The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Children Under Fire: An American Crisis by John Woodrow Cox

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Children Under Fire: An American Crisis by John Woodrow Cox One of The New York Times’ 16 New Books to Watch for in March One of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year One of Newsweek’s Most Highly Anticipated Books of The Year One of Buzzfeed’s Most Anticipated Books the Year Based on the acclaimed series—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—an intimate account of the devastating effects of gun violence on our nation’s children, and a call to action for a new way forward In 2017, seven-year-old Ava in South Carolina wrote a letter to Tyshaun, an eight-year-old boy from Washington, DC. She asked him to be her pen pal; Ava thought they could help each other. The kids had a tragic connection—both were traumatized by gun violence. Ava’s best friend had been killed in a campus shooting at her elementary school, and Tyshaun’s father had been shot to death outside of the boy’s elementary school. Ava’s and Tyshaun’s stories are extraordinary, but not unique. In the past decade, 15,000 children have been killed from gunfire, though that number does not account for the kids who weren’t shot and aren’t considered victims but have nevertheless been irreparably harmed by gun violence. In Children Under Fire, John Woodrow Cox investigates the effectiveness of gun safety reforms as well as efforts to manage children’s trauma in the wake of neighborhood shootings and campus massacres, from Columbine to Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Through deep reporting, Cox addresses how we can effect change now, and help children like Ava and Tyshaun. He explores their stories and more, including a couple in South Carolina whose eleven-year-old son shot himself, a Republican politician fighting for gun safety laws, and the charlatans infiltrating the school safety business. In a moment when the country is desperate to better understand and address gun violence, Children Under Fire offers a way to do just that, weaving wrenching personal stories into a critical call for the United States to embrace practical reforms that would save thousands of young lives.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming in another great podcast oh my gosh after all these years he made another podcast hundreds of podcasts he made another one oh yeah it's there so here we are folks we're at the we're in another podcast

and thank you for joining we certainly appreciate you guys being with us today also go to youtube.com fortune s crisp us to see the video version of this you can also see us in all our groups on facebook linkedin uh instagram and all that sort of good stuff. You can follow the accounts over there as well. Today, we have a most brilliant author on the show, and this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com, and their Micro-iDSD Signature. It's a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just

makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. He's the author of the newest book that has just come out, Children Under Fire, An American Crisis. This is going to be really interesting to talk to him. It just came out on March 30th, 2021. His name is John Woodrow Cox. He's a staff writer at the Washington Post and the author of this wonderful new book.

He was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and has won Scripps Award's Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Storytelling, the DART Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, and Columbia Journalism School's Meyer Mike Berger Award for Human Interest Reporting, among other honors. He attended the University of Florida, where he has taught narrative writing, and currently serves on the Department of Journalism's Advisory Council. Lives in Washington with his wife, Jen, Washington, D.C. That is. Welcome to the show. How art thou, John?

I'm great. Thank you for having me. So welcome to the show. You've got this great book that you've taken and written. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. They can find me on Twitter at John Woodrow Cox. That's probably the easiest. That's maybe the place where I'm the most active. I also have a website that I try to keep updated, johnwoodrowcox.com.

And then certainly you can find me on the post site. Occasionally on Facebook and new to Instagram. So easing into that. There you go. Instagram's a great place to be, especially for book authors from what I understand. I know. I'm a little late. Yeah. So this sounds like a really interesting book, just off the book title itself. What motivated you to write this book? It was a few things, but the big motivator was to

really wake people up to the scope of this crisis. I think that people are aware, maybe from a distance, that these school shootings happen often, but that maybe is the extent to which they understand that gun violence affects kids in this country. So I wanted to really make clear to people, this is a crisis that affects millions of kids, not thousands, and that most of the kids affected are actually not the ones in schools. It's the kids who deal with that everyday chronic gun violence. And the way of getting people to care about that was to tell these really intimate stories about a few children whose lives have been just destroyed by gun violence. There you go. What were some of the details? Give us like an arcing overview of the book

and then we'll get into the details. Sure. The book primarily follows two children, Ava Olson, a little girl who in first grade was on her playground. This is in South Carolina, a small town in South Carolina. She just walked outside for recess when a 14-year-old pulled up with a gun and open fired on a group of first graders. He killed her best friend, a little boy named Jacob Hall, before his gun jammed 12 seconds after the shooting began. And this was five years ago. Ava is still dealing with really severe PTSD from that episode. And then the other main subject in the story is a little boy named Tyshawn McFatter.

