- [Frank] Welcome To Ear To The Common Ground.

Here, we celebrate the power of music and food to bring Americans together.

Filmed from a historic barn on Cash Lane in Music City, each episode of Ear To The Common Ground features one musical artist and a diverse gathering of eight of their fans.

Everyone brings a dish to the table and they talk about one of the issues of the day, face-to-face with compassion replacing contempt as they keep their hearts, ears and minds attuned to the common ground.

I'm Frank Solivan, and these are eight of my fans, Scott, Israel, Megan, Neil, Jody, Michael, Big John, and Clemmie.

Tonight we are focusing on gun rights and control.

Let's celebrate America's greatest diversity, diversity of thought and shine a light on some common ground.

♪ I had to break things off ♪ ♪ And get out while I could ♪ ♪ Find someone else ♪ ♪ That makes me feel like it should ♪ - When my son was murdered, he was 29 years old.

He was murdered in 2003, he was my only son.

My nephew was murdered 2015, he was 18 and my grandson was murdered 2016.

So he was 18- - Was this all as a result of gun violence?

- Mm-hmm, yeah, so either way it go, I still have not differ.

I still don't believe in harsh punishment.

I believe that we need to find a little more out about gun control, gun rights and the hands that it get into.

And that's why I'm really glad I'm here to being a part of this, 'cause I like to hear from everybody, especially this young man here.

- My family was not the richest of the families or... We were pretty poor growing up.

So as far as that goes, I saw guns everywhere I went, growing up in anywhere from Compton, Inglewood to San Gabriel Valley.

- Even kids your age?

- Kids my age, they would bring guns no matter what.

Even still here, I still see guns coming to school.

Recently we had a lockdown because someone brought a gun to school.

I don't know how people just go around just shooting a gun at people that didn't do anything wrong.

Especially, I hope that never happens to me because I have a future and I have a life that I wanna accomplish.

And for everyone who lost their lives and not able to do it, it's a really hard subject.

- Yeah, I'm so sorry for your losses and it's always heartbreaking when you hear it.

And I wanna ask you, were there metal detectors in any of your schools where you saw those guns?

- We don't have metal detectors, but we have police officers.

But what's good without metal detectors?

A police officer can't sense out a gun like a dog can, so.

- Right, and I advocate for this all the time as making this a new standard law that every single school should have a metal detector.

We have a model for it.

We have our recipe in a lot of our inner city schools.

We don't see active shootings there because they have metal detectors and it's only $3,000 on average for the cost of a metal detector.

So what a low cost to save so many lives.

And I always ask that question and so it's unfortunate that you've seen so many guns but if there were metal detectors, would you be seeing them?

- Yeah.

- Certainly within the schools, themselves.

But what does that do for the streets?

You know, what does that do for people's homes?

What does that do for the corner?

What is that?

So are we talking about the poverty, the fear, the rising sense of always needing more protection from the person that makes a person fearful, where do we go with that?

We have a Second Amendment, right?

And I know that that's something that everybody here feels strongly about in one way or another.

So, how do we balance that?

You're a military veteran, right?

And so, you know, I can certainly have assumptions about where you might come down on, but that's not fair, you know, for me to even start there.

So, you know, where do you stand on the?

- Well, there's a difference between a right and a privilege.

However the first humans landed on this planet, there was a right to protect themselves.

And so, in our Constitution, says, "We will not invade in that right," it doesn't say, "We give you the right to protect yourself."

It says, "We know that just as a species on this planet, that there are other things that could get you.

And so you need to be able to protect yourself.

And so we're not gonna get in the way of that."

I think she was a 73 year old grandmother, she was living by herself, four or five men broke into her house.

So she grabbed her trusty shotgun she had in the corner and she held them at gunpoint and said, "Fellas, if you don't leave now, I'm gonna shoot you and then pray for you."

And she was not joking about either one.

- There's a distinct difference in protecting you and yours inside your own perimeter as opposed to when...

I look at it like this, I own a lot of guns.

I love guns.

Most of my guns these days, my favorite ones, are the muzzleloaders and my 1900 Steyr that's so old that it doesn't even have a centerfire cartridge.

If I leave my perimeter, my personal space, then my groove space overlaps with yours.

- [Guest] Absolutely.

- So your First Amendment right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and not having to worry if I'm some crackpot with an Uzi, kind of takes precedence over my privilege to carry a gun outside my own home.

Your grandmother's the perfect example of that.

A shotgun is more effective than a single projectile for self-defense, because you got 30 bullets going, you're gonna knock 'em down.

You might not kill 'em, but you're gonna knock 'em down.

With a single projectile, anybody who's had training will tell you all bets are off in a crisis situation.

You can't guarantee that you're gonna be able to aim that effectively even if you've had the best training, which is another issue.

- But the presence of that firearm is also a preventative measure.

