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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Happy Friday. Today we've got Dr. Leana Wen coming up in our B segment about a half-hour who says stop calling them vaccine passports. We've got our Friday ask the mayor call-in. One kindergarten enrollment for next fall down by 12% and much more with my questions and yours for Bill de Blasio.

Jia Tolentino from The New Yorker today on why she quit Twitter and your calls with Jia on your relationship with social media during the pandemic, so many people have had so many changes with their relationship with social media, whether quitting it, becoming more dependent, it becoming more fraught, lots of things and we will take your calls on that but we start here.

On the day of yet another mass shooting in America, President Biden is trying something new. Executive action to get around a gridlocked Congress to the extent that the constitution might allow. Yesterday's mass shooting was in Bryan, Texas. The one in South Carolina this week was by a former player on the New York jets whose family says football messed up his brain. We're all still reeling from Atlanta and Boulder too of course.

If you've been following the news closely, you might also be aware of just how deadly the whole past year has been with respect to gun violence. According to data from the gun violence archive, 2020 saw the number of shootings with four or more victims increased more than 50%.

Yesterday President Biden announced a slate of executive actions aimed at curbing gun violence. Among them is one that publishes a model for red flag laws. Those are laws that allow family members and law enforcement to petition for a temporary court order to keep people in crisis or potential crisis from accessing firearms. Another action instructs the justice department to issue an annual report on firearms trafficking, something, believe it or not, it hasn't done in over 20 years.

President Joe Biden: Gun violence in this country is an epidemic. Let me say it again. Gun violence in this country is an epidemic and it's an international embarrassment.

Brian Lehrer: But can things like these executive orders make any real difference while respecting gun rights or are they just a sideshow to the demoralizing cycle we've begun to become accustomed to where high-profile mass shootings lead to talk for a few weeks, political momentum then sputters and the media moves on to the next tragedy, at least until the next staggering act of gun violence. Time will tell. Joining me now is Champe Barton reporter at The Trace, a non-profit news site covering gun violence. Hi, Champe thanks so much for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Champe Barton: Hi, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let me start at what would seem like something obvious from Biden's executive actions, compiling the data on gun trafficking. Some people listening might be surprised to hear that the justice department has not released any comprehensive study of gun trafficking patterns since the year 2000. It's not implausible to assume that these patterns have changed over 21 years. Why has it been so long?

Champe Barton: That's an interesting question. Unfortunately, I don't think there is really a clear answer to that. You're certainly right, these patterns almost undoubtedly have changed. The gun marketplace has moved online in a lot of ways which dramatically affects the way that guns are bought and sold and they're trafficked. There are some theories as to why a report might not have been published since then.

The report in 2000 relied, at least partially on firearms tracing data, which is the central dataset that would be used to find gun traffickers in the US. In 2003, there was an amendment passed by Congress colloquially known as the Tiahrt Amendment which restricted some of the ability of the ATF to publish this data. It wouldn't be surprising to me if some of the ATF were just a little bit hesitant to skirt too close to that line that prevents them from publicizing that data.

Another really important thing to note is just that the ATF has been woefully understaffed for a very long time and underfunded. In 2019, they employed only about 770 investigative staff to conduct compliance inspections of almost 80,000 licensed gun dealers. It's entirely possible that they're just swamped and that it's difficult to compile one of these investigative reports. The report that you're referring to in 2000 was actually the product of or was built upon some reports that were requested by Congress and Congress hasn't requested another one of these reports, like you said until Biden did so yesterday.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, let me open up the phones on a few aspects of this. First, I wonder if there's anybody listening in law enforcement or previously in law enforcement or anybody who has engaged in gun trafficking yourself from out of state or out of our area. You don't have to give you real identity and it doesn't have to be ongoing at the moment, who can say, how do guns that would not legally be sold in New York or New Jersey or Connecticut get to our area?

What should we know about gun trafficking patterns that perhaps your experience in law enforcement or in the underworld or anywhere else might help reveal to our listeners? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

We'll also get into red flag laws, another topic from the president's executive orders. Anybody grappled with this ever like the front question of whether to report a loved one who might own a gun or have an interest in owning a gun to authorities because you think they are too unstable or too dangerous in any way to own a gun. Has anybody ever been through that with a loved one, maybe with a client, if you're a therapist, are you even allowed to do that?

