in the wisconsin recall election, here's what the nra did to mayor tom barrett. >> this is your freedom. this is your freedom tom barrett gets your chance to recall the gun rights. >> freedom is the buzz word. nra was more than $17 million, according to our next guest, john nichols, about 6% was spent in support of americans. $11 million was spent against democrats. i'm joined tonight by john nichols. john, i don't want to overstate this. do you think that there is a divide in this country between urban and rural when it comes to the gun culture? >> this divide and how it's talk about and there's a divide in how it's thought about it. . it's not one that can't be left, but it's one that president obama and supporters of gun control have to understand. and they have to take lessons from some of the political figures who have figured out how to leap over it. it's not that hard. what you do have to understand is that people in rural america and grew up around guns. i did. i come from a very small town. my grandfather was a gun collector. he and i made shells in the basement. we went skeet

tom barrett was not talking about guns in that race. that's not the reason he lost. were other reasons that he lost that we regret. the fact is we have mayors who understand if you do the right thing, politics will take care of themselves. they run and they win. >> what do they hope to achieve. >> first thing is, maybe close to 50% get a background check. >> that's because of the gun show loophole. anyone can go into a gun show and that was before the internet generation. now a huge and growing share of the private gun sales that take place in this country with no background check are online with no background check, no record of the transportation and no questions asked. so you should require a background check for all gun sales. second thing you should do is take a very serious look is whether we can craft an assault weapons ban that causes enormous amount of mayhem in minutes because nobody has to reload. you should try to do that seriously in a way that gets them off the streets and i think we can do it. believe it or not, no federal statute makes gun buying a cr