He grew up in Southeast DC. His father was killed in the middle of the day. Just Tyshawn was at school and his dad was just gunned down in his car. And so it follows these two kids and also their friendship. So they have this really unlikely friendship that after I wrote stories about each of these things in the post, they connected and then they started writing each other letters. And then they became pen pals and then they started to FaceTime and they have this really deep relationship where you have these two young kids. One is black and one is white, and they're from very different places, but they have become really critical supports for each other.

That's an interesting dynamic in everything that's going on. As they develop and you follow the two kids, is that correct? Primarily. There's other kids who come into it, but those are kind of the two main kids. Okay. And then basically, it looks like you cover some of what's gone on in the past decade. Over 15,000 children have been killed from gunfire. My God, that is extraordinary to think of. Yeah, it's a big number. We often overlook, again, we overlook those shootings that didn't happen at schools. Most of these kids, a lot of it is just

kids finding guns in their parents' bedrooms and unlocked safes. There's a whole chapter about a boy in South Carolina who finds his dad's gun in a gun safe. He knew where the key was. The key was on top of the safe and he unlocks the safe and a 11-year-old and he takes his own life with his parents in the living room. But this is the type of gun violence that we often overlook. And that's a lot of what the book explores is that we just don't really have a grasp on the scope of this epidemic. Is it also not just having a grasp on it, but actually giving a damn? It really seems like we've tuned this out just kind of school shooting. Yeah. I think there's, I think that's part of it. There's a numbness to it and there's a hopelessness, I think, that some people have around gun violence.

And then I think, too, that racism plays a very real role in all this, that there's an expectation that kids like Tyshawn and Southeast Washington, D.C., are just going to grow up this way, that this is just how it is for them. And I think a lot of that is because these kids grow up in black and brown communities. And Tyshawn, by the time I met him, he was eight years old. I met him just after his father was killed. He already knew four people who'd been shot to death personally. He knew four people. He had on several occasions had to hide or jump behind a bed or dive on a playground because of gunfire in his neighborhood. There was a bullet hole in his front door. I don't think, I don't believe that in the white, you know, middle-class suburbs, if that was the sort of everyday life for kids there that people would

put up with, I think the outrage would be just astronomical, but because it doesn't happen in those neighborhoods, what happens in those neighborhoods are school shootings occasionally or suicides or domestic violence type things. But that everyday sort of gunfire, it mostly affects black and brown kids. I think that's why there's more of a tolerance in this country for it. What is the effect on these children? Because I'm thinking back when I was a kid and I thought I had it rough. But I can't imagine growing up with that as like a norm, number one. And number two, just growing up with it, having experience, I mean, bullet holes through my front

door. I don't, I was worried about, I don't know what I was worried about when I was 10, but. Yeah. When I met Tyshawn, cause he goes to this, or at the time he was going to this charter elementary school in Southeast DC and it was only up to third grade. So it was a pretty small group of kids. And they had, there'd been a spate of shootings, one of which killed his father, all on this road that ran alongside the school. And they had asked the kids to describe in writing with pictures, violence in their neighborhood. And these kids got crayons and drew pictures of people dying on the road, of people being shot, of funerals, of gravestones in really vivid detail. And these are kids that

are six and seven and eight years old. And they're not talking about this every day, but that's what's on their mind. And then ask that kid to perform well at school, to not get angry, to be just as fine as a white kid 20 miles away is so unreasonable. We have such an unreasonable expectation of these kids. And then often when they have big outbursts, angry outbursts, because their cousin was killed over the weekend, then suddenly it's, well, we got to get rid of that kid. He's a bad kid. He has a problem when in fact it's all born out of trauma. That's what's triggering all that. Why is it happening in these neighborhoods more than often? I think that answer is probably obvious from your research in the book and stuff. Why is this happening more in those neighborhoods than others? Poverty is a big driver of when

people are growing up in environments where they're having a hard time putting food on the table. That then creates, if a kid, I've met a lot of young men who they had very few options. They had nowhere to work. Maybe it was a single family home. So they saw an opportunity to make some money by maybe dealing drugs and things like that. Or a lot of these kids are just born into places where it's guilt by association. That's Taishan's father. That's the belief is that he was not active in a gang, but that he had friends who were. And so they targeted him because of that. But certainly the drug trade fuels a lot of violence. And then that creates a demand for firearms. And when you have a place like DC that has strong gun laws, but it's surrounded by states

that have really weak gun laws, there's going to be a constant supply of firearms on those streets. And then you're going to see a lot of violence. So the truth is that we can't blame, but you can never blame a kid, right? You can never blame the child for what's happened, for losing his father. It wasn't his fault or for being shot at or being hit by that stray bullet. People can often be dismissive of the adults to say they made a bad choice. They deserve that. That is never true of the child. Yeah. There's the racist trope that black men are always killing each other in inner cities. And that somehow that makes an excuse for people when they're like, it's okay if white cops do it or white people do it. It's a racist trope. But I think it's important that we recognize that what's going on in these communities,

