Today, Explained - Let’s vent about guns

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

We opened up our hotline. You called and asked questions. We found answers. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin and host Sean Rameswaram, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Paul Mounsey and Efim Shapiro. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After last week's shooting in Uvalde, Texas, we asked you to call in with any questions or just to vent. Some of you had questions. I would like to know what average citizens like myself can do to stop gun violence. How many more of these have to happen? What can we actually do? How much power does the Second Amendment really have? And a lot of you just want us to vent. Since 1999, this has just gotten worse.

It is so easy to get a gun. It's not fair. But you don't have to have a requirement or a license or any training to purchase a handgun. This is preposterous. I want to take the AR-15 away. I'm just exhausted.

I want to take ghost guns away. And overwhelm. This kind of ammunition can put a grapefruit-sized hole into an adult human being. It is going to take more than a bill to solve this problem. On the show today, we're going to hear what you had to say and answer your questions. If a shooter came in, I just think about that a lot.

It's Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from... On May 14th, it was the Buffalo shooting. On May 24th, it was Uvalde, Texas.

Then over Memorial Day weekend, there were more than a dozen mass shootings. Nine people were killed. Something like 60 people were injured. That's just the everyday stuff that doesn't even really make the news. And then this week, four people were killed at a medical center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That one made the news. Around the exact time that happened, a student was shot outside of his high school in Los Angeles and a gunman shot a woman outside of a nail salon in Pitson Township, Pennsylvania. No matter where you land on gun rights in America, no one wants to live like this. My name is Tanika. I'm calling from Westchester, New York. I have a four-year-old who I had an extremely hard time dropping off at daycare this morning.

By the time I'd left her, I was in tears and shaking. It's just, this world isn't fair. It's not it's not the kind of environment I want to raise my child in and I don't really know what we do next hello my name is Carter Nall I am from

Indiana I'm 22 years old and it all just feels so hopeless and I'm 22 years old. And it all just feels so hopeless. And I'm so angry. I became political in 2012 when I was a 12-year-old and I heard about the Sandy Hook shooting. That's when I decided I am against the people who let this happen as a 12 year old and all i can do is just try to channel that anger and that grief and that rage into action because at first i was like oh man they're really going to pass

some legislation they're really going to fix this and then it didn't happen instead they did alice drills they made us train to defend ourselves. It's cowardly victim blaming. It's disgusting. And I just hope all the old people out there who are making money off of this, who profit from the slaughter of children, that your day of reckoning is coming when we vote you guys into oblivion. I have to hope for my kids that we can build a better world for them. Hello, I am a Philadelphia public school teacher and I'm obviously still processing everything

that happened in Texas, thinking about coming into my classroom every day, sitting behind my desk, interacting with my students, but then also trying to think about worst-case scenario of having to then use that same desk as a barricade to protect my students and myself. I keep yelling at the radio. Teachers, too. Every time I have to teach a class of kindergartners how to hide, every time I have to go home and tell my own kids that I would put myself in front of somebody to protect my students and my own kids ask why those lives

matter more. And I have to explain that they don't, but that I can't imagine allowing anything to hurt them. And whenever we have a drill, it makes me incredibly emotional for days. And in my classroom, whenever there's a drill for an active shooter or a threat, I have students who carry that fear and that worry and that burden. I remember feeling this fear when we had to do them during classes, drills that you didn't know if they were drilled or not, and having people come and pull on the doorknob, bang on the door, to make sure that you were quiet enough to just reinforce this fear in you. My entire middle school experience, my entire high school experience,

I was always sort of like looking at people being like, is this a possible school shooter? You know, I see kids kind of being kids or being weird or mean or whatever. I'm thinking like, is this like, you know, do I need to report this person? And so I didn't, but I thought about it all the time. I have a four-year-old autistic son who is in a public developmental pre-K program. I had to talk with his teacher earlier this year about what school shooting protocols would look like for his classroom. And the truth is that they would take all of these children into a quite small bathroom that is located in their room, but this is a classroom of young kids who don't do well being quiet or being still, and his teacher was honest in saying that if a shooter came in, their classroom isn't soundproof. And that he would hear them, he would know they weren't there, and she wouldn't be able to protect them. And I just think about that a lot.

I think about all the kids who are, who have support needs, who have mobility needs, who can't run out of a school. I feel like they deserve to be part of this conversation, too. Hi, my name is Amy. I'm calling from London. My name is Marlene, and I'm calling from Houston, Texas.

