>> and now from grass roots north carolina's 20th annual dinner, remarks on the second amendment, including a woman who helped tennessee and ohio change their concealed weapons laws after her husband was slain by a stalker international restaurant. also, a stand your ground law expert, john lott and gun owners of america executive drifter larry pratt. from june, this is just under 90 minutes.

>> offers speaker tonight is someone i had conversed with and he was instrumental in helping us past restaurant kerry in north carolina. nikki gossard worked in a nightclub in tennessee when a stalker broke in and killed her husband. she was prevented from protecting herself, because at that point in time, unlike north carolina in recently, she was prevented from carrying her concealed handgun within any restaurant that served alcohol. i met nikki at the second amendment march a number of years ago, ma he determined that this was a person we needed to have in north carolina. she has become a national advocate for restaurant kerry ever concealed handgun laws in general. i bring you nikki gossard.

[applause] >> thanks a much. paul, thank you so much for having me here to speak with you about the importance of our second amendment. as a victim at that let crime -- violent crime, my name is nikki goes her and i'm from nashville, tennessee. back in 2009, my husband, benjamin, was shot six times right in front of myself by a man who had been stalking me, right in the middle of a busy restaurant. this restaurant just so happened to serve alcohol and user restaurant where my husband and i ran our mobile karaoke business out of. we had an agreement with a restaurant owner to run karaoke every thursday night. i also ran the show's in

downtown nashville, which is where i met a man that suddenly showed up on the scene out of nowhere, and at first he seemed halfway normal. tourist, we thought he was a tourist at first and then he started coming in more often for karaoke night, and eventually i realized that there was something not right with him. he had never threatened me. there was no restraining order. we all know that restraining orders are simply a piece of paper and i ended up having to block him from my social network, which is how we would advertise our business and retain our customer base because he was sending me some inappropriate messages. i have to tell them, look, i'm happily married and what you're saying to me is inappropriate.

he continued to come to my shows. again, he never threatened me. and many came to my shows at a restaurant where i had never seen him before. this particular restaurant was a good 35 is away from downtown nashville where he normally came. at that point i realized this is not just a dedicated karaoke customer. this is not someone with just a simple crush on me. this man is stalking me. so the moment i saw him i told ben, i don't feel comfortable with that man here, i'm going to ask management to remove them. and ben said, okay, whatever you need t to do. i went to go get management and they confronted him and asked him to leave. he proceeded to pull a 45 out from under his jacket and shoot ben six times.

he actually stood over ben and continued to fire into his body while he was on the floor. i was a handgun carry permit holder at the time. i still am but because tennessee state law at that time i had to leave my permitted handguns that are normally cared for self-defense locked in my vehicle. i followed the law. demand that was stalking me did not have a handgun carry permit. he was not following the law. murder is already illegal, and you know, the law did nothing to stop him. people with evil intent could care less about a law. it's a those of us who are law-abiding that care about the law. obviously, my life has been changed forever, losing benjamin, that type of violence, but its violent.

i get tired of hearing people talk about gun violence. let's talk about violence. i never blamed the gun. i blame the murderer, and to kill you the truth, i blame legislators that prevented me from being able to carry where i needed to so i could protect my husband and i. it is my firm belief that gun free zone's are killing zones, or criminal protection zones is where kelo that want to be evil can harm or kill, knowing that know what they're can stop them. we've all heard the saying second account when police are only minutes away. well, i can to you that it's true. you know, i don't blame the police.

i have a huge respect for law enforcement. but even law enforcement knows that they can be anywhere and everywhere at any time. those police officers came on the scene within three minutes of a 911 call, i've been told. and they were there enough time to put up the crime scene tape and take pictures of my husband. you know, i -- i think we all make decisions based on the options that we have. and i will never know if i could've prevented that from happening, because that option was not available to me. so the decisions that they made were based on the options that i have to. and icy time after time on the news, we see these shootings occur, and the own thing the media will not tell you, the

majority if not all of these shootings occurred in gun-free zones. they are places where these evil people know, no one can stop them. they know it. that's why they go there. they want to get that higher audie bag count. sick, demented, evil people. i don't think anyone actually ever believes this type of violence can happen to them. you know, i had my handgun carry permit. i went through my training. i tried to be prepared. i never looked at it as being -- i look at it as being prepared. and it happened to us, and i don't want you to be paranoid. i simply want you and your family to be prepared as you never know when evil is going to

choose to pay you a visit. evil can strike anywhere, no matter where you are. the question is, will he be prepared to stop that threat? those valuable seconds when that event is happening is when it needs to be stopped, before the evil person can harm more innocent people. you know, i worked really hard after ben's murder with senator doug jackson in tennessee. he was actually a democrat. he was the sponsor of the restaurant carry bill. i got on the phone with him and told him everything that had happened. and he invited me to the tennessee state capital and sit with them while he told my story. they ended up passing the restaurant carry bill. the state of tennessee now you can carry any restaurant that

serves all call as luxury permit holder, as long as you are not drinking any alcohol. and they're still allowed -- if i choose to. i personally choose not to go to those places. if you are not going to allow me the ability to protect myself and you're not going to protect me either, well, i have a problem with that. i don't want to give them my money. actually have these little cards that carry around with me that tell them, you know, your gun-free zones is a false sense of security. yet to really stop and ask yourself, who's most likely to follow their silly rules, you know? someone that wants to our people is not going to care about that sign. it's a false sense of security. i also went and testified before the ohio legislature, their

house and senate, and they now have the restaurant carry bill and i said that my written testimony here to your north carolina legislators, and now you have restaurant carry. despite what the media would have you believe, and i know you all saw it on the news, they kept saying that it would be the o.k. corral, it would be the wild west. they would be blood running industries. they said it in tennessee. they said the same thing in ohio. they said the same thing here. and guess what. it never happened. but it's funny the media doesn't want to go back and talk about how very wrong they were. you know, less than 1%, certainly hundreds or thousands of a person back of permit holders, less than 1% of permit

holders ever do anything wrong with a gun. i can't think of any segment of society that's any more law-abiding. these are not the people doing horrible things. these are the good people out there. they want to be able to stop those bad guys from taking innocent lives. and i do believe we all have the right to protect ourselves. it's our second amendment. it's pretty basic. we have the basic human right of self-defense. now let me tell you about our criminal justice system. i tell people, it's not a justice system. it's just a system. [laughter] [applause] >> took about three years for my husband the murderer to finally

stand trial -- husband's murder. let me take a few things about the case. when the police searched his vehicle, his truck that night, they found two more guns, shotgun and a rifle, a baseball bat, but doctors, gloves, ropes and a knife. now, the more i thought about those items, i cannot help but think that somehow this man had probably planned on harming me. and what i didn't tell you about this story is that i went and hid beside a brick wall when i went to get management and asked that they remove him. something told me, stay where you are, don't let them see you, don't let him see where you went.

let management handle this. that was my option, to hide. and there's some survivor guilt in that, that i'm the one that lived and ben died. but it's a pretty serious, serious situation that could happen to anyone. i just, i want you to know that that judge, number one, it was an insanity defense. that seems to be the go to defense these days, insanity. the judge dropped it from first degree to second degree, and that man is going to get out of the prison. they gave him 23 years. he has already served five. so one day i'm going to have to deal with this person that took the love of my life away from me, out free.

and he's a very, very dangerous person. that's what the criminal justice system has done. and i think it's pretty pathetic. so -- it is, yeah. don't rely on 911. i'm not saying you shouldn't call mine 11, but i think that you should be prepared to protect yourself first, you know, and then call 911. because it might take a while before they get there. and certainly you can't rely on our criminal justice system. you can't rely on the criminal justice system at all. and i would just take to protect yourself and your family, and really think about who you're voting for. the first thing i care about is how they feel about my basic

human rights self-defense but because it wil killed everything else i need to know. our second amendment, you know, that's the one right that protects all others. if they're not good on that, i can assure you they are not good on anything else. thank you so much. [applause] >> i don't think the case for self-defense and the defense of your family gets any more compelling than that. our next speaker, i actually met at a charlotte law school forum for both of us were panelists. i heard his presentation and it was so compelling that i said, i have to bring this guy back to

north carolina for our presentation at our annual dinner. andrew branca is the foremost expert on your self-defense law across all 50 states. is expertise has been used by "the wall street journal," "chicago tribune," npr, numerous other media organizations and by private, state and federal agencies. he's a massachusetts lawyer, and life number of the nra -- well, we all have that problem occasionally. [laughter] and an adjunct professor on the law of self-defense in the six our academy in new hampshire. he lectures and speaks to the country and how to protect yourself against both an attack and the legal machine afterwards. he is a master class idpa competitor, nra certified firearms instructor. he holds numerous concealed handgun permits from what i can see here, and his book, "the

