Mother Knows Death presents External Exams with Nicole and Jimmy. Every week on Mother Knows Death, we will be doing an external exam and we will be interviewing various experts.
Last week, Maria and I discussed the mass shooting that was in Maine that killed eighteen people and injured thirteen people, as well as days later there was another potential mass shooting that did not happen because they found the mass shooter had he killed himself, but he was found with multiple ammunition rifles, handguns, IEDs et Cetera, an amusement park
in Colorado. So unfortunately, mass shootings have become a frequent topic that comes up all the time in my I feel to anyway, And today we're going to be with doctor Jonathan Metzel and he's a leading expert in the forefront of movement of advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health. And this coming January thirtieth, twenty twenty four, he's coming out with a new book that's available for pre order right now, so make sure you
get that. I'm actually going to talk to him about him sending me an advanced copy hopefully, and it's called What we've become living and dying in a country of arms. Welcome to the show. It's so nice to meet you.
Thank you so much.
I'm so glad to be here having this conversation.
This It's just really an honor to have you. You're so accomplished, so that we're just going to go through some things and get to know you a little bit better in your thoughts on this, because I know that this is a huge fear of mind just being an American. So there's been multiple explanations about gun violence in as far as it could be from mental health issues, it could be from playing video games, it could be from the gun laws, and then the guns themselves social media.
But these things are also present in other countries as well. Most other countries have access to social media, firearms, etc. So what is it about gun violence and mass shootings that is specific to the United States. I'm asking you because we have a lot of people that listen from other countries that might not be as familiar.
Well, first let me just say I'll say two things in answer. I think it's a great starting question.
The first is just to.
Recognize how often the charts the United States is in terms of gun ownership and also in terms of shootings. So we are just completely on an island by ourselves.
Really.
We have a Second Amendment obviously in this in this country, in our constitution that tells people, you know, there's a right to bear arms. But what that Second Amendment means has been a topic of great debate. And so before
like the nineteen eighties, individual people couldn't own guns. That the idea was basically guns are for the police or military or safety officers, etc. And there was a shift that started in the nineteen eighties where we reinterpreted the Second Amendment to mean it was a push by the NRA and conservative politicians and you know, all the people we kind of know now, but it was totally out of the blue in the eighties. People thought that was nuts, but basically a push to say that a militia a
person has the same rights as a militia. And it led to a push where we increasingly allowed private citizens to own guns. And I mean we could always kind of own guns for hunting and stuff, but to carry them. And so what we've seen in this country really since the eighties is just an absolute gold rush for gun companies of sales to private people, and we've gone from relatively normal gun ownership rates, you know, people who hunted or had their musket from their grandfather or something.
Now we have more than one gun per person in this country.
We have about three hundred and thirty million people in the country, and we have about four hundred and fifty million civilian owned guns. So there's no other country that has as many guns as we do. And with guns come shootings, and so we also are way off the charts in terms of civilian shootings, anything from homicide to
suicide to mass shootings, partner violence, accidental shootings. We have probably now over fifty thousand gun deaths a year in the in our country, and so it's important for people who are not in the United it States just to recognize really how abnormal that is. I mean, there are places that there are militaries and war and things like that, but we're talking about like people owning guns, carrying guns,
shooting each other in daily life. So point number one is that, and then point number two is just an intro. Is It's really important also to note the mass shootings are terrifying, and mass shootings are becoming much more common. We used to have less than one mass shooting a day in twenty eighteen, and now we have almost two mass shootings a day in this country. But by far, the most gun death in this country is gun suicide.
It's not even close.
And so like a couple of years ago, I had a book come out forty five thousand gun deaths in this country, twenty eight or twenty nine were gun suicide. So it's also really important to note that most gun death is gun suicide, which for me, is much more preventable than mass shootings in some ways. I think those are two jumping off statistical points that we might talk about.
And I'm happy to say more about what you asked about mental illness and video games and stuff like that, but I just think to be on the ground of like just how weird the United States is a good jumping off point.
