People should read. Whether or not you haveer and tiers or experience on this extremely important subject. Gun violence, american violence, global violence. And so id like to actually just begin with the title. Violence inside us. And the early portion of the book where you take the reader through something of a short primer on the biology and the history of violence, and so i wanted to ask you, why begin there . Why did you choose to begin with the nature of violence itself. Guest well, thank you for doing this and really glad to toe be joining you to talk about the book. I start with this question of what kind of violence is inside us, because for me it was the first real thorny question that i came upon when i began what has become the new mission of my political career. Maybe well have a chance to talk about this a little built but while the book is mostly a history of american violence and a conversation about how we overcome that history, it also involves my own political story. Since the shooting in connecticut in 2012. I had been a pretty prodigious has a lawmaker before hand but never had an emotional connection like i do now, and it was those days after the shooting in sandy oak sandy hook when realized it we my political calling and asked questions. The question i asks myself is not different than many others ask themselves when they heard but this young man, with no prior history of violence, no conceivable clear motive, walking into an Elementary School and choosing to gun down 20 first graders. How on earths can a human being do that . How does the brain work in a way that convinces yourself that is a logical next step . And so i really wanted to start the book there and talk about how the brain compels to us violence because, well, 99. 9 of us would never, ever conceive of mass murder, almost every single one of us has had some moment in our life where we contemplated violence or actually undertook an act of violence, maybe at a kid on a school yard, maybe it was in a fight with a relative, and i think it is just really important for us to understand that throughout human history, our species has been more prone to violence hand almost any other animal species, and it has long been a way in which humans organize themselves, maintain dominance over others, and they put themselves in a position to procreate, and thats a discussion how somebody like adam lan lab s come thursday position of concussioning mass murder, the way broken brains operate is important and also just understanding the way that a normal brain operates and how violence really is central to the human story going back thousands of years. Host its a great point, and i think that an understanding of violence, to properly understand it you need to have this grounded, and i think its hard to really appreciate the ubiquity of violence and our historical struggle with it if you dont understand that to some extent violence is not the exception, its in fact been the norm throughout the course of human history. And so i found that particularly compelling. Lets talk about violence in the United States in particular. Most people know that in terms of homicides the United States is something of an outlier, having much higher murder rates than any other wealthy nation. Why is that . Guest so, the book also spends a lot of time trying to explore the reason why america is a more violent well talk but suicide and extental shooting but clearly an outlier when it comes to the homicide rate. And the book talks pull out the fact that that has not always been the case in the United States. For much of americas early history, we were not a global outlier. It wasnt until the middle 1800s, in which americas homicide rate started to diverge from the rest of the world, and it never came back to the ground. We have been a global outlier now for 150 years. And there are two things that explain why those numbers in the out versus global numbers started to separate. The first is the expansion of slavery in the United States. Invention of cotton gin, we brought more slaves to the United States which compels to us use more violence as a mechanism to Order Society and america early on became used to violence, it was a normal mechanism to organize our economy and half of the in behalf of the nation and used in high numbers in the north for the same reason for similar reasons, and violence just became normalized. The second thing that happens the middle 1800s is we have the first wave of new immigrants to the United States. And it is these new immigrants, fighting for economic space, that also begins to expand the rate of violence, and then i said two things, really a third thing that happened in the middle 1800s and that is the invention of the selfrepeating handgun, a behindgun that can be used without reloading every single time and be concealed in your pocket. The United States didnt have any history of gun regulation and those guns very quickly spread throughout the United States. They were romanticized by the people who are selling them, and these sort of three things, the expansion of gun ownership, the greater ability to hide and conceal weapons, the entrance of new migrant groups fighting for economic space, and normalization of violence that came out of americas expansion of slave population, all starts to move the rate of violence and the rate of gun homicides in a dramatic upward direction that america essentially never recovers from. Youre not saying that guns are the only reason that the United States has higher rates than average. Youre saying the reason that our rate of