Introduction

On the night of Dec. 14, 2012, when parents should have been out shopping for the holidays and grabbing the week’s groceries, they instead found themselves gathered at the local firehouse, searching a crowd of faces for their children.
That day at Sandy Hook Elementary school, 20 children between the ages of six and seven, as well as six staff members, were shot and killed.
The atrocity of this event sparked outrage nationwide. Then-President Barack Obama wrote and delivered a televised speech hours later. There were immediate calls on Congress to pass new gun control measures. The website of advocacy group the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence crashed due to a sudden influx of donations.
In the following months, some states, such as New York, Connecticut and Maryland, passed bills restricting the purchase and use of guns. However, both the assault weapons ban and the background check bill that were subsequently introduced to Congress were defeated by the Senate.
Contrary to the messages being sent by those lobbying for gun restriction measures, leaders of the National Rifle Association argued that gun-free school zones would attract shooters and that armed police officers should be hired to protect schools.
Since Sandy Hook, there have been at least 2,237 mass shootings in the US.
However, these statistics do not come close to accounting for the acts of gun violence that are typically less publicized and occur on a much more frequent basis.
Every day, an average of 100 Americans are killed by guns. In a single year, that number reaches 36,383 deaths, along with 100,120 injuries. Fatal shootings are typically isolated events, one-third of which are gun homicides. Victims of gun homicide are 10 times more likely to be African-American than white. In some cases, the victims of these shootings are not those that were intended.
This is the story of some of the 18 St. Louis children who have died by gun violence since May of 2019.
According to St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, many of these homicides have to do with drugs.
“There’s a tremendous amount of gun violence in our city, and it is tied to drugs, almost entirely,” Krewson said. “This summer, there were six kids under 11 killed, and those kids were doing nothing wrong. Those kids were not the intended target, other folks that they were around were the target. How do we know [these shootings] are drug-related? Because there are drugs at the scene. There are guns at the scene. There’s cash at the scene. This is all related … This year, the county has had a couple of small children, 10 and under, killed, and the city has had six: a 2-year-old, a 3-year-old, a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old and two 10-year-olds. So obviously that’s horrible.”
Krewson contends that the drug industry in St. Louis is “almost self-policing” in that many shootings are retaliatory and can initiate a vicious cycle of violence. The fear that this system generates also prevents those who may have information about shootings from reporting what they know to law enforcement.
“We offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone involved in [the murders of these kids] and we have not gotten tips about it,” Krewson said. “Even though there were people around the scene who know who likely did that shooting. We don’t get those tips. So you can bet that those shootings will cause more shootings.”
If the pattern that Krewson described is perpetuated, children in the city of St. Louis will continue to fall victim to this cycle. Most of the minors that died by gun violence this summer were struck by stray bullets fired in conflicts they weren’t even old enough to understand.
They might have been walking with friends, sitting on their porches, playing a game outside, or even eating at their kitchen table when they were shot.
