Jonylah Watkins was a 6-month-old baby whose death seemed random; however, Morgan Freeman explain that Jonylah's father was the target of the attack.
Andrew Papachristos says that the attributes of being young and male are "risk factors" of becoming a victim of gun violence. He uses social network analysis to study gun violence. The anterior cingulate cortex regulates decision-making.
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Andrew Papachristos says that the attributes of being young and male are "risk factors" of becoming a victim of gun violence. He uses social network analysis to study gun violence. The anterior cingulate cortex regulates decision-making.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season8
#episode4
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#morganfreeman
#spacedocumentary
#crime
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Every 17 minutes in America, someone is killed by a gun.
00:07It's a wave of violence that political debate can't seem to stop.
00:14Can science point the way forward?
00:17By pinpointing how the shootings spread,
00:22predicting gun crimes before they happen,
00:24and uncovering how guns infect our minds?
00:31Is this an epidemic that can be cured?
00:35Could gun crime be a virus?
00:43Space, time, life itself.
00:48The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:06If gun violence is a disease, we are suffering mightily.
01:12In Chicago, where shootings on a summer weekend soar into the double digits.
01:20In Newtown, where 20 children never came home from school.
01:26In Orlando, where a night of dancing became a bloodbath.
01:31Every day, new holes are opened up in some family's life.
01:36Is gun control the answer?
01:39Or is it safer to carry one?
01:41The answer may come not from politicians,
01:47but from scientists,
01:49who are tracking the spread of gun crime like a biological pandemic.
01:55Reports of a school shooting in progress are coming out of Colorado today.
02:00They started shooting everyone in the cafeteria,
02:03and then you could hear them laughing and running upstairs.
02:05Since Columbine, the heartbreak has been broadcast live.
02:10Since Orlando, it's been streamed.
02:13The names have been running together.
02:15It's a flood of data.
02:17How do we understand it?
02:21Sherry Towers is a statistician.
02:23In her work, streams of data tell stories.
02:27One of the things that I've noticed as I've been sitting here is that once people lock their bikes there,
02:32they tend to walk underneath that tree and go to the path.
02:37Bicycle.
02:38Lock.
02:39Tree.
02:40Repeat.
02:41Sherry can make a prediction.
02:44Soon, bikers will wear a path in the grass.
02:47We can use mathematical and statistical models to study far more complex patterns than just the ones we're seeing on the school campus today.
02:55For instance, these models can be used to predict the spread of disease within a population.
03:00We can use these models to try to forecast trends in the stock market.
03:04We can also use these models to examine earthquakes and try to predict when and where there will be aftershocks.
03:09But one day in 2014, Sherry's safe world of spreadsheets and stats came unmoored.
03:20She was heading to a meeting at Purdue University when the event was canceled.
03:27A student had been shot on campus.
03:30I realized that that was the third school shooting I'd heard about in approximately a 10-day period.
03:35And I wondered to myself if this was just a statistical fluke or whether there was other patterns involved.
03:42Then Sherry had a radical idea.
03:45Could the media itself be the mechanism of transmission?
03:49Could stories about shootings actually lead to more shootings, triggering an epidemic?
03:56We decided to focus on gun tragedies that get the most media attention.
04:00And those are school shootings and mass killings.
04:02Sherry's team went story by story and broke the events into discrete pieces of data.
04:09Type of shooting.
04:12Map location.
04:14Date.
04:16And time.
04:18It was the largest, most comprehensive survey of its kind.
04:22Was each shooting an isolated event?
04:25With all the data in, Sherry was able to isolate a pattern.
04:35It didn't matter where an event occurred.
04:39The important variable was when.
04:42What we found was there is very strong evidence of clustering in time.
04:46When there is an event that occurs, one of these gun tragedies tends to trigger a similar tragedy in the very near future.
04:52And this bunching together in time is actually the hallmark of contagion.
04:58We typically use the word contagion to describe the spread of diseases.
05:03But Sherry says it also applies to mass shootings.