Okay, Yeah, I definitely wanted to talk I want to talk about all that other stuff too, but we'll get to that. We'll get to that a little bit later. But you were just saying how mass shootings are just so scary, which I agree. They're one of my biggest fears, to be honest with you, and I feel like it's almost getting to the point where it's Groundhog's Day. It's like you turn on the news and there's a shooting.
Now I couldn't even name all of them that even happened this year, just because it just happened so frequently. And my first initial reaction is is that I get really upset, and then I watched the news like crazy, or look at it online for the first day, just to be like, who was it, what happened, who died? You know, all the questions that people have, and then
it's just like the same stuff keeps happening. It's like the lawmakers put out their tweets and say thoughts and prayers, and then one side blames the other side, the other side blames the other side, and then within forty eight hours,
it's like it's like nothing happened. And I feel like, do you feel like Americans have almost some kind of level of like PTSD when it comes to gun violence as far as not even just directly being involved with it, but just hearing about this stuff every single day on the news.
Yeah, No, I completely agree with that. It's it's called habituation. We've habituated this and in the you know, even fifteen years ago, or think back to when we had you know, this early mass shootings Parkland or you know, the school in Colorado, like all those early mass shootings, we would talk about it for months, and now a lot of research shows that this trend that you're talking about, which
I talk about. That's kind of the theme of my book What We've Become that's coming out in January, is I talk about how we've come to. I don't want to say normalize it, because it's not normal, but there's an arc. I tell the story in the book of the Nashville waffle house mass shooting in twenty eighteen, and what I show is that there's a really predictable pattern
where there's shock, trauma, fear that ripples outwards. People who are not in the city or immediate affect it also feel an emotional response to it, and unfortunately it lasts four days. People are shocked, they're horrified, they call for action, they feel helpless, and they then the next thing happens or something. So our cycle of this stuff, You're exactly right, it's not four days for people who were affected personally, right, they're living with this for the rest of our lives.
But because they're so many of these stories that just feel exactly the same. I mean they literally they just feel so similar that in a way, our response is there's almost a pattern of it where and you can follow it in news stories also, you know, two days is the peak, three days is the where it starts to go down, And within the fifth day, we've unfortunately
moved on to the next headline. And so what I ask is, what does that do to our psyche as a country, as people if we're seeing these horrible things and we're in a way moving on in not really moving on. But what I say is that's what people do in war, and so we are living with a kind of PTSD right now.
It's really crazy because in my lifetime, like I grew up in the eighties, and I mean maybe my parents kept me sheltered or whatever, I don't know, but I didn't hear about any kind of mass shooting until the first one that you spoke of, which was Columbine in
nineteen ninety nine. That was And I know that that kind of coincides with like when around when nine to eleven happened and the whole like twenty four hour news cycle thing started because I don't think that that was really happening prior to nine to eleven, that there was like channels that just had the news on all day. If there were, I don't, I'm not really sure how popular it was. But also the Internet as well, like
kind of came out around that time too. So I guess my question for you as far as that is, how much of the blame of this, I guess do you put on not only just the news media but also social media, because these people not only have this platform where they're able to like discuss their crazy thoughts with each other, and that in itself is a problem, but also you have the news that kind of makes these people like famous, and has there been any kind of like studies on that stuff.
Yeah.
I mean the hard part is, so I can argue both sides of this, honestly, because on one hand, you're absolutely right, when you grew up in the eighties, this wasn't really happening. Our first kind of quote unquote mass shooting was in the nineteen forties a guy who had come back from from late nineteen forties of World War two, guy, which I talk about in the book. But in terms of the phenomenon that you're describing. That starts really with Columbine.
It's the advent of the Internet, but it's also the accessibility of guns that civilians couldn't get before. And so the fact that it was a lot easier to get semi automatic weapons, particularly in the early twenty first century when people started to get is very easy to get an AR fifteen, whichhip average person couldn't get. And so the US isn't like there are there are just as
the same number of attacks in other countries. But if you look at like the news in the UK or India or something like that, it's like crazed person attack somebody with a hammer or with a knife or with a machete. It's it's horrible, but it doesn't have the same body count. And so part of what we started seeing was number one, access to firearms. Number two, as you're suggesting, a very strong copycat phenomenon where people, I mean, just because we're so normalized to this stuff, it's hard
to get in the news. It's you know, it's just there's it's like, oh, what are you.
