Jeremy Rosen
Challenging Conversations: Gun Control
Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm, Professor Robert J. Spitzer, and Jeremy Rosen - Challenging Conversations: Gun Control
- And just say a very, very warm welcome to Joyce and to Robert. Today we are on our challenging conversation platform, we are going to be talking about gun control. So before I hand over to you, Joyce, I would do a very short introduction. Joyce Lee Malcolm is a constitutional scholar focusing on individual rights and war and society. She’s Patrick Henry professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, a member of the National Council on the Humanities, and author of eight books and numerous articles. Her essays have appeared in the “Wall Street Journal,” the “Financial Times,” the “London Telegraph,” “The Boston Globe,” “The Philadelphia Inquiry,” “BBC News Online,” and she has been the guest on numerous radio and TV programmes. Robert J. Spitzer, PhD Cornell is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Political Science at SUNY Cortland. He’s the author of 16 books, including four on the presidency and six on gun policy. Gosh, wow.
Wow.
Very impressed on both of you. Thank you so much for joining us today, and it’s absolute pleasure to have you join the Lockdown University family. Thank you, Jeremy, for today. So I’m going to hand over to you.
Thank you, Wendy. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to civilised discussion on controversial topics. I just want to start off with a few words, as you might expect from a Jewish perspective. The Jewish perspective on many moral issues is to have contradictory positions stated as moral obligations in many issues, in almost every area. And then the role of the decisor, whoever that decisor will be, will then have to come to a conclusion, reconcile the two in the context of the situation in which he or she finds themselves. Now, when it comes to something like the use of guns related to the question of war, as we currently experience in Ukraine, on the one hand you have the right to fight for self-defense. On the other hand, you have the idea that violence is bad. And so all metal was banned from the Temple because metal was considered a symbol of violence. Violence on principle is wrong. War on principle is wrong, but there may be occasions when you have to fight because on the other hand, there is a principle, a moral principle of self-defense. You can’t say that one person is automatically better than another. Everybody has a right to be who they are equally as a child of God or whatever. And so I noticed that in the current situation in Ukraine, according to Jewish law, 2,000 years ago, if you besiege a city, you must keep one side open so that the refugees can get out and escape the siege.
Something that is not happening in the world in which we live today. So these conflicting moral obligations are very, very important. In, for example, Israel today, you have the issue of carrying guns because you are being threatened and you want to defend yourself. But in general, Israel is against civilians carrying guns as a general rule. I come from England and we were brought up in Europe to think that not even the policemen carry guns. And there are special situations where armed men may be called in. And in Europe in general, we have a lower crime rate. But on the other hand, America has two different things to Britain. It has the culture of self-reliance of rebellion, right from the very beginning of citizens carrying arms and defending themselves against the oppressors who were the British or whoever else. And unfortunately, then using them against the poor Indians or indigenous peoples. And so you have this tradition in this country of carrying guns, which I always thought was very difficult to understand as I still do to this day, the idea of keeping our death penalty in the United States of America. But the question, of course, is that life is never simple. And where do we draw a line? We’ve just had Sacramento, another example, recurring examples of loose use of firepower. And we’ve heard the arguments that it’s not guns that kill, its people that kill, but this country awash with guns has a far higher rate of death than elsewhere. And then you have the question of how do you control things, whether it’s drugs or whether it’s guns?
By and large governments do a terrible job in controlling things and waste a lot of money and don’t get very good results for it. So these issues, the what is it that enables one to feel safe in a society without having to have guns? Can it be achieved? Or once we allow people to have guns, and as with drugs, if people want to kill themselves when in a free and open society, let them kill themselves. That’s really not how we’re going to resolve this issue. And so I bent open and being English, if you will forgive me, I will go and totally out of fashion and totally politically incorrect. Ask Wendy to start off, sorry, sorry, not Wendy. I’m terribly sorry. Joyce to start off and give her reasons for the position that she holds.
