Making Sense with Sam Harris - #283 — Gun Violence in America

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Graeme Wood about the problem of gun violence in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with Graham Wood. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He's been on the podcast many times before. He wrote a great book on the Islamic State titled The Way of the Strangers, Encounters with the Islamic State. And he's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he also teaches at Yale University.

Anyway, today we talk about guns and gun violence in America, the unique character of that problem. We recorded this a couple days after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and we discuss the issue from every side we can think to analyze it from. No doubt there's more to say. Those of you who are not used to hearing me get choked up will hear me scarcely able to talk about Uvalde at one point. That story and the specific details are unlike any I can think of at the moment. And it is a kind of super stimulus, morally speaking,

that I find it very difficult to think about. Anyway, Graham and I do our best here. This seems like an appropriate podcast to release on Memorial Day. It's also a PSA, so no paywall. If you want to support what we're doing here on the podcast, the way to do that is to subscribe at SamHarris.org, and I feel immense gratitude to all of you who do that. And now I bring you Graham Wood. I am here with Graham Wood once again. Graham, thanks for joining me.

I'm glad to be here, Sam. So we are speaking some days after the Uvalde massacre. And I wanted to have a conversation with you about the larger issue of guns and gun violence in America and what we can do about it. You recently wrote a couple of pieces in The Atlantic about this. And obviously, this is on everybody's mind. This is a problem that, despite how excruciating it is, it seems just surprisingly intractable, and it almost seems

impossible to solve. This conversation will reveal how complex it is. And I mean, the status quo is totally unacceptable, but it seems resistant to change for reasons that are more complex than the people who are calling for change generally seem to realize. And so I think we'll add some complexity to this, I don't know, and perhaps some moral clarity, but I'll be surprised if we arrive at anything like easy solutions. But perhaps to start, maybe you can just summarize your engagement with this issue. What has been your experience with guns and gun culture and your focus on this as a journalist? I mean, obviously you focused a ton on violence and chaos, especially overseas, but just in what part of your wheelhouse is this issue? Yeah, well, I guess the first thing to say is I'm a Texan. So if you want to know what my

experience with gun culture is, I grew up in a place that identifies itself with having lots of guns around. And although I didn't grow up with a gun in identifies itself with having lots of guns around. And although I didn't grow up with a gun in my household at all, probably the majority of the friends I knew had them, shot them as kids, certainly had them in the house. And it feels totally normal for me to be around people who have guns and who use them responsibly. And I spent two years working on a ranch in California, and any rural environment you're in is likely to have a lot of guns in it too. And also to have people with guns who are using them responsibly and who think of them as just part of their culture and part of their work, something they use for work and for fun. So it's never been,

for me, a thing that, as I think a lot of people in my journalistic milieu think of guns as scary things. And, you know, they should be scared to some extent, but they might not quite understand how deeply implicated in the culture guns are. I think, has really influenced me is reporting for years on terrorism and counterterrorism, where much like after Uvalde, after September 11, I remember very vividly watching people understandably looking for anything they could do to keep something like that from happening again. And just like after Uvalde, coming up with a lot of really bad ideas that on just a moment's reflection would reveal how bad they were and how unlikely they were to stop the threat. So just like people after September 11 would say, for reasons it's hard to fathom in retrospect, maybe we need a national ID card.

Maybe that would stop this. Similarly, now there are a lot of solutions being proposed, like having fewer doors to the schools that I think similarly on just a few moments reflection would not solve the problem and certainly not the underlying problem. So that's the background that I take to this. And then in addition to that, I'm just someone who enjoys guns and who just happens to have a few days ago applied for my concealed carry permit. So I have some very recent experience of what it's like to try to be legally armed in this country at this moment. Yeah. And you wrote an article about how just comically easy that is to do. I mean, it's not comically easy perhaps in every state, but where you did it in Connecticut, there really is no process of exclusion. Forget about getting guns.

Now we're talking about you getting a gun and getting a permit to carry it concealed. Do you want to say anything about that? Yeah. I expected that Connecticut, which 10 years ago had the Sandy Hook disaster, to be one of the harder states to get a concealed carry permit. It's not, not compared even to its neighboring states like New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island. And all it really takes is doing a one-day gun course and after that going to the cops. And if you haven't committed some of the sort of like 11 deadly sins that would get you excluded from gun ownership, like having been convicted of a felony or being the subject of a restraining order, or having recently been a mental inpatient, these things will keep

you from getting a gun. But I asked the instructor directly who has been in law enforcement for 30 years. I said, when I go to the police station to get all this paperwork filled out and approved, what if they just look at me and say, you look kind of crazy. You look maybe homicidal. You look like not the kind of person we want on our streets, walking around authorized to be carrying a revolver. And he looked at me and said, he said, first of all, if they excluded people on that basis, you think they'd let me have a gun? He actually looked perfectly normal, but his point was well taken. He said, you could go into the police station with your underpants over your

pants and they would still hand you your permit back. So basically it's, unless you've committed one of the very specific things that will prevent you from having a gun, then a gun is yours to carry around in Connecticut if you can jump through the bureaucratic hoops and take a one-day course. I mean, you're talking about people who wouldn't have been excluded on the basis of most, even all of the remedies that people are suggesting could help solve this problem, right? You're talking about people who legally bought guns, who did not have criminal histories. I guess the Buffalo shooter had some entanglement with the mental health system, but not of a sort that seems currently actionable. We'll talk about red flag laws and what we might do to mitigate this problem. But in so many cases, we're talking about someone who has legally acquired a gun. And even in the case

of Uvalde, he went through a background check and passed it because this person had no criminal history. Obviously, there were many red flags in this person's life, and we'll talk about what it might mean to respond to those kinds of things more in a kind of pre-crime minority report way and just how fraught that process might be. But this is, as you said, the conversation that happens in the aftermath of an atrocity like this rarely hits upon the actionable ideas that would obviously have reduced the risk of the very atrocity that has provoked the conversation. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and I understand why people would flail about in search of a solution here, but none of the things that were in place, they didn't fail in the sense of, as far as we can tell, this guy was legally permitted to have a gun as an 18-year-old without any serious run-ins. So the system quote-unquote worked. And unfortunately, the system working in this case means a couple dozen dead people. So I guess I should briefly summarize my background here. Some people

listening to the podcast will know it, but if not, you can read on my blog or listen to, I think, podcast number 19, where I wrote an article almost 10 years ago titled The Riddle of the Gun in response to a shooting of this sort. And I think it was Sandy Hook that was the proximate cause there. And I've had several other podcasts and articles on violence. So just in brief, I have very little affinity for the religious cult that is organized around the Second Amendment in the U.S. And I share every liberal's outrage at the outsized influence that the NRA has had politically over the years, and just how obscene it looks from the outside, and even from the inside, that America is such an outlier with respect to gun violence. I mean, it just makes absolutely no sense. And so when viewed from Australia, or the UK, or Canada,

you look at the problem we're suffering here, whether it's mass shootings or just the ambient level of gun violence and suicides that is mostly a problem of handguns, and we'll talk about that. It's just insane that we are living this way. And yet, I am also someone who has never believed that calling 911 is a reasonable strategy for self-defense if someone breaks into your home, intent upon harming you or your family. And so I've been a gun owner for many years. I've trained a lot with firearms of various types. I've gone down the rabbit hole there and discovered how fun it is to do that. I mean, once you admit that you have a reason to own a gun and you need to get well-trained to use it and to use it safely, then it becomes just incredibly fun to shoot, right? It's just a guilty pleasure, honestly. And so I understand why there are millions of Americans who love to shoot guns and see a reason to own them. Because again, maybe I should just spell out the moral logic of this briefly, because it's easy to, if you're outside of this, if you haven't gone down this particular rabbit hole, and you ask, you know, why would anyone want to own a gun? Isn't that just increasing the likelihood?

