The Megyn Kelly Show - Guns in America: A Megyn Kelly Show Debate, with Stephen Gutowski and Mike Spies | Ep. 248

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

It's time for a Megyn Kelly Show substantive debate and discussion today - this time on guns in America. Megyn Kelly is joined by Stephen Gutowski, founder of The Reload (a gun rights website), and Mike Spies, senior editor at The Trace (a gun control site), to discuss where criminals get their guns, what sort of gun laws could stop criminals from committing gun crimes, whether universal background checks work and the difference between state laws, the truth about AR-15s, what "smart guns" are and whether they can be effective, self-defense gun use, whether the gun industry should be shielded from legal ramifications, potential gun laws in California and other states, what "straw purchases" are and the dangers of them, and more. Plus: Megyn Kelly breaks the news about Justice Breyer retiring, and the implications it will have on the court and all political parties.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, which we are styling today, a show about guns in America. This is one of our signature debate shows, and today we are going to take a deep dive into one of the most divisive issues in America, guns. While the majority of gun owners are responsible, we are also all too familiar with the tragedies involving firearms. today to help get you educated on what's real and what's not and what are, if any, gun reforms that could actually help prevent future mass shootings or in particular teenagers or people who are not mentally well from getting their hands on guns and using them against innocent victims. We're going to talk about whether there are real solutions that we as a nation can agree on. We have brought together two of the best minds on gun rights and gun control. Both men have broken countless stories

while covering the gun beat. Stephen Gutowski is founder of The Reload, and Mike Spies is a senior writer for The Trace. Stephen and Mike, thank you so much for being here. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, Megan. All right. So, Stephen, you are, the reload is, I don't know, I don't want to say pro-gun exactly, but just for the audience to understand, Stephen, you're more sort of on the pro-gun and Mike, you're more on sort of the gun control beat and focused on what measures we could take to sort of roll back some of the problems we've been seeing. So let's just kick it off with this. Some stats for the audience. According to what I read, we had more than 45,000 people shot to death in America in 2020.

We had a spike in violence in 2021. And the vast majority of those gun deaths were suicide. So it's not all homicide, but a fair amount of homicide, too. And America is the biggest gun country in the world. And in particular, what keeps people talking about it is the mass shootings, right? Like what we saw in Michigan, this kid, Ethan Crumbly, going into the school and shooting, you know, other teenagers. His parents have now been arrested. It's a fascinating case. But we also see it when innocent civilians or police officers are shot to death by people who had no business having guns or the kind of gun that they had. And that's where I'll kick it off, because here in New York overnight, the second police officer died who was shot by the 44 year old suspect. also died the suspect has died since but these cops were called to this house in harlem by the suspect's mom they were walking down the hallway to go into his room and see what was wrong and he came out they didn't stand a chance he came out guns blazing shot the cops uh both of whom are now dead. One was 22. He was shot and killed. And now we have,

and his name, by the way, was Jason Rivera. And then there's Wilbert Mora, just 27. It's so awful. It's just so awful. And Stephen, I'll start with you as somebody who is used to sort of defending gun rights. A lot of people looked at that modification he had on his gun, which I understand was not lawful. I don't know that that was the reason the cops died. You know, he could have shot him just without that modification. But should that guy have had a gun, career criminal? And is there a gun law that could have prevented it? Yeah, certainly.

I mean, there's a lot to unpack with a situation like that, domestic violence call that leads to, you know, the death of law enforcement officers is a horrific tragedy. And obviously, I think most people would question, well, how could this happen? How can we prevent this going forward? And there are a number of ways. I mean, oftentimes in situations like that, what you'll find, and this is true for many mass shootings as well, some of the most famous ones that we know, the shooter was prohibited. They weren't legally allowed to own guns in the first place due to their either mental health history or their criminal history, such as in this case.

And the question is, how do you keep somebody who is already prohibited from owning guns under federal law, so the entire country, from obtaining them? And that's where a lot of the controversy comes in because there's different proposals that range from better enforcement of- better. Let me just stop you there. Let me just stop it and forgive my interruption, but I want to make sure we all stay on the same page. So he should not, this 44 year old man now dead at the shooter should not have had a gun. Why? Well, if he had a criminal history that included either a felony conviction or a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction, then he shouldn't have been able to obtain it, or at least he wouldn't legally have been able to possess the gun in the first place. So we see it all the time, though, with criminals. We see it all the time with criminals who commit domestic violence or some other crime, some other felony, they get out of jail. It seems very easy. It seems very easy for them to get a gun. Am I wrong?

No. I mean, it can be very easy for people who are prohibited, people who are known criminals to obtain guns illegally outside of the current system that we have in place to buy guns through licensed dealers with background checks involved. There's obviously proposals to expand that system to private sales as well. That's where a lot of the controversy comes in with the so-called universal background checks, because the idea there is that private sales should also have to go through the background check system like sales from licensed dealers do. Although, of course, in this case, you're talking about New York, which has a law like that in place already.

And obviously, a lot of criminals just don't comply with it. And they sell guns knowingly. That's the problem. And this gets right to the heart of it right off the top, right? So it's like, Mike, we do have tough gun laws in New York City. And yet, there was this guy sitting with this gun with this unlawful modifier on it. Again, I don't think it wasn't the modifier that led to the death of the cops. A regular old gun could have killed these cops just as easily. But the point is just how easy it is, despite the fact this is a career criminal sitting

there with a gun. You, I don't know. I'd love a real solution. I would. I'm so open-minded on this issue. I've been the victim of a crime. And I've so I appreciate guns with the good guys who protect us. But I have three kids and I certainly worry about, you know, school shootings and the other stuff, too. So I'd love to see a gun reform that could actually stop the bad guys from getting the guns. But we passed every single one of the gun reforms Joe Biden's pushing right now, that guy still would have had this gun. Yeah, I think the problem across the board in America is that we're pretty weak on accountability measures, which is what fuels the illegal gun market. So, for example, one thing, and this in some ways also in a different way relates back to the Michigan shooting that you were talking about,

is we have we have pretty poor storage laws and regulation especially when it comes to uh firearms dealers for example it is as as investigations have shown that the trace is done um there's no real requirement in federally licensed firearm dealers or places that sell guns to store them in such a way that they're not easily accessible, which is why these like the smash and grab situations where people basically just drive a car through the front door and take a hammer and break glass and remove all the weapons and run out or saw a hole through the ceiling and drop in and take all the guns like that. It's a big, it's a gaping hole in our system that allows legal guns to be trafficked into an illegal market. And I think until we're a lot more serious about regulating gun sellers, that's going to continue to be the pipeline. And obviously,

the other issue, which we haven't had. How frequent an event is that, Mike, where people are doing this? We've been following the smashing grab of the Gucci bags. But how often does that happen with respect to the guns? you know, per the investigation that I was referencing, we have quite a lot of video showing the ease with which people were able to break into gun shops and steal a ton of weapons. So I guess, go ahead. Wait, let him jump in. Well, I just want to make a quick point here. These are, this is certainly a phenomenon that happens. This is one way that criminals get their guns. Mike's correct on that point. But I would sort of question the idea that it's easy because given the tactics that are often employed, like as Mike suggested there,

literally crashing cars through buildings to get to the guns. I don't know what, you know, that adding an extra safe after you're willing to knock down the wall of a building to get to the guns is going to be much more of a deterrent in, in preventing these sorts of things. Yeah, no, sure. I don't mean it. I mean, maybe that, you know, referencing the car is sort of an extreme example. There are myriad ways in which people break into all manner of facilities, including gun shops. You know, it's, it's, it's, it is, I mean, there's obvious there's, there's never like a panacea. But in this case, I think another issue, when we're talking about how did this person get the gun, another issue is we don't trace

data is not publicly available per the law, right, Stephen? So that's something that we can't. And what do you mean? The argument for, meaning like, until I believe it was like the 1980s, 1986, it used to be able, the ATF was required to make trace data on guns public, which is to say that the public could assess or could see where a particular gun came from that showed up in a crime is that right steven some some yeah i'm getting this right right yeah that's correct there used to be a more more granular data on exactly what store sold you know how many guns that ended up being traced by the atf of course obviously the industry uh counterpoint to this and the reason that it's not done anymore is because it doesn't imply

necessarily that the stores are doing anything you know illegal or wrong just because some of the guns eventually end up years later sure using crimes this became a controversial thing and that you know because basically just any gun store that was near a city would be labeled a bad Apple gun dealer. And that was one of the reasons that that happened. The only reason I point to it is it just makes it more difficult to assess trafficking patterns. Which is to say it's not as if the ATF can't do it itself. And we all know that federal agencies are usually fairly strapped. And as a public investigation recently showed with the FPPA, they're not necessarily that great at utilizing their own data.

