Advance Rutgers Podcast: Exploring Solutions to Gun Violence

Exploring Solutions to Gun Violence Podcast Episode Transcript

Christine Fennessy
Welcome to Advance Rutgers, a podcast about the many ways that Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is addressing the critical issues of our day. At Rutgers, we believe a better tomorrow starts with bigger thinking today. And our talented and driven community is improving the human condition with transformative, multidisciplinary projects. This podcast will explore those groundbreaking initiatives: what they are, why they matter, and who they benefit.

In today’s episode, we speak with Dr. Mike Anestis. He’s the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and an associate professor of Urban Global Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health. He talks about the mission and the critical work of the Gun Violence Research Center. It’s one of only three state-funded research facilities in the country that’s focused on this topic. He also explains why research into gun violence prevention has historically been so difficult to conduct and what we’ve lost because of it. And finally, we learn about his work as principal investigator on a study called Project Safeguard. Project Safeguard was one of the first randomized controlled trials of Lethal Means Counseling for firearm-owning service members. The results of that study are now helping guide work he’s doing through the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center—work that he says will help make us all safer. Thanks for joining us.

Can we just start this conversation by having you describe what the Rutgers Gun Violence Research Center is, when it started, and what its mission is?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Certainly. So the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, or the GVRC as we call it, was founded in 2018. It was really the idea of Governor Murphy and the underlying principle is to have a state-funded entity whose job is to conduct and fund research on gun violence prevention to sort of fill a void that’s existed. (I suspect we’ll get to that later on.) The idea is to provide data-driven policy guidance and knowledge that we can then use to create tools to help prevent all forms of gun violence. And what we’ve done beyond that is add an additional mission, which is to not just fund and conduct research on gun violence prevention, but to communicate about the science of gun violence prevention so that rather than being sort of an entity stuck inside of academic silos where nobody really hears about anything we’re doing, we can instead empower the communities that actually need this information to then know about it and demand it and create more of a push towards those data-driven ideas.

Christine Fennessy
Excellent. All right. And just so it is clear to listeners, the center is not focused on researching mass shootings, is that correct?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Yeah, and that’s not because we don’t care about mass shootings. They are a horrific phenomenon and they happen far more often than they should—and uniquely often in the United States. The issue isn’t that they’re unimportant. The issue is that those sort of public mass shootings that dominate our conversations about gun violence only represent about 1% of gun violence nationwide. And so our mandate is to focus on all forms of gun violence and all the lives in communities impacted by all those various forms. And to do that, we have to go where most of the action is.

We don’t avoid research or discussions about mass shootings—and in fact, I would say the majority of our media interactions are still on that topic, in fact—but the idea is to make sure that we are getting folks to understand the true scope of gun violence so that the policies that are put forth and the conversations that take place represent the actual nature of American gun violence. Otherwise, all of our solutions and energy go towards something that does require solutions and energies, but at the exclusion of most of what’s actually happening.

Christine Fennessy
Right. Let’s talk next about the scope and nature of gun-related violence, perhaps by starting with a few statistics that really sort of illustrate the problem. And then I was wondering if there was a way that you could also humanize those numbers, so that we can kind of see what that reality looks like in neighborhoods, in schools, in communities?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Yeah, sure. There’s not one magic number that I think completely shines a light on the reality of the situation, but there are a few that jump out. The noteworthy one that’s made the headlines recently is that firearms have become the leading cause of death amongst children nationwide, which is a pretty alarming fact in and of itself. The one that often takes people by most surprise is that almost two out of every three gun deaths in this nation is a suicide death, so you’ve got more than 25,000 folks in any given year in the United States dying by suicide—by that one method alone. And then you’ve got more than 40,000 folks nationwide dying by some form of gun violence every single year.

Outside of COVID times, firearm suicide would itself be a top-15 cause of death in the United States—just that one method for that one form of gun violence. It’s really pretty astounding. And then the other thing that’s worth noting is that you also see substantial racial disparities. On the interpersonal gun violence side of things, the odds of a young Black male being a victim of gun violence are astronomically higher than their same-aged white male peers. And so the way that gun violence impacts different communities is also something that’s important to track, so we don’t zoom out so far and see an overall number and miss the fact that some groups are just bearing a wildly disproportionate share of the burden.

