In September, Train SMART sponsored and presented at GLMA’s 44th Annual Conference on LGBTQ+ Health in Seattle. GLMA is the leading national organization of LGBTQ+ and allied health professionals, including doctors, nurses, social workers and others whose job is keeping their patients safe. This year, a lot of them wanted to talk about guns.
We heard it at the Train SMART booth and in our workshop: Providers are seeing more and more patients who are interested in guns. The reasons vary, but they all come back to safety.
One provider from Oregon told us several parents of transgender kids in their practice are looking into gun ownership to protect their families. Other patients are buying after seeing shootings in the news. Some are reacting to the level of violence they feel in the country right now.
I get it. The climate in this country can be scary for LGBTQ+ Americans, and as a gay man, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Wanting to protect your family isn’t a bad instinct, but we need to press pause, and instead of following a trend, look to see if owning a gun is the right fit for you.
Start with a Plan
What stuck with me was that a lot of families are bringing a gun home to protect themselves — but without a plan to protect themselves from that gun. It’s one of the reasons why Train SMART was created.
Having access to a gun triples a person’s risk of dying by suicide, and roughly 9 in 10 suicide attempts with a gun end in death, compared with about 4 percent of attempts without one. A gun in the home also raises the risk of homicide for the people who live there, too.
Now, one way to reduce these risks is secure storage. Research shows that homes that locked up both their guns and their ammunition had a 78 percent lower risk of self-inflicted gun injuries among children than homes that locked up neither. And when someone in the house is at risk of harming themselves or others, temporarily removing the gun from the home is the best way to reduce the risk.
These are just facts. If you’re bringing a gun home to keep your family safe, a plan for storing it securely must be part of your plan to keep them safe.
Our SMART Guide to Buying a Gun helps prospective gun owners make informed decisions regarding gun ownership, and it takes a safety-first, inclusive, and trauma-informed approach.
What the Workshop Actually Did
Our session, “Talking About Guns and Safety: A Train SMART Workshop for LGBTQ+ Advocates,” was accredited by the American Academy of Family Physicians. Over 30 people attended, including social workers, psychiatrists, EMTs, and physicians across specialties.
That mix of people mattered. Psychiatrists and EMTs meet patients at very different moments, but they’re running into the same question: What do I say when a patient tells me they own a gun, or that they’re about to buy one?
It was a real workshop, not a lecture. Nellis, a Train SMART instructor, guided folks through conversations providers can have with patients: how to ask whether there’s a gun at home, how to talk about secure storage without judgment, and what to say if a patient’s answer worries you.
Providers already ask about seatbelts, smoke detectors, and pool fences. Guns belong on that list, too. Patients are making these decisions with or without a provider in the loop, and talking about safety is part of the job.
The workshop attendees were eager to learn more. And while we built this particular workshop for the GLMA conference, we recognize that it shouldn’t stay there. So if you’re a provider thinking “We should do this in my clinic,” contact us at [email protected].
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Jay Franzone is associate director of Government Affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety. He’s an MPH candidate and Bloomberg American Health Initiative Violence Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.