- Hello everyone and welcome to "Amanpour & Company."

Here's what's coming up.

[children shouting] Desperation in Gaza, with more than half a million people on the brink of famine.

UNRWA Chief Philippe Lazzarini joins me from Jerusalem amid damning allegations over his agency providing critical aid.

Then... - When I was a kid here in Huntsville, there were 11 prisons, now there's 100 and something.

What's going on?

- It's about money.

- [Christiane] "God save Texas."

From criminal justice to the southern border.

A new documentary series takes a personal dive into the conservative Lone Star State.

And I speak to best selling author Larry Wright, whose book inspired the show.

Also ahead.

- This mass proliferation of guns, it's just becoming this defacto response.

- [Christiane] "What We've Become."

"Living and Dying in a Country of Arms."

Dr. Jonathan Metzl joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss guns in America and why we shouldn't believe the stereotype of mentally ill mass shooters.

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Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

Hospitals operating without power, a looming famine, and nearly 30,000 dead according to the Health Ministry in Gaza where the situation is desperate.

President Biden is pushing for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh says, the group is showing flexibility in negotiations, but still is ready to fight.

An agreement could see some of the Israeli hostages released and a pause in hostilities.

But for now, the war rages on.

One of the key groups tasked with providing humanitarian assistance in that besieged enclave is the UN Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, whose leader is sounding the alarm about what he calls a manmade disaster.

But the agency itself is under intense criticism after the Israeli government alleged that 12 of its staff members were involved in the October 7th Hamas attacks, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and hundreds taken captive.

UNRWA fired them and launched an investigation.

And the agency chief, Philippe Lazzarini, joins me now from Jerusalem.

Welcome to the program, Philippe Lazzarini.

Can I just start, please, by asking you about the critical situation on the ground?

You said this week that humanitarian aid had halved.

The deliveries that you were able to do is only half of what you were able in January.

Can you tell me whether, just tell me what you're facing there.

- Yes, first of all, thank you for having me, Christiane.

And hard to describe, you know, this war is a war of all the superlatives.

There have been more children, more health staff, more UN staff, more journalist staff who have been killed in five months, in nearly five months, than in any other conflict across the world.

Now, as you know, the aid has been so far not commensurate to the need.

Gaza has been under siege and in January, when the International Court of Justice has asked the Israel and the international community to scale up its humanitarian assistance, in reality what we have seen has been a decrease.

In fact, in February the average assistance has been half compared to January.

The type of programs that we have, first is a cumbersome administrative procedure on the Egyptian and the Israeli side.

But we have also seen over the last few weeks the main crossing of Kerem Shalom being regularly closed.

Which means that the flow of the convoy into the Gaza Strip is absolutely uneven.

And because the assistance coming into the Strip is so little compared to the immensity of the needs, this has also created desperation, a chaotic situation where convoys entering into the Gaza Strip have been regularly looted.

And I need also the add, that we talk about a pocket of looming famine in the Gaza Strip, primarily in the north, and we haven't been around to bring any convoys from the south to the north since the 23rd of January.

- Explain to me why, if there's looming famine, which a lot of the international community seems to accept the diagnosis of various aid agencies and the health ministry there, why you can't move from the south to the north?

That's not checked, I mean, that's not the borders.

If you've got trucks and aid in the south, why can't you move it to the people who need it in the north?

- Well, you have a certain number of checkpoints.

Israeli military checkpoints.

And you need to coordinate every move of the convoys from the south to the north.

And in reality, most of our demand to move the convoys from the south to the north have been rejected.

And whenever they have been accepted, we had also a number of security incidents.

But the problem here, Christiane, is that we are talking about a manmade famine.

Because we have a kind of a total blockage for the people who are living in the north.

The answer would be extremely easy.

It's political will.

It's a decision to open a different crossing for the north which would allow to bring urgent and critical assistance to the people who are trapped there.

We hear more and more situations where there is not even enough animal food for human consumption for the people there.

- Wait, wait, let me just stop you.

What did you say?

Animal food?

For human consumption?

That's what they're relying on?

There's not even enough of that?

- Yes.

We...

There is not even enough of animal food, animal fodder, for people to eat, or to do bread with animal fodder, indeed.

And we have more and more stories of this nature.

And when we talk about food and acute food insecurity, even in the south where we have access for humanitarian assistance, it is not uncommon that people have to skip a meal, one every two days.

- So, Mr. Lazzarini, I'm going to get into this allegation and investigation, but do you believe that the slowness of access that you're talking about has got anything to do with the fact that it has been alleged that 12 members of UNRWA have been involved in the October 7th attacks?