I mean, if you're going to take the end of this that many New York Times opinion columnists might take, it's just owning a gun is entirely fatuous because it just raises the risk that you're going to kill yourself or you're going to get killed with it by a member of your family who grows deranged, or it's going to get used against you. So your John Wayne fantasies of defending yourself and your family with a gun are irrational. There are many reasons to think that's just not true in one's own case, and to not fear that one is self-deceived, right? I mean, yes, if you have a life of chaos, if you're in danger of being suicidally depressed, or a member of your family seems to be, if you're running a meth lab, if you're hanging out with dangerous, dysfunctional people, well, yes, then adding guns to your life,

you might well think, is increasing the likelihood that you're going to be harmed by them. But if you're an entirely responsible, sane, and well-trained person who understands almost to the level of a religious principle how important it is to store your guns safely, then it is true that the swimming pool in your yard is a greater risk to friends and family than the gun that is safely locked in your house. And responsible gun ownership in that case is a thing. And the reason why it makes sense ethically is, in my view, a world without guns is a world in which the strongest, most aggressive, most violent, most well-trained, and most numerous men always win, right? I mean,

that is what it is to live in a world where you don't have access to a weapon that gives you some kind of range in a physical altercation with a stranger who enters your house. The big guy always wins. And if you want to live in that kind of world, I just don't think anyone should be sentimental or nostalgic for that kind of world. Yeah. One thing, Sam, that really changed my mind about guns was a few years ago for The Atlantic, I profiled a gun celebrity on YouTube named John Correa. And one of the really amazing things about YouTube is that you can see things that in the past, a person could live 100 years and not see more than half a dozen serious acts of violence. Now you can watch YouTube and there will be color commentary

by extremely smart, clever people who have watched thousands, tens of thousands in the case of John Correa and analyze them. And I think a lot of people who have no experience with guns have the immediate assumption that there's just no way that someone is going to defend himself with a legally acquired and owned firearm. That home invaders always have the drop on you, that bad guys end up using the guns against you. And indeed, those things happen. But you start watching these videos, which are curated by Korea, and you start seeing it happens all the time that a self-defender uses a gun against a bad guy. So I think a lot of fantasies about guns, pro and con,

are not surviving scrutiny now that we can actually see more instances. Now, we could talk about whether in aggregate, and it's hard to say, owning a gun is more likely to save you or harm you. And as you say, a lot of the answer to that is going to have to do with how responsibly you store it, how well trained you are in its use, and also whether you're a crazy person or not. So I'm guessing you've done the calculation and you are one of those people who uses guns with a sense of religious commitment to storing them and so forth. And also that you judge yourself non-crazy enough to be responsible enough to own them and so forth, and also that you judge yourself not crazy enough to be responsible enough to own them. Yeah, yeah. And so I feel like defensively, I need to put the punchline somewhere up front here, because many people who read my essay, The Riddle of the Gun, were just blindsided by it and horrified by it. They just could not believe that I would even own guns,

despite the fact that I'm the sort of person who gets the occasional death threat and attracts the occasional lunatic into my orbit. And it is a very nuanced and even confusing argument I make, because I really am on both sides of this issue, and it's not an easy issue to parse. But the thing to put up front is that what I actually recommend, I mean, the policies I would want to see enacted are more restrictive than any that anyone on the left is even arguing for, you know, and would be hopeless to try to implement in the current environment politically. I just, you know, the short form of this is, I think getting a gun should be, you know,

the equivalent of getting a pilot's license, right? I mean, I think you should have to be trained, you should have to be vetted, it should be highly non-trivial to get a gun. Now, you know, there are arguments against that, you know, that biases against poor people, biases against people who just don't have the freedom to do all that, and yet still you could argue, you know,

that the single mom home alone should be able to own a gun, etc. But anyway, I mean, I'm definitely biased on the side of making things much harder than even, you know, the people who are banging on about gun safety are inclined to argue for. you know, the people who are banging on about gun safety are inclined to argue for. And yet, I find it very difficult to wish for a world without guns, again, for the aforementioned reasons. I've just spent enough time training in martial arts and just studying human violence and just knowing, you know, knowing what the problem is without a weapon like a gun when, you know, the guy who spent 10 years in prison,

you know, basically going to graduate school for crime comes into your house, you know, with bad intentions, you know, you picking up a frying pan is a low percentage solution. So, you know, with that said, let's talk about, I guess I have another throat-clearing caveat here. On some level, I wonder whether conversations like this are even good to have, specifically in the aftermath of a mass shooting. I mean, it's because, again, we have a totally intolerable number of mass shootings. I think we've had 212 so far this year in the U.S., which is just insane. I think a mass shooting is defined as anything over four people getting shot in a single incident.

But nevertheless, that is a rounding error on the problem of gun homicide in this country. I mean, that's just not... If we solved all the mass shootings magically, we would still have something like 99% of our gun homicide problem in this country. Right. And to speak of it in the context of a school shooting, there have been, I believe, about 30 such incidents this year. So again, there's, you know, in my lifetime, I believe the total number of school shootings is on the order of about 1,300. So 201 year of mass shootings or 1,342 years of school shootings. So we are quite reasonably exercised about what happens in Uvalde. But when we talk about gun violence in general, that's a very, very small contribution to the number of actual dead.

Yeah, I'm looking at the FBI statistics on homicide, and I think we only have those up to 2019, if I'm not mistaken. So homicide has gone up since then. Famously, in the aftermath of COVID and George Floyd, we've had an uptick in homicides. I don't have those current figures, but when you look at 2019, we had nearly 14,000 deaths due to homicide. And that is, we should say, we should acknowledge way down from where it was in the early 90s. say, we should acknowledge, way down from where it was in the early 90s. And the vast majority, over 10,000 of these, are due to firearms of some type. Most of those are handguns. Over 6,000 are handguns. Unhelpfully, there are over 3,000 where the type of the firearm is not stated. where the type of the firearm is not stated.

So there's probably some mix of handguns and long guns there. But there's only 364 in 2019 that are acknowledged to be rifles, 200 to be shotguns. And when you're talking about the much maligned AR-15, which is everyone's focus in the aftermath of Uvalde, as it was in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, it's, you know, again, this is a rounding error on the problem of gun homicide. And we can talk about the reasons why AR-15s are, in fact, scary. I mean, the context in which they are, you know, you are at a significant disadvantage, given that a person with bad intentions or mental illness has acquired an

AR-15. But having someone gain access to a classroom and the ability to kill people at point-blank range, that is not a context where the unique advantages of an AR-15 are the problem, right? I mean, it's very easy to believe that Uvalde or Sandy Hook would have been essentially the same catastrophe had the shooter been armed only with handguns, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, an AR-15 is not necessarily the weapon of choice if you're going to be going through hallways into small rooms, having a shotgun, having handguns, both of these things are more maneuverable. And no one's shooting back at you is the other thing

for most of the time, unfortunately, for a very long time in the case of the guy in Uvalde. But Sam, I won't ask you about the weapons that you keep in your home, but one argument that I've heard people make is the AR-15 is an excellent weapon against tyranny. If you're a Ukrainian and you have an AR-15 in your house, that will be very useful since you were just invaded. But if we're just talking about self-defense, which sounds like is one of your biggest concerns, then you could just say, all right, no more AR-15s, but anybody who wants to can have an over-under shotgun in his house. And that will work very well. The upper half of the home invader will no longer exist once he's hit with that. And it will not be very useful as an offensive weapon. So you're not going to have gangland slayings with these.

