live from our new center here in moscow this is r.t. top stories now the olympic flame is to be lifted its final destination in the british capital shortly but many londoners are feeling left out of the spectacle and instead overwhelmed by traffic and restrictions big corporations sponsoring the event of squeezed out small business seem to be the only party profiting from the games. a crucial battle for syria's commercial capital pits rebels against the regime is fears of a new massacre saw with the rising death toll. and

as i've already said the olympic flame is to be lifted his final destination at the british capital. will take a pause for the moment for half an hour and i'll be back with more news and in the meantime as promised crosstalk examines why the u.s. doesn't seem to want to make its citizens lay down their guns despite the recent deadly shootings in the country that is next here on r.t. .

hello and welcome to crossfire god's people about the killing of america what explains the high level of gun related violence in the us does gun ownership really promote public safety and are the mass shootings the ultimate in evitable consequence of surrendering gun policy to the gun lobby. to cross on gun control i'm joined by donna shelley in los angeles she is a lecturer in the department of criminology law and society at the university of california irvine in denver we have david coco he is a research director at the independence institute and in washington we cross to mark levine he is a radio host and senior advisor with the truman national security project all right

folks cross talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want i don't know if i can go to you first if guns make a country safer than the u.s. should be the safest country in the world but it's not one up well they think that that's a very interesting question and it raises questions about you know kind of irony and and contradictions and fact the crime rate is going down and yet more people are interested in guns and we saw in the wake of the shootings in colorado and immediate uptick in people contacting. gun schools firing ranges wanting to take out permits on guns and and. and a lot of times people say well i think it'll make me safer and yet you would expect if the crime rate is going down that there would be less interest in guns so there seems to be sort of a contradictory behavior going on ok marc how do you explain the contradiction i agree with that well i think it has to do with the guns that we allow i think most

advocates like myself for greater good control support the right of americans to own a gun for self-defense or for hunting but we allow a lot more than that the killer in colorado had an assault weapon a semiautomatic weapon that had one hundred. bullet capacity magazine you could fire one hundred bullets in one hundred seconds and i think there's a reason why one person could kill or injure seventy people i mean he had a knife he may have been able to herd two or three but this kind of mass killing is allowed because we have laws that allow this kind of thing this was banned from one thousand nine hundred two thousand and four the republicans in congress allowed the bad to expire and we see what happens why was it repealed mark if i can stay with you. well there is a very powerful gun lobby as you pointed out the national rifle association has a tremendous amount of power in the united states it's interesting that a majority of americans the vast majority support more gun control the majority of americans more than sixty percent want to ban assault weapons want to ban these high capacity magazines but the people who love their guns really love their guns

it's kind of interesting thing in political science if you feel very strongly about the issue you could have more power than the majority if the minority is going to vote only on that one issue and the people who love their guns in america really love their guns go to you david a marquee was another contradiction in your go ahead real quick going to go ahead. that i just wired job and we're just a quick clarification that the assault weapon ban expired so it was set to expire and then would have to be renewed it wasn't repealed so what's happened is there's an inability on the part of congress to renew the assault ban weapon dianne feinstein our senator in california tapped it and got nowhere with that ok david if i can go to you what about all these contradictions a lot of guidance not much they were dead on is it don is right that the ban on so-called assault weapons expired in two thousand and four it wasn't a like the congress had the didn't have the ability to do it congress chose not to

when the ban was in acted in one thousand nine hundred for congress ordered that a study be done of this under the supervision of the department of justice and that study concluded that the ban had accomplished absolutely nothing another reason that the ban congress chose to let that ban expire was because they found out that it was phony that it wasn't based on guns that fire faster than any other firearm where they have more powerful bullets it was based purely on the cosmetics of the gun the broader point you raised was about the number of guns and safety i think the question is less who how many guns there are than whose hands they are in the police organizations i represented before the united states supreme court in the heller case which affirmed the second amendment right and in other cases like the county sheriffs of colorado here in the colorado supreme court agree that when you put guns in the right hands you enhanced public safety guns in the wrong hands harm public safety and over the last forty years we've had a very big gun control debate in the united states that now has largely been

