- The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms.

Today's guest documents what happens when those two rights clash and the chilling effect open carry laws are having on protest and public assembly across the United States.

He's Mike McIntire, this week on "Story on the Public Square."

(bright inspiring music) (bright inspiring music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- This week we're joined by Mike McIntire, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist with the New York Times, he joins us today from Connecticut.

Welcome, Mike.

- Hi, thanks for inviting me, appreciate it.

- Thank you so much for joining us.

You know, you've got a distinguished body of work and we really wanna start with an article that caught our attention last fall about the presence of guns at public protests.

The headline was "At protests guns are doing the talking."

Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of that story and what caught your attention?

- Yeah, it was something that grew out of a long interest I've had in issues around gun culture and gun violence in the United States.

We did a pretty big series of stories in 2013 after the Sandy Hook School shooting.

Spent pretty much a year just investigating issues around the gun industry, and marketing of guns, and that sort of thing.

And you know, one of the things that occurred to me over the past four or five years is that we've seen, in addition to growing extremism in right-wing politics, especially in the United States, accompanying that there has been a sort of a policy objective, the opening up of the ability to carry firearms in public has been pretty much a standard part of the gun debate now for some time, and a lot of Republican-controlled states have been really pushing the envelope and trying to make it easier for people to carry guns in public, you know, that being said, there's a difference between being allowed to carry a gun in public for self-defense reasons versus being allowed to carry it in public as a way of stifling other people's speech or intimidating people.

And it just seemed that that was something that was becoming more and more prevalent anecdotally, so we decided to take a closer look and try to see whether there was actually a data-driven way to sort of get at this issue and examine the ramifications, and actually there is, there is a group called "The Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project," it's an NGO that's been studying political violence around the world for about six years now.

They started tracking these incidents in the United States a couple years ago, and so we obtained data from them, analyzed it, and the results were really kind of eye-opening.

- Let's talk a little bit about those results because this is not just anecdotal evidence, you've been able to count the number of incidences that at least have been reported, what did you find?

- Yeah, there was a really kind of an alarming, you know, set of facts that came out of the analysis.

I mean, one is that, you know there are some 700 incidents in the past two years in which there were armed people present at political demonstrations or protests in the US, there is a small increase in the likelihood of violence when these types of incidents happen, but more than that, beyond the indications of physical violence, there is definitely a psychological impact and an intimidation factor that comes when people show up to public meetings armed to talk about school issues or to attend an anti or pro-abortion protest, or, you know, object to alleged voter fraud, which more than likely than not doesn't actually happen.

And so, you know, you get this odd situation where, you know, people are expressing their First Amendment rights and they're being confronted with people who are expressing, to their mind, their Second Amendment rights to carry a gun, and you end up with this conflict that, you know, more often than not will result in a shutting down of free expression by the part of people who are not armed.

We interviewed a number of people who just expressed, you know, their feelings of intimidation, their reluctance to show up at rallies or protests, which in the past they would do, but now they're afraid to because the Proud Boys might be there with guns.

So there was a marked increase in this activity in the past two and a half years, and it is just, there's really no end in sight to it especially given the Supreme Court decision last year which basically, for the first time, affirmed a right to carry firearms in public.

- So Mike, you found that about three quarters of those who are and were openly carrying had right-wing views.

Can you give us a sense of who the individuals and organizations are that comprised that?

It was about 77%.

- Yeah, it was interesting because, you know, there's no way you know, in the data, to explicitly, in other words, the data does not code the person's, you know, political beliefs when they record an incident in which someone shows up with a gun, but the description of the events which are included in the data and then combined with interviewing people and looking up news stories about these events, you can pretty quickly figure out the political affinity of the people who are armed.

You know, a lot of the activity is coming from organized groups like the Proud Boys, which are essentially, you know, right-wing culture warriors who we all now are painfully aware of because of the January 6th investigation.

And so groups like the Proud Boys, groups like the Three Percenters, which is an anti-government militia organization, they tended to show up in the data most often when it came to incidents involving guns at rallies or protests.

There was a much smaller though still significant presence of left-wing activists who were armed at rallies and protests.

