emma: my guest this week is the american anti-gun violence

activist fred guttenberg. fred's 14-year-old daughter jamie was killed at her high school, alongside 16 others by a , by a teenage gunman. i want to talk to him about how so many have become desensitized to gun violence and whether he thinks his great friend, president joe biden, can really tackle the issue. fred, thank you so much for being with me and talking to all of us today. i really appreciate it. fred: thank you for having me on. emma: i have to start by making sure -- we heard just something about your daughter jamie, first of all, because this is why we are here, and i wanted to ask, if you could be kind to tell us a little bit about what she was like?

fred: my daughter was what every parent would hope for in a child. she was kind, she was beautiful, she was decent, she was tough, she was well-behaved. my daughter was a competitive dancer. that is how she spent her time out of school, constantly practicing to dance, but what she also was is somebody who understood that not all kids have the same abilities, so she dedicated her personal time when she was not in school, when she was not dancing, to volunteering for different groups of kids with differing abilities, to make sure they had all the same types of opportunities for social connections and for development. when she was in school, she despised bullies and would put herself in the middle of

somebody bullying and somebody being bullied to make it stop, to the point where, as her dad, i sometimes got real nervous about it, but that is who she was, you know? and i was not going to stop her from being that amazing person. she had her life figured out. she knew what she wanted going forward. she wanted to be a pediatric therapist. she dreamt of working in a place called the paley institute, where they do surgeries on kids to help a child walk for the first time. she wanted to be married by the time she was 25. she had life figured out. she was amazing. emma: she sounds like she had a lot figured out and a lot of ambitions and hopes. i suppose something that you

have spoken about, i know it be a situation any parent would find themselves in a situation, which i note many are in america, is you will have rerun that date many times in your mind. you do not mind me asking this as well, i want to ask what you remember about that morning she went after school. fred: well, let's start with the fact that it was valentine's day, february 14, and it was a perfectly normal morning. and i state normal with all of the good and the bad, you know. the kids were getting ready for school and running late, and, being siblings, they were blaming each other. my son was the driver. he was going to drive them both. because they were running late, i was rushing them out the door, and i kept on telling them you have got to go. you are going to be late. you've got to get to school. those were the last words to my two children that morning. my last words to my son and my

daughter were not i love you. it was, you are going to be late. i never realized i would not get a chance to tell my daughter how much i loved her. it is something that i will live with the rest of my life. it is the reason why i tell every parent and everybody else to make sure you never miss a chance to look someone in the eye and tell them eyeball to eyeball how much you love them, because you never know when you will not get the chance again. emma: that is such an important message. thank you for sharing that, fred. i really appreciate it. fred: thank you. emma: that day, it is february 14, going about your business as usual, and how do you learn something is wrong? is there a phone call? how does this knowledge start to reach you? fred: just after 2:00 p.m. i get a phone call from my son. and, you know, kids today in

school have cell phones, so there is regular communication throughout the day. and my son calls me just after 2:00, and he is a bit of a jokester. so, he calls and he says dad, there was a shooting at my school. my initial instinct was, what the heck is he talking about? that is a weird thing to make a joke about, but what is he talking about? but he immediately then said i cannot find jamie. my son looked after his sister like a hawk. the second he said that, i knew this was not a joke, it was serious. i said, where are you? and he said, they are making us all run, but i cannot find jamie, and i said, you need to run. he said, but i cannot find jamie. he kept saying it to me over and over and telling me he wants to turn around to go to the

building where they knew the shooting is happening. i said you cannot do that, i will worry about your sister. and as he is on the phone with me, and he is crying that he cannot find his sister, there are gunshots. as i am on the phone with him, it is the shots on the third floor, it is the shots killing his sister. he listened to them and i listen to them on the phone while i was speaking to him, convincing them to run. because of the shots, i was able to convince him to keep just running from as far as that noise as he could, and he made it to safety. unfortunately, the rest of that afternoon was all about my wife and i trying to find our daughter, hoping she was ok, hoping the fact that we could not reach her was only because maybe she dropped her phone, and eventually she calls from somebody else's phone. it was getting to the hospital, so that we could try to find her

there, hoping she was now injured and could reach us. it was not until around 5:30-ish when we learned, through a friend of mine who was a police officer, that she was shot and killed. emma: i am so sorry. fred: thank you. emma: i really am. apart from all of the things that will come with such devastation, your life really changed that day in a completely other way, because of how we are speaking now, which is a part of your message. fred: yes. emma: you suddenly found yourself in a position where you knew about the violence, the gun violence, the mass shootings in america, but you had not known about them in quite the same way, and you find yourself with a cause. fred: listen, i live with this intense guilt that my voice was

