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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. The latest mass shootings: the one at the bank in Louisville that left five people dead and eight others injured; and the one at a school in Nashville that killed six, seem to be leading to at least a little gun law reform. We always talk about the gridlock. Maybe there's a little crack in the gridlock after these two. We'll explain what's changing, but a little context first. It was a 25-year-old employee of the bank and a 28-year-old former student at the school, both with grievances against their institutions, reportedly, both described as having mental health problems, reportedly.

Both nevertheless making recent legal purchases of the AR-15's they used in their attacks. Police say the Nashville shooter got off 152 shots from the semiautomatic gun, which fires more quickly than a regular handgun before police could intervene. Another difference between an AR-15 and non semi-automatic, as NBC News explains it, AR-15s inflict much more damage to human tissue than the typical handgun. That's largely because of the speed at which projectiles leave the weapons. They're much faster out of the muzzle of an AR-15 or similar rifle and deliver a more devastating blow to bones and organs.

People who might survive being shot by something else, don't survive being shot by AR-15 in many cases. NBC says those projectiles are also more likely to break apart as they pass through the body, inflicting more damage. Now, the change is coming in Tennessee, where the Republican governor, Bill Lee, is now supporting more background checks relating to potential gun-buyer's fitness to own a dangerous weapon. The change is also coming in the growth of the gun law reform movement that the governor felt the need to respond to, at least in that one red state.

The movement is growing because of the shooting itself and as many of you know, as a response to the expulsion of two young Black lawmakers, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who protested on the Tennessee House floor after the shooting. They've both now been reinstated by officials in their local districts. They're going back to the House of Representatives in Tennessee. Here's Justin Pearson after his reinstatement yesterday.

Justin Pearson: We fight together. The message for all the people in Nashville who decided to expel us, you can't expel hope. You can't expel justice. You can't expel our voice. You sure can't expel our fight. We look forward to continuing to fight, continuing to advocate until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream. Let's get back to work.

Brian Lehrer: Justin Pearson now back in the House of Representatives in the Tennessee legislature, along with Justin Jones. Maybe you've heard the chant that had sprung up in some places, no Justins, no peace. Well, both Justin's are back. We'll explain more now about what's changing in Tennessee and the national implications with the Nashville-based national expert on the topic. He is Dr. Jonathan Metzl, Professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at the school, as well as research director for the gun violence prevention organization, the Safe Tennessee Project, and author of the book from 2019, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland.

Dr. Metzl, you were last here when your book came out. Don't know if you'd remember, you did a lot of book interviews, so thanks for coming on today when your city is at the center of the storm. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: It's great to be back and, of course, I remember our conversation very well.

Brian Lehrer: Do these latest shootings in your state and the state next door fit into any of the patterns that you wrote about in your book?

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Well, in the Dying of Whiteness, I was talking about people's attachment to guns and what that meant, even when the evidence was so clear that the moral effects were not just-- people thought that they were owning guns to protect people, to protect themselves, to protect their families. What I was seeing was the breakdown of safety and health and all of these factors. I would say that there are many important trends that we're seeing in these shootings that I think link right back. Now, I want to be clear that in Dying of Whiteness, I talk mostly about gun suicide. I interview families who suffered from gun suicide.

I would say that the debates around guns that follow shootings, that follow deaths, this idea about do we have individual liberties or do we have a communal responsibility to others? What's the meaning of guns? Who gets to carry a gun in public? That was certainly something that I was tracking, and I think a more subterranean level in southern Missouri and in Tennessee when I was doing my research. Now, we're seeing that those debates really have blown out into the open much more than even they were before. Really, I think we're having a moment of reckoning in Tennessee about how can we protect Second Amendment rights on one hand and people and families and kids and workers on the other.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you mentioned suicides because I think it's often worth saying whenever we talk about a mass shooting, which is a sensational incident, that much more gun violence, much more of the death from guns in the United States is in incidents that are one person at a time, including so many of them are suicides. We shouldn't lose sight of the big picture, even though mass shootings, for obvious reasons, make the news more.

