The Dispatch Podcast - Guns in America

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

King of the gun beat and founder of The Reload Stephen Gutowski joins Sarah and Steve to talk about all things gun related on today’s episode. The topic of guns induces plenty of passion, and comes with plenty of stereotypes and myths. Stephen, Sarah, and Steve talk about all of that, plus gun culture in America, the politics of guns, the NRA, and more. Stick around to the end to hear what Stephen thinks action movies are getting things wrong about guns. Show Notes: -Subscribe to The Reload -Gun ownership rising -Gallup historical polling on guns -We’re out of ammo -Stephen’s piece for The Dispatch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Steve Hayes. And this week, we are talking to Steven Gattowski. He is the founder of The Reload. This is a great publication that y'all should consider subscribing to. Basically, Stephen has created this dedicated reporting just to discuss the nuances of big gun stories as well as shed light on underreported aspects of gun ownership in America. We're going to talk today about the culture of gun ownership the politics of gun ownership, the NRA, gun control, actions on the Hill, and everything in between. I mean, it's really like a cultural touch point, right? It's something that millions, really hundreds of millions of Americans value dearly as part of their not just political identity, but their identity as an American.

And then on the other side, you have a lot of people who've been affected, obviously, by, you know, gun crime and view guns very negatively for... oftentimes legitimate reasons. And those two opposing points of view are at loggerheads constantly in the United States. And it leaves very little room for any sorts of compromise, I suppose, as you've seen really for the last 30 years in the United States. But it's really a fascinating topic. And I think for me, one of the big things about guns that just doesn't get a lot of coverage is really gun culture. You get a lot of coverage of gun crime in major media, but you don't get a lot of coverage of the people who own guns and why they own them and what they use them for. And that's changing fairly rapidly over the last 10 years and especially over the last year.

And that's what I really founded the reload to look into. is that dynamic in how things are different now. Yeah, so how has that changed over the last 10 years? Yeah, well, effectively, I think a lot of people have this picture of gun owners as, you know, rural white men who like to go hunting. And while certainly that is a gun owning demographic, I don't think it's the predominant one anymore. You've seen gun ownership become more diversified. gun owners become more suburban than rural. You've seen them become younger. You've seen more women

become gun owners. You've seen more minorities become gun owners. In fact, the fastest growing section of America to buy guns for the first time last year were African Americans. And you've seen all these demographics represented in new activists as well, breaking onto the scene in the political world. And it's really changing, I think, gun politics in ways that people don't grasp yet and that we aren't fully going to realize for probably another decade or two. What accounts for this explosion in gun ownership over the past couple of years? I mean, you know, I would think, you know, Second Amendment enthusiasts would say, look, this is really sort of an explosion of freedom.

This is people who have realized that they want to either use it for hobbies or they want to protect their families, what have you. There's a pretty negative interpretation, too, which is more Americans are scared of more other Americans and felt like they need to get guns. Yeah, well, I mean, it's certainly a mix of both, but I would say that over the last year, especially with all the chaos we've seen from the pandemic and the police brutality and the protests and the rioting

that most gun buying was probably driven by concerns over that, very real concerns, right? You had meat shortages here in the United States. You had prisoner releases that were very controversial. You had a lot of people died, obviously, over the last year, which really destabilized society. And I think that's something that perhaps peeled back the veneer of like civilization a little bit for a lot of people. You know, you start, you see what happened over the last year with lockdowns that I don't think anyone ever expected could even happen in America, right? Even if, even if they supported them. And you look at the, when the grocery

stores started running out of eggs and meat and toilet paper and everything, and people, I think, imagined what could come if things got worse. And they wanted to protect themselves and their loved ones, which is a natural impulse in those situations. And then at the same time, for a lot of minorities in America, you saw the issue of police brutality in full view. again, right, with George Floyd's killing. And that brought out a lot of justified concerns among those communities that they need to, you know, protect themselves, essentially. And the same thing occurred with Asian Americans in America who bore the brunt of racist

blame for the pandemic and were subject to a much higher rate of hate crimes than, normal and a lot of them decided that they wanted to start taking, I guess, self-protection into their own hands by buying a gun. And you sort of had a perfect storm of motivation to purchase a gun across a diverse swath of Americans. And at the same time, you had the age-old reason for gun sales spikes, which is politics, came into play with the 2020 election because you had Joe Biden run on an extremely aggressive gun control platform, probably the most aggressive in American history, to be honest. You know, he didn't just want to ban the sale of guns like the AR-15,

which is the most popular rifle in the country, but he wanted to, in fact, require all the current owners to register them under pain of felony, a federal felony. So, you know, and he won. So you had a lot of people buy for that reason as well, for political reasons, which is usually what's driven big spikes in gun sales in the past. So you had all of these reasons coming together all at once. So I'm one of these first time gun owners, bought a gun a year and a half ago or so. And the big challenge I have faced is I have this really nice gun and I can't get ammo for it.