Democratic Missouri Representative Alan Green, who was also a St. Louis police officer during the ‘80s and ‘90s, encountered many shootings associated with gangs throughout his time on the force. Similar to Krewson, he saw a connection between an increase in drugs traded in these groups and the number of fatal shootings in the city, and believes that the children who have been shot were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“What I mean by that is a stray bullet,” Green said. “It might be an incident similar to the 8-year-old that got killed. He was out playing and a guy was shooting. That disturbs me. At the football game where people got shot, those were stray bullets that hit two adults, and I think two children. These are the kind of things that bother me too. Safety in the city, we’re talking about gunfire period, and those stray bullets killing kids. That is just not right. A kid should have the right and benefit to play outside without being worried about stray bullets. And parents too.”
While legislators are aware of the many circumstances of gun violence in St. Louis, the people that likely have the most personal insight are those who have direct experience with victims. Lauren Sucher-O’Grady, an ER doctor, and Melissa Puffenbarger, a pediatric emergency doctor, have tended to many people caught in gunfire.
“I would say that was a fairly frequent occurrence when we worked at Children’s. At least once a week we’d have a kid come in with a gunshot wound. Sometimes they were older, sometimes they were self-inflicted, sometimes they were part of gang violence or drugs. But the hardest ones were the little kids who were just kind of caught in the crossfire,” Sucher-O’Grady said.
Unsecured weapons within a home environment are also a major cause of pediatric gun injuries and deaths. In many cases, parents in possession of these weapons are unaware that their children know where the guns are stored and how to gain access to them.
A 2015 survey by the US National Library of Medicine found that one in three American households possess guns, regardless of the presence of children.
Among those households, only three in ten firearms were stored in “the safest manner.”
“When we talk about unintentional wounds, it’s not just that there was another target and the child was struck inadvertently, but it can be because they live in an unsafe environment or maybe somebody in the home is involved in some sort of criminal activity and they have unprotected loaded weapons in the house. Children explore, part of their normal behavior is to go find things and play with them, look at them, put them in their mouth. A lot of our unintended pediatric victims are finding loaded weapons in their home,” Puffenbarger said.
According to Sucher-O’Grady, people who are shot once in their lifetime are at a much higher chance to be shot multiple times, likely due to gang affiliations or living in a neighborhood that puts them at a greater risk for bystander gun violence.
Both Sucher-O’Grady and Puffenbarger agreed that further gun control measures and support systems could work to diminish this ongoing cycle.
“We have to try to see what we can do to remove what spurs on violence,” Puffenbarger said. “Low income, desperate situations, lack of social support, ongoing violence, that’s one way to target it. But we also need legislation. We want gun control. Not gun removal, control. And it’s hard to get that through our legislation. Because depending on what state you live in, you may have political parties that feel very strongly that in no way shape or form is mandating control over guns an appropriate thing to do, because that’s too much of an infringement on your rights.”
Green also acknowledged that a decrease in gun control has caused acts of violence to change over time. During his tenure as a police officer, he saw many instances of individual shootings in which only one or two people were injured. While these types of shootings are still very prominent today, the shootings that receive more attention are on a completely different scale.