gun violence and violence in general are so much higher is because of these two things. To be clear, its your position in the book that the United States would be a more violent than average country even without that. Guest going to be maybe a surprising concession to some who listen to me talk about guns over and over again on nightly news programs. I knew some of this going into the research for the book but it would certainly reinforced for me throughout my course of study, yes, the premise of the book is that america was always going to be a more violent place. And so the question is when how the this smolder fire of violence, what should you do . The last thing you should do is to throw gasoline on that smoldering fire and the gasoline in this case was the explosion of firearms ownership, and the sort of antipathy to any kind of regulation that would make sure they only fall into the hands of folks who are responsible, and so my argument in this book is that in fact we have an elevated responsibility in the United States of america to control violence because our history of slavery, our history of sort of a racist caste system that was reinforces by violence, and our role with the melting pot of ethnicity that tends throughout history to increase rates of violence puts news a position where violence was already going to be elevated and so we should be careful about taking further steps to inflame those already elevated level of violence. Host yes. I wanted to ask you about another surprising concession that you made in the book. Found it interesting that you say that the three Supreme Court decisions, district of columbia was rightly decided and for the audience they thats 2008 case where the court recognize an individuals right to bear arms that was not necessarily connected with any militia or military service. Id like to hear more about that. Why was it rightly decided and what should that mean for advocates of gun control moving forward . Guest the first gun control law in the state of connecticut was a law compelling that individuals attending Church Services and town meetings in the state of connecticut must be armed. Thats probably surprising to folks who now come to connecticut and find some of the strictest laws protecting he ownership of prohibiting the ownership of weapons by certain individual. In fact in the early days of connecticuts history when there was a fear of conflict with native american tribes there was a requirement that people actually openly carry weapons, and i think it speaks to two things. One, it speaks to what i believe to be a common law right that was commonly understood by our Founding Fathers that individuals should be able to carry weapons. They wrote a Second Amendment that is horribly convolute, impossible to understand and conceivably argued to really only relate to mill militia, but if you head the whole constitutional history youll fine our Founding Fathers thought that people had the basic right to own weapons. But what that connecticut law tells you is that right was heavily regulated. In that instance the regulation was a requirement that people own guns but there were far more laws during the early days of our republic in which people were prohibited from owning guns or required to register your weapons or or your gunpowder. A heavy regulation of weapons during our early days which tells you our furnishing fathers didnt thing that legislators could takeway your right to own guns but they could heavily condition your right to own a weapon or could keep weapons out of the hands of certain individuals. Think thats a smart place for the movement to land, which is to say we have no velocity agenda to take air you were weapon but from the beginning of this countrys history we have been engaged in make sugar that only the right people own weapons and only the right weapons in private hands. Thats a safe place where probably 7080 of the country are. Also happens to be what the constitution commands. Host very good. You talk but the nra in the book and at one point the nra was michigan the most powerful if not the most powerful special Interest Group in the country. Would you say thats true today and why or why not . Guest its not true today. It is not true because we have spent the last seven years building up a movement around combating gun violence that that methodically become more and more powerful and has now overtaken the nra. Think we have also done a very good job of exposing the nra. One of the thing is talk about in this book is how the nra has change over the years. Starts as a marksmanship organization and attempts to try to make soldiers more effective with their weapons and to do the same thing for folks who are hunting or shooting for sport, and then this guy comes along, hard land carter who i tell the story of, and he host fascinating part of the story. Could you tell a little bit about that . I dont think many people know that part of the story. Guest so, harlan is a fascinating story. Harlan comes out of the texas border country, his whole family has worked for and around u. S. Border protection as. As a young man he has runin with some young mexican youths who he thinks have committed a crime against his family and he confronts them, and in that confrontation he ended up shooting one of the boys dead on. On a technicality he doesnt go to jail but stays on his record such that at the actually changes his name. He moves one vowel in his name from an a to an o so that he can paper over his past. He eventually joins the nra and kind of objects to the idea that the nra is sort