Science Vs - Gun Control (Pt 2)

Episode Date: August 12, 2016

In last week’s episode, we learned that around 30,000 Americans die each year from guns. This week, we examine possible solutions. Do better background checks, buybacks, and gun registration lead to fewer shooting deaths? What happened in Australia after they got rid of all the guns? To find out, we talk to gun shop owner Bob Kostaras, former ATF special agent Mark Jones, Prof. Philip Alpers, and Prof. Peter Squires. Credits: This episode has been produced by Wendy Zukerman, Heather Rogers, Caitlin Kenney, Austin Mitchell, and Kaitlyn Sawrey. Editing by Annie Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Production Assistance by Diane Wu, and Shruti Ravindran. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll, mixing by Martin Peralta and Haley Shaw. Music written by Bobby Lord. Crisis Hotlines:US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (2755)US Crisis Text Line Text “GO” to 741741Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14Canadian Association for Suicide PreventionUK & Ireland: Samaritans 116 123 Selected References:Background Checks for Firearms Transfers, US Bureau of Justice, 2009 Including details on federal gun purchase regulationsIssues with the current US background check system, plus recommendations for improvement Wintemute, “Background checks for firearm transfers: Assessment and recommendations.” Violence Prevention Research Program, UC Davis. 2013. States with more comprehensive background checks, including better reporting, have lower rates of gun homicide Ruddel and Mays, “State background checks and firearms homicides,” Journal of Criminal Justice, 2005. Most prisoners incarcerated for a gun-related offense did not buy their gun from a licensed dealer Harlow, C. “Firearm use by offenders”, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, 2001. How much of violent crime in Sweden can be attributed to people with severe mental illness? About 5% Fazel and Grann. “The Population Impact of Severe Mental Illness on Violent Crime.” Am J Psychiatry, 2006A study of how gun laws in Australia changed gun homicide rates Chapman et al, “Association Between Gun Law Reforms and Intentional Firearm Deaths in Australia, 1979-2013”, Journal of the American Medical Association, 2016.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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sunnybrook.ca slash special. Chiara. It means smart in Italian. Too bad your barista can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name. Your cafe name. Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway?

Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this. Because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. What does the AI revolution mean? For jobs. For getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think?

I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Gimlet Media's Science Verses. This is the show where we pit facts against truthiness. On today's show, it's part two of our look at guns in America. And today we're asking, do laws that control guns save lives? A quick

warning before we get started. We'll be discussing homicide and suicide. So please take care when listening to this show. Now last week we looked at defensive gun uses and the number of homicides and suicides that are caused by guns in America. If you haven't heard that episode, we do recommend that you go back and listen. But as a recap, we talked about how there are more than 30,000 gun deaths in America each year and two-thirds of those are suicides. We also went through the connection between the number of guns and the crime rate. And spoiler alert, there isn't one.

Guns don't make the crime rate go up or down in any consistent way. But they do make altercations, assaults and burglaries more deadly. This is part two. And in this episode, we're talking about how to reduce the number of people being killed and hurt by guns. Now, if public health professionals found a lamp with a genie inside, they'd probably make a wish that all the guns could just disappear. But they'd also probably make the sugar disappear

and the alcohol disappear and the drugs disappear. But that's magic and a bit boring. And definitely not science. So we're not going to talk about genies today or a gunless world. Instead, we're focusing on how gun regulations can actually effectively reduce gun deaths. And that means regulating who can buy them, what kind of guns they can buy, and what people are allowed to do with their guns. Okay, let's start with a quick explanation of how people buy guns in America right now.

Bob Kostaris, owner of Classic Pistol in Southampton, Pennsylvania, showed Science vs Producer Heather Rogers how to buy a gun. Hi, Heather, I'm Bob. Come in here and sit in the lounge. There's, like, guns on your desk and guns on the floor and guns leaning against the wall. That's what we do for a living here. We're a gun shop. We have guns. Laws about what you need to do to buy a gun

vary state by state in the United States, but everyone in America who buys a firearm from a licensed dealer has to fill out the same federal form, and it's poetically titled the 4473. Bob showed it to Heather. It's the name, address, social security number, date of birth, the weight, the height, the sex of the person, gender, their race, and then the questions.