My husband and I had a lot of conversations about moving back to the U.S. My family are there. I miss them very much. I lived in Tijuana, Baja California for over five years. But I feel so much safer. I'm living in a country that regulates guns, a country where the Wikipedia entry for school shootings has one entry. Now that I've moved our family to Texas, it's always now in the front of my mind in regards to school shootings. Will my son make it back home? You know, will he know what to do, not panic when he's in school in case there's a shooting there? After that massacre, which happened in 1996, the U.K. government introduced regulations to limit personal handgun ownership.

All these concerns that I never had when we were in Mexico, actually, even with the high crime rate in Mexico. And it has brought to my mind, should we move back to Mexico, at least when my son is still in school? Because I know he will be safer there than he, I guess he would be here. I don't have to worry here about my very real child in the same way that all of my friends and all of my family, my sister, with her two children, they have to worry in a way that all of my friends and all of my family, my sister, with her two children, they have to worry in a way that I just don't. And it's not fair. Having lived abroad, I've had arguments with people about whether this is the greatest country in the world. You know, the access to

opportunity and innovation and income here, in some some cases is unparalleled certainly in parts of the country uh being able to you know for myself be a queer woman feel safe most of the time is a real privilege i'm not going to act like there aren't so many privileges in this country, but I just keep thinking about all of the things, all of the ways in which this country is failing. This Ameri-centric view that this is the greatest country in the world. It's pretty mind-blowing. When we're back, we're going to hear your questions and answer them. It's Today Explained. pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Do something. Just do something. For God's sake, do something. Today Explained, we listened to you vent about guns, but several of you had questions we wanted to answer too. We asked Dr. Megan Ranney for help answering them. I'm a practicing emergency physician and academic dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University in Rhode Island. If you're wondering why an emergency physician got interested in guns, look no further than the fact that the leading cause of death in American kids went from cars to guns a few years ago. Hi, this is Darren from Oregon, and I am cynical about anything that's going to change. I'm curious to understand how many more of these have to happen for every single person

in the United States to be impacted directly. It is so normal and appropriate to feel angry, frustrated, and even cynical right now. I've been working on this issue for almost my entire career. And I'll be honest, on Tuesday afternoon, I called a bunch of friends and colleagues in despair. You know, how many more of these do we have to go through before we actually do something? The truth is that these mass shootings are relatively rare. That doesn't make them okay. Terrorism events are never okay, no matter how rare they are. What's also true, though, is that there are more than 100 deaths

and more than 200 injuries by firearms every day across the United States. And I will say at this point, studies suggest that almost every one of us personally knows someone who has been hurt or killed by a firearm. The majority of those are not mass shootings. They are suicides, homicides, domestic violence, and accidental or unintentional injuries. I think the mistake is to think that those don't matter. The same solutions that would help to reduce the number of mass shootings can also be used to reduce that daily toll of firearm injury across the country. that won't scare him. But I feel like more needs to be done maybe through the CDC or through some other local government organizations

that can really educate parents on how to safely educate their children on what to do during a school shooting or how to, you know, frame that in a way that they can digest it. So honestly, for a four-year-old, you don't need to talk to them about this. They don't need this fear in their world.

They're probably doing lockdown drills at school already. I'll say my kids did them when they were in preschool. If they bring them up, you can talk to them about firearms or school shootings in general terms, the same way you would talk to your kid about doing a fire drill or about a thunderstorm. But you don't need to go into the gory details. It gets a little more complicated with older kids. I have a 13-year-old. She's well aware of what's happened.

And we've talked about some more specifics, and we've talked about what adults are trying to do to help keep her and her friends safe, and about what she can do as well. We got a ton of questions about policies. What kind of policies can we implement? What kind of policies have other countries implemented? Hi, my name is Jill, and I'm calling from Rhode Island and I'm wondering if you could do more research or there could be more conversation about what the steps are that other countries, places have taken to do after these mass shootings that have worked for them and what kind of effects it has had on gun ownership in those countries.

There's a lot that the U.S. can learn from other countries while also recognizing that the U.S. is a unique place. You know, I look at Switzerland, where my sister actually lives, next to the United States and Yemen. Switzerland has the highest per capita rate of firearm ownership, but their gun suicide and homicide rates are much lower, and their mass shootings are virtually non-existent. There's some good evidence already here in the United States about policies that can make a difference. Things like universal background checks, domestic violence restraining orders, where folks that have been convicted or under a restraining order for domestic violence lose access to their firearms, either temporarily or permanently, extreme risk protection orders or red flag laws.

