Can Citizens Solve Contentious Issues? Two Experts Weigh In on Our Citizen Solutions Work

The people who are on the frontlines of the American gun experience — from gun owners to gun violence survivors and everyone in between — are often the unacknowledged experts in this debate and often know how to craft solutions that don’t just sound good but are also feasible and effective.

— Jennifer Carlson, Director of the Center for the Study of Guns in Society at Arizona State University 

These words from Carlson, one of eight experts who advised us on our Citizen Solutions work in Tennessee, are a fantastic summation of how we view citizens’ capacity to solve problems. 

Last August, we partnered with Convergence Center for Policy Resolution to hold a “solution session” on gun rights and safety. Eleven Tennesseans with drastically different stances on guns came together to create policies that would help curb gun violence while protecting gun rights. We shared their proposals online, and more than 30,000 Tennesseans weighed in. After a five-week public feedback period, five proposals received majority support.

At a “solutions reveal” in January at the Tennessee State Capitol, Adam Luke, a gun rights proponent who participated in the session, addressed a group of bipartisan legislators and said: 

We are told that solutions are not possible — that we are too divided, too polarized, maybe even too dangerous to be trusted to hold space for one another. The real danger is that not only do American citizens have the capacity to find common ground, but we are great at it. 

Disagreement isn’t the enemy

Carlson emphasized that the goal is not simply seeking common ground but also using disagreement in constructive ways: 

We can and should disagree about the issues we hold dear. The key to moving forward in the gun debate isn’t to end disagreement — it is to figure out how to mobilize disagreement in such a way that we come away affirming, rather than questioning, our basic commitments to one another as fellow citizens.

“A fantastic job”

Daniel C. Semenza researches the causes and consequences of gun violence and is the Director of Interpersonal Violence Research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. He helped review the citizen proposals for feasibility and accuracy. Of these proposals, Semenza said:

The folks that came up with these proposals did a fantastic job. I was surprised by how closely some of the policies matched with the best evidence we have for what works to reduce gun violence.

It isn’t easy to get into a room with strangers that may think very differently from you so I applaud this work. Without the right voices in the room, we run the serious risk of missing crucial policy ideas that can actually be the most impactful. We need people from different political and social backgrounds.

Can we scale this work?

Tennessee was just the beginning. We held a solution session in Wisconsin on abortion and family well-being, and soon we’re planning to tackle other issues at the center of this year’s presidential election. As we think about scaling this work, we also want to hear from you. Is there a divisive issue in your state that needs addressing? Reach out to us. 

Regarding the potential of scale, Semenza said, “This is just a micro-example of what’s possible at the local, state, and national level. When it comes to scaling this, we might be able to do this in a number of states first and then take what we learn from individual states and bring together folks nationally.”

We’ll leave you with more thoughts from Jennifer Carlson about the power of citizen-focused solutions: 

When you put people in a room together and create the conditions for them to see and listen to one another as human beings, you end up with solutions to problems the ‘powers that be’ tell us can’t be solved.

Want to learn more about this work? Watch this PBS NewsHour segment or listen to this All Things Considered episode. 

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For more about Jennifer Carlson, see her website. For more about Daniel Semenza, see his university page.