Are you the actual buyer or the fireman listed on this form? Have you ever been convicted of a felony or any other crime which you could have gone to jail for a year or more? OK, once you've filled out the form, Bob gets in touch with the police who use the FBI system called the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to look for red flags. They run the check for us. They do all the database checking. They come back with an approval number or a denial or research.

Research means the police need more time to give an answer. And denied means, surprise, surprise, you're not allowed to get a gun. And why would you be denied? Well, because under US federal law, certain people are prohibited from buying guns, like those who have been convicted of a crime and sentenced to more than one year in prison, or those who have been found by a court to be mentally ill. There are other reasons. We're not going to go into all of them here. And there are all kinds of exceptions to this system.

The biggest one is that in some states, it's legal to buy a gun through a private sale. Essentially, any random person with no background check at all. But still, this is what America has today. It also has a firearm homicide rate that is 25 times higher than the average for other high-income countries and a suicide rate that is eight times higher. So when it comes to gun control, there's lots of opinions and even some songs.

But then, there's science. Many people on both sides of the gun debate will tell you how we can fix America's gun laws. Let's get into some of the main ideas. Round number one, better background checks. Round number two, regulating guns and removing certain types of guns from the community. Round number three, requiring guns to be registered just like cars so that every time guns change hands, the government knows about it. Okay, let's get into it. Round number one, better background checks.

If you ask the NRA why there are 10,000 gun homicides in America each year, one thing they'll cite is holes in the FBI's background check system, essentially the system that Bob reaches out to when you buy a gun at his store. Here's NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. The names of millions of violent felons, criminal gangbangers, and adjudicated mentally incompetent and dangerous people are missing from the background check system. Yes, the current background check system in America is missing the criminal and mental health records of loads of Americans, which means that people who aren't supposed to be buying guns legally at a store can. You know, our criminal justice reporting system is a hodgepodge of 50 state systems feeding into the FBI's NCIC. Mark Jones is a retired special agent for America's Guns Watchdog, the Bureau of Alcohol,

Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. And by the way, the NCIC is the FBI's criminal record system. So what happens at NCIC is that often arrest records make it in very well. Conviction records are more spotty, typically. And this is partly because getting states and government agencies to put records into the background check system is voluntary. So some states just don't do it that well. So what would happen if we fixed this and had all the records on every person who fell into a prohibited category? Would it make a difference?

Yes. One study analysing a number of things related to background checks, including record-keeping, found that states with the worst background check system tended to have the highest gun homicide rate. And they wrote that this was, quote, a clear and consistent negative association, end quote. But still, there is a limit to how far these background checks can go.

Because the majority of criminals don't get their guns from licensed dealers like Bob. So these criminals won't be going through a background check system. A survey of around 1,400 inmates in prison for a crime involving a gun found that 77% of them got guns on the street or through family and friends, and only 11% of them bought a gun through a licensed dealer. Plus, remember that in many US states you can buy a gun in a private sale without any background check at all.

Here's Mark Jones again. We know that a lot of criminals are getting guns through transactions that don't have any scrutiny on them. To me, that's a real problem. Another problem with focusing on fixing background check reporting is that many would-be criminals would pass a background check when they bought their gun. That is, they were good guys in the government's eyes

up until they used a gun in crime. A paper published last year summarising the available evidence found that, quote, roughly half or more of those who commit gun crimes do not meet any of the prohibiting conditions under federal law. End quote. Plus, two-thirds of gun deaths in America are suicides. And while we couldn't find any specific studies on the topic,

