Publish Date: 10-22-2026
Original Air Date: 4-6-2018

Today we look back to the spring of 2018, when a conservative listener called in looking for common ground on guns and we answered her point by point: the research on defensive gun use, who gets to be the good guy with a gun, what the Second Amendment was written to do, and the policies most Americans, gun owners included, already support. After the shooting at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, every one of those questions is back.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of Life podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it. We're living through the modern age in America, which means there was another horrific shooting at a school recently. It's the sort of thing that would be national news for a long time if they didn't happen every week. This one is fresh in our minds because it happened nearby where one of our producers lives, and their partner is a school teacher, so they are squarely in the middle of the emotional blast radius for this one. That's not what it should take, but it is the reality in our country right now.

When we needed a throwback episode to fill in while another of our producers recovers from a non-gun-related death in their family, the role of guns in America is the topic that came to mind. This is a fairly unique episode of ours. I originally produced it back in 2018, and it is an entire episode designed as a response to a voicemail I received. The first thing you'll hear is that original voicemail, and the clips that follow are collectively my response. And so, to look back to better understand the gun debate in our country, sources today include The David Pakman Show, The Ezra Klein Show, The Bradcast, Science Versus, The Real News, A Progressive Faith Sermon from Dr. Roger Ray, Speak Out with Tim Wise, and On the Media.

Hi, Jay. My name is Caitlin. I'm a right-wing conservative, and no, I'm not racist or evil. I might even be your neighbor. My husband hunts with an AR-15, and I've owned an AK-47 for I don't know how long. I listen to Best of the Left to be aware of all points of view, and thank you for your podcast. I'm generally able to find common ground on these issues presented, however not so much over the gun issue, but by finding common ground we can save lives.

First off, I would like to say that I find the description of my husband, his parents, my parents, and myself as racists with a fetish, as highly offensive, antagonistic, and ignorant. As responsible gun owners, we share your empathy for victims of gun crimes. There is not enough being done to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. In fact, through the Fast and Furious program, guns were actually intentionally given to criminals. The Second Amendment is for self-defense. We believe it is a right to carry weapons for our defense, including against criminals. The Center for Disease Control found that between 500,000 and 3 million defensive gun uses occur every year.

This is many, many times more than the amount of murders committed with guns. The U.S. Justice Department found that 83% of Americans will be the victim of an attempted or completed violent crime. I don't live in fear of any of those things, but I believe in taking responsibility for my own safety. By paying the price of carrying around a few ounces of weight and getting a little training, you might have the opportunity to save the life of yourself or someone you love when the cops are out of screaming range. To me, it just makes sense, and when I'm not carrying my firearm, I have it locked in safe so that no one else has to pay the price.

School shootings are often done with AR or Armalite-style rifles. These rifles are not any more deadly than other firearms. The most deadly school shooting, Virginia Tech, was actually done with pistols with a tenth of the magazine capacity of high-capacity ARs. Both these types of guns require a trigger pull for every shot. The perpetrators chose ARs because they are intimidating, and these evil people get a thrill from having people be afraid of them. If semi-automatic rifles are banned, shooters will use semi-automatic pistols. if semi-automatic pistols are banned shooters will just use revolvers with speed loaders if the only guns that are allowed are single shot rifles or shotguns my dad my dad will not be able to legally buy a gun to protect the kids in his high school class when the next power crazed individual comes into his class with a black market gun or a bomb a knife or even a rented truck I myself own and carry a concealed carry pistol wherever I go within the law. I have never had to use it, thank goodness, but I'm very grateful to know that should the worst happen, I will have the training and wherewithal to protect myself and my family. When a fellow university student commented that she felt unsafe on campus after a rape, I told her that she could get a permit and training with a firearm to not just feel safe, but to actually be safe. She surprisingly commented that she felt less safe knowing that legally there could be people with guns on campus.

Ironically, she wished the law prevented guns on campus just like it outlaws rape.

Having a law against guns on campuses doesn't deter criminals from bringing guns onto the campus because by definition, a criminal is someone who doesn't care about laws. Actually, those who carry legal firearms commit crime at a lower rate than police officers. Now, let's find some common ground and work together to save lives. Those who buy guns for criminals should be arrested. Criminals who buy guns should be arrested. Our background check system passes too many people that are known to be dangerous. We could even support universal background checks if given certain reassurances. Background checks, for some reason, ask what your race is when you go to buy a firearm.

I don't think this is necessary. We can agree to change things like this.

Why don't we work together to keep guns out of the hands of criminals? We can save lives if we work together. There's no reason why criminals should not find guns scarce and expensive, while those of us who seek to use firearms legally to protect ourselves could find firearms available. Thanks very much, Jay.

