New book on solutions to Chicago's gun violence | ChicagoLIVE

On this Saturday edition of Chicago Live, for years, Dr. Rogers has treated victims of gun violence inside of the emergency room. Now he's sharing what he has learned, not outside of the trauma bay, in a new book that explores not just how to respond to violence, but how to actually prevent it from happening in the first place. Joining us this morning is Dr. Rogers, the founder of the University of Chicago Trauma Center and author of Healing the Gun Violence Epidemic. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you so much for having me at Chicago Live. Of course. So, you've spent decades treating gunshot victims here in Chicago. What inspired you to take that experience and actually write a book about it? Well, in so many ways, the lives of people affected by gun violence affects everyone. Everyone through Chicago, it's almost like a pebble that is dropped into a pond and it ripples out from there, affecting everyone that that bullet has touched and that person's life has touched, including healthcare providers. And I was inspired to write the book after an awful night of call where two teenagers were shot and killed. And despite everything that we know how to do in the trauma bay with nurses and anesthesiologists and surgeons and residents, the whole team, we couldn't save their lives. And in the context of that sadness, I really wanted to focus on prevention. How do we actually prevent people from being injured in the very first place? And you know, there are, to your point, countless different perspectives that one can take when it comes to gun violence. I think you have one of the most interesting, unique perspectives to be able to look at this topic from. What are things that you have seen through your profession, through your day-to-day life and job that most impacted how you approached talking about this particular topic? Well, unfortunately, I'm at the end. I'm actually after the event has happened, right? I take care of people in the emergency department, in the operating rooms, in the intensive care units, and that's after the person has already been injured. And I've been informed from my public health training with a master's in public health that there are lots of things you can do to prevent people from being injured in the first place. But to do that, you have to look beyond the operating rooms, beyond the trauma bays. And that's the context in which people live, where people work, play, pray, and enjoy their lives every day. And everyone wants the same things at some fundamental level. And they wanna be connected with themselves and the community and their families and focusing on that aspect of people's lives, that's what brings people into the trauma bay. How can we prevent that from happening in the first place? What are the things that you found from your perspective that we can do to break that circuit? Yeah, so from a public health perspective, you would say there are three components, right? There is the agent, the gun. Unfortunately, that's the agent that most people are killed in cities across United States. And in fact, the number one killer of white men in the United States is actually by a gun that they self-inflict injury. We don't talk about gun-related suicides as much as we do homicides. But that's one. The other is the person, whether it's their circumstances, how does that person interface with the gun? And then the last aspect is community and environment. Where does that interplay of the gun, the person, and the community, how do all of those things together affect people's lives? And if you think about it in that holistic context, you have an opportunity to actually make a difference in people's lives. And Dr. Rogers, in your book, you really highlight community violence intervention programs. For our viewers at home who maybe aren't familiar with them, how exactly do they work in, what role do they play in reducing people ending up coming to you in the ER? Yeah, so thank you for that great question. One of the things that I've been able to do when I've gone beyond the trauma bay, beyond the emergency department, beyond the hospital, is to think about what are community-based organizations that actually doing the hard work every day preventing people from ending up in my emergency department? And the work of community violence intervention has been tremendous. I've been here in the city of Chicago for about a decade. There've been several organizations that have been doing this work for decades. I happen to be a board member of two of them, the Institute for Nonviolent Chicago, which primarily serves people on the west side of Chicago, and Chicago PRED, which was founded by former Secretary of Education and CPS Commissioner here in the city of Chicago, Arne Duncan. And both of those organizations take a, if you will, a public health approach. They look at people who are the most severely impacted, those who've been shot, those potentially shot at others, and they try to wrap a set of services around those individuals to prevent them from being either re-injured or changing the risk factors that led them to be injured in the first place. And that's what you would call secondary prevention. How do you take people who are the highest risk and wrap around services like cognitive behavioral therapy, job training, giving them opportunities to work in the legal economy versus the illegal economy? And then the other context of that is how do you use people with a lived experience with many relationships and community to serve as street outreach workers and prevent violence in the first place by mediating conflict, by resolving disputes before they escalate to gun violence? And when we take that holistic approach in combination with our police department, the community violence intervention ecosystem is a critical component of public safety. And we need to invest in that just as much as we invest in our police department, which often, like me, are focused after the event happens, right? There's not a lot of focus on prevention. When I stay in the hospital, I wait for people to come to me. Community violence intervention organizations go to people in community. Doctor, that actually perfectly leads to my next question because you did say at the beginning of this conversation something really interesting, that your role in this is very much at the end. It is after the violence has happened. And that also puts you in that really unique and unfortunate opportunity where you sort of see the repercussions of that. You see the families being told that they've lost a loved one to gun violence. And then you see sort of that ripple effect of the gun violence. To what degree does that have a profound impact on you and an effect of maybe how you sort of sat down and wrote this book? No doubt. The book was, it came from a place of grief and sadness and personal harm to me because even though I was not directly injured, by being close to, proximate to people who've been injured, people who've been harmed, people who've lost loved ones, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, every time I have to tell a family member that I've done everything