In Sickness and in Health

Switzerland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world. The United States is the only other developed country with more guns per capita than Switzerland. And yet, Switzerland has one of the world's lowest crime and gun homicide rates in the world. Is there a way to have a strong gun culture without gun violence? Guests: Nora Markwalder, Assistant Professor of Criminal Law, Law of Criminal Procedure and Criminology, Universität St. Gallen; Thomas Reisch, Professor of Psychiatry,...

Americans have the right to own guns. But what responsibilities do gun owners have? to themselves? their families? and their communities? Guests: Tony Gomez, Manager of Seattle & King County's Violence and Injury Prevention Unit; Cassandra Crifasi, Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Deputy Director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research, and a law-abiding gun owner; Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of...

Gun owners, their kids, and their families and friends are dying from gun-related suicides. By the numbers, this is the biggest gun violence problem we've got. We live in two very different worlds when it comes to guns in the U.S. The people for whom their only experience of guns is as a problem… and the people for whom guns will never be a problem… until… they are. What can we say to gun owners to help them understand that we care about their safety? Who the messenger is—that matters....

Seventeen states and DC have red flag laws, aka Extreme Risk Protection Orders. But it's not enough to pass a law. That's just the beginning of the work that needs to be done. Guests: Tami Tunnell and Peter Contos, Illinois Coalition Against Handgun Violence; Shannon Frattaroli, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Kimberly Wyatt, Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney, King County Prosecutor's Office. | insicknessandinhealthpodcast.com |...

Extreme risk protection orders, aka red flag laws, have been passed in 17 states and DC, and now Congress is considering a federal red flag law. But how do Extreme Risk Protection Orders work? And do they save lives? Guests: Jeffrey Swanson, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine; Amy Barnhorst, Vice Chair for Community Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Davis; Julia Spoor, Founder of Students...

Saying mass shooters are “evil” is overly simplistic and doesn’t do much to prevent them from killing. But understanding what they have in common, like suicidality, may help us intervene before it’s too late. Guests: Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters, a suicide prevention activist, author of A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, and TEDMED 2016 speaker; Adam Lankford, Professor of Criminology at The University of Alabama; Jillian Peterson, Assistant...

People die by suicide when they think they’re a burden on others, when they’re socially isolated, and when they have the ability to injure themselves lethally. Dying by suicide is really hard to do. It's not an impulsive act. You need to have the knowledge and means to act on your feelings – with lethality. Guests: Thomas Joiner, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University and author of "Why Do People Die by Suicide?", and Michael Anestis, Associate Professor of Psychology at the...

With almost 400 million guns in the U.S., law enforcement officers have good reason to fear for their lives. Every civilian they encounter in the line of duty could be armed and dangerous. Guests: Mark Jones, retired ATF agent and Senior Policy Advisor to the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence; Franklin Zimring, Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley and author of The Great American Crime Decline; David Swedler, Associate Research Scientist at the Pacific...

Have we entered the era of Minority Report and “true crime”? Yes… and no. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, facial recognition, and IPOs are very much part of the story, but so are paper records and microfiche. American law enforcement straddles the digital age… and the stone age. Guests: Paul Neudigate, Assistant Police Chief, Cincinnati Police Department; Charles West, Former Director of Innovation with the Mayor’s Office in New Orleans; and Mark Jones, retired ATF agent and...

Cops are supposed to enforce laws, reduce crime, and make communities safer. But what happens when cops don’t make people feel safe? When people don’t trust the police? When cynicism about the legal system sets in? And when, as in the case of the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force, the cops are criminals? Guests: Daniel Webster, Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research, and TEDMED 2014 speaker; Justin Fenton, crime...

We typically think of policing as something that’s done by police officers. But what if the most important policing… is self-policing... by individuals and communities? Guests: Sirena Cotton, Founder of Roc the Peace in Rochester; Harold Pollack, Professor at the University of Chicago, and Co-Director of the Crime Lab and Health Lab; Patrick Sharkey, Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University, and author of An Uneasy Peace and Stuck in Place; Patricia Rogers,...

Up until recently, Oakland and New Orleans shared something in common: they had some of the highest murder rates in the country. They implemented some of the same strategies focused on high-risk individuals, but gun shootings and homicides dipped in one city, but in the other, not. Why the difference? Guests: Vaughn Crandall, Co-Director of the California Partnership for Safe Communities; Barbara Lafitte-Oluwole with Oakland Community Organizations; Michael McLively, Director of Giffords Law...

Up until recently, Oakland and New Orleans shared something in common: they had some of the highest murder rates in the country. They implemented some of the same strategies focused on high-risk individuals, but gun shootings and homicides dipped in one city, but in the other, not. Why the difference? Guests: Vaughn Crandall, Co-Director of the California Partnership for Safe Communities; Barbara Lafitte-Oluwole with Oakland Community Organizations; Michael McLively, Director of Giffords Law...

Urban gun violence is driven by small groups of high-risk individuals—what some of us call "gangs." They're high-risk for perpetrating violence and for being shot and killed. Guests: David M. Kennedy, Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author of Don't Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America; Stan Ross, Program Manager, Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce...

How are guns transmitted from person-to-person? How do they make their way from legal sources into the hands of criminals, and how we can block that transmission? Guests: Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek, Johnson County, Iowa; Daniel Webster, Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research, and TEDMED 2014 speaker; Cassandra Crifasi, Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Deputy Director of the...

Gun violence isn’t random. Both guns and violence spread like infectious diseases through social networks—in the real world and online. Understanding how gun violence spreads can help us control the contagion. Guests: Gary Slutkin, Founder of Cure Violence, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and TEDMED 2013 speaker; Andrew Papachristos, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University; Desmond Patton, Associate Professor of Social Work at Columbia University;...

Australia shares a similar history and culture to our own. But yet after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, Australians came to see the need for gun regulation very differently. Australia’s newly elected conservative prime minister at the time passed sweeping gun reform. How did that real-world experiment play out? What happens when you reduce the number of guns in a country nationwide? Guests: Rebecca Peters, former Chair of the Australian National Coalition for Gun Control, and former...

In the late 1950s, England and Wales switched from coal-based gas to natural gas in their ovens, which was a lot less toxic. Suicide rates dropped dramatically. This has a lot to teach us about gun violence. Instrumentality refers to how good a weapon is as an instrument of killing. Gas was cheap, available and lethal — as are guns in the U.S. today. So how can we reduce the instrumentality of a weapon? Guests: Ronald Clarke, Professor and former Dean of the School of Criminal Justice at...

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The majority of Americans with guns own them for self-defense. But how common is defensive gun use? And what do these self-defense incidents look like? Guests: David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy and Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the author of Private Guns, Public Health; Sara Solnick, Chair of Economics at the University of Vermont; Gary Kleck, Professor Emeritus of Criminology at Florida State University, and author of Point Blank: Guns and Violence in...