How does carrying a gun read differently when the carrier is black rather than white, say? The racial politics of this were really fascinating to me. So in many states, whites are actually, you know, proportionate to their population, more likely to be armed than other groups. But in Michigan, when I was doing my research, it was actually parity. So African-Americans and whites were per capita armed to concealed carry. They were legally licensed to concealed carry by the state at equal rates, which is actually really surprising when you think that, you know, we know, you know, thanks to mass incarceration and the effect of mass incarceration on African-Americans, particularly African-American men, we know that African-American men are disproportionately going to have a felony record.

That is a disqualifier to own a gun, much less get a gun license. And so the fact that the rates were equal, even given that, I think is pretty telling in terms of sort of the desire to carry a gun. So there's two questions, right? Is there a difference in terms of race, in terms of why people are carrying guns? And then also, how is that actually being looked at differently by public law enforcement, for example? So in terms of the why are people carrying guns, this concern about crime and decline, This was actually something I heard from everyone. And of course, we would think that in Detroit, where the murder rate is higher, carjackings, assaults, sexual assaults, all of that is at higher rates in Detroit than in its suburbs.

Of course, we would imagine that issues of self-defense and crime would be on the minds of concealed carriers and open carriers as well. So one of the people that I opened my book with, this guy named Jason, he's a Detroiter, and he basically says, you know, I wanted to get a gun license because I have a gut. This is kind of paraphrasing him, but, you know, I have a gut. I want to be able to exercise. I want to be able to go outside, and I don't feel safe doing that. So I'm going to carry a gun. Well, he decided that it actually was easier for him to carry a gun openly than concealed.

He went through the licensing process. And so he ended up having, attracting the attention of Detroit police because here you have African-American man with, you know, openly carrying a gun. And so one of the incidents that he described to me when I met him and that I talk about in my book is, you know, he's on Woodward, which is, you know, one of the main thoroughfares in Detroit. in Detroit. He's next to a bus stop and, you know, people are gathering, you know, kind of around him as police come, you know, with their hands on their guns to stop him and question him about, you know, having this openly carried gun. So, you know, the police run his numbers, the police put him in the back of the police car. They, you know, he's like, I'm clean, I check out. And so, you know, they run everything. They say, okay, you check out. And so he gets out of the car and they, the police hand him back his gun because it's legal, right? And he actually shared with me the audio recording because he eventually started tape recording while he went out just to have this on record. And you can hear on this recording people clapping at this bus stop who are suddenly like police gave this man back his gun and didn't take him to jail. Another guy I interviewed, his family had come up to Detroit from the Great Migration. And I asked him, okay, So, you know, what does it mean for you to carry a gun?

And he responded, you know, well, back in the day, my grandma used to shoot off her shotgun on the front porch down south to scare off the KKK. Now, today, I'm in Detroit and I carry my semi-automatic for self-defense. And so he really linked it as, you know, this is a new iteration of a history that's been going on for quite a while. But it's so interesting to me the way it both maps onto our history and our present. And some of the early fights over gun control and the early successes at gun control came after Black Panthers wielded guns, right, showed guns outside, I believe, as a California state capitol.

And it was Republicans at that time who quickly passed gun control. And sometimes I'll see these demonstrations from open carry advocates. And I wonder if the Black Lives Matter protests had 500 African-American protesters, each one of them holding a gun, what would Donald Trump's response be? What would the response of white America be? Because I don't think it would be to celebrate Second Amendment rights. Yeah. So, I mean, there are groups that have been that have done this. So the Huey Newton Gun Club in Dallas has, you know, staged protests and protested in front of police stations, you know, with regard to cases of deaths in custody and police violence and police perpetrated homicides.

And they're fully armed and, you know, armed with long guns when they do this. So this is happening. There are examples, and, you know, I think that these don't get a lot of coverage, but examples where you do have groups of, you know, a variety of racial and gender, you know, identities and backgrounds who are open caring together. So I think that that actually does happen, but it, you know, it doesn't get a lot of press when it does happen. If you look at Rick Ector, for example, he runs an organization called, you know, the tagline is Get Laid, Get Legally Armed in Detroit. And he is focused on arming African-Americans.

There is, and I'm going to mispronounce his name, I'm sure, because I only follow him on Twitter and Instagram, but Maj Touré, his tagline is Black Guns Matter. African-American man teaching African-Americans about gun safety and talking about gun rights. So there's actually a lot of that happening, but it's like there's this kind of cognitive dissonance in the media where, you know, you'll have sort of the usual story about, you know, what are guns all about in America? And then they'll be like, oh, but then there's, you know, Rick Hector in Detroit doing this. One thing I want to talk about here, because I do think it plays very deeply into how these debates end up going, is how the experience of having a gun on you changes your experience of the world.

