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(bouncy music) - Hi, Hello and welcome to the cross cut festival.

I'm Alain Stephens, I'm an investigative reporter for The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering gun violence.

According to the latest figures from the US Centers of Disease Control, there weren't nearly 40,000 gun deaths in 2019.

14,000 of those were homicides, 23000 of those deaths were attributed to suicide.

And amid this in America, there is a nation that boasts nearly 135,000 licensed gun dealers.

And last year, they sold a record 40 million firearms.

It's part of America's long woven and wounded history.

And also a topic that's explored by today's guests that I'm excited to speak with here, is Senator Chris Murphy and his new book, "The Violence Inside Us."

A brief history of an ongoing American tragedy.

Senator Murphy, thanks for joining us today.

- Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for your fantastic work on this topic, really.

I'm looking forward to the discussion.

- Thank you, thank you.

So, I say let's just start with the basics.

Let's set the table here, which is we see the news stories, right?

But I think there's still this question, which is, does America have a gun violence problem?

And what does that violence problem look like to you?

- Well, listen, there's no doubt that there's something different happening in The United States than any other high income nation in the world.

You know, depending on your metrics, we have either 10 times as much or 20 times as much gun violence in The United States as other nations.

We're a global outlier, and it's been that way for a very, very long time.

Essentially, since the 1840s 1850s, America has just been a wildly more violent place than any other high income nation in the world.

And as you mentioned, that violence takes a lot of different forms.

You know, our gun deaths are mostly suicides in The United States.

But there are more homicides here than anywhere else in the world.

There are more accidental shootings in The United States than any where else in the world.

We're an outlier when it comes to domestic violence as well.

And, you know, the book I wrote a couple years ago or a year ago now, I think, you know, makes the case that, well, this is certainly about the number of weapons in The United States.

It's about more than that.

The history of American violence really tracks three phenomenon; American poverty, American racism, and access to weapons.

And so well, you can probably get the most immediate return on sort of preventing grudges from becoming lethal by stopping people's access to a firearm.

If you don't do something about the fact that in this country, if you're poor, you're much more likely to be the victim of violence.

And if you're black or Latino, you're much more likely to be the victim of violence because of centuries of racism and racial oppression in this country and violence being used as a mechanism to oppress, then you're not going to make the difference that we need to.

So it's a big, big problem.

And we'd be fooling ourselves if we only attack it through one set of policies.

- So you are a senator, you wear many hats.

Let me just back up, why gun violence?

Why was this something that kind of took your fascination, your time, and it's something that you wanted to work so extensively on?

- Yeah, as I say, my life was transformed in December of 2012.

I had just been elected to the Senate.

I was sitting on a train platform in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

I was going to go with my wife and two young kids at the time down to New York to see the Christmas decorations on a Friday afternoon, and I got a phone call that something had happened in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

And I very quickly figured out that it was something horrific and evil, and made my way up to Newtown.

In the days and weeks following, I recognize that my political career was now going to be dedicated to this issue of gun violence.

A few weeks after the Sandy Hook shooting, I found myself in a community center in the north end of Hartford with a group of parents whose children had been killed in gun violence in that city, in particular, that section of the city.

They were furious at me.

They were furious, they couldn't understand why I had been in Congress for six years, I'd been in the state legislature for eight years, and just now I was starting to care about the issue of gun violence.

And I was mortified.

And to this day, I'm just so embarrassed by the fact that I didn't work on this issue, until Sandy Hook.

That my eyes didn't become open to the fact that children's lives are fundamentally altered in violent neighborhoods, like the east end of Bridgeport and the north end of Hartford.

Even if they never get shot, the fact that they just fear for their lives and their friends and their family members lives, every single day, it fries their brains.

Their chemistry, and their biology is different than the brains of kids who go to school just a couple towns away.

And so my political career certainly was changed by what happened in Sandy Hook.

But, you know, I've tried to tell the whole story of American violence, because as impactful as that day was in Newtown, in many ways, it was that day, a few weeks later, in that community center in the North end, where I really got my mission delivered to me to work on not just the shootings that the public pays attention to, because they're on TV, but the stuff that's happening literally every single day.

- Yeah, let's talk about that.

Because like, let's just set the whole table here, because I think it's very important.

When I talk to new reporters, and I train a lot of reporters on covering gun violence.

And one of the things that I tell them is, I say, that in many ways, if you looked at America objectively, if you're an alien that came down, it would almost make sense that we would have this gun violence problem.