“All those assault weapons were banned back then, now assault weapons are not banned. That’s two different things… We’re not only talking about the guns or the weapons in St. Louis, we’re talking about these mass shootings that occur all over on a weekly basis. We’ve got anywhere from three to six to 12 to an even higher number of people going in and using handguns, assault rifles, anything they can to shoot numerous people. It’s not like one or two, it’s a group of people being shot today. And that is something that we have never seen before,” Green said.
In January of 2017, it became legal to carry a gun in the state of Missouri without a permit. With the exception of felons, citizens can be armed with assault weapons without being questioned by the police.
This legislation amplifies the sense that injury or death by gun violence is unavoidable for vulnerable populations in the city of St. Louis.
“I’ve talked to parents with teenagers or people in their early 20s whose sons or daughters have gotten shot,” Sucher-O’Grady said. “The reaction is variable. But a good number of them weren’t surprised, although they were devastated and sad. They weren’t angry or surprised, they just knew this was coming. They knew that it was only a matter of time before they lost their son or daughter, because of getting into gangs or drugs or that sort of thing. They have to live knowing that [their child] is going to get shot and killed, that’s how they’re going to die and they’re going to have to bury them. That’s hard. And that’s the reality for a lot of people in this city.”

Clifford Swan III

“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal… Love leaves a memory no one can steal,” a sign peeking out of a bouquet of wilted flowers, meant to ease the mind of mother Trina Houshmand, read. Many similar floral arrangements dotted the tables and countertops of her living room.
It was a normal neighborhood — within it a cream-painted house. Orange-shuttered, with a sea of evenly trimmed green grass surrounding it. Cars were parked in the driveway, and swaths of black-eyed susans led up to the front door, which was slightly ajar. The sound of Romeo, the family dog, barking frantically, alerted his owners that people were approaching.
The hum of the two o’clock news suffused through the house as Houshmand’s youngest daughter, 6-year-old Jasmine, played on her iPad. A portrait of Tupac painted by Houshmand’s son rested on the credenza.
Houshmand’s youngest son, Clifford Swan III, was a talented 13-year-old boy.
As an exceptional student, Clifford would often return home upset over a B on an assignment. Through reassurances from his mom and his own work ethic, he earned straight A’s in all of his middle school courses.
Clifford competed in the Special Olympics as a runner and enjoyed practicing relay races with his friends. He was fascinated with football and soccer. But he was a person of many talents.
At the beginning of 2019, Clifford was signed with Nickelodeon to work alongside Ryan Kelley (from “Ben 10: Alien Swarm”). On the day of the audition, he was so nervous that he couldn’t remember his lines. Instead, in a last-ditch effort, he improvised a promotion for a water bottle and stunned the judges, earning a spot among their star-studded list of child actors. Later, the Nickelodeon logo would appear at the bottom of his obituary.
Clifford’s love of acting permeated his household. After every school day, he came home excited to play with his sister and sing with his mom.
“[Clifford] would come home singing and he would be like, ‘Mama, listen to this!’ And I would tell him it was time to sit down and practice reading, but he would say, ‘Can we just sing it?’ because he loved to sing. He loved all kinds of music. He loved rock, he loved R&B, everything,” Houshmand said.
It would be moments like these that Houshmand would remember.
On Thursday, Sept. 12, Houshmand’s mother was supposed to move into her new apartment in the Spanish Lake area. Houshmand left Clifford with her mother, Clifford’s grandmother, while she went to unload some more boxes. This was when Clifford asked to go play with some other kids. His friend’s mother took Clifford and her son to Schnucks.
On her way back to the apartment, Houshmand received a call from her oldest daughter.
She told her that there was a shooting happening.
“My daughter told me [no one could find Clifford]. I said, ‘Well, I’m not worried about that, he’s ok,’ and I told her to calm down because she was scaring me. Because I just knew he was at the store,” Houshmand said.
When Houshmand arrived at the scene, she was told that Clifford was in the hospital.
“I froze up behind the wheel. And I said, ‘Lord, please, just let him be maybe hurt in the arm, hurt in the leg,’ anywhere but shot in the head,” Houshmand said.
At the hospital, doctors informed her that Clifford had died due to a bullet wound to the head. Since that day, Houshmand’s mother has not returned to her apartment.
She cannot go into Clifford’s old bedroom.
“My soul hurts,” Houshmand said. “Every day I’m thinking that my son is going to come upstairs. Every day. I don’t even like my house anymore.”
Houshmand moved her family into a new neighborhood to protect her children and give them an opportunity to go to a better school district. Her sunny, private cul-de-sac represents more than just a place to live. For now, her mother will continue living with her, as well as some of her older children and her youngest daughter. 18-year-old Jabari Lowery was charged with the first degree murder of Clifford, as well as armed criminal action. On Friday, Sept. 13, he was jailed with a $500,000 bail. Houshmand had to go to court to argue against a bond reduction.
“He took my son from me, who was a good kid. He wasn’t a bad kid. I asked if there could be no bond, because my son was not the intended target. So won’t he be trying to get who he intended if he gets out? He needs to stay in. Because my son can’t have a life, he’s gone now,” Houshmand said.
Houshmand believes that St. Louis needs stricter gun laws, making it more challenging for people, especially children, to obtain guns. In the future, she plans to found an organization against gun violence in the memory of her son. Her main hope is that other parents will be spared the pain that this loss has inflicted on her.
“I don’t ever want another mother to go through what I am going through.”

