Today, Explained - This Time Could Be Different

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

Something changed this week. Teenagers managed to break the deadlock over gun control. Marches, walkouts, and serious policy debates are on the way. To understand what's different about the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Sean Rameswaram speaks with Vox reporter German Lopez, Georgetown psychiatry professor Liza Gold, and Elizabeth Love, a Utah teenager who's a bit of a badass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The weekend's almost here. That means it's time to catch up on your sleep. A good mattress can help. Check out the mattresses at Mattress Firm. Unlike some mattress companies you hear about on podcasts, they've got lots of different brands to choose from. Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep. Something was different this week. Something in our never-changing national argument about guns changed. It started like it always does. Several people are dead and nearly a dozen injured in this school shooting in Parkland.

Right now deputies are going room to room. 17 people are now confirmed dead. We know at least three people still in the school. And then it followed the patterns we're used to. A powerful AR-15 bought legally a year ago. What I first think we need to do is pray for the people that died. Somebody who's mentally ill, like the shooter, okay? Our actions as human beings are a reflection of what's spinning around upstairs in our minds. But then, the narrative shifted.

We have a voice! We have a voice! And continued to shift. This is about people who are for making a difference to save us and people who are against it and prefer money. So, Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA? And then, this morning, President Donald Trump spoke at CPAC. I've been watching this stuff go on for 20 years. The president gets up, everybody's enthusiastic for the first couple of days, and it fades, fades, fades.

Nothing ever gets done. We want to see if we can get it done. Let's get it done right. We really owe it to our country. So what happened? How did a bunch of teenagers manage to flip the script on gun control? I'm Sean Ramos-Viram. This is Today Explained. Music

Everyone's going to filter, you know, the mass shootings through their own particular filter. This is Lisa Gold. And mine happens to be, you know, clinical and forensic psychiatry. Lisa is a professor at Georgetown. You know that thing where we get outraged by a mass shooting, then the shock wears off, and then we move on? Lisa studies that. She calls it learned helplessness.

Every time one of these horrible shootings happens, and every time afterwards, you know, people say we have to do something, something has to be done, and then nothing happens. And that, you know, every time we kind of try to get our hopes up a little bit that maybe this time will be different, it turns out not to be different. And that sort of reinforces it. And our leadership reinforces that. It is a tough issue. Senator Marco Rubio, the day after the shooting. Because if someone decides that they are going to take it upon themselves to kill people,

whether it's a political assassination of one person or the mass killing of many, it is a very difficult thing to stop. But the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, refused to accept the status quo after a former classmate killed 17 students and teachers, and injured many more. How do teenagers change the equation on learned helplessness? Well, learned helplessness is something that develops over time. And they're too young to have gone through, you know,

the kinds of cycles that older Americans have gone through. They are not, these young people from Florida, are not suffering from learned helplessness. In fact, they are like, what? You mean you can't do anything about this? How ridiculous is that? You are responsible! You are responsible! March 24th, in every single city, we are going to be marching together as students begging for our lives. This isn't about the GOP. This isn't about the Democrats. This is about the adults. We feel neglected. And at this point, you're either

with us or against us. And their response to that is to say, well, let's make sure this doesn't happen again, which is kind of how everybody responds after a mass shooting. But the rest of us don't think that there's that there's really anything we can do. You rooting for him? You rooting for the teenagers in Florida? I'm rooting for all of us. You know, gun violence, if it takes the teenagers to shake the rest of our country out of this passive, learned, helpless position, great. Because, you know, we don't have more mental illness in the United States than any place else. We don't have more angry, impulsive people than any place else.

What we have are more guns. And also, by the way, having raised two teenagers myself, you really don't want teenagers to be mad at you. It's really unpleasant. They're articulate, they hold on to things, and they hold you absolutely accountable. And I absolutely love the phrase that I keep hearing them use. We call bullshit. Politicians put it in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this. We call BS. We say that tough, they say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BX! They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.

We call BX! They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BX! No more guns! No more guns! No more guns! No more guns! Any school district, any school in general, should not have to endure the grief and sadness that Stoneman Douglas had to, that Sandy Hook had to, that Columbine had to. There should be none of those, and still there should only have been one for there to be a change.