Is that the reason?

And then we'll get into the allegations in a minute.

- No, I don't believe that this is the reason, because it does not impact on the UNRWA any other UN agency also are prevented to organize convoys from the south to the north and we did not have so far any access from any crossing in the north to the people being trapped there in Gaza City.

- Okay, so 18 donor countries including the United States have decided to suspend funding to UNRWA after the Israeli allegations.

Again, I want to know how you are able... How long can you even keep working, if you can get the trucks in, when you are, apparently, nearly half a billion dollars, you know, low in funds?

- Well, let me start to comment on the allegation.

I mean, there are allegations that 12 staff might have participated to the massacre of October 7th.

These are serious allegations.

These are horrifying allegations.

And would this be the case, it would be nothing else than a betrayal to the agency.

But a betrayal also to the Palestinian in the Gaza Strip.

Once this allegation had been communicated to me, we have taken swift action.

The first one is not only to dismiss immediately the staff, but we have put in place an investigation and we have also put in place a review of all the... How do we say?

Neutrality and risk management mechanism of the organization.

So, on that we have reacted very swiftly.

Despite that, there have been indeed 16 to 18 countries who have decided to pause temporarily, or to freeze their contributions to the agency for a total of order of 450 million dollars.

Today, the agency has the capacity to operate in March.

But beyond the month of March, if we are not receiving new money, or if none of these donor countries are reversing their decision, our operation will be impacted, our ability to respond to the humanitarian situation in Gaza will be undermined.

At the time we collectively need to increase our response.

So this will also impact our operation in the West Bank, Jordan, in Syria, and in Lebanon in a region which, as you know, goes through a lot of instability.

- Philippe Lazzarini, you're saying you have enough for one more month and then it's very, very unknown.

Did you, you have launched, you say, and you dismissed the people who were directly accused.

Did you receive any evidence from the Israelis?

How, in other words, how are you conducting an investigation?

Do you have the evidence?

- We have an independent investigation taking place.

It has been requested by the Secretary General on our demand.

They are totally independent.

To my knowledge, up to today, there hasn't been any new information transmitted to UNRWA and to the United Nations.

So for the time being, the only allegations available are the one which has been shared with me orally on January 18th.

We keep now calling to the Israeli authority to cooperate with the investigation team so that we can come to a swift conclusion about whether or yes or not, these people have participated in the horrible massacre of October 7th.

- Could I ask you to react to an image that has been circulating that has been written about by the Times of Israel, has been picked up by the Washington Post.

And it reports that one UNRWA worker, and names him, was seen on video kidnapping the body of an Israeli citizen, whose name is Yonatan Samerano.

Do you have any information about this allegation and what is UNRWA's response?

- These are shocking images, horrible images.

But again, we haven't seen any... We haven't received anything more than what we see on the media.

The United Nations, UNRWA, have not received anything official from the Israeli authority, despite our repeated call for them to share evidence and to share information with our investigation team.

- But that... You've seen the video.

Does that name match a person you know?

Can you detect anybody?

Can you recognize anybody from that video?

- I personally cannot recognize the person on the video.

As I indicated also, that the name which has been transmitted to UNRWA match our staff list.

This is the reason why I have taken this swift decision not only to terminate the contract of these people, but at the same time to initiate this investigation.

But the pictures seen on CCTV, I cannot confirm whether if this person is really a staff member of UNRWA.

For that we need more forensic evidence to be provided to our investigation team.

And we haven't received it.

- Given that, I just want to pull back a little bit.

Look, metaphorically speaking, Israel has been at war with the UN since practically the creation of the UN and the creation of the State of Israel.

They just think that the UN is stacked against them.

And when these allegations started coming out, the spokesman for the government, his name is Eylon Levy, said the following about UNRWA.

- UNRWA is a front for Hamas.

It has been fundamentally compromised in three main ways.

Hiring terrorists on a massive scale.

Letting its infrastructure be used for Hamas military activity, and relying on Hamas for aid distribution in the Gaza Strip.

It has been compromised in a way that makes it not only a tool of Palestinian terrorism against Israel, but also an ineffective mechanism of distributing aid to civilians in Gaza.

- Now that's not new, it was several weeks ago, but what is your response to that?

- This is absolutely nonsense.

There is today a campaign from some part of Israel to try to dismantle UNRWA.

Not because of this allegation.

