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Just as it's impossible for the CeaseFire outreach workers not to dig more deeply into the lives of the young people they find on the street, it's also impossible while watching their efforts not to think about the deeper causes of so much anger.

Yes, poverty and other wider societal problems are the main causes of low achievement in school, but you have to start somewhere, and schools have long been the route up and out of poverty.

Change the culture of low expectations, and then watch schools and whole communities achieve success. Change the culture of violence, and then watch as young people and whole communities stop the cycle of self-destruction.

During a teenage boy's funeral, Ameena stands at a pulpit and tells the mourners, most of them also teenagers, "We've got a responsibility to bring up our community to be vibrant." Individuals need to start thinking differently and acting differently, and then things will be different. It's similar to the argument of Charles Murray in his new book, Coming Apart, in which he links the problems of the white working class to a culture of laziness and relaxed family values. Culture is the key to improving the lot of the disadvantaged, he says.

But The Interrupters complicates this argument.

After the interruption, what next? Is the interrupters' hard work sustainable without a deeper effort to transform the conditions that led to the violence in the first place?

“I have my days,” she told us. “I’m not always able to get through my day without having some sort of flashback. Her daughter, Autumn, began sobbing and screaming in the middle of her 7th grade Social Studies class. It took three weeks before she felt strong enough to return to school.

The metallic taste was unusually strong, so she scooped up a small handful of sand and slowly sucked on it. It took away the bitterness. The sand gave her taste. It is, I suppose, the equivalent of finding solace in an empty room.

But nothing kept that bitterness away like the sand.

“I’m alone now,” she told me. “Nobody wants to be with me. It’s like lenses. I see everything through this tragedy.”

A principal at an elementary school once told me that he could always tell when it was the end of the day because the school would begin to shake with activity. Students would get into altercations. They’d run down the hall, slam lockers and holler at each other and teachers. They were, in essence, preparing themselves for the dangerous walk home.

we’ve neglected those here. Consider that in Chicago alone over the past 20 years, more than 15,000 people have been murdered. (Chicago isn’t even in the top 10 most violent U.S. cities.) Each has left behind family and friends. Moreover, many of those murders occurred in public places, on the street or in a park or alleyway, and so have been witnessed by others.

CDC found that 42 percent of all teenagers have witnessed violence in their community

A study out of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health has found, not surprisingly, that children exposed to violence tend to do less well at school.

“What’s going to be the impact of having a group of young adults who shut off?” she asked me.

When young children are referred to the center after being exposed to an act of brutality, they’re asked to draw something, and what they draw is typically an idyllic scene — a home behind a picket fence, sunshine, birds. Just the opposite of what you might expect. It is, Marans posits, an effort to regain some control over what they’ve seen, to stop feeling helpless in the face of danger. Without any intervention, these children, as they get older, find ways to establish control, and often that can mean distancing themselves from those around them. A 12-year-old boy once told me, “I don’t have friends, just ‘associates’. Friends you trust.” It can also mean that they take an attitude of “don’t mess with me.”

“Becoming aggressive is one way of adapting, of trying to gain some control over your environment,” Marans says. “Don’t be scared. Be scary.”

children exposed to street violence show the same kind of post-traumatic stress disorder we see in veterans who’ve returned from combat

At war, there’s a sense of common purpose,

Marans and others urge, we need to give both adults and children the tools to grapple with what they’ve seen and heard. Many of the answers are out there (and in fact we see some of it in the film): mentoring, after-school programs, counseling. “What’s tragic is that we know the answers, and we know how to muster the kind of intervention strategies that will be helpful,” Marans told me. “But we seem unwilling.”

Eddie has two brothers who served in Iraq, and one returned deeply troubled by what he’d seen and what he’d done. As he shared his difficulties in adjusting to civilian life, Eddie saw parallels to what he had experienced in the streets. So Eddie has contacted veterans groups, and beginning in April, plans to have former soldiers who’ve battled PTSD come speak to gang members, not necessarily to pull them off the streets, but rather to prod them to consider how the violence has torn away at who they are

“They can have whole entire aspects of their selves that are never felt,” Stolbach says.

To protect himself, he had lost the capacity to feel fear or anger or grief. He had cut himself off not only from others, but also from himself. The children who grow up amidst such violence become kind of spiritual nomads with no one to turn to, often not even themselves. I remember how Gregory Robinson’s sister, Autumn, made a point of telling us she now keeps to herself. “I just want to be left alone.” What could be a more acute form of despair than loneliness?