05:08It appears that gun violence really does spread like a contagious disease.
05:11Unlike influenza that spreads by direct person-to-person contact, the medium for spreading the contagion is media itself.
05:20And as with the biological virus, Sherry's data show there is a definite period during which any one incident of gun violence remains contagious.
05:33What we find is that contagious period seems to last around 13 days, which also seems to be approximately the same time period of the attention span that's given to these high-profile shootings.
05:46Like for instance, the Newtown tragedy or the San Bernardino tragedy.
05:50Thirteen days, one famously unlucky number.
05:55Sherry hopes she'll never make another discovery like it.
05:58This is by far the hardest study emotionally that we've ever undertaken.
06:05You're reading the details about how children have gotten killed.
06:08And you realize that these are entire families who aren't here anymore.
06:12Sherry believes that as long as the media keeps giving mass shootings wall-to-wall coverage, the gun virus will continue to spread and claim even more victims.
06:23Unless someone intervenes.
06:27He's never in. Hold the shots fired.
06:30Mass shootings are the most visible aspect of America's problem with gun violence.
06:35We need a bear catch.
06:36But vastly more Americans are killed in isolated shootings on city streets.
06:41And many of these killings receive little or no media coverage.
06:44But renowned epidemiologist Gary Slutkin thinks they too bear the hallmarks of a virus.
06:52Gary made his name by fighting contagious diseases all around the world.
06:57But when he finally returned to Chicago, he realized his hometown harbored an epidemic of a different kind.
07:03When I began to look at violence in Chicago, I didn't really know very much about it.
07:10But I did ask first to see the charts and graphs and maps.
07:14And the data on it looked exactly like the epidemic maps that I had been working with and all these other problems.
07:22To Gary's trained eye, the clustering of gun crimes resembled the way a contagious disease sweeps through densely populated areas.
07:31He'd seen cholera do this in refugee camps in Somalia during the 1990s.
07:38So what we have here is a representation of a refugee camp.
07:42The white chips here are representing the population.
07:46In the red, a person with cholera.
07:49And when the infection comes, it can spread from one person to another.
07:54Stopping cholera isn't complicated.
08:02A strict regimen of washing hands, boiling water and quarantine will do it.
08:08But Gary struggled to get these practices adopted in Somalia.
08:12Because the refugees were suspicious of outsiders.
08:16Then Gary had an inspiration.
08:19He could hire refugees and train them as health workers.
08:24These locals successfully interrupted the spread of the disease because they had what Gary did not.
08:30But Gary did not.
08:34Street cred.
08:37In Chicago, Gary saw a city repeating the mistake he'd once made himself.
08:43Fighting an outbreak with outsiders who weren't trusting.
08:46The cops pulled up and they left. They're scared. They're scared of the community.
08:53So Gary founded an organization called Cure Violence.
08:58With the mission to hire and train trusted local aid workers.
09:03He calls them the interrupters.
09:06Almost all of them know the violence of the streets firsthand.
09:09Well, I've been shot five times, you know, on different occasions.
09:14The man that was watching us got shot in his head.
09:17I was part of the violence. Now I'm part of the solution.
09:20Because of who they are, interrupters can go where police cannot.
09:25They don't carry handcuffs and they don't serve search warrants.
09:30Instead, they carry a simple message.
09:33You don't need a gun to settle an argument.
09:36I'm crazy, man.
09:38You two guys, man, y'all been around here on a lot of bullshit, won't for y'all?
09:41Robbing people, breaking the windows, all kinds of stuff.
09:45Don't get it all twisted. Once upon a time, this man was out here, too.
09:49Through the interrupters, Gary keeps the focus where he thinks it belongs.
09:54On preventing disease, not punishing crimes.
09:57So, Jake, are you from this community?
09:59Hmm. You're gonna be hearing gunshots tonight?
10:01Probably.
10:02Because retaliation, whatever happened yesterday, it's a cycle.
