with them more.

so, welcome. my name is miriam pawel and i write about california history and farmworkers, not guns. it was a treat for me to read these books and learn about an incredibly timely topic. we will do quick interruptions -- introductions and then get right to the conversation and leave some time for questions and answers at the end and there will be microphones at the appropriate time. to my left its mark for men. -- mark foreman, the national affairs editor of mother jones and the author of "trigger points: inside the mission to stop mass shootings in america not" to the left, jennifer carlsen and associate professor of sociology in government and public policy at the university of arizona, an expert in gun culture. it is her second book on that topic.

she is a 2022 macarthur fellow. and, finally, ryan, the author of "unfired: my battle against the industry that radicalized america." he was one of the top executives at a gun manufacturing company and he took on the industry first from inside and now the outside. so people who come out these very timely issues from a variety of points of view, insiders and outsiders. i think we will have a lively conversation. ryan, i want to start with you. i want to put the issue in context. i will throw out key dates for each of you. the first date is 1994. that is when president clinton signed the assault ban -- in the

assault weapon ban. you write a lot about this as being a very important inflection point in terms of the national rifle association and the transformation of that into a -- an organization you have now spent a lot of time fighting against. take us back to 1994. what happened? why has that become so important in the trajectory of this topic? >> is ryan -- brian: i have struggled like a lot of people to understand how we went from a childhood like i had hunting and shooting with my brother and grandfather and father on a ranch and responsibility around guns to where we are today. i think we have all struggled to understand how politics got from where they were 25 or 30 years ago to today. what i have realized through the writing of my book and my life

and the industry the trajectories of both of those questions are the same. i look at the genesis of that as being 1994. that is the year the assault weapons ban passed. the assault weapons ban did not ban all ar-15's. you could start -- still by a lot of them. it banned semi-automatic rifle's with an additional list of features. it is a bit arcane and troublesome but it did not just ban all guns. it did set our modern politics and gun situation and the divisiveness and us versus them and existential battles it said that on its course and the nra lost the vote barely. they fought a policy battle, not a culture war. all of the former president sata that time lobbied for it including ronald reagan that wrote a letter of the work for the assault weapons ban. and it, barely. as i note in my book it is my experience that the nra learned a lesson from that they would

never forget. they were never not vilify the opponent. they would never not raise it to a culture war. they would never not create us versus them zero-sum games existential battles and they did not end here we are. miriam: talk a little more about what you saw in the transformation of the nra during that time. how it turned from a force of evil. ryan: from afar the nra looks like a finely honed, scientific unbelievably clever machine. i did not experience it that way. it was more of a bumbling operation that stumbled into basic truth about humans and human interaction and how fear can motivate people. about then is when they figured out, and certainly, five years later, after columbine, we now know thanks to enterprising reporters liked him back from the mbr that found tapes for

this, basically, they decided, will we be a constructive part of society and negotiate to do the hard work for democracy, like the, operate in the gray area? they tried that and in their mind. 1995 -- 1999 in columbine five years later they had a choice and thought about it and debated it. we have heard the tapes. they essentially said, should we do this? we have dead kids. should we be a part of society and try to be a part of the solution or should we spin up a conspiratorial fear based system and tell people they will lose guns over this. might that drive political outcomes and gun sales eventually? let's give it a shot. and here we are. >> mark, take us to 2012. you have done work for more than

an decade over issues of gun violence and you write about 2012 as being a seminal time. first, the aurora shooting and then sandy hook. you open your book talking about sandy hook and where you were then and how it set you on a trajectory investigating gun violence, building a database that much -- a database at mother jones. it didn't us to the subject of this book, what you made very clear is not gun regulation, but trying to prevent the assault from happening to begin with. mark: thank you to the l.a. times book festival for having me. it is great to see so many people here that love books. it is wonderful for any author. 2012, i had done reporting on gun violence prior but that was a watershed year specifically for mass shootings.

sandy hook was at one time unthinkable. that's no longer the case. when that happened i was already very familiar with the very entrenched political dogfight we have in our country about the issue. anybody that has followed it knows it goes way back. the political trajectory two decades prior you can see a through line from there to where we are today. the attack in aurora too. by today's standard, in its own right it seems weird to say this. then, it was a truly shocking event that somebody would walk into a movie theater and injure and kill that many people. i was struck by that and started investigating questions of mass shootings. i was startled to discover there was really no puppet date on the problem. that's why we set about building a database at mother jones to start answering basic questions.

