Emily Harding
Hello, and welcome, everyone. I’m so glad to be with you today. My name is Emily Harding, and Leslie Vinjamuri was hoping to be here with us today, but she’s asked me to step in, and I am honoured to welcome you, our Chatham House members, and honoured to welcome our esteemed and knowledgeable panel that are going to help us wade through the tricky world of politics of gun control, and this is all happening just shy of two weeks before the election.
As you know, the issue of gun control and gun violence in the States has been a huge issue for many years, starting with the – well, perhaps most notably, kind of, making a shift with the Columbine shooting many years ago, 20 years ago, but it’s a much broader issue. It’s – you know, according to the CDC, more than a million Americans have been shot in the last decade. Gun access triples things – triples suicide risk, and, in spite of all that, in – it may be obviously because of all that, 93% of voters support background checks, according to Quinnipiac. So, it’s quite a divisive issue, it’s – it has, you know, a lot of emotions, a lot of – you know, a lot of feelings around it, and it’s quite a – you know, as I said, a divisive issue, but yet there’s a lot of support for gun control, as well.
So, I’m going to welcome our panel. We have Professor Ian Ayres. He is a Lawyer and an Economist, a Professor at Yale Law School. He has a book coming out shortly, Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights, so keep an eye out for that. We also have Lois Beckett, who’s a Senior Reporter at – for The Guardian in the US. She has been covering this on the ground, and writing a lot of pieces about the narrative of gun control, as well as policy implications, etc. We have Joanna Belanger, who is Political Director at Giffords. You might know that this is the organisation that Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords initiated, after she was tragically shot nine years age at a campaign event, and she’s gone on to inspire lots of people to rethink about gun control and policy and fundraise and organise around the issue. And we have Michael Edison Hayden, who’s a Senior Investigative Reporter from the Southern Poverty Law Center. You might know that the SPLC has something called Hatewatch, which is looking at hate groups across the US and tracking their activities and their organisation, and Michael has been watching the progression and the changes, within White nationalist groups in the States, which, of course, has a huge influence on the gun debate and support for the issue.
So, welcome to all of you. So pleased to have you here with us. I know that I have lots of questions, and I know that our members have lots of questions about this issue, and it’s just the perfect time to be exploring this, given that, again, the election is really just days away. So, what we’ll do here is I will start off with a couple of questions for each of our panellists, but I really want to hear from the members who have logged on, as well. So, feel free to use the Q&A box to enter your questions there. Just keep a note that the ‘raised hand’ function and the ‘chat box’ are disabled for this event, so we’d really like to hear from you in the ‘Q&A’ box.
Right, so, let’s make a start. Ian, I think we’ll start with you. You know, given your background and knowledge of the constitution and the federal and state divide, how much influence do you think a new or the re-elected President might have on gun control, either expanding its rights or curtailing them, and what can you tell us about what levers of power are available at the federal government level versus the state level?
Professor Ian Ayres
Sure. Guns are regulated at both the federal and the state level in the United States. If Trump is re-elected, there’s likely to be stasis, continued stasis in federal law. If the – and if Biden is elected, it’s – Biden by himself can’t really make large changes. But if Democrats take the Senate and Biden wins, I think there’s a substantial chance that we could have universal background checks, possibly an Extreme Risk Protective Order or red flag statute at the federal level. But there is a lot of action that has been happening at the state level. That states that embrace reasonable gun control have been expanding the lists of prohibited people to include people that are – that have been convicted of multiple DWIs or people that are on the terrorist watchlist.
At – but also at the state level, there’s been an expansion of gun rights by some states. Some states have ‘take your gun to work’ laws that prohibit employers from stopping employees from carrying their guns into parking lots, and many states, as we’ve seen over the summer, have ‘open carry’ laws that allow counter protesters to carry weapons to Black Live Matter demonstrations. And, since the Heller decision, written by now deceased Justice Scalia, there is an individual right to bear arms. It is a limited right, though. It is at its strongest in the home, as a right to protect your home, but it – the Heller opinion is very explicit that it can be limited, and the courts are trying to determine the extent to which that right can be burdened by various forms of regulation.
