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- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from apple news. I'm david green in for shumita basu. Today. The surprising origins of us gun laws. The United States saw another mass shooting last weekend at a Seattle food festival where as of this recording, officials believe multiple shooters killed three people and injured at least four. One of hundreds of mass shootings that have happened in the country this year. Firearm violence causes over 40,000 deaths per year in the United States and is the number one cause of death for children and teens. And polling shows that most Americans support gun violence prevention policies regardless of their gun ownership status. But the problem has come to feel unchangeable.
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B
Both sides tend to be caricatured by the other as extremists, either pro gun, probably with no compromises, or anti gun with no compromises.
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A
That is Mike McIntyre. He's an investigative reporter for the New York Times and the author of Ricochet Guns, Greed and the American Way of Violence. His book dives into our deep history with guns. How exactly they became woven into the fabric of our country and how reckoning with the past can provide the tools needed to address gun violence.
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B
I try to bring my experience as a journalist and also a gun owner myself to try to figure out how we got to a place where there more guns than people and just ringing the wrong doorbell by mistake can get you shot.
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A
Mike started by telling me about the first time he saw firsthand what guns were capable of.
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B
My first daily newspaper job, I was a cop reporter and I used to carry around a police scanner so I could hear calls when they came in. One time a call came across of a body on the side of the road and it happened to be out nearby. So I took a spin over there and sure enough, there was the body of a young black man laying in the grass on the side of the road. And I was actually the first one there. The police hadn't even shown up yet. And so for a little while it was just the two of us. And I'm standing there with my notebook and he's lying there and he looked peaceful, almost like he was taking a nap, except for this small round hole in the side of his forehead. And pretty soon the cops showed up and shooed me away. And I ended up writing a very small item about it. It just wasn't newsworthy, which I think speaks volumes to what we're going to be talking about here. But what really struck me was it was the first time I'd seen a murder victim up close and I kind of expected it would be a bloody gory violent affair. You know, if you beat someone to death or you stab them or strangle them, it's going to be a mess. But this was so clinical and clean and efficient and didn't even have to be up close to do it. You could be 50 yards away. There's a good chance the guy never even saw who shot him. And it struck me that that's really what the gun does. It fundamentally changed the ability to kill, the exercise of aggression. It made it so much easier and simpler and quicker. And it helps explain, once you realize that, why firearms are used in 75 to 80% of all homicides, why upwards of 40,000 people a year are killed by guns, half of them suicides. And yet we treat these things almost as if they're any other consumer product to be bought and sold and marketed and kept around the house or on your person. And together, those facts kind of help inform why it is that America has the gun violence problem that it does.
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C
Well, I'm interested that you remember this story as a young journalist seeing the power of what a firearm can do to a human being. But also, as you mentioned, you are a gun owner yourself. I mean, what was your relationship to firearms growing up? And why are you still a gun owner to this day?
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B
So my background with that is probably not that unusual compared to a lot of Americans. I mean, my father was a gun owner, a veteran. His father was a registered guide in Maine. So he was a hunter and a trapper and a fisherman. And so guns were sort of in my family. There were police officers in my family. And I grew up like a lot of kids, a lot of young boys especially, learning how to shoot at a YMCA camp, going to an old abandoned gravel pit with my dad for the first time to shoot a.22 rifle. I think I was 12. But my father viewed these things as tools. You know, he didn't idolize them. They weren't central to his identity or anything like that. They were just, you know, things he would use either for hunting or self defense. And I think that's how I grew up viewing them. When my boy got old enough and also my nephew, I kind of took them target shooting the same way my dad did. I can't really explain why necessarily. It just sort of felt like something that you would do if you're sort of a boy coming of age in America. Now, I use my experience as a gun owner not to pretend that I, you know, it gives me some special insights into gun violence. In fact, gun rights proponents would call me a fud which is a term for gun owners who might have a shotgun. And so they liken that to Elmer Fudd from the cartoons who had a shotgun.
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C
You're not a real gun owner?
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B
I'm not a real gun owner. I don't have an AR15, I don't have a Glock. Nevertheless, I mean, I think growing up with them gave me an appreciation and a respect for the power of them, the damage they can do and the need to be safe around them.
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C
Why do you keep them around today? Why do you still have them?
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B
Good question. I mean, mainly for self defense. Also I occasionally enjoy target shooting. I don't hunt, but those are the main reasons.
