Today, Explained - A Green New Deal, but for guns

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Vox’s German Lopez explains why Democrats need a bold new plan for gun control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Herman Lopez, you cover Guns in America for Vox, which is to say you cover mass shootings for Vox. It seems like there have been like a half dozen in the past two weekends or so. Is that accurate or is the number even greater than that? The number is probably even greater than that. Certainly a few specific shootings have gotten attention. So we had the shooting in Gilroy, California. At least four people, including a gunman and a six-year-old boy, are dead after chaos broke out at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California.

There was also the El Paso one this past weekend. At least 20 people were killed and 26 injured Saturday morning at a Walmart packed with back-to-school shoppers in El Paso one this past weekend. At least 20 people were killed and 26 injured Saturday morning at a Walmart packed with back-to-school shoppers in El Paso. Today, two more of the victims wounded in the Walmart shooting Saturday in El Paso have died, bringing the death toll in that attack to 22. And then there was also the Dayton one this past weekend. Nine people were killed and 27 injured before police officers shot the gunman to death just 30 seconds after the attack began.

But in between all those and even a little before that, we had a pretty big shooting in Brooklyn. New York police say one person is dead and 11 others were injured in a shooting in Brooklyn Saturday night. We had another shooting in Wisconsin. A deadly shooting spree in northwestern Wisconsin that left five people dead, including the suspected shooter. There are a surprising amount of mass shootings that simply just don't get that much media attention, but tons of people injured. We're talking dozens of people whose lives have been forever changed because somebody decided to pick up a gun and shoot them.

What exactly is the metric again of a mass shooting in America? So the metric I rely on comes from the gun violence archive, which essentially measures any mass shooting where four more people were shot, but not necessarily killed, excluding the shooter. By that count, we've had 250 plus mass shootings just this year. But the reason we're talking about mass shootings right now as a country is because of this shooting in El Paso, Texas, it feels like. What happened in El Paso this weekend? So in El Paso, a gunman walked into a Walmart and started shooting randomly.

He ultimately has killed, as of today, 22 people and injured at least 20 others. Based on what we know, his motives were linked to white supremacist views. So he had posted a manifesto online suggesting that people from Mexico were invading the country and that Latin people were invading the country. He also referenced the New Zealand attack, which was also another white supremacist attack earlier this year. But the simple story here is once again, somebody picked up a gun, walked into a public space and shot a bunch of people. You mentioned the shooter's manifesto.

It's three pages of hatred against immigrants and people, you know, viewed as basically invaders to the United States. It's a wildly anti-immigrant manifesto. But obviously the ideas in this manifesto aren't very foreign if you listen to the president talk about immigration or watch Fox News. Joining me now with reaction is Dan Patrick, Texas lieutenant governor. Dan, your state has been completely overrun by this illegal invasion. I think calling anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people. Is this a major escalation of anti-Latino sentiment in this country?

Yes. We have seen more of these kinds of hate crimes start to bubble up, but this seems to be one of the deadliest ones, at least. And the FBI has said explicitly that it is looking into this shooting in El Paso as an act of domestic terrorism. Why is a shooting like this domestic terrorism and say what maybe happened in Gilroy or maybe what happened in Dayton, Ohio was not? In El Paso, if the motivation was explicitly, I'm going to send a message, a broader message to society, then that's when it becomes domestic

terrorism. Essentially, it has to be ideologically or politically driven in some way. And to be clear here, violent white supremacy is terrorism? Is that how the United States government looks at it? Yes. I mean, violent white supremacy is, in fact, the original terrorism in the U.S. from the federal government's perspective. In the 19th century, the first anti-terrorism laws were explicitly passed to target the KKK and other racist groups who targeted black people for violence, whether lynchings or something else. And from the perspective of the FBI too, most cases related to domestic terrorism are usually racism driven.