of staying out of politics, has sort of goes along with the early gun laws of the 1960s coming out of the wave of assassinations and in the 1970s he and a group of radicals take over the nra. They mount a coup in which they pack an annual Nra Convention in cincinnati and outvote the folks who really saw the nra as an advocate or gun control, an advocate of responsible gun ownership and harlon takes the nra and blasts it into the right wing moment and seize this opportunity for the nra to not just stand for reland regulations of gun and also to link arms with the antigay right, antiea, the anticivil Rights Movement and he sort of invents the nra as the leader of a broad right wing political infrastructure in this country that brooks no compromise on gun laws and really is a facinating story about an organization that was pretty sleepy politically until in the 70s and all of a sudden becomes the epicenter of americas sort of right wing antiregulation movement. Thats what the nra is in 2013 when i First Encounter it in our attempts to get the background checks bill passed in the wake of sandy hook. Host what is the future of the naar senator where do you see the organization in three years or five years or ten years. Guest the second part of the nras story is one that sort of plays out in the last 20 years, and what happened is the nra starts to rely more and more on the gun industry for donations and the gun industry find itself in an interesting position, install the book. The gun industry has to deal with a changing commercial sector around firearms purchases. Back in 1980, half of American Household had a gun and so you could make a lot of money just selling one gun to a lot of households. But today, less than a third of American Households own a gun and its going down, so the gun industry now has to make its money by selling expensive weapons to a smaller number of people and the gun industry goes along. So the gun industry sort of helps create this mythology of the government out to get your guns so you better load up and create a private arsenal before they ban all the weapons you have been buying. So the gun industry changes is against background makes thats the way they resident catalogue your guns and come after them. Theyve vehemently oppose restrictions on assault weapons and get way out of step with members. Theyre in step with the gun industry who needs them to be more radical but way out of step with their members and way out of step with the broad middle of the american public. And so the reason that the gun industry has become i think estreattied at trophied and become impotent because we have done a great job and in particular kids who have taken control of the antigun Violence Movement and has done a great job of exposing that, letting people know the gun lobbies fighting for stuff even its own members dont believe in and thats a consequence of the gun industry becoming reliant on the industry and the industry changing ifound this mass nateing how the interests of the nra align with the interests of the gun industry, which aligns with the interests interests of conservatives in the Republican Party and it reminds me of this classic challenge you hear but politicness United States which is that wellsupport evidence special Interest Group can overcome the will of the silent majority and i want to ask you, how do we overcome that in the area of gun control but also how do we deal with it more generally in washington . Guest well, part of it is having confidence that were right. Another story i tell in the book is the story of the 1994 midterm elections. Its been sort offing myologist it that democrats lost control of the congressin 1994 because the voted for the assault weapons ban. Thatsened of fundamentally not triumph assault weapons ban was wildly popular in 1994. Ronald reagan was one of its primary cheerleaders. All sorts of thing thats Clinton Administration did that were unpopular. The assault weapons ban was in the one of. The but the nra does a beautiful job in 795 and 96 with he help of people like bill clinton to create this story that it was the assault weapons ban that caused democrats to lose, and so that is sort of created a new reality in which for 20plus years democrats just stayed away from the issue of guns because we thought it was political loser. It was never a political loser and it is only been recently we have started to believe the polls which have always developed us people support restrictions on assault weapons. They love universal background checks and that brings me to another story, which it that of lucy mcbath. Lost a son through a horrific episode of gun violence. She becomes active in the antigun Violence Movement and decides to run for a congressional seat in georgia held by republicans for 40 years. And she decided she is not going to hold back himself is going to run as an antigun violence advocate, salt weapons bon and universal background checks and everybody things she is crazy and big her not to run, and she wins. She wins because guess what in people like bans or military style weapons, they love background checks, and part of how were going to win is just having faith that were right and by going out and rung more candidates like lucy mcbath and thats why we won control of the house in 2018 and well win control of the senate 2020 because were just unapologetically running on these issues in a way we didnt back when i first ran for congress in 2006. Host i want to move from politics to policy for a moment. And in the book back up. A colleague of mine said United States doesnt