one expert that we spoke to said that most suicides would not be prevented through better record-keeping in the background checks. Conclusion. Better records could help reduce gun deaths. We can't tell you by what percentage because we don't live in an alternate reality with perfect record keeping. But since the majority of criminals don't get their guns in a place where they would

need to get a background check, and 50% of gun criminals would have passed a background check anyway because they were good guys when they went to buy their guns, it seems that lots of people would be slipping through the cracks. What if we added new information to the database? Another big idea that people have about making background checks better involves including more information in them, specifically more information about people's mental health. Because ultimately, they believe that if we do this, we can find the people who are going to be violent and stop them from getting a gun. And this idea tends to come up a

lot around mass shootings. There's a common theme you see with many of these mass shootings, and that is the theme of mental illness. I'm very concerned about the mental health side of this. A lot of it is just mental illness. People are going to slip through the cracks, they're mentally ill, there's a huge mental illness problem. So is going after mental illness a good strategy to prevent gun crime? Well, one study of 88 mass shooters found that, quote,

the overall prevalence of severe mental illness is low, end quote. And away from mass shootings? One study from Sweden found that 95% of all violent crimes were carried out by people who never had a known severe mental illness. 95%. And you can take these figures in two ways. Perhaps a lot of killers are actually sane. Or perhaps these people actually had a mental illness

that meant that they were prone to violence and the system didn't recognise them, they weren't diagnosed. Say we run with argument number two. If we had better, the best mental health care, could mental health professionals predict who is going to be violent and then stop them from buying a gun? Philip Alpers, a public health associate professor at the University of Sydney, says no.

He says that doctors... They can look at the University of Sydney, says no. He says that doctors... They can look at almost all of their patients and not be at all sure what any of them's going to be doing sometime in the future. And that's because they don't know, and nor do we know. Nobody knows reliably who is going to commit gun violence. And if we did know, the problem would be solved. Philip pointed out that while there are a few mental illnesses

that do make people more likely to be violent... The best mental health professionals, the forensic psychiatrists, the people who interview killers after they've been caught, these are the people who will tell you that their chances of predicting future dangerousness, even in a patient who's totally at their disposal and willing to be interviewed, is not much better than flipping a coin. Conclusion. Even with a beefed up background check system on the lookout for people about to become violent, we just can't catch them all.

Gotta catch them all. Gotta catch them all. Pokemon. Pokemon. So, round two. Buying guns back from the community. I recently saw a tweet from Harlem's NYPD Blue. Oh, you just say NYPD, don't you?

OK, just saw a tweet from Harlem's NYPD at the 34th Precinct and I was intrigued. It read, Need cash? Turn in an operable handgun. All in caps lock. No questions asked. Tomorrow.

No questions asked? I. No questions asked. I had some questions. Is that a recording? No. Yes, of course it is. Are we not allowed to... Is it on? It is on.

It's on? It is on. You can talk to us. You can turn it off. Police officers wouldn't let me go inside or ask them any questions, so I didn't know how many guns got turned in. But then, on the way home, I saw another tweet. Feel a little safer today?

Question mark. 81 guns off our street turned in anonymously at our gun, dollar sign, dollar sign, buyback event. Hashtag, one less gun. The thing is, we probably shouldn't feel too much safer. These small buybacks haven't been shown by science to be effective. For example, after tracking five years of these sorts of gun buybacks carried out by the local police in Buffalo, New York,

researchers concluded that the buybacks did not significantly reduce homicides. The researchers noted that most other evaluations of buybacks in other parts of the United States have found the same thing. They ultimately concluded, quote, gun buyback programs appear to satisfy a local administrator's need for instant solutions to a problem despite a lack of evidence demonstrating effectiveness, end quote. And sick burn. So when I saw that tweet, I thought to myself, 81 guns off the street? That's not a buyback.

This is a buyback. You're hearing the sounds of guns being crushed in the biggest buyback program that the world has ever seen. After the break, the NRA's biggest fear. What happened when Australia took away hundreds of thousands of guns from the public? Chiara, it means smart in Italian. Too bad your barista can't spell it right.

