- America is flooded with guns, About 400 million by one count.

That's more than one for every man, woman, and child.

The frequency of mass shootings is a distinctly American problem.

Yet there's little agreement about what to do about this.

Rhode Island-based author William J. Kole has a new book, "In Guns We Trust," exploring the tightly wound relationship between white evangelicals, politics, and guns.

Kole is a longtime journalist and a former worship leader at evangelical churches in Europe and New England.

What did he learn about why followers of Jesus Christ embrace guns and, in many cases, take them to church?

And does Kole have any hope that Americans can come together to reduce the gun violence in our country?

I'm Ian Donnis, and that's just some of what we talked about in this in depth conversation.

(gentle music) Bill Kole, welcome to "One on One."

- Thanks for having me, Ian.

- What led you to write this book, "In Guns We Trust?"

- Kind of a startling experience that I had.

Just to back up, I had fairly extensive personal experience with evangelical Christianity.

I more or less fell into it at the end of college.

I worked as a missionary for a few years and then kind of slipped back into journalism.

I was a worship leader at a megachurch in Massachusetts when my bass player showed up to practice with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.

And it really blew my socks off.

I just couldn't figure out why someone would come armed to church, you know?

And then I quickly learned that many people were carrying weapons, even to church on Sundays.

And that set me on a kind of a quest to figure out why.

How did this happen in a faith tradition that really is rooted in pacifism?

- Well, let's delve into that.

Jesus Christ is known as the prince of peace.

Why is it that so many evangelicals have what you call an inexplicable fervor for firearms?

- It kind of developed in the late '60s.

Prior to that, you didn't see that much of a gun culture within evangelical Christianity.

A lot of things shifted politically and culturally in the late '60s with Christians who, up till that point, more or less were kind of relegated to the margins of society, didn't really feel like they had a voice, and suddenly began to become aware of their political power.

There are a lot of evangelicals now in the United States, around 60 million.

That's a lot of people.

And obviously as they realized that they had power and influence, special interest groups kind of, you know, gravitated to them and courted them.

The abortion movement, you know, coalesced largely around white evangelicals, and vice versa.

And then guns became sort of this religious freedom issue where, yeah- - And evangelicals really became kind of presidential king makers around the Reagan era, right?

- Absolutely.

You know, and that continues to this day.

I mean, white evangelicals form the core of Donald Trump's base and play a huge role in the MAGA movement.

And, you know, it's almost impossible to get elected to Congress or a governor's office or even a state legislative seat in a red state if you are not pro-gun, if you don't have the support of evangelicals.

- You write that evangelicals have a misplaced sense of fear that is driving them to arm themselves, take guns to church, even be involved with companies that are manufacturing guns with biblical quotations on them.

What is propelling that and the strong sense of an us versus them mentality that you describe?

- This has been a narrative that's been persistent in evangelical Christianity as long as I've been associated with it, and that began in the early '80s.

This idea that they're out to get us it.

It's never really clear who they are, by the way.

But they are out to get us.

They are coming for our bibles.

They're coming for our children.

They're coming for our very way of life.

And it's this false narrative that people have really embraced and latched onto.

- We heard some similar rhetoric at the funeral for Charlie Kirk.

I think it was Stephen Miller, a leading member of the Trump administration, used the us and them framing.

What is propelling that?

- It's this sort of evangelical ethos, this idea that evangelicals believe that they're meant to be separate from the world, that they're meant to be unstained by modern culture and to keep their faith pure.

And yet, of course, they live in a secular society surrounded by everyone else.

And it creates this kind of a paranoia, frankly, you know, where people are afraid that secular, non-Christian thoughts will creep into their families and into their education system and all of that.

And so they kind of build walls and wall themselves off from the general society.

And guns is really part of that too.

You know, this idea that we need to be armed because there may come a day when instead of passive resistance to our beliefs, we are actively persecuted.

- Well, speaking of that, we do live in an age of mass shootings, even in houses of worship.

So does that justify evangelicals who feel they need to be armed when they go to church?

- Some would say it does, you know?

And there have been mass shootings at houses of worship for sure.

But what there really is here is the myth of the good guy with a gun.

And this is something that evangelicals really cling to, the idea that the only way to counter the bad guy with a gun is to be the good guy with the gun.

And honestly, in practice, it really doesn't work that way.

Very seldom in an active shooter situation, if you're a person with a firearm on you, are you able to quell and subdue that person.

There's a reason why law enforcement comes in, you know, in droves, with, you know, dozens of officers and body armor to answer any given, you know, active shooter situation.