have one gun violence problem it hat several and we have four challenges, urban gun violent, domestic gun violence, suicide and Mass Shootings. Would you agree and how are the challenges similar or different. Guest i i would woo agree with those categories and i think maybe not coincidencally we see in my book i work through each of them one at a time. Theres a chapter for urban gun violence, a chapter for Mass Shootings and then sections devoted to suicide and Domestic Violence. Lets start with what unites them and thats personality. What unites them is a country that is awash in guns. What we know is that if you have an easier access to a weapon, you are more likely to shoot your wife, youre more likely to commit suicide, more likely to commit murder in a city or an urban center and you are more likely to be a mass shooter, and so we have to accept that if we were smarter about gun regulation, if we had less guns in the country, less powerful weapons in the country, all of this numbers would come down. And i sort of go through methodically the evidence that suggests that. For instance, have universal background checks, have much lower suicide rights, lower Domestic Violence rates, connecticut has four times less gun homicides than florida does and that is not coincidental to the fact our gunner laws are much our gun laws are much stronger than florida. But you mention the differences and there are too many to discuss in this call but in this event but lets just take one. The difference between gun homicide and suicide. Gun homicides happen in this country primarily or most often to africanamerican males. Gun suicide in this country is primarily an epidemic of white males. And its important for us to sort of explore how we get to both places. Gun homicides in this country sort of tend to track a handful of neighborhoods, neighborhood with huge rates of poverty, high levels of illegal gun usage, whereas suicides tend to be a little built more of a rural phenomenon, and in the book i argue is probably connected to the sort of loss of economic power that white males have experienced over the last 50 years, the recent trend in suicide tells you its not just but depression or a track event. Its a loss of connection to your community and that loss of connection for white males as an Economic Security has been rob from them has been substantial and thats why you see more suicides. Frankly the results of black people in this country having been sub gub jugated for years sub upgated for years they dont subtly feel a loss of connection or economic power because they never halls the economic power and that explains the high homicide rate but because they have tremendously elevated rates of poverty and a sort of cycle of marginality produce bid a racial criminal Justice System and other factor you see high homicides so certain things connect them. Certain factors explain them why theyre different. Host i want to ask but emphasis, in your book you discuss urban violence, Domestic Violence and suicide in one chapter but you give mass shoot as chapter of its own. In 2018 according to mother jones magazine, Mass Shootings killed 80 people. And obviously each one of those deaths was a horrible tragedy. Put sea time there were over 16,000 other homicides in the u. S. According to the fbi. The majority of which were due to urban violence. Why do you focus so much on Mass Shootings. Its a great question. And its a book devoted, the proportional amount of space to gun people who die from gun usage based on the numbers, 80 of the book would be about suicide because that where is the vast majorities of gun deaths are in this country. Im trying be true to entry point for Many Americans to this debate, and the fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, the Mass Shootings do command the nations attention when they happen. And they are the reason why all of a sudden today we have a movement nat that is on the press pest of changing the nations laws for the better and hi hope is the antigun Violence Movement can be merged with the black lives Matter Movement because as i discuss in the book you cant make Real Progress on gun homicide rates in this country especially in the cities without doing some social and economic work in addition to working on gun laws. I do have this full chapter devoted to the issue of Mass Shootings because the reality is that right now, thats a lot of the reason that people enter this movement, thats the reason why moms demand action started, the reason why the Giffords Organization started. Thats what command the attention on tv. And thats what drives the legislative progress. The moments in which we have gotten closest to a universal brown checks bill was in the wake of sandy hook and el paso and so while i dont like the fact that this country only cares about gun violence when a mass shooting happens, and i tell the story the book of getting just get can yelled at at my first meeting after sandy hook when these Prime Minister africanamerican moms and dads saying where have you been . This has become happening in my neighborhood for decade. Where have you been . I understand that but rite now people want to know why Mass Shootings are happening and that is part why thats movement is around. So it does up occupy a little me attention in my book. Host i wonder, i think its hard to argue that the politics are anything other than what you said. And that frankly the public this he vast majorrest of the public is in a sense valuing white lives more than black lives. However, do wanderer whether the future of the wonder whether