Each year, the Chicago Police Department seizes about 10,000 illegal guns and arrests thousands of people for illegal gun possession. Yet guns remain plentiful and easy to acquire, and young people who live in dangerous neighborhoods say they feel unsafe without them.
Now, one group is trying a different tactic, telling those youths: Keep your guns if you must, but learn how to handle them safely.
The approach uses the philosophy of harm reduction, better known in the arenas of drug addiction and public health. Harm reduction aims to be practical and nonjudgmental, offering help without insisting on abstinence — for example, giving clean needles to heroin users or condoms to teenagers.
In much the same way, Stick Talk, a Chicago collective, has taken to teaching small groups of teenagers and young adults skills like first aid for gunshot wounds and how to avoid accidental discharges.
“We found out that a lot of the stuff they teach our children are not working,” said Malik Cole, 27, who conducts Stick Talk workshops in a state-run juvenile lockup where he himself was detained as a youth. “Kids still dying.”
Stick Talk, he said, asked young people what they wanted to learn “to help them survive in life.”
Owning a gun is illegal for people under 21 in Chicago, and Stick Talk does not teach participants how to fire weapons. It does teach them how to carry, clean and store a gun and how to comport oneself during a police stop. Lifesaving techniques are taught by Ujimaa Medics, a Black health collective.
The approach is similar to that of a safe injection site, where people use illegal drugs under supervision. That model has gained support among left-leaning and moderate lawmakers as a way to prevent fatal overdoses but has also faced criticisms from some who worry that it makes drug problems worse.
There are limits to the analogy, however. For one thing, academic experts point out, while drugs harm the user, guns can kill others, endangering everyone in a community.
Stick Talk participants are paid a small sum to attend the sessions. Some come voluntarily, while others may be court-ordered to go to a certain number of meetings.
Audrey Dunford, who lives in the North Lawndale neighborhood, works at a restorative justice court there, where the focus is on accountability rather than punishment. She refers defendants accused of gun crimes to Stick Talk, where they talk through hypothetical conflicts.
“We understand that they’re going to carry guns,” she said. “But we want to impress upon them to be thinking all the time. Just because you got a gun doesn’t mean you can just shoot people.”
The group says that carrying a gun is not an inherently violent act, and that too many people are being arrested for possession rather than for causing harm. “The war on drugs has evolved into the war on guns,” said ethan ucker, one of the founders of the group, who notates his name in lowercase. “It’s the same carceral infrastructure that was built up and built out during the war on drugs that’s now being repurposed in this new way.”
Of course, not everyone who carries a weapon does so for self-protection. Police are increasingly finding guns that are souped up to make them more lethal, with add-ons like extended magazines and Glock switches, small devices that convert handguns into automatic weapons.
“From the left we’re starting to hear arguments about, ‘Why are we so worried about gun carrying?’” said Jens Ludwig, the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “My guess is that few people would actually make a conceptual argument that the world we want to live in is one in which everybody is carrying guns.”
Studies of harm reduction in other contexts have generally found that it makes things safer without increasing undesirable behavior — needle exchanges generally did not, for example, drive up the number of drug users or cause them to use more, and giving out condoms did not induce teenagers to have sex.
Stick Talk operates under the radar, on a shoestring budget funded by foundations, individual donations and fees. Garien Gatewood, Chicago’s deputy mayor for community safety, was not familiar with it. But he said the city has embraced progressive approaches to crime reduction, adopting a “People’s Plan for Community Safety.” Over the last year or so, violent crime in Chicago has plummeted.
“We have to reduce the harm,” Mr. Gatewood said. “There has been purposeful disinvestment in communities that has led to harm.”
Stick Talk has forged partnerships with a few criminal justice agencies, including the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, which offers Stick Talk workshops in its Chicago detention center.
Robert Vickery, the acting director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, said that in his experience arrests and convictions do not stop young people from using guns, but approaches like Stick Talk’s might reduce violence. And, he added, “It’s not like we’re just doing Stick Talk. We’re also providing education and employment and all sorts of other supports.”
“Stick” is slang for gun, and Stick Talk developed out of the turmoil of 2016, when violence in Chicago surged to its highest level in 20 years, with more than 700 homicides and 3,500 shootings. A group of community organizers concerned about the violence held a series of listening sessions. Mr. ucker described the participants as “young people who are really intensively criminalized” and who had been failed by existing programs.
He and his co-director, Brandon Daurham, did not realize it at the time, but they were taking a page from the harm reduction playbook, which insists that drug users have a say in programs designed to serve them and sometimes pays them to participate.
Young people explained that their neighborhoods were laced with invisible lines between territories claimed by gangs or crews, and that they could be targeted even if they were not in a gang, based on where they lived or who their relatives were.
Packing a gun was a rational response, they said. And if they were required to travel to job training and other services without their guns, they said, it was not just difficult but dangerous to attend.
So Stick Talk set up small, unmarked neighborhood “hubs” that can be reached without running afoul of territorial boundaries so stark that in one area, two hubs are on either side of one street. The groups acknowledges that many of its attendees are “both authors and survivors of gun-related harms.”
The harm reduction movement still faces criticism from right-leaning leaders concerned that it enables illegal activities. But it has been largely successful in its fight to reduce the demonization of drug users, measured by the public’s increasing preference for treatment over punishment.
Stick Talk asks for a more challenging empathy shift, using the tagline, “Do we dare love the shooters?”
That pitch became harder to make in 2020, when gun violence began to surge across the country and became the leading cause of death for children in the United States. Police forces responded to the rising violence by stepping up seizures and arrests.
But even as gun possession arrests increased, advocates and academic researchers said, enforcement disproportionately hit Black and Latino people without targeting those most likely to commit violence.
At a Stick Talk location in Englewood, a predominantly Black section of Chicago’s South Side, six teenagers gathered recently to describe what it was like to be in the program, which is modeled after restorative justice circles. Attendees were told in advance that they did not have to give their full names to avoid drawing the attention of the police. One 17-year-old, Ariel, came straight from a funeral repast for a friend who had been shot.
Participants said they were initially drawn by the $25 they receive for showing up but had come to appreciate the frank conversations on topics that were taboo at school. Sometimes they get a history lesson on how gun policy in the United States was shaped in response to armed groups like the Black Panthers.
They also learn about bank accounts and job applications — “real life stuff, like how to get to a future,” Ariel said.
Some said that talking about their shared trauma allowed them to open up. “I don’t have patience, but when I’m in the circle it builds momentum for me to allow patience to happen,” said Jamontay, 19. “My anger — it was bad, but I actually worked on it. I think about what I do instead of causing action and destruction.”
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