Today, Explained - Would NOT demanding gun control be more effective?

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

The Trace’s Jennifer Mascia explains why two gun reform bills the House recently passed are likely to fail in the Senate. Patrick Blanchfield from the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research argues the American gun control debate is a big part of the problem. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. If you're a cynic, and I know a lot of you are, you could look at Americans getting vaccinated, restrictions being lifted, sports welcoming back fans, and now back-to-back weeks with headline-grabbing mass shootings and say, well, there it is, folks. America's back. But Jennifer Macia writes about guns for the trace, and she'd like to tell you America never left. No, mass shootings never stopped in communities of color. Just two weeks ago, 15 people were shot in Chicago, two of them fatally. On the same day,

four people were shot and wounded in Chicago. So you have two mass shootings on the same day in Chicago two weeks ago. They didn't stop national news coverage. CNN didn't break in, and Lori Lightfoot didn't give a presser. These shootings never went away. They take the form of domestic shootings. A lot of times there was a lot of domestic violence. As soon as the pandemic happened, it destabilized a lot of segments of society. Now, to its credit, the House did take up this issue two weeks ago before either of these mass shootings in Georgia or Colorado that are, in fact, getting a ton of attention, what's in the bills that the House of Representatives passed? Two weeks ago, the House passed a bill that expands background checks to private gun sales. They would require unlicensed and private sellers to conduct background checks for gun purchases. Licensed sellers already have to do so.

And they also passed a bill that would close the so-called Charleston loophole, which is how the Charleston church shooter in 2015 got his gun. A shooter who never should have had his gun, but who obtained it actually on the fourth day when no background check had come back after the dealer called him and said, you can come get the gun. So this would expand the investigation period from three to 10 days. But last week, the House also passed the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization. Now, that included several gun prohibitions, a gun ban for abusive dating partners, misdemeanor stalkers, and people serve with temporary restraining orders.

And it would also require the Department of Justice to notify local police when someone fills a background check. So you have those three bills that really forward these gun prohibitions. And that's the House. The Senate is a different story. What's going on in the Senate? What happened after the House passed these bills two weeks ago? They're in the Senate. They're just there, waiting for the Senate to take them up, which would be a difference from Mitch McConnell's Senate, which just didn't take them up because these bills also passed in 2019. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says this time will be different. The legislative graveyard is over. H.R. 8 will be on the floor of the Senate and we will

see where everybody stands. No more hopes and prayers, thoughts and prayers. So now they're sitting in the Senate. The Senate is split 50-50. And Democrats need 10 votes from Republicans to end a filibuster. Now that is extremely unlikely to happen. That basically is preventing this bill from being voted on by a simple majority, because by a simple majority, it has a good chance of passing. Meaningful legislation is looking unlikely, barring filibuster reform. You've been covering this gun reform effort debate for years. Where is the debate right now, politically, compared to where it's been in the past? So the public gun debate is the same place it's always been. Large majorities of Americans, including gun owners, Republicans, split in the Senate, the environment post-Trump also is just way too politically charged for Republicans to risk losing those voters. Trump voters and gun voters, they've kind of merged.

And Republicans are terrified of losing their jobs. And it's just a really politically charged environment right now. Gun politics has been seen as the third rail of American politics for a long time, so it's probably the worst possible time to bring up legislation like this. But Democrats argue it is urgent and essential, as demonstrated by the fact that we had two major public mass shootings in less than a week. The one major difference right now, as we speak on March 24, 2021, is that there is a different president, Joe Biden. Joe Biden spoke yesterday saying that

I don't need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save the lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act. We can ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines in this country once again. I got that done when I was a senator. It passed. It was law for the longest time. And it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again. Can he do anything outside of Congress? We know he has a penchant for executive orders. Well, first of all, he has the authority to regulate gun imports. He could actually use that authority to restrict the importation of assault weapons,

which wouldn't take care of all assault weapons. But, you know, he has said he will use his executive authority to ban the importation of assault weapons, but he has said he will use his executive authority to ban the importation of assault weapons by expanding the list of weapons and components that are considered not suitable for sporting purposes. He could also sign an executive order creating an interagency task force on gun violence prevention that could bring together different federal agencies like the DOJ, Health and Human Services. And he could create like a coordinated national response, almost like a pandemic response. Think like an office of gun violence prevention.

