During this election cycle, arguments over the Second Amendment were not front and center. But opinions on guns and access to them are still issues voters hold strongly. Some of the loudest voices on guns of late have also been some of the youngest. They are featured in a new podcast from KERA North Texas called “Gun Play.” It’s created and hosted by Jerome Weeks and Hady Mawajdeh.
Mawajdeh said their project began when they found out about a project by the Dallas theater company Cry Havoc.
“They work with teens to create documentary-style theater projects,” Mawajdeh said. “Their first was about the Dallas police shooting. Literally weeks after that Dallas police shooting they were speaking to officers and to people who were on the scene and they felt like there were more questions that needed to be asked. And after that, they went into a seven month journey into guns and gun culture and became NRA members, spoke to parents whose children were murdered and parents whose children took their own lives. We just followed them throughout the process.”
The five episode podcast takes listeners through that process – which sometimes got very personal.
“They made this play [called “Babel”] in 2018, which was the deadliest year for school shootings in modern American history,” Mawajdeh said. “And at the time, they were hiding under desks. They were learning how to go through metal detectors, and they were then going and talking to people who had been involved in school shootings. So it was really an overwhelming experience for these kids, sometimes emotionally, sometimes intellectually, but it really pushed them to think about things in a unique way.”