- Thank you very much. It’s interesting that you talked about the Jewish tradition and the religious tradition about weapons because one of the crucial aspect of the right to be armed is self-defense, which you mentioned. And self-defense is the most ancient and basic right. And one of the reasons for self-defense, the religious reason, is that you were created in God’s image. And so you do not have to go around and allow yourself to be maimed or you have the right to protect yourself because you are created in God’s image. So that my issue is that no one should have to be a victim. People in Israel have a right to carry guns that I understood, but you know more than I do, that sometimes they were encouraged to carry guns because of a terrorist that suddenly springs up and starts attacking people. You’ve got somebody local who can stop that person. I am a historian and I’ve looked at, I look at rights from a historical point of view. The English, in fact, had a right to be armed. They were able to use guns and were required to use guns for centuries to police, you know, keep order and be in the militia. And after the English Civil War ended in 1689, the English passed the Bill of Rights that ours is modelled after. And in that Bill of Rights, there was the right for Protestant subjects, who were the great majority, to have guns, to have arms for their defence.
And the idea that people could protect themselves was really important and part of one of the rights of Englishmen that our country inherited, part of the legacy that they were promised is that they would have the same rights as if born and abiding in England. And I think as you say, there’s this very much American self-reliance tradition. There also is the issue that even though we have police, as they say, “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” So we have had a fantastic increase in the amount of crime rates in this country, setting new records, something like 25% increase in murders over the last year in major cities. And with that in mind and with the police under duress and being defunded, it’s all the more important that people be able to protect themselves and their families. And so we have had a record number of people actually buying firearms, millions of people, something like five million who are buying guns for the first time. And I think that the reason this is such an emotional issue is that it’s a matter of life or death. And mainly some of our most important landmark cases from the Supreme Court were from inner city Chicago and Washington where the people who were petitioning had reported on drug dealers and others and their lives were in danger and they needed to be able to protect themselves. So for me, the issue is that you need something to protect yourself. And we are careful about who gets the guns. There are background checks and things, but people shouldn’t have to be victimised by thugs who lash out or take advantage of them. And the situation in America today, thank God, is not like Ukraine, has made that all the more important. So I’ll just leave it there and let you get on with it.
Robert, over to you.
Yes, thank you. I’m a political scientist. And let me begin by sort of describing how I frame this issue. We know that guns and gun ownership are as old as America, going back to the very earliest days, and that’s well known. But what is not so well known is that gun laws are also as old as the country itself. And as a matter of fact, in the country’s first 300 years from the 1600s through the end of the 19th century, towns, cities, colonies, and states enacted literally thousands of gun laws of every imaginable variety. There is no gun law that any person could think of that was not enacted in the 1600s, in the 1700s, and the 1800s. And that has been a primary focus of my research and that of others in recent years. So this history of gun regulation, again, is not very well known. And there are many examples of how this was implemented. And we saw historically the rise of specific gun regulations when specific gun problems arose. In particular with the advent of the spread of handguns among the civilian population, mostly in the second half of the 19th century. And you think for, example, of the Wild West, the Old West, the Pioneer West of the 19th century, so much depicted in movies and novels and all kinds of writings. And the sloganeering about guns that accompanied that was that it was guns that won the West and it really wasn’t. I mean, guns were present, but the West was won. so to speak, I mean, the Western territories taken from the Native Americans who were already there was through settlement, through agriculture, through commercial activity, the rise of cities and towns.
And one of the things you saw was that as soon as an area became populated and inhabited by settlers coming from the East and immigrants was the enactment of strict gun laws. So indeed throughout the 19th century, you saw the phenomenon of localities and states adopting anti-carry laws. And by the start of the 20th century, every state in the country, except for three states, had enacted laws that barred or significantly restricted the civilian carrying of firearms. Now of course, much of the debate in America is key to the Second Amendment added to the Constitution in 1789 as part of the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment that says, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” And as the amendment says, its purpose, oh, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to, there we are. So sorry. As the amendment says, as the people who wrote debated, amended, and enacted the amendment all said, the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution to make sure that states, which were semi-hysterical about this new Constitution. Okay, my computer is ringing. Okay, I don’t know why. These things are unknown and unknowable to me. So there you go. In any case that, where were we, okay, that the amendment was added to provide assurance to the states that they could continue to form and organise and maintain their own state militias because most militia power in the new constitution was taken from the states and given to the new national government. And self-defense, which is already gotten quite a bit of discussion.
