ASM074 Gluten, Guns, & Un-Christian Love

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gluten guns and unchristian love all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i just got back from the wild goose festival and had a lot of fun meeting and greeting so many of you who listen to the program and taking your live questions and man is there a lot coming up in the next few months i'm so excited to tell you about we'll do that right after this song so what do you say let's get it started [Applause] [Music] okay i want to start the show this week with a few really really cool announcements and the first one i'm just i'm out of my mind with excitement over there's an organization called biologos and they specialize in helping educate christians about the theory of evolution so there are pro-science organization that accepts evolution and darwin's theory of evolution as as describing how the diversity of life on earth appeared one of my favorite resources to point people to who have questions about evolution and we're gonna partner together to put on a special episode of ask science mike so here's what you need to do if you have questions about evolution or how evolution integrates with christianity or the bible send a question into the program but instead of using hashtag asksciencemike you'll use ask biologos that's b-i-o-l-o-g-o-s you can do that on twitter you can do that on youtube or soundcloud or you can simply send a question in through asksciencemike.com and just include the hashtag ask biologos we're going to assemble all those questions together and then i'm going to turn those questions over to the scientists and experts like actual phds actual researchers to answer your questions about evolution that'll be a future episode i'm so excited about it but it will not happen if you don't send in your evolution-centered questions for the scientist at biologos again that's hashtag ask biologos and i'll have more information about that on ask sciencemic.com also we have officially started the pre-order campaign for my upcoming book finding god in the waves uh that is a book about my story of losing my faith becoming an atheist coming back to faith through a mystical experience and then trying to make sense of all that through science it comes out september 13th uh pre-orders are actually going pretty well so thanks to all of you who have pre-ordered but if you go to finding god in the ways.com not only can you learn more about the book you can learn more about the pre-order bonuses so right now anyone who pre-orders is entered in a drawing to win an early advanced copy of the book and a one-on-one call with me to talk about the book we're gonna draw one of those names every month between now and lunt launch not lunch oh man anyway between now and launch uh so really excited about that we're also going to announce additional pre-order bonuses so some of those you'll hear about in the next week or two we're about to announce all the tour dates uh that we have so far for the tour this fall i'll be going city to city to promote the book through a bunch of ask science like live events so i can't wait to see you at that and uh really exciting stuff on finding god in the waves um and you know it's kind of like my entire future hinges on this book so i'm a little nervous at this point because this is my first book and i don't know what to expect and if anyone will buy it or not but i really think it's a good book worked really hard on it now also we're getting together in september in denver and chicago for october for the liturgist gatherings we're going to get together and talk about faith and doubt and worship together with michael and lisa gunger doing music it's really beautiful tickets ron said now tickets are selling especially in chicago chicago is going to get sold out pretty quick here so go ahead and move there denver is not selling quite as well so if you've been thinking about attending go ahead and get your tickets so we make sure we have a denver gathering happen and finally the last thing i want to announce here at the top of the program sorry to have like announcements first thing but these are all really interesting worthy things in my opinion you know we've been working on these together groups on facebook so if you're listening to our show or the liturgist podcast and you think you're the only one and you don't fit in at church or you can't find a church or whatever we've started these facebook groups called together and we just added a bunch of new cities based on people asking for them so if you want to check out together or haven't yet or you checked it out your city wasn't available just go to asksciencemike.com click on any episode and then on the right hand on that little sidebar to be a red square that says together if you click on that you can see all the cities we have so far or request a city that we don't have yet okay so that's together so remember we've got hashtag ask biologos for you to send in your evolution questions for a special episode of ask science mike we've got the finding god and the waves pre-order campaign in full swing so go to finding on the ways.com to learn more we'd love to see you at the liturgist gathering in denver or chicago go to theliturgis.com gathering or if you just want to connect with other people who are working through science and faith and doubt check out together all of those will be linked and more information can be found at asksciencemike.com hi science mike my name is kathleen and i have a question for you about gluten allergies it seems that in the last decade or so there has been a