Plain English with Derek Thompson - America’s Gun Problem Is Impossible

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

The Texas school shooting is part of a grisly ritual in American life. A tragedy, followed by mourning, followed by inaction, followed by several months, followed by another tragedy. What can be done? What WILL be done? This episode isn’t about false hope. It’s about information. The New York Times’s German Lopez, who has been reporting on guns and gun control policy for many years, joins the podcast to answer as many questions as we can fit into a show, including: Why are school shootings becoming more common in the U.S.? What are the most successful gun control policies at our disposal? Why doesn’t Washington ever do anything about this problem? What happens now? Oh, and Derek will be off next week. New episodes will return in early June! Host: Derek Thompson Guest: German Lopez Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, Rachel Lindsay here, and I am teaming up with your favorite Ringer podcasters to deliver the Bravo drama and news that you've been craving on morally corrupt. It's the show about all things Bravo. From the Housewives to Summer House and everything in between, we'll be mentioning it all every week. Check it out on Spotify and the ringer.com. Today's episode is about America, guns, and the latest mass shooting at a school in Texas. This massacre is the second deadliest school shooting in American history after Sandy Hook in Connecticut. And these similarities are absolutely eerie.

In that tragedy, the Sandy Hook tragedy, a young man shot the woman he was living with, his mother, before carrying out the brutal murder of 20 children and six adults at the local elementary school before he died. This week, 10 years later, another young man shot the woman he was living. with, his grandmother, before carrying out the brutal murder of 19 children and two adults at the local elementary school before he died. Mass shootings have become a kind of collective, tragic ritual in American society. Tragedy strikes, we see the news, we mourn, we cry, we express outrage, nothing is done. Time passes. Tragedy strikes, we see the news, we mourn, we cry out, we express outrage, nothing is done.

America's gun violence problem is impossible, and I want to understand why. My guest today is the New York Times, Hermann Lopez. He wrote this week's Times Morning newsletter about the Texas Massacre, and he's been writing about America's gun crisis for years. In fact, when I went to find his old work at Vox, I noticed that most of the stuff he wrote many years ago was just updated over and over and over and over and over every time a new mass shooting made his old reporting newly relevant.

Like, I want you to think about that for a second, that this is a unique American crisis in that no event is unique. The details just repeat themselves so frequently that journalists don't even have to write new stories to tell people what happened. We can simply repost what we've already written changing the names, dates, places, and death count. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Well, America's relationship with guns is insane.

I want to stress something in this episode. I'm not a gun person. There's no point in me pretending otherwise. I'm just not that into guns. But it's also really, really important to me, really profoundly important to me that on this show, I find a way to fairly represent perspectives that I don't agree with.

I know that tens of millions of Americans have a relationship with guns that I will never have. I know that it's akin, I imagine, to my relationship, with a car or with whiskey, a product I find useful or deeply enjoyable, even as I understand its negative implications. So if you own guns, if you love guns, I still want you to listen to what we have to say here. And if you disagree with our analysis, please write me at plain English at Spotify.com. Of course, that goes for everyone on every point of the political spectrum. I do think that America's gun problem is basically impossible. But if progress here is possible,

we have to find a way for people who don't agree with each other to talk to each other. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Hermann Lopez, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks all for having me. What I'd like to do here is threefold. First, I want to establish how unique America's gun violence problem is. Then I want to talk about solutions, policies that could actually work to reduce gun violence in America. And I want to distinguish the policies that work from the policies that we think won't work. And third, I want to talk a little bit about politics and why it's been so hard to pass gun legislation, especially at the federal level. So let's start with part one. Hermann, how exceptional is America when it comes to gun violence? It's a complete outlier in the

developed world. Like, no other country comes close. You really had to start comparing the U.S. to third world countries, essentially, to start getting anything close to, to what America faces on a daily basis, really. So some of the data out there is, like, varies on how you define school shooting and mass shooting, but generally, like, I've asked, I actually just asked a researcher about this. And his name is Jason Silva. He works at William Patterson University. And he, he's been tracking school shootings since 1998, and there have been essentially 16 of these incidents where at least four people died besides a shooter in the U.S. alone.