what weapons are they using? what is their motivation? were there warning signs? that is something i started to see early in the research and it led me to the subject of prevention and behavioral threat assessment, the focus of trigger points. for me, fundamentally, the question i got interested in that year among all of the horror and devastation was, what more can we do about this problem? even then it was already escalating. think about the decades since. it is remarkable how we have seen the problem grow and evolve in troubling ways. i became interested in pushing past of the political debate in any way i could find. it's an important debate. gun control is an important debate, come regulation, gun culture. we have been having the same arguments for many years. when i started to learn about

this prevention method and get to know some people that were pioneering at and leading it and handling cases that were really successfully stopping people from committing this violence, i became interested in knowing more and that led to the book. >> now we will skip to march 2020. i read, and we all probably read about the search in gun buying -- surge in gun buying at that point then. it was startling to see the numbers in your book and in ryan's. in march 2020, when covid shut down everything, there were five of the 10 days ever recorded of gun sales and more guns were sold that month than any month in history, correct? how does that lead to your book directly and how does that, in a more general context, change the

debate and the nature of the conversation about gun violence and gun culture? jennifer: i will start by saying i am a sociologist. that means i study society. i study meaning and culture and what everyday people do. about 13 years ago, may be a little more, i was a graduate student at uc berkeley trying to figure out what to write my dissertation on. it was right around the time gun sales were flying off the shelf because obama had just been elected. i thought surely, you know, sociologist armed with these tools to understand society would want to understand something so profound and pervasive within american society, of course, the question of people not just owning guns, but also carrying guns. i was quite surprised to see there was basically nothing. there was very little in terms of sociologists wanting to ask

this kind of question. that is where my first book comes from, citizen protectors, about the everyday politics of guns. not the top done -- top-down nra story or the story of gun violence. but the story of why people, mostly men, are not just owning but carrying guns. my work has been focused on the everyday politics and i had a very different project plan for 2020. i thought i would be doing very different kinds of research. i think we all felt, you know the world closing in on us. things were being shut down. it is march 2020 and i think, how will i possible be useful at this moment? then i see headlines. gun sales surging. unlike surges in the 90's and when obama was elected, there is a saying in the gun industry that obama was the greatest gun salesman in american history because of the search. of course, that was followed by the trump slump were sales plummeted.

the sudden increase in gun sales in 2020 was quite strange also because there was no mass shooting. there was no high-profile instance of gun violence, another way in which panic buying in the gun world is recognized. basically i was like, this is what i have been trained to do. so i started calling gun sellers and asking them, what's going on in your store? what i found was the headline that gun sales were surging was not just your stereo typical, you know, the profile of the white conservative married man. i think that is. from the south or the midwest. there were also first time gun buyers, women, racialized minorities, sexualized minorities, and even liberals were buying guns. this is a story i try to tell in the book. how do we make sense of this

moment were even gun sellers at some points were like, they realize they cannot shoot a virus. this was kind of a joke. it's funny because i think a lot of people watching this that were not embedded in gun culture were like, this does not make sense. gun sellers themselves were also scratching their heads at least at the beginning. there is a really interesting moment in the book were nobody actually really knows what is going on. nobody can make heads or tails of this and at that moment that is something that tells us something very profound. it will become very partisan, but at this moment of chaos and uncertainty, this is what americans turn to, firearms. that did not happen in most other countries. most other countries had a stronger social safety net, and a sense of cohesion and solidarity. brazil was one of the only other company -- countries that saw a similar surge in gun purchasing. it gets as -- at this way that

guns have occupied a central role as tools of safety and security in this country whereas we have seen as 2020 unfolded and into 2021, our social safety net and political system is frayed, to put it mildly. i will end there. >> come back on a little bit about the different types of people that were buying guns in 2020. also, george floyd. how does that tie in? in what ways does that -- the difference in people buying guns change potentially in the debates about gun culture? jennifer: there is a lot there. in the book i try to talk about 2020 as a multilayered crisis, one of those sociological phrases that is very cumbersome. but there's really no other way

to talk about it. you have a world changing pandemic. you have the rise of defund the police, black lives matter, racial unrest. then democratic instability and everything that culminated on january 6. it was very interesting to talking to gun sellers over this time frame. at the beginning, it just was not clear. nobody really knew how to fit what was happening into the narrative we have, right? so, as that unfolded and we got to the murder of george floyd things started to get more familiar in terms of, the police will not be there to protect you. the only thing you can rely on is yourself. there were really interesting conversations i had with gun sellers that were like, i am seeing more african-americans in my store and none of them like black lives matter either, they are not supporters of that.