laws of self-defense" was recently viewed in the nra's first freedom magazine which had to say, and i quote, since most gun owners are so law-abiding that had no personal expense with the criminal justice process, he gives an overview of the crimes that may be charged in a self-defense case including what to expect from an investigative and judicial process in which none of the people who will have been put in control of your fate will understand what it was like at that desperate moment. andrew is the author of "the laws of self-defense" and his topic tonight is stand your ground, the whole truth, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. i bring you andrew branca. [applause] >> hey, folks but before i start, well, informal comments. i just want to say it's easy for

all of us in this fight for our second amendment writes to come to think that we're only fighting feckless politicians which, of course, we are. but hearing him make utah, it's important to remember where actually fighting evil. evil walking the earth. it's important never to forget that. that's the truth fight we're fighting. this is my own serious comments. i'm not a very serious guy. i guess paul mentioned it on them with the -- i will rip the band-aid to write off. i'm a lawyer. it's too. it's worse than that. i am a massachusetts lawyer. a yankee. a yankee in your midst. it's very interesting for me always to come from massachusetts, and a been a member of the gun community my entire life. i started competitive shooting as a young teenager and has been engaged in all my life. to come from a place like massachusetts where you basically, you don't mention

guns, like it's some kind of forbidden religious thing, that's not allowed, and they become to subject gun friend at bible electives, global like entering a gun abuse recovery program. i feel like i should stand up and say, my name is andrew and i am a gun abuse or. i love guns. it's true. it's true, i love them. i love them all my life. of them in for the fun, pleasure to bring me in target shooting and committed shooting. i love what they can do for me and being able to protect myself and protect my family. and, of course, what they mean in a more traditional perspective, of our ability to resist the threat of tyranny. the importance of having guns in the first place is our possession prevents tyranny from taking root in the first place. right? we need not have to bear arms against our government, our government fears as bearing arms

against them, right? it's the deterrent effect that we want. and the deterrent only exist if we preserve and protect that right to keep and bear arms. despite being a massachusetts attorney, i consider myself a second amendment absolutist, by which i mean all prior race trained gun laws are on their feet unconstitutional. any mandatory permitting requirement, any ff al requirements come in the class two, three, four requirements, any excise tax, anything, any prior restraint on the ability to own small arms is unconstitutional on its basis and should be recognized as such. when the day comes, god willing, that the courts applied strict scrutiny to the thousands of gun laws went to do with today, they will fall like a week before us. i guess i get serious again, didn't i? sorry about that. i have to say if you had asked me 20 years ago, 20 years ago i

got my concealed carry permit, started carrying a pistol for the first time in massachusetts of all places. if you would've told me then that 20 years later i would be at a podium with folks like john lott and larry pratt beside me, waiting to speak, i would have laughed. it would've been a ridiculous notion. it is so humbling to be here with them, these giants of the gun rights movement. these are the people who wrote the books i read 20 years ago. that motivate me even in massachusetts to become an activist in the gun rights community. they say every generation stands on the shoulders of giants who came before them, and these guys are it. we ought to applaud them. [applause] >> and i think both of them, including paul am help establish and found this amazing organization and i would be among the first to say they can lead but nothing happens without you guys, without all of you. and even little people like me,

massachusetts attorneys. but each of them only has one vote. they can motivate but they have to go to motivate people who are willing to do the hard work that needs to be done to make the legislatures passed the laws they need to pass in order for gun rights to be protected. protected. can ask, was the gentleman running for the appellate court? could i ask you to stand up? [laughter] i want to make a point that may not be clear to many of you, but we work soar to pass legislation that is favorable to gun owners but it's important to recognize that legislative acts are really just the desires of the legislature. were -- where the rubber meets the road, or the affect of the legislation takes place is in the courts. most importantly in the court of appeals and the supreme court's of the state. if we do not elect the people in those positions who are going to rule on those laws the way we

needed to come you can pass all the legislation you want and they will have no affect. very important a that this gentleman and his peers, make sure you vote for them in these elections. [applause] okay, talk about stand your ground. i'm already 45 minutes past my time. so i'll keep it as succinct as possible. there's a lot of misinformation about stand your ground. that phrase has become a bogeyman of the gun control activist. what we are really seeing here by the way it is the opening of the new front against our gun rights. they have effectively stalemated laws in the near term, the gun-control movement. of course, we can never give up. we always have to fight. they're kind of like a cancer. the moment you take your eye off the of the comeback. they decided they're not gaining much ground so they turned around from controlling our ability to own and possess and

carry guns, to use those guns until defense. now they're becoming less gun control lists in the nixon since and more self-defense control us. dancing okay, we tried to take your guns away, didn't work. we try to keep you from carrying guns. that didn't work. we tried to limit the places you could carry the gun, that didn't work. now what are going to do is make sure that you can carry it, no problem, but if you ever use it we are going to destroy you. we will destroy you economically. we will destroy you politically and if we're lucky we'll get you sent to jail for the rest of your life. so one of the things, laws like stand your ground because stand your ground makes it far more difficult for them to accomplish what they like to accomplish which is to destroy us if we ever use a gun in self defense. unfortunate that a lot of confusion about stand your ground and they use the phrase stand your ground to me on different things. if they use it to me what action means, they would get no support. let's face it if these people didn't like, they would have

nothing to say at all, right? so they pick the phrase stand your ground and a lot about. let's talk about what stand your ground is, what it isn't and why it's important. or whatever the formal title of my topic. to understand stand your ground you to understand what self-defense is in the first place as a legal defense. what you're essentially saying, self-defense, i use force against another person perhaps even deadly force against another person. but i was later justified in doing that under the doctrine of self-defense but how do you qualify for self defense? you have to meet five elements of self-defense. does anybody here -- you guys want to put your fingers in your is because you heard this already. the five elements are innocents, eminence, proportionately, avoidance and reasonableness. innocence means if you can't have been the aggressor in the fight. makes sense. the person who starts the fight can't claim self-defense. eminence means the threat that you're defending against has to

be about to happen right now. someone says i'm going to go and get my gun and come back and shoot you, you can't shoot him right in. when he comes back with his gun you can shoot him, but not right thing. proportionality means you can use more force than necessary to stop the threat against you. so if you're only faced with a non-deadly threat you can all use non-deadly force to defend yourself but if you're faced with a deadly threat you can use deadly force to defend yourself. it's not complicated. avoidance means when you're in a situation where you have a legal history, you have to take advantage of that avenue retreat before you can act in self defense but by the way, that's always been a minority position. currently is by far the minority position in the u.s. the fifth element is reasonableness but everything to do in acting in self-defense has to be that of a reasonable and prudent person and you have to have actually your self believe that it was necessary to act in self-defense. the five elements, in essence,

eminence, proportionately, avoidance and reasonableness. not that complicated. what is stand your ground? all it does is take when one of the elements. avoidance. you know longer need to seek an avenue of retreat before you can act in self-defense. what's left in place? everything else. innocence, eminence, proportionality and reasonableness are all still in place. stand your ground is not some parallel or some bizarre way of claiming self-defense but it's not some mysteries mechanism the nra put in place. stand your ground self-defense is exactly same as the old-fashioned self-defense except for that one element of avoidance. so if you live in a stand your ground jurisdiction and act in self-defense, would you still need to build a proof? you with the innocent person, you are facing an imminent threat, you use no more force than necessary to defend yourself, and everything you did was reasonable. the non-stand your ground states

castates, what they say is evenf you have done all that, if you can't prove a negative, if you can't prove that there was no safe avenue of retreat, we reserve the option of putting you in jail for the rest of your life. that's what living in a non-standard crested the something that you live in a stand your ground state. now, think about what the consequences should be upper repeal of stand your ground to imagine a young woman named mary, walking through a parking garage at night. she is accosted by a rapist. she has done nothing to invite this attack upon her. the attack is about to happen right now and drawing her gun she is no more force than choose to defend yourself against the rapist twice her size, and to perceptions and to conduct were entirely reasonable. but the prosecution in a non-stand your ground faces free to argue there was a stairwell

over there and there he could have run away. rather than defend yourself against that rape is there any non-stand your ground state she goes to jail for the rest of her life for having defended or so. in a stand your ground that question doesn't even come. that's what stand your ground is important. okay, final comment. it's been rumored that a copy of my book, one copy, has been duct taped under one share in this room. but, but, don't reach yet but if you want to participate in this raffle, if the book is not there you have to leave a $10 bill. [laughter] good luck. thank you. [applause] >> as i realized when i first heard andrew speak out and when i heard his comments at the campbell school law i realized he is rarely boring. now, our next speaker is the