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Right. It's important. Mass shootings mobilize people. They garner attention. They seem just the pathological extremes of-- they're really, truly moments of reckoning. Like how did we get here? When this is happening to sanctuaries, people play safe. I think there are bigger conversations about society that happen after mass shootings that are very important. It's not just about numbers or just statistics, but it is also important to note, as you say, that most gun deaths in the United States happens in silence. Upwards of two thirds of gun death is gun suicide.

When I was doing my research for my book, there were about 42,000, 43,000 gun deaths a year in the United States, and about 26,000, 27,000 of those were gun suicides and those numbers have just gone up. We just had a record breaking year. The data came out yesterday for suicides and gun suicides in 2021, 2022. Most gun death is suicide, but for, I think, understandable reasons and maybe also conscious reasons, that doesn't get the same attention that mass shootings do.

Brian Lehrer: Right. On the mass shootings, there's the group called the Gun Violence Project, which tracks mass shootings in the United States, defined as shootings in which at least four people are killed or injured and it counts 145 mass shootings already this year in this country by that measure. It's important to say out loud for the context that that's very unusual in the wealthy industrialized world, isn't it?

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: There's really no correlate. If you just look at maps or graphs, we are on an island by ourselves. We have more mass shootings than we have calendar days, if you count every instance where four or more people are killed. It's also important to note that not all mass shootings, many happen with AR-15s, the one we hear about, but also many mass shootings happen with handguns and other kinds of weapons as well. We just have a steady drumbeat and really, it's the most sensational-- the bar is actually tragically quite high, but the most sensational shootings are the ones that we hear about but there are so many happening that we that we don't hear about.

We also, of course, have more guns. We have more guns than people in our country. We got 320 million, 340 million people in our country and people are guessing about 450 million civilian owned guns. The numbers are just off the charts in every regard.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, the mass shootings have a psychological impact, a sociological impact way beyond the people who are affected. They produce so much anxiety for everyone. You could be a seven-year-old sitting in your second grade classroom knowing that you have to do active shooter drills, which a generation ago people didn't have to do. The randomness of it freaks everyone out from little kids to their parents and everyone else. People who are not close to getting into a dispute that might lead to an individual confrontation with a gun. That's I think another reason that this drives social response, a political response.

Listeners, we welcome your calls for Dr. Jonathan Metzl on perhaps whether the constant political gridlock were often so frustrated by after mass shootings is actually breaking a little bit now or on the larger democracy and justice questions raised by the two Justins or anything related, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's go into a little more detail on those few things you're probably cheering in Tennessee right now, the reinstatement of the two Justins to their seats in the state legislature to be sure, plus the movement that they're part of elevated and energized since the Nashville school shooting, and the expulsions energized it even more.

Republican governor, Bill Lee, generally pro-gun in his politics, signing an executive order now to keep the background check system updated within three days of a person's new criminal or mental health status change that would block them from a purchase, and asking the legislature to pass what he calls an order of protection law like a red flag law to keep guns out of the hands of people found through due process to be dangerous to themselves or others. Has it been an encouraging two days in your opinion in your state of Tennessee?

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: The bar is very low to start with. Pretty much any mammal can get a gun in Tennessee. We've overturned pretty much every gun law you can think of. This session, in particular, there were things coming down the pike. They wanted anyone 18 year old or older to be able to open-carry an AK-47. There was a bill that was proposed to let police officers off duty who were drunk or high fire their guns. It got to the level of absurdity, where people were just sitting around thinking, "Where else can we have guns?"

I'll just say the bar was quite low. I say that because there was so much hopelessness, especially for people like me. I have an amazing colleague, Beth Roth, who helps run what is called the Safe Tennessee Project, and other people on the ground who've been working in red states for quite a long time. We were beaten into the ground, honestly. There was just so much-- well, [unintelligible 00:11:54]-

Brian Lehrer: Can I give the listeners another example from Tennessee that I was reading in prepping for this conversation and have you tell me whether this is actually the case? I think it's less than two years old, a law that allows people over 21 to carry a gun in public, concealed or even open carry, without a permit and without any training. Is that accurate?

