A New Way For Young People to Talk About Guns - with Nina Vinik

Andrew Chand 0:01 

Welcome to solving gun violence, a student led podcast from the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions project. We are dedicated to finding effective strategies to combat one of America's most urgent issues, gun violence. Each of our episodes feature experts sharing actionable solutions to improve public safety while also upholding individual rights. My name is Andrew Chand. I'm a fourth year student at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of leadership and public policy. And your host for today, for this episode, I'm being joined by a very special guest, Nina Vinick. Nina Vinick is the founder and president of project unloaded, and is a leader of the modern gun violence prevention movement. With her two decades in the field, including experience directing the gun violence prevention and justice reform program at the Joyce Foundation, she has combined legal expertise with policy strategy to advocate for evidence based approaches to the gun violence epidemic. Nina and project unloaded aim to reduce gun violence by changing gun culture, chiefly by disproving the myth that guns make people safer. Since its launch in 2022 project unloaded has reached more than 8 million young people through its cultural campaigns and community partnerships, empowering the next generation to choose, on their own terms, not to own or use guns. If you're interested in practical solutions and the future of gun violence prevention, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Nina Vinik 1:07  

I would say there's a model for what we're building at Project unloaded, and that model is cigarettes. 25 years ago, about a quarter of US teens were cigarette smokers. Today, it's less than 3% and one of the reasons for that was the work of organizations like the truth initiative. What the truth initiative did was run creative cultural campaigns that were all about empowering young people with information. So they didn't tell young people what to do or what to think, but they brought them the facts about the risks of cigarette smoking to their health, and armed with that information, young people drove a cultural shift in the way we think about cigarettes. That's the model that we're bringing to the issue of guns and gun violence.

Andrew Chand 2:50 

Miss Vinik, thank you so much for being here today. We are so excited to have you.

Nina Vinik 2:54 

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Andrew Chand 2:56 

Excellent. So to start off, super nice and super simple, can you tell us in your own words, what project unloaded is, sure?

Nina Vinik 3:05 

So project unloaded is a national gun violence prevention organization. We focus on reducing gun violence in all its forms by educating, engaging and empowering young people through large scale cultural campaigns and community partnerships, all built around the core message that guns make us less safe.

Andrew Chand 3:28 

All right, can I ask how were you inspired to start project unloaded, and why the mission is important to you?

Nina Vinik 3:36 

So you know, I have a 20 plus year career in gun violence prevention, but the path to project unloaded actually started even before that, when I was a young lawyer working on Fair Housing cases, representing clients in Chicago, mostly on the west side and the south side of the city. If you know Chicago at all, you know that those are also communities that struggle with high rates of gun violence, and what I learned through that experience was that, you know, I might be able to help a client stay in their home, but I couldn't help them feel safe sending their kids down the block to the park to play, or even sitting on their front porch Because of their fears of gun violence in their communities. And it was really that experience that led me to understand the ability to feel safe in our homes and communities as just a kind of threshold issue for kids and families to be able to thrive. And so that was kind of the beginning of my pivot to focusing on reducing gun violence and building safer communities. And after 20 years, kind of attacking this issue, really from 360 degrees, I saw that we were, you know, ultimately, not making the kind of progress that we need to make on this issue. You know, over that trajectory, unfortunately, gun violence had gotten worse, not better, and gun violence had become the leading cause of death for kids and teens. So it really caused me to think, all right, what more do we need to be doing? What are we missing here? And that really led me to see the need to focus on culture as kind of a missing piece in the way the movement was addressing gun violence.

Andrew Chand 5:28 

Yeah, I thought that's one of the most interesting things about Project unloaded. And do my research, it's very much focused, not necessarily on the hard laws or anything, but a lot of these norms, a lot of these cultural expectations. And a big part of that when you're sort of reaching Gen Z is the social media campaigns, a big part of what you guys do. So could you tell me a little bit about like, what a social media campaign aimed at shifting young people's attitudes towards firearms looks like, and sort of how you target that key demographic?