Emily Harding
Right, thank you very much. So, if we see another Trump Presidency, there might be some stasis, and Biden would have to have some major wins in Congress, as well, to see something like universal background checks actually make a mark or make a go of it. Thanks so much for that. So, Lois, I’d love to chat with you a bit and see what are your thoughts on – what are you saying, in terms of how the gun issue is playing out and what kinds of narratives are moving people on this issue, or if there are narratives that are moving people on this issue, and what – you know, what might those look like? And then also, thinking about how compelling and powerful some of the conspiracy theories around guns and gun control can be, how are they playing out, in terms of public opinion?
Lois Beckett
So, I think one of the most important orienting facts, whenever we’re talking about the gun debate in America is that, you know, because American civilians own more guns than we have people in this country, somewhere at least 400 million guns are the estimates that they range, that people think that gun ownership is a majority – sort of, like, you know, being progun is the majority opinion in America. But, if you actually look at the patterns of gun ownership, only, sort of, 20 to 30% of Americans say that they personally own a gun. Only 40% of Americans say that they live in a house with a gun. And one of the most interesting studies done in 2015, estimated that 3% of American adults own half of the country’s firearms. So that you have a lot of people, millions of people, who just maybe own one, own a handgun, and then we – you have the smaller group of about eight million people who have arsenals, who own an average of seven, and they own up to hundreds.
And so, I think what we’re seeing very powerfully in the political landscape now is the tension between, you know, the – what the minority of people who are very, very passionately invested in gun rights want, and majority opinions, which often find that there’s overwhelming support for things like background checks on every gun sale. But I think one of the things that public polling leaves out is the extent to which the gun issue has been successfully controlled by a minority of very – of people who believe very intensely in a totally unregulated Second Amendment, right.
And I think, sort of, the most powerful thing that we’ve seen this year is in Virginia earlier this – in January, Democrats won control of the state government for the first time in decades and immediately announced a decision that they were going to pass a slate of, you know, what would be, on a global stage, very modest gun laws. But in the United States and in Virginia, which thought of itself as a red state, were somewhat aggressive gun laws, including an assault weapon ban. And there was then a, sort of, grassroots uprising by a gun rights activist who organised, who tried to make their locality Second Amendment sanctuaries, and, on Martin Luther King Day, an estimated at least 20,000 armed gunners came and packed the steakhouse in Virginia, in a show of intimidation, saying that they, you know, were not going to accept gun laws. And that, sort of – armed men at steakhouses, we’ve seen that, sort of, ripple out across the country, picked up with coronavirus restrictions, protests picked up in response to George Floyd protests, to an open talk about tyranny and civil war.
So, you know, we have, sort of, strong gun rights activists who are willing to talk about civil war and assassination and, you know, kidnapping the Governor of Michigan, if they don’t get what they want. And, on the other hand, we do ha – and then, you know, Americans – the majority of Americans supportive of some gun control policies. But then, there’s this other factor, which is that many Americans who don’t own guns are open to one day owning them, and so I think one of the most important numbers that we have is that there have been an estimated 17 million new gun sales in the first nine months of this year. We don’t know how many of those people are new gunowners, but a study from California estimated that, of 110,000, you know, people who purchased guns because of coronavirus, about half of those, 47,000, were first-time gunowners.
So, we have, you know, on the one hand, an invigorated gun violence prevention movement that has been building power and building support, particularly around suburban women, in particular, a large minority of people who are willing to take up arms against the government rather than see any strict gun control. And a lot of Americans who, in a time of uncertainty and mistrust in the government and mistrust in their fellow citizens, think that a gun is the best tool to – that they can have. You know, people – Americans were selling out of guns and selling out of toilet paper. That’s our country.
Emily Harding
Selling out of guns and selling out of toilet paper, that says quite a bit, doesn’t it? And I think it’s just so fascinating, you know, that, kind of, rule of the minority voice in all this that you’ve laid out, and, you know, certainly the developments of the militias and what’s happening in Virginia and Michigan, it’s something that Michael would be keeping a close eye on these days. So, Michael, I’m curious, you know, can you say a little bit more about what we know about militias activities in advance of the election, and how are their activities influencing the gun debate in the election overall? And also, I’m curious about, you know, in the wording of the Second Amendment, you know, it’s 27 words with a few errant commas, but rooted deep in there is this notion of insurrection, and I’m wondering how we see this notion manifesting pre-election, and how it might transpire post-election.
