On moscows meddling. Well explore. Also, the ongoing war in america over immigration. What disease the Trump Administration want the face of america to look like . How should the democrats respond . But first, heres my take. Alfew weeks ago, the Economist Intelligence unit published the 10th edition of its democracy index and for the second Consecutive Year the United States failed to make the top bracket of full democracy and was grouped in the second one, flawed democracy. In this years report, scores dropped for more than half the worlds countries. Professor Larry Diamond described years ago, it shows no sign of ending. Its best seen by looking at the press of the free press worldwide. Take kenya. Last month, kenyan president instructed the countrys Main Television stations no the to cover an opposition event. And when they refused, he shut them down. Turkey is now the worlds foremost jailer of journalists according to the committee to protect journalists. Let me underscore that fact. Government that has imprisoned more journalists than ever is democratically elected. One year after the failed coup attempt, a poll found 177 news outlets had been shut down in turkey. It might be possible to brush these stories aside but what to make of the turn of events in hungary and poland. Administration in hungary has used a series of clever tactics to muzzle the free press. Government taking over public pro broadcasting and cut advertising spending. Many are being employed in poland which has been a poster child for its stellar political and Economic Reforms since the fall of comunism. Even in israel and india, were witnessing systematic efforts to shrink the space in power of media critical of the government. In israel the allegations against the Prime Minister include his dealing with press barons to ensure favorable coverage. In india the government has launched a highly questionable fraud and Money Laundering case against the critic of some of its policies. More than 20 years ago i warned the distinctive problem was elected governments that systematically abuse the power and restrict freedom the and liberties. I subsequently worried america could head down this path. Most people dismissed the danger because american democracy they said was robust. Press freedom after all is guaranteed under the first amendment. But consider poland and hungary which exist within the embrace of the rulebased European Union stugss th stu constitutions. In america in just one year in Office Donald trump has already done damage, threatened to strengthen libel laws. His administration has blocked the merger of a News Organization he considers biassed while facilitating one with more favorable coverage. Emerson once wrote an institution is the length and shadow of one man. Institutions are just collections of rules and norm the agreed upon by human beings. If leaders attack and abuse them they will be weakened and this will weaken the character and quality of democracy. American system is stronger than most but not immune to these forces of democratic decay. For more, go to cnn. Com fareed and read my Washington Post column this week. Lets get started. The shooting at Marjory StonemanDouglas High School has argu opened up the robust argument on guns. But the question is will just as little action come of the debate as came of it back then. Well, President Trump said on wednesday its not going to be talked like it has been in the past. Yet he and republicans ardently embrace the gun lobby. In addition, even gun control advocates recognize the Second Amendment does seem to protect americans rights to bear arms as the phrase goes, but what does the amendment say and what does it really mean . And why is gun culture in america so pervasive and different from the rest of the world. Joining me now are two scholars who have taught, written and spoken at length about these issues, one a professor of American History and the former director of the Second Amendment institute. And a professor of criminology. Thank you both for joining me. Adam, let me begin with you. What i want to ask is the debate about guns and violence, it seems to be me, in america should begin with the recognition that were just on a different planet. Thats why i think the Mental Health issue is a dodge because we have 20 to 30 times as much gun violence as any other advanced strooindustrial countr. Its not plausible we have 20 to 30 times people with mental issues. Youve looked at it and run correlations specifically with gun ownership. Explain your findings. Sure. I did a global study of public mass shooters over 40 years, and i liked at 171 countries. And i did test for differences in suicide rates, homicide rates, firearm ownership rates, National Wealth and i was trying to explain why does the United States have so many more public mass shooters than other countries, and youre right. So when it comes to suicide rates, there are more than 40 countries around the world that have worse suicide problems than the yooiUnited States does. Of the but by far the association was between firearm ownership rates and public mass shooters. Were number one in the world in public mass shooters by a lot. Number one by in terms of firearm ownership rate by a lot and of course number one in the world in terms of total firearms, way more than even bigger countries than us, such as china and india. Wouldnt it be fair to say that what that suggests is while other places may have troubled people and by the way its a sneer on mentally troubled people to assume theyre all violent. By and large they pose the only danger they pose is to themselves. Theyre not more prone to violence towards others. But even if that were the case the fact that those people dont have easy access to guns limits the damage that they can do either to themselves through suicide or to others through homicide. Yeah youre absolutely right about that. In other countries, where you have someone who does decide to commit an act of mass murder, for example, in china, the most common weapons there are kitchen knives and blunt intrumentes. When you have mass murder in china you dont see 58 dead as we saw in las vegas, or 26 dead as we saw in southerland springs. You see five, six, seven dead. It does make a tremendous difference when you talk about representens availability. Professor cornell. There is a limit to what can be done about all this. You studied the history. What i recall in the 1930s and 40s of the federal government placed a lot of restrictions on gun own eership and the Supreme Court went along with them. How is it possible we have the fixed view of the Second Amendment. The simple fact is weve always had gun regulation. It existed at the time of the Second Amendment. It actually got more intense after the adoption of the Second Amendment, and even if you accept justice scalia, who was pretty pro gun and who is decision for the first time defined the Second Amendment not in terms of a ma lilitia based right e even he conceded theres wide room for regulation and that guns have been regulated for a very long time. So really, the Second Amendment poses no barrier to gun regulation. Particularly if you think that the political process would weed out extreme gun regulation measures, we could pretty much do almost anything debated now would be consistent. Really problem is a lack of political will. When you look at the issue, there is this broader issue of the gun culture. We cant get away from it. Nra is very effective, one reason is there is grass roots support. How is that different in america . Australia has great huchbnting hurt, outdoors. But america seems almost