Firearms have a duplicitous role in security: they are both tools of protection as well as sources of threat. My new book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (forthcoming in 2024), takes a narrative approach to present the findings from a multi-sited ethnographic research project about the effects of American firearms on the Mexican society. It traces the journey of the gun through circuits of exchange, both licit and illicit, from retail shops and gun shows in Arizona and Texas to the hands of violence workers, both licensed and criminalized, in Mexico, to gun buyback programs and public art installations. By focusing on firearms – shifts in their cultural and economic value as they cross the border from the U.S. to Mexico, discrepancies in their legality and legitimacy, and their mobility across civilian-military and state-crime divides – this research illuminates the ways in which legal regimes circumscribe the production of violence. Braiding stories of people who live and work with guns on both sides of the border and either side of the law, the book traces these contours of impact that American weapons leave on Mexican society – its body politic as well as individual lives.