In all other developed countries, if you add every other developed country, which is 35 of them, there have been six. So the U.S. alone has almost three times, the amount of school mass shooting since 1998, then all these other developed countries combined. It's just completely...

It's a whole other category. It's a whole other category. And what's so interesting to me when I look at the school shooting number in particular, because we're going to get to general gun violence in just a second, but I just looked this up. From 1970 to 2017,

there had never been a year with more than 60 school shootings recorded. since 2018, there have been more than 100 every single year. Again, from 1970 to 2017, there had never been more than 100 school shooting victims in a year. Since 2018, more than 100 every single year. Hermann, any theories about what's going on here? Because obviously, gun violence is a part of American history.

But school shootings at the frequency and violence that we're seeing them are a surprisingly modern phenomenon. Why is this happening? The closest thing to an explanation is, like, copycat, essentially, that this is some sort of, it's weird to call it a trend or a fad, but we know from, like, historically that, like, assassins, like people who try to kill celebrities and important figures, we know that, like, mass shooters in general, they do look at what other mass shooters were doing. So one thing that could be happening here is, like, since Sandy,

hooks and Columbine. People have been looking at these and like somebody who was wired in a way that would make them likely to do this to saying like, yeah, I can do this too. And that might be part of it. But I think I come back to to the issue of just like how many guns in the U.S. again and again, whenever I think about this. Because like, I'm sure there are, I mean, there are people who are have serious mental health issues who have these kinds of thoughts all over the world. It is just that in the U.S., it is way easier to actually pick up a gun and do this. So I think even if there's some other explanation, it fundamentally comes down to just how many guns there are in the country.

Right. And the fact that we have more school shootings and the rest of the developed world combined is nestled within the fact that America's civilian gun death rate is four times higher than Switzerland, five times higher than Canada, 35 times higher than the UK, 53 times higher than Japan. we just have way more gun deaths, and it's impossible to explain the situation without beginning with the fact that we have way more guns. And it's not just that there's this association that exists sort of in a dumb and simple way. There's been lots of studies that you've written about

that seem to indicate that for every percentage point increase in gun ownership between states, the overall firearm homicide rate increases by about one percentage point for all of their factors controlled. So you have this extraordinary correlation between gun prevalence and gun crime. Hermon, I know that you've talked to some conservatives about this topic, about this discovered and proven and re-proven relationship between more guns and more deaths. Does anyone really dispute this? Does anyone really dispute this correlation between more guns and more deaths within the United States? There are some people who do, which is, but they don't really have.

facts for their dispute. They just, I don't, I don't want to get into, like, your facts versus feelings kind of debate. But, I mean, when you look at the data, it's really just impossible to ignore what's happening here. There are some researchers like John Lott who try to put out studies, essentially, that suggests that guns are not the underlying problem. But, like, these are researchers who have, like, frankly, just really bad track records.

they're the everyone else in the field says that you should not take them seriously. But like conservatives, those are the kinds of studies that they do bring this up, they latch on to. I also think there is a sizable amount of like everyday people who acknowledge that, yeah, probably the abundance of guns in the U.S. does lead to more gun violence, but they think that's just the price of freedom for like the ability to have a gun. I have talked to conservatives before. I have some in my extended family who are like that, who just say, like, I like having a gun. I like shooting a gun.

Like, I just enjoy doing it. And, you know, if there are this many gun deaths in the U.S., so be it. Like, that's just the price of having freedom. So I think there are those two camps. One is just seems like a denialist, like in the same way you might see, like a climate denial or something like that. And the other are people who admit that, yes, this might be a problem, but I think it's worth the cost. Worth the cost because of the Second Amendment. And you and I are not going to do a whole exegesis on the history of the Second Amendment here, but let's just state for the record and stipulate, the Second Amendment exists. It's not going to go anywhere. The Bill of Rights is not going to be changed, very likely in our lifetime. And America has simply grown up over the last 200 plus years with a Second Amendment that inscribes into our law and into our culture, an association with guns and, frankly, a love of guns. I don't share it, but it exists.

