true and. interesting. headlines this hour russia's prosecutor general reportedly considers registering american media outlets as unwelcome in russia in response to a crackdown on all the tea in the u.s. . president trump calls for a senate investigation into domestic channels he describes as fake news networks. as the rift in catalan society deepens over its independence push several major banks and companies decide to move their headquarters out of the troubled spanish region. and a british pharmacist is found guilty of spreading terrorist propaganda after showing videos of beheadings to children and attempting to radicalize them. you can

find out about those stories and be back in an hour with all the latest news from around the world and in the meantime cross talk delves into the debate on gun control in the u.s. . hello and welcome to cross talk where all things are considered peter labelle americans are constantly warned about the threat of terrorism terrorism is very real and very deadly however terrorism is not the primary killer in america americans are the gun debate is important but why is america so violent.

cross talking violence in america i'm joined by my guest brian becker in washington he is the director of the answer coalition as well as host of loud and clear a daily news show on radio sputnik also in washington we have don de bar he's an anti-war activist and a host of a daily radio program and in las vegas we cross robert barnes he is a trial lawyer in criminal and constitutional law already gentlemen cross-like rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciate it i always go to the first person that gets up early for this program and that's robert in las vegas truly appreciate it considering we're almost halfway around the world from each other in mike introduction robert you know talking about violence in america you know i'd like to tell something to our viewers here i am not only spent most of my adult life i've spent most of my entire life living abroad and one of the questions i'm asked constantly is why is america such a violent place we can say because of guns but because maybe you could because of

social attitudes because a whole wide variety of things we have an international audience here robert what would you say how would you answer that question why is america such a violent place go ahead. well i think as a country we were sort of uniquely founded and i was you compared to europe where you have countries that are five hundred six hundred thousand years old america was based on people trying to carve their way out into a wilderness space and part of that was not only a hunting culture but a culture that led to lot of violent conflicts not only with tribal wars and the civil war a lot of our gun culture derives from the civil war where people are allowed to bring take their guns home with them it became part of their identity then you had sort of the wild west and all of that imagery so i think a lot of it stems from that we still have a drug trade that that it's criminalized in a way that leads to a lot of drug related violence gun related violence as part of drug trade i think as a whole the that there are certain aspects unique to american society that reflect

the sort of institutionalized violence that has became sort of endemic as part of aspects of our culture not the majority part of our culture but aspects of our culture that unfortunately have been difficult to step well so the slavery itself i'm very i'm really i'm really glad you say difficult ok ok brian let me go to you because it's nothing to be proud of one can be proud of their heritage of course ok and their family lineage but that i'm sorry it doesn't meet the test for me it doesn't explain why in the twenty first century the country is so terribly violent coming off some of the worst massacres using guns yes in the united states it's not replicated around the world that i'm aware of in industrialized countries go go ahead brian. this is a complex subject thirty thousand people will die from gun violence in the united states this year will be about ten thousand homeless sides from gun violence by the way home aside from gun violence are declining in the united states because the

crime rate is the client in the united states population has for its four point four percent of the global population but half of all of the civilian owned guns in the world. in the united states four million people in the united states or four million are fifteen semiautomatic guns are are owned by civilians in the united states when you go back to the founding of the country the country was based on this this form of capitalism unlike european capitalism was formed based on a settler regime that relied on slave labor slave labor can only be retained as in slave people by virtue of violence and so the american founding fathers so to speak the colonial settlers relied on an armed force in order to suppress their in slave workforce in order to do that they militia or deputized white people who were given the privilege of not being slaves in order to join with the slave owners and terms

of retaining control so you had a situation where you had slavery and the aft and then the fast and dislodgement of indigenous peoples and there were millions of them in the united states so gun violence was in fact part and parcel of the foundation of the united states we have the glorification of violence we see it all the time and culture we also have the fact that the mainstream media now stephen paddick shot all these people killed all of these innocent people and wounded so many and he's been he's been sensationalized for the next four days paddick knew when he did this that if he was killed yet he would become like the greatest mass murderer in american history for a sociopath that might feel very rewarding so it's good for ratings perhaps but it's not really good as a public policy here here i agree with that you know john you know brian brought up an interesting point i mean the crime rate is going down the homicide rate is going on but gun ownership is going up but in the same time it in some people i guess the

expert community classifies a massacre if there are four fatalities well if you use the number four for a massacre then one is happens every single day in the united states i just gave you substitute sticks there roughly how do you put it all together i can't go ahead don. i'd like to agree with both robert and brian just to sort of amplify it a little bit and to summarize very quickly you have essentially europeans that came here conquered this land murdered the inhabitants or drove them out dragged other people here put them under a condition of slavery at the point of a gun in the sword and had them develop the country they took in immigrants from basically dispossessed serfs and peasants in europe and put them in a labor market here to compete with the people who had already been given privilege to be workers here that those were other europeans and then over successive periods