settled because we have many many more laws to work to keep guns out of the wrong hands well and even embankments been settled then why are we all these mass killings if you're saying. why are these mass killings and i'll say that i think i'm going to stay with me stay with david ok. well we know that some gun we have gun laws the try to reduce that one for example in colorado like in forty other states we protect the right of people to carry firearms for lawful protection after they pass a ten point fingerprint background check and a safety training class that prevented a massacre of over one hundred people at a church in colorado springs in december two thousand and seven because of our license to carry law there was a volunteer security guard at their church she shot the attacker and according to the pastor she saved over one hundred lives the interesting the don has pointed to is that since one thousand nine hundred to two thousand and ten our overall homicide rate has fallen by fifty percent and at the same time we've nearly doubled

the number of guns in the united states the problem with the these mass killings these psychopaths who go on a rampage is that unfortunately the united states has drastically cut its mental health spending so a lot of people who forty or fifty years ago would have been in mental institutions getting treatment are now out on the streets and some of them are committing homicides one at a time and some of them creates insatiable homicides that attract a lot of international attention ok marc you wanted to add i do because obviously we need more mental health treatment and i'm all for that but we're never going to stop a small percentage of people from being crazy that's true in the united states that you in every country on earth there's a small percentage of people who are mentally ill who have a screw loose who don't know right from wrong this guy apparently thought he was in a batman movie so the answer is not stop all the craziness worldwide the answer is to prevent these people from getting these very dangerous weapons and i'm really glad to hear that david supports background checks but the national rifle

association does not forty percent of guns in america that is. a background check to the licensed gun dealers they do the background checks but if you buy online and this guy bought a whole group of explode on the legs and says this is all on line he bought three thousand bullets without anyone giving him a check it seems to me we need strong. the law is on this point don if you want to know if you don't know what you're talking about all right. sorry that go ahead. yeah i'm sorry i missed it we had a little bit of technical difficulty and i missed a bit of the debate and just to take it back a little bit at the point that that i was in on this you know. i i'm just flabbergasted to hear something being said that the gun debate has been saddled clearly we've seen in the past few seconds on this show it's not saddled it if if you know one side has has maybe been bullied into silence that might be a way to describe the debate but hardly it's been saddled if we have politicians

that don't want to show leadership on this. and have been silenced on this or chosen to be silence on this but i don't think that we can call that a debate that spends saddled and i hope we don't have we have only going on this issue go ahead david sure we can have a robust debate like we're doing right now but then the media is very interested in that but the american people have settled the debate through their elections and the reason the politicians in washington d.c. and in most of our states or in pushing laws to crack down on law abiding gun owners like mark and you favor is because politicians who do that consistently lose but of course if you want to keep on pushing that the former issue that the american public isn't interested in we have lots of gun control laws and lots of gun safety laws to promote guns in the right hands and the american the national rifle association which everybody makes into this bogeyman has a sixty eight percent approval rating among the american public according to

reuters so of course politicians are generally because they reflect the will of the people going to support one of the most popular groups in the country which is more popular than congress and the president put together david do you think that america the n.r.a. support you i mean let me ask you the question here do you think americans should be able to buy an assault rifle in an urban area. no an assault of an assault rifle is a gun like the the famous aftermath kalashnikov the forty seven invented by the russian kalashnikov it in one nine hundred forty seven there's been very strict controls on guns like that machine guns ever since the national farms act of one nine hundred thirty four what the gun prohibition lobbies in the united states have done is intentionally confuse people and think guns that based on their appearance might look like that or the same american laws are very strict on automatic firearms including assault rifles but the american public has rejected the idea of banning guns simply based on how they look the a r fifteen is the capitol act in the matter

is we have your viewers may have slowed ones bullet every time you pull the trigger and it doesn't for bullets that are more powerful than other guns in far as bullets that are about in the middle of rifle power ok donna jump in go ahead david what. i'm just going to say you know if we can we can talk about the ins and outs of the mechanics and the looks and the operation of guns and it doesn't change the fact that we have these mass shootings and you know i i i just. you know i guess one of the other things that bothers me about this whole debate discussion is this sort of sense that if you don't know all the ins and outs of the mechanics of guns if you can't talk that cool talk then then you really don't have a place in the debate and the fact of the matter is that you know americans might not know every in and out of a gun but they know what happened in colorado and you know i i don't know what you do with the statistics but let me interject

