Is Your Nurse Pack’in? Firearm Responsibility in the Workplace
“Imagine my surprise when she (a nursing colleague) reached into her backpack in our locker room to retrieve her water bottle, and I saw that she had to move her gun out of the way to get to it.” -Day Shift Nurse
I am a nurse, a grandmother, a professor, and a survivor of gun violence. While this is a personal opinion piece, I do not raise any personal opinions about guns here. This piece is not “for” or “against” firearms. Rather, it is a reflection on nurses’ often surprising—and nuanced—relationships with firearms. It is a realization that, with this relationship and unmatched public trust, nurses are uniquely positioned to study and advocate for firearm policies in the US. Indeed, we may be the nation’s best hope for meaningful bipartisan reforms.
Nurses Who Carry
Across the US, nurses face the threat of violence in hospitals, clinics, parking garages, on public transport, and on the street as they make their way to and from their jobs. Workplace violence has grown precipitously according to a recent national survey showing that nearly half of nurse respondents experienced workplace violence in 2024 compared to only 3.8% the year before.
What’s more, some nurses face compounding threats within and beyond work, as race- and gender-based aggression can increase the odds of violent attacks. In the most recent 10 years, we have seen a 56% increase in murders of women, for example. This statistic is especially relevant given that nursing remains a predominantly female profession.
With a consistent rise in workplace violence, nurses may face heightened risk due to odd working hours, reliance on public transportation, or parking lots that are far from their facility. Many nurses carry self-protection devices, such as pepper spray, air horns, knuckle-worn jab weapons, and tasers. While generally not acknowledged, many nurses also carry firearms in their cars. Some carry firearms into the hospital to place in personal lockers, despite workplace policies against doing so.
What’s in Your Workbag?
As of this writing, I have found no publicly available data concerning hospital and medical office workers’ choices to carry while on the job. Chances are, nurses who carry don’t want to disclose that information, posing a fundamental challenge to research on the topic. Instead, disclosures happen in private conversations, web forums, and social media posts. It is worth noting that there is a growing market for commercial products to assist nurses in concealed carrying, including scrubs with holsters.
Nurses who carry do not do so naïvely. They know the chaos and destruction that guns unleash. Nurses treat gunshot wounds in ERs; they tend to the lifelong injuries and broken lives that follow gun violence; they run to community shootings as bystanders run away; they carry on with work to be done, even as gunshots echo in their hospital lobbies.
Before we become entangled with arguments about whether nurses should or shouldn’t carry guns, we should step back to consider why many do. In addition to the personal protective fears mentioned above, nursing colleagues have shared with me a sense of responsibility. They report that carrying might position them to defend themselves, patients, and peers should a workplace shooting occur. At Emory, many of us were forced to grapple with questions about “what we would do” after a gunman opened fire in a private medical office near our Midtown Hospital, killing one person and wounding four others. Whether you agree with these rationales or not, listening to and understanding them is helpful and important.
Practicing Empathy
As professional nurses, we are called upon to practice empathy and suspend judgment in the face of needed care. A nurse responding to gun violence, whether at work or in public, is just as likely to render compassionate care to the shooter as to the victims. We deliver this care by listening, assessing, and taking action, even when the acts of our patients might contradict our core values.
Likewise, finding consensus among ourselves about gun responsibility is something that we have the power to do despite its inherent difficulty.
The topics of gun violence and gun responsibility often create high emotions that result in people aligning themselves with what we identify as “Far Left” or “Far Right” opinions. This polarity in thinking often leads to a binary political orientation that stalls important discourse. And yet, our profession encourages us to be thought leaders and negotiators in finding solutions to healthcare problems. It is in this negotiation space that we can build logical solutions to reduce harm from gun violence.
So, how can we negotiate? We can bring data and share stories. Let us gather baseline insights regarding how nurses think about and interface with guns in their personal and professional lives. Let us listen to nurses and seek to understand with nuance. Doing so can afford powerful qualitative and quantitative insights. With the right insights, we can lead real solutions—within and beyond nursing.
Nurses Are Prepared to Lead
Nurses, with our empathy, leadership skills, and high levels of public trust, are uniquely positioned to introduce solutions on a national scale. Nurses know how to gather the data people don’t want to share—how to contextualize conflict, understand competing points, and use negotiation tactics in healing and non-harmful ways. We can be influential on local and national policy about gun issues.
An effective way to build influence is through our national organizations. In 2015, the American Nurses Association (ANA) issued a policy statement that outlines the ANA’s professional position on violence in the nursing workplace. This statement is currently under revision with the aim of developing and offering continuing education for nurses about workplace violence. While the former statement did not address gun violence specifically, the revision provides an opportunity to recognize this threat.
In 2022, the American Academy of Nursing issued a position statement on firearm safety and violence prevention as well. This statement outlines several policy recommendations in detail, and it was followed in 2023 when the ANA’s Membership Assembly issued urgent recommendations to address gun violence. With the ever-rising incidence of gun violence and nursing organizations’ acknowledgment of critical needs, an important question emerges about how nurses can engage on these issues.
The issues are extremely complex and must be addressed in strategic ways. We, as individuals—and large, organized bodies of nurses—need to find our “HOW.” How can we leverage our influence to reduce personal and public harm from gun violence in the workplace and all places?
Let’s start right here - write in the comments below:
- Share a story or offer an insight about how guns have affected your practice as a nurse.
- What do you wish our national nursing organizations would do about guns and nursing?
- Again, I ask: What’s in your workbag?
🤔 Nurses, share your thoughts in the discussion forum below.
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