- [05:47]
C
And self defense I think is important because I think that's the reason that a lot of people own firearms in our country. And I mean I look at some statistics like about a third of Americans are gun owners. 20, 24, close to 45,000 people died by firearms in the United States. That's an average of one death every 12 minutes. But like getting beyond statistics, like when it comes to the question of how we got here, you wrote that by the time the second amendment was ratified, and this is like 1791, the rationale for it was already in doubt. Say more about that.
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B
Well, that was one of the fascinating things from my research. I mean this issue of the second Amendment, what the meaning of it is, is so much at the core of the current debate around gun rights. I tried to take an objective look at what were the founders thinking when the second amendment was drafted. And it seems pretty clear to me. I mean the context, if you can rely simply on the wording, was the need to maintain the ability to call up a citizen based militia in place of a standing army. That was the big fear of the founding generation, was that a professional army could be misused by a despotic ruler against the people. You know, I have to remember at that point in time there was no model to look to on the world stage of a professional army. Ansford to the people through their democratically elected leaders that didn't exist. So therefore the second amendment was intended to preserve the right of people to come together collectively as a well regulated militia in defense of the state. Now in this context, well regulated, it's important to point out, doesn't mean limited or restricted. It means well trained. And then in reference to what you just said, in terms of the rationale for coming in doubt, George Washington expressed his own personal reservations about relying on a militia. He said it was folly to do that. It was depending On a broken staff. Leaning on a broken staff. He very much wanted some sort of professional military capability. And one of his first military exercises in his presidency was trying to deal with American Indian uprisings in the Northwest Territories. And it was a total disaster, relying on militias. And so it became pretty apparent very early on that for a emerging geopolitical power with expansionist ambitions, you can't rely on shopkeepers and farmers as the tip of the spear.
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C
Right.
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B
And by the time you get to the early 19th century, the whole concept was just falling into irrelevancy. And we of course had a professional army by the time of the Civil War.
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C
But the distinction between individual citizens having firearms and having the right to bear arms as part of a militia, I mean, that's always been a really important sort of legal question that has, that judges and others have grappled with for decades now.
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B
Yeah. And it really is at the core of so much of the current debate. And so it boils down to this. Gun rights proponents would say that even though the second Amendment as written speaks of the need to bear arms in order to have a citizens militia when necessary, gun rights proponents would say that, you know, it's sort of implied. It's obvious that that also means that people have a right to bear arms, to have a gun at home, a musket at home, for any lawful purpose, because you can't be expected to be able to call up for militia service without having a gun. And so if you have a gun at home, then it goes without saying you can use it for other lawful purposes. The counterargument to that would be that there is evidence that the founders didn't necessarily regard the collective right and individual right as one and the same. There were state constitutions at the time, Pennsylvania and Vermont or two of them, that had a right to bear arms in their constitutions. But they made clear it was for defense of the people themselves and the state. So they noted there were two different issues. The right to have arms for your own personal defense and then the right to have arms for defense of the state. Other state constitutions didn't say that. They just simply referred to defense of the state, meaning a militia. And the founders, James Madison et al, were certainly aware of this. They had these in front of them while they were drafting the constitution of the Bill of Rights and they chose not to include it. That's important because in practical terms that meant that these other non militia uses for guns would basically fall under common law and not constitutional law. Any activity that falls under common law is much more easily limited or regulated by state legislatures. And that sort of is why the modern gun lobby worked so hard to try to change the conventional interpretation of the second Amendment to include an individual right. Because they knew that if that was how it was going to be interpreted, it became almost like a roadblock that you couldn't get past if you're trying to regulate the use of firearms.
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C
And that is much of the meat of your book, your research at the New York Times, I mean, digging into new material that gave you a lot of insights into how the NRA has operated, including working with lawmakers who gave them, you know, heads up when things were happening that they should know about that supported them in getting legal scholars to craft exactly what you're saying. This individual. I mean, tell us more about what you have learned about the gun lobby, the NRA, and how potent this force was in the last 30 to 40 years to get us here.