attacked any attempts by working people in this country to try to stand up and within all of that they went around plundering the rest of the world so there was plenty to go around with the privileged group to feel as if they were making an advancement and materially in a sense they were suddenly they reached the ebb and flow point and now they started taking those privileges away from more and more people and it became a smaller and smaller privileged set materially creating all kinds of anxiety dumped into that the chemicals that are you know we have advertisements for example for medication for anxiety that says one of the primary things to be concerned with to call your doctor if you have suicidal ideation you have what kurt vonnegut described as bad chemicals and bad ideas running through a sea of anxiety insecurity fear frustration and anger and a lot of guns dumped on top of it and the biggest producer of arms in the world ok

you know robert you know but mckay. i could agree with you know anxiety is on the increase we see in mazing social tensions in the u.s. in parts of europe right now. where does this these anxieties come from. is our guns a solution for some people because as brian pointed out this shooter in las vegas may be all he was a psychopath and just wanted fame and guns was his mechanism maybe a bombing would have been another or poisoning you know again you know i'm not a big fan of guns but the same time i do respect the second amendment ok so you know i'm kind of torn right there but i think you know bringing up the opiate crisis thing. and deciding in society i think these have some really important issues that it was soon as the events happened in las vegas the gun debate boom there we go there we're off to the races and i think a lot of important other issues are are not looked at carefully go ahead robert. oh

precisely i mean to some degree we have a celebration of violence on the left that's happened in the last exotically ited states where you have in you have people saying punch a nazi it's ok to go and kill conservatives most these people were killed were likely conservatives so you had this if you're out there and you have a sociopathic tendency and you have maybe an undiagnosed mental health problem and you combine that with his sociopathic proclivities you're being told by aspects of the media it's ok to kill certain groups of people it's ok to be violent as a as a solution to your problems i mean i was shocked when the mainstream media people like chuck todd welcome to put in t.m. apologists on meet the press the c.b.s. senior legal counsel right after this incident happened posted on facebook info comfortable posting on facebook that it's ok to be violent towards people that shouldn't feel bad towards these people so that's clearly part of it is the media's created a space where they have legitimize certain violence as a solution to problems we also have

a military industrial complex to some degree in the united states that says hey let's solve any of our problems of bombing somebody so to some degree that's the the mixed messages being sent out but i think clearly mental health is a key component of this this may turn out to be an undiagnosed mental health problem in this particular individual he was showing signs of being a compulsive addict in terms of his gambling habits he was lying to people about his success gambling you don't you're not successful as a video poker player there is no algorithm to be successful as a video poker player he was getting comped by almost every major casino in that state and the only people they cop that heavily in this state is when you lose money at the casino now when you make money at the casino there's still unexplained sources of income as to him he's buying houses in cash but he was an i.r.s. agent twenty twenty five years ago how did he come into that kind of cash because clearly it wasn't gambling but as part of that he was clearly there has been the new york post reported that he was being treated with s.s.r.i. drugs like value and that you know sista lect of serotonin reuptake inhibitors

those. drugs have been known to cause all kinds of problems particularly in people who are not well suited to those drugs well scott adams it was a comment in there today there's a thirty of evidence of problems with them over the last couple of years that is these mass killings people who have been medicated you're right let me go give you one minute before we go to the break here but it seems to be that there's a bias has been weaponized i liked what robert had to say there about that the immediate reactions is again you know oh these are trump people are gun toting people religious people that i thought was so inappropriate go ahead brian. well that is inappropriate of course i don't agree with it but i don't agree with robert at all that and or the people who are struggling against k.k.k. rebranded as the all right the k.k.k. and people like the k.k.k. lynched nine thousand black people between the end of the civil war in the one nine hundred thirty s. i think that's ridiculous to compare anti foot to better of the cause of violence

like this i mean that too is extremely ludicrous yes of course i'm somebody who voted for donald trump i mean it's it's obscene to say that donald trump anybody who voted for donald trump is automatically like a violent person i mean that's ridiculous but there are a hardcore right right wing super white supremacists who are supporting donald trump in our book in bold and by him here is the thing is that. holmes outfront right hold that thought we're going to go to a short break and after our short break we'll continue our discussion on violence in america.

