Debra Gillespie founded Mothers Against Gun Violence in 2004, less than a year after her son, Kirk Bickham Jr., and two of his friends were shot and killed by Jaki Marion, a felon who under the law should not have had access to a gun.
Through the organization, Gillespie lobbied for The Responsible Gun Ownership Bill—a piece of legislation introduced in 2005 by former state Sen. Spencer Coggs and former state Rep. Leon Young—which would have required private citizens to undergo a background check whenever transferring or selling a gun and required people to report to police if their gun was stolen. Gillespie successfully pushed for resolutions at both the city and county levels to support a statewide law, but the bill died in the state Legislature.
Despite her legislation failing to become Wisconsin law, Gillespie has not stopped advocating for those affected by gun violence. Her latest effort is a collaboration with UW-Milwaukee called The Gun Violence Project, an interdisciplinary project that brings together multiple university departments and community groups such as Mothers Against Gun Violence.
“We’re finding that a lot of people have an interest in gun violence, but it’s such a big problem that I think it’s not possible for one faculty member—or even one department or disciplinary perspective—to really address and fully understand it,” said Leslie Harris, an associate professor of communication at UWM who is partnering with Gillespie on the project. “I think because the project is so interdisciplinary—and because it includes Debra and community feedback and community involvement—in the end, it’s going to be a more meaningful project than it would otherwise be.”
At the core of the project is a growing collection of interviews from people who have been affected by gun violence in the city. Subjects range from an older woman who lives in Riverwest talking about hearing shots fired in her neighborhood to a local radio DJ sharing his experience of surviving being shot in the head. Gillespie hopes that by pulling stories from all over the city, observers will be able to see that gun violence is not just an issue affecting certain neighborhoods, but a widespread problem.
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Gun Violence is a Citywide Problem
“I think that Milwaukee is definitely a segregated city,” she said. “Because of that, I think we tend to think that a problem is either a black problem, a white problem or a Latino problem. When we talk about gun violence, as we see, it’s traveled through our entire city. We need to come together to address the entire issue.”
The group is currently in the process of compiling interviews, which will be transcribed by a UWM communication department faculty member and posted on the website in text format. Faculty from the university’s film department will also produce the audio from the interviews into short, three-minute clips. Eventually, the group is hoping to secure enough funding to produce short video documentary clips. Faculty from UWM’s Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health will map out the interviews, so that people can see where the stories took place and better understand the subjects’ experiences. “As they tell their story, you will travel with them through the narrative,” Gillespie explained. “We’re hoping that people get a sense of what that person experienced when they experienced gun violence.” The interviews will also be grouped by category, so that people can, for example, find every interview related to intimate partner violence or gun violence when there was not a death.
“We’re thinking about this project as something that people can move through in different ways,” Harris said. “So, rather than having one way to view and digest the information, we can pull out all of the clips of a certain theme, and you can go through those; they can be put together and integrated in different ways, depending on how people want to view them.”
Collecting ‘Stories of Resilience’
One of the goals of the project is to use the interviews to pull information and find patterns that will help researchers and the public learn more about the effects of gun violence on the community.
“We’re trying to get beyond the statistics,” Harris said. “We have plenty of statistical information, but that tells us very little about the meaning of gun violence in people’s lives. By collecting these interviews and making these stories public and accessible, we’re hoping that people can have a deeper understanding of the meanings of gun violence and how it impacts people on a daily basis.”
The group currently has around 20 interviews completed. About half of them are already transcribed, and they are hoping to begin posting the interviews to their website this month. So far, Harris said she is seeing many “stories of resilience.”
While gun violence is a complicated issue that can manifest itself in many ways which are difficult to see, this project hopes to use personal stories to shine a light on the subject in a way that can help get to the root of the problem.
“We want to have a better understanding of gun violence in the Milwaukee community,” Harris said, “because in order to address any problem, especially such a complex problem as gun violence, we really need to understand it. We want to know how gun violence shapes Milwaukee—people’s experiences in our communities and the relationships people have in our communities—so we can start looking for better solutions in the future.”
Anyone interested in sharing their story with The Gun Violence Project can reach out to Debra Gillespie at magv.wi@gmail.com.