And parenthetically, I would make a distinction between violence that is intrastate violence, Russia invading the Ukraine. Israel in a defacto state of war since the late 1940s as a nation state versus citizen behaviour in the context of a nation that is not at war with another nation. And with respect to personal self-defense in our daily lives, the operative fact is that you don’t need and never did need the Second Amendment to provide a right of average people to defend themselves from grievous bodily harm, attack, the possibility of death at the hands of someone else. That has always been in the common law for hundreds of years. And if you needed the Second Amendment to provide it, well, there would’ve been no defence in a personal self-defense case until 2008 when the Supreme Court decided in the Heller decision that for the first time in history, the court says that the Second Amendment also, or instead, provides for a personal right of self-defense for average citizens in their home using a handgun. And that’s kind of the new legal constitutional standard that the court imposed beginning in 2008. And there are some other changes in the works right now as we speak, which people may or may not be interested in getting to. And finally, the proliferation.
You’ll get a chance to say something in due course.
Okay. With respect to the current situation in America in recent times, we witnessed a progressive decline in crime in every category, including violent crime, from the early 1990s up until the last couple of years, and this is where Joyce Malcolm made the important point that we’ve seen an upsurge, interestingly enough, an upsurge in violent crime and an upsurge in murder, but not an upsurge in other categories of crime, only in violent crime and murder, which obviously is a matter of great concern because interpersonal violence is more, you know, serious than somebody having a $100 stolen from them, let’s say. And there’s been much discussion about why we’ve seen this upsurge in the last couple of years. And obviously it’s related to the pandemic that there’s a general understanding of that. But among the three or four factors that probably explain the upsurge, key to that is the fact that indeed millions of people have gone out and gotten guns, mostly handguns and ill-trained, ill-prepared, and well-intentioned perhaps, but the likely proximate cause of most of the rise in interpersonal violence and murder we’ve seen is tied directly to the spread of firearms, handguns, among the civilian population. Guns that are stolen, used for suicide, used in impulsive criminal activities, including murder, and that they generally spread in society in unfortunately bad ways.
Thank you, Joyce, you’re itching to go?
Yes, itching, but I agree that there were laws over the years about controlling how guns were used. They were not supposed to be used so as to terrify the public. There were places where you were not to take a gun, but they never forbid you in this country from carrying a gun, they forbid you from carrying a gun concealed. You were supposed to carry it openly so people knew you had it and it was only the criminals who carried a concealed weapon. We have the opposite feeling today. We don’t like to see people walking around with guns openly. So we have shifted it so that people can carry concealed. So there were laws, but they were sensible. They never forbid people from being able to own guns and use guns for their own self-defense and protection and to protect their community and their families. The issue about the militia has been really settled by two landmark Supreme Court cases, the Heller case that took a look at the Washington DC gun ban on residents being able to have a gun in their own home for their own protection. And two years later, McDonald versus the city of Chicago, both of these were really draconian laws where no one could have a gun in their own home for their own personal protection or even take that gun from one room to another inside their home and the Supreme Court and these decisions, and it isn’t a new right, they were explaining the language that had been in the right, but it had never really been examined by the court. Was that it wasn’t a rule just for the militia to have guns, that it was an individual right to keep and bear those guns in common use for self-defense and other lawful purposes. And that’s what they decided in Heller, the majority. And then in McDonald versus City of Chicago, that understanding of the Second Amendment was incorporated for the entire country as one of the basic rules and understandings of our system of law.
So as far as murders go, and I hope you don’t mind my answering lots of these things at once. It isn’t the normal citizens who are causing the upsurge of violent crime. It’s basically the fact that the police have been targeted and under more constraint and defunded and are shrinking police departments to keep order. There’s some districts attorneys who are not willing to incarcerate people or let them out without any bail that they have to pay for. But the thing is that most of these crimes with guns are not committed by ordinary people who go out to get a gun to protect themselves. There are gangs in Chicago, for instance, who are the prime movers in all of these shootings and drive-by shootings. There are people who really shouldn’t have a gun. And the background checks that the FBI has are supposed to keep felons from being able to have a gun. But obviously these people who are planning to misuse a gun are not interested in what the regulations are. So it isn’t the ordinary person who’s untutored who goes out and shoots somebody. It is people who are violent criminals or have had terrible backgrounds and that then the community is violent.
But what’s sad about all of this gang violence in a place like Chicago is that ordinary people who are living in that area are being victimised by these gangs. And that’s why they need to have something to protect themselves. The police are afraid to go there. They’re being ambushed and targeted. So I know this is, I’m sounding emotional, it’s an emotional issue because under those circumstances it’s unfair not to let people protect themselves. And you can say, “Well, they could get a baseball bat.” The gun really is an equaliser in the sense that it allows a woman or someone older or to actually have some viable means of self-defense and not just, you know, hiding in the bathroom with the door locked, waiting for the police to arrive.