Going to do?
That's worse than the horrible thing we just had two days ago. And so there's a copycat phenomenon. So it's all these things kind.
Of together.
That really, I think, really have created this thing that I don't know, I'm curious about your sense. I mean, for me, it just feels out of control, right because it's like access to guys, a political gridlock, and it just I don't know, just the repetition of this is honestly, the word is just exhausting.
It's exhausting right to have to live like this.
I think this is this like this. Similarly, I'm going to give you as actually nothing to do with guns. But we have this highway in near Philadelphia that only has two lanes going in and out of it, right, and it was created I don't even know when it was created years ago when my when my parents were little. But they basically say they can't they can't make the highway any bigger because of the way the mountain. The mountain is, it goes around in just different different ways
that they can't make the way any bigger. So they just kind of instead of really trying to fix the problem, they've just ignored it. Since you know, the nineteen fifties and now and now here we are with double the population and the problems still there because I think they just feel so overwhelmed by it they don't know how to fix it, so they just kind of like hope
it'll go away or something. Yeah, I feel the same way about the gun thing, Like, especially when you're talking about in the eighties when they really could have like nipped that and got it under control. But even when they did recognize it was a problem, it was definitely in the nineties, right, and then why are we letting decades go on and on and not doing anything at all to kind of like reel it in a little bit, you know what I mean? And yeah, totally it's exhausting.
No, it does feel like that mountain that you can't move. I mean, it's it's interesting, like we're having this conversation on a Monday. Tomorrow, the Supreme Court's going to hear a case about whether someone accused of domestic abuse has has a Second Amendment right to guns.
So it's it's just it's just almost pathetic.
Really honestly where we are right now and what could have been done. I mean, it's interesting to know, like right now, you know, it's it's hard right now to think about what can be done because it's really a
numbers game. Right now, there are millions and millions and millions of gun owners who never fire their guns, and so how are you going to Like the gun owner who I interview a lot, would say, how are you going to restrict my access to my AR fifteen which I use for sports shooting or I really like owning. And it's true, we have like tens of millions of
AR fifteens in ownership right now. And one person commits a mass shooting, and they'll say, well, does that mean we should restrict AR fifteens to everyone because of that one person, and that the answer easily would have been yes twenty years ago. But now there are so many AAR fifteens in circulation that even if you restricted AAR fifteens, there's there's just way too many of them out there that you know that that it's just going to be
hard to get them all back, honestly. And then this you mentioned mentioned almost before, or for people who don't know, I'm a psychiatrist and a sociologist, and so a lot of my work looks at mental illness and gun violence, and what I argue is that it's again a numbers game because the dramatic majority of people with mental illness don't hurt anybody else. In fact, people with diagnosed mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of
violence than the perpetrators of violence. And so how do you pick that one person who's going to do this horrible thing out of the hundreds of millions of people who are diagnosed with mental illness. It's just, you know, I think you're exactly right to say when this thing first started, we could have nipped it in the bud, the way we do with any other consumer product that kills people. But now I think part of the hopelessness
isn't just that it keeps happening, which it does. It's also that it just feels like, what can we do at this point? With so many guns and so many shootings, It just feels like it, you know, That's what I argue in the book, These mass shootings become constitution of who we are, Like it's this is just what we have to put up with to be Americans right now, which is kind of depressing, but I think might as well be honest about it.
As a starting point.
It is and and you know, I I grew up in a family with guns. My grandfather hunted, taught my brother and it was never a it was never used in any kind of a negative way. They they locked them up responsibly, legally purchased everything else. So I'm always I'm always torn, and of course I'm torn to take away guns because of what you said that you're not
take you can't get rid of them. And I actually would feel more comfortable to have have guns knowing that other ones are out there, because I know that that we would just have it for safety purposes, you know, not to go do anything. And another point that you made is is how draining it is to live like this, And honestly, like it's really affected me so much much
so that I had my middle daughter. I had her in school in preschool, and it was in twenty eighteen, and on the day after Valentine's Day in twenty and eighteen, which so happens to be the day after the Parkland shooting, the school had a function that was like, oh, let the kid's family come to school like grandparents, sisters, brothers, whatever.