the of if the future of the movementes not based in elevating one type of violence over another but instead ofcrafting a coherent poll so that constituents that care but violence and deeply care but violence in inner citiesconstituents that care about suicide and of course Mass Shootings, all come together. Increasingly i wonder whether we cant elevate one or another. Itself has to be all of us at the same time. Guest i think that is 100 right and that is the message that has been sent. That whats those parents are telling me in the north end of hartford. They say listen, we grieve more for the families in sandy hook than nibblings because we know what their pain is. But why do their lives matter to this country and our kids lives dont . In the opening pages over the book i tell the story of a young man who died in hartford two months before sandy hook and i opened the poock with his story. I open the book with his story and its important for people to understand that while my awakening to this issue comes through sandy hook, his life, shane olivers life, matters just as much as any of those children who died in sandy hook, but his story occupied no space in the headlines. His story never get told by the national news. Every single one over kids in sandy hook had their story told inch the end this public is a an attempt to acknowledge people come into the issue threw Mass Shootings but we only beat this epidemic if we come together, and in connecticut we have done that. We were able to pass really strong gun laws in 2013 after sandy hook because those parents in the north end of hartford joined forces with the parents of sandy hook. Literally marched together through the streets of the state and ended up with our gun laws being changed for the better and, yes, i think that the future here is in these movements and our understanding of the issues merging. Host absolutely. That obviously commodores to different policies corresponds to different policies. One issue with urban violence is urban violence is not as spanssive to changes in legislation others other forms of violence, yet is a more responsive to concrete sort of programs like focused deterrence, something you mentioned in the book. So, one of the things i think is important is we have to remember that this is about dollars as well as legislation. Guest thats right and your work highlight importance of this and its why i try to make clear that the one thing that tracks exposure to violence more than nigglings in the country is income, poverty, and frankly that is true across several buckets of gun violence we talk about. Youre more likely to be this suicide, be the victim of Domestic Violence and youre more lyrically to be the victim of of gun homicide if you are lower income and so much of the solution is just sort of coming to this conclusion that economic desperation does often beeget violence and blitz a way to say well identify the atrisk populations for violence and put resources into the populations, focus resources on those populations to give. The pathways to success and its a sort of targeted way to just solve the economic problem, and i have this story from the baltimore in which im walking to through the streets of baltimore as part of my research for the book, and this guy comes up to me, guy who said he had been shot multiple times in the streets baltimore and talking why there is more baltimore happening in the city and he says, hunger, man, it hardens your heart. And that becomes the headline of a section on the book and he is saying that, you do things when youre hungry, when you cant put food on the table you wouldnt do otherwise, and to him and i that data backs this up that explains many of these elevated rates of violence in the poor sections of our country. Host obviously poverty, lack of opportunity, these are all the evidence we have seen that these hyperfocus programs as you said that identify the people in places at the highest risk for violence and then directly work with those populations, those can be important as well. Guest let me just say thats truism do talk about these focused programs, and i just want to make sure that be dont use that as a substitute for broader economic reform because i think it is important to recognize that in my opinion, it has been the diminution of economic stand offering White Americans that helped lead to the suicide epidemic, and so i think these focused investment oft money at atrisk populations is i think way to provide a temporary fix. The more permanent fix is to recognize that we just have an economic crisis that is putting people in all sorts of economically desperate situations across the country and that is in part what i believe drives some of our stories of violence. And i want to make sure we do both the target intervention and then the broader conversation as well. Host absolutely. You cant divorce the broader social justice issues from the immediate violence issues busts i think its important that when we are talking but violence that i randomly impacting White Americans we offer direct, concrete solutions to that violence. But when we have violence that impacts black americans we are offering indirect, root cause, things that will make a difference generations from now. So, we absolutely need lets all communities deserve immediate end to violence but your book goes into this and agrees with that. I want to turn to the moment were in today. Its impossible to ignore the conflict in the country right now and you are well positioned to speak to this. How do we mav gate our way through the Current Crisis