A number of them kind of grew out of the racial justice rallies that happened in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, and if you interview a lot of them, you find that many are arming themselves now, according to them, as a reaction to what they see as right-wing intimidation.

So even in the instances in which you do have people from the political left showing up with, let's say, side arms, that are at a rally, you know, they say it's because they have been confronted in the past with people on the opposite side of the political aisle armed with, you know, AR-15s or what have you, and so they're doing it as a self-defense measure.

It's always hard to know but it was overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon, and which kind of makes sense if you understand the political backdrop to it, which is the Republican, largely, objective of expanding the right to carry firearms pretty much anywhere and everywhere.

And you know, there was a time, a generation ago, when that was not necessarily a given but this has become a standard policy argument and many Republican activists in this realm really don't see any limits to it.

- So what effect did open carry folks have on demonstrations and events involving LBGTQ rights and abortion access?

Those were certainly in the news last year and probably will be in 2023.

What effect, I mean, you talked about a chilling effect, can you expand on that?

- So there was a pretty good example of that that we discovered in which a museum, a city museum, had scheduled a event which was to coincide with a summer-long series exploring the history of gay pride in the south, it was supposed to be capped by a party which was family friendly, they had screened it to make sure that, you know, the activities that were scheduled were good for all ages, nevertheless, the advertising around this was picked up by conservative talk radio and it was immediately sort of taken on as a cause celebre, as an example of, you know, to their minds, of, you know, radical left-wing culture, you know, being sort of foisted on the public through a city museum, and to protest that people with guns showed up, and once that happened, the museum staff got very concerned and they, you know, hurriedly canceled everything that was going on, everybody had to evacuate the museum, and the people with guns went home and then there were no arrests, and that was pretty much the end of it.

But, you know, you can see in that one little sort of encapsulation there the problem and the dynamic here is that you, you know, it's one thing if you object, let's say, to the type of activity that they have scheduled with the museum.

You know, people have a right to object to that and they could express their opinions, but there's a difference between that and showing up, you know, with an assault weapon and standing around outside while people are trying to get into the museum with their kids for not just the LGBTQ event but also it was a planetarium show, there were other things going on that night, all of which got canceled because of these people who showed up with guns.

So, you know, we've seen over the past year sort of an evolution away from the types of events that were the causation of these types of incidents previous and this past year tends to be more LGBTQ events and also abortion-related events since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

So you can see that what's interesting about it is, you know, the presence of guns in the public square has become sort of an accepted thing in many parts of the country, and there's no better evidence (coughs) evidence of that than the fact that, you know, as the issues change and evolve with the news or with events, the presence of guns really doesn't change, you know, they're still there, you know, whether it's objecting to the outcome of the 2020 election or objecting to, you know, an abortion clinic downtown, it's really sort of here to stay, it seems.

- So I'm guessing there's really no way to quantify this but the effect of open carry, I'm guessing, has a chilling effect on people who might be planning events, meaning we are thinking, "If we have this event, people with guns will show up, people will be afraid, so we're not even going to have our demonstration or event."

Is that a fair thing to assume here?

- No, sure.

Because, you know, it may be difficult to quantify in terms of actual numbers of times that happens, for obvious reasons, but just anecdotally, in interviews that we did, we found, you know, we found people who said that, that they had, you know, previously planned in the past and had done, let's say, a racial justice rally, you know, they were forced to change their minds.

There was an incident in Wisconsin last August in which a annual good neighbor parade, was like a summer event, decided to, in the past they always had, local elected officials would participate in the parade and march in the parade, along with everybody else.

This happens to be very much a blue corner of the state, it just happened that all the elected officials, locally, were Democrats last year, local Republicans got up in arms about that because there was some rumor started spreading that Republicans were being excluded from the parade, and that led to threats against the parade organizers that people are gonna show up openly carrying guns at the parade if Republicans were not allowed to march in the parade with Democrats.

Now, it sounds ridiculous, but that led to the decision by the parade organizers to prohibit all politicians, whether they're elected or not, from participating in this parade for the first time in 50 years.

