hello welcome to moral politics produced and directed by bill alford i mean host valerie to rico and we're going to talk tonight about gun regulations do guns kill people or do people kill people how often have you seen the bumper sticker if we regulate guns are we going to end up at the mercy of criminals or worse a dictatorship if we don't regulate guns are we going to continue to face school shootings and the shootings of public figures and officials here with us tonight is sarah robinson progressive blogger and gun owner thank you for joining us tonight sarah it's great to be here valerie so which is it guns or people it's  absolutely both it's a more nuanced conversation that's a false it's a false equivalency a false dichotomy and of course we know that that there are societies like canada where you have a huge number of gun owners and other this problem and there are other societies like much of europe where you have no guns and no problem but it's it's it's not it's both so you're saying canada has the same gun access we have and they don't have the same problem it's similar it's not identical there are no handguns in canada or which is to say there are no legal handguns in canada and criminals do have handguns but if they catch you with it doing a crime that's one of the things you're prosecuted for no legal handguns no legal handguns but of course it's a big hunting culture so any it's very rural a lot of could get a court can it is a big country and people live way out in the outback and so you know the right to own a firearm is inviolable to canadians so many of them do most of our crimes are committed with handguns so that's right smith a pretty substantive difference does it is it is a substantive difference when you see gang violence which you do see for instance in vancouver because it has a big drug problem because b c is a major marijuana growing province and there are gangs there of various different types and they all have handguns and they do they have a lot of violence because you know with the guns and i think handguns well we're coming down to a deeper level of of conversation here there are two different god ethics i think operative in america and elsewhere so you say to gun ethics what do you mean by that there's two od together food i grew up in one such outback and i remember my for you know deer carcasses hanging in the wash house that my father had shot and this is this was how we got meat when i was young and we didn't have much money so there's that and people who grow up in that in that culture there's a large canon of information that's passed on within families and through boy scouts and through the school i mean kids carried guns to my high school yes i'm sorry you saying that kids carried hunting weapons here hunting how do you think we had a we had a hunting club the boys would work on their guns and metal shop and wood shop he was sick could pick up trucks with gun racks in the senior parking lot and in fact a lot of the teachers probably had guns as well and nobody ever got shot nobody thought about this because the country can and around guns is one of extreme responsibility i fired my first weapon at the age of five and it was not about teaching me how to fire a gun because it was a forty four magnum and it was big my father was had his arms around me you know and i had a massive kickback and what i learned was respect for a very powerful weapon that's less than one and you know everything else proceeds from that and so very often boys would get their first rifle at twelve and go out hunting and you were taught to handle yourself in the woods but part of the city part of the country cannon is the most dangerous creature in the autumn woods is a city person with a gun and in fact this is if you want to talk to country people about about about gun control this is a good place to start because in the city you have a lot of people who are pack closely together who are not hunting they're not getting food they're not do what they're doing self defense but mostly they're hunting each other and the odds of a person who doesn't know what they're doing having a gun are very high the odds of an innocent bystander getting hit is very high because of the density and there's just there's in the cities there is not nearly the place in the culture for a gun country ethic it sounds very traditional in which people are raised with guns there are long barreled guns there's a familiarity with it there's a sense of responsibility there kind of rituals and traditions for teaching kids about guns and that and that there's and that it's very different from how city people it is very different if you're living in the city and somebody has a gun it's a dangerous situation almost automatically if you see a gun there odds are somebody is going to get hurt right well i mean that's what we should be all the time in movies that if they're if a gun ends up in the news it's because somebody was doing something with it they should exactly and children in the cities are not raised with this cannon what teenagers in the cities learn is it's really a great way to freak out your parents which is a very attractive thing which is you need to buy a gun to buy a get to have a gun to be around guns it makes the parents  comfortable and so they a lot of rebellious teens are drawn to it for that reason the country can and takes that element of rebellion out of it because you've been handling these since you were a child so what you know it's not the big deal and that that huge clamor is not applied the way it is in the city so there's these different ethics and neither one is wrong city people are absolutely right to be terrified about guns because on their landscape the presence of a gun is a dangerous thing country people have a different a different approach and  politically what happens is you start getting conversations with people in the city because they have a lot of money and political power and media access try to kind of inforce their view of how it would which is right and natural for them on the whole rest of the country but wouldn't you say the i hear the n r a defending the right of people to carry handguns to not have any imitations on where they carry them or whether they have whether they're regulated who can carry the assault weapons ban how does that relate to this old can actually there recent poll that just came out in the last few days where where both democrats