they're usually, they're maligned communities. A lot of these communities are set up because of some of the racist social programs we've had, like redlining that has gone on. When Eddie Glaude Jr. was on the show, we talked about how there's freeways that have been made to separate all of our communities. And these marginalized communities are persecuted. They don't have support systems like hospitals. They don't have good schools. They don't have good funding and everything else. And it's inexcusable just to dismiss those with there's violence in those communities. So clearly what's going on there, clearly this is happening because of inattention by governments and care and racial issues and things of that nature. And as you go through the journey with these two kids, is their narrative pretty much go through the whole book? It does. I followed them for, I think, about three years altogether and go back and forth. For me, they represented the bookends

of this crisis. Here you have a white girl in a rural South Carolina, an area that really holds guns sacred, where people love God, but they love guns almost as much, and a place that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And then you have Tyshawn, who's on the other end of that spectrum, growing up in a very liberal place, where guns are really considered this infectious disease, and where people are quite liberal and rejected Trump. And their bond, this connection is so, it's just so uniquely American that two kids, one seven and one eight could bond this deeply, entirely over gun violence because they have this shared experience. They have this shared American experience and neither judges the other. They feel

like they can really be their best selves. And it's just a remarkable thing, these chapters in the book where it's just the two of them talking to each other and sharing and leaning on each other. So we get to see, get an insight to how it's affecting them psychologically. It's extraordinary to think about a young child going through the stuff that people go through in a military situation, if you're at war in Iraq or something, and you've got guns placing all around you and you're dodging bullets and stuff like this. Do you talk in the book about different issues or things that we can do to resolve this? Yeah. So the book tackles all sorts of things. There are three big issues that we could take on, I think, as a country that are largely nonpartisan and they're backed by a lot of evidence. This is the low hanging fruit that if America wanted to make a substantial difference right now, they could do these things. And the first, the most obvious is research. It seems boring, but in the mid 1990s, the Congress prohibited the CDC from studying gun violence. Most people don't know this.

Yeah, it was the Dickey Amendment. This one congressman, lawmaker from Arkansas, had said basically included a one line in the spending bill, and it effectively ended any sort of gun violence research from the CDC, which also ended lots of grants that they would have issued. Wow. And for over two decades, we didn't study gun violence. It would not be dissimilar to in the early months of the pandemic. One lawmaker said, I don't really like the results that I'm seeing from researchers. So we're going to stop researching COVID. We're just going to not research it. This was in the middle. The 1990s is famously the worst decade in modern American history in terms of gun violence. And they stopped

researching it right in the middle of that epidemic. Only until the last few years has Congress devoted any money, even though, frankly, it's still almost symbolic, the amount of money that they're putting into this. But I think that is a really obvious thing that we could do. And it's not to say, here's how to take people's guns away. It's to say, what works and what doesn't? What gun laws actually work and which ones do not? Many of them we don't know for sure. It's a lot what works and what doesn't, what gun laws actually work and which ones do not. Many of them we don't know for sure. It's a lot of conjecture. It's based on too few studies. One thing that we do know works is child access prevention laws.

These are laws that are backed overwhelmingly by evidence that they save lives. And what these basically mandate is that adults have to keep their guns from falling into the hands of children. And if their negligence allows a kid to get a gun and shoot themselves or somebody else, then they can be held criminally liable. Those laws work. And a lot of it isn't ultimately about prosecuting the parent or the adult. It's about signaling to them that this is important and that they need to put their guns away as a sort of educational tool. There are millions of gun-owning parents in this country who are under the false belief that they can educate their child out of making a bad decision with a gun. It is absolutely false. The research bears that out over and over. A couple of examples of this.

In the rural South, there was this survey done of gun owning parents. And they asked these parents, has your kid, they asked them two questions. Does your kid know where your gun is? Among the parents that said no, nearly 40% of their kids said, yes, I do know where their gun is. And then they ask them, has your kid ever played with your gun? Yeah. I'm laughing because we used to find all the, my parents would have the Christmas gifts. Exactly. We were to find them and my dad's gun.

And kids, boys especially, guns are cool. It's the thing that they want to play with. Among the ones who said no about, have you played with the gun? One in four of those kids said that they had taken the gun out and played with it. Any of those kids could have been dead just by, because many of those guns are loaded. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing that really would make a real impact is universal background checks. So this is a thing that's supported by 90% plus of Americans, an overwhelming majority of gun owners believe in universal background checks.