Michael Edison Hayden
Yeah, thanks for having me. You know, I think the first thing I wanted to say, even though this does not answer your question, is that, you know, being progun does not necessarily mean that you’re part of a hate group, so I want to make that distinction upfront. I also want to note that gun manufacturers and, you know, progun, pro-Second Amendment groups rely very heavily on White supremacist propaganda in order to drive gun sales. So, that is then – and they use, sort of, the same tools that our President does to stir up his base, which is present these threats – if you think about the 2018 campaign, there was the caravan, right? This idea that non-White people are going to just show up in your living room and start eating your food and taking your belongings and doing who knows what, like, all kinds of, you know, things that play on sexual anxiety and stuff like that, right?
Now we have this Antifa obsession, which really started in 2017 with this fake Antifa civil war, which is a huge thing with InfoWars, it has a huge crossover with militia and gun fans InfoWars stories. And, you know, they had a – there was a fake civil war to drum up – you know, and to drum up interest for these far-right groups, and a lot – drove a lot of gun sales, and there was this idea that Antifa is just coming to your house and they’re going to do this stuff.
And Trump is doing a very similar thing right now, which is, you know, Antifa’s coming to the suburbs, right? They’re going to come and black bloc, they’re just going to come – the anarchists are going to come and they’re going to – you know, they’re going to adopt your family and whatever else, right? So, you know, this is, sort of, built in. This dynamic is built-in, this, kind of, give and take between Trump and these gun manufacturers, so it is the – you know, so the surge that you see in militia activity, which – or that we’ve seen in White supremacist activity is both a product of capitalism and a product of – you know, of Trump and his rhetoric.
Obviously, these – there have been some not very good signs in the leadup to the election. I think everybody has been talking about that, right. Trump said that – made that comment, the stand back and standby comment to the Proud Boys, they can deny whether that was a call to – you know, to do something before the election or do something on the day of the election, right? But certainly the Proud Boys viewed it in their private interactions, you know, as being a cohort, they’re public-facing wanting power, as being a call to, you know, show up at polling places, or to, you know, prepare for things, right?
The Whitmer plot is, again, another thing where Trump says liberate Michigan, you know, he says that Michigan can deal with these people and, you know, months later, we find out that they were plotting to do know – who knows what with her, and, of course, she was both, you know, a talked about Vice-Presidential nominee, right, and somebody who was gaining a national profile as a critic of the President. So, you know, where are we in terms of what’s going to happen and, you know, win the election, you know? I don’t want to speculate too much because I don’t want to be in the business of encouraging this to happen, or, kind of, willing it in to happen by repeatedly saying that this is going to happen, but it’s obviously something we’re very concerned about.
I’ll give you one small example from a story that I did recently, where, you know, there’s – we found a – you know, a bunch of members of The Right Stuff, and I work with some White nationalist group in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. What were they doing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania? These are all folks who are not from there, right, and so it’s obviously – Pennsylvania’s a big swing state, you know, it certainly made me concerned as to why that would be the case. And, you know, hopefully, you know, this – there’s a peaceful transition to power and this stuff doesn’t work. But that dynamic I mentioned about Trump’s rhetoric and producing actual violence in a form or plots of violence, you know, the Kyle Rittenhouse thing, for example, in Kenosha, is real, and it’s had a huge impact on the growth of White nationalist groups in this country, and it’s something that people should be concerned about, I think. How concerned? I would urge you to just – you know, somewhere in the middle is, I guess, what I would say.
Emily Harding
Sure. No, I mean, there’s a lot of, you know, alarming trends happening there, and just a quick follow-on question, so, you know, the groups have been perhaps more active and have tried higher level things. Do you have a sense as to how that might play with voters? I mean, you know, some of that can – that could drum up more interest in this, you know, kind of activity, and, you know, gun ownership, or it could make, kind of, people say, you know, “I really, really don’t want to be part of that.” Do you have a sense of how that might be affecting the electorate?