And I went to the school and the door was just wide open, like anybody could have walked in, and it just it sent me down this rabbit hole of like this is going to happen at this school, my kid's gonna get shot, blah blah blah. And I decided to take my kid out of school, and I homeschooled my kids for like two or three years before I was like, what the hell am I doing? I need to put my kids in school. But it's it's like such a big fear of mine. So do you have
any advice to people that like it? Like, it's never personal, happened to me, but it affects me so much that it like actually made making me make huge decisions in my life.
As far as I mean, this is to me the definition of terrorism, honestly, that terrorism makes us feel unsafe in places that should be avenues of daily life. Right, And that's easy if we think about someone somewhere else in the world or a suicide bomber or something. But think about what you're saying, right, afraid to send your own kids to school. I mean, what's the role of society. It's to keep people safe. That's that's why we join
together in civilizations, is to keep people safe. And you know, for some people, including people I interview for my book, they say well, I feel safe, I'm if I'm carrying my air fifteen all the time, or they want to
be armed all the time. And so for some people, their notion of safety is just for me, it's it's really again exhausting, because to be on guard all the time that somebody's gonna potentially shoot you in the grocery store or when you're out bowling like in Maine earlier, or you know, sending your kids like it's just I don't know. At a certain point, that kind of hypervigilance really has a real psychological effect on people. It really does, and certainly it has a massive effect on people who
are caught in this. But just the trauma of being a fear all the time and of mistrusting other people, it's to me. To me, it's I mean, we'll see what how this goes. But in the book, I argue that everything that happened in the pandemic, where everybody split apart in a million different pieces, it was predicated on the divisions we'd already set up in the gun debate, where people's idea. I mean, I don't ever interview people who say, like I don't want to be safe, I
want to be unsafe. But people's idea of what it means to be safe is so different really in regard to their relationship to guns, and so it's a know, how do how do we put that back together? I know that was your question for me, but I'm just mirroring that.
That's a really hard press.
It's an interesting point that you bring up, because my next question was going to be about like this, like safety in school in general, and I just told you that my biggest fear is that is my is something like that happening at my kids' school. But me personally, I would almost feel better if there was like a cop there that had a gun. I don't know, like I know that a lot of people are against that, but I do have this sense of just because I grew up around it and know people that are like
responsible with it, that would protect you kind of. And I mean, like the president has people protecting him with guns. Banks have people protecting the bank with guns. So and that's money that's not your child. You know that you're not your child, So I I kind of it might sound silly for me to say.
That sounds like at all, No, it sounds really deep and honest, right, I mean, I totally agree. Again, you shouldn't have to live in a society where you send your kids to school and worry if they're going to come home. And and I agree with you that that's kind of where we're at. Like it's it's it's it's naive to say, oh, let's just buy up back all the guns. You know, that's not the world we live in.
And so that is going to be in the back of people's mind stuff like this happens, and that's going to be in the in the back of their minds. And so, I mean, I it's not like I'm some gun grabbing liberal who whatever.
Like I mean, I have a lot.
Of complex opinion opinions about this having started for a long time. But my dad was in the Air Force. I was born on an Air Force base. Like I've been around different forms of weapons different times in my life.
But but it's just it's just.
