The awful shooting at Umpqua Community College is terribly upsetting.

I’ve talked with Melissa about it a lot.

One of the changes since she first started teaching a little more than ten years ago is that all teachers now ‘watch a video at the beginning of the school year showing us what to do if there is a shooter and how we should have a weapon handy.’

She has actually spent time visualizing what to do if a shooter came to her school. I cringed and cried as she texted me “BTW, my weapon is a metal garbage can, and I’m going with an upswing to the head.”

While  discussions seem to focus on who’s right about how to fix the problem, Melissa’s words ring very true:

“I agree that one thing won’t fix it, but doing nothing won’t fix it either.”

While reading an op ed piece by Dr. Sanja Gupta on CNN a few days ago, I decided to learn more about epidemiologist Gary Slutkin.

Gary Slutkin is an epidemiologist, an innovator in violence reduction and the founder/executive director of Cure Violence, formerly known as CeaseFire. The program is being replicated in several US cities as well as abroad.

After a decade of fighting epidemic diseases in Africa, Slutkin returned to the United States began looking at gun violence, noting that its spread followed those same patterns of the infectious diseases he battled in Africa.

In part, his programs place “interrupters” within communities to stop the spread. “Interrupters are trained health professionals who act as mediators and go to the epicenter of violent behavior.” They don’t judge. They try and understand what’s behind the need to be violent.

His ideas focus on using science as a part of the solution to cure violence.

Here’s a video of Gary Slutkin speaking at TedMed, a global community dedicated to unlocking imagination in service of health and medicine.

Let’s treat violence like a contagious disease