Imagine you had a home with a picket fence out front, and you had planted blackberry bushes on both sides of that fence.

Let's further imagine a local population of raccoons kept going to town on the blackberries you were growing outside the fence line and squirrels were polishing off the ones inside.

You could create two entirely separate plans to keep critters away from your fruit, but does that really make sense?

Don't the two challenges have enough in common that you'd be better off addressing them together.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Look, people who live near wild animals hungry for their produce are mostly just inconvenienced.

But people who live in places where assaults and shootings happen often can be negatively

affected for life even if they are witnesses to the brutality rather than victims of it.

But as my guest has discovered, many efforts to keep people safe have historically focused either on domestic violence or community gun violence without considering the many risk factors these terrible occurrences have in common.

And now some advocates say it is time to tear down the fences between those efforts.

Abine Clayton is a reporter on the Guns and Lies in America Project at The Guardian,

where you can read her reporting on the links between community gun violence and domestic violence.

Abine, welcome to think.

Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. You begin this article by telling us about a woman

you call Alicia Thomas. What is her story? So, Alicia, as we have been calling her, she is a native of

Sacramento, California. She grew up during the, you know, the crack

era as she describes it, was unfortunately witnessed to gun violence outside of the home. She also

had two parents who were teenagers when they had her and struggled with drug abuse, substance dependence, and would regularly get into physical fights.

So as a child and adolescent, she saw violent conflict being, you know, the way that people settled their issues.

And as she grew up, she ended up in a relationship with a man who regularly abused her, physically, mentally, financially in some cases.

But though she was with him for 20 years throughout that time, she just thought, well,

this is how relationships go.

...