Ieva Jusionyte Traces the Guns That Move Violence North to South in Exit Wounds

Ieva Jusionyte’s new book, *Exit Wounds*, starts from a border and follows a commodity. In a conversation with Public Books, the anthropologist explained how her research tracks gun trafficking from the United States into Mexico, where the flow of weapons becomes part of a larger cycle involving migration, drug addiction, and drug smuggling.

Following the guns south

Jusionyte said she arrived at the topic almost by accident while doing fieldwork on the US-Mexico border in Southern Arizona for an earlier project. Working as a paramedic and firefighter and crossing the border frequently, she began noticing signs warning that bringing guns and ammunition into Mexico is a crime. At first, she admitted, she had not paid close attention. Her attention was on what could not enter the United States. Only later did she begin asking why gun law looked so different on the Mexican side, and how many weapons recovered at crime scenes there originated in the United States.

That shift became the basis of *Exit Wounds*, which she described as a multi-sited ethnography. Rather than treating gun trafficking as a single-chain problem, the book looks at it from several angles: the meanings guns carry in each country, the people drawn into the trade, and the institutional settings that shape the violence surrounding them.

Numbers, but not only numbers

The conversation also returned repeatedly to statistics, which Jusionyte said are often the easiest way to make the issue legible. She cited the scale of murder in Mexico and the United States, along with the striking contrast between the number of gun stores in US border states and the number in Mexico. But she cautioned that numbers can mislead as much as they reveal.

For her, public data can be useful because it is accessible through records requests and because it gives shape to a problem that is otherwise hard to document. Yet she stressed that those figures need context: they do not capture the full range of gun deaths in the United States, and they can flatten the human realities behind illicit economies. Her method, she suggested, is to think with numbers without letting them stand in for the story.

Journalists, danger, and the border

The book also reflects Jusionyte’s longstanding interest in the people who make hidden systems visible. In earlier work she focused on journalists and emergency responders, and in *Exit Wounds* she again makes room for journalists whose reporting intersects with her own research. She said anthropologists and journalists function, in a sense, as doubles: both try to render violence understandable, and both often rely on the same figures, documents, and routes of inquiry.

That shared work can be dangerous. Jusionyte discussed how one of her characters, a journalist named Juan, is in a government protection program. She said she has sometimes co-signed articles with him as a way of reducing his exposure, while he has also helped reduce risk for her when she travels in unfamiliar communities. The book, then, is not only about violence but about the conditions under which it can be studied and reported.

What the state does with guns

A major thread in the conversation was the role of the state. Jusionyte invoked Charles Tilly’s idea of the state as a “protection racket” and said she is interested in how that idea changes when the line between legitimate and illegitimate force becomes less stable. In Mexico, she noted, people working for organized crime, the military, and the police all use guns and perform security functions. The question, for her, is what can be understood if one stops assuming that only state violence is legitimate.

That interest in legal and illegal force runs through the book’s treatment of the “plaza,” a territory controlled by organized crime. Jusionyte said the term is useful because it describes a specific kind of territorial struggle: violence tends to flare when control is contested, whether between rival groups or between a group and the state. The plaza, in her account, becomes a smaller-scale version of the border itself, a place where jurisdiction and authority are continuously negotiated.

Beyond shootouts

Jusionyte also pushed back against any narrow definition of violence as a shooting or murder alone. She said the book is concerned with structural violence: laws that determine who may own what kind of gun, where guns are made, how ammunition moves, and which commodities are treated as normal in one country and criminal in another. She also pointed to the symbolic world around guns, including narconovelas and narcocorridos, as part of the broader production of violence.

That cross-border comparison leads her to a larger argument about US gun culture. In her view, guns in the United States have become tied to stories of frontier life, freedom, masculine power, and personal autonomy, amplified by advertising and lobbying. Mexico, by contrast, tightly restricts gun advertising and has far fewer gun stores. Jusionyte suggested that comparing the two countries can make US attachment to firearms look unusually entrenched rather than inevitable.

Returning to the source

She ended *Exit Wounds* at the Smith & Wesson factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, a choice she said helped her return to where the violence of the book begins. The visit also underscored a geographic irony: while the factory sits in a state often associated with stricter gun regulation, weapons manufactured there are part of the circulation that shapes violence in Mexico.

Jusionyte said the factory is no longer easily open to visitors because of protests by gun safety advocates and families affected by gun violence, and that production of some rifles is shifting away from Massachusetts. That ending fits the larger arc of *Exit Wounds*: the book asks readers to see not a distant foreign crisis, but a connected system in which US firearms help produce the violence that migrants are often said to be fleeing.