Christine Fennessy
Wow. All right. It’s clear this is a huge problem, but it’s only been in the past few years that the federal government has started funding gun violence research. Why is that?

Dr. Michael Anestis
It’s really political pressure and lobbying. In the 1990s, the Dickey Amendment came to pass, which was essentially the results of substantial lobbying. [The amendment] made it such that it wasn’t actually illegal for the federal government to fund gun violence research, but the idea was that federal dollars are not to be spent towards anything that could be deemed as being part of gun control and a lot of federal funding agencies took a really conservative interpretation, or cautious interpretation, of that and essentially froze all funds specifically towards gun violence.

Now that doesn’t mean they never funded gun violence related topics, but it meant that they were never seeking out those topics. And a lot of times research gets funded because NIH for instance says, “We want research on this topic.” Well, if they never say, “We want research on gun violence,” then fewer people are going to submit such grants. And so that had a really chilling effect for a long time. It started to open up a little bit after Parkland, and then really in the last few years open up substantially more. But I will say that gun violence has the same number of deaths each year as sepsis, but we have 1% of the research funding of sepsis. So we are funded way more than we were previously and yet wildly underfunded relative to other causes of death that are the same kind of burden.

Christine Fennessy
Why is that?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Well, I think again, it’s just a very politicized issue and progress can be slow but meaningful. But the reality is there’s a lot of political pressure on folks not to be seen as pushing back against gun rights, which isn’t what gun violence research does. None of the research we’re doing is about overturning the Second Amendment or taking people’s firearms away or anything along those lines, but it’s very easy for things to be spun that way. And one of the tricky things about science is the stories we tell tend not to be headline-ready. They tend to be nuanced and complicated and unemotional. But very straightforward, headline-ready emotional topics grab people’s attention more.

And so it’s very easy for someone to say, “This is a gun grab,” and to get people riled up. And then to have the counter-argument be something spun cautiously by a scientist just isn’t very compelling. And so at the end, there’s often not the momentum we need to push for greater progress. The caveat there being that certainly the pending budget proposals have called for an increase, I believe it’s 60 million dollars in federal funding, for gun violence research. And more and more foundations are requesting funds like this, and we’re certainly trying to do our part as well. So there is momentum. It’s just a trickle relative to what it should be.

Christine Fennessy
What do you think has been the impact then on gun violence research from this loss or lack of funding?

Dr. Michael Anestis
It’s one of those things that’s going to be impossible to quantify, because the way that academia works—the incentive system—is that you get a tenure track position by [publishing in] impactful, peer-reviewed publications that are often the result of federally funded or externally funded grants. And when there is no funding on a topic, that steers people away from putting their focus onto that topic. And so, generations of would-be gun violence researchers—and all the people that each of those gun violence researchers would’ve trained to come into this field, and all the knowledge they would’ve created—didn’t happen. So, the effect is exponential. It’s not that a handful of people didn’t write grants—it’s that those people didn’t train all these other people, who didn’t train all these other people, each of whom would’ve done projects that built off of and informed one another.

And so, we are way far behind where we should be as a field, and basic questions have gone unanswered because the incentive system steered people away from this topic, because there was no funding. It’s very easy to spin them as unproductive, politicized researchers. And that’s why I have such great admiration for the folks who were doing this before me, when the funding was much harder to come by and political movement was even more powerful at sort of suppressing the work than it is now. It’s extraordinarily unfortunate. You can’t make up for what was lost there. We’re getting funded now, but underfunded, and so we continue, actually, to lose what could otherwise be in place because the infrastructure momentum is not fully where it should be.

Christine Fennessy
Wow. That is so layered. Why does evidence-based research—or in this case, the lack of it—matter so much in a crisis so big as this, so immediate as this? What effect does that lack of evidence-based research have on law enforcement, have on communities, have on policies, when there are such holes in our understanding?