It seems like the good guy uses of a shotgun are pretty high and the bad guy uses are pretty low. So what do you think about that as a remedy, saying no more AR-15s, definitely no more handguns, but you can have a home defense shotgun anytime you want it? Yeah, well, so I mean, it's just now we wade into why the problem is so complicated. So again, the problem, the overwhelming problem in our society with homicide and suicide based on firearms is a problem of handguns, right? So all the talk about assault rifles, AR-15s, is not acknowledging that fact, right? But the other problem is handguns are never on the table for banning. I mean, it's just not, are never on the table for banning.

I mean, it's just not, it's a political non-starter. It's not, certainly when you're talking about a culture in which concealed carry is a thing, it's, you know, it's the only thing you're going to carry concealed is a handgun. There are reasons why I would consider a handgun preferable to a shotgun for self-defense even at home. So,

you know, there's an argument to be had there, but it's just that the handgun is the last thing anyone is going to ban, and it is 99% of the problem. And again, if you take a situation like, you know, a school shooting, a handgun is arguably the most insidious thing to use because it is the thing that can be concealed until the last moment. I mean, the person walking into a school with an AR-15 looks, you know, every inch the dangerous maniac as he approaches the school because he's, you know, what business does somebody have holding an AR-15 in the parking lot of a school unless they're a cop responding to a school shooting? So it gives someone, if there is protection of any kind at the school,

it gives people the ability to notice that something completely out of the ordinary is about to happen. Whereas with a handgun, a handgun concealed in a backpack can be brought into any place of business, any soft target, a movie theater, an auditorium, any place that doesn't have it's usually worse to get hit with a round moving that fast, but in fact, not always. And it's easier to wrestle a long gun away from an attacker than it is a handgun. It's easier just to grab the barrel and point it toward the ceiling, and then all of a sudden you're in a wrestling match. And so the problem is, even when you're talking about mass shootings, handguns present every part of the problem. And so everything you're going to hear about banning assault weapons, it's symbolic more than anything else. And it's not to say that I'm against banning AR-15s. It's just, if we could do that, we still haven't solved the problem. I should say that,

the situation in which a rifle presents a terrifying advantage is where a person is shooting from some distance, right? I mean, hitting something at a hundred yards with a handgun is genuinely difficult, even for a very good shooter. And it's trivially easy with a rifle. And so anyone with, you know, 30 minutes of training with an AR-15 can hit something at a hundred yards at will. And that is not true with a handgun. I mean, it's just, it's, and it's not true with a handgun, even if you're a good shooter. Right. And so that's so that's a huge difference. And so when you're talking about a situation where someone's, you know, on the clock tower on a university campus shooting people at distance, you know, Charles Whitman style, yes, rifles present the problem there. But the problem

in that case is that many rifles that people would use for hunting, you know, the very same rifle is precisely the rifle a sniper would use to kill people at distance. So unless you're going to talk about fundamentally removing guns from circulation, it's very hard to see how you're closing the door to various aspects of this problem. Yeah, which raises the question, since the AR-15 is not the ideal weapon for wreaking havoc in a school or post office, then why is it constantly being used? And I think there's some interesting answers to that. One is that there's just a whole bunch of them. They're extremely common now and they weren't 20 years ago.

But also, I think it points to something else that's really important, which is that there's a social contagion effect. Everybody knows what an AR-15 is. Everybody talks about an AR-15. They have this talismanic importance to people who love guns and people who hate guns. And one of the questions that I think we should be asking that is going to have a really complex and difficult answer is why this is happening now, given that there have been guns in the US for a long time. And I think that these questions are related. That is, the social contagion that causes people to use an AR-15 is probably similar to the

social contagion that makes people think, I'm an unhappy teenager, I'm an unhappy adolescent, and the way I'm going to express that unhappiness is with a suicidal rampage in a school. So I think, just as you say, the precise frame of the rifle, the precise type of weapon is probably not what we should be thinking about. But instead, why is it that people have this idea in their heads that if they want to, say, express their politics in the case of Buffalo or express their hatred of the world in the case, it seems, of Uvalde, why do they go to schools to do it and why do they pick up an AR-15 to do it? Yeah. Yeah. I realize now I never actually made the point I wanted to make at the outset, which is yet

another caveat here, which is around my uncertainty in even having this conversation focusing on a mass shooting. For me, it's somewhat analogous to talking about plane crashes in the aftermath of an especially horrific plane crash, right? in the aftermath of an especially horrific plane crash, right? And I notice this in what I'm inclined to say or not say to my daughters about both of those topics, right? So if there's a plane crash, the truth is, unless they bring it up, I'm not going to talk to my daughters about plane crashes, right? Because I don't want them to be afraid to fly. The likelihood that they're ever going to be in a plane crash is infinitesimal.

And the likelihood that they could do anything useful in a plane crash is also close to infinitesimal. So I think their lives are better just not thinking about plane crashes and being told accurately that the likelihood of being in one is vanishingly small. accurately that the likelihood of being in one is vanishingly small and that they're safer on a plane than in many other places, including cars, where they're not worried to be. And I do want them to feel that way about going to school, right? So in the aftermath of a school shooting, telling kids, especially kids under 10, what they should be doing if a maniac comes in with a gun and starts murdering people. I really have misgivings about even having that conversation. And it's just, there's something so oppressive about this picture of the world that must be forming in the minds of our children, where we're talking about making schools resemble more and more something like a prison in terms of

the access to the campus, and for them to be doing drills and being told what to do in cases like this. I question the whole project psychologically. And it's not to say that if you're ever in a situation like this, you wouldn't want your kid to know to run away from the sounds of gunshots. But it's just, I'm uncertain about whether it's wise to focus on this in the way that we do, given the actual probabilities. I mean, on the day that Uvalde happened, it's got to be something like 75 million kids went to school that day in America, right? So it's just, this is not a likely experience for anyone, and yet focusing on it, you know, amplifies everyone's terror and concern. So anyway, that's, you know, I say that only to then focus on it because I do think we, as a society, we have to get our heads around this.

But, you know, I have not sat my daughters down and had a talk with them in any kind of extended way around this issue. And I just expressed my reasons for not doing that. And I know you just wrote an article that sort of took the other end of this to some degree. So I'm just wondering what you think about that. Well, first of all, I agree with you completely. I mentioned before the number of school shooting dead in the last 40 years is on the order of 400. So that's like 10 a year. That's 10 too many, of course. But the idea that the chances of a 10 in 50 or 75 million chance of dying, that that would cause us to change the architecture of our schools, the feel of our schools, and also to force our kids under the

age of 10 to once or twice a year mentally and physically simulate the possibility that there will be this extremely rare event of someone coming in and shooting as many people as possible, it seems to be obviously disproportionate and harmful for kids to be asked to think about that. And on the topic of social contagion, that means every kid in the country is on a regular basis asked to think about this as something that might happen, which increases the psychological availability of that as something they might not just live through, but might perpetrate. So I think that's completely nuts that we would rearrange the lives of children just

on that basis. And in particular, I've written about why changing schools so that they're more prison-like, first of all, wouldn't help very much, if at all. And second of all, for pretty obvious reasons, I don't think kids should go to school in prisons. I think they should go to school in happy places where they can think about ideas and play and be kids. On top of all that, I do think that kids have to be, they can be told how to react in a way that doesn't traumatize them. And that's what I've sort of come down to when I talk with