Robert?
Yeah, just a couple things. Joyce was mentioning the Heller and McDonald case, the Heller case 2008, the McDonald case 2010 that applied the federal standard to the states. And indeed that’s when the constitutional interpretation changed. I would just say that the court changed its interpretation of the meaning of the Second Amendment for the first time in history. And it could change the law, but it cannot change the history. And pretty much every colonial historian, a legal historian of standing, has pointed out, as well as jurors across the ideological spectrum, that the court’s reading of history was terrible in that case. And it’s ironically, one of the most history driven decisions of the Supreme Court in its history as Justice Scalia who wrote the decision said. And the court has a right to remake the law, but they can’t change history. I would just say also regarding the contemporary crime situation, we use terms like ordinary citizens, normal people, honest people, good people. But you know, we say these things as though they have meaning. Society just doesn’t divide up neatly into good guys and bad guys. I mean, you hear this rhetoric all the time and it just doesn’t explain what’s actually going on. I mean, twice as many people are killed by gun, although, well, the number’s less. Annually, more people die from gun suicide than gun homicide.
[Joyce] That’s true.
And those are gun deaths no less than any other death by a firearm. And people obtain guns with good intentions. But a gun that is obtained by an average citizen for self-protection, and self-protection is a thing obviously, is more likely to be used by a distraught teenager to commit suicide, more likely to be stolen, to be discharged accidentally, to fall into the wrong hands. And that’s doubly so because most states no longer require any training whatsoever to obtain a gun in the first place. And that itself is problematic. And certainly, final point, self-protection is important. Well, a couple points, self-protection again is very important, but there are lots of ways to protect yourself in addition to or aside from a gun. And there rarely seems to be discussion about all of those methods because there are lots of ways you can do things, whether you’re at home or out on the street to protect yourself. And I would just add as a footnote that the defund the police movement, for which I have no regard, let me say, did not result in the defunding of police departments. I mean, there have been numerous studies and in fact, not only has that not happened, police forces are now getting even more appropriations around the country precisely because of the upsurge in crime. And only one state that I know of, New York state, enacted a bail reform law. And they’re continuing to study whether it’s had any effect on crime in that state.
You want to come back again, Joyce?
Yes, I’m a historian. My book, “To Keep and Bear Arms The Origins of an Anglo-American Right,” was cited by the majority in the Heller several times. I know the history, I have worked on the history. The Supreme Court members did a really good job of examining the history in the Heller case. It wasn’t terrible history, it just that people who don’t like the Second Amendment wished that they came up with a different viewpoint. I mean, there are facts there and there have been understandings of what the rules were about guns and who had guns and how they were used over the centuries and the legal right to have arms. So in that sense, I think it’s really unfair to claim that that was terrible history. It’s only terrible if you don’t like the result. But it was very carefully done by a group of quite a lot of scholars. The Supreme Court didn’t get to the issue of the core meaning of the Second Amendment for a long time, hadn’t really come up. Most people believe that they had a right to be armed. And I should say it didn’t get to the meaning of the First Amendment until early in the 20th century. The idea of freedom of speech. You think, well surely early on they would have looked at that. So some of these things take a long time to actually percolate up and sometimes people wait for a good case or a good court or some other reason why they wait to bring a case. Often the courts are not interested in hearing it so that I don’t think that that makes it a new right. It wasn’t a new right when Madison put it in his proposed list of rights that he wanted ratified so there’s nothing new about it. It was an English right first. And I want to say on the issue of that you could protect yourself other ways. England has gotten very strict about not only guns, but you’re not supposed to carry any weapon or any article I should say, that could be used as an offensive weapon if you were attacked. And so what have they put in that category?