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B
That really was one of the bigger eye openening moments for me in my. In my work was learning that there were a number of members of Congress over the years, stretching back to the 1960s, who had dual roles. They were a member of Congress, but they're also a member of the board of directors of the National Rifle association at the same time. And in that dual capacity, they were advancing in Congress policies and bills that were what the NRA wanted. And they also, as you point out, were in a position to also alert the NRA to activities in Congress that potentially threatened gun rights or were perceived to do so and could give them advice on strategies of how to kill bills or punish certain lawmakers. It was really kind of a remarkable conflict of interest. Central to this was one Congressman, John Dingell, Democrat from Michigan, very powerful, and
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C
we should underscore Democrat. Like, I think there's this tendency for people to think like that. Republicans are often, you know, the ones who are supporting the NRA and fighting for gun rights. But a Democrat, John Dingell, was absolutely central in everything you're talking about.
- [12:12]
B
Yes, on this particular story of the radicalization of the nra, he definitely was. And yes, he was a liberal Democrat. He was a liberal warrior on issues like health care and labor, education, environment. But on this one thing, he was very much out of step with the rest of his party most of the time. By the time you reach the end of the 1960s, you've got a real important moment in the evolution of gun rights, the Gun control Act of 1968. And that was largely in response to the political violence, assassinations and street Crime happening in the 60s, fueled by cheap revolvers called Saturday Night Specials, that was a big concern back then. And so the Gun Control act was the first major attempt to kind of bring some order to the chaos. But it also resulted in a blowback by gun rights proponents. They began to view this as the beginning of a slippery slope toward perhaps even Nazi style gun confiscation. This is what they were talking about. And John Dingell was really at the forefront of, you know, promoting this idea and warning the NRA that they had to get much more aggressive. And the reason I learned all of this, by the way, is because I looked at his archival papers. The nra, they've never talked to me. I've tried over the years to get interviews and comment, and they've always ignored me. But so he, he joined the board of the NRA at that time and he set about creating the NRA's first lobbying arm. And this new lobbying institute, it's called the Institute of Legislative Action, was really designed to do one thing to ensure that there was never again going to be new laws that would impose limits on gun rights. And to do that, they wanted to make sure that they could punish politicians who didn't toe the line on this. They wanted to use the courts to harass and impede gun control groups. And importantly, they also wanted to cultivate a new legal environment that ultimately their goal was to change the interpretation of the Second Amendment away from a collective right to an individual right. That was sort of the holy grail. And to that end, they underwrote supported scholarship books, legal reviews, court cases, and it worked. They eventually got the Heller decision in 2008, which was the first Supreme Court decision, the first one to declare that people do have an individual right to have a gun for self defense. That decision quoted a lot of the scholars that had been supported and underwritten by the nra. So it really was a remarkable success story by this one organization, driven in large part by this one politician.
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C
So there's the Second Amendment, obviously, and a lot of the legal grappling that we've seen with that. You also get into your book about the origins of stand your ground laws, which are of course related to personal protection, which, as you said, is the reason that gun owners, even including yourself, hold onto firearms. What should people know about stand your ground laws and their inception and sort of the role that they've played culturally and legally when it comes to firearms in our country?
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B
Yeah, this is one of the more fascinating discoveries, and it's useful to note that this is the 250th anniversary of the nation and the antecedents of modern stand your ground laws can trace back to another national mile marker, if you will. It was the centennial of 1876, and there were a couple of really influential court cases that came out of that period at the state level where people who had been convicted of murder or manslaughter were having their convictions overturned by state supreme courts because they were concluding that the person who had shot the other person was doing so in self defense. And it was within their legal right to do that. The reason this is important is because these cases that were, in which these reversals were happening were instances in which somebody had been accosted in a public space, like on the street by someone else who didn't have a gun. And under English common law, there was what was called a duty to retreat that had been imported into the colonies as a legal concept. And the idea is that before you can use lethal force to defend yourself against someone who is giving you a hard time in a public space, maybe threatening you, you have a duty to try to remove yourself from the situation,
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C
try to get away before engaging.
