Consider This from NPR - As Lawmakers Debate Gun Control, What Policies Could Actually Help?

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

President Biden urged Congress to act and the House is preparing to pass multiple gun control measures. But the Senate is where a compromise must be made. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is reportedly discussing policies like enhanced background checks and a federal red flag law. While it's unclear what Congress might agree to, researchers do have ideas about what policies could help prevent mass shootings and gun violence. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce explains. Hear more from her reporting on Short Wave, NPR's daily science podcast, via Apple, Google, or Spotify. NPR's Cory Turner reports on what school safety experts think can be done to prevent mass shootings, and former FBI agent Katherine Schweit describes where Uvalde police may have erred their active shooter response. Schweit is the author of Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis.Help NPR improve podcasts by completing a short, anonymous survey at npr.org/podcastsurvey. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

We know what the president wants to do. We need to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And if we can't ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21. In a primetime speech last week, President Biden also called for stronger background checks, for federal red flag laws, and for a repeal of legal immunity that protects gun makers from liability. I just told you what I'd do. The question now is what will the Congress do? We cannot keep doing this. Democrat Lucy McBath of Georgia is one of the lawmakers leading the gun control effort in the House of Representatives. An entire generation of

children are learning that the adults they look up to cannot or will not protect them. The House will vote this week on a series of gun control measures, including a lot of the things that the president asked for, like raising the age to purchase semi-automatic rifles and a federal red flag law. And we have solutions that a majority of American people believe in. While it is true that many gun control measures have broad public support, any House bills are unlikely to pass the Senate, where Democrats have a smaller majority. Which is why the Senate is where any gun control legislation will truly be decided. Are we going to make some noise this week? Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut spoke at a rally for gun control advocates outside the Capitol on Monday, ahead of this weekend's March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C. Murphy and others have signaled that Senate

negotiations will mean compromise with Republicans. An assault weapons ban, for example, is not on the table. But reportedly, things like a federal red flag law or enhanced background checks are. We are in very real discussions right now to try to craft a bill. I am more confident than ever that we are going to change the gun laws of this country to make our schools a safer place. Consider this. Two weeks after the Uvalde shooting, we don't know yet what, if any, action Congress will take on gun control. But researchers say there are specific policies we already know about that could help prevent mass shootings. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Tuesday, June 7th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Here's one important point about gun violence research. It's just disproportionately underfunded. Mike Anestis is executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University. He told NPR that federal funding for research into all forms of gun violence has long been neglected. There's money out there, but it is really far below where it should be given the amount of injury and death

and economic costs associated with gun violence. That said, researchers have been able to study some gun control measures by comparing states that have them with states that do not. That is honestly less than ideal from a public safety standpoint, but it does provide researchers with opportunities. Daniel Webster is co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. He and some colleagues recently looked at over 30 years of data on shootings in the U.S. that involved four or more victims. We did find two policies that had significant protective effects. Number one, bans on large capacity magazines or ammo feeding devices that make it possible for a shooter to avoid reloading as often. The greater ammo capacity that you have in a semi-automatic firearm,

the more bullets you can fire uninterrupted. Reloading gives victims a chance to escape or fight back. The second policy is one supported in public polling by more than 70% of Americans. And that is, require anyone buying a gun to go through a licensing process. A licensing process requires someone to, you know, directly apply and engage with law enforcement, sometimes their safety training and other requirements. Daniel Webster spoke to NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce,

and you can hear more of her reporting on gun violence research in an episode of NPR's daily science podcast, Shortwave. There's a link to that in our episode notes. Now, efforts to prevent gun violence, of course, are not just limited to Washington, D.C. Just this week, for example, New York State passed 10 different measures strengthening gun laws, including a measure to raise the age to buy an AR-15 style firearm from 18 to 21, a ban on the sale of body armor to most individuals, and a ban on large magazines. Legal challenges are expected, of course. Meanwhile, in other states with more Republican control, the conversation around gun laws is focusing on schools more, arming teachers, hiring more security, or restricting access to just one door.

But school safety experts who have been studying shootings for years are pretty clear on what will work and what will not. Here's NPR's Corey Turner. Matthew Mayer has been studying school violence since before Columbine. He's part of a big group of researchers who started putting out position papers back in 2006 about why school shootings happen. The question today, Mayer says, is not why. It's do we want to change or is this acceptable to us? And we have to start being more honest with ourselves. For Mayer, a professor at Rutgers, that honesty has to begin with gun safety policy. There's a broad consensus from school safety experts that arming teachers is not good policy. Mayer and his colleagues have called for universal background checks and banning assault-style weapons. We don't let people buy hand grenades.

We don't let people buy bazookas and other instruments of war. That big group of school safety experts that Mayer's a part of? They're also calling for the removal of legal barriers to sharing information among educational, mental health, and law enforcement agencies in cases where a person has threatened violence. And they want to allow courts to issue time-limited restraining orders, requiring that firearms be recovered by law enforcement when there is evidence that an individual is planning to hurt others or themselves. In its own report on school shootings, the U.S. Secret Service also flagged the importance of gun storage safety.