Nina Vinik 5:57 

Yeah. So I think the starting point for everything we do at Project unloaded, including our social media campaigns, is a piece of data that actually was surprising to me, and that is that there's been this enormous shift in the way the public understands the risks that come with having and using guns. And what was maybe most surprising to me, was that the biggest shift in this perception has come among younger people, and this is where social media comes in. So 25 years ago, most Americans said having a gun at home will make me less safe, not more safe. Today, that has completely flipped, wow. And now most Americans believe that having a gun at home will make them safer, and that goes for most young people as well, which is counterintuitive, right? Because, you know, it's also true that gun violence is the leading cause of death for kids and teens. And you know, yours is a generation that I think is uniquely impacted by gun violence, and yet there is still this widely held belief that having a gun will contribute to safety more so than it will contribute to risk. So we use social media to try to change that narrative, to effectively reset the narrative with the facts about how guns contribute to risk. We do that on social media because, you know, that's where young people are spending their time. Absolutely, it's where you go for information, where you go to find community. And what we find is that when we reach young people with the facts about how guns make us less safe, we can shift those narratives and views away from the idea that guns contribute to safety and away From interest in future gun ownerships so we design creative peer to peer social media campaigns that we run on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, that are all built around bringing young people the facts about why guns make us less safe. We do that not with a partisan political message. In fact, all of our campaigns are strictly non political, but instead, they are positive and engaging and even fun, you know, around a topic that can be, frankly, you know, pretty heavy, yeah, and I think that's what is, maybe the secret sauce behind what we do at Project unloaded, we are really meeting young people in the conversations that they're already having online, which might be conversations about gaming or sports or cooking or mental health, and making those conversations safe spaces to talk about guns and gun violence and the facts that show that guns make us less safe.

Andrew Chand 9:14 

Yeah, could you maybe just for the audience, share some of those key facts I know, sort of perusing the website, that there are a lot of key data points, but what are some of the key facts that you would emphasize if you're sort of just entering this conversation with somebody?

Nina Vinik 9:27 

Yeah, great question. So a gun in the home doubles the risk for homicide for people living in the home, it triples the risk for suicide. For young people, the risk for suicide is actually four times greater when there's a gun in the home versus when there isn't a gun in a home. So those are some of the basic facts that we're incorporating into our campaigns. You know, we have 15 seconds in our social media campaigns to grab the attention. Of our audience to keep their attention and to deliver our fact based message, and we always end with a call to action, which might be Visit our website to learn more, or sign up to text with us so we can stay in conversation. And that's true of all of our campaigns, and they're all really positive and engaging. And in addition to our social media campaigns, we also work with a lot of content creators who are reaching their own audiences to amplify the message. And you know, our content, it all looks a little bit different. Our campaigns include our SNUG campaign. That's our longest running campaign.

Andrew Chand 10:44 

And SNUG is like safer, not using guns.

Nina Vinik 10:46 

Yes, it's also gun spelled backwards, and you snug.com. Is the website where you know anyone can can go to learn more. And then we have our newest campaign, which is called working on it, and that's a campaign that's focused on the intersection between youth mental health and gun violence, and the idea there is we're all working on something. When we're working on our mental health, we're safer without a gun around. So every campaign is a bit different. We're reaching different audiences through our different campaigns. We have a campaign that is built just for young people living in neighborhoods that are hardest hit by gun violence. That campaign is called guns change the story. It runs in specific zip codes in cities that are struggling with high rates of of gun violence. So, you know, there's something for everyone in in our content, and gun violence isn't one size fits all. And so you know, our campaigns and our content, you know, similarly, are not one size fits all.

Andrew Chand 11:51 

Yeah, really quickly. Also, you know, you have only 15 seconds in these campaigns, and most Tiktok videos are reels. But the impact, as you've shown, has actually been quite large, I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong. It's like you're able to shift young people's views by 20% just by providing some of these facts. Does that sound correct?

