Robert: You get shot at, you get scared. Your first reaction is to always run. Then there’s the ego part, takes over. You want to make sure nobody’s going to say, ‘Oh, he ran.’

Gun Violence Victim: I never killed anybody that I know of, but a lot of shooting and stuff happened. I might of shot somebody cause when you’re in a drive by shooting or something, you just go by real fast and shoot and whoever it hits, it hits.

Gun Violence Victim: Sometime you have to turn off. You know what I’m saying? I turn off. I shut down. I don’t think. I don’t care if your mama cry, if your mama brains on the floor. I don’t.

Victor: Since I was small, I used to play with guns, water guns, and, you know, I just graduated into a real gun, went from a bb gun to a real gun.

Co-Host Chuck D: Teens kill other teens every day in America.

In The Mix Host Andrea: That’s right. Every 24 hours, sixteen teenagers are shot and killed.

Co-Host Billy Baldwin: Guns are showing up in schools and on the street all across the country, not just in the big cities. They’re in the suburbs. They’re in small towns. Guns are everywhere. I’m Billy Baldwin.

Andrea: I’m Andrea from In the Mix

Chuck D: And I’m Chuck D, and gun violence does not discriminate. It crosses over age, race, geographic and economic boundaries. It does not discriminate.

Andrea: Teens say that guns are a status symbol for power and protection. The truth is that it’s rare that guns are even used for protection. Only .05 percent of all guns used are for verifiable self defense.

Billy: Teens want to be like the tough guy in the movies, squeeze off twenty rounds and then walk away without a scratch. We all know that’s not real life.

Chuck D: The music industry also paints a big picture on the high life, grow up buying gun violence and thinking that people actually could get away with it.

Andrea: So we’re going to break down some of these myths and show the devastating impact that some of these guns have. We’re also going to talk with some teens who have taken action, so stick around.

Billy Baldwin: Los Angeles, California, City of Angels, Hollywood, where movies since the 1930’s have portrayed guns and violence as powerful, glamorous. A state where every week 17 kids under twenty are shot dead. Home of the drive by shooting, home of the adopted gang family.

Lonnie: I lived that life. It’s a jungle out there. Survival of the fittest. You always want to be the top dog. I wanted to be the Top Dog. I want to be the one that everybody respected and feared. I looked up to somebody, he had money, he had cars, he had girls. So that was my idol. You know, I looked up to Scarface. So that was my whole thing. I would watch a movie and go and just do the same thing.

My mother loved me, my dad loved me, got whoopings, all that. Chores – before I left the house, I had to clean the yard. If somebody did something and there was time to go and do something, I handled my business and that mean go do a drive by, go shoot somebody, go kill somebody, then I will pack my gun.

Virginia: When I got into my neighborhood, it was like a do or die situation. I got in, I told all my homies and everybody else, I’m going to die for this neighborhood. You know, I always wanted to be the one to carry the gun. Who wants to carry? I do. Who wants to rob this? I do. I was always the one that wanted to do bad stuff. I thought like, oh, yeh, I’m the biggest, the baddest, and nobody’s going to mess with me cause I got a gun. And if my enemies roll up, I’m going to shoot at them.

When you’re in a drive by shooting or something, you just go by real fast and shoot and whoever it hits, it hits. It’s kind of emotional. People get killed. Cause I had a lot of my own friends that I know die right in front of me, die in my arms or next to me.

Andrea: Westchester County, an all American suburb, ten-plex movie theaters, malls and country clubs, the quieter place than the city that people think they’re safer than safe. But are the issues really different when it comes to teens and guns?

Robert: Just, you know, an average day life in the suburbs: go to school, smoke pot, hang out with the fellows. Make sure you got nice clothes to wear. Good kids carry guns, too. We all do, just depends on the people you hang out with and the reputation you want to uphold. Through fourth, fifth grade, I started with just pocket knives and stuff until I got my hands on a hand gun. Carried it everywhere. Slept with it under my pillow, felt it was cool. You need guns for protection if you proclaim to be the person you are. Can’t just talk about it and not be about it. You know, you have own protection, friends, yourself, your neighborhood, so to speak the ground you walk on.

Got arrested for possession of a hand gun. It’s a day-to-day living, three meals, shower, you know, you’re just stuck there. I call home once in a while. You’re too stressed out when you call home, know what’s going on out there, the weather’s changing, it’s getting nice. Drives you crazy. I prefer to just work out, read a book, keep to myself. Can’t be part of the in crowd in jail. Won’t get you nowhere here or out there. I hope to get out, sooner or later. I mean, I would be happy to just go home right now. But I guess I ain’t going nowhere. It’s just life.

