What To Do About Guns
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This is honestly. There's this Onion article that came out originally after the school shooting in Sandy Hook. Here was the headline. No way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens. It's a smart and dark joke. And it's one that has the rare distinction of never getting stale. That Onion headline resurfaces every few months, sometimes every few weeks, even sometimes every few days in America. Tulsa, Buffalo, Uvalde.

And then the regular reports of murders that come out every weekend from cities like Philadelphia and Chicago. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides in America. Then, in 2021, it went up again. Over the last few years, the leading cause of death among children in America is now guns. Like many debates in this country these days, it's tempting to paint each side in the gun debate as cartoonish.

One side clearly on the right side of history. The other, not just wrong, but maybe even evil. Here's the thing. Americans have the undeniable right to bear arms. And we do. The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other nation on Earth. And that number has only ticked up significantly lately.

Gun sales over the past two years have increased to their highest levels in U.S. history. And many of those guns are being bought by first-time gun buyers, and they're from every demographic background. Clearly, Americans of all stripes, for all different reasons, value this right. But also, many Americans, including many gun owners...

find themselves contemplating that onion headline and asking, is there really nothing that can be done to stop this epidemic of senseless gun violence? How have we normalized the fact that innocent people in this country can step into a subway car or walk into a grocery store or go to pray at a synagogue or a church or go to a concert to enjoy themselves or a baseball game or a party or a car show, and maybe that day they'll just be gunned down?

And that's to say nothing of the little children murdered in their classroom. In Texas, 19 of them. There is simply no world in which our founders would look at what happened in Uvalde and say, yes, that was our intention when we wrote the Constitution. So Americans agreed that something should be done. But time after time, it seems like nothing actually is. Matthew McConaughey, the actor, went to Washington this week. My wife and I, my...

Wife and I came out, we spent most of last week on the ground with the families in Uvalde, Texas. We shared stories, tears and memories. And he spoke there as a son of Uvalde. We met with the local funeral director and countless morticians who hadn't slept since the massacre the day before. They've been working 24-7 trying to handle so many bodies at once. So many little innocent bodies. Some of those children were shot so many times that...

that they could only be identified by their sneakers and DNA tests. Mayday wore green high top Converse. We wore these every day, green Converse with a heart on the right toe. These are the same green Converse on her feet that turned out to be the only clear evidence that could identify her after the shooting. Camille and I came here to share my stories.

from my hometown of Uvalde. I came here to take meetings with elected officials on both sides of the aisle. We came here to speak to them, to speak with them, and to urge them to speak with each other. Enough with the counterpunching. Enough with the invalidation of the other side. Let's come to the common table that represents the American people. Find a middle ground, the place where most of us Americans live anyway, especially on this issue.

He embodies what so many Americans in poll after poll say that they believe. That yes, we have the right to bear arms. But there are things that can be done to address the horrors that have become ordinary. Because I promise you, America, you and me, we are not as divided as we were being told we are. No. How about we get inspired? Give ourselves just cause to revere our future again.

Maybe set an example for our children, give us reason to tell them, hey, listen and watch these men and women. These are great American leaders right here. Hope you grow up to be like them. And let's admit it, we can't truly be leaders if we're only living for reelection. Today, a frank conversation about why this subject is so contentious and what can actually practically be done about guns.

My guests today are David French, senior editor of The Dispatch and the author, among other books, of Divided We Fall. He's a veteran and also, as you'll hear, a gun owner himself. My other guest is Rajiv Sethi. He's a professor of economics at Barnard University who's been researching gun violence data and writing about innovative solutions about what we can do to address this problem, even in a country with a robust Second Amendment. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. David, Rajiv, thank you both so much for being here and for talking with me today. Thanks so much, Barry. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Today, I want us to try and have as productive a conversation as possible about what we can actually realistically do in America in 2022 to stop the horrific amount of gun violence we're experiencing in our country right now. So before we get to possible solutions, and both of you have written about various ones, let's get on the same page about the problem.

No one in this conversation and no one who's really seriously following the rise in crime across America thinks that guns are the only problem that our country is facing when it comes to violence. That said, America has more guns than any nation on earth. And as of 2020, and I was shocked when I read this, the leading cause of death among children is guns.

That was also the year, 2020, that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history. So I want to understand from your perspectives just how uniquely American this problem is. Rajiv, maybe let's start with you. So I think it's uniquely American in at least two different ways. One is statistical and one is cultural. So statistically, we have very high homicide rates compared to countries at comparable levels of prosperity rates.

If you look at Canada or New Zealand, Australia, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, we have about four times the homicide rate of Canada, about 10 times the homicide rate of the United Kingdom. Culturally, we are very different because what's uniquely American, I think, and this hits you very hard as a naturalized American, as somebody who wasn't born or raised here,

is that there's a widespread belief, not universal by any means, but a widespread belief that there's essentially a sacred right to bear arms that's enshrined in our most cherished document through the Second Amendment. And it's not just that the Second Amendment exists, it's that it's celebrated. A well-regulated militia Being necessary for the security of a free state The right of the people

So there's something about the culture that cherishes the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. That's also uniquely American. So, you know, certain kinds of policies that other countries have adopted in the wake of mass shootings are not available to us. So I would say in those two respects, it's uniquely American.

David, do you understand it the way that Rajiv does? Is there any data that you would add? Do you think that this is a uniquely American problem? There's one aspect here that is unique and one aspect that is not unique. One thing that's absolutely unquestionably unique in the world is our gun ownership rate.

i think it's about 120 guns per 100 people in other words there's more than one gun per person in the u.s now that's skewed a little bit there are collectors who have huge numbers of guns and some surveys indicate a majority of americans may not even own a gun and the minority who does own a gun they will own more than one typically

But the bottom line is there's about 400 million guns for about 320, 330 million people. And there's just no question that that's quite exceptional.

where we're not all that exceptional is in murder rate and homicide rate. There are a host of countries, especially in Latin America, but also in parts of Europe, where there is a higher murder rate than the United States, even though they have a lot lower rate of owning guns. So, for example, if you're going to take two countries, one, Russia has a homicide rate higher than ours and a gun ownership rate that might be about 10% of ours.

Ukraine has a homicide rate that's higher than ours and a gun ownership rate that's less than 10% of ours. And we can really go down the rabbit hole of South America, for example, that is virtually every country has lower gun ownership and higher rates of murder rates.

And this gets into something about America that I think is really important. How do we think of American exceptionalism? Because we often compare America to European countries, but we sort of shun comparing America to South American countries, when in a lot of ways, the American culture is a melting pot, an amalgam of an awful lot of different cultures coming in together have resulted in something that it's

This kind of stands apart in a lot of ways. On one hand, we're extremely prosperous, but we're also way more religious than most other prosperous countries. We're extremely prosperous, but we're also a lot more violent than a lot of other prosperous countries.

In a lot of ways, America is kind of its own thing. And so a lot of our comparisons and our models that we use to compare, I think, are kind of off base because at some basic level, we're comparing apples and oranges. And one thing about America, if you're gonna compare us, say to Europe,

We've been way more violent than Europe for a really long time. I was looking at Twitter earlier today, and there was an interesting chart I saw that America's homicide rate as a multiple of key European countries has existed at anywhere between two and a half to six times the homicide rate of major European countries since 1725. And so we are talking about something that is

really different about this country in its violence, different about this country in its gun ownership rate, but not different about this country in its violence once you leave the sort of the Western Northern European context. Are you two at odds over the facts here? Meaning, Rajiv, do you dispute what David's saying? When you say that America's homicide rate is particularly high, is it that you're comparing it to Western and Northern European countries?

Yes, that's why I qualified my statement by saying at comparable levels of prosperity, certainly El Salvador and Panama have much higher homicide rates. And you can find countries with substantially higher homicide rates, but they are not economically advanced in the way that we are. And I didn't mean to suggest that this difference between the United States and comparable countries is...

is a recent phenomenon, so I completely agree with him that it's long-standing. But I do think that the comparison with Western Europe, with Australia, with New Zealand, Canada, and with Japan and South Korea, these are meaningful comparisons. I mean, these are countries that have, you know, roughly similar economic systems, roughly similar levels of prosperity. And to throw El Salvador, Panama, Latin America into the mix, I think, I mean, it's perfectly accurate. I have no quarrel with what David just said on the facts.