executive director of gun owners of america, larry pratt has been the leader of that organization for 30 years, now comprises 300,000 members dedicated to preserving the second amendment freedom. larry has appeared on national and rated tv programs like nbc's today show, cbs's good morning america, cnn's crossfire, larry king live, fox had the and homes, many others but by personal favorite was watching him dismember peers morgan. [applause] but i'm going to say something all the more personal at this point because larry, i don't know if he knows it, he got me involved in the gun rights movement. he was the first guy i called

when i decided in 1994 that something needed to be done. i was a nobody. i didn't know anything about how to go about any of this, but he took my call and be nurtured that interest. and he helped grass roots north carolina become what it is today, not only by the initial council, but by supporting our organization, especially during our nascent years and training our activists and grassroots mobilization techniques. this guy is the true grassroots of the second amendment movement. i bring you larry pratt. [applause] >> and a good evening to you. i am so glad that paul has invited me to be here with you. delighted to see how many of you there are. you know, i don't think the establishment has gotten the message yet, but a message was

sent from the seventh district of virginia last week that there's a new four letter word in use -- brat, brat, brat. they're still stunned that someone eric cantor could go down. [applause] and we are so happy he did. we took part in that campaign toward the end. we began to realize, oh servant of the people, but almost too late all the same, that hey, this guy might have it together. we thought we were going to go down with the worthy cause but at least we need to send a little digital salute to mr. cantor the little did we realize this guy was going to go across the finish line, and he hopefully has given new energy to other people similarly engaged either against rhino in

a primary or some other form of socialist in the general election. the ruling classes really have trouble accepting new information. i give you exhibit a., shotgun joe. the vice president, who has all this advice for the ladies, as to which is the preferred gun for them, not one of those nasty ar-15, but a shotgun of course. and within days, at least one wag had a video together that showed one woman after another falling flat on her back, shotgun falling out of her hand. obviously, having not been instructed as to what to expect. and then the last frame was a lady at a range, control far, boom, boom, with an ar-15. i know someone who knows the vice president personally. he made that information available to him. this person is a second

amendment expert, a firearms expert bar none. and it was like water on a ducks back. liberals live in a fact free environment. but they play for keeps because they've been trying to tar us and others to object to the rise or continued looting of big government and its dangers including their efforts to disarm the peasants, us. they have responded by language that could be quite fatal if it's not checked. because they're calling it from the very top of the regime in washington, they're calling people like us potential terrorists, returning veterans, pro-lifers. the american heart association is a hate group. i made described half the people in your, i don't know, but that's what they are up to and that's what the nazis did to the

jews. it's what the soviets did to the ukrainian farmers. it's what has been done by tyrants throughout history, demonized, disarmed, killed. so the second back -- second amendment is a very much today as it always has been of course, because it's that knowledge in the back of many politicians minds that it is there and that they perhaps ought to recognize some limit. a congressman was talking one time -- he admitted it and he said, it was not again issue. whatever it was he was talking to her about it but she knew that he was the gun rights organization. out of the middle of nowhere she said, i bet you want to shoot me, don't you? well, lady, that's what the second amendment is all about. that's what it is all about. so keep that in your mind as you write your laws because it just

might come into play one of these days. that is what it is therefore. we've seen a lot of shortcomings in this leadership. one of the reasons we're happy that eric cantor is the foot skate is that he was one of those very instrumental in a surprise, like an ambush on the floor of the house, handful of rhino republicans joining democrats in voting more money so the states could turn more names of people into the federal computers for more people not to be able to get guns. really cool, eric cantor, thanks a million. actually, thanks a million. -- 10 million. then we are seeing with the president met, that's what operation choke point is all about. they're putting the squeeze on gun stores through the federal

deposit insurance corporation saying these are dangerous businesses, therefore they have to be charged higher interest rate -- i'm sorry, they have to be charged higher rates, fees for their handling of credit cards, or dropped altogether. happily the free market has come to the rescue, and a number of entities, hopefully guns in america will join them soon with a satellite company, process and check credit cards for merchants that are being hammered by the regime. i'd like to give you a little background on how the toomey-manchin gun control, gun registration bill was killed. we were probably about two weeks out from a boat and if we had heard from the nra. so we thought, you know, tears morgan has given us his piers morgan memorial e-mail list come everybody came onto our server crashing it three times to find

out what we were all about. and a lot of us stayed to get her e-mail and things of that sort to help in the loving. we thought maybe we'd better lobby our big brother because we really need him now. this thing could pass. it was a very touch and go enterprise that we were engaged in. so he put out the e-mail saying look, if you are an entertaining them accountable if you are, would you please call this guy at this them at the end of a and to get the power to be publicly opposed to the toomey-manchin bill. and a week later, i mean, kind of pinching ourselves still, that's what happened. the next thing was even more surprising. senator manchin went screaming to me become i've been betrayed. nra has done a 180. we almost had this bill in the bag. we had no idea what was going on. we came so close. so piers morgan, wherever you are, if you're listening to an nsa monitor, we love you.

[applause] >> one of the things that eric cantor did to get -- we're still not sure where out of the words -- the woods with this is he has been pushing amnesty but and if he does that, it's the end of the republican party at march more important it's the end of our republic. i speak spanish but i'm in a hispanic church and i know what i'm talking about. these are 85% democrats and when you vote democrat, you vote for gun control. eric cantor seems to think immigration is going to win the hearts and minds. i've got news for you, eric cantor. that's not going to happen. not in the near run but it will take a lot of work through churches and other entities where these folks who work one on one, and the idea that you pass some bill to give them a vote, they're going to say

thanks, but no thanks. it's just that simple. so for us this bill was a great existential threat to the second amendment. because 10, 15 years after eric cantor's fantasy is materialized, we are toast. politically we are finished. so that's why we were so happy to see and a cantor go down. we were sorry that boehner didn't go down, but he only got 60% against a 30 year old that with no money. and maybe some other people will now be encouraged that they can go do some more rhino hunting. i saw this marvelous photo. i couldn't find it before i came up, it depicts like a 1910 perhaps seeing, black and white photo, couple european hunters with a long guns standing near a dead writer. and the caption on this is, somewhere in virginia las.

[laughter] one of the things that encouraged is the opportunity that we had to work with senator cruz and senator lee. probably it was around the beginning of august there was a meeting in senator lee's office were a number of groups, and other people like yours truly that headed up groups that are already opposed obamacare, or as i prefer to call it, zero care, we oppose it because is going to shovel names of people that are never been adjudicated in a court of law in any due process on to the federalist and lose the right to keep and bear arms. so we've been a long and vocal opponent of the zero care. we were similar situated. at the meeting also is senator cruz. f-18 i had almost never heard him another politician was, look, i don't know whether we're going to win or lose this fight, but we have got to fight.

wow, that's what i have been waiting for a long time to hear somebody say, he's in it for the long haul. he may lose some battles but he's in it to win the war. that was very encouraging, just watching this guy is to watch somebody who is really smart and really handles himself well. i think we've got a leader that we've been looking for. clyde and bundy and the events that came about at the ranch there -- i forgot, bunker hill, nevada, probably is our greatest current example of why we have the second amendment. federal government has been doing things with land it i haso constitutional authority to do for years and years. finally, someone stood up to him and said i'm not going to be pushed around anymore.

and to my pleasant surprise and amazement, a lot of other americans agreed. they went out there at the drop of a hat to defend this man. i was called to attend a news congress is going to be held in the ranch, at the ranch the saturday, the monday after the fed ended up folding on saturday. so i was on my way, almost on the way to the airport, and i got a call from stewart and said they have gone. and they fled because they couldn't quite believe that the american people would stand up to them. one of the things i learned that was kind of frightening, when the cowboys, i do think some cowgirls, riding towards the corral to set the cattle free, they had guns aimed at them. not at the ready, alabama. and they were convinced that some of them were going to get

shot. so at the last minute, the sheriff's department finally came together with all the publicity, we were able to watch this unfold real-time, and the deputy went up to one of the blm boys and said, you want to be known as the folks that gun down unarmed men and women? and apparently it was a good question because the guy had no answer and they did stand down. and so it really tells you the importance of a sheriff's department. the sheriff was late to the game, but finally when he realized i better look like a sheriff, he sent his deputy out there and it works. the supremacy of the sheriff is a doctrine that operates in almost every state of our country. [applause] and the second amendment was then under the proper authority of an elected county sheriff.

