for the u.s. military if they decided to follow obama in turning on the american public i think this is truly a fanciful idea. that the u.s. military would thd turn on the american public -- but if they were to do so, guns in the hands of citizens will not be a realistic check. recall that george washington thought that those who would take up arms against the federal government was treason -- he rapidly put down the whiskey rebellion. >> thank you, john. don, you can speak to the question or his answer. >> the right to self-defense is not just something that was ratified or necessarily affirmed by the united states supreme

court in the 2008 decision. it is something that comes to us at the founding of our nation. with the commentary that was quite heavily cited in the heller decision. the history and the legacy and the right of self-defense in what was eventually referred to the castle wall, the right of every man to defend his own castle, is deeply embedded in american tradition and law. the check on tyranny, i think if we go back, i am somewhat in agreement with my opposing party here, it would be tough for the untrained civilians who know how to use their firearms for

purposes of hunting and going to the range and if they engage in self defense training to go up against the united states military. hopefully we would never have to do that. but that is not the point. the point is if that acts as a deterrent. the military continues to have quite a tough time against afghan rebels and the taliban and, in the current theater of war in that section and that part of the country. we had a similar problem in iraq and baghdad. modern armies, when faced with insurgent people, who are protecting their own homes and way of life, there is an effect here to make sure that these people remain free and that they can repel what they perceive as invaders. but more importantly, i think judge kuczynski's comment towards the end of the quote, i

may not have included that, is the mistake of giving up your arms, his mistake you only get to make once. thank you. >> a reminder to all of you in the audience, as the wheels are turning, take your cards and send them to the aisle. this is a question -- and i have to stand up again. to answer this. we will not be able to go back and forth. this is the question from -- to john donohue. if implementing australian or european-style gun restrictions in the united states would save 15,000 lives per year, would you support this? 10,000 lives, 5000 lives? >> america had the opportunity to remain a european colony in 1776 and we rejected it. we rejected the european mindset of being governed by our

superiors. we went on to write a constitution that endures. political philosophy often is different for different parts of the world. the ideas are not necessarily critical -- and furthermore, and i will violate godwin's rule here, be careful about tendering europe as a model for gun control policy. the best documentation we have of the abuse of gun control is from germany, the hellhole that was created when the ss took over the government and world war ii interrupted. the best documentation for how gun control contributed to the mass extermination of undesirables in germany, there is a great book by stephen halpert, called gun control -- i highly recommend it.

the person i am standing in for today, wrote these articles -- and a similar one for don case on gun control and genocide. much has been written about australia's draconian gun control laws that went into effect in the 1990s. he likes to use this for the reduction of violent crime -- after the confiscation of many kinds of firearms. however, there is one inconsistency in this point of view. crime rates also dropped and have been following in the united states during the same time. gun rights people like to talk about gun sales and the concealed carry law, and the majority of the states. and the intergenerational effect of lip -- liberalized abortion that took place earlier. to account for at least part of the reduction of the crime rate.

there is just one problem and that is that australia liberalized abortion laws at the same time that america did. so if the theory is that abortion in the 1970s cold enough people from the population of future criminals to result in a crime reduction in 1990 -- in the 1990s, why doesn't that argument holds for australia at? i am not aware of any other constitutional law subject to this level of analysis. imagine asking how many more murders would be solved if we violated the fifth and sixth amendment rights, and criminal suspects. this addresses the trade-off between public safety and fundamental rights was made when a particular constitutional right was adopted. the gun-control debate characterized this as a callous unwillingness to adopt more gun control, might actually be evidence that we have reached a free people with the right to

keep and bear arms and we will not tolerate any further restrictions. thank you. >> john? >> i think the australian experience is worth considering. they essentially took very extreme measures to reduce the number of guns, prohibited the use of guns for self-defense, and the murder rate trended from 1.7-1.1 since then. ours is up around five. importantly while there were 13 mass shootings and 103 deaths from 19 79-1976 -- 1979-1996, since the new gun laws there have been no mass shootings.