In half the shootings they studied, the gun used was either readily accessible at home or not really secured. Now, to the things researchers say schools can actually control, there's been a lot of movement in recent years toward hardening schools, like adding police officers and metal detectors. But Otis Johnson Jr., who heads the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools at Johns Hopkins, says schools should focus on softening. Our first preventative strategy should be to make sure kids are respected, that they feel connected and belong in schools. That means being truly responsive to the social and emotional needs

of students, working to build kids' skills around conflict resolution, stress management, and empathy for their classmates. These are things that we learn. And if your parents didn't have these skills and tools or all of them, you can't give what you don't have. Scarlett Lewis founded Choose Love for Schools after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School 10 years ago. Choose Love is a social-emotional curriculum being used in thousands of schools. I interviewed her back in 2019, and she told me how much she loves working with kids to build kinder, safer schools. When I was handing out bracelets and I said, what's your favorite character value? And they said, without hesitation, forgiveness.

And I'm like, really? Why forgiveness? Because you can let it go. Because it feels good. The idea is these skills can help reduce all sorts of unwanted behaviors, including fighting and bullying. In its report, the Secret Service found most of the school attackers they studied had been bullied. Jackie Nowicki has led multiple school safety investigations at the Government Accountability Office, and she says her team found a few things closely linked

to making school environments safer. Anti-bully training for staff and teachers, adult supervision, things like school psychologist, and a law enforcement representative work together to identify and support students in crisis before they hurt others. Which reminds me of something Scarlett Lewis told me back in 2019. There are only two kinds of people in the world, good people and good people in pain. And from Lewis, that's a powerful thing to say. Her six-year-old son, Jesse, was murdered alongside many of his classmates at Sandy Hook Elementary. That was NPR's Corey Turner. In the wake of Uvalde, the debate hasn't just been about how to prevent mass shootings. It's also focused on what happens once one is in progress.

The picture that's emerged of the law enforcement response in Uvalde is, at best, chaotic, and at worst, totally incompetent. Police waited more than an hour to head into the classroom while the gunman was inside. When I see something like this happen, I feel like somewhere along the road, the law enforcement training just didn't happen. Or the execution. You know, maybe that's the way to say it. It wasn't just the training, it was the execution. Katherine Schweit spent two decades as an FBI special agent, and she created the agency's active shooter program after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. She told NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer the police response in Uvalde revealed weak points in how both schools and police prepare.

You know, I'm going to tell you the truth. I was shocked. I was shocked. The law enforcement was there for an hour on the other side of a wall is just unheard of. Right. And for people who haven't followed the details, when you say on the other side of the wall, you mean they were literally outside the classroom as there was a shooter inside sporadically shooting and they did not go in? Well, you know, it's complicated. All of these situations are incredibly chaotic and there's no getting around that. But what we know for sure is that there were officers in the hallway on the other side of the door with a shooter inside the door. And that's just unacceptable in an active shooting situation. Walk me through what an ideal response would have been according to the active shooter program you designed. Let me qualify a little bit and just say, the law enforcement training that the FBI is pushing out and has pushed out for years requires that when there is active shooting underway, even if it's

a single officer, you must pursue to the sound of the shooting or where you believe the shooter is, you must pursue all the way to the shooter and neutralize the shooter. That is the lone objective and that you should never waver from that. Which is the opposite of what happened in this situation. Sasha, it's difficult to explain how dynamic these are and have a listener maybe appreciate that this is a matter of seconds. And a law enforcement officer, if they're trained, should continue moving forward, even if it means busting through a door, shooting through a

door. I recognize the risks that are going through their heads at, oh my gosh, there's children in that classroom. I don't want to hurt a child. But we need to pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue, because the shooters have already proven that they're willing to kill people and they'll continue doing it. Katherine, we've been talking about the role of law enforcement. Let's also talk about the role of the children who are under fire or potentially under fire. You recently wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that schools have put too much emphasis on training children to hide rather than flee. You're saying they need to run. Could you tell us more about that?

When I was working with then-Vice President Biden's team after the Sandy Hook shooting to look for solutions, one of the decisions that we made as a group, all the federal agencies said, look, run, hide, fight is what people do in a shooting. And run, hide, fight teaches us to do the run part first. What we're teaching kids in school is we're teaching the hide part in schools, but we're not teaching the run part.

There were little kids who escaped from Sandy Hook Elementary School because their teacher stepped up, stood in the way of the shooter, and they escaped out a side door. And the FBI, even just in the recent years, released new training that says escape, your first priority has to be to escape. So somehow when it comes to schools, we missed and permanently, I feel like we've missed up to this point, an opportunity to teach children and teach adults in schools that they need to run. That's the first thing they need to do. They need to escape.

That's Katherine Schweit, the author of the book Stop the Killing, How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ilse Chang.