Not because of its proximity with the defacto Hamas authority in Gaza, but the main reason behind it is to try once and for all to address the refugee statute.

There is a belief that if UNRWA leaves Gaza, leaves the occupied Palestinian territory, that the refugee statute is addressed once and for all and through this also, it will also undermine the future aspiration of the Palestinians for self determination.

- So Norway's prime minister has said that the idea of terminating the whole UN agency, which is what Israel is calling for, over these 12 employees is not the answer.

He says, "It would be like disbanding an entire police force instead of holding bad actors accountable."

And he's basically saying that without UNRWA, who would be responsible for the health, the education, the food of these 2.3 million people in the besieged strip?

Who would do it if it wasn't UNRWA?

And Israel was successful in getting disbanded.

- This is so true.

And I keep saying that it is short sighted to call for the disolvement of UNRWA today.

Look at what this organization is all about.

We are providing public services like education, like primary health to one of the most destitute communities in the region, being the Palestinian refugees.

Now, if tomorrow you have a ceasefire, we will enter into a long transition phase.

If we do not have the primary tools to provide public services to hundreds of thousands of girls and boys deeply traumatized in the Gaza Strip, who we urgently need to bring back to an education framework, what will we do?

We will just sow the seeds for further hatred, revenge, and resentment.

There is no one else beside the state or a strong administration which can bring back such a number of children into primary and secondary schools.

There is no UN agency, there is no international organization, and certainly not the Palestinian authority today that will be present in the Gaza Strip.

- So it was the Norwegian Foreign Minister.

But he also said, any attempt to replace UNRWA now would be unable to match the infrastructure and support that you have and that it would anyway take too much time.

But okay, fine.

So what do you say, again, to Israel?

Particularly the Prime Minister whose day after talking points include getting rid of you.

Can you see a situation where another agency could pick up those pieces?

Or the Israeli state itself if its then in charge of the enclave?

- I think this is a very ridiculous question.

There is absolutely no UN agency geared to provide public services to the scale UNRWA is providing to the Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip.

So if you get rid of UNRWA, you need an authority, you need a functioning state to take over the activity.

In fact, UNRWA is, unfortunately, a temporary lasting agency.

And our ultimate goal is to transfer all our activities to an emerging state which would be the outcome of a political solution.

So the answer today is, let's have a political trajectory.

Let's achieve a political solution and make sure that UNRWA once and for all can phase out, because we would finally succeed where we haven't succeeded for more than 75 years.

- I want you also to comment please on a report in, I believe it was the Wall Street Journal, reporting about a US intelligence dossier which was released sometime last week, February 21st.

Reporting low confidence that your employees had participated in the awful attacks of October 7th.

It said also that Israel's long standing dislike of the UN agency could mischaracterize much of their assessments on UNRWA.

And says this has resulted in distortions.

This is one person in America, apparently, familiar with this intelligence dossier.

So, have you briefed the Americans?

What have they said to you about this?

Because they said, look, it may have happened.

But they can't say it with conclusive confidence.

Only low confidence.

And on top of that, it says that it dispelled the idea that the UN had worked with Hamas, beyond establishing how best to deliver aid.

What have you said to the Americans and what have they said to you about this?

- To the best of my knowledge, there have been absolutely no intelligence or proof, or details which have been shared about this allegation.

The allegation seems to remain allegation.

Even when we talk about the 12 staff who allegedly have participated in the massacre of October 7th, there have been a document which has been shared with the media, I believe also with the US.

And when we have asked, what is in this document, in fact it was nothing else than the extended allegation or information which have been leaked to the public.

The problem today is that most of the allegations that we hear, and there are so many about UNRWA, are just allegations which are shared either through social media or through the journalists, but none of them are shared with the United Nations and none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are also shared with the member states.

- How, first of all, they also allege that there were tunnels UNRWA facilities like schools.

How difficult is it to deal with a single authoritarian, take no prisoners, or no criticism organization like Hamas when you are trying to deliver aid?

How difficult is it for you to work around that?

And how much do you, I mean, are you ever forced to compromise your values for that?

- As an agency, we have not been forced to compromise because our mandate is really straight forward.

It's to bring to our school any children of the Palestinian refugees.

We had 300,000 them in our school, girls and boys, in the Gaza Strip.

And I have to tell you, Christiane, that many times also the Hamas was not really pleased that these children were attending our school, rather than the schools under the control of the defacto under Hamas authority.

And we have seen, for example, during the summer camp where whenever UNRWA was organizing summer camp, allowing children to do artistic activities, sport activities.

