| No Images? Click here   By Samantha Storey and Nick BaumannGun violence deaths and injuries cost a total of $229 billion each year, according to a 2012 study that measured direct spending on law enforcement, criminal justice and health care related to shootings, as well as indirect costs like lost wages and the effects on victims’ quality of life. In other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000, according to the study.But for a fraction of that cost, hospitals have figured out how to prevent the violence on the ground. HuffPost's senior reporter Nick Wing, who covers guns in America, followed one participant in one such program and discovered a world where just telling someone they mattered could save their life.Talk to us about gun violence prevention programs. Why did you focus on a hospital-based one?These community-based initiatives are among the cheapest, most effective and least politically divisive solutions to gun violence. They work directly in neighborhoods that experience the most shootings, and specifically with the individuals who are at highest risk of being victims or perpetrators of that violence.I think people are generally unfamiliar with the concept, though the fact that there are new programs still launching with some frequency (the one I wrote about started in 2017) may suggest they're becoming more popular.Hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) do this work in a more controlled medical setting, as the name implies. That's important because it gives hospitals a way to go beyond just treating injured patients, and to actually help them in ways that can keep them from just coming back with new injuries.What was surprising about reporting this story?I was a bit taken aback by how intuitive this process is. When one of the main characters, Che, explained his path away from violence, you could really see how valuable it was for him just to have someone take an interest in his life and wellbeing. Gun violence can often feel like such a massive and complex problem that we forget there are individual humans at the heart of the issue. Just meeting those people where they are and working with them one one one to improve their lives can go a long way toward preventing violence.What was most challenging?As always, I think the most challenging thing about reporting on gun violence is getting people to care about all of the varying ways this issue affects communities in America. So much of our focus on gun violence revolves around mass shootings or school shootings. Those incidents are undeniably terrifying and horrific, but they also tend to be the rarest and hardest to predict or prevent.What do you hope readers take away from the story?I hope readers understand that the conversation around gun violence can't just be a reactive thing that explodes every time there's a mass shooting. Gun violence doesn't rest between the massacres that get front-page treatment. If we want to make a real dent in gun deaths and injuries, we're going to have to care about this issue all of the time, in all of its manifestations.
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