my loved ones about what they should do in the case of a mass shooting. You just say, look, this is almost certainly never going to happen. But if it does happen, all you have to do is run away, run as fast as you can. And the chances that you will be fine are extremely high. I mean, if there's a mass shooter in a school, that person is going to kill people, yes. But if experience is any guide to what it's going to look like it's going to be someone with no training going in there having just bought his ar-15 and the chances of his being able to hit someone who's running are vanishingly small you said 30 minutes will be enough to hit someone from far away yes if you've got a bench rest, if you've been training. And if that person is essentially standing still. Yeah, I mean, hitting something moving

is hard. And this is just generic advice for somebody in a situation where a gun is pulled on them. Someone pulls a gun on you and says, don't move, you run away. It is, I mean, yes, you still might get shot, but the moment you're running, it is genuinely hard to hit somebody. And even when you're, even when you have some training on this, and even cops don't get training on moving targets very often. It's just, you know, it's a fundamentally different situation than shooting a stationary target. So yeah, I mean, running away is always good advice. So I think that giving advice to people in ways that is not itself traumatizing, you keep it simple. You let them know that it's not going to be something that you're ever going to have to do, but reassure them that if it happens, all you have to do is pretty much

just one thing. And it's something that you do every time you go out in recess is run, and then you don't stop running. And if you do that, the chances that you get through it are extremely high. So I hate the idea that kids, first of all, I think it's a bad idea to have them shelter in place, to have them... I would tell a kid, if your teacher says to shelter in place and there's shooting going on and you break a window and run, you will not even be charged for the cost of the window. You will not be kept in detention the next day. There will be no one who faults you for doing this. And I think the outcome is likely to be far better than if you shelter in place. Because the worst possible outcome, especially with an untrained shooter, is that he corners you, that he's standing in the doorway, the only doorway

out of the classroom. So avoiding that scenario is the main thing that we have to do. I have a suspicion about how the shelter in place suggestion came about. I think it's because schools thought about fire drills. It used to be that you really wanted to keep an account of where all the kids were. You get them out and you know who everyone is so you don't have to run back in and look for some kid who's wandered off. But obviously that's not a great template for dealing with an active shooter scenario since no one's ever going to go back in unless they're going in to kill the shooter. So I think that keeping the advice simple and based on thinking of it as a foot race, I think is probably the way to go.

Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would add here is that as kids get older, and once you're talking about teenagers who, you know, increasingly are physically equivalent to the size and strength of an adult, then one thing changes, which is then it's possible to, you know, physically swarm a shooter and bring them down. And there's some training, and just a different mindset is relevant. I mean, a bunch of 16-year-olds could definitely take down a shooter, and if they're cornered, knowing that acting in unison is very different than acting serially and just getting shot serially. I mean, this is a point you made in

your article, and this is a point that many of us made. I made this 10 years ago in my article, but this is just very much in the air. We all noticed in the aftermath of September 11th that the rules have changed for hijackings in the sky, right? If the plane is already flying and someone stands up and says, okay, everyone just stay in your seats. If you don't move, nothing bad's going to happen. There's a bomb on the plane. I'm just going to take control of this thing and we're going to fly to Cuba. That used to be, people would just comply in those situations for understandable reasons. They're terrified and hoping against hope they're going to be safe if they just follow directions. But in the aftermath of September 11th, everyone, probably on Earth, who heard about it,

understood that there's a very different logic once that plane is flying. And the moment somebody stands up, whatever they're saying, whatever their rationale, you're going to gouge their fucking eyes out, right? And you're going to all do it at once. And it's just, you know, just raw animal response to an absolute imperative, right? There's just, there's no negotiating in that situation. There's nothing to believe. The person who has advertised his intention to take over the plane has to be overcome immediately. Now, I would recommend that we have that attitude on the ground in an active shooter situation when running isn't the option, right? So yes, if you can get away,

by all means get away. But if you're stuck in a classroom or stuck in a movie theater and someone is just shooting, which is to say they've already advertised their intention to kill people for no good reason, then we have a real coordination problem that can be solved, and it can be solved exactly the way it's now solved in an airplane, right? Which is everyone, you have to recognize that it doesn't matter who this person is, it doesn't matter how well-armed he is, it doesn't matter how big he is, it doesn't matter how well-trained he is, there's no one who can deal with 10 people simultaneously swarming him, right? It doesn't matter if he's a member of SEAL Team 6, if it's just bodies everywhere pummeling him, the unarmed crowd is going to win. And it is just, the problem in those situations is no one wants to be the first to

get shot, right? But if the person is already shooting people and there's no running away, we have to solve that coordination problem. And so, I mean, that is advice that is completely useless for eight-year-olds, but it's not useless for 16-year-olds, right? So that's the one thing I guess I would add for the school scenario when you're talking about high school. I might add one thing to your addition too, which is that you pointed out that this is what you do if you can't run. One thing you can do in terms of the architecture and planning of schools is make sure there aren't places where you can't run. I mean, Ted Cruz suggested having a single door and he added

that it should be a single door for entry and for egress from the school. And that's one reason why this is a terrible idea. I mean, you need to, not just for shooting, but for fires and other reasons, you need to have ways in and ways out. And you want to have as few places, a few calls to sack as possible, where a guy with an AR-15 can be barricaded into a room with eight-year-olds. So the very fact that we would be suggesting that we'd have one way in, one way out for the school tells me that we're in a kind of September 11 mentality, where we're thinking of what specifically, what would we have liked? We would have liked to have some static defense force at the front of the school. Well, guess what? A, that's not plausible to have at every school at all times. And B, there's going

to be a lot of trade-offs there where instead what you want is ways for people to get out, which of course has the added upside of making the school more open, more pleasant, and more like a school and less like a prison. So I think really thinking carefully about how we react to this and not doing it in a stupid way. in my piece, a maxim that the cryptographer and security engineer Bruce Schneier had after September 11, where he's pushed for a long time saying, what you want is a security system that fails well. So if it doesn't work, then the outcome is not a total loss. So if you have a single door to get in and an armed security guard, then if the shooter is able to ambush that security guard and get in, then the fact that he's trapped inside the school with all the kids is not ideal.

So instead, you should organize this school in such a way that there's lots of ways out so that once he gets in there, even if he managed to get the jump on the one security guard or the two security guards in the single point of entry, then as soon as those gunshots ring out, then that school just empties out and every kid runs for his life. That's a very robust security system. It's kind of the opposite of what's being proposed right now. So yet another reason to think that making decisions in the aftermath of a school shooting is a terrible way to go forward. Again, we're focusing here on a mass shooting and the worst possible type

of mass shooting, a school shooting, right? So this, you know, you have all these happened, I think, two weeks after Buffalo, where many grown-ups were killed in a market, and that was a racist-inspired atrocity. I guess it's worth differentiating the sources of violence here because, again, now we're talking about mass shootings, which are, it sounds crass to say it, especially in the aftermath of a tragedy like this, but this is a rounding error on the problem of gun violence. I mean, there will be more kids killed, probably even in

a single city like Chicago this weekend, by, you know, ordinary handgun violence of a sort that we're all too familiar with and all too ignorant of at the same time. You know, it's just, we're not paying attention to inner city violence, and it's just in the background, and it's, you know, disproportionately young black men killing young black men for no good reason in cities all over America. And if you're not going to get a handle on that, you're not going to change the outlier status of America in the world with respect to gun homicide. But when we're talking about a mass shooting like Uvalde or Buffalo, these can have very different characters.

I mean, in my mind, there's at least three different sources of violence, and they're highly non-analogous, but they can be overlapping, right? And therefore, an event like this can be overdetermined, right? So in one case, you have just frank mental illness, right? You have somebody who is deranged and whose reasons for doing what they're doing are totally uninteresting and probably inarticulate, right? I mean, if we asked Adam Lanza why he killed all those kids and teachers at Sandy Hook, he would probably have had nothing intelligible to say, right? He was clearly mentally ill. And that might have been the case with the Evaldi shooter or not. I don't think we know at this point.