He could set the tone and take on and imbue this sense of urgency into this crisis. Because while we have a pandemic, there is still the epidemic of gun violence happening parallel to that. He could go all in on the ATF. The ATF has been underfunded and short-staffed for years. The ATF, which is part of the executive, can regulate ghost guns, which are becoming a much bigger problem in crime. I mean, he doesn't have the authority to just, you know, ban certain types of guns or expand background checks on his own. It matters that somebody who supports gun reform is in the highest office of the land. It matters. But as we saw with Obama, it's not everything. What would it really take to reform gun laws in the United States? I mean, these aren't laws that will change whether or not there are mass shootings even. These are just laws that might make it slightly

harder to get a gun. A lot of people have said if the deaths of 20 school children didn't do it, what is? We now know their names, in fact, this morning. They are so young, all in the first grade, all of them shot more than once by a semi-automatic rifle. The medical examiner saying mercifully, death was swift. He added this is the worst case he had ever seen. The liberty of any person to own a military-style assault weapon and a high-capacity magazine and keep them in their home is second to the right of my son to his life. Let's honor the founding documents and get our priorities straight.

First graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun. Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad. And by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day. Now, a lot has been done at the state level since Sandy Hook. State legislatures got very active and started passing state gun restrictions. It's a patchwork, so you can go into another state, get a gun, and bring it back. It's not foolproof. It does matter. Connecticut has some very strong gun laws and they have

a pretty low number of gun deaths and especially intentional gun deaths. So the federal government, you could even make the argument that it doesn't even matter anymore because how useful has it been in the last decade when it comes to gun legislation? It hasn't. Some people even say federal gun reform doesn't even matter anymore. I talk to violence intervention groups on the ground in cities like Los Angeles, and they're like, look, you know, gun laws are great, but we want funding for evidence-based strategies.

Like, we're past looking to the federal government to solve this problem. That's kind of where we're at. We are, as a country, getting past the idea that Congress is going to fix this because Congress hasn't. That means whatever solutions are going to be piecemeal and they're going to be indirect and they're not really going to get at the problem in a holistic way. But that's what we're left with.

The case for not talking about gun control at all, in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing 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. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Alright, I'm recording your recording. Okay, great. Let me have you say your name and how you want us to identify you on the show. Sure. I'm Patrick Blanchfield. Pat is fine. I'm an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. I live in Pennsylvania, though. And I'm a journalist and academic. I have a book coming out from Verso called Gun Power, the Structure of American Violence, and that's going to be out this winter, which winter may actually be early 2022. Winter 2021 is a strange unit of time that apparently is not reducible to the calendar. I'll tell people to try and find the book when it's out. Thanks, yeah. Okay, so Pat, Jennifer, our guest in the first half of the show,

she's a reporter at The Trace. She just said that federal gun control is probably dead in the water despite all the attention it's getting right now. Instead, it's pretty much on the state. So this country is doomed to live in this patchwork of gun control and legislation. Are we doomed as well to live in this perpetual cycle of shooting, clamoring for action, marches for our lives, and then inaction forever. If we want to bet on structural inertia and like the well-channeled pathways by which outrage, trauma, and exhaustion sort of flow downhill on this kind of mountain that we've built for ourselves, then the answer would be yes, we are quote-unquote doomed. But I would also say