Dr. Michael Anestis
I think there are two ways where the evidence-based, or lack of evidence-based, [research] is important. The primary role of evidence-based research, or data-driven research, is to sort of cut through our opinions or what intuitively seems plausible to find what actually works. Evidence-based research holds us to account. It lets us find answers that actually work and give people a guideline that isn’t based off of emotion or intuition or anecdote, but in fact from carefully crafted study based on appropriately sampled groups of folks that yield replicable findings, that then yield data-driven solutions.

The other way that I think this is extremely important is that it also helps push back against the narrative about things being politicized. When science is conducted properly, there’s an open “recipe” for what folks did. You can see exactly what took place, and you can sort of audit those findings and see if they are or are not correct or do not line up with what the author says the interpretations are. It becomes a lot harder for someone to say, “No, this is just a gun grab,” or “This is just someone who’s pushing for gun rights.” It’s about: these are the data, and this is how they concluded that, and the strengths and limitations of those data, and what we can and cannot rightfully conclude from those data.

And so, it diffuses the conversation to the extent that people are willing to think about it that way. And obviously in our current political climate, there’s been a movement towards delegitimatizing science or creating alternate truths, flooding the zone in a way that makes it difficult for us to all agree upon a basic set of facts. And that complicates this to a whole other level. But if we can, I guess, set that aside for a moment, what this offers is a chance to have a non-politicized conversation on a very hot-button issue.

Christine Fennessy
Well, that makes sense. Okay. So, progress has been slow, but are there examples of some studies in this area of gun violence research findings that have had a real impact?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Yeah, sure. The [Bloomberg] School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, for instance, has looked at policy work. And what they’ve been able to do is highlight the utility of, for instance, licensing laws for firearms and show, using some really innovative approaches, how the implementation of those laws resulted in shifts in gun violence rates. Similarly, you’ve seen more recent research on extremist protection orders. This has allowed us to better understand the utility of certain policies for preventing certain forms of gun violence in really compelling ways, and also highlight some of the risks associated with some of those policies.

On a clinical level, we see new research on things like lethal means counseling—conversations on how to get people to store their firearms more safely—and what you can see from those types of studies is then folks like the Department of Defense getting on board and interested in trying to adapt and implement those types of interventions to help service members. So, you have seen some effects on the policy level. On the clinical level, you’re seeing hopefully emerging research on violence interruption programs to see how effective can they be done and how can they be implemented in a consistent manner that yields the same type of big results that we’ve seen in some cities but not in others. We have certainly seen progress in some places and less in others, but that’s to be expected, again, given the sort of uneven funding environment that we’ve had.

Christine Fennessy
And what about your own research? What area are you most involved in with gun violence research?

Dr. Michael Anestis
I have been a suicide researcher a lot longer than I’ve been a gun violence researcher, and so I’ve come to gun violence prevention from a suicide prevention lens. That’s where my personal research is largely focused, and I do that in several ways. I do that in research—trying to better understand firearm ownership, who are firearm owners, how do they store their firearms, and why and what are the obstacles? I do that with randomized trial research where we actually implement interventions to try to change people’s storage practices.

I also have, more recently, shifted to doing a lot of research to better understand messaging—how can we create and disseminate persuasive messages that will then also, at a population level, sort of shift social norms on storage practices so we don’t have to identify risk ahead of time (which, for a variety of reasons, is a really complicated process that we’re not so good at doing)? How can we treat it the same way we treat things like drunk driving, for instance, or sneezing into your elbow instead of your hand? How can we shift social norms on a behavior that could yield a lot of real benefits across the board in terms of gun violence prevention, in fact, well beyond suicide prevention?

