well, put this down. and announce the main event. to defend the resolution we have professor gary cleck, gary, please come to the stable. >> taking the negative on the resolution we have professor paul helmke, professor, please come to the stage. brett. please close the voting. thank you. we have closed the voting in the initial vote. and now, gary, you are to defend the resolution about guns, we read it a couple times, please come to the podium and defend the resolution. >> thank you, gene. i am happy the voting was done before you got a chance to get a good look at me. all right. the proposition really has two points. i only want to make two points, number one, if you actually banned guns it's going to primarily effect noncriminals. and that's the noncontroversial part of what i will have to say. and secondly, there is a harm in taking guns away from good guys. which is where the couldn't vary ends and resumes. first of all, let's define what we mean by a prohibition of gun control law. by definition it means you're trying to take guns away from everybody. theoretical, legally speaking it applies to everyone equally criminals and non--criminals in like. in practice that is not going to be the case. the nra may have been a little over the top when they said when guns are are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, but more moderate way of phrasing the same basic idea is if you tell everybody they can't have guns, the people likely to obey the law that says you can't have guns are the law abiding. i mean it's true by question anything. it's not really a controversial point. so what that implies is, you will proportionally reduce the share of noncriminals who have guns, whose only involvement in crime would be as victims than it would be the proportional drop in gun ownership among criminals. it's because of the compliance with the law will be higher among noncriminals than criminals. well that in turn means that gun uses by noncriminals will be affected more. so you will reduce defensive uses of guns by noncriminal victims more than you will reduce criminal uses by offenders just because of who it is that would obey the law. so, if you are really pro control and you favor banning guns, you don't really care about taking guns away from noncriminals. you figure, well, you know at worse maybe a few hunters won't be able to shoot bambi, so big deal. there is no serious harm. but until you take a count of self defense with a gun. and for years the myth was, well, you know it's crazy to try to defend yourself with a gun because the criminal only take it away and use it against you. it's completely mythical. you know, when pressed for examples of that happening, advocates of gun prohibition came up empty. it just doesn't happen. and i systematically looked into it using the national crime victimization survey data which is a huge scale national survey done by the census burrow that asks people about their crime victimization experiences. and nobody has that experience. people use guns for self protection, have, you know, basically one resolve, they come out of it okay. the bad guy doesn't take their gun away from them and they don't injured or lose property. so, where did this notion that self defense with a gun is a bad thing come about, people would be able to cite examples where somebody used a gun defensively and was injured, only here is the little detail they left out. they got injured first and then out of desperation used the gun for self protection. it can hardly be use of a gun that caused them to get hurt because they got hurt first. for a long time the survey in question didn't get at that detail of sequence. it turns out, virtually nobody who uses a gun for self protection is then subsequently hurt. likewise, virtually nobody loses property. in short, self defense with a gun is almost perfectly effective and relative to other forms of self protection, it's more effective, that is to say, anything else you could do running away, yelling for help, fighting without a weapon, calling the cops, you name it, or doing nothing, it doesn't work as well as using a gun for self protection. and by using it, i mean it's usually just threatening with a gun. it rarely involves shooting and when it involves shooting often it's just shooting up in the air as a warning shot. and hardly ever involves good guy shooting and wounding bad guy. so it's basically threatening a criminal with a gun is almost always effective. now the evidence for this is overwhelming. there is really no serious dispute about that. where big dispute came about how often does this happen? maybe it's effective, who cares. it practically never happens. crime victims almost never have a chance to use a gun for self protection. in a place like new york city that's true. if you are not carrying a gun, if you don't have a gun you can't use a gun for any purpose. but in the rest of the world, the rest of the united states, any way, people are armed to the teeth. used to be a point of propaganda that we had way too many gun the and more guns than people and it wasn't true 30, 40 years ago. it's true now. there is over 350 million guns in private hands now. and the big boost was the obama effect. you know, make noise about various kind of gun control measures and everybody raised out and bought whatever kind of gun they didn't own. make jokes about it, the biggest run for the gun industry they ever had. well, what we know about how often defensive gun use occurs in the country as a whole, is the national crime victim national survey. well, the problem with that though, it's a non-anonymous survey done by the federal government. somebody who works for the government and reporting to the justice department that is the law enforcement branch of the federal government is asking the questions in a non-anonymous survey. not surprisingly this does tend to discourage people reporting a defensively gun use. so we unfortunately have to use other sources of information and there have been over 20 national surveys that have asked the question, have you used a gun for self protection. and they use representative probability samples of the population so you can project to the population as a whole how many defensive gun uses there were. the estimates range from 1 to 3 million. huge numbers, and to put that in perspective, most years there are fewer than 500,000 crimes in which the offender used a gun. so, there is on the order of 4 times as many defensive gun use by vick tills as there are criminal uses by offenders. so now combine that with original premise i started with, which is if you been guns for everybody in theory, the way it works out in practice you will reduce defensive gun use proportionally, defensive by noncriminals more than reduce criminal uses by crime offenders. and so you have got guns that are used for self protection, huge numbers of times. and there are used very very effectively to reduce injury, if you get rid of all that defensive gun use the implication is, those people who would have used a gun but now can't are more likely to be injured. you would therefore have more injuries, mostly nonfatal but some fatal, as a result of denying guns to people who could have used them effectively for self protection. i will reserve the rest of my time to paul, reneed it it. -- he will need it. >> well, there is no trading, you can't pay for the minutes you do get 15. gary took less than 10. you can take your 15, if you want. >> first of all, just thank you all for being here, thank you for the invitation. it's been 10 years since i debated gary, we had a 3 on 3 debate where i debated gary, john lott, steve, mel brook a lawyer for the nra and this is my second time with gene and one of his debates, i debated john 2.5 years ago i think it was at your former venue. and always enjoy having the chance to discuss this issue. i come to this issue from multiple backgrounds, i was a lawyer in fort wayne, indiana, i was a mayor in fort wayne, indiana. i ran a police department, i dealt with the issue of crime and defensive gun uses and criminal gun uses quite a bit as head of the police department after i left the mayor office, i was -- where we tried to lobby for some common sense what i consider common sense gun laws. and now i'm a professor at indiana university at bloomington, indiana, i don't do research. i look at things from law on a policy side. gary does research and statistics and recession theories that go over my head. this issue is a complicated issue, a complicated proposition. gary