But sometimes enterprising journalists such as yourself or many others, given the opportunity to do that, could potentially add an extra layer of protection or at least transparency when it comes to some of the questions that we're dealing with right now. What did it say? I guess, I think it's, I think, you know, when it comes to a useful proposal, accountability seems to always be the best deterrent in my, in my personal opinion. So, you know, when it comes to universal background checks, which are far from a panacea, I would totally agree with that and are sort of better than nothing, but don't even necessarily account for the most important factors. Let's go through it. Let's go through it. Let's have an easy to understand discussion on the

things that are being proposed and that get kicked around and that, you know, we know Joe Biden wants. He definitely wants universal or uniform background checks. So what does that mean? Right. Don't don't we already have universal background checks? I don't know if you can call them universal, but background checks in most of the states, Stephen. Yes. So under federal law, what the way it works is there's a specific system that was built for commercial gun dealers. And so if you want to sell guns commercially, if you want to make a business out of selling firearms, you have to obtain a federal license from the federal government. And if you're selling a gun to somebody who is not similarly licensed, then you have to perform a background check. That's how the system was designed to work. It specifically targets commercial sales and does not regulate

non-commercial sales. So use gun sales by just regular people who aren't selling their guns to make a profit or build a business around that. Just to give a practical example of that. So if I walk into a gun store in Connecticut, where I live now, and I say, I want to buy a gun, they would do a background check on me. But if I went to my neighbor who I knew had guns and said, can I buy your handgun from you, your pistol? She could sell it to me and I wouldn't have to go through any sort of a check and it would be a lawful sale. Well, not in Connecticut because they have state laws that deal with this as well on top of the federal regulations. But in Virginia, where I live, well, sorry, no,

Virginia also just recently passed this. But Pennsylvania, where I'm from, that would be the case. Yes, if you're within state limits, if you want to buy a handgun, now handguns have also added regulations on top of them. You can't buy them across state lines without going through a licensed dealer first, even used guns. So there's a lot of sort of complication that goes into this stuff. But your example would be accurate in a state that doesn't have a universal background check law in place, which is, to be clear, the vast majority of states in the United States. So the vast majority of states would require a background check even in a private sale?

Would not. Yeah, would not. It's just a commercial sale. Okay. And when they do the background check on me, what are they mainly looking for? Whether I've committed a crime or I'm on some sort of a, you know, if it's a state that has a red flag law, I've been red flagged for some mental deficiency or risk? you know, if it's a state that has a red flag law, I've been red flagged for some mental deficiency or risk? Yeah. So under the federal system, what they're looking for is whether or not you've committed a felony. So a crime that's punishable by over a year in prison or a domestic violence misdemeanor. And there's, we can talk about this later, but there's some

controversy over what exactly constitutes a domestic violence, misdemeanors. People want to change the definition there. Or if you've been adjudicated mentally ill as a threat to yourself or others, which is really a legal process as well. And those are the main prohibited persons. What if I were adjudicated mentally ill five years ago, but now I'm fine? Because you see this young man who, when he hits 20, has a schizophrenic outbreak. He's showing signs of being threatening. And so let's say he gets a two-month commitment, and that's been documented. But now it's five years later. He's 25. He hasn't had any other issues. Would that prevent him from getting a gun? It would, unless he has had his rights restored in some way, which is a process you can go through. It's pretty arduous, but it's possible. Would it prevent him forever? Yes.

Yeah. Forever more. Okay. Well, that's good. I mean, that is not one area in which I am pro-gun at all. I feel like if you've shown signs of having, especially one of the mental illnesses that we know are often linked to gun crimes, you are one of the few who's not going to get a gun. And I mean, as a country with over 400

million guns, sorry, not everyone can have one. Certain things preclude you. And those people are on the list as far as I'm concerned. Okay, so that's the background check. So how many states then, you tell me, Mike, how many states are more like Pennsylvania where it's like, well, for instance, Nevada is a good example, right? In the wake of that horrible mass shooting there at the music festival, they, through a ballot measure, I believe, the citizens of the state of Nevada passed a background check law,

and then the attorney general refused to enforce it by arguing that privates, by, but it was effectively unenforceable. You couldn't, how could you, how could you enforce the law? Like how could you, how could you require people to conduct background checks if they're not, um, if they, if they're not, if they're not licensed stewards. Right. Like how would my neighbor who I love be said like, what database would she be looking at to figure out whether I was a criminal or had a mental health issue? Well, the way most of these work, the way most of these state laws work, and if I remember correctly, I believe there's only eight states. Actually, it's probably more like, I think it's like 10 now that have passed universal background checks at the state level.

Yeah, I was going to say it doesn't, yeah. Yeah, it's somewhere around. It's not a big majority, although they do tend to be very large population states like California, New York, Massachusetts, you know, so it's a lot of people live under this sort of regulation already, but the way it usually works is they require you to go to a gun store, go to a licensed dealer in order to sell the gun to the private party. And one of the common criticisms of this policy is that it's basically unenforceable. There's how would law enforcement know if you ever did that, right? I mean, unless the gun later on shows up in some

other crime, maybe they can trace it back to this. But that's one of the main criticisms, that it's basically unenforceable well that's and that what i was going to say is i think the way there is that that will always be a problem so i think the only thing you can do to mitigate that issue is to build in an accountability measure which is to say like you know it's a back-end thing but if you don't do a background check and you sell a gun to someone through a private transfer, then they go and commit a crime with it, then you can be held responsible for it, which is obviously it would be preferable to prevent that in the first place. But it's also like, I mean, it's a deterrent. And as long as you make it clear that that's built into the law, that seems like at least a potential way to address the issue that's reasonable. Well, there's also obviously the concern that the other way of enforcing universal background check laws there's a registry, it makes it easier to

confiscate the guns, as you're actually seeing right now in Canada, where they have recently banned the possession of AR-15s and similar rifles, and they have a registry of who owns those guns. So once that goes into effect in April, it'll be interesting to see from certainly from down here in the States how that plays out. Oh, my gosh. How do you like to be the guy who has to go seize the AR-15s from the gun owners who love them? And I actually I'm dying to talk to you about AR-15s because they it's a gun that's been very maligned. It's it's it's used in a lot of these mass shootings. But is it really any different from a semi-automatic pistol that you'd see any place in most women's handbags in Texas, right? We're going to pick it up there right after this break.

And we've got a bit of breaking news to bring to you when we come back. Don't go away. Stephen and Mike are back with me. But first, before we get back to them, let me bring you the breaking news. Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court has apparently decided to step down at the end of the current term. This first report was NBC News and Pete Williams, very long term Supreme Court correspondents, a correspondent over there and justice correspondent. CNN going with it as well. Stephen Breyer to retire. He's 83 years old. He'll step down from the current court again at the end of the current term, which would mean June. And that means they that Joe Biden will have another new Supreme Court hell off the court while they still have a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate that could confirm him. And keep in mind, the Democrats do confirm the Senate. This won't be one of those things where Manchin or Sinema will stop a Democratic nominee from getting up onto the bench.

