A national social media campaign about gun violence has a focus on youth in Milwaukee

It’s hard to change any adult’s mind about anything, let alone a subject as heated as guns in the U.S.

That’s why a national nonprofit's social media campaign about gun violence is focused on teens, and the Milwaukee area is one of a dozen cities where the campaign is live.

“We all know very well, as we get to be adults, it’s very hard to shift our views on all kinds of topics, but that’s not true when it comes to young people,” said Nina Vinik, the executive director of Project Unloaded. “It is a period when they’re collecting knowledge. They’re forming their attitudes that ultimately will lead to their behaviors — their choice whether or not to own and use guns.”

Vinik has spent two decades in the gun violence prevention movement and is the founder of Project Unloaded. In January 2022, the group launched its social media campaign, called Safer Not Using Guns, or SNUG. Its goal is to fuel cultural change, rather than policy change, around gun ownership.

The campaign has been active in the Milwaukee area for nearly two years and has reached around 164,000 young people on Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, according to Project Unloaded.

And the campaign is informed by a youth council made up of teens from across the country — one of them a senior at Brookfield Academy.

Videos encourage fact-checking about dangers of gun violence

A typical SNUG advertisement lasts just 15 seconds and includes one or more young people speaking to the camera as upbeat music plays. They recite the phrase “safer not using guns” and repeat a statistic, such as kids who live in a home with guns are four times as likely to die by suicide than those who live without them.

The ads also encourage the viewer to fact-check them, and the American Academy of Pediatrics backs up the suicide rate claim. According to the academy, in the past decade, 40% of suicides committed by children involved guns. Nine out of 10 of those suicides were committed with guns that victims accessed at their own homes or from a relative's home.

The campaign includes videos that run as paid advertisements on Instagram and Snapchat, and videos produced by influencers on TikTok.

The campaign has reached more than a million people across the country, according to Project Unloaded. And according to a survey the organization performed, 15% of young people had a greater awareness of risks associated with guns and a 15% decrease in interest for owning guns in the future after being exposed to the campaign.

Milwaukee is one of many cities struggling with youth gun violence

Vinik said Milwaukee was chosen as one of the first dozen cities for the campaign because the organization wanted a diverse collection of locales.

“And, Milwaukee of course has a big problem with youth gun violence,” Vinik said.

Like other American cities, Milwaukee has had an increase in youth gun violence since 2020. That year, gun violence became the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since the pandemic, accidental shootings involving children have doubled in Milwaukee, according to a Journal Sentinel database of such incidents. Children are the victims of homicides and nonfatal shootings at twice the city’s pre-pandemic rate, according to the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission.

The number of child perpetrators of gun violence has also increased in recent years, although adults still far more often commit such acts, according to the commission.

A number of factors contribute to youth gun violence. Academics and officials in Milwaukee have cited concentrated poverty, chronic and traumatic stress, and easy access to firearms. Those factors have been made worse by the far-reaching impact of the pandemic, experts have said.

The SNUG campaign has also run in Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, Seattle, Tampa, Minneapolis, Denver, Charlotte, Sacramento, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh.

Gun violence made Brookfield senior feel anxiety about being out in public

Anvesha Guru, the Brookfield senior who sits on the SNUG campaign’s youth council, said she became interested in gun violence prevention after she first joined Instagram in 2020.

That year, the U.S. had its largest single-year increase in homicides in more than a century — the majority of which were carried out by firearms.

Through social media, Anvesha noticed how frequent of a problem gun violence is in the U.S. and in her own region. She said it gave her anxiety about being out in public and attending school.

“It was such a mind-opener because I had never really thought about it to that extent,” she said.

Anvesha, who wants to study economics and biology in college, interned with the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort, or WAVE, which advocates for gun violence prevention. It was through that connection she joined Project Unloaded, where she and the rest of the youth council advise on how videos will catch the attention of their peers.

Since the launch of the campaign, she said she’s noticed other people in her school having more conversations about gun ownership. Her friends have told her they don’t want themselves or their parents to own guns.

“Seeing that on social media specifically, there’s something about the informal nature of it that really gets the message across,” Anvesha said. “I found this work to be really fulfilling and it’s a way to put my mind at ease about where we’re going in this country when I can see positive impacts from the work we’re doing.”

Contact Elliot Hughes at elliot.hughes@jrn.com or 414-704-8958. Follow him on X at @elliothughes12.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Social media campaign about youth gun violence has focus in Milwaukee