is treating it as sort of prohibitionist, one of the versions of the resolution was prohibitionism i think the final one that gene announced was while law that restrict not prohibit gun ownership reduce crimes, the benefit would be more off set by the gun uses, forget the proposition. the main issue is are guns more of a benefit or more costs that comes from guns? is our system one that puts more costs or more benefits on us? and our present system doesn't prohibit guns, i don't know anyone who argues with prohibition of guns, it's considered a lost cause even if someone would want to. but gary talked a lot about what he saw as some of the benefits having guns. when we talk -- and guns can be used defensively, guns can be a benefit. but clearly there are cost with guns. and i think before we get into the issue of how many defensive gun uses there are and doing the cost benefit analysis, let's briefly review the costs that go along with guns. in this country, today basically we have 2 to 3 accidental deaths by gun every day. 2 to 3 people are killed by a gun accidentally every day. often young children. there is the teenager that didn't know the gun was loaded, that is one of the reasons i came to this issue, i had a friend shot in the back when other friends thought the gun wasn't loaded. 2 to 3 accidental gun deaths per day in this country. i might mention, that is -- you know that's quite a few, that is a lot more than other countries experience in terms of accidental gun death. every day there is 55 suicides by gun. now a lot of people say what's that got to do with this whole issue, we are not talking, they are not criminals that is not accidental, suicides are going to happen regardless. we have more suicides by guns than any other country. one of the things when you talk to people that deal with mental health issues, deal with suicide prevention, if someone's thinking that they want to commit suicide, a a lot of discussion about this this is a cry for help, you want some intervention, it's a spur of the moment type thing, it's different obviously in different situations. basically almost every other way that you try to commit suicide, your successes rate night be 10% to 20%. if you use a gun it's 90% to 95%. 55 suicides per day in this country. then we have homicides. we average about 32 gun homicides per day in this country. that's a virginia tech happening every day in this country. nobody pays too much attention to it unless it's in a mass shooting. those 90 to 100 type deaths are happening with a gun every day in this country. those are the costs of our current gun policy. and for every death with a gun, there is another 2 to 3 people that are injured with that gun and survive. they survive the accidental shooting or the homicide attempt or the suicide attempt and they live with that gun injury oftentimes the rest of their life. these are the penal like jim brady who was accidentally -- i mean who was injured, seriously injured in the assassination attempt on president reagan, he died a couple years ago, they a contributed that death to his shooting. he lived with that injury, gabby giffords got the bullet in her brain in tucson in 2011. how that's affected her. and for everyone of those gunshot victims, you have got the families who survive, you have got the families and friends and coworkers that are helping to bear the costs that are seeing the pain, they are seeing the suffering. you know, i still remember one of the last nights i spent with jim brady at his house, i could hear him scream every time he rolled over in the bed, those were from injuries that happened 25 years earlier. there is continuing costs for all of us. then the direct costs, the medical costs, lost productivity. estimate from 6 million for direct costs half paid by the taxpayer, some go up to a billion dollars in costs in terms of the impact of gun violence in this country. gun violence in this country gives us a very serious cost. now is this normal? you know, maybe this is just part of what life is like. no. children under 15 are 9 times as likely to die of an accidental shooting in this country than in the rest of the developed world. that's children under 15, 9 times is likely to die of the accidental shooting here than in other civilized developed nations. in 1992 our murder rate was 5 times that of other frontier countries, australia, new zealand and canada. most of those murder were gun murders. 10 times the suicide rate by guns in this country than in the other 25 most developed countries. 10 times more suicide by guns. it's in every 17 times more gun homicides in this country than in the other civil rised countries. why does this country have -- civilized countries. why does this country have more suicide deaths, homicides by gun than other country as soon as one reason, we have more guns per capita than anybody else does. when you look at 350 million guns that makes a difference. and it makes a difference when -- i am not the expert, people that have published their study that show a gun in the home is 21 times more likely to be used against you and a family member than it is to protect you from an intruder. often a lot of that is the suicide, but sometimes it's the accidental shooting, sometimes it's picking up and shooting the brother-in-law when you don't expect him to come unique rescue the middle of the night. 21 times to be used against you or a family member than it is to protect you. those who carry a gun are 4 times more likely to get shot than those who don't carry. these aren't necessarily causation things, people that have the gun in their home might be more dangerous neighborhoods, people that carry the gun might be more dangerous professions. the womens have a risk of being two mess particular homicide victim, -- domestic homicide victim increases 7 times when there is gun in the home. there are a lot of studies out there that say the more guns in a house, in a county, in a state, in a country the more gun violence you are going to have that includes all the homicides, the suicides and accidental shootings. there are tremendous costs to having gun violence, to having our gun policy, tremendous cost of gun violence in our country. that is something that needs to be taken into account. one thing i learned as mayor, when you look at crime statistics there is a lot of vacations, one of the hardest numbers to fudge are deaths. and so when you look at numbers of deaths you have done something significant. so there is costs, serious costs to our current gun policy. now gary argues there are benefits though to having guns, and sure, sometimes a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. sometimes james bourne, james bond is there to stop the bad guy. but the statistics are all over the place. gary's initial study on this said there were 2.4 defensive gun uses each year in this country. there is a group called the gun violence archive that looks at like every newspaper, every police report they can find on a daily basis, obviously not everything is reported, they came up for with 2100 defensive gun uses in all of 2017. just a little over 2000. that's the bottom line probably. but that is looking at police reports, that's looking at newspaper studies across the country, try to find some evidence that there have been defensive gun uses. the national crime victimization study that goes back to people twice a year, that follows up with information, they come up with 100,000 defensive gun uses each year. gary comes up with 2.4 million. where did this number come from? again, i'm not the expert, there is all sorts of false positives how people are are unwilling, will say that they've done a defensive gun use when they haven't. gary also says there is false negatives. if you want those debates there is tons of scholars to do this. i notice when you read scholarly literature they are fast injury than politicians, there is concern with rare events. when you are looking about something that happens only 1% or 2% of the time, obviously it doesn't take too many people reporting falsely or remembering things poorly to get the number up higher. there is the problem with telescoping. yes, i use the gun but maybe it was three years ago and you are only asking about the last 2 years. the national crime victimization study tries to correct though things. there is questions of sampling be, gary's original samples which had 5000 people on it, i read the whole thing the other night, it talks about how it over sampled for males and people in the south