it is very interesting that there was a lot of enthusiasm for the demographic diversity data gun sellers were seeing in their stores. but, it was also framed, in terms of these very particular ways of imagining politics and how politics should be done. not engaging in collective politics that has historically characterized black social movements in the country, but emphasizing individual rights, and, individual sovereignty as a source of democratic engagement and freedom at all those things. it is really interesting. they were very enthusiastic about the wide range of people coming into the stores. of course, the buck stored of -- sort of stopped when it came to liberals. the conversation was then about they will be irresponsible. i have to make sure they are safe gun handlers. they might do more harm than good. this is a question of how porous

gun culture is. it was really interesting to see how those conversations developed over the years. miriam: and ryan do you want to jump in on the 2020 phenomenon, the surge, and how that affected what you wrote about? ryan: i was still in the firearms industry in 2020. i left in july of 2020. 2020 was unlike anything i had everything area prior to barack obama leading in the bulls in 2008 the united states never consumed about 6.5 million new guns in a year. by the time he left office the u.s. was consuming almost 70 million guns. that is why president obama, despite all the attacks on him, was called -- nobody in the

industry referred to him as president obama. they called him the best gun salesman in america for that reason. i the time 2020 rolled around you had a conflagration. all the stuff jennifer talked about and lockdowns. kyle rittenhouse and election, all this stuff. 23 million guns that year. so we go from less than 7 million in 2007 and 278 to 23 million in. we now have about 450 million guns in the united states. to give you an idea of that -- what that is, drive around a light like i did this morning and there are lots of cars. there are 200 67 million registered vehicles in the united states. there are 150 million more guns than cars. that gives you the idea of the scale and 2020 was unbelievable. it did start like jennifer said in the firearms industry it was like, oh my god, the demographics have spread out and we have been wanting this

forever, everybody is buying them. by the end of 2020 it was back to the same cadre and reasons and fear and hatred that was driving it. mark: specifically in the context of mass shootings there was an interesting question in 2020 because there seemed to be a lull. there were not any major high-profile attacks for maybe almost a year. it provoked interesting theories about why that was related to the pandemic. i have to this day not seen any scientific conclusion about why there was that brief pause. but, i would say that it was pretty clear to me pretty quickly in terms of what was happening politically, both the continuation of what we had seen in national politics during the trump presidency, and also, what was happening with covid, the further polarization happening around that, seems of grievance and political rage.

i knew, i think, in a fundamental way that the pause would be temporary. of course, it was. and not only that, but there are more mass shootings driven by political ideology now than there were. it is something that has gone on historically but it is an increasing phenomenon from a primarily coming from the far right. not exclusively. but it is a significant evolution of the problem with targeted gun violence rampages in public places. miriam: how did it change to the commitment to focus on in triggerpoints, behavioral threat assessment. was there more focused on it because of the increase in mass shootings and the high-profile nature of them? mark: leaders in the field of threat assessment i was speaking to around that time were expressing very stark concerns about the political dynamics in the united states and what that could lead to. they were essentially confirming

that extreme ideology has -- as a factor in mass shootings was more on their radar. it was a higher level of concern. one thing i write about in the book is out no single thing is predictive of a mass shooting. it is actually a very complicated equation in terms of motive. why do people commit attacks like that? that is something i was interested in from the beginning and what drew me to the subject in trigger points. because at the field of work bringing together collaborative expertise to try to answer that question and act -- it can be very difficult in a lot of cases. there are cases where it is really almost impossible to say what the motive was. what was fascinating to me about this prevention work is it really developed around the idea of studying patterns of behavior and circumstances that lead up to these planned attacks. these are planned acts of violence. we have some myths about mass

shootings that persists even now. there has been some improvement in public discourse and media coverage. but the notion of mass shooters all being insane and unhinged and snapping, we used to hear that nonstop after mass shootings but that is not what happens. these people are in many cases planning for a long time very carefully what they will do. that is the opportunity of the prevention work. there are patterns of behavior and circumstances that are detectable and identifiable in ways that can work towards intervention. political ideology then begin to figure in more. miriam: jennifer and brian, you have read each other's books. can you comment, what did you learn from jennifer's book? what surprised you? what was validated? what was your response reading her book? ryan: i got an advance copy of

