More Guns, More Shootings

are gathered with friends and family and chosen family. You know, I use it as a day to really just have gratitude. Right. It is not about the founding of this nation, is not about the fucking Pilgrims. It is not about the mass genocide that was visited upon the indigenous population of this country. For me and for my loved ones, it is about an opportunity for us to gather together, for us to share some food, make some food, eat too much, laugh really hard, drink too much, and just enjoy each

other's time. This Thanksgiving holiday, like so many that have come before it, have been marred by headlines that are visited upon us with regard to mass shootings. And the fact that around many people's tables, they're loved ones won't be sitting, their loved ones, won't be laughing, their loved ones won't be arguing about who needs to wash the dishes and who needs to set the kids table. No,

they're dead. They're dead because they decided to, you know, go to the grocery store, or go to the movies, or you know, go to a queer club to feel in community with other queer people, or did you just have a good time. They're dead because they decided to go to school that day. The arbitrary nature of mass shootings in this country, meaning that they can happen anywhere and at any time, has us all just living on edge, right, Like,

there's no better way to say it, you know. Jonathan and our conversation, he will talk about the habitualness of our practice in terms of moving through these stages of grief and rage that we vacillate between on a day to day basis, and how it has just become a norm, a part of how we exist in this country because there's no end to it. You know. Jonathan often talks about the fact that liberals and progressives need to reframe their message and reframe their messaging. And my thought is

that it isn't necessary like in this particular instance. You know that I talk about messaging a lot when I talk about electoral politics. This issue isn't about the messaging. It's about who's in power, right, It is about who wields the power. Because every sensible person with a brain in their head knows that AR fifteens shouldn't be readily available to civilians for fucking what, what are you hunting that you need an AAR fifteen four? Not a goddamn thing.

It was a gun that was made for war, right, So why does that need to be a part of your fucking stockpile? And if it is, you should definitely be on somebody's fucking list, right, somebody that's you know, is being surveiled as being watched for their potential for fucking violence. But we don't do that, right because that would be encroaching on people's freedoms freedom to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.

Every sensible person knows that you should have a waiting period, you should have rigorous background checks. There should be an age requirement in every fucking state, that is nationalized, that you need to go through a series of background checks, you need to go through safety training, You need to then get re certified every year in order to keep

right your weapons. If you have any types of infraction, whether they be domestic violence, whether it be any type of violent incident, that then your guns are taken away.

You should be in mass databases right that if you have a weapon in your home, you should have to put up a sticker that says, so you know, one of the things that I did see over the Thanksgiving holiday, And again, I don't know if this is just something that is happening in New York, and I probably believe that it is because of a Supreme Court decision that overturned New York's ability to ban assault rifles right, which

had been a hundred year old ban. But you know, the Supreme Court, they don't give a fuck about precedent, and they don't give a fuck about American constituents, citizens and our safety or anything. They care about power, right,

they care about owning the libs. But there was a commercial that was airing and it was parents, white parents dropping their kid off for a play date, and they're asking sore heterosexual couple is at the door and another white heterosexual couple answers the door, and they say, hey, you know, just quick question, is the tiger going to be on a leash for the entire time that you

know Johnny is going to be overplaying? You know, just want to make sure that everybody's going to be safe, because they are equating in this commercial a you know, lion, a non domesticated animal being loose in the home as the same thing as having an unlocked gun in the home. And it is a commercial about people asking right and needing to ask the question do you have a gun in your home? And if you do, is the gun

locked up? Right? Because I don't want my fucking kid being dropped off at a place someone's home where they have a bunch of guns and guess what, none of them are locked up, And so there is access that is granted to young kids, which, by the way, according to this PSA commercial, gun violence is the number one killer of kids now, right, So asking these questions and feeling like you have the ability to ask these questions

as parents are really fucking important. But going back to my earlier statements is that everyone knows everyone believes if you want to own a gun, own a fucking gun, but it should be a normal gun, not a weapon

of mass destruction. And it should be registered, and you should have had to go through safety training, and it should be locked up, and it should be registered, and you should be of a certain age and having to have gone through a series of background checks to make sure that you are not a violent person, Like you should have to prove those fucking things in order to be able to get a gun that can kill someone, right, Like, this is not rocket science, but the powers that be,

the people that are in power, want to make it seem as if we're crazy for asking for these things, and that it is normal to wake up every morning and to see a headline of five people gunned down, six people gunned down, nineteen people gunned down, fifty people gunned down. That that's just how we should live. That's

the cost of freedom. It doesn't feel very free. So coming up next my conversation with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, where he will talk about his upcoming book book that he used writing about gun violence and why it was denied from thirty five publishers. Given this great success of his previous book, Dying of Whiteness, and what it is that we all need to be doing

and paying attention to right now. Folks. You know that whenever we have the opportunity to speak with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzil, we are always pleased, sometimes depressed when we finished, But you know, it's important to

have these conversations. Jonathan. You know I thought about you a lot over the Thanksgiving holiday because it seemed like there were multiple mass shootings that happened leading up to the holiday that happened over the holiday, and it is as if I am struggling with the ability to stay