So, you know, this is the kind of thing that happens in, you know, small incidents around the country and many of which never even get reported.

But, you know, there's definitely a corrosive effect, I think, just on, you know, our culture and the ability of people just to sort of do what they normally do as soon as politics gets injected into it, along with the ability of people to use guns as sort of their exclamation point at the end of their argument.

- Mike, you know, I got a couple of questions that sort of leap to mind.

One is, is there, and it sounds to me, just based on what you've told us already, that this isn't the case, but I wanna ask it anyways.

Is there any doubt that the folks who are bringing weapons to, and open-carrying at public events like this, is there any doubt about their intention to intimidate?

- That's a really good question and I have to say that certainly in not every incident, it's possible to know, you know, what the motivations are, and certainly some people will tell you that the reason they show up with guns is because they're afraid of Antifa, let's say, or they wanna, you know, protect themselves against potential violence that could happen from the opposite side of the political aisle.

I think that what you have to do is sort of look at the outcome, many times, in these situations, and it is a very lopsided scene when you attend one of these events in which people do show up with guns, it's very rare that you wind up seeing armed people on both sides of the aisle, is normally the case where a small group of people, let's say, shows up to express their support for gay rights or for, you know, abortion rights or what have you, and they are not armed, and then what happens is you get another small group of people who show up on the other side of the street to oppose these other people's point of view, and some of them show up carrying assault weapons or having pistols on their hips, and there's no obvious reason why they would do that because nobody on the other side of the street is carrying anything.

And so that is, if you look at the data, that's predominantly the type of situation that we're talking about, it's not like an armed standoff between anybody, it's not like the people who are showing up with guns are facing threats.

It's more just an expression of their right to carry a gun but they're weaving it into the expression of free speech, and it, you know, for many people who've looked at this, constitutional lawyers, and other people who kind of have studied the evolution of gun rights in this country, some of them are very concerned about it because it just introduces an element that can't help but be intimidating many of the, you know, much of the time.

- Yeah, you know, and I think about it too from a historian's perspective, and I think about the evidences throughout history where armed minorities have used the threat of violence as a political cudgel, if you will.

And I wonder, you know, just in your reporting on this, if you had an opportunity to step back and sort of view it through that larger context of the rise of domestic extremism in the country, the rise of militia movements, and this sort of moment where federal law enforcement is now as worried about domestic terrorism as it is international terrorism, did you have any opportunity to sort of reflect on that and what it says about this moment in American politics that openly brandishing a gun at a peaceful protest is somehow acceptable?

- Yeah, I mean, it is important to kinda take in the historical sweep of things when you look at this issue.

And it's important to note as well that if you go back, for instance, to the late 1960s, early '70s, you know, domestic extremism and violence was a real serious problem.

I mean, there were, you know, we had terrorism incidents happening within the United States, committed by domestic actors, and you had also incidents of public carrying of guns for political purposes.

The Black Panthers in the late '60s would do it, and their argument was they were doing it to, you know, defend against police, you know, abuse.

Nevertheless, it was definitely a political expression that they were doing by, you know, walking around with guns.

So this is not necessarily a new issue but I think to your point, you know, when you combine it with what we've seen the past five or six years, when you do have a growing, you know, evidence of extremism on the political right, when you inject, you know, firearms into that mix, you can't help but expect bad outcomes.

And you know, just in the last couple of days you had a case of the Republican failed candidate who, you know, was arrested for orchestrating the, you know, shooting at homes of Democratic politicians.

So, you know, it's hard to know where this ends, but I think that, you know, with the, right now, the Supreme Court recognizing the right to carry firearms outside of the home, that was the Bruen v. New York State decision last year.

There was little expectation that there's, any rollback is going to take place.

So, you know, it's the kind of thing that will probably continue unabated until and if there was some expression of political leadership to tamp down on it.

And one of the things that, another outcome of our data analysis, which is interesting, was that when it came to the presence of actual elected officials at some of these armed incidents, it was almost overwhelmingly just purely Republican politicians who seemed to feel more comfortable being in the presence of people who might have a gun at an event like this.