But I think that it muddies the picture a little bit. Okay, so let's break down a little bit what we mean when we're talking about gun violence.

We tend to sort of lump all gun violence into one bucket, but in reality, there's actually multiple different kinds, right? There's mass shootings, there's gang violence, there's suicide, obviously, there's armed robbery. Where is it helpful to talk about what America is facing as a gun problem? And where is that framing actually obscuring a deeper problem that we're not seeing? Rajiv, maybe let's start with you.

So you're right, you know, that gun violence can be defined in different ways. And, you know, one of the problems actually with the debate over gun policy is that people use the term in very different ways. Some people lump together suicides and homicides. Some include accidental discharges, for instance. And, you know, suicides are somewhat more common than homicides in the United States. We're at around 24,000 suicides now annually, about 19,000 homicides annually.

And to put those two things together, I think, adds confusion actually to the debate, especially when it's not transparent that they're being put together. So when people use the terms without being very clear about what terms they're using, that can cause a great deal of misunderstanding. So to take one quick example, if you put together homicides and suicides and you look across states, states with high gun ownership rates have higher rates of gun violence.

If you look only at suicides, then that relationship is actually even stronger, even tighter. In fact, it's so tight that sometimes people use the gun suicide rate in order to measure gun ownership as a proxy for gun ownership. That's what the Rand Corporation does to some degree. It's an input. But if you look at homicides, it's much more complicated. It's a much more complicated picture. It's not a strong, positive relationship between gun homicides and gun ownership across states.

And we can get into when we get into the policy questions, we can we can talk about the implications of that. But I think the first point is that in any conversation about this, we need to be clear about what one means by gun violence. Well, one of the things you've pointed out really, you know, sharply in your research is that high gun ownership means

doesn't always correlate to the kind of shootings that we've recently seen in Buffalo, in Texas, in Tulsa. So for example, in the Mountain West, places like Montana and Wyoming, there are more guns per capita, you say, than anywhere else in the country. Yet those aren't the places with the highest gun homicide rates. So talk to me a little bit about that research.

So you earlier talked about the distinction between mass shootings and sort of more routine homicides that arise under the radar, so to speak. They don't attract much media attention. They're more common than the mass shootings in terms of total victims by far, but they don't get as much attention. And if you look at gun homicides collectively, so you look at the mass shootings globally,

as well as the more routine homicides that come out of escalating disputes, for example, which are very common, you do find exactly what you said. So there are a number of states, not just in the Mountain West, but even in northern New England, basically the New England states that share a land border with Canada, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, they have very high rates of gun ownership and very low rates of gun homicide, actually.

So, yes, the relationship between homicide and ownership is much more complicated. The relationship between suicide and ownership is quite different. So when I'm looking right now at a lot of the articles being passed around on social media, often, frankly, they're not articles. They're memes or they're GIFs or they're little stats or they're infographics that show gun deaths.

You're saying that they can be misleading, those stats, because they often put suicides right next to gang violence, but they tend to release this information right after a school shooting. So when someone like me, someone that's not as informed as either of you, reads that, we're thinking, oh my God, you know, this number of people are dying in mass shootings every year. Is that kind of what you're getting at? Yes, it's the lack of transparency. So, you know, the salience is

of the school shooting, coupled with the fact that these are social media posts without a whole lot of explanation, can lead to misleading inferences. And that really obstructs the debate, actually, if we want to move forward on policy. So, David, I was in London last week, and the thing that people wanted to talk to me most about was the mass shootings that have been taking place in this country. And they honestly looked at me, some of them, like I had survived a war zone. They cannot get over the

What has become normal here when it comes to guns and when it comes to mass violence? There is this sense that among these people that you can just, as an American, walk into any Walmart, any gun store in America, in most states, and walk out with a loaded gun.

How true is that actually? Can you please help me separate the caricature from the reality? What restrictions actually exist? How easy is it to get a gun in America? Tell us about what it is versus what the memes on Twitter would tell us that it is.

Yeah, you know, the type of gun, the age at which you can buy it, the way in which the gun, the kind of magazine, the way in which the gun is designed, that's going to vary from state to state to a pretty large degree. I live in Tennessee. Tennessee is a state with pretty strong protections for gun rights.

so i can walk into a licensed firearms dealer and i can buy a gun pretty quickly presuming assuming that the background check goes quickly but i do have to pass a background check so i fill out a federal form and if i lie um i can be prosecuted if i'm lying on that form is specific specifically as to who i'm purchasing the gun for i can be prosecuted but i do have to pass a background check a federal background check

And I can purchase weapon. I can purchase ammunition. And David, when you say you have to pass the background check, is there a waiting period? Like, is it a form you fill out? So you fill out a form. And then some states you'll have a waiting period before you can actually pick up the gun. In Tennessee, there's no waiting period. The waiting is just literally waiting while the gun dealer is on hold. Yeah.

So the process, I've done this multiple times, is very simple. I want to buy this gun, fill out the form. They call in with your information and you wait. And if it's a very busy time, like around the holidays, sometimes you might wait a few hours. If it's not a busy time at all, you might just wait a few minutes, but you get cleared through the background check.

And then the weapon is yours. Now, again, this can be quite different in another state. So there's a lot of federalism in our gun laws in this country. And so in California, it's a very different scenario. California has sort of the universal background check regime that folks want to implement nationwide. It has...

an assault weapons ban it has uh magazine capacity restrictions it has waiting periods so it's just very different in california than tennessee as to you know what what is the process

So it is pretty easy where I live. I'm not going to lie. It's pretty easy. Yeah, I mean, so sorry to be ignorant here. I've never tried to purchase a gun and I've never tried to purchase a gun in Tennessee. What would come up in theory during that form that you're filling out, the background check, that could actually keep you from getting a gun? Prior convictions, domestic violence convictions, felony convictions, adjudication of dangerous mental illness.

So basically, it's mainly a search for a disqualifying criminal conviction. There are a smaller number of people are disqualified because of mental health adjudications. But as a general matter, if somebody is going to be disqualified for purchasing a gun in the U.S., it's because of a disqualifying conviction. So that means, though, that let's say, you know, the killer in Texas, right?

who didn't have any prior convictions, probably would have passed that test, even though he was, you know, torturing animals and things of that nature. And did pass, and did pass. Now, here's where, I don't know if you want to start to move into the solutions segment of the podcast yet, but this is where I'm kind of like the guy in the university quad with the bullhorn who won't shut up about this concept called red flag laws. Right.

Because what we've seen, and there was a 50-year National Institute for Justice-funded study of mass shootings in the U.S. And by the way, how sad is it that we can do a 50-year study of mass shootings? But we have a 50-year study of mass shootings.

And one of the things that they found was it's overwhelmingly the case that mass shooters purchase their guns legally. It's overwhelmingly the case that they use handguns and not these so-called assault weapons. But it's also in a majority of cases they leak their plans before they commit the crime. And a red flag law is designed to remove guns from someone or prohibit someone from buying guns when they have exhibited that they're a threat to themselves or others.

How did they get on that list, though? In other words, if someone is of previous conviction or a felony offense...

you know, there's presumably state and federal databases. If I'm a mom and I see that my child is doing some creepy things and saying some scary stuff on the internet, how do I get them on that list so that they would be actually flagged when they go and purchase that gun during that background check? It's very similar to like a domestic violence restraining order. You would literally go to court as the mom or say a principal or an employer or a police, you know, a police department. You would

literally go, that's why one of the reasons when I talk to people about red flag laws, I always compare them to domestic violence restraining orders 'cause people understand that system. It's more than if you see something, you say something because in a lot of these mass shootings, people have seen something and said something and nothing happened 'cause then it was up to the police

But what a red flag law does is it allows me, if I see something, I can go on my own and seek a petition from the court. And this is happening. Florida, for example, passed a red flag law after Parkland, and it has issued thousands of red flag orders. When I last looked up, I think there were 2,800 active red flag orders in the state at this moment.