Nina Vinik 12:08 

That is exactly correct. So we really believe in testing everything we do and measuring the impact. And every time we've tested our approach, whether it's through our digital campaigns or through our community partner programs, we see between a 15 and 30 point shift in increased awareness of the risks that come with having and using guns, and decreased interest in future gun ownership. Now we've already reached, as you said in your intro, about 8 million young people all across the country.

Andrew Chand 12:43 

Wow, that's pretty spectacular. On the subject of different campaigns being different for different people and different areas, I sort of want to ask about the urban rural divide. And very interesting with you, sort of coming from Chicago, as you spoken about, obviously, while a lot of people may think of gun violence specifically in the urban context. There's a lot of gun ownership in rural areas, and a lot of the problems are just as equally serious there. And so when you're working on trying to change this gun culture, given that the two spaces on the whole, on average, have pretty different gun cultures to begin with, how do you sort of tailor the campaigns to the contexts that you're working in?

Nina Vinik 13:24 

Yeah, it's a great question, and we do. But the first thing I think, I would say is, you know, all of our campaigns are backed by a lot of research that we do leading up to the development of the campaign. We want to make sure we're learning and hearing from young people who we're trying to reach in the campaigns what I think doesn't matter. It's what it's what they think that matters. And so what we learned is that young people, whether they're from urban or rural or suburban communities, share this belief that having a gun will make them safer. And there is a significant population of young people in every type of community that haven't made up their minds yet about where they stand on guns and gun ownership. So that's our target audience, whether they're in urban or rural or suburban parts of the country. So there are commonalities across those audiences. Now that said, as you point out, in rural communities, there tend to be higher rates of gun ownership, you know, as a starting point. So we're all about meeting young people where they are, and so we really work to create content that's going to speak to young people who might live in rural communities, versus content that might speak to young people who live in more urban communities. We work with creators that might have audiences across those different demographics, and we. Want to make sure that the message is connecting with the audience. If it's not, that's not content that we're going to use, we're going to adapt it. We're going to use content that's going to be much more successful for the audience that we're trying to reach.

Andrew Chand 15:14 

Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Shifting gears a little bit. I do want to talk about some of the research that project unloaded has conducted and shared. Can you tell us a bit about in general, what role that research plays in the broader campaign, and share any particular studies or findings that you think are extremely important?

Nina Vinik 15:36 

Sure, so before each of our campaigns, before snug, before guns changed, the story, which is focused on primarily black and Latino teens and communities with high rates of gun violence and are working on a campaign, we did about nine months of research where we really focused on learning directly from teens in the specific audience that we're trying to reach. So in the case of working on it, that was research that really explored the intersection between youth mental health and gun violence. And what we learned there is that, you know, young people are really worried about their mental health, and they're worried about gun violence. Gun Violence is contributing to anxiety and other mental health concerns for for this generation of young people, there is not a lot of awareness though, about the risks for firearm suicide that come with access to firearms. Those facts, though, were persuasive when they were presented to young people in our study, and that creates an opportunity for this kind of risk education, right? So that we can help young people understand how a gun puts them at greater risk when they're working on their mental health. So it was those findings, and we did release a report that summarized some of those findings back in December of last year. That report is called triggering. It's available on our website, and then we use those findings to work with our creative agency partner to build that working on it campaign. So that's how we use research in our work, and we're also using our research to inform the broader gun violence prevention community and other interested stakeholders that might be working to address mental health or gun violence. We think the findings really can have a broader application

Andrew Chand 17:45 

Absolutely and sort of the whole mission of this podcast as well is evidence based solutions to gun violence. So thank you for putting out all that research. Very fascinating to look through, and so we've sort of touched on the cultural campaigns the research. I also want to ask about another cornerstone of project unloaded, which is the community partnerships on the ground. Can you tell me a bit more about those?

