How did a gun importer and social worker partner to fight suicides by firearms?

Just about everything about where they landed is improbable.

Michael Sodini, raised by a single mother in San Francisco, didn’t grow up around guns. People in his community who had guns were mostly “cops, your neighborhood pharmacist, gangster wannabe, or your real gangster. That’s it, right? So to me, guns weren’t a thing,” he said.

That changed when Sodini graduated from college and his Italian family from New Jersey informed him that he would be joining the family business.

“They were like ‘You’re coming to work with us,’ " he said.

Sodini said he soon realized “I am nothing like these people.” But since he knew little about the firearms industry, let alone his family’s business, he decided the best course was to “just listen and try to pay attention,” he said.

One thing he observed was that as his family’s company, Eagle Imports Inc., worked the same trade shows year after year, some of their regular customers weren’t in attendance.

“What I noticed about SHOT Show was, every year it seemed like one person that used to hang out around our booth wasn’t there. It was always like ‘Oh, you didn’t hear about David? He took his life with a firearm,’” Sodini said. SHOT Show, short for the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show, is a closed-door trade show in Las Vegas that is the biggest event of the year for the gun industry.

Beyond that, no one in firearms circles would say much about those suicide deaths by firearms, which Sodini said he thought “was the weirdest thing,” considering that gun shows attract many first responders, active duty military members and veterans “who take their lives at an alarming rate, yet we don’t talk about suicide.”

It hit hard after someone Sodini had worked with “took his life with one of our firearms,” he said.

“It was the most wild thing that I’ve ever seen, because his funeral was like a who’s who of the gun industry, and nobody reported about it. Once we put them in the ground, we all moved on. There was no blogging. There was no talking about it. There were no magazine articles about it,” Sodini said.

He didn’t know what to do and like most people in the gun industry at the time, he reckoned, “What are we supposed to do? It’s a mental health thing.”

A few years later, he and a sales representative were at a gun show in New Orleans. They had dinner with a woman they had just met and they talked about what they did for a living.

“When you’re not from the gun industry, you want to ask all kinds of questions, right?” Sodini said.

The woman said she was gun neutral and didn’t have a dog in the fight. But she wondered what gun rights supporters talk about after a mass shooting.

“I said, ‘Everyone blames us. We blame mental health, and nothing ever happens.’

“She asked one question that changed my life. She said, ‘Well, how do you work with the mental health community?’

“I literally was like, ‘We don’t.’ I couldn’t think of anything,” Sodini said.

His colleague threw out the suggestion that perhaps the company could donate $1 from every gun purchase. “It was a silly statement looking back at it,” but it made Sodini think “Why aren’t we involved?” he said.

“I became obsessed with the idea, and I had to go back and see if there’s somebody already doing it. But then I also had to find out if there was a mental health organization that would even talk to me because of … what we all said back and forth to each other,” he said.

After a deep dive into research, he found Mental Health America ’s Position Paper No. 72. Founded in 1909, Mental Health America is a leading national nonprofit that promotes mental health, well-being and prevention.

The document stated that the organization had not taken a position on most issues relating to the gun control debate “because those issues are outside of MHA’s core competencies. However, gun violence is having a substantial negative effect on the mental health of our country, particularly on communities of color and our youth.”

Mental Health America’s position was “music to my ears,” he said. “So I said, ‘These are the people that I need to talk to,’” he said.

He wrote what he calls his “‘Jerry McGuire’ email,” but he was urged to not send it to the mental health advocacy group until he had his own organization in place. Sodini, a self-described “line skipper” sent it anyway.

The same day he received the approval to form his own nonprofit organization, Walk the Talk America , Mental Health America contacted him and said, “We’ve been passing around your email and we would love to talk to you.”

They invited him to the organization’s regional meeting in Los Angeles. He and colleague were so excited they got there early. Among the first people they met was Debbie Plotnick, Mental Health America’s vice executive vice president of state and federal advocacy.

“We told her who we were and we were greeted with open arms,” Sodini said.

Meeting Debbie Plotnick

Plotnick is from Philadelphia and earned three degrees from Bryn Mawr College, where she studied social work and public policy.

She is also mom to a daughter “who spent her entire adolescence, from age 14 to just past 18, being actively suicidal,” Plotnick said.

While she is obviously well-educated, Plotnick said what gives her legitimacy in the mental health and public policy spheres is her “lived experience.”

Plotnick’s an “urban person who didn’t own firearms,” she said. If she had them in her home during her daughter’s teenage years, public health research shows there would have been a much higher likelihood that her daughter would have died by suicide.

One Harvard University study published in the journal Preventative Medicine in 2022 states “one way to reduce firearm suicide is to keep household guns away from a person at risk for suicide.”

