Guns and Mental Health by Walk the Talk America
The Walk the Talk America Podcast is where firearm culture and mental health meet with curiosity, not confrontation.
Each episode brings together voices from the firearm community, mental health professionals, researchers, and everyday gun owners to have honest conversations about suicide prevention, culture, and practical solutions.
We focus on education over outrage, nuance over noise, and collaboration over division, because reducing negative outcomes requires diverse perspectives.
And because this work is personal, every episode closes with a simple but powerful question: How do you stay mentally healthy?
Guns and Mental Health by Walk the Talk America
Ep 164: Bridging the Gap: A Yale Researcher, Gun Owners, and What Actually Reduces Harm
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For the first time on the WTTA podcast, we’re joined by a researcher, and not just any researcher.
Michael Sodini and Kevin Berry sit down with Kerri Raissian, Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of Public Health’s Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative. Kerri shares her path from growing up on a cattle farm in Texas, to working in a district attorney’s office and running one of the largest domestic violence shelters in the country, to becoming a researcher focused on what actually reduces injury, trauma, and death.
This conversation goes straight to the real tension points, without the usual talking past each other:
- The difference between reducing firearm deaths vs reducing overall deaths and why substitution matters
- What gun owners worry about with ERPOs, and what it would take for policies to be trusted and usable
- Why secure storage keeps showing up as a high-impact solution, including the reality of firearm theft from vehicles
- How research funding changed after 2020 and why more universities are building firearm research initiatives now
- Why storytelling and lived experience still matter even in data-driven policy work
It’s candid, nuanced, and exactly what it looks like when the research community and firearm community sit at the same table and actually try to build answers together.