And what that would do is put a real dent in trafficking, is gun trafficking in this country. People say, oh, gun laws don't work because Chicago still has violence. The guns that people are shooting each other with in Chicago and D.C. and New York are not from Chicago and New York. They're coming from. They're from, exactly, the Iron Pipeline. They're coming from Georgia. They're coming from Virginia. They're coming from other parts of the South. So suddenly that would disincentivize people to go to these

big gun shows where they can stock up on guns and not have their background checked to then drive all those weapons back to another city and then sell them for a higher price. Now you mentioned something called the iron. The iron pipeline, right? It's basically I-95. It's that people, gun traffickers will drive from the North to the South, buy a bunch of guns, drive back North, and then sell them in cities that have stricter gun laws, places like Chicago, New York, and DC. Those guns are all being trafficked from somewhere else, but we live in a country with open borders. So the argument that often people make is gun laws clearly don't work because look at the violence in those places.

It's ludicrous because if I'm in Washington, D.C. for the last 20 years, I could just drive to Georgia where D.C. has no influence, no authority, buy a bunch of guns at a gun show, and then just bring them back and sell them for twice the price. Yeah, you can make a fortune. Exactly. And they do make a fortune. Until there's some more uniformity, you're going to continue to see that. But universal background checks would definitely put a real dent in people's ability to do that. Yeah. Like you say, people always use that Chicago thing.

And I think even the state next to them, is it Indiana or something? Like on the border, wherever that city is they like they can just right across the board that's crazy exactly yeah one thing i wanted to ask you about on your second point about the laws penalizing parents and giving them more of a hey there's some penalties here are there different states that are doing that now or there are states that are close to that or have they either yeah i think some of the states are all over the place on this. There are. There's a couple of dozen states that do have child access prevention laws. There are varying degrees of teeth in those laws. Some of them are really strict. Some of them are

not so much, but they all are backed by evidence that they actually make a difference. And I suspect a big part of that is just to signal to the parents that, hey, maybe you should do a little more research on this. Since the book came out, I've gotten a number of emails from gun owners who said, I read this chapter about this little boy who is a great kid who wasn't really even interested in guns, finding this Dan's gun and killing himself. They read that chapter and they went out and bought a gun safe because they had kids at home. And until they read that, they thought, I've told my kid not to play with that gun. He won't do it. It's just not true. It's a lie and it's a really fatal misconception.

You cannot educate a child out of making a bad decision with a gun. And teenagers are incredibly impulsive. There was this really compelling study in the book out of Texas where they had surveyed teenagers and young adults and said, how soon after you decided to take your own life did you actually attempt? A huge percentage, it was five minutes. Within five minutes of deciding I want to kill myself, they had actually attempted to kill themselves. If you have access to a gun, you're almost never going to survive. So that access makes a big difference. People want to be dismissive of suicide by gun and say, oh, people will kill themselves no matter what, even whether they have a gun or not. That is not

true. The availability of lethal means makes a huge difference. There was this one more study I'll mention that was to me, maybe the most compelling in the entire book. The best way to predict the rates of suicide in a state is not the number of kids who have previously attempted suicide. It is the proportion of homes in which there is a gun. That is the best way to predict the suicide rate in that state. It's just how many homes directly correlated. They're directly correlated. And the point is that it's just that access, right? It's that if you have access to a knife or a bottle of pills, both of which people typically survive versus a gun, which you typically never survive, that's going to impact that eventual suicide rate.

Yeah. So are most suicides done by gun? So I believe they are, including the adult population. I believe they are. And then very much skews male, female. So certainly the vast majority of men take their own lives with guns. A few women take their own lives with guns, unless actually they're in the military. Women in the military take their own lives with guns at a much higher rate,

which speaks to this whole other element that the more familiar, what's familiarity really? Is there comfortable with a firearm? It begs the question, is educating a child, making them more familiar with that weapon, if in fact they do eventually become depressed or their girlfriend breaks up with them or whatever the situation is, does that actually put them in more danger? That's something we should study. Yeah. And I know men tend to, I think the studies show this, men, when they decide to commit suicide, they go for it. And women tend, it tends to be more of a cry out. So there's like usually a test. They probably turn to like pills or something else. Yeah. I think there's

some truth to that. Definitely men survive suicide at a much lower rate and it's because they use gun. Yeah. If you're going to go, you're going to go. I've, I don't know, but you don't want to, you don't want to miss that shot or miss unless, unless I think you're asking for help. But it's interesting, the statistic you had that people that want to go in that really depressive state, they're, they're just feeling that bottom, sadly. If they can get access within five minutes, and if you could buy that time, it would make a difference in saving their lives and stuff. Yeah. I think it's nine in 10 people who have previously attempted suicide do not ultimately die by suicide. That is not how they