So you just give a fake name. Your cafe name. Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid,

you wouldn't be thinking any of this. Because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this, because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. Welcome back to Science Vessels. So, we're talking about gun control, and we've landed in Australia, the land of sun, beaches, and helpful kangaroos called Skippy. What's the matter, Skippy? What's got you all excited? Yep, this was really a thing.

It was like Lassie, but it hopped. But Australia is also the land of gun control. We are known for having some of the strictest gun laws in the world and it all started in response to a horrific mass shooting in a town called Port Arthur in 1996. Good evening. All Australians tonight share the horror of the Port Arthur massacre. 35 people are dead, 18 are injured.

The lone gunman, armed with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle, opened fire first at a restaurant in the heart of the picturesque Port Arthur penal colony. Within 12 days of the Port Arthur massacre, the conservative Prime Minister John Howard announced that semi-automatic and automatic weapons would be banned, and the government then bought those newly illegal guns from the public. Anyone who refused to hand over their weapon was breaking the law and risked jail time. Within a year, 640,000 guns were collected and destroyed.

So what happened to gun violence in Australia after that? Let's start with mass shootings. In the 18 years before Australia instituted this ban on thousands of guns, there were 13 mass shootings where five or more victims were killed. But after the gun laws came in, we haven't had a single mass shooting on the same scale. That's Philip Alpers, our gun control expert from Australia again. And in a paper published this year, he attributed this drop in mass shootings to the ban on semi-automatic and automatic weapons.

So what happens to the numbers when you look at all gun deaths in Australia after the buyback? In the years after the Australian gun buyback, the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia dropped by half. In fact, by more than half. And it stayed there for 20 years. It has not started to creep up again. And that includes homicide, suicide and even unintentional gun deaths. Philip also pointed out that the rate of suicides and homicides that did not involve guns fell over those same years. So it's difficult to show precisely what effect the gun laws played in this decline. To nail that down, Philip says what we need to do is a randomised control trial. He also says that it's hard to imagine

how such a trial would take place. Actually, though, it's very easy to imagine how such a trial would take place. What you would need to do is get an island exactly the same as Australia, with the same people, same guns, same culture, and then you wouldn't bring in the gun laws. Then you track the death rate over time and compare it to the death rate in Australia. Obviously, we can't do that. So we have to do other things,

like, say, comparing the gun death rate in Australia to the United States. It's ten times lower. And for more than a decade, Australia's gun death rate has been on the decline, while America's gun death rate has stayed pretty much the same. Conclusion. What happened in Australia was a public health wet dream. Getting rid of thousands of guns and then taking... What's that, Sia? Oh, yeah. No,

I should mention that. Yeah, no, thank you. Very helpful. So, before the buyback, there were over three million guns in Australia. And then 640,000 semi-automatics and automatics were taken within a year. But today, how many guns are there in Australia? Yeah, no, Skip, I know the answer. It was a rhetorical question. I knew the answer. It was a rhetorical question. I knew the answer. Today, there are just over 3 million guns in Australia, so about the same as what they were before the buyback.

They're not semi-automatics and automatics, but Australia really has quite a few guns for a country of 23 million people, and quite a few Olympic medals too. Anyway, when Philip talks about the shooting culture in Australia right now, he says, and this is his word, that it's vibrant. Australia has a vibrant gun culture, a lot of sporting shooters. It's a pleasant sport. I used to partake myself. I still enjoy target shooting when I get the opportunity. Are you a good shot?

Yes. How did I know you were going to say that? Continue, sorry. But here's the thing. Even though Australia has about the same number of guns as we did before the buyback, our gun homicide rate and suicide rate remains low. In 2014, there were only 31 gun homicides.

