The Truth About Guns In America They Don't Want You To Know! - Mike McIntire

0:00What happened at Sandy Hook would have been that moment. And for a little while, it seemed like it could have been, but it very quickly, I think, evaporated. That was the point where, you know, America decided that the deaths of little children were acceptable losses. If that didn't do it, I'm not quite sure what would, because that was such a horrific tragedy. There's been others since. They're too numerous to even itemize. But it seems like that to some extent, that type of thing has resulted in what you might call acceptable losses in our country. We don't seem willing to move the needle when these tragedies happen.

0:29Guns are now the leading cause of death and children, which also means that all of our innocent children are in potentially harm's way. Are we going to keep living like this? I feel, not to be cynical, if I brought you back on the Open Book in five years, we'd be talking about five years more of mass shootings and catastrophes with very little getting done. If it's unfair for me to say that, say something optimistic. Well, I think that... Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. To join us today is Mike McIntyre. He's a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He's an investigative journalist and author.

1:05And man, what a book. You can hear the cracking sounds coming out of this book, Ricochet, Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence. And I really appreciate you accepting our invitation, Mike, because I want to talk about all this. But before we get into Ricochet, tell us a little bit about yourself. You spent an entire career uncovering complex stories through investigative journalism. I think this could be your opus, by the way. I mean, you know, I'm just looking at it. It's a major deal in our country, but what got you into all this? Well, thanks for having me here. It was good of you to say that, Anthony.

1:39And I'm actually talking to you from the New York Times building, hence the warm, personalized, fuzzy background that I'm sitting in front of here. You can blink twice if you need an evac, all right? Yeah, exactly. I know, it probably looks like a hostage video. Um, but so yes, I work for the New York times. I'm an investigative reporter on the investigations desk, and I've really tried to focus on investigative reporting for most of my journalism career, about 40 years now. Um, and you know, reporting on gun violence and gun issues has been something I've been doing since my earliest days as a young newspaper reporter.

2:15Um, I was on the cop beat, uh, on my first daily newspaper job and I used to carry around a scanner so I'd know what was going on with police calls. I remember one day I only went on the job maybe a couple of weeks and a call came in for a body on the side of the road and I happened to be out nearby so I drove over there and sure enough there was a body of a young black man laying in the grass and no one else was around. I was literally the first one there. The cops hadn't even shown up yet and for a little while it was just the two of us and I'm standing there looking at him and he looked almost peaceful like he's taking a nap but he had a small round bullet hole in the side of his head.

2:52And pretty soon the cops showed up and shooed me away. And it wound up not even being a very big story, which I think probably speaks to some of the issues that we're talking about here. It was not uncommon. But what struck me was I thought the first time I'd see a murder victim, it would be a blight, you know, sort of a bloody violent affair. But this was so clean and efficient and clinical. And it got me thinking that it was really because of the gun. You know, guns made it so much simpler and easier to kill. You don't have to look somebody in the eye while you're extinguishing their life. Um, you can do it from a distance, you can do it from behind.

3:27And so, you know, we, we treat these things, even though they fundamentally change the exercise of aggression and they're uniquely dangerous, we treat them almost as sort of any other consumer product, you know, to be, uh, bought and sold and marketed and, and kept on your person around the house. Um, yeah, I think that's one of the things that really kind of propelled me to, to go ahead and write the book. It's just drawing upon my years of experience, observing this, noticing this, and reporting on these issues. But we also, in the age of the video gaming, we've got young kids that have totally disassociated what they're doing because they're, you know, they're playing Fortnite or they're playing Call of Duty.

4:06And what do you do in the game? You shoot at people with guns. Am I wrong about that or am I missing something? No, and the gun industry is well aware of that, you know, they've started concerted efforts, um, probably in their, I'd say the early two thousands to begin trying to sort of plant their products in violent video games, um, and in movies and in TV shows, there's a whole sort of sub economy right now of influencers and, uh, consultants that specifically do this kind of thing. They help firearms manufacturers and gun retailers get their products in the kind of games that you're talking about.

4:42There's been nothing to show a specific link between a game and, you know, desire to kill somebody. Um, and my, my son who's a grown up now, he liked shoot them up video games. Um, having said that, you know, there have been a number of instances in which mass shooters in particular, young men, uh, more absorbed in these things, uh, and learned lessons from them. Uh, Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook elementary school. He used a specific method of taping up in staggered pairs 30 round magazines for the rifle that he had. That is exactly what in Call of Duty, one of the characters did.