Michael Edison Hayden
Well, I mean, it’s really, really difficult to say definitively, and people don’t like White supremacy. It doesn’t – you know, or at least overt White supremacy. However, you know, I mean, this, kind of – this, sort of, more subtle White supremacy, you know, dog whistling and stuff like that, has been really popular and has really been, you know, an effective – you know, has been a – been made effective politics for the GOP throughout the Trump era. And what I would say about that is that I – every time, you know, issues of Trump’s racism or his, you know, unwillingness to deny – unwillingness to disavow White supremacists comes up, it seems like a bad political issue for him, it puts him on defence. So, my instinct is to say that – is, you know, it’s not popular with him, but the point of it may not be that, right? The point of it is to make people scared to vote, it’s to make people scared to speak up about, you know, systemic racism, to speak up about, you know, the things that they’re seeing in their community. I mean, that’s the reason to stoke it, and we’ll see how, you know, effective that really is as a tool. You know, and, so far, it looks, as if where everything we can see, a lot of people are voting, so…
Emily Harding
Right, yeah, indeed. Yeah, it’s election season as opposed to election day. So, Joanna, I just want to turn to you to – you know, you’re on the ground, you’re organising, you’re working in advocacy on the issue, and I’m wondering if you can shed some light on, you know, given the fact that guns are such a divisive issue, and the moment you say “gun” or “Second Amendment,” you know, people have already decided what’s going to come out of their mouths next. How – are there ways that you’ve seen to really penetrate into the middle of this issue, and have there been candidates maybe locally who’ve had success with certain messages on that front, or organisations? And then we heard a little bit about some of the state level developments from Ian, but I’m wondering what you’ve seen in your work.
Joanna Belanger
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of this is – as we’ve heard from other panellists, you know, this is an issue that I would say, in the past, has certainly been something of a zero-sum game for voters, and to your point, like, you’re very Black and White to many voters. I think we’ve seen that really shift in the last four or five years. Hillary Clinton was the first Presidential candidate we’ve seen in a long time who’s so proudly run on a gun safety message and didn’t shy away from it. While, on the other side, Trump was endorsed pretty early from – by the NRA. They spent over $30 million on his campaign, which, sort of, stunted by today’s numbers of how much money Biden has, but, at the time, was a pretty shocking number. They were the biggest outside spender that cycle, and they spent over $50 million in 2016 all-in, on all the races.
If we look at, sort of, how that has continued, in 2018, of course, voters were thinking about Parkland and the incredible students that created March For Our Lives and the wake of that. The other, I was, sort of, thinking about this, this morning, you know, between the times that Americans went to the ballot box in 2016 and when they were getting ready to go in 2018, we’d seen the huge tragic massacre at the Route 91 festival in Las Vegas. Not long after that, there was a large shooting that folks may remember at Sutherland – in Sutherland Springs, Texas, at a church, where a shooter came in, this was just weeks after Las Vegas, and opened fire on a church service, and then, about two months after, was Parkland. I’m so – yes, was Parkland.
So, I think what we’ve seen is this has really shifted from an issue that – even in, like, 2015/2016, we would, sort of – when we were talking to voters and we were doing research on this, if we asked about it, it was something that voters would talk about their concern around. It wasn’t something that would – particularly the gun safety side, it wasn’t something that would naturally get volunteered as, like, a reason I’m going out to vote. Whereas it was still something – with Republican voters, with the, sort of, vocal minority that Lois was talking about, it was volunteered really quickly as, “This is the reason that I’m going and I’m going to vote for a Republican, is because I want to protect my Second Amendment.” And we’ve really seen a shift where Democrats were turning out, in 2016 and 2018, because they wanted to vote for gun safety, they wanted to vote to strengthen gun laws and, at the same time, we were seeing protecting the Second Amendment just fall a little bit further down the list on the Republican side. I suspect we will see that maybe pop back up on the Republican side this cycle, and we might see both of them.
But I think one thing that happened in the – you know, in the last two election cycles or so is that what we had always seen in our research was in the wake of a high profile, really awful shooting, which, unfortunately, we had a lot of them to study, we would see that voters, particularly women, particularly parents, grandparents, it would be in the back of their mind for a few weeks afterwards, and it would – if they would think about, “How can we pass background checks? What sort of laws can go into effect?” Right, we would see outlawing bump stocks be very front of mind, right after in the wake of Las Vegas, but then people would, sort of, forget about it.
There wasn’t time to stop thinking about the effects of these – that these laws could have, and that – and, sort of, the urgency of passing stronger gun laws. This went from something that was a fleeting concern in an – the head of, sort of, a busy parent, something that, like, sort of, stayed lodged in the back of your mind all the time. And we saw that, earlier this year, before coronavirus hit, we did a lot of research of suburban women, both gunowners and non-gunowners, and both alike, undecided voters really mostly. So this was where we saw this also start to shift from just being Democratic base voters to people who were open to voting for Trump, but also, at the time, the TBD Democratic Presidential candidate, they were – this had become something that they always thought about.