I could, the team did everything they could, and yet still their loved one is no longer gonna come home again ever. That takes a piece of me, takes a piece of our staff. You can't see that degree of sadness, that degree of loss, and not feel something yourself. That's part of being human. And I live with the lives that have been touched by gun violence, especially those lost by gun violence every day. And that profound heaviness is what prompted me to write the book, Healing the Gun Violence Epidemic because I see hope, I see opportunity. And sometimes some of these families tell you just horrific things and you say to yourself, how are you still standing? And yet still they persist. They love, they heal, they take care of their families, they get the kids off to school. It's really remarkable, the human spirit, the resilience that people have despite incredible loss. And when I see that hope, it gives me hope that people can actually not only deal with significant grief and loss, but continue on. And I often think to myself after I see, particularly young people who've been injured by gun violence, I say to myself, what if we gave these young people not a good second chance by saving their lives? What if it gives them a great first chance? And that is what inspires me and promoted this thought process over the past three years to put this book together to share with the community at large. Now we know that gun violence is a very complicated issue with many layers, not just here in Chicago, but really across the United States in general. If a policymaker who can make some of these changes that you're speaking about could read just one chapter of your book, what do you hope that they would take away from that experience? I would take, what I would hope is that they could take away this fallacy, this belief, which is false, that gun violence is intractable, it's not solvable. In the city of Chicago, we had a horrendous series of years right after COVID with the violence, especially gun violence, picking up to leading to over 800 homicides. And through the work of community violence intervention, the police department, public health, community-based organizations, basically hospitals, everyone working together for a common goal. Last year, we had the safest year in Chicago with just over 400 homicides, still too many because 400 people's lives were altered by their deaths. What about the people left behind? So from a policy perspective, I would encourage us to think that we can win this war. We can make significant impact if we work together across our various sectors to really take on this challenge. We've done difficult things before. We saw the moon in 1962, and President John F. Kennedy said, we're gonna get to the moon before the end of the decade. And not only did that happen, but we made space travel possible. And I think we can make Chicago the biggest, safest city in the world. You know, it's so great to spend a little time with you because we really get to appreciate your perspective. And one thing I don't think a lot of people always understand or perceive is the trauma that you indicated that the surgeons and the hospital staff go through in treating others. What are the things that you do to keep yourself healthy? And what do other staff members do to, you know, when you're involved in trauma? I thank you so much for that question. I think sometimes we are the hidden victims, nurses, doctors, residents, learners, medical students, you know, everyone that's touched, social workers, everyone that's touched by that. Because it's not just the families and communities. We are members of communities too. We're part of people's families. And for me, I got three great things. I got faith, you know, a belief in things not yet seen. Leads me to have pathological optimism at times. I have a wonderful wife and three sons. And, you know, they bring me incredible joy, that connection. And then the last is just the love of friends. You know, it's really amazing how that connection to other human beings really can lift you up in your own darkest moments. And those three things are invaluable to me, especially awful nights when I feel completely spent, you know, even with my pathological optimism, I get sad, I get depressed, I get... Sometimes I say, this city, how can we accept this as normal? And we shouldn't. But faith, family, friends really helped me and boost me up. The other thing I do is I work out. You know, I turned 60 this year and, you know, I got less time in front of me than I have behind me. So I'm very cognizant of trying to take care of my mind, body, and spirit. I think all those things work together to keep me going. I like that, the three Fs. Yeah. Faith, family, friends, I like that. Sure. Doctor, let people know where we can find the book. You can find it, you know, increasingly it's in bookstores, but, you know, in this day and age of social media and internet, Amazon, Google Books, anywhere you buy your books, it's available. And it went, it got released July 7th and I look forward to people's feedback, thoughts, discussions. I'm doing a fair number of book talks, et cetera, in the city and beyond. So I really look forward to people digging in and sharing their thoughts. And, you know, even if they disagree with me, I love the discourse because I think increasingly we need to have more discourse. You know, one of the hard things, I gotta say this, is other countries have solved this problem. You know, there was a mass shooting decades ago in Australia and Australia said, we're just gonna get rid of 70 automatic weapons. We're gonna purchase them back from people. We're gonna make common sense laws across the country and they have had remarkable decreases in gun violence and it's very sporadic now compared to the fact that the United States, we have a mass shooting literally every day. Over 80,000 people are affected by gun violence directly by a bullet that injures them. We have another 45 to 50,000 people who die from gun violence every year in the city. In this nation, the number one killer of children between one and 19, basically our future, the number one killer of children was surpassed by gun violence in 2020 after decades being motor vehicle collisions. We've made motor vehicle collisions safer. We make cars safer. Your bags, speed bumps, speeding, tickets, et cetera, we can do the same with guns. We can make them safer. And there's some legislation that has been on the docket, the Rifle Act to try to make gun manufacturers more accountable for their products. But by the same token, we see that just in the state of, there've been some reversals of assault ban weapons in various states recently. And I think that those rolling back of those laws that are trying to serve and protect us from the guns that do harm is another challenge from a policy perspective. I feel like there's a sequel book and you can just call it, see, I told you, I told you we could solve this and it could just be how you were right. Doctor, thank you for taking the time to chat with us. It's a fascinating conversation and we look forward to talking with you again. Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day, gentlemen. You too.