All kinds of chemical sprays. Any knife with a blade more than three inches long. Virtually anything that one could think of to protect yourself is on the off list. You can get 10 years for having a chemical spray. So I mean, I thank goodness we’ve not gone down that road, but there’s a website that the police in Britain have where people can send in questions. And there was a question from a woman who said, you know, “How can I protect myself when I’m out on the street?” You know, ‘cause gun crime and other crimes in Britain have gone up. And the only thing that they had was something called a rape whistle where you could blow the rape whistle. You were not to say, you were not to cry “help” because the public had been taught to wait for the professionals. You walk on by and you were supposed to say, “Call the police.” So they’ve made it harder and harder for law-abiding people. I hope that you can accept that, Robert, law-abiding people who want to be able to walk about safely to do anything in their own defence. And that, you know, it is a slippery slope to say, “Well, you don’t have guns, but you may have a knife.” And so more go out and get more knives. “You can’t carry scissors” because you know, unless you have a really good reason to have scissors, those can be used. So that’s not to say some of these things wouldn’t be helpful, but I think that there’s something particular about a gun because you can be at a distance. And in fact most of the people who protect themselves just brandish the gun. They never use it because often the people who are about to attack 'em once they see the gun, back off. So it has some unique benefits, however, annoying that-
Joyce, if I can just interrupt for a moment because I’d like to move this a bit away from the constitutional issue because the constitutional issue really is to do with the culture of the country and the culture of European states is different to the culture of American states. It’s a strength and it’s a weakness. Coming from Europe the strength of United States is it’s a crazy place and almost anything goes. And then it’s less uptight in many respects. But it also means you have a wider range of population, a broader mix than you do. And although it’s dramatically changed in Europe, it hasn’t changed in Europe as much as it is here. And therefore the question is, leaving aside the constitutional issue, how are we going to deal with two issues? Issue number one is, it’s one thing self-defense, it’s another thing to carry a bloody machine gun. And one of these things that, you know, rattles off large, large numbers of bullets and yet you have something like the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which tries to block any kind of limitation on guns. So on the one hand you have that side, on the other hand, you clearly have both a bureaucracy that cannot get its act together. You have a government that’s so divided that it seems impossible to find any kind of compromise on an issue like this. And the whole question of enforcement, and I don’t just mean police enforcement, I mean we take drugs, vast amounts are spent, vast amounts to control the drug trade. And it’s absolutely useless. And the question of course is, “Well, are you going to go on trying to control it or you’re going to let people drug themselves to death?” The two extreme positions. What are you going to take? How are we going to deal with this in practical terms? What given the limitations of government control, bureaucratic control, as you say, nobody pays much attention to what the FBI says or anything like that, the mix of population. What is a practical solution? I’d like to hear both of you come up with a positive solution of how we can address this issue of constant killing of large numbers in this country. So would you like to go first on this one, Robert?
Sure. As has been often pointed out, there are a great many guns in American society, far more than any other Western democratic nation has. There’s no doubt about that. On the other hand, the guns that are used in crime are a pretty small subset of those weapons. They tend by and large to be handguns, which is why the greater focus in history on handguns as opposed to long guns and their connection to crime. And you’ve mentioned a couple of times, Rabbi, the case of drug regulation by the government and how the war on drugs has been a failure, which is certainly true, but I wouldn’t hold that up as an exemplar indicative of the government’s inability to do anything. I mean, James Madison said that “If men were angels, no governments would be necessary.” Men are not angels. Women arguably are, but not the men for sure.
Don’t say that now.
[Joyce] Thank you.
And government is necessary and there are, you know, real things the government could do to get at the, some of the bad, destructive consequences of firearms. You mentioned firearms that shoot large numbers of rounds in New York state, in its state law kind of a remedy for that, which is that it, and a few other states, is that it put a cap on what it referred to, or barring, what are called large capacity magazines, box-like devices that hold ammunition that hold rounds limiting them to no more than 10. And other states have that. And an even more effective remedy is one where the magazine is fixed in place, is not removable. And that alone would have a measurable effect on the ability of people to fire off large numbers of rounds in a short space of time 'cause you couldn’t do it if you had to hand load after your weapon was completed or was depleted. Now that’s one particular thing, one fairly small thing. But there are other obvious, you know, remedies that a number of states have have enacted that can have and have had beneficial effects like so-called red flag laws, extreme risk protection orders, which now I think 20 states have, including some conservative, Republican states have enacted. Studies have shown pretty consistently that licencing or registration regulations are pretty effective at keeping firearms out of the wrong hands. Uniform background checks, around 20 to 25% of all guns that are sold are sold without any background check because of the vagaries of law as it is written in most states. There have been efforts to enact a federal law to close what’s referred to as, really not correctly, as closing the gun show loophole. What they mean is uniform background checks, the Brady Law background check that both the Rabbi and Joyce have referred to earlier. And even doing things like that would be helpful. It’s not a problem that will be ended, that can be solved, but are there remedies that are feasible, that could be done, that could staunch the process of firearm mayhem? Sure there are. And those are just a few examples.