So how we respond to that problem in our society, how we flag these people early and intrude in their lives in such a way as to reduce the risk of anyone coming to harm on the basis of their mental illness, that is its own separate problem, which is worth figuring out if possible. But it's a different problem from the problem of comparatively normal people. It's hard to think of someone being normal who would commit a mass

shooting, but comparatively normal people who, you know, they're not delusional, they're not obviously mentally ill, they're high functioning perhaps in other modes in their lives, but they can be in the grip of an ideology that causes them to do something horrendous because this is what they think is important to do, right? I mean, in a Muslim context, they could be jihadists. I don't know enough about the Buffalo shooter. Perhaps he was also mentally ill, but it's totally possible for someone to be a white supremacist asshole in extremis who decides to kill people for patently racist reasons. And yet if you had psychometric data on this person, you would not diagnose a mental illness, right? So those are very different situations,

and we have to talk about them differently. I read the whole manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo. And I can say with some confidence that there is no, unless you're going to go reading his 4chan posts or his email, then there's no way you're going to detect that this guy is so crazy that you definitely should not sell him a gun. Whereas in the case of the Uvalde shooter, I think it's pretty clear that he was unwell. His co-workers at Wendy's thought he was crazy. There was a chance, a chance anyway, that an inquiry into his mental well-being would have detected that maybe he shouldn't have an AR-15.

So I think there are distinctions like that to be made. I mean, one thing that's... I mean, the Buffalo shooter, he spends a long time in his manifesto describing his kit, what he's bought in terms of armor, weaponry, and so forth, what he's planning to do. And he killed about 10 people in Uvalde. The guy who was far less equipped, far less knowledgeable about his weapon, killed 20. So going back briefly just to the questions of what the response can be. In other words, someone who really knew what he was doing, or at least somewhat knew what he was doing compared to someone who didn't know what he was doing, nonetheless killed far fewer people. And I think that's because in a supermarket, anybody who could run, ran.

And then in Uvalde, because they were kids and they were told to stay put and wait, and the doors were locked so nobody could come in and save them. And then the cops, for horrifying, seemingly negligent reasons, did not do so. Yeah, we will get to that. That's the thing that just pushes this so far over the edge for me as a news story. Yeah. Your point, though, is totally right. If we're thinking about how do we keep guns out of the hands of people who are going to use them in homicidal ways, then you have to reckon with the actual people who are doing this.

And in the case of Buffalo, I just don't think that there was any way where, you know, if he had to go and have an interview with the chief of police where he lived to show that he wasn't totally crazy, I bet he would have passed the interview. So, you know, where does that leave us? Whereas the guy in Uvalde, I like to think that a 15-minute conversation with someone used to having those conversations would have revealed that maybe this guy should be looked into a bit before he's given an AR-15. Yeah. And that certainly seemed to be the case with someone like Adam Lanza, or who was it? Was it James Holmes and Jared Loeffner. I mean, those guys were just properly bonkers

and alarming everyone with how crazy they were. And so this raises the issue of red flag policies and just what sort of intervention is possible when even somebody's mom is terrified that they're going to commit some harm on the basis of their delusions, there seems to be very little to do, right? It's like you can't, I mean, to incarcerate somebody in some kind of mental hospital and hold them there for long periods of time until

you're convinced that they pose no risk to society. I don't know where the current laws are state by state, but it seems like we're not in a position to do that at any kind of relevant scale, and that there are civil rights concerns around being able to do that that are an impediment. And I guess the thing we should also acknowledge is that these different sources, they're the pure cases of these differences, but then there are cases where these variables overlap, where, but it's worth differentiating the pure cases because they're very different problems.

I mean, the problem of a dangerous divisive ideology that is causing even normal people to support violence or even engage in violence that would otherwise be unthinkable, you know, whether this is being leveraged by, you know, religious sectarianism or racist sectarianism or some other belief system. I mean, that's its own problem that we have to figure out how to solve. And then there's the problem of crazy people. I would say that there's a third class of person who's not crazy in the sense that they're delusional, but they're morally insane. I mean, there are people who are actual psychopaths who are virtually guaranteed to harm people

in various ways, but they're not delusional. And to have a conversation with them is not going to produce signs of florid mental illness. You might not notice anything other than a malignantly self-absorbed person. Or more likely, if they're a psychopath, you'll enjoy their company on the first conversation and invite them over to your barbecue. Right, right. So it's not likely you're going to catch them either.

I mean, I have one idea in this department, though, which is I acknowledge that we exist in a political reality where it's unlikely that any of the things that I would like to see in the way, you know, I'm always impressed when I talk to people who really think about their self-defense, their guns, about how concerned they are about making sure that their guns are kept safely and that nobody gets anywhere near them who isn't supposed to have them. So I wonder if that can be leveraged somewhat. So here's what I'm thinking of. There is someone who sold the Uvalde killer his guns. And I only wish that whoever that was felt more of an obligation to have a conversation with him and check him out than that person did. And as far as I can tell, much of gun culture ignores that responsibility on the person who is handing off the gun in exchange for money. They'll say, oh, if you're

selling someone steak knives, you don't check out to see whether that person is planning to use them to murder his wife. I think that norm should change. And whoever sold those guns probably should, well, that person's name should be known. I'm sure that person already feels plenty bad, but I think that person should probably feel worse. And that should be the expectation, that if you're going to be in the business of selling people guns, you're going to be in the business of making sure that you're selling the people you trust, which currently does not seem to be the norm, but maybe we could push it there and it would require no legislation to do so. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe there's a role for insurance and liabilities around this happening, right? If

you're selling people guns and one of those people turns out to be a mass shooter, well then maybe you're liable in some sense, right? And then there would be an industry of insurance, presumably, that would grow up around that. And just the cost of... I mean, there could be creative ways to make things expensive. I mean, one of the things about the Evaldi shooter that was so surprising to many people is just how many rounds of ammo he had on him, right? He had over 1,600 rounds, you know, in the school. I think he shot some hundreds.

I think he shot at least 150 rounds. And he apparently had magazines everywhere. I think he shot about 100 in the first three minutes, which, by the way, means that he was deaf. There's no way you can fire that many at that speed and still be hearing things that are going on around you, unless you've muffled your ears, in which case you're also not hearing things going on around you. Yeah, I don't know if any of these guys show up with ear protection, but it's, and then that speaks to the possible advantage of having a law against high-capacity magazines. There are many people who would emphasize that here, the difference between having, you know, 10 rounds before you go empty and having, in the case of an AR-15, 30 or more rounds.