The adrenaline is pumping.

The shooter is moving.

And if you don't train a lot with your weapon, the chances of you being successful in stopping that, it's almost nil.

- A lot of gun owners say they or believe they need a gun to defend their family and their home against a burglary, a home invasion.

How does the presence of a gun in the home or a workplace or other setting influence an outcome?

- Okay, so I understand that too.

The desire to take care of our families, you know, our spouses, our children, is noble.

But here's the problem with that.

You know, let's take the hypothetical example of a home invasion.

You're in bed with your partner and somebody enters your house.

That would imply, if you're gonna use your gun to good effect, to actually, you know, halt that violence, that that gun is loaded and it's on the nightstand next to you or it's in the drawer right next to you within easy reach.

That's not how you're supposed to store guns.

You know, we have safe storage laws also here in Rhode Island.

I mean, you know, you are supposed to lock up your firearm, and then separate from that is your ammunition.

- That's been cited as a rationale by gun rights supporters for why they're against safe storage, because they feel it would hinder their ability to defend themselves.

- Well, right.

But here's the other thing.

You know, we are preoccupied, rightly, with mass shootings because we have more mass shootings in this country than we have days of the year.

And that's a horrible situation.

But, you know, the greatest number of gun deaths are suicides, actually.

So, again, you bring a firearm into your home, exponentially greater are the chances that, you know, someone who's despondent in your family may get ahold of that firearm.

There's also accidental gun deaths with children who find your gun and play with it and with tragic consequences.

Incredibly, Ian, accidental deaths of children in the United States, guns is the number one cause, more even than car crashes, which to me is astonishing.

- You live in Rhode Island.

You're familiar, I believe, with how whenever gun legislation is debated at the State House, hundreds of people come out on both sides.

The gun rights supporters wear yellow t-shirts typically, and they say that they're law abiding, they're respectful of the lethality of firearms, and that when there are new gun restrictions, it punishes law abiding gun owners.

How do you respond to that argument?

- Look, we're in this endless cycle of gun violence, you know?

And it becomes almost an academic argument to me.

We have a uniquely American gun scourge.

I lived outside the United States as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press for the better part of 20 years.

You just don't find this kind of gun violence anywhere else except in the United States.

And so, yeah, of course, we have a Second Amendment.

People have a right to own a weapon, in some instances, to carry that weapon, either openly or to conceal it with the proper permits.

No one is suggesting here, and I'm certainly not suggesting, that we disarm the American population, but we've got to do something to staunch the bloodshed.

It's just madness.

And the idea that we cannot somehow consider amendments to the Second Amendment or laws supplemental to it to reign in this problem is nonsense, frankly.

- You mentioned the distinctly American quality of mass shootings, and you write in your book about how some other countries, Australia and New Zealand, took action after mass shootings to restrict guns more stringently, and as a result, they have far fewer, if any, mass shootings now.

But what is it about America's gun culture?

Or is it just the number of guns, that there are more than 400 million guns in the US, in your view, that feeds into mass shootings?

- Yeah, it's interesting.

You know, we do have this sort of Wild West mentality.

It's kind of in our DNA, this idea that we're very self determinative.

You know, we're cowboys at heart.

And so there's that dynamic in the country.

But it's interesting you mentioned Australia.

Australia and the United States actually culturally have some similarities that way.

You know, we have lots, you know, vast rural areas.

You know, hunting and, you know, defending against dangerous animals and things like that are things that we share as cultures.

But they had, you know, one horrible mass shooting in 1996 and took decisive action to stop it and they've really, with very few exceptions, have had no, you know, repeats.

So there is a way to do this, to tackle it.

I went to Scotland for the book, where the UK had one mass shooting at a school in Dunblane, Scotland, also in 1996.

Within days, a grassroots movement formed because they said, "We can never see this happen again."

The same way we felt after Sandy Hook in 2012 as Americans, they felt that way, but they actually did something about it.

- You write that 37,000 new guns are produced in America every day, that there are more than 400 million guns in America.

What level of optimism do you have that the US will more fully come to terms with the horrible trend of mass shootings?

- I am optimistic, honestly.

A couple of things here.

Yes, we are awash in weapons, absolutely.

And we keep making new ones.

You know, because our response to the gun crisis is that we need more guns, which is not going to help us out here.

It's not gonna change the trajectory of gun violence.

Polls and surveys consistently show that a massive plurality of Americans supports common sense gun restrictions.

So I'm talking here about universal background checks, because, you know, it's still possible to acquire a firearm at a gun show or in a private sale where that doesn't happen.