unique. Yeah. I think youre right. And certainly part of that is based on our history. This idea that a lot of americans believe we need guns because we need to be able to protect ourselves from tyranny. I guess the irony here is the biggest threat being posed these days is not the government coming into your house and terrorizing your family. Its sending your kids to school, going to work, going to a movie theater, going to church, going to a night club, and then being faced with this threat of public mass shooters. So the tyranny is really being perpetrated by the public mass shooters, and other countries take a frankly a much more practical position. Professor cornell, what are the simple things that could be done that in your view are incontrovertibly constitution and will pass muster pretty easily . First thing to realize is that people who seem so pro Second Amendment dont seem particularly supportive of the first amendment. Congress has made it pretty clear if you work for the cdc or nih you cant do research and we cant formulate more effective policies unless we can gather data and analyze it. 9 first thing we need to do is allow people to do research on gun violence. Clearly theres nothing in the Second Amendment that prevents that. We need to despite people saying we should enforce the laws on the book. We have to furchds tnd the atf. They are prohibited from updating the methodologies to take advantage of searching capability. If we can do a background check for a gun we could do some about ammunition. I think we want to know when suddenly theres a spike in consumption of ammunition. If someones buying thousands of rounds and not starting a competitive shooting hobby. We want to know that. Gentlemen. Thank you both. Very, very sensible sane perspective i hope has impact. 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Text audio22 to five hundred five hundred to start listening today. My ci can worry about it,ine. Or do something about it. Garlique® helps maintain healthy cholesterol naturally. And its odor free. And pharmacist recommended. Garlique. ® Robert Muellers indictments of russian nationals landed with a boom in the United States. Even President Trumps National Security advisor mcmaster said the evidence of russian meddling was now really in controvertible. President trump tweeted his satisfaction with those remarks but didnt hear much from moscow. I wanted to talk about that and the effect the indictments will have on us russian relations. Joining me now steven cohen. And david is a National Security correspondent for the new york times. Steve cohen, let me ask you. Muellers indictments of course are symbolic or meant to persuade none of these people are ever going to see the inside of an american courtroom but i suppose they were meant to convince those americans who doubt there was in fact a sys m systematic Government Election to interfere. You have always been skeptical that there was such a plan, that it was some kind of great crime and needed to be investigated. Are you now convinced . Absolutely not. Let me issue the obligatory disclaimer. I am not, nor have i ever been a supporter of donald trump. But i am a supporter of facts. Lets railroemember what the st is. Its the overarching narrative in which mueller and this investigation operate. According to the story, russian leader putin directed kind of attack, they say, an american democracy in 2016, which included stealing mrs. Clinton ae s emails and disseminating them. What is being said is that President Trump was put in the office or abetted by the russians and people go on to say that he is therefore in some way under the control of the kremlin and therefore treasoness. So i see here two crisis. With this ill stop. One, a crisis of the american presidency. This has never been said by an american president before so far as i know. Secondly, a crisis of american russian relations because we are now in a cold war much more dangerous than the preceding one. We have to ask ourselves, if we dont trust our president to keep us out of a Nuclear Conflict or any kind of war with russia, are we doomed . These are the consequences of what we call russia gate for which i can find no factual evidence. David, no factual evidence . The mueller 37page indictment did have a lot of facts in it. It sure did, and when you go through the 37 pages, what you get are intercepted conversations between people who were working in this patrol factory, as we call it, four Story Building in st. Petersburg who were churning out the facebook posts, twitter posts, the advertisements calling on americans to come out in the streets sometimes to bring both sides on divided issues on the streets at the same time. And clearly, mr. Mueller had access to some intercepted american intelligence. He didnt say where some of this came from, and it appeared, if it you read the indictment carefully, that theyve also turned some people who they didnt name, but who were participants in all of this. So i dont think theres much of a question that it happened. Now, to mr. Cohens question did it affect the election, as it created a crisis, we dont know and mueller does not state whether it had effect on it. I think the reason he was so upset is he didnt restate what Vice President pence said, which was it had no effect on the election. We simply dont know what the effects were u and we may never know. Let me point out, so called troll factory in st. Petersburg began as a strictly commercial operation a number of years ago to promote the guys restaurant. He didnt learn if you got fake people to say his restaurant was great business ticked up. So he began to sell this service, sort of fake news service to russian politicians, and the market was so good he decided to expand it to the United States. People who have is it tustudiedd dont even claim its had any impact on our elections. Let me add to what david said. Neil mcfarland reported in the new york times, there is no evidence it was even tied to russian intelligence and he says its unlikely that it was, because it was such a clumsy essentially commercial operation. Now are we really going to endanger the american presidency and our relations with russia with what is not truly, so far as we can see, hard intelligence, factual, but scuttlebu scuttlebutt. Let me ask david, the sort of central question, i imagine that mueller is looking at is whether the release of some of this data that the Hillary Clinton emails and such, was in some way coordinated with the trump campaign, and it seems to me that is where you get at the issue of not the russian interference but the issue of whether there was some connection or collusion with the trump campaign. Thats a very good question. I think the president was initially quite happy with the indictment, because he looked at it and it indicted a group of russians, and you didnt hear much criticism of director mueller, special counsel mueller, for that indictment, because he was going only after russians. Next indictments may well look at the we dont know this for a fact, but we believe one of the things hes looking at are these Intelligence Agency connections that went into the dnc and in John Podestas emails and then would come the question were they getting any guidance, any coordination from anyone on the campaign. Theres been no evidence of that, hard evidence out there yet, other than what you describe. Which has been the overall statements of president and some others in the campaign made during the campaign. And its very possible that the russians didnt need any guidance. That they seem to be pretty savvy about how to operate in the america