Solving Gun Violence: Greg Jackson

00:00:00 - Bobby Doyle

Welcome to Solving Gun Violence, a weekly student-led podcast from the University of Virginia's Gun Violence Solutions Project that tackles one of America's most urgent issues, preventing gun violence. Each episode will feature experts sharing actionable solutions to improve community safety while upholding individual rights.

My name is Bobby Doyle, and I'm the director of the Gun Violence Solutions Project and your host today. This episode features a conversation with Greg Jackson, the former deputy director of the first ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. We discuss how his federal work has had an impact on the safety of everyday Americans and the many reasons to have hope that there is more that will be done in the coming years on this issue. If you're interested in practical, evidence-based solutions in the future of gun violence prevention, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Today, we are honored to be joined by Greg Jackson. He is the former deputy director of the White House's Office of Gun Violence Prevention. He's also a campaign organizer, a strategist, a person who has experienced gun violence himself, and has done a lot of great work to try to address gun violence in this country.

Greg, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:01:33 - Greg Jackson

Thanks for being here. And I'm also a UVA grad.

00:01:37 - Bobby Doyle

Yes, I didn't list your greatest achievement. OK. So I'd like to start with a really big question. Many people, when we talk about gun violence in this country, see it as something that is inevitable, that will just keep going and going, and there's not really a lot of solutions for it.

00:01:55 - Greg Jackson

As someone who's worked on this for years and years, what do you say to someone who says, we can't do anything when it comes to gun violence?

Well, I think, first of all, I'd say, well, you're wrong. There is something we can do about it.

Gun violence is truly a public health crisis. And our country has proven that we can overcome health crises of all shapes and forms. Whether it was the COVID-19 epidemic, the bird flu, automobile deaths.

I remember when I was in high school, death by automobiles was a huge issue.

I actually lost one of my high school friends to a car accident. Two of them now that I think about it. But America stepped up.

We started to think about, how can we shift behavior? How do we make cars safer? How do we make sure that we shift the culture around speeding and reckless driving and endangerment? And now, automobile deaths are way less likely.

And I think with gun violence, we can do the same. It's not a simple product of human behavior. What we're seeing in our country is truly an epidemic that we can turn a corner on. And we're starting to see communities do that all over the country. Places like Boston, where they saw a 82% reduction in homicides.

They had less than 20 homicides in 2024. And this is a major metropolitan city. And so there's so many examples across the country where we've been able to turn a corner on this issue that it's silly to think that we can't do it and can't defeat it.

00:03:36 - Bobby Doyle

Yeah, exactly. You worked on this issue in the White House and helped pass a lot of executive orders that tried to get at this issue specifically. Can you talk about any examples? Because while there were many that were passed, not many people actually know about many of them.

00:03:54 - Greg Jackson

Oh, yeah. Well, this could be a whole TED Talk right here.

00:03:58 - Bobby Doyle

The floor is yours.

00:04:01 - Greg Jackson

Yeah, well, the first step that we did was start to invest in strategies that we know can prevent violence.I think for too often, we think about what happens when the gun is drawn and what type of gun and what harm that gun has caused.We don't think about how can we prevent that violent interaction in the first place.

And whether you look at suicides, hate-based violence, domestic violence, community violence, school shootings, all of it really boils down to an individual that's in a moment of crisis and they have access to a firearm.

And for too long, we focused just on access to the firearm, not how do we prevent that moment of crisis. So the first big policy that the activist movement that I was a part of pushed for was funding for programs that work with those who are most at risk or most vulnerable to lashing out in that moment of crisis.

And the number one group we started with were victims of violence, people who've been harmed, who've been traumatized, who have lost their big brother or been shot before or have been abused in other ways.

They are the most at risk and most vulnerable to that moment of crisis and lashing out. So how do we pour more resources into supporting and working with them? And so we started with funding for the Victims of Crime Act to increase the Crime Victims Fund.

We also started with funding for community violence intervention programs, many of which take behavioral therapy approaches to those who are at risk. But that was the first big step. It's investing in what we know can help those who are most at risk.

Then we said, okay, now that we're starting to do that, to get the programs to support those before that moment, how do we think about preventing that person who's at risk or at least in that moment of crisis from having a firearm at that time? Like how do we create time and space?

And so that's where we looked at some really major policies that can change that.

And the biggest example of that was the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It was the first bill passed in 30 years in 2022. And in this bill, it has some very key policy changes to specifically remove those firearms in that moment of crisis.