It's potentially a big difference, except if someone has any kind of training, the time it takes to pop in a new magazine is very brief, so unless somebody is standing right next to them unharmed and ready to gouge their eyes out during that brief pause, it's not a panacea to have only 10 round magazines. And so the question is, you know, in what context does it make sense to own thousands of rounds of ammunition if you're a non-maniac? There's a very clear case in a training context, you know, i.e. at a shooting range, but there's not really a clear case out in the world, right? So I guess, I forget who expressed this idea somewhere recently, I think it was on a podcast, the idea that you could make ammunition much, much more expensive than it is, so that it would just be just fundamentally unfeasible to have hundreds, much less thousands of rounds of ammunition out in the world. But you

could exempt shooting ranges, so that you could actually go to a range, you could practice, you could shoot hundreds of rounds at normal expense, but there'd be some way to actually not, to have, you know, to ensure that people couldn't take hundreds of rounds away from a shooting range. And, you know, out in the world, you know, if every round cost $30 or whatever it is, presumably you would not have someone show up with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. You know, that's just one idea that had never occurred to me, and perhaps there are other ideas like that. Again, if you've managed to lock yourself in a room with a dozen kids, and you have, you know, some dozens of rounds of ammunition, you're going to be able to kill all

those kids with whatever gun you have. And so that's just the problem of guns, period, right? It's not a problem of assault weapons, and it's not a problem of high-capacity magazines. And until we get our heads around that, or get our heads around the impossibility of responding adequately to that challenge, we're really not thinking about the problem of gun violence in America. Unless you want to say more on that topic, the thing I think we really must talk about- I'll just point out one thing. The idea of making ammunition more expensive may have just occurred to you, but it's part of a Chris Rock routine, I believe. Oh, really? You can have all the guns you want, but let's have a tax of $1 million per bullet. That'll just take care

of everything. Yeah. I mean, maybe there's something there, but again, it's easy to see how if you're determined to get lots of ammo, you're going to be able to do that in America. So the thing that makes the Evaldi story so shattering for many of us... Honestly, I'm not even sure I can talk about it. Do you want me to intro it? I just have to get the tears back in my head. Do you want me to intro it? I just have to get the tears back in my head. We can either take a second or... Yeah, no, you take the lead.

I'll compose myself. I mean, the Uvalde story, it's still coming out, of course, but the thing that is going to haunt us forever is what we now know about the TikTok of the response. You know, what happened play by play, which included a really long time when the police were apparently there, the shooter was still active, the shooter was still killing. And some of the kids were actually on 911 for the better part of an hour saying, save us. And 19 police officers were in the hall not saving them. And the Texas authorities

say they made the wrong decision. No kidding. But that decision was to treat this as if it was no longer an active shooter scenario, but a guy barricaded in a classroom with nobody else. So my understanding is the first 911 call came in at 1130. And then by 1135 or so, there were already police who were there. And then by 12 o'clock, after which hundreds of rounds have gone off, there were 19 officers in the hallway. And it took until 1250 before border patrol showed up. And it sounds like at this point that it was it was them just saying we're we're just going to do this and going in at 1250 having acquired the key to the room and then killing the suspect who it sounds like now jumped out from a closet door but you know

we as a society are going to be thinking for a long time about how it can have gotten that bad, the response. And it's at this point, just days later, it's still gutting to imagine what those minutes were like for the kids, some of whom survived and then some of them died because of the delay in that response. Yeah. And then there's this video of the police keeping the parents out while this is going down. Perhaps you've been able to characterize this video. In seeing this video, which is perhaps the most infuriating thing I've ever laid eyes on, I worried that I didn't know exactly when this footage was shot, and maybe there's some way in which, you know, I just don't have the right frame around it. But if in fact, this is during those, I think, 78 minutes when, you know, there's still kids who are getting killed, and there are now cops there with,

you know, full tactical gear, right? They've got their long guns, they've got their body armor, and many of them are focused on keeping hysterical parents away from the school. Right. And you've got 19 of them stacked up in a hallway, not going in to kill this guy. And you've got, I mean, just the parents I view. I know. One of the moms, you may have read, she got the word that this was going down. She got in her car and drove 40 miles, got there, said, I'm going in to save my two kids. And then she was handcuffed. The Uvalde cops handcuffed her so she wouldn't go in. And then she convinced them to uncuff her and then then wandered away, and then jumped a fence into the school, got her kids, and ran out. And this is all happening before they've neutralized the shooter. So, I mean, there's mom of the year right there, but the idea that parents who were willing to do anything to save their kids

were being stopped from doing anything while the police were doing nothing. And this is Texas, right? So there's two ends of this you can take. And, you know, I guess both have been taken. Certainly one has been taken by people who are on the gun safety side of this. And they look at this, they look at, I mean, this is in Texas, right? This is, you know, there is no state where the Second Amendment is trumpeted with more bravado. And this just seems like a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that the, you know, the answer for a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, because you've got these officers with their guns stacked up in the hallway doing nothing. stacked up in the hallway doing nothing. But of course, that's not the whole story. The whole story is the reason why this situation is so lacerating is because the answer to the bad guy with the gun was a good guy with a gun. And we needed that good guy with a gun 78 minutes earlier, right? And when the good guy with a gun finally broke through the fucking mesmerism that had taken over that place and kept those cops from doing the obvious and he opened the door and walked in and shot the guy, that was the solution. That's the solution everyone was pining for and was right to pine for in that situation. And it was trained for as well. I don't know if you've seen some of this reporting, but journalists, I saw the New York Times got this, they looked at the training that had been

done in Uvalde for this kind of scenario. And it was standard. I mean, it's been the protocol since after Columbine that what do you do if there's an active shooter in the school? You go in, close distance and neutralize the shooter. And you do that even if it means hopping over the dying bodies of students who have already been shot by him, because there's nothing that matters until that person is no longer shooting. So that you would fall back and wait to see what happens next, turn it into a possible hostage situation, negotiate. This was contrary to the training that they and Uvalde had gotten just a matter of a couple of months before. And also, by the way, the training that should be obvious to anyone, even without training, nothing can happen that will be of any use until the person who's murdering people is no longer doing that. I mean, if anything changes, if anything's going to change as a result of this catastrophe, you've got to think it's a school, right? I mean, like you respond

immediately. Even if you're just, you're not waiting for backup. If you're not willing to go in alone in a situation like this, you're in the wrong job, right? I got to think that switch is going to get flipped as a result of this. Yeah, I would think so. And almost every law enforcement officer I've met, I'm pretty confident would react the right way. I mean, they certainly seem to be that they've gone into that line of work because they want to protect people in most cases. And there couldn't be a more obvious case than a guy with an AR-15 in an elementary school who's still walking around. I think it might also be useful for that protocol, that post-Columbine protocol, to be maybe even better known, despite this counterexample. Shooters should know, just like hijackers know that they are going to be torn limb from limb by passengers on an airplane. Shooters should know that here's what's going to happen when you go in. You're going to kill some people. The school is going to empty out faster than you can imagine.

And then in a matter of seconds or minutes, you are going to be inundated by people with guns who are trying to kill you. There's not going to be time for you to negotiate, not going to be time for you to record TikTok videos. It's just going to be you with your very short life. And that's not how it was at Uvalde. I hope it can be credibly promised to people who are thinking about this in the future that that's how it will be if they try it. Well, so this opens the door to the much maligned NRA talking point. And I should say, again, defensively, that I'm no fan of the NRA, that the answer on some level is more guns, right? And to have teachers with guns in the immediate aftermath of Evaldi when you have 19 cops in full gear doing nothing. But I'm just wondering if there's... I mean, there are two ways we could go here. We could try to imagine a world where we do something akin to what Australia did in the aftermath of a mass shooting,

and we just disarm our society fundamentally. And we could talk about a gun buyback and a change of the Second Amendment. And that politically seems totally hopeless, but perhaps it's not, and perhaps that's the thing people should be focused on. But given that we've got 400 million guns on the ground, and it doesn't even seem dimly possible that it will be hard to get your hands on one if you really want to for the foreseeable future, then you have people certainly in gun culture saying, well, the problem in this case is that you had cops who shouldn't have been cops, who didn't have the training or didn't have the character or both to respond appropriately. And when somebody responded appropriately, we saw what happened. The Border Patrol agent opened the door and killed the guy, and that should have been done sooner. So really, the solution was a gun. And I was thinking about another heavily armed society where I don't think things like this happen. And there seem to be cases there where it plays out more or less as the most dewy-eyed NRA enthusiast would imagine. And I'm thinking of Israel. Again, I don't have a lot of data on this, but I've just seen various videos and heard stories where somebody begins

killing people, a jihadist of one sort or another starts stabbing people on a sidewalk, and it's about 15 seconds later that somebody pulls out a gun and shoots him. And I'm just wondering, do you know anything about, is there any lesson to draw from Israel for American society, or are there just too many ways in which that is a different case? Man, I've been to Israel and I've observed this. You go in and you get a bagel with shmir, and behind the counter there are two armed men who are making the bagel for you.