considerable upswing in the number of people who have a gluten allergy or a gluten intolerance less than 10 years ago i had never heard the term celiac disease and i probably didn't even know what gluten was presently though i could name about 20 of my friends family members or acquaintances who have celiac disease or some form of a gluten intolerance and these people are not children or teenagers but adults who have consumed gluten their entire lives and now find that it gives them digestive or other physiological issues i've read that allergies can develop at any point in your life but i do not know for example an abundance of people who are suddenly lactose intolerant as grown adults so my question for you is has there been a considerable change in the way our food specifically our grains are grown produced and manufactured such that our guts can no longer digest them or is there another reason adults suddenly find themselves ordering from the gluten-free section of the menu thanks so much for what you do that's a great question i'm going to start with my usual disclaimer that i hate answering food science questions because you're entering the darkest corners of biochemistry and complexity because you're you're combining biochemistry with a large-scale social science and environmental science when you ask how and why our reaction to food changes oh man are you in the deep end of the data pool and um so i'm going to give my best answer to this question based on my understanding and my research and i am fully expecting a scientist or two to write in and correct me where i got it wrong and i'll probably do a you know a correction based on that so here's what i am relatively confident in based on my research number one almost all allergies are on the rise in the west we're getting more allergic to things one theory about why that is is related to our very high levels of sanitation so basically uh we're so clean in the west so free of parasites so free of bacteria that uh if you could envision our immune system as a security force it gets paranoid now it's like looking for false positives all the time that's one theory or one excuse me one hypothesis that i've seen that i don't think is in any way universally regarded as accurate but that's one possible explanation for the overall rise in allergies in the west now both celiac disease and non-celiac gluten intolerance are on the rise about one in a hundred people now have celiac disease and about maybe one in 33 would be clinically diagnosed with non-celiac gluten intolerance now everything i've seen and based on the science i read this rise does not seem to be linked to the way we are producing our food it's not that we have radically altered food chemistry in regards to wheat especially instead what many health scientists believe is that this increase in gluten intolerance is linked to other health factors especially those that correlate with the way that we process grains into sugar in the bloodstream so what do i mean we are more overweight and more obese as a society we have higher cholesterol we have high blood pressure we have increased incidences of cancers and of type 2 diabetes and as your risk factor for all those increases the potential for you to have adverse reactions to processing wheat and other grains increases now because we have this significant increase in wheat allergy or wheat allergen related disorders a lot of people are making the assumption that some digestive issue they have is related to wheat and you have like 30 percent of adults reporting that they are trying or would like to try a gluten-free diet now notice the difference in numbers here one in a hundred have celiac disease maybe as high as one in 33 have a non-celiac gluten intolerance right but one in three almost are wanting to try a gluten-free diet so you have a huge disparity in people who are actually suffering a clinical disorder and people who are just thinking i should drop gluten and that's kind of more your your buzzword uh reaction to food science the stuff i get afraid of now if you think you have celiac disease or uh gluten intolerance you need to see a doctor okay you need to see a doctor you need to see a doctor and get diagnosed you shouldn't self-diagnose and just put yourself on a gluten-free diet because some studies have come out and shown that gluten-free diets can create deficiencies in fiber intake vitamins and minerals because if you eat whole grain wheat it gives you a lot of fiber it gives you a lot of vitamins and gives you a lot of minerals so if you're going gluten free you want to do that in concert with a doctor and or a nutritionist who can help you compensate in your diet for missing out on those things there's nothing about gluten that is intrinsically bad for human beings it's not some evil chemical it's a naturally occurring substance in a normal balanced human diet okay so gluten is not the bad guy unless you have a genuine allergic reaction to it which one in a hundred people do with celiac disease or one in 33 do in terms of a non-celiac gluten intolerance so don't self-diagnose don't self-diagnose guys i'm telling you and girls and non-gender-conforming people uh you really want to work with the medical professional when you think you have allergies it's pain there's copays i get it but you better be safe than sorry before you make radical diet changes because fiber is an incredibly important component of digestive health and having a good movement of food through your system with consistency if you know what i mean fiber is your friend not the enemy so that's a really great question yes there's a