I mean, unless it's somebody who really is totally unqualified, like we saw, for example, with Harriet Myers, who George W. Bush withdrew once he realized he couldn't get her through. And so this will mean that a liberal seat on the high court remains liberal for all intents and purposes. I mean, if you want to read the tea leaves, that's what will happen. He'll step down. Biden will choose somebody else, nominate, and then they will have to be confirmed by the Senate. And that means the current balance of 6-3 on the Supreme Court this time next year will probably look exactly the same, except instead of having an 83-year-old man, he's the oldest man on the court right now, in that one seat, they'll probably have somebody in their 40s, if the Democrats play this right, because you want get somebody younger uh who can sit on the court for a long long time big news and uh and who knows if monica crowley was right remember her theory if she was right uh who knows it could be kamala harris biden has a has previously said that he sat on the campaign trail he can always change his mind that if he were to have a

seat open up, he would nominate a black female. That would that would she would qualify. Monica's theory was that they would turf Kamala Harris off to the Supreme Court. They would draft in somebody she believes the Hillary Clinton team would make it would really want it to be them as VP. And that would pave the way toward better electoral returns for the Democrats in 2024. It's fascinating. My goodness. Okay, we'll continue to follow the news back to our gun debate. Stephen and Mike are back with me and let's talk about the AR-15. AR-15 rifles, they look scary. They look like a machine gun. They're not a machine gun. They're nothing like a machine gun. They're actually much more like the Glock that you pull out of your side pocket and shoot. It's a semi-automatic rifle. That's my understanding. Stephen, you're the expert. But more and more, there's a focus on these weapons in particular, trying to ban them. We talked earlier about how there's about 400 million plus weapons in the

United States. I read that there are 434 million guns in the United States, according to the Trade Association for U.S. Firearm Industry. They estimate 20 million of those are ARs, some sort of AR weapon. So your thoughts on whether that gun is getting a bad rap? Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a lot to talk about with the AR. I think, for one, it's the most popular rifle in the country, which is probably why it occasionally will turn up in some of these high-profile shootings, because, I mean, it's just so ubiquitous. There's one literally over my shoulder here for those watching on YouTube. But it is a derivative of the military rifle, a similar platform. But as you alluded to, a different firing mechanism inside of it that only allows for semi-automatic fire, which is one round per pull of the trigger, whereas the military version is capable of fully automatic fire, which is continuous fire when you pull the trigger until you let go. So that is one significant difference in the gun's operation.

But otherwise, it's a similar design, which is also probably one of the reasons why it's so popular, because you have a lot of veterans who come back and want to own the gun that they trained with, or at least the same platform. And it's the same reason that the 1911, the old army sidearm is extremely popular in America. You know, it was a gun designed for use in military context. And it's now probably, if not the most popular gun design in the handgun market, certainly one of the most popular. And, you know, they are really not used that often in crime. Rifles as a whole, which ARs are just a subset of, are only used in about 300 murders per year, according to the FBI. That's out of

about 15,000 per year. And over the last two years, that number has actually increased quite a bit, as you alluded to earlier in the show. And so they get a lot of attention probably because of how they look. They look similar to the military gun. They are a similar design. But when you look at the data, they're clearly not drivers of the crime epidemic in America. And I don't think they were drivers of the murder spike we've seen over the last two years either. These aren't guns that are commonly used by criminals in their activity. So that I think is an important distinction to make. Mike, we saw them used, an AR-15 was used in the Parkland shooting in Florida and the school shooting there where I think it was 17 kids were killed. Then there are AR style, AR-15 style rifles because AR-15 I guess is a brand name.

So you have guns that look just like that. One was used in Aurora, Coloradoado that movie theater mass shooting as well yeah sandy hook the worst i mean i mean honestly just the most unfathomable mass shooting of all time um so that that this leads people i think in great frustration, including myself, saying, what the hell can we do? What can we do? Do everything. Do everything. That leads people to say, get rid of the AR-15s. But I just don't, that's not realistically the answer. It's the same thing as a handgun, which is what was used, for example, in Virginia Tech, the most deadly mass shooting we've had of all time, I mean, at least in recent history, at a school, I mean. So you tell me whether the AR-15 is being sort of wrongly targeted or singled out.

Well, I think, first of all, everything Stephen said is right. And so it's worth like looking at statistics and numbers. And the point you're making is also correct, too. I mean, ultimately, it's a small figure in a much vaster scale of gun homicide. presence because of where it has shown up historically, which are these like milestone mass shooting events that are really, if you think about it, they're fairly akin to acts of terrorism in the sense that like it's, while they're ultimately still not frequent, they're persistent enough that they upset the social contract especially in places that we expect to be safe whether that be our children's schools or the you know uh church um a concert the movie theater any of the places that you're talking about so it obviously it's it's more it's it

becomes like it's a it's a it's a symbol and and that i guess is why people are so drawn to it because it's it creates an obviously visceral reaction especially because think about the things that are tied to or the deaths of children um that's i think the first thing people come to mind i think the ar first became widely recognized after sandy hook as like as a tool as a tool of terror. But if you were actually seeking, and I think that everybody is, most people, we are anyway, to address everyday gun violence, then of course, banning the AR is really not going to make a dent in that. And that's not going to be the thing that's going to change the lives of people who actually live with this on a daily basis. Which is, again, why I could come back to just, it's why it feels like accountability is the most important thing.

I mean, you're talking about the Michigan shooting and the fact that the, in the school there that the parents are being prosecuted for that. That's an incredibly, as you know, an incredibly rare outcome. People who traditionally don't secure their firearms in such a way in which their children can't get a hold of them are not, even when states have laws that seek to hold people accountable for failing to secure their firearms in such a way that minors can't get them, those cases are rarely prosecuted in the first place. So let's just let's pause there, because that kid, he's 15 years old.

His parents wanted him to have it like that case is an outlier in that they got him the gun. They knew he was having trouble. The school certainly had identified him as a disturbed kid. And the parents were celebratory of him having the gun. I mean, even if you had a law that said you must secure the gun from the child, do any of us believe

these parents would have said, make sure you lock it up so that he can't get it? They were thrilled that he had it. No, I presumably there. I mean, well, they bought him a gun to use, which is less,

which is, I think, the less typical scenario than a parent owning a gun that is not the child and just leaving it unsecured so that somebody can, like, go easily retrieve it. So it's, I mean, in some ways, the scenario is unique because it was, in theory, it was his. Whereas, like, a more typical scenario would be, like, Newtown, right, where the kid gets his mom's gun and then wreaks havoc with it. So, yes. But that's also in also in that situation, though. And knowing what we now know about that sick, sick killer at Newtown, nothing would have stopped him. You think about the mother put a lock on the gun in a cabinet that he wouldn't have broken it and got like it's absurd.

These mass killers will kill kill they will find a way this is what drives me nuts about the gun debate look and i said this i was on the air at nbc after florida and parkland and i said everything has to be on the table you know this has to stop happening everything needs to be on the table there can be no nra shutdowns of the discussion there can be no nothing's on the tape, like something's off limits. But the thing I always come back to is show me the thing that would have stopped it. And for me, and I'm happy if you want to talk me out of this. For me, I always come back to we need better interventions when we see somebody's mental health going south. It's talk

about red flags. Red flags are almost always all over these mass shooters health going south. It's, talk about red flags. Red flags are almost always all over these mass shooters. Almost always. It's very rare that you can look back and say there was nothing we should have seen. What we need is a meaningful place to put them and make it easier to commit them while that aura of concern, suspicion is around them.

I'll- Yeah, I don't- Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I think that's true. I don't, and it's certainly like, I don't, you know, I don't think taking stricter measures

when it comes to like, you know, gun storage and having like a robust public education campaign in support of those laws to like let people know that they exist would be at the exclusion of also having like a far better system for dealing with people who are

like struggling with their mental health i mean i think that those things probably in fact should and ought to go hand in hand with each other um you know i and i so that that's that's true um can i say for sure that like if there was a you know if there was a law on the bucks that said like if you have a gun you're required to secure it in such a way so your minor can't get it. And if they do, you're going to be held liable and prosecuted in some way with whatever the penalty is. If that was widely understood to be the law, would it eliminate these situations? No, not any more than having like a limit on the legal limit on alcohol consumption for when you're going to drive a car is eliminated drunk driving.