So, how can we have so many guns and so few gun deaths? Well, in 1996, Australia didn't just buy back guns and they didn't just ban semi and fully automatic weapons. The Aussies brought in a whole lot of rules around buying and keeping guns. Today, in Australia, to buy a gun, you need a proof of a genuine reason to own one. Genuine reasons include sporting, hunting and collecting,

but not self-defence. You also have to get a licence. You have to register your gun with the government, which means the government has a list of who owns exactly which guns. To sell your gun, it has to go through a licence dealer or the sale must be witnessed by a police officer. And if your gun is lost or stolen, you have to report it to the police. And the whole idea behind these laws

is so the government can track how guns move around the country, which means that every time a gun changes hands, the government needs to hear about it. Philip summed up these laws quite nicely. There are three pillars of gun control. One is to license the owner of the firearm, just as we license the owners of cars. And the other is to register the object, to register the gun, just as we do with cars. And the third is to have a presumption that the right to keep and bear arms is not absolute. It is a conditional privilege. Whoa, Philip, stop.

Stop. We promised in episode one of Science vs Guns that we wouldn't talk about the Constitution. You're getting mighty close. We're sticking with the science. The important thing here is that Phil says destroying those 640,000 guns probably wasn't the key to the Australian success story.

It was all those other laws around it. These were probably more important even than the buyback because they will last a lot longer. So let's focus on the effects of registering a gun. Registration made each shooter personally responsible for each gun in their collection. And that meant that the rate of gun theft dropped by more than half after the new laws were brought in. And that's because people were more responsible for their guns. They locked them up.

They took care of them because they had to report them if they were stolen. And hearing about these Australian laws makes Mark Jones feel really jealous. He says that when he was working with the ATF, he could only dream about having information like this. And without it, he said it made it really easy for guns to slip into the illegal market and hard for police to hold anyone responsible.

He walked me through a scenario. Say a gun, a Glock 19, shows up in a crime and it has a serial number which can be traced back to the manufacturer, Glock. So, Glock then says the gun was sent to Bob's gun store and Bob then says they sold the gun to me, Wendy. What happens next? Then ATF would come and knock on your door and say, Hi, Wendy, I'm Special Agent Jones with ATF.

We're investigating the recovery of a firearm. Do you own a Glock 19? And in many cases, the reaction is, yeah, yeah, I have a Glock 19. Okay, Wendy, where is it? It's in my box in the attic of my house. We go up and you look in the box. There's no gun there. Okay, Wendy, what'd you do with your gun? What happened to it? You say, oh yeah, I had a Glock 19, but I had a, somebody broke into my house and they took all my stuff. You're basically then in the clear from that. And with 20 years of experience behind him, Mark says he saw many people wriggle out of legal responsibility this way. The story that the gun was lost or stolen is a very, very common story amongst straw purchasers or people that had guns and got rid of

them. A straw purchaser is someone who buys a gun for someone else. It's illegal in America, but Mark says it's very hard to police. So it's a pretty common thing for traffic or firearms traffickers to tell the straw purchasers, don't worry, if your name's on this, don't worry about it. If the cops come, just tell them it got stolen. Well, in places that have the law that says you have to report it, that doesn't fly anymore. They got to find another excuse. Conclusion.

In Australia, gun laws worked, but it took a whole lot of measures, registration, licensing, and not just taking away people's guns. But the story doesn't end here. There's another country that has gun laws that are very similar to Australia's. But the effect of some of those laws wasn't as clear. The UK has a very similar system to Australia. So for some time they've had registration, licensing

and a ban on semi-automatics. And then after a mass shooting in 1996 where 16 children and their teacher were shot and killed, the UK government banned handguns. They then bought them back from citizens. So after the handguns were banned, what happened? That's the interesting thing. Peter Squires is a professor of criminology and public policy

at the University of Brighton. The real irony is that in the four years after the handgun ban became law, handgun crime doubled in Britain. After the UK government bought around 160,000 handguns from the public, according to police reports, crimes involving handguns in England and Wales went up. They peaked in 2003, six years after the handgun bans kicked in. And Peter says this was partly explained

by increased gang activity at the time. And the gangs, he says, they didn't hand in their guns. But there was also some really messy things in the data. For one, in 1998, police changed the way they recorded crime, making it hard to compare the gun stats before and after the buyback. Plus, those gun crime stats in the UK, they include fake guns. Plastic guns, things that look real, but really only fire a plastic pellet or nothing at all.