enraged with headlines that just keep coming. Now what feels like just on a regular basis, I think that the last stat that I heard, and you correct me if I'm wrong, which is that we are at what November, the end of November, barreling towards the end of the year, and we've had in this country over six hundred mass shootings. More mass shootings have taken place than have days in

the calendar year thus far. So I just want to get your thoughts on the number of shootings that have happened over the last week or so and let what do you think is happening? Are we covering it more? Are there more shootings? Is it just like par for the course? What is happening? Well, you're first year exactly right that there has been more than one. If you define, as many scholars do, a mass shooting is for or

victims shot usually strangers. There have been over six hundred in the US this year, so quite a bit more than one per calendar day. The number I mean, if it's just you turn open the news any day and they were going to be a couple of mass shootings. We didn't used to count mass shootings, used to be just the high profile kind of things that we've been seeing.

Over the past couple of weeks, we started counting all the multiple victim shootings, which we should have been doing from the beginning, and it turned out that there are a lot of multiple victim shootings that don't make it to the news because they're like in urban areas and

stuff like that. And so when you start adding it up, the toll is not just the carnage that we see in suburbia, which is horrible and in places where it's arresting, but there's also a toll in I mean, really, the true toll of mass shootings are the ones that don't make it to the news, right, The true toll of mass shootings and gun violence happened in like inner cities and that kind of thing. And I think for me, you know, when you start adding up just the overall

toll on an aggregate, it's it's breathtaking. It's really breathtaking. Yeah, as you know, I'm kind of in the middle of this, and so, like many gun scholars, I spent a good part of my Thanksgiving going on the news and trying to explain. For the US news, it was kind of

trying to give perspective. And the minute the minute we started, the minute we started getting some perspective about about the Colorado shooting, then there was the Walmart shooting, on and on, and so it's kind of like, where are we going? What's the plan here? And it just feels like there's so much anger and anguish and as you're right, you're right that the next day there's going to be another headline.

And even the Colorado shooting, which even five years ago would have been a national headline for months, was replaced by another mass shooting the very next day. And so the level of helplessness about this issue is just so frustrating. I mean, we're gonna shatter the record that this year, I think for gun deaths in a year, which was about forty two thousand. Looks like we're on pace for more than that. And it just becomes habituated in a way.

And so I don't know. For me, I care about the mass shootings, which is what everybody hears about, but I also care just about the role of guns in everyday life. And there was an article in the Washington Post about guns showing up at protests and what does that say for just the potential for violence, not just the shootings we see, but whatever civic discourse we have left. And so it's a it's a problem that's only getting worse. And on the other hand, I'll just say, and excuse

me for going on long about this. Yeah, but the book I'm writing now is about mass shootings in America and looking at race and mass shootings. And not to do any sour grapes, but my last book won a bunch of awards. It's sold quite more than one hundred thousand copies. It did very well, and I couldn't find a publisher for my book about mass shootings, because every

single publisher I went to. Now I have a home, thankfully, but every publisher I went to told me there's no market for gun books because nobody wants to think about this. And I'm about to prove them wrong the book I'm writing now. But I you know, I don't know. I wrote Dying of Whiteness. It won all these awards, and then I had like thirty five rejections in a row

when I wanted to write a book about guns. And so it's just like people feel like, oh, everybody's tuned out about it, and that's you know, to me, I don't believe that, But that's kind of the world written. What is next? I mean, that's kind of that's really shocking to me, the response from publishers that nobody's interested in it when it is something that has permeated did our everyday existence. There's not a day that goes by

that we aren't inundated with gun violence. And so was that like just the blanket response or that they don't

want to touch it for whatever other political reasons. They've tried selling gun books in the past and they just don't sell because half the country won't buy them because they think that it's like liberal take your gun book, and so Republicans automatically won't buy it by the framing of other gun books, and then they think liberals already feel like they know everything they know about it and they don't need to learn anymore. And so you're kind

of killing the audience before you get in there. You know me, I'm a complicated person, and I'm like, I'm about to overturn that. But even now, it's like a daily fight just to explain why I think it's important. I keep saying, like this is a story on the front page of the newspaper every single day or every day. You just have to tap into the complexity of it, not tell people what they think they already know. And so I'm hoping I'm writing one that's a bit more challenging,

but we'll have to see. I mean, if nothing else, you and I will be talking about you know, I'll be happy to talk about it, yea. You know, one of the things that I do want to touch upon in this conversation again, and I you know, obviously at the core the issue is access to guns, right, Like we know that that that's the problem. There are too many guns in America. Access to guns, it's just way

too easy to get one, so on and so forth. However, with the past several shootings that we have talked about, that you and I have talked about on Woke Gay app from Buffalo. It was a white supremacist with a map with a manifesto in in Colorado. It is anti gay rhetoric. And you know, unfortunately we heard from or as people made this man viral, the father of the shooter, who was more concerned with his son not being gay than it was that he committed an act of absolute

depraved violence, killing several people at that club. Then you have, you know, threats of anti Semitic violence, and so on and so forth. It seems to me, Jonathan, that the last several high profile shootings, the ones again that we see on the headlines that are gracing the cable news segments, are ones that are spawning from hate. They're not just your quote unquote average every day domestic dispute, your average every day you know, gang territory or things of that nature.