Does that break confidentiality, or do you have a duty to report in a circumstance like that or anyone else on red flag laws and gun trafficking patterns to the prime topics when President Biden's gun-related executive orders yesterday 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 with Champe Barton reporter at The Trace. Which, if you don't know, is a really excellent non-profit news site covering gun violence. Champe, can you elaborate on the one sentence description of red flag laws that I gave just before I introduced you?

Champe Barton: Yes, absolutely. The first red flag law was established in 1999 in Connecticut. In the year since, they've most frequently been enacted as a response to mass shootings. Interestingly though they are actually more "effective" as a suicide prevention tool. The way they work is that they allow certain individuals whoever who have some relationship to someone who may be at some risk of hurting themselves or others.

In some States, this is just law enforcement officials and others it can be family members or medical health professionals or school officials. Essentially it allows these people to petition a court, to remove the firearms from a person who may be a risk to themselves or others. In New York City, police officers, school administrators, district attorneys, family members, or household members can request these sorts of hearings. The way that the process works is that the person making the request will have a hearing with a judge where the person whose firearms will be restricted is not present.

Let's say the school official, for example, will present evidence saying, "I think this person is a risk." If the judge agrees, they will grant the order temporarily, the guns will be removed from the person who is at risk and then within a week or so that person will have an opportunity to present their own evidence as to why they should be able to keep their guns. Then the judge will make a determination about the length of the order, essentially.

If the evidence that the person whose guns were taken away is compelling, then they may grant them access to their guns again, if not, they might say, "For a year you will not have access to your guns and you cannot buy any new guns."

Brian Lehrer: President Biden is not mandating a national red flag law. It seems to me all he's doing, and this is why it's possible that he's prohibited from doing anything that has much of an impact with respect to guns, just nibbling around the edges. All he's ordering the justice department to do, as I understand it, is print up guidelines that States could use if they don't already have red flag laws like New York and Connecticut do to write ones of their own. Is that correct?

Champe Barton: Exactly. It's just model legislation so that they have a blueprint to follow if [unintelligible 00:09:59] state who doesn't have one of these laws once they implement one.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any sense of, let's say in the case of New York where the red flag law took effect statewide only in 2019 or in Connecticut, which has had it for 20 more years, who actually tends to have their gun rights restricted under these laws?

Champe Barton: It's hard to say. There isn't great data on this but typically, like I said, these have been proven in some studies to be pretty effective suicide prevention tools. I was reading something earlier, there was a study in 2018 led by a team of psychiatrists at Duke and they were examining the efficacy of Connecticut's red flag law. Their team estimated that for every 10 to 20 gun seizures, one suicide was prevented.

That doesn't really give you too much of a specific sense of the individuals whose guns are being taken away, but it does give you a sense for what is being prevented, which I think is what's most important here and in that instance, it is the most part suicide.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here's Rick in White Plains. You're on WNYC. Rick, thanks so much for calling in.

Rick: Hey, my pleasure. I've sat in on probably half a dozen ERPOs, which is what we call emergency risk protection orders. Generally what they're being applied to are people who are floridly mentally ill and their family members know they have firearms or for people who have, for instance, early onset dementia. They're wandering in the street, they drop a gun and they forget that it's there, where they're sitting on their front porch with a shotgun, aiming at family members and they do work for that.

The other thing I wanted to say is, having worked in law enforcement for more than 30 years, guns get driven in cars from states where they're easier to buy. They get driven to Webster Avenue or some other place in the city of New York, where there are currently no police patrols, because most of the police patrols are around central park where the tourists are. People take them out of the trunks of their cars and they sell them. It's that simple.

The cops aren't where the guns are coming in because those are underserved communities and a lot of times, they don't want the police there. They tell the police to get out and that's when the guns get transported in, there's no cops. The Feds have much more involvement in gun trafficking. There aren't a lot of Feds. There are so many crimes going on that you can't really get below the most intense level of crime in any area. There are a lot of things that do not fit into the left right narrative and more importantly, you can't have both sides of the line.

You can have no gun violence only if you have no firearms, but you can't have a society where you have firearms, whether they're legal or not, whether they're protected or not, and have no gun violence, eventually somebody's going to flip out who passed the background check and commit violent acts. That's going to happen.