rise but it's still not some societal epidemic it's relatively rare you know as high as you know three and a half to four percent of the population has a allergic reaction of some kind to gluten [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hi mike i'm sure you get tired of hearing this kidding but i really want to thank you and gunger for any form of faith i carry now i was raised a pastor's kid and lost my faith in college i am not married to an ex-jude and agnostic and the mother of a 16 month old daughter and i don't know if you meant i am now married um which would make more sense with the sentence but anyway so i have recently found my way back to church via the liturgist podcast however i have found a home in church where we disagree on several fundamentals of faith this has not been an issue for me as i am able to filter teachings through my own understanding of god my struggle however is i feel like i cannot raise my daughter here what she will be taught there is not in line with my beliefs her journey will already be a struggle as she will have competing messages from parents grandparents aunts and cousins is there a constructive way to help her understand that the messages she is receiving particularly about her father and grandparents going to hell is not necessarily as clear-cut as she is being told how do you handle these mixed messages or is there a progressive church in orange county you can recommend wow great question and i understand after i kind of went through my faith deconstruction i continued attending a southern baptist church for quite some time uh and i felt like i could pursue its teachings and and um thoughtfully push back on what didn't fit but i kept going there with my children and one of my daughters uh tried to lead one of her jewish friends to christ because she told her if she didn't she would go to hell and uh also came home one day and we were talking and she saw what she wanted to be when she grew up and i did the famous american parent line well you can be anything you want to be and she said dad i could never be a pastor right because in the church we were attending women couldn't be leaders of the church and that's when i realized this was not the best environment for my children because of what they were getting so first of all i don't think we should necessarily plant ourselves in faith communities we fundamentally disagree with or that don't hold disagreement on core issues as a core value right so i go to a very theologically conventional methodist church but there's a lot of grace and openness on ideas about theology in that church and how children are taught so the one thing is you may not be in a church that's actually safe for you and your family especially if they're telling your child that their father is going to hell that boy that gives me the heebie-jeebies so i wrote about the church in my upcoming book finding god in the ways and why i love it again and in that chapter i kind of talked about the two things you need in a faith community one is your church needs to affirm you exactly as you are exactly as you are let me say that again your church needs to affirm you exactly as you are but your church needs to also challenge you to become who god is making you to be okay uh and that will not involve for example praying the gay away that's not what i mean by who god is making you to be how can you be a force of healing and peace in the world how can you be a source of greater love that's what your church should challenge you to become and it sounds like you might not be in that kind of environment for you that church might be safe for someone else that church may challenge someone else but it doesn't fit you and your family now in terms of your kids it's okay to talk to your children about the fact that different people believe different things especially when they're old enough to ask why so my kids know what i believe about god they know that it's in some ways different than what their mom believes about god which is different than what their mimi or their pops or their grandmama or their papa believes about god and we talk about the different things different people believe and why it's okay for you to tell your children what you believe especially when they're too young to parse through multiple narratives but if you want to save them a lot of difficulty and angst as they grow you've got to equip them to evaluate different ideas about god and find the ones that will fit the image of god that they carry now you're in luck there happen to be a couple of churches i do actually know about in orange county that may be a better fit first of all one of my best friends is the reverend sarah heath and she just started a new commission what do you call him in the methodist church i should know i'm i'm a methodist anyway she just became the pastor of the costa mesa first united methodist church and uh she's going to be making that an open exciting christian community so you could check that out also i've heard from one of my patrons on patreon about a place called the table orange county which you can find at thetableoc.com which is another uh open progressive spiritual community in orange county so uh maybe give those a shot see if it fits better for you and your family uh whatever it is we've got to resist this notion of planting ourselves in spiritual communities that reject us or marginalize us or traumatize us right it's one thing to to have a sense of unity in the church which is great but i actually think denominations are an okay thing if you took the the presbyterians and the catholics and the baptists and