is america doing enough to keep guns from getting into the wrong hands? a no hold's barred debate. plus, governor romney on welfare. >> he'd ask the middle class. it's like robin hood in reverse. it's romney hood. >> tonight, the campaigns square off. and a day at the beach turns terrifying. my prime-time exclusive of the survivor of the cape cod shark attack. this is "piers morgan tonight." good evening. our big story tonight, inside the mind of a shooter. jared lee loughner, the alleged gunman of the tucson shooting that killed six people and nearly killed gabby giffords entered a not guilty plea in a court today. a judge ruled him competent to stand trial. this comes after news the psychiatrist who treated the alleged aurora shooter james holmes was so concerned about his behavior. an abc news reporter yesterday even contacted university police. in oak creek wisconsin, police saying tonight there are links between a white supremacist movement and this man. he was mentioned in a small number of files going back seven years. all three shooters bought their guns legally. my response to that is why were they allowed to? surely, there must be new controls put in to stop people like this from getting guns in america. joining me now, criminal defense attorney alan dershowitz. darren koppel of the independence institute. and dan bahm, author of the forthcoming "gun guys, a road trip." we're seeing a pattern here of people who are clearly mentally disturbed in some way. lawfully purchasing handguns. we saw it with jared loughner. with james holmes in aurora. all buying handguns. perfectly buying handguns legally. all clearly deranged in some way mentally. >> first of all, it's very dangerous to try to preventively detain people based on predictions of what they're liking to do in the future. that leads to tiyranny in many kinds of societies. second, you can't ban the kind of music, for example, that may have inspired this racist to kill. what you can do is limit the availability of guns. now, limiting the availability of guns is not going to solve all the problems but when you think of what you can do with the least negative impact on civil liberties of americans, gun control is clearly the right direction to go. >> david koppel, my question for you really is this. i just don't think it's good enough for people who are pro guns to simply react to all these incidents by saying there's no need to do anything. because as there are more of them, the need to do something becomes more and more urgent, doesn't it? >> i think that's exactly right. what we want to do is do something intelligent and thoughtful and not just lash out at this scapegoat and percent a persecution of law-abiding gun owners. the people and the state legislature enacted eight different laws. three of those were to strengt be protections against guns getting into the wrong hands. five of them were to protect gun rights so that law-abiding gun owners would be able to exercise eir rights. we know those laws save lives. in december 2007, a evil person went to a mega church in colorado springs with 7,000 people inside and he was armed and he was stopped and shot accord to the pastor because there was a volunteer security guard there. e stopped the murder. and according to the pastor, saved over 100 lives. we can strengthen the rights of law-abiding people to own and carry and use firearms. and we can continue to improve ways to try to keep guns out of the wrong hands. such as after virginia tech when both sides came together and enacted good laws to help mental health records more properly get into the fbi's database about persons prohibited from owning guns. >> how do you make it harder for crazy people to buy weapons? >> the first thing you do is you do know harm. whenever something like this happens, there's an immediate call for more gun control. like mr. dershowitz and the editorial board of "the new york times" and the usual suspects. then the national rifle association gems up its hideous machine and we have the usual screaming match. what nobody ever seems to do is listen to gun owners. 40% of american households own guns. very, very few of those people commit crimes with them. and i just spent two years driving 15,000 miles around the country talking to gun owners. and what i picked up was gun owners identified very strongly with their guns. you can like that or not like that. they take a tremendous amount of pride in being able to live alongside these very dangerous tools and not hurt anybody. and when you come along somebody like mr. der sdershowitz, someb who to me does not look like a big gun guy, he comes along and tells the ordinary gun own, you can't be trusted with this kind of gun, you can't be trusted with this kind of ammunition, you can't be trusted to buy guns under these kinds of circumstances, the reaction is, well, to hell with you. and what you get is this resentment. there's a tremendous amount of resentment among gun owners that every time something bad happens, they got tarred. >> let me bring alan in. you've had a few whacks in. >> i like the fact your guest can tell who a gun owner is just by looking at him. he can just by hearing my name whether i'm a kind of gun guy or not. but let's think about his example. >> it's by what you've written, alan, you've made that very clear. >> -- very few gun owners commit crimes. let me give you another analogy. very few people who spd 90 miles an hour kill people. but the vast majority of people who kill people on the road have been speeding or drunk or driving while drunk. the same thing is true with guns. the vast majority of gun owners don't kill. but people who do kill tend to kill with guns and often with illegal