Over the past couple of months, the Twin Cities have experienced the effects of gun violence firsthand. On June 14, Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, were assassinated in their home. On August 27, two children, Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, were killed in a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, and 21 more people were injured. On Sept. 12, St. Olaf College football player Mathew Lee was shot and killed in South St. Paul. On Sept. 15, seven people were shot at a homeless encampment in Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood.

This is not an extensive list of gun violence in the Twin Cities, let alone in the United States. Metro State University professor Dr. James Densley and Hamline professor Dr. Jillian Peterson, along with the work of numerous Hamline students, have collected data on gun violence across the nation in the Violence Prevention Project. This research originally began with mass shootings — a shooting with four or more deaths as defined by the project — but has grown to understand more gun-related homicides.

“We’ve really expanded our research in the last few years to try and capture more nuance in all the different forms of violence that are occurring in our society,” Densley said.

The Violence Prevention Project’s work does not stick to just data. There is a goal to make the research accessible to the public and lawmakers.

“How do we translate this data into effective policy? So we have continued to build the databases but we are also doing a ton of media, a ton of policymaker meetings to try to think about how to use this data to make change,” Peterson said.

Discussions on gun violence do not stop at the numbers. Gun violence is a personal, complex tragedy that expands far beyond data points. Peterson believes that sometimes the human side, the stories of those impacted by the violence, can carry the most power and is often pushed aside.

“In the two hearings this week in the Senate, there were so many Annunciation parents and they were talking about cleaning their nine year old’s bullet wounds as they were sobbing to lawmakers, and that is the piece that I think gets lost sometimes when we don’t center those stories,” Peterson said.

Knowing the area where a shooting took place, seeing that the people who were murdered existed in familiar places, can be eye-opening. Senior Maggie Paoli reflected that learning about Lee in her hometown was a strange feeling.

“It was pretty shocking to hear about that [the murder of Lee] and know that he went to school in my hometown and we both lived in the same area for some time, x amount of years, and he is our age and knowing all of those ties so intimately is so frightening, and knowing that you are so close to where it is really centered and tied in Minnesota which is where the cities are,” Paoli said.

There is not one clear path to prevent gun violence, but rather a web of several factors. The solution may be able to be found at the intersection of these causes.

“We tend to hunker down in gun control or mental health. And with mental health, 99.99% of people with a mental illness would never dream of doing this; it is a complicated conversation … On the gun side, it is the same. 99.99% of gun owners would never dream of doing something like this. However, there are people in crisis, saying they are going to do this and they are able to just walk into a store and buy a weapon that can fire 116 rounds in four minutes. So it is like how do we acknowledge all of those things and work together to prevent that person from accessing that kind of weapon,” Peterson said.

Gun violence can seem like a tragic, difficult to approach topic, but Paoli hopes to see people willing to believe there is a solution, that there is a way to prevent these tragedies.

“I hope to see more hope, that sounds super cheesy but that is a huge thing I think we are missing right now is understanding between groups and also just actually believing that something can actually be done about it… there is always a solution that can be found, the problem is it is a very divided subject right now and people are scared and nervous and when those emotions get mixed into the group it is not easy to be rational,” Paoli said.