Episode for March 28, 2024
SUPD 1072 Author Ieva Jusionyte / Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Borde
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On today’s show!
Ieva Jusionyte (Ph.D., EMT-P) is a legal and medical 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, is coming 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 (Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and others), Jusionyte’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian, and she’s been the featured guest on NPR’s “The Takeaway” and “Forum.”
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.
Ieva Jusionyte explains how firearms made and sold in the United States have played a significant role in the perpetration of violence across the border in Mexico. Mexico strictly regulates the sale of semi-automatic rifles at the federal level, but these weapons are easily available across the border in states like Texas and Arizona. Organized crime groups use funds obtained from illegal drug sales to smuggle weapons purchased in the U.S. into Mexico with devastating consequences. An estimated 200,000 to 500,000 weapons are smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border every year, and 70% of firearms recovered from crime scenes were purchased in the U.S.
Turns the familiar story of trafficking across the US-Mexico border on its head, looking at firearms smuggled south from the United States to Mexico and their ricochet effects.
American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. 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.
An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. 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.
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