Airdate: July 16, 2025
Julie Rose: What is the most uncomfortable question you have ever asked someone?
Heidi Yewman: It felt like I was asking this really personal question, right, like, "Hey, how much money do you make?" Or something that was totally inappropriate, and that's how it felt inside.
Julie Rose: Hey there, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a show about sticking with moments that challenge us even when they're uncomfortable. And you're probably wondering, "Why would anyone choose to be uncomfortable?" But I know from personal experience, and you probably do too, that sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can stay open and curious about it. And that is what we're here to explore, so let's get Uncomfy.
Heidi Yewman is with me. She's an author, a documentarian, and a gun safety advocate. Her upcoming memoir is called "Dumb Girl: A Journey From Childhood Abuse to Gun Control Advocacy." I'm so excited to have her here with us today. Heidi, welcome!
Heidi Yewman: Oh, thank you. So glad to be here with
you, Julie. Thanks for inviting me.
Julie Rose: It's a funny thing about, uh, guns in America that it almost feels taboo to ask people about their firearms. Um, and, and I mean, I have several siblings who have firearms in their homes, and I feel like it's sort of not my business to ask them, "Where are your guns, and how are they stored?" But you have been involved in a campaign that encourages people to have those very uncomfortable conversations. What inspired you to take the lead on that in your community?
Heidi Yewman: I got involved with gun violence prevention after the Columbine High School massacre. So, I had graduated from Columbine 13 years before the massacre, and Dave Sanders, the teacher that was killed, had been my basketball coach and typing teacher. And, uh, I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time, and I flew back for his funeral and the mass memorial, and it was just so upsetting and so sad, and then to see my former teachers with swollen, red eyes who'd been crying and just this unimaginable tragedy. And I was sitting there and something just sort of hit me and I was, I was a stay-at-home mom at the time with a one and a four-year-old, and I thought, "I can't just let this kind of thing happen. I need to get involved. I wanna stop this kind of thing from happening." And so I got involved in gun safety advocacy. And one of the big campaigns that I'd learned about was the Asking Saves Kids campaign, which is the campaign you had referred to, and it's all about kids' safety. I, I didn't like the sort of debating about statistics and who should be included in the statistics of death and who, um, what legislation should be passed, and it was, it, it was all very, sort of against each other, and it wasn't about learning about each other, and it wasn't about learning, um, different people's perspectives, and so, the, this was a great campaign to be able to talk about guns without judgment. And so, as a, having a, a, being a mom with a one and a 4-year-old, I was invited to bring the kids over to play dates quite often, and so I had never thought about this question, and I was, I felt like I was a, like, we all think we're great moms, right, but we all know in our heads that we're, we're, uh, struggling, but I, I knew my kids were safe in my home. I had things locked up, they weren't gonna get into any bleach or this kind of thing, but I didn't, I didn't, it didn't occur to me to ask people if they had guns in their homes. I don't have guns in my home, so it's not something I really thought about, um, so, so it was really important I found out to ask this question.
Julie Rose: Do you remember the first, the first time
you, you did?
Heidi Yewman: Oh, I do. I really remember the first time. So, I had learned about this campaign, I thought, "Yeah, I'm gonna do this. My kids are gonna be safe. There's no way they're gonna be, you know, accidentally killed at a, at a friend's house," like, I had met other moms who this had happened to, and so the first time I, I was, my three, or my 4-year-old was invited to a birthday party up the street, and I asked the mom, I was gonna ask her, "Do you have guns in your home?" But, Julie, it felt like I was asking this really personal question, right, like, "Hey, how much money do you make?" Or something that was totally inappropriate, and that's how it felt inside. But what I figured out was, I asked other safety questions, I asked, you know, "Who's gonna be supervising? Is there a dog that's dangerous in the home?" And no one, no one bats an eye on those kinds of questions, and so this was just another question that I added to that. And I was super nervous, asked the other questions and said, "Oh, and also, do you have guns in your home, and are they locked up?" And she said, "Oh my God, I'm so glad you asked. Yeah, I, we do have guns in our home, but they are, they're locked up in a safe and the ammunition is stored in a separate, uh, locked up place." And I was so grateful, and it was like, "Oh, awesome." But then as I walked away from that situation, I thought, "Oh my God, what if she would've said, 'Yeah, what about it?'" Right, which was always my worry.