not a part of this before it was my family. i will never get over that, but it is a part of this cause now. the crazy thing is, it did not happen immediately. the first 24 hours were actually a blur. while i knew that my daughter was killed, i had not really started to focus on the notion that this was going to violence until the next day, at night, when i went to the vigil, and at that vigil, the mayor asked if i wanted to take a speaking slot. i said, what the heck, i went up there, and i looked at this crowd of people, thousands of people, crying with candles and lights, and that was the moment where it hit me that this was gun violence that broke my

family, broke my community. i just remember telling people that vigil about my daughter, but saying to everyone in the crowd, this time, gun violence came to the wrong family, to the wrong dad, and the wrong community. and i went home that night and i walked in my house, and i said to my family and friends who were there is either going to break that f-ing gun lobby, and it is been my mission ever since. it has been to break that lobby, break the grip on our legislators and make effective legislation to do something about gun violence in america, and i cannot stop. emma: well, there are many people who are very grateful to you, because it would also say that they would be scared to do it, because of the carrying of guns and because of the threats and because of the risk. fred: sure.

emma: are you ever scared to speak up and say anything because of what has happened to your family as well? fred: because of what happened to my family, i have lost this capacity for fear. what my daughter had, running down the hallway, with an active shooter carrying an ar-15 at her back, you know, people need to learn my daughter knew. it was not like she was caught by surprise. she knew what she was running from, she was in the hallway. she was the second to last to be shot. she made it to within one second of safety. what she had was fear, genuine, real fear that i will never, ever be able to fully understand or comprehend, and it because i will never have the level of fear that she had, you cannot intimidate me any more. you can't. words won't do it.

what i really have found, more than that, is that the majority of people in this country have been supportive, have been amazing, and give me hope, because the majority of people in this country are like me. it is not that they are anti-gun. it's they are anti-gun violence. they want to do something about that, and so for every person who tries to intimidate or threaten, i can genuinely say i do not care, but to everybody who understands what my mission is and is supportive, i can genuinely say thank you and i hear you, because i do. ♪

emma: what you said -- and i am very struck by it and moved by it, what you said at the beginning of our conversation, that you have guilt about not

adding your voice before, it does not mean you did not care. it is about something else, which i went to get your view on, which is, how do you get people to care to the point where they also push for change, or, rather, how do you stop people from being desensitized to this, because it is so common, gun violence in america? how do you do that? fred: it is such a great question, and i will look back. i will just use sandy hook as an example. i felt horrible emotion over it, anger over it. i watched all of the news reporting over it, and i did nothing. i did nothing, and i lived in this bubble. this was parkland, florida, this was the community, actually, a lot like newtown, where you never see this happen, and i allowed myself to stay in this bubble. part of what i do now to help people care, people always say

to me, i cannot imagine how you feel. i go out of my way every chance i get to help people imagine how i feel, to help people imagine the terror, to help people imagine the violence, and to help people imagine themselves in that. , and not me, because i think, at the end of the day, the more people realize, wow, this happen ed to somebody else, but it could happen to me when i go to the mall, it could happen to me when i go to the shopping center or the movie, it could happen to my family when i send them to school. , the more likely they are to become a part of solving it. and i will tell you, if you look at the last three elections in this country, doing something about gun violence has been a top voting issue. it has changed election outcomes, and i think people are listening now. if you look at polls, over 80%

of america wants to solve this. we are winning the fight, but moving the political system in this country is a lot of work. emma: well, i mean, you say that as well, but i am also aware we have seen recently in states where mass shootings have happened, where politicians are elected for anti-gun reform as well. all it takes is not a one policy thing, of course, but you have spoken very publicly about your relationship with joe biden. i know he has a very important figure to you. do you have faith that he can be the president that can make that change? we do not know what is going to

happen next. fred: without question, not only do i have faith, i can actually point to the fact that something has already been accomplished that is historic, and it has not happened in over 30 years, which was, back in april, he signed the safer communities act, a real piece of gun violence prevention legislation that does really big things to start to finally bend the curve and reduce gun violence. is it everything i could've hoped for? is it everything i would've wanted? well, no, it is not, but it was a real significant package that was able to get bipartisan support, and i am actually, to this day, so thankful for his leadership on that, for the leadership of people like my friend senator chris murphy, who negotiated in the senate nonstop to get it done, even when -- and

