>> i want to change the trajectory, ron. >> plus, new insight into what would cause the 2015 front-runner to drop out. >> i'm not a masochist. if i was dropping to the polls where i thought i wasn't going to win, why would i continue? >> and wncht in south carolina. >> jeb is different than george. jeb is who he is. good evening, from new york. i'm chris hayes. after nine people were murdered in oregon, democrats are putting the issue front and center on the campaign trail and giving hillary clinton a rare opportunity to come at bernie sanders from the left. at a town hall today in new hampshire, clinton made a strong case for new government action to take on gun violence in america. >> on the republican side, mr. trump was asked about it and said, you know, thing likes that happen in the world. and governor bush said, yes, stuff happens. no, that's an admission of defeat and sur end -- surrendert is killing 33,000 americans. >> among the plan it woe tighten gun show and internet sales loophole and close the charleston loophole and block gun purchases for -- sanders is extending his lead. while clinton is still ahead in iowa beating sanders 47 to 36%. when you add biden to the mix, clinton's support drops to just 33. bernie sanders held a massive rally of about 20,000 of people in boston, double the number who turned out to see barack obama himself at a similar event in 2007. >> what a huge crowd! and let me thank the many thousands of people who are outside who were unable to get in. thank you! >> gun control may be the one issue where clinton can reliably challenge bernie sanders progressive bona fide. he famously voted against the 1993 brady bill requiring, among other things, background checks for gun purchases. and in 2005, he voted for immunity for gun sellers. >> the gun sellers are the only businesses in america that are totally free of liability for their behavior. nobody else is given that immunity and, i mean, that just illustrates the extremism that has taken over this debate. >> joining me now, msnbc national correspondent joy reid, author of "fractured." i recommend it to everyone. i'm working my way through it now and learning a lot. i did not predict guns would be the focus of an emerging policy fight. >> i think one of the things that has changed in our politics is will are now actual grassroots groups -- color of change is planning to jump into this under their criminal justice reform banner. >> this is, you know, i remember attacking bernie sanders' record on guns. but what i think is surprising is it's not the record you would associate with bernie sanders when you look at how sort of thoroughly progressive he's been on other issues. >> bernie sanders has set himself up as the guy who is toughest on corporate america. >> that's why he such a strong vote. >> absolutely he's going to have to answer for that in the debate. as you said in the setup, it's the one place where hillary clinton can be extremely aggressive from bernie sanders' left. there's the fact that bernie sanders, you know, he's got the left y politics, the guy is in politics in a very rural state for a long time, he knows how to talk to rural voters. >> don't forget hillary clinton was the first lady of arkansas, an also very rural state. not to mention martin o'malley has all these issues of criminal justice reform. one of the central tenents of what i was writing is the mcgovernite left. you have this older left that's looking to bernie sanders but you're the young, emerging left activated by barack obama that is looking to bernie sanders as a way to get that actual reform. >> if you're playing the video game of assembling sufficient delegates to primaries, black voters, particular black women, are the demographic cornerstone. if you're talking south carolina, that's how barack obama won south carolina. this is clinton's african-american support, down among black democrats 31%. can you see that sharp line on the right. that is the thing if you're the clinton campaign, you can deal with losing new hampshire, there's a lot of things you can deal with. the thing you can't deal with that. >> you can lose iowa and new hampshire and be comfortable as long as you are guaranteed you're till going to come back and win. their firewall is south carolina. they need african-american voters. what's really interesting is hillary clinton, what she still lacks is really sort of almost an endorser. who is going to be the person that for her says you're okay, the way that joe biden said to white working-class voters that barack obama is okay? where are her surrogates? i find it fascinating. she's got wendy davis on board. she's got people like howard dean on board. she's got a lot of good surrogates for white voters. i'm wondering when she's going to start to deploy some african-american surrogates. >> very interesting question. joy reid, always a pleasure. read that book. all right. policy proposals like the ones we've been mentioning on gun safety are increasingly meeting with a counterargument from guns rights maximalists that there's nothing we can do to prevent kind of mass shooting we saw in oregon last week. >> you have people that are mentally ill and they have problems and they're going to slip through the cracks and no matter how you do it, no matter how you try it and if you go back 2,000 years and if you go forward 2 million years, you're going to have problems. i can tell you that people say oh, we're going to stop it. it doesn't work that way. >> that's a pretty fatalistic way of look at gun violence in america, especially from a presidential candidate. it's largely contradicted by the research and experience of psychologists, law ebb enforcements officials and other experts, who are working to find out what makes the mostly white male perpetrators of mass murder snap and how to see the warnings signs. their work is the subject of a mother jones cover story. i'm joined by the editor. you've been doing sustained reporting for several years now on mass shootings. first let's talk about the distinctness of these two problems. there's a gun problem in america, a gun fatality problem, a gun violence problem, and then there is a mass shooting problem. how to think about that final category, which is numerically small but part of what i think has precipitated such horror among the american populace. >> right. well, one of the things you'll hear when mass shootings come up and