in the united states there were 42 mass killings since the australian gun ban. 21 in the years before. this is so dramatic that it reflects more than the reduction in guns. it reflects a change in the culture that comes with guns. that change has been beneficial. gun culture makes those with severe mental illness more likely to act out, with mass shootings. it is important to remember that 42% of adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden does come from a more concentrated number. the numbers with serious mental illness is 13 million per year. i do disagree strongly with my former colleague kuczynski who

is an immigrant from an autonomous country, which i think has worked his sense of what the value of guns would be in a country like the united states, which has a tradition of lawfulness that i think we should try to encourage. and not the lawlessness that is encouraged by the idea that we are going to take up arms against -- that number that is used -- that word that is used sometimes against our current president. >> thank you john, that you can't sit down. the next question is for you. if the government cannot control the firearms owned by a law- abiding person, what is -- what about the amount that any firearm can hold? is a bad guy has two guns, that old 10 rounds each, or one round

one gunman holds 20. >> these are legitimate questions. what are the kinds of controls that will make a difference, it is true that if you have the number of rounds that a gun can carry, one way in which a criminal can subvert that is carrying multiple guns, but we did learn in the adam lanza scenario that he came in with 30 rounds in a clip, meaning he could fire 30 bullets before having to reload. it was when he had to reload that 11 children were able to run out of the schoolroom in newtown. those lives were saved. similarly in tucson, a number of

years ago when gabby giffords was shot in the head and a number of others were killed, jared loughtner had a 33 round clip and he was able to fire 33 times before he unloaded. and as wayne lapierre says the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, in tucson, it was a 54- year-old army colonel, unarmed who's stopped him when he had to reload because he had run through his clip. i do think that we see in two very obvious in recent cases, where making the criminal -- reload more often is a beneficial thing.

without question, lives were saved when they did have to reload. think of how many more would have been saved if they had been under the restrictions of the federal assault weapons ban which lapsed into thousand four, which had limited high-capacity magazines to 10 rounds of ammunition. someone like loughner would have had to reload twice -- and it is true that you can't stop everything but the one thing we have learned across the board, look at the car accident rates. the extraordinary accomplishments, the reduction in the number of lives lost, through motor vehicle accidents, it is because of a very deliberate effort to restrict all of the ways in which cars are deadly that we were able to achieve the goal. it really is a sad phenomenon when the nra, which is much more interested in promoting activities that will encourage the sales of guns, rather than

protecting the lives of american citizens, or reasonable steps that could be taken. and are prevented. >> don, your question? >> the issue of magazine capacity and whether it should be 10 or 20 or 30, seems to me to be somewhat of a red herring. it would foreshadow an answer to what might be a future question. i don't agree with professor donohue that there should be background checks on everyone who purchases a firearm. there are those who are diagnosed with mental illness -- who are not getting firearms. to the nra disagrees with that, if they disagree with that they are wrong. the idea of background checks is not the same thing as registering gun owners and guns.

it is possible to do background checks -- who are not on the mental health list, not necessarily registering the gun owner or the gun. once you have done that and you make sure that the gun buying public and the gun owning public are trustworthy with owning guns, they don't become untrustworthy because they put 11 bullets in their gun rather than 10. or they could put 12 bullets in their gun instead of 10. if you want to regulate guns and ammunition and feeding devices in the same way you regulate guns themselves, do so. once you make the determination that this gun owner is trustworthy, they engage in ordinary safety rulings for

guns, what sense does it make to limit the ammunition feeding device that they are going to use. the natural limit is probably imposed by the manufacturer themselves. the a ar-15, the magazine capacity was between 20-30. and the rifle that was available to civilians that used to be in army rifle this was once limited to 20. that is probably the maximum number that you need. in imposing an arbitrary limit like seven or eight or 10, in the face of bad guys now you have to reload.

bad guys are going to do bad things. we would like to limit their firepower. the way to that is to limit their access to guns in the first place. thank you. >> all right. this is back to you. this is john's question. very simple and short one. do you think there is a constitutional right to own a fully automatic weapon. >> i remember seeing that question. and remembering that i have four minutes to respond to it, and don't necessarily have four minutes worth of material. i think that there is a constitutional right to have common and ordinary weapons for self-defense. that is what the supreme court told us. automatic weapons are not currently illegal to own in the country. part of my law practice is assisting businesses, motion picture studio armories and individual -- individuals maintaining the licenses. and the possession of automatic weapons. a very stringent requirement

that requires approval not only by the federal government but the state government and the federal law enforcement agency as well. the query on automatic weapons would be this. if the submachine guns are necessary to protect the life of the president and other vip government officials, why wouldn't it be necessary to protect your life? that is part of the personal protection details, since the question was asked, is there a constitutional right. there is the self-defense utility and automatic weapons -- my question -- my answer is no. they are not, and ordinary at this time. what i personally use an automatic weapon for self- defense, the answer is no. well aimed fire is more effective than spray and pray. but i will tell you that submachine guns are fun to

shoot. >> will thank god, we don't have a disagreement on whether there is a constitutional right to have an automatic weapon, but it makes the point that lines have to be drawn. and the supreme court says you have a constitutional right to have a gun or firearm for self- defense, but -- i think that the nra, for example, is setting the bar way too high. that anything a criminal could get their hands on is something that they should be entitled to. and quite frankly, it depressed me to no end when i saw that the mass murderer who killed 69 children in norway a couple of years ago was praising the american gun laws.

