Setting the stage for dialogue

In August 2023, five months after the deadliest school shooting in Tennessee history, 11 strangers with diverse views on gun rights spent three days together hashing out recommendations to the state legislature for lessening gun violence. Since then, they’ve stayed connected through regular group texts and become a national model of collaboration in addressing one of the country’s most divisive issues.

Two members who represent opposing positions traveled to Hartford, Connecticut recently to talk about their experience—and what others can learn from it—as part of a panel discussion on reducing firearm violence organized by the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) and UConn ARMS.

“We did something out of the ordinary. It’s not very often you have people at different ends of the spectrum come together in a productive area,” said college student Jaila Hampton, who lost her best friend and other friends to gun violence while growing up in Memphis.

Hampton is part of group known as the Tennessee 11, which became the subject of a 2024 feature-length documentary produced by the Builders Movement, a cross-partisan non-profit initiative working to move beyond “us vs. them” thinking to solve problems together. The 85-minute film follows Builders’ Citizen Solutions program, which convenes people from across the ideological spectrum to find common ground on a pressing issue and build upon it with concrete solutions that represent the will of the majority.

Builders piloted the program in Tennessee after three 9-year-old children and three adults were killed in the March 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville. Following the shooting, the Tennessee legislature convened for a special session to debate potential new gun safety laws. The Tennessee 11, meeting while the legislature was in session, delivered five recommendations of which the state legislature adopted one—mandating firearm safety training at elementary, middle, and high schools.

The Sept. 25 Hartford panel discussion set the stage for dialogue with a screening of "The Tennessee 11" documentary at Connecticut’s Legislative Office Building. The panel included a college student, a firearms instructor, a clergy member, a teacher, a combat veteran and suicide prevention advisor, a retired law enforcement officer, and a mental health therapist.

YSPH Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, thanked Tennessee 11 member and combat veteran Jay Zimmerman for sharing in the film his story of a friend who took his own life by firearm. Ranney, an emergency medicine physician, said she came to firearm injury prevention work after a young man was brought to her ER after shooting himself with a family member's firearm in a moment of desperation.

She decried the lack of scientific study of the causes of gun violence. “We apply science to so many health problems and yet we have no science behind how to answer this one,” Ranney said. People would be appalled if they showed up at the ER and their doctor didn’t know how to diagnose whether they had appendicitis, she said. “We somehow ignore that basic strategy when it comes to violence.”

During the panel discussion, Zimmerman said that before the Tennessee 11 convening he had “preconceived notions.” In his family, hunting was a bonding experience spanning generations. After learning of Hampton’s experiences, Zimmerman said he had to “take into consideration how her views are shaped and just find that common ground.”

YSPH Community Scholar Nelba Márquez-Greene, a licensed marriage and family therapist, highlighted the commonalities that exist among parents and families within the firearm injury community regardless of what state they live in.

“I’ve heard lots of mothers cry when they lose their kids to gun violence,” she said. “We all scream in the same way.” Márquez-Greene said she was drawn into the firearm injury community “unwillingly” after her daughter Ana Grace was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut along with 19 other children and six educators in 2012.

The panelists discussed the barriers that have existed in addressing gun violence and the value scientific research can bring in fostering solutions.

Connecticut State Rep. Renee LaMark Muir, D-Deep River, a former Hartford homicide detective, pointed out that in 1996, the U.S. Congress quashed federal funding for gun violence research. It remained unfunded for 25 years.

Ranney said science can provide society with guidance on how to prevent gun violence. “Science does not happen without society behind it,” she said. “It happens because of conversations in the community. … We can’t talk about firearm injuries without talking about society.”

Panel discussion organizers said they hope the lessons learned in Tennessee will inspire similar convenings in other states. At YSPH, educators are interested in employing "The Tennessee 11" documentary as a learning tool.

“We are looking for ways to integrate the film and discussions in our YSPH classrooms,” said Dr. Kerri Raissian, PhD, a senior research scientist and member of the Firearm Injury Prevention Team who moderated the panel. “Moreover, it's part of our larger mission to bring people together to have meaningful and productive conversations about this and other hard topics.”

Hampton would like people to see each other’s shared humanity and recognize that they still have so much to learn, adding, “We show this can be done everywhere.”