That historically and even today that we are one of the largest and most prolific purveyors of small arms in the world, and we have a lot of these companies.

We have this rich lineage of firearms technology.

You actually took that as kind of one of the opening salvos in your book, and I thought that was really smart.

Tell me a little bit about that history.

And perhaps some of that history that many Americans don't know about the gun.

- Yeah, I mean, I mentioned before that America becomes a global outlier on violence in the 1840s 1850s, right?

And it's not coincidental three phenomena.

One is, this is the first rush of new migrants to The United States, right?

This is the first wave of European immigration.

And what we know is that, when there are sort of people competing in The United States, from different backgrounds, for economic space, there's a higher likelihood of violence.

The second thing is, you have the invention of the cotton gin earlier in the century.

You have the mat, you have an explosion of the slave population in the south.

And so by the 1830s, and 1840s, the amount of violence you need to keep an entire group of Americans in chains is just epidemic.

And what happens is, the entire country becomes anesthetized to violence.

When it's the foundation of your economy, it just becomes more accepted as a mechanism to impose and enforce other norms.

And so what you see during this period of time is, white on white violence in the south beginning to increase as well.

Just when you have that much violence under girding your economy, it becomes the norm.

And then lastly, the invention of the handgun.

And that's, in many ways the (mumbles) You know, it's a big part of our story because the handgun gets invented in Hartford, Connecticut.

All of a sudden, you can fit this lethal instrument in your pocket.

And these shoving matches that used to happen on the streets of New York, all of a sudden become lethal.

Almost every other high income nation decides to regulate that weapon.

The United States does not.

The United States puts no regulation on the consumer sale of the weapon, and the Industry flourishes in The United States, and gun ownership rates skyrocket.

And so all of these things are happening in the middle 1800s.

A huge rise in gun ownership rates, epidemic levels of racial violence, and then these new waves of immigrants, which sort of set off violent contests in our cities.

And as you said, it's not shocking that The United States all of a sudden becomes a place where there's more violence than anywhere else in the world.

- So talking a little bit about this historical prevalence, how do these tendrils of our history shape the way Americans view guns today?

- Well, so early on, the gun industry figures out that a great way to sell weapons is to sort of embed the gun in American culture.

And so the earliest advertisements for guns feature the western expansion.

In fact, all of Colt's early guns are named after sort of heroes of the Wild Wild West.

And what happens early on in America's rapid growth is that, the West becomes kind of synonymous with American freedom, with American entrepreneurship, with American individualism, and the gun becomes wrapped up in that story.

And so Colton, Winchester, all these guys sell their guns based upon this fable of these rugged American unique individuals going out and settling the West doing battle with Native Americans.

And all of a sudden, this idea of sort of liberty and individualism, and the firearm become one common story.

And of course, the NRA, the modern NRA, sort of catapults that into the cultural mainstream.

That's unique about The United States.

Nowhere else is the gun interwoven into sort of the founding mythology of a nation, at least a high income nation.

And so that is where we sort of sit today where for so many people, the values associated with Americanism are connected to a device, a firearm, and that in part explains why it's sort of difficult to make progress on this issue.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I always tell people that when it comes to guns in America, that really the reason why people are so vociferous with the debate around guns is because it's the symbol in which you know, the firearm represents you very much our senator, and just bringing it to just modern times, right?

We have these mass shootings, we have the discussions, right, where people are saying we need to talk about legislative solutions, but there's this gridlock, right?

What do you see kind of on that front lines?

And why do you think that we can't seem to find any sort of legislative common ground or solutions when we talk about gun violence in America?

- Well, I think there's a lot of reasons for that.

But you know, the biggest is the power of the gun lobby.

So, you know, the NRA for the majority of its life time was a marksmanship organization.

The NRA actually wrote and pushed America's earliest gun control legislation.

The first state model gun licensure laws were written by the NRA, who were really looking out for responsible gun ownership.

It's not until the 1970s that they get taken over by anti-government radicals who sort of see the gun issue as a way to sort of unite a lot of different anti-government causes.

Because what they see is that, the gun is, and the sort of story of the American settlers using the gun to break free from British tyranny is the best way to tell people about how dangerous government is.

That government is so dangerous that you need to be armed against it.

And there's nothing that can sort of prove your conservative anti-government bonafides better than supporting the armed insurrection, the right of armed insurrection of the American public against that government.

And so the Republican Party comes to sort of rely on the NRA endorsement as a sort of stamp of approval for a broader set of conservative values, right?