love of guns that does not exist in similarly rich developed countries. And that's just a part of the cultural sort of step, step one that you have to deal with here. I want to talk about, I want to move sharply here to solutions because the facts are kind of too depressing to marinate in for too long. I feel like America has this grisly ritual now around school shootings in particular where the massacre happens. There's this outpouring of shock and grief. And then these exhortations that we have to do something on the policy front. Because frankly, it's tragic and embarrassing to suffer tragedy after tragedy and to do shit all about it. So we're going to get to Republicans in a second. But the menu of solutions from Democrats tends to be pretty

consistent. And I'm going to name four of those solutions. One, background checks. Number two, banning assault weapons. Number three, generous bybacks for guns and ammo. And number four, red flag laws. So let's talk about all four of these ideas, starting with background. checks. The House representatives has already passed bills to expand criminal background checks and expand the waiting period for gun buyers who are flagged by the instant background check system. But those bills have languished. The Senate hasn't moved on them because Republican opposition. Let's talk about background checks. What are they? And what is the research say about whether or not they work? Yeah. So the idea behind they are called universal or comprehensive background checks is, look,

everybody should have to pass some sort of check before they purchase a gun. That involves looking at their criminal record, mental health, maybe some other things that might come up as part of like looking into somebody's background. You know, this is the kind of thing that a lot of people go through if they get a new job, especially in like security or something along those lines that they'll go through a background check. So the idea is like, yes, you apply this to guns. Make sure that essentially people who are criminals or have criminal records or have mental

health issues do not have access to guns. The U.S. requires this for most guns already, but there are a bunch of loopholes in the law. So the most famous one is like the gun show loophole. And that's kind of like a misnomer because like really what the issue there is is a private sale. Like if I'm one person who owns a gun and I want to sell to another person, I do not technically had to do a background check in most states. And like that can happen in a gun show, but it can also happen. between family members, between friends. Like, it happens all the time in the U.S. So that's a pretty huge loophole.

You don't have to do a background check. And you can imagine, since there are more guns than people in the U.S., it is not particularly hard for, like, people to actually, you know, sell guns to their friends or family as a result. And do they work? What does the research say about whether or not they actually reduce gun violence in the areas or the states that pass them? Yeah, so this is where it's a little more complicated because there's, there's,

like a good report from Rand from a few years ago that looked at a whole bunch of gun loss. And generally, yes, if places have more stricter background checks in place, they do have fewer gun deaths. Where it gets a little complicated is that there are also some studies that suggest that comprehensive background checks alone, meaning when you go from that bar of just having background checks to making them universal or comprehensive, like it's actually not clear how big of an effect that has if it has an effect at all. And I think the reason for that might be that, like, even in those kinds of situations,

a lot of people are still going to buy guns illegally, essentially. And, you know, how do you enforce a check, a background check law for, like, a dad selling a gun to his son, right? Like, are the police really going to be, like, checking on every single one of those sales? If it even is a sale, right? It could be a gift, which would technically, require background check on the results. Like, how are they going to enforce that?

It's just an extremely difficult thing to enforce. But I would say that generally, like, the idea is it adds some friction to exchanging guns, and that probably has some effect. It can just be really hard to pick up in some of these studies. Yeah, that makes sense. There's so many different ways that people can buy guns. And there are so many guns that are available, more than 380 million at last count, or 390 million. That's more guns than Americans. So, of course, it would be easy to potentially

buy these on a black market, buy them in a private sale, find a way to access the guns that already exist rather than go through the comprehensive background check to buy a new gun that's being brought onto the market. So, you know, I think this is an interesting case where I think we're going to see this in a couple of the different policies that we're going to talk about. It has an effect. It just doesn't necessarily have the kind of dramatic effect that we would wish, which isn't a reason necessarily to not do it. With thousands and thousands of gun deaths, if you reduce gun deaths by 1%, you're still talking about maybe thousands of lives saved, especially over a decade, but the effect isn't necessarily that large. Let's talk about

banning assault weapons. Tell me a little bit about what this would look like. And for people's understanding, this would make it illegal to buy the kind of weapons that were used in Texas that were used at Sandy Hook, that were used in Buffalo. And it would seem obvious, I think, to a reasonable person that banning the sale of the sort of weapons that we see over and over and over again being used in mass shootings would make at least a little bit of a difference

to mass shootings. So what are the pluses and limitations of this policy? So the pluses, as you said, like, look, these are extremely powerful guns. Like, they are used often in these mass shootings, and they are used for a reason. They have their longer range. The velocity is faster. There are some articles out there.