get all the attention they do in the media including again last week with what happened in oregon is this is a tiny fraction of our overall problem with gun violence and a lot of people argue that this should not drive policy. and yet these events have an enormous impact on us psychologically, financially, in the local communities where they happen. they're just absolutely devastating. so there is -- the flip side of that is there is an imperative to shape policy around it. and you know, while the politicians seem to do nothing over and over, there's actually this growing legion of people behind the scenes in law enforcement and in mental health who are scrambling trying to stop these attacks from occurring. there's just some remarkable paradoxes to it. it's relatively unknown. and you know, in some ways it's the only serious thing that's going on in our country to try to mitigate the problem. >> tell me what you encounter in your reporting about what solutions there might be or what the folks that have devoted themselves to this have discovered. >> so the article focuses on a strategy that's known as threat assessment. it's been around actually for quite some time, almost three decades. but it's been developing pretty rapidly the last few years and growing. it's essentially law enforcement officials and mental health experts working hand in hand to try to prevent violent crimes like mass shootings from happening. the way they do this is it essentially starts with a tip about someone who's creating anxiety or fear at the local level and if it gets to what's called a threat assessment team, this group of law enforcement and mental health professionals get together and quickly try to analyze the situation to gather as much information as possible, as they can about the individual, and then they try to intervene in the most constructive way possible. and one of the most fascinating aspects of it is this is by and large social and mental health interventions. it rarely involves arrest and prosecution. and even when there are national law enforcement agencies involved there's a whole unit of the fbi that's been doing this increasingly for the last few years, and as the head of that unit told me for this story, their goal is prevention, not prosecution. in the vast majority of cases that's what they try to do. >> when i first started the piece and you started to talk about threat assessment i sort of immediately had this kind of "minority report" kind of feeling, like are we going to get into the world of precrime. even when we throw around the term of mental illness in the wake of this, there's literally tens of millions of people who, quote, have mental illness. look at all the people on ssris. right? so that category just seems like almost a useless one in its largest way. this is something much, much more sort of focused and rigorous. >> right. and that is a really key point, chris, that not only is the mental health profile far too broad to be meaningful for trying to stop these types of crimes, it's one of many, many factors that they look at and it takes into account itself the context of every single case, the current circumstances of the person of concern. that has a lot to do with the level of concern with threat assessment teams and how they go about trying to intervene. and that is a key distinction. it's not in a sense precrime. at least in what i'm seen in my reporting, looking into this for months and talking to many people who are doing it. again, what they're trying to do is really get people off what they call this pathway to violence, where if someone is creating concern that they might carry out an attack like this. and often it is the kind of young males that we see carrying out these crimes. what can be done to try to steer them in a different direction. that's the imperative of it. >> there's also this broader question, right? when you zoom out past mass shootings, something you've been reporting on. it just is the case that more guns mean more gun fatalities. and that's true as a sort of correlation across states, particularly when you look at suicides and homicides, and that's a sort of iron law that i think people are pretty reticent, particularly on the kind of gun right side of this to acknowledge. >> oh, absolutely. and the data just becomes clearer and clearer. and with this threat too, and in particular with mass shootings, i think in the months of reporting the story one of the most troubling discoveries for me was learning that the copycat factor, the copycat problem is actually far more serious than many people realize. it's something that many of us who've studied this issue have long known in a basic sense and suspected, but the research that is emerging now from the fbi, which studies this problem, and from forensic psychologists shows that there are many cases where people who not only do this crime, carry out mass shoot gds, but also the many hundreds of people who may be considering it, many of them are influenced by what they see on television and on the news about the people who commit the crimes. it's sensationalized to the point where they're really kind of getting juice from it, as one of the people i spoke with described it. >> mark follman, great article. check it out. coming up next, desperate times for jeb bush's campaign. and after thus far distancing himself from the bush legacy, why he's thinking of bringing george w. to the front lines. and later the scramble in the gop house. why john boehner is delaying votes for leadership. plus the united states bombs a doctors without border hospital in afghanistan. we will look at the changing story of just how and why it happened. those stories and more ahead. because the more data you have, the better. and right now at at&t get $300 credit for every line you switch when you trade in a smartphone and buy any smartphone on at&t next. if legalzoom has your back.s, over the last 10 years we've helped one million business owners get started. visit legalzoom today for the legal help you need to start and run your business. legalzoom. legal help is here. but grandmcause we uses we don't charmin ultra soft.clean. charmin ultra soft gets you clean without the wasteful wadding. it has comfort cushions you can see that are softer and more absorbent, and you can use up to 4 times less. enjoy the go with charmin. many, many people in the world of media and advertising and