The CEO of Lifebridge Health is Behind a Plan to End Illegal Gun Trafficking in Maryland

Through its administration of several Safe Streets violence-interruption sites in Baltimore, LifeBridge Health has been directly involved in efforts to prevent gun violence since about 2021. Twice last year, Neil Meltzer, the hospital and urgent care system’s CEO, went to the White House at the invitation of its Office on Gun Violence Prevention, including serving as one of the lead presenters at a June summit on public-health and hospital-based strategies to address gun violence.

In December, under Meltzer’s leadership, LifeBridge Health launched a public-education campaign, called Stop the Iron Pipeline, to build statewide awareness around the trafficking of illegal guns into Maryland.

Launching a public awareness campaign about gun violence seems like an unusual initiative for a hospital system. What was the impetus?
What has been frustrating to me is the fact that our communities have been deeply affected by gun violence—every day, we and every other hospital system see the impact of that violence—and we also know what the situation is. At the White House, I learned specifically that so much of the gun violence in Maryland is [traced back] to guns that were trafficked from out of state.

This is an issue that LifeBridge has been intimately involved with through its administration of several Safe Streets violence-interruption sites in the city.
What we’re trying to do is get to the root cause of gun violence, and Safe Streets programs and interventions address what’s happening in the streets of Baltimore, specifically. But we also know that we’re the number-one state in the country for trafficked guns…This is an issue that’s statewide.

LifeBridge has produced a short film and song, “Pipeline” (dropping Feb. 13), by Grammy-nominated rapper Logic and young singers from Resonate Baltimore, the Parkville music school. What does the campaign entail? How do you plan to get the word out?
Everything has gone out on social media, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and on the website of the movement. It’s a highly visual website that we hope will connect to a younger audience and get them engaged. Our goal is to educate them around the issue and then have them take action by signing a petition to the governor, asking him to prioritize this issue.

Maryland has comparatively strict gun laws, which obviously doesn’t prevent the inflow of guns. Is the idea ultimately to put pressure on other states to act as well?
We’re hoping this begins to put some pressure on maybe Virginia or the Carolinas. It’s possible to pinpoint a gun shop in Georgia, for example, where illegal guns are coming from. So, we’re also hoping there’ll be more aggressive action in Maryland, such as what [New York] Attorney General Letitia James did in New York, filing lawsuits against out-of-state ghost-gun retailers. We really just hope to break the cycle some way.