We have up to 250,000 kids being registered, whereas whenever Hamas or the authority were organizing summer camp, they had only 20,000.

And they have always seen, in reality, UNWRA also as being a cultural threat.

- It's a really dire situation in terms of so much life being in the balance right now.

Philippe Lazzarini, thank you very much for joining us.

Now, in the United States the Governor of Texas has declared a state of emergency in 60 counties where massive wildfires are tearing through the panhandle.

Threatening homes, farms, and businesses.

It is the second largest wildfire in the history of the state, and another devastating reminder of the climate crisis.

Just one of the many challenges people there are facing from the oil and gas industry, to the criminal justice system, now a new HBO documentary series, "God Save Texas," is taking a personal look at the often dark history of the Lone Star State.

With three directors returning home to the hugely influential and conservative part of America.

Here's a clip from the trailer.

- When I was a kid here in Huntsville, there were 11 prisons, now there's 100 and something.

What's going on?

- It's about money.

It's industry.

- [Richard] It seemed like the prison just had this gravitational inevitability to it.

- Texas is about to kill an innocent man.

- [Richard] What I saw as an unfolding tragedy, created a kind of panic in me.

- Now, the show is an adaptation of the book by the same name.

By the Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist, Lawrence Wright.

He's produced some of the most definitive investigations of our time, including on 9/11 attacks, the Camp David Accords, and the COVID pandemic.

And Lawrence Wright is joining me now from Austin, Texas.

Welcome back to the program.

- Thank you so much, Christiane.

- I want to dive into "God Save Texas" in a moment, but you have reported from Gaza.

You've done a lot of reporting in that part of the world as a journalist.

What do you make of the situation there right now and some of the conversation that we were just having.

About, you know, aid and the horrible politics all around this.

- You had a wonderful interview.

I was very intrigued by it.

I was in Gaza after Operation Cast Lead.

I guess it was 2011.

And you know, I had never seen such devastation.

Which doesn't compare at all with what we see now in Gaza.

It... You know, Gaza... You know, it is a kind of prison.

You know, sometimes Israel objects to the term, the open air prison, but most of the Gazans that I spoke to, at least, had never been out of Gaza.

They'd never even been to the West Bank.

You know, it's a totally isolated entity.

It's no wonder that there is this built up anger and frustration.

Israel seems to think that they can eliminate Hamas militarily.

But I'm sure you've seen the polls.

It's 75% of Palestinians support what happened on that awful day in January.

That's Hamas.

It was never that big.

But you know, it's not just the people fighting in the tunnels.

It's the feeling that has erupted from the population and I think it's a totally misguided idea that you can simply eliminate Hamas militarily at the cost of 30,000 or more civilian lives without enlarging the people that support that.

- [Christiane] Larry, I just need to stop you a second.

- You know, you make peace with your enemy.

- Yeah, you do.

And they're meant to be trying to have some kind of ceasefire.

But I want to ask you also, because it's highly relevant, the huge Israeli public opinion for getting their hostages back.

And you wrote a play called "The Human Scale" which was about that very famous now exchange, I think, for Gilad Shalit, the soldier, who was exchanged for more than 1,000 Hamas prisoners.

You explored, I think, the relative importance each side gives to people.

Tell me what you were exploring there.

- Well, what caught my attention about the Gilad Shalit situation is the exchange rate between one population and another.

They exchanged him for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

And I called it the human scale.

And you know, one life can equal 1,000, I think that says a lot about what's going on.

The undercurrent that drives politics in the Middle East is the devaluation of some lives and the over valuation of others.

- Can we switch to the United States?

Because we're gonna be talking about "God Save Texas" and your books and the show on HBO, etc.

Which, by the way, I have to say, HBO is part of our parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.

How should the rest of the world, where I am, just look at America today?

Whether it be Texas, which is often a bellwether of certain politics, Alabama, the IVF ruling.

You know, all the stuff that's going on.

Just, the Republicans, the Trump Republicans preventing aid to support a fledgling democracy fighting for its life.

How should we be thinking about this and where does Texas come into it?

- Well, the country is at an inflection point.

I mean, we're marching into a very dangerous couple of months right ahead of us.

And I'm no prophet on this.

I can't tell you what's gonna happen.

But America, the future of our country, is going to be determined, I'm convinced, by the elections.

And the thing that one can hope is that, you know, this country is constantly changing.

You know, when I was a kid, Texas was blue and California was red, you know.

These things can change.

And with Texas, which is the future of America, because it's growing so fast and by the year 2050 it's projected the size of California and New York combined.