Brian Lehrer: Right, but the question is degree and compared to other countries. I have the stats somewhere, I could look them up. I imagine, Rick, that working in law enforcement you know these roughly. We have so many more guns per capita than any other country in the world, not even close. We have so many more gun deaths per capita than any other country in the world. It's a question of degree, right? It's not like we can get it to zero or anybody can get it to zero, but what's going on in this country is unique.

Rick: That's true. However, I just wanted to state, you're not finding NRA members going out committing gun crimes. These are people that the NRA wouldn't want in their membership and every time a new gun [unintelligible 00:13:57] law's proposed it doesn't-- For instance, the best gun control action we ever had with James Comey back during the Bush administration, locking up people in federal prison for gun crimes. That's not happening today. They're being let go on plea bargains.

We have people walking around who are in violation of New York State's weapons laws, and they're out on probation. If you're not going to lock people up with a history of burglary and assault who got caught with an illegal handgun, how is cracking down on some guy who has a rifle and wants to shoot [unintelligible 00:14:32] out on his ranch? How is that going to have an effect? It's not, so just when it comes to locking up dangerous sociopaths.

Brian Lehrer: Rick, thank you very much. I appreciate your call and your perspective. There's one thing I just have to jump in and not let go unaddressed. When he said that there aren't police on Webster Avenue, he's talking about Webster Avenue in the Bronx and they're all-around central park to protect the tourists.

We know that the history of the last 30 years and really much, much longer is that people in the Black and brown communities that he's referring to by implication there feel way over policed and that police saturate their neighborhoods. I couldn't let that go unaddressed. Champe, is there anything that you want to say to anything that Rick-- he was making a gun rights case. He can do that. He's also got perspective it seems from his background on both trafficking and red flag laws.

Champe Barton: Yes, absolutely. I think he made a good point there, and that was when I was going to bring up. The other thing is, at the end of his point there, he mentioned you're not targeting these "dangerous sociopath" with these more run of the mill gun control laws. I think there's two points to make about that argument.

One is ,on a certain level if you back away from his language, that, that is correct in some way. A thing like a red flag law isn't necessarily designed to stop gun homicides that are routine in many cities across the country because these people are not necessarily people who are having mental health breakdowns. These are more crimes of survival.

The thing that is important to note, and I think this is another facet, I think probably the most important facet of Biden's gun control plan at present is that the idea that you have to lock these people up in order to contain gun crime is misguided. I think that there are an abundance of community gun violence intervention programs out there that are underfunded and struggling to get state or city backing.

In Biden's gun control plan he announced $5 billion to try to go to some of these programs. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that that effort will be way more effective than over mass incarceration at reducing gun crime in the US.

Brian Lehrer: Some of another's to put a little more meat on the bones of what I hinted at a minute ago and I cited these a couple of times on the show recently after Nicholas Christophe with The New York Times put some very clear data graphics in his column. Guns per 100 people in the United States, 120 guns per 100 people in the United States. The next closest Canada, 34 guns per 100 people, 34 compared to 120.

Gun murders per 100,000 people, the United States 3.4 murders per 100,000 people with guns. Canada is again the next closest with 0.6, a rate of 0.6 compared to 3.4 in the United States. That's more than five times the rate. Champe, just to put that, find a point on it again, before we go any further, this is the third time in recent weeks on this show, but the US is really in a class by itself.

Champe Barton: Absolutely. The interesting thing about that is, there's so much research to suggest that an increase in the number of guns that are in circulation increases the number of gun crimes that happen. Gun homicides, gun suicides, shootings et cetera, and that's to be expected. It's like, what our listener was just saying, which is basically like, if you have no guns, then no one can shoot anybody with a gun because there's no guns to shoot and so that is absolutely the proliferation of guns in the US, absolutely correlates with amount of gun death that we see in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Do you know, by the way, to the one of the callers other points because he was taking aim at some of the bail reform and parole and other criminal justice reforms. If people convicted of gun crimes or accused of gun crimes, maybe it's possession and not actually using the weapon, but whatever are being led out of jail or let out of prison more frequently than before?