We really heard a lot of women and some focus groups talk about, you know, one day realising, about a year ago, that every time they entered a public place, whether it was their church, or their grocery store, or a movie theatre, or a farmers’ market, they, sort of, made a plan of what they would do, and it was some – it was things – these were habits that had changed, and that was starting to affect voting. And then, on top of that, before the school closures in the States, the anxiety that we were seeing in parents and in children about the lockdown drills, it wasn’t even just, “What if my student is the next one to have a shooting in their school?”, it was, like, “I see the effect it is having on my six-year-old when they come home and tell me what it’s like to have a lockdown drill.” And they know that they have to, like, hide behind a desk because a shooter may come in and kill them, or they might – you know, if they’re the fastest one to hide in a bathroom stall, they will not get killed, but their friend will. I mean, the stories of this are really heartbreaking, as I’m sure everyone can imagine, and, unfortunately, have – may have experienced themselves.
So, this is where we saw – I got a little off topic, and I apologise, but this is where we saw, like, this – the rhetoric hasn’t changed so much from us as the mood has changed, and I think that has allowed an opening and a willingness to listen to what a lot of elected officials have been saying all along, which is, “We’re not trying to take your guns, we are not trying to create a big registration or outlaw guns. We are trying to pass responsible gun laws. We are trying to pass background checks, we are trying to” – as Ian was talking about, right, background checks, Extreme Risk Protection Orders, these are the sorts of things that would make it harder for people to have those guns in those instances. And the public was more willing to listen, and it was in the media more often because these shootings got, unfortunately, more frequent for a while.
I do think that was coupled with, like, sort of, the failing of the NRA, partly of their own making, partly because the politics was shifting. There have been more gun violence prevention groups of recent because – March for our Lives, Giffords, Everytown, Brady, most of us either grew or came out of the wake of Manchin-Toomey in 2013, after Sandy Hook. So, I think there was, sort of, like, a catchup to the – and influence that the NRA has had for 40 years, and we’re just seeing, sort of, the first – we’re all still in the first decade of this work, and so voters are catching up, as we are.
Candidates are doing this well up and down the ballot. I think some of the senate races, where you’re seeing Democrats succeed in really interesting places, Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, MJ Hegar in Texas. MJ Hegar is running a – to unseat John Cornyn, who is, like, a top NRA darling in the Senate right now. He’s received over $4 million. MJ is a veteran, she’s a gunowner, she’s a survivor of gun violence, both when she was a child and in the military, and she’s just so unapologetically for gun safety. She’s a wonderful candidate that talks about this in a really heartfelt way and is able to say, “I believe in the Second Amendment, but I also believe in responsibility with guns,” as Lois was, sort of, talking about before.
Emily Harding
Right, right, yeah, and, I mean, you know, I think what you’ve just highlighted is how deep into the psyche of Americans gun violence now is, in terms of how they operate in their daily lives. I mean, one of the statistics that stood out, as I was looking at the Giffords website, which is a fountain of useful information on gun violence statistics, was that 60% of teenagers in the US worry, daily, I think, about gun violence, which is a really shocking number. And, you know, it’s almost – yeah, it’s something we can’t get away from necessarily, and also, just considering the number of suicides that take place by gun violence, and that that is affecting more and more people in America.
But I want to – you mentioned the NRA, Joanna, and we have a question from one of our members about the NRA, and she’s asked me to read this aloud, so just to the panel, “How does the NRA influence members of Congress on gun policy? What are the legal regulations regarding what lobbies can and cannot do? And are those rules being broken or are the regulations themselves not fit for purpose?” And I guess what I might add to that, too, is, you know, if the NRA is potentially losing influence, what – are there any, kind of, gun control advocacy lobbying groups that are emerging as a powerful resource? So, Lois, I don’t know if you have particular thoughts on the NRA and this question?
Lois Beckett
Yeah, I can tackle some parts of this. I mean, I think that – I mean, the idea that there are lobbying regulations that could fix the problem of gun violence in America, I think conveys more the way that the media has used the NRA as a shorthand, to construct a very simple narrative that, you know, the NRA is bad, and Americans want gun control, and if we could just stop this handful of lobbyists from handing out cash, then America would have sensible gun control laws again. And I think, you know, that has – that narrative, I think, is shifting and has changed recently, but I think it just, you know, profoundly mischaracterises what is actually going on and what are the real stakes of this debate.