and i think that was the way episode should've ended and the way it did in the. and memo to washington, it can happen again. in fact, it was on the verge of happening again if you might have seen in the pages of any other major media, that on the red river, the boundary between oklahoma and texas, all private land, always has been private land, they were talking about grabbing some land because of this, that, or the other, law force or whatever, some nonexistent vegetation. and the militia in both states said we will see you there. they didn't even have to deploy. the feds got the message. this is not the time to be messing around with the american people. we had. eric cantor knows it, and others are going to know it. [applause]

i would say in closing that if you had one question and one demand that you might make on your, particularly members of the house or those running for such a position, are you going to work to get the spineless leadership of your party to be fund x, y and z programs? let's start particularly with not raising the debt limit. let's start with defunding zero care, and we can go on from there to other things that need to be equally dealt with, as are generally. then i think if we inject that into these campaigns, they will realize that what happened to eric cantor was not a fluke. eric cantor was the first burst of law are coming out of a 10th of all came that has finally burst forth. so let's do it, folks. [applause]

>> before paul comes up and introduces our final speaker, the volunteers in about three minutes are going to go read and click the invalids. so please make sure you have major be. if i have is $5, go ahead and throw it in the envelope it all goes towards our fund which were really going to need this year in this election. this is a crucial election. the political victory fund, all the funds towards supporting candidates. and let me be clear that we don't write checks to candidates. what we do is we run ads. we will send out alerts which cost a lot of money. so we don't put the money in our pockets, but we do action items that support them. and then, is there anybody else that is interested in a raffle ticket for john lott's foundation for the guitar? if it is, raise your hand and i will come by with -- every go.

than a white showing up with the guitar. -- than a white pick anybody else? thank you. >> our next guest, john lott is an economist who held research and teaching position at the university of chicago, yale university, stanford, ucla, wharton, and rice, was the chief economist at the united states sentencing commission. his past books have included three editions of my favorite, more guns, less crime, crime and freedom, law is t contribute and weekly columnist for fox news.com, opinion pieces have been such places as "the wall street journal," "new york times," "los angeles times,"

"usa today," "chicago tribune." has appeared in such television programs as abc and nbc is nationally evening news broadcast, fox news, the "newshour" with jim lehrer, and the today show. now, ann coulter called him one of america's most feared economist. and she said, you can tell the conservatives and liberals fear most because they starting automatic refer to as discredited. asked senator ted cruz. but no one is called discredited by liberals more often than the inestimable economist john lott, author of the groundbreaking book, more guns less crime. his topic for the evening, let me get this right, is making up facts about guns. before introducing though, we have a photo op on the board to our history goes back further

than you know what, john. let me in about, oh, i don't know about 1995 or so, i actually ended up your first copy of your first research, crime deterrence, and jay adams, and i took it to elon college, not elon university, and that to me is approaching sarah brady. she had done a lovely speech on how she wanted to reduce gun violence in america. so i approached her entourage, and the security closed around her. but before -- i said, this is pretty, i just enjoyed to reduce violence. i want to help you do that. and she beamed and the security guards parted it and i said, i think you need this but and i slapped dr. lott's study into her hands. we bring you john lott and his topic, again is making up facts

about guns. [applause] >> i greatly appreciate the chance to talk to you all again. and there's been a lot that's been going on here. and you know, it's kind of fortunate, paul earlier played a video when shane watts was on cnn. and it kind of foreshadow some of his gush and i was going to be having. just amazingly within a minute or two, you have several claims that were being made there, that 40% of guns were obtained without background checks, or purchasing without background checks. and the claims you would have seen many times over the last year by president obama.

finally, after a long time you would go and have some of the media fact checks point out that here you have a survey, a tiny survey that was done over two decades ago that was done before we even had the brady law in effect. and it wasn't just sales. most of that was actually 36% were transfers within family gifts or inheritance. and just the fact that somebody would go and just change the terminology from saying, a parent gifting or for inheritance to a child with a gun, and some of called it a gun sale, to scare people that somehow unrelated people were obtaining guns, just give you some idea of our people were willing to go in order to try to make up numbers or claims.

let's see what we've got here. and so, but, it just kind of, in the last couple of weeks, the president has gone and made many other statements. seven minute presentation a couple weeks ago, like 10 days ago, they must that may be about 15 false, completely false statements within a short period of time. and what i thought that would try to do is to go through some of those and talked a little bit about the supporting evidence that he brings up in order to try to support that. let's say i've known obama for a number of years, maybe about 18 years or so. we both taught at the university of chicago law school for a period of time, and he's a true believer. i'm not going to go and use terms like nazi germany in the '30s, or whatever, that people may have referenced today.

but is it dangerous for people to go and produce misinformation? does it create confusion in the debate and make us so that we might adopt laws that are incorrect? yeah, i think there are real dangers and real dangers for people safety. just go through a few of these things here now. so again these are quotes, about 10 days old from president obama. one thing he mentioned, he said my biggest frustration is this a site has not been able to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can just do unbelievable damage. we are the only developed nation on earth where this happens. you know, just typical exaggeration this case. you know, you want to ask the president, is norway a developed nation? because in july 2011, ignoring bomb deaths that were there. you had a shooter who killed 69

people with a gun and wounded 110 other people. that's the record right now for single person killer. how about germany? most people may not realize this, but two of the three worst k-12 public school shootings in the world have occurred in germany. they both have occurred in germany since the year 2001. in germany, 18 people killed, and another one you had 15 people killed. i earlier had done work looking at mass public shootings in europe from 2000-2010, and what you find is that the per capita rate of mass public shootings with isn't that much different than the united states. you say how could that possibly be. i haven't heard of these things, but you go into look at these attacks which are worse than columbine, and yet how many of

you have known about these attacks in germany? it's interesting when you have these horrible attacks occur, it may get an hour or two with the media coverage in the united states, and then it disappears. europe gets much more coverage of american mass shootings and the united states does of europe. you may not realize, you know, finland within the last four years has had several big attacks where 10 people or so have been killed in a university or at a mall. but you would have known that just by trying to depend upon the american media in order to try to understand that. the president then went on and, referring to, apparently according to the white house, after i called them up, preferring to bloomberg's numbers that came out last week of school shootings said, and now it is once a week we have something like this happen. let's just take a minute about these claims that have come out

recently by bloomberg, where he said there have been 74 school shootings since newtown. we had this type of argument before. in february they produce the same type of numbers where they said at the time it had been 44. the amazing thing to me is how uncritically the media covers these things. within like two weeks you have had well over 2000 different news stories about it when it came out in february. basically none of them critical. none of them going and asking an academic or a critic to go and evaluate the type of claim that was there. it was just pretty much put out as received wisdom. ..

>> i don't know why this keeps coming up. so i've got a feeling we're going to have a problem with that. but, you know, the question is, is it a tragedy that somebody gets shot near an elementary school who's engaged in gambling? sure it is. nobody wants that to happen. or if you have a 43-year-old man who commits suicide at two a.m. in the morning near a school or at a school? yeah, that's a tragedy. but these are not the type of shooting incidents that go and terrify parents when you go and you talk about these things. many of these events didn't even have, you know, those types of tragedies, any deaths or injuries occurring. so i'll just show you one possibly better way of looking

at this, and that is what's happened to the number of deaths over time. you know, you take the 15 instances that cnn claims have occurred since newtown. still sounds like a lot. they don't go through, though, and carefully tell you did people die? was anybody shot in these instances? and if you look at this, you've actually seen over the last couple decades a fairly significant drop in the rate of people dying from mass shootings on either k-12 or universities. in the five years -- because we start getting this data pretty solidly, there's a couple of organizations that start collecting this back in 1992. if you look at the first five years, you're talking about an average of 26 deaths a year. obviously, any death is too many. if you look at the last five years, even with newtown, the average per year is about 12. so it's fallen from 26 to 12.