So, it will be decisive in American politics.

But if you look at the demography, you know, it's a majority minority state.

It is the most urban state in the nation.

It's got four of the top 10 most populous cities.

It is also a very young state.

All of those are change agents and democratic vectors.

So things are going to change and the Republicans in Texas have been scrambling to rejigger the elections and continue to gerrymander the districts.

Austin, where I live, most liberal city in Texas, but its got five congressmen.

Four are Republicans, ha, ha.

- Well.

- So, that's what gerrymandering looks like in Texas.

- So let's talk about some of the, the three parts to this documentary series.

So, they tackle a bunch of things.

The first one I want to talk about is basically the border where one of the directors, and she is the Mexican-American filmmaker, Iliana Sosa.

She explores how closely linked Mexico is to Texas, particularly in the area of El Paso and Juarez.

The two border cities.

Here's a clip, and then we'll quickly talk about it.

- If you close the border, it strangles our ability to live with one another.

- [Iliana] But there's magic in the multiplicity that defines this region.

And being not one, but many in the in-between.

I didn't always have a word for it.

But the Aztecs did.

They called it, "Nepantla."

- It's really interesting because she really focuses on this in-between-ness.

Between the two cultures.

And as you know, its become a huge issue again in the election.

Both Biden and Trump are at the border.

And its just suddenly taken over again.

What do you say about that clip?

What do you hope that particular doc will say?

- Well you know, the border is so stigmatized right now throughout America.

And yet, when you get close to the border, you understand it entirely differently.

It's not just the blue strip of the Rio Grande.

It is a region.

And you know, the border is wide.

But main street of El Paso is the main street of Juarez.

It's just interrupted by the border.

It's like one giant entity.

And now, of course, its been militarized and it makes it very difficult for people to carry on the lives that they used to have which was the free crossing from one side to another.

And it is, it's a real problem.

You know, when you have two million people crossing without documentation every year it becomes an enormous tactical problem for cities and states to handle.

But at the same time, the odious nature of politics surrounding the border has stigmatized that region unfairly.

- And there are pledges if Trump gets back in he's talked about big detention camps, militarizing the whole situation there.

But Texas also has the dubious infamy of being the execution capital of the country and maybe even the world.

In "God Save Texas" there is another episode called Home Town Prison and this is the well known filmmaker Richard Linklater.

He returns to his hometown, it's Huntsville.

It's where the major execution prison is there.

I've actually visited it.

Here's what he said, or this is a little clip.

- Even today, the criminal justice system looms over my hometown.

It's not just people behind bars who are being pushed to the brink.

It's state employees.

- After the executions, this was a long walk.

- What I was witnessing really unnerved me.

- And that's when I broke.

- You know, it's interesting.

They're set to execute another person tonight and it is actually interesting also to hear how this damages the soul of those who are doing the executing and part of that whole employee complex.

- Yeah.

I was so moved by Rick's segment on our documentary.

You know, he approaches it so humanely.

He's not...

He doesn't condemn the people, but he condemns the actions.

You know, the way the prison system has turned it into an industry.

The way the death penalty lingers mainly because of politics.

And you know, I just, I was so stirred by his portrait of Huntsville.

And also amused.

I mean, he had classmates in high school that became prison guards and some of them became prisoners.

One who died on death row.

His mother married a prison guard and then married a prisoner.

And his sister had her high school prom in the women's prison.

- [Christiane] Oh my god.

- [Lawrence] So, it's an intimate relationship.

- That really is.

That's incredible.

- Yeah.

- You've also done writing that fictionalizes Texas, right?

This is based on journalism, but "Mr. Texas" was your satire about Texan politics.

What is it that is so endlessly fascinating about Texas?

- Well, there are several things.

One is that we are a myth making state.

You know, if you think about Texas, even if you think about it from London and your perspective, when people think of cowboys, oil men, you know.

And those are a big part of the state, but the mythology that we award that is very evocative.

I used to live in Egypt.

I think about the Pharaohs looming over modern day Egypt.

Well, so does the cowboy loom over modern day urban Texas.

The other thing is, I think we kind of cherish our characters, even though there are some ruinous ones among them in our state house.

But Texas, I like the way that people talk.

The sense of individual liberty, which is sometimes used as a conservative club, but it's something that I, as a reporter and writer, I also appreciate.

- Really, really interesting.

Larry Wright, thank you so much for joining us.

And the show based on his book is airing on HBO now.

Now, Texas was also second in the country for mass shootings last year.