And what does it mean to say we're going to look into this as an act of domestic terrorism? Does that mean there's more resources going towards it? Does that mean that they maybe stop future acts of domestic terrorism? Because this is still someone who found it easy to get a gun and easy to go to a Walmart and open fire. And there's a whole lot of people in this country who could do that right now. Does having more eyes on this one shooting help stop any future shootings? So it could in the sense that if the FBI is super aware of just hate in general, just bigotry in general in America, it can watch like internet forums like 8chan and say like, hey, look, this person is posting this manifesto online. Maybe that's a warning flag. Maybe we should pay more attention to that. But one of the things that the FBI has said that makes this

particularly difficult now is that there's no like single white supremacist group in the U.S. that's like directly guiding these people into these attacks. So in the past, for example, with Islamist terrorism, when you say, OK, so ISIS is directing people to do these attacks. We can like trace a link between these people and ISIS and maybe by stopping ISIS's operations directly, we can stop Islamist terrorism in the U.S. or abroad. With this, it's just there is no single white supremacist group you can point to guiding all of this. And that makes it much more difficult. There's just too many of these lone wolf incidents. And that might make it more difficult to actually stop these attacks if you're only pursuing this as like an anti-white supremacy angle. So this shooter in El Paso posted this manifesto to 8chan,

is that right? Yes. And 8chan is this infamously toxic breeding ground slash forum for white supremacy, in some cases, violent white supremacy. There's been a lot of talk since the shooting in El Paso about shutting 8chan down. Has that happened? Will that happen? Can that happen? One step in that direction is one of the services that essentially protects 8chan from cyber attacks, to my understanding, Cloudflare, has said it will no longer do that. Okay. So that's one step in this direction, and 8chan has been up and down today as a result of that. Is there a chance that someone else will just provide these sort of secure services for 8chan? And if so, does that make it sort of inevitable that sites like this continue to exist? It's a good possibility. The internet is a big place. The

world is a big place. There are always going to be people willing to host and maybe even protect these websites. So I don't think it's unlikely that they'll eventually find new protections, a new home, and be just fine and continue as they were. While the nation was still reeling from this anti-Latino white supremacist attack in El Paso, there was another shooting this weekend in Dayton, Ohio. What happened there? As far as we know, this man went to a rather popular place with like bars and restaurants in the area and just started, again, just shooting

people at random. Nine people, including the gunman's sister, were killed and 27 more were injured. Unlike El Paso, we don't have a really good idea of what this person's motives were. We are already seeing some stuff pop up about his background, and he apparently had some misogynistic views, which is pretty typical in these kinds of shootings. But otherwise, there doesn't seem to be a connection to El Paso. Earlier this morning, the president spoke about these two shootings in El Paso and Dayton. What did he have to say? Essentially, he, for the most part, just stuck to his old talking points on gun issues. So he pointed to mental illness.

We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but when necessary, involuntary confinement. Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun. He actually at one point pointed out violent video games, which has become a Republican talking point in the past few days regarding these shootings. We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately. He did mention that he wants some stricter gun laws passed,

so like red flag laws that would allow authorities, if there are like red flags, quote-unquote, pop up, authorities can seize a person's guns. We must make sure that those judged to pose a grave risk to public safety do not have access to firearms, and that if they do, those firearms can be taken through rapid due process. But for the most part, he seemed to focus on anything but gun control. His remarks, in large part, were focused on talking about how we bring about cultural change, because it's our culture that's making us uniquely violent in some way. Cultural change is hard, but each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life.

That's what we have to do. But there wasn't that much concrete leadership in terms of like driving the debate on what kinds of stronger gun laws we should be passing. I will make sure that we get universal background checks passed, the assault weapon ban, that we do something about magazines. What we're doing hasn't worked because we haven't had a system in Washington capable of delivering what the American people have told us they want. Eighty, ninety percent of Republicans want universal background checks, not to mention the common sense solutions like red flag laws that disarm domestic abusers and flag mental health risks and an end to assault weapons. These kids are traumatized. I support all the gun reforms here. We need to start dealing with the trauma that our kids have. We need trauma-based care in every school. We need social and emotional learning in every school. We need to start playing

offense. If our kids are so traumatized that they're getting a gun and going into our schools, we're doing something wrong too. Seven children will die today from gun violence, children and teenagers. And they won't just die in mass shootings. They'll die on sidewalks. They'll die in playgrounds. They'll die in people's backyards.