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Oh, no, that's very accurate. This was a very big deal in our state. There was a slow drumbeat after Governor Lee was elected. He allowed guns in people's trucks, guns in parks, guns on college campuses. There was a drumbeat of increasingly permissive gun laws. That 2021 bill which he's signed twice, he signed it at the Tennessee State House, and then he signed it at the Tennessee Beretta factory in front of gun executives, really opened the door for-- Tennessee became one of the top states not just for gun rights, people would say, gun ownership or what they call a constitutional carry that nobody should have any say.

That 2021 bill was really important because again, as you say, an adult could carry a handgun open or concealed without a permit and without any training whatsoever. Pushing that back to age 18 for people who've been in the military. It really was a watershed moment, that 2021 bill, because it really opened the doors. I think that's important to note that there are like a little poke in your eye kind of bills, and then there are really big ones like that 2021 [unintelligible 00:13:34] that really have a significant gun rights people. I have a lot of friends, I interview a lot of people and my research is interviewing gun owners who say this was great for their freedom and liberty, and self-protection.

I can point on my side to public health data that shows that Tennessee went up even higher in the list of states where there's the most gun-related injury and death. It's really a push and pull. You had asked before about what happened over the last couple of days. I would say that I'm very energized. I want to be very clear about that, that I think young people, students are really getting out on this issue. After the mass shootings, people felt unsafe, and this mass shooting happened two miles away from Vanderbilt where I work. A lot of people know people at the Covenant School or had their kids there or knew people who were victims.

Also, you could just hear it. I know a lot of places in the country have this, but when it's happening to you, when you hear the helicopters and the sirens, and at Vanderbilt, the sirens were getting quieter because they were going towards the shooting, and then they were getting louder because the victims were being brought back to Vanderbilt hospital. It felt very personal. There was really just a rippling effect, as you say, a moment of terror in our city.

I do think that what happened next there's so much learned helplessness about this issue. Things like this happen, and then it goes nowhere. Really, the youth picked us up here. It was really incredible. Students, high school students, college students, Vanderbilt students, other students, and younger students too all came out to protest them. I saw yesterday that middle schoolers marched to Governor Lee's residence to deliver letters about keeping us safe.

The pressure after this shooting, I think, was quite considerable in a way that I don't think red-state politicians have really felt that kind of uniform pressure. I don't know. As I was watching it, I thought, "There's no way he can do nothing." I think what happened is an important first step, but as always, the devil is in the details. What will happen? Will those laws go into effect?

It's also important to note that we had a Supreme Court case, the Bruen case, last summer that really opened the door to challenge any kind of gun reform. Is what he did constitutional? I think that'll be the pushback on it. I would say that the very fact that he's saying he'll talk to his caucus about this, I think is a major step. I don't want to minimize that. I also want to just give all the things in the world to the young people who made this happen.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. It's progress to hear someone like Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee say these few simple words, which I'm about to play, which probably sound like common sense to most people listening. Here's the governor.

Bill Lee: A person that has shown that they are a real threat to themselves or to others, that person, that individual should not have access to firearms.

Brian Lehrer: Well, yes. I also read that Governor Lee won't call his proposal for an order of protection law, that's what he calls it, a red flag law, as it's usually known because Republicans are against red flag laws. Do you know what he's really proposing, and if it's different from what you would call a red flag law?

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Right. I don't mean to complicate every answer, but this is just a very complicated space so I will say that there is a lot of debate about what to call these. There's also a pushback on the left to calling these red flag laws because people feel like it makes people with mental illness look like ticking time bombs, or red flags. The debate about what to call it, people in the left like me, he had proposed ERPOs or Extreme Risk Protection Orders, all this clunky verbiage. I don't really care what we call it, honestly. I don't care what he calls it. I think the important thing to note about these kinds of laws are two things.

First of all, it's incredible to note, especially in red states, what people have to go through if they see a relative spiraling, not just toward violence toward others, but toward violence toward themselves. They actually would have to get their relative committed, and then that commitment would have to get upped to an involuntary hospitalization, and then they'd have to meet with this crazy board to take away their gun laws. It was hardly anybody-- Families, I think, felt very very helpless about this.