Xavier Usanga

“He was far too good for this whole earth.”
Streams of black and white cars whiz past as mother Dawn Usanga vividly recounts fond memories, sitting sideways on a bench in front of a street only two blocks away from where tragedy occurred. She waved to drivers who honked a hello of familiarity and ruffled the black and scarlett fur of a stray dog as he joyfully greeted her.
Heading to Hyde Park, neighbors initiate everyday conversations with Usanga, catching up on recent events. This is an area she knows. This is her home. And yet, in this same neighborhood, her child was stolen from her.
Usanga knew that Xavier was a gift from the beginning.
“He was born at two-and-a half pounds. They said that he couldn’t breastfeed, that he was going to be on breathing machines for weeks, and they didn’t know how long he was going to be in the hospital. From the beginning of his life, he beat the odds. He was off the machines in five hours, he was breastfeeding in 24 [hours],” Usanga said.
Xavier’s persevering attitude continued to grow with him, as he flourished into a bright little boy.
“He was on my hip forever,” Usanga said. “He always smiled and he lit up people’s faces in this community. He wouldn’t talk a whole lot, but he was always smiling and always polite. Everybody was just so attracted to him. He could make anyone smile in any of the worst situations.”
Despite being quiet, Xavier’s cheerful exuberance made his tricks unmistakable when it came to games. While playing hide-and-seek, he would constantly give himself away by giggling too loudly. If he thought that he’d hidden too long and scared his mom, he would laugh, give her a big hug, and say, “Sorry I scared you!”
Xavier’s playful antics continued in the form of games of Uno, during which he attempted to show Usanga the strategies that he learned from his sisters. On one particular night, he sat down with her to show her the best ways to cheat.
“He said ‘Okay, mom. You know the rules, you know how to play, right?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Okay, well, this is how Angel cheats and this is how Trinity cheats, and this is how I cheat.’ So we started playing and he told me that he takes cards sometimes and sticks them under his leg or sticks them behind him. So I would catch him and he said ‘I knew you’d catch me.’ He would be so funny,” Usanga said.
The following day, his life would end.
August 12th will be eternally ingrained in the mind of the Usanga family. Dawn Usanga was out buying groceries at the store around the corner. Xavier and his two sisters, Angel and Trinity, were together playing games at their neighbors’ house.
“It was really strange,” Usanga said. “I was sitting at the corner store and I saw this guy walking out to the store with a bulletproof vest on. He looked at me as he walked down the street and I was sitting in the truck. I asked [my friend] ‘Is that really a bulletproof vest? What is he doing walking around with that?’”
Minutes later, Usanga heard the rapid ringing of shots echoing down her street.
“I was like, ‘Thank God that my kids are at the neighbor’s house and they’re inside and they’re safe.’ And so we pulled around the block and went back to the house and that’s when people were flagging me down and screaming that: ‘the boy had been shot,’” Usanga said.
Xavier, Angel and Trinity were walking back to their home, intending to grab an item they had forgotten, when they heard the bullets being fired.
“They were crossing over the alley into our backyard when they just got flooded with bullets. They all hit the ground when they heard them go off and when the girls got back up to run, they looked back up and they saw that Xavier wasn’t getting up. Trinity had grabbed him and reached around, and she was trying to stop the bleeding that was coming from his throat. She has a very vivid recollection of it. His eyes were fluttering and she was holding him, and she thought that he was trying to talk, and she was trying to help him [with] breathing. My other daughter was trying to perform CPR on him and that’s when our neighbors ran out to the yard and grabbed him and took him in,” Usanga said.
Xavier passed away shortly after. Guilt now plagues Usanga’s daughters, as they try to figure out how they could have prevented this from happening, or wish that they had been hit instead. Angel, who believes that Xavier was her responsibility, cannot let go of the thought that she should’ve protected him.
Weeks after the shooting, disbelief over this tragic event lingers in Usanga’s family and in the community.
“Personally I came to terms with the fact that he never had anything bad in his life ever happen to him and that he was okay, but at the same time, all of us who grew to love this little boy are faced with turmoil and questions of why he had to go so early, why his life was taken,” Usanga said. “There’s a whole community of people with emptiness in our hearts and in our minds.”
In dedication to Xavier’s memory, there will be a garden planted, commemorating the joy of his life while drawing parallels between his contagious happiness and the blooming of flowers.
“I always told Xavier that he was the perfect little boy and that I never wanted him to grow up, that he could be like Peter Pan or even one of the Lost Boys, that he could always be perfect and never be faced with any of the possible things that were out in the world. I kept him so sheltered. He was just so great.”
According to Usanga, Xavier’s gentle spirit and kindness will live on through those that knew him.
“He was never upset. He was always was the sunrise in the morning and the rainbow at the end of the day for everybody he came across.”

