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It was about trauma and pain and remembrance, the stories behind the grim statistics and honoring the lives of victims cut tragically short.

Those factors and more are what made "Remembrance Conference 2025: Medical students and faculty taking action on the epidemic of firearm violence through public health" so powerful.

The idea for the , which this year took place June 6-8 at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, was sparked by a conversation in 2023 between Allison Brashear, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School, and Aron Sousa, dean of the Michigan State ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ College of Human Medicine. Both of those campuses had recently been impacted by gun violence, and faculty and students from both medical schools began meeting annually to share their experiences and support each other.

This year’s conference focused on the special role medical schools and health care in general can play in working to reduce firearm injuries and deaths. In 2022, more than 48,000 people died from firearms in the U.S. — more than half from suicide.

“The trauma goes beyond the victim,” Brashear noted. “We need to be thinking about what we can do as health care professionals. We want to energize people to go back to their schools and communities and say, ‘What can we do?’”

Seventy-five participants attended from UB and MSU, as well as from other universities and local and national organizations, including the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), Western New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Most Valuable Parents (MVP), Erie County Central Police, Erie County Medical Center, The Non-Violence Project and others. 

In the talk that opened the conference, Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, explained why public health is the appropriate approach to address gun violence.

It begins with gathering data about the threat, identifying what puts people at higher risk or what protects them, developing and evaluating interventions, and then implementing the most successful interventions.

Ranney said such an approach has not been tried, “partly because there was no funding for this type of work and because people like me were told not to work on this.”

Ranney has not been deterred. She co-founded the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine (AFFIRM), a nonprofit committed to ending the gun violence epidemic through a nonpartisan, public health approach.

Rob Gore, a trauma surgeon at ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ Hospital at Downstate in Brooklyn, author of “Treating Violence: An Emergency Room Doctor Takes on a Deadly American Epidemic,” and Jacobs School alumnus, is similarly focused. As an emergency medicine physician, he saw how many patients were young Black men with life-threatening wounds from gunshots or stabbings. It drove him to start searching for the roots of violence and ways to prevent it. He founded Kings Against Violence Initiative (), a violence-intervention program in Brooklyn that operates programs in schools and hospitals through a network of volunteers.

Every health care worker is affected. “There’s the stressor from trying to keep someone alive,” Gore said. “That’s its own special beast. The idea that ‘wow, if I just had a little more time and a little more money, I could keep this person alive.’”

Similar conditions prompted Richard Miskimins, assistant professor of surgery and trauma medical director at the ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ of New Mexico, to become engaged in this work. New Mexico has one of the highest levels of violent crime in the U.S. and one of the highest suicide rates. He has led numerous antiviolence initiatives through social intervention, education, mentorship and legislation.

His advice for working in this space: “Avoid being an absolutist. Are you unwilling to compromise? Then you’re part of the problem.”

Gale R. Burstein,  Erie County health commissioner and professor of pediatrics in the Jacobs School, and Ryan Belka, assistant attorney general, discussed New York State’s Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO), also known as the “Red Flag Law,” which 21 states now have. It allows health care providers concerned about a patient’s access to weapons to report their concerns to law enforcement, who may then choose to file an ERPO.

Medical students discussed how relevant discussions about gun safety are in pediatrics, especially since firearm violence is now the most likely cause of death for children in the U.S.

Kerryann Koper, a fourth-year student at the Jacobs School, noted that firearms safety is relevant to every specialty.

“We want to reach every single medical student,” she said, “and help them incorporate firearm safety into patient care conversations.”

Those conversations often don’t happen because clinicians don’t feel confident about how to bring the topic up, a concern echoed by Patricia Logan-Greene, associate professor in the School of Social Work and co-leader of the Grand Challenge in Social Work to Prevent Gun Violence. But it’s essential because the majority of school shooters got the guns they used from their home or someone else’s home. She cited a study that found that a third of youths questioned said they knew how to get their hands on a loaded gun in five minutes.

And social determinants of health are always a factor, a point was made by Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning in the School of Architecture and Planning and associate director of UB’s Community Health Equity Research Institute, who discussed how conditions in underserved communities contribute to gun violence. “We believe there’s an association between these conditions and Black-on-Black violence,” he said.”

Zeneta Everhart, Masten District councilmember and the mother of Zaire Goodman, one of three people who survived the 5/14 racist mass shooting at the Tops market, agreed. “We’ve got to care about poor people before we solve gun violence,” she said, adding that after a shooting, nobody comes to the neighborhood to help people heal. But that’s precisely when resources and programming are needed, she noted.

Conference participants learned about the physical, social and personal devastation that guns inflict. But attendees said they also felt positive and hopeful about working with each other to prevent gun violence. They said Saturday evening’s remembrance service, led by Kinzer Pointer, pastor of Buffalo’s Liberty Missionary Baptist Church and a conference organizer, was particularly meaningful.

They came away feeling empowered to share what they learned. “Some people assume, ‘well, I’m not going into surgery or emergency medicine, so why care about this?’” Koper concluded. “But as students, we want to say, ‘Open your eyes. It’s everywhere.’”

Sousa and the MSU students who came to Buffalo agreed, posting their  when they returned to MSU last week.

Conference sponsors included the School of Social Work, Cindy and Francis M. Letro, M& T Bank, MSU, the AAMC, Erie County Medical Center, the ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ of New Mexico School of Medicine, the Ohio State ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ College of Medicine, Catholic Health, the Community Health Center of Buffalo, Kaleida Health and California Northstate ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ College of Medicine.