by Lael Ewy
In what ways does a
trauma-informed, harm-reduction approach make sense in challenging
the prevalence of gun violence?
Let's make the
assumption that the presence of a gun and the beliefs associated with
that gun are important to the gun owner. This is a pretty safe
assumption given the outsized emotions that even low-level
discussions of gun violence elicit. The trauma-informed perspective
would lead us to see these beliefs and emotions as linked to a sense
of safety for the gun owner, that while guns themselves are
dangerous, the safety they provide outweighs the danger.
By this perspective,
any statistical, regulatory, or traditionally argumentative
approaches to addressing gun violence are destined to fail.
Only by looking
behind the gun to whatever need is being met by the presence of the
gun can we begin to address what's really going on. We need to take
the emphasis off the sacred object itself and onto the felt sense it
satisfies or worldview it completes.
Let's go back to the
sense of safety. If, as is often noted by gun-rights activists, a gun
makes them feel “safer,” and they feel they need that gun
wherever they go, the obvious conclusion is that they feel unsafe
most of the time, indeed, that the world itself is not merely unsafe
at this time but fundamentally an unsafe place. For these
people, for some reason or another, threats loom around every corner,
and the most likely target for those threats is the individual.
If so, then banning
guns will be just about as effective as banning drugs has been:
people will get them anyway. The drugs are meeting a need that the
person feels she cannot meet any other way, and so also with the gun.
Whatever happened in
the lives of gun activists, from assault to combat, from the presence
of Mexicans to the election of a black president, makes them feel
that an existential threat is ever-present, and that so they must be
ever vigilant.
How much of this
rises to the level of actual trauma or whether it's simply due to the
overactive imaginations of otherwise high-strung people is
immaterial; again, you can't argue someone out of a feeling of
existential threat. But we can begin to help people address why they
feel so constantly scared.
Unfortunately, it
will require us recognizing and listening, without judgment, to
perspectives that are often very difficult to hear.