If you have the NRA endorsement, then you're a real conservative, because you hate the government so much that you want people to be able to be armed against it.

It becomes really hard to make progress because every Republican and some Democrats choose that NRA endorsement as their sort of I am a true Conservative stamp of approval.

Now, that is changing.

Democrats don't want that stamp of approval any longer because the anti-gun violence movement is now more powerful and the NRA is in a bit of disarray.

So its power has just been greatly diminished.

So we can talk about why that's changing.

But I think we got to this place because of the way in which the gun industry and the gun lobby kind of interwove itself with the modern conservative movement, and essentially locked the Republican Party down on any and all progress on gun reform.

- We focus a lot I think, when we look at legislative solutions, when we look at the NRA, we focus a lot on on mass shootings.

And as you said, the mass shooting is very much a catalyst for a lot of people to kind of look at this issue, but the reality is that when you look at the statistics, it's the aggregate death, the day to day gun death, the neighborhood violence.

You know, I remind people that you and I here when we're talking on these panels that I tell people that you're much more likely to be shot with a handgun, and you're much more likely to be shot in one of these kind of common violence interactions that many Americans tend to forget.

What is it about that simple day to day violence that Americans don't seem to put as much energy into, legislators don't seem to put as much energy into, even the media doesn't seem to cover as much?

Why is that?

- So I'm remembering a story that I told in the book about a pastor in Hartford, who I write about.

(mumbles) open the book with a story of the death of his son.

The pastor's name is Sam Saylor.

And Sam said to me, during one of my interviews with him, that was really interesting.

He said, anytime they're talking about a gun death in Hartford, they use the phrase when describing the suspect as known to police, or somebody familiar, the police are familiar with.

And he sort of read that phrase used by his newscasters, as a mechanism to explain to their suburban viewers that they don't need to worry about this gun death.

This is a criminal sort of element that the Hartford police are dealing with on a regular basis, that are shooting at each other on a regular basis.

This is somebody that's known to police, not somebody that you have to worry about in the Hartford suburbs.

And so that sort of sense of separation from the homicide epidemic, I think is a big part of why that sort of daily carnage that happens often in our low income neighborhoods doesn't seem to register in broad public opinion.

I think the nature of the suicide epidemic, in which suicides are often very private, right?

Families aren't willing to talk about them, and so you don't get a broad community conversation around suicide very often.

I think that's the reason why suicides tend to not register in a way that mass shootings do.

The mass shootings are public.

And mass shootings, especially when it's strangers being shot, all of a sudden, feel threatening to everybody, right?

You can sort of say, I'm never gonna be the victim of a homicide, because I live in a safe suburban neighborhood.

I don't really feel like my family is in jeopardy of a suicide, and I don't hear about them as much in my circle.

But mass shootings, school shootings, church shootings, man, I feel like those things can happen to anybody.

And it is true that you're more likely to be killed by a falling object than be killed in a mass shooting in this country.

It's just not a statistically relevant method of death.

But it feels really scary, because it seems so random.

And that is why the mass shootings I think are elevated in our public conversations.

- One of the things that has also been brought up in some of the work that we do here is that a lot of the mass shootings get legislative attention simply due to the victimology of it.

The reality of it is that we're talking about white victims and white areas.

How does race play into who gets the attention and the triage when it comes to fighting gun violence solutions?

- I was up in Baltimore a couple years ago, and I was visiting an afterschool program in an elementary school there.

While I was there, there was a shooting within a couple blocks of the school.

The school went into lockdown.

And I found out afterwards that it was a (mumbles) and I tell the story in the book as well but it was a father of two twin girls at that school.

He had literally dropped his kids off at school that morning, and he had been shot walking into his house a few blocks away at nine o'clock that morning.

When I got home the next day, I wanted to find out what had happened.

I really struggled to find any new stories about this guy, about who he was, about why he was targeted, about what happened to these girls.

For days, I searched and searched and searched online.

I could barely find anything.

And his name is Corey Dodds, he was African American, young guy, looked like he had a bright future ahead of him.

And I thought to myself, what if that happened in a Connecticut suburb?

What if some dad in Westport, Connecticut, had dropped off his two white girls at a suburban elementary school, and when he got home was shot on his doorstep?

That would be national news.

That would be on headline news, that would be on CNN.

You wouldn't be able to avoid that story.

And the only difference is that Cory was black.

That's the only difference, is that we value black life differently.

This country doesn't care when a black man dies, like we care when a white man dies.