- [Big John] Right.

- Actually, the Justice Department says that 67,000 non-incidences happened because somebody you know, presented a firearm and the crime didn't happen.

Now, we have no idea how many of those situation didn't even get turned in because somebody ran, you know.

So there's the other side of that too that says the preventative part of this says, "Okay, I'm not gonna be your victim today."

- Yeah, and the shotgun... My mantra is always, "Stop the threat."

It's never shoot to kill.

And if you use a shotgun, you're gonna kill the person.

And so, I have a little bit different concept when it comes to that.

My goal would be hopefully, to never ever have to use my firearm, which was why everything has to be about prevention first.

But if I had to use it, I have a high level of training so that I know what my process is gonna be there so that I can hopefully, avoid having to actually kill another person.

Because our new statistic that I just received is in a self-defense situation where somebody had to use their firearm, 60% of those people commit suicide within one year of that act because we're not designed to kill people.

So there's a lot of interesting things when you brought in the perspectives and when it comes to crime prevention, brings it back to your point where I deal with a lot of women that are in domestic violence situations that have gotten out, but they have husbands walking through restraining orders trying to kidnap children.

What else are they going to do other than have a firearm?

Because they're completely vulnerable, and so, there's a lot of- - Do you believe in increasing the number of people that are armed to increase safety?

I guess that's kind of what I'm sensing, or is it- - I'm not about arming more people, but I'm about having everyone that needs it, get access without a lot of economic strain.

Because when we look at the crime rates where the people are struggling in those high-crime neighborhoods, those are the locations that those people don't have the financial means to be able to get firearms when they have multiple gunshots in their neighborhood every single day and they're trying to protect their children.

- We have to start with families and the socioeconomic situation and education.

We have to start way earlier so that we don't get to this point.

- Right.

- [Megan] And I don't believe that we should give up on that yet.

- Any kid could get guns.

I could get guns at my age.

- Accessibility is a problem.

- Yeah, access.

No matter, you could get guns, you could get drugs, you could get anything you could think of, if you know the right people, especially coming from the neighborhoods I've came from, I coulda got endless things of whatever I wanted.

I could have got money, I coulda got all that.

But no, I didn't wanna choose that route.

We should try to have a more stricter policy on selling guns to certain people.

Because I know adults who sell guns to kids and- - Well, there are laws.

There are laws.

- But that's not legal.

- But they're not enforced.

- It's already there.

- They're not enforced.

- Right, it's not legal.

- It's a double-edged sword there because you have... Training is something that previously, in the homes, you had parents who would help or train or teach 'em how to hunt.

And that's the way I was raised.

I was raised on the farm, raised to hunt.

Well, that's something very different than what the modern day is going on there.

And with that being said, the training facilities I think, are a mighty positive thing when it comes down to actually having a plan in place and not just getting a tool and not knowing how to use it.

- Does anyone else feel like guns are being romanticized?

I mean social media, Hollywood, media in general, music, I mean, even in our field, it's like the responsibility of gun ownership is being diminished and made into like...

I'm looking at this like 12-year-old kids are thinking, "Oh, okay, to be cool, I need to do what that grownup guy's doing."

But we're not teaching the responsibility that goes along with that.

- It influences a lot of kids.

I know at some point it was like, "Oh, that's really cool," and pointing a gun at a camera is really cool.

No, it's not, it's not cool at all.

And about an incident that happened is, we had two kids that were juniors.

They were walking.

They're siblings, they were walking, we had a younger sibling and an older sibling, and they thought someone was gonna shoot at them and they pull out their gun just to be safe.

It goes off on its own.

It has a little misfire, it goes off on its own and kills the older brother.

And I had a very long conversation with them.

I would ask them, "Why was your reasoning behind having a gun?"

He was like, "It's really rough growing up out here."

And I was like, "I 100% get that.

But I've seen you many of times on Instagram or any social media platform just waving that gun," like it's something- - A status symbol?

- Yeah, and I still don't understand why they do that, but it is being very romanticized like you were saying.

- What I have seen kind of an evolution in our society is that, now what it means to be a man, our new masculinity's simple as a guy with a big gun because that's all the images they are seeing.

So we no longer see dads throwing the ball with kids in the backyard and we don't see the dads working hard making money to support their families.

They don't see those images for men.

They see the "take out the bad guy" video games.

They take out the bad guys, "shoot 'em up" movies, everything that they see online is a guy with a big gun.

So we are perpetuating this as a society because when boys don't have their coping skills and all those tools that they should have, they're trying to be a man.

And what it means to be a man is to get a gun and take out the bad guy.

- [Big John] That's what we're teaching 'em.

- Right, we are.

- But we overlooked a lot of video games off the top.

We just overlooked 'em.

They started off with the guns.

You know, we as parents, families or just community, we didn't pay attention that these video games was programming them, mentally.