Christine Fennessy
So you’re talking about shifting social norms in terms of how guns are stored?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Yes. The reality of firearm ownership in United States is that it is essentially omnipresent. The sort of upper-level estimates are that there are 400 million personally owned firearms already in circulation—so more firearms than people in the country. So, no solutions are going to involve firearms not being present. We are a nation, for better or worse, that has come to accept a certain level of risk that comes from owning firearms—something we do with lots of other things. We accept risk with driving automobiles, we accept risk with consuming alcohol or consuming sugar, in fact. This is a risk we’ve accepted.

The solution then is to say, “Well, how can we mitigate that risk? How can we lower it, if it can’t be eliminated?” One of the ways we do that is to focus on making firearms less readily accessible, and that can have a number of effects. It can reduce the odds of suicide. It can reduce the odds of unintentional injury—for instance, a child accesses their parents’ firearm and unintentionally shoots themselves or someone else. It lowers the odds that domestic violence will be fatal, and it lowers the number of victims in domestic violence incidents. It also lowers the odds of theft and subsequent trafficking of those firearms for use in crimes down the road. So safe storage is a way to lower risk, not to zero, but below current levels.

Christine Fennessy
What are some of the research areas that the center will be exploring?

Dr. Michael Anestis
We’re across the board on all forms of gun violence. We have a team of faculty and post-doctoral fellows and doctoral students, each of whom have their own research interests and projects going on. For instance, a lot of my work is funded by the Department of Defense—looking at various ways to, again increase the safe, secure storage of firearms and the creation and dissemination of messages that produce that outcome for service members and veterans. We have research we’re doing in collaboration with the Newark Community Street Team, a violence interruption group in Newark, to better understand the lived experience of illicit firearm ownership amongst Newark citizens.

We are in the process developing a couple of nationally representative surveys, one focused on gun violence experiences amongst Black men and women and one focused among Native American, Alaskan Native men and women. Both of those groups have exceptionally high rates of gun violence exposure and victimization, but most of our analyses are on fairly whitewashed samples or just sort of subgroup analyses of these folks. We’re designing, on the front end, to better understand the perspectives of these communities and developing the surveys in consultation with members of those communities to make sure that the results we get speak through the voices of the folks that we’re trying to represent.
We also just issued a couple of calls for proposals, and so we are reviewing those right now. We’ll fund several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of projects conducted by researchers focused on gun violence within New Jersey. Whatever type of form of gun violence they are focused on, whatever type of solution they’re trying to look at, that depends on the project itself. But what I’ve read so far is that again, it cuts across the board. And so, what I expect to see by the end of this year is that we will take what we did last year, which I feel great about, and expand that substantially such that at the end of the academic year, when we hold our annual GVRC Research Day, we’ll be able to present folks with a sort of steady stream of new information on all forms of gun violence representing so many different communities and their perspectives.

Christine Fennessy
Let’s talk about another of the primary goals of the center: this aspect of communication. How will that communication happen, and why is that communication so important?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Sure. So it happens in a lot of different ways. A few examples would be: Every time we publish a peer-reviewed journal article that’s often sort of the endpoint for scientists, we do a few things. We create a visual abstract—a quick summary with good visuals that make it more digestible that we make freely available and disseminate broadly on every single one we do. We often then also leverage that into some sort of online conversation, whether that is a Twitter chat or a Twitter space or some sort of webinar that we do or an interview with one of the authors. The goal is to again, get the information out as broadly as possible. We frequently write editorials in mainstream media outlets and appear on TV or radio wherever we can. We have hosted free events online in numerous instances over the past couple years. I mentioned earlier GVRC Research Day, which is our annual convention showcasing all the research we conducted and funded over the previous year and the words of those authors that is free to all community members and that we record and then make available after the fact as well. We do the same thing by simply highlighting our students’ research as well. We are intending to host annual days of listening and learning with the communities across New Jersey this year as one of our newer initiatives.

Our goal is really to engage in as many ways as possible through as many mediums as possible to just get as many people to encounter this work as we can. And the reason I think it’s so important, again, is that otherwise the information gets lost. The most common outcome of any peer-reviewed paper is that nobody ever reads it, ever. So you create this article that no one reads, that’s locked behind an expensive pay wall that’s inaccessible to the public—even if it was publicly funded research, which is a whole other conversation to be had. And then scientists show up at conferences and they talk about it in jargony language and nothing really much comes out of it ever, and that’s just a sort of dispiriting thing. And if you sit back and think, “What am I doing with my career?,” that can cause some people some angst.