he said i feel camaraderie with my european-american comrades who had no gun laws as opposed to the oppressive gun laws of europe, and he was grateful he was able to get the 30 round capacity clips that he used in his shooting spree in the united states because he could not get those in europe. this underscores a key point, restriction has to be at the core of this right. and i think that don makes a very unfortunate error in thinking that simply because someone can pass a background check they are ok. you just alluded to the fact that 13 million people have a serious mental illness. right now, the background check system has a million people indicating that because of the mental illness, they are not entitled to have guns.

that means 12 million people can currently buy guns and would be able to do that will live -- buy guns with universal background check because they are not in the system. or what happens when you get your gun and develop a mental illness? other countries are much more aggressive in renewing your license repeatedly, to make sure that you still meet the requirements but we are, in this country, unfortunately very >> in that regard. and we pay a hard price for that. remember also that for years the nra would say, you just need a gun to defend yourself, 98% of the time, if i get carried away here, all you have to do is

brandished a weapon and you will be fine. if that is true there really is no need, 98% of the time for anything more than a simple handgun. >> thank you, john. so we finished two questions and we are on to the third. there are some good ones coming from you. stand by. this is from dawn to john. to lower the number of casualties of mass public shooting, why would the policy be to have a trained person in place to engage the shooter? >> i guess i am not sure who the trained person he has in mind is. certainly, if you had a police officer or a trained security officer in a particular place, when the mass shooting breaks out that would be beneficial thing, but of course, don't exaggerate the ability of that to necessarily stop mass shootings. think of the sandy hook case.

there had been a security guard standing at the door in the sandy hook case, it's quite possible they would have been overwhelmed by the firepower that adam lanza unleashed in the school. remember in the recent navy shipyard shooting case, they killed i think 12 individuals -- an armed security guard and former maryland state trooper, who was told, stop him from getting out of the building, and then he immediately kill that officer and took that officer's gun, and then use that officer's gun to shoot others when alexis ran out of the shotgun ammunition he had brought with him. having guns around is helpful, in the hands of well-trained individuals, but having guns

around for other individuals can only make things worse. we were just following the events of a few days ago in florida. a 71-year-old former police officer got into a fight with someone in a movie theater over texting and when the texter, sending a note to the babysitter of his three-year-old daughter, complained and they started exchanging angry words and he threw some popcorn at the 71- year-old former police officer, who then shot and killed him, and the former police officer said that he was defending himself against the assault of the popcorn.

this, unfortunately, is very much an nra inspired attitude, your response to assaults and perceived threats -- if this is a powerful and deadly one, and again just like in wisconsin, the 20-year-old who was coming home to visit his family, he did not think his 13-year-old sister was in her room, he heard some noises, he got his father's gun and shot through the door and almost hit her in the bicep.

this should first attitude, does not always work out well. it is consistent with an attitude that leads to the greater levels of homicide in the u.s.. we should be trying to move in a different direction. there are less lethal measures, of self-defense and i think that we should encourage the use of those rather than the most lethal and certainly wrapping up the firepower is almost always a terrible idea. >> thank you. don? >> i wasn't meaning to suggest that people should shoot first and ask questions later. but i think the point i wanted to make with my question was that there are two sources of well-trained people to stop mass shootings. one would obviously be a uniformed officer, whether it is private security or a police officer. the other is people with licenses to carry firearms.