I guess the two questions are, number one, what does that do to us if every time we send our kids out in the world, we're worried this is going to happen to them? And then number two is if we protect schools really well, there's just going to be some other target. I mean, look at what happened in Maine where people were playing cornhole, Like I mean, you just can't protect every single thing. I mean, that sounds like a military zone. And so in a way, for me,
it's got to involve some kind of coming together. What I argue in the book, and this is where I think the book's going to be controversial. I argue that we're too far gone to mandate behavior. I think the pandemic for me, taught me that in a way, like I can tell you what I think a good health policy is. I think it's important to wear a mask and get a vaccine. And I have plenty of friends and colleagues who feel completely different, and I can't make
a policy that makes them wear a mask. And we're almost at that point with guns where I think there should be background checks. I think there should be, you know, I honestly think there should be an assault weapons ban. But I also know my policy is not going to work on a lot of my friends here who are
ardent gun I mean, I'm in Tennessee. I know you know a lot of people who care a lot about guns, and so I think we really need to focus in addition to finding the right policies, I argue that we need to really go back to basics and think about what it makes for us, what makes us feel safe in a community. How can we make communities safe really build build communities that where people don't fear each other. Which sounds kind of naive, but I just I've become
almost a structuralist doing this work. I started off being like, a we need policies that control things, and I actually don't feel that way anymore. I feel like, what makes you feel safe? What makes the school feel safe? Well, I mean that's the question. What makes the school feel safe? Maybe it's having an arm guard, but it's also you know, the neighborhood, the lighting, the parks, the fact that you know your neighbors. Like, we need to kind of reinvest
in our communities in a way. So that's kind of where I'm coming down on these issues right now. But it's it's an I mean, I'm a doctor, but I'm kind of feeling like the policies of controlling other people's behaviors that might have worked in the cigarettes or seatbelts, but we're not there now.
Yeah, And I think that this is a good point you're bringing up because I think, like my whole feeling is like, if you're going to do the two worst things ever, which is like commit the worst crime ever murder and both legally and morally, like you're not going to follow any gun laws. You're just not You're not gonna You're not going to care. And there are a lot of gun laws in place, but like Maine is a perfect example. I mean, this is just one that
happened this week or not last week, whatever. Of like, these laws, they don't don't help all the time. There's a lot of gray area and they're not followed, and so just making more laws necessarily isn't going to make things better.
Well, the one caveat though, I will say again is mass shootings are what gets our attention, but we could dramatically cut gun death in this country. I mean, I'm not against all laws.
I think that.
Like partner violence, for example, like the Supreme Court case tomorrow, I sure hope they come down and say that someone with a restraining order does not have a right to gun because we know really clearly from data that if someone has been abusive to their partner in the past, they're going to do it again in the future. I don't think that person should have a gun. I don't think people should be able to drink and carry weapons the same way that we don't let people drink and drive.
I mean, there's a ton of I mean, I have a whole list of things I talk about in the book, and I think that, you know, we could really cut dramatically guns, suicide, partner violence, certain kinds of homicide, accidental shootings. So it's not like we're just going to keep going forever. I mean, I do think there are things we can do.
The hard part about this, though, is that mass shootings for understandable reasons are what are the most terrifying, and by far those are the hardest kinds of shootings to predict or to prevent. I mean, we heard it in Maine that everybody said, I can't believe it happened here, But everybody in Maine probably has a gun. So the fact that somebody just snapped one day is really it's
much harder to predict that. But I still think we could dramatically cut gun death if we really got serious about stopping the other kinds of shootings that are much more, much more patterned.
Yeah, I think a big issue is, which I'm semi familiar with, the whole buying a gun situation throughout the country. It's just so different from state to state. I feel like it's kind of weird how the variation. I live in New Jersey.
I I.
Think that our laws are pretty good. You have to kind of like if you want to you have to wait a little while if you want to get something, it's not as easy. But in Pennsylvania, which is literally ten minutes away from where I'm at right now, you could just go. You could just walk in a store and buy a gun. Right But I don't know if there's been any studies done with states with like stricter laws like that versus yep. And it does it show that there's a decrease in No.
The problem is some of the words the safest place to be statistically for a mass shooting is to be in a state with the kind of laws. New Jersey is a great example. New Jersey excellent leadership in this area for a couple of reasons. I mean, it's got great laws, but it's also the Rutgers as a gun safety center, So a lot of research about keeping people safe.
If you live in a state that has tight gun laws relatively, I mean for US standards, and you're surrounded by other states that have tight gun laws, your rate of mass shooting is a lot lower. So New York is surrounded by Connecticut and New Jersey, for example, its rates of this kind of stuff are a lot lower
than Tennessee. Or I wrote my book about the waffle House mass shooting, and the mass shooter was in Illinois and drove to just drove across state lines, and he went from being an illegal gun owner to being a legal gun owner literally by driving thirty five minutes across state lines. And so until we have like a national policy, it's just going to be this patchwork thing. So you're definitely safer to be in a state that has tight gun laws, especially if you're surrounded by other states.