jennifer's book and i remember after i read it i was hiking with my dogs outside our house and i was quite excited because so much of what she writes about i have felt for such a long time that the american public would be interested in. we were just talking before the panel started about the inner workings and critical nature of the gun business, gun resellers, how important it is to the right. how much information and a social science travels through that conduit. how integral it is to the far right movement. i contend that without this sort of social glue that guns and gun sellers provide, the far right would crumble or sag. i felt validated in that opinion and i was really interested when i read the book. jennifer: i would say that one

thing, if you basically consume any media on any side of this debate, you are going to be just overwhelmed by polarization, right? you will be overwhelmed by standpoints that say, this is what it is and they just completely put the other side out of mind. that's not really, in terms of what people in the u.s. actually think about guns, that's not actually very accurate. and it is also extremely problematic to have a debate about something that is so profound and complicated and has such high-stakes when you have this contrived two sides. the thing i appreciated most about ryan's book is actually the premise of the book, that you are coming from inside the firearms industry with an honest open standpoint on it means beyond your paycheck, right?

i think it is really powerful. i see this. one thing i want to point out is any time someone does this in this debate they get ripped apart by both sides of the debate. it is pretty terrible. it's a pretty great illustration of the toxic culture we have now. i would say anytime you see someone doing that, even if you are like, i don't know if i am totally on board with this middleground being traversed, i would say, like, pause and try and sit with it a little bit because that is one of the things we need to move forward if we are going to have a debate where we can even sit in the same room and have a conversation. mariam: two of you grew up with guns and jennifer you grew up in what you describe as a conservative fireman and place. you talk about your father. so, not all of you are in some

ways, not what the stereo typical take is on the gun industry. jennifer, we will start with you. you write about this very movingly. in what way this book was an attempt to bridge the gaps, and the way your own personal story figured into that. jennifer: i would not characterize my book as anything on the scale of trying to take on the gun industry as much as trying to have a conversation or inside a conversation about where we are in terms of partisanship. i don't know if anybody got to see laura dern yesterday. a beautiful mother-daughter story. it was really profound because their book is premised on conversations they had with the weight of illness and what they thought was impending death.

i think it is so powerful if you have the chance to have those conversations. i was not able to have those conversations with my dad. our ability to talk about politics ended long before he was diagnosed with als. three years after his diagnosis he passed away. that was june of 2019. so i think in some ways, there is the story of, i was at this point where i had the tools to do this research and i jumped in. and the other very personal motivation writing the book is to ask the question, what would my conservative west point, university of chicago mba, quintessential conservative father, what would he have done? where would he have been in this? i think it is important especially was -- with just how toxic and intense partisan is, the more we can open ourselves

up to vulnerability and not having everything be clear-cut. this is the first book i have written where i let it be more of a question in the end. rather than, this is a sociologist with a clear-cut nice analysis with a nice little bow. that openness i think is what we need. yeah. my father was definitely in this book. mariam:, you were a national political reporter and you have devoted so much time to guns. what brought you to that? mark: i tried, dare i say, to be apolitical with the book, which is maybe impossible, on the issue of guns and gun violence. i can text sure this very briefly at the opening of the book talking about growing up in the midwest. i guess i felt thankful for that

background and experience. understanding the more mixed politics of that part of the country. gun culture. i grew up shooting at summer camp, trap shooting. it was a very different culture then. the nra was about safety and responsibility. i remember that vividly from my summer camp years. i really wanted to get past the politics. to me that was the big challenge in the way of writing this book. i wanted to think about how else we can frame or reframe this problem. because we are just so stuck in the same heated arguments politically. the way that is weaponized politically to maintain the status quo. the dynamic jennifer is describing, there are people in power in the gun lobby, in the gun industry, and in political office that are very invested in keeping it as it is, to have the same arguments over and over because it is very profitable both politically and financially. for me, trying to answer the

question, what else can we do, what more can we do about this? what i realized doing the work researching and reporting the book for years was discovering that there are ways we can demystify the problem of mass shootings. because, that has really come up with the politics over and over again. the other ring of mass shooters as insane evil monsters we cannot possibly understand. and everybody just goes to their corners again with the same gun arguments. for me it was, let's understand the nature of this crime. who is doing it and how and why? it turns out the answers to the questions are very dangerous that what we hear about often in the political debate. the single greatest example of that, i think one of the biggest and most damaging ms. -- miss we have relates to mental illness, that that is blamed as the fundamental cause and used politically. for me, it was moving away from the gun background to think about other issues.