in california you are required to go through 16 hours of training to carry a firearm in the state. california is called a discretionary issue state eerie you still have to this -- you still have to display good moral character before this can be issued. but good people of guns often do stop mass shootings. the arapahoe shooting in colorado several weeks ago was stopped by an armed security guard at the school when the teenager walked in and started shooting. there was a death and there was a fatality, but once he was confronted with a good guy with a gun he took his own life and the shooting stopped. and so what would have been a mass shooting which is usually defined as four or more deaths in the same place was limited to one and one injury if you don't count the bad guy. the -- there are other -- one of the other areas of agreement that i have with professor donohue, there is probably no area of public policy where we are more likely to get what is

called confirmational bias than in the gun control debate. depending upon your point of view you will find the facts that support your position, whether it is anecdotal or statistical. there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that sometimes, yes, just brandishing a firearm, sometimes using the firearm can stop a crime. so the point of the question was that some -- that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun at a mass shooting. the other point i wanted to make was that the tucson shooting where congress woman gabriel giffords was wounded there were two men who helped tackle the shooter in that incidence. one was a gentleman who had a

concealed carry permit and had his gun on his person. he did not draw or shoot the gun but was able to assist in the apprehension of the stopping of the shooter. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> all right. the last prepared question. >> could i just make one quick response on that? >> please, john. >> away to pull this up on to the screen? i see. i shouldn't have gone to this. i'm sorry. i had it here and now i have lost it.

i'm sorry. let me take one second and find that. here it is. okay. so this is the case that we were just talking about and this is one episode where one of the prominent researchers who has claimed that many good things come from guns is a guy named john lott who wrote the book called "more guns less crime" says one can only hope that the saturday attack in tucson encourages more citizens to carry concealed handguns. fortunately one shopper in the walgreen's was joseph zamudio. he ran toward them. he helped tackle the killer before more harm occurred. so that is what john lott said what happened. what really happened, lafner stopped shooting and was reaching for a new magazine when he was tackled by two unarmed individuals.

zamudio mistakenly grabbed the wrong man. when the crowd shouted he had the wrong man. he said i almost shot the man holding the gun, i could have very easily done the wrong thing and hurt a lot more people because the gun had been taken away from lafner by the time that zamuzio got there. his gun played no positive role and if he had gotten there quickly and had the mindset that the n.r.a. tries to encourage, get out your gun and be the hero of the day, he might have shot the real hero of the day, the retired army colonel and patricia maish.

>> the last prepared question is from john to don. and it reads -- here. has any credible study ever suggested that one would reduce the risk of death of a gunowner and a gunowner's family by purchasing a gun? >> this is one of those questions that if we were in court i would probably object to the form of the question. [laughter] >> because i don't know of any power on eartha will reduce the overall risk of death for anybody. we all die. i'm not sure that the author means to imply that the mere act of purchasing a firearm carries a risk of death.

reduce the overall risk of death of the gun owner and the family by owning or possessing a gun. but again, mere ownership or possession is not inherently dangerous. unlike radio active isotopes, firearms require human interaxe to be dangerous. why human beings commit irrational acts is more properly addressed to psychologists, cessionologyists and psychiatrists. the most appropriate answer generated in a free country it guarantees an individual the right to keep and bear arms is that the individual is free to make up their own mind. for someone who refuses to learn how a gun works or refuses to learn proper handling or refuses to safely store a firearm the risks may be too high. when i'm consult as part of my gun law practice by a new gun owner i inquire do you own a gun safe? if the answer is no, the client is advised that in my legal

opinion owning a gun safe is a precondition for owning a gun. if you can't afford both, buy the safe first. they can be purchased in various forms and cost anywhere from $100 to $2,000 for a good one. it projected a subtle add homonym. the defensive use of firearms versus the risk of criminal or negligent misuse of firearms. the institutes of medicine and national research council produced a report in 2013 titled priorities for research to reduce the threat of firearm related violence. there are some flaws in the report which has a tendency to log roll suicides and accidents

with firearms into the definition of firearm related violence. the report is not charitable in any way to the idea of gun ownership but acknowledges that the defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence although the exact number remains disputed. almost all of the national surveys estimate -- indicate the defensive use by victims are at least as common as offensive use by criminals with estimates of annual uses ranging from 500,000 to three million. and the context of 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008, on the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of 108,000 annual defensive uses. the vir 86 in the numbers is the controversy. the estimate of three million is probably too high. the estimate of 108,000 is probably too low. but elsewhere the same report, the national research council's report citeds 105 incidents as of 2010 involvele firearms where

someone died and included accidental discharges or homicides or suicides or any time when anybody was injured. the injury figures were in fact 73,000. the lowest possible figure for the defensive use of firearms even from somebody on the gun control side is 105,000 or 108,000 with 105,000 injuries or deaths. so, we come down it a coin flip. so in a worst case scenario, this is hardly overwhelming evidence that law-abiding citizens can't be trusted to make their own risk assessments. the more probably correct approach to the defensive use of guns and the actual number was published in the journal of criminal law and criminology in an article called "a call for truce." he puts the number closer to 1.2

