Welcome back to Between bells everyone.
One organization is flipping the switch on
gun culture project unloaded aims at taking,
taking on the subject of gun violence through cultural
campaigns geared at teenagers with a goal to ultimately
push back on the idea that more guns make
people safer joining us now discusses Nina Vinick,
founder and executive director of project Unloaded.
Nina, Welcome to the show.
You spent two decades working in gun violence prevention.
Talk to me about the inspiration behind creating project
unloaded and why this needs to happen now.
Yeah, thank you so much. It's great to be with you.
So a few years ago I started to pay attention to some trends
when it comes to guns and what people understand about about guns.
So 20 years ago, when I started to
work on gun violence and gun violence prevention,
we had been in a roughly 25 year period of declining rates of gun ownership.
Household gun ownership had been steadily falling for about a 25 year period.
And at that time,
most americans believed that having a gun at home would make them less safe,
not more safe.
And today that has completely flipped.
So gun ownership is on the rise and most americans today believe the myth
that having a gun at home is going to make them
more safe
rather than less safe.
And
interestingly,
the steepest
shift in that curve has actually been among
younger americans. So today three quarters of young people
believe this myth that having and using guns is going to make them safer.
And you know,
policy change is important and we need to take some steps in that direction.
But unless we can take on our pervasive gun culture
and peel back on on some of these troubling trends,
it's going to be really hard to get ahead of this problem.
You know,
the recent mass shooting in Highland Park yesterday at the fourth of july parade is,
is a great example.
You know,
Highland Park has some of the strongest gun laws of anywhere in the country.
And yet these tragedies still happen because we have 400
million guns in our country and a culture that has
internalize this myth that guns make us safer. And so a project unloaded.
We are pushing back on that myth and changing
that culture and we're starting with younger people.
Earlier this year,
you started a campaign called Snug Talk to me about the
meaning behind that and you even got some Tiktok influencers involved.
Yeah. So Snug stands for safer not using guns.
And it's our campaign that is focused on, on teens.
So we learned in our research that teens
are already talking with their peers about guns,
but they don't have any real information about
the risks and responsibilities associated with good news.
They're interested in getting that information and they
don't know where to go to find it.
They're turned off by the polarized nature of the debate.
And so we thought that offers an opportunity for a different
kind of conversation about with young people And so with snug,
we are
empowering them with information.
We're delivering the facts in a
engaging, accessible way.
We're working with young influencers who have big audiences among teens
and we're giving them the factual information that they need to make
a decision that's in the best interests of their health and
safety and the health and safety of those close to them.
And that's a decision not to own and use guns were safer not using guns.
How is social media, especially Tiktok evolving activism,
especially when it comes to the younger generations
and you think we'll see this continue.
So social media is incredibly important for activism,
but also it's a place where young people who aren't
activists are going for community and and for information.
So that's why we're on platforms like Snapchat and
Tiktok where young people are spending their time,
they're going to get information to be informed about
issues and topics like guns and to build community.
And,
and so that's why we're working with influencers on Tiktok
and through digital advertising on Snapchat and Tiktok to,
to meet young people where they are and to bring them the information in
a way that's empowering and inspiring and we're really making a lot of headway.
So we're finding that our snug campaign is reaching millions of young people,
they're engaging with the campaign,
they are overwhelmingly positive in their reactions to it.
And in our pilot,
we discovered that exposure to our
snug campaign is increasing young people's understanding
of the risks around gun use and decreasing their interest in gun ownership.
Have about a minute I want to ask you about
President biden signing that bipartisan gun bill into law.
Are you hopeful that this will make a difference moving forward?
I am hopeful that it will make a difference, but I think we have to admit that
this bipartisan legislative compromise
is an incremental
step in the right direction.
It doesn't do everything we needed to in terms of federal policy to really address
our gun violence problem and that's why we also need to focus on culture,
change a project unloaded.
We're not waiting for Congress to solve this problem.
And frankly, the Supreme Court
has only made that more difficult with
their recent ruling expanding the Second Amendment.
So we don't need to change Congress, we don't need to pass laws.
We're empowering young people to rewrite their own story
when it comes to guns and gun violence.
Nina Vinick, founder and executive Director of project Unloaded.
Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it