this is human behavior. yes it is mental health, but what is that about? it is very complicated. it's not just crazy people out of their minds snapping and not knowing what they're doing. it's different. they know what they are doing and they have planned it a long time. if we blame mental illness it does real damage too. it is very stigmatizing. the vast majority of people with clinically diagnosable mental illness are nonviolent and we know that from decades of research. they are more likely to be victims of violence. when we have political leaders go on television after the latest terrific mass shooting and say that mental illness pulled the trigger, it's incredibly damaging both to the majority population that suffers from these afflictions and to furthering our lack of public understanding of the nature of this problem. you cannot solve a problem until you understand the problem and that became the mission.

mariam: i want to add a postscript on the difficulty of separating out the politics. you said you wanted to be apolitical. correct me if i am wrong, but i believe part of the reason you and mother jones started to compile the database is because the data does not exist and part of the reason it does not exist is because the nra has blocked any federally funded research into that kind of data. mark: i am glad you brought that back around. it goes back to the mid-1990's where the republican party was working with allies in congress to suppress gun violence research and it is part of the story as to why there was no database when i would looking for it in 2012. it put enormously chilling effect on research in terms of federal money. maybe jennifer can speak to this. a lot of academics i spoke with on another related project around gun violence told me that they just did not want to go there. they knew they would get attacked and there was no money available. why not study heart disease or cancer or something where there

is a much more profitable career path? this was a real problem too in terms of what the politics did to damage us as a society. setting the stage for this era of mass shootings. what we call an uppity bit of mass shootings. -- and academic of mass shootings. >> it has been out for a year and a half. jennifer talked about the kinds of attacks. you write about attacks you became the victim of as you began to speak out on these issues. what has happened since? what has the response been like. are you still a pariah in the circles you were when it started? has anybody come back to you, former colleagues saying maybe you were right? is there any rethinking among people who you were close with for a long time?

mark: that is a whole other book. -- brian --ryan: my book is not apolitical. i found myself in the middle of the industry i felt was dividing the country. it's not apolitical because the topic is not apolitical. it's very political. there is no balance of right and left in the firearms industry. there isn't even a little bit of balance. it troubled me greatly. for a long time i had been fighting to change that from the inside and i could not take it anymore. i looked around at families divided over politics, right in the middle of the trump years. families and workplaces and mass shootings and i knew guns were in the middle of it. everybody was struggling. how is it my dad voted for that guy? i thought i will write this book

to explain how we got here. because as mark said, we cannot hope to improve this if we do not understand how we got here. sadly, it's quite political. so i tried to write the story of the way the nra partnered with the firearms industry to essentially radicalize our politics. i think all radicalized politics have roots in the firearms industry and in the nra. as far as i -- how i have been received, i did not get a lot of christmas cards from the firearms industry. mark: not the ones they were just where they were holding assault rifles? i did not get thomas massie's or loewen boebert's christmas cards. i had gone to weddings and mourned the loss of parents at funerals and to date out of the hundreds of friends, with many that had stayed at my house, i have heard from one or two. it is still 1.5 years in.

a funny thing happened. when people leave the industry often they: say, thank god, they call in and say, thank god. it is worse than i thought it was. keep going. but, to the point, i thought we would be attacked so vociferously. i live in a very conservative and gun friendly part of the country. i was worried about my kids going to school. i was worried about my wife going to the grocery store. there is a hill above my house and i was worried about snipers there. i have lived in this business. actually the opposite happened. we have been absolutely deluged with positive stuff. 95% positive. i thought it would be 5% positive. every morning i have messages

from people that are like, i owned guns but i can't take it anymore, thank you for doing this. or, i can't understand how my dad got to this place but i read your book and now i understand. long, 3000 word, perfectly grammatical. that hatred ones only have four letters in them and they are not grammatically correct. but i have to tell you, it has given me hope, not that we are out of the dark with regards to our grown situation and gun radicalization situation, because icing it will get a lot worse short-term, but the underlying political ideas and reasonableness and indecency of gun owners across the country, -- and decency of gun owners across the country i am optimistic about that. how we get from a to b is a lot harder. but the feedback to my book has made me optimistic. >> it is all this -- mark: it is also the three letter word, the