5:24And this was pointed out in the lawsuit brought against the manufacturer of the gun. So yeah, there are a lot of things that play into this problem that we have. And I think you've hit on one of them. It's not just about today. I mean, you do an amazing job of explaining the history and the culture of guns. It's the 250th birthday of the country. Tell us where the love affair started with guns. I mean, we have more guns in the country than people by like a factor of four. I mean, so tell us where we, you know, I mean, I think it's crazy. You know, obviously, I've been to Australia many times. I wish we would adopt their gun control and gun safety laws.

6:04but uh and most of the people agree with me we can't get the congress to do it of course but we just go back to the culture for a moment because i think you write vividly about it it is one interesting aspects of this is that we're you know we're a young country uh if we come to think about it and and yet um you know so was the introduction of of firearms it's not that old either yeah like i think the exploration of settlement the new world kind of dovetailed with the widespread adoption of guns. So they've been with us sort of like the wallpaper of growing up life in America since before the founding.

6:39And we have an interesting relationship to violence, right? Our country. I mean, and this is not some sort of a polemic about America being a American, being a violent country because every country has its issues with violence in the past and it's unique to that country. And so is the United States. And there's a flip side to this. I mean, you know, we couldn't have freed ourselves from the crown if it wasn't for a violent revolution. We couldn't have ended slavery without a violent civil war, but neither could we have reached the point to rebel against the crown if we hadn't first subjugated a continent, sometimes violently.

7:13And we couldn't have freed the slaves without first embracing that violent institution for centuries. And so we have a very complicated relationship to violence. And over the centuries, you know, it's gone, the gun in particular, which is integral to all of that, it's kind of gone from being a sort of a utilitarian object to also this totemic of masculinity. And these two things kind of combined with each other, I think, to create a really unique culture that we have, the United States around firearms. There's sort of a militaristic aspect to it. There's also a lot of heroism, patriotism, machismo, all kind of wrapped together in gun imagery, which the gun manufacturers know very well.

8:00And that's a big part of their marketing. And it's a big part of the appeal to, especially to young men who are often looking for some way to feel powerful. So yeah, I mean, our relationship to guns as Americans is, I think, uniquely sort of bound up in the history of how we got here, which involved a lot of violence, both, you know, that was necessary and also perhaps not. But I think in a way, it kind of is useful to understand that when you try to fathom the gun problem we have today, but at the same time, it makes it harder to do anything about it. I mean, I'm frustrated. I mean, Barack Obama, I went to the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook tragedy.

8:42obviously we raise a ton of money for gun safety but also situational awareness around schools and try to like we're we're playing small ball in my opinion mike in terms of trying to defeat this level of wanton and indiscriminate violence when you could just do a few certain things and you would cap the level of casualties. So take me through what goes on and why, despite the fact that 70, 80 % of our fellow Americans want this to end, why we can't get it to end. I think it boils down to largely two words, Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has really They kind of adopted the gun lobby's long-term effort to reframe our understanding of what the second amendment was intended for or what it should do.

9:38Um, you know, we're talking a little bit about the history of, of the country and gun violence. The second amendment, you know, I think in its plain reading was intended to preserve the right of people to come together collectively as a militia in defense of the state. Um, and that was pretty much the interpretation that the courts had for the better part of two centuries, when it even rarely ever came up before the Supreme Court, until you reach the latter part of the 20th century. And the gun lobby, largely the National Rifle Association, really launched a concerted effort to sort of remake our understanding of the Second Amendment and expand gun rights in a huge way by basically reinterpreting it to mean that the Second Amendment preserved an individual right to own a gun for any lawful purpose, not just collectively for militia, which that idea is pretty much defunct and obsolete.

10:31And the Supreme Court adopted this point of view in 2008 in the Heller decision, and they've expanded it ever since. And so what you're alluding to earlier, I mean, when you see attempts by states and occasionally Congress to pass a gun law, they run afoul of this interpretation of the Second Amendment and a Supreme Court, which has determined that an individual right trumps attempts to restrict firearms in any meaningful way. And just real quickly, I mean, this came up a couple of weeks ago. The Supreme Court has agreed to take up in the fall the issue of assault weapons bans in states around the country.