in theres been violence between left wing protesters and right wing counterprotesters, lift rally fighting in the streets with injuries and deaths on both sided how much do we stop this . If you were president , how would you lead us out of this . And what would you do if you were joe biden . Guest sure. People will notice i rewrote the introduction to this book. As of june 2020 date on it because i wanted to make people understand that you even though wrote this book a year ago you can read this book through the prism of today. Why . Well, much of what were seeing today has long historical roots in this country. Vigilante justice has been around in america for a long time, and theres a connection between the rise of the Klu Klux Klan in the late 1800s and 1900s, and the caravans of americans in cities today, odd odd against all odds my life of hardship, fast breaks, and second against all odds y life of hardship, fast breaks, and second [loss of audio] theres a Straight Line between the zoning laws put in place in the jim crow era, to the experience today in which black people and white people dont live with each other and a black mans experience cant be understood by a white Police Officer who has their knee on their neck and this book i hope is a way for people to understand how we got to this moment today. And how if you dont understand that past you cant fix this country for the future. Listen, just getting rid of donald trump will his election hinges on the chaos being turned up. He is talking about going to kenosha, not to help that Community Heal but to turn up the heat to try to prompt more riots so that he can claim that this is a law and order election, even though its been his divisive rhetoric that in part contributed to the separation. So, thats a big step forward. But your question is, what should a new administration then do . Again i think the new administration should, a. , recognize that the economic crisis that exists in low income communities in this country is a big part of the reason why this violence is occurring. I think the next administration should move quickly on reforms to our gun laws. I think the next administration should think really boldly about policing reform. Ask yourself a question. Does every Law Enforcement officer need a firearm . Does every Emergency Response call require police . Can we reorient the way in which we enforce the laws such that there arent so many potential explosions of violence . And then back up and think to ourselves, how do we create a common understanding off our lives . Right now, we you are less likely to go to school as a white kid with a black kid than you were ten years ago or 20 years ago. Schools are becoming radically more segregated and so lets start think about how we go to school, how we live together. So that we can have more shared experiences. So i dont have to buy a book to understand a black persons life and i have a neighbor that is africanamerican or Asian American or lat teen know all of that has too be part of the next administrations policy. Host let me press you further. Youre the president right now and we are seeing chaos in ken northern sharks seattle, portland, oustitis. What would you do right now . What would be the speech you would give, the actions you would take . Well, again, i think its a little bit hard to create that hypothetical because the moment we the system has been created by a president who has doning in but fan the flames to its hard to say what would you do . I argue we might not be in this moment if we had a president obama who would have early on taken steps to heal, and those steps would have involved telegraphing we are going to take the black lives Matter Movement seriously, not just in words but in deeds. People right now are appreciative of the words being used by politicians but they want actions. So, they want a policing reform bill faced federally. Want the nations guns through be changed. Want to see investment in Public Housing and if i were president i would be championing those legislative efforts and be using healing rest rick and that doesnt immediately erase the pain it provides a tangible signal we are going to change as a nation and right now the president is doing the exact opposite. He is actually saying hes going to fight housing desecration even harder. Going to fight any and all Police Accountability measures, and hes going to go to these protests as a mechanism to fire up his base. Thats the response that makes this worse, not better. Host thank you for letting me press you on that. You call your book a template for action. What are three policy, as relating to gun violence that if you had the vote and the budget you would take right now. Guest first and for most, universal brown checks. No matter how strong my states universal background checks law is, it is only as strong as the weakest state because the guns that get used for homicide in my state more often than not come from states that have loose background checks laws and so i think you will see a big diminution in gun violence if you have a National Requirement that nobody buys a gun without a background check. So, that would be the first thing. Second i would sort of pick up where we were discussing. Would have a National Investment in focused deterrence. Every single community, were going to identify the communities at risk of violence and were going to make an investment in those communities. Were going to give these kids a pathway to succeed, vision of their future that involves putting down violence as a mechanism to order their lives, and