So it's true that weapons are absolutely everywhere. And in the rare cases where they're needed, they're produced and then often used with great efficiency. So yeah, that's a data point. They're also just rarely abused in the way that they are in the United States. So I suppose that the takeaway from that is that it's not just the presence of guns, but a culture of guns that we're looking at. The number of people who have those guns because they are motivated by self-defense and who

have training in most cases because they've been in the military, in many cases they are combat veterans, is so high that that just makes all the difference. I mean, if in the case of the United States, we've got lots of people who have guns who are totally untrained. I mean, if my concealed carry class last weekend was any indication, then the modal concealed carrier is not John Wick. It's a guy who has a pretty good chance of shooting his own hand or foot in ordinary training and who really has to have rules of firearm safety tattooed on his hand if he's going to be expected to remember them. So I'm not sure how much we can take away. If we armed the same number of people in the United States as are armed in Israel, I don't think the results would be great. Now, you and I have talked, Sam, about Finland, where there are a lot of armed people, and it's completely

anathema to just be walking around with a handgun. So there are ways that, and this is because of Finland's territorial defense plan, which is to be ready in the event of an invasion to start an insurgency. So almost every man who's under the age of 45 is part of that defense force in case of a Russian-style invasion, like it happened in the Winter War or Second World War. So I think there are cases where you can see lots of guns everywhere with, as there is in Finland, as there is in Israel, very little abuse of them. But the fact is we don't live in those countries. We live in a country where there's an enormous amount of abuse of guns, crime with guns,

and just a lot of guns, 400 million guns. So I'm really hesitant to try to extrapolate from countries that are not ours. Yeah. And we have, I think, a unique cultural problem. I mean, you mentioned the social contagion factor here, and we have different cultural problems. I mean, as I said, you know, most of the problem of homicide is a problem of homicide in the black community on a daily basis, in the black community on a daily basis. And it's, you know, it's black on black, young male crime, overwhelmingly. And that's its own problem. When you're talking about the problem of mass shooting, certainly the prototypical case is of a white guy. That's not the case in Uvalde. You have a Hispanic there, but it's just, you know, it is disproportionately white young men at the center of these horrors. And there you have a very different kind of cultural contagion. fetishizing of AR-15s and whatever connection there is to video game culture and just the

social isolation of many of these young men. I mean, when you look at who they are and how they spend their time prior to snapping, there is a profile of this sort of person. And it's different than the profile of a teenager in the inner city who's in a gang, who's dealing drugs. I mean, it's a very different logic to the violence that ensues there. I take your point. I might make one sort of pedantic correction or elaboration, which is mass shootings. First of all, there's a lot of them right now. We're on track for, I think, 600 or 700 in this calendar year, which is twice as much as there were 10 years ago. But that includes drive-by shootings. So I think the sort of prototypical workplace or a school shooting is a white guy who's gone bonkers or is in some cases ideologically motivated.

But mass shootings in general, a lot of them do happen in scenarios that are pretty different from what we tend to think of when someone goes postal. Isn't the definition like four or more people getting shot? Yeah, I think that's the sort like four or more people getting shot? interesting relationship where it seems like video games for a lot of people turn into outlets for their rage. If you really like the idea of shooting a room full of people, there are very realistic ways you can simulate that. And it seems like some people get that from video games. And then there are other people who play video games because of their social isolation, and they just fall deeper and deeper into that isolation in lieu of any engagement with any other social reality. And it seems like the Buffalo shooter, crazed anti-Semitic racist,

also just was deep into the isolation of the pandemic, disappeared down racist and anti-Semitic rabbit holes. And then when he emerged, was completely nuts. And then in the case of the Uvalde shooter, he too, it sounds like, was spending a lot of time alone because for some reason of social dysfunction. And then also probably, it sounds like he was also using video games as a remedy for that social isolation. So I wonder how much of the jump in numbers in the last couple of years, which has been significant, both in mass shootings and in school shootings, how much that has to do with people who are just alone and not able to deal

mentally with the effects of that. So in closing, it might be useful to talk about possible remedies here, and we've mentioned a few in passing. And again, I don't know how quixotic either of these ideas is. I think I said at the beginning that this conversation may produce really nothing actionable as an idea. But I keep coming back to, again, now we're focused on the distinct problem of mass shootings of the crazy or ideological sort, right? Where you have somebody who's, however isolated they are, you could imagine them attracting the attention of family members and other kids in school. And I think that in the case of the Evaldi shooter, people were just obviously concerned

about what a hostile person he was. And he seemed scarcely hinged to people. And I'm sure more information will come out about that. So the question is, what do you do when you're a student in a school or a parent and there's a young man in your life who you have every reason to worry about and they haven't done anything illegal yet? intrusion in the lives of such people, you know, at scale, you know, perhaps facilitated by, you know, social media networks that could get us actual data on this. I mean, obviously, you have companies that can profile people fantastically well for the purpose of delivering them ads. We could be profiling people who worry us and delivering those data to the dangerous people in any given city, the idea that you're going to get a knock on the door by, you know, from the NYPD, and that something good is going to come of that when you're in a socially isolated game playing AR-15 worshiping quasi-lunatic already, I sort of seems hopeless. What army of social workers

and mental health professionals are we going to marshal to intrude in the lives of people if we produce these data? I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Yeah, I think you've adequately described how hopeless that situation is. Facebook does not want to be the clinical counselor to the world. The NYPD and every other law enforcement agency has nothing like the amount of resources to check out everybody who would be flagged in this way. So I'm not sure where that leaves us. I mean, there are enough crazy people all over the world. There was a guy recently convicted of killing a bunch of people in sleepy Norway with a bow and arrow. He was unwell, but he was sort of undetected by the system in

the sense that nobody expected him to go on a bow and arrow serial killing spree. So that suggests that even extremely well-resourced societies, which are pretty good at monitoring their own, are not going to be able to come up with some magic ability to detect people and then not detect them so sensitively without specificity, too, that they'll be able to identify which ones really need their attention. And that's why I keep coming back to this idea of you want people who are getting on the radar to interact with others in person. And I'm talking about others who have the ability to actually stop them in their tracks, stop them in their plans. And I don't know about you, when I think, oh, this person might be a psychopath, my first instinct is not to personally intervene in that person's life. It's to get as far away as possible. But there are people who

are trained to do that, and those could be school counselors. And as a last line of defense, I keep coming back to this idea that if I'm selling guns, I want to be confident of who I'm selling to and have a conversation with that person. And I want that for my own wellbeing because I could not live with myself if I sold a AR-15 to someone who later used it to kill people. So it would be good to try to work on the points in the chain of bad events where there's a possibility of having that face-to-face with someone where there has to be a moment when you look the person in the eyes and try to figure out if the person's homicidal or just wants to shoot targets or feral hogs. So maybe that's the way to do it. I don't know quite how to change the culture so that that happens, but it seems not to have been adequate in this case.