So people are utilizing it. If you don't know it's there, you can't utilize it. But if you know it's there, it's a very helpful tool when you actually see someone who by their behavior is indicating that they're a threat to themselves or others. Okay, so like I said, I've never bought a gun. I don't know a lot about guns. I've shot a gun a few times. I've never loved it. My wife is a way better shot than me. And I know that in conversations like this, a good way for people like me to come off as idiots is

is to call a gun by the wrong name or try and pretend like I actually deeply understand the difference between an AR-15 and an M16, which I kind of do, but not totally. So I'm not trying to do that, but I do want to really understand that when it comes to murder and attempted murder and mass shooting, like what sorts of guns are actually being used? Rajiv? Yeah, so I think it's important for us to distinguish between mass shootings and AR-15s.

The homicides that we spoke about earlier that are actually more frequent but less well-noticed. The mass shootings do take place with weapons that have a lot of firepower, the assault rifles and, you know, with sometimes high-capacity magazines and so on. But that's not really what's involved in most homicides. Most homicides are, you know, committed with handguns.

And they're commonly, you know, often stolen. They often come across state lines. The reason why you have such little correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide by state is partly because gun homicides in states with very restrictive policies like California and New York and Illinois, in fact, are committed with guns that have come from somewhere else. And the red flag laws, for example, that David talked about, I think that they could conceivably have an impact on mass shootings.

But if we just keep in perspective that mass shootings are a relatively small component of total gun homicides, they're not going to do much for most homicides, actually. So to answer your question, it really depends on whether you're looking at mass shootings.

or whether you're looking at violence in cities that is arising either out of preemption, about retaliation, about deals gone bad, about escalating disputes. Those kinds of killings are usually done with handguns and quite often with handguns that have been lost or stolen or trafficked or come from straw purchases and very much with a lot of likelihood from other states. I think there's

There's a Pew study that found that rifles, so the category that includes the guns that are sometimes referred to as assault weapons, were involved in something like 3% of firearm murders.

To me, one of the things that I always notice, right, after one of these mass events, mass events, that sounds so sanitized, after these mass murders, the rhetoric, right, is always the same. You get the thoughts and prayers, and then you get, we need to ban so-called weapons of war. We need to ban assault rifles, right?

Now, that, of course, politically never happens. But I guess I wonder, what would the effect of it actually be if it did? Would it actually make a material difference? You know, this has been looked at quite a bit. And I agree completely with Rajiv on this, that

We have to talk about mass shootings as their own thing, okay? You cannot talk about mass shootings in the same context that you talk about more quote unquote routine gun crimes such as domestic violence or street crime. That is a different species. It's like a different animal.

But when you're talking about mass shootings, there's a few things we know in addition to the fact that the majority of cases, the shooter leaks their plans. It's about 77% of mass shootings are committed with handguns.

25% of mass shootings involve either assault weapons, what are so-called assault weapons exclusively, or in conjunction with handguns, which is much higher than the rate of overall violence with rifles in more routine crime, which is, as you said, is a very, very small percentage. In fact, more people are killed by fists and knives by far than by rifles. And the RAND Corporation has actually done a study of studies

And they looked at 18 separate policies that might potentially impact mass shootings. And they found, and I'm reading the quote here, no qualifying studies showed that any of the 18 policies we investigated decreased mass shootings. Now, here's the big caveat to that. Nine of the policies...

They just didn't find studies that met their criteria for rigor. So we don't really know. And if those nine policies where they didn't have any studies that met their criteria for rigor, that included things like red flag laws. That includes things like gun-free zones or laws allowing armed teachers, for example. So we just don't have studies there.

But where they did have studies that met the standard for rigor, those included assault weapons bans. Those included high-capacity magazine bans. Now, why would that be the case? Those included minimum age requirements. Why would that be the case that these, something like an assault weapons ban or a magazine capacity ban wouldn't, there's no evidence it impacts mass shootings?

Well, you have to go back to the nature of a mass shooting itself. It's one of the most meticulously planned crimes. Now, I'm not saying all of them are meticulously planned. There's some evidence that a few are impulse crimes.

But as a general rule, they're very meticulously planned. And if you are dealing with a crime that is very meticulously planned, virtually any gun control measure is relatively easy to evade. Let's take the Buffalo shooter, for example. He bought a rifle that complied with New York's ban on assault weapons, and he modified it to make it more deadly. This is one of the reasons— Legally. He illegally modified it.

This is one of the reasons why Glenn Kessler, all the way back in the 2016 campaign season, wrote a pretty famous fact check saying that

None of the popular ideas for controlling mass shootings at the time, and you've looked at background check, universal background checks and assault weapons ban, have stopped any recent mass killing. It's precisely because of this incredible meticulous planning. And so that's why people are really drilling down into the science of this, are looking at different ideas, right?

like the red flag law, to take an example, is one of the different ideas that's relatively new because some of the old ideas really haven't been proven to have an effect. Let's get a little bit of a better understanding about where the gun debate is right now in America.

What, in your understanding, are the best cases for each side of this debate? And side could be debatable itself. Help me separate the substance of that debate for the noise that swirls around it. David, how do you see the two sides in this debate? You know, in many ways, because I've been writing and talking about this for a long time, I feel like the gun debate is in many ways almost a proxy for a lot of our cultural debates.

We have reached a point where the two sides almost can't even understand each other and can't understand their perspective. You know, I would say if you're talking about the gun control debate, there's a pretty straightforward, pretty straightforward and pretty straightforwardly compelling analysis which goes something like this.

Guns, particularly semi-automatic weapons, are extraordinarily deadly. It is very easy to get them and purchase them in the United States. And how many times do we have to see somebody who's obviously not fit to own a weapon be able to so easily purchase one and then go and immediately commit murder with it? And why is it such an impediment to

to your right to self-defense to put additional hurdles in the way of somebody who's a person who is a threat to themselves or others. What is it about a waiting period, for example? What is it about preventing a weapon like an AR-15 that's very much like the M4 I carried in Iraq, although not the M4 I carried in Iraq because it can't fire a three-round burst,

But a weapon that's very much like the M4 I carried in Iraq, why can I get that so quickly? When we've seen time and time again, people buy these things quickly and then use them quickly to commit mass murder. And there's a very sort of straightforward logic to that that's pretty compelling. And the answer is often very unsatisfying, which is we've tried that, it doesn't really work.

But what does happen when you put obstacles in the face of a purchase of a weapon is oftentimes what you do is you tell someone who's very law-abiding. You place an obstacle into a form of collective punishment of the law-abiding that doesn't have any impact on the criminal. And so if you're going to regulate, if you're aimed at a problem manifested by criminals...

your regulation should impact criminals far more than it impacts the law-abiding, whereas most gun control measures impact the law-abiding far more than they impact criminals. And so, therefore, you're getting the law backwards. And so in my branch of sort of the gun rights movement, we think much more of person control than gun control, if that makes sense. Controlling who are the people who can purchase and possess, right?

versus controlling what are the weapons available. Now, I don't believe we should have freely available machine guns or bazookas or any tank weapons, but amongst the weapons that are commonly in use for a lawful purpose, it is much more practical to aim at the people who are not fit to possess a weapon than it is to

So you're saying that one side actually has a good, reasonable case that doing more to delay or prevent the purchase of guns for certain people seems to do measurable good for little cost to average Americans. Right.

But the good case on the other side is something like these laws that you're proposing as they're written seem like they're only going to upset the law abiding and not actually make much of a difference. Well, that, you know, and the answer is, but what you're proposing doesn't actually make a difference. Right.

So if you look at, you know, because one of the things we're not operating from a standpoint of no knowledge here about what policy does. Right. And from the standpoint of, you know, looking at the Rand Corporation study of studies, child access prevention laws and waiting periods do seem to have an impact on two areas, unintentional deaths and injuries and suicide. That's where they seem to have a pretty good impact. Stay in your ground laws by, according to this study of studies,

are problematic when it comes to violent crime. They may increase violent crime. And so the gun rights community needs to think really hard, in my view, about its support for stand your ground laws. Is it worth the cost here? But time and time again, you know, when we were looking at some of these things, you know, the effects of the assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004 have been extensively studied and it didn't look like it had a material impact

at all on violent crime. And so one of the difficult things about this debate is you'll talk to people and the thing that seems like it should work, the thing that logically feels like it would work doesn't work. And so what do you do then? And that's one of the challenges of the debate. Rajiv, do you agree? Is that what your research has borne out?