Despite pleas for tighter gun laws, public possession of firearms has only gone up in recent years.

And in his new book, "What We've Become," Dr. Jonathan Metzl lays out the social and political issues that get in the way of preventing these recurring tragedies.

And he's joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what more needs to be done.

- Christiane, thanks.

Dr. Jonathan Metzl, thanks so much for joining us.

In 2019 you and I talked about your last book, "Dying of Whiteness," which looked at the policies in the rural south and how they were kind of working against the very people that were voting for them.

And now you're out with a new book called, "What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms."

Another gun book.

Why go down this road?

- Well, it's great to be back.

I actually didn't think I was gonna write another gun book.

I felt like the research I did in 2019 through Southern Missouri, it really told me so much and it's not that there's ever, you know, you've said the final word on this topic.

But then a mass shooting happened in my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee.

A very racial charged mass shooting.

A naked white man with an AR-15 went into a Waffle House in South Nashville that was really full.

It was kind of 2 o'clock in the morning full of celebrating young adults of color.

Killed four people, injured four more.

And I'm somebody who studies race and gun violence and mass shootings and mental illness.

And I just felt like this was kind of a story that had to be told, both because of the local connections, but also because it became pretty clear pretty quickly for me that this was a parable of many larger issues that are facing America.

- You spend a couple of hundred pages here just kind of taking apart that one story.

And it is fascinating how many different layers you kind of unpack.

I guess one of the first things that people wonder is how did this guy, who clearly isn't in his right mind, if he's running barefoot to a Waffle House at 2:00 in the morning with a semi-automatic weapon, how did he get his gun in the first place?

And you kind of illustrate that this was not by any stretch the first red flag.

That the systems that we setup failed.

- Right, I mean this shooter, who I talk about in the book.

What I do in the book, for most of it, is I track the story of how this shooter and the gun got to the Waffle House on that night.

And as you say, there were so many red flags.

He was from suburban, rural Illinois.

He had bought his gun legally, like many mass shooters do.

But over the years leading up to the shooting, he had multiple police encounters.

First with local police, you know, had done things including jumping naked into a public pool in Illinois where he was from, shaking an AR-15 in the face of one of his father's employees.

And it leads up to the point where he ends up in Washington, DC at the White House demanding to speak with President Trump.

He tries to kind of jump through security, gets arrested.

So he had police files every step of the way.

And as I show in the book, at ever step they say, this guy has at least four semi-automatic weapons, but again and again and again, his guns get returned to him or they get returned.

His father, who gives them back to him.

And so part of the story is a story about race.

What does it mean to disarm a white man who is displaying these kind of symptoms.

And as I show, is you almost want to scream when you're reading the book because every step he's basically telling people what he's going to do and then ultimately he drives to Tennessee and commits this mass shooting.

- I'm hard pressed to think if it wasn't a six-foot tall white guy, if it was a person of color, if it was a woman, all of these different kinds of demographics, any of those red flags would have been enough to trigger a different type of, I guess a societal immune response.

But somehow, he's able to evade one after another, just because we kind of give him the benefit of the doubt.

- Yeah, that's exactly right.

I mean, I have a kind of alternate reality I talk about in the book, which is, imagine this same shooter but as a six-foot tall black man.

And I say, he certainly wouldn't have made it probably passed the first police encounter.

But in the second police encounter, this shooter, Travis Reinking, the real Travis Reinking jumps naked into a public pool and then gets out and it turns out he has these guns.

And so part of the story is how he is repeatedly, he and his parents, actually, his father, are repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt.

Because, as I argue in the book, even a clearly disturbed white man is seen as somebody whose rights are to be repeatedly defended.

It's more about the right of somebody like him to carry a gun, even in this extreme instance, than it is about any kind of disarmament.

And that's true in Illinois, and it's certainly true when he moves to Tennessee and then ultimately commits the shooting.

- Throughout this book you also kind of pull on the thread of the consequences of race when it comes to how we see policy, how we see gun violence overall.

Because one of the immediate reactions after a mass shooting, etc, the defense is, well, look at Chicago.

Look at the crime that's happening here.

That's where the gun violence is, etc.

Right?

That we need to be tackling this from, well maybe, a conservative point of view.

But then you end up, you also show, that there's actually an increase now.

It says, I think, 52%, a majority of Americans now own guns.

This includes liberal Americans.

And 41% of black Americans.

So that's a 17 point jump from just four years ago.

What does that say to you?