Our goal is to break that mold and to have our work have meaning. Not to claim that it’s more meaningful than it is or to say that we’ve solved the problem with every paper we put out, but to say, “Here’s this thing we did, why we think it matters, what the limitations are, but why we think it’s useful and here’s where we’re going to go next.” And to keep that conversation active. And also to make the voices of scientists be more credible and familiar and accessible to communities that might benefit from that knowledge, so that when people are trying to figure out what are the answers and “What could I do?,” scientists aren’t thought of as others; they’re thought of as part of the community. And that also can prompt scientists to hear the community more and work with them and hear the perspective of those communities in building their research questions and thinking about their answers so that it becomes a bidirectional conversation.

Christine Fennessy
Have you gotten feedback from the community on any of this outreach that you’ve done over the course of the center’s work that has helped you do that communication better?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Not direct feedback. It’s like reading reviews on Amazon. You’re either going to get glowing reviews that aren’t representative or negative reviews that aren’t representative. But I think that the way we take feedback the most seriously, quite frankly, is in our research on messaging. We try not to manufacture messages without first understanding what people prefer. A lot of our research right now is focused very much on finding out from firearm owners, for instance, who they want to hear from and then conducting experimental studies that actually see well, what types of content actually seem to result in changes and attitudes? And then building the way we speak around that. I give a lot of talks in DOD contexts speaking with military leadership, and I often joke with them that I think about titling my talks, “It Ain’t Me,” because it’s not.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that my voice isn’t going to be what convinces firearm owners to think about firearms differently. And that’s understandable, because I’m going to be seen (by nature of my position and all sorts of other things) as someone who’s on the outside and maybe has an agenda that I don’t actually have. And so, it’s about understanding who is seen as compelling, and leveraging those voices and working with them and building those collaborations. I’m hoping that the way that our communication evolves over time is that we are able to work collaboratively with the folks we identify as compelling messengers to reach communities, not just with findings from specific studies, but with the overall messages that all of the signs of gun violence is sort of telling us—to get those ideas embedded into those communities through the voices that they trust.

Christine Fennessy
Wow. Okay. Well, this seems like it might be a good segue into this idea of building bridges with firearm owners. This is a really critical part of the work that you’re doing. So, can you just talk a little bit more about that and how you’re able to overcome this perception that you have an agenda? And how you instill this idea that you’re trying to find other messengers that can also deliver this message in a way that their peers will hear?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Yeah. I often tell people one of probably the most beneficial thing I ever did professionally was spend most of my professional life living in the deep South. I grew up about 90 minutes from where I live now, in southwestern Connecticut. It’s a very blue area with low firearm ownership rates. I was not exposed to firearms very much, and I thought of them very negatively. It just wasn’t something I associated with myself. And then I went to the deep South for graduate school and for my residency, and then I took a faculty job in southern Mississippi for the better part of a decade, and I did a lot of work with the military. And all of those perspectives are very different from my own, and I came to know people who think very differently than me. It became important, if I wanted to do anything other than get hung up on, that I adapt how I speak about things and that I look through different lenses than my own.

And so, I had a really long practice, basically, on how to think and speak about things differently. And that’s what I brought up here with me [to Rutgers]. And the idea is that this conversation goes nowhere useful without firearm owners. That’s where the firearms are. And so, it isn’t about finding an echo chamber of folks who agree with you, and it isn’t about belittling folks who don’t agree with you by declaring yourself an expert and telling them what’s what. It’s about finding a way to speak with folks and find common ground and to move towards progress incrementally, which I think is sort of a theme of our entire conversation today—which is how to accept every win you can get and every sign of progress you can get to move things forward.