they had to all be together on sunday morning they'd probably strangle each other so i think it's okay for you to find one of the many streams of christianity and there are hundreds today where you can fit and be a part of christian community and service without feeling like you're dying a little bit every sunday church should be a source of inspiration and a source of life more abundance so that you can help heal the world [Music] well in addition to my good friends on patreon who make the show possible financially ask science mike is also supported by a few sponsors whose products i really like and enjoy personally the first of those is sanebox i get a ridiculous amount of email a truly staggering absurd quantity of email and i travel all the time so it's always difficult to find those messages that are related to the work i need to get done and i signed up for a service called sanebox before they ever became a sponsor for the show and it saved my email so what sanebox does is it's kind of like having a an ai robot personal assistant who goes through your email and sorts it and puts all the pertinent important things from people you actually know that have action items in your inbox and puts everything else in a second folder called same later that you can check out when you have time what this means is in my inbox i only get 10 to 12 messages a day now while i get thousands of messages in my sanebox now i'm not talking about spam google already handles my spam for me i'm talking about messages that are to me but are newsletters or things that don't require my immediate attention now here's the great thing about sanebox it works with any email app and almost any email provider you don't have to install any new software all you've got to do is go to sanebox.com sciencemic to create an account get a free trial and get a discount on your membership they're going to do all those things if you use that url sanebox.com science mic it takes almost no time to get started and it will go through if your email inbox is a mess right now and clean it up for you i'm telling you sanebox has my highest possible recommendation i also want to tell you about pinatagrams and their new product minipolitics.com that's really cool not only can you send a small pinata to a friend now you can actually send a pinata donald trump to somebody which i think is hilarious i've sent a few pinatagrams i've received a few and it is a blast so go to pinatagrams.com or minipolitics.com to learn more i'm i tell you it'll stand out more than any card or a letter you could send someone [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads the bible says we are completely changed after we become christians does this mean unbelievers are incapable of truly loving anyone else what are all the differences between a christian and a non-christian other than a belief in jesus and a desire to follow his teachings and become more selfless and loving can non-christians still love unselfishly is there any scientific evidence to support either answer this is a fantastic question it's a timely question and it relates to my own personal experiences i grew up hearing that non-christians couldn't truly love because they didn't have god and i believed that all the way until i became an atheist and i noticed that once i no longer believed in god i still loved people in fact in some ways my love for my family and friends seemed more powerful and more authentic because i knew i had a limited amount of time to love them that there was no heaven or eternal realm where i'd be with my family i still felt like i loved my family but then when i told my wife i didn't believe in god anymore at first she didn't think i could still love her because she'd been taught the same thing about non-christians being unable to love now here's the thing we've got machines now that we can brain scan people and non-believers love other people just as much as believers there's no neurological distinction if you look at other possible metrics for love you'll find for example that atheist marriages tend to be more successful or less likely to end in divorce than marriages between believers so that's a data point a scientific point we can look at that also supports the idea that non-christians can love unselfishly you know the the core of your questions seems to kind of know where the difference between christians and non-christians and that's christians follow jesus now a lot of christians like to make exclusive exclusive or superior or exceptional claims about what it means to follow christ i'm not one of them for me i've chosen to follow christ i think there's a scientific case that that can be a beneficial decision that it can result in you being a more loving a more peace seeking and a more forgiving person uh but there's certainly a lot of christians out there who are just real jerks right and i've got friends who are secularists who are also just boy they're real jerks so uh i'm not sure we can distill loving non-loving good person non-person to cleanly map to christian or non-christian i think the one of the judges the effectiveness of world view of a worldview or a belief system is how it changes the way you behave in the world and the fact is i know people who are atheists who work hard to make the world a better place and i know christians who do the same so if i'm going to judge people which i am very reticent to do i'm going to do so based on the fruit of their life and not the set of beliefs that cause them to make those actions to me both the gospel and atheism reveal the heart of a person in the way they behave towards others