And I have some, just in case anybody's thinking of robbing my house. I do have some, but I can't get much. I mean, it's really hard to get 9mm ammo. It's hard to get other kinds of ammo. Do you expect, you had a piece about this at the reload.com this past week talking about just how short we are of ammo broadly. Do you expect that to catch up? And what's the cause? Is it just that so many more people have guns?

Well, it's a combination of two things. One, the main cause is that just so many more people have guns. I talked to the head of one of the major ammo makers in the country about this, Jason Hornady, and he described it as though, you know, what would happen if the NFL suddenly had eight or nine million more people who wanted to go to football games? What would they do, right? They'd have to build new stadiums. and that would take years. And that's exactly what you've seen in the ammo industry.

You have all these new gun owners like yourself who not only want to have a gun, but they want to be able to shoot it, right? They want to be able to practice with it. And most people who own guns want to be able to have a small stockpile. Maybe not 50,000 rounds, but you might want to have 500 to 1,000 rounds on hand just in case you have a shortage like that, like exactly what we're experiencing now. So you have all these new people coming in to buy it, ammo. And then you also have people who've turned into essentially ammo hoarders or stockpilers.

You have a lot more of those now from what people in the industry told me in that piece. People don't want to buy just one box anymore. They want to buy a whole case now. And that's choking off supply as well. So you're seeing increased demand in the form of new owners and increased demand in the form of current owners becoming stockpilers, basically hoarders. And you can sort of understand why someone would do that. You've seen this same impulse across all kinds of products over the last year, right?

With toilet paper, obviously, computer parts have gone under a huge shortage. Because the gas shortage, right, that was largely driven by panic buying, even more so than the pipeline shutting down for a week. And then you also have the issue of supply of basic materials to make ammunition is becoming more scarce, like you've seen with construction materials or computer parts. They've all had issues with shortages based on the raw materials being more expensive and more difficult to get. And even shipping, things like shipping or cardboard.

There's a cardboard shortage. And that all goes into effect the ammo supply. And unfortunately, it probably will get better eventually. But the timetable we're talking about is like two years before you're going to see normal supply of ammo at the gun store where you can just walk in and walk out with as much 9mm or 2,23 or, you know, 45 that you want at normal prices. So at some point, gun ownership culturally became associated with this idea of freedom. And I think for a lot of people, they take that for granted. Like, well, of course it does.

It's sort of, it's self-explanatory. Just to be clear, I grew up in Forpin County, Texas, before other people lived there, very rural part of East Texas, lived on the end of a mile-long dirt road. We had a gun in my house to pick off armadillos out of my mom's Azalea bushes. So I grew up very much with a gun in the house. In fact, it's how I found out that Santa Claus didn't exist because my presence were kept with the gun. And so I wasn't allowed into that place. But then, of course, I went and that's when I found the presence. So I say all this, like culturally, I get it. But when the mask wars happened, all of a sudden I had this

moment where I stepped back and said, maybe it's not so obvious that it was always going to be guns. in the way that, like, now it's mass that represent freedom culturally for a lot of people. And I'm wondering if there's a point in history, you know, we think of the Wild West as this period that lasted for like 100 years when, in fact, it's like sort of a 10-year period, you know, in the 1880s. Between the 1880s and let's call it the 1980s, when did guns attain this cultural guns equal freedom status that now we kind of take for granted? Well, I mean, honestly, I would think that that basic idea goes back to, in America, at least, to the founding era, right?

Because the whole concept of the Second Amendment really is about armed populace being able to throw off the tyrannical governments, you know, as the founders. did with with great britain um and so like for in america i think it has very deep roots in terms of what guns represent to americans other parts of the country i mean uh other parts of the world uh you you would have a very different connotation for what a gun represents um in fact that's been an issue with uh asian americans um from what chris chang uh who He was a prominent Asian-American gun rights activist told me in a piece that I did on a new Asian-American gun owners group. You know, in certain parts of Asia, guns are not at all associated with freedom or the rights of the people.