That have tight gun laws.
And you would just think, in an ideal world, we would learn from the places that have fewer mass shootings and enact those laws. Like I don't see why that's so hard, but apparently it is.
It's also weird that there's not that you don't have to get some kind some kind of training, Like if you want to drive a car, you have to take a driver's license test just so you can show that you could basically operate the vehicle. Not that it prevents most people from just sucking at driving or whatever, but like, well, at least it's like you check the box, and like people have to do a written test and a driving test to show that they have some competency, right, Like, I.
Mean, I can give you a full list, I'll just give you four examples of what we should be doing and what we are doing that are exactly in line with that. So training with a firearm to get a license or a permit or anything like that, is people are less likely to have to shoot a gun if they've been trained how to use that gun. And that's true in countries where people, for example, have military service and then they have guns as civilians. It's true in
the United States as well. And so what are we doing, Well, we're doing.
Exactly the opposite.
We are letting people just go into wherever, Walmart or whatever and buy an air fifteen, go to a gun show, go online. So there's been a dramatic push. Tennessee is a great example. There used to be a significant training requirement and now there's barely anything, and so you can basically just buy a gun with no training. People have what's called permitless carry. Now you don't need to permit all these things. And so we've done the opposite of that. Alcohol.
If alcohol is present, and there's an argument, there's about a five to seven times greater chance that a gun is going to be fired in anger. So you would think you wouldn't have guns in bars, but instead, in Nashville we're right now you can carry a loaded gun into pretty much any bar in town. So but what do we're letting guns in bars? If somebody has a history of domestic abuse, they're more likely to shoot their partner,
you would think those people shouldn't have guns. But yet the Supreme Court tomorrow is hearing whether domestic abusers can have guns. And I can just go down this full list of what we should be doing and what we are doing, and in pretty much every case, we're doing the wrong thing as a country. So this is where I think politics, we need to change our politics.
I think it's the bar thing is interesting because for me, it's like, obviously they shouldn't let someone go into a bar with a gun. But then if you're like Let's say I'm out to dinner with my husband and we go to the restaurant. Like the guy that comes in the bar that wants to shoot people, is he's not reading the sign out front that says don't carry your
gun in. And then maybe like my husband, who's a responsible gun holder that would protect not only us but people in the restaurant, then wouldn't have it because he was told not to have it, You know what I mean? And I know that that I know that that's not probable, but you do hear sometimes that armed citizens are taken out.
Yeah, people, should I give you the uplifting, supportive counterpoint or the real world depressing counterpoints? I mean, okay, the uplifting counterpoint is I hope you have a lovely dinner
with your husband. The depressing counterpoint is twofold number one. Unfortunately, if somebody and data shows this again defensive gun use, just given the speed through which semi automatic bullets fly, if somebody's coming in with a plan, it's it's much better to have no guns somewhere, because the thought that somebody's going to whip out a gun in a in a restaurant in the time that it takes for them to just understand what is happening while somebody else has had,
you know, ten years planning this crime or something like that. It's just data is not that great. You're much more likely to shoot some other you know, boy patrons and stuff like that. But we've got a history. I mean, if you look at like Dodge City, Kansas, and the wild West or the ok Corral or all these saloons, you always had to check your gun with the sheriff before you went even into the saloon and like the old frontier days. So it's not like we don't have
any history of that. In fact, the whole history of guns in this country has been let's check, let's check them at the door, even if we let people have guns. And so I don't know we somehow forgot that along the way.
Yeah, it is. It is crazy how the law could have been misinterpreted or whatever happened that now we've gotten to this point and it is you just sit there, you hear and I know that you have this thing that both sides have to come together to come up with a resolution because it's not clearly like it's not working, and they're just so extreme on both sides like get rid of the guns, or like it's not a problem with the guns at all, And you're like, come on,
if you talk to any person in the world, they'll say it something needs to be done, Like nobody's cool with what's happening right now.