There was only one example we found where a democratic politician was at that kind of an event whereas there was something like two dozen or 30 events in which Republicans were there.

So I think that the Republican party definitely has this as, you know, part of their, ingrained in their philosophy in terms of the expansion of gun rights.

And as I said, it's hard to know where it's going to lead.

- Is there a geographic bounding to this?

Is this more prevalent in certain parts of the country?

- Well, it's definitely more prevalent in states where you're allowed to do it.

So there is a growing number of states where the ability to carry at least some form of gun in public is legal.

Some of 'em allow open carry, some allow concealed carry, some limited to long guns, which would be rifles, as opposed to handguns, but there's a preponderance of states where you can do it to some degree.

Having said that, you know, there's definitely a greater incidents of these things happening in southern states and in states where they're just more comfortable with gun culture, and so, which I don't think is a big surprise.

So you tend to see these things happen a lot in states like Texas or Arizona, and there are some northern states where, you know, which also have histories of, you know, where gun culture is just sort of accepted, Michigan is one.

I mean, Michigan is a state where you had, during the COVID lockdowns, armed militia groups being allowed inside the state capitol.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- To protest.

So, you know, as I said, there's a bit of a culture clash going here too.

There are parts of the country where people couldn't fathom anything like that happening, and there are other parts of the country where it just happens and (cough) and people accept it.

- So, you know, I hate to sound pessimistic here, but what, if anything, can be done to change this, given the effect that it's having on the public discourse?

I mean, in some states I'm guessing nothing can be done or the residents of those states and politicians there don't want anything, but is there anything that could be done in other parts of the country or have we gone down a rabbit hole and who knows where it ends?

- Yeah, I hate to join you in your pessimism, but I don't know the answer to that either, and in fact, you know, as I think I might have mentioned earlier, one of the things that is kind of disconcerting is that you do see, as these incidents proliferate, a tendency for people on the opposite side of the political aisle to also feel like they need to arm themselves in response to what they see as intimidation.

So we're in a bit of a vicious circle, to some extent, where, you know, you have one side of the spectrum feeling pretty comfortable with arming themselves for, you know, purposes that don't seem to justify it, and then, in reaction to that, you do have people on the other side doing the same.

So, if anything, I kind of see it spiraling, I don't know how that changes.

You know, I think that this sort of gets back to the core issue of this, just the intractable nature of the gun debate in the United States.

- So, Mike, on sort of a parallel note, in a June, 2022 story you wrote about how gun companies, quote, "Exploit the anxiety and desires of Americans in a growing campaign that refocuses," quote, "their message away from hunting towards selling handguns for personal safety, as well as military style weapons attractive to mostly young men."

Talk a bit about this shift in messaging and advertising in the gun companies 'cause it really does seem to go hand in hand with what we've been talking about here.

- [Jim] We got about 90 seconds left here, Mike.

- Yeah, I mean, the gun marketing has really significantly changed in the last decade or so, and it's largely been driven by the popularity of AR-15s which, military style weapons that are now some of the biggest sellers in the United States, and so, you know, as part of that they've tried to market those guns as a sort of a cool, you know, military type weapon, to a certain demographic, and they've succeeded, and that's a lot different than, you know.

from what we may have grown up with in terms of, you know, thinking about rifles you would buy for hunting or self-defense, these are really not that, and they're big money makers, and they really are at the core of what the industry is focusing on right now.

- You know, in about the 45 seconds we have left.

Do you give any qualms about going to a public protest now given the reporting that you've done?

- No, I mean, you can't sort of start thinking that way, I guess, because I mean, I think it's important that if people are choosing to arm themselves in this way for an intimidation reason, you can't allow that to happen.

So I think that you have to continue going about, you know, what you're doing and exercising your rights, and not be stifled by others.

- It's a fascinating contrast, the competition between the Second Amendment and the First Amendment, your reporting is remarkable, and I'm sorry that we didn't get a chance to talk about your reporting on Putin and Trump and everything else, but Mike McIntire, thank you so much for joining us this week.

- [Mike] Oh, thank you.

Appreciate it.

- That's all the time we have this week but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can always find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

With G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, I ask you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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