And you talk about this quite a bit in the book, the way in which the gun carriers that you interviewed and spend time with, they're constantly scanning for threats. They're sitting with a clear view of all the exits. They're existing within – having the gun, it seems like it makes the world into much more of a drama in which they're the hero and they may be called to do these extraordinary, dangerous, heroic things at any moment. And it sounded to me like a really addictive, interesting way to approach the world, to enliven your day, particularly if other parts of your life at this point offer less opportunity for that kind of narrative and status and feeling of essentialness.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely a bit of the gun being engrossing, right? It's this heavy thing that's on your hip. You know it's there. Um, and certainly, I mean, this is in the NRA classes where, you know, part of what they talk about is situational awareness, looking at your surroundings, um, you know, running through scenarios, thinking through, you know, uh, if someone came through the door, how, you know, how would, how would things go down? And so that's definitely something that, you know, is encouraged by these classes to think through sort of, and part of that is thinking through the implication that you have a lethal weapon on your person.

One thing that I write about in my book though, is that, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on sort of, you know, practice with your firearm, be able to unholster, you know, know that you might have to shoot from, you know, shoot from an uncomfortable position. What happens if your dominant hand goes down and you have to shoot with your non-dominant hand? Think about all these contingencies and commit it to muscle memory. Be aware that, you know, threats will, you know, something could happen when you're, you know, when you least expect it and that sort of thing. But what is missing in the NRA courses and then the courses that I watched as, and observed in my research was that question of how do you know if a threat is actually a threat?

And I think, of course, of race, you know, of things like the weapons bias and the fact that social psychologists have shown that if you have an object that's, you know, an ambiguous object that's associated with a darker skinned face as opposed to a lighter skinned face, you're more likely to see that object as a gun with a darker skinned face. And if it is a gun with a white face, this is actually interesting, it'll take you longer to realize that that's a gun. And that stuff isn't talked about in the NRA classes or in the classes that I observed. And so if we're going to have gun training classes, that needs to be part of the conversation.

Not just do we see the threat, not just can we respond to the threat, but how do we know if a threat is actually a threat? That's a big missing piece of the puzzle.

I think the Overton window just took a fairly huge lurch to, well, let's call it the left today. Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens believes the students and demonstrators who protested over the past weekend for gun control, gun safety reform should seek a full repeal, a full repeal of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. Writing in an op-ed published by The New York Times on Tuesday, Stevens observes a concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of the Second Amendment. And he said today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

But his op-ed is brief here, so I think it's worth sharing as much as I can of this in full. He writes, rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society. that support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But John Paul Stevens, the former U.S. Supreme Court justice, adds, The demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform.

They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

Concern, he writes, that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that, quote, a well-regulated, well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Today, writes Justice Stevens, that concern is a relic of the 18th century. He goes on to offer some actual history here, not the rewritten history of the National Rifle Association about the Second Amendment, but some actual history of how the Second Amendment has been regarded since the founding of our country, and at least up until the NRA began to rewrite the facts to eventually get a favorable, if very slim, majority ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 after decades of failure.

Stevens writes, For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not, not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939, for example, the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a, quote, well-regulated militia. During the years when Warren Berger was our chief justice, he says, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I'm aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Berger publicly characterized the NRA as perpetrating, quote, one of the greatest pieces of fraud.

I repeat the word fraud on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. That was from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for almost 20 years. And in case you don't believe me, Des, you dug up this from, is it, 1991?

Here's Chief Justice Warren Burger, I think, on the PBS NewsHour, saying exactly that. If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn't be any such thing as the Second Amendment. Which says? that a well-regulated militia being necessary for the defense of the state, the people's rights to bear arms. This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud. I repeat the word fraud on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. Now, just look at those words. There are only three lines to that amendment. A well-regulated militia. If the militia, which was going to be the state army, was going to be well regulated, why shouldn't 16 and 17 and 18 or any other age persons be regulated in the use of arms the way an automobile is regulated?

That was the former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Berger saying that, yes, what the NRA is perpetrating is one of the greatest pieces of fraud by a special interest group that I have ever seen. And that fraud continues. In 2008, Justice John Paul Stevens writes in his op-ed at The New York Times today, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Berger's and others long, long settled understanding of the Second Amendment's limited reach by ruling in District of Columbia versus Heller that there was an individual right to bear arms. Stephen says I was among the four dissenters and that's right just to be clear up until 2008 since the founding of our republic the U.S. Supreme Court had never ruled this way not until 2008 until the now late and very radical right wing Justice Antonin Scalia wrote his five to four majority opinion in that case Justice Stephen says that decision which I remained convinced was I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable, has provided the NRA with a propaganda weapon of immense power.

Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple, simple, and would do more to weaken the NRA's ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option. I'm not so sure it's simple, but he goes on to say that simple but dramatic action would move Saturday's marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States, unlike every other market in the world. It would make our school children safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.

That is retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in The New York Times today. In response, Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA's lobbying arm, said Tuesday that the NRA, as well as a majority of the American people and the Supreme Court, believe in the Second Amendment's right to self-protection. And we will unapologetically continue to fight to protect this fundamental freedom. Of course, the Second Amendment doesn't actually say anything at all about self-protection, as Chris Cox mischaracterizes it there. But that gives you an idea of how the NRA has been able to sort of move the Overton window to the right on this issue.