and the west just because they knew they needed to do -- he knew he needed to do that in order to get more people in the survey than he had just with the number, if you made the adjustment wrong then that controls the numbers, gary can answer those and argue those better. but, the numbers vary, that is what i'm trying to point out. when i make policy as a mayor, i say what are the numbers, somebody says it's 2000, gary says it's 2.4 million, try to explain to me why there is so much discrepancy. gary's gosh gosh gary's study makes me wonder, not only issues about defensive gun uses not show up on police reports, these defensive gun uses don't show up in hospital reports. they don't show up in emergency room reports, gary says bad guys when they are shot don't go to the hospital, so maybe that takes care of it. but there is oath things there. according to gary's studies, when someone is confronted by a bad guy and they fire at them, they hit their target 53% of the time. 53% hit rate in gary's original study which is something police officers don't admit. that unheard of. you are in a shootout situation, they are hitting their target 53% of the time. another interesting thing, gary's thing is 46% of gun uses are by women. this is in the early 9 east. now maybe that's true but it -- 90s. now maybe that's true but it doesn't fit the literature. women don't fire guns at the same right. women aren't involved in the same gun couple tour in the same rate. 50% of gary's study is women. gary's conclusion based on his survey that there have been 340 to 400,000 lives saved, people save from murder by defensive gun uses in a single year. now think of that. i have already pointed out when you have 32 homicides a day, maybe we are doing 15 to 20,000 homicides a year in this country. but gary's good guys with the guns are saving almost 400,000 each year. something doesn't fit here. the numbers don't make sense to me. and i think that's one of the problems with this whole discussion. last point i want to make though is even if gary's numbers are right. or somewhere in this range between 100,000 on the national crime study and gary's study, are these necessarily beneficial, positive gun uses, this is the other fascinating thing. what are some of the categories that are considered defensive gun uses? gary's originally study counts saying i have got a gun, is it defensive gun use. in other words i've got a gun. don't yell at me. okay. defensive gun use. only one half of those -- only one of those people that had a defensive gun use even pointed the gun at the offender. 47% percent there was no threat or attack for their defensive gun use. excuse me, if there is no threat and no attack, how is it a defensive gun use this and you are not pointing your gun, 52% of the offenders, 52% of the bad guys were unarmed. and only 18, according to the survey, only 18% of the offenders had guns. something is wrong here. a lot of arguments over whether these defensive gun uses are effective, just as likely to get injured with a gun, without a gun, some likely are saying you are as likely to get injured with a baseball bat. obviously the numbers don't add up. what does add up we have significant costs and the defensive uses are questionable. i think we can find a way basically to say, let's reduce the bad things from happening without taking the good things away. thank you. >> gary, why don't you get up to the podium if you want for the rebuttal argument. okay. fine. >> first of all, we need to make clear that the term prohibition covers a lot of ground. no, of course the brady campaign, which paul used to head, is not advocating complete ban on all firearms. that would be point less. it's a political impossibility. the organization has favored a ban on handguns. in fact, they did this openly until the 70s. and then they kind of did it covertly thereafter, for example they filed an am i cuss curia brief, it was ruled unconstitutional, we need to preserve this handgun ban. if that is not favoring handguns, not favoring handgun prohibition i don't know what is. well, that was ruled on unconstitutional, you couldn't favor that anymore. so now they favor banning so called assault weapons. which are not military weapons that can fire like machine guns, they are wildly popular guns owned almost overwhelmingly by noncriminals and used for noncriminal purposes that fire one shot at a time and they favor banning those. they also favor banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, again, which are not used by mass killers to boost the casualty count in mass shootings. they are used almost entirely by noncriminals for noncriminal purposes. paul refers to the fatality rates for suicide being many times higher for attempts with guns than for other attempts as if we ought to compare guns with the entire set of all other suicide methods as if people would be as likely to substitute the least lethal methods of suicide if they couldn't get a gun, put a gun to the head and pull the trigger. they would favor what is the next most lettal method killing themselves. there is no significant difference between the fatality attempts by hanging or shooting. they are both 85% fatal. he says guns are 21 times more likely to be used against gun owners than they are against the criminal. that is not true. but it's a myth that will not die. the studies it was based on in similar ratios, they didn't count all defensive gun uses, most of them or even a tiny fraction. they covered killings. how many times are civilians, the law abiding people killed, how many times are the gun owners killed, and how many criminals did they kill? as if the point having a gun for self protection is to pile up bodies on your doorstep. that is not the point. the point is to save lives, to prevent injury, you can't count up the number of lives saved. that ratio is no relevance at all of the it's basically a cross benefit ratio in which you counted up the costs and then didn't count any of the benefit, it's not in killing criminals it's avoiding in being killed yourself or injured yourself or losing property yourself. he says more guns lead to more gun homicide. well, yeah, duh, that's true. more gun homicides, you can't commit a gun homicide unless you have a gun. the issue is, do you kill more people when there is more guns? is there a higher homicide rate overall? no, there is not. all of the best method logically soundest research finds places with highest gun ownership rates do not have higher total homicide rates, they don't have higher total suicide rates, they have a higher percentage of homicides and suicides involving guns. and he seriously cites as evidence of how often defensive gun use occurs, the number of newspaper accounts or news accounts compiled in the gun violence archive and it says there were 2000. yeah, probably are 2000 defensive gun uses where somebody was crazy enough to actually report it to the police which in turn got reported to the local news media. but that has nothing to do with how many are committed total overall, it has nothing to do with it you would be crazy to either tell the police or the news media or anybody else you don't have to tell that you pull add deadly weapon on another human being, no matter how justified you think it was and how justified it in fact was, reporting it can do >> >> first, and again, we are getting to a lot of topics here. there are a number of studies that show the opposite of what gary says from other academics and he gets into law magazines and journals who basically say that gary is not right in his methodology is not right and when you actually look at many of the studies, there is more and not only do you have more homicides in this country and more gun homicides, and generally they show our homicide rate is so much larger because of the guns. if you take the guns out of it, we are the same level of rapes, robberies, and the same level of burglaries, but we are out of whack in terms of total homicides, and is driven by the fact that we have such a high rate of gun homicide and that is driven by the fact that we have the guns. we are so much worse than the rest of the developed world because we have so many of these guns. that holds true for the accidental deaths and for the gun suicide and for these other things. a lot of times in the suicide, people are looking at a cry for help. maybe there is some methods like hanging that is close to guns, but most people will not go to that trouble. most people are trying peels and knives and those are the thing