I think that the Atlantic has run that, like, speak to what these bullets coming from these guns do to bodies. It's horrific. So if you try to limit those, then, yeah, you can't have an effect. Like, at the very least, you're talking about a situation where maybe a mass shooting is less deadly, because if somebody's used. using a handgun, like they might not be able to get out as many bullets. They might not do as much damage. The injuries might be more treatable. Just to stop you there, because you mentioned the

Atlantic article, and the Atlantic does have this article that was called What I Saw Treating the Victims from Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns by Heather Scher. Heather Scher is a, she is a doctor, she's a radiologist. And she has this passage in the article. I'm just going to read it really quickly and then spin it right back out to you. Quote, I have seen a handful of AR-15 injuries in my career. Years ago, I saw one from a man shot in the back by a SWAT team. The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat traveling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic, moving away from the bullet like waves of water

are displaced by a boat and then returns and settles back. The process is called cavitation. It leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange. This is not a small pistol. This is a small missile traveling through people's organs that essentially explode their organs even if only one bullet makes it in the body.

It is a, to call this and a pistol a gun, I'm not going to do a whole semantic thing here, but it is an entirely different category of weapon. So back to you on the effect of assault weapon bands. Yeah, the biggest problem is how do you define an assault weapon? And this is something that the old band from the 90s ran into. It's like there were still a lot of assault weapons circulating in the U.S. because how you actually define it, like, is it the barrel?

Is it the grip? Like, you have to start defining very specific parts of these guns to try to say, like, this is an assault weapon. And look, this is, like, one of the most boring debates. Anybody can have it on Twitter. Like, you can literally just go on Twitter and just start trying to argue with people about this, and you will quickly realize how semantic and boring this guy. But it is a genuine problem with a law, like, and creating a law along these lines. I would say that's one of the bigger limitations of these measures.

And depending on how it's written, a lot of assault weapons could sneak through. The other issue with it is, I mean, even if you ban assault weapons, like, we are talking, like there are plenty of other guns available. And handguns are definitely not as they don't cause as much damage as that article shows, but they still cause damage. And if we're talking about like shotguns, those can cause a lot of damage. I mean, we're focusing on this shooting in Texas, right? Like, this happened in one classroom.

The unfortunate reality is somebody can do a lot of damage with the shotgun in one classroom. Like, it gets really grisly talking about this in a way that makes me uncomfortable. But like, when you're comparing, like, in the Las Vegas shooting where this guy was parked at the top of building shooting down into a crowd, yeah, a handgun or a shotgun is not going to do much. And like the real problem there was assault weapons. But like if we're talking about like a school shooting, it's a very different situation. And there is some, I think there's some valid criticism about like, look, these shooters would just use another kind of firearm. Right. I guess my response to that, and I understand that you're representing an argument from critics of this law that that you've reported from, you know, my response to it is, is that, you know, these weapons, assault weapons, they were used in Texas in Buffalo and Boulder, Orlando, Parkland, Vegas.

Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, the list goes on and on, Tree of Life Synagogue. These are all massacres with assault weapons, which facilitated the massacre by virtue of the fact that they could fire a lot of rounds very, very quickly, each of which were basically small missiles with the power to explode in Oregon. So while banning assault weapons wouldn't eliminate gun violence, wouldn't reduce it even by 30, 20, even 10%, it would still make these kind of horrific incidences less likely. Right. And I mean, it's important to point out.