ultimately die. So the point is, if you can survive that suicide attempt, that's probably not how you're going to take your life or not how your life will end eventually. There is this big misconception that, oh, the gun in the home doesn't make you any more likely to die by suicide. And it's just not true. It makes you many times more likely to die by suicide. Would it help if you mentioned that a lot of people, education is kind of part of that. They read your book and stuff. Would it help if we force people? And force is, that's a word that's going to set people off. But we just basically said, look, if you're buying a gun, you've got to buy a box for the gun or a security for the gun.

Or at least if it's a handgun, maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I think that a pistol safe is really inexpensive. You can buy a really good pistol safe for 250 bucks. And the safest way to store a gun is locked and unloaded and you store the ammunition somewhere apart from the weapon. So if the kid does somehow get that weapon, they can't kill themselves. There is this counter argument that, oh, what if somebody breaks into my home? I won't be able to shoot them. Even though that happens far less often than that sort of part of the world would have us

believe. It is incredibly rare that somebody actually breaks into your home and you gun them down. But there is even a solution for that is you get a gun, get a pistol safe that is either fingerprint or you put three digits or four digits into it. And you're the only one who knows it. You can even theoretically keep a loaded gun right next to your bed. If you really think somebody is going to break into your house, that is so much more effective than putting the gun in a drawer. The Ava, so the example I often use is Ava Olson, little girl I write about in South Carolina. Now there's all these kids who went to this school who are deeply traumatized by this. The way that started was this 14-year-old who had all sorts of red flags in his past. He had brought a machete to school once. He'd been expelled. He'd made threats. He tortured animals.

This was a kid who very clearly was violent, prone to violence. And his dad kept a pistol right next to his bed. So what this 14-year-old did, he walked in, got the gun, walked downstairs, shot his father in the back of the head and killed him, and then drove to school and opened fire on the school. If he didn't have access to that gun, it wouldn't have happened. What he really wanted is his dad had a semi-automatic rifle. He had a version of an AR-15. That's the gun he really wanted. He tried to break into his dad's gun safe, believing it was there. He had put soap on the digits. He was doing all this sort of internet research on how do I break into a safe? The gun was not in the safe. It was in the closet. He walked right by it. He just didn't know.

This is somebody who the world might've heard about if he had just turned around and found the assault rifle in the closet, but he didn't. He only knew there was that handgun there. But again, if it hadn't been there, it wouldn't have happened. If he hadn't had access to that gun, it wouldn't have happened. More than half of the school shootings, I get into this in the book, more than half of the school shootings since Columbine would not have happened if kids did not have access to guns. That's a really compelling argument to just lock up the guns you have. Just don't let kids have access to guns. And we could cut school shootings in half, at least. Wow. That just sounded like a whole chill across my body. I'm just moved and stunned

because I just realized we're too many times looking at the compactness of a school shooting and you're like, kid got a gun and shot up a school. So the kid's the problem. And like you mentioned, clearly it's a parent problem i think sandy hook the the mother turned the the kid into a gun nut and he's like kid loves guns so give him more but yeah what a compelling addition to this story that you're telling because he could have wiped all those kids on the playground and god knows driving around what he did recently we saw that alabama shooter who shot up the Asian massage parlors. He was just going around to each one. And yeah, you think about how much it is. I don't have kids, but I've always had the belief that parents should

be prosecuted for what their kids did. And we have this weird thing. If they're under 18, then they don't, they're really not in control of their functions. And I don't know, it seems 12 is the new 18 these days, but what do I know? But the, it's really a concern about all of this. That's just chilling that he walked by that semiotic, semi-automatic weapon. He was trying, he was looking for that gun. Yeah. Yeah. What he wanted to be was a famous school shooter. He had looked up death totals, how many people others had killed. He was on all this internet. Oh yeah. He was obsessed. This was his bender. He was obsessed. He had researched at length. We had a list of favorite school shooters and was on these websites where they fantasized about school shootings. He Skyped this live. There was his chat group listened live to the school shooting. It was, he was streaming it at the time of the shooting. And you can hear them

in the background saying, I can't believe he went through with it. They're all chatting this in real time. Did you look at anything in your research as to why he was violent? Did his dad abuse him? Did he have abuse issues? Or was this kid just off the bed? The defense, his defense, he's since pleaded guilty to murder. And I think, as I recall, he's been sentenced to life now. But he, I think, life, 30 plus years, certainly. And his defense argued that he had been abused. That was not proven. His sibling had said that his dad was really rough on him.