The study of suicide deaths in five states, which included Utah, found that among men who died by firearm suicide, 88% used their own gun. Older white males have had the highest rate of suicide death, traditionally, which has been the case for many years, Plotnick said.

For women, 52% used their own gun and 32% used their partner’s gun, the study found. Among young adults ages 18-20, 42% used their own gun to end their lives, 43% used a family member’s and 8% used a friend’s firearm.

Among youth 18 and under, 79% used a firearm belonging to a family member while 19% used their own, the study states.

Her daughter is now in her early 40s, is a nurse, a healer, a mom and “she’s fabulous,” she said.

“My personal story is, my tagline is, ‘Every gray hair says Ashley,’” said Plotnick.

Ashley says Plotnick has her to thank for her silvery mane, which enables people “pick me out in a crowd, and the direction of my policy career, which is always personal.”

When Mental Health America leaders agreed to meet with Sodini, they extended the invitation, in part, to discuss their public policy work.

“One of the things that we always try to do is, we try very hard to have an open mind and not be judgmental. ‘Try’ is the operative word there, because we don’t always succeed, but we try,” she said.

According to Sodini’s account of the meeting on the Walk The Talk America’s website, “We spent the day listening to legislators talk about their initiatives to increase federal funding and raise awareness of the many issues the mental health industry faces. Many of these speakers shared their personal stories of both victories and losses, which was all very humbling for me.”

Sodini invited Plotnick to the SHOT Show, which was unfamiliar territory for her but she agreed to go.

“So what does this non-gun affiliated person from Philadelphia, who’s from the urban environment, who doesn’t know anything about any of this, do? People were wonderful to me because I wanted to hear from them. I didn’t want to talk at them. I wanted to talk to them,” she said.

Sodini, who is tall, fit, sleeved out with tattoos and at one time worked as a fashion model, and Plotnick, a petite, wiry woman with a distinctive Philadelphia accent, have, over time, come together to work toward reducing suicide by firearms.

“That’s our lane we have together, and it’s a huge lane. There’s some issues on the side that we don’t get into. Well, Mike and I often do get into them, and we have very nuanced and very frank conversations where we try to learn more from each other,” she said.

Recently, they spoke at the Stop Stigma Together, a three-day national summit in Salt Lake City on stigma surrounding mental illness and substance use disorders, which was an initiative of the Huntsman Mental Health Institute .

Disagreeing better

Much has changed since Plotnick’s and Sodini’s initial meeting six years ago.

Sodini sold his share in the family gun business and dedicates his time and energy to his nonprofit Walk the Talk America , with the goal of closing the gap between gun owners and the mental health world.

One of his initiatives has been getting gun sellers to agree to include fliers listing mental health resources in the boxes that guns and accessories are packaged.

Walk the Talk America’s website offers free, anonymous mental health screenings and a list of mental health providers who have taking the organization’s firearms cultural competence course , which helps clinicians improve their understanding of firearms culture. The nonprofit offers the classes to clinicians for free.

Another initiative is #CauseAPause , intended to create time and distance between an impulsive urge to use a firearm in a time of crisis. Some gun owners post photographs of their love ones in or on their gun safes as a reminder of their reasons for living.

Plotnick now lives in rural Colorado, which is part of the Rocky Mountain suicide belt. Eighty percent of suicide deaths occur in rural America.

She is continuing to work in public policy and collaborating with the firearm-owning community to promote mental health screenings and training in suicide prevention for adolescents and adults.

While older white males still have the highest suicide rate, the rate is rising in other populations such as veterans.

The 2023 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, based on 2021 data, showed veteran suicide rates increased by 11.5 % from 2020. For male veterans, the suicide rate is 1.5 times higher than general population and 2.5 times higher for female veterans compared to the general population.

The youth suicide rate is also on the rise. Between 2000 and 2018, the suicide rate among youth ages 10 to 24 rose from 6.8 per 100,000 to 10.7 per 100,000, according to a 2020 National Vital Statistics Report .

There is more work to do and more opportunities to partner on strategies to make children, families and communities safer, Plotnick said.

While speaking at the Stop the Stigma Summit, Plotnick shared a photograph of the view outside her home. The image included a buck with an impressive rack of antlers framed by the vaulting Colorado sky.

“My older son has become a hunter. I have a freezer full of elk. Who knew?”

Plotnick said she has more to learn about gun culture but she, like Sodini, is open to having difficult conversations because they can lead to initiatives and practices that save lives.

To punctuate her point, Plotnick throws up a slide of Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat.

“We love that their National Governors Association initiative this year is ‘Disagree Better.’ So they may not agree on everything, and you and I don’t agree on everything but we’re going to be here to disagree better. We really believe that it’s long past time we stop talking about each other and start talking to each other,” Plotnick said.