Trevon Russell

Trevon Russell used to go to the park while his parents were at work.
His father would drop him at his grandparents’ house, about a block and a half from Mount Pleasant Park. A popular hangout spot for neighborhood kids, it had been an integral part of his life since he was a young child.
According to father Jermar Russell, the 16-year-old, who was living with autism, also enjoyed reading books about different presidents and sketching portraits of them in his free time. After attending Roosevelt High School for his freshman year, Trevon transferred to Nottingham Community Access and Job Training School.
A couple weeks before he was supposed to return to playing basketball after school and griping about homework, Trevon was rushed to the hospital with gunshot wounds. He died later that same day.
Trevon was killed on August 2, 2018, while sitting on his favorite red swing.
Jermar was at work when he heard about what happened from his own father, Trevon’s grandfather. Also a native of Saint Louis, Jermar commented on the difference between his generation’s experiences and his son’s.
“You’ve got kids scared for their life. When I was growing up, I never felt like that. All we did in the summertime was have fun,” Jermar said.
Trevon’s death remains an unresoalved case. Police identified a person of interest; however, no arrests have been made to date. According to Jermar, while the detective believed he had acquired some solid leads, there was insufficient evidence to pursue them.
Jermar, frustrated with the lack of community response to not only his son’s death, but also the numerous other shootings in Saint Louis, said, “People are still wrapped in this mindset that telling what they see makes them weak, makes them a target. If I see someone in front of me kill a kid, I’m snitching. I’m telling. I’m telling on you and you’re going to jail.”
Jermar believes the problem is rooted in irresponsible ownership of the weapons. When they are stolen and end up in the hands of youth, Jermar believes, is when trouble begins.
“It ain’t like no people out here my age killing these kids– it’s their peers. People under 20 killing the other youth. There are a lot of theories you can come up with, but the youth are out of control,” Jermar said.
At the end of the day, Jermar refuses to blame the problem on causes like video games. He attributes the epidemic to parenting. As a parent, he says that he often feels like he should have put his son in a summer camp or another structured and supervised environment; however, this expectation is so contrasted to his own childhood.
“When I was growing up, summertime was our break. I was just trying to let [Trevon] be a kid.”

Dr. DaMaris White

Students at Pierre Laclede Junior Career Academy can sometimes hear gunshots from their classrooms.
“It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen,” said Dr. DaMaris White, who is currently in her fifth year as principal at Laclede. “Some of our students are desensitized by that just because they live in an area where they hear a lot of gun violence and they’re exposed to that, so for some it’s not alarming. Sometimes it’s more alarming for the adults than it is for the children.¨
Located on the edge of what some call the ‘Hayden Triangle,’ an area designated by the Saint Louis police chief as the highest crime neighborhood in St. Louis, and just two and a half miles from Natural Bridge Avenue, which was named 2015’s Most Dangerous Street in America by The Guardian, Laclede has become a safe haven for its scholars.
“I call them glows and grows. [Reading and math] are our glows and our grows are simply our children, what happens outside of the classroom, outside the school that has nothing to actually do with the child,” White said.
Along with fellow educators and staff members at Laclede, White is working to make Laclede a place where all children feel safe. She uses empowerment as a tool to give her students a space to talk about what it feels like to be them. Several afternoons a week, Laclede partners with Washington University in St.Louis to bring in a therapist. Students are given a chance to talk with the therapist about anything on their mind. White noted that the subject of the conversation doesn’t have to be trauma.
“We don’t look at all our children and always think, ‘Oh, it’s just a traumatic environment,’” White said. “Not all of our children experience trauma.”
To assist students who are coming to school with trauma, White believes in the importance of relationships between educators and students. This involves making sure every student knows they are loved and supported at school. White also implements an open door policy to help build relationships.
While White and her colleagues at Laclede strive to shelter their students from the violence, they are not able to control what the students experience outside of school; however, they still take measures to keep their students safe after school.
“We’re going to trunk or treat. So, hopefully, that will derail the students from going out trick or treating, just to keep them safe,” White said.
White also discussed the Open Court basketball program at Laclede. Near the end of the school day, older students are given the chance to play basketball in the gym. This program isn’t just a way for students to shoot the ball around or run out some energy, though. It is also an effort to keep them out of parks after school.
As an educator who gets to interact with the children who attend Laclede, White said that people need to remember that the children exist.
In fact, she wishes that we all would talk about healing more.
“When we don’t heal as a people, be it black or white, violence continues. Hate continues when we don’t heal as a people”.