That he can say that, oh, the Second Amendment, the right to self-protection. He can just say that without really being challenged at all on it. That's not what the Second Amendment actually says. He may be right about how the majority of Americans currently feel about the Second Amendment. But I would suggest, along with John Paul Stevens op-ed here, that you are likely to hear a lot more about repealing or amending the Second Amendment, which I don't think will be simple at all, as Justice Stevens suggests. But at least we can start having that conversation in this country. And hopefully having that conversation makes reform that all the more possible. It begins to move that Overton window again back to what I'm calling the left.

and makes it all the more possible to have discussion of what is politically viable in this country, shifts it back closer to where it had been for almost the entire history of our nation.

Bullet point number one, self-defence. Best estimates suggest there are more than 300 million guns in the US right now, a number that has been slowly rising. And I say best estimates because no one really knows. Guns aren't traced very effectively around the states. Still, a recent Pew survey, Pew Pew survey, suggests that 34% of US homes have guns in them. And the main reason Americans buy guns, according to the Pew survey, is to defend themselves and their property. The survey found that almost half of Americans who own guns say they have it for protection. And this idea that you need a gun to protect yourself is promoted by the National Rifle Association.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. This is Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA. He's speaking at a press conference. And when you hear your glass breaking at 3am and you call 911, you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you. And Anthony Calandro, owner of Gun for Hire, he agrees with this. There's an old saying, when you need help in seconds, the police arrive in minutes. But if you're home alone, who's going to protect you? If two men were trying to break into your house, a firearm is the ultimate equalizer.

Anthony says he's never had to use a gun to protect himself, but he likes the idea that he's ready if something, anything, would happen. When I go to a restaurant, I sit with my back to the wall, because I need to see who's coming in and out and watch everything. Because no one's sneaking up on me. Where did that begin? I have no idea. I think you're just, some people are born that way. And I was born that way. You know, they say what they call a sheepdog. If you're born that way, you have that sheepdog mentality. It's just the way I am. But how many people in America will actually use their guns for self-defense?

Well, there is one number that gets cited quite a bit in the media. There are 2.5 million defensive uses of guns every year. It's like 2.5 million. Two and a half million times a year. 2.5 million times. 2.5 million times last year, law-abiding citizens pulled guns in self-defence and saved lives. So let's take a closer look at this number. Where did it come from and can we trust it? Let's start with the man responsible for it, Gary Kleck. He's a professor of criminology at Florida State University and he's been writing about guns for decades. Do you own a gun yourself? I never answer that question.

The reason being that people use it as an excuse for not thinking about the issues, but just judging what people have to say, and that's foolish. Gary's study was the first to come up with this number, that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses. And here's how he got it.

Back in the early 1990s, Gary's team surveyed just under 5,000 people to ask them, have you used a gun, even if it wasn't fired, for self-protection or the protection of property at home, work or elsewhere? And he found that 1.3%, that is 66 people, said that they had. So then... You take the percent of the sample who said they had that experience and multiply it times the population. So he took those 66 people, that 1.3%, and multiplied it by the adult population of the US, which equals...

OK, so you've got to carry the one and... Two and a half million times a year. You never, ever, ever, ever sort of do that. You never extrapolate like that. This is David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University. and he takes issue with Gary's methods. Nobody who has any training in epidemiology would ever extrapolate the 1% of people. David says multiplying out 1.3%, which in this study, remember, was only 66 people, to the population of America is dangerous. And here's why. Let me give you an example. A recent US survey of more than 5,000 women who had been pregnant found that 45 women, or 0.8% of them, consistently affirmed that they had had a virgin birth. The survey was published in the British Medical Journal. Now, if you pull a Gary Cleck and multiply that out to the number of women who gave birth in, say, 2013, you'd find that there would be around 31,000 women in America who were virgins when they had their bubs.

So in just a decade, there might be 310,000 Jesus babies. Well, hallelujah.

The point is they were mistaken. They had sex and then they had babies. The other point is that when you're talking about very small percentages being multiplied out to very big populations, a few people being mistaken can lead to a very big wrong number, which is why no scientist would say that there were 31,000 virgin births in the US in 2013. I asked Gary about whether his very big number on defensive gun uses might also have this problem. The percentage point is very small. So if you're a little bit off, then actually it's orders of magnitude that this figure could be wrong, right? Not if it's a little bit off.

It could be orders of magnitude off if it's way off. But if it's, say, one percentage point off, if it's one percentage point off, this could be a problem. If, yeah. I mean, you can speculate anything if it were. But, of course, we don't have the slightest evidence to support that view, and we have ample evidence to contradict it, which is the results of the other surveys, which always indicate huge numbers of defensive gun uses. Yes, other surveys do exist. And yes, they have gotten similar figures, around 1%. But David Hemenway, who has actually done some of these surveys, says that just because you can replicate a result, it doesn't mean it's true.

Why? Because sometimes people lie, leave stuff out or just misremember and they do it in the same pattern over and over again.