guns. i agree that we don't want to scream and yell about it. i'm not unhappy being on the same side as "the new york times." what we're trying to do is limit e access of guns to people who don't need them. americans love guns. and, you know, the analogy's almost as if -- i know, i've read your writings. you think americans are just bad people. and you can't change people from being violent. well, if you can't change people from violent, you really think americans have a love affair with violence, then you really do have to take the guns away. americans also have a love affair with speeding and with drunken driving. we can't stop them from thinking about those things. we can stop them from speeding. even though very few speeders kill. we can stop them from having access to too many guns because guns in the hands of people like this do kill. we have to use a little common sense. the fact that we have more guns than any country in the world today and have more violent crimes than any country in the world today has to have a caro lation. i believe it also has a correlation. you're right, that we have crimes because americans are violent people, that's an argument in favor of taking away guns. not in favor of letting them have their guns. >> let me bring in david kopel. at what point do you say to americans the right to bear arms according to your constitution doesn't mean the right for crazy people to go into gun are to, buy weapons, whoever it may, and go into sikh temples, movie theaters. what do you do about that culture? >> i think americans look at the experience of england. you went from a country with zero gun control laws in the early 20th century to now something that's acknowledged as having the most severe gun laws in the western world. in that period, you went from a very low crime area to a place where the crime really went up by 50 times and now according to a joint study by the u.s. department of justice and the british home office, the uk has a higher violent crime rate, significantly, than the u.s. -- >> let me jump because you use -- hang on, hang on, hang on. you used this with me last time -- >> -- because you have no self-defense -- >> you used this with me last time. it's untrue. the reality about the british gun situation is actually, particularly because of the new handgun rulings in the '90s after the atrocity. in fact, gun crime and murders from guns are on a rapid decline throughout britain. and, you know, i think -- >> i'm talking about totally crime. >> wait a minute, you also throw at me norway. and said, look, it even happens in norway. the reality about norway is norway had a massacre. most countries at some stage have a crazy person who commits an atrocity. the last audited figures from 2005, it had five killings from guns. america last year had 11,000. there is a massive difference here. >> dan made the point that other countries with no unga guns ha higher homicide rates than the united states. you're fixated on guns. in america, we look at the harms of guns. and also the benefits. like crime deterrence. most british burglaries take place when the families are home is because britain has outlawed self-defense with a firearm. >> that is ridiculous -- >> that is such a -- >> you don't know the studies -- >> of course i know the studies -- trying to draw some parallel between the burglary rates in britain because we don't have guns. what would you suggest, we go and arm everyone in britain to kill everyone who burglars their house? come on. >> in the united states, we do that and we have a lot fewer burglaries. >> we don't have 12,000 gun murders a year, do we? let's try and get it back to a more even keeled debate. it is incendiary. it does inspire a lot of passion. what is the sensible way of movimove ing the two sides togetherth? where do you bring the i want gun control lobby i. ists to th don't want any gun control? mitt romney in massachusetts actually brought in a meeting of minds and did actually move this debate sensibly. >> i think the first place to start is what do you want to achieve? do you want to reduce violence? or do you want to get rid of the guns? if you want to reduce violence, maybe we should just keep doing what we're doing because violence is about half of what it was 20ears ago. homicide and other crimes of violence about half. you'd have a hard time finding another time in american history when crime has dropped this much. and this was a 20 years in which gun laws got looser. policing has gotten smarter. sentencing has gotten tougher. there's all kinds of things that have gone on. so when -- when people say, oh, you just want to do nothing about violence, i think that's a lie. because elected officials and police officials all over the country are doing a terrific job at reducing violence. >> let me bring in alan. >> it's a hard week to make that argument. but violence is way down in the united states. >> can i respond to that? >> before we go to alan, what i would say, it's very good to have the debate. i think not having the debate is completely the wrong response. america has to debate this. because you've had two of the worst gun incidents in the last ten years. in the space of three weeks. you've got to talk about this. >>et me respond. one of the reasons why crime is down in america is because we have the highest concentration of prisoners anywhere in the world. we have -- >> perhaps. >> -- more prisoners per capita. most of our prisoners are racial minorities. we have more people in jail not having been convicted of crime in pretrial detention. we have massively denied the civil liberties of people in order to reduce the crime. >> this is true. >> -- where people are stopped on