Melissa Puffenbarger and Lauren Sucher-O’Grady

“I would definitely say I probably have a natural predisposition towards a pessimistic outlook on life. I think that’s just been confirmed with my job. I’ve seen horrible violence. And just the things people do to each other, that you never think about, that maybe you saw in an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit one time, you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s terrible’. And then you see it in the real world, and it’s 10 times worse. That’s the kind of trauma that we go through as individuals who have to see that level of violence,” Lauren Sucher-O’Grady said.
Both Sucher-O’Grady and Melissa Puffenbarger have seen and treated countless injuries due to gun violence. Puffenbarger, as a pediatric doctor, began her career in Cleveland and later moved to St. Louis. In just her first week at a new hospital, she was surprised to encounter a child gunshot victim.
“I think that struck me when I moved from Cleveland to St. Louis, which, in general, are very similar cities,” Puffenbarger said. “But St. Louis, unfortunately, is winning the gold medal right now in pediatric on violence and has been for several years. [. . .] I didn’t really feel that presence in Cleveland. I’m sure it was there, but it just wasn’t as present. And I think it seems to be, with regards to pediatric gun violence, a problem of the inner city where we see a lot more violence, a lot more crime.”
Sucher-O’Grady used to witness gunshot victims on a near-daily basis during her residency at Barnes Jewish Hospital. Due to her specialization in the ER, many of her patients have just experienced major bodily trauma.
These conditions leave memories that are difficult to shake.
“I had this one kid who was eight. I think she was on her mom’s bed doing her homework, and the bullet came through her window, shot her through the head and went into her mom’s leg. And she died in the ER, we had to tell her parents. It was really aahard,” Sucher-O’Grady said.
This wasn’t Sucher-O’Grady’s first time informing parents that their child had died due to a bullet wound, nor will it be the last. The small details stand out to her; a young girl’s pink barrettes, or her tiny braids. For these reasons, Sucher-O’Grady cautions others against becoming ER doctors unless they are prepared to “show up for work every day and have it be the worst day of everyone else’s life”.
Depending on the type of gun and distancefrom the shooter, trauma from impact differs greatly. Especially in children, a bullet can enter a small part of the body and cause massive internal damage.
Due to this risk, an element of pediatric medicine is preventing potential threats for children.
“We would ask about wearing helmets when you ride your bike. And, are you wearing seatbelts? In Cleveland, we would ask, ‘Are there guns in your home? And how have you made them safe?’” Puffenbarger said.
Many Cleveland citizens were opposed to doctors asking about firearms in the household, because they viewed it as a violation of 2nd Amendment rights. However, doctors retained this ability as, according to Puffenbarger, the procedure was in place solely to ensure the safety of children in the home.
Sucher-O’Grady and Puffenbarger often see kids who have been exposed to gun violence multiple times before they’re even old enough to understand it. This can lead to PTSD, fearfulness and a variety of other emotional problems.
In one instance, a 2-year-old boy came into the ER with a bullet wound in his hand. His mother claimed that she had no idea where the gun came from.
Later, law enforcement found that the injury was a result of her unsecured weapon, which he had discovered in their home.
“Every time I walked past this 2-year-old’s room, he held up his hand and was like, ‘I got shot! I got shot!’ Not crying, or distressed,” Puffenbarger said. “2-year-olds don’t have a lot of words. It bothered me that he could string together these three words… and seemed pleased about it. This is part of his world. He’s seen this before, this was not new to him. That was just the first time he got hit. That’s what bothers me.”
In St. Louis specifically, the types of injuries encountered change depending on location. Sucher-O’Grady and Puffenbargar have both worked in different county and city hospitals, and have noticed these differences.
“[In the county] it’s more self-inflicted, I’ve noticed, either accidentally or purposefully. I’ve seen one BB gun accident that was between a father and a son, that was a true accident, but the BB gun kind of lodged in the soft tissue of his neck,” Sucher-O’Grady said.
In the city, fewer gun violence injuries are self-inflicted.
“Most of the time it’s, ‘I was sitting on a couch or sitting on the bed, something came through my window or through the wall,’” Puffenbarger said. “Or, ‘I was outside playing, minding my own business’. Maybe 5-years-old, 7-years-old, sometimes younger, and who knows who the target was, but the child was in the way, unfortunately.”