Champe Barton: I don't actually know the figures on that but I do think it's important to note before moving on here, the assumption that we have going into an examination like that is that these people are prone to crime. If you let them out, there's a chance that someone who is prone to crime because they have committed some sort of gun crime in the past will do so again.

What we admit in any of that conversation often is why these people are committing crimes and if you think of them like humans then you will understand very quickly that the reason that someone has committed a crime is because of very understandable problems that they are experiencing, whether it be food insecurity, housing insecurity, income insecurity. There are a number of community problems that correlate very heavily with high rates of gun violence in cities across the country. There are many activists and many researchers who have been pointing to this for decades now.

Going back to Biden's executive action plan, this $5 billion that he announced for community gun violence intervention programs is really one of the first times that the government has ever taken note of that correlation between these socioeconomic problems and gun crime and essentially given it a shot and try to address those rather than addressing this problem from a law enforcement perspective.

Brian Lehrer: Those are the community-based violence interrupter groups as [crosstalk] is that what's getting funding?

Champe Barton: Yes, there's a number of different programs that it's not 100% clear the exact type of programs that are going to get this money but yes, those violence interrupter program as well will certainly be among the group that does.

Brian Lehrer: Here is Daniel, a professor at West Point. He says-- Daniel, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Daniel: Hi, good morning, Brian. My comment has to do with a lot of the arguments that I hear about good guys with guns can fix these problems and that more guns in the hands of good people can fix things. I want to just share a personal story. I was about 23 years old in Texas, and I believe that having a gun is a good right to have, and that you should exercise it and good people should carry guns and I carried a gun, a handgun for about a year.

What I found was that the more I carried the gun, the more my spidey sense was up and that I was looking for situations where I might be able to make a positive difference but the more I thought about that, the difficulty it is for a good person to engage and utilize a firearm in a stressful situation is so incredibly high that I came to the conclusion that it's probably best that I don't carry it, that I'm not going to be a positive factor in fixing any of these problems.

I think that something that gets missed in these arguments is that the skill necessary to be able to engage and use a firearm in a stressful situation is a really, really hard thing. The factors that we need to have in place for people that want to do that, the standards need to be much higher for the general population, if they indeed want to be a car-carrying firearm, and I just don't think that the [unintelligible 00:22:46] [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Thinking about this argument at all, in the Boulder shooting or after we heard what happened in the Boulder shooting, when there was that hero cop who, because of a sense of duty doing what he was trained to do charged in there rather than away from it to be the good guy with a gun, but not a bystander, not a civilian. He was a police officer who ran into the shooting in the middle of the shooting, and he did disable the shooter from being able to continue his rampage, but he got killed by the shooter in the process.

Daniel: In that situation, I think he was off duty police officer. I think that he's in a position to maybe make a difference. The thing I'm thinking about is in an active shooter situation where there's multiple people with guns, how is it that a police officer is supposed to know the difference? On top of that, if I'm always looking for an opportunity to use my gun, given the state of the world that we're in, that's just not a good position. I just don't think that the argument that good people with guns can always make a good difference is a strong one.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel, thank you very much. I was backing up your points saying, even in a case where it's trained law enforcement like the officer in Boulder, he may not come out of it alive. Though he did make a difference in that case.

Champe, is there data on this because I could get pro-gun rights people versus pro-gun safety law, enhancement people to argue all day, whether it's more dangerous for "good people" to be armed for in the event of an active shooter situation that they may come upon or be in the middle of versus the harm that would be done through the proliferation of guns because there'll be more suicides and whatever.

Champe Barton: That last point is the one to make, I think. There is absolutely an abundance of data that suggests that the increase in gun ownership leads to, or at least correlates with an increase in gun crimes. The issue with trying to examine whether the good guy with a gun logic works is because what you're dealing with really are just like edge cases here. There are so few mass shootings, so little of the gun deaths, so few of the gun deaths or gun homicides, at least, in the US every year result from somebody being in a public place and there's a classic movie criminal drawing a weapon, and then being either disarmed by another person with a weapon or not.