that's about a 55% drop. that's a greater drop than we've had in that same period of time in terms of the murder rates that have to considered there. -- that have occurred there. i don't think people want to phrase things in terms of what's the bottom line in terms of how many people get killed or injured in these attacks because it takes away a little bit from trying to exaggerate the fear factor there, i think. again, one death is too many, and i'm happy to talk about things that can be done in order to try to prevent those attacks that still do occur. but if we're going to have a sensible debate, we at least have to agree on what's happening to the numbers here. i'll give you another quote from the president. that we're going to put some common sense rules in place that make a dent at least in what's happening. until that, it's not just the majority of you because that's already the majority of you, even the majority of gun owners

believe this. well, you know, i just showed you a misstatement by the president with regard to the background checks that were there. and, you know, it's not too surprising when if people hear those types of claims, that they may also make mistakes with regard to what they think the current laws are or not. well, you look at this, and, in fact, you know, you can get some surveys that go and say do you support background checks on gun sales x you'll find 80-90% of people go and do that. but the question is, what is moment there? it's interesting, if you go and ask people about specific legislation, for example, here's a pew poll that came out last april that asked people about the particular vote that was before the senate, asking them are you very happy to very angry about the fact that the senate

bill was defeated, it didn't go forward? if you look at republicans, about 51% were either very happy or relieved it was defeated. only 34% were disappointed that it was defeated. among independents more independents were happy that the bill was defeated than were disappointed. 48-41. only democrats, by a 62-22 -- 67-22% margin were on net disappointed as a result of that. and you can see other polls that when they specifically ask them about the actual law that was up there. the other thing that's interesting, if you go and ask people what do you think is going to happen with background checks, poll after poll shows that people don't believe it's going to have an impact in terms of protecting people. i'll just give you two. in fact, rasmussen is relatively, people are

relatively optimistic in this one saying it would have a benefit. they found even there though only 41% believe more background checks would reduce gun violence. from december, a recent poll that included background checks in their list by 63 to 32% margin, they don't believe that tighter background controls -- quote: they would not be effective in keeping criminals from obtaining guns. and the interesting thing is if you actually look at the background checks there, there's almost no criminals who are stopped from being able to attain guns. when the president goes and says there are two million prohibited people who have been stopped from buying guns with background checks, the right terminology is that there have been two million initial denials. but there's a huge difference between using the term "initial

denial" and prohibited people being prevented. i'll just give you one example. you may remember the late senator ted kennedy. five times he was on the no-fly list. five times when he went to the airport and tried to board a plane, there was somebody else who had a name similar to him and, therefore, he was stopped from flying. okay? now, i assume the's not going to count that -- the president's not going to count that as five time as we stopped a terrorist from flying -- [laughter] but that's, essentially, the the way the numbers are counted when they go and do the background check counts they have here. if you look at the numbers for 2010, they've stopped reporting them this way under the obama administration, but you could see there were 76,000 initial denials, only 44 of those were deemed worthy of prosecution, and they got 13 convictions. and if you look at those 13 convictions, my guess is none of you would think these are really

seriously dangerous people that are there. they're people that may have made mistakes, didn't realize that they had some covered offense that prevented them from doing it. you know, it's interesting, just a couple of weeks ago, mark glaze -- who's just now stopped being the executive director for michael bloomberg's every town group -- had an interview with "the wall street journal". and one of the things that came out in there and -- there is that he basically admitted even though they immediately go and push for background checks or these other gun laws after these horrible tragedies, one of these would have stopped them -- none of these would have stopped them. anybody who's involved knows these people who committed these crimes wouldn't have been stopped by things like background checks. and i'll just read you what he says. quote: because people perceive a mismatch in the policy solutions that we have to offer in the way some of these mass shootings have happened, you know it is a messaging problem for us, i think. is it a messaging problem when a mass shooting happens and

nothing that we have to offer -- again, nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting? sure, it's a challenge in this issue. i'll just give you another example. just how these things get phrased. if i just go and ask you are you in favor of background checks on gun sales, it gets a very high rate. people think that should be done. but just a little bit more information. national shooting sports foundation hired somebody to do an alternative poll, and they just provided some background information and said a vast majority of guns sold at gun shows are sold through licensed dealers who are required by federal law to conduct background checks before guns are sold. do you believe additional federal laws like the universal background checks are necessary for gun sales? if you ask it that way, you get 53% no, 40% yes, 7% don't know. quite a bit different from kind of what you would hear

constantly in terms of, you know, what we should be doing here. i don't know if i'm going to go through this, but it's just, you know, there's this -- the president has this boogie match in terms -- bogeyman in terms of gun groups people here having all the money and, therefore, that's what's causing politicians to vote the way they do. they couldn't possibly believe the way they say they believe. and so he says, so if you are running for election right now, that's where you feel heat, from the nra and gun manufacturers. well, ad age went through advertisements on gun issues, pro and con, and found that gun control organizations in 2013 actually spent about 7.4 times more on television opponents than their -- on television advertising than their opponents did. you know, just this year the nra, according to "the new york times," typically spends about $20 million per election cycle.

bloomberg spending, pledging to spend 50 million a year, and giffords' group is going to spend 20 million this year. so you get an idea, and those are just two of them. i could go on. literally, there's like 15 of these quotes in just accept minutes that i could -- in just seven minutes that i could, but i'm just going to go through a couple more. and we have this. [laughter] >> [inaudible] >> so the bear net trying to log on here. internet trying to log on here. australia just said, well, that's it, we aren't seeing that again and, basically, imposed very strict, tough gun laws, and they haven't had a mass shooting since. well, you know, i could go and talk about the fact that they did have a buyback, but gun sales have gone back up again now. the gun ownership rate's about a third drop in gun ownership when they had the buyback, but gun ownership right now in australia

is pretty much back to where it was before the buyback. so put that aside, because obviously that impacts how one's going to talk about this. but the thing is, you just can't pick one data point. i mean, i could pick one state to go and look at, different states have had different laws. you want to go and try to look at things -- i could look at new zealand, for example. new zealand, neighboring australia, an isolated island nation again. if you look at new zealand's mass shooting rate prior to, over the same period of time that people talk about for australia, 1980-'96, they had .005 incidents per 100,000 people. that was actually high or than australia's -- higher than australia's which was .0042. after that both countries have had zero mass shootings. australia may have changed its laws, but new zealand didn't. again, you just -- it's what we call cherry picking. it's kind of like i could go and

flip a coin 20 times, get 10 heads and 10 tails. would i let somebody just go and say, well, i'm going to pick 5 tails from that sample and say it's obviously a biased coin because all 5 of them are heads, okay? you don't do that. you don't just pick one number. there's a reason why these guys don't point to places like europe, for example, in these discussions. as i say, germany has much more stringent laws than australia has, and yet it's had some of the worst mass shootings in the world. but they wouldn't want to include that in their discussion. what i've tried to do with bill land december at the university of chicago, we looked at all the mass shootings in the united states over a couple decades, and what we've found was that we looked at 13 different types of gun laws, and the only one that had any impact on the rate of these mass shootings was the passage of conceal-carry laws. there's about a 60% drop in the rate at which these attacks

occurred, and there was about 80% drop in the rate in which people were killed or injured from these attacks. but the reason why you looked at all the states rather than just picking one is because, you know, you just, there's just so many things that can change. and if i could go and just pick one state, i would hope nobody would believe that. so now i want to talk a little bit about an example, because i've raised some things about multiple studies that bloomberg's put out. just want to go into detail about one of these, because it's gotten massive news attention. you probably don't even realize the influence that it's had. back in january 2013, bloomberg put out a study basically saying that in '96 there had been an amendment to the federal budget that had restricted money going to the cdc saying they could not use government funds to lobby for gun control.

and there have been lots of claims. bloomberg's group claimed that ended federally-funded research, that research has dried up. i mean, i can give you quotes from that, uh-uh be -- but i'll just give you the media. basically, they're relying on this original study. headlines from the washington post, quote: federal scientists can again research gun violence. this is after obama kind of unilaterally changed the rules. or gun research is allowed again, with the stark claims that, quote: academics were forced to stop their research at the point of a gun or at least at the insistence of the national rifle association. in april 2013, abc's "20/20" ran a segment titled "cdc ban on gun research caused lasting damage." or abc in january this year, quote: in 1996 the nra successfully lobbied congress to pull millions of dollars out of

government-funded firearms research. this has resulted in, essentially, a 17-year moratorium on major studies about gun injuries. well, you know, just to kind of say here, so this was a study by bloomberg, and i'll just give you one quote from the bloomberg study. it says, quote, the amendment -- the so-called dickey amendment, quote: has driven many experts, has driven many experts to abandon the field and keep young researchers from taking it up. do you think that means a decline in the number of articles, right? that seems pretty clear. but the decline in federal research has undermined overall knowledge creation because scholars are highly dependent on federal grants to support their research. i'll just tell you, only about 3% of firearms research and

medical journals are funded by the federal government. but in any case, the bill itself, the way it actually read, quote: none of the funds made available for injury prevention control at the centers for disease control and prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control. that's all it says. okay. so how did, how did bloomberg's people go and measure this? what they did was they looked at medical journal articles on firearms as a percentage of all medical journal research. and they'll point out that the percentage of articles on firearms fell fairly substantially from '96 to 2011 when they stopped doing it. they didn't include the numbers for the year prior to their study where it'd gone up a little bit. it's gone up hugely in 2013. but the problem is, they were never saying that the percentage of articles were falling.