Right, Joyce?
Yes, Rob mentioned that the guns that are actually used in crime are not a huge number of the guns that are out there. And the government, in fact, I think the Attorney General just recently announced that they the Department of Justice was going to locate or had located some 70 guns, I think in Chicago that had come from certain gun dealers that were selling a lot of guns or trafficking in a lot of illegal weapons. And certainly the government can do that. One of the problems with the background check is that you’re not supposed to allow someone who’s a felon to get a gun, but the background check is only as good as the statistics that are on it. So states need to report the latest criminal lists and so forth so that they can be included in the background check. And that hasn’t been that well done. I know it’s a bureaucratic kind of thing, but it makes a real difference. One of my concerns is that in the case, particularly of people who commit a mass murder, often these are people who are really mentally deranged. And this country back in the seventies dismantled its large institutions for people who were, you know, had mental problems and these were supposed to be replaced by local, smaller, community groups and places for these people to go. Those never really materialised enough. So a lot of people with serious, dangerous mental problems are let loose with a prescription of pills that they’re supposed to take. And I have a former colleague who had a brother who was really a danger to the family and they could not find a place for him. So I think something needs to be done. It’s not a sexy issue. And the healthcare industry and people are concerned because people won’t go to you if they’re afraid that you’re going to hand their name in and they’ll be incarcerated in some way or put in a special hospital. But there needs to be more concentration on getting people who are a danger to themselves and others in some kind of a facility where they can be looked after. More people who are mentally dangerous are now in jails and those jails are not the place to heal anybody or to even deal with it. So my solution as far as that goes is that we do something on that issue.
That’s a fair point there. There is an allied problem of the number of people who need psychiatric treatment, who are just, the facilities aren’t there, they’re turned on the streets and a lot of them it ends up in violence of different kinds, which is an allied issue. But, you know, I think what I’d like to do now, if you don’t mind, is start addressing the questions that have been coming in. And so I’m going to address them to you and you’ll answer them as they come up.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - The first one from Bill Bates is, “Will America ever revoke the Second Amendment?” I think I know the answer to that, but I’d like to hear what you have to say.
A - The answer’s no.
A - Yeah, we agree.
A - I would just add as a footnote that you don’t have to tinker with the Second Amendment to address the gun issue in the way America faces it today. Although arguably the court is moving at a direction now to the court’s formulation in 2008, I think struck a, you could argue a fair balance between rights and the ability of the government to regulate, but the court may be poised to toss out many existing gun regulations and I think that would be a mistake. But no, Second Amendment’s not going anywhere.
- No.
Q - Next question from Yehuda. “Could you explain the US law regarding assault weapons rather than handguns? Do you know what proportion of the two million weapons purchased in the USA in the past fortnight were assault weapons as opposed to handguns?”
- Joyce?
A - Yeah, I’d like to answer that. The title assault weapon has never been perfectly defined. That phrase first came into use in 1989. The assault weapon label kind of conjures up the kind of machine gun you were talking about, an AK-47, something like that. But basically, since it’s not specifically limited to that, all sorts of ordinary weapons that the Supreme Court said were in common use for self-defense and other lawful purposes are being pushed into the assault weapon label. And we had, for 10 years, we had a ban on assault weapons. What made a semi-automatic an assault weapon? It had a, it looked scary, it had a kind of pistol, a brace at the bottom that kind of stuck out so that you could control it more easily. And a scope. So basically guns that are perfectly ordinary, semi-automatic, where you just pull the trigger once for each shot have been pushed into this assault weapon label. The real assault weapons are the ones that you would actually use on a battlefield. And those are the ones that are real automatics.
A - With all due to my friend Joyce, the term assault rifle actually dates to World War II, the Germans developed a weapon called the Sturmgewehr if my German pronunciation is right, and the translation is assault rifle. As early as the early 1960s, advertisements were appearing in gun magazines, selling assault rifles and assault weapons. You could find the old ads and they entered the American civilian market late 1960s, early seventies, but there was no real interest or market for them until you get to the late 1980s when the market and sales finally began to pick up as the gun manufacturers were marketing them as assault rifles and assault weapons. It was the gun companies that popularised that term. And then of course you had people starting to commit crimes with these weapons, mass shootings, one in California in 1989 that was very shocking to the country. Today there’s no precise count. Today though there’s maybe 15 million assault weapons in circulation in the country, that’s out of maybe 300 million guns in America. So it’s a small proportion. However, in recent years they’ve been bestsellers and become very popular, partly for political reasons they’ve become more popular. And while they even now represent a very small percentage of gun murders and gun assaults, they represent about a third of mass shootings and that’s one of the problems.