But what I mean, I usually the function of the law most of the time is to be like, is to be a deterrent. Is it not? I mean, that's sort of the, it doesn't fix everything. You're looking to diminish, not to entirely eliminate. I mean, that's sort of the, it doesn't fix everything. You're looking to diminish, not to entirely eliminate. I mean, you'd like to eliminate, but I see your point. Well, what about, what do you make of that? I just have two points to make here real quick. Yeah, go ahead, Stephen.

Because, you know, that's fair, right? Obviously, certainly, sometimes you could get arguments that if it doesn't completely eliminate the problem, you know, it's completely useless altogether. And, you know, Mike's point there is fair that about diminishing and how law works in real life, that you're not going to, by making murder illegal, you don't eliminate murder, but it doesn't mean it should be legal.

I understand that. Two points though. One, you know, a lot of these mass shooters, if you look through the history here, have been able to obtain guns legally, including the Parkland shooter, because a lot of the red flags that they exhibited along the way went unnoticed or undealt with. The Parkland shooter is a very good example of this because he had actually been involved. One, he had, you know, had suicidal ideation that he expressed to school officials. He could have been committed for that. He was involved in several domestic violence incidents, which he could have been charged over. Either one

of those things would have at least made him a prohibited person. And it would have made it much more difficult for him to obtain a gun, uh, in that circumstance. Uh, you know, and there's, there's a number of shooters, including the, the Virginia tech shooter should have been prohibited, was prohibited, but was his records weren't in the system. Same thing for the Texas, uh, church shooter. There's a lot of these examples of either situations where the person ought to have been prohibited if somebody had taken action or they were prohibited, but the system didn't work for various reasons. And so there should be more done about that.

Red flag laws have been one solution to this. But of course, they have their own issues because, you know, the NRA and other gun rights activists are amenable to this concept in theory, but in practice they've been opposed to most of the actual laws that have been passed because they don't deal with a number of problems. One, they don't have the due process protections that a lot of people would find necessary for something like seizing a gun from someone, even temporarily, because owning a gun is a constitutionally protected right in America. And it's this very serious thing to take that right away from somebody, especially with things like ex parte hearings

or without legal representation for the person being accused. And then on the other point, assault weapons bans have been sort of the common response to most mass shootings, including Parkland or Sandy Hook or any number of these attacks that have, as you guys mentioned, featured AR-15s being used. But the way that they work in practice, it's very questionable as to how much of an effect they would have. What's included in an assault weapons ban? I mean, any semi-automatic weapon? How are we going to get all those? 70 million. Usually the way that they are written is that they go after effectively cosmetic features.

And this is the common critique of them, that you can't have a pistol grip with a flash hider on a semi-automatic rifle that also accepts detachable magazines. that has all the same functionality as an AR-15, but remains legal under an assortment ban because it doesn't have the sort of cosmetic features that an AR-15 has. Or you can actually, and this commonly happens, you can modify an AR-15 to just remove the cosmetic features that are actually banned under these proposals. And in you know, in the end, they're kind of designed oftentimes to make it slightly more inconvenient for somebody who's trying to perpetrate a mass shooting to carry one out rather than dealing with, you know, perhaps the red flags of a potential perpetrator instead. Like the magazine capacity limits, one of the main arguments for why those might be effective

against mass shootings is that the shooter would have to reload their gun more often in theory if you were able to eliminate the hundreds of millions of high capacity magazines that are now in circulation in the United States.

And so this sort of, I think there's a lot of almost magical thinking that goes into some of these restrictions that happen to be, unfortunately, the main policy prescriptions that we've been debating for 30 years. There's a lot of other things that we could look at in terms of how to prevent these things. I mean, red flag laws are more recent innovation that has unfortunately become extremely polarized. They only really pass in blue states at this point because of the opposition I mentioned earlier that there isn't really,

it doesn't seem to be a lot of actual interest among our political leaders to come together and try to work out a red flag law that deals with some of the critiques that people have of them. Yeah, like how can we ensure due process and make sure it's not being used punitively, let's say by an ex-wife on an ex-husband who doesn't deserve to have his gun taken away. Just to correct something I said, it's not 70 million semi-automatic weapons in America. It's 70% of the gun market is semi-automatic weapons.

And again, the gun market has put 434 million guns into America. So, I mean, you're talking hundreds of millions of semi-automatic pistols out there. There's no way of seizing them. That's not happening. That's just not. And so we pacify ourselves by saying, well, automatic weapons ban or assault weapons ban. So we'll get like the worst of the worst. Okay. You're still going to have hundreds of millions of guns in America. And don't forget, as I said, the shooter at Virginia Tech had two semi-automatic pistols. That's what he did. You can unleash a lot of hell with just a semi-automatic pistols that's that's what he did you can unleash a lot of hell with just a

semi-automatic weapon so you know handgun a pistol and those are never going to go away they're not going to go away so so what's the answer right so let's talk to the guys right after this quick break about is there something that we actually could do to make our communities safer against bad guys who get their hands on guns. Don't go away. Remember, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. Would love it if you went there now and checked out our monologue, our opening monologue from yesterday, which was about, it was a response to Whoopi Goldberg trying to call people who want the COVID restrictions to go away selfish, saying, how dare we, right? So I had some words for her that I think you'll enjoy. If you prefer an audio

podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. And there you will find our full archives with more than 240 shows, including our other debates and discussions on climate change, on Israel and Gaza, on trans athletes, and more. Don't go away. There are suggestions that communities with stricter gun laws may not be any safer than those that don't have strict gun laws. But is that true? One of the many things we're going to get to today on our debate between Stephen Gutowski, founder of The Reload, and Mike Spies, a senior writer for The Trace. OK, so we'll get to that in one second. But I'm just looking at the list of things that Joe Biden had been pushing on the campaign trail. We've talked about two of them, assault weapons ban, universal background checks.

The others that he has been pushing are an end to internet firearm purchases. And then there's just sort of a slew of executive actions, which he's actually taken in part and is under pressure to take, which we'll get to. But you tell me, I'll start with you as somebody who is reasonable and pro guns. Steven, is there anything that you think we can be doing? You heard Mike say more accountability for gun owners. But is there anything you think we can be doing to try heard Mike say more accountability for gun owners, but is there anything you think we can be doing to try to prevent, I mean, we can't always stop criminals from behaving criminally, but is there any way of cutting down on the number of mass shootings or on just how mass they are? Yeah, certainly. I mean, one thing I would note,

just going off what you'd said before the break, is that there, as you mentioned earlier, there's 20 million AR-15s and similar of police in the United States, in the entire law enforcement community in the United States, and about four million in the United States military. So that gives you some idea of how impractical. You mean like their personal use? No, just that. Oh, on the job? Yeah. Oh, wow. The entire country's law enforcement has about 1 million small arms. So U.S. civilians own about 20 times that number in just AR-15 and similar rifles alone. So it gives you a better idea of how impractical it is to actually try and collect all of those firearms as a solution to these issues. You know, so because that is something that, you know, you've had people like