11:13First time they will have done this. I think it's likely they probably will overturn these bans. But if they do, the decision will largely be based not on debates about public safety, but on a rather arcane test that the Supreme Court itself came up with to try to determine the legality of these types of weapons. It'll be the common use test is called. And basically it hinges on whether or not AR-15s in this case are considered to be in common use. Do a lot of people have them? Are they popular? Do they like having them? If so, you can't ban them. You won't find this test anywhere in the Constitution or in the Second Amendment.

11:53This was created by the Supreme Court. And I think it would surprise a lot of average Americans to know that this is what was driving decisions about gun policy as opposed to facts on the ground. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. I have a theory and I'd like to test the theory on you, if you don't mind. My theory is Citizens United. And just for viewers and listeners, what is that? That was a Supreme Court decision in January of 2010 where Justice Scalia said, hey, it's your First Amendment right.

12:30If you're a multi-billion dollar corporation, a multi-billionaire yourself, flood the zone with money. You can put it into any project, anything that you want to do. And with that, that's exactly what happened. We're nine to 10 times more money into the system from corporations and plutocrats than ever before. And the money, I think if you follow the money in our country, the money guides policy and the money is flowing towards this expansion that you write about. And so despite the fact that the American people hate it, the politician is like, hey, where's the money? Oh, the money's right here.

13:09Okay. What would you like me to say? And well, that's in the direct against interest of your, the people that you're serving. Don't care. I need this money to re-insure that my personal power is maintained through my incumbency. So that's my theory. And if you think I'm wrong, please challenge me. But if you think I'm right, please help me and provide more evidence to what I'm saying. I think there's a, there's a big element of that. I don't know whether it's the, the only thing, but I do think that there is an element of what they would call dark money, um, flowing into a lot of mysterious groups that are bankrolling, uh, lawyers who are writing amicus briefs and making filings and some of these important Supreme court cases.

13:51That is a story I wrote about with, for the New York times. I also wrote about some more in my book, uh, tracing where this money came, came from and where it went. Um, and this is not a, a new thing, although I think I agree, CISD United certainly put it on, you know, steroids, but the NRA perfected this model going back decades, you know, with their report cards on politicians. They basically would, you know, shut off the spigot, you know, for campaign funds to mainly Republicans who didn't tow the line on, on gun policy. But I think that since CISD United, Yes, we see we've definitely seen an easier flow of money into places, you know, where they're affecting jurisprudence.

14:37You know, they're helping shape court decisions by, in this case, filing briefs, you know, paying for lawyers and scholars to produce work that is pro-gun rights. Um, and look, if the work is legit and, you know, kids academically sound or whatever, then that's one thing. Um, but there've been questions about even this, you know, there's been judges who've not, uh, decided to pay attention to certain scholarly reports and things that have been paid for by the gun lobby, basically, because they questioned the methodology and the, the, uh, the, the quality of the, of the work. So I think there's definitely that factor, which has kind of tilted the scales a bit on gun laws in the United States.

15:23Yeah, well, I mean, it's that, Mike, and then it's the stuff that you write about related to the children. That's the thing that really blows me away. It's like me going to the elementary school and saying, here are packs of cigarettes, guys, and here's a lighter. Let's light up and smoke in the first grade. So tell us, in your own words, why was that such an important part of the story, the influence that the community has, the gun community has, on getting the children into the gun ideology. There's a really useful analogy to the tobacco industry here, right? Because if you remember, the cigarette companies were, you know, doing much the same thing with their own products to try to basically cultivate the next generation of smokers.

16:13And so you had the whole thing with the Joe Camel, you know, cigarettes, the cartoon character and all that. The gun lobby had its own ways of doing something similar and the motives and incentives were also similar. You know, so the NRA really wanted to make sure they were sort of seeding the ground for the next generation of NRA members and people who would want to be gun owners and perhaps join the organization. The gun industry, the companies that make and sell guns are interested pretty much in the same thing. They want to make sure there's a new generation of young people who are interested in shooting, learning how to use guns, and then ultimately buying them themselves.

