The debate over gun control continues to divide the nation, with presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump taking opposing sides. In 2022, the United States recorded 48,204 gun-related deaths, an average of one death every 11 minutes. But it is doctors like Jessica Beard, regularly faced with the carnage, who are calling for measures to deal with the issue.
In the heart of North Philadelphia, where gunshots echo far too frequently, Dr. Jessica Beard stands on the front lines of America's gun violence epidemic.
As a trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital, she regularly witnesses the devastating impact of firearms on her community.
But Beard is not just saving lives in the operating room. As Director of Research of the Philadelphia Centre for Gun Violence Reporting (PCGVR) she's also leading ground-breaking research that challenges how we understand and report on gun violence in the United States.
In an interview with RFI, Beard reveals the complex web of historical racism, media narratives, and policy failures that contribute to the ongoing crisis.
From the lingering effects of "redlining" to the harmful impact of sensationalised news coverage, her insights paint a picture of a deeply rooted problem that defies simple solutions.
As the nation grapples with an issue that claims nearly 40,000 lives annually, Beard's work offers a fresh perspective on how America might begin to heal its wounds.
RFI: You're in North Philadelphia. Could you describe the situation with regards to guns?
Jessica Beard: This area around our hospital is a place where people get shot very frequently. And our hospital takes care of the largest number of people who are shot in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
We know from our research that gun violence risk is actually place-based, meaning that people who live in certain neighbourhoods and cities in the United States are more likely to get shot.
And our research shows that this is in part due to "redlining," a racist practice that prevented black people from getting mortgages to own homes.
In Philadelphia, areas that experienced "redlining" are still the areas where people get shot today.
"Redlining" is not the only thing that's contributing to community gun violence, but it's a marker of systemic and structural racism and disinvestment in people and places.
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RFI: In Europe, people are alarmed to read about US school shootings and other gun incidents each year. How does this work in the American mind, how is it normal to be allowed to have weapons that can cause this kind of damage?
Jessica Beard: Gun culture has for a long time been a part of American culture. And I think it's kind of hard to generalise about the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence.
In North Philadelphia, many of the people who get shot are shot with illegal firearms. Whereas in rural Pennsylvania, the problem largely is firearm suicide. And in fact, the numbers are pretty similar.
In rural Pennsylvania, gun ownership places you at risk of shooting yourself or harming yourself.
Research from the 1990s shows that women who live in homes with guns are more likely to be shot by intimate partner violence.
But unfortunately in the United States, because of political reasons, there was a ban on research on firearm violence. In the 1990s, Congress actually banned funding for gun violence research that might be meant to support restriction in firearm access.
That [ban] was lifted by President [Barack] Obama, and there's been more and more investment in gun violence research.
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RFI: Can you tell us more about your research into US media reports of gun violence?
Jessica Beard: We looked at local television news in Philadelphia and we collected 7,000 TV news clips, and watched a sample of them. We that most clips frame gun violence through the lens of crime. The majority of narrators are police. You will very rarely see somebody like me talking about gun violence on local TV news.
News reports focus just on a single shooting event without context, causes, and solutions, called "episodic" crime reporting.
When audiences view these reports, they tend to blame victims. They don't see gun violence as preventable; they see it as inevitable. And in fact, our big concern is that racist stereotypes can be perpetuated both about the people and the places where gun violence happens.
We also asked patients who had been shot in the summer of 2021, a big peak in gun violence in our city, how they felt about news reports about their injuries.
They felt dehumanised by the "episodic" crime reports, they felt that their safety was being threatened when certain things were mentioned like the hospital that they were treated at, and they felt retraumatised by graphic content.
About 10 percent of these news reports actually contain a clip of the shooting event, which can be very traumatising to the people involved but also result in this normalisation of violence and a desensitisation to violence that I think American news audiences have.
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RFI: How are the two presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump different in their approach to gun violence?
Jessica Beard: Vice President Harris has started and is coordinating an Office for Gun Violence Prevention out of the White House, a federal move to identify and collaborate with doctors like me and other public health folks to support evidence-based interventions.
This Office urges Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring safe storage of firearms, which should prevent unintentional injury, requiring universal background checks for all gun sales, eliminating gun manufacturers' immunity from liability, and enacting the Safer America Plan, which would support community interventions to prevent gun violence.
We're also hopeful now that the Surgeon General has declared gun violence to be a public health problem. And that the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control are funding gun violence research.
When it comes to firearm suicide and intimate partner violence, there are other policies that seem to prevent those. One of those is called Extreme Risk Protection Orders. So in states that have enacted ERPOs, as they call them, the rate of firearm suicide is lower.
An ERPO would be that you go to a judge and you can ask for a temporary removal of firearms from a person that you think is at risk, maybe your loved one, for example.
We saw a spike in gun violence, related to the containment policies and related to Covid and loss of access to social supports for our communities. And our hospital saw double the rate of shootings following March 2020 and into 2021.
But we're actually at an all-time low for shootings in our city now so we've seen that come back down which is a big relief.
RFI: And Trump?
Jessica Beard: I haven't seen any plans to decrease gun violence.
RFI: So what ideas do you have to improve the situation?
Jessica Beard: I'm most interested in preventing community gun violence. A community violence intervention is basically community outreach by credible messengers after a shooting to prevent retaliation.
So what that looks like at Temple [Hospital] is if someone gets shot, they come into the hospital and they receive social services, they can receive psychological care and referral, receive victim services.
The truth is that those programs are under-resourced and grant-funded. So my advice would be that those who care for people who are shot are funded in a way that is sustainable.
What also seems to work is investment in parks, green spaces, schools, and social services. We have neighbourhoods and parts of our cities that don't have access to health care, social supports, and schools, so community investment is one of the main solutions to community violence.
