Monthly Gun Debate Update - November 2024
Ieva Jusionyte's EXIT WOUNDS - How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across The Border
Revisiting EXIT WOUNDS and Reconnecting with Ieva Jusionyte
While researching potential Public Relations firms to support my graphic novel Should We Buy a Gun?, I rediscovered a gem I encountered at the 2024 Los Angeles Book Festival: Exit Wounds by Ieva Jusionyte.
So I reached out via an Instagram story and she reached back :)
Ieva had some good advice and I started to revisit her book.
Soon realizing its look at how gun policy impacts the border crisis was perfectly timely for a post-election November Monthly Gun Debate Update!
Ieva Jusionyte
Ieva Jusionyte (Ph.D., EMT-P) is a legal anthropologist and a certified emergency medical responder. She is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. Born and raised in Lithuania, Jusionyte earned her B.A. degree in political science from Vilnius University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from Brandeis University, in Massachusetts. Before coming to Brown, she was John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
Jusionyte studies borders, law, and violence, and is the author of three books, including multiple-award winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2018), which received the 2019 Victor Turner Prize In Ethnographic Writing and the 2020 SAW Book Prize. Her new book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border, came out in April 2024.
Jusionyte has held fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Fulbright program, and her fieldwork and writing have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. In addition to research articles published in flagship scholarly journals, Jusionyte’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone, and she’s been the featured guest on CNN’s GPS, ABC News Live, and multiple NPR shows.
Apart from her scholarly pursuits, Ieva Jusionyte is a trained EMT, paramedic, and wildland firefighter, and spent five years volunteering in fire and rescue departments in Massachusetts, Florida, and Arizona. She lives in Boston.
EXIT WOUNDS
After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico.
Based on years of fieldwork, Exit Wounds expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border.
Border Crisis is also a Gun Issue?
Jusionyte’s book was published earlier in 2024.
The same year that Donald Trump ran again and won partly on his aggressive border policy.
Promising to heavily deport refugees from Mexico, Central, and Latin America.
Yet what Jusionyte’s book shows is that American guns are in no small part one of the main factors for the refugees wanting to flee their countries and escape to America.
Mexico, for historical and cultural reasons, didn’t manufacture firearms.
America, for other historical and cultural reasons, has had a significant arms manufacturing business.
While there have been moments in the countries’ shared history where America didn’t directly approve selling guns to its Southern neighbor, mostly the US has approved it, and, when not, private American corporations or dealers found ways to do so anyway.
As the freedom for gun sales have increased particularly in border states like Texas and Arizona in the 20th and 21st century (as well as those guns lethality), Mexico has tried to make laws to limit its citizens’ ability to own them, but illicit increasingly lethal guns kept and keep coming across the border.
The irony is that you could argue…
While Trump offers deportation and border walls, his support of our gun industry creates the very insecurity that pushes people to vote for him to protect themselves.
Human Stories
To Jusionyte’s incredible credit, she’s just as formidable an ethnographer about the human stories and anthropologically lived experience of the situations.
Chapters about the history and policy are broken up by a series of case histories.
Jusionyte masterfully and empathetically weaves together these gripping stories including:
A teenage girl turned trained assassin.
Two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers.
A Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection.
And a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime.
The one about the teenage girl was particularly moving to me.
Jusionyte points out how much she didn’t want to leave Mexico because it was home.
But how she felt like she had no choice because her parents were in America.
When she comes back at a very young age still due to difficulty with her mother and racism.
She’s undefended from the state or family from a cartel that captures and trains her.
This mixture of statistics and policy and history with narrative non-fiction, storytelling, and sympathy makes Exit Wounds stand out in the field.
Why This Book Matters
I was reading it this week at a tennis facility.
When a woman entered and asked what it was about.
I shared that it was about the unseen effects of America’s guns on the border crisis.
She said it sounded interesting.
But then added:
Couldn’t that just be a New Yorker article?
I laughed and said I bet the author has done article versions of this as well.
But as the person walked away.
I couldn’t help but feel for book authors.
What I’ve included in this short review for the monthly gun debate update only scratches the surface.
And as we enter another era of Trump policies about the border, it could be helpful for our citizenship to understand some of the externalities America is responsible for that is affecting this issue.
I urge you to check it out if interested.
And other books soon ;)
Plus it’s got a special cover!
