The title itself, the violence inside us. You take the readers for both the biology and history of violence and so id like to ask you why begin air, why did you choose to begin here . Guest thank you so much for doing this and im blessed to be joining you to talk about this book. I start with this question what kind of violence is inside us because for me, it was the first real question is why i began the mission of my political career. While the book is mostly a history of american violence and how we overcome that history, it also involves my own political story since the shooting in connecticut in 2012. I had been pretty prestigious as a lawmaker before hand but never had an emotional connection like now and it was after sandy hook i realized this was about to become my political calling that i startebuti started asking que. The question i ask myself wasnt that different. A young man with no prior history of violence and no motive walking into an Elementary School and shooting and gun down 20 firstgraders. How on earth can a human being do that, how does the brain work in a way that convinces your self but that is a logical next step . I wanted to start the book the air and talk about how this compels us to violence because we never conceive of mass murder. Almost every single one of us have had a momenhas had a momens where we contemplated violence or undertook an act of violence. Maybe it was the kid on a schoolyard. Maybe it was in a fight with the relative. I think its just important for us to understand throughout history our species has been more prone to violence than almost any other animal species. And its long been a way in which humans organize themselves and maintain violence over others and they put themselves in a position to procreate. So to me, that discussion is part of how somebody like adam lanza understands and the way broken brains operate as important but also just understanding the way that they normal brain operates and how violence is central to the human story going back out. Host its a great point and i think that an understanding violence, to properly understand it, you do need to have this grounding and i think its hard to appreciate the struggle with it if you dont understand to some extent it hasnt been the exception that its been the norm throughout the course of history. I found a compelling. Lets talk about violence in the United States in particular. Most people know the United States is something of an outlier having much higher pay rate of murder and other nations. Why is that . Guest the book spends a lot of time trying to explore why america is a more violent race. We will talk about suicide and accidental shooting as well, but we are clearly an outlier when it comes to the homicide rate. The book talks about the fact that that has not always been the case in the United States. In fact, for much of americas early history, we were not a global outlier. It wasnt until the middle 18 hundreds in which americas homicide rate started to diverge from the rest of the world and it never came back to the ground. We have been a global outlier now for 150 years. And there are two things that explain why those numbers started to separate. The first is the expansion of the cotton gin, we brought more slaves to compel to more violence as a mechanism to order society. And in america very early on with a normal mechanism to organize our economy and health of the nation and it was also used in high numbers for the same reason, for similar reasons and violence just became normalized. The second thing that happens is we have the first waves of new immigrants to the United States and. To expand at a rate of violence and then two things, there thea third thing that happened in the middle 18 hundreds and that is a reinvention of the handgun that can be used without reloading every time and can be concealed in your pocket. The United States didnt have any history of the regulations of those guns started quickly spreading throughout the United States. They were romanticized by the people who were selling them and sort of these three things, the expansion, the greater the ability to conceal and the normalization of violence that came out of americas expansion of the slave population all started to move in a dramatic upward direction that america never recovered from. Host so youre not saying that guns are the only reason that the United States has higher rates than average. You are saying that the reason our rates of gun violence and violence in general are so much higher is because of these two things. So to be clear it is your position and th in the book thae United States would be more violent than the average country even without that. Guest desisting to be a surprising concession to some listening to me talk about guns over and over again on the nightly news programs. I think i knew some of this going into the research of the book, but it would certainly reinforce for me throughout my study yes, the premise of the book is america was always going to be a more violent place. So, the question is when a have this sort of smoldering fire existing in this new country, what should you do . The last thing you do with his throw gasoline on the fire and the gasoline in this case was the explosion of the firearms ownership and any kind of regulation to make sure they only fall into the hands of folks that are responsible. My argument in this book is that in fact they have an elevated responsibility in the United States of america to control violent because our history of slavery, our history of a sort of racist tax system that was reinforced by violence and our role would the melting pot of ethnicities that hands the history to the increased rate of violence puts us in a position where violence wa was already gg to be sufficient careful about taking further steps to clean those already elevated. Host i wanted to ask about another surprising confession you made in the book. I found it interesting that you say the three Supreme Court decisions the district of