million defensive uses a year. thank you. thanks. >> i don't want to bore you with a long numbers debate, but i will say that i'm reading a book now on which i think i make the claim that the single most unreliable number ever to appear in any public policy debate is the claim that defensive gun uses are anywhere along the lines that don was just mentioning. this isn't don's fault because there are people who actually make these claims but they collapse if they are looked at with any refinement. indeed, the basic methodology which was a flood methodology to flawed to begin with, embarked upon 20 years ago when crime was at a much higher rate than it is today. whatever was true 20 years ago, is not true today when crime is so much lower. but essentially what they did was they just called up a lot of people on the phone which turns out not to be a great way to sample people today because how many people answer their phones

these days? the answer for these surveys is now less than 10% will answer and respond. so you are getting a very selected sample to begin with. they said did you use a gun to stop a crime? 1% of people said that they did. and then the researchers said 1% of 250 million adults is 2.5 million. ergo there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses. it turns out if you kick this tire at all it collapses. first of all, people are very likely to answer in a way that makes them feel good about themselves or justify their choices. there is no verification of whether what they said is true. i assume that the police officer, former police officer who killed the man in the florida movie theater last week had he instead just brandished

the gun and screamed at the guy would have said i used my gun to thwart a crime last week as this guy was going to throw more popcorn at me. not to mention that those numbers also capture defense of property and therefore are probably illegal half the time because using deadly force is supposed to be limited to cases where you are saving lives the others. the numbers are completely off. we do have some hard numbers, though, and they -- about 8/10 of 1% of the time that someone is attacked they do tend to use a gun to defend themselves. so it is a very, very small percentage. but in a big country and with a lot of crime, it probably is in the neighborhood of 45,000, but, you know, no where near a million.

and again, remember, we also know 232,000 guns are stolen every year. ha is moving a gun -- that is moving a gun from the "law- abiding sit den" to the criminals and when you get five times moving from theft as you get some what benign or positive use out of a gun it raises serious questions. also one thing, the main n.r.a. tactic, which is obviously designed to promote sales of guns and since that is their business, is to scare people to think somebody is coming into your home and is going to kill you. and turns out, there are about 85 home invasion killings each year. so not a trivial number but 1/10

the number of people who die from gun accidents. if nothing else was going on, keep in mind if you think the gun is going to save you and we said 8/10 of 1% of the time when you are attacked people use guns to protect themselves, 8/10 of 1 percent and there are only 85 deaths even if you could somehow stop all of those 85 deaths, if by doing so you are ramping up the gun accidents that doesn't look like a good deal. one other thing, again, i think the gun culture is very important. i'm glad don said something that is extremely important. he is very much against the n.r.a. position here which would not want any sort of safe store and requirement imposed as a matter of law and i think that is really essential if we are going stop some of these problems because as the nancy lanza scenario showed, she made those guns available to her son and we all paid the price. so it would be one thing if gun owners would limit the deaths to themselves, but the big problem is there is what we refer to in the economics world as large negative externalities when you buy your guns and something has

to be done to address that so that gun owners take seriously the requirement that they keep their guns from migrating to the criminal segment. let me just end on one note. israel which is a country that does take security very seriously in this regard makes it a criminal offense for your gun to be lost or stolen. think about that one. if your gun is lost or stolen you can go to jail and people do go to jail in israel for that offense. in the united states 232,000 guns are stolen every year. countless more are lost. much more effort needs to be made on the part of the so- called law-abiding citizen to stop guns moving into the hands of the criminal element. >> thank you, john. okay.

so we have reached the end of the organized debate, the prepared questions. and we have selected a few questions for each -- for john and don from the audience. these are terrific questions. not surprising from a stanford audience. thank you very much. and i will do my best imitation of michael here, when people call in with a comment rather than a question he responds to the comment and says thank you very much but doesn't pose it as a question to his guest. here are three which i'm going regard as comments even though they are phrased grammatically as questions. i want to read them to you because they are useful to enter into our thinking tonight. this is actually apropos what

you just said. why is it not the case that if you decide to purchase a gun you are not also held financially or legally responsible for the potentially tragic results of your purchase? why are some gun deaths "tragic accidents"? why is no one held responsible for the choice to purchase a deadly weapon and bring if into their house? this is an interesting one but i will just read it as a comment rather than pose it as a question. please explain how the right to self-defense has been transformed into an obligation of self-defense and the onus for public safety shifted away from public policy to the individual victims who "could have saved themselves if only they were armed"? how is that anything other than blaming the victim? and finally, why isn't much more funding and advocacy directed towards the enforcement of existing laws?