And then, you know, a ban on military style assault rifles, which are the weapon of choice in mass shootings.

The AR-15, for example, is the fastest growing, fastest-selling, you know, firearm in America.

It's like the Ford F-150 pickup of guns.

And most of us say, I'm talking about upwards of 80% of Americans don't want those available for civilian use.

So that tells me there is the political will among the people to change this narrative.

Getting through to our elected representatives and breaking, essentially, the log jam at which evangelicals have placed themselves is a key problem, and it is a problem.

It's a challenge.

- Why is it that gun sales have surged so much in the US over time?

- It varies.

You know, it varies with administration.

It varies with, you know, which political party is in power.

When Barack Obama was elected, there was a huge surge in gun sales because gun rights supporters felt like the Obama administration might crack down on gun ownership.

The same thing happened with Joe Biden's election.

So it's kind of cyclical in that way.

It's a pattern that we just can't seem to break ourselves out of, even though, again, we have 120 guns for every 100 Americans, which places us way at the top of the global rankings.

In fact, the second closest country is the Falkland Islands, and they have about 60 guns per 100 citizens.

So we're way out.

You know, we talk about American exceptionalism a lot.

Oh, we're exceptional all right, but not in the way that we really want to be.

- We talked earlier about the us versus them mentality.

What role does race and the changing demographics of America play in that?

- Yeah, you know, we are becoming, fast becoming, a nation where white Americans will be a minority, you know?

And I think among evangelicals, there is some concern about that.

There is some overt racism within that cohort of Americans.

The very fact that evangelicals found their voice and their political power in the late '60s when we were desegregating our society speaks to this.

There was a resistance among white evangelicals.

They didn't wanna see segregation end.

And there's still this passive, if not active racism in faith communities.

It's unrighteous, it's unbiblical, and it's a factor.

It's kind of an X factor here.

- You write about how your faith has been shaken by delving into these issues.

How are you dealing with that right now?

- Oh, Ian, you know, for the book, I really immersed myself in gun culture and in white Christian nationalism for, you know, more than a year as I researched and interviewed people, and it really wore me out.

These are not shiny, happy people holding hands, you know?

And I think I write it at one point of the book, with apologies to the band REM, that's me in the corner losing my religion.

I really had my faith shaken to its core by associating myself with people and, you know, having real deep discussions about guns and God, and I'm really deconstructing my faith.

I don't necessarily know what I believe anymore, but I know I don't believe and no longer can identify as an evangelical in good conscience.

- What about the theological basis cited by gun rights supporters for why they bear arms?

Why are they wrong in your view and why are you right?

- Look, you know, they cherry pick scripture.

They'll find one verse here or there that they'll hang their entire gun theology on.

There was a passage in the New Testament where Jesus enters Jerusalem and He goes to the temple and He sees the money changers and people selling doves and animals for sacrifice and He realizes that there's this whole, you know, machine of people profiting off of faith.

And it made Him angry and He took a whip and He overturned tables and said, "You've made, you know, my house of prayer, you've turned it into a den of thieves."

That's a key passage that gun rights advocates will point to and say, "Look, Jesus is kind of a Rambo figure.

You know, He used power and a weapon," and it was just a whip, you know, and they had swords, right?

So they see a parallel between an AR-15 and a sword.

It's a big leap to me because I think when you read the Bible, you see unambiguously and objectively that Jesus Christ is a nonviolent figure.

- To bring things back into the current moment, you mentioned Christian nationalism.

You write that there's a more entrenched militia culture in the United States now and an awful lot of angry people and hyper-partisanship.

Where do you see all this leading?

- It's very troubling to me.

You know, again, yeah, you're right.

We're seeing gun ownership soar, especially among white evangelicals at the very time when Christian nationalism thought has entered the mainstream.

It was only a few years ago that that was a fringe ideology.

And now, of course, look at the Trump administration.

Look at MAGA.

I mean, this is part and parcel of what it means to be an American for many people, this idea that not only are we going to arm ourselves, but we're ready to use our weapons if we need to to defend our way of life.

And I find that very alarming.

You know, there were studies done where people were asked, how likely are you to, you know, actually use your weapon to defend the country?

And among white evangelicals, it's really high.

I mean, people are quite, they express to pollsters anyway, "Yeah, I wouldn't hesitate to use my gun, you know, against what I perceive as threats by the government to my liberties and my religious freedoms."

Not a good, it's a bit of a cocktail, frankly, an explosive Molotov cocktail.