- Yeah, it’s interesting. I often have wondered about this idea of needing guns to defend oneself and the other argument is we need guns for leisure, for hunting, poor deer that are riddled with bullets from machine guns. Surely that’s not one way of hunting in sport. But I have a question that’s come up with, I’ve never thought of, a very strange question. I put to both of you. I don’t have any answer to this, but it’s from Harriet who asked…
Q - “Is gun violence another legacy of slavery?” Huh?
A - I would say no. I mean there-
A - There was violence in slavery without guns and guns without slavery.
A - Right. No, it isn’t. I mean, the slavery was a horrible institution and the legacy of racism continued afterwards. What has happened is that some of the gun control laws came in around after the Civil War in the early 20th century because in the South they were afraid of the freed slaves having weapons. So it was a way of stopping that. And in places like New York, they passed the Solomon Act because they did not want the immigrants coming from Eastern and Southern Europe to be able to be armed. So some of these early gun regulations were based on things like that. But you know, the tradition of being armed was that, and in fact-
It’s interesting that that’s the situation today, this fear of immigrants is fear of the violent immigrants, not I think fear of ordinary, peace-loving citizens coming from any part of the world.
Can I just add one thing?
Yeah. Sorry.
Machine guns are outlawed. I mean you can’t, I mean, so that, you know, fully automatic.
It’s important to make this, yeah, Joyce makes a key point. People often don’t understand the distinction between a semi-automatic weapon and a fully automatic weapon. The ownership of fully automatic weapons is tightly regulated going back to a law from 1934. The assault weapons people buy at the sporting goods store today are semi-automatic. Although there’s been a problem recently with a device you can buy on the internet, naturally, that can change the firing capabilities from semi to fully automatic. And that’s a big problem or may be a big problem.
Yeah, that’s another question that’s coming up later about the issue of ghost guns.
[Robert] Yeah.
Q - Question specifically for you, Dr. Spitzer and that is, “What other ways can you state specifically that would work as well as a gun in self-defense?”
A - Well, there are myriad self-defense options. I mean, if you’re at home, for example, bars on your windows, better lighting, watching the location of your hedging and landscaping around your house. Are there places for people to hide? Are there places that are dark. Owning a dog, Neighbourhood Watch Associations, home alarm systems? There are, you know, lots and lots of things that one can do to enhance one’s sense of personal security. And again, remembering that in most places, even with the upsurge of violent crime in the last couple of years, the vast majority of America is a very safe place. I mean, statistically, objectively, we’re a pretty safe country. I mean it is a matter of concern that violent crime has gone up in the last couple of years, but it’s mostly occurred in very specific geographic locations that do have chronic crime problems. Some of them have been addressed pretty effectively. Chicago for one, others not so effectively.
Q - Yeah, it’s interesting because one of the questions that just come up from Alfred and Yana is “Since the justification of the Second Amendment is federal, why can’t there be federal licencing rules for gun control and limitation?” Is that just a political problem?
A - There can, yes, and there can, in fact there is, and it was passed by Congress in 1934 pertaining precisely to fully automatic weapons. I can go out and buy a machine gun like an old Tommy gun, you know, from the 1920s.
Yeah.
But I have to file an application with the federal government. They do a background check, that that’s a thorough check, not like the instant check where they check your background, you’re fingerprinted, you’re photographed. And it’s a process that takes, you know, can take several months.
Right.
But I can get a licence to own that weapon. It’s been a remarkably effective law that’s been in place now for 90 years. So can the government do it? Sure, it can 'cause it did and it withstood constitutional scrutiny. But why it hasn’t, that’s a political question.
Q - Exactly. A question for Joyce, “Do you have a gun? And if so, how long for and have you ever had to use it?”
A - I have an old shotgun and I have never had to use it. I did used to use it to shoot at clay pigeons. They are extremely hard to hit. Mine usually fell to earth quite safely and they could be recycled. Can I just say something about that prior question?
Sure.