They're associated with oppression from, you know, government forces from police or military. And so I think we have a unique tradition here in the United States that views gun ownership as or, you know, an armed populace as a philosophical bulwark against tyranny. And that's not necessarily something that other cultures around the world view guns as. They don't view that in the same way. And then, I mean, I think your question maybe is more, more. about like how do guns become a cultural touch point in conservative America, right? More so than like just generally because certainly I think over the last several decades guns have come to mean gun ownership has come to mean something very specific

to a certain subset of you know conservative Republicans and you can see this in how the NRA has sort of evolved over the years and their messaging to appeal to us their what they view as their like core audience perhaps at the expense of other constituencies right and yeah i mean i think politically in america since you know the 1980s uh 90s um that it has become a much more partisan uh issue where uh certain uh subset of Republican Party views gun ownership as like a cultural signaller that they are, you know, conservative, that it's a sort of identity signifier, right? And that I think has only gotten stronger with the party realignments that we've seen of the last 30 years and the way

that the two parties have polarized on guns. You've seen, a move from, I would even say that it's even more present on the Democratic side. You've really seen them move from since the 1990s when Al Gore, part of his loss was blamed on his position, you know, being too far out on gun control. Then the Democrats sort of made it a backburner issue for several decades. And then now in recent years, since the Obama administration, they've really begun to push back into a more restrictive mindset on gun control. They want more gun laws now, and they're more vocal about it.

They've made it a bigger issue than it used to be for the party. And as that's happened, as there are fewer Democrats who are pro-gun and there are fewer Republicans who are pro-gun control, it's become a wedge, you know, obviously a wedge issue and it's become something that is used to signal that you have a certain set of beliefs more than just that you like to hunt or you want to defend your family or yourself. Now, like I said, over the last decade or a couple of years here, especially, I think general gun ownership is becoming more diverse. And so you have a lot of people who own guns that don't fit that sort of conservative

of Republican framework, but certainly there is an identity politics aspect to gun ownership in the Republican Party, for sure. It feels to me like the power, the altitude of the NRA has been declining since the Heller decision that found an individual right to bear arms at the Supreme Court and then was incorporated in McDonald. there's some sort of internecine culture or conservative legal culture stuff of why I think that hurt the NRA.

But I think there's been a more precipitous decline even more recently than that. A, do you agree that the NRA is no longer sort of the power broker that it was and B, what effect has that had on gun culture in the United States? Those are really good questions, right? Well, I mean, for one, when a, you know, political interest groups are always in kind of a funny position, right?

Because if they accomplish their goals, they become less relevant and less powerful in a certain way. Although, you know, I don't necessarily agree that Heller was the BL endoffer for like, you know, the gun rights litigation movement because it really was sort of the beginning, I would say. It's like the baseline was established there with Heller. The very lowest level thing that the Second Amendment could possibly mean, if it means anything at all, is that you can keep commonly owned firearms like handguns in your own home for self-defense. That's basically what Heller established, right? Fun side note for non-advisory opinion listeners.

I did a whole segment on our episode about how I camped out in front of the Supreme Court through the night to hear the Heller arguments. It was raining. It was very cold. and I finally, I made it in, I got a seat. I had set up a whole government outside in the line sitters to then finally got inside, and it was so warm and cozy, and I was so tired, and I fell asleep.

Classic. Sorry to interrupt. Please continue. No, that's fantastic. Yeah, but so, you know, Heller really just established a sort of baseline, and there's still a lot, even 10 years later, uh or what is it's almost 13 years now i think um that there's still a lot that the gun rights movement wants to accomplish in the courts and the supreme court has really been completely absent from that in that uh during that time period and that they're getting back into it

literally right now with a new case on gun carry because they haven't addressed at all what the right to bear arms the bear arms part of the second amendment means uh whatsoever so uh you know i i I think there's still a long way to go. And really, the NRA wasn't the one who drove Heller anyway. The NRA is the biggest group by far. They have five million dues paying members, which is a really important point. People pay them money to be an NRA member, which is very different from every town or Mom's Demand Action.

They say they have five million members. They just mean like newsletter signups, which is very different. That's where the NRA's power comes from is how many members they have. But, you know, I don't think that they have lost their cachet necessarily, at least not until very recently where they've started to see declines over their corruption scandal that they're currently going through. I think that's had a bigger effect on the NRA's power, both on the Hill in D.C. and, you know, with the membership even. Although I will say that, like, my view on like the NRA long-term issues is that the biggest problem they have besides the immediate threat of being dissolved by the New York Attorney General, which is obviously pretty big threat. And they just tried to, it's big enough that they tried to file bankruptcy to avoid it and then failed to do that. So not a great sign for what's going to happen in that case.

If you ignore that part, I guess, which is hard to do, certainly. But the bigger issue is that they first announced having 5 million members in 2013. That's eight years ago. And in the bankruptcy court, Wayne LaPierre said they had 4.89 million dues paying members, which means they haven't grown their membership at all. In fact, it's slightly regressed in eight years. And that's not good. As you could imagine, they're still very big and powerful, much bigger than anyone else out there.

And they do legitimately do a lot of things. You could not replace the NRA overnight if they went away. You couldn't do it. You could eventually probably replicate what they do among multiple different groups, but it would be a while before you could catch up to everything that the NRA actually does because they do real significant work. I mean, they're still passing, you know, gun carry laws as we speak. Texas just became permitless carry in large part because of the NRA's efforts.