background checks, against ownership by convicted felons and mentally ill by both sides of the debate? what good is endless polydebate when the implementation is sorely lacking and resulting in mass shootings. good comment. now i have two questions for don and two for john. i'm going to start with this one to don. and this is i suspect in part response to your in vocation of the threat of tyranny. here it goes. to what extent do you believe gun ownership by civilians contributed to greater aggression exhibited by members of a more fearful law enforcement community? do guns in fact help create an oppressive police state that gun owners seek to keep in check?

>> if i understand the question correctly, it is that police -- that the question is police officers afraid of civilians with firepower somehow respond more aggressively in situations. i will assume that is what the question is. the answer to that is i don't know because police officers are required to have probable cause in order to interact with a citizen in either effecting arrest or conducting a crime investigation. whereas the individual obviously has a legal duty to make sure that there is a threat of death or great bodily injury before they employ their weapon. there are different and competing policies at stake for the private gun owner versus the police officer. also i don't know how the question actually relates to the idea of tyranny.

we are talking about a policy of tyranny where the government is oppressing or engaged against identifiable groups ever people or minorities in which case the government is then using the police officers or the military that they have at their disposal to actually commit crimes or genocide against masses or groups of people. whereas individual officers engaging in law enforcement activity, they may or may not be fearful of an armed civilian population. but one of the consequences that we see at least in california and we can debate whether it is a good idea or not is that the state of california does maintain a registration or database of handguns. police officers usually know he they roll up to a scene whether or not there are at least handguns in the house. in january of this year, long arms are required to be registered to the state of california.

i don't think this is necessarily a good policy or a good turn of events but the state of california is marching headlong into making sure or trying to make sure that every firearm in the state is registered. now leave for another time whether or not that is a good policy or a bad policy. i think the point is as i stated earlier we do want to make sure that law-abiding people are the only people with access to firearms. background checks are a good idea. registering guns and gun owners is not. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> all right, john, this is a question for you. switzerland allows all citizens to own at least one automatic gun per household. why does this nation have fewer gun deaths than america according to the chart that you have shown? >> yes, again, this is something where the n.r.a. has tried to i think confuse the public about what actually happens in switzerland. switzerland actually has what our second amendment was designed to have which is a well regulated militia and therefore they require citizens to have

training and they give them an assault weapon for which they are given a sealed container with bullets in it and they are those bullets -- the bullet containers are inspected every year and if they have opened them they will be summarily arrested. they are not allowed to use those guns. and the only time they are allowed to open those ammunition containers is if they have to fight to get to the assembly place if the nation is under

attack. so if that were the system that you wanted to entertain in the united states, i think we would see a move towards far lower gun deaths than we have. the swiss example is a very different one. it is a highly regulated system. it would be deemed tyrannical to most propoe intercepts of the n.r.a. type positions. guns are not the only thing that influences crime. affluent nations tend to suppress crime more effectively than poorer nations. better police forces and so on and so forth. and we in the united states tend to be somewhat out of control population. one manifestation of that is our excessive amounts of guns and other is our excessive use of drugs and another is our excessive use of incarceration. switzerland is a much more moderate country and has less of all of those unfortunate attributes.

>> thank you. question for don. i'm glad we are having all these comparative questions, international and their understanding. this is about mexico. right now in mexico, local citizen militias are patrolling with assault weapons to deal with drug cartels. is this a good model for american cities? >> i think the missing component of that question is whether or not the wild card in that case is whether or not the citizens of mexico actually trust their police departments. i personally believe that we can trust our police departments and so no, i don't think that vigilante squads in the united states are necessarily a good

idea. but i don't live in mexico and i'm not subject to the horrific violence of the drug cartels in mexico. and this brings me around to a point i wanted to make, another point of agreement that i have with professor donohue. he wrote a short article in 2007 advocating drastic policy changes with regard to the war on drugs. i happen to agree with him on that. we saw reductions in crime after prohibition, after they cut -- after the united states government experiment with prohibition in the 1920's and 1930's. saw a reduction after we repealed prohibition. i think that is probably a good place to start and some place