And of course, if someone sticks one of those in your face, you don't want to know whether it's real or not. Peter says banning handguns created a market for imitation firearms and the british gangs were mad for them when um we had an anti-gang task force in 2008 and and they did a load of dawn raids on on on gang addresses and arrested something like 70 to 80 gang members and they recovered 1,000 guns, they said. Only 10 of them were real guns. So that's the kind of proportion we're talking about. And by real, he meant that only 10 of them could fire rounds

out of some 1,000 recovered guns. Fake guns were so common in the UK that they became a popular cultural reference. Remember the movie Snatch? You're having second thoughts. And the fact that you've got replica written down the side of your gun. But it's also true that not all gun crime was carried out with toys. And the fact that I've got Desert Eagle written on the side of mine.

And since guns do make altercations more deadly, it was expected that taking away 160,000 handguns would reduce the number of people being killed in a homicide. It didn't, though. Gun homicides in the UK actually went up in the years after the bans kicked in. But, and this is really important, it was from a very low base. At its peak, 96 people were killed in a homicide by guns in England and Wales. In a population of around 52 million people at the time, 96 being killed by guns? That's not a whole lot. That same year, more than 230 people were killed in Washington,

D.C. alone, and there the population was less than 600,000. Today, there are so few gun homicides in the UK that a paper published this year by Professor David Hemenway at Harvard set the gun homicide rate at zero. Conclusion. When we look at the stats, the handgun bans in 1996 did not have an immediate effect on UK's homicide rate. So, when it comes to science versus gun control, does it stack up?

Round one. Will better record-keeping in the background checks prevent gun violence? Yes. But it probably wouldn't do much because half the people who commit crimes with guns don't fall into the categories prohibited from buying guns and lots of criminals don't buy guns through an official dealer.

Would expanding mental health checks do it? Well, it might catch a few people, but the best experts cannot reliably predict who is going to be violent and who isn't. Round two, does buying guns back from gun owners save lives? Well, little programs in churches really can't do much. And even taking hundreds of thousands of guns away doesn't seem to be the key. The science says that what works is comprehensive national laws. Round three.

Does making gun owners get a licence and register their guns with the government reduce gun deaths? While the science makes it difficult to prove this sort of thing, Australia and the UK, which have some of the most stringent gun laws in the world, also have a very low gun homicide and suicide rate. But there's something else to think about here. Because when it comes to guns and crime, culture and country are really important. When speaking to Peter Squires about what happened in the UK,

he brought up culture. I think the idea of not feeling safe unless you're packing a gun is quite an alien idea in the UK. of not feeling safe unless you're packing a gun, is quite an alien idea in the UK. And against that, I put quite a lot of the firearms industry marketing that you often see that sort of talks about having to defend yourself in the last resort. People in Britain don't think like that. And Philip Alpers talked about this kind of thing too.

In fact, they both said that the mass shootings the UK and Australia experienced were a tipping point. They changed something within society to make lots of people feel differently about guns. And when they talked about culture, it made me feel really uncomfortable because it felt really unscientific. But coming from Australia, I can tell you, I have noticed there is a real difference in the way that we talk and think about guns.