that end of been the 20% level. interns! in terms of a gun ban, when i was a brady, we supported washington dc, i said i would not push for a gun ban. i don't think they are effective but if the people feel it will be effective, and they should make that decision. they made that decision in the mid-1970s and thought that maybe some of the surrounding states and communities would do the same thing. it was easy to get from virginia, so it was pretty ineffective. it did reduce the number of suicides after it went into effect and some evidence it reduced the number of homicides for a period of time. but i told people if they disagreed with it, they are to run for mayor or city council. they decided to have the court intervene and have them get involved in the study. by the time it came up in the courts, brady took a neutral stance on brief because we felt that the decision by the courts was one that the court was not going to say there is going to be one set of rules for washington dc and another set of rules for ever of the city in the country. we also wanted to make sure that the people really understood what the decision yet. again we are not arguing second amendment law here, but the supreme court in the case, justice scalia made it very clear that the second amendment rights like other rights is not unlimited. you can have restrictions on who gets a gun and how they are stored how they are carried and how they are stored and what kind of guns going to be available to the people. that is a decision by justice scalia and what he wrote. that same language was basically repeated two years later. communities and states can put restrictions on guns. i think that is the issue here. what sort of things can we do to try and make it harder for dangerous people to get guns? since the last time i debated gary, we have shootings at sandy hook, tucson, the pulse nightclub shooting, the las vegas shooting, and numerous church shootings and what have we done as a country in reaction to that? nothing. we have not passed any national legislation and a few executive orders that president obama tried after sandy hook have been rescinded since that time. we have done nothing as a country and we still have problems here. i don't think that makes sense to me. there are things that we can do and gary admits it in some of his articles that background checks are not going to stop people from having good defensive gun uses. think the gary showed any defensive gun use was so-called assault rifles, the area -- the ar-15. if we have some background checks and if we have some restrictions on weapons, a gabby giffords shooting was stopped when he was going to change his magazine clip, and if he had a smaller magazine clip, he might not have killed that little girl and shot less people. the sandy hook kids, some of them got away when he went to change out his magazine. those sort of things to make a difference and we should look at some common sense restrictions to make it harder for dangerous people to get guns and stress there is a risk and a responsibility as well as rights that go along with guns and will not take away the chance for people to have good defensive gun use if they need it.[ applause ]seem we are going to the question and answer section park --. at any time you can ask a question of each other, the other question of this moment, or do we want to pass for the moment. >> i will after a couple of questions. number 1, the brady campaign attitude toward the washington handgun ban, they did write a brief, but did that say absolutely nothing about whether or not the brady campaign thought this was an effective way of controlling violence? is that your position now? that the breed did not advocate this would be a good idea from a standpoint of policy? >> the brief address the legal issue, the second at many issue, which is what legal briefs do. they don't discuss the policy implication of it. we indicated that the second amendment because it had the clause that said they -- said a well regulated militia for the security of the state, language that disappears from the second amendment discussions, because it dealt with a collective right, that was the main argument in the legal brief. art resume by city councils and mayors by congress. we was discussion the legal issue in the brief and in most of the breeds, none of it went into effect. the justice in his dissent to try to look at a number of things being wrought up. the amount of gun violence in our community for example. but the crucial decision was not a policy decision, but what does the second amendment mean. i think the court has got it wrong, but they have allowed for commonsense gun restrictions. >> you say that somewhere in my article about how many defensive gun uses there was, that i said the sense of gun use saved 400,000 lives? is this really something i said or something you are reading into it? >> i was reading it at 12:30 pm at night. -- 12:30 am at night. i actually had the page number here. the first main one that had your survey. i think this is the first main one that has your survey. when i write this this late did not, on page 177, 50.7% of the respondents believe they saved a life with their defensive gun use. that would calculate to three and a 40,000-400,000 saved lives and then you say it is impossible to know if this is true. >> there you go. >> basically, usa you cannot believe your own numbers. at the end of your article what you did is you basically said i cannot believe my response. so i am only going to believe and let me finish, you said, even if they are not telling the truth, if only 10% of them are telling the truth, that would translate to 40,000 saved lives, which is more than the number of gun deaths in a year. you had a very long discussion on this on page 177. >> right, and this included the follow-up remarked that you sniffed out of the quote or paraphrase do whatever you wanted to call it. these are our not what people think, but their perception. i expressed that you cannot know they would have saved alive. so in short, i did not. but that is something that you made up. >> but you should there is -- said there is 2.5 million gun uses. but maybe these people don't really do anything with it since half of the people are not even saying they have a gun. >> that gets into the question that i want to put with you guys. he says specifically let's assume for the moment that your estimated 2 million is true. but what is the nature of this defensive gun use? he broke it down and said it is not really what you would think of defensive gun use. can you address that challenge? >> in every single case they did something with the gun. at minimum they threatened the defender and in a few cases, is a small percentage of the cases, they actually fired at the offender trying to shoot the offender. maybe in 7% of the cases, they claim to have shot the defender. unfortunately, we never established how they knew that. they didn't have a wounded person sitting on the living room floor bleeding on the carpet. they in many cases was guessing. what we knew at minimum is that they threatened the offender with a gun, and it is not just saying at the point of information i have a gun. it is threatening the person and there is a difference. when you are pointing a gun at somebody who is trying to rob you or attack you, it had the meaning due to its context and the meeting is this is a threat . i am willing to shoot you. >> only half of them pointed the gun. you say in your survey that you count i have a gun as being a defensive gun use. >> i would, it is a verbal threat. if you are trying to say they are not all dramatic, and they don't involve attempts to physically assault the other person, absolutely, i said that from the start. but you seem to think there is no value in people merely threatening an offender and then a causes them not to attack them. there is value in it. >> i can see there is good defensive gun issues. but somehow when you're $2.5 million defensive gun use you is locked into the rights of the gun rights argument in this country and a lot of this is macho i have a gun and get away and even though 18% of you have a gun, you better get out of there because maybe half of them think they pointed a gun at the person, we are talking something different. when i think about defensive gun use, i'm thinking about someone who has a gun and shows a gun and maybe points a gun, but half of your people didn't even point the gun at the person. i think we are living in a bit of a dreamworld here, and