Chuck D: Yeh, New York City, the city that never sleeps. The five boroughs with high rise apartments and schools with metal detectors, where overall crime is down but in a state where approximately ten young people are shot dead every week.

Victor: I live in Coney Island and I live the project life. Since I was small, I used to play with guns, water guns, and you know I just graduated into a real gun. I went from a bb gun to a real gun when I was about twelve, thirteen. It’s like you look at a brother and you be like, gee, just one little thing can just kill someone.

I had brought a gun with me to school one day. I flashed it off in front of a crowd because it was animosity between me and someone else, you know. And I got caught by police. I never had a gun license. It wasn’t legal. So I did time for it. I was locked up the whole time. I was just feeling pain for something I regret doing. I really regretted doing it. I just like having a gun cause everyone else was carrying a gun. You know that really wasn’t the right choice cause it got me put away.

Lonnie: I didn’t see the guys coming, nothing. All I seen was somebody like had a gun to my head, told me, ‘Get up.’ I stood up. I’m like, ‘Dude, just don’t shoot me.’ Everything bad that I did seemed like it was just going like this and I’m looking at it like, man, now it’s my turn. You know? He shot me in my arm. I’m like, okay, my arm is broke. And then they shot me. I guess they hit me and paralyzed me.

Virginia: They recognized me from something I did. When they called my name, I turned around and she had shot me in my left eye, like at an angle, and that’s how I lost my eyesight. My life has changed a lot since my accident. There’s a lot of things I cannot do. I can’t, you know, can’t watch TV. I can’t go places by myself anymore and I always was the type of person that was on my own.

Lonnie: I was sitting in the hospital and I was thinking of ways to kill this dude. People was coming to my bedside, asking me, ‘What you going to do?’ And I’m sitting there contemplating, what should I do? You know, my thing was not to do nothing to him but to do his mother. You know, I’m going to shoot his mother. You know, a couple of times. But I didn’t want him to die, but I wanted him to take care of his mother for the rest of his life.

Virginia: The last time I was in the county jail was like, you know, I’m going to try something now. Might as well. All my friends that I grew up with, most of them are dead or in jail for the rest of their life. I ain’t got no homies no more around. So I got out and I got involved with Teens on Target. When I got involved with them, it was kind of something I was looking for, you know, go out and let the youth know that gang banging is not what it looks like.

Gilbert Salinas: Okay, my name is Gilbert Salinas. I am a program coordinator for a program called Los Angeles Teens on Target. The program consists of people that have been through a lot of violence, people that have seen the streets. A lot of the members are gang members. A lot of the members are in wheelchairs or disabled due to violence.

Lonnie: You want to be bad. You want to be tough. You want to be known in elementary or high school. You know what? Here I am. I’m gonna make you be known. I’m gonna give you a gun. This incident changed me, made me just think about life now. You know what I’m saying? At first, life wasn’t nothing. Life was waking up and seeing how many pounds of weed I can sell, how much dope I can get rid of. I’m going to tell you to go shoot this person. Go do this. Go do that. You want to be down. You want to be from this neighborhood. Show me.

Now you in jail. It took one time for me to go to jail and all of it was taken. All of it. Everything. The hundreds of thousands of dollars I had, the cars, the houses. The police in house, my mother sitting outside naked. You don’t get a bath for like seven days. You go up in there, you got like ten thousand men and they tell you to drop your drawers, bend over, cough. They pushing in your back. You eat food that you don’t know where it’s coming from or what’s going on with the food. You cry. Every time a cell door slam. Boom! You don’t know where you’re going from day to day. You’re puking on the floor. You’re getting feet fungus, jock itch. I mean, you name it, you’re going to get it.

Virginia: Gang banging is not what it looks like or it’s not all that people say it is. You know, you see gang members and they act like if it’s just a life to live. Deep down inside they’re really hurting or they’re scared. It’s not a normal life when you can’t walk where you want to walk without watching your back. I mean, you can’t even go from your front yard to your back yard sometimes.

Fidel Valenzuela: You make them realize that if you have a gun, that means the next person’s going to have to shoot you first. See, carrying a weapon is not going to protect you. It makes other people use weapons on you. If you carry a gun, you could shoot yourself.