a little bit of gender in here and i don't know if the moms the mothers are being asked in these polls because i don't find many mothers like myself that think that what's going on in colorado what's going on with our gun laws is a good thing we fear for our children well you live and you live in your own social circles and if. i don't know people who have diverse views on this debate of course polls talk to all kinds of people the fastest growing demographic in texas for lawful for a lawful license to carry permits is black women that then that the reason why the national rifle association is one of the most popular groups in the country today is because it has positive approval ratings among every group in the united states men women republican to democrat you said advocates want to restrict the rights of law abiding gun owners i want to be very clear here we're trying to restrict people that are crazy the national rifle association you know this says that crazy people should undergo a background check they says you should be able to go to

a gun show to a family friend you are somebody you know maybe here illegally sharia law and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the killing of america stay. with the. original or mouths to feed but where will the food come from and science provide the answers to the future of under the microscope. the future.

welcome back across town to you for about three months you were talking about gun control in the u.s. .

ok david we always hear the phrase guns don't kill people people do but it seems like americans kill people what's so different about america that it's industrial peers japan the u.k. germany what's so different well in terms of massacres there there's a lot of the same in many countries germany you mentioned japan there are far more actually there is a new united states than any other in scotland i have all of that i have now killed all of them have been by far if you look if you look at the ten worst if you look at the ten worst mass killings perpetrated by a single individual over the past decades nine out of ten of them happened in other countries and many of these countries have the very repressive kind of laws that a minority of americans favors and we see that it doesn't stop at more broadly the met the greatest mass killings in this country in the world have happy. because of gun control and disarmament the soviet union nazi germany mean the pol pot every

country that has had genocide has very systematically worked to disarm the victims every country in the world that's a tyranny south korea north korea many others have extremely repressive gun control laws the american founders understood that if you give the government a monopoly on force it creates a very dangerous situation in the long run indomie you want to jump in there i'd like to respond if i'm going to do that i had heard a lot of people are killed by guns in the united states i don't see why we want to be just looking at mass killings and sort of having a contest of which which country can produce the person that can kill the most people at any one time that that just seems to be a rather sick way to to look at the issue in oh it's overall the number of people killed by guns and the u.s. is is quite quite out there in that i think it's i think it's kind of sick to just think about to just focus on the guns i think you should look at the overall violent crime rates the united kingdom with extremely repressive gun laws has

a higher total violent crime rate than the united states but they're not you know hills and david partly because they're not they don't have certain things that guns . you can tell us how it was written i know you've ever said that if you have that kind of twisted us that i had mark eighty percent of gun deaths in the dust realize world of the twenty three major industrialized nations eighty percent occur in the united states of america we have a rate three times higher than canada our neighbor to the north more than five times higher than great britain ten thousand americans die every year due to guns and all i'm saying is not to restrict the rights of law abiding gun owners but to keep the crazy people from having guns why is it the national rifle association supports the right of violent felons and mentally ill individuals to get guns without background checks the vast majority of americans don't have. a lot of give me a c.p.a. exam to have guns ok david go ahead after after sure after after the terrible

murders at virginia tech in two thousand and seven the country fortunately didn't get into this kind of hysterical debate that the some of our other guests are trying to get into and the national rifle association as well as some of the gun control groups in the administration other people came together to find ways to improve the background checks so that meant state mental health records which weren't getting into the federal databases so that a person would be denied a gun purchase were improved that's the kind of constructive solution we can continue to ignore if they don't want to influence our every president obama spoke i know is about improving those mental health records. why can't everyone who wants to go in america undergo a background check we have to get licenses to drive cars because cars kill people too why can't we get in every one of the only cars in america should have a license if you're in the military the police you should have a gun if you're a crazy person you shouldn't have a gun that makes sense and most americans agree with me on this david you want to respond because we don't need to create a lot we don't need to create a licensing system because we have the background check system guns or that was

strictly regulated consumer product in the country today they are the only place you don't. go to a store to buy one. is far more ok donna jumping. on a car is going to do they didn't call the police to ask if they could sell it to me . i mean you know when you come care that regulation of guns is a regulation of automobiles and users of guns and users of cars it it it's. it's just confounding to see the difference in this and you know. and i think it that it it goes back to a history and a psychology that is very uniquely american and difficult to unravel and and and. and i don't i don't know that it necessarily goes back to a second amendment in the fact that it's there but just we have in america