There's a reason that all these shooters you mentioned went to an assault weapon, right? Like, they're kind of telling you that they do believe that this is a deadlier weapon, that it is what they're going to be most effective with in these kinds of situations, right? So, like, that's important to know. Like, these shooters themselves seem to believe that these weapons are deadlier and more dangerous. Maybe you should, like, take that seriously. I would say, though, that, like, it is important to emphasize, though, that this is very focused on mass shootings because most gun debts in America actually do involve handguns.

The vast majority. Because most, I think by virtue of most guns out there being handguns, that's just how it works out. And it's something like, it totally depends on the number, but fewer than 10%, like less than 10% of gun deaths overall in the U.S. actually involve these long guns that we're talking about. That statistic that I read, less than 10%. Yeah, but they're disproportionately represented.

for sure in these mass shootings, which is obviously worth taking seriously on its own. I want to move on to number three here, which is red flag laws. What are red flag laws and how would they work? So red flag laws are essentially, you know, with these mass shootings, I'm almost sure we'll start hearing stories. In fact, I think we're already seeing stories about how there were red flags before about this person, the person who carried out the shooting. The idea is like the authorities, family members, whomever. Like, they, someone should be able to report that. And then the authorities should be able to confiscate that person's guns if whatever that red flag is turns out to be serious.

So obviously, just by the way, I'm describing that, all that sounds really vague. And that's intentional because a lot of these red flag laws, they have different designs. They take different shapes. In some places, the family is more involved in terms of like actually reporting to the authorities. In other cases, the police do most of the heavy lifting. What classifies as a red flag can vary from state to state because different states have different red flag laws. But in general, the idea is like, look, if somebody has a troubling pass, they're doing something troubling, even if it's just as simple as like they're posting some really scary

stuff on social media, someone should be able to step in and make sure this person doesn't have guns. And just to be clear, when that person steps in and says, you know, this person is doing spooky stuff on social media or they're starting to act weird at their job at the Wendy's. Who do they call? Who do they contact? And what is the chain of decisions made to then take away from that individual the right to access guns? Yeah, this is a very important point because it's make sure that people's due process rights are essentially protected here, right? You can't just report anyone for anything. So yeah, you usually would contact the police. The police would then go to the courts, and then the courts would effectively approve the confiscation to this person's

firearms. And it doesn't have to be permanent. It can be temporary, like, especially if you're dealing with somebody in a mental health crisis, maybe after they get treatment, they can get their firearms back, like, after they've essentially taken care of those issues. And yeah, so the idea is, and this is usually what trips up these bills in terms of like Congress or more conservative of legislatures is how do you protect people's due process laws? Because for Republicans in particular, the concern is that these laws would be used to mass confiscate what they call law-abiding citizens' firearms. Right. The mental exercise that I sometimes do because, you know, I don't want to get too ideological, but I'm personally not a gun guy. Sometimes what I do is try to replace the word

gun in a sentence with car, right? So how would I feel if someone thought that I was starting to act a little bit weird. And I heard from law enforcement that I couldn't drive my car. Like, I would, I'd probably, I'd probably be very upset. And I can imagine that I could start to lobby people to get upset on my behalf. How dare people take my right to drive a car away from me just because they had an opinion that I was acting strange. I wasn't acting strange. I was, whatever. I had a terrible week. I was suffering from a bout of depression. My girlfriend had just broken up with me, and I'm sorry that I was rude to people, but I was just really, really upset. You can see how, one can imagine how red flag laws, whose ethos, I totally agree with, could run afoul of all sorts of due process problems

because we do have a different conception of guns in this country than we do in other countries. We have the Second Amendment right. So our red flag laws, have they been tried? Have they been proven effective and legally upheld in various places? Yeah, so the flip side of what we were just talking about is sometimes things will slip through, right? Because people have due process protections. The laws aren't enforced perfectly as a result. Like, police might be skeptical of pursuing.

