Caheri Gutierrez, before the shooting.

Last weekend was an especially violent one, even for Oakland. On Friday, four people were killed, and over the rest of the weekend, 11 people were shot, though not fatally. There were 126 homicides [PDF] in Oakland last year, cementing the city’s distinction as one of California’s more violent urban centers. Oakland certainly doesn’t have a lock on gun violence. Other cities like Stockton are struggling, too. But the situation in Oakland has been going on for some time now, and locals are giving a lot of thought to what it means to live under the constant threat of violence.

As part of KQED’s occasional series, “What’s Your Story,” Oakland native Caheri Gutierrez (pronounced “Carrie”) shares her story about working with at-risk high schools students after she herself was shot in the face as a teenager. Guiterrez is a Violence Prevention Educator for Youth Alive, an Oakland non-profit with a mission to prevent youth violence. Below are excerpts of my conversation with her:

“I was just in the car and all of a sudden I started to feel like I was getting electrified. It was really intense shocks from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. The guy that was driving, my friend, starts screaming that he’s been shot.

I reached over to him to try to help his hand and that’s when he looked at me, and he was like, ‘Oh my God, Caheri. It’s you. They shot you. They shot you.’ I touched my face and my hand just went inside of my face.

Five days later, I wake up at Highland Hospital and my hands are tied to the hospital bed. I have tubes coming in and out of my nose and out of my mouth. It was hard.

An x-ray of Caheri Guiterrez's jaw soon after she was admitted to Oakland's Highland Hospital.

Some of my family members are, you know, gang-related, and so is my brother. And I remember my uncle asking my brother, ‘Who did it? Where are they from? What are we going to do? Are we going to get them?’And things like that. I couldn’t talk but I was just like, ‘NO. This cannot happen to anybody else.’

While I was at the hospital I was connected with an intervention specialist. Her name was Tammy Cloud. I got out of the hospital a month later. And Tammy comes to my house and she was like, ‘I think you should come to this program and talk to the high school students about getting shot and how you think about life now.’

Besides my personal story, I teach them a curriculum about violence. It makes me feel like I make a difference. It makes me feel very hopeful because I am a victim to the violence that happens in Oakland. And I’m one of the many victims. And when you talk to someone and you can give them an example of what can happen, I think they really soak that in and they think twice about hanging out with people who are gang-related, or even picking up a gun.  Ever since then, honestly, I feel like getting shot happened for a reason.”

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Listen to Caheri Gutierrez’s story:

You can also read Caheri Guiterrez’s blog.

(Image: Kaiser Health News)

We think of the Centers for Disease Control as collecting data on just about everything. But scientists say a lack of funding and political pressure had long prevented them from researching gun violence. And not just the possible causes of violence — but data collection around specific acts of violence.

On Wednesday, the president addressed the need to look for those causes in his proposals to curb gun violence. In a section [PDF] titled “End the Freeze on Gun Violence Research,” the president directs the CDC to research gun violence and also wants Congress to pony up $20 million to expand the national database on violent deaths.

“We don’t benefit from ignorance,” Obama said. “We don’t benefit from not knowing the science from this epidemic of violence.”

From the president’s plan:

… for years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other scientific agencies have been barred by Congress from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” and some members of Congress have claimed this prohibition also bans the CDC from conducting any research on the causes of gun violence. However, research on gun violence is not advocacy; it is critical public health research that gives all Americans information they need.

Larry Cohen, executive director of Oakland’s Prevention Institute, called the backing of research “perhaps the most important part” of the President’s proposals.

“People have been working for years to prevent violence, but it’s like we’re working with blinders on, because there are certain very obvious places we’re unable to look,” Cohen said. ”Clearly there’s no way to look at the epidemic and not realize that guns are a clear element of homicide, and yet we’re told, ‘don’t look at guns.’”

NBC News quoted scientists who were equally enthusiastic about the president’s plans. From NBC:

(Scientists say) pro-gun advocates — including the National Rifle Association — had choked off funding for CDC firearms research starting in the mid-1990s and imposed a chilling effect on those who dared to pursue it.

“He’s saying this is very important and I’m going to back you on this,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, president of the Task Force for Global Health and director of the CDC’s Center for Injury Prevention and Control from 1994 to 1999. “Basically, they’ve been terrorized by the NRA.”

If you’re wondering how we got here, Slate published a great explainer:

In the 1990s, politicians backed by the NRA attacked researchers for publishing data on firearm research. For good measure, they also went after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for funding the research. According to the NRA, such science is not “legitimate.” To make sure federal agencies got the message, Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) sponsored an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, the exact amount it had spent on firearms research the previous year.

To be fair, Dickey later recanted and published an opinion piece in the Washington Post, titled “We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it.”

Now researchers will get a better opportunity to look.

It sounds good, but as Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center said today in a statement, that’s been tried already — and it didn’t work. “There were TWO armed law enforcement agents present at Columbine High School during the assault by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that left 15 dead and 23 wounded. They twice engaged and fired at Eric Harris in an effort to stop the shooting, but were unsuccessful because they were outgunned by the assault weapons wielded by the two teens.”

And if you’re thinking that having a gun protects you from guns, think again. After all, Rachel Davis, Managing Director of the Prevention Institute points out, in Newtown, Adam Lanza first killed his mother, a gun enthusiast. “The first victim of this shooting was a gun owner who was not able to stop this from happening,” Davis says. “The problem of guns is they raise the risk of lethality.”

We are a society that craves simple solutions, yet violence is a complex problem. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. While Davis favors an assault weapons ban, she says that’s only one piece of a comprehensive approach. “Another piece,” she adds, “is addressing mental health needs — that includes access to high quality mental health services, reducing the trauma people are exposed to and then addressing the trauma.”

Mass shootings in Newtown understandably capture widespread media attention, but remember that children are murdered every day by firearms. In 2010, according to CDC numbers, 1,260 children up to age 18 were killed by someone who used a gun. That’s more than three children every day — or 21 children in the week since Newtown.

Davis argues for broad community-based prevention programs. Davis points to “GRYD” — the Gang Reduction Youth Development program which has been in place for several years in Los Angeles. GRYD is multi-pronged. “It’s not one single thing,” Davis says, “but a combination of strategies and efforts that are coordinated in the neighborhoods that are most affected by violence.”

For example, in LA’s successful Summer Night Lights program, parks are open after dark — prime gang-activity time — with free food and extra programs. Families flock there.

And it’s effective. Here are some statistics from the Summer Night Lights website:

(Image from Summer Night Lights website)

Got that? “Gang related homicide” down 57 percent — those are real lives saved.

In a profile, the LA Times showed how GRYD also takes at-risk youngsters and not just stops violence but puts kids on a better path:

According to a study by the Urban Institute, since GRYD began operating, gang crimes have fallen by 21.6%, faster than crime overall in the city; in the two years before it opened, they dropped 14.9%. Moreover, GRYD is reaching large numbers of at-risk youngsters: Young people enrolled in the program were 29% less likely to skip class, while those from the same neighborhoods not in the program increased the amount they cut class by 53%.

What all these statistics show is that violence is preventable. “There’s growing evidence for it,” Davis concludes, “but there’s no simple solution for it. We need to put in comprehensive solutions that are working in places around the country.”

Learn More:

KQED Forum:
Living with Gun Violence

KQED Lowdown Blog:
The Geography of U.S. Gun Homicides;
The United States of Firearms: America’s Love Affair with the Gun

Fresh Air:
Assault-Style Weapons in the Civilian Market