10:06If you want to use violence and shoot somebody as a way to solve your differences,
10:10we're trying to say that's not the way to go.
10:11Right.
10:12Because you can't take back a life.
10:14It's a simple but revolutionary approach.
10:16And it has shown dramatic results.
10:19We started in February. By March, it was already 67% down.
10:23It was amazing.
10:25There was this park across the street that they'd never used.
10:27And now their kids were playing there.
10:30The epidemic's no longer there.
10:35Gary has now rolled out cure of violence in locations across the country.
10:40On average, the program has reduced shootings by 44% and killings by up to 56% in the neighborhoods it targets.
10:50It's an approach born from medical techniques.
10:54To Gary, its success proves gun crime is no different from a virus.
11:00You can't see gun crime under a microscope.
11:06But if it spreads like a virus, if we can fight it like we fight a virus,
11:12maybe we need to stop thinking about gun crime as a political issue and start treating it as a medical issue.
11:20Some researchers already are.
11:23They've discovered a new way to predict shootings and to stop them.
11:29Every virus spreads in its own unique way.
11:34Mosquitoes spread malaria.
11:37The common cold relies on a sneeze to spread its germs through the air.
11:43On the internet, memes go viral when they spread from person to person across a social network.
11:50If we're going to stem the epidemic of gun violence, we have to discover the precise means of its transmission.
11:58In Chicago, the police department is trying to do just that by launching a high-tech and highly controversial program to reduce gun crime.
12:11This is the heart of the operation.
12:14It connects to 29,000 surveillance cameras.
12:19It has microphones to record gunshots in real time.
12:24And the brain behind all of this is an algorithm designed to predict who is going to be the next victim of a gun crime before the crime happens.
12:34It was developed by Illinois Tech Professor Miles Wernick.
12:38The algorithm tries to see how many times have you been shot recently, how many times have you been arrested on things like weapons charges.
12:48And all of those play into a pattern which turns out to be very accurate in predicting a person's risk.
12:55Miles developed his algorithm from one he'd used to detect the spread of cancer cells in MRI scans.
13:02But Chicago PD Deputy Chief Jonathan Lewin has used it to develop a politically charged heat list.
13:10There are 400 people in Chicago most likely to be involved in violent crime.
13:17So we were wondering could we look at person-based prediction methods and could we look at a way to develop a risk score for a specific person's likelihood for becoming involved in future gun crimes.
13:28And this is a subject who, as you can see, was first arrested when he was 13.
13:33He's 14 in that picture.
13:34So he's 15.
13:37And as we see too often, this subject ended up being killed, fatal, multiple gunshot wounds.
13:43Everything we're doing is trying to prevent this.
13:46Is the heat list government overreach?
13:49An invasion of privacy?
13:52Or can such tightly targeted policing actually stop the spread of gun violence?
13:56Yale professor and Chicago native Andrew Papacristos believes we need more and better data to predict and prevent the spread of urban crime.
14:06His social statistics work was the inspiration for Chicago's current program.
14:12So really my stock in trade is dealing with big data sets.
14:16Data sets like arrest records, victimization records, census records, survey records, and pulling them all together.
14:20So when I was growing up in Chicago, there were 800, 900, nearing 1,000 homicides a year.
14:27Then kids all around me were getting pulled into gangs, other types of stuff.
14:31Still, I've never had anybody pull a gun on me.
14:33I've never been shot at.
14:34The question is why?
14:36Andrew doesn't believe he just got lucky.
14:39His research shows that gun crime is tied to limited networks of people, far smaller networks than you might expect.
14:48And you don't have to be a criminal to be a victim.
14:52Janilah Watkins was just six months old when she was shot to death.
14:57She was lying in the backseat of a car while her father changed her diaper.
15:01She was so innocent. Her murder looked truly random, and I was interested to see how random it actually was.
15:08Investigators learned Janilah's father was the target of the attack.
15:13To the media, her death was a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
15:20But as a statistician, Andrew wanted to know whether Janilah's death could have been predicted.