There's also a lot of culture change and a lot of work around identifying folks who are at highest risk, around denormalizing violence. When you look at Switzerland, there are a lot of factors that go into their low violence and death rates. And so the solution here is both policy and talking about the family neighborhood structural factors that have led us to this point. to be a local legislator on my town council. And I ran for office to make a difference and make the world a better place. And we're working on things on the local level. But while we wait for federal action to happen, what is going on in the local level? Are there things local legislators like me can do to decrease gun violence and increase gun control and gun safety? There are a lot of things that can be done on the local level. And in fact, we're seeing most of the progress around firearm injury prevention

happening on the local level right now. The types of things you can do range from funding programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters or Boys and Girls Clubs to greening vacant lots and putting in community gardens. It's actually been shown statistically to decrease the rates of firearm injury in a community. To, of course, working with your local police departments and courts to make sure that any laws that are in place are actually enforced. To maybe even passing new laws as well. Now, Connecticut already has pretty strict policies around safe storage,

around permitting, around background checks. But there is often more to be done. In my home state of Rhode Island, although people who have been convicted of domestic violence are not legally allowed to own firearms, there have actually been studies showing that family court judges don't always ask about firearm ownership at the time that a decision is rendered. That's a really simple change that doesn't even require policy or new legislation, but can make a huge difference because domestic violence is one of the strongest predictors of someone killing someone else. From the local level, I don't know, to the maybe biggest question at the federal level, some people had some questions about just rethinking some of the founding principles of this country.

Hi, my name is Sam Myers calling from Tucson, Arizona. And the most recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has got me thinking, is the U.S. system just irrevocably broken? And do we need to go back and start from scratch like Trulia is doing right now, rewriting its constitution? Gosh, we can't even get the Equal Rights Amendment through. You can't blame him for asking. Hi there. My name is Jalen. I'm from Canada. And watching all these mass shootings happen in the US, I think I hear a lot of fellow Canadians and of course, people around the world saying, you know, this doesn't happen anywhere else but America. And to people that are pro-Second

Amendment or pro-gun rights or whatever it is, what is the response when they are confronted with that objective truth that it's very clear there's a correlation between accessibility to guns and the amount of mass shooting events. And America's unique accessibility to guns is very much connected to mass shootings. How do they confront that statement? You are exactly right that a mass shooting happens when someone with hatred or a suicidal impulse has access to that lethal means. There is a long pathway that gets them there. And there are a lot of moments where intervention can happen, both around reducing access to firearms for folks with histories of violence or hatred or various types of convictions. DUIs are actually a big predictor of hurting someone else through education of folks

that are already firearm owners about how to recognize risk. And one of those really important things is recognizing that 40% of Americans are firearm owners or have a firearm in the house. There are 400 million firearms in private hands right now in the United States. Those are facts. And we've got to figure out ways for firearm owners and non-firearm owners to work together to commit equally to reducing this scourge. I mean, look at our COVID response, too. We're a bit more politicized and divided right now in general. And sometimes I fear that we're going to get worse before we get better. But the only way we'll get better is by a bunch

of us trying to get there. The last question I have for you was the one we got the most. And it maybe wasn't even a question as much as it was a frustration. And it was just that people have this real sense that nothing is going to change because they've seen it all before. I go back to that tweet from Dan Hodges, a British journalist who talked about once America decided slaughtering children was fine, this was over. And I really feel that's true. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm 41 years old.

And since 1999, this has just gotten worse. I don't want to sound hopeless, but if we can't rally around dozens of dead children, then my hope is pretty low. Thank you for your time. I don't know who will listen to this, and I know it won't change anything, but my heart is broken. I'm an emergency room physician. I take care of folks every shift who are in the worst moment of their lives. And I know that the but thousands of other physicians, thousands more public health professionals, social workers, counselors, parents across this country, firearm owners and non-firearm owners alike, are equally committed to fixing this. And I think, you know, it's really normal to be angry and frustrated and sad right now.

I also would implore us to keep going in whatever way makes sense to you, because that's the only way that we do make progress. And I believe we can get there, but we only do it together.