1997. David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, the first kind of rebuttal to this so-called research. First, there is something called the social desirability bias, which is that respondents would falsely claim that their gun has been used for its intended purpose to ward off a criminal to validate their initial purchase. A respondent might also exaggerate facts to say that a use of a firearm was a so-called defensive use when in reality it was not. And again, you're just asking people There is nothing actually linking the claims from individuals to any actual records of such defensive gun use. Second, there's this problem of gun owners responding strategically.

There are millions of members of the NRA in the United States and other gun groups. They are probably all aware of the debate around guns, so they would have a reason that they would exaggerate or straight up lie about defensive gun use. Number three is the risk of false positives from something called telescoping, which is where respondents might recall an actual self-defense use that's outside the timeframe. So some of these 5,000 respondents, 66 of whom said they were involved in a defensive gun use, they were asked, have you had a defensive gun use in the last year? And if they actually had a gun use that was defensive a year and a half prior, that would be telescoping and it would drastically skew the data, especially when it's being extrapolated to the entire population of the country. These are the sorts of biases, Lewis, which make the study worthless. And when you look at the complete lack of, of, of rigor, scientific rigor that's applied here, you say, okay, it's pretty obvious to me, but we'll just ignore that study.

But then the so-called study is touted as gospel by groups like the NRA and so many others and when you say a lie often enough, it becomes the truth in the minds of so many.

David points to surveys about how many sexual partners straight men and women have had. So you can ask people in the United States over and over and over, and the men will always tell you more than the women. That doesn't mean that's true. And you're just looking at heterosexual couples. It doesn't mean it's true. That is, either there is a small group of horny women out there, and props to them, or men are lying. Or women are lying. Or both are lying. Given what we know about people, it's likely that someone is lying. And David Hemenway thinks this is what is happening in these gun surveys.

Just like when you ask guys, how many people have you slept with? If you ask Americans how many times they've used their gun defensively, they tend to inflate the number. So, if Gary's numbers are wrong, do we have any idea how many people use their guns defensively in America each year? Yes, we do. Meet the National Crime Victimisation Survey. Forget Gary's 5,000 people and extrapolating. This beast interviews around 90,000 people, so it's much more reliable. And it's considered the gold standard amongst researchers in this field. But it's not just the size of this survey that makes it more trustworthy. It's also the way they ask the questions.

So rather than straight out asking people, do you use your gun for self-protection, which can overestimate results because people like to boast. This survey first establishes that someone was the victim of a crime. And then they ask, did you do anything with the idea of protecting yourself or your property while the incident was going on?

Freeze, you diseased rhinoceros pizzle. Now, according to data from this survey, there are only around 100,000 defensive gun uses per year in the US. So that's much smaller than Gary Kleck's 2.5 million. And when you look into the details of this survey, you find that a lot of common images that we have about guns that are used defensively don't hold up.

Hold up!

So, for example, more than 80% of the time, the people who said they used their gun defensively also said that they were the only person with the gun in the altercation. So much for a good guy with a gun facing off against a bad guy with a gun.

Another image that the gun lobby likes to promote is a woman pulling out a gun to protect herself against a man in an alley or trying to break into her home. This is from a 2013 speech by the NRA's Wayne LaPierre. The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun. Firstly, only 13% of rapes in the US are committed by strangers. Most rapists are known to the victim. They're often married or related to her. So the vast majority of sexual assaults aren't happening in dark alleyways. And then when we look at the crime victimisation survey, of the 337 women in the sample who had been sexually assaulted, none used a gun in self-defence.

And just to challenge one more popular image that we have, you brandish your gun and the bad guy flees. Well, sometimes things don't turn out that way. Using data from that big survey, David Hemenway found that when people used a gun to protect their property, it did work two-thirds of the time. Yes, there's a bit of suggestive evidence that having a gun may reduce property loss, but the evidence is equally compelling that having mace or a baseball bat will reduce property loss. In other words, just yelling at the guy, turning on the lights or threatening to call the police were pretty good tactics too. When people did that, it worked about half the time.

Conclusion. Best estimates reckon there are around 100,000 defensive gun uses in America each year. Not 2.5 million. And using guns in self-defence is slightly more effective at scaring bad guys than doing other things. But we've got to weigh this small benefit against the bad things that guns can do.

One of the points that the NRA woman made had a kernel of truth to it. I mean, in the town hall CNN organized, is that according to her, there were 39 points where the young man that did the shooting was in connection with the state or social agencies in some ways, whether it was the police force or some kind of social agencies. and they kept kind of diagnosing him as having mental illness. They saw some of his very threatening posts on social media. We have to start, number one, following up on red flags. 39 times in the past year, it was law enforcement or it was social services that went to this individual's home.

But the irony of her statement is she supports, and the NRA in that, right, It precisely supports the kind of politics that cuts back on social services, that cuts back on mental health care, that cuts back on public health interventions. The lack of interventions in the schools, which is partly a resource question and partly a lack of agenda, but the number of severely depressed, disturbed kids that simply go through Now, most of them don't shoot anybody, but often they shoot themselves. I mean, suicide rates are also skyrocketing. It's not just about mass shootings. Why is there such an opiate academic? This society is sick. And the people who only focus on gun control.