And there were some accusations that his dad had some alcohol problems. But this was a kid who very much had seemed well-adjusted until he got into the middle school age. And then he suddenly became pretty violent. What triggered that? It's hard to say. He was obsessed with torturing animals and things like this. He had some real problems and clearly was a kid, clearly, who should not have had access to a gun. His parents knew he was a danger. They knew it. He'd been expelled. But the truth is that it doesn't take a kid who is that dangerous, clearly dangerous to say, oh, only that kid should we keep from firearms. The other example I talked about, Tyler Paxton, this 11-year-old from South

Carolina. He was a great kid. A's and B's, totally obedient. He was an only child. His parents adored him and he adored them. He wasn't really even that into guns. And he still got into his dad's gun safe and shot himself. We have this belief that, oh, that kid's not like my kid. It doesn't work that way. It can happen literally. I had a friend years ago who had a real, he listened a lot to Alex Jones. So he had a lot of paranoia. He would call me about chemtrails and stuff. And every three months there was, the country was going to go into some sort of, I don't know, Illuminati lockdown and stuff. And I'd just be like, okay, just call me in three months and let's see how that goes. Okay, buddy.

And stay off the radio. But I remember he was living in L.A. And he lived in a fairly nice neighborhood. I stayed there for a week. It was nice. I didn't feel in danger at all. But he had some sort of paranoia, narcissistic thing he went on about how I need to protect my family and my kids and this whole rap. And so he had guns purposely in every room in the house.

Because, I don't know, I guess he watched watched that what's that room thing where the panic room it's like way too many times or something and and and i asked him one time i go so where are all the guns he goes i don't know i forgot where half of them are i'm like what the hell he's yeah i hit him so the kids wouldn't find him and i'm like but now you can't find him maybe the kids have found him and these kids were babies so they they hadn't gotten to him yet but he couldn't remember where half of them were which was pointless and then like i mentioned earlier me and my brother my parents would hide every year they would buy all our christmas presents early we would always find where those were and then my dad had a pellet gun so it wasn't like a real gun but we were always playing with that thing we'd take it outside and play cops and

robbers. We, we, we point our head. We do all sorts of stuff. We point at each other. If that would have been a normal gun, we probably would have, somebody would have gotten shot.

I can guarantee you that we play with that thing all the time. And our parents never knew because we knew it was hidden and we play with them and they're gone. And then we put it back when they were back. And so if you're a parent out there who thinks that you're, you got this thing under control, you don't. Your kids are way smarter than you

and they know where everything is. We knew where everything was in our parents' home because we were bored. We're kids. We had nothing better to do. We're just like, let's go see what's in the closets. And so it's really interesting to me. Do we need to educate people more?

Or another, I'll ask you the next question after that. Yeah, so I think that's absolutely central to it. I think most gun owners in America want to be responsible. They don't want their kid to get their gun. They don't want their kid to make a bad choice. They don't want anybody to make a bad decision with their gun. I think that's true of the vast majority of gun owners. It's a matter of ignorance rather than negligence in most cases that they just don't know. A great example of the night that Tyler shot himself in South Carolina, there was the first

police officer who arrived, knew Tyler. This is a really small town. He knew him. He had been the school resource officer. And he walks in that room where his father is holding Tyler, trying to keep him alive. And right away, he knows that Tyler's not going to survive. And he had two children who were very similar in age to Tyler. And what this police officer had done for years, he would come home, he had his service belt with his gun on it, and he

would either just put it on the floor or maybe hang it on a hanger, on a hook. But he went out and bought a gun safe right after that. Because he if this kid, because he knew Tyler, he knew what a great kid he was. He knew how attentive his parents were. So what that was, it was just education. He wasn't a negligent police officer. He wasn't a negligent dad. He just didn't know any better. So I am absolutely convinced that if more gun owners simply knew that this is real, that your kid, you cannot trust your kid not to do a bad thing with a gun to

themselves or someone else, that they would do the responsible thing. I'm absolutely convinced of that. The vast majority of them would do that. Is there any research or research in your book or any forecasts of what a difference that would make if maybe we just got a rule that says, you buy a gun, you get a gun safe. It's a package deal. I do know that the Rand Corporation, it's a gun safe. It's all, it's a package deal. I do know that the RAND Corporation, it's a bipartisan group who looked at all the data. They looked at all the big sort of policies. And this was the one, child access prevention laws were the ones backed by the most research.

