hood and emerge as adults. The focus must be on the present with an eye toward the future and respect for the past.

Recommendations for Education, Research, and Community Practice

This recommendation chapter is a perfect time to transition from the themes raised in the previous chapter. A detailed map is in order to help navigate the field of urban gun violence because it is so easy to get lost in the murky sea and dark skies, as represented by contradictory data, competing theories, and local political considerations; there is desperate need of a North Star to help gain our bearings and successfully navigate finding solutions. The values outlined previously in this book help shape this North Star. Readers will develop a better understanding of how they can help shape this field’s evolution when collaborating with self-help organizations.

Understanding the Crisis of Urban Gun Violence

There is a place for a statistical portrait of urban gun violence, particularly when deconstructing how it is manifested at a neighborhood or community level, and this chapter provides it. This portrait provides the backdrop or canvas on which to better place and understand the stories associated with gun violence. Numerous publications provide a statistical portrait of gun violence to further pursue if interested. This chapter highlights key aspects from national and urban perspectives, including subjects that must be a part of any urban gun violence strategy, setting the stage for the introduction of key constructs in the following chapter that influence urban practice, research, and scholarship. This chapter’s statistical portrait is one dimensional but critical in shaping the argument about the saliency of gun violence in the communities served. This picture can best be conceptualized as a backdrop to the social, economic, political, and cultural perspectives, allowing for a more in-depth appreciation for the challenge ahead for those embracing this social justice mission. The narratives embraced to bring this subject to light can use statistics as a backdrop.

Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Perspectives

Urban gun violence knowledge is evolving and promises to gain steam as it garners more attention. Interventions will necessitate a grounding in the social sciences and the urban practice experience, positioning professions to advance the knowledge base on how best to address gun violence at a neighborhood and social network level. This chapter provides a broad social-economic-political-cultural context for understanding the origins and broad reach of gun violence in the nation and its cities and touches on aspects rarely the focus of attention yet playing a prominent role in helping understand how urban gun violence emerges. Four viewpoints are covered in this chapter (social, political, economic, and cultural), allowing coverage of usual and unusual aspects of urban gun violence. These perspectives are not ranked in order of importance and must be present in any analysis of urban gun violence and search for solutions, more so when seeking a nuanced and localized approach. These perspectives interact in a highly dynamic manner; when one is particularly impacted, the others react accordingly. Gun violence permeates society, with few urban segments escaping its grasp.

Epilogue

Even when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is. —POET ANDREA GIBSON I have made it a habit to have an epilogue, which goes by many different names, as a parting effort to finish a book that simply refuses to be finished, and more so on a topic such as urban gun violence. Trauma’s reverberations are immediate and intergenerational, including the generation yet to be born, spanning multiple decades and becoming part of urban family and community narratives. These generational reverberations also compromise the nation’s moral fabric, casting it internationally as violence prone....

Overview and Context

Gun violence often elicits strong reactions across a wide social-economic-political spectrum and touches all of us either directly or indirectly. Gun violence, as it manifests itself in our urban centers, represents the death of an American dream for countless youth and young adults, primarily young people of color, across the nation’s cities and communities. Simply put, a life span must extend beyond age 18. Living long enough to graduate from high school is a nightmare disguised as a dream. Unfortunately, we mourn his death because we are unable to celebrate his life and the potential future contributions he and others like him will simply not make because their lives were cut short or because their health is compromised due to a bullet. His family, and countless other families, are left to pick up the pieces left behind by gun violence.

Approaches to Preventing and Intervening With Gun Violence

The importance of local context cannot be overly emphasized in shaping how helping professions can best aid in preventing and intervening early in gun violence, but that does not mean that the national picture cannot provide a broader context to help understand local situations. Interventions requiring many different institutional and community partners have garnered saliency as pathways to solving gun violence. Multifaceted interventions by their nature are complex, requiring contextual grounding to maximize success and taking localized circumstances into account. A cookie-cutter approach is ill-advised. Successful interventions also require cooperation of multiorganizational entities, all requiring considerable expenditure of time, energy, and other resources. In addition, these approaches require engendering trust. This chapter grounds readers with various approaches to dealing with urban gun violence.

An Overview of Urban Self-Help Organizations

The self-help literature is almost half a century old, attesting to its longevity, and reviewing this literature is beyond the scope of this book. Its evolution now encompasses urban gun violence, introducing a new need and geographic context. Although gun violence does not have to have heavy racial overlays, in this instance, it does, making it significantly different from its predecessors, which ostensibly were a-racial and non-urban specific. It brings a geographical setting that historically was not emphasized by previous self-help movements. This chapter introduces readers to this field and how gun violence represents the latest evolution of the self-help movement.

Three Case Illustrations (Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.)

It is hoped the cases that are the focus of this chapter will inspire hope, with the passion they bring being contagious beyond their geographical confines. These illustrations, based in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., are not representative or generalizable across the country; they highlight key findings specific to the sites. Although themes are highlighted, combined with the scholarly literature presented in the next chapter implications for practice and disciplines interested in urban gun violence are presented. They represent different budgets, missions, developmental histories, staffing, and futures. Self-help organizations are best appreciated within a historical context. Healing and caregiving are topics rarely associated with communities of color, and nothing could be further from the truth. Even in the most dangerous communities, there are people who are fearless and have taken the challenge of helping, and sometimes risking and losing their lives in the process, and there are institutions that have also assumed this role.