then probably given the moment we are in, i would double down on policing reform. It is true that one of the things and maybe you agree one of the things that i believe draws violence in communitieses of color is a lack of legitimacy in Law Enforcement. When youre in a city of los angeles and only 35 of homicides occurring to victims of color are being solved, then you start to think about whether you need to take justice into your own hands. A mother in baltimore who lost her son and has no success in getting a police to take it seriously, said her sons friend would regularly come to her and say this, left me go out there and deal with is and she said no, im not going to put another family through this, but that is what is going on when police are not focused on solving crimes committed against people of color but instead are focused on rounding up people of color and putting them in jail. So, policing reform, not just Getting Police out of commune office color but making them effective in prosecuting crimes in communities of color is not big part of the solution. So thats what i would say. Host thank you. So, lets unpack this a little bit. Right now we have some reformers calling for significant changes in policing, and yet some reformers calling for defunding or abolishing the police. And at the same time we have significant spike of homicide in the nation residents cities on the order of 20 to 30 in many of american cities. Research by myself and other criminologists has documented this pretty well. And this is violence that is not happening between police and protesters. Its happening in communities in poor communities of color, between and among young men without a lot of hope, without a lot of opportunity, who are often involved in this type of violence, and some people believe that and i think many people believe that the police have some role to play in responding to that. How do we find our way out of this and it feels like the Politics Today make it sort of impossible to find sort of a reasonable middle ground. I dont think its impossible to find that middle ground. Ive spend time sitting down with the organizers in connecticut who have been holding the Defund Police rallies understand what they mean by that, and they acknowledge that of course there that to be a mechanism by which to enforce laws. What their Police Officer is that the current their belief is that the current truck tour is so broken it cant be reformed and you have to rebuild Law Enforcement from the ground up and so i think its important to understand that the Defund Police movement is not suggesting that there should he be no enforcement of laws. Theyre simply saying that the existing structure is so broken as to be unrepairable and you have to rebuild it again. Whether or not were going to do that i think we should be bold in the way that we think about how our laws are enforced in this country. Thats why i do suggest sort of thinking to your, okay, what are the Domestic Violence calls need . Does it need every time a Police Officer with a weapon . Do we need Police Officers in school today . Right . We want our schools to be safe but does that require a Police Officer with a weapon to be in our schools . Who can arrest kids for pretty minor drug offenses or broaches of the peace when they get in an argument with an assistant principal . I think that, well, i dont support eliminating the police die think we should have some pretty comprehensive conversations about how to rebuild the way that we enforce our laws. And boldly. Host i want to wrap up with a final question. In your book, you really issue a call to action, and you basically tell the reader, if you are moved with this book, just do something. Thats to paraphrase what you say in a final chapter. What are a few things, maybe two or three things the average person can do right now to save lives and fight violence . Guest i talk about in my book the guilt i feel today for having been a late convert to this movement. Young man i spoke about, who occupies the first chapter of the book, was 20 years old when he was killed by another 20yearold on the 20th day of october, 2012, the 20th victim of gun violence in that city. He get killed over a fight over a girl. He was going to a transaction with a customer, he was in the car flipping business and was going to collect the last payment on a car, and the group that was surrounding this customer of his started mouthing off about shanes girlfriend, and shane fought back on behalf of the girl, he threw a punch, the kid went back to his car good, an illegal gun and fired it at shane and shane ran away and died later that day in the hospital. Shane grew up like two miles away from me. From where i grew up. And my life growing up in a peaceful suburb had nothing to do with shanes life going up. Tell his story of his life. He was constantly dealing with the threat of violence. Had to become a good fighter even with one arm that didnt work to protect himself and end up dead at age 20. I decided to structure my life in a way that now i spend huge amounts of my time working to try to make up for lost time. Thats why i ran for another term in the senate to pass laws like the ones you talked about that would make sure that there arent more shaneology veries. You shane olivers. You dont have to run for the newscast. All you have to do is go online and sign up to become a member of an antigun violence group, a local group in your or state or a national group. You just run for local office. Just decide to be a member of your board of education and make sure that your school is investing in the kind of programming that lifts kids out of poverty and makes sure that different colors dont get trapped in cycles of criminality. Pay attention to the businesses you frequent. There are National Boycott campaigns right now against organizations, retail establishments that refuse to keep gun out of their stores. You can be part of that movement. Thats worked tremendously well over the last few years. You can make a donation to a candidate who is running for office, five dollars. Itself will make a difference, believe me. So, there are all sorts of small things you can do and what we lack is not people who believe in the things necessary to change the trajectory of gun violence. 