Gun violence is a national health emergency in this country. And we need to treat it like that. Hermann, it sounds like the president doesn't have a whole lot of new concrete ideas to add to this mass shooting epidemic in the United States. But there are 20 some odd people running for president. Do they have anything more to offer? They have some ideas. So in general, when this comes up at Democratic debates, the Democrats are really focused on the same things we've essentially heard for the past 25 years on gun violence, which is universal background checks and assault weapons bans and maybe some

like other restrictions on people who are showing like red flags. Yeah. I should say there have been some of the people running for president. Some of like the mid-tier and lower-tier candidates have proposed more aggressive things. So like Cory Booker suggested a licensing scheme. So it's like with a car, you have to get a driver's license. You would have to get a license to buy and own a gun in the U.S. And we did an episode about this with you focusing on Massachusetts, where they have a licensing program that actually helped reduce gun violence. Right, yeah. There's very good evidence that this licensing system would be more effective than, just say, universal background checks, for example.

So would any of these ideas, mandatory background checks, licensing system, assault rifle ban, have stopped the El Paso shooting, the Dayton, Ohio shooting, the Garlic Festival shooting in Gilroy? I think the answer is unfortunately probably not. The problem is that the U.S. has so many guns out there, and they're so easy to get. And even if your state specifically makes it difficult, you can just cross state lines and buy guns elsewhere. This happens a lot in New York. People go to Virginia. People go from Illinois to Indiana to buy guns. And that means that at the end of the day, these people will probably find a weapon somewhere. That doesn't mean that these other measures are completely ineffective. They maybe would reduce the death toll in some of these situations. But in general,

if somebody wants to get a gun in the U.S., it would probably still be possible. So if these types of plans wouldn't stop these shootings that we saw over the past few weekends, what should Democrats be talking about? Well, just as Democrats have been talking throughout this whole primary process about a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, they've been talking really ambitious ideas on all sorts of policy areas. They should essentially try to think a little bolder on guns. Basically, Democrats need a Green New Deal, but on guns. So what would a Green New Deal for guns look like? So I think one is just a much more rigorous licensing system, even above what Cory Booker is suggesting.

Okay. Two is banning certain kinds of firearms that we haven't talked about banning, such as handguns or semi-automatic weapons. Those are the majority of—handguns in particular are the majority of guns used in gun violence. And then three, actually taking these guns away once they're banned, which is something we have not done previously with certain gun bans. So I feel like that could be confusing because those sound like things that have been tried or have been proposed. Let's start with the licensing. What further licensing needs to happen and how would that help? Sure. So right now the licensing plans generally, like the one Cory Booker suggested, it would enable, like in Massachusetts, most people who apply to get a gun actually do get a gun license in the end, like something 90 plus percent of people who apply. The question we would have to ask is if we want to put higher standards on getting a license. So in the UK, for example, and in Japan as well, just self-defense is not a good enough reason to get a firearm.

In the US, for constitutional legal reasons, according to the Supreme Court, they say that it is enough to get a firearm. Maybe we should reconsider that. Maybe like politically, ethically, morally, that's just – that's not a good idea. It's led to all these guns in the US. And that's the kind of thing I mean when I say a more rigorous licensing system. It's like, yes, the licensing system is good. There's good research behind it. But maybe it should have even more hurdles involved. Okay.

And how about taking away handguns? That feels like antithetical to the American way. Sure. But I would just point out that actually in the 60s when Americans were pulled on this, a majority said that with the exception of like cops and other people who like literally use handguns in their profession, they were okay with essentially a handgun ban based on Gallup's polling. That changed over time. But the point here is even though assault weapons get a lot of attention, particularly due to these mass shootings, most gun violence is done with handguns. We're talking about like everyday shootings. We're talking about suicides, which still make up a majority of gun deaths. Those are usually done with just normal handguns and typically semi-automatic handguns. And the third thing you

said would be even more controversial, I feel, which is actually taking guns away. Sure. Yes. Like back in the 90s, we banned assault weapons for 10 years. But when we did this ban, we did not actually take away people's assault weapons. We didn't ask people to bring them in and give a market value like New Zealand and Australia have done with guns when they banned them. It was just a ban on future sales. Right, exactly. And that meant that there were just still a bunch of these assault weapons around. And as a result, the research on this has found that this assault weapons ban didn't seem to have much of an effect on overall levels of gun violence. It might have made mass shootings a little less deadly.