So you actually saw that in the Buffalo shooting. Like New York is now talking about making its red flag law strengthening it because they believe that like this guy should have been caught before. They were warning signs before and he just slipped through. So that's one limitation. In terms of the research, though, one of the interesting things about these studies is that they, as the best studies we have on red flag laws, it suggests they do work, but primarily for suicides, which that's important on its own. The suicides are most gun debts in the U.S. But, I mean, it kind of makes sense because if somebody's having a mental health crisis, like, that is probably when family members are going to call the police and then the police.

police will get involved and then they'll be able to take away that person's guns. The, in terms of like other kinds of shootings, I don't think we know. I think there just aren't that many good studies out there about this yet. But at least a suicide data is pretty, like, I think it's really persuasive. So red flag law is clearly effective at reducing gun involved suicides, not as clearly effective at reducing gun involved homicides. Let's move on to the fourth topic here, which was the idea of generous buybacks for banned guns and ammo. This policy, I think, would probably be modeled off of Australia's experience, which is relatively famous in the U.S., in part because of its sheer impossibility here.

But tell me a little bit about what Australia did and whether something remotely like this could work in the U.S. Yeah, so in Australia, what they did, they had a horrible mass shooting in 1996. They essentially at that point made their gun laws much stricter, banned some kinds of guns. And the guns that were banned, they then said, you have to turn them into the government. We'll pay you back for the price, but you have to turn them in. And that's the key is you have to. It was mandatory. It's basically mass confiscation.

Like, there's really no way about it. And, you know, in the U.S., this has been tried in some models, but they're always voluntary buybacks. and that is very different because you're basically asking people, like, to turn in their guns voluntary. These aren't guns that are banned with very few exceptions. If somebody has, like, an automatic weapon, those are legally banned in the U.S., then, like, and then they turn those in. I'm not sure how that would work out in a voluntary buyback because I think police would have questions as to why this person has this weapon. But generally, the idea is, like, if you have a gun, you don't want to use it anymore, you can turn it in. That's usually how it's worked out in the U.S.

very, very different from the Australian model where the government essentially said you have to turn these firearms in. Like we are just no longer going to have these out in civilian ownership. And you at this article for Vox that tied together a lot of these policies, the background checks, ban

on assault weapons, red flag laws, potentially generous bybacks. You made the point that, and you can rephrase if I'm misrepresenting you, but you made the point that all these things individually don't empirically do so much. They are all mildly effective, moderately effective at reducing gun deaths in some places, but they don't really, really impact the picture as much as we would hope. What we really need is something bigger. We need the equivalent of a, of a, I don't know,

Green New Deal or a Manhattan project for thinking about, gun ownership and gun use in America. Taking the ideas we've already talked about, what else would you put into that package of a comprehensive policy to reduce gun violence in America? I think the one I always gravitate to, because it seems like the most, the easiest to explain to people

is just requiring a license to own a gun. This is something that basically every other developed country does. Like Canada and Switzerland probably are on like the looser end of gun laws when you compare among developed countries besides the U.S. obviously. And even they require licenses. So that's really simple. Like, you know, you get a license to drive a car, you get a license to own a gun. And the process, there are some states that actually do this. It's like Massachusetts has really strict gun laws. And one of the

things is it's like a month's long process to get a gun license. Once you get a license, it's pretty, easy to get a firearm because they assume, like, look, you went through this thorough check that took months, you should be able to buy firearms. So that's one thing I would add to there. I think in general, though, one of the issues that I think conceptually the U.S. struggles with is we're very reactive to the event that's making the news right now. So you think about, like, mass shootings, and we focus on assault weapons right away because those are the weapons that are happening.

But, like, that's a very narrow view if you're talking about all gun deaths, since assault weapons are very rarely used in all forms of gun violence overall. So I think if we were like talking about like a bigger project, a Green New Deal, it would have, we would have to make the goal clear. And the goal, frankly, just has to be, there have to be fewer guns around. And the ones that do remain, there just has to be less access to them. Right. You're thinking from first principles here. You're saying, look, the first principle of gun violence in America is that there is this stark correlation between gun prevalence and gun violence. So the goal of our policy should be to reduce gun prevalence. That's all we should be talking about. How do we find a way to reduce gun prevalence?