One of which was expanding background checks for those who are under 21 and looking specifically at those who are under 21, their mental health records and their juvenile criminal histories.

Not to impose some type of crime on them or prosecute them, but if there are any serious flags from law enforcement or from local mental health specialists, then the gun seller should know that, our background check system should know that and deny that accordingly.

So that was a huge step we made.

Another one was for funding red flag laws, which we know is not federal, but many states have these laws where you can remove the firearm if you know someone's in a moment of crisis. So let's say a sibling sees that their brother is lashing out or online saying suicidal things and has a firearm as well.

Okay, well now through red flag laws, you can go in, you can apply to the court system, they'll review it, a committee, and then law enforcement can actually temporarily remove those guns. And the theory behind that is that we can always return a gun, but we can't return a life.

And so why not take away those guns temporarily until that person gets the help that they need. So in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, there was $750 million to help states implement these laws that have already been passed across the country.

One other big one is that we closed what we call the boyfriend loophole, where if someone is a domestic abuser, if they are deemed as just a dating partner or a boyfriend, then they are not prohibited from buying a firearm, even if they've been convicted of domestic abuse.

But if you're married, you are prohibited.

And so with this same law, Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, now if you're convicted, regardless of the status of who your domestic victim is, you are prohibited from buying a firearm. All of this was in the bill, but thinking about how do we just keep guns away from a domestic abuser who's still in the middle of a serious conflict, a young person who is lashing out and maybe a known threat to themselves or others, but also looking at those who are younger who have known flags or known concerns, and maybe we just at least make them wait till they're a little bit later to purchase firearms.

So the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was huge to make sure we're keeping guns away from folks in that moment of crisis.

And then beyond that, what we did for, as part of the Biden-Harris administration when I formally joined, is we started to look at two things.

How do we continue to invest in strategies that we know prevent violence, but then how do we build out a stronger infrastructure for upstream accountability? For too long, when we think about accountability, we focused on individuals, like this person has an illegal firearm, they should go to jail.

But we haven't said, okay, well, who brought that gun to that person, right? Where did that person get the gun when they brought it illegally?

And who manufactured it and marketed it? Did they have a role in it? And so upstream accountability was a huge part of our policy approach where we made gun trafficking a federal offense for the first time. So prior to the Biden administration, if you trafficked a firearm from state to state, you would only get a warning and a fine.

And we found one person who trafficked 100,000 guns with no federal criminal penalties, but we made that a crime.

So now we can actually prosecute those individuals. We also said, hey, if you're a gun dealer that's violating the law, we will now have a zero tolerance policy that if you violate once, your license will be revoked. And for too long, many gun dealers were not being held accountable.

And so we shut down 250 gun stores that were violating laws that we knew was fueling illegal firearms.

And then lastly, we looked at manufacturers and we said, how do we make sure that manufacturers are being responsible? And one of the biggest ones we saw was the biggest manufacturer of ghost guns, Polymer 180. And we knew that ghost guns were a huge problem.

People were assembling guns and buying pieces and assembling them. But we said, hey, if you're gonna sell pieces of firearms, then you need to conduct background checks as well. And Polymer 180 said, that's not good for our business model and they shut down their doors.

And so those are just examples of some of the policies that we took after that bill was passed to make sure that we're building more upstream accountability for the entire industry that we know is profiting off of this serious health crisis of gun violence.

00:10:01 - Bobby Doyle

What I really like about that answer is how you lay out all the different levels at which we can make interventions into gun violence itself. A lot of people think about it, as you said, as how do we restrict guns or restrict access to firearms? But there is the preventative measures you can take.

There's the measures at distribution of firearms. There's helping victims. There's a lot of different inputs and points in which you can actually make impact. And there's great research that really backs this up.

You brought up the Bipartisan Act many times. And this is often seen as a partisan issue, even though there are people around the country with all partisan angles that care about reducing violence in their communities. We go around and talk to people and they hear them say, I really wanna make sure people are safer.

That's where we all start from. Could you talk about through your work in the White House beforehand, or going up about how you see this as an issue that brings people together rather than dividing people?

00:10:58 - Greg Jackson

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I grew up in a place called Fluvanna County, Virginia, which is like 20 minutes outside of UVA. This is probably the only podcast where they know where that is. And my dad, I grew up on a farm and we hunted. My dad has over 20 guns.

I have a few guns on a farm. And I know firsthand that those mean a lot from a cultural perspective.

