Words Concept

The Problem

'Gun culture’ is incredibly visible in American English. The average teen wouldn’t think twice about calling “Shotgun!” while rushing to the car. Who hasn’t apologized for “jumping the gun” when cutting someone off in conversation? And in places where young people aren’t able to curse, how many of them shout “Shoot!” when something goes wrong.

If we want to end the toxic things about guns in this country, let’s start by ending how gun language dominates our conversations.

THE ACTION

DoSomething will create an ‘end game’ list of of words and phrases inspired by gun culture. We’ll ask young people to print out this list and challenge their friends to go a day without saying any of the words or phrases on the list. We'll game-ify this to make it engaging and fun! For example — we can have young people track every time one of them says or writes a term that’s on the sheet, and then post their score on social media inviting others to join the challenges or, personally re-doing the challenge to beat their personal best.