again, we are only talking about 222 respondents who admitted these what the defensive gun uses. if you get down to 111 that pointed the gun and then you are getting down to the 30-40 actually had an attack going on, we are talking about pretty small numbers. >> you do realize as a lawyer that if somebody does threaten someone with violence, that is an assault. and it is a criminal assault when a bad guy doesn't for bad purposes, why is it in your mind that it is translated into not a real threat? not unless he actually points the gun? but verbally threatened to shoot somebody doesn't count in your mind. >> clearly that is a threat, and i think we are mixing different things and people have taken your $2.4 million figure and translated it into they need their ak-47 to be able to shoot back when the gang is invading their house to all of a sudden i saw somebody trespassing and said i have a gut and get out of my backyard. >> let's say it is a half of 1 million, all the way up to 1 million, of defensive gun uses, that is legitimate, you seem to have said that you don't rule that out. if it is three quarters of 1 million and reasonable gun uses, isn't that waiting in the balance in your view? if you believe the number? >> i am approaching this issue as yes guns can be used for beneficial purposes. gary is outlining some of those. but guns can be used for very negative purposes. i am not taking a prohibitionist approach. i'm saying let's make -- this do more background checks and get some of the semi automatic assault rifles and high- capacity magazines and treat those closer to how we treat a machine gun and hunting rifles. >> you mean prohibit them. >> let's go after gun trafficking and do some things that will make it harder for dangerous people to get guns and stress the risk and responsibility of gun ownership. >> before we open it up to questions, just a final question, is there any legal restriction on gun use that you support? any at all? >> yes, going back as far as early 1990s and over a quarter of a century ago, i have advocated what is known as universal background check. i am all in favor of keeping guns away from bad guys because that is not a prohibitionist measure. it is not like we are going to let anybody criminal or noncriminal have a semi automatic weapon because it looks like a machine gun when we know perfectly well what that means is to disarm non- criminals. but a background check, it only prevents guns from going into the hands of people who cannot pass a background check this is convicted criminals, people with a record of mental illness and so on and alcoholics and drug addicts and so forth. it is the non-prohibitionist character that makes it a good idea because it will only reduce a bad use of a gun and not reduce the defensive issue. >> that is a main legislative priority that the brady campaign has had over the last 10-25 years. that is something that we cannot get congress to adopt, and we need more people like gary and others to stand up and say it makes sense. >> any questions from the audience. please phrase your question as a question and take it away. said mister mayor, -- >> mister mayor, what kind of regulations do you propose and say would help with the suicides or the domestic situation type of shootings and what kind of data is there that it would actually help decrease those numbers? >> obviously laws are not going to take care of all of them are even close to all of these problems. it is more the gun culture and the idea of having a gun in the home will protect you all of the dam -- time and not realizing that god will cause a problem. what i was mayor, i got a call and one my police officers is married to another police officer. they keep a loaded handgun on their nightstand because it is a dangerous world out there and they are police and train -- trained. guns have a lot of bad consequences to them. some people propose a waiting period and all is lost and i need to commit suicide and it will stop there. that my stop someone else. i think a blog -- a lot of it just deals with the stress and responsibilities, so less stress the risk and they can be misused. but instead we have an attitude in this country that anyone can have any gun any time and place. >> comments from you guys? okay. next question. >> i did a quick search after your comment on number of accidental gun shootings per day, and it turns out in 2016, there was about 37,000 accidental deaths from automobiles. that is about 100 today. i am not going to ask you what you don't advocate more common sense. why do gun control advocates have to rely on data like that, much of which has been discredited by people like gary, in order to make their argument? why can't you look at the same data and make the same argument with a valid useful data? >> let me talk about cars just real quickly because it comes up all of the time. we register cars, so we know who the owner is. we license the driver and have test on that. i think that registration of guns and licensing of gun owners might make some sense. when we find out that a driver is misusing alcohol or drugs, we take their license away from them. we test to see if they know what they are doing with a are driving a car. when we find out that cards are unsafe, we require things like airbags and seatbelts. we have done a lot to reduce car violence by looking at both the people that drive the car and the cars themselves. that is a good approach to take and a public health approach to take. with guns, i would like to take the same approach. that's figure out what we can do. part of the problem it is tough to find good research. for a long time, basically, congress had some writers on some bills who made it impossible that the cdc and the national institute of health could not do the research. people had to research on their own, and in the research become suspect. i would like to see more research on this and if the data takes us someplace, let's do it. the one thing that is pretty clear is the number of deaths that are appearing at one of the most solid things not based on survey and maybe they reflect some numbers. i am relying on the number of people killed with a gun each day and you try figure out where the gun came from. all of that is hard to research too because congress is made of horrible to trace where guns come from. you can find out where a single gun comes from, but you cannot get information if that gun store sold all of the other guns used in the crime. we make it impossible to get the data so that you can not develop a policy prescription that deals with guns. >> paul admits to an advocacy of registration and there's a difference between registering cars and registering guns. nobody is fiercely advocating banning cars. maybe the really green people would think there is something set for that, but they are a small minority. but there is lots of people who do support banning guns. about half will support banning semi automatic guns they get labeled as assault weapons, and about a quarter will still support banning handguns although the number is declining. so yes, people want to ban it. what would you need administratively if you wanted to seize all of the guns are handguns all! or all of the assault weapons? you would need a record of who has them. law enforcement or it is a governmental impossibility to know who owed you a gun and who should turn it in if you declare you have to turn in an assault weapon, which is exactly what is happening. the state of california said turn in your assault weapon. how would they know whether or not if you had one or should be turning it in? the only way the government can know that is if they have a record of it. that is what registration is. it records who has a specific gun. it doesn't have any crime control value. every single study that has assessed the impact of registration laws on crime rates is found there is no effect of having a registration law on crime rates. it has no crime control rationale, but it has plenty of rationale banning some guns administratively feasible. >> the supreme court in the heller case and the mcdonald's case made it clear you cannot ban guns. i congratulated after the night ended the supreme court said the remedy was they should get the license for his gun. so why don't we move forward with the licensing and registration scheme? we cannot do that because they might try to take our gun away. that i point out that the most avid gun rights folks have concealed carry permits which means the government has their name with a list