Gilbert: At the age of seventeen, I was hanging around my friends one day. We started fighting over who was going to use this gun. And before you knew it, one of my friends is holding onto it and I rush him and try to snatch it from his arms and, guess what? There was what’s called a magic bullet, a bullet in the chamber that we didn’t know of. And when that gun went off, it hit me in my stomach. It knocked me out. I was in a coma for twenty-six days.

You do not need to go out there in the streets and gang bang. If you want to do that, that would be your choice but take a look at reality here. I’m a reality check here. If you come down to this level, I will end up seeing you in a wheelchair. I will end up seeing you in jail or maybe in a cemetery.

Lonnie: You ain’t got no enemy in the world, none. When you start gang banging, you start taking on all these different enemies. All right? Your house start getting shot up. Your mother got to sleep in the bathtub. If your mama ain’t sleeping in the bathtub yet, keep doing what you’re doing and she will start.

What I teach them is like yourself first. It’s okay to say I’m sorry even though you’re not in the wrong. It could save your life. And what we do is we just give them examples: somebody bump into me. I would say excuse me and stop the fight.

Valenzuela: What we’re trying to bring is that it’s okay if somebody calls you a punk. It’s okay to have your pride hurt, cause you can heal the wounds but you can’t heal gunshot wounds.

Gilbert: I put myself in this wheelchair and it don’t matter who was holding the trigger, I shouldn’t have been hanging around with them people. I shouldn’t have been a gang member.

Valenzuela: You’re involved in a circle, a certain circle, you have a higher risk of being a victim of violence.

Virginia: I feel that a lot of enemies that come up after me and stuff from stuff that I did before. I have a lot them that respect me because I can’t see but there’s a lot of them that will never forget the things I have done. So when they do see me on the street, I do have problems sometimes.

Lonnie: I get mad cause I want to stand up and stretch. I walk my dog. I play with my daughters. I wish I had a better life.

Gilbert: The only way we will solve gun violence is take the guns away. We don’t need no guns. Why should everybody have a gun. It’s like the cowboy days. You got a gun so I got to have a gun. The only winner’s going to be the one that draws quicker. They’re not helping us.

Robert: I want to go home and I don’t want to get in no trouble in the penitentiary. Looking back on it now, I think I would have stayed playing sports and going to karate class, try to—you know, if I had a second chance at it, sure, I would have taken a different path. But I didn’t know better then. Back then, it was just the cool thing, I guess, to do, the in thing. But now, I want start a family and move on with my life, so there’s no room for handguns in my life any more.

Victor: My cousin was murdered in his house. He was tied up, shot to the head, to the body, shot several times. Just the time that I should get it, go grab a gun and walk outside with it, walk somewhere with it, you know, do something with the gun. This is the time to bust a gun. This is the time that I should get caught by police with a gun. My cousin just got killed, you know.

What stopped me from doing that was, you know, just thinking back and you know, I tried better things. In the long run, you realize, you know, that it was good to just sit back. You know I was like thinking about my cousin. I really do not want to end up like that. You know, cause it’s what you live by is what you going to die by. You live by the gun, you going to die by the gun. And I don’t want to live by that cause I don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to die shot in my head on the street, my mother coming home from work and seeing me laying on the street, bleeding, guts coming out, and my brain out my head cause I was shot. That’s not the way I want to die. I want to die of old age.

Billy: For every teen killed by a gun, his friends and family members left behind mourn and cope.

Chuck D: Losing a loved one is never easy, but when gun violence is involved anger and revenge play into it. These are some of the factors that cause ongoing problems for gangs.

Andrea: A friend of mine was shot and killed. At first, I didn’t know what to think or who to talk to. But recently I sat in on a coping session with teenagers who were going through the same thing.

[in session] You know, in high school, I knew a lot of guys who, you know, who come in everyday, in and out of school every day and talk about, oh, this one’s cousin got shot or his brother got shot or he has to go to a funeral, he has to go to a wake. And there’s no talk about it. There’s no discussion about it. It’s just like that’s the way it is. That’s what you do. That’s the way…that’s the way you live.

FACES Director Susan Montez: People think that if you don’t talk about it, it disappears. But actually it doesn’t, if just festers and grows.

Group Member: I woke up one day and it was like maybe eight, nine years after my brother’s death and it just hit me, like nine years later.

Group Member: Even though there can be fifty thousand people around you, you’re still going to feel that emptiness and that’s what hurts a lot. You run the scenario in your head a thousand times and you ask yourself why? Why? Why? Why wasn’t I there? How come I couldn’t do nothing about it?