Julie Rose: What do you, and what, what would you have
said, do you think? Because that is the fear, it's like, "That's none of
your business," or, "Yeah, I do, and? You know, you wanna get into it
with me?" Right? It could have gone a lot of different ways.
Heidi Yewman: Yeah, but I've found through the years of asking, that is not what happens because gun owners also don't want their children dying from a gun that's used that's been hidden under a bed or something. That's, that's, none of us want that. And so, I have had people say, "Yes, I have, yes, we have guns," and then my follow up question is, "Okay, well, can, are they locked up? And if they aren't, can they be before my child comes over?" The key I found out is to not be standing on the porch with the birthday present asking the question.
Julie Rose: And the kid's standing next to you.
Heidi Yewman: And the kid's, right.
Julie Rose: "I wanna go play!"
Heidi Yewman: There's way too much social pressure to,
like, say, ignore the answer or just, like, you know, say whatever. So, yeah,
it's,
Julie Rose: so when do you do it then? You call in advance?
Heidi Yewman: Yeah, that's, that's what I did. And I, sometimes I would use humor depending on, I say, "You know, look, my, my son is not allergic to peanuts, so no worries there, but he's deathly allergic to guns." And so, right, so using humor also worked or, or saying, "Oh, my son, he gets into stuff all the time he's not supposed to be, and I'm worried about if he comes over to your house that he's gonna get into stuff at your house. Do you have any gun, do you have any guns that aren't locked up?" And so it, it does, it's not, like, this official question that has to be very con, it's, it's a conversation, and often, most likely, people are grateful. Either they hadn't ever thought to ask and then they'll continue to ask when they have their kids go over to other people's houses, or people who have guns have been very like, "Yeah, absolutely. We, we don't, I, we can make sure the guns are locked up."
Julie Rose: Why, why is it important to ask that
question?
Heidi Yewman: Well, it's important because if you have a
neighborhood with ten homes with kids in 'em, four of them are gonna have guns,
and those guns are not gonna be locked up. I produced a film called
"Behind the Bullet," and I interviewed a family in North Carolina
where they had a gun in the home for self-defense, and it wasn't locked up, and
the mom forgot to lock it up in the morning, and the, the, um, 8-year-old boy
found it and, uh, accidentally killed the five-year-old brother. And so, it's,
this is a tragedy that happens all the time throughout our nation, and so it is
really important that we make sure that kids don't have access to firearms.
Julie Rose: And it's solvable just with storage. It
doesn't have to, it doesn't have to be a, a legal fight about whether or not
you should have guns or the extent of the Second Amendment. This is something
that can kind of skirt all of that really difficult debate.
Heidi Yewman: Exactly, right, and we, we do, we, you
know, we make sure our kids are in seat belts in cars, and we have helmets on
our kids when they ski, when they ride bikes, all this, so this is a, a safety,
it's a safety issue.
Julie Rose: Let's talk about your, your documentary for a moment, Heidi Yewman, um, "Behind the Bullet," award-winning documentary. It's quite striking in that you actually profile people who have used a gun and, and injured or killed another individual, or at least in one case, a woman attempted suicide with a gun, um, and survived. So, what were you hoping to accomplish by, like, focusing on the people who had wielded the weapon as opposed to the, the victims of, of the gun violence, you know?
Heidi Yewman: Well, my goal for the film was I wanted to have a conversation with gun owners, and so I wanted to, if I were to have done a documentary where I was just talking about the victims, which has been done, and it, and it's appropriate, but that's not how you're having a conversation with gun owners. So, I was in Texas at a film festival and this woman came up to me and she said, "Heidi, your film did, it was so wonderful because I didn't feel judged. So often I will watch a film about gun violence and it's often saying how gun owners are terrible people because they own guns," and she said, "I appreciate that your film didn't do that. It just showed the consequences of what happens when you, when you buy a gun, bring it into your home because you want your family to be safe from, from things that you're worried about, and, and then the gun gets used in a different way." And so, Julie, the motivation for the film was actually after the Sandy Hook shooting where Wayne LaPierre, who's the spokesperson for the NRA at the time, he went on TV and said, "The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," and so I wanted to explore that idea, and I wanted to explore, "So, what does that mean when you are the good guy with the gun? You buy the gun for self-defense, you use it in a mass shooting to stop the bad guy, which is the ultimate dream, what happens to you afterwards, after you've taken a life? You haven't broken any laws because you shot in self-defense and then now you just move on with your day and your life?" Well, I found that that's not what happens. There's huge, there's a moral consequence that happens, a moral injury, if you will. I, I interviewed one guy who shot an intruder in his house, and it was justified, he wasn't arrested, um, and he watched the guy bleed out on his front lawn. And it was justified, but he has nightmares, he's paranoid, he has neighbors who say to him when he's out mowing his lawn, "Hey, Kevin, did you kill anybody today?" And it's just, it's, it's this thing that continues to happen, and so I wanted to have a conversation and, and show, "This is what can happen without judgment."