So not exclusively then. I think there's often a, you know, they overplay how important their power is like a lot of groups do. And so does the left. And then you have people on the right who criticize them and wildly underplay their importance. But either way, I think they've gotten less powerful very recently because of the corruption scandal, but are still formidable and will be.

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So let's dwell on that for a minute. This was one of the reasons I was excited to get you on. You've been covering this corruption scandal, these bankruptcy filings, and you know this stuff, I think, as well as anybody. So we thought we would take this opportunity to get something of an explainer from you. Let's say that you are a passive news consumer and you're not that interested in the day-to-day of the NRA. And you didn't follow this whole episode in great detail. How would you tell people what's just happened? We see the NRA in our headlines.

We see corruption. We see bankruptcy possibilities. We know that New York State is going after them for what. whatever reason. What's just happened with the NRA? Yeah. So the basic is the basic roundup is that the NRA, NRA leadership like Wayne, including Wayne LaPierre, is accused of essentially diverting NRA members money to pay for their own personal expenses over decades to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. That's the accusation from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who's a Democrat and also a very public opponent of the NRA,

called them a terrorist organization when she was running for AG. But that's the accusation, right? And they're in New York state court because that's where the NRA was founded back just after the Civil War. And that's where their charter is. So the New York AG has purview over their status as a nonprofit. And they filed, the NRA actually filed bankruptcy. And they didn't do it because they're out of money.

They have more assets than they have debts, right? So they're not insolvent by any means at this point. But they were worried about Letitia James' goal of dissolving them. That's what she wants. She wants this very radical thing, frankly, because this is not really something that's ever happened to a group like the NRA ever in the United States. And you can see, obviously, the political problems of a politician

shutting down one of her political opponents, even if there is corruption involved at the organization. That's a very big reach. The Teamsters, for instance, were not shut down, even though they were literally run by the mob, right? We didn't shut them down. They were reformed and placed under oversight from the federal government, but they weren't shut down.

Anyway, that's the danger. that they're trying to avoid by filing bankruptcy. Now, this was a, it was called a Hail Mary move by a lot of bankruptcy experts. And the goal was to try and basically litigate the case in federal court, or at least get federal bankruptcy court to prevent Letitia James from being able to dissolve them. They wanted the bankruptcy court to protect their assets and then potentially to move those assets from the New York entity to a new Texas entity. but they spent $22 million, I believe over $22 million on this effort, and it failed.

It got dismissed by the judge. They didn't even make it into actual proceedings of the case. It got dismissed before they got that far. So they're back to square one with that, and now they have to go back to New York court to try and fight there against James in the case that they clearly. didn't have high hopes for because they literally filed bankruptcy to avoid it. So that's where it's at right now. You know, there also were some dissident board members who tried to wrestle control away from Wayne LaPierre during the bankruptcy trial by getting a court-appointed, basically,

auditor, and then creating a members committee to take over. But that just failed as well. they wanted to appeal the decision, but they couldn't raise enough money to do it. It's a very small percentage of the number of people on the board. The NRA has a 76 member board in case you weren't aware, which is huge compared to almost every other, you know, nonprofit or corporation out there. But yeah, so they're in serious trouble. Some of these problems kind of burst into public. I think, you know, the kind of thing that if you worked in Washington,

You were familiar with the NRA generally. It's long been understood that there's some, shall we say, shady spending going on, questionable spending going on. And then you had these very public accusations from Oliver North back in 2019, where he made direct accusations of tremendous amounts of misspending. And then in this bankruptcy, I mean, these bankruptcy proceedings, they had to admit to a lot of stuff that's like sort of mind-blowing, right? Yes, that's true. There's several more layers to this, including what Oliver Norse motivations were for why he did that, because he worked for one of the NRA's former top outside contractors, Ackerman McQueen, which is the one, that's the group where basically LaPierre and others are accused of essentially running NRA money through this group to pay for their own personal expenses so that, you know, more or less so they don't show. up on the NRA books, basically, and instead they get billed as Ackerman payments, which aren't, they're not itemized. It's been a big issue. But they had a falling out in 2019, which led

to this whole internal fight between Oliver North, who was president at the time, and Wain-Aa-Pierre, who was the CEO. But yeah, they have admitted quite a lot of corrupt things in court, essentially. I mean, for instance, Wayne LaPierre himself, now he had already, this had already been filed on their 990, but essentially he admitted to diverting $300,000 worth of NRA money for private flights that aren't reimbursable under the NRA's internal policies. they called it excess benefits is what they the term that they're used for it and he wasn't