I had one incident where I asked the young man, you know, "Why did you even go get a real gun and come back and shoot your own mother?

You killed your own mother.

You know, where did that come from?"

And he told me by him playing that video game for so many years and for so long, that he was mentally programmed that he really wanted to see how it felt to really shoot.

He was so desperate to let us know that he couldn't take it no more.

The impulse of him really needing to see what that felt like, is the cause of him pull that trigger.

And we didn't never talk about that no more and I think we should.

- I got a question for you, matter of fact.

How did he get the weapon?

- [Commie] Right!

- That goes back to my point.

- He told me exactly what you just said earlier.

He said, "Miss Greenley, I can get a gun just like I can get a bag of potato chips.

What do you want?"

The second thing were what kind of gun do I want?

He letting me know he can go get me one.

The second thing we overlooked were the gun shows.

We overlooked them gun shows, because I was out in the streets for a minute.

I wasn't all goody two-shoes for a minute.

(guests chuckling) Let me just be real here.

I know that I- - [Megan] We've all been on a journey, it's all right, I gotcha.

(guests laughing) - I know that I have taken a golden envelope myself to a gun show with a list of guns on it about what I want, and gave that envelope that contained 3,000 to $5,000 in it and, "You're gonna bring me that list back out because I done paid you a extra 5,000 or 10,000 to bring me that."

Now when you bring me that, you pull on off and you go back to Brentwood, I pull off, I'm going back to the hood and now I done call my friends, "Meet me at my house, I got to show y'all what I got," we overlooked that.

We didn't ever bring that back to the front street.

So it's a lot of things we overlooked the way, we can't just throw it all on the gun control, the gun rights that, you know, we had today is because we overlooked a lot that made it what it is today.

- Here's the thing, we have 350 million or 300 some odd million people in this country and I guarantee you, out of all of the children, there's a child that will be affected by every bit of it.

So it is a video game problem, it's a Hollywood problem, it's a bad parenting problem, it's a lack of parenting problem.

It's a, you name it- - And that's back to what I was- - If you have a child or someone who is misusing a firearm, you can throw any possible set of influences at it and you're gonna have something you know, that's gonna...

So, then, we need to look at some of those underlying things.

We need to talk about video games, we need to talk about accessibility.

And you said right off the bat that, you know, you were about training but also about crime prevention, right?

And so, for the people who are involved in working with firearms, the fact that there are people out there that are putting those two topics together and trying to bring those, you know, into... We are a Second Amendment country and I don't see that changing anytime soon, right?

We all know.

- I have kinda a question about that actually, especially for the gun owners at the table.

I'm not a gun owner.

Some people, I can kind of get a sense already, some have said.

Canada has done an assault-style buyback.

I think Australia did it in the '90s following their huge mass shootings, respectively.

And also, you can argue that maybe mass shootings kind of distract from the real issue, which is day-to-day gun violence rather than school shootings.

But, I guess open question to any of the gun owners, what would be your thought when you hear mandatory buyback?

I can sense- - [Jody] Protest in the street (laughs).

- Well, I mean you're getting back to my point about the government raising your kids versus you.

I understand the issue there, but it's a touchy subject when you start getting into buying back- - Blurry lines.

- A freedom that you have with the Second Amendment.

It's a very touchy subject.

That's a difficult, slippery slope, that's difficult.

- Yeah, I also think it's hard to define the Second Amendment.

- I'll get that, I'll explain that for you- - Well, I'm saying, because- - Just go right ahead.

- Well, we've all read the Constitution, I mean.

- It was written- - I don't know!

I don't know if everybody has.

- It was written how many hundreds of years ago in a society that looks very, very different- - That's exactly right.

- To the one we have now.

So that's why I'm saying right to bear arms to me, means what arms, where and when and why?

- And the man who wrote that document said specifically that it needed rewritten, every generation- - [Michael] It was intended to be rewritten.

- Because he was smart enough to understand technology changes, and when technology changes, parameters must as well or we end up getting to a point where this side's not willing to budge, this side's not willing to budge.

So somebody has to give a governance.

When cars first came out, there were no lanes on the road.

Nobody had to have a driver's license.

After a while they were like, "Oh man, we're running over each other because people won't just give the right of away like we used to in horse and buggy.

So we're gonna have to have lines and you're gonna have to stay in your lane."

- Yeah, and I think that becomes an issue also then, to create more accountability for our manufacturers.

I'm a firearms person, but we look at our airsoft guns and they're exact replicas of the real ones and they're not mandated in most states to have an orange cap.

So you have law enforcement negligently shooting children that- - Do you include the NRA in that when you're talking about manufacturing, marketing, et cetera?

Do you guys that own guns, view the NRA positively negatively, neutrally?

- The NRA isn't the Second Amendment right and people mix those up together and put them as one conversation, it's not, really.

