Across the Atlantic, the UK is grappling with an epidemic of its own. A routine traffic stop in London on Wednesday night turned bloody when a driver turned on police officers and allegedly hacked them with a machete, an incident becoming more familiar to the city’s law enforcement officers. This surge in knife crime saw London’s murder rate overtake that of New York last year, while across England and Wales, 43,516 knife crime offenses were recorded in the 12 months ending March 2019. 67 people have been murdered in London in the first six months of this year and, according to statistics released in May, five young people are attacked with a knife every day in the British capital.

In both countries, politicians have been accused of doing nothing. US President Donald Trump has been bashed by Democrats for refusing to push for tough gun control legislation, while London Mayor Sadiq Khan has been accused of ignoring the rise in knife crime, often singled out by Trump himself. Against the seemingly impossible task of curbing the violence, there is one solution that nobody in either country seems to have tried: talking to the young men most often responsible for the murders. In the US, a Secret Service report last year found that the average mass shooter is white, male, and has a history of mental illness.

An LA Times opinion piece by two criminal justice professors who studied mass shootings since the 1960s states that these killers were often pushed to action by mental health crises, following drawn-out bouts of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. “Proactive violence prevention,” they recommend, “starts with schools, colleges, churches and employers initiating conversations about mental health.”