Nina Vinik 18:08 

Yeah, thank you for asking. We're really, really proud of this work, and frankly, it grew out of demand that we heard from local organizations on the ground, kind of during our first year who came to us and said, Hey, we love what you're doing at Project unloaded. How do we get our young people involved in your work? And I'll be honest, we didn't have a good answer to that question. So we hired a great young member of our team to build out what became our community partner program. We piloted it in Chicago back in 2023 as a intensive summer program where we combine firearm risk education with social media skill building. So we've come to call the program social media for safer communities, and the idea is to help young people learn the skills that come with social media marketing. You know, a lot of young people want to be content creators, so we're giving them the skills and the tools they need to do that content creation, and also helping them understand why guns make them less safe, and how they can use their own voices and platforms to shift cultural narratives driving gun use in their own communities. So in the summer, they are building their own social media campaigns to reach their peers with the message that guns make them less safe, and then we have an after school version of that program as well. And our target population for our community partner programs is young people who have a personal, personal story with gun violence. They've been personally impacted by gun violence. We started in Chicago. We've. It's expanded to Sacramento. We've been in in Philadelphia as well. And the programs are really all about kind of giving young people their own platform to create content that reaches their peers, with the goal of shifting these these norms that are driving gun use project unloaded. Then takes the content that the young people in our programs create, and we feed that back into our campaigns. So it really, truly is peer to peer messaging and content and storytelling, kind of reaching young people in their offline networks as well as their online networks to kind of make the message sort of mutually reinforcing.

Andrew Chand 20:50 

Yeah, well, that's just fascinating. I really like the idea of sort of pairing the demand for those social media skills with the demand to learn the facts. It might not be salient to them right off the bat, but that's such a cool idea. You spoke a lot about sort of empowering the young people to run their own campaigns. Can you tell me a bit more about the youth leaders that you guys sort of highlight, or that you're able to find, and if you have a particular story or anything you'd like to share, I think that'd be great.

Nina Vinik 21:15 

Yeah. So we have now two different programs for our sort of youth leadership development. The first is our Youth Council, which has been kind of a core of our work at Project, unloaded from the very beginning. These are high school and college age students from all across the country. They are truly the heart and soul and backbone of everything we do at Project, unloaded. They contribute to all of our campaigns. They contribute to the design of our community partner programs. We just launched a new toolkit for young people. Our youth council members were advisors in the development of the toolkit. You know, they tell us what's going to work and what's not going to work. For their peers, they tell us, if something is cringe, and, you know, believe me, that is all we need to hear. We we will adapt or or pull anything that just doesn't, you know, pass their smell test. They are fabulous young leaders. I cannot say enough about them. We've had sufficient demand for participation in our youth council that we've created a second group, which we call our Creator core. And these are really young people who just want to be involved in content creation. And they, you know, contribute to all of our campaigns with their own content creation skills, also a group of young people from all across the country. I think the you know, one of the most interesting parts of of that leadership development work is that our community partner programs have become a pipeline to broader leadership opportunities, either through the Creator core or the youth council, so young people who learn about us through our community partner programs then go on to leadership opportunities with with Project unloaded. And one example I will give is Leah McLean is currently a second year member of our youth council. She started as a participant in our community partner program in Chicago. She liked what she saw. She liked what she was doing. That led her to apply to be a member of our youth council. She was a standout member of the youth council last year, and then reapplied to come back for a second year, and now is one of our, you know, really just incredible young leaders. And there are other examples, like like Leah. So you know, we're really developing the next generation of leaders of the gun violence prevention movement through through all of our programming, and, you know, they, you know, make me so proud and humbled every day. They are just really essential part of everything we do at Project Unloaded.