and republicans americans generally were polled on their own their views about guns and it turns out that seventy to eighty percent of people democrats republicans n r a members everybody thinks that that there should be laws in place that would not not allow somebody who has a history of mental illness to have access to a weapon there is it is an amazing american consensus on this that there's an amazing consensus that children the people under eighteen should not be allowed to be licensed to hold weapons that if they are if if a father takes his son shooting or hunting you know that the father is responsible and should be present you know the kid can't have a gun in his own right there's an amazing consensus coming up around this regardless of the n r a which is really wonderful so we have we have this consensus you're saying and yet what we had in arizona with the tucson tragedy in which gabrielle giffords and her constituents were shot was mentally ill person with a handgun in the city unregulated no regulation of the concealed carry right and what this brings us to another difference between the u s and canada i think is really salient family and friends saw this coming a mile away right they knew that that that he was going off the deep end and had had got into some really into some really difficult strange dangerous ideas into his head and was and had this interest in guns and they tried to to reach out to the middle to a mental health establishment that was not there to to get you registrars they  called around they tried to check there was nobody for them to turn to and they could have had this office somebody had been out there to listen they could have had this off so you're saying the mental health minister astonishment wasn't there right even if they had been they couldn't stop him from having a gun there's there's no right there's no loss and so what you have a candidate it's different is that if a family is in this kind of distress they call the mounties they call social services and there are ways that the registration system is such that not only people who are have a history of mental illness a history of drug abuse this kind of thing they can be disqualified from going to ownership because licensing is very tight and who gets a license if you take a two day course and you have to wait two weeks in the mail to get your license after that so there's there's this long drawn out process that lea to the licenses just like your driver's license so it can be taken away by the state so you're saying if one was in canada first of all there would be a regulatory process his family could call and say are mentally ill son has a gun he's talking crazy we want something done to ensure his safety and the safety of people around him secondly that if it was a regulated gun it would have to be a gun with a longer would be a rifle means he'd have to walk into any kind of gathering outside of a safeway store carrying a rifle which would be immediately obvious to everyone and if you wanted to have a handgun then what he would actually have had to do is go to the black market get it exactly but does it let me let me ask you a question for example for a minute about that black market question people in this in of course shooting needs that's perfectly adequate but does that actually reduce the number of guns in the hands of criminals i think it does my experience of vancouver which has a very low crime rate is that the guns help but it's not just the guns the mental health infrastructure helps too  because you again you've got people who are there to step in before things degrade to this point before you get to crimes of passion for instance in all the all the little domestic you know a lot of americans are killed in domestic kinds of violence where there's a gun in the house and you know the husband wife have a fight and somebody gets shot and it's a very common scenario in american in america well i guess i think it's the most common scenario and i think you know people they think people getting killed with their own guns people getting killed by people who know them right so if you're just concerned about the total number  of people killed by guns i suppose regulating or actually is going to take care of that piece take it but to get a problem is that what people are most scared of is random violence right or he will violent crimes committed by people who they've never met who are there to steal something from them or walking at a street and getting mugged exact point being shopkeepers being held up and those things also happen in canada just like they happen here but again not to this because the availability is lower  so i agree with you that there are but that but that's one piece of it there are other pieces of it and the other pieces are the mental health piece and there's also the right wing rhetoric piece which is pretty in particular i think is an arguable the more we find out about what your old life and was it was it was into it the more the more we understand that he was indeed deeply influenced by right wing violent right wing violent rhetoric but what about the people who say look he read mind comfy read but he also read the communist manifesto he was reading right and left wing but there's more information that's come out since then he's there we there's a movie called cite cased that has attracted quite a following among right wing give and it talks and it's a lot about it a lot a lot of the ideas can straight out of the far far right wing i mean on farther right about sovereign citizenship about gold buggery about you know that have america should be on the gold standard it's not real money if we don't have gold backing it up there are just this this whole movie is rife with these far far far right wing ideas and a lot of what was in gerald gerald mufflers you tube videos which i watched comes right out of sight geist so now that it's come out that he that he was very much influenced by this movie in recent months that is the direct tie that brings us right back to yes he was he was influenced by these far right conspiracy theories that gave the demons in his head which were already there you know the right wing did not put them there but they gave them a name and a face and motive in direction know sarah palin's obviously come under some heat for her crosshairs map and the argument is there's no reason to believe that he ever even saw that no that's it that's not a