But I mean that's part of the issue, is that I really feel like the average person could figure out a solution to this. It's actually not that hard. I mean literally every other country in the world, you know, I've studied guns in Israel obviously right now very contested position part of the world, but I've studied gun laws
because Israel has before all what's happening now. Everybody is trained in a gun in the military, but they have very very small rates of like mass shootings and stuff like that, because everybody gets training, and to just carry a gun to public you have to be above age thirty or forty for some people, even places. On My point is just even where there are a lot of guns, they don't have the problem we do, which is just anybody can have a gun, and so it's not that hard.
We just have to figure out what every other country in the world except ours has done. But the problem is, even though like I would say probably eighty five percent of people agree on background checks and red flag laws all these things. But the problem is our political system does not let the average person get in the room with somebody who doesn't agree with them and just figure out a solution. Our political system really rewards these extreme positions.
And so it's not just a health problem, it's really how are we going to change our politics? And I think that's underneath a lot of this stuff.
Yeah, and that could be said about a lot.
Of different everything else.
Yeah, get those.
Guns, all right? So I sent you are a psychiatrist and psychologist or psychiatrists.
I'm a psychiatrist and a sociologist. Yeah, I direct a department at Vanderbilt.
That's awesome. So this is like a question I have for the kids. I guess I don't talk. I'm pretty I talk to my kids about like everything except this because I don't want them to be scared. I kind of want your advice on this. Like, they definitely do these drills at school, but I asked them. I tried, because they're at nine and ten years old, So I say, like, well, what are they doing it for? Oh, in case the
bad person comes to school? They don't specifically mention that, and they don't know about the one that happened in Texas. I actually like shut the news off for six months after that because I just was like, I can't function Like it was bad, but so I don't I don't say anything to the kids. But then I'm like, am I doing them a disservice by not saying it to them? Because if it does happen, they would just be completely unprepared.
Whereas I heard some things that even though I tried to avoid coverage of the other school, I heard some things about kids pretending to play dead and this and that, and and I'm like, should I tell my kids this? Like or is that gonna Yeah.
There's there's got it.
I mean, in a way, it's such a hard topic, right because your kids are going to read you. I mean, just because you're not going to talk about where your kids. Your kids are pretty smart about reading. You know, Mom's
not exactly telling us the whole story right here. And then because of every all, you're not their only information source unfortunately, so they're going to hear about it from other people too, And so I do think it's important to like talk about it in a supportive way, but not like freak kids out as much as possible, if
that if that's possible. But I do think that, you know it, It is part of why my book is called What We've Become, because we're like robbing kids of their childhood by telling them, oh, go to school, but also, you know, get into the you know, hide behind the door of this horrible thing happens. But I do think that I do think that increasingly, you know, especially if they're bringing it up, I think it's important to say, like, our goal is to keep you safe and all that
kind of stuff, but let's talk about it. So I do think that some degree of openness, if they start the conversation, can can be helpful.
Yeah that's good. That's good advice. All right. So before we wrap things up, I just want to know a little bit about you. How how did you become I'm really interested for people who might want to go to school for this kind of stuff or who were interested in this what what originally did you go to school for and how did it lead you down this road of becoming an expert of mass shootings and gun violence.
Yeah?
Well, I mean, in terms of my professional history, I went to med school first, and I did internship residency fellowship in psychiatry and neurology. So I totally trained as a psychiatrist first, but I was always interested in kind of politics the real world, and so I went back to school and don't do this at home, but I got a PhD in sociology while I was working in psychers for a long time, and I became a professor who studies kind of the relationship between really mental illness
and politics and race. And so I had a book come out, gosh, about ten years ago now called The Protest Psychosis that looked at the over diagnosis of schizophrenia in black men, and I kind of told the cultural story of why I thought that happened in the United States, which was part psychiatry, part sociology, part reading about mental
illness and stuff. And after that book came out, just every time there was a mass shooting, I'd get ten thousand calls from media about was mental illness the cause of this mass shooting? And all my research shows that that's actually not the case. That even though certain of course shooters suffer from symptoms of mental illness, that there are all these other stories about race access to guns, politics, all these other bigger stories that we don't tell when
we say mental illness caused a mass shooting. And so I just kept getting these calls from media, and I thought, man, there must be something here. So I really started to devote pretty much all my time now to looking at questions of mental illness and mass shooting. And ironically, I've shifted,
as you can hear in my answers here. I used to be like, we need better policies, and now I'm a total structuralist, and I've gone to argue that, you know, my model now is there's all this research, for example, that shows that neighborhoods with better street lights and more parks have fewer shootings. And so instead of trying to like mandate behavior, like let's fix the street lights and build parks and make people feel safer so that somebody
walking around with a gun seems out of place. And so for me, I've gone from somebody who was a total policy person to somebody who's like almost like an urban structuralist now, where I think we need to like rebuild connections with each other in a way.