And like there's no way to tell this story of American violence without sort of working through that prison, because that is also why we only respond when the mass shootings happen legislatively.

Because, you know, Washington state capitals, because of decades of systemic racism, have just chosen to value the life of one race of people over the lives of others.

And that's why you can't talk about the issue of American violence, just through the prism of firearms.

You've got to be able to talk about race as well.

- And yeah, one of the things that I do as a reporter is, you know, I look in the criminal justice system, because it's so integrated with gun violence and gun violence legislation.

And I have to admit, you know, I have to come out and say that there are a lot of well-intended gun control policies that are put out there, but I think many of them are white-centric, that they often forget that the criminal justice system in this country does not enforce law, equitably.

When we think about gun violence solution, is law enforcement our best option?

Or are there other alternatives that could perhaps curtail the violence without having to go to them as kind of the one-stop shop for dealing with everything?

- Well, as you know, there's all of this data out there about these targeted intervention programs.

And they've got different names all over the country, but there's a lot of data in places like Boston and Oakland, in New Haven and Bridgeport to show that they work.

And the idea is that you sort of take a group of young people who are at risk for violent behavior or to be the victims of violence, and you put resources around them, right?

It's just sort of a different way of, you know, sort of saying that when you sort of lift up people economically, who right now have very few sort of options to advance other than risky behaviors, you make a difference when it comes to violence rates.

And the most compelling data is that, the clearest indicator as to whether you're going to be a victim of violence, or not, is your income.

There's FBI data out there, whether you believe it or not, that shows that it's actually your income rather than your race.

That if you're really poor and white, you have a incidence of violence that is comparable to being poor and black.

It's just that we have a lot more poor black people and poor, Latino people in this country than poor white people.

But if you put resources around at risk communities, you'll inevitably find a reduction in the rates of violence.

If more policing led to less violence, we would have seen some return on our massive investment in the security state over the past 60 years.

There's just very little evidence that that does anything except sort of push people, and particularly people of color into what Sarah Alexander calls the cycle of marginality, in which you end up in prison, you end up out of prison without the ability to get a job, you end up in a place where all of a sudden risky behaviors, which subject you to a higher level of exposure to violence is your only means of survival, because that sort of interaction with the criminal justice system puts you on a pathway that robs you of all sorts of other legitimate economic means of advancement.

- Right, and I think that's so interesting.

And yeah, there's a study that I recently read that said that one of the biggest kind of flags for neighborhood and community violence is simply if you're able to make more money than your predecessor and your family, just income advancement in the family is a huge contributor for being able to get away from violence.

When we talk about solutions then, right?

'Cause you know, I'm in this world of like law enforcement, I find it super interesting that like, we have these programs that are like, the ATF will jump on and give mandatory minimums to drug dealers who had like one pistol on them, right?

And on the flip side, there's no federal arms trafficking law, right.

Like, so you have these guys who are moving weapons, and they're moving weapons across state lines.

I see the moving weapons in Mexico, and then they plead out for like 18 months, because they kind of, there's not really strong laws in there.

What's going on, man?

Like, why is it that seems to be we're so focused on one thing, and not this other thing?

It's almost just like this misnomer.

- Yeah, I know, that's right.

It sort of shocks people to know there's no federal firearms trafficking law.

Those are state laws.

And as you mentioned, there are all sorts of traffickers out there, whether they're trafficking guns internally within The United States, or externally out of The United States that get away with it.

And part of that is because we don't have a federal statute.

Part of that is because it's really hard to identify them.

The NRA quietly was really successful over the past 40 years in essentially rendering the ATF feckless.

The ATF, for instance, can't inspect a gun dealer more than once a year.

So even if you get a whole bunch of complaints about a gun dealer, there's a handful of bad apples out there.

Most licensed gun dealers, gun stores are doing it the right way.

But there are a handful of bad apples out there.

But as long as they get through their once yearly inspection, they don't ever have to worry about the ATF coming back again, to do an inventory check to see if they're actually selling the weapons or selling them at the front or the back door.

And all of that is due to the NRA success in essentially making it impossible to track trafficking.

And that's because an increasing share of the gun industry's profits comes from illegal trafficking.

I have the number in my book, I forget it.

But I remember being shocked when I sort of looked at the percentage of the gun industry's revenue that comes from trafficking to Mexico and Central America.

Because all the guns in Central America and Mexico, for all intents and purposes come from The United States.

There's no gun stores down there.

They're all from us.