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B
Like try to escape, right, all the way to the wall if necessary. Which is, this is origins of a legal term, back against the wall. You know, at that point then you can legally use lethal force. But what these court decisions were saying was, no, that's not how we do it in America. If you're confronted with belligerence, you don't have to back down. You have a right to stand your ground. There was a decision in the state of Indiana, the Supreme Court concluded that it's the tendency of the American mind not to back down when confronted by a threat. There was another one out of the state of Ohio where they said a true man had no obligation to flee from an aggressor. So these decisions were coming down at a time when there's sort of this fervor in the air of the American centennial and what it means to be an American. A short time later, these decisions I just mentioned were incorporated into federal law by the U.S. supreme Court. Beard versus the U.S. which essentially established a stand your ground, right? So you can draw a straight line between these cases and the stand your ground cases that have drawn a lot of attention today. And one other thing I would just quickly mention is that the reason, one of the reasons why this change of attitude was happening at the end of the 19th century was really because of the prevalence of firearms. The gun itself was changing the law. And by that, I mean, it was one thing to expect someone to flee from an aggressor. If that other person is threatening you with their fists or even a knife or a club, you might be able to get away. But if they have a gun, they could just shoot you in the back. And so the practical effect of that was, okay, if you have the legal right to stand your ground against somebody with a gun, well, you better arm yourself, because otherwise it's a one sided fight. So in this sense, it was the increasing prevalence of guns that was actually changing the conception of the law itself.
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C
So we've got sort of stand your ground and this part of American identity that you stand your ground, we've got the individual right, right to bear arms. As you said, that was largely driven by an incredible lobbying effort in the last number of decades. You also use the phrase true man, like a true man will defend themselves in one of the quotes that you mentioned. And that raises the subject of masculinity, which is so tied to gun culture in America, the marketing of firearms, and very much where we are today. What is the relationship between masculinity and firearms in the United States?
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B
You know, it's really fascinating because the best place to turn to for the answer to that question is the gun industry itself. They long ago identified this as key to their success. As far back as the 1950s and 60s and even earlier, potentially, advertisements for guns were all about masculinity to one degree or another. But it really got amped up in the 21st century. And a good example of how this happens is Remington, the gun maker, had a very notorious ad for a Bushmaster assault weapon. And the ad had a picture of the rifle, and it said, consider your man card reissued, subtle as a brick. And, you know, the continuation of that ad got even more specific. I actually have the wording right here. It said that in a world of rapidly depleting testosterone, the Bushmaster man card declares and confirms that you are a man's man.
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C
Wow, that was in marketing materials for.
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B
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Now, I mean, you can kind of laugh at this and roll your eyes, but I mean, I think that a lot of gun safety advocates would argue that, and they have argued in court that this kind of marketing and advertising is dangerous because it appeals to a certain segment of the population who might be young men who are alienated, isolated, troubled, and they want to feel powerful and they want to be on top of. And so this was successfully argued by the plaintiffs in the case brought by families of the Sandy Hook School Shooting victims against Remington by successfully argued, I mean, they didn't win the case, but they got a settlement from Remington, which included the requirement that Remington release their internal documents that show this very thing that I'm talking about. And so I think that until gun companies kind of drop this practice of kind of appealing to the darker aspects of male psychology, I think that arguably this is always going to be part
- [21:21]
C
of the equation as you think about solutions to our gun violence problem in the United States. I mean, you raised the comparison of how it took years, but finally people were able to take on big tobacco for their marketing because of the risks they pose to young people and everyone. What parts of sort of the big tobacco lesson and offer some opportunities for people who want to do something about guns in the United States and what sort of apples and oranges here?
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B
Yeah, so first of all, gun rights proponents would say there's no need for any of this, that things are pretty much as they should be, that it's
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C
just keep guns out of the hands of people who are going to use them illegally.