direct hit in this in this case no i think that's a good example of the kind of thing but i think the left to see has done a little too hard the fact of the that is if you can go to media matters to america or the s p l see as website and these people keep track of these things ongoing i think the number that we need to focus on is th years ago today twenty americans have died at the hands of right wing shooters who were directly inspired by this kind of hate speech wow really really how come we're not hearing that story you're not hearing that story i don't know why we're not hearing us and that to me is a much more potent indicator of where we are than sarah palin's target map that there are big shootings in arizona brought the total up to six more it was fourteen before that it's twenty now so you're saying there's not a direct one to one correspondence between something like sarah's up no no time limit it's it's like it's like saying that the tobacco industry got off for forty years by saying that you can't prove that any one case of cancer was caused by cigarette smoke we know that your pov the population is smokes gets cancer in a much higher rate but you can't link anyone with any one smoking addiction to any one death the climate change deniers are having are doing that making the same trick right now you can't terrorism i just love that word which is a total nerd word it's a two hour drive what does that mean but it's means it's inherent in this system that if you set these things in motion the system will deliver the outcome it's just as as as a mechanism and so if you have a highly addicted population of smokers you will you what the outcome will be you'll have a lot of cancer deaths and if you have global warming the outcome will be that you have these events all right so if you are if you create this climate of hate speech in which a lot of which you have people who are unstable whose demons need names and faces and motivation direction they will take it from this and they will they will if you tell them you know if you put a target on somebody back that somebody else somebody will take you up on the offer now the person who do was intending to massacre her folks at the tides foundation in the summer i'm blocking on his name he very clearly attributed his guidance to glenn beck yes he did and at the same time he said glen beck never talks about conspiracies he never tells us you know to go hurt someone we just know can you comment on that phenomenon take that man his word one thing it's not true that one back ever glenn beck's chalkboard this is of course the famous is the the font of all americans conspiracy theories these days he's all those old maps he draws trying people to this that the other and eventually the tides foundation which is often at the center because his little maps yes he was absolutely naming a target and he wasn't telling us somewhat so without the science needs to go off those people he never quite said that but he led them right up to it and there's there's a difference i have friends who are national  job it is to divine which groups domestically and internationally are dangerous and which ones are just talking smack and there's and there's there are things you can you can hear you can listen for that will tell you who's had it often what kinds of things for example w ok everybody talks like that we talked about we talked about targeted districts in battleground states for ever write this and saying people have no problem with this where you cross the line is where you start saying those people are wrong and somebody needs to do something about it that they need to be they need to be taken out they need to be put out of their misery our misery you know where we're you start talking about what needs to be done to eliminate them and when she that suggestion begins to creep into the rhetoric it's a sign that people are beginning to rehearse in their minds the elimination of their political enemies and some crazy person is going to hear that as a divine call to action exactly precisely as a psychologist one of the things i think about is the fact that when people the best way to get people to do something really bad is to get them really scared and that when people feel threatened when they are frightened when we are frightened we are we become capable of really almost anything that's an excellent point that is excellent point in a lot of the right the rhetoric that you hear when you sit and listen to glenn beck or or bill riley who are you sarah palin is be afraid be very afraid these people are out to get you they're threatening your future they're threatening your children you must act now that imminence is always a piece of it too that we're going to lose everything if we don't act now and when you start hearing people talk like that this is the integrate these are the ingredients of all good manifestoes all right it's not that every every every call to action is structured that way will result in action but if if a call to action is not structured that way it almost certainly won't and there there is there are certain points that they have to hit in the immediate threat to our future we must act now is always a big piece of it and if i guess if you listen to these right wing talkers they're dealing in that all the time and it does stimulate that the base base of the brain fears center that makes people kind of suspend their rational judgment and become willing to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise well in any audience there are crazy people right there are and i in fact there are those who say that politics in particular attracts crazy people yes and that part of what you learn as a politician is not to activate them not to commit to trigger them by reacting either with or against them yes  it's a major safety issue so let me come back specifically to this question about guns that we seem so conflicted over in in our country i you know i listened to what you said about kind of an approach to guns in rural america where guns are a part of our history their rifles largely people use them for taking care of safety for providing food for their families children are raised from an early age to handle guns safely responsibly respectfully and then you've got this city  association to guns in which guns are mostly handguns there associate with crime their associated with gangs they people buy them for self defense who don't know how to