‘Together is where we save lives’: A messaging guide for California advocates working to reduce injuries and fatalities from firearms (adaptable to other states and localities)
From Berkeley Media Studies Group and the Hope and Heal Fund: Is there more violent crime in the United States than there was a year ago? Less? What about in your local area? A 2023 survey from Gallup found that Americans are confused about these questions, and perceptions of violent crime often do not align with the data.1 And that’s just when it comes to the big picture. Add in nuances around violence involving firearms, and misunderstandings soar. For example, many people across the political spectrum are unaware that more than half of firearm deaths in the U.S. are suicides.2
In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General declared injury and death from firearms a public health crisis, which highlighted the critical and ongoing need for solutions to the crisis grounded in principles of community action and systems change. California advocates are already at the forefront of leading community-organizing efforts to move the needle on firearm injury and death, using a range of interventions from school-based and restorative practices to trauma-responsive care to cognitive behavioral therapy. This guide is intended for advocates; it aims to give them a roadmap for using the news to lift up those solutions and amplify messages from the communities most affected by the problem, so that the narrative around efforts to prevent firearm injury and death is as robust as prevention, intervention, and healing work happening around the state.
News coverage matters because it not only affects the public’s knowledge about violence and its causes, but also shapes how audiences understand potential solutions.3,4,5 Right now, stories about community-led efforts to prevent firearm-related injuries and deaths aren’t the ones we see and hear the most frequently. Instead, news about firearm deaths and injuries tends to focus squarely on mass shootings. Mass shootings are undoubtedly tragic — and on the rise — but comprise only a small fraction of firearm-involved deaths and injuries in this country.
When the news does spotlight day-to-day incidents involving firearms, mainstream outlets often struggle to tell stories about the causes of and solutions to firearm violence and firearm suicide in ways that can help readers and viewers understand larger patterns and truths about what it takes to make communities safer. Instead, news stories often focus on street-level assaults and homicides, and overrepresent Black and Brown communities as perpetrators of violence. News about firearms also tends to prioritize the perspectives of law enforcement, while the voices of people most directly impacted by violence or firearm suicide are largely absent, as are discussions of community-led solutions.
From decades of research, including our own, we know that these patterns may keep audiences from understanding the true prevalence of issues like firearm suicide and domestic violence involving firearms in their communities; deflect attention from systemic and structural inequities like racism and poverty; reinforce the underrepresentation of Black and Brown communities as expert voices and leaders of change; and obscure the possibility of approaches to preventing violence and promoting healing that go beyond criminal justice responses.6 What’s more, the news shapes policy agendas.7,8,9 So, when community-led efforts to reduce injury and death from firearms aren’t part of the public conversation, it’s harder for the people leading those efforts to ensure that voters, funders, potential community partners, and others are aware of and engaged in their work.
On the other hand, when community members and spokespeople from community-led efforts are the key sources for news stories — not just reacting to, but creating news proactively — then they can broaden the understanding of firearm violence prevention by expanding who speaks about it and what they say. Community members can, for example:
- challenge harmful stereotypes or narratives about their communities;
- draw attention to equity and justice concerns relating to policing;
- point out that community-led violence prevention advocates report that they are often held to higher standards than law enforcement when it comes to reporting positive outcomes; or
- call on the media to investigate community-based solutions with the same intensity and focus with which they investigate problems.
How, then, can people working to prevent injury and death from firearms create effective messaging? How can they communicate such complex issues when many different stories emerge from the data? For instance, while California has the strongest laws in the country and a lower rate of deaths due to firearms per capita than most states, firearm deaths have dramatically increased in the last few years, mirroring national trends.
That’s precisely what we hope this guide will do. Advocates can use it to help shape news narratives to reflect an important truth: that no matter who we are or where we live, we all want to reduce the public health problem of injury and death from firearms — and everyone can play a role in keeping people safe.
With support from this guide, California advocates can engage in media advocacy: the strategic use of mass media to communicate with policymakers, thought leaders, and the voting public about efforts to prevent injury and death from firearms, support people affected by violence, and promote healing.10 We hope the tactics outlined here will help advocates to better align their organizing and messaging efforts so that policies and programs to reduce violence and promote healing — as well as the narrative surrounding them — reinforce one another. That’s a key step toward helping move us faster and further toward a world in which safety is the norm.