Beto O'Rourke suggest, you know, it's obviously not every gun control activist wants this, but it is something that's become but it's something that people do legitimately want to try. But as far as solutions go. Stand by because I'll let Mike respond to that point and then we'll

go back to solutions. Go ahead, Mike. I was just going to say, you just highlighted a very interesting point. Which is to say that you've just pointed out that law enforcement is vastly outgunned when compared to the American public. And we're talking many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many orders of magnitude. And I guess, I mean, that sort of, I guess, throws things in sharp belief for me. I mean, one of the things that makes police encounters, one of the factors more fraught, right,

is that police have to assume that any situation they're walking into, somebody could have a gun. And so then it raises the question of what do you do about the guns that are already out there, right? That's sort of the point you're making. You can regulate what's not on the market yet, but there are already, as Megan, I think you said, about 400 and something million firearms that are already in the hands of Americans. 434. And that does, 434, those are legal guns, right? That doesn't include whatever is on the, what is the unknown, the unknown firearms. So, you know, it is sort of a problem, for sure, that, you know, law enforcement doesn't know where those guns are and that they can't actually be accounted for. I realize that, like, making the argument for a registry, and I'm not

about to do that, is effectively a political non-starter, though it tends to be the case that arguments for any kind of regulation, including red flag laws, as you're pointing out, often are non-starters. So what does it even matter? So why don't I just say whatever I want? And in that case, I don't really buy the the i think it's a fairly weak argument which is it's sort of how this is made the sort of abstract slippery slope argument that if there if if americans were somehow required to register their guns it would open the door to a certain kind of charity in which you know there would be mass gun confiscation i know you're pointing out what's happening in canada with ar-15s all the points that have been made here by the f-15s are valid and right there is i think a question that is asked which is like like why what civilian application do these weapons have you could say the same thing about handguns too um but i think that's sort of the point that gets raised because they they show up

because they because their their analog is is the military rifle that you were talking about. I get it. You're saying you're explaining why they continue to be targeted without defending necessarily the the targeting because if AR-15s if we can get rid of those and get rid of mass shootings, I mean, every mom I know would be in line to do that, to vote for the guy who would do that. But it's we all know the truth. It's not going to. You know, as I said, 70 percent, somebody will do the math on 70 percent of four hundred thirty four million and tell me how many semi-automatic pistols there are. OK, so one more quick break because we do have to pay bills and then get to the solutions and about what Joe Biden's pushing now. And also whether more and more states should pursue the equivalent of the Texas abortion ban approach on guns, because now at least three states are. Will it succeed? Don't go away.

We're about to get into solutions, and one of the ones proposed by Joe Biden is smart guns, smart guns. He has said that he would like to see eventually 100 percent of all the new guns sold in America be, quote, smart guns. Stephen, what is a smart gun? And is that a smart idea? Well, he's actually said something more extreme than that, especially during the debates that he wanted all guns immediately to only be sold as smart guns, which right now is not possible because there isn't a single one on the market. However, there are some coming to market this year. I actually was able to see one in person at the industry's

trade show in Las Vegas last week. But a smart gun is the way that we talk about it generally in media is a gun that has an internal locking mechanism built into the actual firearm that uses either a fingerprint scanner or an RFID reader paired with like a special watch or a special ring in order to unlock the gun so that the user can shoot it. Whether they're a good idea or not is sort of up for debate about just whether somebody would be interested in buying something like that. The more serious debate is over whether or not they should be mandated as what the president wants to do. Well, what would be the reason not to do it, right? I mean, I guess the goal is that way your kid can't fire your gun if they find it loaded

in your bed stand or some thief who comes into your house and steals your gun isn't going to be able to make it operate unless they steal your ring, which you presumably have on you and so on. So they're trying to cut down on illegal thefts and other thefts of guns and to make them not usable. That's the idea, right? But as anyone who's ever used a cell phone with a fingerprint scanner could probably tell you they are not the most reliable things. And you might not want to bet your life on whether or not your fingerprint scanner can actually read your fingerprint at the moment you need to shoot the gun. So you can see the sort of the obvious drawbacks of this sort of technology.

It sounds great in practice or great in theory, and it could work in practice. And all these guns that are coming to market are still early prototypes, frankly. I wasn't even able to actually manipulate the gun or handle it at SHOT Show. So we don't really know how well they work at this point. And it's still in its infancy, largely because there was a mandate in New Jersey that said they had passed a law in 2002 that said as soon as one of these sorts of guns becomes available on the market anywhere in the country, that would be the only kind of gun that could be sold in New Jersey, eliminating completely traditional firearms, which a lot of people are highly skeptical of the reliability of these kinds of guns. I mean, just think about the gun you use for self-defense needing to be recharged in and of itself even if the technology works perfectly uh is a problem that a lot of people are going to have good point the other thing is mike that uh there was a writer's article

pointing out that in 2014 a german company put a put a smart gun, 22 caliber pistol on the market, but it was pulled after hackers discovered a way to remotely jam the gun's radio signals and using magnets. They found a way to fire the gun when it should have been locked. So that seems like it should be the end of the smart gun discussion. But am I wrong? No. I mean, look, in terms of just looking at the reliability of technology, it's definitely not unfair to raise the questions that Stephen is raising. It's true. I mean, I struggle with the thumbprint thing on my phone all the time. I guess, though, you sort of bring up a different point, which is like, that's a problem because of a self-defense scenario. But the one thing that we don't really address is that the vast majority of people who have guns for self-defense scenarios are never going to be in a scenario in which they need them for self-defense. number on this, but just like traditionally the case that when it comes to legal gun ownerships,

specifically in outstates, rural areas, suburbs, that sort of drive policy in a lot of places, those are places that have generally fairly low rates of gun violence. And again, I'm not saying, well, then that means that, you know, that's the point. I'm not trying to make the point that that should mean, well, then, you know, for that reason, you should have to have a smart gun because you're probably never going to have to use it. But it is also worth stating that a lot of supply is driven by this theoretical idea that you're going to need a gun in a situation that you're almost never going to be in. But that supply also then fuels the illegal gun market, creating problems for those that are actually

going to be in that situation. What about this? Yeah, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, I mean, as far as how often guns are needed in self-defense, I mean, obviously there's quite a lot of controversy over this and there's several different estimates you could look at. Gary Kleck, who's a criminologist at Florida State University, well-known for studying this topic, and has come up, you know, he's done surveys that indicate there's two to three million self-defense uses of guns each year. Others have put the number, you know, significantly lower than that, although there was a DOJ review during the Obama administration that concluded that, you know, whatever estimate you use for how often guns are used in self-defense,

it's still clear that they're used far more often for self-defense than they are to commit crimes by, you know, any estimate that's out there. So, you know, just to speak to that a little bit, I understand what Mike's getting at as far as like, hopefully most people will never have to use the guns that they have bought for self-defense because nobody wants to be in a situation where you have to use deadly force against someone else. But people do buy them because they want to have that option, just like you would buy a fire extinguisher, even though you hope never to have to use it. And that's where smart guns also come into play. It's like, people should be able to buy them if they want them. People buy

biometric safes that have some of the similar drawbacks that put a gun into. So I can see somebody wanting to integrate those two things. My history tells me that the real purpose behind the Second Amendment was people wanted to be armed in case the government came knocking and in case a militia organized by the government came to sort of take over their their their house, their their belongings and so on. And I'm not saying that's going to happen in 2022. Yeah, I'm not saying that that's going to happen. What happened at Concord and Lexington, right? That was the spark of the American Revolution. The shot heard around the world was fired in

opposition to the British Army trying to confiscate guns from the colonists. So yeah, that is a big part of the American gun tradition. That seems to me an argument against the smart gun because it's like why would you give control to who's to say the government wouldn't be able to interfere with all of that technology to shut down the use of your gun of everyone's gun, you know, in some crazy, you know, conspiracy theory world.

But I mean, if you look at sort of the purpose behind the Second Amendment, what people are worried about, and there are some people who are worried about our government or whatever. They have a right. It's written right in their constitution i don't think they want to give anybody hackers or far more nefarious actors the ability to stop their gun from firing right from a remote place and that would be the concern i don't if what it's and you know i i'm not one to really uh say which is the best or most useful policy and and if i but i mean my personal assessment is I do think smart guns probably rank pretty low on that list. I think there are more useful things or smarter things that could potentially be done. I am curious though, if I don't mind backing up for one second, Stephen, did you say there

are numbers that suggest that self-defense shootings outnumber criminal shooting? That seems I've never seen it before. One thing that is surprising, there's a couple of things that are surprising to me about that. Well, in fact, just the idea of it, that seems very shocking to me. But two, there's also this other question of how self-defense shootings get characterized as self-defense shooting, which is to say, I mean, it's a subjective scenario that, I mean, is retroactively characterized as self-defense by the person who pulled the trigger.

