What is Walk the Talk America
Walk the Talk America (WTTA) is focused on bridging the gap between mental health and responsible firearm ownership. How are we doing this? We believe that by improving the quality and availability of mental health resources to gun owners we can reduce suicide by firearm. We are paving the way by educating mental health professionals about gun culture and breaking negative stigmas around mental health for gun owners. We are saving lives.
We’ve developed a national directory of mental health professionals that have been trained by WTTA in order to be a resource for the veteran and gun owning population. This directory will be able to sort by location and provide the name and contact information of mental health professionals available in the user’s desired area.
We focus on suicides
Originally, Walk the Talk America was founded with the idea of stopping the next mass shooter. However, as we got more connected with the mental health community we were guided toward suicide prevention. Why? We lose 72 people a day to suicide by firearm. There is a big opportunity to save a lot of friends, parents, and family before it is too late. Gun owners don’t deserve to be stigmatized and have possible consequences for doing the right thing and seeking professional help. Mental Health America uses “B4Stage4” which points out that our best way of preventing death from cancers and other diseases is with early prevention efforts. What if mental illness was approached the same way? If we were able to get people the help they need before stage four, we could save a lot of lives.
There isn’t another existing solution to just throw money at
Originally, we thought we could raise money to mental health initiatives targeting suicide prevention by firearm. Those initiatives don’t exist, we are that initiative.
“After I got it set up and found that the mental health community was open to working with us, I was convinced that we would stop the next mass shooter. Hell, I thought we would probably stop all mass shootings. In my mind, I was Superman and all I had to do was raise the money to throw at the mental health professionals, who were going to work their magic.” — Mike Sodini
About mass shootings
Mass shootings are horrendous, but stopping the next shooter is like finding a needle in a haystack. Instead what if increasing the quality and availability of professional mental health care got a future mass shooter the help they needed before reaching that stage?
We need to grow
Walk the Talk America has been operating on a budget resembling a local small business. While accomplishing success over the last four years, the time is now for us to grow that budget to closer resemble a national nonprofit. Please consider donating money to help us make a nationwide impact.