St. Louis Violence Prevention Commission

“The problem being, there are people with very good intentions who want to do something, but they don’t necessarily know all of the agencies and coalitions that are already out there doing the work. And so people tend to start new things rather than trying to figure out what’s already going on,” said Jessica Meyers, coordinator for the Saint Louis Area Violence Prevention Commission.
The Saint Louis Area Violence Prevention Commission, or STL VPC, is a group dedicated to connecting and organizing other organizations addressing the problem of gun violence in the St. Louis area. The group works with over 100 organizations, all targeting different aspects of gun violence in St. Louis.
“We are not a direct service organization, we’re more of an umbrella organization that aligns and convenes all the agencies that are working on violence prevention in the St. Louis region,” Meyers said.
STL VPC’s website states that the organization envisions a St. Louis region where communities enjoy quiet nights and the sounds of children playing during the day.
“We really want to focus on what the risk factors are for being a victim of violence or the perpetrator of violence, and what the protective factors are,” Meyers said. “We have groups that are working to decrease poverty, and that’s part of violence prevention. We have groups that are working to green vacant properties in St. Louis city, and that’s violence prevention.”
The organization’s guiding principles include focuses on respect, integrity, community engagement and racial equity.
“One of our objectives is to improve police-community relationships. Unsurprisingly, post-Ferguson and even prior to the death of Michael Brown, there was a lack of trust between communities, especially communities of color, and gay and trans and queer communities with law enforcement,” Meyers said.
STL VPC has created an anonymous online survey and held events, which gave people an opportunity to discuss what is working and what isn’t in the St. Louis policing system, a factor tied closely to gun violence in the St. Louis area.
The Youth Violence Prevention Partnership (YVPP) works closely with STL VPC. This group shares many of the same focuses and is especially specialized in the safety of youth in the St. Louis area. The two organizations are closely linked, and both are working for a safer St. Louis.
To get involved with STL VPC, the group has created four levels of engagement: promotion, universal prevention, selective prevention and intervention. Promotion involves spreading the word about STL VPC, universal prevention focuses on prevention programs benefiting groups or communities, while selective prevention includes programs focused on individuals at high risk for being involved in violence as either the perpetrator or the victim. Finally, intervention involves serving individuals who have been directly or indirectly affected by violence in their community.

The Trace

The Trace is a single-issue nonprofit newsroom which focuses on gun violence. As an organization, it works to educate Americans on the statistics and conversation surrounding this issue.
Thousands die yearly due to gun violence, and often information pertaining to each individual incident can be sparse. The Trace works to shine light on not only large-scale statistics, but also individual people and events. It publicizes data which is not visible to the public and additionally gathers data to create new statistics.
A major facet of Trace reporting is the search for tangible solutions to the prevalence of gun violence. The use of graphics is employed to convey information in a straightforward and visual manner; often to outline potential plans.
“I was a little skeptical of this idea of a newsroom that just covered one thing, but that soon vanished,” said Beatrice Motamedi, who worked with The Trace on the Since Parkland Project, a collection of obituaries for the 1,200 children who have died by gun violence since February, 2018.
Motamedi is the executive director of Global Student Square and co-director of Newsroom by the Bay. She has developed many student-run publications and travels to teach about journalism.
“Gun violence and gun control and gun rights, all of that is an exceptionally complex topic. And it involves so many parts of American politics, American society, American culture. And I’m glad that there’s a newsroom that focuses on that and has built the expertise to really understand, you know, everything from how statistics get generated to the financing of organizations such as the NRA.”
The Trace continues to report on a topic often shrouded in chaos and uncertainty, hoping to elucidate present tragedies and prevent them going forward.