And that flow, that iron pipeline, makes a lot of money for the gun industry.

And so the NRA pushes really hard to make sure that there aren't laws that can crack down on.

- Yeah, one of the things you bring up is, just our global kind of stance as far as exporters of violence and how we kind of stand in the global market.

Can we just talk about that really quick, 'cause I think a lot of people think of firearms so intrinsically as just this American problem that's like very much linked to us.

But it is very much kind of this broader scale problem linked to our entire arms industry in general, and some of our ideals about that.

Can you just touch a little bit about that?

- Yeah, I mean, so I wrote this chapter for the book called "The Violence We Export."

And I think my publishers were like unclear whether a chapter on sort of American militarism and American (indistinct) - It made total sense to me.

As a reporter I was like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense, you know.

- No, and it's a real part of the story, because it's a way to explain how massive The US weapons industry has become, and how they not only drive US policy, and sort of drive a sclerosis of our violence policy in The United States, but they now get people killed all over the world.

It's American weapons companies that push the federal government to sell weapons all around the world that lead to conflicts boiling, in the Middle East and Africa.

So many of those weapons are US made weapons, and the US government ends up pushing them into the hands of folks who ultimately irresponsibly traffic those weapons.

And so I do tell that story in the book.

And it doesn't matter to me when we talk about selling drone technology into the Middle East that it evidently is going to get into the wrong hands and get more people killed.

It just to me is more evidence of the way in which the weapons industry in The United States has far too much power.

And I'll just leave you with this.

There's an international arms trafficking treaty.

And I got to double check this.

But last I checked, there were four countries that refused to sign it.

I believe they were North Korea, Nicaragua, Syria, and The United States of America.

And the only reason that we're not a signatory to the international arms trafficking treaty is because the gun industry doesn't want The United States to sign it.

The NRA opposes it, because the gun industry profits from all these weapons being trafficked out of The United States around the world.

That's bananas that were on that list with Syria and North Korea.

- Yeah, and I tell people this because I think a lot of times, just to give people perspective that, I say that the civilian gun market in America is actually one and perhaps a very small kind of leg to the entire table of the firearm industry, that if the American civilian, suddenly we are unable to buy firearms, that many of these gun companies would still survive and be profitable, just due to the fact that they're able to capture these lucrative international contracts, and even domestic government contracts with our police departments.

- Can I say one thing about that?

Because I think it's important for people to understand what the market looks like, and you know this.

So we had a record number of gun sales last year, right?

And so where are they all going?

Well, the interesting data point is that, we have a long time trend of fewer American households having guns.

So back in 1980, that half of American households had a gun.

Today, that number is maybe 1/3.

What's happening is a small number of Americans have all the guns.

So 3% of Americans own over half the guns in The United States.

And so the gun industry, you know, why they hate an assault weapons ban so badly, is because that's where all their money is.

They're selling these really expensive, really tricked out weapons to a small number of people who are either collecting them or piling up because they're getting ready for armed revolt.

And that's where the market is today.

So when you see these numbers about all these weapons being sold, don't think yourself oh, that means 20 more my neighbors that didn't used to have guns now have guns?

No, that probably just means that the one neighbor who used to have six guns now has 12 guns.

- Yeah, so I'm getting some audience questions like coming in.

And one of them I think is, everyone's just chomping at the bit, which is solutions, right?

And I think people want to know, what evidence do we have of things that work?

What have you seen that has had some positive change in reducing gun violence.

So you know, and I feel like I'm beating the same drum over and over.

But, you know, in all of my research, it points to the same thing, background checks and permanent loss.

States that have universal background checks, that makes sure that you can't get a gun through a internet sale or a gun show if you're a criminal, in states that have permits for handguns, at the very least.

Those are the states where you have lower rates of gun violence.

Connecticut does that about 30 years ago, and you see a 40% reduction in our gun homicides.

Missouri, in the mid-2000s, they're the last sort of southern state to get rid of their universal background checks law.

And with a year, they see a 20 something percent increase in homicides.

And all around Missouri, you start seeing Missouri bought guns used in crimes in a way that you didn't before, because the universal background check is no longer the law.

So you know, that's where I think we start.

And the good news is that that intervention, background checks is the most politically popular, right?

90% of Americans want that.

There's good evidence to suggest that assault weapons restrictions work too.

That 10-year period of time where we banned assault weapons in this country, you saw a break in mass shootings.

That's not coincidental.

Before the assault weapons ban, mass shootings were up here.