When you think about it as a family heirloom, you know, when my father handed me his rifle that he learned how to hunt on, you know, when he was a teenager, like that has a lot of pride in, especially on my dad's side and like young men learning how to hunt and provide for themselves.

But that is very different from the handguns being put in the hands of 12 year olds in our communities to handle disputes or arguments, right? And unfortunately, the culture and the things that we really, so many Americans take pride in with firearm ownership has been tainted, if you will, in how guns have been used and sold and marketed across the country.

And so I have that vantage point of being someone who grew up in rural America, who understands hunting and firearm ownership, but also lived in the inner city and a victim of gun violence from interpersonal conflict, a survivor, and knowing that there are really two stories that are happening here.

But what I will say in both communities, whether it's the inner city where folks are getting firearms to protect themselves or rural America where they're preparing their hunting and they use it as a tool, both of those communities do not wanna see more violence.

No one wants to watch their nephew shot and killed. No one wants to go to a funeral because their grandfather committed suicide. Like no one wants to turn on a TV and see a school shooting. Like there's so much agreement around we need to solve this problem, even if there are so many different cultures that play a role.

And when we think about the bipartisan approach, we came to the table with Democrats and Republicans and we said, hey, this is a problem. Do you agree?

And everyone agreed, this is a major problem.

This is the number one cause of death for youth. It's the number one cause of death for pregnant women in America. It's the leading cause of newly disabled Americans, right? This is a huge crisis. But then we asked, okay, well, how do you think we fix it?

We saw from Republicans was, hey, we need to invest more in mental health. We need to invest more in security and making sure things are stronger. Maybe we need to harden our schools and harden our buildings. And we came to Democrats and said, well, hey, it's the gun.

Like how do we make sure that we have less guns in America and less access to guns? And we said, well, look, all of these answers can be right. You know, there's not a one or the other. Like we're not debating pro-life or pro-choice.

No, we're saying, how do we fix a problem? And all of these solutions can play a role.

And so acknowledging that first and forehand was a big moment because prior to the debates around the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the NRA had really just made this about the Second Amendment and everyone had bought into that debate. And that was what you saw on each side was, should I have my gun?

Is it a right? Is it not?

We weren't trying to solve a problem.

We were trying to win a debate. And after the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, we finally got to a breaking point where leaders were trying to solve a problem. And so then we could kind of give and take. Okay, well, we don't want to bulletproof every school window because that's way too expensive, but we can invest in mental health.

You know, we can create the 988 suicide crisis lifeline, right? Okay, well, we know we can't take away everyone's guns. That's not necessarily the best approach, but we can expand background checks and make sure domestic abusers don't have firearms, right?

And so that's where the negotiation was born. And it took a lot. I mean, it took a few months of back and forth, but I think what made it most successful was that our leaders needed to find a solution. And frankly, the American people would not allow them not to.

There was so much pressure on members of Congress in that moment for them to take action that even Republicans who historically have been able to kind of drift away from this issue, they felt the pressure. You know, they were getting 15 calls for every one call to leave it alone, that 15 people were saying, we need you to take action.

And they shared that with us. They told us that the pressure is so intense, they're going to do something. The real question is, what are we going to do?

And I think that created room for real collaboration. And what's also exciting about that bill is now that it passed, now that we've seen the impact of it, which has saved a lot of lives, Republicans are some of our most enthusiastic champions of it, right?

There was a big op-ed in the Newsweek and we had three Senate Republicans were the ones who celebrated and said, look, this new administration is coming. This new Republican-led Congress is about to be here. What we cannot do is turn our back on school safety measures and efforts that we've taken to reduce gun violence.

And that was a big deal for them to draw that line in the sand around this issue and that progress specifically.

And so, yeah. So I don't know if that answered your question quite, but I think that's the big difference is that we went from trying to win a political debate to how do we solve a problem? And that's really how America's been successful with almost every public health crisis is how do we collectively look at this and figure out different ways to get there?

Not just one silver bullet, for lack of better words, but like an entire strategy and approach that chips away at all the factors that led to this moment.

00:16:26 - Bobby Doyle

Yeah, and that's why we're focused here at UVA and across country, people are focused on solutions. Solutions really is the name of the game. It's not helpful to point fingers and blame people or say people are in the wrong or doing wrong things. We wanna point towards how do we actually make our community safer and make sure that we're getting to a place where everyone can feel comfortable with the state of the country.

We've changed administrations. Where do you see the edge of us improving our community safety?