## Guns

[Music] “hi science mike micah here from chicago huge fan of the show i actually have a pretty big question for you but i feel like you're probably the really the perfect person to answer it and this question involves data on guns

the orlando shooting actually just happened a few days ago and so all of us are really still reeling from that this horrible tragedy

and i actually saw a video and posted it to my feed on facebook that vox put out about the number of guns that are in circulation in the united states and how that potentially correlates with a greater number of gun deaths in the united states

some friends and proud gun owners responded to my post with more statistics about how gun ownership and concealed carry in certain states actually make those places safer

with all the statistics that are out there about gun deaths i was hoping that you could shed a little bit of light on first maybe the validity of the data that's presented in the video by vox and also um just about whether or not i guess you think that more guns equals more gun deaths

it seems like a pretty simple correlation to me um but it seems like any time this conversation comes up folks who are afraid that their second amendment rights might be stripped from them seem to say that no legislation or stricter gun laws will help the situation and there doesn't seem to be any other solutions provided except for you know fighting mental illness

so i guess you could even if you don't mind even address mental instability and extremism and how that correlates

again i know it's a big question here but just would really love to know your thoughts on gun ownership in the united states of america and whether or not you think we do have a gun problem here or if it's you know just a problem with uh mental illness or extremism and that kind of thing

so love to hear from you on this

again i appreciate everything you do

i absolutely love your show it's been life changing for me

so thank you for taking the time to listen to my very long question”

well this is the question of our time isn't it

i mean this is this is the big thing maybe one of the greatest points of polarization between our two major political parties in this country right now i am so reticent to answer this question for a couple of reasons

one is this is a really diverse audience and it's it's left leaning it's liberal leaning but there are a significant number of conservatives in the audience and there are significant number of gun owners in the science mic audience

now let me go and disclose my bias

i cannot stand guns i don't like them if i could wave a magic wand and have them all disappear i probably would do that so let's go and admit my bias but the fact is most of the people in my family own guns most of the members of my family would typify the good guy with a gun argument they're not going to use a gun in violence against other people many of them use guns and utilitarian functions in fact so my family actually supplement their diets uh via hunting i live in rural communities and it's for them an enjoyable and affordable way to provide sustenance for their families so let me go and disclose this is a pretty complicated messy thing for me and also we are talking about sociology here

so the amount of guns is a factor and as you alluded to in your question oftentimes we have more gun violence in states with higher gun regulation

but a lot of times that's also tied to what poverty rates

it's also tied to education levels

so trying to tease out all the factors at play here is difficult and that's why you can use a data driven narrative to make a decent argument both for and against gun control so i hate to start with disclaimers but i have to i have to so if you disagree with me and you after you hear my statistics you push back with your own go ahead and send them into the show i may do a follow-up uh that include this as well i've tried to look up some of the pro-gun statistics um a lot of them don't come from super credible sources but some do and where i found credible cited sources i've included the pro-gun argument in my answer as well but let's start with the biggest problem

the biggest problem is we don't have really good data on gun violence in this country and that's because the nra lobby pushed congress to ban funding on gun research

the cdc can't evaluate gun crime

they can't get the funding and nor can anyone else who relies on federal research dollars

and that is crazy

that is crazy that we can't even study the issue because of a gun lobby

that makes me sick to my stomach

if we're going to make better decisions we need data and i can't see this as anything else than an intentional conspiracy to obscure the topic by keeping us in the dark

and to give you some idea in 2014 there were 33 804 car deaths in america and 33 636 firearm deaths

and we do use federal funds to study automobile deaths and to make cars safer right

and the reason these numbers are so close is because automobile deaths as a percentage of prop population have been falling dramatically uh for as long as we've had automobiles basically since the 1920s

and that's partially driven by research

so the fact that we can't study guns is a big deal

i also want to note and this is important violent crime including gun crime is already in decline in the united states

it's going down so that's an important note that gun advocates would want to point out that even though we have more and more guns uh we we are seeing a decrease in gun violence but we're not that's we don't know why that's happening and we haven't tried anything

there's no legislative component to that uh kind of the the thing to me typifies america's approach to guns is we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas uh so let's think of a few ideas related to gun crime maybe first

first of all let's let's admit something sometimes good guys with guns actually stop bad guys from committing crimes or violent crimes it does happen

there's a liberal narrative that that never happens

that's false

but let's talk about how often it happens

good guys stopping bad guys using guns is outnumbered two to one by accidental gun deaths

so for every one good guy that stops a bad guy 2 people die from a gun accident including an average of about a person a week who is shot by a toddler

let me say that again

about a personal week is shot and killed by a toddler in the united states

so that's accidental deaths

well how do good guys with guns compare to criminal gun homicides

well there are 34 criminal gun homicides for every one good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy 34-1

and in terms of gun suicides there are 78 suicides via gun for every one person who stops a bad guy with a gun

so 2 to 1 accidental gun deaths 34-1 criminal gun homicides two good guys and 78 to 1 gun suicides

now let's talk about gun suicides

that's a problem that disproportionately affects white men

and let's talk about criminal gun homicides

that overwhelmingly affects black men

these are these this is a serious cause of death in our society

and the fact is you're way more likely to accidentally kill yourself or someone else with a gun if it's in your home than you are to stop a bad guy