that part of what I think the task for people who care about these issues in a sustainable way and also for people who are brought into them by these sort of regular exceptional traumas to do is to think about how we sort of that, there are some possibilities, but we have to both be very granular about what we want and what we want to see happen, right? Both affectively and practically. Is the trap the Second Amendment or is the trap the gun control debate? Which one are you talking about here? I think those two things are fundamentally related, right? So like part of my work is historical in orientation. And if you look at sort of the history of the discourse about the Second Amendment, this only really exists from the 1950s and 60s onwards, right? Clearly, the Second Amendment is an ancient part of our founding documents, but the body of legal scholarship and the turn to locating gun talk or gun debates in the Second Amendment

is a comparatively recent turn. What you're saying is that the Second Amendment for a long time was something about the rights of militias, and all of a sudden, the Second Amendment becomes something about, I have a right to a gun as a person. That's my American right. That's part of it. But also more broadly, like if you were to search a law journal for articles about the Second Amendment, like constitutional law journals prior to like the early 60s, you don't find a lot about it. And hell, the NRA, which is like the iconic organization for like gatekeeping a lot of these debates, doesn't talk about the Second Amendment much at all until the 1960s. If you ask someone if they

believe in the Second Amendment now, or if they're pro-gun control, right, or what do they think about gun control? These are like these tags that they activate a whole set of meanings, and they feel like they're eternal organizing features of our politics, but they aren't. Which is to say that much like the focus on the Second Amendment as an organizing concept for how we do political debates or lead constitutional law debates, et cetera, about guns, the term gun control doesn't really enter the American lexicon until the 1960s either. And the reason it does is for many of the same reasons that the Second Amendment becomes a quilting point for right-wing movements. And that's that it's a

very helpful way for organizing politics about race, about violence, about sort of issues of American identity and our relation to the military and arms industry, et cetera. So like, there's a way in which, and it's sort of a grim thing to say, the phrase gun control only emerges because it works for quote-unquote both sides of the gun debate as we understand it. But that's a false horizon of possibility. Like those two sides aren't the only ways of breaking down the various issues that are gun violence. I mean, it kind of reminds me of pro-life, pro-choice, which are terms that it seems like no one's fully happy with on either side. What are the ways to reframe effectively this so-called gun control debate? et cetera, right? If you put it within the broader perspective of both gun violence more broadly in this country, and also against the broader backdrop of other types of violence,

you can possibly arrive at solutions or interventions that mitigate, or in some cases, outright prevent gun violence. But that means, but that means in some ways stepping outside, and this is a real challenge because you have to forsake the fundraising, you have to forsake the, some of these institutional affiliations that are put together, like the mailing list or whatever, but that oftentimes means not even talking about guns. It means doing public health interventions or policy interventions that result in situations changing before guns even enter the picture, either like in the situations themselves or in how we frame them in media and politics. What are you talking about, like mental health?

Well, I mean, part of it, and it's very difficult because every map of these conversations has been mapped out. There's this constant shell game of what's causing the violence. If instead of talking about like gun control as a possibility or even gun reform, we just look at gun violence, right? We see that exposure to gun violence reflects other kinds of vulnerability in our society. And COVID underscores this too. It's not like mass shootings went away. They've went up there because they always happen at homes. Most American mass shootings happen at homes. But like the people who are most likely to be, to wind up at the end of a fatal gunshot or injury, that tracks to their acute categories of vulnerability, whether it's white men as they

get older and face bankruptcy and medical issues, their increasing likelihood to commit suicide, whether it's women in already situations of high risk of abuse and who can't either leave or have other options from the state, right? They're more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence. Whether it's police shootings, right, which are a category of gun violence that sometimes is not associated with it, but like endeavors in policing produce encounters that are likely to end in violence. Whether it's like inner city gang violence, right, so to speak, or rather retaliatory violence between youth groups. That tracks to things like the criminal black markets or the lack of job opportunities. And mass shootings themselves, like the mentally ill

are far more likely to be victims of violence, right, than they are to perpetrate it. And there's no definitive way, nor I think will there ever be, to predict who is violent in what situations. The reason people shoot one another and shoot themselves is because they're miserable and because shooting themselves or shooting other people is a live, imaginable option that seems better than the other ones at the time. And I think that if you give people, if life is less miserable for everybody, and if people have other options before that, then shooting people and shooting yourself becomes less of a live option. And to be granular about this, like, look, gunshot fatality from homicides in urban settings directly reflects the lack of hospital care in those spaces.