of concealed carry permits. >> they don't like that either. >> but they have it. that i point out in this day and age, when facebook and twitter and everybody else can figure out what kind of toothpaste you use and what kind of magazines you get, you can find out pretty much everything about everybody. you don't think somebody can figure out who the likely gun owners are in the country. the idea that the gun registration is some way the government is going to take your gun away, i think that is left over from centuries and decades past. >> so as a lawyer, you think that kind of information that is floating around on the internet would be enough for the court to issue a search warrant for a gun? >> they are not going to do that because cannot have a gun ban. >> i'm pretty sure a registration form by the government would be a basis for probable cause. >> next question. >> related to the registration question. what you think the effectiveness of these laws will be in the face of printed guns? >> it seems everyone wants to ask you a question paul. >> i wish i knew more about it. it is one of those things were first of all, the cat is out of the bag or the horses out of the corral or whatever. the information will not die if it is on the internet and circulating. the plan and the programming is there to make your 3-d printer crank out the weaponry is there. but, does anybody really want one? that was my initial reaction when i first heard about somebody saying you can 3-d print a gun. why would you want one? most 3-d printers, they crank out plastic. do you really want a gun that is going to melt after firing 2- 3 times, and especially, are you going to won't want one there is 350 million real guns out there made out of steel, and why would you need or want this? i think it is gun and archivist out there who are pushing the idea of putting out these 3-d manufacturer guns. i guess to a libertarian audience, it is thumbing your nose at the government maybe and what it is all about. i don't see it as being any practical significance. >> i think the significant thing is how this is going to change in the future. if you get to the stage right now, a lot of these plastic guns are not as durable and not reliable, and they might be only good for 1-2 uses and then they might explode or overeat. do you still need a metal firing pin -- overheat. do you still need a metal firing pin? trying to understand, and all guns ignored the 3-d guns, all gun start out on the legal market and how did they end up in the hands of the bad guys? often times a nurse:from the good guys -- often times they are stolen from the good guys. directly now though, you can have gains making the guns. that is still years away, and if it ever gets to the stage where you can easily make an effective multi use gun on your own, i think it is going to make it, and the debate will be a lot different. >> this question is for paul. since you mentioned mass shootings, it seems to be the case that a lot of the shootings might have been prevented if already existing loss was properly enforced and effectively. i am curious why you are advocating for additional regulations and restrictions if the case is that the already existing loss might have prevented these things from happening if they was properly enforced? >> i am not sure what laws you are talking about other than a law against murdering somebody. law survey number of purposes. laws are written to prevent crimes and bad things from occurring. loss are also written when a bad thing occurs and the legal right -- a law is also written when a bad thing occurs in the legal right to arrest that person. with a lot of the mass shootings, basically the person did not break any law at all. the gabby giffords shooting, arizona did not have any laws on the book with regards to guns and he was not breaking a single law. he did not break the law until he pulled the trigger. again, he was not stopped by the good guy, he was stopped when the magazine ran out of bullets and he got tackled by a 65-year-old person. again, you have some of the school kids get away when he went to change the magazine out because the magazine only held 31 bullets. if he had a smaller magazine that was capped at 10-18, more people might have gotten away too. but laws have problems, you strengthen the loss. one quick example. one of the you gun control laws we have on the books is the gun law of 1968. for 25 years, basically the way it operated was if i went in to buy a gun, and i would have to fill out the form and honestly bad people can lie. the brady bill started to have a background check from federally licensed dealers said let's do a check on this sort of thing. we did not say that that prohibited purchase along doesn't work let's get rid of it, they said let's figure out what we need to do by going to the federally licensed gun dealers who are presumably law- abiding to figure out what they can do. when we have something that is not working and bad things happen, look to see if you need to change the law or what you need to do. but instead, we basically say that the laws are no good and we cannot do anything and let's get more guns, at as i always say, if more guns made a saver, we would be the safest country in the world, and we are not. >> the one specific gun control measure that paul mentioned, the brady campaign and other gun control organizations mentioned, if the ban on large capacity magazines with the idea that if these mass shooters had magazines that held for more than 10 rounds, which is the usual cut off, then they would hurt fewer people. it is a subtle one, and well there is no real difference between a guy who has 30 rounds in three separate magazines each holding 10 rounds versus a guy who has a single 30 round magazine. it is not the difference in rounds that matters, it is the fact that the guy who has only a 10 round magazine, he has to reload more often. that is why paul keeps saying that one example of gabrielle giffords that somebody tackled the shooter while he was reloading. the problem is that we don't really know what happened is that. he may have well been struggling with a defective magazine and that is why they were able to tackle him. in other words, it had nothing to do with him trying to reload as far as we know. maybe that was the case, but there is to my knowledge in the past 30 years not a single case of someone who actually got tackled while they was reloading. the fact that a ban on a big magazine would make the shooter reload more often, it doesn't have the significance that he is hinting. he also says in the sandy hook shooting, a bunch of school kids escaped while the guy was reloading. we in fact not the slightest evidence that is what was happening. we don't know if he was choosing to stop shooting for a while or whether he was taking a break to wipe the sweat off with his four head? we have no idea and no evidence whatsoever that he was reloading and it had absolutely anything to do with the kids escaping. >> paul, you mentioned a lot of the school shootings as an example like sandy hook, and you said we do not have a good guy with a gun stopping the shooting. you also earlier compared u.s. statistics to other civilized countries. my question is would you then support all all that said a law -- that law that do not allow a good guy with a gun to stop the shooting. because the gun free school zone act is why you cannot have a good guy with a gun stop a shooting. can you defy what a civilized country is to -- too? >> i meant developed countries and i tried to clarify that when i was speaking. generally, they look at other industrialized countries when they are doing these comparisons. the other comparisons was to new zealand and australia because they had sort of the frontier settlement background that we had. i have no objection to schools hiring school resource officers and bring them police officers and so on to deal when there is a threat and to deal with the possibility of a threat. i am opposed to having teachers given the responsibility of doing this. my wife was a teacher for 37 years and tough enough to keep your purse secure much less a gun secure in the classroom. i have talked to people who have been shot and injured at virginia tech and other school shooting situations, and some of these people was people who was familiar with the gun and had used a gun, and they indicated that the gun would have done nothing for them and only made them an earlier target in this situation. if we are going to have, and if there is a threat