90 of americans believe in universal background check, we lack a Political Movement that is Strong Enough to actually get the changes made and we are close. Were so close to being Strong Enough. And the 2020 election probably be that decisive set of elections that are winning these fights, especially on the nations gun laws in 2021. Host so, the most important thing we can all do to end this fight is vote in the next election. Guest yeah. Its a little bit trickier this time around to vote than it was last time around, so everybody has to make a plan to vote, right . You have to go and figure out if youre going to vote by absentee or mailin vote. Do it early this year, make sure you know where your polling place is if you do it on election day. But this year when democracy is on the ballot, when the future of the trajectory of violence in the nation is on the ballot, everybody has to cast a vote. Well, thank you senator murphy. Thank you for appearing on the program today and answering my questions. Thank you for writing the book, and thank you for your advocacy on the important issue. Anything ive missed or left out or anything you would like to share with the audience before we go. Guest i just am really grateful to be part of a movement hat has grown this quickly and this robustly and i always sort of tell crowds of antigun vie advocates the great social change movement movements that are not those that succeeded right off. Those that hid road block after road block and failure after failure. Maybe we wont pass all the laws we want in 20201 but giving ups whats relegates you as a movement to obscurity. Its perseverance, confidence in the righteousness of your cause and being auto canada educated about youve caution and i hope this book motivates people and gives them the facts to win the argument that are necessary in order for us to [loss of audio] host thank you again, senator. Guest appreciate it. Robert gates took a critical look at the use of u. S. Power around the world at the end of world war ii, heres a portion. How the United States had gone from the position of supreme power, probably unrivaled since the roman empire in ever dimension of power in 1993 to a country today beset by challenges everywhere. And i thought about how did that happen . How did we get here . And so i began looking at all of the major Foreign Policy challenges we have had since 1993 and thinking about what we had done and what we had not done that contributed to that decline in our role in the world, and our power in the world. And what i came up with was a set of nonmilitary instruments of power that we had that had played such an Important Role in our success in the cold war against the soviet union and had been neglected and withered after the end of the cold war as a time when we continued to fund our military, we basically dismantled all of the nonmilitary instruments of power, from diplomacy to economic leverage to Strategic Communications and more. We can go into that later. And as i looked at the situations, at these challenges from somalia and haiti in 1993, and others, right up to our relationship with russia and china today, north korea, it occurred to me that we had failed in many respects to figure out how to compete with these powers outside of the military realm. And so and the reality is of the 15 challenges that i write about, for all practical purposes i considered 13 to be failures, and that is why in the title the word failures comes first. Theres couple of successes and theyre important and theres some lessons to be learn from those as well. But we had a lot of problems during that 27year period and i would just conclude by saying, the wars in iraq and afghanistan both began we are very quick military victories, and the problem that identified whether it iraq and afghanistan or somalia or haiti or others, was that once we had achieved military victory, we then changed our mission. We decided to move to trying to bring democracy and reform the governments of the countries and thats where we ran into failure. To watch the Program Visit or website and do a search for robert gates or his book, exercise of power. Tonight on booktv at 6 00 p. M. Eastern, its Author Interview program, after words, this evening former fbi Deputy Assistant director or counterintelligence, peter strzok, discussing his chief and the work he did on the russia investigation. Find more Schedule Information at booktv. Org or consult your program guide. Dontingous now us armstrong williams, columnist, talk show host, radio host and the author of a book what black and White America must do now. Welcome to washington journal. Guest thank you for having in jive if the title of your book deals with a prescription, what has to be fixed in what has to be healed in your opinion . Guest oh, good question. So much of our focus has been on Law Enforcement, isolated police