And here, again, I would point to the leadership of the Democratic Party and much of the sort of liberal class that think gun control is the answer without dealing with the issue of the rot in the society that is so screwing up people's heads that massive drug addiction, deep depression, high suicide rates. I mean, talk about that healthy society. And yes, of course, let's also talk about gun control, but not to talk about the rest. That is a hypocrisy. And this thing that this NRA woman says at the town hall where she over and over again called this young man, the shooter, a monster. He's a monster.

I don't believe that this insane monster should have ever been able to obtain a firearm. This monster carrying bullets to school, carrying knives to school. No, he's another child of ours. He's one of our kids. who, he wasn't born a monster. You know, if what he did was monstrous, not if, what he did was monstrous. But how does he become that kind of monster? She doesn't want to deal with that whatsoever. She wants to demonize him. So it's virtually back to this good and evil argument. Somehow he's an evil seed. And the good, God, guns, country. we need to go get these monsters and of course to do that we need our guns

another of the top categories is domestic violence and as tragic as the death toll was in las vegas there are that many women shot and killed by their husbands or boyfriends every month. In September, there were more than 50 women shot by their domestic partner. That many were killed also in August and July and June and May and April, March, February, January. More than 50 women are shot and killed by their husband or boyfriend every month. There's a lot of domestic violence in our country, but if there is a gun in the house, the woman is five times more likely to be killed. A woman who buys a gun to protect herself is more likely to be killed by that gun than she is to be able to successfully use it to defend herself.

Some estimates are as high as 17 times more likely. If a woman pulls a gun to defend herself, she is 17 times more likely to die. Now, we're talking about math. One of the things to love about math is numbers don't care what your opinion is. Numbers don't care what you believe. Every woman I know that owns a gun says, well, it wouldn't happen to me. I know how to use it. I'd be willing to fire it. But the math says you are 1,700% more likely to die if you own a gun. And the math is that 50 more women will be killed in November and 50 more in December until we find the will to change the way we are.

Guns do not have an impact on the overall violent crime rate. They don't affect the number of assaults or rapes or burglaries. But they do have an effect on one particular violent crime. homicide. Here's David. What guns do is they make hostile interactions, robberies, assaults much more deadly. What he means is that if you put a gun in the middle of an altercation, it's more likely that someone will die. In the US, 16,000 people are killed in a homicide each year and the majority, 11,000, are killed with guns. And when we look at the US, states with more guns tend to have more homicides and more firearm-related homicides.

But there are exceptions. So you can find states like Idaho, for example, with lots of guns but not a lot of murders per capita. But there is one subset of the homicide rate where the correlation between guns and death is rock solid. And that's the female homicide rate.

A paper published this year tracked firearm ownership and homicides across 50 states over 33 years, and it found that it was unambiguous. The more guns in a state, the more likely it is that a woman will be murdered. If the gun ownership in a state goes up by 10 percentage points, the female firearm-related murder rate goes up by 10%. Now, we're not exactly sure why the link between statewide gun ownership and murder is stronger for women than men, But women are more likely to be killed by someone they know, while men are killed in greater numbers and more often by a stranger. And one idea is that because men are often killed by strangers, their murders depend on a lot of other factors, like the overall level of violence in a state, while violence against women depends much less on these factors.

That is, women are being abused everywhere, but the likelihood that one will die depends on who has access to guns.

Well, there's a great piece in the New York Times back in November of last year, I recommend you look it up, where they sort of break some of this data down. and the research that they are referring to in the Times piece is from a guy named Adam Lankford. He is a professor at the University of Alabama, did a study back in 2015. Here are the things he found. He found, first of all, of course, we have 270 million guns in this country, almost as many guns as there are people. The United States only has 4.5% of the population of people on this planet, but we own 42% of the world's guns.

The only nation that has a higher rate of mass shootings is Yemen, and Yemen has the world's second highest rate of gun ownership after the United States. So even to the extent there is one that slightly outpaces us on a per capita basis, let it be noted that Yemen has the second highest rate of gun ownership. So the top two, Yemen and the United States, in terms of mass shootings, are also the top two in terms of gun ownership. Might there be a connection there? You know, the law of parsimony, basic statistical common sense tells you, yes. When you look worldwide, as Professor Langford did, he found that a country's rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds that it would experience a mass shooting.

He also looked at mental health and he found that the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita in the United States, and the rate of severe diagnosed mental disorders in the United States are all in line with those in other wealthy nations. No real statistically significant difference. And yet we have a bigger problem. So it can't be mental health. And in fact, a study in 2015 found that only about four percent of American gun deaths overall could be attributed to mental health issues. So that can be in play. And obviously, I think we probably agree that nobody who commits a mass murder type shooting is probably psychologically healthy.