When you put a gunshot trauma ward in a community that's driven by gun violence, deaths go down. Now, that's not gun control policy, but that directly saves lives. So investing in hospitals saves lives. By the same token, as people grow older and they face bankruptcy and they don't have anyone to talk to, they're more likely to kill themselves. But imagine if growing older wasn't a race between your deciding which is going to last, like hold out longer, your body or your bank account, or if you had regularly someone to talk to. And so there's some way in which like, look, if we had universal single-payer health care and people were able to talk, like get mental health care, their lives would be less miserable and certain options would seem less

inevitable or present. So is the argument you're making here that instead of always focusing on this binary of gun rights and gun control and being stuck in this sort of third rail of American politics, we can't touch the Second Amendment mindset that we have been for whatever, decades, it would be more effective and even more practical to just try and solve all the other problems we have. Is that what you're saying? I'm saying that gun violence is a tip of an iceberg for broader systems of ways in which

people are made miserable and disposable and other types of violence. And the historical reality of what the gun control debate is, is that for the right wing, on the one hand, it's a way of doubling down on certain types of racial, cultural politics and certain types of vigilante violence and the arms trade. And for the liberal gun control movement, you know, historically speaking, and certainly for Joe Biden, it's a way to fundraise and raise money and arm police. So, right, so the answers are either

more guns in civilian hands for the right or more guns to the police, you know, for liberals. Do you think Joe Biden would find that assessment reductive? I mean, I don't really care what he would personally think, but you can read his platform.

I mean, you could read his advocacy in the late 80s. Like there are multiple gun control measures that are proposed by Republican presidents, right? Like, or hell, even like George W.H.W. Bush, like Joe Biden leads the cadre of tough on crime Democrats that actually come back with asking for twice as much money for police.

He's made no secret that his approach to a lot of these things are gun bans and more money for community policing, which is more of the same. And again, like, I don't think more people with guns or like, quote unquote, the right people with guns, particularly given what our police look like in this country and their problems with violence are a solution to gun violence. It's just throwing more gun violence at gun violence. Like, so the question is like, really, when an act of outrage happens, like an outrage, outrageous mass shooting event, people want to do something that is dramatic and that makes them feel as vindicated as the horror just made them feel horrified or traumatized or outraged.

And what that essentially produces is this kind of both burnout but this thirst for grand policy interventions that will substantively yield dramatic changes and or see the ATF kicking down doors or more cops, who knows? But the way our inertia works in this country is that that gets channeled to repression. That gets channeled to people serving mandatory minimums for gun possession. It gets channeled to all this type of stuff. And we have the empirics on it. We know it. And it's a trap that we've built for ourselves in terms of policy and in terms of psychology. And I think that if we're looking for like one-liners or like easy ways to deal with with this, we're not going to find it. But I also think that we need to be attuned to the fact that these mass shooting events represent broader systems of ways in which we abuse and treat people like objects. And if we just did a little bit less of that, if we just tried it, I mean, why not? It's weird that we're, and I'm not putting this on you, I'm thinking

about this as something I see and I feel myself sometimes, that it's easier for us to resign ourselves to doing the same thing over and over again and accepting doom than it is to do something that might be very different but not hit the same, like dopamine rewards or feelings of vindication. Patrick Blanchfield. Pat is fine. He's an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He lives in Pennsylvania, though. He's a journalist and academic. He has a book coming out from Verso called Gunpower, The Structure of American Violence, and that's going to be out this winter, which may actually be early 2022. You can find him on Twitter at Pat Blanchfield. That's B-L-A-N-C-H field. You can find Today

Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained. I'm at Ramis Ferum. Thank you.