This isn't just a Florida thing, by the way. Teenagers across the country are organizing and protesting, speaking out and writing. I was in seventh grade when Sandy Hook happened. I saw a school that looked like mine with kids that looked like me suddenly turned into a war zone. Elizabeth Love is a senior at West High School in Salt Lake City. I spent the weekend after Sandy Hook terrified to return to school. When I did return, I was anxious whenever I was on my school's first floor, reasoning that the second was safer. Elizabeth wrote about being fed up with weak gun laws for Vox this week.

In American schools, the fear of gun violence always looms. Last week, even before Parkland, a car backfired outside my school, interrupting class with a sharp pop, pop, pop. Adrenaline shot through my veins as I grabbed my friend in a panic. All 32 pairs of eyes in the room widened as our teacher rushed to the window to make sure it was only a car. We called Elizabeth to ask her what about this Florida shooting felt different to her, all the way out in Utah, how it sparked this movement. She was in her high school library when we called,

but picked up her phone anyway because Elizabeth is a regular badass. I think it has everything to do with the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas. They have been absolutely amazing. And out of most mass shootings, you, especially school shootings, you don't see the victims themselves speaking out. I mean, obviously they have to grieve and they've just been through a traumatic experience. And so I think the fact that there are all these students who are just at once all coming together and speaking out, it's a really powerful thing. And it's allowing students like me to join a movement that we've been waiting for for a really long time. So what is the thing you think you can do? What are you hoping will happen and how are you hoping to operate in this, contribute to it? So right now I'm helping to organize a march in Salt Lake City for a lot of students that'll coincide with the Students from Florida March for Our Lives in Washington. And our goal for that is just to kind of kick off this movement that we believe is starting. And I think the ultimate goal is to create safer schools in a safer country

where students don't have to worry about their schools being shot up and they don't have to worry about these types of violent things happening at school. And I think these marches and this outrage is just the beginning. And what are you saying to people when you're trying to get them to sign up for the march or to participate? What are your sort of arguments or is it super obvious? Well, I think for kids my age, I don't really need arguments. I think it's for everybody that I've talked to, it's a no brainer. I mean, we've lived through this mass shooting after mass shooting. So you haven't encountered anyone who said like, you know, I don't really want to participate. I don't want to see more gun control,

anything like that? Oh, I've heard like, some participate. I don't want to see more gun control, anything like that. Oh, I've heard like some people say on Facebook, like, oh, we should plan a counter march to protect our rights and whatnot. But I haven't heard this stuff coming from students. I think it's more coming from adults. When Vox tweeted your essay, people were cosigning and retweeting, but some people were less supportive. Someone wrote, here's the answer. Staff at this campus are armed and trained to meet threats to student safety with deadly force if necessary. And it's got an image of that bathroom sign guy holding a gun. Is that the kind of solution you want to see at your school? We already have security guards and we have police

here too. I mean, our school is smack dab in the middle of downtown Salt Lake. And so there's no shortage of security. And to give a security guard to stand at the front of a high school or an elementary school, an AR-15, that's just not the environment that we want for our education. And it's not something that we have to have because there are other solutions. Another person wrote, you're a teenager. Last week, you were eating Tide Pods on YouTube. This week, you're an expert on the Constitution and mental health issues. That one's by far my favorite one that I've gotten. Do you feel like people aren't taking you seriously because of your age? I doubt that that person actually read what I

wrote because I didn't talk about the constitution and I didn't talk about mental health issues. I talked about the experience that I've had going to school in this mass shooting era and explained why this outrage is happening now. So I think had that person actually read what I had written, they would understand I was not eating Tide Pods last week. What are the kinds of gun regulations you'd like to see? So I think first of all, we need to close the gun show loophole and we need universal background checks. I think that that's the first step and it's a popular step. And then second of all, I don't think any of the teenagers out here protesting for reform are claiming that they have all the answers or know which legislation is going to prevent gun violence and which legislation