- It tells me that owning a gun and carrying a gun has become our defacto response to moments of uncertainty.

And it also tells me that those feelings of uncertainty are very profitable.

I mean, what I talk about in the book for example is after the police murder of George Floyd, the gun manufacturers and gun sellers specifically targeted black and latino Americans saying, you need a gun and the police aren't going to protect you.

And also, that was based in real fear of what people were seeing in that video.

More recently after October 7th all of a sudden we're seeing Jewish Americans go out and buy guns who have never bought guns before.

So in a way, to me, it kind of is a structural problem.

When we destroy the interstitium that keeps us feeling connected.

When we destroy, really the materiality of thinking we're in the same network.

That all of a sudden, everyone is out for themselves.

And that's, in a way, again, why I fall back on we need to rebuild civic and democratic infrastructure argument in the book, because this mass proliferation of guns, it's just becoming this defacto response, but it's also, for me, a bigger symbol, really of the demise of our infrastructure that makes us feel like we're all connected.

- What you point out in this particular, really tragic case, is that this act of violence that he perpetrated on these people led to the purchase of more weapons.

- When I was interviewed by the media right after the shooting happened, I gave what I thought was the standard line which is, we need more red flag laws, we need more background checks, we need assault weapons bans.

That's kind of the standard mind for people like liberal public health people.

And I still do believe that, but in the book, I unpack why that doesn't work and I really, I mean part of what's been controversial about the book is, I really take on the arguments of both sides and critique the arguments of both sides and try to imagine a different gun debate than the one we're having.

And so part of the book is about what it means for liberals like me to get on television after every mass shooting and say, we need more background checks, more red flag laws.

It was just so clear that they wouldn't have worked in this case or many other mass shootings, because they involve government databases that many gun owners distrust because, as I mentioned before, just the politics of race really impacts who gets to carry a gun and who is seen as a patriot.

And also because the other side, for me, the NRA side has been so good at rallying the liberal response by people like me into scaring people that people like me are gonna go take their guns.

And so that leads to more gun sales.

It leads to more institutions that are dominated by, for example, NRA anointed judges.

So, really what I'm trying to do in the book is use this shooting to show certainly why the NRA side has used these tragedies for its own purposes and that's part of it.

But also, the limitations of what I thought was my standard approach for thinking about new ways forward.

- And you pointed out that during the shooter's trial what was happening in the Tennessee legislature was pretty counterintuitive.

Explain.

- You know, that's part of the race story I tell in the book.

You know, we had this, I mean the pathology of a naked white shooter with an AR-15 killing young people of color, young adults of color, it just could not have been more clear.

And what I talk about in the book is, Tennessee had two ways to go, we could have either said, let's come together and learn from this tragedy and figure out a way.

Or we could have said, well this means we need more guns.

And I really center a lot in the book on a gubernatorial election that happened right after the mass shooting.

The 2018 governor's election in Tennessee.

And their were public health candidates.

And there was one candidate, Bill Lee, who said, this means we need more guns.

I'm gonna actually do away with all the gun laws.

And what happened was, right after the shooting, Tennessee elected a guy who did the opposite of what would have stopped the shooting.

And then the book ends with another example in 2022 where when the shooter went to trial five years after the shooting, they couldn't charge him with a gun law because between when he committed the crime and when he went to trial, carrying the gun the way he did wasn't a crime anymore.

So we keep doing the thing that's the opposite of what we should be doing, in a way.

And I really try to ask what does that mean?

What does that tell us about what we've become as a society.

- Along with taking apart kind of how the public health argument has in some ways failed us, you also take a look at mental health and how our focus right now on mental illness as the reason to blame for what these perpetrators do, I mean, where does that fall short?

- Well, I'm a psychiatrist and I think that there is an important role for mental health, just not the role that we've been put in a lot of times.

In other words, what I show in the book is after many mass shootings, for understandable reasons, many mass shooters, including Travis Reinking in the Waffle House shooting that I write about, suffer from symptoms of mental illness.

But as I show in the book, that's not the same as saying that the mental illness was the only thing that drove them to commit their crimes.

In fact, when I start to list out all the factors that lead to mass shootings, mental illness often isn't in the top 30.

It's loose gun laws, history of violence, history of substance use, all these different factors.

And so I try to be very aware of that.

I do think there's a role for mental health, but what we saw for a long time is that mental health was the one thing that the right and the left could agree on.

In other words, people on the right would say, it's not a guns problem, it's a mental illness problem.

But people on the left would say, well look, we have the New York SAFE Act, for example.