15:25Janilah didn't have almost any of the risk factors that we usually look at in his models.
15:32Being young, being male, living in a particular neighborhood, being part of a street gang.
15:37But what those really tell you are about aggregate risks.
15:40The vast majority of people with those attributes, they never shoot anybody, nor do they ever get shot.
15:45To find Janilah's risk factor, Andrew peered into the network of people around her,
15:50using a forensic tool called social network analysis.
15:57It measures relationships between people, counting their number and their strength.
16:03Who were Janilah's parents?
16:06Who were their friends and their friends' friends?
16:10All of those connections carry risk factors.
16:14So one of the variables that really helps you identify who's at risk, who's a potential victim,
16:19is exposure to violence.
16:21Even if you're not directly engaging in these sorts of incidents, but people around you are,
16:26it can increase your individual probability of getting shot upwards to 500 to 900%.
16:32For Janilah, the greatest risks stemmed from her father.
16:36He had been shot in the past, and almost 40% of his associates have been victims of violence.
16:42Statistics don't assign blame to anyone, but mathematically speaking, anyone belonging to her father's social network faced dramatically higher risks.
16:55If her father is literally living in a world where his friends are getting shot, she's at risk by her own connections to this network.
17:04Andrew's social network analysis shows that gun crime is highly localized within social networks.
17:09In one of Chicago's high crime neighborhoods, 41% of all gun homicides took place in a network that represented just 4% of the population.
17:21You have a very small percentage of the population that are responsible for the vast majority of the violence as victims.
17:28You can use that information to use prevention efforts, as well as enforcement efforts when needed, to get those individuals, and in fact, to save their lives.
17:36But focusing on small social networks to prevent gun crime also has a downside.
17:43In Chicago, the police department has faced criticism for tracking people based only on who they know.
17:51But it claims the heat list has a social benefit.
17:55A cop may come knock on your door, but a social worker would be there too.
18:00The goal is not to be punitive. The goal is to try to reduce the chance that somebody's going to be continuing the cycle of violence.
18:08The jury is still out on Chicago's heat list.
18:11But no one expects it to prevent every gun death.
18:15So how can we protect ourselves from the gun virus?
18:19Should we all go out and buy ourselves a gun?
18:23A gun?
18:26Come on.
18:30You've seen it in the movies.
18:32Our hero saves the day with a well-aimed shot.
18:36The end of the road for you, Malone.
18:40This is the heart of the gun debate.
18:43Does it take a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun?
18:48I ain't done yet.
18:53Or would it just mean more bullets flying around?
18:58Do guns make us more safe?
19:01Or less?
19:05Epidemiologist Charlie Branis started out as a paramedic.
19:10On the tough streets of Philadelphia, he treated many gunshot wounds.
19:14As a paramedic, I was exposed to cases of gun violence.
19:18But it became very frustrating not to be able to prevent those cases,
19:23to simply see them on a regular basis.
19:26It was here in Philadelphia where the right to bear arms was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791.
19:33Today, it's reeling from gun violence with almost five shootings a day.
19:39So now, Charlie is returning to the crime scenes he once visited as a paramedic,
19:45with the skills of an epidemiologist.
19:48And he's asking one burning question.
19:52Does carrying a gun make you safer?
19:55It is important to begin to think about whether a gun is protective or perilous.
19:59And if you are in possession of a firearm, under what conditions will you be able to protect yourself?
20:07His first challenge was how to study this scientifically.
20:11Charlie knew he couldn't hand out guns and wait to see which subject got shot.
20:16But epidemiology offers a different approach.
20:20Find people who've contracted a disease and then work backward to discover how they caught it.
20:26To identify cases of the gun virus, Charlie got his research team hooked up with Philadelphia's police department.
20:33We set up with the city police department a system whereby we were notified typically on the day of a shooting, but soon after, within hours.
20:45As the shootings rolled in, the team collected key details about each victim.
20:52Where was he at the time?
20:54To what age group and race did he belong?