And one way to do it is to ban the sale of certain types of guns like assault weapons. Another way is to ban, it to make it more difficult for people to acquire guns quickly with background checks and licenses. Another way might be to do voluntary buybacks. Another way might be to take guns away, to take access away from some people who are plausibly flagged for the state with red flag laws. If we put all of these things together, we can possibly have this kind of Green New Deal for Manhattan Project 4, Pick Your Famous Policy X for reducing gun violence in America. I think we have to turn the page here and talk a little bit about Republicans, because Republicans have a completely different attitude toward guns than the way

you and I have just been talking. I want to set you up with. with a comment that Ted Cruz made yesterday. He said, quote, we know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on campus.

End quote. I want to point to this for two reasons. Number one, the first principal reason. You and I have just said that our goal should be to reduce gun prevalence in America. Ted Cruz is saying the goal should be to increase gun prevalence in America. We have militarized American citizens,

let's make our kids safe by militarizing American schools. The second point that has to be made here is that there were armed officers in Parkland, and there was an armed guard at the Buffalo supermarket, and there was reportedly an armed guard at the Texas school yesterday. A paper published in J-A-M-A, JAMA, Journal for American Medical Association, found that, quote,

controlling for location in school characteristics, the rate of deaths was 2.83 times higher in schools with an armed guard. present. So even when it comes to armed guards, the first principal thesis of this podcast still holds more gun prevalence, more gun violence. Hermann, what do you make of this idea, this fixation, which is on the right, that we have to respond to the militarization of American citizens with yet more gun prevalence, including at schools? Well, you see this in a smaller scale in American households, because a lot of people buy guns, like when you ask them, why did you

buy a gun? One of the top reasons is self-defense. And when you actually look at the statistics, these households that have guns are not more protected from firearm violence. In fact, they are actually at much high risk, particularly of suicide, but also other kinds of gun violence, like domestic violence incidents. If a gun is present in the house, much more likely to be deadly. because someone, whether it's a person protecting themselves or the person like carrying out the violence, they will be able to pick up a gun and shoot the other person. That is just the reality. It is, I mean, this is like really simplifying things.

But the basic argument here is if there are no guns in the world, there cannot be gun violence, right? Just, I mean, it's literally impossible. And on the flip side, it's like, so if there are more. guns, there's more use of these guns. And I think if you just replaced guns in that sentence with just about anything else, it would be a boring common, right? If there are more cars around, people will be able to drive more. Like, of course that's true. Like, we see that in all sorts of countries. It's, it's just... I think it's a good point. But the reason the car example is really important is because the same way that it's obvious to lots of gun-hating liberals that cars are useful,

it's obvious to lots of gun-loving conservatives that guns are fun, that guns are a part of their identity, a part of their lives. They enjoy these tools, these toys. They enjoy the social activity, the feeling they get from holding the metal. They just love these things, and their love of this product is protected by the Constitution.

That is the sheer, just unmovable fact that we keep slamming our heads up against. So I want to ask a question was actually written into the show by a listener, Lieb, which that was really good. And, you know, I really think it's important for us to do, to try to do a good faith read of the other side here. Leib writes, quote, I want to understand the Republican side of the gun law debate. Why don't Republican congressmen and senators put their support behind an attempt to pass

laws to prevent the sale of lethal firearms, create more background checks, and otherwise stop mass shootings? end quote. I believe that Republicans, conservatives don't want mass shootings. They don't want mass shootings of children. And yet they do seem to be against the kind of policies that are most likely to, at the margins, make these kind of events less likely. Why do you think that's the case? What's the best faith read of the Republican side of this debate? I think that, you know, there are lots of talks about the gun lobby, the NRA, and all of that. And I, I would say it's not that nefarious, not that malicious.

It is like much more self-interested. It's their voters. Their voters do not want them to do stuff about this. Like, you know, you take a policy that polls extremely well, like universal background checks. In some polls, it polls 90% support, right? In Maine, when it went up for a vote in 2016, like was literally on the ballot, it lost. Like, this is a policy that pulls at 90 plus percent.