columbia versus heller was in fact rightly decided. And so to the audience that is the 2008 case where the court recognized the individuals right to bear arms but wasnt necessarily connected with any militia or military service. I would like to hear more about that. Why was it rightly decided, and what should that mean for advocates of gun control moving forward clacks guest the first gun control law in the state of connecticut and i tell this story in the book was awol propelling individuals attending Church Services and town meetings in the state of connecticut must be armed. So, thats probably surprising to folks as well as prohibiting the. But in fact in the early days of connecticut history when frankly there was a conflict, it was a requirement that people actually openly carry weapons. And i think that it speaks to two things. One, it speaks to the rivalry to be a common law right that individuals should be able to carry weapons. Now the Second Amendment that is sort of horribly convoluted, impossible to understand and can be argued to only relates to militia but i think that if you read the full constitutional history youll found they thought people had the basic right to own the weapons but that also tells you is that the right was heavily regulated. But there were far more during the early days of the republic people were prohibited from where you were required to register their weapons. They certainly thought legislators could have heavily tradition the rights of certain individuals and i just think that is a smart place for the movement to land. We have no secret agenda. We have been engaged in making sure. I think that is a safe place and happens to be what the constitution demands. Host at one point the nra was one of the most powerful if not the most powerful. What you say that that is true today and why or why not . Guest it is not true today. Because we have spent the last seven years building up a movement around eradicating violence that they become more and more powerful and now have overtaken the nra. Weve also done a very good job of exposing the nra. One of the things i talk about in this book is how they have changed over the years. If. Then this guy comes along who i tell the story of in the book and host could you tell a little bit about that because i dont think people know that part. Guest he comes out of the texas border country. His whole family has worked for and around u. S. Border protections. As a young man he has a runin with some young mexican youth he thinks committed a crime against his family and in that confrontation he ends up shooting one of the boys did. On a technicality he ends up not going to jail but it stays on his record is such that he actually changes his name. He moves one vowel in his name so he can sort of paper over his past. He eventually joins the nra and kind of objects to the idea that the nra sort of goes along with some of the early gun laws of the 1960s especially coming out of the nnn in the 1970s he and a group of radicals eventually take over the nra. The amount that they packed in the annual convention and all vote to stop the nra gun control and advocate of responsible gun owners. Hed take the nra and plasterers it to the rest of the developing rightwing movement in this country and he seized this opportunity not to just stand for the last regulation of guns but also link arms with the antigayrights, the anticivil rights movement. And he sort of invests in them as the leader of broad rightwing political infrastructure in this country that has no compromise on gun law and its a fascinating story how an organization that was pretty sleepy politically up until the 70s all of a sudden becomes the epicenter of this sort of rightwing antiregulation movement. And thats what the nra is in 2013. When i first encountered it in our attempt to get the bill passed host where do you see it in three years, five years continuous clacks guest the second part plays out in the last 20 years. What happens is a the nra starts to rely more and more on the gun industry for donations and they find themselves in an interesting position again. The gun industry is worth of cuts a deal with a changing commercial sector around firearms purchases. Back in 1980 half of households bought a gun so you could make a lot of money just selling one gun to households. Today, less than a third of households own a gun and its going down. The gun industry now has to sell a lot of expensive weapons to a smaller number of people and the gun industry goes along for the gun industry sort of helps create this mythology of the government to get your guns so you better load up and create a private arsenal before they ban all those weapons for the gun industry starts to be against background checks because thats the way they are going to catalog the guns and come after them. They oppose restrictions. All of a sudden they get out of step with their members. They are way out of step with the members and the broad middle of the American Public and the reason if thats become atrophied has become increasingly because theyve done a great job and in particular these kids have taken control of the antigun violence that could have done a great job of exposing that. The gun lobby is fighting for studies in its own members dont believe in and of it as a consequence of the gun industry becoming more reliant on the industry and industry changing. Host i found it fascinating how the sort of interest of the nra aligns with the interest of the gun industry which align aligned with the ins of conservatives and the republican party. It reminds me of this classic sort of challenge that you hear about politics in the United States which is that a wellfunded, well supported specialinterest can often overcome. So i want to ask you how do we overcome that in the area of gun control and how they feel with this more generally in washington . Guest part of it as having the confidence that we are right. Another story that i tell in the book is the story of 1994 elections that has been