Emergency room doctors and trauma surgeons have a unique and unheard perspective on gun violence. In treating the people wounded in mass shootings, physicians know firsthand how radically different assault weapon injuries are from those caused by handguns. However, due to political pressures and the self-interest of industry-backed lobbying groups, their voices have been stifled or, in some cases, silenced altogether. The result: Americans have been deprived of physicians’ powerful and unique perspective on this uniquely American problem.

Our charge was to create and bring to life an idea that could call attention to this unheard medical point of view and activate Americans concerned about gun violence to call on their political representatives to ban assault weapons.

Impossible Operation is an ironic symbol of the frustration and difficulty physicians experience when attempting to repair assault weapon injuries. Our idea was to reimagine the classic American board game, Operation, in such a way that it gives voice to this silenced experience and becomes a cultural lightning rod.

Chosen for its iconic American-ness and immediately familiar topic, we started with a simple but fundamental twist: make the game unwinnable. From there a new, imaginable patient was introduced: a young schoolgirl with an assault weapon wound.

Taken together, the result is a provocative symbol capable of rallying nationwide physician participation, capturing the attention of Americans concerned with gun violence and the media, and memorably revealing the medical reality of assault weapon injuries.

Some may say this idea is ridiculous. We say no more so than the laws that make its existence a necessity.

Our target audience was Americans concerned about gun violence. Arming them with the medical perspective on gun violence, allowing them to experience it, and activating them to collectively contact all 100 US senators, would allow us to turn a political issue into a public health issue.

To lead this effort, we enlisted two communities that have intimately experienced the effects of assault weapon violence firsthand: physicians and families of victims. The face of our initiative included Manuel Oliver (father of a Parkland shooting victim and founder of Change the Ref), Dr. Joseph Sakran (surgeon, founder of This Is Our Lane physician activist group), and Dr. William Begg (treating physician at Sandy Hook).

Our approach involved creating an online game and response mechanism at ImpossibleOperation.com, driving organic conversations and traffic online by sharing a pointed film with our influencers’ followers, and delivering gameboards to senators and media to generate media coverage.

Impossible Operation was launched while the US Senate was in session, in order to call attention to Bill S.66—The Assault Weapons Ban of 2019.

As part of a multi-platform initiative, physical versions of the Impossible Operation board game were sent to influential politicians on Capitol Hill.

Our physician influencers shared a powerful social film with their followers online to create a groundswell, and gameboards were delivered to the national news media to generate mass scale, bringing the public into contact with our message and driving them to our online version of the game at ImpossibleOperation.com.

From our site, after playing the game, site visitors selected the state they lived in to seamlessly tweet the game directly to their elected senators and share the message with others. In amplifying the voices of physicians and families of victims with a unified message, we exponentially grew our already wide range of supporters.

Impossible Operation successfully activated our target audience to contact all 100 US Senators via tweet and demand the ban of assault weapons.

Five thousand doctors participated in the campaign, collaborating on the game, tweeting out the social film, and sharing photos of themselves with the game.

Impossible Operation was picked up by national broadcast media and news outlets, securing a 10-minute feature on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and a feature on ABC news, further fueling the campaign CTA.

Online, Impossible Operation reached more than 63,000,000 people, with more than 41,000 retweets and 54,000 likes.

Gun-safety organizations and celebrities spread our message online, including March for Our Lives, Alyssa Milano, and Susan Sarandon, garnering more than 4,200,000 engagements in its first week.

Overall, Impossible Operation reached 100 million people, meaningfully changing the substance of the assault weapon ban conversation.