20:57Was he under the influence of drugs or alcohol?
21:01And most importantly, was he carrying a gun?
21:05But in epidemiology, you can't pinpoint why a person gets sick until you compare him to a similar person who hasn't.
21:13So, for every gunshot victim, Charlie's team had to find a comparable person who was not shot.
21:21As a case came in, depending on their age, their race and their gender,
21:28we called around through random digit dialing across the city to find someone roughly of the same age, race and gender
21:36to ask them quickly about their experiences at the time of a case's shooting.
21:40And lastly, they asked their interviewees whether they themselves had been carrying a gun at the time the crime took place across town.
21:49How old are you? Do you own a gun?
21:51Where were you at 10 p.m. last Wednesday?
21:53Were you in possession of a firearm at this time?
21:55For over two and a half years, Charlie and his team collected data on almost 3,500 shootings.
22:03They ended up with 677 shooting victims for whom they had a good comparison group.
22:10Now Charlie could answer the central question.
22:13Are you less likely to be shot if you're carrying a gun?
22:16We expected to see a protective effect and we simply could not find it, no matter how we analyze the data.
22:25In fact, Charlie saw exactly the opposite.
22:30Philadelphians were four and a half times more likely to be shot if they were in possession of a gun.
22:36One of the things that we hypothesized from our case control study was that possession of a firearm changed people's actions, mere possession of it.
22:46And so that perhaps people reacted in ways that they would have otherwise not reacted had they not had a firearm.
22:53Charlie plans further research to see whether firearm training could make guns more protective.
22:59But his research on gun possession sends a simple message.
23:04If you want to lower your chances of being shot, don't carry a gun.
23:10Is the best way to immunize yourself against the gun virus not to put a firearm in your hand?
23:18Well, that may not be enough.
23:21Because science is finding guns do strange things to our minds.
23:26The mere sight of one can trigger an outburst of violence.
23:36We've all heard it said, guns don't kill people, people kill people.
23:43In other words, the gun isn't what matters.
23:46It takes a finger to pull the trigger.
23:49But new research casts doubt on this idea.
23:51Maybe it's not the people who fire them, but guns alone that are fueling the epidemic.
24:03Why do people shoot one another?
24:07For over 25 years, Ohio State University psychologist Brad Bushman has been asking that question.
24:14But recently, he's been asking it in an unusual setting.
24:21This state-of-the-art simulator was designed to study the behavior of drivers.
24:28But Brad hijacked it to study aggression.
24:31In this experiment, drivers encountered a number of frustrating events, such as somebody mimicking their behavior, somebody cutting them off in traffic, construction zones.
24:45We all know about road rage, but Brad wanted to see if he could trigger it with something seemingly unrelated.
24:53We placed a stimulus object in the passenger seat.
24:58What we told participants when they got in the car was this car is being used in a number of different experiments.
25:06All right, and again, I just wanted to apologize.
25:09Derek Spinner was supposed to put it away, but they didn't, so you can just ignore that.
25:13Brad and his team measured how the tennis racket subjects drove, how frustrated they got, whether they broke any traffic laws,
25:21or leaned on their horns.
25:25Nothing unusual happened.
25:27But the tennis racket was just there to set a baseline.
25:31Brad's real question was what would happen when a gun was sitting on the passenger seat.
25:36So he's breaking the speed limit again.
25:39He's pretty impatient, I think.
25:41Oh, dude.
25:44Oh, man, that's a double yellow line.
25:47Yeah, I think he's really an aggressive driver.
25:49In driver after driver, Brad saw the same thing happen.
25:56What we discovered in this experiment is that the mere presence of a gun in the passenger seat made drivers more aggressive.
26:05It primes or activates aggressive thoughts in memory.
26:09We call this the weapons effect.
26:12In a fight, having a gun would give you the upper hand.
26:15So perhaps Brad's armed drivers consciously chose to be more aggressive.
26:22But Brad thinks we may not be so logical, at least not according to a second experiment.