- Your book describes how some conservative Trump supporters, mothers in Tennessee, are among those pushing for more stringent gun laws.

They're responding to a mass shooting in that state.

Why is it that this trend of mass shootings, horrible losses of life, very young children being gunned down, why has this not sparked more changes in the US?

- It's completely mystifying to me, you know?

But we get into this cycle of thoughts and prayers.

So we have a mass shooting.

Everyone, you know, is troubled by it.

I don't think anyone celebrates or supports a mass shooting.

And I think, also, there's nothing wrong with thoughts and prayers, but thoughts and prayers, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I would add with thoughts and prayers.

We need action.

We've gotta break this cycle.

Look, right now, we're in mid-October and we've already had more than 50 school shootings since the school year began, which is astonishing to me.

How can we be okay with that?

It seems like we've hardened ourselves to this bloodshed, and our children, if we can't do this for our children, you know, something's wrong with us.

And, you know, the reason why I wrote the book is because I find that evangelicals are complicit in this bloodshed, not only by owning more guns than any other subset of the US population, and not only by running a lot of the big gun manufacturing companies, but by very deliberately blocking access to, or not access, but progress on legislation that would actually, you know, do something about it.

- Speaking of that, gun rights supporters lean on the Second Amendment as a foundational element explaining, defending, and justifying their right to guns.

You take some issue with that.

You cite conservative former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger.

What is the misunderstanding in your view about the Second Amendment?

- Well, from the perspective of the book and the narrative here that, you know, white evangelicals are showing hypocrisy and complicity in our gun crisis, and actually could help turn it around, what I see in my former faith tribe is an insistence that not only is the Second amendment the law of the land, which, of course, it is, but that it's breathed by God.

Evangelicals see the Second Amendment as almost like scripture.

And that's the narrative within that faith community, to the point where any attempt at addressing gun violence can be seen as challenging the essence of the Second Amendment.

And there's a belief that God wants us to have guns and He wants us to be able to defend ourselves.

And so even something as small as a safe storage law is seen as a threat to this bedrock principle, which, again, is equated almost as, it's almost like a passage from the Bible to many evangelicals.

- Gun rights supporters tend to respond to mass shootings by arguing for hardening targets, posting police officers at schools, for example.

Is that an effective way to reduce the likelihood of a mass shooting?

- There has been some success with that.

I mean, you know, clearly some schools have stopped a shooting in progress because there was a school resource officer there.

But honestly, where are we gonna stop with this?

You know, churches are soft targets.

Are we going to erect metal detectors, you know, in front of our cathedrals and houses of worship?

Again, this idea that the answer to our gun crisis is more guns is folly to me.

We just get stuck in a vicious circle here that we can't seem to break out of.

Yeah, you know, I don't see that long term as a solution.

And furthermore, look, we've got Gen Z now who know nothing more than, all they've known their whole life is this culture of violence and gun violence.

They've been raised since their kindergarten days on active shooter drills and things like this.

When you start to do these drills with young children and you harden the schools, research has shown this can be deeply traumatizing to a child.

So, again, wouldn't it be easier to just remove some of these weapons from our society?

Who really needs an AR-15?

You will never win that argument with me, that someone, you know, you need that high capacity machine gun, essentially.

What, to hunt deer with?

Come on.

- You had a long and distinguished career with the Associated Press.

You were a foreign correspondent, led a bureau in Vienna before becoming New England Bureau Chief.

Now you're an editor with Axios, the online media organization.

We've seen in Providence how there's no longer a physical AP office.

Talk about how the AP is changing and what it means for news consumers, if you would.

- Well, I mean, it's not just the AP that's changing.

You know, we're seeing this right across the board.

We're seeing newspapers go more into digital formats and out of print.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Our consumption habits are changing.

AP still has a presence and a footprint in Rhode Island and still is covering the issues that are important here.

We still, I would maintain, in Rhode Island have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to good, solid news sources.

Ocean State Media, of course, is one of them.

But, you know, there's just so many.

- To me, the big change is that there's less day-to-day coverage of communities outside Providence from when the "Providence Journal" used to have bureaus in those communities.

- Yeah, and that's a problem.

You know, these so-called news deserts are proliferating and we are more than ever, arguably, you know, in need of eyes and ears and people, you know, journalists, to challenge.

And we are not there, we're not in the room anymore, which is, that's problematic.

- Author and journalist Bill Kole, thank you so much for sitting down.

- Thank you for having me, Ian.

It's a pleasure.

- Thanks for joining us.

You can find all of our past interviews on Ocean State Media's YouTube channel.

See you next week.

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