use them and and and then we've got this constant relentless back and forth about about gun control about whether there should or should be regulations with with some people wanting guns basically taken away from everyone saying there's no place in society for them and then you've got these other people who are saying you should be able to solution or are we just stuck i don't think we are stuck i think we are only stuck if we realize that there are if we start realizing that there are two different attitudes two basic different metaphors stories going on here and trying to impose one story on the other either way is not going to make good policy should we have different regulations for countryside and cities that also have the state regulations are a patchwork enough you know for more rural states to tend to have a more more freewheeling kind of gun and this is  one of the reasons it's a good idea to leave it to the states and not make national gun policy because nevada is going to have a very different ethic about this than california does because california is largely an urban state and nevada is largely a rural one but i would think for example if you were talking about as  kind of universal human rights as a constitutional issue then you really could let governing entities that kind of beit make their decisions based the rules on population density so you could have different rules within the city limits of seattle then you have in world king county absolutely you don't have that new york city has extremely stringent gun in fact i think handguns are illegal in new york city so yes there are cities that do have very strict gun laws counties and states you know i think being able to let their own policy is probably the best way to resolve this because that way the people who feel like they really need to have guns in the back of their pickup truck in reno can go do that where the people you know in downtown seattle who really don't want to have people driving around with rifles the back their pickup truck in it really kind of put bringing together this red this right red right wing coalition that we have now does the n r a speak for their membership i'm not sure they do my father was a life member of the n r a and i know that he thought a lot of their policies were kind of were  over the top i get to this assault rifle thing is this is this is my dad talking if you need more with more than one shot to drop your deer you're not you don't have gun control that's that's going control so the ironic ironically the whole gun control is using two hands message i mean there's some grain of truth in the fact that what they're saying is in the rural america gun control is being able to manage a weapon well and responsibly and accurately and the thing of it is everybody in rural america knows that there are people even in their own midst who should not have guns and if you come to if you come to the people who subscribe to the traditional cannon that ok and you point out that you know do you want your you're your expert other in law who beat your sister up in need to the point where she did a restraining order she sh politicians who support gun rights do they give people more permission to carry weapons around them like the take sarah palin for example she doing doing a talk to in fact i think coming up she's going to talk to a gathering of hunters does that mean people have more right to have guns in the room with her it's really really interesting that sarah palin security people will not let guns anywhere within yards you know hundreds of yards of her so no they will not be carrying guns to see here in all probability  journalists who are tracking that information down right now but so far what they're finding is that sarah palin security people are not messing around with this people people can't figure out quite where the dividing line should be in terms of regulating violent talk it's it's not regulation as in the legal sense but it is a sense of responsibility we all have a responsibility in a democracy to monitor our own discourse in a way that doesn't pollute the conversation it doesn't short circuit our ability to do so democracy together and that's really what the right wing with with this hate rhetoric that's what they're doing they're saying that the liberals have no place at all in our society they should be eliminated and they're just they're getting justification for this it's very hard to rule a country together you know there you what they're saying is we have no common future  that that's worth talking about and so what happens so it really then becomes the only solution is to get rid of these people yeah right it's a go but my friend if i were cause of elimination of language and it always precedes genocide and of any kind of any kind or any kind of mass political proud of their sense of control and the responsible use of guns responsible storage to practice the discipline that goes with being a gun owner and it's equally important to to watch your loaded rhetoric as well because what are loaded guns it start sparks a conversation as we're starting to have now about gun control that's going to end up with gun control laws that no gun owner progressive or conservative is going to like it could be very draconian national law that that gun owners are going to find very oppressive  and so it's in their interest not to have these right wing hate talkers out there kind of pricking at people and making people scared scared enough to take these extra steps so it's really if you're if you're interesting you're second amendment rights you need to be responsible with your first amendment rights i think with my children for example that them always talking about responsibility and privilege being two sides of the same coin exactly and if you want any object whether it's a pencil you know or or a gun or a car you want to be able to manage it you have to manage it responsibly and as with children i say if you don't manage it responsibly i just take it away from you and of course i am an autocracy in my own home but the reality is that as a collective we end up having to have that same kind of  conversation that the only way we really can have our freedoms is in the context of people using them responsibly right it's all about personal responsibility and here and we have to make we wanted our guns we manage our language we manage our automobiles and this is what it means to be an adult