punished in any way for that he just had to pay back the money and additionally his long-time assistant Millie Hallow who had previously been pled guilty to a felony for taking tens of thousands of dollars from a D.C. Art Commission that she worked for in, I believe, the 1980s. She pled guilty to that. Then later was hired by the NRA. And then the NRA admitted on their 990 and in court that she had again diverted tens of thousands of dollars from the NRA to pay for her son's wedding and other personal expenses. She was also not punished in any discipline in any way for this other than being made to pay back the money and she still works there as well so it's obviously wayne la pierre but that's two examples of some things that came out

in court i mean there's quite a lot more i mean law pierre didn't uh also didn't tell the board of directors uh before filing for bankruptcy that was a major point in this case uh he didn't tell anyone really he didn't tell the board of directors he didn't tell the the nera's lawyer he didn't tell the CTO there's maybe you just forgot the chief financial yeah

well he said in court he was worried about leaks yeah this is actually one of the one of the big reasons why they got dismissed which is kind of odd because like the board

the board is not does not have any distance there's no distance between the board and Wayne Lampier on any of the stuff right outside of these four board members who you know tried to take control the organization

through the bankruptcy court. The board, despite not being told ahead of time about the group going into bankruptcy, came back several weeks later and voted to approve the bankruptcy anyway and authorized them to go into bankruptcy again if this bankruptcy didn't work. So, of course, there's a lot of problems at the NRA board that only they had two emergency meetings on the bankruptcy, right? The group is in bankruptcy, right? They had emergency meetings, and only 60% of the board actually showed up to those meetings.

40% just didn't even come. So, bottom line question for you, what are the long-term implications for the NRA on this? I mean, you've talked about how powerful the NRA has been, how it's been effective in pushing legislation, both the federal and the state level, and serves as this clearinghouse for 5 million NRA members. If I were an NRA member, I'd be pretty peeved about this. I'm paying these membership dues, and I'm reading about, you know, Wayne LaPierre's annual Caribbean yacht trips. Yes, that's another real thing.

I mean, I would be pretty angry, and I would think that this might take that stagnating membership level, you know, at 4.8 million, and lead to further reductions. Is that happening when you talk to NRA members around the country? Are they frustrated by this or not really? Yes. I mean, I think that members that I hear from are all universally opposed to Wayne LaPierre and to say that they will not give any money to the NRA as long as he remains in his position.

And that's basically the only thing I ever hear about the NRA from NRA. from gun rights activists and former members, or even life member, you know, current life members. And I do think that that probably does have a significant impact on their membership rates. However, one thing to keep in mind is that the NRA is, you know, the main opposition, or at least publicly, especially in media, the main opposition to what Joe Biden wants to do on gun control. And so that's how they're presented. They still have that position legitimately as the biggest gun group in the country. And so they will benefit certainly from just the effect of being the default place to go if you don't like what Joe Biden is trying to do on guns, which a lot of people don't. In fact,

it's one of his worst performing issues for the president. So, uh, I don't think that they're going to, like, suddenly drop to, you know, three million members where they're not going to lose millions and millions of members over there. So they really already would have, I would imagine, at this point, if that was going to happen. So I think long term, the most likely outcome for the NRA is that they'll carry on the way they are now for another couple of years while they fight this New York case. And then they will probably lose that case. you know you never know what could happen obviously in in legal cases but to me you know if you're trying to file bankruptcy to avoid a legal prosecution in a state you probably don't have a good

expectation that you're going to win there so um they'll probably lose i don't think that they'll be dissolved just because it's such a high bar and it's so politically charged to do that um like legitimately, it would be concerning on a fundamental level if Letitia James, who is openly, politically opposed to the NRA, fiercely so, was able to shut them down completely, even if their leadership did do all the things she claims they did, right? And some of which they've already admitted to doing. But I think instead you'll probably see the leadership be removed. and you'll see fines imposed and maybe some sort of, you know, restructuring plan put in place. Of course, the NRA could go back to bankruptcy court again.

It's sort of, they might have, it might come down to deciding between Wayne LaPierre and the future of the organization for the board members. because the problem with going back to bankruptcy court is the judge effectively said that if they did, he's likely to appoint a trustee, which would displace LaPierre and the other leadership. So they could do that once they get closer to like a verdict that threatens their assets, but it would probably come with a high price as far as their leadership goes. So the talking point from the left for 20 years, I guess, has been that Republican candidates are bought and paid for by the NRA. And so as we talk about how the NRA is, if nothing else is distracted

at the moment, I'm curious what the political effect of that is. And some of what I hear from you is that actually it probably will have no effect on the Republican Party stance on gun control, on gun owner's support for the Republican Party. So I guess then the real question is, did the NRA ever matter? Yeah, right? This is a good question, I think, because I think it's true that there's a reason,