sort of mythologized democrats lost control of the congress in 94. That is just fundamentally not true. The assault weapons ban was wildly popular. Ronald reagan was one of its primary cheerleaders. There were all sorts of things the administration did that were unpopular. The assault weapons ban wasnt one of them. The nra does a wonderful job in 95 and 96 with the help of people like bill clinton to create this story but it was an assault Weapon Damage caused democrats to lose and so thats sort of created a new reality in which for 20 plus years democrats just stayed away from the issue of gun. It was never a political loser. But since we started to revolt which was always told people to support restrictions on assault weapons. That brings me to another story that i tell them about. A woman lost her son through a horrific episode of gun violence and she decides to run for a congressional seat that had been held by republicans and she decides she is not going to hold back. Shes going to run on universal background checks and that he thinks that shes crazy and begs her not to run and she wins because guess what, people like bans on military style back to the weapons and background checks. Part of how we will win his faith that we are right and by going out and running more candidates like this. Thats why we won control of the house in 2018 and we will win control of the senate in 2020, because we are just unapologetically running on these issues in the way that we did back when i first ran for congress. Host im going to move from politics to policies for a moment. In the book, sorry, tobacco, a colleague of mine once said that the United States doesnt have one gun violence problem, it has several. And by my count, we have at least four separate gun violence challenges. We have domestic gun violence, gun suicide and mass shooting. Would you agree with these categories and if so how are the challenges similar and how are they different clacks guest i would agree with those categories. You see in my book i work through each of them one at a time. There is a chapter on urban gun violence and a chapter on Mass Shootings and one for suicide and Domestic Violence. What unites them, what we know is there is easier access to a weapon you are more likely to shoot your wife, commits suicide, commit murder in a city or urban center and more likely to be a massive shooter so we have to accept that if we were smarter and have less guns in this country and less powerful weapons in this country, all of those numbers would come down to. And i sort of go through methodically be evidence that suggests that. Connecticut has four times less gun homicides than florida us and that isnt coincidental that the fact that our gun laws are much stronger. But then you mentioned the difference. Lets take the difference of gun homicide and suicide. It happens in this country primarily or most often to africanamerican males. Gun suicides in this country is primarily an epidemic of white males and its important for us to sort of explore how we get to both places. Gun homicides in this country sort of tend to track a handful of neighborhoods with huge rates of poverty and high levels of illegalillegal gun usage whereas suicide tended to be a little bit more of a rural phenomenon. And in a book i argue it is probably connected to the sort of loss of economic power white males have experienced over the last 50 years. The recent suicide trend shows it isnt just about depression or traumatic pain but its a loss of connection to your community. And thats loss of connection for white males, picture and Economic Security that a substantial. So thats why you se see more suicide. Frankly the results of black people in this country having been subjugated for years. They dont actually feel a sudden loss of connection or loss of economic power because theyve never had that economic power. [inaudible] but because they have these tremendously elevated rates of poverty and a sort of cycle of marginality produced by the racial criminal Justice System and other factors. Certain things connect them into certain factors explain them, explain why they are different. Host in your book you discuss open violence, Domestic Violence, suicide all in one chapter but then Mass Shootings has a chapter of its own. In 2018 Mass Shootings killed 80 people had obviously each one of those deaths was a horrible tragedy. But at the same time during that year there were over 60,000 other homicides in the u. S. , according to the fbi. The majority of which were due to urban violence. Why do you focus so much on Mass Shootings . Guest thats a great question. And theres a book devoted to the proportional amount of to people that diethe people that n usage based on the numbers 80 of the book woul with beyond sue because the vast majority of gun deaths are. What i think im trying to do here is be true to the entry point for Many Americans to this debate. The fact of the matter is whether we like it or not, the Mass Shootings do command the nations attention when they happen. And they are the reason why all of a sudden today we have a movement on this clause for the better and my hope is that the antigun Violence Movement can be merged in some way, shape or form into the black light is not a movement because as we discuss in the book, you cant make Real Progress on gun homicide rate in this country especially in the cities without social and economic work. But i do have this chapter devoted to Mass Shootings because the reality is that right now thats a lot of the reason people answer to this movement, thats the reason it started and by the organization started with command the attention on tv and thats what drives the site of topics. It was in the wake of sandy hook and el paso. While i dont like the fact this country only cares about gun violence in a mass shooting happens, and i told the story in the book about getting just, you know, getting yelled at and bikers Public Meeting wednesday his africanamerican moms and dads stand up and say where ha