But what is the number? Do you have numbers? Yeah, well, this is from a DOJ review that was ordered under the Obama administration, and I believe it was 2014, where they reviewed some of the studies that have looked at how frequent defensive gun uses are. And to be clear, defensive gun use does not necessarily mean that somebody actually shot their gun at someone else. It can be a scenario where they display the gun to, you know, stop, to deter someone from attacking them, similar situation. And those are, Gary Kleck's numbers are self-reported. It's a survey. So some of those uses may even be, you know, illegal in theory, although, you know, Gary Fleck's written a lot about this. I'd encourage people to, you know, go and read his actual writing to get a better view of it and some of the critiques of it as well, as you've mentioned here. But yeah,

effectively, you know, DOJ compared that and some other estimates that put the numbers lower. There's a couple of crime surveys that are done each year by different institutions that somewhat address gun, defensive gun uses that put the number lower, maybe half a million instead of 2 million to 3 million a year. And then, you know, they looked at the number of crimes committed with a firearm as well, which tend to be in the 100,000 range, not necessarily murders. Like we talked about murders earlier. That's obviously a smaller number. But, you know, so you get when the DOJ looked at those two comparisons, they found that whatever the estimates were, you know, and there is a range, defensive gun use was still more common than criminal gun use in the United

States. And so that, that was just my, the point I was getting at as far as you know, what, what the information is available out there on how guns are used. Certainly even with 3 million gun use, defensive gun uses a year, that's still you know, what, less than 1% of all guns being used in self-defense uh you know as we've mentioned earlier because there's over 400 million in the country so uh you know yeah go ahead mike i i mean i well i think like this one thing is interesting

you know just to at least talk about is that the idea of self-defense is a right. I don't mean with a gun specifically, just in general. It's sort of inarguable one should have the right to defend themselves. But it's interesting how self-defense is also a marketing concept. And the problem with that, going back to what I was saying earlier, is that marketing tends to be directed at communities that are, again, have generally fairly low rates of gun violence. And I think it would be pretty hard to challenge the idea that most gun owners will never encounter that kind of situation where they'll have to pull their gun. But because that's a driver of supply, and because we have this issue in which, as I was saying earlier, gun sellers are not really required to secure their firearms in such a way that it's ultimately they're fairly easy targets for theft.

And also, this is an ATF problem. The ATF does a pretty bad job at shutting down gun dealers that engage in trafficking activity. You know, inspections are not conducted as frequently as they should be. As you know, you're not allowed to inspect a store more than one time a year if that store gets inspected at all. Stores that engage in bad activity, whether it be like poor accounting of inventory, other red flag issues, often they're let off with a warning multiple times when it becomes fairly clear that they're engaged in and trafficking uh and obviously those weapons wind up in the communities where they or guns are used in a in a way that sort of terrorizes you know sort of

terrorizes people on a daily basis um and i think so this is all a way to say, if I were to pick, and I think this is where I'll say something that probably everybody will disagree with, but if I was thinking about it, a useful tactic for accountability, then I think that it would make more sense to focus on the sort of broad industry immunity that exists right now for the gun industry. Okay, so let's get let's get to it, because you've been pushing accountability. And we haven't really gotten into what does that mean? Right? Because the gun, the gun manufacturers are not allowed, they may not be held liable right now, for the use of their firearm in a homicide right that we we haven't done to them what we did to cigarette companies um and though i mean i i don't think it's exactly

the same thing the gun manufacturers versus cigarette manufacturers but in any event they are shielded from liability and do you think that that shield should be removed? I think, well, I mean, I guess I'm sure maybe maybe maybe at least amended. I mean, I think it's a problem that it's so I mean, I know there are some lawsuits that are proceeding right now and have gotten much farther than I think anyone imagined they would. I think it's the law is frequently misunderstood, as I think Stephen has smartly pointed out before publicly. The law does not allow gun makers to market products in an overly sexy way that makes people want them. That's not covered by industry immunity. But there is this question about whether or not if your product, and again, opioids are certainly not a perfect analog either, but if your product is problem that there's no way to hold somebody accountable for that or a company accountable for that that just sort of off the table you know there's no there's no avenue toward discovery no way to know for example to what extent like you know companies are aware or what what is it built into their model to what extent like their firearms are going to end up being trafficked

every year and wind up on you know on the black market as opposed to the legal market uh and is there is there you know what information uh are they internally keeping on distributors and how they're there? We're talking about bad app or gun dealers. I mean, think about this. You know, they were that this is like a gun manufacturer could be held liable if a person gets killed because the gun malfunctioned and the person got killed. Yes, because the gun wasn't made properly in the same way as if my brakes in my car don't work and I, God forbid, get hurt, I can sue the car manufacturer. But gun firearm injury is apparently the 13th leading cause of death in this country. And that that

eclipses car crashes for the fourth year in a row, according to my data here. So so it's it's more likely to kill you than a car crash is. And yet, five years ago, it wasn't that way. You're more likely to die in a car crash. And yet we don't hold the car industry responsible for drivers who take out the cars and don't drive them well and die or kill somebody. In the same way, we don't we don't require the gun manufacturers to foresee improper use of their product in a way that, you know, if you look at four hundred and thirty four million guns in America and consider the fact that we've had forty five thousand people killed by guns a year and 60 percent of those are suicides, you can't hold somebody liable for a suicide

um it's like you're getting down to numbers that are on a percentage basis that are pretty small well that's true i mean i guess the problem with comparing it to the car industry is there's a distinction between car accidents versus like a deliberate misuse as you know what i mean i mean there's obviously some people use their car to kill people on purpose um but most of the time when people are dying in car accidents it is because it is an accident and i again this isn't a this isn't a i i don't want to suggest that this is sort of a perfect way um to to put a dent in like a in a problem that play i mean, we could say it plagues the country. Really, it plagues areas of the country. But I guess it's more like the idea that it's completely off the table rather than considering each case on its merits is sort of the problem from my perspective.

Well, I would question this just a little bit here, because I think if there was proof that gun companies were intentionally selling guns to people that they knew were going to commit crimes with them, that they probably could be held liable, even with the Protection of Lawful Commerce and Arms Act. I haven't seen any evidence that that's the case. Obviously, there's the argument that you'd need to get to discovery in some of these lawsuits in order to find the evidence of this. And fair enough, I suppose. But more often what you're seeing with this controversy, and this goes back to the 90s as well, the Protection of Lawful Commerce and Arms Act was a response to a tactic used by gun control groups in the 90s to enlist local cities to sue gun manufacturers over the criminal use of their products by third parties, generally years later. to the ATF's trace data aren't recovered until eight to 10 years after they've been sold for

the first time, after the gun dealer sold it to a distributor who sold it to a, or sorry, the gun maker sold it to a distributor who sold it to a retail customer. So it's kind of hard to make that direct liability connection between the gun maker. Yeah, it's not like Smith and Wesson directly to the man who ran out and committed a mass murder. I mean, it's not that simple to trace that. And that matters. Proximate cause matters

when it comes to civil liability. And this was a specific problem with this industry. You weren't seeing these sorts of lawsuits against Ford for people who, like you alluded to earlier, go out and kill people with their cars by running them over intentionally. You know, that you don't see that sort of tactic used against them. And that's why the industry, the gun industry has this particular law in place.

