Jonathan Metzl, Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society, is available for analysis on President Biden's gun violence plan.
A recognized author and expert source in the wake of gun incidents and mass shootings, Metzl can speak from a balanced perspective on the legacy of mass shootings, gun violence, gun legislation and reform and narratives around mental health.
Dr. Metzl is the author of the book, Dying of Whiteness, which examines the stereotypes of race and mental illness surrounding gun violence, and recent research, which lays out a five-part agenda for future research into mass shootings and multiple-victim homicides.
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Biography
Dr. Jonathan Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his MD from the University of Missouri, MA in humanities/poetics and psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and PhD in American culture from University of Michigan. Winner of the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2020 APA Benjamin Rush Award for Scholarship, and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship, Dr. Metzl has written extensively for medical, psychiatric, and popular publications about some of the most urgent hot-button issues facing America and the world. His books include The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, and Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.
When TV united America: Friday marks the day nearly half of USA watched the same show
USA Today online
2025-02-28
Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, noted the starkly contrasting reactions to the halftime show featuring rap star Kendrick Lamar, many of them colorfully expressed on social media.
Metzl saw a similar pattern while researching his latest book, “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms.’’ He said half the country reacted to mass shootings by calling for tighter gun laws, and the other half by saying more firearms are needed.
Murder As An Act Of Terrorism, Fed's Rate Cut Decision, Female Mass Shooters
NPR radio
2024-12-18
Another expert I talked to is Jonathan Metzl. He studies gun violence at Vanderbilt University. He said the shooter's gender is not the most salient fact in this circumstance.
"It's not surprising to me that - given the increasing availability of guns and the fact that we have so many mass shootings in this country, that we're, I think, going to increasingly see different kinds of people commit these kinds of shootings and other shootings."
Psychiatrist advocates for reforming U.S. approach to gun safety
PBS NewsHour tv
2024-01-29
Already this year, there have been more than 3,000 firearm deaths in the U.S., according to the Gun Violence Archive. Dr. Jonathan Metzl, director of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University and author of the new book, “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms,” joins William Brangham to discuss how America tackles gun violence.
What are the chances the parents of the Highland Park shooter will face prosecution?
CNN online
2022-07-12
"If anything comes out of this, just based on the history of these kind of complaints, I would bet that it would be a civil case, not a criminal case," Jonathan Metzl, a professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University who studies gun violence, said of the likelihood of legal troubles for Bobby Crimo's parents.
They survived the parade shooting. What do they tell their kids now?
TODAY online
2022-07-07
Dr. Jonathan Metzl, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, has been studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), mass shootings and gun violence in America for 20 years.
Supreme Court strikes down NY State Concealed Gun law
MSNBC tv
2022-06-26
Jonathan Metzl and Rep. Ritchie Torres join MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart to discuss how the Supreme Court made it harder for states to regulate guns by overruling a century-old New York law that limited licenses to carry firearms.
When Vanderbilt University psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl learned that the perpetrator of the Uvalde, Tex., school massacre was a young man barely out of adolescence, it was hard not to think about the peculiarities of the maturing male brain.
Activist Investing Has Come for Fossil Fuels. What About Guns?
New York Times
2022-05-28
“It’s kind of a Hail Mary,” said Dr. Jonathan Metzl, the director of the Department of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, whose research focuses on guns in America. Shareholder resolutions are weak, Dr. Metzl said, because they can only influence one company at a time and, without broader, more coordinated pressure, individual gun makers have no incentive to act.
As Texas school shooting confounds the world, CBS News looks at other countries' reactions to their own massacres
CBS Mornings tv
2022-05-26
"We've got a gun lobby, a corporate gun lobby that has its tentacles so deeply into our political process," said Dr. Jonathan Metzl, a sociologist who told CBS News he's witnessed the gun lobby pressure American politicians into withholding support for new laws by threatening to withdraw campaign finance.
Division of Health Humanities University of Illinois
2018-08-21
PLENARY PANEL CHAIR/PRESENTATION: Feeling Race in the Public Eye: Media and Race during the Trump Era
American Sociological Association Annual Meeting Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
2018-08-13
PANEL CHAIR/PRESENTATION: Guns in Trump’s America
American Sociological Association Annual Meeting Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
2018-08-11
Selected Articles
Using a structural competency framework to teach structural racism in pre-health education
Social Science & Medicine
Jonathan M. Metzl, JuLeigh Petty, Oluwatunmise V. Olowojoba
2018
The inclusion of structural competency training in pre-health undergraduate programs may offer significant benefits to future healthcare professionals. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of an interdisciplinary pre-health curriculum based in structural competency with a traditional premedical curriculum.
The interdependence of African American men's definitions of manhood and health
Fam Community Health
Derek M Griffith, PhD, Associate Professor, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, PhD, Marino A Bruce, PhD, MSRC, MDiv, CRC, Roland J Thorpe, Jr., PhD, and Jonathan M Metzl, MD, PhD
2016-10-01
2016
In this paper we explore themes that cut across how 24-77 year old African American men define manhood and health. Utilizing a thematic approach, we analyzed data from nine focus groups (N=73). We found that manhood and health were relational constructs that are interrelated in men's minds and experiences.
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms
American Journal of Public Health
Jonathan M. Metzl MD, PhD, and Kenneth T. MacLeish PhD
2014
Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances.
Structural Competency Meets Structural Racism: Race, Politics, and the Structure of Medical Knowledge
AMA Journal of Ethics
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
2014
Physicians in the United States have long been trained to assess race and ethnicity in the context of clinical interactions. Medical students learn to identify how their patients’ “demographic and cultural factors” influence their health behaviors [1]. Interns and residents receive “cultural competency” training to help them communicate with persons of differing “ethnic” backgrounds [2].
Priscilla Wald's erudite retelling of the Henrietta Lacks story locates individual-level decisions about bodies and cells in the shifting terrain of politics, political economies, and notions of selfhood. Wald takes us on a sweeping tour of philosophical and economic …