I agree with what David said earlier about the gun debate being in some sense a proxy for a variety of other debates that are taking place along the same sort of lines of cleavage in American society.

A lot of people who are in favour of gun control, they would like the kind of policy that Australia implemented after the Port Arthur shootings in 1996 which killed 35 people. A siege is underway in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur where at least 25 people have been shot dead in Australia's worst massacre. It's understood the gunman is a 22-year-old armed with a machine gun.

The first of the names of those slaughtered at Port Arthur are being released. Among them 55-year-old Mervyn Howard and his wife Mary from the tiny village of Dunstown near Ballarat in central Victoria. In very short order, a very conservative Prime Minister in Australia. A national response, a national approach, a national solution

Led an initiative that repurchased about 20% of existing guns outside, banned a large number of weapon types, had a 28-day waiting period, very muscular policy. And the research shows that that was effective in reducing homicides and suicides in Australia, quite substantially, especially suicides, actually, but also homicides.

And, you know, it's how do you make a causal statement like that? Because actually homicides and suicides were actually going down in Australia even before this was implemented. And so, you know, researchers tried to, in this case, look at variation across states in Australia. Different regions had different strictness of gun laws prior to the implementation of this national uniform, homogenized approach to gun control. And if you find that those states that had the biggest gun

distance with regard to the change in gun laws also had the biggest decline in suicide and homicide, then you can make a causal claim. Yes, the policy had this impact. And I think that regarding why the gun control debate involves so much paralysis and so much talking past each other and so much misunderstanding is partly because I think the advocates, you know, don't see why we can't just do something like that. And part of the reason is the following. So

I mean, I've been in the United States a very long time now, but, you know, it's a gradual process of understanding the country, my adopted country. And one very important article that really changed my perspective on these things was one, I think, by Stanley Levinson in 1989 on the Second Amendment in the Yale Law Journal. And basically, he argued that the Second Amendment is actually part of a

a tradition in American thought, American society, that is distrustful of authority, of government, of tyranny, and that, you know, it ought to be seen in that light in conjunction with the other rights that are in the American Constitution. And I think that, you know, that makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. So when you talk about policies that restrict the rights of legal gun ownership, even if it is banning assault weapons, people feel that it's an infringement of a right that they have as Americans that they will powerfully resist.

being taken away from them. A lot of people like to undervalue what the Second Amendment was actually written for, and it was designed to be a check against the government. A lot of people don't like to talk about that aspect. Of course, it was also there to allow us to defend ourselves. But if you think about it, the AR-15, symbolically and literally, is the best defense against a tyrannical government.

And then not only that, it serves as an excellent precursor for them to then inevitably get to the point where they really want to get to, which is essentially the handguns. See, they can sell the whole idea of the AR-15 needing to be banned because it's evil and it's only meant for killing, as they like to say, which is not true. And so once they get that, then we have another shooting that happens, which it will, and then they'll go ahead and use that to justify further restricting our rights again. And so they'll take a little bit at a time, wait for another tragedy.

and take a little bit more after that. And I think it's important to understand that that's a legitimate position. It may be a position that one disagrees with, but there is reason behind it. It's part of an American political tradition. It's very widespread. To take one very simple example, suppose that the Constitution prohibited same-sex marriage, which there was a time in which this was not an unrealistic possibility that people might have a constitutional amendment to actually prohibit that.

Under current conditions, the way the society is right now, I could easily imagine repeal. But the Second Amendment, I can't. And the reason I can't is because the Second Amendment has a certain powerful cultural basis that's part of the American political tradition. And I think this is not understood by gun control advocates or not conceded enough. If it were, then they would look for solutions that do not infringe upon these rights, even if they wish that these rights didn't exist.

So that's where I'm coming from. I'm trying to think about policies. And this relates to what David said about policies that impose a burden on law-abiding gun owners who might be adopting practices that some other people in society find distasteful or bizarre or absurd.

But they still have those rights, and one needs a policy that will not infringe on those rights, or will not infringe on those rights in ways that they are especially prone to resist. I think a lot of people look at the gun buyback program that you mentioned in Australia and a lot of the stringent gun control measures they put in place and say, well, why not us? You know, Australians have a strong sort of independent renegade identity, although COVID kind of put that into question. You know, there's a strong hunting culture there.

And yet they responded very, very differently than we have to the mass shooting that you mentioned. And I'm struck by the fact that, you know, maybe we're similar in a lot of ways, but a key difference between Australia and America is the Constitution and the Second Amendment of that Constitution. So let's talk a little bit more deeply about that.

You know, David, right now we're in the middle of a debate, which maybe is about to get even hotter in this country, about whether or not you can find in the Constitution somewhere a right to an abortion. But it's hard to read the Second Amendment and not see clearly in black and white that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns.

It says, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The words that leap out to me there are well-regulated. And I want to put that question to both of you. Are those arms well-regulated?

You know, that's a really good question. And I think that I would recommend to anyone to read Justice Scalia's opinion in the Heller case. We hold that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to have and use arms for self-defense in the home and that the district's handgun ban, as well as its requirement that firearms in the home be rendered inoperative, violates that right. Where the Supreme Court declared unequivocally that that Second Amendment protects a personal right

to keep and bear arms in the home for self-defense. The Second Amendment provides, quote, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Scalia conducts essentially a history class. In the events that had given rise to the English Bill of Rights, the Stuart Kings had not abolished the people's militia, but had simply taken away the people's arms.

or the arms of their opponents, leaving in place only a standing army and a select militia dominated by their own supporters. What he does is he separates out the well-regulated militia clause from the right of the people clause, which is sort of the operative clause. The mere right to keep and bear arms in a state-organized militia does not solve the problem.

Because of the state could like the Stuart Kings limit the organized militia to its own people So what the Second Amendment means is since we need a people's militia The people will not be deprived of the right to keep and bear arms And so what a lot of people do is they say what well regulated militia means that the only context in which you can own a weapon is in a militia context and

But that's not the way that this sentence reads, and that's not consistent with other places in the Constitution that acknowledge the right of the people. That is always when used elsewhere in the Constitution as talking about an individual right. Undoubtedly, some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security,

and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct. You know, I think part of the reason here is that when you're talking about the experience of life in the American colonial system, that the militia was often something along the lines of every able-bodied male.

and would have their personal weapon. And the militia was an indispensable element of peacekeeping that existed at that time in American history. And it was also very, very tied, and this is very critical, to self-defense. It was very tied to self-defense. The district's total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of arms that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense.

Under any of the standards of scrutiny the court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition, in the place where the need for lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute, would fail constitutional muster. And that's, I think, so critical to understanding the attachment of

that people have, the cultural attachment that people have to owning firearms. And I'm not talking about the gun fetish stuff or someone's posing with an AR-15 for a Christmas card or they're marching with an AR-15 outside, say, the Michigan State House or Secretary of State's house, you know, to try to intimidate them. I'm talking about this core self-defense interest

That's the heart of the Second Amendment. And, you know, speaking as somebody who not only owns more than one weapon, also owns an AR-15,

I own that for self-defense. And why do I possess something like that for self-defense? Because I'm trying to think about what are the foreseeable threats that I would face. And the foreseeable threat that I would face is a weapon that is commonly owned and used in America, another semi-automatic rifle, another, a semi-automatic handgun. And so I think that this discussion of the Second Amendment

really can't be divorced from not just the history of widespread civilian gun ownership in the United States, but also from its deep connection to self-defense and the continuing necessity of self-defense that exists in our culture. To go full circle back, and I'll stop filibustering in a minute, to go full circle back, this goes back to the very nature of our culture itself.

America is much more violent than Europe. It's been much more violent than Europe for a long, long time. It's much more violent than Australia. It's much more violent than New Zealand or Japan or South Korea. And it's been that way for a really long time. And so you kind of get into a chicken and egg issue. Is it more violent because it's had more guns?

Or does it have guns, more guns for self-defense because it's more violent? Rajiv, what do you think about that? Like, as someone who's studied comparatively all of these other cultures and their relationship to violence, which came first, our love of guns and our commitment, you know, enshrined in the Constitution to our right to have them? Or are we somehow more predisposed to violence as a culture? Which is it?