Andrew Chand 24:16 

Yeah, that's just very inspiring and so great to hear about young people sort of taking charge of really an issue that's sort of going to become their story, and it affects their lives quite substantially, as we've talked about. I want to shift gears again and ask a question about the theory of change that's sort of underlying project unloaded, and so, from my understanding, like your program seeks to shift gun culture and those attitudes to change the narrative surrounding firearm ownership and all of that. Basically, it's sort of a demand focused strategy. It's aimed at reducing the population's demand for guns. But I have a question, what would you say to people who might feel skeptical of this approach, who may feel that in order for there to be this change, that we're. We're all craving. Quite frankly, the government needs to pass laws and maybe restrict something on the supply side. Are there key data points or arguments that you would offer to those people who think, oh, this demand stuff is really important, but maybe we need to do more on the supply side?

Nina Vinik 25:15 

Well, I think both the supply side and the demand side are really important. And you know what I would say is that, you know, legislative approaches, policy approaches, I think, have proven to be necessary, but not sufficient, to address this problem. So as long as people believe that having guns will make them safer, and as long as they're acting on that belief which the data indicate that they are and bringing more guns into our homes and communities. It's going to be really hard for policy based, supply side based solutions to get ahead of this problem, and that's why we also need to think about demand side solutions. Now to those who are skeptical, I would say there's a model for what we're building at Project unloaded, and that model is cigarettes. So 25 years ago, about a quarter of US teens were cigarette smokers. Today, it's less than 3% and that's contributed to a big drop in lung cancer rates, and one of the reasons for that drop was the work of organizations like the truth initiative. What the truth initiative did was run creative cultural campaigns that were all about empowering young people with information. So they didn't tell young people what to do or what to think, but they brought them the facts about the risks of cigarette smoking to their health, and armed with that information, young people drove a cultural shift in the way we think about cigarettes effectively. In the span of a generation, cigarette smoking went from cool to uncool, with young people leading the way. That's the model that we're bringing to the issue of guns and gun violence.

Andrew Chand 27:18 

That is such a perfect metaphor, if that's the correct word. And that makes a lot of sense. I read an article that I think that you had written in Huff Post talking about you had sat on an airplane and tried to talk to somebody who was very much a two a enthusiast, a second amendment enthusiast. And you make a really good point. You can talk about the legislation, the laws, the rules, all you want, but as long as people are still demanding them, that's going to make any change on the supply side really difficult, because the backlash is going to be there, and if you can change that demand, it may not only directly reduce the gun violence through the demand for guns, but also make those supply side regulations a little bit easier to pass. Is that correct? Is that 100% yes, you said it very well, excellent. I really think that's such an innovative theory of change. I haven't seen much else like it out there, but super important to remember and consider, sort of going back to Project unloaded main mission about changing those attitudes about making sure people know that having a gun makes them less safe. Can you talk about through all the different strategies that project unloaded has tried, if there have been any that have been the most effective in convincing people that in reality, they are indeed not safer with guns in the home or around them?

Nina Vinik 28:39 

Well, I'll give you an example that I think is really interesting and has been really successful for us so far. So this year, we launched another new campaign, which is called leave guns in the game. And this is a campaign that we launched with a set of partners who are gaming creators online. And the reason we wanted to try a campaign like this is again, based on our research, which found that about half of young people say they are playing video games every day, and about a third of young people, including about half of young teen boys and men say that they are first learning about guns through video games. Now, video games often get blamed for gun violence. Mass shootings in particular, there's no evidence of that. So you know, it's a bit of a red herring to say that video games cause gun violence, but video games can be a place that offer an opportunity for norm changing and risk education when it comes to guns. So because so many young boys in particular are learning about guns through video games, we thought that was an interesting way to reach an. Important audience with the facts about why guns make us less safe. So this idea came from our youth council. So the name of the campaign is, leave guns in the game. And the idea is, guns can be a lot of fun in video games, but in real life, guns add risk. So by working with partners who are trusted creators in the gaming space, right with audiences that you know, look to them and follow them because of what they do. You know, in the gaming arena, we're opening up a safe space for a conversation about why guns in real life add risk. So we've experimented with some, you know, Twitch live streams where, you know, members of our team or into gaming are playing live first person shooter games with some of these creators, and as they're playing the game, they're talking about the campaign, sharing information about Project unloaded and facts about why, you know, guns are putting us at greater risk. And what we've seen through that campaign is an incredibly positive and engaged response from from the audience, it's really remark, I'm not a gamer, but it was remarkable to watch the chat in these live streams with people commenting about different ways that gun violence has impacted them, you know, telling stories like, oh, you know, my cousin was was shot and killed, you know, few years ago. Or, you know, in, you know, my friend's house, you know, they had a gun at home, his little brother, you know, found the gun and, you know, was able to fire the gun. We're creating a space that feels safe to lift up these stories. And often, you know, in online spaces, there's a lot of pro gun content, but, you know, not really a counter weight where you know people, young people feel safe to tell their stories and to have a different conversation about guns. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to meet young people where they are, you know, in video games, or, you know, with their love of video games, and provide that safe space to have a different conversation. It's been really successful for us, really effective. And I think that's just one example of the impact that we're seeing from the kind of work that we're doing.