Or in Tennessee, where I live, legislation after a mass shooting that said, mental health practitioners are the ones who need to be the ones who are alerting authorities if patients are being threatening.

And really what I do in the book, I hope by the end of the book people will realize why it's important to have mental health as part of this conversation, but why putting mental health practitioners at the front by themselves of this issue, in a predictive role, really is statistically just doesn't really do the job we want it to.

In a way, it's based on stereotypes of mental illness.

Many people come to mental health practitioners voicing some kind of hostility.

But only a minuscule percentage of them go on to commit crimes.

And the other point is, I just think mental health expertise is very useful at looking at the bigger issue which is the polarization around guns in America and that is never part of the formulation.

- So what are some of the new ways forward that you figured out, I guess in the writing of this book, doing the research.

I mean, what can we kind of learn from how the NRA was able to communicate their viewpoint to people?

Because they seem to capture the essence of what it feels like to own a weapon.

Or the freedom that sort of brings about, versus kind of the public health argument, that we kind of heard from saying, oh, we really have to look at this as a public health issue and as a health problem.

- Part of what I saw, of course in the shooting that I studied, but then in the hundreds or thousands of mass shootings that happened while I was writing the book, is that there was this divide where one side channeled even recently by President Trump at the NRA convention a few weeks ago, said, I'm going to let you keep your guns and keep your power.

He's aligning guns with power and guns are very tactile.

And telling people that your self defense is your own, the gun is your own first responder, as somebody told me.

It's your tactile material response.

And then people like me who are arguing for abstract government regulations, databases, rules and regulations which I think are important, I wish we had them, but they end up just playing into the hands of people who are saying, look, these guys are promoting big government.

So what I do in the book toward the end, is I try to imagine a new kind of gun debate that's based in building infrastructure.

I argue for making public safety an entrepreneurial project, bringing in, I use research, for example, that talks about how there are these small studies that show that if you fix street lights and open up green space and invest in education and jobs programs, that actually, that reduces gun crime.

And those are just tried in little areas.

And I try to imagine, what if that was our national policy?

What if we weren't arguing about the 2nd Amendment, which you know, we still will be.

But I also said, how can we build infrastructure in ways that make public space in particular feel safe.

Make it feel well lit, to use that metaphor.

And I kind of go down that path.

That if we can come together on this infrastructure, I think that's part of it.

But I also argued that the democrats need a broader coalition than they have right now.

In a way, a lot of people say that they believe in things like background checks, but that doesn't mean that they will vote on those issues.

And so ultimately, it's building a broader coalition of people who feel like they're under this umbrella.

- Near the end of the book, in part of your recommendations, one was develop a better southern strategy.

What does that mean?

- What I try to show is just why a lot of the interventions that I think were well intentioned, that when they were devised, probably in the heyday of public health in the 1990s and early 2000s.

You know, government databases, regulations, empowering police and judges to disarm people even temporarily, they probably made sense in the context of the blue state America where these were being framed, and then in light of other things that had worked against cigarettes and cars.

But I think we need policies that understand the histories of guns in the South and the meanings of guns in the South.

And that in a way, try to intervene.

Let me just be clear, I think a lot of this is happening because what I learned from studying the NRA in this book is that they really did start as a grassroots organization and they didn't start by wanting to take over the Supreme Court.

They got their power by grassroots groups and running for school board and election board.

All these other factors.

And in a way, I think a lot of that's happening.

It's happening in Tennessee right now.

David Hogg has a new organization that's using the frame of gun safety but having people run for office all up and down the board.

Across, in a way, red state America.

I do think that's what needs to be happening.

And again, I do think there are ways we can form alliance in more sustained ways than we have with people who are gun owners who also wanted to see this problem changed.

- Author Jonathan Metzl.

The book is called, "What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms."

Thanks so much for joining us.

- Thanks so much.

- Ideas and solutions for this scourge.

And finally tonight, Yulia Navalnaya has delivered a powerful address to the European Parliament.

She is, of course, the widow of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny.

And she has taken up her husband's cause, vowing to continue his work to advocate for democracy and fight for quote, free Russia.

Navalnaya told European leaders they need to stop being boring if they want to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin.

- You cannot halt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions.

There is no difference from the previous ones.

You cannot defeat him by thinking he is a man of principle who has morals and rules.

- Another strong message from a grieving woman.

Navalny's funeral will be held on Friday in Russia.

And that's it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up on the show every night, sign up for our newsletter at PBS.org/Amanpour.

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