#WhatIfChicago Initiative Seeks To Get Guns Off Streets

You may have seen Russell Simmons tweeting about this yesterday, but in case you missed it, there’s a new initiative being sparked in the city to help get guns off the streets. As part of Chicago Ideas Week in October, #WhatIfChicago seeks to use social media (Twitter in particular) to build awareness and share ideas and create potential solutions.

A lot of people on the various social networks have asked how they can be involved, and how they can make a difference. Well, this is a start. Hit the jump for details and full press release.

Murder and drive bys. Gang wars and unsolved shootings. A 60 percent increase in homicides in the first three months of 2012 alone. None of this is news for anyone who lives in Chicago. Everyone knows someone through someone else who has been affected by guns on our streets.

But thereʼs a new social movement that could tackle our gun problem. #WhatIfChicago is a new Twitter experiment that hooks up everyone from regular people to Ceasefire, the Interrupters, the Police, community leaders, and anyone else who wants to stop the violence. The goal is for all of Chicago to put heads together and come up with ideas to get guns off our streets.

Anyone who Tweets an idea to #WhatIfChicago will get heard. The best ideas will be presented at Chicago Ideas Week this October. And those ideas will get discussed by an expert panel of journalists, hip-hop moguls, police superintendents, and violence experts from Harvard. Ideally, the best ideas will get put into action. But if this experts could do it alone, it would be done. And that’s why #WhatIfChicago was born: The gun issue is bigger than academics, community leaders, the police, or even these smart non-profits who know the issue like nobody else. #WhatIfChicago was born because only Chicago can heal Chicago.