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Saint Helena Virtual Forum

The Gun Violence Crisis:
What’s Behind America’s Obsession?

A conversation with Colin Woodard, Director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. Author of six books including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

Streaming August 9th, 2023 at 5:30pm PST or anytime thereafter at

"North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn’t confront or assimilate into an “American” or “Canadian” culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory."
"Listen to the southern conservatives talk about violence in America and you’d think New York City was as dangerous as Bakhmut on Ukraine’s eastern front. 
In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions to which Florida and Texas belong  have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute."            Colin Woodard
Mr. Woodard will be interviewed by David Freed a frequent participant in the Forum. David shared a Pulitzer Prize for the Los Angeles Times coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and was an individual finalist for the Pulitzer Prize’s Gold Medal for Public Service. Dave previously interviewed Dr. Beth Shapiro about biodiversity, de-extinction, and reinventing nature to save the planet and recently Dr. Mordy Rosen physicist at the National Ignition Facility on the prospects for nuclear fusion. Those interviews can still be viewed in Past Forums.
David Freed

 If you didn't catch the interview of Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at NIH, you can still see it on our Past Forums page.  Dr. Volkow is a world leader in the neurobiology of diseases of reward and self-control such as addiction and obesity. The interview by Dr. Betsy Bates Freed covered Dr. Volkow's fascinating background as well as a breakthrough study that revealed there are shared genetic markers that underlie substance use disorders. These new findings offer a road to more effective prevention and treatment strategies for multiple substance use disorders.

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       Dr. Nora Volkow

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