the street. we have a range of other violations. so the question is how do you reduce -- we also have demographic changes that explaining some reduction in violence. >> yes. >> how do you -- let me finish. how do you reduce crime in the way that minimally violates civil liberties and the answer to that is gun control. it is the single most effective way to reduce crime. now, the argument that a person at the temple with a gun stopped the killing of 100 people is absurd. there should have been a policeman who has a gun. policemen who have guns. standing at the temple. preventinging tha ing thathat. look what happeneded with george zimmerman. we don't want people walking around in synagogues and members and temples and at schools and airplanes and at homes with guns that are used to commit suicide to kill their children, to accidentally commit crimes and to accidentally commit violence. the pervasiveness of guns in our society is destroying america. that is common sense. all these phony studies. they are the worst example of academic misconduct. these studies, they prove nothing. they confusion correlation with causation. they assume that they can demonstrate that the presence of guns stops crime. there is no way of proving that empirically. these are phony junk science studies. common sense -- >> okay. >> should i dismiss the studies and count on alan dershowitz -- >> i'm going to reluctant draw it to a close. let's keep having the debate. the important thing in america is to keep talking about this and try not to get overexcited about it. in the end, i expect there has to be some kind of limitation to the sheer volume of guns you have out there. there has to be. for now, thank you for joining me, i appreciate it. next, i'll talk ton the doctor who tells all of us what unlikely trait, ths they have i common. 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joining me now is dr. michael welner. he does pioneering research on defining evil in crime. thank you for joining me. it's a really complex issue. there are many issues around guns in america. this particular one of crazy people doing crazy things, what can you do to try and red flag these people? >> well, homicide, murder, is a byproduct of many different qualities. you can't generalize about murder but you can generalize about mass shooting. look, mental illness wasn't just invented. neither were guns. yet we've seen a proliferation in recent decades of mass murder. and why? because there's a social payoff. there is the vehicle. through hyper exposure of news coverage and relevance of a person who's unremarkable as has just been described. or failing. who had high expectations of himself. we don't see people with chronic conditions. we see people who are unremarkable. who crawl into the cracks because they are not obviously ill even if they have a psychiatric condition. who recognize there's a social payoff. that we will talk about them on your show. or their perceived grievance. people who know they can go in an instant from being unremarkable to relevant at the very least and notorious jokers or anti-heroes or, in the example of page, the person in the white supremacist movement who actually got up and did something. which in my experience in dealing with the white supremacist community, you have plenty of folks in these chat rooms who grouse about nobody getting up and doing something. and then someone will say, i will rise above and i will become relevant to them. it is a social phenomenon of people seeking relevance. that we reinforce. and so the next person inspired watching how we cover it basically chooses shock value, recognizing that if they're shocking enough and creative enough, so you eliminate guns, they'll pick bombs. >> look, i mean, to me, that's always a very simplistic argument. if you had that argument with terrorism for example. we said about al qaeda. okay, they blew up the world trade center but you know what, if they weren't doing that, they'd be doing something else. we're going to leave them alone to do their thing. you can't just leave these people to do their thing. you can't just say, well, if it wasn't guns, it would be bombs. my issue about page for example is this. there is a man who was thrown out the army for misconduct. he had a criminal record. he was in ha relatively high-profile band full of skinhead white supremacists who were spouting vile stuff about anybody nonwhite in america. you've got a clearly dangerous criminally minded, unstable character, with a vested interest in doing exactly the kind of thing he did. how do we flag out people like him? because the media within a few hours of his name coming out can tell you all about him and the american people can say, here are 20 reasons why he shouldn't be given a gun. yet he was able to walk in i think two weeks ago and purchase the gun that caused the mayhem. what do we do about that? >> well, two things. first, he was able to purchase the gun because he wasn't obviously disturbed. secondly, there are thousands of people whether we like it or not, who think like him. and who may be even more venomous and vitruptive in what he had to say. the reason i mention bombs is merely to say bombs are an instrument of spectacle. when something is blown up, people notice. if guns are not available -- >> in all these cases, don't you just have to make it as difficult as you possibly can for people of this kind of mentality? to acquire these kind of assault weapons? why do you really need to have a handgun or assault weapon of type that they're using to commit these things? unless it's to do harm? >> mass shooting is an end point in an individual who may have mentally illness and who may not. at some point