every rush hour have a common interest. and to see why. business community. culture entertainment and sports you know too. much. economic development is all about numbers really pleased to report this quarter we are. six point zero. but what do we know about the other figures. that. were twenty million dollars last year more than one thousand times the average wal-mart associate. with all due respect. i have to say i don't think

that's right. just a free market works. people went from pretty simple financial lives. to the point now where people are. just totally submerged in their financial accounts and they're all in debt and what exactly divided society. the whatever the government tried to do. might be making things worse. by saying this is not how capitalism works this is. hopelessly disastrously wrong. welcome back to crossfire all things considered i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing violence in america.

ok i'd like to go back to brian here you know right before i went to the break brian we were talking about violence in the public sphere is real and keep it does commit violence ok and talks about violence so i think we have to be clear about that ok and donald trump didn't invent them all right but it does that not withstanding of course you know we've had the k.k.k. and neo nazis it in the public sphere for a long time here in their inexcusable and you know as much as i worry i worship the first amendment you know their speech is very very offensive but i don't have a right not to be offended you want to finish point brian go ahead. yeah i'm just going to disagree i think that people like in charlottesville help prevent a lot of violence because you had armed klansmen and nazis intimidating and beating up black people and surrounding a church where peaceful people were there and then beating them up that's actually what happened those are the facts and charlottesville but here's my point peter is that the gun culture of violence starts from the top in the united states here we

have a military industrial complex we have a trillion dollars a year that's the real number is spent on weapons and war the people who own guns have the second amendment the right to buy guns but the people who got shot in las vegas don't have the right to health care necessarily another word for society puts a priority on guns and on militarism we have we have every generation being sent to fight and die korea vietnam iraq afghanistan wars without and and all of those wars are considered to be wonderful even if hundreds of thousands or millions of people die america's just always right and gun violence and gun culture is saluted and celebrated and we always say these are our warriors coming back another words there is no no sort of thinking about what does it mean when the united states has a thousand military installations spends a trillion dollars on a war is going to expand that is expanding nato towards the east and then really celebrating militarism as the fundamental instrument of u.s.

foreign policy but then says to the american people who have as the other guests have said lots of problems and lots of guns hate don't be violent i mean this is a celebration of violence in america it's i think when we have got a legal order the illegal assault a missile attack on syria and you had all of the went mainstream beautiful wonderful look at that beautiful missile i mean i agree with you completely there you know don one of the things that came up in the days after the massacre and in las vegas. on facebook for example on my page here this. is not to. spirity theories that just overwhelm and you know we've had conspiracy theories before but it seems to me one of the reasons why these conspiracy theories come about is because of the lack of trust in the mainstream media and we're getting a lot of fake news out there i don't know if you saw the sheriff in las vegas hours ago to give an update his update to the media was to debunk conspiracy theories

that never seen anything quite like it in my life. and i think that's is the condition of we're in here people don't know what they don't know and that creates anxiety we have talked about it already on this program go ahead done. you know one of the problems is. rooted very very deeply rooted and i'm going to disagree with robert respectfully i'll agree that there is a bias that manifests in the media but i would say that the bias could be reflected by the way this shooter is treated and other mass murderers that have white skin what we're probing their you know motivation and that's what should be done by the way will understand what's going on we need to know how you know the mechanical process of these things becoming manifest but samir rice in a twelve year old kid is supposed to have known better than to play with a toy gun in a public space that's as deep as the inquiry goes publicly about his killing at the

hands of police here we're supposed to understand the financial stresses in the psychiatric and psychological and pharmacological motivations again which i think we should but there's a deep seated bias that travels with the history of this country which again starts with the europeans coming here stilling the land murdering the people grabbing people from africa putting them to work at gunpoint giving some folks privilege over them then taking it away and leaving everybody awash in guns and chemicals i don't know what with the philosophy by the way of entitlement to power and supremacy i think that that is a very toxic soup that we are all swimming in and unless we start to unpack all of that and try to find ways to deal with our commonalities including the fact the world swimming in this toxic soup you know we're going to drown in it ok but let me robert you know one of the things is that what i really disliked and i thought it was very manifest in the election is that again the mainstream liberal media they

just go play a cultural politics they go it's near default position here and i find that it doesn't work with the majority of people the majority of people in america i'm convinced don't believe that they are the. themselves are racist ok but the mainstream no it's the white person's problem it's white men that's the problem here how does this get to solve these terrible problems of gun violence and violence in general in the united states because i don't see why it's jingoistic it's a nice little phrase to put out there ok but it doesn't get us any further ok we're in a cold. case about what i mean i'm not saying you said that done ok i'm serious ok we talked a few days ago you know what i mean ok so you know robert here i don't exactly do same discursive strategies that are very biased in the media kick in when this happens and i don't find it gets any further down the road go ahead robert.