26:29Driver behavior is a great laboratory for studying aggression, not just in a driving simulator, but in the real world.
26:37Researchers did an experiment where they had a pickup truck pull up to an intersection.
26:44Driver remained at the stop for 12 seconds to see what the motorist trapped behind him would do.
26:51A few honked.
27:06Most sat quietly until they pulled out and went around.
27:09In a second version, the truck blocking the intersection had a rifle on a gun rack.
27:16What's amazing about this study is that people do the opposite of what you would expect.
27:37Motorists were more likely to honk their horn when there is a gun in the back window of the pickup truck than if there is no gun in the back window.
27:47It's an instinctive response, not a logical one. There's nothing logical about it.
27:53Why does a gun provoke an aggressive response, even when it's in someone else's possession?
28:04Brad thinks it comes down to the wiring in our brains.
28:09Human beings are very good at identifying potentially dangerous stimuli in their environment, such as spiders and snakes.
28:17It's called the fight-or-flight response.
28:22And it happens faster than we can think.
28:27Brad believes that the sight of the gun activates that same system.
28:32We've been repeatedly exposed to images of guns and violence,
28:38that the link between guns and violence in the human brain is very strong,
28:42because people recognize them as a source of threat and danger.
28:48In other words, a gun doesn't merely shoot.
28:52It plants the idea of violence in your mind.
28:55And by triggering those feelings, a gun is actually prompting you to use it.
29:01Of course, it takes a finger to pull the trigger,
29:04but by increasing these aggressive impulses, the trigger may also be pulling the finger.
29:09Today, there are more than 300 million guns in America, silently triggering our aggressive impulses.
29:23A few of us give in to them.
29:28But if you catch the gun virus, do you have it for life?
29:33One scientist thinks he's found a way to cure it.
29:36Gun violence, whether it's mass shootings or the ceaseless daily litany of killings,
29:46is almost always committed by one type of person, young men.
29:52If we're going to eradicate the gun virus,
29:56we need therapies to target those who've been infected.
29:59Is there any way to cure them?
30:07Neuroscientists Can't Kill is trying to understand the brains of those who kill.
30:12I got 911. What's the location of your emergency?
30:15Sandy Hook Elementary School. I keep hearing shooting. It's still happening.
30:17It was approached by the parents who had lost their children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in that tragedy.
30:24And they asked if there was any science that we could do that might help us understand why people might commit such types of crimes,
30:30and how we might be able to develop better ways of preventing them.
30:33The tragedy of Sandy Hook haunts our society.
30:37In just five short minutes,
30:40twenty first graders were murdered, along with six teachers.
30:45The killer was male, twenty, and disturbed.
30:52Not unlike the young juveniles, Kent has come to study.
30:55All of these kids that we were working with were in an ultra-supermax facility, the highest-risk facility in the state of New Mexico,
31:04because they had committed one or more felonies.
31:07And I'm not talking, you know, simple things. These are serious, multiple felons.
31:11A lot of the time, the crimes that are committed by these kids are used handguns or firearms.
31:16And almost every one of them has had or owns a firearm, or has acquired one.
31:21It's really something that's just commonplace.
31:23Kent studies the brains of these violent young offenders,
31:28but his subjects can't come to an MRI lab.
31:32So, he brings the lab to them.
31:35So we designed and created a state-of-the-art mobile MRI system.
31:39We've scanned the brains of over 4,000 inmates,
31:43developed the world's largest repository of youth populations.
31:47Kent is trying to detect patterns in brain anatomy that are correlated with violent behavior.
31:53He scanned the brains of 25 incarcerated young men who had committed murder,
31:59and contrasted them with the brains of 150 offenders who had not.
32:04He looked for differences in areas involved with emotion, impulse control, and decision-making.
32:10The amygdala, anterior cingulate, and orbital frontal cortex.
32:19The scans revealed stark differences.
32:22It turns out that parts of this amygdala are actually not well developed in youth that commit homicides compared to their peers.