I don't actually think it makes sense to talk about violence of our culture because violence is so heavily concentrated. You have, you know, the famous storied Appalachian feuds, for example, multi-generation killings that were extraordinarily violent. You had the prohibition era, you know, killings in Chicago that were very, very violent. You have, you know, very high homicide rates in some parts of the country right now.

And other parts of the country don't see any of this, actually. So in other words, there's not a single American culture. There's different pockets of American culture. That is actually the point I was trying to make about the paralysis in the gun debate. It's that there are two very different cultures. And this actually goes back to the clause in the Second Amendment that you identified. And some people, you know, some people will argue that you could just drop it and ignore it. And you don't really change the meaning of the Second Amendment. That

it's essentially irrelevant to our interpretation of the Second Amendment. And I think that that's the position that basically says that, you know, we have these rights and they can't be taken away. Your regulation has to be very, very limited, light touch. And then there are others who focus on that as being absolutely essential, inseparable part of the Second Amendment.

and who actually will argue that the Second Amendment is essentially non-binding and that there were parts of US history when the Supreme Court felt that way and that something like the Australian policy, you know, following Port Arthur could be implemented under the Second Amendment. These are two cultures in America, actually, you know, very different interpretations.

Now, which one is more reasonable? I'm not qualified to judge, but I'll go back to, again, Sanford Levinson's article. And he says that if you interpret it as part of the American political tradition that is suspicious of government,

Then under the Second Amendment, people may well, you know, one might reasonably decide that people have the right to own bazookas, that people have the right to own, you know. Nuclear weapons. Yes, because whatever the state, you know, if your interpretation of the Second Amendment is about the citizen versus the state, it's not even about personal protection even. The level of firepower that it would admit under that interpretation would be absolutely massive.

So that's why I think, honestly, I think that people who would like the Australian type policy, you know, should understand two things. One, that under the Second Amendment, under the current interpretations of it and under current reasonable interpretations of it, that is absolutely impossible. That's off the cards. That's one thing to realize. And the second, the honest position would be to advocate for repeal.

George Will has done so, you know, among conservatives. John Paul Stevens, ex-Supreme Court Justice, has done so. Benjamin Witt. You know, you have got people across the ideological spectrum who have argued for it. Make an honest case. It's not going to work for a generation, maybe two, maybe three. But at least make an argument for it. But understand that until such repeal is achieved...

We cannot do what Australia did. Now, if you understand that, then the question arises, what can we do? And that's really, you know, what I'm trying to figure out with the homicides, most homicides, not just the mass shootings, but most homicides in mind.

Let's talk about sort of the reason for the Second Amendment and this thing that you're identifying, Rajiv, that maybe is unique to American culture, which is skepticism of power and resistance to tyranny, right? So supporters of the Second Amendment,

gun rights supporters argue that the founders wanted American citizens to be able to defend ourselves against would-be tyrants, right? And the question is, what is tyranny? And what are those kinds of tyranny, right? I see two types that are constantly coming up in these debates. One is the argument that it would be much harder for some invading force to take over America because we're such a well-armed country. The other is that

If our own government, and this is the argument you hear more and more often, if our own government were to become tyrannical, which was, of course, the experience of the founders, then we would be able to resist our own government. Here's my issue with that argument, which Rajiv just sort of pointed to. In a world where nation states have nuclear weapons and heat-seeking drones and fighter jets everywhere,

How honest an argument is this for guns as a force against tyranny? Like, isn't the notion of a bunch of, no offense, David, a bunch of dads like you with shotguns- Wait a minute. Protecting us from either kinds of tyranny, either from the outside or the inside, isn't that kind of naive? Yes and no. And let me go with the yes before I go with the no. Okay.

The yes here is that even the argument itself that this is a realistic threat that we need to plan for as American citizens, given the fact that America has a functioning election system, it has a functioning court system, it's a functioning classical liberal democracy, as many problems as we have with it, we're... On the one hand, you would say...

we're really far from any sort of scenario that could reasonably plausibly justify taking up arms against this government. And so that as a sort of top line defense of the Second Amendment feels to me something that is receding over time in importance as we have established the existence of a classical liberal democracy and maintained its institutions for more than two centuries.

That sort of idea that there's a clear and present danger of government tyranny is, to me, receding. Now, there are some people in sort of the gun fetish culture who say, oh, heck no, you know, the lockdowns demonstrate we need our guns. Really? Really? Is that actually the case when you could have voted out any of these politicians, you had a court system available for you to challenge the lockdowns?

Public health measures have long, including draconian public health measures, have long been a part of American constitutional law since the founding. But if you're talking about the kind of tyranny that would justify taking up arms against government, we're removed from that. Now, where is it not a bad faith argument is that, look, there's a long history of pretty...

lightly armed insurgencies being really difficult to deal with.

And, you know, even for the most modern military, it's not just simply a matter of using massive firepower to suppress insurgencies. That's just not how it works. And also, you would have to note that if there was an insurgency in the an actual insurgency in the United States, it probably much like the Civil War split the military, you know, so you wouldn't necessarily be in a situation where all of these lines were absolutely clear in the hundred and first airborne was, you

you know, crushing y'all CADA. And, you know, that's not the likely scenario. So on the one hand, this idea that, hey, I need to own three AR-15s and maintain 15,000 rounds of ammunition in a stockpile because the government might do something is a far less salient reason for possessing a gun than, you know, I feel like my family is under threat

Because of reason X, Y, and Z, the neighborhood that I live in, because my girlfriend's crazy ex-boyfriend, because I have a public voice and people have threatened me. You know, those are much more salient reasons to own a gun than if Joe Biden wins again, America's over. Right.

The argument that you mentioned that, you know, a weakly armed population, what can they do against the government of this power? That was actually anticipated by Levinson in his paper. And he basically said all it does, what it does is it imposes costs on the person who's trying to exert their power. And the more costs you can impose, even if they're negligible in comparison to what they can impose on you, will deter them. So that's one argument that one could make with regard to that.

But I want to just disagree. Sorry, I just wanted to disagree with David on one thing, which is his optimism about American democracy. I am very, very concerned and shaken about where we are with American democracy, with what has happened since the last election, about beliefs, about outlandish conspiracy theories, the unwillingness to accept defeat, the attempts to hold on to power. Maybe I just fundamentally disagree, but I'm very, very concerned

about American democracy. And it's heartbreaking for me as someone who chose to be American to see what's happening here. But I just don't think an armed population can resist this. I mean, this is not a solution in any sense. So I want to revise and extend my argument because I agree with Rajiv on something, on the threat to American democracy. But what I would say is the threat is ironically enough coming often from the gun-owning community that is trying to, quote unquote, ward off tyranny.

So when I'm talking about that the justification for the gun-owning community of a threat of tyranny is declining, that doesn't mean that the gun-owning population isn't becoming a threat to democracy all by itself.

And the more it brandishes weapons in public protests, the more it dives into conspiracy theories. But the fact that those folks are diving into this conspiracy theory world, that they're arming up because they feel like the last election was stolen, that's not an argument for the Second Amendment. That's an argument that this culture, this particular part of the culture is broken. So in this circumstance, the threat...

to American democracy in this scenario that Rajiv is talking about, that I'm concerned about, isn't coming from the government itself. It's coming from a paranoid armed population. And that does trouble me. - But do you see a connection between the paranoid population that led to, for example, early in COVID, remember there were all those headlines about people being, about stores being sold out of ammunition and these long lines to get guns.

to what extent do you guys see that phenomenon as a reaction to

to the fact that americans feel really uneasy about where we're headed as a democracy are people buying guns because they're worried about the weakness in american democracy the weakness of for example the ability of our police forces in some cities to protect them and that's what's leading them out to actually become gun owners some of them for the first time so those are i look at these are two different things one is increased lawlessness in cities

increased violence in cities is a classic self-defense reason to purchase a weapon. The fact that you saw people could sometimes see or sometimes live amongst riots, right, for example, and felt very personally vulnerable. That is a classic I am defending myself reason to purchase a gun. It is not a

I'm going to overthrow this. This government is going to- No, but it's saying, I don't trust the people that I pay taxes to. I live in a neighborhood, for example, to get personal, where it is very common that people pay basically a retired police officer group to offer private security. Why? Because if you call 911, they don't show up. Yeah. Yeah.

