Gun Violence

THE PROBLEM: In our House Meetings during the fall of 2019, community members shared stories of families hearing gunshots at night, of grief due to loss of a loved one to gun violence, and anger at feeling unsafe in their own community. At the Community Problems Assembly in November of that year, over 500 members voted to prioritize gun violence for research and action. 

The Gun Violence Committee has held over 62 research visits to better understand the problem of gun violence in the Midlands and solutions that can be implemented at a local level. The committee learned that the first step towards implementing any evidence-based local strategy to address gun violence is to bring in an outside entity to conduct a problem analysis alongside community experts, such as law enforcement and social service agencies. The National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC) out of John Jay College in New York is an organization with a proven track record in reducing gun violence in communities across the country and has the greatest capacity out of organizations across the country to conduct a problem analysis. They are the experts that will collaborate with law enforcement, social services, and the community to get a foundational understanding of the complex problem of gun violence in our city, and then make recommendations on how to build onto the framework and resources that already exist in the city. With gun violence getting worse and worse in Columbia, the community needs an intervention that is proven to drastically reduce shootings and homicides.

ACTION: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the 2020 Nehemiah Action was canceled, but our gun violence committee kept pushing forward. In the fall of 2020, MORE Justice held a “GVI Town Hall” meeting virtually where over 100 community members and representatives from over 10 community organizations gathered to learn about Group Violence Intervention (GVI), one of the evidence-based programs from NNSC that is proven to reduce gun violence by over half. The next year, over 1,100 people joined together for the 2021 Nehemiah Action on Zoom. The gun violence committee was prepared to ask Columbia Police Chief Holbrook to advocate for a contract with the NNSC for a problem analysis and ask him to meet with the director of the GVI strategy. Unfortunately, Chief Holbrook refused to attend the meeting. At the 2022 Nehemiah Action with nearly 700 people present in-person, newly elected Mayor Daniel Rickenmann committed to fund a problem analysis for gun violence to be completed by a nationally recognized entity as the first step to a gun violence intervention strategy. At the end of 2022, the Mayor announced the creation of the Office of Violent Crime Prevention to help oversee the reduction of our gun violence crisis. MORE Justice's Gun Violence Committee plans to continue working with Mayor Rickenmann and this new office to ensure that the best practices are implemented.