you know, the NRA has had all these struggles over the last several years, but we haven't seen a huge increase in gun control laws. There's been no new gun control passed at the federal level. And so if this idea that the only thing stopping, you know, gun control laws from being passed in America is that the NRA buys literally, you know, senators and congressmen, if that were true, and you hear that a lot from people on the left, then we would have a lot of new gun control

right now because the NRA's finances are not in good standing. Like they spent, I think, about half in 2020, they spent about half of what they did in 2016 on the presidential election so that they don't have the same kind of spending power. But the thing about it is, like, that was never what made them power for. to begin with anyway. It's not insignificant. It's not nothing. But they aren't, you know, anywhere near the top spenders in federal elections. And instead, it's, it really is that membership and the ability to get those members out to perform activism and then also to vote, you know, ultimately. And, but the, you know, the thing about that is, yes, they're huge in terms of a political organization,

because they have 5 million members. But there's like 120 million Americans who report having a gun in their home. So clearly they haven't captured the best swath of gun owners in America. There's many more people who are not NRA members who care about their gun rights and even vote based off of them.

And that's what really makes gun, owners in America a powerful constituency. It's not the NRA specific brand or the NRA's specific money. I don't think they're meaningless. I think that if it went away tomorrow, it would be difficult time for the gun rights movement for several years before the kind of infrastructure that the NRA provides could be reestablished. There's no other group out there that does, that has like a national state level um lobbying arm like they're oftentimes the ones who who help uh push bills through in state houses they might not be the biggest state biggest group in the state on you know the the state level there's a lot of state based groups but they they are a very

significant one everywhere throughout the country and um and then on the hill they're really the most effective gun rights lobbying organization by far. There really is, like, you know, the gun industry has the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which does lobbying on the hill, and they're significant. You have Gunners of America does some lobbying, but I'll give you an example of, you know, if you compare Gunners of America to the NRA, right? Gunners America started doing a lot more legal work that they've had some legitimate wins there in recent years. But there was a bill called Fix Nix back in 2017, that increased funding for the FBI background check system to get more records in there because Sutherland Springs church shooting, that guy was prohibited, but his records were never shared with the background check system.

So he was able to pass a background check and buy a gun. So Congress fixed this or tried to fix. it by, you know, passing this bill and GOA opposed the bill while the NRA and MSSF and others supported it. And the bill passed overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis with about a dozen House GOP members voting against it. So it gives you some sort of indication, I think, on the relative power of the two organizations on the Hill. Like, there's not that many people who would listened to GOA over the NRA at this point in Congress. And there just isn't anyone else set up to replicate what the NRA does.

So it's kind of, I guess, maybe a long way of saying it's kind of a mixed bag. Like they're not the be all and end all, but they're also not nothing. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door. Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision. No.

And you set up credit card transaction alerts at secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web. I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. So speaking of the Hill, you have an ATF nominee who favors restrictions on AR-15s. So at the federal level, the Biden administration, pursuing various gun control measures.

At the state level, you have Texas about to allow what's called constitutional carry, meaning someone can carry a handgun without a license, background check, training, etc. Where is gun control going in the next year or two in your mind? Anywhere? Nowhere? Great question. I think on the hill in Congress, going nowhere. Shipman's nomination is probably going to be the, if he gets through, which it's not clear he will. I mean, Biden is literally trying to put an actual gun rights, gun control activist. He literally works for Giffords, the gun control group right now and has

worked for a bunch of other gun control groups over the last 10 years. He's trying to make him the head of the agency that regulates the firearms industry, which is a pretty, bold step, I guess you could say. And his positions are pretty far out of line with what most moderate senators actually support. Basically, none of them, you know, Tester, Mansion, cinema. On the Democratic side. Well, on either side, to me, Collins, Murkowski, who are people who might vote for Biden, you know, nominees. And, yeah, because a lot of Republicans will just vote no on most Biden nominees with the sort of become the thing for each party at this point. But they're all pretty far, like none of them support an assolvance ban and none of them

certainly none of them support trying to force every current owner to register their guns with the ATF. But so it's a big risk putting him up there, but he could, he could, he has a real chance of being confirmed, I would say at this point. And that would probably be the biggest thing to make it through Congress on gun control at this point. I don't think there's going to be any sort of compromised background check bill that actually gets to 60 votes. They're not even going to try to pass an assault open's ban through the House, let alone the Senate at this point. They didn't even try that last year when they had a bigger majority. So I don't think you're going to see much on the federal level outside the Supreme Court.