The vast majority of gun homicides in the US happen in cities like I was mentioning before in places where there are just an abundance of socioeconomic problems that lead to this sort of criminal behavior. I think that the good guy with a gun versus bad guy with a gun binary argument thing that goes on often in political circles obscures the fact-

Brian Lehrer: Oops, did we lose Champe? Champe Barton from The Trace, I guess his line dropped off. We'll go to our next call or in the meantime, while we connect him. Carol in Clinton Hill, you are on WNYC. Hi Carol, thanks for calling in.

Carol: Hi, good morning. What the first guy was talking about, how they would arrest the person, and then after he got out of jail, they give them back the gun. I don't agree with that, but where I live up, there's a lot of guns violence. It was one year, it was clean, no shootings. Now it's just where everybody just shooting at each other.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have, [crosstalk], yes go ahead. I'm sorry.

Carol: We had two deaths in one month. We had an innocent bystander where she was coming up this particular fashion store and she ended up getting shot because the other two were shooting at each other.

Brian Lehrer: It's terrible. Carol, do you have an impression why it's spiking in your neighborhood in the last year?

Carol: I think it's because everybody's probably on edge right now because of the COVID 19, I believe. I'm just very shocked. People getting killed, we had two people killed in one month.

Brian Lehrer: Is there any particular, either police response or other policy response that you would like to see?

Carol: I'd like to give a heads up to the 76 precinct, which they have very, very, very good record of showing up and helping the public.

Brian Lehrer: Carol, thank you for your call and that obviously is terrible what's going on in your neighborhood. We know that there's been a significant increase in shootings around New York city and around the country in the last year and Champe Barton from The Trace is back on the line with us.

Champe, I don't know if you heard the last caller from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn talking about how there hadn't been many shootings in her neighborhood in recent years and they have spiked in the last year. Do you at The Trace have data or research or reporting that indicates for all the competing theories out there and you know people will say the police are pulling back in light of the racial justice movement, or they'll say like Carol is indicating people are more on edge during the pandemic or there could be other reasons that people bring up.

Do you have good reporting on this? What is causing this spike in shootings the last year?

Champe Barton: Yes, absolutely. I'm glad you asked this because this comes up all the time. I think, I'm beating a dead horse here. If you think about what happened last year is you have a pandemic that took a lot of people out of their jobs and ended with a lot of people's lives and essentially put a lot of neighborhoods and communities into a worsened socioeconomic climates.

It's exacerbating the same problems, what we would consider the root causes of gun violence that are already on a regular day are causing shootings and now you have this added pressure of the pandemic, which is worse than your access to food, your access to your income, your access to housing, whatever it might be.

There is not a robust research just because the pandemic is still going on and it's really hard to do this stuff on the fly but the researchers that I spoke with about this and the activists and advocates and the community members who are dealing with this, that I've spoke with in my reporting seem to be in overwhelming agreement that the last year has just really exacerbated the root causes of gun violence.

You're just seeing an increase that is proportional to the amount that the pandemic has worsened the socioeconomic prospects for communities across the country.

Brian Lehrer: Before we ran out of time, I want to touch one other thing that was in the president's executive actions yesterday. He addressed what are known as ghost guns. Explain what that is. Is that like literally homemade guns out of a 3D printer or something?

Champe Barton: Correct, yes. It's not always made out of a 3D printer, but yes. It essentially just refers to guns that are not serialized. The way that these are made is that gun--

Brian Lehrer: When you say serialized, do you mean they don't have a serial number on them, right?

Champe Barton: Correct. The way that these guns are made typically is that there is a single regulated component of the gun essentially that needs to have a serial number. It's something called an 80% lower receiver. It's not worth to really get into the details of what that means really, but essentially it's just this like chassis of the gun. If this component can be made in a 3D printer and there are like gun kits that allow you to construct it from a variety of smaller parts.

Essentially, if you don't have this 80% lower receiver from a factory essentially, then you won't have any serialized component on the gun and the gun therefore will have no serial number. That's what's considered a ghost gun.

Brian Lehrer: Well, there isn't that much that the president can do without going through the gridlock Congress on this, but he's trying to do what he can. That his advisors tell him the constitution and the law allow him to do by executive action. He did a few things yesterday. We've been talking about them with Champe Barton who's a reporter for The Trace, a nonprofit news site covering gun violence. Champe, thanks for your time this morning. We really appreciate it.

Champe Barton: Thanks for having me, Brian.

 

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