They were the ones that said definitively, this will make the biggest difference of all the laws, including things like assault weapons bans and even universal background checks. This was backed by more evidence than anything else. Like I said, what we would know for sure is things like school shootings. I know that because that's my own research, is that if kids didn't have access to guns, we would eliminate more than half of the school shootings in America overnight. If we could just ensure that, that if you're under 18, you can't get access to a weapon overnight, that would

drop by more than half. And that doesn't even count all of the Tylers of the world who, during the course of this conversation, a kid will find a gun, in all likelihood, in their home, shoot themselves or someone else, and hopefully no one dies. But almost certainly, because of how often that happens in this country, that'll occur at some point during our conversation. And I think I saw just a couple months ago, a mother was keeping a gun underneath her car seat or something like that for protection. And the two-year-old or three-year-old,

I think it was four or five, found her mom right through the seat. And you just hear stories like that and they're heartbreaking. And what's interesting about what we're talking about, and hopefully my audience gets this, is we wouldn't have to have this whole discussion of taking away the Second Amendment, eliminating guns. If we could get that amount of

reduction or more off of just getting these guns secured, we wouldn't have to have those discussions. It wouldn't be an issue. We'd just be like, Canada, I don't know if you did any research in Canada, but Canada, I think, has more guns per capita than we do. And some other countries do too, but they don't have the problems that we do. So maybe they're just better at storing their stuff. The regulations are certainly stricter. A lot of other countries that do have guns, they have, you have to be, get training with that firearm.

You have to, there's often waiting periods in other places where, you know, cause somebody in this country can go buy a gun and immediately kill themselves. If they had a cooling off period, maybe they wouldn't do that. Or maybe they wouldn't go home and kill their spouse, which happens all the time as well in these domestic violence situations. The cost is so immense. Ava, for example, she doesn't go to school anymore. And before the pandemic, she had to be pulled out of school. She's been diagnosed with really severe PTSD. She's on antidepressants and antipsychotics. She pulled her eyelashes out and would bang her head against the wall. This is a girl who was perfectly fine by all accounts before that day.

And it destroyed her life. And it's no different for Tyshawn, who's gone through immense amounts of anger. And that's why I spent so much of the book just telling these kids stories. These are remarkable kids too. They're brilliant and creative and loving. And they've, we have with this trauma because we've just decided this is acceptable in this country. Nowhere else in the world is that true. Just, we are the only developed country that deals with this kind of violence. And it's, it's just uniquely American. That is heartbreaking and tragic. These kids will go through that for their whole life. They'll carry that. Yeah, they will carry that weight.

The other thing, in addition to that, would it help if we had stronger mental health laws or mental health? You're talking about having laws that if parents don't get their guns better secured, they would be better off. Would it help if we had more penalties for, look, if the kid's got some issues, you're responsible for that. The kid who did the Florida shooting at the school, they knew that kid was off his rocker. Sandy Hook shit. They knew that kid was way before. That's just one of those things where maybe there should be a law that says, look, you get to do his jail time. I don't know. There is something similar to that. It's these red flag laws. And these are laws that say if a person appears to be a threat to themselves or someone else,

you can get a court order to take their guns away for some period of time. Those make a lot of sense in many ways. And I think a lot of gun owners agree with that. Somebody is really clearly depressed if they're threatening to kill their wife, if they're saying, I'm going to go shoot up that school. It's not permanent. It's a temporary thing until a medical professional can clear them to say, okay, this was a temporary episode. They're okay. Again, they can get their firearms back. The book is not, there is no call to end the second amendment. There is no, hey, we should strip people of their guns. There's no call for the banning of AR-15s. That's not what the book is. It is evidence-based and it is very much founded in four years of reporting,

really up close. And there's no one who can say that, oh, this is the kid's fault. You can't reasonably say that. You can't say that, oh, this is just how kids just live with it in this country because it's not an unfixable thing. We're not going to go from 41,000 plus dead from guns, which is what happened in 2020, the worst year in modern American history that most people don't know. We're not going to go from 41,000 plus to zero, but if we went from 41,000 to 30 or 25, that would be worth it. That's a lot of parents. That's a lot of kids. That's a huge difference. And we could get there in ways that would not deprive law abiding gun owners of their weapons. And it would just be great if everyone would get this or if the NRA would get behind this and be like, Hey man, we don't have to have these fights. Of course,