Julie Rose: Did something change in you as you had those
conversations? What, what is, have you, have you ever found yourself softening
your position as a result of these conversations with gun owners?
Heidi Yewman: Yeah, abs, absolutely. So, again, we're in this polarized world right now, and we're on teams, and, right, we're either pro-gun or anti-gun, and so I was on the sort of anti-gun, that's the way I was thinking about things. And so, when I went into this world where I was hanging out with gun owners, I discovered that we all, we have so much in common. And, um, you know, you had a guest on a couple weeks ago, uh, his name was, uh, professor Anand Pandian, and he was, yeah, he, I thought what he was saying was very interesting because he was also talking about going into other people's worlds, and so what I found is gun owners and non-gun owners are the same. We, we all are motivated in the same way. We want our kids and our families to be safe, we want everyone to grow up prosperous. And so, I don't have a gun in my home because it, um, I know statistically it makes me less safe because someone's more likely to use the gun to, to kill themselves or it be used against them, but gun owners also are bringing guns into their home because they wanna keep their family safe, so we're all acting out of love. And I, I just, the, sort of, this guy that I interviewed, Kevin, in the film, he was very, um, pro-gun. He had guns all over his house, watching Fox News, kind of a, he was kind of a stereotype, if you will, and I thought, "Well, this is gonna be terrible," but I really started to, to bond with Kevin, and we had a lot in common. We talked a lot about trauma and about our families, and, uh, by the end of it, I didn't, I didn't see him as this caricature of an NRA guy, I quite liked him. And so, I think we have to, as, as you've often talked about on your show, we have to go, we have to get uncomfortable, we have to go into spaces that we aren't normally in, and then that's where opening happens and that's where you can find empathy for other people and their situations and their experiences.
Julie Rose: And so, so, so what's the "Then what," right, or the "So what," right? So, you find empathy, you, you find out you quite like this guy who you thought was sort of a caricature, uh, initially of the other side, um, he doesn't change his position, you don't change your position. What was the point? I, I think that the empathy is the "Then what," because I hear stories on TV or I, I see people struggling and I don't judge them in that same way. And it's sort of,
Heidi Yewman: I've found this opening in my heart and
I'm kinder to people. I feel like, I feel like there's an opportunity for us
to, to be curious about, "What are other people's experiences?"
Because we do judge people so harshly and we put 'em in the camps and we say,
"You're this, and I'm this, and we're opposite, and we have nothing in
common," but if we go into those worlds and we bring them together, then
I, I feel like that's when there's common ground and that's where there's
understanding, and I don't need the other people to need to understand me,
right? It doesn't have to be two ways, it can just be one way. And I think that
energy makes our world better.
Julie Rose: Heidi Yewman's documentary is "Behind the Bullet." It's available on Amazon Prime. She's a gun safety advocate, and she's got a new memoir coming out August 19th. It's called "Dumb Girl: A Journey from Childhood Abuse to Gun Control Advocacy." You can learn more about Heidi and her work at heidiyewman, that's Y-E-W-M-A-N, .com. Heidi, thanks so much for your time today.
Heidi Yewman: Thank you, Julie.
Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. What is the most uncomfortable question you've ever asked somebody? I'd love to hear about it. Why did you ask it? How did it go? And would you ask it again? You can send an email to uncomfy@byu.edu. Let's continue the conversation. Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Hyobin Kim and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. I can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.
Comments
Post a Comment