isn't going to prevent gun violence. But what we do see is in other countries where they have regulations put on their guns, they don't have the problems that we have. And so I want the Dickey Amendment, which bans Congress from funding CDC research on gun violence, repealed because we at least need to start looking for answers. Right now, there's sort of this outrage about another 17 kids being killed. But how do you sustain this once that sort of outrage fades away, which it seems to always do? Here's what I think will happen. We're all going to be able to vote pretty soon. And so even though it might not always look like people on CNN calling out their politicians,

we'll be calling them out with how we vote because this is an issue. This issue is at the top of our minds and it'll be the issue that will decide who we vote for in all the coming elections. And the second thing is, is these mass shootings happen so frequently. And this is what the response is going to look like now after each of them. So if politicians think, oh, this is going to fade away in a couple of weeks, well, there will probably be another mass shooting pretty soon at the rate that we have them in our country. And it'll just start bubbling back up again unless they solve the problem. After the break, we find out what works and what doesn't when it comes to gun control. This is Today Explained. like ones you can walk into. Mattress Firm can help you stretch your budget a little further when you're looking for ways to improve your sleep.

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to ensure perfection and 120 night low price guarantee so you know you paid the perfect price. Again, go to MatchesFirm.com slash podcast to learn how your sleeping could be improved. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Ferrum. Students across the country are demanding better gun control, and most Americans are on the same page. So what would work? What exactly should these kids be asking for? I'm Herman Lopez. I'm a reporter at Fox. Herman covers mass shootings.

Since 2014, since Fox launched. Yeah. Hermann covers mass shootings. Since 2014, since Fox launched. And I honestly couldn't remember all of these events that I've covered. I just feel that same sense of horror and sadness every single time. Hermann, President Trump spoke at CPAC this morning. He spent a lot of time talking about these school shootings and doubled down on this idea of arming teachers. These teachers, and I've seen them at a lot of schools where they had problems. These teachers love their students and the students love their teachers in many cases. These teachers love their students and these teachers are talented with weaponry and with guns. So the president wants to arm some teachers,

the ones who know how to use guns. Could that work? The short answer is no, probably not. This is something that often comes up in these debates. The NRA seems to be a big fan of this idea. And it's something that Trump at first kind of like seemed to just be throwing out there and on Thursday really leaned into it with the bonus comment that the teacher should be paid a bonus if they take training and arm themselves. And this is one of the most ridiculous ideas thrown out in this debate.

In general, the problem is that there are too many guns in the US. That's what correlates with our levels of gun violence. And this would effectively add more guns in a school setting, which would create all sorts of possibilities, not just for like mass shooting scenarios, but teachers getting into arguments with their kids or the kids getting in arguments and somebody finding the gun, doing something ridiculous. I mean, one statistic to keep in mind here is it is more common in the U.S. that somebody accidentally shoots themselves or accidentally shoots somebody else than actually uses a gun to defend themselves in a justifiable homicide. I'd rather have somebody that loves

their students and wants to protect their students than somebody standing outside that doesn't know anybody and doesn't know the students. Trump's argument seems to be that a teacher with a gun is better than a armed guard on campus because this armed deputy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland didn't help. Yeah. And the note, it did not seem to help. In fact, that officer has now resigned in part because of his response. It seems like he basically just stood outside the school.

The sheriff said he could clearly hear gunshots for four to six minutes outside the school building, and he just did not go in. And the thing is, is that this isn't that surprising when you look at the evidence on how people respond to mass shootings and while they're armed, they, these are just traumatizing events, and they panic. There have been multiple simulations kind of like walking not just civilians but also police officers through these kinds of settings where a crime is taking place. And people just panic because this is life or death. Right. So one FBI data point that's really telling here

is that in about half the situations where law enforcement respond to active shooting scenarios, police get injured or killed. These are people who are trained to respond to these kinds of situations full time, and even they get injured or killed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but one thing the president isn't talking about is banning assault rifles.

