The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 23

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

This program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week's Munk Members podcast analyses two stories in the news. First, something feels different about the latest school shooting incident in America. The scale of horror and the event following so closely on the racially motivated killings in a Buffalo supermarket suggest a bigger set of problems are besetting the U.S. beyond the urgent need for gun control. What are these issues? How could they be addressed? Janice and Rudyard discuss. The show wraps up with a recap of week of events in the Russia-Ukraine War and the fierce debates at Davos over the morality of a negotiated settlement that could leave Putin in control of large swaths of Ukraine's East and South. To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.Munkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this. The Monk members only podcast, our weekly program digging into the big issues and ideas in the news. We do this each and every Friday with Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs,

internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, great to be in conversation with you again. Great to be here with you, Richard. Two topics that I want to dig in with you this week. The first is. a difficult one. It was one that I found myself throughout the week avoiding. I would see pictures on websites. I would see headline news stories and I would turn the page or close the tab. But I think it demands not simply our attention. It demands an acknowledgement of a bigger moral quandary here. And I'm talking about these tragic shooting that unfolded in Texas this week, killing over a dozen. 19. 19 in total. K-K6 school children, teachers. You know, I,

we all struggle with these events. You don't know quite how to understand them. And I think understanding them has to reside, you know, live in, you know, finding solutions. You have to have some framework to put around an event like this to see how this stops. Do you have a framework, Janice? Is there a way that you've come to understand what is now after Buffalo? Just an incredibly bloody and heinous month in the United States. First of all, Roger, the United States is a huge, liar in comparison to everybody that we would normally compare them and ourselves. So it is a huge outlier.

Let's just all understand that something is not normal in this situation. How do you solve this? And the Americans have been struggling hopelessly really with this. There is a framework which is helpful. And Nicholas Christoph actually wrote an interesting piece about this. It's a public health framework. When you have something that is causing severe illness and death and injury, public health framework is not a bad framework.

Why do I say this? Because the obvious answer is much tougher gun legislation. When you look across all the G7 countries, we have incidents like this. We have, Norway, we had in Canada. but it's just of a different order of magnitude. And we have wholly different gun legislation. The problem is in the United States, they're just structural obstacles

to getting that gun legislation passed. The United States is a wash in guns. So we have to have a different approach. Think about guns as a threat to health and start doing the kind of work in the United States that was done on cigarettes, on alcohol, on a whole series of public health issues where it's a slog, but it's about changing the culture.

And we have to move away from a hopeless effort to get gun legislation through because this is at the state level. I agree, that would be part of the solution. I guess what I've struggled with this week is a realization that all these events, It is not 65-year-old women walking into supermarkets and schools and shooting people indiscriminately. These are young men of a very specific age range.

Usually they're in their late teens. Often, interestingly, they and tragically, they attack a woman in their life before they perpetrate these crimes. There's a strange pattern of attempted murders or killings of their mother. or grandmothers before they begin these assault. So there's something very specific here. And I know it's amorphous and it's hard, you know, from a political scientist, public policy perspective, to think on this.

But you just have to wonder if there's something wrong with the culture of a portion, a segment of young men in America. And that the prevalence of guns is really just coincidental to the mental illness, because that's really what it is, the mental illness that is evidencing itself in these hugely destructive ways amongst this very specific, you know, demographic group. So violence by adolescent males is a worldwide problem. If you actually look at it, it's fascinating when you look at civil wars in different parts of the world.

You know, the most violent activities are always perpetrated by young adolescent. And even without mental health issues and then later on any mental health issues and you're in a very different world. So let's use a public health framework for a minute. We do not like 12-year-olds drive. We don't even let 15-year-olds drive because we know that the capacity to execute is much lower in adolescent male brains than it is, but when they get to be 25 or 21 or whatever age or 18. So that's why I think that's a useful perspective. No 18-year-old should be able to buy gun. So let's not go after gun rights in American culture, which goes to the heart.

of the response, you know, it starts from the Civil War on and then gets exacerbated by the civil rights movement and gets juiced up again in great replacement theory and all sorts of things. Let's just focus on this group that you're talking about and say, look, we're not attacking gun rights, but we're going to change the age level given what you just talked about. So you have to be 21 before you can buy a gun. Now, just a determined 15-year-old or 18-year-old going to his parents' room and grab a gun, sure, that's possible. But that's not, of course, that's possible. And you're never going to get anywhere near zero in the United States. But each one of these people and these horrific incidents, Roger, actually bought a gun legally. That's a nightmare.

