{"id":175950,"date":"2021-08-25T06:55:11","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T10:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=175950"},"modified":"2021-08-20T11:13:03","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T15:13:03","slug":"uconn-sociology-professor-examines-community-gun-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2021\/08\/uconn-sociology-professor-examines-community-gun-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Sociology Professor Examines Community Gun Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a summer when gun violence is on the rise in the United States and Connecticut, UConn sociology professor Mary Bernstein is examining the problem and looking to see what can be done to reverse the disturbing trend.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI am really interested in how groups work together across lines of racial and geographic difference, how they define gun violence, and what they think the best strategies are for solving the problem,\u201d says Bernstein.<\/p>\n<p>In her <a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/socf.12538\">2019 paper<\/a>, \u201cOnce in Parkland, A Year in Hartford, A Weekend in Chicago:\u00a0 Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement\u201d (co-authored with Jordan McMillan, a recent UConn sociology doctoral graduate and Elizabeth Charash &#8217;18 (CLAS), a project manager at the Brady Campaign), Bernstein examines the extra work that racially oppressed people must do in their activism because the public views the gunshot deaths of Black and brown bodies in urban settings, which constitute the majority of deaths by gun violence after suicide, as routine, whereas gunshot deaths in suburban settings are seen as extraordinary and worthy of outrage<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn that paper, we also look at the different challenges that movements face,\u201d says Bernstein. \u201cGun violence that takes place in urban areas and are a function of concentrated poverty, lack of good housing, lack of economic opportunities, which then results in high levels of community gun violence in certain neighborhoods and particularly high rates of death and injuries among Black and brown people, especially men.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bernstein pays close attention not only to <em>why<\/em> there is disparate attention given to different kinds of gun violence, but also to <em>how<\/em> activists contend with it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/n5o064RgKAA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you have a case like Sandy Hook, which was a terrible tragedy where 20 first and second graders and six educators were murdered in their school, the entire country mourns \u2013 as they should,\u201d says Bernstein. \u201cBut in the same year you have roughly the same number of people killed in New Haven, Hartford, or Bridgeport, maybe a bit less, and yet nobody seems to pay attention, and why is that?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat is where I come from \u2013 to really think not only why there is this disparate attention given to different kinds of gun violence, but how do activists contend with that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bernstein examines these issues with Jordan McMillan in an article published this year entitled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/full\/10.1177\/07311214211010845\">Beyond Gun Control: Mapping Gun Violence Prevention Logics<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn that paper, we really map out what we call &#8216;gun violence prevention logic,&#8217; and what we argue is, there are two particular logics,\u201d says Bernstein. \u201cThere is the reform logic, and that\u2019s what people typically think of as politics: Let\u2019s try to change the laws and policies so people who shouldn\u2019t have guns, don\u2019t have guns, and that guns themselves are made less lethal.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat logic is really important, but a second approach is what we call an intervention logic. That is really trying to tackle the root of gun violence in a different way, and it\u2019s really about trying to interrupt violence at all different levels. This might take the form of street outreach workers or violence interrupters. The goal is to really prevent violence before it happens. This work takes places in hospitals too, where if someone has a gunshot injury, a staff member sits down with the family and friends and tries to make sure there is no retaliation and that the family has the support they need. It\u2019s really about painstakingly trying to interrupt violence before it happens.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a separate research project, Bernstein worked with a team of other UConn faculty members and graduate students &#8211; including Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences Blair T. Johnson and Kun Chen, associate professor of statistics &#8211;\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0277953621003014\">publishing a paper in the journal Social Science &amp; Medicine<\/a>\u00a0entitled \u201cCommunity-led factors and incidence of gun violence in the United States, 2014-2017.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The paper concluded that \u201cgun violence is higher in counties with both high median incomes and higher levels of poverty, characteristic of racial segregation and concentrated disadvantage, a legacy of institutional racism, negative police-community relations and related factors.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As Bernstein reflects upon the issue, it can be very personal, like it is for most people.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think, like a lot of people, I hadn\u2019t thought a lot about gun violence in Connecticut until Sandy Hook happened,\u201d says Bernstein. \u201cI remember hearing the news on my way to the airport to pick up my father and stepmother and thought, How is this happening? But again, part of this is also a function of, where do I live versus where is the community gun violence taking place? As a white woman, I don\u2019t live in a gun violence hot spot area.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think that people have no idea how much gun violence takes place on an everyday basis. I think that people who are outside of those neighborhoods that are gun violence hot spots just don\u2019t know. People living in the North End of Hartford live a very different reality than people who might live three or four miles away in West Hartford. One of the things I\u2019ve learned in my research is that a lot of white people, a lot of white activists, have an &#8216;aha moment,&#8217; when all of a sudden they realize that \u2018wow, this is terrible.&#8217; They know tragic mass shootings happen, but had no idea this was going on regularly in these urban areas that are just down the road.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mary Bernstein&#8217;s research examines how groups work together across lines to define gun violence and seeks to find strategies to address the problem<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":176267,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,1715,2076,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2113],"class_list":["post-175950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-community-impact","category-research","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-25 19:03:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175950"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176268,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175950\/revisions\/176268"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/176267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175950"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=175950"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=175950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}