But while we're on the subject of liability, right, putting some skin in the game for the gun manufacturers, there are now three states, California, New York, and one other, that are styling laws, they're drafting laws, that look like the Texas anti-abortion law that was just challenged at the U.S. Supreme Court, where they understand if they were to say no guns in California, it would be reversed immediately. But instead, because of the Second Amendment, but instead they're writing laws like if you understand that somebody's committed gun violence or is manufacturing guns, there can be a private civil suit against them because we're declaring that you have a private right to sue in such cases. And that is working right now in Texas. And there's a question about whether it could work against guns. It was a concern expressed by Justice Kavanaugh from the bench when they heard the Texas

abortion case. It's been a concern expressed by gun advocates who say this is slippery slope. By the way, my crack producers sent me the article that I think you were referencing, Stephen. This is from Forbes, and it's talking about, this is a Forbes article from 2018. It's talking about a 2013 study ordered by the Centers for Disease Control, and they are saying that essentially if you take a look at the data released by the Centers for Disease Control. And they are saying that essentially,

if you take a look at the data released by the CDC, their data imply that defensive defensive uses of guns by crime victims are far more common than offensive uses by criminals. And it goes on from there. But in any event, okay, so liability, the three states right now, California, Illinois, and New York are considering proposals that would mirror in approach the Texas abortion law crackdown where they create a civil liability, a right to sue civilly against people who in New York, for example, violate New York's gun laws. So gun laws that might not be upheld, anti-gun laws that might not be upheld if the state just wrote them and tried to start enforcing them may now be written in as broad and offensive to the Second Amendment way as possible and could potentially stand if they just make it not the state who's going to enforce this, but it's just creating a private cause of action by private citizens who see gun owners having a gun or having concealed carry in a way that doesn't comport with a law that they would like to write. So you tell me, Stephen, whether this is troubling to you and whether you think it'll work. Yeah, I mean, certainly I think the trend overall is troubling. You know, it feels like perhaps if things keep going in this direction, we're all going to be incentivized to sue each other over everything. Well, we already are. That's America.

Fair point. But yeah, I mean, I think it was clear once Texas went down this road with this sort of novel approach to trying to institute an abortion ban, whatever you think of the underlying issue. People can agree or disagree with abortion and whether it should be legal, just like with guns. But it was clear that this would be used probably immediately on trying to enforce gun control laws that couldn't otherwise withstand judicial scrutiny. And now you're seeing sort of the first grasps at this with California's governor Newsom and the attorney general in New York, Letitia James. And I don't think that their proposals make a lot of sense because right now what they've said is just, we're going to do the same things we're already doing with past laws. Like California already has an assault offense ban and bans on homemade firearms that aren't serialized. And so using this tactic for that doesn't make sense.

Tish James, the AG of New York, that's what she said. She said, I'm writing a proposal that would allow residents to sue for violations of New York's weapons ban. It's like, well, wait a minute. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, it doesn't. The ban that's already on the books, right, has been upheld by the courts as constitutional. So why do you need to create like you're not you're not doing what Texas what Texas did. Texas intentionally wrote a law that they knew would be unconstitutional if enforced

by the state. And they just transferred sort of the right of enforcement to private citizens in civil lawsuits. And that's how they tried to do the end around. Like, unless that's what these states are doing, they're not doing the same thing. Yeah, exactly. But I think that the idea has been planted and you could use this to really to outlaw gun ownership or gun dealing altogether. Yeah. If you wanted to, and frankly, the Supreme court, it hasn't completely validated this approach, but by letting this law hang around in this way, you know, I, my guess is that the courts will figure this out. Eventually it is, it is a hard tactic to, to come to grips with is my understand, not a legal expert, but from what

I've heard and what I've read, it is a hard tactic to deal with based on the way it works. But I'm sure, my guess is they'll figure it out at some point. I mean, you know, I'm not privy to the thinking of any of the attorneys general

or governors in any of those states. But it also, there's at least part of me that thinks that that approach which is also just a way to highlight the problems with the texas law i mean i don't know that that what it's like i don't you know it was sort of it was it was clearly it was not as much of a i mean i i don't know that it's necessarily you know a thought that this is going to have like a this is going to be a really useful approach to you know um to bringing down

gun violence so much as just like if you're going to do this and and infringe on the rights of so many people in texas and turn people against each other and to basically informants uh and upset the social contract well we can do the same thing too as you're pointing out to like another sacred right that you care about and and you know it it just it seems like it's just as plausible, but it's OK. Let me ask you a question. We haven't we haven't touched on straw purchases. And I feel like we should, because this is another big thing you hear from people who want gun reform, that we have to crack down on straw purchases. So let me give you that one, Mike. What is a straw purchase? And is there any way of cracking down on it i mean it's when you you're not able to purchase a firearm so you have somebody else purchase one for you who is

able to legally buy one and is that is that often done by by gun salesmen with a wink and a nod like they know they know it's not the person but you know here you go anyway because I want the money. Well, it would be intellectually dishonest of me to suggest that that happens often only because I don't know if there's a way of empirically measuring that. But I mean, certainly there are plenty, I mean, there are certainly gun dealers who know and are engaged in those kinds of trafficking scheme and are aware that they're selling to people like you know essentially to launder firearms to people who aren't supposed to have them um yeah i mean i think if they don't know if the if the gun manufacturer if a gun seller doesn't know then how do we crack down on it because it's already

illegal for somebody to do that well well so one way to potentially crack down on it uh just potentially and i don't i mean it is again another accountability measure which is like in most places i i don't i think almost every place this has been a big fight in philadelphia which is where you know steven's uh backyard or old backyard um which is putting a requirement i mean i guess in this case it case, it would not be a stolen weapon. But most places, you're not required to report to the police if your firearm has gone missing. If you had a measure in place that required you to do that, and you were a straw purchaser, and then the gun you bought wound up in the hands of somebody else who committed a crime with it uh that could be one potential way i mean it's again it's a it's

a back end it's not a front end i don't know that you can stop it on the front end but if you know if if a straw purchaser um uh shows up in like a trace i mean that's sort of the you know and that i can't really think of another way. I mean, what I would suggest one that this is, this is an area where you probably have broad agreement, prosecution of straw purchasers, people who are intentionally lying to buy a gun for someone they know can't legally own one. I think a lot of people across the spectrum on this particular point would agree that we want to see further enforcement of this because you don't often see crimes like that, or even a crime where somebody who is prohibited tries to buy a gun and fails the background check.

Often these don't rank at the top of federal prosecutors' priority lists, so they tend to be paperwork crimes, right? And so they're not very sexy to prosecute, but they are fairly important, I think most people would agree. And this sort of goes back to your original question of, like, how do we deal with gun crime? Perhaps, you know, mass shootings and your general everyday gun crime are different problems that have different solutions. But one thing that I think a lot of pro-gun advocates would say is stricter enforcement of current gun laws, like straw purchasing infractions, would be one way of reducing crime going forward. And so this straw purchases, if you are more often prosecuting people for committing them, especially in circumstances

where it's clear that they knew they were buying a gun for a criminal, that's something that you could probably see quite a lot of agreement on. Okay, let me ask you the question of gun laws, if we tighten them up. You know, New York City's got very tight gun laws. Most of the blue states have tighter gun laws than the red states. And yet we do see, you know, tons of murders and homicides in states like New York, in New York City, in Chicago, which is in Illinois, and in California, which has, you know, tight gun laws as well. And whenever that happens, whenever you see like record number of homicides in Chicago, which we saw in 2021, people say,

oh, so much for the gun laws, right? Like the tighter gun laws don't lead to a lower crime rate. So I don't know whether that's true. We did look up a chart and this is from the gifford center as in gabby giffords and they are definitely not pro-gun um you know they want gun reform and they want it yesterday and i understand that especially given what happened to her but they went through and sort of ranked each state all 50 states by the strength of their gun laws and so if you have a really, really tight restrictions like California does, like they're ranked number one in terms of the number of gun laws they have and how strong they are. And then they said, how many deaths per 100,000 by guns? California has only seven deaths per 100,000. And then you've got, if you look up and

down the list, the states that have like an F from the Giffords Center and rank at the bottom of the list in terms of gun states that have very tight gun laws have higher death rates by guns. It seems to be the opposite, that the more loose your gun laws, the higher number of deaths by gun you're going to see in your state. Is that true? Right. Well, the first thing I would point out there is you're talking about gun deaths, not gun murders, which is again, two thirds of those are going to be suicides. And so the solution is again, another area where the solution for gun murder and the solution for gun suicide are going to be very different most likely. And so that's one thing to point out with these sorts of rankings that you see from the gun control groups. Everytown did a similar one recently as well. And I would also point out that it doesn't necessarily correlate, especially gun murders versus, you know, the gun control rankings for which states they feel have the best gun laws. And oftentimes the argument you'll get in response to this problem, like, for instance, Washington, D.C., has far more gun violence than sort of specious in my mind, because if that if Virginia is the problem, Virginia's gun laws are the problem.