The question, however, is whether or not a mental illness, a diagnosable mental illness, was the catalyst for the crime. We can argue that anyone who does this is emotionally and psychologically disturbed or disordered, and yet they may not be legally or clinically mentally ill. Oh, and by the way, it's also worth noting that even if every single one of the shootings was done by someone who was mentally ill, that doesn't really change the fact that mentally ill people who don't have access to weapons of mass murder have a harder time committing mass murder. The New York Times piece also pointed to a study back in 1999 by Franklin Zemring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, which found that when you look at the United States, we don't actually have a lot more crime than other developed countries.

Contrary to popular belief, we sometimes think that we have the most crime. We don't necessarily have the most crime. But what we do have is that our crime is more lethal. So what Zimmering and Hawkins found is that someone in New York, for instance, even at that time, and crime in New York has fallen even more in the last 20 years since they did their study. But someone in New York was just as likely to be robbed as someone in London. There really wasn't any difference if you're in London or New York. But the New Yorker was 54 times more likely to be killed in the process of the robbery, which, again, speaks to the hardware being used in the robbery.

It's a lot harder to kill someone you're robbing if you don't have a gun than if you do have a gun. And so when you rob someone in the United States and you put a gun in their face because you can, because there are all these guns around, you're more likely to use it. And so there is a direct relationship between the number of guns, the level of gun ownership and violence. More gun ownership simply corresponds with more gun murders in developed countries, in American states, in towns and cities, and even when you control for the crime rates. And gun control legislation does, in fact, reduce gun murders. According to one recent study, looked at 130 studies in 10 countries, and it all found the same thing. Gun control legislation does reduce gun murders. And yes, of course, I do know the comeback. I've been hearing it since I was a kid. You've heard it as well. The folks who say, oh, gun control legislation won't really work because, you know, the people who are motivated to commit crimes with guns, they're just always going to be able to find a gun. And so passing laws against these guns or trying to ban these guns, you know, that just won't work.

But if that's your argument, that bad guys are always going to find a way around the law, then that's a reason not to have any laws at all. Why have any laws? Because by definition, lawbreakers are always going to break law. So I guess we shouldn't have laws against robbing banks or laws against rape or laws against assault or laws against murder. Because, you know, if you're really dedicated to doing that, you'll just go out and do it. That's not logical, right? We have laws, A, to express the moral and ethical sense of the community, B, to deter certain crimes and C, to allow for punishment.

If you're going to argue that laws don't deter bad guys, then why would you have, for instance, a law against child pornography? Right. I would say that pedophiles, I'm guessing, are probably pretty highly motivated to find child porn. Right. And they are probably every bit as motivated to find and view child porn as a school shooter, potential school shooter is to go shoot up a school. So by the logic that says, well, why ban guns of this sort or that sort? Because, you know, people can always get their hands on. And by that argument, we shouldn't ban child porn. But of course, we should ban child porn, A, because child porn is toxic and evil.

And B, because by banning it, you know what? You actually do deter people from looking at it. I would guess, and I think it's probably a fairly good guess, that there are lots of people out there who would look at child porn, who would participate in the viewing, if not distribution of child pornography, but for the fear, thank God that they have, that if they do, they might go to jail because they probably figure, you know what, somebody's monitoring that. So in fact, having a law that bans child pornography does keep people who would otherwise look at it from doing so. Is it going to stop everybody? No, we still have prosecutions for child porn, thank God. People get arrested for that all throughout the course of a year. You'll hear, some big stories about that in the news. So it doesn't stop it entirely, but only a fool would deny that it reduces it. When you pass a law against something, it does in fact diminish its occurrence.

Central to the president's gun safety message this week was the assertion that the reforms he's advocating reflect what most Americans want. And what's often ignored in this debate is that a majority of gun owners actually agree.

A majority of gun owners agree that we can respect the Second Amendment while keeping an irresponsible law-breaking few from inflicting harm on a massive scale. In his speech, the president insisted that it's Congress, not the American public, that's divided when it comes to reforming national gun policy. Until we have a Congress that's in line with the majority of Americans, There are actions within my legal authority that we can take to help reduce gun violence and save more lives. Wait, the Congress is out of step with the mainstream about guns? That's not what we're hearing on TV. A Pew Research Center poll shows Americans are almost evenly split on whether it's more important to control guns versus protect gun ownership.

Americans are more closely divided on rights and the effectiveness of gun laws. 47% say it's more important to protect gun rights, while 50% say it is the need to control gun ownership. But Americans are deeply divided. In our latest poll asked which is a higher priority, 46% said new gun control laws. 47% said protecting the right to own guns. So which is it? How much consensus is there really on this issue? And if Obama is right, where does this persistent idea about a nation divided come from? Health policy scholar Colleen Barry has some thoughts on that. She's co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy Research.