nra, the blame on the nra. it's not just the nra. i think it sometimes overstated. politicians, primarily the right wing of the republican party, or most of the republican party these days have actively taken up that cause to use it as a political weapon. so when you see gun owners with that attitude, they are reflecting what politicians are doing, to the point where it is a regular thing now for political candidates for greg -- national office to go shoot assault rifles for their campaign ads. what does that tell us about the state of our politics? miriam: i thought you were trying to be apolitical? ryan: everybody asks me why we can't get something passed. take for instance universal background checks polling between 82%-80 5%. a lot of republicans support universal background checks. not even ice cream polls at 85%.

yet we cannot pass it. why? this is why i wrote the book. the gun issue for most of the right is not really an issue. it is a totem, something the whole system is organized around. think of it this way. it is identity. you can't know there is asbestos in the beams of your house. but it is a different thing to rip the beams out of your house and have the whole thing crumble. you can know there is a problem and also that you cannot touch it because the whole thing will crumble. that is what is going on on the right with guns and that's why nothing can pass. miriam: jennifer, you want to look forward? what do you see looking forward? is there room for change in death? if so, where? jennifer: i want to make a point about the acceptability of the asbestos in the beam and how it can be livable.

this is an interesting panel because it is called gun violence in america but you are gun violence, but mass shootings. it is important to remember that suicide and what has been called community gun violence is actually the vast majority of gun deaths that happens. when we look at racial disparities and who is harmed by guns, particularly gun crime and gun homicide, it is boys and men of color, particularly our forget american boys and men. those disparities. we know gun violence has increased since 2020 and that is part of the headliner. the other side of that is those disparities are actually got worse. it's really appalling. i think in terms of, why is this acceptable? i think we need to talk about race and make sure we are

recognizing, even on this panel, the scope of the problem is not being recognized. i want to make that point. not that it is -- i mean, we all have important aspects to address with this. but i do want to recognize that that voice or that perspective is absent. because it's absolutely crucial. on that point i want to say a couple things on the future. one thing i think about a lot is the argument of, why can't the u.s. just be like the u.k. are australia or canada? there is a mass shooting that happens, it's appalling, it's horrific and massive gun regulation is passed shortly thereafter. i want to say we are not like these countries and it is not just guns that separate us from those places. but one thing that does happen here is an incredible amount of work that happens beyond the law. i think of community violence intervention workwear people are

literally on the streets putting themselves in the line of fire in communities where gun violence is concentrated. actually addressing where the at risk communities are that are being impacted. there has been recent work on this were community violence interventionists are experiencing more trauma and exposure to gun violence then law enforcement and a lot of people in the u.s. do not even know this is one of the major community-oriented, community grassroots bottom of ways gun violence is being addressed. i think there are also interventions like this in the context of suicide. it's not a question of, if we cannot pass a law that all hope is lost. it goes back to what ryan talked about. there is hard work of learning how to care about each other again and talk to each other again and how to actually be fellow citizens. i mean citizens largely --

broadly defined, not legal citizenship. being members of the same civic space. that is something that passing a law will not fix. i and my book by saying, if we are trying to find places where we might find new political culture, a renewed engagement in our everyday politics, it is actually the people crossing political lines. so maybe, the liberal gun owner, the people willing to cross into different political spaces where we might actually find some thing unexpected or renewed in terms of how we engage the issue. mariam: one of the problems with 2020 and the pandemic was a lot of community intervention work shutdown. it was a direct correlation increasing violence in those communities and cessation of those programs. maybe now we will get back on the right track.

ryan: since i have written the book, i have consulted with giffords and giffords started a gun owners for safety organization which does not need to be a counterbalance to the nra. it means to be what jennifer describes. there are lots of gun owners out there that are just fine with being responsible citizens that appreciate responsible and decent regulation to keep fellow citizens safe. but they don't have a say space to say that. there is no safe place for them in the gun world to say that. there needs to be a place for them to say that and giffords has been forming back. they have had a lot of success with that in michigan the last few weeks. i am very heartened. >> jennifer, those points are crucially important. they speak to how it is a broader problem than the issue over the fight over gun laws. it is so fundamentally important talking about systemic issues we