The states are really in control of their particular gun rules and regulations and most of the states something like, oh, more than 40 states, have in their own constitutions the right of the people to keep and bear arms. So their own state constitution sort of mirrors the Second Amendment usually without the militia clause. And the states are moving in a very different direction from the federal government in that they have become more and more liberal in allowing law-abiding citizens to keep and have weapons. And there are only a handful of states, maybe, you know, seven or eight, Bob probably knows the number, which are very strict about allowing people to take the gun outside or whether, you know, the way in which they regulate it. There’s a new movement among the states, I don’t want to get too constitutional, but it’s called Constitutional Carry. And in those states, if you have the right to have a gun, you have the right to carry it without any extra certificate. There are now 25 of these states. So half of the states have that. So the great majority of states allow law-abiding people to have weapons. They have various restrictions and rules for training, but they have been moving to make it easier and easier. So the federal government is sort of working in the other direction.
Q - A question from Jennifer Malvin. “What influence has the gun lobby had on the purchase and availability of guns? Without the gun lobby, would we see a decrease in the purchase of guns?” Either of you or both?
A - Who is the gun lobby? I mean, five million people bought guns for the first time. It’s ordinary people. I don’t think that the gun lo- The gun lobby would have no power if it weren’t that there were millions of people who supported.
Well, it’s a classic case of interest group politics. It’s kind of an exemplar. What’s generally referred to as the gun lobby is a reference to kind of the big dog in the gun rights realm, which is the National Rifle Association. And the NRA unfortunately has, shall we say, shot itself in the foot pretty badly in the last couple of years through internal problems, gross misspending of the money in its treasury, lots and lots of problems that are their own cause, corruption at the top mostly. But there is a cadre of, there are a core of people around the country, not a numerical majority to be sure, but who feel very strongly about the gun rights issue and for whom the gun issue is like their number one thing. And that’s not like most Americans, most people have multiple issues that they are concerned about or think about. And there’s an old axiom in American politics that says that a small but highly organised minority can often win the day over a large, but fairly apathetic majority. And that’s kind of a summary of gun politics. Public opinion polls show consistently and for nearly 80 years that most Americans favour stronger gun laws than what we have on the books today. Mostly we don’t have that because there’s a numerically small, but highly motivated group of people who will get up off the sofa, will vote based on the gun issue, contribute money, go to a meeting, write a letter, do the things that you need to do to influence the political system that most Americans don’t do, except on those rare moments where the country as a whole kind of becomes outraged by an assassination or a mass shooting. And that’s kind of a capsule summary of, you know, interest group politics as it functions, not just in the gun issue, but for many issues at America.
So if I may kind of sum it all up, it seems to me from my perspective that what we’ve identified here is a cultural problem more than a specific legal problem. And it’s one that relates to individuals, their sense of responsibility, their sense of morality, their sense of concern for each other and for society . It is something that it’s almost impossible to legislate for. And this is a country in which in principle we believe in freedoms and less legislation, except of course there’s an argument that goes both ways. And the beauty of the United States, and if you like, great handicapped, is the system in which you have different states. And yet it’s a strength because if you don’t like the rules of the state that you are in, you can move to another state if you prefer that environment and it’s your choice. But in the meantime, the fact is that this is a society in which there’s a lot of violence and Stephen Pinker thinks we are getting better. And for a while it looked that way. I’m not so certain it is because at this moment, as I see it as a semi-outsider, but now an insider, the division within our society between extremes and between those who don’t want to listen to a point of view and the inability to get consensus on any issue is the most disturbing problem that I think underlies this problem of should we or should we not? How are we, how are we to regulate guns? And on that, I would like to thank you both so much for a really enlightening discussion and I hope we’re going to meet again somewhere unless somebody pulls out a gun. And that would be the end of that.
Not to worry.
Thank you, Rabbi.
Thank you very much. It’s so nice to have a civil conversation.
Well, thank you very, very much. Thank you, Rabbi Rosen. And thank you to our esteemed guests. And I just wanted to say to those of you who missed it, we had the privilege of having Judd Ehrlich on. He produced the documentary “The Price of Freedom.” Jeremy, did you have the opportunity, did any of you have the opportunity to watch that documentary?
No, I didn’t.
I have a small speaking role in that.
Excellent, that’s right. I thought that I recognised you, now you’ve just reminded me and I thought that was an excellent documentary.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you both of you. Thank you. It was really outstanding. Food for thought.
Thank you.
Thank you for having this kind of programme.
Bye.
Bye.
Thank you, bye bye.