that i would rather see public policy direction go rather than tinkering with a fundamental right. we should repeal the war on drugs and should stop incarcerating people and stop giving drug cartels an incentive to market these drugs and then use illegal firepower to maintain their market shares. i think that that would go a long way towards helping to reduce the gun violence that does exist in some of our major cities. i'm not aware of any particular criminalogical report that segregated or done a breakdown on gun violence with respect to whether or not it was a drug enforcement violent crime or whether or not it was simply a run of the mill homicide. but i think that a study like that would be most helpful in trying to decide if the drug war is a large component of the gun deaths and gun homicides in the country. but i'm afraid i'm not an expert in mexican internal politics or

domestic politics in mexico. >> thank you. all right, the final question is to john. i'm not familiar with this person, gary clank. maybe you could fill me and the audience in this your answer. the research shows that for every use of one gun to commit a crime there are three or four cases of guns being used in self-defense of a crime. or in self-defense. i will leave it at that. how do you take this study? >> i know gary's work quite well. he is the author of that claimed 2.5 million defensive gun uses. somehow managed to get on to the panel that don had mentioned as coming out endorsing that number. but again, i think that the number has been criticized so powerfully. remember, one percent of americans are schizophrenic. if you call up and ask have you taken a trip in an alien spaceship this year, about 1% of people answer that question yes. i would not extrapolate to that

that 2.5 million people actually took a ride in an alien spaceship this year but that was the methodology that led to these exaggerated numbers. we do know there are, you know, i think the best estimate is in the neighborhood of 47,000 times guns were used in confronting, you know, again, 8/10 of 1% of the six million violent crime episodes in the united states. it does happen, rarely. even though tons of people have guns, but criminals usually don't let you know that they are about to attack you, and it as very limited set of time -- it is a very limited set of times when you get to actually use your gun. again, it is 8/10 of 1% of the time that you are attacked. so since we are big country, the numbers can be large, but nowhere near compares with the

large number of gun thefts which again move the guns from the "law-abiding citizens" to the criminal element. and again, remember the dangers of the misthinkings that are so prevalent and initiated by the n.r.a. where people like nancy lanza were thinking i need to have an arsenal to protect me and my family. here i live in this one of the safest communities in the united states and, indeed, in the world, newtown, connecticut and thinks i will have my arsenal to make my family safe and yet was totally oblivious to the dangers she was imposing on herself and

her son and, of course, the broader community. and this is the point that must be underscored. the problems of stopping gun violence must be taken very seriously by the current owners. it is really only luck that leads to the gun not killing them. most of the time guns do not get abused, but simply a matter of if you are just leaving it around and people like adam lanza have access to the weapon. >> it is 9:00. let me say her slowly thank you all for coming and thank you for

your excellent input. was an intellectually figure rating evening for all of us. you may have noticed the camera us. that is c-span. this will be the broad cast in the country. i think one thing you will see is we can have a debate, a conversation like this where differences of opinions get raised where we are intellectually challenged to fisher -- figure out situations we all face but can do it using the frontal cortex to. we do not need to shout at each other. i said -- i would suspect bill o'reilly would say it is a failure. you did not see anyone spitting at each other on the stage. share differences of opinion. understand in those differences we have a common goal, a common

purpose to figure out how to live together peacefully have met not only here but in the world. thank you for a wonderful evening. [applause] >> the senate services committee examined just -- examines military retirement benefits, including a reduction in cost of living adjustments under the bipartisan act. you can see it live starting at span a.m. eastern on c- three.

the foreign affairs subcommittee examining the next round of talks on iran's nuclear program in a hearing today. they will hear from a former u.s. ambassador to the u.n. and former deputy at the u.s. international atomic energy. live coverage starting at 2:00 eastern on c-span three. coming up today on c-span, washington journal. 10:00 eastern, the house returns for general speeches. later, the house begins legislative work on bills related to national parklands and good samaritan laws. , a preview of president obama state of the union address. senior, ken walsh, white house correspondent for u.s. news & world report. utah.jason chaffetz of

at 9:15, ♪ u.s. capitol. president obama will present his state of the union tonight at 9:00. can be part of the conversation on the phone, on twitter, and our facebook page. c-span.orge in via or listen on c-span radio. for our next 45 minutes, we would like to hear from you about what issue you want president obama and the congress to tackle in 2014.