and you're much much much much much more likely to die as a part of a domestic disturbance if there is a gun in your home and this is absolutely overwhelming statistically a few other things you know we'd like to point out even though terrorism is such a big uh thing in the headlines and we budget heavily for in our foreign policy and domestic policy from 2005 to 2015 71 americans were killed in terrorist attacks on u.s soil while 301,797 were killed by gun violence in the same period

and although we talk about mass shootings a lot

it's still a very small percentage of overall gun deaths

so less than two percent of annual gun deaths would be a part of a mass shooting

and this is also a big deal because uh more than twice a day someone under 18 is shot and killed via a hand con

i mean it's it's a it's an epidemic in our country

and gun sales are going way up

in fact eight percent of gun owners stockpile 10 or more weapons which is i know some people who have that many guns

it's a it's an interesting behavioral thing that i don't quite have a finger on and because there's so many guys that get stolen a lot and become a part of crime

and you know meanwhile it's pretty hard to get congress to do anything about it

now to give you some idea about how far out this puts the u.s from the rest of the world

no other wealthy western country is even remotely in the same league of gun homicides per day even adjusted by population

it's not it's not even close so in the united states you're about as likely to be killed by a gun as you are to have a car accident

if you look at other developed nations it's you know in canada it's statistically similar to alcohol poisoning

in ireland it's similar to drowning in a lake river or ocean

the netherlands is about as likely as accidental gas poisoning

in germany about as likely as contact with a throne or falling object

in france it's about as likely as hypothermia

in austria drowning in a swimming pool

in australia falling from a building or structure right

so these are similar countries wealth-wise and development-wise

norway it's about as similar as an accidental hanging or strangulation

these are all obviously very rare events whereas for us it's about like getting a car accident a really common way for human life to end you see consistently uh when you talk about the not the amount of guns uh if you plot gun deaths by state with going under gun ownership by state you're just going to find a really nice clean correlation with 50 data points that more guns does equal more gun deaths

and the same is true when you do that by country

you see the u.s is less than five percent of the global population but owns 42 percent of the world's guns which is what one of the contributing factors for why we seem to have a completely unique relationship with gun violence

so when australia reformed their gun laws and their gun culture mass shootings plummeted

gun rates also over time appear to decline

more affected was the suicide rate

suicide rate in australia really dropped when they got rid of the guns

gun advocates would point out that the gun homicide right and the homicide rate in general was nowhere nearly as impacted as the suicide or mass shooting rate

and this is what i mean when things get complicated

now it's not that the us has more crime

it does not

if you look at you know burglary for example we're even in the developed world uh a pretty safe place

but what the us is unique is in violent gun crime and suicides with a gun

now this is a really personal topic for me

ask science mike very nearly does not exist because when i was a teenager i put a shotgun in my mouth and tried to kill myself and uh thought the gun was loaded

it wasn't

i didn't know how to load it or i wouldn't be here

and this is why gun suicide is such a big deal in the united states

you don't get a lot of second chances when you try to kill yourself with a gun

gun suicide has a haunting finality to it

other forms of suicide they're just not as lethal

and uh if people survive a suicide attempt they're relatively likely to just live the rest of their life

so how many lives have we lost uh people's own hands from guns

so the data does seem to support an argument uh that more guns creates more gun deaths

now as i mentioned i have a lot of friends who have guns and love them and i respect those people

but i just gotta ask like when's enough going to be enough

how many toddlers need to shoot their parents how many mass shootings how many gun suicides how many gun homicides have to happen in this country before we evaluate what the right to bear arms really means and how beneficial it is to our society

i don't want to oversimplify this narrative at all

and i've tried to point to some of the nuance

but our right to bear arms so easily has a huge cost in human life

gun homicide for black males is a significant risk especially gun suicide for white males is a really serious risk

and you have to think the second amendment was written with men in muskets in mind who'd recently overthrown an occupying government

and they they needed to be ready they expected you know what if the u.s government became as tyrannical as they viewed the british government

at the time it's muskets

nd in modern contexts like your handgun your shotgun even your ar-15 if some part of the country declared total war on the u.s government against tanks and drones and fighter jets and bombers i just questioned the ability of a gun owner to hold off the federal government if it came to that