10 years of the ban, they go down.

As soon as the ban is repealed in 2004, mass shooting starts to spike again, when it's just a little bit harder to get your hands on a weapon that kills people wildly efficiently, like an AR-15, or an (mumbles) 15-style weapon.

It's just a little bit harder to perpetuate a mass shooting if that's what's rattling around in your head.

So we're going to start with background checks.

That's what we're trying to pass right now in The United States Congress.

Because I also think that once we get a win, we start to show Republicans that there's actually more benefit to be on our side than on their side, which is a paradigm shift for a lot of Republicans who have been used to doing nothing, because that was just the safer option for them.

It's not safer any longer politically, for them to do nothing.

- Right, so one of the things is, you know, every time we get these things about solutions and stuff, or like what's out there, I want to tell everyone who's like listening to this, that there's actually not a ton of information.

Information that we have out there is like very hard to come by.

I have to say, your book as well researched.

What were some of the things in your research that you found you wish there was more data on but it's just not out there, and you wish you could find?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

So there is decent data around background checks.

You know, a safe assumption is that, states that have universal background checks have a 15% reduction in gun violence.

There's other data that shows it higher.

One of the things that we don't have good data on is what the size of the unregulated market looks like.

When we talk about gun sales in this country, we're talking about background checks.

The only way we know a gun sale happen is because the gun dealer pings the background check system.

We don't really know how many guns in this country are sold without a background check.

How many guns are sold on armslist.com, how many guns are sold through just private sales, how many guns are sold in gun shows?

Again, maybe it's 20% of all gun sales are a gun without a background check.

Maybe it's higher.

That's something I wish we had a lot more data on.

And I'll tell you, it matters in real time, because as we (mumbles) If we can't get to universal background checks, then you sort of have to set a line.

And how you draw that line matters.

For instance, most of the unregulated sales are online versus private sales offline.

We just don't have a lot of great data there.

- Yeah, I mean, one of the things I have to bring up is, you know, we do have for instance, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

A lot of the information they have, is not available to the public and a lot of the information, there's been a lot of stifling of information.

In your research, did you find there's stuff that was out there, but you just simply couldn't access due to the politics around gun control?

Or the fact that just there was not that body of information available?

- Yeah, I mean, you probably have more experience with this as a journalist, and a reporter than I do.

But yeah, I mean, as you know, one of the things is that, the gun lobby makes sure that none of this information is computerized.

So all the records on gun sales are in paper files.

And that hamstrings not just folks who are trying to do research, but investigators, people who are trying to solve crimes, because they got to literally go to the paper file of the gun sale in order to figure out the ownership chain of a weapon.

So maybe I don't run into that as much as you do but we have sort of purposely developed a really archaic system.

- Yeah, so you mentioned earlier National Rifle Association is in trouble.

That's no secret.

They're shifting right now and having some issues.

How does that change the legislative landscape now that kind of the big dog in the area is possibly not so big anymore?

- Well, it really matters.

Because, you know, in 2013, we lose the boat on the background checks bill in the Senate.

We actually had 55 votes for it, but it was filibuster.

And we didn't lose that vote because we lost the argument.

90% of Americans supported that bill, but we just didn't have as much political power.

The gun lobby was very powerful.

The anti-gun violence movement essentially was non-existent in 2013.

Brady had been kind of carrying the torch for years.

But all we've done in the last eight years is build an anti-gun violence movement that is now more powerful than the gun lobby.

We have more money, we have more volunteers, we're louder in town halls, we're louder online.

And it doesn't hurt that the NRA is going through bankruptcy and no other group has kind of taken their place yet.

That matters when I talk to Republicans in the Senate.

You know, they right now are sort of thinking of themselves, who do I wanna be on the wrong side of?

For years, they just knew they didn't want to be on the wrong side of the NRA.

Now they've got Moms Demand Action, and they've got Giffords pack in every town and Brady and Newtown Action Alliance incentive promising.

All these groups organize phone calls and other offers, they show up to their town halls.

And now these Republicans are thinking, I don't know, in the next 10 years, I might not want to be on the wrong side of those guys.

I might rather sort of take the vote in favor of a background check's bill.

And that's just because we have more political power.

Yes, the NRA is on the mat but we also now have people and money and volunteers, and that, whether you like it or not, that matters when every buddy who's voting on this has to run for reelection.

- One of the things that the National Rifle Association and many 2A advocate say, that if you want to reduce gun violence, and you know, we hear it all the time that we should put more good guys with guns out there.