I think some of this plays into the political aspect of power and all that crap and parties. But no, I mean, like I said with my friend, he couldn't find half the guns he hid. And I remember telling him, I'm like, your kids will find them. Yeah, they will. They will. Just give them time. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So it's definitely tragic. So anything more you want to plug in the book before we go out? Yeah, I just, I would say one other aspect of school shootings that I think people are, have not come to grips with. And I devote several chapters to this is we think of school shootings pretty narrowly as the kids who get shot. We, that's really how we decide whether we're going to care or not. There was a school shooting earlier this week. One kid died. The cable news trucks didn't show up there because it wasn't seven or eight. But there's two parts of that that matter. One is I did a database post of how many kids have been on campus

during a school shooting since Columbine. So it's kids who have been exposed to gunfire on their campuses since Columbine. That number is about to hit 250,000 of kids who've been on campus. A meaningful number of those kids are still dealing with it, whether it was last week or 20 years ago. So again, it speaks to this idea that it's bigger than we think. And another point to illustrate that, we looked in one school year at how many kids had been through lockdowns, not lockdown drills, but the actual lockdown where the school said, there's a threat, we're going to lock down. Somewhere between four and 8 million kids went through a lockdown in one school year. The vast

majority of those were caused by guns. And a lot of those kids, many of those kids thought at least for a second that they were going to die in their school. Because they had seen Parkland. They had seen Sandy Hook. They knew that these things happened. So they're suddenly in a corner with the lights off and the door shut. And they're waiting for somebody to come in and shoot them. And we know that because kids were writing wills saying, this is who I want my toys to go through. This is saying goodbye to their parents, texting goodbye to their parents.

None of these kids are considered victims of gun violence. But they absolutely are. They absolutely are. So it's so much bigger than we think but it's not hopeless i think that's really the message of the book is that this is hard and it's devastating but it is not hopeless there are things that we could do now that would make a difference for these kids what's the way to get these politicians to we need to send them all your book but what's the matter i mean this is just we do we just need to get people to get on board with this or does the politicians ever going to get on board with this or is it just always going to be a muck up in washington with that i i think it's going to take the politicians deciding that it's politically advantageous to vote a different way i think that's it yeah but it's the advantageous to vote a different way. I think that's it. Yeah, but it's the people,

but also when they decide that the lobbies, the gun lobbies influence is not enough for them to vote the way they've always voted. Because the truth is that the Senate does not vote in line with their own constituents. 90% of Americans, again, support universal background checks. I can tell you 90% of the Senate does not support universal background checks. I can tell you 90% of the Senate does not support universal background checks. The vast majority of Americans, 70% plus, support these child access prevention laws. Again, the Senate doesn't vote that way. So people think that America is so divided on guns. We're not. Americans largely agree on the big things. There's a lot of smaller things, things like what an AR-15 is, what an assault rifle is. There's a lot more debate around that.

The big things most Americans actually agree on, it is the Senate and Capitol Hill that is split. It is not America. Once they start, but there is still this immense fear from the gun lobby. They have a great deal of fear. If you're somebody in North Dakota or South Carolina, and suddenly you're labeled a gun grabber, the chance that you're going to win that next election go down a lot. So that's the part that I think those folks are going to have to overcome. They say they're more afraid maybe of mom's demand than they are of the NRA. Yeah. It's just insane what we do in this country sometimes, but I love your arguments and your research and everything that's in the book. And I love that it's a great resource to just get some gun boxes people and save some stuff and keep your stuff in the thing i don't

know i don't have kids i have two dogs but like i said from my childhood i don't have experience to know what kids do yeah dumb do you have to be to be like yeah i'm sure they won't find the guns laying on the tv thing. Anyway, awesome stuff. It's been wonderful to have you on, John. This has been really insightful. And hopefully a lot of people will take your encouragement, read your encouragement with an open mind. I would love to get rid of the gun debate. And so if we can enact some of these laws just to try and prevent the deaths, maybe make a thing where you're spending a lot of money for guns. You spend a couple bucks or a hundred bucks, you get a box. Maybe there's some incentives or some tax breaks we can give to people.

If you buy a box with your gun, you get 50% off or something. You can write whatever. It's a good idea. And then, you know, then you get the vendors behind it and all that kind of crap. But that would be good. And then stopping that iron, what was the iron pipeline? The iron pipeline. Yeah.

That's crazy, man. Anyway, thank you for being on the show. Give us your plug so people can go out. Yeah. Again, the book is Children Under Fire, An American Crisis. I hope that people will read it. I think it could really make a difference. And if you want to follow me, I'm on Twitter at John Woodrow Cox. And thanks for spending some time with us and sharing this wonderful data. Yeah. Thank you for having me, Chris. This was great. Thank you, John.

Be sure to order up the book and follow him, Children Under Fire, An American Crisis, just came out on March 30th, 2021. John Woodrow Cox. And probably follow some of his articles at the Washington Post there as well. Thanks, my friends, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss. Get all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all that sort of good stuff,

and Clubhouse, and we'll see you guys next time.