The evidence is kind of mixed on that. But otherwise, it didn't have to have much of an effect on overall levels of gun violence. It might have made mass shootings a little less deadly. The evidence is kind of mixed on that. But otherwise, it didn't have a big effect. And if you talk to researchers and experts, it's because, first of all, there were loopholes in the law, which creates all sorts of problems. But even beyond that, it's just the assault weapons that remained out there were still pretty accessible to people. That's why it's important to take this other step. It's not enough to just ban firearms. If the U.S. has more guns than people, then at some point you have to actually drain some of those guns out of the system. A background check, a rigorous licensing system, even bans, might do this over time. But if the idea is to immediately reduce gun violence in the U.S.,

then maybe that's something we should start seriously talking about is actually making sure that there are fewer guns next year in the U.S. And this has worked in places like Australia, who did like a massive gun callback after a mass shooting? Yeah. In the 90s, Australia had this pretty big mass shooting. And pretty quickly, the conservative government there said, OK, no more. This is ridiculous. We've had a few mass shootings besides the one that really drew attention at the time. And they banned a bunch of certain kinds of firearms, particularly like semi-automatic rifles. And the government said, okay, you have to bring your guns in. We'll buy them back at a certain percent of market value. And then they'll just be destroyed. In the end, the Australian government

sees hundreds of thousands of guns. And essentially the research suggests that this worked, that this reduced the number of gun deaths, particularly in the places where more guns were bought back. But now you're really talking about something that a lot of Americans would disapprove of. You're talking about something that politicians can run a campaign against. And they especially want to take away your guns. You know that.

They want to take away your guns. You better get out there and vote. You better get out there and vote. What is public opinion like on a gun buyback program or actually banning guns like handguns, which people will say I need for self-defense. I need to protect my family. So there's no doubt about this is an extremely unpopular idea in general in the U.S. Yeah. Most people, depending on the polls. Even Democrats at the debates are saying, I'm a gun owner. I'm a son of a gun owner.

I'm a daughter of a gun owner. My child is a gun, whatever. Kamala Harris says. I am a gun owner. And I own a gun for probably the reason that a lot of people do, for personal safety. They always phrase, this is always how the debate is phrased, like, we still respect the Second Amendment. We still want you to be able to buy a gun if you're responsible. Responsible gun owners are fine. So on and so forth. But yeah, I think what is important to note here is that,

I don't actually think this is going to happen tomorrow. I don't think this is that- I promise it ain't happening tomorrow. Well, it's definitely not happening tomorrow. It's probably not happening in 2020 even if after 2020 if Democrats take back the White House and Congress. It's not going to happen. But the thing we saw in the past few decades is important to remember here because we were at a point in the 60s where very strict gun regulations as today's standards seemed reasonable to most Americans. So that changed over time because the National Rifle Association, the NRA, became a really political organization. It went through a lot of changes in the 70s. And it really started lobbying. Politicians, the public,

started doing these massive campaigns, got in law journals saying that the Second Amendment defends an individual right to bear arms, and so on and so forth, and really shifted public opinion. When you see that, it makes you think, could the same thing in the reverse happen? I think the answer is probably yes, but it would involve a bunch of ifs. So if gun control advocates got louder and bolder in their proposals, if maybe Democratic politicians got louder and bolder in their proposals, and also if the public was just receptive to this. Like, if we see enough of these mass shootings, will Americans become more supportive of these tougher measures?

And it's a long-term project, but I think it's possible. But what's it going to take, Hermann? I mean, there was Sandy Hook, Never Again. There was the March for Our Lives. There was all the enthusiasm around the Parkland kids. They toured the country. It felt like there was a moment there. And here we are again.

What does it take to get get lasting effort on this issue? It seems like it ebbs and it flows. I think it's just time. I mean, it's not the most fun, exciting answer, but we've seen over the past few years that gun violence has crept up, particularly mass shootings, has crept up in, like, Democrats' interests, like in the most important problem they see. Healthcare is usually the top thing.

Maybe climate change is up there as well. But gun violence is starting to creep up. It was actually one of the things that they wanted asked at the Democratic debate based on some polling. That's just the kind of thing you want to see if you want to see change in this area. It's just this issue remaining in people's radar for a while. But it's going to take time because everything in the U.S. when it comes to policy change just takes time.

Herman Lopez writes for Vox.com. That's where you can find his piece that fleshes out some of the ideas he discussed on the show today. It's titled, Democrats have been discussing the same ideas on guns for 25 years. It's time to change that. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you.