they were talking about people leaving, not doing research. that means the number of articles. what's basically happened is the number of articles on firearms research went up, it's just that medical journal articles on everything else went up even more. that's, to me, a completely different type of claim. and i'll just show you. so, for example, if you just looked at the number of articles, so it was growing quite quickly. it's true it didn't keep on growing at the same rate, but it still has gone up a little bit afterwards. and by 2013 it's about double what it was in '96. and if you look at the total number of pages, because they say how stamm -- how substantial are these articles that are there, you find an even bigger increase in the number of pages in medical journals because the average article on firearms became longer. so there was more of them, and the average became longer.

so if length of articles is related to how substantial they are, then that would seem to go against that claim. so neither the number of studies, nor the pages on research have fallen. the average for the length of studies has gone up. you know, why do we need government funding for research? i've done some of the largest studies that have been done on gun control, i think by far in terms of the most data. you look at a lot of these medical journal studies, they'll have what we call 50 on vegases. you look at 50 states in one year. i don't know how you pick one year to look at, but they do. people who have looked at my books know that i'll look at all the counties in the united states or all the cities in the united states by year for as many years as that data's available and try to compare how crime rates change over time in places that change their laws relative to ones that don't.

well, my concern about government funding is twofold. one, i don't really see the need. it's not like we're building cyclotron up there. i would have a graduate student and say, look, if you will work on this with me, i could pay you, but i could save some money, and i could make you my co-author. so why don't we do this? and a lot of graduate students want the chance to have their name on an article that's going to be published because they want to get an academic job later on. the problem with government funding research is that politicians just cannot keep politics out of who they give the money to. i'm not telling, saying that when they go and give this money they say and you'll get this conclusion. what happens is that they know the politics of different people who apply, and the people who agree with them politically are the ones who get the funding, and the ones who don't don't get the funding. there's no reason why we should

go and use federal tax dollars to go and subsidize one side's research versus another in this debate, and it's not clear to me why the federal government should get involved at all in this discussion. now, paul's video had a little bit of a discussion here between cnn and shannon watts. since he played the video, i'm not going to go true the whole -- through the whole thing, but she was asked is there an example in school shootings or malls or of these public facilities where, basically, a bad guy with a gun has been stopped in any other way besides, besides by police officer? has a civilian used their gun to stop them from committing this crime? and she says this has never happened. and, of course, there's laughter here. i mean, i'm sure without any problems we could go through a long list of things. you look at schools like in pennsylvania, you have pearl,

mississippi, you have universities like appalachian law school, you have malls like in salt lake city or you have portland, oregon, you have churches like the universal life church. i can mention to you shootings on streets in memphis in, you know, in downtown areas in oklahoma city. other places, many of them public shootings have been stopped by citizens with guns. all briefly talked about the shooting in las vegas. the one thing that i would add about it is that here you have this guy -- it's true he died -- but he stopped, temporarily, the male killer there. the female had to go and get a cart, pretend to be one of the shoppers, go around behind him and then shoot him in the back and kill him. the question is how long that took. i have no idea. but for her to think of the idea to get the cart, move

strategically to go and be behind him, let's say it's 30 seconds. if you have people running out, people, you're giving them a 30 second head start even if that's all it took to be able to go and leave the area. everybody, by all accounts, it was a crowded walmart. isn't it amazing that with a crowded walmart he, this permit holder was the only person in the walmart that they were able to go and kill? so anyway, but i just want to go and point out something, and that is just in the last month we have been deluged with information about, as we have in the past, about what goes through these killers' minds. and i'll just give you a couple of examples. elliott roger, the killer in santa barbara. i wonder, have people read this guy's manifesto? how many people have read the manifesto? okay. you go and read it, and several places in there i'm just going

to read you one, he explicitly talks about why he picked a particular place to go and attack. so here he says another option, a day in which many young people pour in from all over the state to have a spring break party. i figured this would be the perfect day to attack us la vista. but after watching previous videos, i saw there were way too many cops walking around on such an event. it would be impossible to kill enough of my enemies before being dispatched by those damned cops. he's is essentially saying -- and if you read this, the guy wants anticipation, he feels he's not being given the proper attention -- he wants to kill as many people as possible. but he worries with multiple police officers there, he'll be stopped because they have guns, and they'll be able to stop him. the new brunswick killer in canada, this is from his facebook page.

i don't know if anybody has looked through this. this guy had a half dozen comments dealing with gun-free zones on his facebook page. this is just one of the comments that he had. so he has a civilian who's being attacked by a criminal here, he says, but wait, there's a gun ban in this city, you can't to this. we have passed a law. this is supposed to be all rape bows and uni-- rainbows and unicorns from now on. and, of course, the criminal's basically thinking, what a moron while he has his gun in his back and getting ready to shoot. this guy picked a place where he knew civilians around there weren't able to go and defend themselves, and it's something that he, obviously, was thinking about. there was a case in rogersville, tennessee, just earlier in june. so i'm just taking things, very recent cases. i could give you lots of others. just reading from the news report there in the local newspaper, so according to law

enforcement officers the teens intended to become the most notorious mass murders of all time with the highest body count. their road to fame would be paved with bodies of their classmates and teachers at volunteer high school in church hill. authorities say the boys, who are now 16 and 17, even studied the 1999 columbine shooting, correcting, quote, mistakes, unquote, made by those shooters for the purposes of maximizing the number of students and faculty deaths in their planned volunteer high school massacre. the plan included killing the school resource officer first. why did they do that? they knew that he could be the one guy to stop them. and so you have a uniformed guard there. uniformed guards, god bless 'em. but they have an incredibly difficult job. they're sitting targets there. it's hard to go and be constantly day after day, month

after month, year after year on your toes in case something might go wrong. and what you end up happening, and it's just not other cases that those will be the first guys being taken out. the question is what's your backup plan? these guys respect stupid. and what -- aren't stupid. what do you do when you're not able to go and stop them? i know i'm out of time here. so -- i believe so, right? okay. [laughter] i always talk longer, i apologize. you know, you've got that -- you got that when you asked me to do it. i apologize. [laughter] [applause] so you can't feign ignorance on that. and even then i've made a lot of cuts from what i would have liked to have said. but, man, i really appreciate the time here. you know, we've had nicki's talk and larry's and andrew's here. you know, there's so much

information that's here, and the question is how do we go and get this out? because the media, you know, it's just amazing to me. we can't even get them to go and mention something as simple as gun-free zones. we have attack after attack. my guess is this debate would be dramatically different if even once in a while when they're going through their checklist of things -- how did they obtain the gun, what type of gun was used in this -- often things that are difficult to determine, and they make mistakes about. just once in a while the simplest thing to figure out is did the attack occur in a gun-free zone for the very reasons that nicki was talking about before, you know, that serves as a magnet for these types of attacks. i mean, we see the comics and other things here from these killers. you know, if that was mentioned, my guess is the political debate that we have right now would be dramatically different from the way it is. thank you very much, i appreciate your time. [applause]

>> ralph nader and grover norquist are at the national press club today talking about issues both the left and right can agree on. that starts at one p.m. eastern live on our companion network, c-span. and later this afternoon former cia acting director mike morrell is among the speakers looking at the war on terrorism, a discussion hosted by the mccain institute for international leadership. it's live at 5:45 p.m. eastern also on c-span. and tonight a recent senate agriculture committee hearing on school lunches. according to the centers for disease control, childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the last 0 years, part -- 30 years, part of the reasons for mandating higher nutrition standards. here's a preview of that hearing. >> of course kids like non-whole grains. yes, that's what they prefer. they like sugar even more. you give a child a choice would you like to have sugar for runs

of or would you like to have fruit and vegetables, they're going to pick sugar. it's what they like, their taste buds love it. but we have to be the adults in the room. you just don't give kids the foods they want, you have to give them and teach them how to eat well for their whole lives. and that takes leadership. it takes determination. it takes creativity. and i love the fact that you told your school district pick three colors every day. my children when i was teaching them about nutrition when they're 4, 5 and 6, that's how we did it. how many colors can you put on your plate? they loved that. because i fed my children steamed vegetables as chirp, they only -- as children, they only like steamed vegetables. they don't want butter, cream, cheese on it. they've been eating fruit at every meal since they were babies. so my kids, as a consequence, because they're introduced healthy foods at every meal, they prefer healthy foods. a lot of these kids are not getting healthy foods at home.

they're getting refined carbohydrates at every meal. of course they'd prefer a burger and fries. that's what they've been fed since they were little. so i feel, yes, to senator hope, it is -- hoeven, it is easy. people like the grits they've had since they were a kid, but let's not serve refined foods at lunch. let's actually push them to eat something healthy that makes them healthy and reach their full potential. when a kid's obese, he doesn't reach his full potential. he can't concentrate in class. he's often made fun of. he has low self-esteem. he doesn't reach his full potential. she doesn't reach her full potential. so i am grateful that all of you have thought outside the box figuring out how to solve these problems, meet nutrition standards. so i do not want to back off these nutrition standards. let's figure it out. we can figure it out. ..

