When Ieva Jusionyte came from Lithuania for advanced studies in anthropology at Brandeis University, she had nagging memories of the Soviet Union’s threat to reoccupy her homeland and the resulting need some people there felt for firearms.
Yet in Lithuania, and later Massachusetts, she never gave much thought to guns. It wasn’t until she worked as an emergency paramedic along both sides of the border in Nogales, Arizona—and earned a PhD that included ethnographic research—that she was thrust into a world that forced her seismic mental shift away from popular beliefs about guns and the U.S.-Mexico border.
The title of her third book distills the transformation into a few words: “Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border.”
Jusionyte writes that the change in her big picture was first prompted by road signs in all caps that she noticed along southbound highways near the border. “WEAPONS AND AMMUNITION ILLEGAL IN MEXICO.” The signs aroused her ethnographic curiosity, and when she delved into official counts of gun stores the number seemed to back up the message on the signs: two gun stores in all of Mexico versus 9,940 in U.S. states bordering Mexico (as tallied by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or ATF).
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