Through the Wormhole

Every 17 minutes in America,

someone is killed by a gun.

It's a wave of violence that political debate

can't seem to stop.

Can science point the way forward

by pinpointing how the shootings spread,

predicting gun crimes before they happen,

and uncovering how guns infect our minds?

Is this an epidemic that can be cured?

Could gun crime be a virus?

Space, time, life itself,

the secrets of the cosmos lie

through the wormhole.

captions paid for by discovery communications

if gun violence is a disease, we are suffering mightily.

In Chicago, where shootings on a summer weekend

soar into the double digits.

In Newtown, where 20 children

never came home from school.

In Orlando,

where a night of dancing became a bloodbath.

Every day,

new holes are opened up in some family's life.

Is gun control the answer, or is it safer to carry one?

The answer may come, not from politicians,

but from scientists,

who are tracking the spread of gun crime

like a biological pandemic.

Reports of a school shooting in progress

are coming out of Colorado today.

They started shooting everyone in the cafeteria,

and then you could hear them laughing and running upstairs.

Since columbine, the heartbreak has been broadcast live.

Since Orlando, it's been screened.

The names have been running together.

It's a flood of data.

How do we understand it?

Sherry towers is a statistician.

In her work, streams of data tell stories.

One of the things that I've noticed

as I've been sitting here

is that, once people lock their bikes there,

they tend to walk underneath that tree

and go to the path.

- Bicycle, lock, tree, repeat. - Sherry can make a prediction.

Soon, bikers will wear a path in the grass.

We can use mathematical and statistical models

to study far more complex patterns

than just the ones we're seeing on this school campus today.

For instance, these models can be used to predict

the spread of disease within a population.

We can use these models

to try to forecast trends in the stock market.

We can also use these models to examine earthquakes

and try to predict when and where there will be aftershocks.

But one day in 2014, Sherry's safe world

of spreadsheets and stats came unmoored.

She was heading to a meeting at Purdue university

when the event was canceled.

A student had been shot on campus.

I realized that, that was the third school shooting

I had heard about in approximately a 10-day period.

And I wondered to myself

if this was just a statistical fluke

or whether there was other patterns involved.

Then, Sherry had a radical idea.

Could the media itself be the mechanism of transmission?

Could stories about shootings actually lead to more shootings,

triggering an epidemic?

We decided to focus on gun tragedies

that get the most media attention,

and those are school shootings and mass killings.

Sherry's team went story by story

and broke the events into discrete pieces of data...

Type of shooting, map location, date, and time.

It was the largest, most comprehensive survey

of its kind.

Was each shooting an isolated event?

With all the data in, Sherry was able to isolate a pattern.

It didn't matter where an event occurred.

The important variable was when.

What we found was, there is very strong evidence

of clustering in time.

When there is an event that occurs,

one of these gun tragedies

tends to trigger a similar tragedy

in the very near future.

And this bunching together in time

is actually the hallmark of contagion.

We typically use the word "contagion"

to describe the spread of diseases,

but Sherry says it also applies to mass shootings.

It appears the gun violence really does spread

like a contagious disease.

Unlike influenza, that spreads by direct,

person-to-person contact,

the medium for spreading the contagion is media itself.

And, as with a biological virus,

Sherry's data show there is a definite period

during which any one incident of gun violence remains contagious.

What we find is that,

the contagious period seems to last around 13 days,

which also seems to be, approximately,

the same time period of the attention span

that's given to these high-profile shootings,

like, for instance, the Newtown tragedy

or the San Bernardino tragedy.

13 days... One famously unlucky number.

Sherry hopes she'll never make another discovery like it.

This is, by far, the hardest study, emotionally,

that we've ever undertaken.

You're reading the details about how children have gotten killed,

and you realize that these are entire families

who aren't here anymore.

Sherry believes that, as long as the media

keeps giving mass shootings wall-to-wall coverage,

the gun virus will continue to spread

and claim even more victims

unless someone intervenes.

Shots fired.

Mass shootings are the most visible aspect

of America's problem with gun violence.

But vastly more Americans are killed in isolated shootings

on city streets.

And many of these killings

receive little or no media coverage.

But renowned epidemiologist Gary Slutkin

thinks they, too, bear the hallmarks of a virus.

Gary made his name by fighting contagious diseases

all around the world.

But when he finally returned to Chicago,

he realized his hometown

harbored an epidemic of a different kind.

When I began to look at violence in Chicago,

I didn't really know very much about it.

But I did ask, first, to see the charts and graphs and maps,

and the data on it looked exactly like the epidemic maps

that I had been working with in all these other problems.

To Gary's trained eye, the clustering of gun crimes

resembled the way a contagious disease

sweeps through densely populated areas.

He'd seen cholera do this in refugee camps in Somalia

during the 1990s.

So, what we have here is a representation

of a refugee camp.

The white chips here are representing the population,

and the red, a person with cholera.

And when the infection comes,

it can spread from one person to another.

Stopping cholera isn't complicated.

A strict regimen of washing hands,

boiling water, and quarantine will do it.

But Gary struggled to get these practices adopted in Somalia

because the refugees were suspicious of outsiders.

Then, Gary had an inspiration...

He could hire refugees and train them as health workers.

These locals successfully interrupted

the spread of the disease

because they had what Gary did not...

Street cred.

In Chicago, Gary saw a city repeating the mistake

he'd once made himself...

Fighting an outbreak with outsiders

who weren't trusting.

The cops pulled up, and they left.

They're scared.

They're scared of the community.

So, Gary founded an organization called "cure violence"

with the mission to hire and train trusted local aid workers.

He calls them "the interrupters."

Almost all of them know the violence

of the streets firsthand.

Well, I've been shot five times, you know,

on different occasions.

The man that was watching us got shot in his head.

I was part of the violence.

Now, I'm part of the solution.

Because of who they are,

interrupters can go where police cannot.

They don't carry handcuffs

and they don't serve search warrants.

Instead, they carry a simple message...

You don't need a gun to settle an argument.

Crazy, man.

You two guys, man, y'all been around here

on a lot of bull, both of y'all.

Robbing people, breaking in windows, all kinds of stuff.

Don't get it all twisted.

Once upon a time, this man was out here too.

Through the interrupters, Gary keeps the focus

where he thinks it belongs...

On preventing disease, not punishing crimes.

So, Jacob, you from this community.

You're going to be hearing gunshots tonight?

Probably, 'cause if you tell

for whatever I did yesterday, it's just a cycle.

If you want to use violence and shoot somebody as a way

to solve your differences,

we trying to say that's not the way to go

'cause you can't take back a life.