a very different relationship with our guns to the point where we're willing to regulate drivers of automobiles more have only then we are willing to regulate guns when you think about that david david well that's surely true that the certainly not true in california in california if you're if you're sixteen years old and pass a simple test you can get a permit to drive a car in public it's nearly impossible for a law abiding adult who could pass a ten point fingerprint class and in twenty hours a safety training to get a permit to carry a handgun for lawful protection in california forty one states including colorado well you know you can see who wanted. to carry me to write laws and pass the class . what it is it's it was a new class go ahead donna. there are nine class there nine so you know who the hell you are an example of why the right to carry ok donna go ahead so what you're doing is completely simplifying the driving regulations to make it look like we

don't regulate driving very much and we have only regulate guns now i will grant you gardner a lady had a fair system for issuing drab medical system thirty one states of affairs system ok we don't even. want to go on to drag our cars mark ahead. we don't even require a test to own a gun in america yes there are state by state regulations yes california is stricter than most but in the vast majority of states you don't need to do anything to own a gun you have to pass a background check only if you buy from a licensed gun dealer not if you buy a gun show not if you buy online and in many states there's absolutely no test and you don't even have to know how a safety works to own a gun in america which is why so many children are shot in guns i mean come on reasonable regulation on how much trying to ban all guns in america but to say that you should have to undergo the exact same kind of regulation that you do to drive a car to own a gun makes perfect sense to me because guns do things other than guns kill people cars do things other than kill people and

a hunter doesn't need one hundred bullet capacity magazine i think you can concede that point david what do you think about that. well i guess this shows why maybe we should have tests to be a journalism before you go expounding on stuff you know the basic facts you cannot buy guns online in the united states and it's certainly true that hunters don't use one hundred round magazines every state in the country has hunting regulations which would limit rifle capacity for hunting typically. hundreds of boil it and i think it would be much wiser is that he says is if you want to if you want to drive can i talk if you want to drive a car in public you pass a there's a fair and objective system to get the permit to do that based on safety rules cars kill about thirty thousand people in the united states annually in forty one of our states if you want to drive and carry a gun for lawful protect. public there is a stricter more severe and tougher but still fair system for people to get a permit but unfortunately we have nine states including california and new york

were permits are unfairly denied to people and that is criminogenic again back to the start of the show we stopped a massacre in colorado at a church in two thousand and seven because we have a fair objective law so that people can find it's descaling of the law to what degree does the the n.r.a. right law in the united states when it comes to guns how powerful is the lobby. well you know i don't know that i'm the i'm the person that's the expert just speak on that i'm mark maybe a better person to speak on that but i do think that when we look at the politics let's just take cars and guns and we look at the at the politics of regulation well in california for example fairly recently we we increased the regulation of driving for fifteen and a half you can get a permit sixteen seventeen years old below eighteen years old it's a regulated system and it's a gradual system and you don't get handed the keys on your sixteenth birthday and

those regulations were adopted in a reasoned and reasonable environment where the issue of safety was debated and statistics were looked at and we have a very different system of driving for sixteen eighteen year olds now than we did when i was sixteen years old but the question is about the gun situation why can't we have the same reasoned debate and moving forward on on on changes in the law and policy and regulation based on experience instead of. outsized you know hysterical discussions and misrepresentations of fact and so on you look at the at the politics on this and they look very very different david you want to jump in and respond to that. well i guess it donna suggesting that maybe california should move to

a graduated carry permit system so that maybe a sixteen year old could get a beginner's handgun carry permit and then and then work that way up from there may be that that's something worth talking about most in most states you need to be twenty one to get a permit to carry a handgun for protection again that's one of the many ways that guns are regulated much more severely than automobiles that are the most regulated consumer product in the united states today ok mark and then you're going to have more analyzed for the program heating mark why do americans love their guns explain to my international audience you know there is a history in the united states of america it's the history of the frontier it's the history of the old west it's the history of the militia men at lexington and concord fighting back the british regular soldiers there is this history in america and those of us that advocate greater gun control are not trying to take away the rights of ordinary same people who haven't committed a crime from owning guns but we do want background checks for people who are mentally ill it's too easy to buy a gun if you're crazy if you've committed

a violent felony and it's too easy to buy very powerful weapons that you don't need hunters don't need one hundred bullet capacity magazines if you can't shoot a deer in one hundred bullets you shouldn't be a hunter and the deer will probably run away all right on that note thank you very much for an interesting discussion many thanks to my guest today in washington denver and in los angeles and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember prostitutes.

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