32:31As well, kids that commit homicides have less over the frontal cortex.
32:35Parts of the brain that we have found that are not developed normally or developed differently are actually parts of the brain that are kind of the last to develop.
32:41They usually don't reach full maturity until age about 25.
32:45It appears almost like even though they're 15, 16 years old, their brains might only really be 10, 11 years old.
32:51With 85% accuracy, Kent could guess which juveniles had committed murder just by looking at their brain scans.
32:58Do these differences mean some people are incurably violent?
33:06Or is there a saving grace in the brain's capacity to change?
33:10People are only really kind of beginning to understand this, but the brain continues to change throughout your life.
33:15All the experiences that you have, they continue to shape and mold the brain.
33:18But most prison experiences are not helpful for handmaid's brains.
33:29Unfortunately, in a correctional environment, there's really no behaviors that get reinforced positively.
33:35If you're quiet and you're good and you don't do anything, what happens? Nothing.
33:40The only thing that gets these individuals any type of social interaction is aggression.
33:44It's a very dangerous environment for everyone.
33:55That's called compression.
33:57It compresses them into a very limited set of behavioral things that they do.
34:04The term compression comes from diving.
34:08As a diver descends into the depths, he encounters greater and greater pressure from the water.
34:14After a while, his body adjusts.
34:18But at this point, returning to the surface actually becomes dangerous.
34:23Kent thinks it is just as hard for imprisoned kids to return to positive kinds of interaction.
34:31The diving analogy is a good one because, you know, you don't just pop right back up to the surface and you're healthy again.
34:36That can kill you, right?
34:37Kent is now studying kids who've been through a therapeutic program called decompression.
34:46It asks social workers and prison guards to reward good behaviors instead of just punishing bad ones.
34:52And so if the kids were good today and they talked to someone and they engaged to someone and they didn't get in fights, they'll get some reward.
35:02And they learn through this positive reinforcement strategies that good things can happen to them if they act better.
35:08Twelve months after decompression therapy, Kent conducted a second series of scans.
35:15He saw that critical regions had begun to grow and change.
35:20There's an area of the brain that helps to regulate decision-making and capacity for decision and help you understand when you make mistakes.
35:27And that area of the brain is called the anterior cingulate.
35:28And we actually are seeing an increase in activity there.
35:31These circuits, the control, help to regulate your behavior, regulate your thinking.
35:36They are getting better.
35:37Many underage felons are ultimately released and have to make the dangerous transition back to a free society.
35:45A group of inmates not treated with decompression went on to kill 16 more people.
35:52But inmates who received the therapy killed no one.
35:56One of the things that the programs try to teach them is how not to act impulsively.
36:01Whether that's with a firearm or without, it's likely to lead to better outcomes if they don't act impulsively.
36:07Kent may have found a way to cure those who have been infected by the gun virus.
36:12But this therapy can only reach a select few.
36:16And only after they have already gone to jail.
36:19Now, one young scientist is working on a different way to solve the epidemic of gun crime.
36:24Fire a different type of gun.
36:31We've seen how the gun virus spreads.
36:35Mass shootings move through the media.
36:38Street violence spreads through social networks.
36:41Holding a gun or seeing one triggers the urge to commit more violence.
36:46We all want to stop this pandemic.
36:50One man decided to focus on a part of the disease that has long been overlooked.
36:59Howdy.
37:01Hey, Kai. How are you?
37:03Like many young people in Colorado, 19-year-old Kai Klopfer grew up at the gun range.
37:07Do you want to shoot the AR-15 today?
37:10Definitely. I'd love to.
37:11Awesome.
37:12Growing up in Colorado, firearms were always a part of the culture.
37:16Maybe not as much as, say, Texas, but they're definitely accepted.
37:20Most high schoolers don't dwell on the problems caused by guns.
37:25Kai was no different until four years ago, when gun violence dropped just down the road.
37:30315 and 314 for a shooting at Century Theatres.