to a somewhat lesser extent politics are absolutely obsessed with knowing just what it is that millennials want and crave. well, fusion, a network aimed at that very group, is working to answer that question. they've done something novel and very smart. they're exclusively polling people aged 18 to 35 years old so they can actually get detailed polling, particularly cross-tab data on the group and today they released another batch of results. finding out that millennials overwhelmingly want a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants. a stunning 81% of people aged 18 to 35 said they favor a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants who have children who are u.s. citizens. that is the group targeted by the executive action signed by the president that is on hold by the courts. and that number jumps up to 91% in polling people just aged 18 to 21. and that is the type of result that if you are, say, a republican political strategist should give you a pit in the bottom of your stomach. either that or a desperate hope that none of these people come out to vote. the state of a party in trouble with young people and the maybe potential possible decline of donald trump. all that coming up. >> make america great again, right? 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(interrupting) you can't pick it up, can you? go ahead. he can't lift the hammer. it's okay though! you're going to change the world. your brother's administration gave us barack obama because it was such a disaster, those last three months, that abraham lincoln couldn't have been elected. >> you know what? as it relates to my brother, there's one thing i know for sure. he kept us safe. [ cheers and applause ] i don't know if you remember, donald -- you remember the rubble -- >> jeb bush managed to fire up the crowd with that line at the last debate. but moments like that have been relatively few and far between. and the lack of enthusiasm continues to show up in the polls. the latest nbc/"wall street journal" poll from new hampshire has jeb at 11%. that double-digit support is a teensy bit of good news considering the same poll in iowa has him at 7% and the latest pew research national poll has him at 4%. which i think it's safe to say is not where the jeb bush campaign thought he would be at this point in the cycle. because going into this election one of jeb's biggest strengths was his donor network and the bush political machine, which conceivably would give jeb the ability to lock up a whole bunch of key elites inside the republican party. and in the theory this would then give jeb bush the room to run in the primaries without having to tack sharply to the right and take on positions that might be toxic later to voters in the general election. or as jeb bush himself put it last year, the candidate should also be willing to lose the primary to win the general. but as he struggles in the polls his campaign is considering bringing in the 43rd president and america's most polarizing amateur painter, george w. bush. according to the "new york times," advisers to jeb bush in the early primary state of south carolina have asked national campaign officials to call in w with the idea that bush 43 could help his brother shore up support among conservatives. a "new york times" cbs poll in may found 71% of republicans had a favorable view of george bush. but for a candidate who has thus far tried very hard to distance himself from his brother and whose campaign slogan famously doesn't even use the family name, the question is will this help cement his status as a dynasty candidate running on his brother's record? joining me now michael steele, msnbc political analyst, former head of the republican national committee. michael steele, bringing w in to south carolina, good idea, bad idea? >> i think it's actually a good idea for him. i think it -- as you noted, president bush still has a lot of good cachet with rank-and-file republicans, particularly in the southern base of the party. and it says to me that jeb is looking to play in the south, that he actually wants to be competitive in a state like south carolina where, you know, conventional wisdom says skip that and go on to the next state. so i think the campaign realizes a couple of things which you pointed out. one, that their back's up against the proverbial wall in terms of where their donors' expectations are and where they are in the polls. but i also think they probably see a further pathway to sort of galvanize some new energy for themselves, coming out of the south. >> you know, i agree with you, actually. as a sheer question of strategy i think there's basically nothing to lose. and part of the reason -- >> right. >> -- is you're not going to fool anyone about who your brother is when it comes to the general election. like the idea that oh, they're going to totally bust you, the democrats are going to bust you because they're going to show a picture of the two of you guys together in south carolina. like yeah, we all know. that's not news to anyone. >> that's your brother? >> right. >> who knew? >> that's not a surprise. so just lean into it would be my advice. i mean, there is a base -- part of the problem, right? for him is that there is a radically different views of the bush presidency among the republican base, particularly southern republicans, south carolina republicans, and the country at large. but you're going to have to -- i think at this point it's cross that bridge when you come to it territory for jeb bush. >> absolutely. yeah, he has to -- look, this is about winning a primary right now. this is, you know, notwithstanding what he said about losing the primary to win the general. he realizes he needs to actually win the primary. so this is all part of i think a new strategy to sort of create some energy in some different spaces in this process that hopefully will have some ripple effect in places like new hampshire where the polls are starting to look good. iowa. again, he's not going to compete directly. but every little bit helps to create the kind of momentum he thought he otherwise would have. >> one of the most fascinating dynamics of this election so far has been the way that kind of donor back seat driving has -- it was your job to get back seat driven by donors for a certain period of your life and clearly you're still not over it. but the thing is on the one side, the up side for