exactly the same sort of discrimination against a certain group of people that the media communicated that would let someone like stephen paddick believe this was an ok group the target is the same bias they're showing after the shooting which is you know the where i'm from in small town tennessee that is not the source of gun violence in the united states today so whatever the historical role of violence in the united states today you're far safer on the south side of the strip than you are in the south side of chicago and the reality is most violence most gun violence today is by gangs in the inner cities and from central america so i mean i saw it myself as a criminal defense lawyer once you had el salvador and gangs and gangs like m s thirteen come to make a significant role and you could argue about america's role in that the one nine hundred fifty s. one nine hundred sixty s. coups in central america that it backfired in the same way that are involved in the middle east has backfired and you could talk about that from a historical perspective but from a contemporary perspective the real threat the real problem is actually mostly gang violence and drug related violence and a a part of our government that says the only solution and part of our media that

says the only solution to anything is violence whether it's bombing overseas or mass imprisonment at home so those are the issues that have to be addressed they have to be addressed more honestly historically we can all point fingers in different directions but right now the contemporary problem is not a problem of conservative gun owners the problem is a problem of mental health and of the drug war and of inner city gangs you know brian one of the you know i i have kind of an interesting upbringing of my formative years from five to fifteen i grew up in a little town outside of denver colorado and then from fifteen up until i left the country i lived in california wow what different gun culture is there were in colorado it was a marksmanship it was target practice. revering guns in the in the sense of being really safe around people safety's always on the ritual of cleaning the gun afterwards then i went to southern california whoa a lot of people have guns in open wow it was quite terrifying for me so. seeing

those very different cultures here and this is one of the things that you know one size doesn't fit all in and i but i'm actually very afraid of being around guns because i saw a lot of gun violence when i lived in southern california and i actually like living in russia because there aren't very many guns go ahead brian. right i mean it's really wrong to demonize any part of the population and say that the reason there is gun violence and i grew up in western new york i mean a lot of people had guns i mean we were i'm not unaccustomed to that that culture and there's a lot of hunting culture as well it's also wrong to demonize people who happen to live in cities or black people or latino people and say they are the problem of guns and killing i mean you know there's another thing peter that we haven't talked about there were there were five hundred twenty one mass shootings in four hundred seventy seven days the day after the las vegas being the role you know look back

five hundred four hundred seventy seven days a lot of them are men killing women. and the amount of violence that men who are the wives have left them whose girlfriends want to break up with them that's very routine in the united states and a lot of the gun violence a lot of the gratuitous killing that's going on here i mean all killing is gratuitous like that is about what is about sexism in patriarchy and it never really gets when men kill women that the media narrative is the woman was ready to move on but he wasn't another it's kind of a benign description as opposed to the idea that women should be property and if they if they act like independent people who want to divorce or separate then it's ok to carry out acts of violence against and that's a big epidemic in the united states i don't know what it's like in all of the cultures but it is very prevalent here you know brian one of the things that you know one of the things that i. i witnessed one in southern california is that so

many people feel so powerless and having caring heat a piece somehow made them feel more powerful and i've always liked that about guns because it's your character that makes you powerful it's what you say and what you do and in giving the case of the violence against women yeah i mean if you feel powerless and you can't reason then you use force ok again that's getting back to the very kind of origins and i'm talking about in this program is it where does the buy lands come from let me go to don let me let finished don finish off the program one minute go ahead on. yeah we go back to the point basically you have people that are frustrated and alienated they feel disempowered because they are disempowered i mean we have a system that is not responsive to the average person at all other then responding as as the others have said with violence if you want to have a speed bump added to your street for example in a suburb tried try doing that if someone has

a vested interest in that not happening the entire street can go down to city hall until the cows come home it doesn't get accomplished a couple of kids get run over by a car it doesn't get accomplished so when tens of thousands of workers lose their jobs or when you know tens of thousands of people develop asthma because they're pollutants in their neighborhood because you know they're poor folks or they're black or brown folks or whatever when all kinds of things are visited upon people and they look for some remedy somewhere there is none and they feel completely frustrated now rather than dealing with the problems what the way the society deals with it is by treating symptomatically the manifesting side with drug value right with all these different gentlemen we in the end we've launched this we've run out of time i think in closing we should all say a prayer for the victims of last vegas many thanks to my guests in washington and in las vegas and thanks to our viewers for watching us here as you see you next

time and remember last time. the long hard sell you on the idea that dropping bombs brings the chicken on. forced me to fight the battle but don't. produce offspring to tell you that celebrity gossip and public bus files are the most important news today. off the bad guys and tell you on the cool enough to buy their product. all the hawks that we along with all the walking.

and all the child. had a great childhood a of two amazing parents gave me everything i needed. done at the flat when i was young. i mean we were poor but it was so much love as did.