That is different than the threat that we were talking about before, the threat of Trump and the denial of the results of elections. But that is another kind of weakness in American democracy that I think a lot of people, especially in blue cities, are responding to right now.

Oh, I agree with that 100%. I own guns in large part because I cannot count on the police to be present to defend me 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And different things alert different people to that reality. So a riot does or a lawless atmosphere exists.

And, you know, we're about to have a recall of a DA in San Francisco that's directly related to the lawless atmosphere. And I know personally San Francisco progressives who have purchased guns who never thought they'd ever own a gun in their lives. Me too.

Because of the lawless atmosphere. That is the classic self-defense reason to own a gun, which is different from the government is oppressing me and I'm going to overthrow the government. Right. This is the government is failing me and I have to take my own protection into my own hands. Right. It seems like there are kind of two groups here. One is the group, broadly speaking, let's say from the right, that says,

Look at the government look at the institutional capture of government look at the way that they're turning against us Look at the way that they're demonizing us look at the way that they're colluding with big tech and on and on and on We could get more extreme in those arguments I gotta get a gun and then we have a group and this is much more the group that I live amongst which is saying oh my god, you know We're not being protected the DA's in our cities are not enforcing laws Crime is on the rise

They don't seem to be enforcing laws. Right. I got to get a gun. So both of those things seem to me happening at once, if that makes sense. Yes. I just want to point out, Barry, that what you're describing, the second phenomenon that you're describing about a response to underprotection,

is something that has been felt in some American neighborhoods for a very, very long time. And for example, Philando Castile, who was killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, was armed and he was legally armed. Kenneth Walker, who was Breonna Taylor's boyfriend in the apartment when she was shot, was also armed and was also legally armed. And, you know, their explanations for that was entirely self-protective. And, you know, one of the reasons why

why you get high rates of homicide actually in some neighborhoods of America is precisely because of underprotection. In fact, Randall Kennedy in his book Race, Crime and the Law said that even more than violence by the state against African Americans, the bigger injustice was actually underprotection. And if you look at homicide clearance rates,

the rates at which homicides are solved, that people who commit murder are brought to justice, is shockingly low. You look in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. Under these conditions, you can be killed with impunity. If you're going to be killed with impunity, you have incentives to take preemptive action, even if you're

There's no other reason to kill. You may still want to do it just for self-preservation. This is a phenomenon that is not new in America. It's just new in certain parts of America. But I think this is one of the reasons why the arguments that were coming from places like the New York Times op-ed page arguing for defunding or abolishing the police were just so wildly out of step for where...

you know, the majority of Americans are and especially the majority of poor minority Americans that live in extremely violent places. I mean, you just have to look at the precinct level data on voting for Eric Adams in New York City. Where did he get his votes? 70%, 80% in areas where people are over-policed, I would say, but under-protected. So there's, you know, they have got problems with the police and they would, you know, they would like substantial changes in the way in which they are treated, especially, you know, just going about their business on a daily basis.

but also need much, much higher levels of protection than they are currently receiving. So yes, I agree with you on that. I want to talk briefly about the NRA and then I want to get to your solutions. There's this popular perception in the mainstream press and beyond that, I think, that most Americans really want there to be more stringent gun control,

but for the NRA. If it wasn't for the gun lobby, essentially owning enough Republicans in state houses and in Washington, we would actually have the kind of changes that we were talking about before that Australia implemented. I know the NRA is very rich and it's very powerful.

But I worry a little bit that it's kind of become part of our conspiratorial mindset where, for example, you know, if we see someone like Joe Manchin opposing, you know, refusing to support the Green New Deal, it can't be because of principle. It has to be because he's sort of bought by some corporate interest. Right.

So let's separate sort of myth from reality here on the question of the NRA. How true is it, actually, that they have sort of bought the Republican Party and that they are the main sort of sticky wheel that's keeping us from implementing more stringent gun control? I mean, obviously, a lobbying organization that has millions of dollars to throw around is going to have an impact.

But it is far below the popular story of the NRA. Far below. And one of their evidences for that is the NRA right now is an organization in a state of crisis. The gun lobby group is in shambles. The Wall Street Journal today reporting that the group's longtime leader, Wayne LaPierre, is accusing NRA President Oliver North...

of extortion and of pressuring LaPierre to resign. It is racked by scandal. Gun owners across America should be horrified by what I saw inside of the NRA. It's got terrible leadership. A former top lieutenant is officially declaring war on perhaps the most powerful and best-known lobbyists in Washington.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. It is hemorrhaging money. It is an abomination of members' money that what's gone on over the past 30 years. It's to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in wastage. He accuses LaPierre and other executives of misleading dues-paying members of the NRA and using their money to finance LaPierre's lavish lifestyle.

including $542,000 for trips on private jets. And yet that doesn't hasn't changed the underlying public support for the Second Amendment. The way I've put it to people is, yeah, the NRA is powerful. If you could wave a magic wand and it went away tomorrow, you might have a

the NGRL, the National Gun Rights League, that would immediately form because they're manifesting in their organizational manifestation of widespread public sentiment of a, especially a very intense base. And it's that intensity, I think, that really is important to understand because a lot of these gun control proposals that people float out that they, there's 85% support. Why can't we get this to happen?

What's a very soft, low-priority 85%, whereas the people who actually engage on the issue, they are quite passionate, and they put their signs in the yard. They actually make sure they vote in the primaries. And so there's a lot of soft support there.

for gun control, and a lot of much more hardcore support for gun rights. And as you know, we all know when soft collides with hard, soft tends to lose. And this is not just in the gun rights debate, it's across a whole bunch of political collisions that we have in this country. Rajiv, I wonder if you see it that way, if it's not the fault of the NRA or other gun lobbyists,

Is it just that a sizable population of America really feels that the right to bear arms without many restrictions is a litmus test issue, is absolutely essential to determining who they would vote for, and therefore betraying them or crossing them or annoying them would essentially cost many people, you know, their elections? Yes, I absolutely agree with that. And the best evidence for that is actually something that David cited in a recent article of his.

when he talked about some of the rhetoric, the pro-gun rhetoric that's really excessive and in fact even offensive, where you've got toddlers playing with guns, you've got people using guns for Christmas cards, you've got, you know, the politicians leverage their attachment to guns because they think it will be effective. And they think it will be effective because the voters...

who put them in office respond favorably to it. That, to me, is quite strong evidence that that's exactly what's going on. After the break, David and Rajiv propose their solutions and speak directly to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Stay with us. ♪

Okay, so...

We know that it's not the simplistic answer of the gun lobby deciding to prevent gun control laws getting passed. We know that it's not a simple answer of America simply doing as Australia has done. What you guys have both laid out in this conversation is that this is a sincere division.

that sincerely divides Americans and what they believe is core, really, to their identity as Americans. So given all of that, let's talk about what can actually be done. And I want to recenter our conversation here for a moment and just say clearly that whether it's handguns that are killing tens of thousands of people in cities like Chicago or Philadelphia or

or it's these high-capacity weapons that are being used in school shootings, what it means is that innocent people, often young people, sometimes children, are dying.

And it seems that far too often to me, this issue is being used as a political football and that as a result, real meaningful reforms are not being put forward. One of the things that I so respect about both of you is that you're focused on actual meaningful solutions. So Rajiv, let's start with you and some of the outside of the box solutions that you've been writing about.

What do you think should and can be done to stop this crisis? So let me say first that I think that this lack of correlation between homicide and ownership across states is actually good news in the following sense for policy, which is that, you know, suppose we accept the fact that because of the Second Amendment, its interpretation by the courts, American, you know, political culture and history, we are not going to be able to do much about ownership.

Ownership will stay exactly where it is. Can we then still do something about homicide? And the fact that there is a lack of correlation to me is heartening, actually. Maybe we can. So what could we do? My focus, Barry, is very much on the lost, stolen guns, the handguns that are used for most homicides in the United States, the straw purchases, gun trafficking, and so on, which to me, if we can do something about this, we'll make a dent in the problem. So what can we do?