16:53But how they targeted kids in order to achieve this is really kind of fascinating and in some ways concerning to a lot of people. One of the discoveries I made in my research were previously unseen confidential documents from the NRA from the early 1980s, where you could see them having meetings behind closed door is the leadership talking about strategies to get more kids involved with guns. And one of the projects they had at the time was trying to get marksmanship programs, rifle shooting, integrated into school phys ed curriculums. And the reason they were trying to do that, in their own words, they said that they felt this is a good way to slip it in.

17:35They were trying to basically figure out a way to do it that wouldn't get a lot of attention. If they put it into an into an existing athletic program. I thought that would be one way to do it. So I find it interesting because it kind of shows an awareness on their part that what they were doing could be viewed, you know, with objection by, by people. And then you have the gun industry itself coming out with studies in the early 2010s, looking at how they can use, and this is again, in their own, in their own words, use kids from gun friendly families as what they called peer ambassadors to try to influence other kids who may be leery about guns or came from families that didn't like guns and try to get them interested in guns by kind of luring them into like playing paintball or archery or things like this with a goal of eventually getting up to actual firearms.

18:28So, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that, you know, has been going on behind the scenes to try to, you know, basically sort of inculcate this, you know, an interest in guns and kids and young people and there's also a lot of uh more public ways they've been doing it with with youth groups and things like that showering them with cash and and equipment um but yeah no it's a very it's a very uh serious long-term goal of the industry and the and the lobby to um basically out of self-preservation to try to you know get get future generations um interested in in using and and of course, buying guns.

19:05I am always worried. You know, my kids have lockdown drills. We've got guards at the school systems and I'm always worried. And what I don't understand is what do you think, and again, this is an opinion, but what do you think it would take for the crossover? You know, where people said, you know, I, you know, that whole, you know when we were kids the network show you know i'm mad as hell and i'm not going to take it anymore i'm as mad as hell and i'm not going to take this anymore what what would have to happen i mean what's happening is these massive tragedies every single year and relatively callous indifference but what would have to happen it's a really good question that i wish i had the answer.

19:54You would have thought that what happened at Sandy Hook would have been that moment. And for a little while, it seemed like it could have been, but it very quickly, I think, evaporated. And there was a pretty interesting observation by, I think it was a British newspaper columnist who basically said that was the point where America kind of basically decided that the deaths of little children were acceptable losses. I mean, it's kind of sad that it took somebody from outside the country to make that observation. But if that didn't do it, I'm not quite sure what would, because that was such a horrific tragedy.

20:37I happened to live close by in Connecticut when that happened. I talk about this in the book. My wife had actually recently applied for the school librarian's job at Sandy hook. And a good friend of mine lost his stepdaughter there in the tragedy. So there's been others since, you know, they're too numerous to even itemize. But yeah, it seems like that to some extent, that type of thing has resulted in what you might call acceptable losses in our country. We don't seem willing to move the needle, you know, on when these tragedies happen. I think, and this is something I talk about in the book, you know, for, let me say this, first of all, if you were to ask gun rights advocates um whether or not things need to change whether it needs to be a different climate a different reinterpretation of the second amendment or more laws they of course would probably say no i mean they think that things right now are okay in terms of gun rights they would blame things like on sandy hook on other other issues mental health video games want the teachers to be armed mike right it was like you know arming teachers a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.

21:44As opposed to just stopping the bad guy, you know? Yeah. And on this issue of mental health, which is a big one that comes up a lot in video games, I mean, just to touch on this again for a second, I mean, every developed nation on earth has its problems with crime, mental health, you know, video games, social media. But what they don't have are, you know, school kids and grocery shoppers and churchgoers being murdered on a regular basis. And they, and they also don't have the easy availability and sometimes arguably reckless marketing of firearms. That's, that's the difference really. Um, cause we have the same problems that other countries do with these other issues.

22:23And yet the one thing which differentiates us is, is the gun issue. But in terms of like, what, what, what do you do about it? I mean, for gun safety advocates, uh, I point out in the book that one potential model ironically is the NRA itself. um they launched a very successful long-term detailed strategy starting in the 70s um it took about a generation for them to do it but they succeeded and you know not just i'm not talking about playing whack-a-mole knocking down individual gun laws but basically changing the whole landscape around the you know the legal aspect of guns and the culture around guns uh and it worked and they did it by subsidizing and supporting you know friendly scholarship and court cases and law reviews with a goal eventually bumping cases up to a sympathetic supreme court and that's what they did and there's nothing which would prevent you know gun safety advocates from i guess doing the same thing pointing in the other direction but it's not going to happen overnight you know when i closed your book i'm like you know the the title is awesome but i feel like ricochet there's some irony there because I feel like guns are now the leading cause of the death in children.