I think one of the most important books that has come out over the past couple of years, there have been a number that have really tried to reframe the gun control debate and, sort of, what – you know, ask what are we really fighting over? One is by Jonathan Metzl, a Public Health Professor, called Dying of Whiteness, and another is by Roxanna Dunbar-Ortiz, who is a Historian writing about settler colonialism and the role of White supremacy and guns. And what both of these books argue, a growing argument in the scholarly community, is that the stakes of the gun control debate are not about regulation and not about congressional policy. That the stakes really here are the extent to which America is a White supremacist country, and guns are a marker of our racial hierarchies, and a marker of our racial anxieties, and so that you see in all kinds of actually quite complicated ways how White Americans and Americans of other races use guns as a marker of citizenship, who is recognised as a legitimate citizen, who can carry a gun in public, who can, you know, carry an AR-15 into the Capitol Building and be, you know, recognised and have the police statement say after the fact, “Well, they were just protesting.” You know, “They were just loud, they weren’t violent,” and who, you know, picks up a gun in a Walmart if you’re Black and can get shot as an active shooter, you know, just for handling a gun, or for handling a toy gun as a child.
And so, I think, you know, there’s been an increasing recognition that this is not a procedural or a technical problem, and that this is not fundamentally a problem about money, that this is a problem about actually, you know, Americans – what Americans fear, and particularly what White Americans fear, and their beliefs about what they need to protect themselves and keep themselves safe, and what price, in the matter of their own lives, and the matter of other people’s lives. They will pay for continuing to have guns as a mark of White racial power in this country, and I think, as Ian was pointing out, you know, in the more than 30,000 gun deaths each year, more than 20,000 of those are gun suicides, and that’s primarily white men, older White men, younger White men, dying of suicide, you know, disproportionately in, sort of, rural progun states.
And so, that’s the argument of Jonathan Metzl’s book, is that – you know, that White Americans have guns, in order to enforce the unequal distribution of opportunity in this country. But that having those weapons, sort of, for the imagined fear that, you know, 150 miles from Ferguson, someone’s going to come and burn their house, and, as a protest, a Black person is going to come. The cost of that is actually, you know, 20,000 gun suicides a year, and that this commitment to racial hierarchy and to armed racial hierarchy kills more White people than anything else.
Emily Harding
So, maybe a – maybe the NRA just being a shorthand for some of the racial implications and drivers of the current gun debate. I’m going to turn to Courtney Rice, and I’m going to – he’s had an upvoted question here looking at election results of Democratic Party administration. So, I’m going to ask him to ask this question live. So, Courtney, if you could unmute yourself.
Courtney Rice
Hi there, thank you for joining us this afternoon. I was curious, if the election results in a Democratic Party administration and Congress, and we do, as a result, see gun reform, is there any way such safe – such reforms could be safeguarded, or are we resigned to a cycle – safeguarded against future Republican administrations, that is, sorry, or are we resigned to a cycle of reform and counter reform?
Emily Harding
Great, thank you so much, and I am going to put that question to Ian ‘cause you – in the pre-session, you kicked off a little bit of a discussion about potential gun reforms, so if you can take this one for us, that would be wonderful.
Professor Ian Ayres
Sure. It’s difficult to have them – reforms, gun safety reforms, entrenched. The prospect of a constitutional amendment is very low, that’s one kind of entrenchment. The – you can get a little bit more durability to reforms by influencing the courts and that the Judges that have a broader view of what is reasonable gun safety regulation could make them long – more – a bit more resistant. But I think the real possibility for entrenchment and making them more durable would come from changing the public’s mind. We’ve seen, just getting the Obamacare in place, people learned that it is something that they liked, getting same sex marriage in place, even though that is now a constitutional view, that what’s important here is that the surveys have changed, and this is picking up on earlier comments here. I think there’s a great prospect for people to treat new gun safety regulations like they do with our 1930s law prohibiting machine guns. There’s no movement to repeal that, and if we can start finding that other gun safety regulations have broad-based support, that’s the safest way to – practicable way to deal with entrenchment.
Emily Harding
Right, brilliant, thank you so much for that, and that touches on an – a question that we had about reform from Edward Villear, so thank you, Ed and Courtney, for raising that question about reform. Another question from Tanji Morgan, who she asked me to read this out loud, is “Can you speak to the increase in first-time African-Americans purchasing guns this year?” So, this was touched on a little bit earlier, so Joanna, would you have thoughts on this maybe, or Lois, I think you perhaps mentioned that earlier?