he will tell you this -- i did not have faith that he could get it done. i never saw him being able to accomplish in the senate what he did, but he got it done. emma: but, fred, there is been more violence since. there have been more shootings. fred: sure. emma: how do we move or how do you and the people you are working with move to stop that? what needs to change? fred: well, listen, and it is a great question. we passed this back in april. if you look back to when my daughter was killed in 2018, there were about 300 million weapons in america. by the time we passed this legislation, there were 400 million weapons and ghost guns. the reality is, the legislation passed is going to be forward looking and i believe will have a real dramatic impact, but we have to come to grips with the

reality of the numbers of weapons that we have. i will tell you, for me personally, the holy grail of solving the violence in america at this point, because of the number of guns that are out there, is through ammunition, and i am working to pass something in the united states congress called jamie's law, which seeks to extend background checks to ammunition. there is no requirement for a background check on ammunition. you have all of these weapons out there, many of which are in the hands of what is called a credited purchaser, and they walk right into a store and buy bullets. if we can get background checks on ammunition, we will stop that. we will save lives immediately. and so, for me, that is the holy grail right now of solving this problem, and i am not going to stop. emma: it makes a lot of sense

because of what is already in play because of what you talk about. we will see what happens, because it is so political, and it is such a strong lobby. fred: yeah. emma: this is a very simplistic way of asking about something that is quite complex, but because you have looked at this so much, who do you blame for your daughter's killing? fred: a lot of people. let's start with all of those who failed to stop it when they had different chances to do so. let's start with the person who made the decision to do it, but also i can't not focus enough on the political reality, that we

live in a country where that killer, in spite of all the red flags, was able to buy the gun. i played the legislators who failed to do anything for all of the years. my daughter was born in 2003. the year that she was born, there was actually a ban on assault weapons in america that expired in 2004, and you can look at the trajectory of sales after that ban expired. you then fast-forward to 2007 to and the heller supreme court decision, which put this whole phrasing around common use. the industry built common use into a business model, and they kept flooding our streets with more and more of these weapons every year, to the point where they were no longer just being used from a hunting or sport

perspective, they were now being used overwhelmingly in daily violent incidents, so i blame everybody who is a part of building that system, whether it is the supreme court decision, whether it is all of the legislators who failed to do anything to prevent this explosion of weapons on our streets. i blame them all, and those legislators who still exist, who refused to acknowledge the significance of this problem and who fight back and to use bs, you know, lies to continue to push that system, they have blood on their hands right now. i blame them right now. stopping the next one requires defeating still more people, and we are going to continue working to do it. emma: you mentioned right at the top of that list unsurprisingly, rightly, the killer, who has not been given the death sentence.

instead it is life in jail. what was your reaction to that quite recent decision? fred: for the past almost five years now, my life has really been very much wrapped around what is going to happen to him, and the trial and that outcome, and because there was going to be this trial, i wanted him to get the ultimate punishment. i wanted him to get the death sentence, and when the verdict was delivered, for a couple of days, i was actually very distraught, but then i went to visit my daughter at the cemetery, and i always come back from a visit with her maybe

feeling smarter, because, in her own way, she communicates with me. and i left the cemetery and i realized that no matter what happened to the killer, every day i will still be visiting my daughter at the cemetery. nothing changed, nothing changes, and it put me in a place where i was finally able to put the killer out of my head. he got the punishment he got, he is going to one of the most miserable places on earth in the florida department of corrections. he will face ultimate judgment there, i am sure, but i will still be visiting my daughter at the cemetery, and because of that, it was in that moment where i was finally able to put that killer out of my head. he is no longer in my head. i no longer think about him. i no longer wonder about what is going to happen to him. i no longer have any second or minute of my time focused on him.

i am no longer losing sleep over him, and so while i was disappointed in the verdict, i am actually now in a healthier place than i have been for almost five years. emma: well, that is very good to hear and important as well, because the only thing we can control are our reactions. fred: yeah. emma: i am also aware, picking up on what we were talking a little bit about before, is that we still, amazingly, and i say that in the truest sense of the word, and have people who write horrific things about these mass shootings, who did not believe them, conspiracy theorists. you will be very familiar with this terrain, sadly. fred: yeah. emma: what do you think of alex jones? fred: i think alex jones is the lowest form of humanity that exists.

i wish him nothing but terrible outcomes because of what he did to other people and continues to do. in spite of these horrible financial legal judgments against him, he has not stopped behaving badly. he is a liar. he is somebody who has directed violence at others. he has used his platform not for good but for evil, so in his remaining days on earth, i hope he pays a horrible price directed by the courts and pursued by those families that he spent all of those years harassing, and i am certain that when his time is up, he will pay a final judgment as well. he is as low a form of human life as can exist. ♪

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emma: you talk about use of platform. i also noticed that when the new owner of twitter the other day , elon