You could see movement there, for sure, on their gun carry case. But then at the state level, I mean, I think you're probably more likely to see more gun rights bills than gun control bills at this point. Like, permitless carry is the most popular gun policy of the last decade. In 2010, there were two states. that had permits list carry and then now today in 2021 there are 21 states that have permitless carry and Texas is the biggest state to adopt it and which will probably lead to more states doing so now these are all you know red states of course and you might see a few more states pass red flag laws but I think

you're kind of tapped out on the states that are willing to do that based on the makeup of state legislatures at this point because those are those have really only passed in in blue states. So you're sort of, and there is obviously a same sort of limit with permanent carry. At some point, you run out of states that are willing to consider this because guns generally and all gun policies, frankly,

have become so polarized and the debate over them has become so stagnated that you really aren't going to see permitless carry pass in, you know, New York or Maryland or even Virginia, and you're not going to see a red flag law pass in, you know, Oklahoma or, or, you know, Alabama or wherever else. So we might be reaching a point where there isn't a lot more of the trendy gun laws. There's not a lot more space for them to pass in the remaining states that don't already have them.

if we're thinking about the polarization that you just mentioned um you know we talked earlier about how you've had you know suburban folks buying guns maybe pushing them closer to the republican side of the polarization issue and you've i think seen others who might have been at least sympathetic to second amendment issues or freedom arguments in terms of gun ownership push the other way with the numbers of mass shootings we've seen. There was a shooting in San Jose two days ago that's gotten a lot of coverage. Has there been an increase in the number of mass shootings over the past five years, or has it just gotten more attention from the media, given what we've seen?

It's a good question. It's a good question that I would have done. There's so much I want to say on two points there. The first one is just directly on your question about mass shootings. There have been an increase in mass shootings, even by what I would consider the proper definition of them, which is like what Mother Jones uses in their database, which is essentially three or more people killed at one time in a public random shooting.

Because the big issue we've had with mass shootings in the media lately, There's a couple, but the big one, to me, is that they basically, a few years ago, just changed what mass shooting means. It used, you know, there's really, there's no official definition of it from the, you know, FBI or anything like that. There is a definition of mass murder, which is where the mass shooting term originated from, which is three or more killed it in one event. And that's what was used for a long time. But then back in, I believe, it was 2015, some gun rights activists decided that that was not good enough definition. And they changed to three or more shot, which, as you might imagine, wildly increases the number of incidents that are called mass shootings. It really does by like tenfold.

That's when you started to hear, like, oh, there's more mass shootings than, you know, you get a mass shooting per day or there's more than one mass shooting per day in America. That's because they changed how they count. of them. And so that's what mostly the media uses now, even though I think it's extremely misleading because the vast majority of those incidents aren't anything like you know, you're a Parkland or

a Las Vegas or even the San Jose shooting, right? And you also, I would also argue that the most media outlets don't really buy that definition because they still only do wall-to-wall coverage of the old style,

you know, the three or more killed at a time events. They don't cover every, they don't cover most shootings in America. That's another point I wanted to make too. It's like, the media is only concerned about mass shootings, which is, which wildly distorts actual gun violence in America because if you, and this last year has been, you know, a fantastic example of this or a perfect example of it, because we had essentially no public mass shootings during the lockdown period, during the pandemic from about March through January of this year,

we essentially did not have any of these major mass shootings until the one in Atlanta after things had started to open back up again. And obviously it's not a good solution to the problem because it came because there were no crowds and no one was allowed, you know, to gather close together. But it did show, to some degree, the issue with media coverage of mass shootings, because since there were no mass shootings, there really wasn't much coverage of gun violence at all in media. Now, obviously, there were certainly other things going on that were very important to cover at the same time. But I think most people don't realize that 2020, there was a huge spike in murders in the United States. Gun murder was up significantly over the previous five years. And that's continued into 2021, but you don't see coverage of your everyday, like, you know,

regular gang murders or domestic violence murders. They don't get the kind of coverage that mass shootings get. That's just the reality of how it works. And I think then trying to take those kinds of shootings, which make up most of gun murders in the United States, mass shootings are responsible for a very small number of actual. murders in the United States is shocking and horrific as they are and hard to understand. And, you know, you can see why people obviously are interested in them because of all the factors that go on.

You can't, people can't relate to why someone want to do that, obviously, as much as they could understand the motivations behind, you know, a gang murder or something. And so I can understand the interest. But it paints a very misleading picture when you try and conflate all the San Jose's and lost Vegas and Parkland shootings with, you know, a gang murder in Chicago or, or anywhere else. And these crimes have different motivations and different solutions. And so there's really not much value in lumping them together the way that the media does now other than trying to imply to people that something like Las Vegas happens three

times a day in the United States. And it doesn't. And then on the other point that I had about it, what you said is this sort of, are we just stuck in like a polarized nature of guns in America forever? Is there going to be something that can move away from the stagnation we've seen on the issue over the last 30 years? And I do think that there is. And this was part of what I wrote about for the dispatch, right? Is there this new breed of gun owner that's come up and this new demographic of gun ownership in America, all the people who aren't necessarily traditionally associated with being conservative Republicans, a lot more of those people are buying guns now, right? A lot more minorities, younger people, people from more urban and suburban areas.