are working on around this whether it is inequality or housing or social justice, community-based intervention. that is what behavioral threat assessment seeks to do. the model is similar to violence interrupter programs. trigger points, when i have started to talk to people in that space i thought, gosh, nobody knows about this. what if this was more prioritized? we start to see that now in policy at the state and federal level. there is money flowing into this idea. it is one thing to have the funding and another thing for it to be implement it. it is complex work, but i find it hopeful. i think this is a constructive approach to talking about the problem. it's not just background checks. it is important. red flag laws are a newer policy tool that i think is more specifically targeted to the problem that has a lot of promise. we have advanced this as a society in some ways even though

it can seem so daunting. i think there are a lot of people thinking about this in ways that go yonder being just so stoked. there are people that want us to stay stuck. i think a lot of gun owners feel that way. there is hope going forward. even the narrative of despair and outrage we see over and over after big mass shootings, i have come to argue in my work most recently for mother jones, my reporting, that is feeding the problem in and of itself now because it is creating a cultural and political validation for the problem of gun violence and mass shootings. i have looked at threat assessment cases where you have trouble high schoolers that say, or write, oh, school shootings happen all the time and i am thinking i will do that too. i can get famous. i can get revenge that day. we feed into that by saying over and over that this will never end and there is no way to solve it and we are stuck in a

political dogfight there cannot be solved. we need to get past that. ryan: i have come to believe this is the most important thing you can work out or character -- work on or care about for democracy. it is so much smarter than guns. the hard work in a democracy happens in the messy gray area. it does not happen on the left pole or the right pole. it happens in community violence prevention and hard politics. and negotiation and decency, upholding social norms. the gun industry and the gun debate is poster child for all of that being so crappy. i cannot even really describe it. anything you care about is now governed by these nra are real or nothing type politics. even local school boards. i do not think we can progress as a democracy until we start improving this thing, or the things around us. because, they are so emblematic of everything else we do.

mark: that is a false time economy -- false dichotomy, right? not the real world. miriam: we will open it to questions for you guys. there are microphones. microphones, let's start over here. please wait for the microphone so you can be recorded. >> thank you so much for this. honestly this was one of the panels i was the most excited about. you are all titans of nonfiction. very factual reality, how depressing the world is and what we can do about it. i wonder if you had any thoughts about fiction that deals with mass shootings or the media's approach to guns. what would you encourage fiction writers to do if they want to approach the suspect -- subject? jennifer: i have an answer.

i cannot speak about fiction specifically but i can speak about art. i think that when we are thinking, how do we get out of the binary where it is so polarized and partisan? how can we find something that will allow us to let our guard down? it's hard. one of the ways, and this is obviously coming from an academic perspective, but you have these arcane debates and it is, what is the real meaning of the second amendment? how do we produce the most beautiful perfect statistical analysis that will finally make everybody on the others put down whatever and say this is over. it is not going to happen. i have an article i wrote where i open with two quotes. one is from a conservative and one is form -- from a liberal and the other says that if the

other side of the gun debate would listen to the facts we would not be having this debate. i think this actually is a debate where we need to let go of our need to clean the facts. i know it's very threatening. i know that. i actually think that is why art and fiction is so crucial. because it is a space where we cannot allow ourselves to imagine things differently, where we can get in touch with emotions that the facts may be protecting us from. i cannot tell you how to do that. but i can say that i think it is absolutely essential in this debate. miriam: in the back? >> having been involved in several action films, successful extra judicial action films in the last century, i am wondering if there is a natural mental hygiene problem with the celebration of warrior culture,

the marvel universe of old truck extra judicial violence and whether we need to address that as a systemic problem. mark: that is a question that comes up a lot around mass shootings and ryan could speak to the industry side too. for me what became most interesting looking into that question and working on the book was realizing through the lens of behavioral prevention, three threat assessment, that there is no scientific support for the idea that violent entertainment causes violence. it's just not true. there is no scientific proof of that. yet, there is a relationship. because we see, particularly in mass shooting cases, and interest, a fixation often on that kind of content. there is interesting correlation. one thing i talk about in the book is there are cases where

perpetrators of mass shootings, particularly young males, which are not exclusively who doesn't, but a large subset of perpetrators, will often engage in that kind of content very intensively in the late stages of heading towards a mass shooting. the pathway to violence. a series of steps of thinking and planning and then escalating towards actually carrying out the act. within that, playing violent video games or watching a violent film over and over. it is in some cases a form of psychological rehearsal. like getting psyched up for an attack, imagining what it would be like. it's not causal. but it is potentially a behavioral warning sign. there is a use in understanding without phenomenon is. in terms of changing our culture, that's a much bigger question. tens of millions of people enjoyed violent entertainment and will never do anything violent. there is no causal effect from it. blaming violent media goes back