And in a state that Hillary Clinton won, it lost. And it's because Americans say that they want stricter gun loss to some degree. But once the debate actually starts, I think a lot of people, especially those who are, like, most passionate about this issue, start getting really worried that, like, you give them an inch, they'll take a whole mile. Like, they'll start going further. It'll start putting you in a. red national database for guns. Like, this is a big talking point for not just the NRA, but really gun owners in general. They're worried that, like, they'll have to register in a national database.

And all sorts of privacy violations will happen as a result. They're worried that, like, eventually some, it'll start. And once that they have that database, they know where to go to actually confiscate your guns, yada, yada, yada. I think a lot of Americans genuinely believe this. And at the very least, the Americans are going to vote on this issue. You especially think about a Republican primary, there very few issues can trigger like a very passionate minority like guns, right?

Especially in Republican primaries. I think that's the biggest issue is for, they have to watch out for their voters. So, you know, there's all sorts of explanations for that. I think the NRA does play a role in that it has like essentially recharacterized America's gun culture over the past few decades. and there's like lots of good articles and books about that. I think the way that the Second Amendment, I mean, the U.S. is one of the very, very, very few countries

with like an actual right to gun ownership in its constitution. It, like that and in its laws in particular in general. And I think that has warped our culture in a way that has translated to how people vote and what they believe in. I'm glad that we ended here with, voters because even though this takes us to a somewhat depressing place, it's still really, really important. Like, I can imagine four reasons for an elected representative or American citizen to not want to pass new gun restrictions. Number one is cynical love of money. You're just in the

pocket of the NRA, for example. Number two is cynical love of power. You just want to stay in office and you're willing to do whatever it takes to stay in office. Number three is sincere love of or sincere support for gun ownership and fear of government overreach, because I think that people that are paranoid about government overreach often have the Second Amendment looming rather large in their imagination, and then finally you have sincere love of guns. And the truth is that there are just a lot of people that are a part of gun culture who love these things and are against any rule or almost every rule

that is going to restrict their access to them. And right now what you have is this relationship, I think, between cynical politicians and sincere voters who are a part of gun culture. And it's created this immovable block that is very, very hard to pass gun regulation over at the federal level. So, Hermon, what do you think are the prospects for federal legislation on gun regulation that hits Joe Biden's desk in the next few months? I think it's basically zero, unfortunately. You know, you look at, there's a suite that surfaces every time there's a mass shooting that in retrospect, Sandy Hook was the end of the gun control debate in the U.S., because once it became tolerable for children to die,

like if that's tolerable, nothing else will move these lawmakers. God, that's so depressing. It's true because, and it's such a contrast, definitely did not feel that way at the time. It generally felt, I remember around that time, after the Sandy Hook, shooting that Congress was finally going to do something. Not enough by a lot of people's standards, but something. And in retrospect, the fact they didn't, I mean, you look like sometimes I will look through like the pictures of these kids who died at Sandy Hook. And it is just like, if those faces did not inspire these lawmakers to act, I just don't know what will. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

And, you know, Graham Wood, an Atlantic writer, just published this essay on our website. I just want to read is conclusion because it ends at a very similar place that we end. He says, quote, I cannot kill anyone with my laptop, but I can certainly do harm with it. And if someone suggested that it should be taken away because the social negatives outweigh the positives, I would be outraged from my cold, dead hands. You may object to this comparison on any number of reasonable grounds, but if it baffles you completely, you probably have no clue how deeply guns and gun culture. are embedded in America. And to change a culture

is infinitely harder than to change laws. I'm not sure where that leaves us or rather, I am all too sure. End quote. That's Graham Wood from the Atlantic. And the truth is that this is

where I land too. And I am sorry to be a bummer about it. Because like I said, I am really optimistic about so, so many things about this country. But I'm not optimistic about our capacity.

to solve this problem. Hermann Lopez, thank you very, very much for educating us on this, and we will talk to you again sometime soon. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. Thank you very much for listening.

Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you have a comment, a concern, a question, an idea for a future show, please email us at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space, English at Spotify.com.