And what do you think about the prospects of having a true sea change in culture of the sort that Australia had in the aftermath of their mass shooting where they literally just bought back all the guns? I mean, so we've got 400 million guns. You know, a plausible buyback would probably be, you know, $400 billion, maybe even put that at a trillion dollars. There's a lot of people who would sell their guns. One would imagine if you were giving them $2,000 or so per gun. But obviously there are probably millions who wouldn't at any price

because gun ownership is their religion. But if there were the will to change the laws and a buyback, you could imagine just changing the facts on the ground where all of a sudden we look more like the UK in terms of the number of guns in existence. And I mean, there's some universe in which that is possible. But the question is, how likely are we to live in that universe? Yeah. I mean, you would know as well as I, do we live in that country, the country where people turn in their guns in exchange for a few thousand dollars? I don't think so. When I talk to people who are really into guns in a way that I'm not, you know, I don't own guns. I

don't shoot guns every week, but the people I know who do, they think of their guns as part of their identity, part of their life, sometimes part of their work, definitely part of their leisure, part of their existence. I mean, no exaggeration to say that a dozen times a day, they are thinking about where their guns are. They're thinking about how to store their guns. It's just like a huge part of how they're spending their mental cycles. So I don't think these people are going to be willing to just give up their guns. And they'll immediately ask themselves if the laws change or if there's a social push for them to give up. If the laws change or if there's a social push for them to give up, why me?

The world is safer with me carrying a gun than it would be without my carrying a gun. And sometimes they're right when they think that. And I think it will be extremely difficult to convince them at scale that they should think otherwise. Yeah. I mean, that's what is so hard to parse about this, because, I mean, there are people I know who carry firearms, people who I've trained with, right, you know, current and former SWAT operators who, off-duty, are never going to be caught unarmed. And, you know, honestly, I feel safer with them living that way than being unarmed.

Just given the reality of violence and the current facts on the ground. Yeah, it is genuinely hard to think about, but in the aftermath of an event like this, it really is tempting to hope for a total reset of our society. And I just don't see any path politically that we could even begin to walk to make that possible. And that is very frustrating. I mean, even things that virtually all gun owners agree on, like making a truly comprehensive national background check system that would catch anyone who had any reason not to be sold a gun. As far as I know, there's widespread support for that, even among gun owners, and I think even among NRA members.

And yet, that has thus far been politically a non-starter. Yeah, yeah. I think you're right that most gun owners, they like to think of themselves as special. They like to think of themselves as people who are extremely responsible, and unlike Joe Schmo, should be allowed to have guns because they can be trusted with them. The other thing that it's the hardest part of this puzzle to deal with, but I think serious consideration of it is going to be part of the solution, really thinking about the social contagion portion of this. Our friend Steve Pinker likes to talk about how the problem of streakers running onto football fields was solved when networks decided we're just going

to cut the commercial. You're not even going to know if you're at home that there's a streaker on the field. And then suddenly there were just no streakers on the field for most people who were watching football games because they never heard about it because they were watching on TV and nobody even mentioned them. And then suddenly it just isn't a thing anymore. Now, obviously, journalists can't stop reporting on the existence of mass shootings, but there is the availability of this idea of mass shootings as what one might do when one has a political point to make. That's not great that we're in a society where that's one of the first things that you think about as a way to tell the world how much you hate it or how much you want fewer Jews in charge.

So changing that, I have no real advice, I'm afraid. But that's going to be part of the solution when someone smarter than me comes up with ideas on how to change it. Well, I feel like the mainstream media has drawn some lesson about this. I don't know when things change, but there's, I perceive, a reluctance to cover a mass shooting of this kind in any way that focuses on the shooter. I mean, there are many cases where I don't even wind up learning the name of the shooter. I mean, it's not to say that it's been completely suppressed, but like in the Buffalo case, if I knew the guy's name, I have since forgotten it. And I think that is good. I mean, there's definitely a way, there's a type of coverage, there's a type of fame that can be

visited upon a shooter, you know, whether alive or dead in the aftermath of something like this, that is genuinely counterproductive, right? And it's just, it is part of the contagion problem, because then you have the aspiring mass shooter thinking about how famous he's going to be after what he does. And so I think insofar as we can draw a lesson from the case of the streakers, I think we want to do that. And actually, there was a mass shooting, the biggest mass shooting in American history, the Vegas shooting, which just went down the memory hole so fast, I mean, inexplicably fast. I think the only thing that explains it was just how wrapped up we were in some Trumpian cycle of indiscretion politically, where, you know, there was just no oxygen left in the room, even for a mass shooting that killed, I think that was 58 people and wounded hundreds. And again, the name of that shooter is not in my brain. Do you have any ideas about why the greatest mass shooting in American history has been so fully forgotten? enough, claimed it very soon after it happened. And there seems to be no reason to believe that ISIS had anything to do with it. It is weird though, because ISIS typically does not do that.

They very rapidly said, this is our handiwork. And it's strange that they would claim the one mass shooting where no even remote motive ever came up. And he also didn't, he wasn't, he was like, was he in his fifties or sixties? I mean, he didn't really fit the profile either. He was in his later middle age at least and pretty wealthy. And everything about that mass shooting was so strange. It was such an outlier that I kind of understand why we would memory hole it because it doesn't fit with anything else that we've seen before or since. The numbers, the venue, the planning, the motive, all of these things just don't fit with any previous case. So you'd think that the most quote unquote successful mass shooting would be one that

we try to learn from. But if we did try to learn from it, we'd probably make some bad decisions because it turns out not to be a very good model for anything that's happened. Yeah. Well, Graham, it has been very interesting and hopefully useful. Again, we've arrived in a place that's unsurprising to me. It would have been a miracle in my mind if we had come up with something that was genuinely novel and actionable here, but it seems useful nonetheless. Are there any points we haven't made that you want to make in closing? No. I mean, I think it's really difficult to come up with solutions that are good. It's not that hard to find seriously proposed solutions that are really bad. So even when I kick myself for not figuring out how to solve the problem, I at least take some

solace and maybe I'm pushing against some bad ideas that would make the lives of our children worse. And in this case, I think we identified a few of those. Yeah. I think that's, maybe I just want to reiterate one that came from you that, you know, honestly, I hadn't thought about all that much, but I do think moving in the direction of a more open campus is counterintuitive for people, but you just want that campus to be able to empty as quickly as possible, right? And so the Ted Cruz solution is just, it should be obviously wrong, and yet it's tempting to many people, the idea that you're going to have a single choke point that's well defended, and otherwise, you know, everything

is a brick wall. I mean, that just, that is obviously not the way to go. And, you know, happily, what seems, you know, most practical here is, you know, emotionally speaking, the most desirable. And I think we do not want schools to resemble penitentiaries. We want schools to be, you know, open, non-paranoid places to be. And if you can get out of school immediately, wherever you happen to be, that's also the outcome you want in the case of a mass shooting. Yeah. I think all of that would, having a more open school would be having a much better school. And if kids are feeling alienated, if they're hating the world, I don't think it's going to help for their school to be prison-like, for their teachers to be of help for their school to be prison-like, for their teachers to be like correctional officers, to generally be in an environment where they're thinking about death because of the very way that their campus is laid out. So it seems like there's a lot of positive externalities that would come from just setting up the school in a way that if there was one of those rare events, then the kids could scatter like a flock of birds,

and the place would be empty in a matter of seconds. Yeah, yeah. Well, Graham, as always, it's great to talk to you. Thanks for everything you're doing. As you know, I read you whenever you show up in the Atlantic, and then I tap you whenever something in your dark wheelhouse appears in the news. And unfortunately, that's all too often. So you're my go-to journalist for all things violent. Thanks for that, Sam. Thanks for a reminder of the dark world that I live in. But yeah, conversations with you are always the best.

I appreciate it.