so for me like enough is enough already

we've lost too many lives because guns are just too easy to have

and we have too many and there's an economic incentive here

we're a major weapons manufacturer for the world

and it produces wealth

and man if the u.s loves anything the u.s loves wealth and money and power

so what would i do if i could go in and draft laws and get them pushed through the country

what would i do i would immediately i mean yesterday lift the congressional research ban on guns and gun crime i would want to spend federal dollars getting a better picture of what's happening so we can make better recommendations now in the absence of that data a couple of things make immediate sense to me right now one limit magazine size for assault weapons if we can't ban them yet okay let's at least cut down the magazine's size gives people higher survivability and it helps law enforcement stop people in mass shooter situations the other thing i would say immediately let's start licensing registering and requiring people to demonstrate safe gun storage in order to buy a gun it's what other developed countries do i'm not talking about confiscation yet i'm not talking about a buyback i'm talking about licensing registration and requirement to demonstrate safe gun storage so we've already tried doing nothing and it's not working so can we try to do something if we can't get to an australia style buyback okay what are the common sense things we can do and can we tell our legislatures that we will not tolerate nothing that we will not tolerate loyalty to the nra over loyalty to a majority an overwhelming majority of american citizens who want to see a change right most americans don't own a gun and even many gun owners agree that we should have common sense legislation to slow the rate of guns entering society now pro-gun voices often point out that reducing poverty and improving educational access would do far more to curb violent crime rates than gun legislation and guess what i completely agree [Laughter] if we want to take on the mantle as a society of eliminating poverty and the educational gap based on income absolutely i think that would be effective but can we do both can we also embrace some common sense gun legislation and work to address poverty and education gaps in this country how beautiful would that be finally you asked about the linkage with mental health and mental illness and violent crime this is ask science mike this is already a long answer for the show we'll probably return to this topic in more depth on the liturgist podcast in the future i want to know let you know i heard that part of the question but i just i don't have the time to dig in this is already complex and uncertain enough but i guess what i would say most americans agree it's time to do something and so to me that's something three points write your congressman write your senator call them raise hell to lift the congressional research ban to limit magazine size and to create licensing registration and safe gun storage programs as a requirement for an american to buy a firearm we've tried nothing and it isn't working so congress it's time to try something well there's another episode of ask science sciencemike in the books and uh gun owners don't click unsubscribe i would much rather you write me and tell me what i missed then write me off okay and i you know i've had a lot of one-on-one topic discussions with many of you and frankly the fact uh if you're a conservative gun owner who listens to ask science mike you sound like a pretty interesting person anyway so let's hang out and talk about it okay a few things one we need questions kind of a weird trend uh listenership is going up right now uh science mike is more popular than it's ever been but the number of questions coming in are going down now we're in no danger of not having enough questions to put on a program uh but it's just a strange trend i don't know if it's summer everybody's too busy at the beach whatever but send in your questions you can use hashtag asksciencemike on twitter or on youtube or on soundcloud or you can go to asksciencemike.com and send a question directly to me via email or you can record a question and we'll play it back on the show by the way we get way fewer recorded questions so statistically you're much more likely to make it on the program if you do the voicemail style question than if you type a question okay there's that i want to thank the patrons for making the show possible people have dug really deep i appreciate it uh it's it's it's getting me through the summer when there's less appearances so i appreciate that it directly ties to me and my family's well-being so thank you for that if money's tight uh that's okay you can lower your pledge i've seen a lot of people do that lately and that's completely okay my vision is with as many people who listen to the show i'd love to see lots and lots and lots and lots of one two and five dollar a month people um so that less people are doing like 75 or 100 a month or some of those really generous folks like that and if money is so tight that you can't even throw a couple bucks that's no problem head over to itunes and rate the show or share an episode of the show on social media that also helps us a whole lot uh andrew golucky does our pre-production work and also organizes the together groups he's doing amazing work thank you andrew greg nordin as always a weird scheduling turns the show around fast it sounds amazing thanks for producing that science mike greg and jeb bodiford wrote and recorded performed everything they asked science my theme song if you need original music production jet can do the same for you thanks for listening everyone and i can't wait to talk to you next week [Applause] [Music]