Four Ways to Reduce Gun Violence

Pedro Reyes, profiled in this issue of the Voice, approaches the issue of gun violence through art: he transforms surrendered guns into tools, including shovels and musical instruments. As a complement to his approach, we asked four Carls working in gun-related endeavors for their top recommendation for bringing about meaningful change.

1.  Support young people in making smart choices about guns

Mary Lewis Grow

While helping organize the Silent March, a 1994 display in Washington, D.C., of 38,000 empty shoes representing that year’s gun deaths, Northfield’s Mary Lewis Grow felt a wish forming: she wanted to connect young people to the issue of gun violence in a way that would empower them and give them a sense of agency.

Having an “almost mystical belief in the power of simultaneity,” she created the Student Pledge Against Gun Violence, in which students nationwide could sign the same voluntary contract on the same day. In visualizing themselves making this commitment in unison with others, she hoped, they might realize that their voices, multiplied, could have a generational impact. The pledge asks young people to promise never to bring a gun to school, never to solve a personal issue or dispute with a gun, and to use their influence with friends not to settle their issues with guns.

During the Silent March, she met then-Senator Bill Bradley and asked him to help give the idea wings. The result was a Senate resolution calling for a Day of National Concern about Young People and Gun Violence and national distribution of the Student Pledge. Since Grow was from Minnesota, Bradley wanted the support of Senator Paul Wellstone, a friend and former colleague of Mary Lewis’s husband Roy, Carleton’s Frank B. Kellogg Professor of International Relations. Wellstone enthusiastically agreed and the resolution went to the floor with 84 co-sponsors, passing unanimously.

From there it multiplied into system-wide use in New York, Chicago, Washington, and New Orleans, as well as smaller cities and towns throughout the country. The website offered a menu of student- and teacher-led awareness-building activities to provide context for the Day of Concern. Within a decade, more than 10 million students had signed the pledge, and youth gun violence had dropped dramatically.

When Roy was diagnosed with metastatic cancer in late 2005, Mary Lewis “lost [her] psychic energy” for the work. (Roy passed away in 2013.) She maintains the website, and some schools still use the pledge each October. But, she says, the time is right for reenergizing this campaign and she hopes that younger faces and other groups will help renew its momentum. “We need to remind students that gun violence isn’t inevitable,” she says, “and reversing it begins one decision at a time.”

2.  Build a national network of student gun-violence attorneys

Jaxton Alston ’23

“I have vivid memories of being a middle schooler and not having to worry about school shootings and lockdown drills, and then Sandy Hook happened and, in a day, everything changed.” Jaxon Alston ’23 grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, just 27 miles from Newtown, and being in close proximity to the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history left an indelible mark. Today, he’s in his final year at the University of Minnesota Law School, where guns are a big focus of his work.

He interned at Everytown: Law, a legal arm of the gun safety organization launched a year after Sandy Hook, and worked as a special assistant to the Minnesota Attorney General as a member of the interventions team for his law school’s Gun Violence Prevention Clinic, an experiential learning program that supervises second-year student attorneys in litigating gun violence cases. The clinic has teams working in two areas, affirmative litigation, which sues gun retailers and manufacturers, and interventions, in which legal counsel helps defend state gun laws when their constitutionality is challenged.

Alston’s hope is that the concept of the University of Minnesota’s clinic—the only one in the U.S. dedicated to gun violence prevention—be expanded to other law schools, both to add critical resources to under-staffed AG’s offices and to expose future attorneys to a potential career path working to address gun violence. “It’s very gratifying to see your work have actual results. Some of the things that the clinic works on end up at the Minnesota Supreme Court or the Minnesota Court of Appeals, and they become good law, like requiring a serial number or making sure you have a permit to carry,” Alston says. “They may seem like very run-of-the-mill laws, but they actually do help with cutting down gun violence.”

3.  First, look at the root causes of self-armament

Caitlin “Cat” McMurtry ’09

“We live in a society that is swimming with guns,” says public health and social work professor Caitlin McMurtry ’09. Five years ago, there were 1.25 guns for every American, and then things shifted. “We are used to gun purchasing and carrying as a behavior we see on the right. But since the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, we’re increasingly seeing it on the left and among marginalized groups as well.” Black, Latine, and LGBTQ+ people are some of the biggest new gun buyers, according to a study by McMurtry. “So many people across the political spectrum feel fearful and disaffected right now.”

McMurtry’s research indicates that low trust in government is linked to far greater odds of owning a gun and that, over time, gun ownership is increasingly concentrated among those with the least trust in Congress and the executive branch. As trust in government nears all-time lows, she worries that state violence and corresponding federal disinformation, as seen recently by ICE agents in Minneapolis and DHS officials in Washington, may further deteriorate trust and fuel a new wave of firearm purchasing, especially on the left.

McMurtry, an assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, agrees that the number of guns in the United States is concerning, since access to firearms is strongly correlated with increased odds of death from suicide and homicide. But regardless of whether it is possible to reduce the number of guns we need to understand why so many are arming themselves. “I’m asking the discipline [of public health] to start from a different place: we have to address the fear and uncertainty that’s driving people to own guns. And if someone owns one, what conversations do we need to have with them about harm reduction?,” she says. “Sometimes that means having frank discussions with friends and family about a history of depression or suicidal ideation. Like, ‘I know you own a gun and I’m sensing that you’re not doing so well. Can I hold onto your gun for you while you go through this?’”

4.  Use the courts to find the truth—and hold the gun industry accountable

James Hannaway ’09

Progress around gun safety can be difficult, and, as James Hannaway ’09, found last August 27, bittersweet. An attorney at Berger Montague PC and a Baltimore native, he was co-lead counsel in a two-week jury trial, representing the City of Baltimore against a gun dealer near the city’s border, and the jury had just reached its verdict: Hanover Armory was ordered to pay $62 million for its role in helping flood the city with “ghost guns,” unserialized weapons made from kits that can be purchased without ID or background checks.

The city had seen a 1500-percent increase in recoveries of ghost guns between 2019 and 2022, many which had been used in violent crimes, many made by the manufacturer Polymer80 (which, in a related suit, settled for $1.2 million in 2024) and sold by Hanover. It’s the largest verdict against a gun dealer in U.S. history—and it came the same day a gunman killed two schoolchildren and injured 30 others at the Church of the Annunciation 40 miles north of Northfield. “My Carleton friends in Minneapolis were texting me as the news came out: ‘I’m glad we can have this one glimmer of hope in a really dark moment.’”

The case, brought by Berger Montague PC, Brady, and Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP on behalf of Baltimore, doesn’t set legal precedent in the traditional sense, but it does send a powerful message: The gun industry can’t operate with impunity. “We saw people in the community step up and say, ‘No. If you’re selling a product that can kill another human being, you’d better be damned sure that you’re selling it to the right people,” Hannaway says. “And that is a message that gun dealers have not heard for years.” 

With good reason: in 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was passed into law, which the gun industry has frequently used to “basically immunize itself from cases like ours.” But, Hannaway adds, “we can get around it if we show that the defendant in a case has violated a law relevant to the selling or manufacture of firearms. We don’t have to accept the status quo, and we don’t have to accept that the status quo will remain the status quo forever.”