37:35Team 6, we got another person outside shot in the leg of a female.
37:39I got people running out of the theater. They're shot.
37:43In Aurora, Colorado, the Century Theater became a scene of horrific slaughter when a young man opened fire.
37:50He killed a dozen people and wounded 70 more.
37:55Like all Americans, Kai was deeply shaken.
37:58But in the dark days that followed, he began to think about solutions.
38:04At the time, I was looking for a project that could have some societal impact.
38:09And with the Aurora theater shooting, I realized that I need to create a gun that only works for certain people.
38:15And so that's why I'm working on smart gun technology.
38:21Kai thought that by designing a gun that will only fire for its owner,
38:25he might help prevent some acts of mass homicide.
38:29Then he realized that out of more than 30,000 gun deaths each year,
38:35two-thirds weren't homicides at all.
38:38There's an even larger problem of suicides and accidental gun death, like misuse of firearms,
38:44that almost nobody talks about.
38:4621,000 firearm suicides.
38:48Children that every 30 minutes are killed or injured with a firearm.
38:51Kai knew many of these victims were using a gun that didn't belong to them.
38:56Would these people have died if the gun had refused to fire for them?
39:02Starting with a $3,000 loan from his parents, Kai has now invested four years on this project.
39:09He went through an extensive prototyping process using a 3D printer in his bedroom.
39:19There's a fingerprint sensor embedded in the grip of the firearm that captures an image of their fingerprint,
39:25that image is processed and then matched against a list that's stored on the gun, encrypted and secure,
39:30of everyone who's allowed to use that firearm.
39:32Once we have a verified fingerprint, there's a little motor that takes signals from the circuit board and produces physical motion.
39:41We then use this motion to lock and unlock the firearm.
39:45What started as a high school project has become a business in the making.
39:52But Kai has an uphill battle to get his prototype to market.
39:59Smart guns are not a new idea.
40:01And about 20 years ago, the government saw that it was an obviously good idea and decided to just throw a bunch of money at the problem.
40:08They gave out grants to some major firing manufacturers like Smith and Wesson.
40:11For the very first time, a gun manufacturer will include locking devices and other safety features and will develop smart guns that can be fired only by the adults who own them.
40:24The smart gun was met with fierce resistance.
40:28Gun advocacy groups claimed their Second Amendment rights were at risk.
40:33Smith and Wesson got boycotted and almost lost over 40% of their business, which is substantial for any company.
40:38They basically abandoned the projects and swore more or less never to work on it again.
40:43Before a single smart gun could be sold, the product was withdrawn.
40:49A lot of the public, especially the gun owning public, perceives smart guns as a gun control or like something that's going to be mandated.
40:56It's not gun control in any way. It's not external control. There's no government database.
41:01Kai believes smart guns will help to inoculate some of us against the virus that claims so many American lives.
41:08without compromising Second Amendment rights.
41:11With this technology, the owner is still free to do anything that they judge they should do with a firearm.
41:17But it will stop children from finding guns, teenagers from using it to commit suicide,
41:22and a solid portion of the over 30,000 gun deaths that happen every year in the United States.
41:27I might not be able to stop the next psychopath who walks into a movie theater, but there are lives that I can save.
41:39Even if we can save one person's life, that'd make the whole thing worth it.
41:44A smart gun would make a dent in the gun virus, but only a small one.
41:53In fact, all the solutions are in their early days, which is strange considering how dire the situation is.
42:01Guns claim over 30,000 American lives each year.
42:06When Ebola threatened our shores, the full resources of our public health community were called into service.
42:14You know how many people died in the U.S. from that devastating disease?
42:19Two, when the United States puts its resources to work, we have great results.
42:29But in 1996, a federal law prohibited the Centers for Disease Control from funding anything that may lead to gun control.
42:40The law has had a chilling effect on gun violence research across the country.
42:45I believe in science, and I believe it's only with the unfettered help of science and the answers it provides, that we'll have a hope of ending this devastating epidemic.
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