So I'm going to just put forward a very hypothetical scenario that might sound a bit bizarre to you, but it has a purpose. So just imagine, just imagine if the Constitution protected the right of individuals to own and operate motor vehicles so that, you know, there were restrictions on what legislators could do to infringe upon that right. Let's just take that as a thought experiment. I know it's a little strange and a little absurd, but let's think about it.

Let's think about what would have to change in order to abide by the constitution in terms of how we currently regulate motor vehicle ownership and operation. So there are three elements that are really key in terms of motor vehicle regulation. They are licensing, liability and mandatory insurance.

Licensing is related to the red flag laws that David mentioned earlier, which is that you have to take a vision test, for example. You can't drive. You might have your license suspended for DUI. So there's eligibility criteria. So that's the licensing part. Liability, if you hurt or injure somebody with your vehicle, you have to make them whole. You are responsible for that injury and that harm.

And you may be responsible even if it's done with somebody who's taken your vehicle, your child, your neighbor. You know, you are responsible for keeping your vehicle safe. If you are negligent, for example, with regard to the safety of your vehicle, you can be liable for the damage and injury that is caused by that thing that you own. And mandatory insurance, you know, you have to have insurance so that you can meet your obligations under that liability. You hurt somebody, you don't have the means to pay, your insurance company will pay, but that requires mandatory insurance.

I think it's worth thinking about what in this general approach would be invalidated if there was a second amendment for cars. What wouldn't be able to be done, actually? And it seems to me that we could do various versions of all of these things, actually.

You know, you have something like licensing in the sense that, you know, certain people are not eligible to own firearms. Liability is something that's very much worth exploring. New York State just recently passed a new law in response, actually, to the Buffalo shooting, where you've got a requirement for safe storage requirements.

and other states are looking at this kind of thing. To me, that's essentially unenforceable. If you have a requirement with criminal penalties for safe storage and people leave their guns lying around and they get used to injure somebody or get stolen or lost and used in a crime...

you might notice the violation, but, you know, it's already too late at that point. And there's no penalty associated really with the person who left the firearm unprotected or nothing serious. I don't think the criminal code is really the way to deal with this. I think the way we deal with cars is the civil code. So you're saying we don't need to repeal the Second Amendment, we can keep our right to bear arms, but

we can ask gun purchasers to undergo something like the process of what you do when you get a driver's license before you get behind the wheel of a car. Yes, and insure yourself against the injuries that could be caused by the firearm that you may have left lying around. Your child takes it to school and shoots somebody, you are liable for not having kept it safe. That is a much more powerful incentive for safe storage than any safe storage law with criminal penalties, in my opinion.

I'm not saying you don't have to get rid of the Second Amendment. I wouldn't shed any tears. I know that many people would. I know that it's a heartfelt issue. I don't have any particular attachment to it. In fact, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But I do accept that it's there. It's meaningful. It's popular. And it's part of American political tradition. And we need to understand that and acknowledge it, even if we don't necessarily agree with it. So leave that in place. Don't try to reduce ownership.

but impose burdens on the owners that they might consider to be reasonable and acceptable. And I think that, you know, they do consider perfectly reasonable and acceptable the burdens that they have with regard to motor vehicle ownership.

And cars are durable, like guns. And cars can cause a lot of injury and death, like guns. So I think I would like people to maybe think along these lines. That's all I would say. That sounds pretty reasonable to me. David, I'm curious what you think. And if you think voters who want and are looking for in their candidates a robust defense of the Second Amendment could get behind that, or if Rajiv's idea is just compelling to squishes like me. Squishes. Squishes.

I think the fundamental reality is if you impose anything that puts a subjectively determined governmental barrier between you and the possession of a firearm, there's going to be extreme resistance to that. In other words, any kind of licensing regime

that is subjective in the sense of there's any degree of fitness determination before you can purchase a firearm. There's gonna be a lot of objection to that. And also it's probably gonna be unconstitutional as of within the next 30 days because of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association case that's going to deal with the right to both keep and to bear arms and strike down the New York State's very subjective test that it's imposed on whether or not someone can bear arms outside the home.

What I do think is there's a great deal of support for measures that take a look at actual behavior and objectively categorize certain kinds of behavior as disqualifying. So that's the felon in possession. That's the violent domestic offender that's adjudicated dangerously mentally ill on a temporary basis. That's when someone has indicated that they're a threat to themselves or others through a red flag law. But again, what you're doing is you're saying,

The default is I have a right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, but I can lose that right by conduct, by conduct. And there's a lot of support for that. I think there's also a lot of support for prosecuting existing laws, which has fallen out of fashion in some places. I've got some

statistics for you. So Larry Krasner is one of these progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia. Well, and these statistics are kind of eye-popping. If you go back to 2016, only about 35% or so of firearm prosecutions were withdrawn or dismissed. So only about 35%. By 2022, that's hitting to almost 60%.

of firearms prosecution. So we're not talking about somebody caught with a dime bag of weed or a tiny little bit of cocaine, not sort of your classic nonviolent drug offense. We're talking about firearms offenses here with an almost 60% withdrawn or not prosecution rate.

And that's extremely harmful to the enforcement of law. It isn't so much the length of a sentence that deters crime, because criminals don't really know what sentences are. It's not like they say, well, if you steal that man, it's going to be 15 to 20, but if you steal this, it's only 10 to 15. So no, it's not like that. It is much more related to certainty of punishment.

And so if you have creating a situation where there is a better than even chance, if you're even caught with a firearm committing a crime, that you're not going to be prosecuted, you're completely undermining the rule of law in that circumstance. And so there is a huge amount of public support for existing laws. There is a lack of prosecution for existing laws. That's part one. Part two, what are the behavior-based things that we can do

Red flag laws, completely behavior-based. What Rajiv was talking about with safe storage laws, and I like the idea of a civil remedy for violation of a safe storage law, that there's going to be a concrete financial penalty to pay if you violate a safe storage law and someone is harmed as a result, which that actually dovetails with Rand studies that safe storage laws do have an effect on accidental deaths and on suicides. Again, that's very behavior-based.

And these behavior-based reforms, I think, A, have the benefit of being much more measurably able to save lives, and B, fundamentally,

having much more broad public support. David, just translate safe storage laws for me, meaning if you don't have your gun locked up and someone kills someone with it, you can be sued. What does it mean exactly? Well, it depends. Sometimes it can be a civil remedy. You can be sued. Sometimes it can be you can be imprisoned. In other words, if a kid is in your house and you have not stored a firearm safely, let's say you have a loaded weapon in a kid's reach and they harm another kid,

There could be criminal penalties as one form of it, or civil penalties as another form, or both as another form. But one thing we have seen in the RAND studies is that these safe storage laws do make a difference when it comes to accidental deaths, for example. And so that's something, again, that's all behavior-based. And the virtue that that has is it connects deeply with the best of gun culture, which is...

This is a grave responsibility that I have when I own or possess a firearm. It's a right, but it comes with grave responsibilities. And that's the gun culture I grew up with, Barry, which was we always had a gun in our home. There was always an understanding that this is a very, owning a gun is a very serious thing.

So that's why I'm frequently looking at what are the behavior-based remedies that we can use. And just to give voice to the other side, isn't the argument against storage laws like this, and granted, I know that there are many, many kinds of these laws and proposals that, look, if someone breaks into my house...

I don't have time to unlock and then load my gun. Right. That would be their argument, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. But, you know, again, when I'm saying a safe storage law, the understood implication should be a well-drafted law that allows for the reality that you have to be able to defend yourself in your home. So fortunately, technology is actually quite helpful on this score in that you're able to have very quick release safes now.