00:16:58 - Greg Jackson

You know, we made tremendous progress in the last- for years. And just to like sum it up, you know, we moved $242 billion into gun violence prevention efforts or made those dollars available.

We passed the first law in 30 years. It had six major policy changes in it. And then the President Biden and Vice President Harris administration in our office executed 54 presidential actions to address violence. And mind you, Obama and Trump before only did two.

So we did 54, you know, which is a historic record by far. And I will say that as a result of that, we saw tremendous progress. In 2023, we saw a 12% reduction in homicides, the steepest decline in American history. And in 2024, the numbers are still being calculated, but we anticipate like a 16% reduction.

So we have a tremendous amount of momentum and the numbers are starting to reflect those policy changes. I think the future is going to be weird because the upcoming administration has not made this a priority. You know, gun violence has not been something that they've talked about or debated about.

It's not in Project 2025. The only thing in Project 2025 is removing the zero tolerance policy for gun dealers. It's like one paragraph out of what a 300 page plan. So this issue is just simply not a priority for this current administration. And when they talk about crime and violence, they tend to scapegoat undocumented individuals in this country and immigrants.

And I don't think that's numerically, that's not a driver of gun violence in our country. So I think at the federal level, we're going to see stagnation as far as progress on this issue. We're going from heavy momentum to kind of like a halt. But I do think the beauty of it is that we won't regress.

I'm optimistic there won't be backward steps. And frankly, a lot of these policies were just passed in the last six months. So the ripple of those policies will, we won't feel them until like next year in 2025, 26, 27. We'll likely continue to see drastic reductions, maybe even steeper reductions, which is kind of scary if it's mischaracterized as the Trump strategy.

But that I think that's the reality. But what I think is really positive, and this is what we should anticipate in the future, is that, you know, President Biden created the first ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. When his administration started, there was only one statewide office.

Now there's 14. There was only 20 city-based offices of gun violence prevention. Now there's 130. And so the infrastructure and the leaders and the offices that have been built across the country during this administration, they're still standing. They're still open for business.

They're still pushing for different solutions. They're still managing resources. They're still running campaigns. They're still working with victims and those who are at risk. And so that's what encourages me is that the state and local level of government is so much stronger and so much smarter on this issue after this administration that while the federal government may be stagnant, we have a much greater level of capacity at the state and local level to continue to push them forward.

And so I don't think we'll see big laws. No, I don't think we'll see some big budget move. No. But I think what we'll see is that the dollars that were made available being used at the state and local level, I think we'll see innovative grassroots strategies that will continue to thrive, especially in our inner cities where homicides are steepest.

I think the areas that may suffer are smaller towns and rural areas where there aren't offices or infrastructure. And especially when you think about suicide, that's the communities that are most harshly impacted by gun violence. And so I anticipate you'll continue to see homicides drop.

And you may see either a steady or unfortunately, an increase in suicide by firearm in our country.

00:20:50 - Bobby Doyle

Yeah. And just in general, the rural communities, small cities are just under focused on and resourced by research and by initiatives that try to reduce gun violence. That's something at UVA we're really focused on trying to address.

00:21:06 - Greg Jackson

And I think we just we also just as a movement, we've allowed the media to decide what forms of gun violence are important, as opposed to the impact of the crisis. Because we know that when we look at suicide, it is overwhelmingly elderly white men. And when we look at homicide, it's overwhelmingly younger black men.

And if you just looked at the media and took that hot take, you would say you would think that school shootings were everything that's driving this crisis, and they're less than 1% of the deaths. And so what I think we all have to think about is how do we shift from reacting to media to really analyzing the problem and pushing resources and strategies to address that.

In a rural America, we have to get to older white men who are in that moment of crisis just aggressively as we are looking at school shooters or, you know, gang violence in America, which, you know, gets all this kind of hot take media responses.

00:22:06 - Bobby Doyle

Yeah, people don't, I think, generally understand how prominent suicide is when it comes to our gun violence problem, and how much it is the big driver of the deaths we see from gun violence specifically, and how deadly guns can be when it comes to taking your own life.

Yeah, that's something that both some of the work you've done has helped address, but also needs to be pushed on further. As a person who's a first responder, I've been one for 11 years, I've seen so many examples of this personally, and it is devastating, not in a way that you see in the news media.

These are not stories you'll see reported as much when you type in gun violence into Google. But if you ask people in your life, there will be almost everyone will have a story about someone they know, who has died from suicide by a gun. Yeah. We, we have all these great initiatives, a lot of great ideas people have.