They pushed for armed teachers in schools, and more what I will call violence preparation instead of violence prevention.

Do we know if the good guy with a gun theory works in violence prevention?

- You know, we do.

And it's a total made up myth by the gun industry designed to sell more weapons, right?

The data is incontrovertible on this.

If you have a gun in your home, it is way, way more likely to be used to kill you, to be involved in an accidental shooting than ever to be used to protect your family against perpetrator.

And that data is backed up, no matter how you slice it.

Communities that have more guns have higher rates of gun violence, not lower rates of gun violence.

Homes with guns, more likely that you are the victim of a event of gun violence.

And so we just have to sort of tell that story.

Of course, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence, right?

There's really no evidence of mass shootings that have been broken up by good guys with guns.

There was a good guy with a gun on the Parkland campus, there were plenty of good guys with guns in Las Vegas, there were people with assault weapons walking around Dallas the day that the sniper started shooting from a rooftop.

None of them could do anything about it.

And so we just got to tell the story because it's literally a marketing gimmick, made up to sell more weapons by the industry.

(indistinct) - Gotcha, are you there?

- I'm there.

- Alright, great, I got you back here.

Okay, so excellent here.

So I missed what you said.

Can you re-go over that last answer there?

- Well, if you can hear me okay.

- I got you now, yeah.

Yeah, the data just is so incontrovertible.

Here, you're much more likely to be the victim of gun violence.

If you own a gun, you're not going to use that in a heroic defense of your house.

You know, in Dallas, the shooter from the rooftop, you know, nobody was able to take him out, despite the fact that there were men with assault weapons patrolling the space below.

It's a gun industry, marketing gimmick that good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns.

That's just not how it works.

- Right, and so one of the things also I wanted to bring up here, when it comes specifically to mass shootings, which is this thing that, like I said, it's just really kind of driving a lot of attention and stuff.

When it comes to mass shootings in particular, what do we know about the types of people?

And is there any success that has been found in preventing mass shootings?

- Well, I mean, we haven't tried any interventions.

So all we know is that the assault weapons ban did dramatically reduce mass shooting events during that 10-year period of time.

Because as we know, mass shooters rely on that weapon, the AR-15s semi-automatic rifle.

What we know in studying mass shooters is that they study themselves.

So many mass shooters have done research on prior mass shooters.

That's one of the reasons why they use the same weapon.

These are copycat murders, which is also why we become more careful in publicizing information about the shooter.

Because shooters actually are looking to glean as much information as they can from past years.

There's obviously a demographic profile, right?

They're mostly white, they're mostly male, they're mostly young.

There's probably an explanation for that.

Just like we see the suicide epidemic being largely white and male, there is likely a sense of social dislocation from white men, right?

Who feel that they're owed something, that they deserve to occupy a place in society.

And when they are dislodged from that place, they think they need to take into their own hands, the solution.

That's the mass shooter.

For the suicide, it's that dislocation is just so hard to reconcile with what you expected that it leads you to take your own life.

Again, suicide is a male epidemic.

It's a white epidemic.

It's not a female epidemic.

It's not a epidemic that exists in communities of color, I think, because that dislocation from expectations to reality is so much bigger amongst white males.

The same thing happens in the mass shooter epidemic.

So you know, that doesn't give you a lot of great sort of path forward, except that conversation about race is probably important when it comes to the mass shooter epidemic as well.

That may seem countercultural, because all the mass shooters are white, but they may be acting out in part because of the sort of the white patriarchal assumptions that sort of, they're grappling with.

Obviously, these are folks whose minds are sort of coming on done.

That's harder to fix with broad policies.

But that broader storyline of expectations matters too.

- It's so interesting that you say that, because I kind of came to the same conclusion, just coming from my background.

There is definitely this sociological element to it, where I do think there has to be this question of, how many mass shooters are resorting to violence because of just the dashing of white societal expectation, right?

The fact that you have this expectation, you sit someplace in society, and when those expectations aren't met, you lash out at society.

I think that's kind of a real thing.

When we talk about just mental health and violence in general.

What do we know about mental health?

Because recently there has been kind of some debate on that.

A lot of people have been saying, we need to really start implementing red flag laws and these types of things to try to take guns out of the hands of people who show mental distress.

At the flip side, there's a lot of people that says that this gives a bad connotation that so many people are fighting mental illness, that that doesn't mean you are necessarily violent.

What do we know about mental illness and violence in America?

