‘NBC Nightly News’ Dedicates Half of its Sunday Broadcast to Stories of One Night of Gun Violence in America

NBC Nightly News The first 14 minutes of Sunday’s broadcast were devoted to one story: footage that took place in four major cities overnight.

Kate Snow, host of Sunday’s Top of the Show, said that “more and more Americans die in petty incidents every night” across the country, as a series of horrific mass shootings drew attention across the country. Snow and three other reporters worked night shifts in different cities to see “how gun violence is destroying communities and shaking our country.”

Snow said this in an interview with Deadline. night news Weekend Executive Producer Matt Frucht thought “of the horrific gun violence we’ve reported, especially when there’s a mass shooting, which frankly there’s a huge media backlash when it happens. But when you work the weekend shift, you’ll notice that on Saturdays every week we talk about violence and see if we can fit a little into our schedule. I just felt bad for Matt. He felt that we should spend the night focusing on the daily, unfortunately horribly routine, violence that is happening across the country.”

“Whether it’s a bad weekend in Chicago or a bad weekend in Philly, we treat individual shots as they happen. The hard thing to turn off and broadcast is the sum of the frequency at which it occurs. It happens literally every night in America, even more so on the weekends, but every night in America. There is gun violence in cities and towns across the country, and the magnitude of these numbers is difficult to quantify. You can look at the statistics and they will tell you that yes, there is an average of 40,000 gun deaths each year. But it’s hard to understand who these people are, how these gun deaths happen, how they affect communities, how they connect our police and our healthcare system. “

Snow was watching Pastor Donovan Price, who cares for victims of gun violence and their families in Chicago. Price told Snow he had intervened in 1,000 murders in his career, and Saturday was no different as he counseled family members of other victims.

Gabby Gutierrez was at the Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore where she reported two gunshot victims, one of whom did not survive. This is evident when a “time of death” call is made by a member of the medical team trying to save a life.

Gaddy Schwartz was with Houston Police Department Chief Larry Crosson and was at the scene of both attacks. While one was involved in the kidnapping, the other arrived after the event to see distraught relatives and emergency vehicles. At 3:30 a.m., Schwartz reported a total of six shootings in the Houston area in about six hours.

Jesse Kirsch was stopped in the late afternoon by the Philadelphia Police Department, where the first incident was reported. In one case, the police intervened with a small child wandering the street. “The boy has been reunited with his family, but based on everything we’ve seen in this area, it’s really hard to come up with the idea of ​​a little boy standing in these streets in the middle of the night.” said Kirsch. .

Frucci said the project took several months to plan and then produce, adding additional staff to the timeline. He described the project as “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my career, because that was the logistics of shooting the footage overnight, so we had to get the teams out in the field, we had to make sure. . They were doing it safely.” They’ve had several meetings over the past few weeks regarding the safety of reporters and crew. A team of 20 was ready to shoot starting at 5am ET. Six different editors worked on the piece to finish it Sunday night.

Snow said Price “not only asked but begged us, please show us what’s going on here.” “He told me last night, ‘This isn’t going to change unless the country tackles endemic gun violence every weekend, every night,'” he said.

By 7:35 p.m. Saturday, Price said he had already heard of the two shootings.

“What you do is wait on your phone, search for text messages, search for radio traffic, look at the scanner app. And when you see a gunshot or a shot and someone is sent to the hospital, he runs to find families, shepherd them, pray with them, and do all kinds of help. Services.”

Snow said Price introduced her to Diane Archer, who was the abuser of her two oldest children. “The last one was the day before Mother’s Day and her son bought her a cake for Mother’s Day.” He was shot outside his home, and Price knelt down and wiped the blood from the floor “because he didn’t want his mother to see him.”

Price told Snow that not enough attention was paid to “local” gun violence like this. “When you’re there, man,” he said. “When they are here, they are. This is what they did. That’s how they live.”

Snow said he asked Price how we fixed it. What can we all do? “He said it started with all of us, actually all of us paying attention, it’s not just me in my small community in Chicago. Everyone in the country needs to pay more attention and invest more in solutions.”

However, the episode did not touch upon the political issues of gun control or the recent Supreme Court decision that expanded gun rights. Rather, he devoted himself to the human side of one night’s trauma.

Frucci said: “Audiences understand that this is not just a big group shot to watch out for. These are everyday shots that require attention as they happen much more often than people realize. “