In 2025, I returned to Maryland, where I grew up, graduated high school and college, and fled in 1996. Nearly 30 years since breathing the green, humid DMV (DC-MD-VA) air, I am again in Calvert County. Battle Creek Cypress Swamp. Chesapeake Bay. Underground Railroad. Charles Ball. Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. Flag Ponds Nature Park. Calvert High School. Patuxent Friends Meeting.
And I just gained my Licensed Massage Therapist (LMT) status in MD (MD#06970). I am excited to have the license to touch, discuss our somatic experience with clients and peers, and to collect fees for services where needed. I currently carry licenses in New Mexico and Maryland which feels novel. Please spread the word–Jered is offering somatic therapy and education to individuals or groups, in person or virtually.
I’m reflecting on transitioning my NM LMT to a MD LMT–background checks, verifications of curriculum, attestations of good moral standing, affirmations of proper behavior by the NM State board to the MD board, a jurisprudence exam, and over $500 in fees to various bureaucracies. Notwithstanding the adjacent history of massage with brothels and human trafficking, nor criticizing the goal of ensuring therapists have requisite training, competencies, and references–the process (several months) seems in stark contrast to our access to guns.
Maryland’s Handgun Qualification License requires a background check and a 4 hour course with many exemptions for manufacturers, law enforcement, military, firearm dealers and antique marketeers. In Maryland access to firearms are not enshrined in the state constitution and local access is determined at state, county and city levels and by the state’s abutment with VA, DC, PA, WV, and DE who each have their own gun laws. There are competing blocks interested in gun laws as there are elsewhere: national lobbies, local retailers, gun users, victims of gun violence, and gun manufacturers.
Where I grew up, hunters like their rifles. Most early country road memories for me involved seeing those on proud display in the back of pick-up trucks during annual hunting season preparations. I did not participate with the exception of using a bb rifle gun to target various action figures that friends and I would set up. We all played capture the flag with cap guns, Western fantasies of conquest (Cowboys and Indians), and some sort of strange each for themselves, last gun wielder standing battle.
But most of us did not graduate to firearms, hunting, or human combat. Granted, I am from a family of transplants to rural Maryland, not the nativist white family that claims original rights here. And I am from an immediate family of pacifists. I recognize that guns, fundamentally, are designed to kill, despite any sporting arguments to the counter, with the exception of perhaps paint guns and the like. I respect the art of shooting, but I never needed a gun, nor do I want one now.
I grew up when the era of drive-by shootings gave way to the rise of militia style patriot and isolationist groups, which presented to me as disaffected white men. The attempt on President Reagan. Timothy McVeigh. Waco, TX. Columbine. Not to mention the broader pop culture fascination with guns connecting them with machismo, patriotism, freedom, family, and the conquering right of self-defense which increasingly includes female revenge tales. In America apparently, if beaten down, one can return a hellfire of bullet ridden vengeance.
I do not see guns as partisan. They seemed to do as designed and advertised–kill. I am the grandson of WWII veteran traumatized by the instant deaths he witnessed. Friends still live with the health impacts at all levels of their being of having survived war. And no movie or television show presented anything different. Pull trigger, solve conflict, kill enemy. This is even more so in gaming entertainment, slang, and .
I argued early on that it is the scale and ease of pulling the trigger that is the problem. It is of a different immediacy, range, speed, and lethality risk than a knife, bow, or spear. If the gun is not the problem and people kill people then I would like to keep the technology of killing away from people who would like to solve conflicts with annihilation. Maryland has a “Red Flag” Law, but for me the red flag is needing the gun–and the red flag indicates a culture of violence and cruelty, not marksmanship or an aberrant individual using a gun. Why are we living in a way that needs such immediate lethality as a guarantee of civility against our otherwise beastly desires to kill each other? Are we really all secretly holding back murderous Hobbesian instincts?
I just don’t buy the premise. Most people are not a threat. A few are. Even fewer are coming for me mortally. I do believe that trauma is uniquely situated within social animals–it is not the emergency alone, it is how others support us or don’t that tips the trauma scale. We mitigate trauma by showing up for each other. Trauma increases when we suffer alone and misunderstood.
Who could feel like a gun is a guarantee for their survival in the face of a hostile culture? Historically, black people, as the Black Panthers epitomized. Women caught in a cycle of domestic abuse including gun violence from husbands. Indigenous people faced with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Labor organizers faced with federalized massacres like Ludlow, CO. I get why these folk might want a gun to stand their ground.
But that is not who I see demanding guns be easily available . I see white people and white men in particular feeling like it is their god-given and generational heritage to use, own, bear, and pass on guns to each other without government interference. In Maryland, long guns have very little regulation compared to handguns. For long guns, there is no permit required to purchase, requirement to register, have an owner license, and can be on display in an office or vehicle. The way we imagine a knight bequeathing a sword to a page appears to be the way Maryland thinks about hunting rifles. (They still host jousting here.)
Circling back to my massage license. I have to put in over 700 hours of core training with at least 16 hours of continuing education every 2 years including ethical considerations in massage therapy practice. Something so basic as human touch has a regime of regulation, reporting of violation of professional standards, and sanctions for the therapist who touches inappropriately. I have to demonstrate anatomical, procedural, and record keeping competency. And I must be held accountable for any harm I cause to a client.
Perhaps our approach to guns could learn something from our approach to touch.