Colleen, welcome to OTM. Glad to be here. I gather some of the disconnect stems from one particular tracking poll that is kind of a benchmark for measuring the public's mind on this question. Tell me about the Pew poll. Yep. So the Pew Center poll asks respondents, what do you think is more important, to protect the rights of Americans to own guns or to control gun ownership? And they've been asking this question for about 20 years, which is great to be able to track opinion over time. However, there are a number of real concerns about the Pew Center question. Because the language, you should excuse the expression, is loaded.

The concept of priming is well established in social science research, and it suggests that using terms like rights versus controls may prime respondents in a manner that could bias their responses. So generally, we think of rights as good things and control as less desirable. And this type of priming may be more pronounced as we've moved into an increasingly politically polarized time. But beyond the incendiary possibilities of the language, there's also the question of its lack of specificity. You've learned that when you get a little more granular, the opinions seem to magically change. That's exactly right. In the weeks following the Sandy Hook tragedy, I learned that most of what we knew about public attitudes around gun policy were these questions like the Pew question that capture a general public mood.

And so we went into the field to collect using rigorous research methods, data on public attitudes for 30 different specific policies. Give me some examples of some of the policies that the respondents as a whole tended to endorse. Our survey found very high levels of support for background checks for all gun sales. Over 80 percent support among gun owners and non-gunners alike. Americans, including gun owners in majorities, supported a whole range of policies to restrict guns from people who are at highest risk for gun-related incidents, including prohibiting people convicted of domestic violence, prohibiting a person on a terrorist watch list, requiring prison time for persons knowingly selling a gun to a person who was prohibited.

gun violence restraining order policies like the one that was just enacted in California. Now, as you mentioned, this seminal bit of research happened right in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. Clearly, the public was sensitized to the dangers of guns in the society. So sensitized that maybe these results are themselves dubious. What did you do to correct for the recency effect? What we ended up doing was going back into the field in January of 2015, where there were no major events that occurred, and asking those same questions related to different policies. And I was genuinely surprised that for the majority of policies, we saw virtually no differences in support over time and between gun owners and non-gun owners.

A few minutes ago, we learned that, in fact, when asked about specifics, most people support basic gun control, whether or not they own a gun. So now we know. But does it matter? Does an overwhelming consensus on an issue translate into policy? Well, in 2014, Martin Gillins of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University published a study looking at exactly that question. Who rules, they asked. The answer, not you, unless you're economically in America's top 10%. Really, they proved what we already suspected. The majority simply can't move the needle on policy without that sweet elite cash on their side. Interest groups, as you could have guessed, also out-influence average people, and interest groups representing rich people are bigger influencers than most.

Except, and here's where it gets interesting, there's an outlier, the National Rifle Association. Benjamin Page, welcome to the show. Thank you. You graphed the likelihood that a policy would be adopted based on how many average citizens wanted it, And it seemed that whether it was 10% of them or 90% of them, the result was a flat line. What did that flat line represent? It does not mean that average people never get what they want. Because if they happen to agree with interest groups or the affluent, they do tend to get what they want. And that's actually fairly common. That's one of the reasons you don't see people screaming in the streets.

You also found in your study interest groups that represent financial elites, like bankers say, they're more effective in influencing policy than groups that represent regular folk, right? Is that just because elite special interests have more money? They have more groups and more money. Business groups have about twice as much influence as other interest groups. And that includes big math membership groups, groups of seniors, labor unions, women's groups. All of them fade to almost nothing compared to the power of business groups. So that brings us to the NRA. I described it in the intro as an outlier. Why? The NRA is one of the most effective interest groups that's not primarily a business group.

It's actually unusual to have such overwhelming public majorities for policies like registration, licensing, no assault rifles, that sort of thing, and yet have essentially no policy response. So that's one respect in which it's an outline. And correct me if I'm wrong here, part of the reason why the NRA is an outlier is because its members are not, generally speaking, particularly affluent, and yet it wields this enormous influence. That's right. It's a little bit tricky because it's hard to tell how important gun manufacturers are in the financing of the NRA. A lot of that is just difficult to know. I suspect that the makers of guns and ammunition spend a fair amount of money helping the NRA have gun-friendly policies.

Do we have any data that suggests the NRA doesn't particularly represent the majority of its membership when it comes to policy issues? I'm not sure about its membership. What we do know is gun owners. Gun owners are perfectly happy with background checks. They don't want criminals having guns. But I still don't understand why the NRA wields so much influence. What the NRA has that's very unusual is they have both money and troops on the ground. The last few times we've had gun legislation, politicians noticed that fairly small numbers of people can dominate results, especially in primaries. A lot of public officials who voted for gun control got kicked out of office.

not because most of their constituents opposed it, but rather because a small group of people could have a lot of influence. That kind of takes us to the larger picture, it seems to me, that guns are just one example of a number of problems with democracy in the United States.

Thanks for listening to another throwback episode plucked from the archives to give you context for today. If you get value out of the show, we'd appreciate your support at bestoftheleft.com slash support through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. so coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of washington dc my name is jay and this has been the best of left podcast coming to you twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from bestofleft.com