23:39I mean, it's just unbelievable, but that just blows me away, which also means that all of our innocent children are in potentially harm's way. But when I hear the word ricochet, I'm just wondering if the arguments are ricocheting off the American people and their political leadership. and are we going to keep living like this, Mike? Or is there something that could, and I asked you this question before and you answered that you don't know the answer, but I feel, not to be cynical, but I feel like if I brought you back on the open book in five years, we'd be talking about five years more of mass shootings and catastrophes with very little getting done.

24:23Is that unfair to me? If it's unfair for me to say that, say something optimistic. Well, I think that, um, first of all, it's sadly probably not in stuff, not unrealistic what you're saying, but on the other hand, I do know when you've got kids yourself, I have three kids who are probably older. They're, they're all adults now. Um, the younger generation I have noticed is, is very concerned about this in a way that I hadn't seen like when I was younger. And I do think that even though it hasn't quite coalesced in a cohesive political form yet, we have seen these sporadic, you know, kind of bursts of what could happen when young people are energized and organized on this issue.

25:14I mean, you'd like to think it wouldn't have to take another mass shooting at a school for this to happen. But, you know, after parkland um that did have a pretty big lasting um movement of young people motivated to try to do something um and i do have to think that that the younger generation uh i think has a different take on this than perhaps you know you we did growing up or even in between and i think if anything you know if there's any seeds of change there probably would come from that i don't know exactly what it would look like uh or how long it would take for that to happen but But I do have reason to hope that, you know, that I think today's kids growing up aren't necessarily absorbed in some of this culture around this in the same way that previous generations were.

26:05Okay, so we're, I mean, as Walt said, and we'll have to see what happens. But we're down to the five words. Okay, so I've got five words we pick from your book. I'm going to say the word. I need you to give me a sentence or two. Okay, you ready? Go ahead. Say the word guns. You know, I'm a gun owner myself. I'll say that. This is not, I'm not anti-gun. I'm anti-gun stupidity. Okay. I'm with you. Remember, I didn't tell you this, but, you know, I'm an Italian-American. I grew up with a father that grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania. We were hunting the Friday after Thanksgiving, you know, and I knew how to clean and change a Winchester semi-automatic my whole life.

26:47and so i'm i'm i i get it but you got to have them in response and i'll tell you something my dad those guns were taken apart he was a former u.s army serviceman those guns were taken apart them and the ammo were locked in an impenetrable safe you know and that's how we rolled so i'm with you on that violence intractable problem uh with a long history um and that's more than one sentence but i i think that that's you know uh trying to untangle that from your gun You're a good writer and a good public speaker. You can give me more than one sentence. I'm just trying to capture the ideas. The NRA is an interesting one because you taught me something about the NRA in this book.

27:28So if I say those three letters, NRA, you say what? Extremism. I think that that defines the path. They radicalized, Mike. They radicalized. Yes, they've radicalized since the 1970s in a way that I didn't understand until I really started digging into this. Yeah, it's tragic, actually. What about America? I say the word America. Exceptional in many ways. I think that our gun violence problem is not one where we want to be exceptional. And yet, sadly, we are. But I think that, you know, we should be able to draw upon the many, many, many positive aspects of our country to be able to solve that problem.

28:07And that's something I hope would happen. All right. Last word. And I'm going to give you the last word. Ricochet. Well, I think that probably could be utilized in a number of ways, including a good one that you suggested. I, in the book, use it to describe, at one point, the path that a specific gun took from a law-abiding person on its way to being used in a political assassination. and i likened it to almost like a pathogen that kind of ricocheted through the populace bouncing off of people who were sort of immune to its kind of deadly lure and until it finally found a host that wanted to use it and wound up using it to kill bobby kennedy in 1968 it's it's a loaded word to use another gun metaphoric thing it's a loaded word ricochet really appreciate you coming on and writing this book.