Lois Beckett
Yeah, I mean, important to know that we don’t have anything more than anecdotal data on this point, but that, in the survey from 2015, there was indication that there were – there was growth in purchasing of handguns in more urban areas and among women, suggesting different demographics, people who were not White men, who obviously have the highest rate of gun ownership in America, were interested in buying guns. I mean, anecdotally, there have been a lot of stories this year, not just on Black Americans buying guns, but earlier this year on Asian Americans buying guns, as there was an uptake in xenophobia linked to coronavirus. You know, so I think, just briefly speaking, like, Americans are taught to see guns as tools that can fix problems that their government won’t solve, including this rampant xenophobia, and so some Americans will turn to that tool when nothing else is available.
Emily Harding
Right, so hard to really get an assessment of what those numbers might look like and what the contours of this uptick in gun ownership can – it really looks like or what it might mean, but just noting that, anecdotally, it is happening, which is pretty significant. So, I have a question, I’m going to ask Tatiana San Miguel to please unmute and ask your question, and if there’s – you know, I’m not sure who is best placed to answer this particular one. So, I’m just going to ask the panel to unmute if you have some thoughts.
Tatiana San Miguel
Thank you, Emily. If there is a development in the US towards stricter gun ownership rules, could that be reflected in other countries like Brazil?
Emily Harding
So, Lois, you – do you have some thoughts on that?
Lois Beckett
Just – so, a quick thought. So, yes, I mean, one thing that is interesting is that the NRA has played a global role, and in Brazil in particular, in working with gun rights organisations there to undermine attempts to pass gun control laws. So, I think, in a lot of ways, you know, Brazil and the United States right now, there are so many parallels in our history, in the ascendency of, sort of, right-wing Christian movements in the latter half of the last century, in the overlap of certain ideologies and gun rights in our different histories of slavery and racism.
So, I think, you know, one question for me is, if the NRA is weakened, will that have effects in other countries where the NRA has worked in the past to support gun rights? But I think very much – I think Americans often tend to compare our rates of gun violence to Europe or Japan and say that those are the parallels for what we should be talking about, in terms of understanding our problems with gun violence and the solutions. But I think, actually, the United States and Brazil, both of which have very, very serious and high rates of gun violence, probably are a more accurate parallel, in terms of thinking of diagnosing what our problem is, with the violence that we deal with, and what the solutions might be.
Joanna Belanger
And the other thing I have noticed, how much our guns are trafficked over borders down into South and Central America, and we’re also having an increase in problems with ghost guns, which are untraceable guns, and the more we can – like, there are some of these laws that are getting past the local and state levels, but we really need federal backup for any of them to be actually effective, and that’s something that we’re hoping to see more of if things go our way in two weeks.
Emily Harding
Right, right. Thank you so much for that. So, we just have a minute left, so if we go over a couple of minutes. I’m going to ask for a lightning round here. Are you optimistic, pessimistic, or neither, maybe somewhere in-between, about the broad trajectory of gun control in the US? Are we trending in the right direction, or are we somewhere in the murky middle, or do you think we are not trending in a direction you would like to see? So, Michael, I’m going to start with you.
Michael Edison Hayden
Sure. I mean, you know, it’s a little bit tough to be either, you know, hardily optimistic or pessimistic here, but what I will say is, you know, I am optimistic that advocates of gun control are winning the debate, you know, at least nationally. I am more pessimistic about being able to implement gun control without, you know, bouts of violence then cropping up. Now, if you look at the extent to which rheto – like as I mentioned, you know, in the leadup, rhetoric has been heated, and that has led to a number of terror attacks in the US that, you know, should be pretty concerning. And to, sort of, cross over between, sort of, the AR-15 being the symbol of American freedom and this type of thing being marketed and, you know, being used – well, if we look at the AK-47 type gun in El Paso, but being used in the Tree of Life synagogue, for example, you know, being used in Poway synagogue in California.
These things are connected, and I do think, again, broadly speaking, people are getting sick of living under this fear, and they are – I think it says something that the messaging from extremist groups or extremist propagandists has been that, like, oh, you know, this shooting incident that’s harkening everywhere didn’t happen at all, right? The false flag thing that you get from InfoWars, that they are forced to, you know, deny reality, I think is – you know, broadly speaking, I’m confident the American people are going to embrace something safer. But I am, you know, obviously increasingly concerned about the potential for extremists to resist that in ways that maybe violent. So, well, that is my…
Emily Harding
Right, so broadly optimistic about the debate, but a little – feeling a little…
Michael Edison Hayden
Not necessarily optimistic about American culture.