I think that's the important point that when you saw somebody spiraling-- A relative probably knows their relative better than a police person, or an average judge, or somebody who's going to see them, even a psychiatrist, because they see that person every day. There were no avenues really to say, "Hey, man, my relative is looking really bad now and we need a little bit of help." That actually happened in both of the shootings, Kentucky and Tennessee, where the relatives needed some help.

What this is just doing is saying, here's a process with which when somebody reaches out and says, "We need some help," it's not going to involve involuntary commitment, it's not going to involve that person losing their Second Amendment rights. Instead, there's a process through which there'll be a temporary restriction, that person will maybe lose access to guns for 30 days, or 60 days or 6 months, or something like that. There's a process of a temporary removal of firearms for somebody who has shown a spiraling behavior.

It's really very, very basic, and as you say, it seems like common sense. I think initially, these red flag laws were seen as compromised positions between people who care a lot about Second Amendment rights and people who just wanted to give families something to do that they could get some help. Again, we'll see how it plays out.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, is that safety theater, or do red flag laws, so-called, actually work? I heard Connecticut senator, Chris Murphy, who is a leading advocate for gun law reform say on TV this morning that after the Parkland shooting in Florida, they passed a red flag law that's prevented around 6,000 gun sales. I'm just curious if you've looked at Florida or any other state, and as a researcher, have a judgement of if red flag laws are actually preventing actual deaths and injuries.

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Well as a teaser, my next book will address this exact question. It comes out in January so I will say hopefully, [unintelligible 00:20:12] and talk about that.

Brian Lehrer: Make this your earliest possible book interview invitation.

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: You got it. I will say that I think the question is how do you judge progress? I think that there is such frustration on the side of people pushing for gun safety, it was like, "What can we do that will work? That will bring together both sides of this contentious debate?" There have been studies of-- I'm going to use the shorthand red flag laws, that's just what I do, but everybody calls them different things. I will say that the early studies of red flag laws showed maybe a 15% reduction and this was before they were widely known, people didn't know they were available.

They stopped shootings but they also stopped suicides. I think that's the big thing is that the early data showed that they were effective when somebody saw their relative spiraling towards suicide, they also had-- so it wasn't just about stopping mass shootings. I think that's what falls out of the conversation a lot of times. A place like Tennessee, again, you can buy a gun at a gun show, your neighbor can buy you a gun, there's tens, thousand guns everywhere. It's not like any one policy is going to be the magic elixir that's going to stop this.

I will say that you're just giving families something to do and I'd be curious to know what the data would be in a place where red flag laws are really-- enforced is the wrong word, people know that that's a resource but also in a red state. If Tennessee does go down this path, what will the effect be? I'd be curious to see that, but I certainly think that the early data shows maybe a 10%, 15% reduction but again, I would take that with a grain of salt because a lot of people don't know that that's an option.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I know you got to go in about five minutes. Let me get in a couple of phone calls for you. Steven in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Dr. Jonathan Metzl from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Hi, Steven.

Steven: Hi, great. Thank you for taking my call. Two, I want to comment I think it's interesting that the red state governor, Bill Lee, from Tennessee is advocating for this-- I'm going to call it red flag law just because that's what I call them. They are personally affected by gun violence, same with Andy Beshear. He's a Democrat but still in Louisville and Kentucky also starting to be more rhetorical about having more strict gun laws in their state.

The other idea I had which is more extreme and I think controversial, but I feel that I've been pushed to this point where we have to start fighting this with publicizing photographs of these events so people actually see what happens to the human body when an AR-15 at close range. I don't know what-

Brian Lehrer: I'll leave it there, Steven, for time but I'm glad you brought it up and you might have noticed in the intro to this segment, I took a minute to describe a little bit of how an AR-15 or being shot with an AR-15 is worse than being shot in general with a so-called regular handgun. There's a very good article in The New York Times in the last few days that describes it in graphic detail so ditto to what you said. Let me get one more call in here for Dr. Metzl. Roland in DC, you're on WNYC. Hi, Roland.