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B
Well, right. The problem with the argument that we just need to keep guns on the hands of criminals is that there's a circularity of the logic. I mean, if you think about it, every criminal starts out as a non criminal, right. So some of the worst mass shooters were, you know, law abiding citizens up until the fateful moment. They weren't. So but in terms of, you know, comparisons to the tobacco. Yeah, I mean, that was a vice, if you will, whose manufacturers succeeded for generations at kind of, you know, wielding power and cranking out pseudoscientific studies to try to knock down, you know, complaints about the health problems. And it really wasn't until you had some brave whistleblowers and sort of a critical mass of public revulsion that things started to change. As I point out in the book, I mean, guns are a different issue. I mean, guns have a utility and purpose. The signal cigarettes do not. And it raises all sorts of questions of what is the proper balance there. I think that for gun violence prevention advocates looking to make long term change, arguably you could look at the NRA's playbook itself and see how they did it. And there's no reason why it couldn't be emulated by other people coming at this from a different angle, ultimately what would have to happen for a change of attitudes would be a change in the Supreme Court's interpretation of the second amendment. Because until that were to happen, any attempt to legislate serious restrictions or limits on Firearms are going to hit that wall, that brick wall of Supreme Court decisions. There have been three of them, three main decisions in the last 20 years that have really expanded the scope of gun rights. Short of that, I mean, there are other things which people involved in these groups are attempting to do all the time, which are dealing with age minimums, for instance, for the purchase of rifles. I mean, you can look to examples, for instance, of Nicholas Cruz and Salvatore Ramos. These were two mass shooters in Parkland, Florida and Uvalde, Texas. Each of these cases, these were teenagers who waited until they turned 18 and could legally purchase the weapons they then used to kill a total of 38 children and adults. What if the age minimum had been 21? We'll never know whether that could have made a difference. But those are the kinds of things that I think are being looked at by gun violence prevention advocates. Other issues are magazine sizes, red flag laws, which make it easier for police to take guns away temporarily from someone who's deemed to be a threat to themselves or someone else. We are seeing, I think, at the state level, examples of gun companies being held accountable for irresponsible and reckless marketing. So that has sort of found a little bit of renewed traction in some sense of sort of going after the marketing and sales of guns. I think that one thing which, you know, history has shown is not always successful are bans, outright bans. Americans don't like to ban things. When you look at the 1994 assault weapons ban, I think Democrats believe that it probably cost them control of Congress that year. Polls show that at most, maybe half of Americans are in favor of an assault weapons ban. But when you start talking about other types of guns, no support at all. But for people who want to change the current landscape of gun laws, it would really take a long term effort, much in the same way that the gun lobby itself succeeded.
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C
And I really want to understand what we think the key is for a generational effort like that to succeed. Because, I mean, like, one thing I heard you say is that guns are different from tobacco because guns have a utility and a purpose. I think there are a lot of people who have never owned a firearm and who hate guns, who don't think that they have any utility or purpose. And I wonder if getting over that is part of the key to making progress.
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B
Yeah, I think probably on the side of people who, who want stronger gun laws, there has to be a recognition that, you know, guns are here to stay and they're part of the history and tradition of the United States, whether You want to interpret the Second Amendment differently or not? And I think once that's accepted as a reality, you know, perhaps it would become easier to have that kind of discussion between both sides. But at the same time, you know, on the pro gun rights side, I think that you see similar problems. You have gun groups like the NRA and the Firearms Policy Coalition and the industry itself kind of promoting very extremist views of what the opposition is all about, that any kind of gun laws are a slippery slope and they'll lead to storm troopers knocking down your door and taking your gun. James Madison had a great quote during the Federalist debates on this very issue, because anti Federalists were concerned that the Constitution wasn't going far enough in protecting gun ownership. And they're spinning increasingly kind of unrealistic scenarios of government suppression. And Madison called this the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal rather than the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism. And basically what he was saying was, enough with the phony outrage is getting in the way of considering sensible policies. And I think that that's probably something that could be said about both sides right now in the debate. I just.
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C
Stepping back, you've won awards for reporting on, I mean, politicians who conceal their taxes and sports corruption. But this is your current project that you've dug into so deeply. And I just like what gives you the motivation and momentum to keep thinking about firearms and reporting on them.
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B
I mean, I've had some personal interactions with gun violence over the years. I mean, I've been touched, you might say, by a couple of mass shootings in kind of interesting ways. I mean, one is when I was a reporter at the Hartford Current newspaper a very long time ago in the 1990s, and there was a guy who was an accountant with a state lottery corporation who came to the paper with stories of corruption, and he wanted to tell us. I actually met him briefly in the newsroom. He was being interviewed by a colleague of mine. Not long after that, he called the newsroom again, wanted to come meet again. But my colleague didn't get the message till the next morning. And by then the state employee had become a mass shooter. He'd gone to the state lottery and killed the top officials. I don't know what he would have done if he'd come to the newsroom again and talk to us. And then fast forward to the Sandy Hook school massacre, which happened in Connecticut, not far from where I live. A friend of mine, journalist friend, his stepdaughter was a substitute teacher there. She was killed trying to shield her kids. So there was a feeling in both of these instances with me that it really can happen to anybody anywhere. And it's always kind of sustained my interest in learning more about how we got to this place and how these things continue to allow to happen.
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C
Mike, I've learned so much, and I just really appreciate your reporting the book. Thank you so much.
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B
Well, thank you for having me.
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A
We will include a link to Mike's book, Ricochet, Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence on our Show Notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News and conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, the
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C
little headphones at the bottom to find.