That's really cool. And I think that your work is just is really important right now, just because this is such a hot topic. And like the guy in Maine, he had he was here, he probably had some kind of schizophrenia or something. He was having psychosis. But but like you don't really hear that that often with the shooters, because the other the other kid, the younger kid that was in Colorado that they found dead, that they said he was probably going to commit some kind of mass
shooting with all the stuff he had. He had not even like a parking ticket. He had the cleanest record, no history of anything shocking, they said. I think they were saying that he played like call of duty at night. But like so doa thousands or millions of other people
that it's not a problem. So it is interesting because I mean, all one sense, you say, okay, if you're going to go in and shoot like a bunch of kids or something wrong with you, right, yeah, But that's not the same as as like a mental illness, like like a bipolar or schizophrenia.
And again, people with those illnesses are much there's nothing in any psychiatric diagnosis where the symptom is attacking somebody else, So they're much more likely to get beat up themselves than to attack somebody else. There's nothing predictive about psychiatric diagnosis.
But I do have this theory.
I've never tested it, but I do feel like if we did policies that impacted the other kinds of shootings we've talked about that, I bet we would have fewer mass shootings. Other's if we made if we've made it much safer for domestic abuse and gun suicide and all these other if we just did that, I bet we would have less mass shooting as well. So that's really not a health decision, that's a political decision. I hope, I hope tomorrow the Supreme Court does the right thing.
But it's sad that that's that's how low the bar is that we're debating if somebody who's like beaten their spouse should have a weapon.
But that's kind of where we are.
Yeah, And it's you know, we've been covering the news stories every week and it's like I read it all the time. It's so scary because you can't even you can't. All you do is get this piece of paper that's a restraining order. Like that's that's really scary that you have to that anybody has to live like that you know what, So you have this book coming out in January, and are you working? So that's done obviously, you're just
kind of waiting for that to happen. My book came out last year, so it was like.
Oh great, I saw that. Yeah, I saw that.
That's great.
But what are you working when anything else? Or you're just kind of like chilling right now till the book comes out.
Well, I have two books.
So I had a book called Dying of Whiteness that came out in twenty nineteen, okay, and that's getting reissued in February. So there's a new version of Dying of Whiteness that's coming out, and the new book, the new book, What We've Become is also is coming.
Out in January. And then I don't know.
I want society to figure it out so I can write a book about like music or sports or something like. You know, I'm as tired as the next first said. So I hope we figured this out because I would like to write a cheerful look after this.
I know, right, it gets so depressing after a while. It's just like, but I mean, you're you're so pleasant to talk to, So thank you so much for coming on to Honor, where could anybody do you have a website or social media that people could follow you?
Yeah, I'm I'm I'm on It's Jonathanmeetzel dot com. J O N A t H A n M E t z l dot com has all my information there and then I'm usually a Twitter person, but for this interview, I I've just joined Instagram, so you can probably find me there because so so so yeah, but yeah, just on my website you can find all the stuff.
All right, Awesome, we'll put we'll link everything in the podcast and everything and on Instagram, so we'll definitely shout you out because we want people to check out your stuff. Great, Thanks so much for comming. Thanks so much, my honor.
Thank you, great conversation.
Thank you for listening to Mother nos Death as A's a reminder my training is as a pathologist's assistant. I have a master's level education and specialize in anatomy and pathology education. I am not a doctor and I have not diagnosed or treated anyone dead or alive without the
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