many decades. but it's really not a very helpful way to think about the problem. from my perspective, in terms of prevention. that said, there is an industry role in also presenting this imagery of guns. of militaristic packaging appealing to max skill entity -- masculinity and what some people consider toxic masculinity. that is something the gun lobby has exploded over the years. ryan: i have written several articles on that. i think it is -- it is inescapable that the gun industry six out -- seeks outplacement in video games and movies because it does so guns. the gun used in you faulty -- uvalde was celebrated a few months before on the front page of the modern warfare videogame. there is a link. for me, you know, japan has lots

of violent videogames games, right? japan does not have the problems we do. it comes back to this. the penultimate thing i think about it, is be a good citizen. care about our democracy. we can have unbelievable powerful rights, but not without commiserate powerful responsibilities. our balance is out of whack. >> can we come to the front of little bit? right there, gentlemen. >> you may be aware that there are well observed guidelines around reporting on teen suicide. you don't glorify it or imagine how it happened. you just say, here is a funeral. and the reason is that these events propagate similar events, copycat events. isn't there similar data around mass shootings? if so, is it something we can ask our journalists not to glorify?

mass murderers, 24/7, breathlessly, after they commit such a crime to make themselves a modal -- immortal. mark: i have written about this a lot. it's a complicated question. it's a similar question in terms of violent entertainment. there is no evidence to suggest it causes it but it is part of the cultural backdrop and dynamic and way of thinking in many math shooters. they do emulate other math shooters. there are a lot of cases showing that and that sensational media coverage can exacerbate that. i started focusing on this in 2015 where there was -- when there was a case in virginia when a journalist shot his colleagues on television reporting from the field. then they put it on social media. it was a very shocking event at the time. since then we have seen a more livestreaming attempts and things like that. it is part of the dynamic, knowing the news media will show

these things and circulate them over and over again. that behavior has changed quite a bit recently. there is a growing awareness and appointive progress. that media understands better by and large that doing that can have an exacerbating effect and fueled the problem. not because it, but compound is. i think it's important. but it's a balancing act because when the events happen, there is strong public interest in understanding what the crime was, what the impact was. these are inordinately damaging events when they happen, devastating for communities and we have a duty has journalists to report on that. it's a question of how to do it in a way that balances two concerns. there is a middle ground i have written about where we can identify who did it and try to understand how it happens, but not excessively glorify it. the days of seeing a math shooters mugshot on the front page are over.

that's a good thing. miriam: we have one quick question. you pick whoever. >> thank you. the vast majority of people in this country are in favor of gun control. whenever there is a mass shooting, republicans always give thoughts and prayers and then they say, it's not the time to talk about changing things. i am wondering if any of you panelists can imagine a scenario where any republicans changed their positions? miriam: 32nd answer because we have one more question. ryan: i was at the white house signing ceremony last june were 65 senators voted for a bill that was moderate. it was not sweeping. it was a moderate improvement.

that means 15 republican senators motive for it. there is a groundswell somewhere, as everybody knows. politicians do not lead, they follow the base. that means there is a groundswell telling them something is going on. i can envision it, yes. seven, it happened after some pretty horrific events. so. miriam: final question. >> i appreciate you. thank you for being here. i am a student getting my masters in public policy and i would be remiss if i -- if i've it did not thank you for having this conversation at a campus when school shootings happen every week in this country. my question is about solutions. the ratio of guns to people in the country is something we have never seen in world history saweetie solutions we have never seen before. i wonder what innovative policy solutions you believe are innovative and effective? though i know policy is not always the answer, but policy

often does come before a culture change. jennifer, i read your book citizen protector and i went to uc santa cruz to study politics and something that interested me was the difference between how white people and by pok -- bipoc interact with their guns. miriam: we have to stop because we are on live tv. jennifer: in terms of policy give people resources. that is what is so encouraging about the gun bill. it actually did give resources to communities to know how to deal with gun violence. at the grassroots level. i think that is the starting point. whether you're talking about actually funding interventionist, dealing with education, employment, housing. i think it comes down to resources. and so that's a very simple policy prescription, and that's what i'm going to give you. >> are oka