In Childish Gambino's hit "This is America" there are two scenes in which the singer plays a cold-blooded shooter[1] while he's rapping about partying and making money. In each instance, after he murders his victims, an accomplice comes out with a pink silk cloth to gingerly collect the weapon: a handgun for an execution, a military style assault weapon for the mass shooting.
The camera doesn't dwell on the dead bodies, giving way for the singer to jump into his next dance move, accompanied by a handful of other young dancers in school uniforms. Why bother with the dead when we can be entertained, he seems to be asking Americans. And while the song and the video deals with much more than guns -- institutional racism, income inequality, a desensitized population fixated on entertainment -- I'm focusing on his statement on where America's conversation about gun violence currently stands.
This spring, I led a team of seven moderators in five states to have such a conversation with nearly 150 people from across the country in a month-long digital town hall organized just weeks after the Parkland high school massacre. In an Advance Local and Spaceship Media[2] journalism experiment, "Guns: An American Conversation," we tried to get a grip on a very complicated question: Why do well-meaning Americans have such are hard time talking with each other?
Where there was little agreement from people on the extreme ends of the gun-control discussion, there was more than enough hope in the middle. This group showed us the nation is ready to have a serious conversation about guns. And, yes, we can move forward to resolving this issue -- and by extension other contentious issues facing us. This is America, too.
How? The most important thing we