You can keep one right by your bedside and the release is extremely fast. It's not like you have to sit there and fumble around with a combination lock at 2:30 in the morning, scared out of your mind. So there are ways to define safe storage that protect your ability to quickly defend yourself.

but would encompass like leaving a loaded Glock just sitting on the kitchen table. You also have technologies that can make a firearm safe even if it's not locked or unloaded. You know, radio technologies that allow it only to be fired by a legal owner or fingerprints or, you know, biometric technologies with backup, you know, systems. And my feeling is that if it was expensive for people, for other people to use their guns in ways that harm people,

or injure, you know, that injure or kill others, then they would themselves find the best solution for safe storage. And, you know, a smart gun, for example, is safe in ways that other guns may not be

Rajiv, you have a number of suggestions that involve new tech, like fingerprint or facial recognition. Can you tell us a little bit about those? Well, it's contentious. There are these so-called smart guns where, you know, you can have...

biometric technologies that prevent use by others other than the legal owners. If you lose your phone, Mary, you know, it's very hard for somebody to just use it. You know, they have to go through some steps. One could, in principle, have that with firearms also. And you do. You do have those technologies. And then people argue that, look, first of all, you know, that's another failure point, right? If it's wet, for example, you know, you've not, we've all experienced this with our phones, you know, with wet fingers, you know, it's taking time to respond and you

So you can have backup systems with bracelets and so on, radio communication technology. So there are ways to do this. But this actually links into the conspiracy thinking that we talked about earlier, is that people feel that with digital rather than analog technologies, that they could be more easily tracked, that they could be somehow controlled and so on. So there's some resistance. There's also resistance with regard to price. They're more pricey. But for that, I think...

You know, it's like solar power compared to coal. It was also very pricey at one point. I mean, I think if the market grows, I think the price will come down. I want to give you both the chance to talk as clearly and directly as you can to all of the lawmakers out there. And I know a number that listen regularly to this show. What do you want to tell Democrats that they are wrong about and should give up on? And what about Republicans? What should they give up on and what should they focus on?

David, let's start with you. Take the soapbox. All right. Give those people your message. I've got an album side on this, Barry. I've got frustration. I'm going to go airing of the grievances. Democrats, stop trying all or nothing. And this goes beyond gun rights.

Electoral reform, we're not going to reform the Electoral Count Act unless you re-overhaul the entire electoral system, really? The Equality Act has to include provisions that go and strike at religious liberty itself, really? Does everything have to be big? Why not go attainable? Why not go for an attainable reform? It is not a surrender, it's actually progress.

If you have a reform that can get Republican votes and it's not everything you wanted, and I know a lot of people want, and this is something on both sides of the aisle, they want the issue. They want the issue. We've got to have some attainable measures. We have to make some progress because haven't we had enough time where you've had the issue?

You've had the issue for decades. Why not do something attainable? So that's my big beef with the Democratic approach as of now. It seems to be so maximalist. And David, what about Republicans? Republicans have to stop with maximum resistance to anything. So one side is maximum demand and the other is maximum resistance. It's maximalist v. maximalist. And this is, of course, sort of the story of our base-driven politics on a number of fronts. It's maximalist versus maximalist.

The American people both simultaneously broadly support gun rights and are anguished that we can't seem to pass much of anything, even modest, to deal with a very real problem. And so I think this combination of maximalist v. maximalist is really tearing— it's not just breaking down the functioning of our Congress, it's tearing at our social fabric.

in a way that I think is really destructive. And that's why I've been so encouraged to see the Cornyn Murphy conversation. - Republican Senator John Cornyn and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy are meeting today to try and find common ground on gun reform.

Senator Murphy said that he doesn't want to have show votes on this. He actually wants to figure out if there's a way to get something done. So while they could bring a background check to the floor and have it fail and pin it on Republicans, those who are very close to the talks actually want to accomplish something. I've been very encouraged to see bipartisan legislation introduced last year.

from Rick Scott and Marco Rubio on the right. If you're threatened to harm yourself or somebody else, you shouldn't have access to any weapon. On red flag laws and Angus King on the left. Senator Angus King tells us members of Congress seem ready to debate certain parts of the very controversial issue. So there's the seeds of something here that has bipartisan agreement. The enemy is maximalism. Rajiv, how about you? What is your message to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle?

To Democrats, I would say that even if you disagree with the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, accept the fact that it's not entirely unreasonable and that it has a lot of support in the population and that it's consistent with various other American political traditions and history. And because of that, understand that the maximalist position, as David put it, the Australian solution, for example,

is out of reach for us. So you have to think about other alternatives. And there I would say please focus on handguns, the stolen, lost, straw-purchased, trafficked handguns that cause so much mayhem, so much havoc in our cities. Yes, the mass shootings really understandably draw attention to this issue, but let's use that attention actually to address homicide more broadly and more generally. So that's my message to Democrats.

To Republicans, I would say you talk a lot about personal responsibility, but think about personal responsibility for somebody who has left their firearm unsecured, maybe in a glove compartment of a car, and it is stolen and trafficked and taken somewhere else and results in death. There's irresponsibility there. Ought you not to be taking steps to try to punish that irresponsibility, to try to contain it, to send a message to that person that they're doing something wrong and deeply immoral?

Find a way. Find a way to stop that from happening. Okay, so one last big kind of messy question. Let's see if this comes out right. How much of this debate just comes down to the fact that whether we like it or not, America has this right enshrined in our Constitution?

And there's just not a world in which we're going to see significantly less guns in our country unless we decide to change the Constitution, which we've done and which we could do because it's a democracy. But short of that, I don't see the situation changing very much. The most extreme alternative, right, which Democrats would call a gun buyback program, which Republicans would call they're coming to get your guns, for whatever good it might or might do, I feel like it would tear our factored country apart.

And so maybe you would both say that I'm guilty here of maximalism. But doesn't it really come down to the fact that if we're not willing to change the Constitution, we're just going to have a country full of guns and all of the risks that come with that? I think you're right. I think the Constitution constrains our legislators quite considerably. I don't agree with the view that one can simply ignore the Second Amendment because of the militia clause.

And I think I've said earlier also that the honest position, really, for somebody who would like a maximalist policy is to make the case for repeal, not the case that the Second Amendment can be ignored. And, you know, I think a persuasive case can actually be made. And many people across the ideological spectrum have actually tried. David, does it come down to the fact that

If we're not willing to change the Constitution, we're just going to have a country full of guns and all the good, but also the bad that comes with it. So I think the bottom line is we're going to have a country where people own a lot of guns. I think that the—I'm someone who supports the Second Amendment. I think it is enshrining a right of self-defense that's one of the rights that human beings enjoy. Now, if I was—if I'm in a country—I don't know what the gun ownership rate is in Singapore, say—

very, very tiny amount of gun violence, very tiny amount of gun deaths. And does that mean that I would want to introduce a bunch of guns to Singapore? No, no. But we are in the United States of America. We have to deal with the country that we have. In that country, this idea, and I do think a right of self-defense exists across all countries, but what that means is different country by country, depending on what the nature of your threats are.

And so an amendment that would say you law-abiding citizens no longer have a right of self-defense that's meaningful in a nation awash with weapons, I think would be a great injustice. So I'm against repealing the Second Amendment. I believe in a robust interpretation of the Second Amendment. But here's the good news, Barry. We don't have to

crack down on the Second Amendment to do something really meaningful about gun deaths in this country. And this goes back to what Rajiv was talking about earlier. We have seen in the recent past, in the very recent past, a decrease in murders in the United States by more than 50%. If you go back to the bad days in the early 1990s, where we had almost 10 murders per 100,000 Americans, which is a

very dre- it's a dreadful murder rate. We got down to just over four per 100,000 at the same time that gun laws were largely relaxed across the country and more guns were manufactured and more Americans owned guns. So I'm not saying the ownership of guns caused the decrease in murders. I'm saying that we know how to decrease a murder rate substantially, even in a country where people own a lot of guns.

And I think that that's a good news element. I'm glad that Rajiv noted that, that this is a good news element here is that we're not helpless to decrease the murder rate, even in a country with a lot of guns. We've done it before and we've done it very substantially before. And so what are the things that decrease the murder rate, even in an atmosphere where gun laws were becoming more lax?

is a really interesting and fascinating question, Barry, that we could have three more podcasts about. Well, hopefully we'll have a second round here, but here's to hoping that lawmakers step up, listen to some of the reasonable and sober suggestions that you've laid out in this conversation and find a way to thread a really, really difficult needle without tearing us further apart. Rajiv, David, thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you, Barry.

My thanks to both David French and Rajiv Sethi. And my thanks to you for listening. We'd love to hear from you. So if you have any tips, feedback, suggestions, especially about future debates, please write to us at tips at honestlypod.com. And if you appreciated this episode, share it with a friend and have an honest conversation of your own. See you next time.