Group Member: One day I’ll feel upset and the next day I feel sad, or the next two minutes—you know what I’m saying? I don’t know what to feel about nothing. I don’t care what happens to you. Or then next minute—you know what I’m saying—I’m feeling that I want to make sure that won’t happen to nobody.

Group Member: It’s like you want to scream, you know, and it’s like you want to cry. And it’s like you just want to be happy.

Montez: I think that you have a lot of emotions at the same time. I think that’s real, you know, and I think that confuses people sometimes. And I think especially guys and especially around gun violence choose to listen to the anger part.

Group Member: You get this constant image like they’re laughing at you. Yeh. You know, like they got over on you. You know what I’m saying? Like, look at what I did to you? It’s just like you’re a walking time bomb. I mean I never carried a gun only because I knew that if I had a gun I would have used it.

Group Member: I’ll be honest. I used to carry a gun. It ends up maybe about six months later, my cousin ends up dying. They shot him twice. And that’s when I decided the gun that I found, I don’t need it because I know the way I felt when my cousin passed away and I wouldn’t want nobody else to feel that feeling that I felt at that time.

Montez: I think it’s a really powerful thing to be the one that says no to revenge because the cycle stops right then and it’s much more powerful than continuing it. It would just build the body count.

Andrea: Are there ways of talking about these people that feel good as opposed to remembering the way in which they died?

Group Member: A lot of little things that we done make me so happy. We could have just wen to the store but at the time I remember I be so glad that we went to the store.

Montez: You know, every memory doesn’t have to bring back the pain after a while. The same door that holds in the bad feelings holds in the good feelings. It’s the same exact door, so when you shut it down to prevent yourself from feeling the bad stuff, you also prevent yourself from feeling the good stuff.

Andrea: What’s something that you would tell somebody who’s going through this right now?

Group Member: I think it’s better to deal with it, you know, like just take it like day by day. Surround yourself with people that love you, that somehow sympathize with you, and at the same time, not make you go back there.

Group Member: I just try to turn around and do something positive with it, you know. I wrote a screenplay. Basically, a lot of the movie reflects on what we’ve had, you know, as growing up.

Group Member: Try to use what happened and have it push you to—in other words, think about what that person that’s not there anymore would have wanted you to do. I went out and I talked to people about it. And I worked because we here, we go around and perform for teenagers all over. And their gratitude for me sharing my life with them helps me out.

FACES Member: We’re from FACES. We’re a group that uses theater to help us work through issues, such as gun violence.

FACES Member: My name is free floating anger. What I am is all that pain and frustration and anger that you have right here that you’re not letting out. You see, my job is to let that out, the pain and frustration that’s right here. And most of the time when you let it out, it is usually on someone that has nothing to do with who you’re mad at in the first place.

As you all can see they just dropped each others books. [FACES members play scene]

That was very good. Isn’t he in fact the exact same guy that was walking with your girlfriend and you couldn’t do nothing then cause everybody was there. You would have gotten into trouble, whatever the case might have been. Right? But right now is the perfect time to take out that anger then and let it out right now on him just for dropping your books. You can remember that the anger you feel every time your father beats you. Remember it and let it out on him right now just for dropping your books. Go ahead. [FACES members continue scene]

The scene you just saw, "Free Floating Anger," a couple of minutes ago, can you guys relate to that in any way?

Audience Member: This guy was messing with me and like he wanted to fight me and I knew he wanted to fight me but like I didn’t want to fight cause in my school they have like a strong policy for fighting. You get fifteen days suspension and whatever. You know, I’m following him and I’m like, ‘What’s up with that?’ And he’s telling me he’s going to shoot me and stuff and all this other nonsense. So I’m like, ‘Say, all right, man, you know what? Forget it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get on your nerves or whatever.’ And he was like, ‘Yeh, yeh, you right. You right.’ Whatever. And he just walked off and that was that.

FACES Member: You going to tell me that if you’re at rage and you just want to kill somebody only because you had a fight, you’re going to try to get rid of it and you going to think—you don’t think at that moment.

If you have a gun, you’re just waiting. You’re just waiting to trigger it off. You’re waiting to use it, so you go outside and if you’re at a party and somebody bumps into you, you’ll start an argument cause you have a gun.

Audience Member: Actually, when I was coming here, some guy bumped me on the shoulder and he was like in his thirties, you know, or late twenties and I thought he was wise enough to know, you know, not to bump me. And I asked him, ‘Excuse me, what you doing? Why you bump me?’ He’s like, ‘What?’ Says, ‘Oh, man, it’s too early for this.’ And I walked away.