Roland: Hi, good morning. First of all, thank you for taking the segment. We don't have enough education on what guns do and I think unless we treat it as a public health issue which the NRA does not like to think that it is, we're never going to get serious. I was in China on the same day that the Sandy Hook Massacre took place and then that same day a gentleman in southern China went into a school and attacked 16 children with a knife. They were all out of the hospital within two days.

Another situation and when I was four years old, my father was at his business, my mother was in grad school at Johns Hopkins she was away from our house in Baltimore and I was being taken care of by an aunt who was also a college student at Gordon [unintelligible 00:24:54]. While she was doing her homework and I was in the dining room, I came downstairs holding a 9mm Luger that my father had brought home that he'd taken from a German POW in the war.

It was loaded and I was waving it around in the house and my aunt gently slipped out the front door, locked the door, went to a neighbor's house, and called my father, and said, "Please send somebody to disarm your four-year-old."

Brian Lehrer: Locking up the guns you have among other things. Thank you, Roland. In the last couple of minutes, you can wrap up any way you want but the first caller brought up Governor Beshear in Kentucky who's a Democrat but another thing that I see that just happened I saw this in The New Republic less than two weeks before the mass shooting there this week, the State of Kentucky declared itself a second amendment sanctuary state. What does that mean? It means they're banning local law enforcement agencies from enforcing federal firearms laws including the bipartisan bill passed by Congress last year. Governor Beshear, though he's a Democrat, didn't veto it.

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Well, much to say and hopefully we can keep talking. This is the beginning of a longer conversation. I'll just say in response to these really excellent questions, first about red state governors, I think you're exactly right, Brian, that it's just almost unfathomable to think how much people's hands are tied and people are really just on the ground. You're seeing it now with the protests, the students, but also there are plenty of red states politicians, Democrats, center Republicans who have been trying to do this but the barriers are it's not just the NRA which is huge, it's also there are barriers upstream.

Just people should read the Bruen case from the Supreme Court last year that said that any gun reform has to be consistent with the writers or framers and ratifiers of the constitution and so the barrier is so high. I really think that people fighting this fight in red states need more help, but I also think the warning sign of the Bruen case from the Supreme Court last year is that when you federalize gun rights, it's not just red states that are going to be challenging these kinds of things. It's going to be coming for gun laws in New York as we're seeing in other places.

This is a pretty urgent issue and I just think red-state politicians who are doing this need help, and we need to all join together. The question of what guns do I think it's important. I write about this a lot. I think what AR-15s do to the human body is horrific. These are literally weapons of warfare and that's not just hyperbole. They really were made for warfare. There are a lot of other conversations we can have about AR-15s. I don't know. The victims of the shootings, what would it feel like to have your shot relative pictures of them around?

It's hard because I just think having kids murdered in school for me is enough of a shock value and I just think there are ethical questions about showing people's bodies in that way that I just think we want to be wary of. I guess the question is, is the idea that that shock is going to move the needle past what we already know? Well, I think it's important to know and I don't mean to throw a wrench into things we're talking about at the very end here, but what we're seeing movement in red states right now is because historically, red state politicians have not had to worry about people voting on gun issues.

Nobody has gotten voted out of office because of their stance on being pro-gun and so if that changes, if people feel like they're going to get voted out of office because of gun issues, it'll matter more than any pictures or anything like that. If we can mobilize voting blocks that vote on this issue reliably the way the right has, that'll change things. Then the last caller, just two quick things about that. Accidental shootings by kids, another thing we haven't talked about, but having guns around unsecured is another focus of laws that we've been trying to pass in Tennessee that have met blocks.

There's a lot of accidental shootings of kids just picking it up and we haven't even touched the question of race and guns and gun laws which is another issue for a later day that I think is really important.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Metzl, I know you got to run. Thanks for your complexity of thought on this, for your passion on this, and keep a late morning appointment open in your calendar for when that next book comes out. Okay?

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: You got it. Thanks so much.

Brian Lehrer: Jonathan Metzl, Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at the school as well as research director for the gun violence prevention organization, the Safe Tennessee Project, it's a mouthful, and author of the book from 2019, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland. As he said, that's a lot about suicide by gun in the United States. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, much more to come.

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