Yeah. I just wonder, you know, if there is, again, a mental health crisis. There there is. That is also part of this. And then, you know, you can see, you know, I live in downtown Toronto. And I think you can see the effects of this pandemic in terms of an increased prevalence of people on the streets who are clearly dealing with mental health issues. I think we have an entire approach in our society to, you know, it was founded on some good impulses to deinstitutional. mental health in the 1960s and the 70s, but now a lot of mental health care is

really only available to people who can pay for it and have the means to do that. And mental health is a way of thinking about public health, of thinking about individual health, I think often, especially in the United States, I would argue maybe likely even more so in Texas, is kind of a bit of an afterthought to to how do you identify people who are at risk? How do you provide them with, you know, therapy and care? How do you try to intervene a lot earlier in this process? So you're not ending up with a scenario where the intervention consists

primarily of armed police officers showing up at a school after, you know, a mass shooting incident has begun. You know, that's exactly right that there are mental health issues. associated with almost all of these. And you're also right, Roger. We are seeing a tremendous increase in mental health in almost every society that experienced lockdowns all over the world. And the long, you know, I don't know how direct the correlation is,

whether it's longer the lockdown, the worst crisis. But we are facing a crisis and layer onto that, that access to mental health care, as you said, It's so stressed that people wait 18 months, two years in some cases, in our own society. And so you have the perfect storm here. What's also remarkable in every one of these cases, the person, there are signs beforehand, usually on the web or in texts or in posts or on social media that they have, very violent intentions.

But of course, there's a ton of that that never culminates in an act of violence. And secondly, you run smack up into privacy legislation. So where if we were intervening, every single time we read this kind of violently, frankly, racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic di-tribes that are out there that police or teachers could access, there would be a huge question, a huge question of rights and would be very, very difficult to get our societies there. So we're really in a very, very tough spot now where this is concerned. Getting better access to mental health care, we know in the city that you and I are talking about that we are, we are, have a waiting list of 18 months now for a troubled adolescents. Just think about that. And just to make this picture more complicated, again, in the city in which we live in, a young man with a gun walked by a school yesterday in one neighborhood, was shot by the police in a preemptive attack. There's no way of evidence that this kid intended to attack to school. So that's how tough this problem is.

Yes, about being reported that it was actually a BB gun. Yeah. That he was. And he's dead now. Yeah. Right. And so think about that one, too. Yeah.

No, it's, you know, these are an often, again, as I say, stories that I close the tab or I flip the paper over. But I think we have to reflect on it. And, you know, some people say, well, it's just an American thing. No, my response to be twofold. One, we're all part of it. of humanity people and you know we owe each other a kind of burden of care hopefully that you know is greater than our own specific nationality and then second you know this is an issue in

canada we've had you know attacks on visible minority groups unfortunately predominantly muslims in our society we've had our own shooter incidents tragically targeting women yeah yeah you know the van attack in toronto uh shooters on the danforth i mean Again, I just, I think that there's, I think there's just a crisis of mental illness going on. And as a society, we, we've kind of outsourced it. We're just in time delivery. We've taken all those, you know, tricks and tweaks from, you know, the likes of Amazon. We're applying it to the mental health of our society.

And I think we're paying the price for it. Let's just have one quick note, Roger, too, which is these kinds of crises grow worse always. when there's a broader culture of conspiracy. They always do. And when there's social change, right? So we are living at a time where it is perfectly okay in the United States and in some parts of Canada as well to talk about a great replacement theory where the white community in Canada is going to be replaced by

and just fill in the blanks, okay? Jews, Muslims, you know and the list goes women are replacing men it just it doesn't matter you fill in the blanks but when this stuff begins to rise and the noise level grows it's so easy for young people with a predisposition to mental health to find communities and hear this over and over and over again on the web and have those instincts reinforced. And that's frankly what we're seeing. Yeah.

So there's a bigger issue where, and I like your, your, your, your, your, your, your, you're, your, your, your, your, your duty of care, but part of that duty of care is not only about regulating guns. It is actually addressing these conspiracy theories, which are frankly running wild in our societies and say, these are harmful. These are harmful to our mental health and they're harmful to our physical health. I hope some of the leadership candidates for the progressive conservative, sorry, the Conservative Party leadership federally are listening because there's a lot of really weird

conspiracy theories about the WHO, the W.EF, you pick your acronym. The Conservative Party of Canada seems to want to have a debate about fringe to be polite ideas and conspiracies that supposedly are great. thing, Canadians. Wow, pretty shocking stuff. Let's come back after this break in update, Janice, on the Ukraine War. We haven't discussed it for the last couple of episodes, but this has been an important week in many ways, a debate surfacing now that kind of, can you say, pre-shadow, foreshadows, the monk debate that we had a couple of weeks ago about how does this war end, and is there any agreement amongst the different parties? Forget Russia and Ukraine. I mean,

Ukraine, NATO, Europe about what a end to this crisis could take shape and again what that would look like. Back after this short break, you've been listening to a sample of the Monk Members Only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www.munkdebates.com. Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our monk members podcast. Thanks for listening.