And I think that is what could change the gun debate over time more than anything else. Because as those people become, you know, gun owners, you already see in polling that people who are gun owners are less likely to support gun control measures across the board, right? Not that they necessarily become immediately opposed to everything or the numbers go back in the favor of what, you know, the NRA might want or whatever. but they're less likely to support it. So you already have that change by the nature of owning a gun in and of itself. And then some percentage of people who own guns become gun rights activists or become gun voters as well, right? And then some percentage of those people become activists. And how big those percentages are will have a big, a long-term effect on the gun debate.

And I think it's going to take several years for that transition to happen for a lot. of these people. You've seen it with some people like Scott Kane from Asian American Pacific Islander gun owners and John Keyes from Guns Out TV, who I wrote about for the dispatch. But I think it'll be a while for the rest of them to develop. And I don't necessarily think that they're going to just become, you know, party-line Republicans, right? I don't think that's the natural transit. Some of them will. Some of them might already be there or were before they bought a gun. But I think what will be more interesting to watch is how these types of new owners from different demographics affect the Democratic Party on this issue. Like, will they in the long term force

Democrats back to closer to the center on guns? Because I think there's probably a decent path for a lot of Democratic candidates to appeal to people who have been put off by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but who also value gun rights and are put off by Democrats' positions on those things on that issue. And so I think if those people do develop into gun rights activists, they might not give up their opposition to the Republican Party, but they might force Democratic Party into offering more candidates that they can support if they want to, you know, win elections. So that's really where I see the potential for long-term change in the American gun debate.

All right. Last question. What movie actor would you say most annoys you on screen in terms of the way they hold or fire a gun? most of them right it's hard it's hard when you know like about this is probably true for a lot of things right if you know a lot about a subject and then you watch a movie that deals with it it can get very annoying because just so much especially with guns in in like Hollywood. There's just so much stupidity that goes on all the time. I mean, at least 50% are firing with one hand while trying to aim. That feels weird. Yeah, a lot of them will... I will say that I think John Wick has kind of gotten a lot of the action movies to start, like, trying to emulate, like, competitive shooters or military

shooters. And so at least they look oftentimes in the way they hold the guns, like they're competent. But the problem for me more comes with like how bullets work in a lot of these universes where it's just like, what do you do? Like none of this makes any sense. Like you're just getting shot 15 times and being fine or like if you stand behind a wooden door, you know, you can't be hurt by bullets being shot through. It's just a lot of nonsense that goes on. And then especially for me, because, you know, my background writing about gun law and politics, like a lot of the, anytime they talk about anything with gun laws, it's almost

always wrong. And it can take you out of it because I'll give you an example, mayor of Easttown, which is great, right? It's about my, my, no spoilers, where I'm from. uh it's about where i'm from in pennsylvania delaware county um and uh but there's a scene in there and you know it's this well done like gritty crime drama uh that follows a detective trying to solve you know kidnappings and murders and so forth and uh there's one scene where they talk about how they like looked into how the gun that they recovered from the

from one of the suspects was the he was the only one who had a registered gun in the house and it was like and it takes place in pennsylvania which doesn't have a gun registry so it's it's like no stop or i remember mr robot if you remember that show from fx the like sci-fi hacker show i remember one point in that show like the fbii agent or mypd agent was like oh we we used micro stamping to to like match the shell casings from the scene to your gun and I was like, I mean, they had done enough research to know what micro stamping is, which is required, which is something that's required in California on, that new guns have the, you know, have this technology incorporated. But they, I guess they engulf are enough to know

that this isn't a real technology doesn't exist. It's theoretical. Like nobody makes guns with micros. That's part of the problem with California's laws. Like they mandated this theoretical technology being guns that nobody produces. And so it's like, that happens. That happens. a lot. But, yeah, and it really can take you out of it. It's just like, oh, okay, whatever. Or I watch, like, sometimes it's on purpose, right? Like, Zach Snyder's new zombie heist movie.

But it just gets so stupid, like, watching just everyone's bulletproof all the time. And it's like, there's a zombie with a bulletproof helmet. And he just gets shot a thousand times in this. It's just like a thin piece of metal. And it's just so annoying to me. It's like, that's not how bullets work at all. So dispatch listeners, the takeaway from this is you don't watch movies with Steve Hayes because he's never seen a movie and that will just confuse him. And you don't watch movies with

Stephen Gatowski because he will ruin them for you and you will not enjoy the movie. That's my takeaway. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. If you want to read all about what Stephen's thoughts are, his reporting, everything else, go to the reload.com, subscribe. It's great stuff if you really want to know what's going on in this world. We really appreciate you being here. Thanks. Hey, thanks for having. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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