Why doesn't Virginia have the same gun violence issue that that Maryland or D.C. has. Good point. And then they'll often also argue that in states like, for instance, Vermont, that have looser gun laws than most of the rest of New England, they also have low crime rates. And they'll argue that those low crime rates in Vermont are the result of the surrounding states having stricter gun laws. So you kind of get this situation where they're sort of cherry picking the logic here, in my opinion. And I personally, I'll let Mike respond here in a second. I just, personally, I think it's more complicated. There's a lot of things that go into why a state has high

violence rates or low violence rates. And it's not just whatever their gun laws happen to be, because you'll get the same argument from, from some pro-gun people as well, that, you know, the states that have, or areas that have more guns or lesser gun regulation have lower crime than, you know,

rural areas have less crime than cities do, even though most cities have stricter gun laws than rural areas. And it's more complicated than that in real life, I think. Go ahead, Mike. Yeah. Well, that's true. And I think also, as you're pointing out, it's not comparing Virginia, for example, to D.C. It's not apples to apples.

I mean, there are entirely different social factors at play in a city like the District of Columbia or even in New York. Having said that, even in New York, with the exception of the last two years in which we had a complete once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, before that happened, gun crime in New York City was low, especially for a city of 8 million people for many years, I mean, you know, post the high suicide, I mean, high, high homicide rates of the 80s and early 90s, the city was like, I would say, an exceptionally safe place to live until two years ago. It's still fairly safe. I mean, gun homicide has risen,

still substantially lower than the high rates of its worst periods, which is worth pointing out um i mean it is also we don't we've never we've never lived in a country where we have any uniformity of law when it comes to guns anyway so it's like when we talk about chicago i mean you know it's a city can enforce whatever ordinances it wants but it's not like it lives on an idyllic city it's like got a wall around it's an island it's next to indiana it's got neighboring outstate areas that have different gun cultures than the city doesn't mean it's not there's no way to you know whatever whatever law you impose there's obviously the problem is like how do you choke off trafficking into areas that are prone

to having high rates of gun violence and ask why those areas have high rates of gun violence. Usually they do, right, because of a number of social factors that I think we've sort of briefly touched on, whether it be like lack of industry, poverty, historical segregation, redlining, all these things that have created problems within cities that have never really been addressed addressed systemic factors that have never been touched or addressed uh meaningfully that's sort of you i mean it's it is that combined with easy access to firearms that creates uh centers where there are high rates of gun violence all right right, so let me ask you this. Let me zoom out for a minute, okay? Because what I've concluded now after this show is

we're up Schitt's Creek without a paddle, as they say. We already have, the country is swimming in guns. It's a gun culture. It just is. It has been since its founding. And we mere mortals who find ourselves living in 2022, there's not much we can do about it. They was this way for hundreds of years before we got here and it remains this way now. Practically, realistically, we're not going to change that. And so I don't I don't see the solution to homicide rates or mass shootings as crackdowns on the guns. It's not to say we

couldn't change things at the edges. So understanding that that's the best we could hope for in terms of the guns. And again, the mental health discussion is a whole other discussion, which we'll have to have in another show, because that's an area in which I really do think we could we could make a difference. But, you know, when somebody's crazed and wants to murder another person or never mind a mass murder it's really hard to stop them by taking away this weapon or that you know you can use a car you can use a knife we've seen it in london we've seen it in waukesha you're like you want to kill a lot of people there are a lot of ways to do it so anyway if i said to you this steven you get you get to choose one, right? As like, do you have kids? I don't right now.

OK, but I have plenty of loved ones. Yeah, exactly. So you care about, you know, your your your family or whatever. You can choose one reform that you think will make the greatest difference in cutting down on the gun homicide rate, you know, the gun mass shooting rate. What would it be? Probably stricter enforcement of current laws combined with community violence interruption programs. I think those two things could be,

make a real difference. I mean, and I understand the pessimism, but I would point out that, you know, as Mike alluded to earlier, the murder rate used to be much higher in this country than it is now, even after this spike we've seen recently. So there are ways to- It's creeping. Well, to your point, yes, stricter enforcement of laws. And of course, the country's going in the opposite way right now with these soft on crime DAs who, I mean, these cops, we kicked off the show with these two poor cops who got murdered by this suspect Friday night. And what happened in New York, that used to get you the death penalty? Boom. You kill a cop. You're facing the chair. Period. End of report. No longer. The new D.A.,

Alvin Bragg, is not going to enforce a bunch of laws that are already on the books. He's not allowed to do that. It's not the same as prosecutorial discretion. He's he's changing the law with the stroke of his pen. I'm not saying that this guy shot the cops because he knew he wouldn't be getting the death penalty, but he won't be getting the death penalty because this guy changed the laws. We're going softer on crime. I do think it has a factor in the higher crime rates that we're seeing. But can you just speak to before I give it to Mike for his one thing, the violence intervention? So we haven't touched that. And I read some of your articles on it. Yeah. Violence interruption programs are actually one of those areas where you probably would see a lot of agreement as well, because they aren't focused on trying to ban certain guns or restrict ownership by law abiding people or anything like that. And it also isn't using necessarily law enforcement tactics to try and stop shootings. Instead, it focuses on using community leaders and providing community support to the small number of people who tend to be the ones most at risk to actually commit these sorts of violent acts. Because it's not like even in a large city, it's not a lot of people generally who are out there committing these shooters. It's a small group of people.

And if you can intervene with somebody that they respect, perhaps you can create a situation that off ramps that tension and reduces the potential for violence. And you have seen some studies that indicate this approach has worked. And you're actually seeing some funding being directed towards this without much pushback from, or any pushback really, from gun rights advocates because it doesn't interfere with someone's lawful person's ability to own firearms. Okay, go ahead, Mike. One thing. I think that's sensible. Setting aside societal factors and root causes,

which I think we were just touching on, if I had to pick one specific gun policy, I think that I would focus, again, on gun dealers specifically. I mean, if we're talking seriously about combating everyday gun violence um then i think that means better regulation of gun shops uh and not allowing uh dealers to openly flout restrictions, doing a better job with inspections, not letting dealers that are posing serious red flags off with repeated warnings, requiring dealers to better secure their wares in such a way that it's more difficult to steal them in

large numbers. I think, again, those are the guns that end up going to the places that deal with gun violence on a daily basis. So that's what we really care about, because mass shootings are horrible in the sense that they live in our imagination. They upset the social contract. They cause widespread fear, but again, are ultimately still a very, you know, a minuscule percentage of overall gun death and shooting. Then I think that that makes the most sense. Obviously, we know the guns are already out there, but that's a horse out of the barn situation.

And, you know, I don't I don't like I like both of those. I like both of your suggestions. I will say one other thing on the part of the media and these mass shootings. There's a responsibility to report that it happened. There is absolutely no responsibility to keep it on the news on loop day after day after day. That is becoming part of the problem. It's one of the reasons. Do not inadvertently or advertently glorify any mass shooter. And I do think it helps. It sends a message to the next one. You'll get nothing. No one's going to know your name. No one's going to give to anything about you. And I don't know. I just think the media can play a role in being more helpful and stopping some of it, not all of it, sadly. Guys, thank you so much. I learned a lot and I really enjoyed our discussion. Me too. Yeah, I really appreciate it.

See you later, Stephen. See you, Mike. Okay, so don't forget to tune into the show tomorrow because we're going to have more on the latest breaking news. Justice Breyer retiring later this year. That and we'll have Matt Walsh. Very excited to have Matt Walsh back on the show. In the meantime, download the show as a podcast on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, or Stitcher. Leave me a comment on the Apple comments if you would. Download at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. You can subscribe. We appreciate it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.