CNN hosts a town hall on gun violence: Live updates – CNN

CNN and other media organizations focus more intensely on mass shootings like in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, but gun violence is more than those major events, said Joe Sakran, director of emergency general surgery at Johns Hopkins.

“The mainstream media, let’s be honest, we talk this issue around the mass shootings. But that’s just a small proportion of the epidemic,” he said. 

“We have young black men that are being killed on our streets every day in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia. And those stories often go untold,” Sakran said to applause.

“So I think we have the responsibility to tell those stories.”

CNN law enforcement expert Charles Ramsey said he’d seen that day-to-day violence in his long police career.

“You go to an outdoor crime scene and you’ve got a body laying there, crime scene doing what they do, and look across the street there’s kids over there looking at what you do,” Ramsey said. 

“They’ve got to walk passed that same place to go to school the next day. And then we wonder why they have trouble reading and writing. They’re traumatized,” he said. “There aren’t the services in place to be able to help these kids.”