They're an organization just like every other that has their best interests for their own means.

And so, I think that, you know, it's people being educated on the issue so that they know, you know, where we should be placing those funds and those efforts to hopefully, prevent those crimes from happening, you know, the manufacturer accountability, cars had to put seat belts in just like you said.

And so, we have those blurred lines that really shouldn't be there because it's about politics and money, it's not about community safety and we see that on a regular basis.

- Some generations don't take that step.

They take a step backwards and they wanna do something else.

- Do you think that progressing as a society means more gun control or less?

I guess is a good question because, obviously where an issue is going to go from one way to the other, you know what I mean?

I think that's what it means to be a progressive versus a conservative.

A conservative, you like to keep things the way they are, typically.

I mean there's multiple definitions for that but a progressive is pushing change of some kind.

I think we were kind of touching on this earlier as far as this metal detector and school idea, which I mean, I don't know why anyone would really argue against that, it's kind of a no-brainer, preventing kids from having what they shouldn't have in the school, but we kinda were getting at that as far as where and when can you have guns and we have obviously, different viewpoints here.

You're an instructor and you're an instructor.

- Yeah, the gun control laws wouldn't have to be as crazy if we injected resources into those communities that are struggling with guns.

You know, we need those resources put there so that they can have better tools for opportunities.

They feel hopeless because nobody is helping them.

What are we doing for our communities?

We hear the politicians speak all the time but they're really not anything about, you know, public interest or their own, they're about their own self-interest, right?

So we don't see them injecting resources into the community.

- Look at the gun violence rate in Germany.

If you establish parameters, doesn't mean that everybody has to be forced into a corral.

But if you establish parameters that are just common sense.

- One little thing is not gonna change it.

She was talking about multiple levels of things.

There's many, many issues that are contributing.

So we have to cast a wide net.

- We all know the cigarette lobby was massive, insanely funded, right?

They put billions of dollars into, you know, and we all know defrauding the government and lying to the people and all of that.

But we overcame that.

How can we take that experience and what happened there and apply it to common sense gun regulation and making, you guys were talking about Hollywood making it cool and that kind of thing, well, so where do we start?

- [Frank] Hi everybody!

- [All] Hi Frank.

- Thank you guys for coming.

- And Jeremy.

- And this is Jeremy, yeah.

- Hi Jeremy.

- Hi.

- Thank you guys for coming and having such great spirit and hanging out and talking about things.

We're gonna have some music in a little while but this, is my mom's lemon bar recipe.

I get choked up if I talk about it too much.

- [Megan] I know, I've seen so many pictures of your beautiful mama.

- Yeah, she was an incredible cook and it inspired me to cook and so on and so forth.

So, hence the name of my band, Dirty Kitchen.

My family used to get together around tables like this and have big meals and the next thing you know, instruments start coming out of the cases and we would play music and talk story and you know, have a really cool connection that way and you know, I miss it, you know?

Everybody's kind of a little dispersed now but I'm really glad this was an opportunity to bring people together with music and food.

So thank you guys so much.

♪ I gotta get away, just ease my mind ♪ ♪ That woman got me running crazy, about to lose my mind ♪ ♪ Said she's gonna do right ♪ ♪ Swear she's gonna be good ♪ ♪ Well, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ ♪ So I slammed that door ♪ ♪ Said I won't be back ♪ ♪ I'm only two days gone ♪ ♪ I got a broken heart attack ♪ ♪ Said she's gonna do right ♪ ♪ Swear she's gonna be good ♪ ♪ Well, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ ♪ Yeah, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ (guitar music) ♪ I had to break things off ♪ ♪ And get out while I could ♪ ♪ Find someone else ♪ ♪ That makes me feel like I should ♪ ♪ Says she's gonna do right ♪ ♪ Swear she's gonna be good ♪ ♪ Well, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ ♪ Yeah, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ What'd you say, son?

(guitar music) Yeah.

(guitar music) (thunder booming) (group laughing) (guitar music) Want me back, that's what she's wanting to do.

♪ Try and smooth things out ♪ (guests applauding) ♪ Well I wish I could, baby ♪ ♪ But there's too much room for doubt ♪ ♪ Says she's gonna do right ♪ ♪ Oh, I swear, she's gonna be good ♪ ♪ Well, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ ♪ Yeah, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ ♪ Oh, she said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew ♪ ♪ She said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew ♪ ♪ She said she will ♪ ♪ But she won't like I knew she would ♪ (guitar music) (guests cheering and applauding) Thank you, kindly.

♪ The islands again ♪ ♪ Sing it with family and my friends ♪ ♪ Back on the islands again ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Down on the islands again ♪ ♪ Singing with Ernie and my friends ♪ ♪ Back on the islands again ♪ - [Frank] Oh, let's take it out (indistinct).

(mellow guitar music) (gentle music)