author john yu shares his opinion on international law and what little effect it has on the behavior of powerful nations. saturday on booktv's afterwards, mike gonzalez and how he thinks republicans can make gains for

the hispanic vote at noon eastern. we have the former chair u.s. commission on civil rates, mary francis berry. friday night at 8:00 eastern on american history tv on c-span3 and, auditors and historianses talk about the burning of washington during the war of 1812. sunday night at 8:00, the anniversary of president gerald ford's pardon of richard nixon. find our television schedule at c-span.org and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us and send us a tweet at hashtag c 123. email us at comments at c-span.org, like us on the facebook and follow us on twitter. >> senate judiciary committee looked into gun violence against women. they heard about pending legislation to additional protections to the violence against women act as we as protecting constitutional rights of the accused. also the personal stories of

those who experienced domestic and gun violence. rhode island democrat sheldon whitehouse shares this 2 hour and five minute hearing. >> good morning, everyone. the hearing will come to order. i'm delighted to see you all here and i welcome the witnesses. i thank them for coming. i welcome my ranking member, the distinguished senator from iowa. i welcome senators close boo shaar and blumenthal from minnesota and connecticut and i have one procedural announcement which is that we evidently have a vote scheduled at 10:45. so towards the end of that vote, i plan to, and senator hirono from hawaii, nice to see you. >> [inaudible] >> i plan to adjourn the hearing or recess the hearing briefly to allow us catch end of one vote, beginning of next and reconvene. that will probably take about if

i have minutes total, so you all know. june 18th, 1989 carmen considers was watching television with her 8-year-old son, travis whenner ex-boyfriend broke into her apartment and calmly, walked toward her, carrying a pillow. when he was just a few feet away from mrs. cruz, mr. escobar pull ad gun from the pillow, pointed it at her and pulled the trigger. travis watched, as his mother collapse, felled by a bullet shot by his own father. miss cruz spent hours in surgery while doctors removed the bullet from her abdomen. she was hospitalized for three weeks and wore a coloss toe my bag for two years following the shooting. today miss cruz is passionate advocate in rhode island's domestic violence community but her scars serve as constant reminder, as survivor she is one

of the lucky ones. american women are 11 times more likely to be killed with guns than women in any other industrialized country. as this chart shows. the red line, which you may not be able to see, stands far beyond any other industrialized country. put another way, women in the united states account for 84% of all female firearm victims in the developed world. let me repeat that. women in the united states account for 84% of all female firearm victims in the developed world. of all the women murdered in this country, more than half are killed by family members or intimate partners. in fact, when a gun is present in a domestic violence situation, it increases the risk of homicide for women by 500%.

protecting women from gun violence by domestic abusers should not be and has not been a partisan issue. in the late 1990s congress passed important laws prohibiting the possession or purchase of firearms by individuals convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence or subject to domestic violence protective orders. these laws which are part of the violence against women act, an an amendment authored by the late senator frank lautenberg, complimented the prohibitions on convicted felons and passed congress with broad bipartisan support. these laws have saved lives. in states with rigorous background check laws, 38% fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners. but they're not enough. current law prohibits domestic abusers from possessing guns only if they are or were married to the victim. if they have lived with the victim or if they have a child

in common with the victim. dating partners who have been convicted of domestic violence offenses are not covered even though the most recent data more domestic abuse is committed by dating partners than spouses. closing the dating partner loophole would save lives, plain and simple. he. there are other steps we can take as well. requiring universal background checks and helping states collect and share data necessary to insure that those who we already agree should be prohibited under existing law, are in actual practice and fact, prohibited when they tried to purchase firearms. along these lines, i'm willing to work with anyone who wants to strengthen the national instant criminal background check system or nics, to insure that it operates as congress intended it to. nobody on this committee has been working harder than senators blumenthal and close boo shaar to -- klobuchar to

shined light on the guns in domestic violence and allow abusers to use guns to insure, threaten and kill their victims. we'll hear more about their initiatives. i want to thank them both at the outset for their commitment and their efforts. i would loose like to thank chairman leahy in his leadership in reauthorizing the violence against women act last year and for his longstanding recognition of the role of guns in domestic violence. finally, it bears mentioning that this is not a hearing about the second amendment. or the right of law-abiding americans to own firearms. nobody on this committee wants to deprive individuals, women or men, from legally owning guns and none of the solutions we're here to discuss involve doing that. what we're here to consider is how guns and domestic violence situations threaten american women and how best to insure that those who should not possess guns do not possess guns.

i understand that there are a number of domestic violence survivors and advocates here with us today. i would be honored to recognize them right now if they wouldn't mind standing up. [applause] that. i would also like to submit the statements of our chairman, senator patrick leahy, of christie assaulters martin, bonnie example, laura ponce, katy ray jones, every town for gun safety, and the national center for victims of crime into the record. without objection they will be add the into the record. thank you all for support of this record and want to welcome all our witnesses and thank you

for participating in the hearing a and turn the microphone to my distinguished ranking member, senator grassley. >> bonnie campbell, you just mentioned, is a former attorney general of the state of iowa. mr. chairman, we're hear to discuss a very important subject. thanks to our expert who is have agreed to be panelists for us, all of us want to see the federal government take appropriate action to assist in fighting domestic violence and especially domestic homicides. i have met with many victims of domestic violence over the years. i feel compassion for the physical, mental and emotional injuries they have suffered and you particularly feel that when you talk to people that have experienced that. they have told me of the fear that they confront, and i want to take effective action against perpetrators of violence against women. so today i'm one of the lead republicans in a group of bipartisan senator who is have

come together on a bill to address sexual assault on our nations college campuses. but to me, all domestic homicides are tragedy. it does not matter how the victim died. 45% of the domestic homicides now do not involve guns, a figure considerably higher than in the 1980s. in 1996 i had the pleasure of voting for the lautenberg amendment. those convicted of domestic violence, misdemeanor, were prohibited from owning firearms. so were those against whom permanent restraining orders were entered because of domestic violence. for these prohibitions to be effective, obviously records of the convictions and restraining orders must be entered into the national instant background check system. and the chairman just spoke about his interests in that, for that to be an effective system.

so it distresses me even now, all these years later, according to the center for american progress, quote, only 36 states have submitted any domestic violence misdemeanor convictions to the nics index and of these 21 states, submitted 20 or fewer of these records and even smaller number of states have submitted records regarding restraining orders. 19 states have submitted domestic violence restraining order records to the index and of these, nine states have submitted 10 or fewer, end of quote. i note that rhode island has submitted exactly zero misdemeanor domestic violence records to nics and exactly ceo domestic violence restraining order records. corresponding numbers for delaware are zero and zero. hawaii, three and zero. illinois, one and zero. minnesota, 16 and 2. new york zero and 10.

vermont, two and zero. these states are failing to do their job. iowa ranks near the top among the states in this regard but i can confess to you we still have to do a better job in my state. 79% of the records submitted come from three small states, as the report says, quote, if all states submitted records of misdemeanor domestic violence convictions at the average rate of these three states, we can project there would be 2.9 million records in the index in this category, more than 40 times the number currently submitted, end quote. this mean as large number of prohibited persons under the law today can purchase a firearm through legal channels because the instant background check system fails to identify them as such. our nics system is full of holes with respect to the current gun prohibitions, greatly reducing the effectiveness of background.

last year senator cruz and i offered an amendment to legislation before the senate that would have helped fix the system. our amendment would have improved state compliance, with nics reporting for mental health records, for prohibited persons. it received the mosby partisan support of any similar legislation but it didn't move because it didn't receive the 60 required votes. we should do the same with respect to persons who have been convicted of domestic violence crimes and subject to permanent restraining orders. we should be able to gain bipartisan effort to enact legislation of this type but that is not the majority's approach. there are two bills before the committee on domestic gun violence. one of them, from senator klobuchar, expands the definition of prohibited person to include dating violence beyond cohabiting relationships and in current law as well as to add convicted stalkers to the list of prohibited persons.