someplace, get somebody who is trained to handle that threat do deal with it. that is how you handled the situations. you are never going to have a perfect situation. we are always hoping that the hero is there someplace, but in real life, that is hard to have and adding more guns to the situation, just ins up usually having more things go wrong. has anyone here been in the school when there was a school shooting? >> i guess not. >> the gentleman in the back. >> the one that i usually like to bring up is college campuses because a lot of the time, they will talk about the college kids should be able to have their concealed carry permit. i talk about that people have gone through years of school generally and not many people have ever been in the school shooting and there is more now than there used to be. and i say how many of you in college knew anyone who ever got drunk or ever abuse drugs? how many of you knew people who was seriously depressed? then you add into that that college dormitories are not very secure and the classrooms don't have places to store things. the idea of adding more guns into a college setting or even a high school setting i don't think makes sense and that you are hiring professionals to be there. >> paul argues that the reason you cannot have authorized teachers or security officers with guns in the school is because you can't secure the gun . if you can't secure a purse, how can you secure a gun? there is a simple device called a trigger lock which goes behind the trigger and makes it utterly impossible to fire the gun whether you are lit in a classroom or anybody else. if you are not the authorized user who doesn't have the key to stick in that lot, you are not going to be able to use it. to my knowledge and 40 years of research, i have never heard of a single documented case where someone defeated a trigger lock and did it harm with the gun or an unauthorized user got the gun and disengage the trigger lock. they did not commit homicides or suicides and they did not commit an accidental death or injury with the gun. that is not an issue but the fact that people have to make up these serious reasons why you cannot have authorized shooter just shows the weakness of the argument. it is not like every schoolteacher would be packing a gun on their hip. the usual proposal is that there would be 1-2 people trained often because they are former military or police, who are the authorized accessor of the gun. there may be 1-2 guns in the entire school and they are secured in a locked cabinet or a trigger lock. the idea that the problem is that somebody unauthorized will get the gun and god knows what will happen. it is not an issue. if you want to argue, then they would surprised or shocked and would have the frame of mind to use a gun effectively, that is possible and a plausible argument. but the idea that you cannot secure the gun or these proposals entail all of the teacher being armed and packing a gun on their hip, that is crazy and has nothing to do with the real debate. >> my question to the both of you, and it seems both of you are okay with a background check and you happen to make a quip about gangs in chicago printing guns, so i think that is an allusion to the black communities in chicago experiencing gun violence by gangs. i'm going to phrases question of the new york state gun control law. in new york state, you have to put up a $700 registration fee to get a permit. you need seven pieces of identification outside of your municipal identification to get a permit and for -- imagine seven pieces of identification for boating. -- voting. you can get the knife for your gun permit if you was convicted of a single felony in your previous before applying for that permit. then, you can still get denied. it seems to me that the sort of laws, these gun control laws in new york only affect communities of color because most legal gun owners in new york are white. i would like to know what either of you guys -- would be in support of repeating the races new york gum wall. >> this will have to be the last question -- -- racist new york gun law. >> this will have to be the last question. >> it is almost impossible for a middle-class white person to get a permit in new york. it is the city more than the state of new york. the questioner did accurately portray how very difficult it is. furthermore, it can be denied on totally subject grounds. somebody in the police department says i don't think the spurs has a reasonable basis or sufficient reasonable basis to get a permit. there is no specific criteria that is articulated in the law. it can be an subjective judgment. yes, when you have that kind of descriptions, anybody can be racially biased or gender bias, can easily let their bias influence that. that is different from a standard background check where it is cut and dry. you have a criminal conviction or you don't. if you do then you cannot get the gun permit and if you are clean, then you can go ahead and get it. the new york city laws are remarkably subjective. >> anyone who has a felony regardless of how long ago it is, they cannot buy a gun and much less get a permit to carry. that is federal law and one of the things that go back to the gun control act of 1968. the supreme court has not yet ruled on the issue of whether or not there is a constitutional right to carry a gun outside of your house. we are not really getting into the constitutional issues. i have generally and i don't know the details of new york carried laws, -- carry laws, with a share for the police chief can have a chance to deny someone because often times they will have information that will not be a formal disqualify for buying a gun, but they know they have responded to 25 domestic arguments at that place, and they have neighbors who know there is drugs being sold there or they have arrested this person by -6 times, but they might be on a misdemeanor charge that involves violence but not enough to make them not be able to carry a gun. i think the way to counteract subjective discrimination would be to have some sort of appeal process and that doesn't bother me. generally, i trust the sheriff and the police chief to have a better sense of who should be able to carry a loaded gun in public and therefore endanger the rest of us. >> you can take the podium to summarize or stay in the chair. >> i am still going to do it from the chair. the debate, the really technical debate is too boring to talk about. in a way, this issue really boils down to how much defensive gun use there is. it is a mark of how threatening large numbers of defensive gun uses is to the pro-control movement that they go to such a great length to discredit large estimates. paul will seriously suggest that you can count up defensive gun uses by counting up how many news articles there are about it. he doesn't actually quite say i believe that and in fact, he doesn't believe it, so why bring it up? he offers the national crime victim survey of 100,000 defensive gun uses, but that survey has never asked a single respondent a direct question about defensive gun use. they only are talk about how many people volunteered the information that the point of a deadly weapon at another human being and not surprisingly in a government run government- sponsored survey, which is not anonymous and they know where you live and your telephone number and so on, people are not really going to volunteer that information. that survey has nothing to say in this debate. but there are 20 national surveys plus 20+ have indicated that defensive gun use is really, and why is that surprising? tens of millions of americans and maybe hundreds of thousands of americans own guns and there is a lot of crime out there with you at half! were you at half an opera -- where you would have an opportunity to use the gun. they are not killing people to protect themselves, they are just avoiding death and injury for themselves by the most part by pointing a gun at a criminal and saying knock it off. i don't have any problems at all with gun control measures that are selectively aimed at bad guys including convicted felons and people who are declared to be dangerous to themselves and others by a court of law. i have no problem with that either. but what i do have a problem with is the lost that will disarm more people whether it would be of all guns or so- called assault weapons or large capacity magazines, it will do this more for non-criminals than criminals. all of that is bad policy and poorly sought out and not supported