Journal Talks: Guns and Public Safety

The Kansas Leadership Center is encouraging civically engaged Kansans to conduct thoughtful conversations on tough issues using the KLC’s Leadership Framework. KLC needs your help to initiate these conversations across the state. Our goal is to have 200 conversations on the topic of guns and public safety in 2019.

What are Journal Talks?

Journal Talks are a small-group conversation series based on content from The Journal, the Kansas Leadership Center’s print and online magazine. Each year, KLC selects an issue of statewide interest, such as guns and public safety, and encourages civically engaged individuals to discuss it using KLC’s principles and competencies of leadership as a guidepost.

To learn more about the concept behind Journal Talks, please see the column written by Shaun Rojas, KLC’s director of civic engagement.

Now, it’s time for KLC alumni, the thousands of people who’ve participated in Kansas Leadership Center programs over the past decade, to put the skills they developed to use. We’re asking alumni to convene small-group discussions shaped by the KLC framework about this issue, a series of locally led convenings we call Journal Talks.

How do Journal Talks work?

The idea is that you as a convener decide where Journal Talks will take place, how the conversation will be set up and who will be asked to attend. To help, KLC has produced a set of discussion cards on the topic of guns and public safety that should work well with groups of 4-6 people. Although we’ll provide guides, there’s no one way to host a Journal Talk. Talks can take place in a classroom, at the dinner table or in a coffee shop. Pretty much wherever you want, with whoever you want, with your creativity being the only limitation. Our only request is that you come to the discussion with a willingness to honor the KLC leadership idea of holding and testing multiple interpretations and points of view.

What will change as a result of Journal Talks?

The purpose of the talks isn’t to get people to come to agreement. KLC doesn’t take policy positions on what should be done about civic issues and we don’t expect the discussions people have will result in immediate changes. However, we do believe that it’s important for KLC alumni to practice to conducting conversations with others on the most difficult, emotional issues impacting society. If thousands of people can build their skills at understanding different points of view and get more comfortable at having difficult discussions on the heated topics that divide people, that is likely to improve the abilities of society to solve tough problems across the board.

Talking about guns and public safety seems hard? Can I really do this?

Sure, it’s not an easy topic to tackle. Chris Green, The Journal’s managing editor, acknowledges as much in a column from the Winter edition examining five barriers to talking about guns and suggestions for how to get past them. You can read his column here – THE 5 BARRIERS PREVENTING A BETTER DEBATE OVER GUNS AND PUBLIC SAFETY.

There’s also a video of Green’s presentation about the five barriers from a Journal launch event this past March.

Do you have more questions? Do you need more information?

Please contact Shaun Rojas at srojas@kansasleadershipcenter.org or 316-712-4956.

Discussion Stories

Get the Discussion Guide!

We’ll be publishing an easy-to-use discussion guide for conducting Journal Talks on guns and public safety in the near future. Until then, you can use the content we published in the Winter 2019 edition of The Journal, which is featured below.

From the magazine:

To put guns and public safety in perspective, The Journal tells 14 stories of Kansans sharing what they believe about guns, why they believe it, and what they think Kansans need to discuss when it comes to the topic. We’re urging our readers to spend the most time exploring perspectives they either disagree with or want to understand better. The Kansas Leadership Center teaches that it’s only through holding and testing multiple interpretations and points of view that we can truly understand the nature of tough adaptive challenges.