For instance, if I’m speaking in an audience of predominantly firearm owners, I open up my talk with, “Here’s what I am here to do and here’s what I’m not here to do,” and I’m a very “cards on the table” person. I will often ask audiences to close their eyes and think about the last time that they argued with someone about the fundamental rights of firearm ownership and either they or the person they were arguing with changed their mind. And everyone kind of chuckles and I’m like, “Yeah, it’s because it’s literally never happened.” So, it’s not what we’re here to do. This isn’t about the Second Amendment; it’s about understanding the perspective of folks who make different decisions than you and understanding that nobody wants anybody to die, or very few people do, and so this isn’t about disagreements on that, it’s about: What’s the best way to balance different cultures and needs with lowering risk for injury and death?

Christine Fennessy
Is this conversation tied into what you did with Project Safeguard?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Very much so.

Christine Fennessy
Okay. Can you talk a little bit about what that study was? What was the question you were exploring and what did you find?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Sure. Project Safeguard was a randomized, controlled trial of an intervention called Lethal Means Counseling, which is a one-on-one conversation about, in this case, how to store your firearm safely. It was funded by the Military Suicide Research Consortium through the Department of Defense. And what we did was we recruited a group of 232 firearm-owning members of the Mississippi National Guard, and we randomized them to get one of four interventions. They either got a single session of Lethal Means Counseling; or they got a single session of Lethal Means Counseling plus free cable locks for each of their personally owned firearms; or they got [a single session of] our control intervention, which was the same kind of approach, but talking about a different topic like sleep hygiene or stress reduction or something like that; or they got that same control intervention plus cable locks for their personally owned firearms.

Then we followed up with those folks at three months and six months afterwards to see if this one sort of 10- to 15-minute conversation or the provision of cable locks could yield meaningful and sustained changes in firearm storage practices. And there’s a couple of things to think about in terms of how we structure that. One is that the intervention used what’s called motivational interviewing, and so this ties into that [consideration of] working with firearm owners. Motivational interviewing is an intervention often used for things like substance use problems, where someone was mandated a treatment and they feel maybe sort of ambivalent about changing and ambivalent about getting any treatment. And the idea behind motivational interviewing is that you can’t force someone to change. It’s the opposite of those intervention shows where they say, “Look what you’re doing to your mother and you’ve got to stop.” That can create momentary but unsustainable changes, because people themselves weren’t intrinsically motivated to change. Motivational interviewing is a technique that basically accepts people’s ambivalence, doesn’t force people to go one direction or another, but tries to leverage their own intrinsic motivation to make changes. We use that approach, which essentially prevents you from arguing; it prevents you from being the expert. It’s a conversation amongst equals about a topic that you’re not going to force someone to go a certain direction on.

The other thing to keep in mind is that we recruited folks regardless of whether or not they were currently at risk for suicide. And the reason for that is that the folks who die by suicide using a firearm are far less likely to have told someone about it or to have sought help for it. So, if I only know this intervention works for folks who say, “Hey, I’m having a hard time,” then I’m testing the intervention with a group of people who aren’t the people I need to help. I need to go way upstream and make sure I can get this to work regardless. On the one hand, someone might say, “Oh, those people are less severe.” That actually makes this harder, because I have to convince someone to do something for a problem they think is irrelevant to them because they’re never going to be suicidal, and they’re probably right, actually. But everybody thinks that until they’re wrong. So, I have to convince people to basically buy the fire extinguisher when they think their house can’t ever catch fire.

And what we found is that folks who got cable locks, they very quickly started using cable locks, and they maintained that through the six-month follow-up period. Folks who got Lethal Means Counseling used locking devices [and] used gun safes more frequently than people who didn’t get the Lethal Means Counseling intervention—and again, that was maintained at follow-up. The combination of the treatments wasn’t better than either treatment alone, but each one individually was quite powerful, which is great news.

But I think maybe even more importantly, what we found is that the treatment was really highly acceptable. The concern is that you’re going to talk about this topic and ‘oh, it’s going to be touchy, there’s going to be an argument.’ And we certainly had some cases of that, but what we found is actually 100 percent of the people who received either Lethal Means Counseling or a cable lock said they would recommend the intervention to a peer. It didn’t scare people off. It means if you have a little bit of cultural humility, you can have these conversations even when folks weren’t coming and looking to have it.