It also takes a lot of money. As you said, there was a lot of investment federally. When you think about resourcing, how do you think about making sure that there is funding and support built in to help sustain these initiatives?

00:23:09 - Greg Jackson

Yeah, I mean, look, the reality is you're already paying for it. And that's what I tell people, you have a choice. Do you want to invest in life? Or do you want to pay for death? Like a homicide actually costs our government and our economy between 400,000 and $2 million, one homicide.

So if you have 40 homicides in your community, you've likely lost, what, $80 million? So when you start to think about it that way, and that's, that's a small number of homicides. Think about Memphis, that last year had over 400 homicides. Think about the economic impact that has on a city.

It is devastating. It's almost a billion dollars lost from their economy. And that's when you look at, you know, law enforcement costs, medical costs, court costs, court fees, impact on the family and their ability to earn, impact on the quality of life in that community, impact on the property values, impact on the businesses.

And that stuff adds up. And right now, our calculation is that our country is losing around $557 billion a year to the crisis of gun violence. And so when we think about resources, and we talk about it, I always remind people, you're already paying for it.

I'm actually trying to cut you a deal, right? Like if you invest in it on the front end, we can prevent it. And if I say, hey, give me $20 million for a program in the city, and we reduce violence by 100 homicides, well, hell, that's, that's the, that's the greatest investment ever.

That's the ROI that I think any business person would take. And so that's, that's the angle we have to look at it, not how do we do something new? Or how do we find new dollars? No, how do we be smarter about investing dollars on the front end to prevent crisis, before we have to pay for on the back end and damage our economies and our bottom lines.

And I think that's a very clear and smart argument that most people can, can stand with. And that's why we've been able to gain access to so many resources. And the last thing I'll say is, as far as sustaining it is, this is a public health crisis is well known, well adopted as being such, then we should make sure that we are investing the same amount of money in this crisis as we do other health crises.

Like gun violence is the least researched of the top 30 causes of death, even though it's the number one cause of death for youth, right? So why don't we, why not study it the same way we study sepsis or youth cancer, right? If we really accept it for what it is, let's at least make sure the resources match other crises of the same kind or similarity, and make sure that we're investing appropriately.

And if we start doing that, we'll have well enough resources to, to address this crisis.

00:25:39 - Bobby Doyle

We at the University of Virginia very much believe that there should be more research into this. And I'm glad that there has been an expansion. And I'm hopeful that there will be even greater expansion. Before we wrap up, I would love to hear if you have any other things you want to tell people about or any other things you want to talk about before the last question.

00:25:56 - Greg Jackson

I mean, I think the biggest thing is we have a public health crisis, we're taking a public health approach. And when I think of the concept of public health approach, the most important part of it is that it's people centered. And we have to like invest in people, pour into people, think about how to help people.

We always say hurt people, hurt people. Well, I believe and I think it's shown very true that heal people, heal people. And so if we can just start with that, just how do we help heal those who have been traumatized, those who have been exposed to violence, those who are at risk of violence.

If we can start there and make that kind of the foundation of how we attack this issue, we'll solve it extremely fast. And so I I want to just elevate that and make sure that that's something that we continue to to keep our eye on, because Republicans have great ideas for that.

Democrats have great ideas for that. Independent thinkers have great ideas for that. And that's a way more important thing to prioritize than just should you have this weapon or not. And I hope that our listeners will will lean into that thinking as well.

00:27:01 - Bobby Doyle

That's great. Last question. To leave people with just a really simple takeaway, I'm going to ask you to answer this big question in one sentence or two at most. What does the solution to the gun violence epidemic in the United States look like to you?

00:27:15 - Greg Jackson

Invest in people who are most at risk and protect them from a malicious industry aiming to profit off of their pain, period.

00:27:26 - Bobby Doyle

Beautiful. Great. Well, thank you for joining us today, Greg Jackson. It's been a great to have a conversation with you. And is there anywhere people can find you?

00:27:40 - Greg Jackson

Oh, yeah. You can find me on Instagram at The Action Jackson. I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter at Gregory Jackson. I don't do the TikToks, but I'm also on Blue Sky, though. You can check me on Blue Sky. Yeah, that's it. Look forward to seeing you all on the Internet.

00:28:01 - Bobby Doyle

Beautiful. Well, thank you for joining us. For more information about the work we're doing here at UVA, you can go to the Gun Violence Solutions Project's website, Google Gun Violence Solutions Project, and you can follow other initiatives at UVA through there as well.

Thank you so much and have a great day, everybody.