One public health expert’s quest to improve violence prevention

Dean of Yale School of Public Health Megan Ranney has worked in violence prevention for most of her career. She started out as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late ’90s before heading to medical school to become an emergency physician and getting a masters in public health.

In the emergency department, she regularly saw victims of violence and self-harm. But one day in the 2000s was a “big transition point” for the doctor, when she cared for someone with a self-inflicted fatal gunshot injury.

Ranney noticed the healthcare industry wasn’t applying research-backed tools to reduce firearm injury in the emergency department, and so she decided to begin her own work to address this “uniquely American epidemic.” (According to the CDC, 44,447 people died from gun-related injuries in 2024.)

“No one was really talking about firearm injury or gun violence as a health problem,” she told us.

Fast-forward to 2026, and Ranney has held positions as deputy dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and chief research officer at the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine.

Ranney spoke with Healthcare Brew about her research to reduce firearm injury, from how physicians can help prevent harm to how social media can perpetuate youth violence, and how she’s working to build public trust in 2026.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What factors contribute to gun violence?

Most people think about the immediate cause of gun violence, which is someone is upset and has access to a firearm. But people rarely think upstream of that, about what leads someone to acquire a firearm or to make the decision to use it against themselves and others. In the field of public health, we think about those upstream drivers as being on an individual level, but also around family or community, around society and policies, and we’ve learned a lot about each of those. I think a lot of times there’s an assumption that this only concerns one political party or one part of the country. It only concerns urban [areas]. One of the biggest things that I’ve learned over the past 15–20 years is the degree to which this is an issue.

What has worked to mitigate gun violence?

A lot of times people feel like this is a really hopeless issue and feel like they don’t even want to think about it because they don’t think it’s addressable. There are actually a lot of examples of things, both in the research but also in practice across the United States, that have worked really well, particularly over the last five years or so.

There’s a variety of things that work from that very small, individual-level intervention, things like screening people who are suicidal and asking them whether they have access to a firearm, and getting them to temporarily lock up that firearm or get reduced access to it. There’s things that work on a family or community level, like youth mentorship programs, like having community violence intervention programs that identify people who are high risk and intervene. There’s things that work on a neighborhood level, putting in gardens or green space has been shown over and over again to reduce the incidence of firearm injury in a community. And then there’s stuff on a much wider societal level, things like having access to mental health resources.

What makes these initiatives successful and other methods to decrease gun violence unsuccessful?

I do think that there is an assumption that if we just arrest people that that will reduce the incidence of gun violence, and that’s been shown to not be true. That goes back to that initial part of, why do people do this? Why do people hurt themselves or others? It’s both the impulsivity and anger and belief that this will solve something, along with access to a firearm.

We know that simply telling kids not to touch a gun if they see it doesn’t work to reduce kids touching guns, unintentionally or accidentally shooting themselves or a family member, or even youth suicide. We know that having families make decisions to keep guns safely stored, in other words, locked up in a way that is not accessible to the kid, does reduce youth suicide and, as an extension, unintentional injury.

With the rise of social media, loneliness from the pandemic, and isolation, what’s the relationship between gun violence and the digital age?

We know that social media, unfortunately, is being used to drive both violence against others, like homicides—it’s used to amplify beefs or arguments—but also can drive firearm suicide. There’s lots of studies showing the impact of social media on kids and young adults, depression, and inclinations toward self harm. The loneliness part is also deeply intertwined [like] when you look at the pandemic—and the rise in firearm injury during the pandemic—or when you look at the converse and the beneficial effect of putting in parks and green space and streetlights and making neighborhoods safer. During the pandemic, we all became more lonely and isolated, and we weren’t watching out for each other.

Trust in public health has been rocky lately. What do you see as your role in building back trust?

What I learned about building trust, I learned from working on this issue. When we are talking about firearm injury, you have to be talking with people who are hurt by firearms as well as people who own or have access to a firearm. Those often overlap, but not always, and you have to find ways to bring those groups together. Just like you can’t talk about reducing car crashes without talking to car owners or car manufacturers. Similarly, we can’t really talk about reducing firearm injury without talking to people who own firearms about how to improve safety. So I tend to do a lot of work in the field of firearm injury to create trust with firearm owners about the fact that we are going to talk together about something that matters deeply to them, or to us, depending on who we’re talking to. It’s a lot about listening, about creating shared objectives, about not passing judgment, about being open to creative solutions. And then most of all, about creating changes that are tangible and usable by the community with which you’re working. If I come in and talk about firearm suicide prevention in a way that doesn’t make sense to someone in rural Alaska or in urban New Haven, that’s not going to work. You have to build trust with folks to partner with you on creating solutions that make sense and that can be implemented in that community. I think the same thing is true for trust in public health in general. Of course, there are bad actors out there spreading falsehoods, but there’s also been a disconnection sometimes between the work that public health does and the way in which communities experience their own health. To me, a big part of regaining trust is working with those local community members to identify the health problems that matter most to them, giving them choice on behalf of themselves and their families, but also on behalf of their communities, in ways that they can then see tangible outcomes.