- Well, our gun violence epidemic, it cannot be explained by mental illness.

Period, stop!

Why do I know that?

Well, because there's no evidence that America has more mental illness than Britain, or Japan, or France, or Switzerland.

There's no evidence that America spends less money treating mental illness than any of those other countries.

What is different is that, in this country, the ease of access to firearms, and the regular use of violence as a mechanism to suppress communities of color leads to elevated levels of violence.

And yes, this continued effort to explain violence through the prism of mental illness does stigmatize people with mental illness.

If you're mentally ill in this country, you're much more likely to be the victim of violence, not the perpetrator of violence.

Not every mass shooter is mentally ill. Adam Lanza had no mental illness diagnosis.

In fact, even when you sort of go back retroactively and do a deep study of all these mass shooters, half of them would never have been diagnosed with a mental illness.

So it's really important to understand that our mental health delivery system in this country is broken.

It is.

We don't do the right thing for people with mental illness.

We should fix it, but not because we think that's going to change the trajectory of gun violence in this nation.

I'm not saying it won't have an impact.

But there's just no evidence to suggest that's the driving reason behind gun violence in America.

- And so lastly, I have to do a little bit of navel gazing but like we have to talk about, which is media, and the role that media plays in society's understanding of gun violence.

How does media influence violence and how we digest violence in America?

- Well, I mean, the first problem is that the media only covers murders when they happen in the dozens.

There is just no interest in the national media to cover this epidemic except when there's a mass shooting.

If there's not a mass shooting for months at a time, you won't see stories on the national news about the epidemic of gun violence.

Second, there is a propensity in the media, especially the local news media, to essentially sort of turn African-Americans into perpetual criminal suspects.

They cover violence that happens in African-American communities in a way that creates this perception that black people have a propensity to violence that white people don't.

And as I mentioned before, that sort of turn of phrase suspect known to police just sort of creates this idea that there's just this unending cycle of violence in black communities, that doesn't exist other places.

So, you know, those are two ways that the media has to get better.

Find a way to cover violence when there's not a mass shooting, and be really careful about how you cover violence in communities of color.

- So one thing I could put out here is that, we're at the tail end of a mass casualty event with a pandemic.

We've had civil unrest, we've had historic record breaking gun sales.

And, you know, you're a leader here, you're a political leader.

What would you tell people who are worried about this?

What does the future look like when it comes to America's gun violence crisis?

Do you predict that it's going to get worse, that it's going to get better?

And what do you think that curtailing this violence will actually look like in the future?

- So here's the good news, policy change works.

There are two moments in the last 100 years where Congress steps up and fundamentally changes American gun laws.

First, in the mid to late 1930s, we passed the first two firearms control acts.

And second in the 1990s, when we pass the universal background checks bill and the assault weapons ban.

It is not coincidental that if you look at the trajectory of American violence rates over the last 100 years, there are two precipitous declines.

There are literally two moments in American history where violence rates fall off a cliff.

Guess when they are, the late 1930s and the mid-1990s.

Now, there's likely some other explanations for that, but I believe the primary explanation is that the practical impact of controlling weapons, keeping them away from dangerous people.

And the moral impact of government at the highest level sending a signal of condemnation have impact.

And so my belief is that if we do prove successful in passing the most significant anti-gun violence measures since the mid-1990s, this year in Congress, maybe we won't have the exact same impact.

But there will be a practical and moral impact to congressional action.

So the past is often predicate.

And the past tells us that when Congress stands up and does something, that the trajectory of violence in this country changes.

I plan for and hope for that to be the story going forward.

- Thank you, thank you.

Well, unfortunately, I think we're out of time here.

Well, thank you, Senator Murphy, for taking so much time to explain this point and topic that just keeps coming back up in public consciousness.

Thank you for taking some time here, and sharing your expertise with us.

I think it's such an important topic - Well, and if I can just recommend people to follow your work.

The Trace does unbelievable work in this space, uncovering truths that nobody else could get at.

So we rely on what you guys do regularly in our work.

So really honored to share the stage with you today.

- Thank you.

And I'll be contacting you, I'm sure in the future so, for all sorts of stories and things.

But thank you for taking some time.

- Great, thanks everybody.

- Thank you guys for joining us the Crosscut Festival.

I hope you guys had a chance to check out some of the other sessions this week.

Anyway, I hope you guys had a great rest of the week.

If you want to follow any gun violence reporting, you can go to thetrace.org.

Other than that, thank you for sitting down and listening to us talk about this topic.

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