And as an anecdote, Peter said that when the semi-automatic bans kicked in, although there was a backlash from some of the gun-loving community in Australia, even the president of Australia's Association of Professional Shooters was on board. These are the real crocodile dundees, the guys who go out and shoot kangaroos with a single shot to the head. But they use single-shot guns. And when asked if a semi-automatic was an essential tool, this guy said, nah, they're just toys for city boys. And that was the attitude at the time, still is the attitude. Quick correction here, that guy was a gal, Robin Smith. Back in America, though, we couldn't avoid talking about culture either. Or that other C word.

The Constitution. When we ran some of the things that Australia did to control guns by our gun shop owner Bob Kostaris from Classic Pistol, he brought up culture pretty quickly with our producer Heather Rogers. So it's like when I buy a car, I have to register it. Like I kind of think about that. It's different. I really feel it's different. They're not going to come take your car someday, potentially. Maybe they will. I don't know. They're illegally owned by me. Why does the state have to have a record so they can come confiscate them

that's scary why is that scary because our constitution was written with the second amendment to protect gun ownership against an unjust government so we can defend ourselves against a non-just government we did to the british in the Revolutionary War. We'd be drinking tea if we didn't have guns. So, you know, I just don't think there's a gun registration needed. I'm against it. And this is something we don't have to contend with in Australia. Oh, what's that, Skippy? Can you not interrupt while I'm doing my bit?

I just want to finish the show. No, there's no... No, stop that. Thanks. I appreciate... No. I swear, you little kangaroo! That's science versus gun control. Oh, and by the way, that is not what a kangaroo actually sounds like. That was what Skippy sounded like. But this is the actual sound that a kangaroo makes. Stick around for a

sneak peek of our next episode of Science Versus. It's science versus organic food. And it won't hit you next week, but the week after. Plus, if you stick around, we say sorry to a bird. And I told you so to a couple of listeners. This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, Caitlin Kenny, Austin Mitchell and Caitlin Sori. Edited by Annie Rose Strasser and Alex Bloomberg. Production assistance by Diane Wu and Truti Ravindran.

Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll, mixed by Martin Peralta and Hayley Shaw. Music written by Bobby Lord. Science Versus is a production of Gimlet Media. So, over at Science Versus, we are obsessed with fact-checking. We read and re-read academic papers. We pester the academics like crazy until we think we've got the story right.

But still, sometimes we get it wrong. We're really sorry when this happens and we will always tell you when we think we've messed up. So, in episode one on fracking, I went out to a fracking site and on our way there, we saw this. Aw, look, Doug. You see it, Doug? It's a grouse, isn't it? Right back there. See? Oh, I see him on the edge of the road there.

That was the state bird of Pennsylvania, the ruffed grouse. Except I didn't call it that in the episode. I called it the ruffled grouse, not the roughed grouse. We got quite a few tweets and emails about this. Thank you so much for spotting it. We don't like making mistakes. I'm sorry. But while we're here, we've also been getting a number of tweets

and emails about the plural of octopus. It's definitely not octopi, but some people have been telling us that they believe it's octopodes. Well, time to clarify this once and for all. We got Catherine Martin, a lexicographer for Oxford Dictionary, into the Gimlet Studios. Her job is to decide what words go in the dictionary. How equipped are you to answer what is the plural form of octopus? I think fairly well equipped, and it's octopuses. Yes!

Catherine mentioned that language is alive and evolving all the time, so it may not be the final word on this, and if you want to hear more of that interview, head over to the Gimlet homepage. Oh, and we have also reached out to a bunch of academics, professors of linguistics and ancient Greek, to find out about this octopuses thing. We have now heard back from three professors, one from Cambridge, one from Oxford and one from Harvard, all telling us that octopuses is correct, not octopodies. I told you, we fact-check our stuff. But still, sometimes we get it wrong,

so keep us on our toes and keep telling us. Next time on Science Versus, we'll be tackling organic food. Is it really worth splashing out the extra cash for the organic stuff? Jesus, she's harsh, isn't she? No, they're not suckers. They believe different than me, that's all. They got a different point of view.

You know, theirs is wrong, but I mean, other than that... I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Fact you next time.