Andrew Chand  

Again, sort of using the video games as a place where you can reach people who might not otherwise be able to be reached with this information that we know is effective. You know, they may not read the research papers, but everybody plays Fortnite now and then. So you can see this information that can really change your views and change your life.

Nina Vinik 

Yeah, exactly. And you know, one thing we learned through our research is, you know, for young people, you know, they're kind of turned off by the polarized nature of the gun debate, and so we really avoid that very polarizing, you know, partisan conversation about guns. We don't work with any creators who are, you know, sort of social issue commentators, sort of, first and foremost, our Creator partners are into sports or cooking or, you know, lifestyle content or gaming. And again, what we found is that no surprise, most people don't want to talk about gun violence. They don't want to read about it. They it's not something they're really interested in seeing in their feeds. So what we have found to be most effective is to enter the conversation through a side door, not through the front door. And I think that has, I think, really been maybe our most important insight in how to connect with young people on this topic, how to bring them in to the conversation, how to make that feel like a safe space for them to engage in this conversation when you know, a sort of front door conversation about guns and gun violence may not be the most successful path.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, we're nearing the end of our conversation before I ask our big final question that we ask everybody, is there anything else you'd like to share? And if nothing comes to mind immediately, do you think you could tell our listeners a bit about how they might be able to get involved with Project unloaded?

Nina Vinik  

Well, what I was going to share was, please, do get involved with us. Follow us on social. We are on all the platforms at Project unloaded. If you are a member of Gen Z, you know, consider applying to be part of our youth council or our Creator core. There are lots of ways to get involved. Sign up to text with us. We'd love to be in conversation with you in real life or online there, there are all kinds of ways to do that, so please, please. Do you know, stay connected?

Andrew Chand  

Yes. Well, thank you for that information. Now, our last question, I would like to describe it as comically big. It probably does not have one answer, and that's actually, I think, the point, while we ask it, we sort of want to get all of our guests perspective on this, and maybe sort of looking back and collecting the ideas we can gain some insights. But the question I'm going to ask is, what does the solution to gun violence look like to you?

Nina Vinik  

Fewer guns in fewer people's hands. We want to continue to reach more young people every day. We've already reached about a quarter of US teens. We're not even four years old, so we're really just getting started. We hope over the next three years to reach more than half of all young people with our campaigns and our content and our message, all with the goal of having young people decide that they don't need guns to be safe. That will mean fewer guns in our homes and communities, and if we can do that, that's going to make us safer.

Andrew Chand  

Miss Vinik, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciated our conversation.

Nina Vinik 

Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Andrew Chand   

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of solving gun violence. For more information on Nina's work and project unloaded, find them on all social media sites, at Project unloaded, or visit project unloaded.org to learn more about the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions project, you can visit us at gvsp.virginia.edu Please make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you can be notified as soon as we post our next episode. We'll see you next time you.