Christine Fennessy
Wow, that’s so interesting. Can you give an example of perhaps a couple of things that might be said in a Lethal Means Counseling session?

Dr. Michael Anestis
In our approach—and again, there’s different approaches, but in our approach, the Project Safeguard approach—it’ll often start with, “Hey, just tell me about your firearms. How do you store them? What’s your reasons for storing it that way? Are there any circumstances or what circumstances would you consider it might not be a good idea to be able to access them quite as readily? What might you do in those circumstances? What does your family do? How important do you think it is to have your firearm in a safe?” For instance.

The thing is it’s idiosyncratic, so there is a guidance to it, but it is not a script that you read. You have to go where the conversation takes you. And the goal, again, is to try to get somebody to a point where they have some sort of plan for what they would do either now or under some circumstances and then to write that plan down as a sort of way to feel more committed to doing it. And then we follow up again over time to see, “Well, hey, did you do any of these things? And if not, why not?”

Christine Fennessy
How did working on that study, and the findings that you came away with, help inform the work that you’re doing with the center?

Dr. Michael Anestis
Well, it’s informed a lot. A lot of our work is funded by the Department of Defense, and it’s informed a number of follow-up grants we have going on right now, where we are adapting the intervention to different populations, testing implementation in different context. I’m about to propose a new project where we’ll try to train faith leaders across New Jersey to have this skill set. It’s really created an avenue for us to try and get the idea out that these are conversations that a lot of trusted folks could use. It doesn’t need to be between a doctor and a patient. In fact, it really shouldn’t just be between those folks because, again, the folks most vulnerable aren’t often coming to their healthcare provider with this information. So, it’s guiding our efforts to empower or equip a lot of folks to do this and, again, normalize the process of talking about firearm storage not as a way to take away anything from anybody, but as a way to just recommit to safety in a way that people aren’t necessarily thinking about it right now.

Christine Fennessy
It seems like very often we’re hearing in the news about an instance of gun violence. How do you stay motivated and positive, maybe even hopeful, that things might change for the better?

Dr. Michael Anestis
I think that staying positive in a field like this depends on your mindset about things. I’m a very action-oriented person. When a problem arises, I initially pivot to, “Well, what are the steps we take to resolve this problem?” And so, I see this field not about constantly just being steeped in the stories of loss and tragedy and injury that are what we read in the headlines, but about the steps we’re taking to prevent those, which is fairly uplifting. My whole career in suicide prevention has been the same thing. It’s not about just ruminating about all the loss. It’s about preventing the next one, which is, again, a much more uplifting way to think about these things.

I also think it’s easy to just see some progress. My own personal narrative was, I was sitting in a really small office at the University of Southern Mississippi feeling very disconnected from the political environment that I was in and trying to figure out, “Well, what is the solution to that problem?” And I decided to use my nerdy, sort of niche science skills to look at firearm suicide just on my own. And from that, I am now sitting in this position at Rutgers with a lot more of a podium than I had in that moment not that many years down the road. That was maybe seven years ago when I first started doing any of this firearm-related work. That’s a pretty quick trajectory, and so I think it’s easy to feel the winds of progress being at my sails when I can have that much movement, even in the midst of a climate that isn’t always full of rapid progress. So at least from my perspective, I’ve been privileged enough to have been given a lot of opportunities to do increasingly interesting, hopefully impactful things in this field over a relatively short period of time.

Christine Fennessy
That’s it for today’s show. I’d like to thank Dr. Anestis for his time and for the important contributions he’s making towards improving public health.

Music in this episode is by Epidemic Sound, and you can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Multidisciplinary projects like the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center embody the innovative drive of Rutgers, New Jersey’s academic health and research powerhouse. I’m your host and producer, Christine Fennessy. Join us next time as we explore more initiatives that will better the world.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.