Since Parkland

For one year following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, over 200 teen reporters created profiles for every child, age 0 to 18, who was killed due to gun violence.
Since Parkland, the culmination of these reporters’ work, stemmed from The Trace, along with the Gun Violence Archive and several other organizations.
The project covered the stories of 1,200 American children killed by gun violence over a 12 month period. Each story is roughly 100 words; a brief synopsis of an entire life.
“It’s not like the ordinary, you know. You’re not always working on projects like these… they’re so excruciatingly hard but then you’re also just so very grateful to be doing good work,” said Beatrice Motamedi, Senior Project Editor and Curriculumaa Designer on Since Parkland.
Reporting for the project often occurred through the use of social media. Students would contact various people connected to the individual they were reporting on to understand what they were like before they passed away.
“The students did a really good job, they used a lot of social media to try and reach out. We had one story where the student contacted the grandmother, and texted back and forth with them about what her grandchild was like,” Mohamati said.
CHS student Lila Taylor participated in the project as a Teen Outreach Editor.
“The project opened my eyes to gun violence outside of the St. Louis area. I knew gun violence was a problem here; protests were held minutes from my house and trials were held blocks from my school,” Taylor said. “Working on Since Parkland created a national connection that I had been lacking. Working with the other Teen Outreach Editors made me realize how passionate people were about this project and this issue.”
The project aimed to not only report on the child deaths across the nation, but to humanize the statistics. Each story gives insight on those often only seen as another point in a sea of data.

Mom’s Demand Action

The day of the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, mother of five Shannon Watts created a Facebook group spreading the message for Americans to take action against gun violence. What began as a small Facebook group quickly grew to an organization with over six million supporters. The group has individual chapters in each of the 50 states, as well as Washington D.C.
Moms Demand Action focuses on the creation and ratification of legislation which can strengthen gun restriction laws in order to increase gun safety state and nationwide. Each chapter specializes in creating change in their respective state, with groups spanning cities. Gun violence prevention activist and spokesperson for the St. Louis Chapter of Moms Demand Action, Kim Westerman, explained that Moms Demand Action is heavily focused on the mission of keeping individuals safe, rather than pressuring partisan issues.
“[Guns] have become an issue that is partisan, but it really shouldn’t be because all of us want to keep our families safe,” Westerman said.
To achieve their objectives, Moms Demand Action’s efforts have a strong focus on advocacy.
“On the local, state, and federal level we’re working to get stronger gun laws in place. We also do a lot of education work to help educate adults mainly on how to properly store guns and recognize suicide risk signs to keep kids safe from gun violence,” Westerman said. “The other thing we do is support survivors of gun violence. Not just people who survived a gunshot, but family members who lost someone to gun violence. It can tear a family apart, and it’s really upsetting, so we support them to elevate their voices.”
On Saturday, August 17, Moms Demand Action organized a rally on the Arch grounds to demand stricter gun legislation be passed in response to the recent El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio mass shootings. Many of those who attended donned red Moms Demand T-shirts. The rally was one of over 100 taking place across all 50 states.
Westerman feels as though gun safety measures in Missouri are only declining.
“We’ve been playing defense for a while and in Missouri the NRA have a real foothold in their state legislature, and they’ve been pushing for more on the laws that weaken gun safety measures,” Westerman said.
The immediate goals that Moms Demand Action is looking towards involve changing state and federal legislature to ensure that guns have regulations and checks. Westerman mentioned the 2007 repeal of the law requiring Missourians to obtain a sheriff’s permit before purchasing a concealable gun, as well as the removal of any training or permit requirements to concealed carry.
“They’ve been trying to get guns everywhere…that would allow guns in places like daycares, hospitals, churches, so we’ve been really fighting these bills,” Westerman said.
In addition, Westerman explained that Moms Demand Action is pushing for the passing of bill H.R. 8: The Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019 in the Senate, which would require a background check on every gun sale or transfer.
“Federal law requires a background check for every gun sale, but not if you buy it from companies or if it was from a private seller,” Westerman said. “This bill will require that the unlicensed seller and the buyer need to have a license to maintain gun shops. That passed the House in February…it is not scheduled for a vote [in the Senate] yet, so we’ve been pushing people to call their Senators every day and demand that they pass this bill.”
Moms Demand Action meets the first Thursday of every month, and also has a youth partner group, Students Demand Action. These organizations both encourage action on the part of youth and adults in promoting gun safety advocacy and supporting safer gun legislature.
“Right now the majority is speaking out and it’s going to make our legislators change things. I’m hopeful that people will continue to speak out,” Westerman said. “I really hope that young people especially make their voices heard. We’re making a change.”