by the best available evidence. >> so let's put together some good policy that is going to try to reduce the number of deaths and injuries and the cost of having guns, but still not take the guns away that are going to be used for defensive gun purposes. gary concedes that background checks make sense. we have discussed so-called assault weapons and no evidence i think, at least in the early thing that are red, and maybe it is from the mid-1990s, that the so-called assault weapons was used for defensive purposes. i think most of the time, the person was first of all, waving a handgun, and i think that was the most prevalent that you had on the chart in front of me now. in your survey, you indicate that if you responded to the offender, 48% with a gun, what kind of weapon did you have? it was a baseball bat, knives, and a handgun. they don't list assault rifles. what i am saying is that we can structure some things, and registration and licensing if we go there should not be taking the guns away from good people. it should help us be able to track you actually also gun and where it is going. loss will acquire the guns to be required locked up like gary said and suggested for schools might make some sense. but what -- but what we are doing is nothing and we are allowing people to get any number of these guns they can and we end up with a cost of it. a lot of the time to think what we have not talked about tonight is how these defensive gun uses sometimes in and of themselves cause problems. and one of his comments, he says maybe 33% of bad guy versus bad guy gun defenses. sometimes, you get an arms race or an escalation of the conflict because of the gun. look at the jordan zimmermann and trayvon martin situation. this at the worst should've just been a fight, and george zimmerman pulls out a gun and martin is dead. you get a situation where somebody comes to the house and the door is open and they pulled the gun of the shooting suspect and they shoot him -- and they shoot him, and it was a police officer in the wrong room. having a gun makes you more willing to escalate the situation. the are good purposes for guns and i am not anti-gun. but i think we need to realize that we as a society allow people to have an instrument that can kill others, killed many others and killed them at a distance, and particularly allow people to clear those loaded in public, thereby impacting others accidentally or intentionally or negligently, and we as a society i think have an appropriate chance to respond to that. it is not an constitutional issue, and require some research and good policy. my bottom line tonight is less not take away good defensive gun uses. let's try to get some more effective gun laws that will make it harder for dangerous people to get guns. let's lift the prohibition on studying these issues and treat this as a public health issue and try make it safer for all of us. so,sh anyone who wants everyone to have any gun there is, there should be plenty of room for middle ground. let's decide which people should be restricted. right now we restrict felons and the dangerously mentally ill. but maybe some violet misdemeanors should be put in that category and maybe some other should be taken off of that category. let's look at the types of guns. right now we restrict machine guns. we have done that since the mid- 1930s. you don't see machine guns used in a bank robbery anymore. pesticide that a semi automatic should be created more like a machine gun or create new rules for them. the scope to the categories and where should a gun be excluded and who should be able to carry a gun? those are the sorts of things the supreme court said is constitutionally permissible and things that could be effective at things that should be study. this should not be the hot button issue that we make it out to be and we should not have to come back 10 years from now and have the same argument we had 10 years ago. thank you for being here.[ applause ]>> please vote on the resolution. if you voted the first time, the revolution -- resolution is in front of you. tom woods, are you in the house? i highly recommend his show and i have been on his show 14 times. i will make a plug for something he is doing. tom, take it away. semi i was going to say -- >> i am going to say jean has been own a lot of times. he is giving me a minute to promote something that i do that is a lot of fun. every year, my colleague cohost this podcast, and i assume that podcast is self-explanatory. somehow we have been able to have a profitable crews monetizing the name for two years running. this is our third year in the most fun that you can possibly imagine. we are doing it again next month where it is a mexican riviera and it is not too late to join us. it will be the most enjoyable week of the year and if you cannot make it next month, and we have not announces publicly and i will get in trouble with bob, but i guess the c-span cameras are running so bob will find out that i said it. we are going to do alaska next year in july and that is on your bucket list for a lot of you. for the crazy people in your room, going to alaska with us is specifically on your bucket list. if you would like information about this year or any other of our future cruises including alaska, text the word contra to the number. thank you a lot.[ applause ] >> how do we stand and are we ready to close the voting? still coming in. i want to make some future announcements about the forum. on october 15 at the jerrod lynch the ater, that debate on socialism versus capitalism, -- jerrod lynch the ater, that debate on socialism versus capitalism. -- thearter the debate on socialism versus capitalism. again, the author of black is the country. that will be a debate about antiracism versus racism. on monday, december 3, a harvard professor economics, the author of the curse of cash , will defend that resolution governments of the advanced industrial economy should phase out the use of paper money in the form of large denomination notes and sharply restrict the use of crypto currency. that is in december, and those two events, and the other event you may will be held and will be the only event and the exception will be next month on october 15. are you ready to bring the results? please bring them up. >> the initial vote in favor of the resolution was 45% all the way to 50%. the vote for yes picked up 6%. the no vote was at 34% and down 2.5%. it looks like the yes will get the tootsie roll. congratulations gary. which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> here is a look at our live coverage on tuesday. the house is back at noon eastern for general speeches with legislative business. on the agenda, a bill to reauthorize the coast guard the fiscal year 2019. on c-span 2, the senate resumes debate on the nomination of's even deign to be general counsel of the --'s stephen -- stephen to be the general counsel of the agricultural department. on c-span 3, the senate armed services committee will hold a hearing to review recommendations from the commission on national defense strategy and in the afternoon, a senate commerce subcommittee hearing with the head and the four commissioners of the trade commission. >> what does it mean to be american? that is this year's student camera video competition. students and their teachers from around the country are posting on social media about it. heidi long tweeted what does it mean to be an american. social studies students brainstorming constitutional rights and national characteristics, an important people and events of the nation. civic students brainstormed ideas for the student. gary hoskins had to do students have their product recognized in recent years. indiana senator tonya tweeted that he visited her high school today to visit her government class and was interviewed by students participating in the scholarship program. we discuss freedom of speech and the first amendment. mrs. king from william gandy middle school tweeted that at cpn classroom, it is project -based learning at its finest. this year, we are asking middle and high school students to produce a 5-6 minute documentary answering the question what does it mean to be an american? we are awarding $100,000 in total cash prizes including a grand prize of $5000. the deadline for entry is january 20. >> next, doctor priscilla chan zuckerberg on the chan zuckerberg initiative . doctor chan is a pediatrician and the wife of facebook cofounder mark zuckerberg.

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