another by senator blumenthal also expands that relationship and would make those subject to temporary restraining order entered without notice to the alleged abusers of prohibited persons. a significant problem exists with the completeness of background checks under the law. it is hard to believe that expanding the universe of prohibited persons whose records will not show up when a background check is performed will reduce gun homicides. i fear that false hopes are again being raised. in many states few persons are convicted of misdemeanor stalking. in maryland, for instance, zero. were convicted of that crime last year. one in arkansas, five in new mexico. making these offenders prohibited persons will not accomplish very much, even if their records made it to the nics which is questionable assumption. these bills would expand retroactively the definition of

prohibited persons but they will also make actual individuals who were allowed to own guns criminals retroactively, not by virtue of their crime but by the passing of the legislation. who is going to spend the time and the personnel to go over every domestic violence conviction record and examine the relationships between the parties to determine whether they fit the definition of these bills? who is going to actually input those records into nics? suppose someone determines erroneously that a prior conviction was for conduct against a dating partner? what recourse will the individuals have to demonstrate that he is not a prohibited person? how will guns actually be taken from that prohibited person? how soon would an officer be diverted from another law enforcement activity, removing those guns? the restraining order provisions could pose some problems. in a large percentage of cases temporary restraining orders issued without notice to a

defendant do not lead to permanent orders yet the constitutional rights of the accused could be taken without due process. that person will not know that he or she is a prohibited person if during the brief period the order is in effect, law enforcement should show up to take away a gun. we should also be very skeptical that the temporary order will be entered into nics in time to stop someone from passing a background checks. making existing nics records more complete is far more likely to make the difference in domestic violence homicides, especially gun homicides than the bills the committee is considering. i understand that domestic violence advocates asked the majority to hold a hearing on domestic violence homicides many months ago you about were repeatedly put off. for instance, klobuchar bill was introduced more than a year ago. only as we're about to head out of town, with very few

legislative days remaining has this hearing taken place responding to the request of advocates. only after, as the number of days until the election grew short, did the committee schedule the hearing. the committee has now held markup, has not held a mark up for bills for two weeks now. had the majority been serious about reducing domestic violence we had the time to work together to come up with a bipartisan solution. there are, there was a real opportunity in this congress for bipartisan effort to combat intimate whom of all kinds. that opportunity i believe has been squandered. the bill before us, the committee today, deal with a problem, keeping currently prohibited persons from owning firearms. i hope that going forward we will work together to find bipartisan, well-thought out practical ways to protect women and men from violence of all kinds. thank you, mr. chairman. >> i'm sure we will, senator

grassley. i think this hearing will help advance that cause and because senator klobuchar and senator blumenthal have shown such leadership in this area and have bills in this area, they have requested, making an opening statement. so i will recognize the two of them for opening statements. first, senator klobuchar and then we'll proceed with the witnesses. >> thank you very much, chairman whitehouse. thank you senator grassley and thank you chairman leahy for holding this hearing and thank you to senator blumenthal for his work in this area. tragically we've had a number of major shootings that have killed multiple people over the last few years in our country, from newtown to nevada, we've seen that there is still more to be done in terms of closing loopholes in our background check system, and looking at mental health issues. i would point out some of the issues raised by senator grassley which are good ones about the record-keeping, some of that would have been helped by the manchin-toomey bill which

contains penalties for states an grants to make it easier for them to enter in this data. in states that do require background check for private handgun sales, 38% fewer women are shot to death by their intimate partners. as a former prosecutor i have seen first-hand how domestic violence and sexual assault can destroy lives and tear apart families. for eight years i ran an office of over 400 people. i was charged with protecting domestic violence victims and for enforcing the gun laws we had on the books, enforcing the laws involving felons in possession of a gun was one of my major priorities for those eight years. but one of the things i learned as a prosecutor is that there is still more work to be done. i was reminded of this over the christmas holidays in 2011 when i went to one of the saddest funerals i ever attended, for officer sean snyder.

weigh as young lake city police officer with three children. his department had received domestic violence call from a 17-year-old victim, someone she dated. officer schneider, just doing his job, showed up at the door that day. he was wearing a bulletproof vest but no vest could have protected him when the perpetrator shot him in the head and killed him. at the funeral in that church were his three children, only a week ago, the officer had been there with the family at the church nativity play. that day he was in the front in a coffin and his three little children walked down the aisle of the church and one thing i will never forget, was the little girl, in a blue dress, covered with stars. that is what this is about. last year the women of the senate stood together to reauthorize the violence against women act. the bill that was signed into

law included the provision i worked on with former republican senator kay bailey hutchison that strengthens and updates federal anti-stalking laws to better address the new technology that predators are using to harass their victims. passing that bill was a critical step in protecting women but there's more to be done. a recent report found that 57% of recent mass shooting involved domestic violence. that's why last july i introduced along with senator hirono, the domestic violence and stalking victims protection act. our bill really does two things. our common sense bill would help protect stalking victims and keep guns out of hands of dangerous people that stalk. it makes sure that stalkers can't get guns. many states already starting to do this on a bipartisan basis with democratic and republican support, including my own state. one in six women have been stalked during their lifetime. stalking is often the first step in an escalating pattern of

criminal behavior that culminates in physical violence. the department of justice reports that 76% of women who are murdered by intimate partners were first stalked by their partner. second, our bill would make an important change to expand the definition of victims who are covered. right now people who aren't married and haven't lived together or have a child together aren't covered under the current definition of intimate partner. they're vulnerable because their stalkers and abusers are really able to obtain fire arms despite commit ad domestic violence crime or being subject to a permanent restraining order. our bill fix this is problem by expanding the definition of intimate partners to include dating partners. many states have already done this. we're simply bringing the federal law in line with what many states have already done. i've been proud to stand up for this bill with former representative gabby giffords and her husband, as astronaut captain mark kelly, in support

of this bill. like gabby and mark, in my home state of minnesota we value hunting and the outdoors. if it is not duck season or pheasant season in minnesota it is deer season and when i looked at doing this bill i always thought of my uncle vic in his deer stand and wouldn't do anything to hurt him in the deer stand. answer is clearly no. this bill is about preventing a person with a documented history of domestic violence or stalking or mental illness from having a firearm. that's it. i know that senator blumenthal has been working on these issues as well, especially for dating partners and temporary restraining orders and i want to thank him for his leadership. one of the things that justice mccaffrey said in his testimony was that our bills, quote, look to strengthen current federal domestic violence laws to bring them more in line with the current laws that many states have dealing with crimes of violence toward women and same sex partners.

these bills are simple. these bills are designed to focus on an area where we know we've seen rampant violence. i want to thank all of our witnesses for being here. and i hope that our colleagues will join us in supporting these bills. and one of the reasons senator grassley, that we waited to do this hearing, was that i've been trying to get a republican cosponsor on this by we've been very close several times. i know i'm going to get it done but that is the reason that we waited to have this hearing. thank you, senator grassley, senator white house. >> senator blumenthal. >> thank you, very, very much, senator whitehouse, for convening this hearing and for yourself spearheading and advocating measures to stop domestic violence and i want to join you thanking our chairman, senator leahy, for permitting this hearing to go forward. i want to particularly salute and thank my colleague senator klobuchar who has been so

steadfast and strong in advancing this cause and i'm proud to be working with her and to be supporting her bill as a cosponsor and i think our measures are very much complimentary. i want to thank also the other members of this committee, including senator durbin and senator hirono, senator feinstein and the late senator lautenberg for their leadership, really income practicable leadership in this cause and of course the many advocates around the country who are championing common sense, sensible measures to stop gun violence and domestic violence. the two together are a toxic, deadly combination. women are five times as likely, more likely to die from domestic violence when there are guns in their household. i, especially want to thank the

survivors, the loved ones, victims who are here today. i know how much courage and strength it takes for you to be with us. but your presence is so powerful and meaningful, far more eloquent than anything i could say here or anywhere else and i want to say a particular thanks to a connecticut family, who are here, mary and doug jackson. their daughter, lori, was a victim of domestic violence. but she chose not to accept it. she displayed the courage that her parents taught her and she decided to break with it. as many of you know, that

decision takes such enormous bravery and resoluteness. she broke with her husband. she went to live with her parents. she took with her 18-month-old twins. she left her abusive husband and she decided to begin a new life. lori's act of courage should have liberated here. should have freed her. but instead, she became a victim again. and this time fatally. her estranged husband tracked her down in her mother's house. and he used the gun that he was still legally allowed to possess, to gun her down and seriously injurer her mothers, firing bullets at her that almost killed mary jackson.

mary and doug jackson are with us today and i am so deeply grateful to you for joining us. lori jackson sought successfully a temporary restraining order. which should have protected her. the law failed lori jackson. the judge granted that restraining order after determining that her husband posed a clear threat to her safety and the safety of her children. but even after that determination, lori's husband was still able to keep the gun that killed her. even if he hadn't possessed that gun, he could have legally purchased a new one. even at the moment of heightened rage, when he learned that she had left and was seeking that

restraining order. in most states somebody subject to a temporary restraining order can lose access to his house, to his children, to his car, but under federal law he can still keep his guns. . .