A colleague of mine, David Zehrung, is a psychologist practicing in Pennsylvania. He will be speaking this month to the Pennsylvania Psychological Association about firearms. He asked me to provide a 3-minute overview of what I’d like psychologists to know about gun owners. I put together a 5-minute version for “Light Over Heat” this week.
Some additional materials on this topic:
Walk the Talk America is doing great work at the intersection of guns and mental health.
My essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Gun Safety’” for The BulletPoints Project.
My take on Guns are Normal and Normal People Use Guns.
A longer presentation on the changing face of gun owners I gave to the Outdoor Writers Association of America.
Gun Curious 
Your presentation is very reasonable and I wonder how it will be received?
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In addition to being a firearms instructor I have a master’s degree in clinical psychology. In the course of earning the latter, I interned four years at a Suicide Prevention Center. If I was still in that line of work, this is what I’d want psychotherapists to know and tell their patients:
If I was going to attempt suicide, I would not use a gun. Guns don’t always work and, when they fail, they leave a mess. We humans are tough. We can survive with large chunks of our anatomy, including pieces of our brain, destroyed. I and anyone who’s worked in a hospital Emergency Department could tell you gruesome stories of people who attempted to shoot themselves in the head or heart and survived, but with permanent, horrific injuries.
There are better solutions, “not killing yourself” being the top of the list. I worked four years helping people find reasons to choose that alternative. It’s part of a psychotherapist’s job.
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