Emily Harding
A little precarious on the violence that might come with that, and, Michael, I know that you might need to drop off, so if you do need to drop off before the end, thank you very much. And, Lois, lightning round, optimistic – are you optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in the middle?
Lois Beckett
I mean, I think, similarly to Michael, you know, I think the trajectory of public opinion over the longer term, over ten or 20 years, does seem like it is shifting towards more and more scepticism about guns, just as we’ve seen a lot of movement on scepticism about police violence and more Americans enthusiastic about shrinking police departments, about saying that maybe having a Officer of the State with a gun is not the best solution to maj – like, the majority of small incidents and problems that pop up in our cities all the time.
But I think, you know, like Michael, I’m very concerned about acts of terrorism related to gun control and related to this election. I think we are definitely going to continue to see some violence, and so I think, from my point – you know, obviously, you know, for people who spend a lot of time talking about domestic terrorism and talking to people who are actively afraid about the possibility of civil war, which has been talked about in the past year in a way that has never been talked about before, you know, interviewing, you know, a college kid with a gun at the Virginia Capitol, saying, like, “I’m starting to think that, like, insurrection or civil war could happen in my lifetime.” That’s very scary, but it’s very possible now to deescalate from that, and so I think my hope is just that we don’t see enough violence, enough of these acts of terror, to make it possible for us to go back, and just let it go and deescalate back into the normal level of American violence, which is still quite high.
Emily Harding
Right, right. Joanna.
Joanna Belanger
I am not normally the optimistic one in a group, but I’m going to say I’m feeling optimistic. It’s not eas – it’s not possible to work for Gabby Giffords, who was not supposed to live the year, and see where she is today and not be – not stay positive about the people who have dedicated their lives and their – all of their time and their careers to making – educating everybody and making sure that people are fighting to fight for stronger gun live – laws, excuse me. I also think, while of course what’s happening right now feels, sort of – feels so unprecedented, and I never would have guessed that we were facing the calls for a civil war and the kidnapping plots against Governors Whitmer and Northam, and the Mayor in Wichita, I also didn’t think, after Las Vegas and Parkland, which felt like incredibly low points to be working on this issue, that we would be, you know, in a moment where our organisation, and whereas someone who works on the politics of this, was in a place where we were working so closely with Senate candidates in Kansas and South Carolina and North Carolina and Texas, and congressional candidates across the country, and state legislatures in Texas and Iowa and Minnesota and places. So, I do think that the politics and the culture of this are shifting faster than I thought they would, but this blowback is real, but I will call myself optimistic about things to come here.
Emily Harding
Fantastic. I like that we’re turning a natural maybe pessimist into an optimist on this issue. So, Ian, last words, lightning round, are you feeling optimistic?
Professor Ian Ayres
I’m also optimistic, and not just because the surveys are changing, not just because gun safety candidates are winning, but I’m particularly heartened that red states are more open to passing gun safety regulations than maybe ever before, or at least in – within recent memory. Florida, after Parkland, passed a package of gun safety regulations, including Extreme Risk Protection Orders. Virginia just passed a package of gun reform, and there are a variety of issues where progun people are – a majority are willing to support reform, not just universal background checks, but trying to get the guns out of dangerous people’s hands. One of the things that I’m very excited about is that 11 states, including red states like Louisiana and Tennessee, have introduced bills to give people the right to temporarily give up their ability to purchase and possess guns, and these self-restriction laws, which can really help on gun suicide, have now been enacted in both Washington State and Virginia. That’s good news.
Emily Harding
Fantastic. Great. So, it’s a difficult discussion we’ve just had, you know, there’s a lot – the violence is real, but the long arch of this is trending in the right direction, it sounds like, and some very positive things happening on the local level around this issue.
Thank you to all of you so much for contributing today, Ian and Joanna and Lois, and, of course, Michael had to drop off for another event. Thank you so much for your time and your input on this. Members, thank you so much for coming along, I’m sorry, there’s a couple of questions that we didn’t get to. There’s always more discussion than we can really fit into these sometimes, but thanks very much, and have a great day and we’ll see you next time. Take care.