Audience Member: I know with myself that I’m very proud. I cannot just walk away, you know. It’s very hard for me to walk away. And also, I cannot say I’m sorry because of the prideness that I have.

FACES Member: You have to learn that pride…pride is…pride is…the wise person is the one that has pride. The wise one is the intelligent one who has the faculty and the ability to get out of that situation.

FACES Member: So how can you deal with your anger and walk away from a fight?

Audience Member: Fighting is…you don’t use your mind in fighting, just follow your anger, so if you can just walk out of the situation and everything, I think that takes more of a man.

FACES Member: If you go out with your best friend, and that person has a gun, your life’s in danger. Cause if—what if that person gets into a fight with five guys, you know, and he takes out or she takes out the gun, and all these five guys that carry guns. You know, her life is gone and yours is too because you were with her.

FACES Member: Get rid of the problem or the problem’s going to get rid of you. Know what I mean? If you can’t diffuse the problem and back away from the problem, if you like go ahead with the problem, the problem’s going to put you in jail or make you dead. You know what I’m saying?

FACES Member: Just walk away. Turn your back to the situation and just get out.

Chuck D: Yeh, we’re living in a war zone. There are so many more guns on the streets today than when I was growing up. The cycle of murder, violence and revenge has to be stopped and kids can’t do it alone.

Billy: The community has to get involved on a local and national level to help kids get guns off the streets. Sometimes taking action is the best way to cope with gun violence.

Andrea: That’s right. I went to Washington and spoke with Sarah Brady, the head of the Center to Prevent Hand Gun Violence. She worked to get the Brady Law passed after her husband was shot in an assassination attempt against President Reagan. The Brady Law says that there’s a five day waiting period before you can buy a gun to do background checks. What kind of laws can be created to keep young people from buying guns?

Sarah Brady: Certainly make it illegal for anyone to sell a gun to a minor in a secondary sale. That is a sale that is not over the counter. Today, that’s not the case in most states.

Andrea: Teenagers feel like, you know, what can they do?

Sarah Brady: When we passed the Brady bill, young people from all over the country came in because it meant so much to them. As a group, they can write editorials or letters to the editor to their local paper, saying, ‘I’m afraid,’ and, ‘I’d like this community to get involved in stopping violence.

Andrea: This PSA was produced by a girl in prison.

PSA: Doing drugs may be this kind of line, but can lead to this kind of line, which could lead to this kind of line. And that’s the end of the line.

Sarah Brady: Become active as a group politically, putting…making telephone calls and writing to the Senators and Members of Congress.

Andrea: Jeronique Bartley wrote to President Clinton after her mother and sister were killed in a drive by shooting in Atlanta. Jeronique was invited to the White House to read her letter in front of Hillary Clinton.

Sarah Brady: Rally around a piece of legislation. We’ve had teens that have worked very hard, both in the high school, and in the college level, for CAP bills, the Child Accident Prevention bills.

Andrea: After a shooting in their school in North Carolina, students formed a group to prevent gun violence.

Sarah Brady: When adults realize that there’s a cry out for help in the community and it’s coming from the young people themselves who are most affected by this gun violence, they’ll listen.

Chuck D: The fact is guns are our problem. We have to stop killing each other. When you happen to look on TV and see these music videos glorify guns or hear a song talking about how a gun is fly, you have to begin to separate the real. As a matter of fact, in reality, guns only cause pain for everybody involved.

Billy Baldwin: If you carry a gun, you’re twice as likely to become the victim of gun violence. There’s other ways to protect and defend yourself. When I was a kid, we didn’t settle fights with guns.

Andrea: If you want to stay out of trouble, you got to pick your friends carefully. I mean, see how they deal with conflicts. Right? Well, if you see a fight starting, don’t hang around and watch until somebody pulls out a gun and risk your own life. Walk away.

To find out how you can get involved or anything else about gun violence, you can call these toll free numbers: the National Crime Prevention Council at 1-800-WE-PREVENT, or the Juvenile Justice Clearinghouse at 1-800-638-8736.

And we want to hear what you think about gun violence, so write us at In the Mix, 114 East 32^nd Street, New York, New York 10016. Or, you can call us at 212-684-3940. Or e-mail us at inthemix@pbs.org. And check out our website at pbs.org.

Chuck D: Peace out, you all.

Andrea: Bye, guys.

Billy Baldwin: Be smart.

Chuck D: Stay safe.

This In The Mix special was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Thanks a lot, guys.

[end of program]