No, the president has generally avoided that topic. He has proposed raising the age requirement on assault rifles to 21. Right now, long guns, meaning rifles and shotguns, under federal law, if you buy them from a licensed dealer, you only need to be 18. And this is something we heard Senator Marco Rubio also proposing at the town hall he did in Florida on Wednesday night. And just today, Governor Rick Scott did the same. We will require all individuals purchasing firearms to be 21 or older. There will be exceptions for active duty and reserve military and spouses, National Guard members, and law enforcement. Does raising the age limit on buying an assault

rifle do anything? I mean, I was buying beer before I was 21. No, in general, this is probably a policy that is just too limited to have a big impact. If you look at the data and the Washington Post has put this together, it suggests that most mass shooters are 21 or older. So that should immediately show you, no, these people will still probably be able to buy weapons. So you'd think that they'd be proposing an assault rifle ban, but they're not. We did have one in the 90s into the early aughts. Did that work to reduce gun violence in any way? If you look at the research during the 10-year period that this assault weapons ban was in place, it does not seem like it reduced gun crime, although that comes with a few caveats. The main one being that this law was riddled with loopholes. For one, we've never had

actual universal background checks in place in the U.S., so it's kind of questionable just how much a ban can work in that environment if you're not even checking the transaction to make sure that it's following the law and whatnot. So the United States is this patchwork of gun laws. Florida is proposing all these new ideas today, and cities have their own regulations. So what do we see working and not working in that patchwork? In general, the states with stricter gun laws do actually see fewer gun deaths compared to the states with laxer gun laws. But the problem, as you kind of alluded to there, it's a patchwork of laws. And the problem with that is that even if, let's say, Chicago or New York imposes really harsh gun laws, people can still cross the border. In Chicago, they can go to Indiana. In New York, they can go to the South and buy all sorts of weaponry that they wouldn't be able to buy back home and then take it back home. And people love to point out that Chicago has really strict gun laws and also one of the highest rates of gun violence. Yeah, that's a big talking point. The White House has made it itself before. I've heard it, yeah.

The city with the strongest gun laws in our nation is Chicago. And Chicago is a disaster. It's a total disaster. If you live in Chicago, it's a few hours drive at most to Indiana, particularly Gary, Indiana, where you can buy guns and just take them back home to Chicago. And you see this. Most guns used in crime in Chicago come from outside the state. What that gets into is that the U.S. really needs a big nationwide solution to this problem.

So what should we do? What would be the big picture legislation that could solve this problem or at least address it. Australia banned a bunch of guns after a mass shooting. Could we see something like that here? There are a few things the U.S. could do, in particular because its gun laws are so weak that there's so much room to go up. Some states have seen success, particularly Missouri and Connecticut, with universal background checks and licensing requirements on handguns. They have seen noticeable decreases in homicides and suicides related to those licensing and universal background check requirements. Missouri is a particularly interesting case

because it had a licensing requirement for handguns for decades and decades. It repealed them in 2007, and all of a sudden its gun homicides started going up. You also saw just an increase in the amount of guns there. So again, that's evidence that it was the guns driving this. So you could do something like that, that would help. But the question is, how much would that help? If the fundamental problem in the US is it has too many guns out there, making it very easy for somebody to carry out some sort of horrible shooting or hurt themselves or hurt others, whatever, then the problem is that we need to find a way to immediately reduce the amount of guns.

And that's exactly what Australia did. They confiscated a bunch of weapons that they banned. 650,000 guns were seized in Australia. And if you look at the data, it suggests that that resulted in a drop in both gun homicides and gun suicides. So that's what the US probably needs to be thinking about at this point, because until you address the core issue of just so many guns being out there, you're still going to have levels of gun violence that European countries and other wealthy nations don't see.

Do you think this activism on the part of teenagers could lead to some big picture national legislation? This time does feel different, right? These teens really do seem to be driving something. But I guess my question is, like, will we still be talking about this in a month? Will we still be talking about this in two weeks? Because legislation moves very slow through Congress, needs a lot of time. And that's what's tricky here. You have to keep people's attention on this issue for weeks, months, etc. And I don't know if these teens, as inspiring as they may be, can actually accomplish that. Has it come so far that students have to sit outside the White House and demand change

and pretending to be dead? People are dying. Children are dying. When does it stop? It stops right now. This is Today Explained. Okay, we're done for the week. We're going to go home and get some good sleep. And you should too. Mattress Firm would like to help.

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