These are actually spawning from hate of particular groups. At a time when political violence and anti gay anti Black, anti Jewish, all of these things are at an all time high. Can you talk about that and the root the causation right outside of the access to guns being prevalent in this country unlike anywhere else in the world, talk about the root that the patterns that we are seeing in terms of the who are the victims and

who are the perpetrators of this gun violence? Well, I would say one important point to note is that is that just the very first part of your question, there are many more everyday shootings. Right. So the finding we've had in public health for the past forty years is the more guns, the more shootings. It's probably one of the most contested findings in the history of America because that everybody then said, oh, there are anti guy and

all this kind of stuff. But so we just have a lot of guns in households, and so the first part of your question is there are a lot of shootings we don't hear about, right. Those are the ones that are the partner shootings and guns suicides and accidental shootings. There's a lot more of all of that. We're just not hearing about it right now. And so it's important to note that what we're seeing is a very particular sample bias in a particular way of much bigger category

of gun violence. Now that being said, it does seem to me like when you add guns to any situation, you're providing an outlet for the kind of hate that's being validated right now. And so there is, of course, as we talked about last week, a real validation for anti gay hate, anti trans hate, anti semitism, and guns become almost a character in those narratives of I have this intense emotion, it's being validated by society, and here's a tool that's going to let me happen address that.

And then people who used to be what we would call like the most on the fringe, but now I don't know. We've got Mike Lindel running for them, Speaker of the House, m and outhkeepers stockpiling weapons for you know, for January six and all the kind of stuff. So what is the fringe? The fringe is kind of moving like algae toward the middle right now, yea and so and so. But but again, when you add guns to this mix, you're providing an outlet for this kind of extremism.

You know, I what I struggle with and it's really you know what I am struggling with and I and I said this at the top, is the ability to sustain outrage? Is the ability to sustain grief? Right, um, Because at this point it's just so rampant that you'll if you think about these things on a regular basis in the way that we do, you won't want to leave your house. And So when you're writing this book right now, Jonathan, what is the emotion that you are

looking to conjure in the reader. Is it one that is just informative, this is what you need to understand in a historical context and how we got to where we are, or is it like this feeling of rage, of anger, or of grief and sadness about where we are in terms of our gun predicament. So my title for the book, which is now being rejected by the publisher, this is sour Grape, say I apologize? Is how We Lost? That was the working title of the book, and it's kind of a story of how a miracle lost the

gun debate. They think that nobody's going to buy a book with lost in the title because it's too much of a downer. And I'm like, the whole topic is a downer. So I'm trying to tell people, like how we got to this point, which is in part a story about conservative America, but it's also a story about

a liberal America. And they want to change the title to like, you know, a doctor at the front lines of Yak a yak, yak yak, And I'm like, man, nobody, let's tap into the emotion that people are having right now. And so I'm just trying to explain how we got here, honestly, and I think people will be surprised to know it's not just an in our a story, it's also missteps by liberal America. Liberal America is has for the past

forty years. What I argue in the book, it's put its faith in public health, which is what we do now, which is that we only have a narrative after the shooting. We don't go further upstream to talk about the judges and the political system and the rigged elections. We have no strategy for that when it came to guns for decades,

and we're paying the price for it now. And so I'm trying to kind of tell a story that is also about liberal America understanding how we got here and it'll probably by the time it comes out, be titled like Sunny Paris and Springtime or something like that. For anybody out there, Man, don't write a book. It ruins your life. But I would say that I would say that that's the story I'm trying to tell, is liberal

America understand Like how the hell we got here? Which is the kind of the story that I try to tell, that the answer was in front of us all along. We just we got into this pattern of mass shooting, then calling for public health based gun reform, then nothing happens, Rince repeat. That's kind of the story of the book. And and and so it really is a book about liberal America needing to change its tactics and when it comes to guns, to understand the upstream politics of judges

and capital and all these other factors. And so I think how we lost to me as a catchy title, but it'll probably be like Puppies in your Bed? Yeah,

and can we can we win? Yeah? You know, because I think that one of the things that I have realized that I've noticed, I should say not realized, that I've noticed over the last um last several shootings is that doctors are going on to talk about gun violence in the United States as a public health crisis in the way that we frame the pandemic, in the way

that we have framed other issues. And I wonder, is that Jonathan just too little, too late, or it does does that conversation in and of itself how we understand public health which again now with COVID and republic and because of Republicans and their apprehension of you know, wanting to have their constituent live um, public health has become

something that is highly politicized. So does it even help or does it continue to hurt this issue get the kind attraction that it needs by couching it in this way. It's it's it's great as a fifth tier strategy, it's ridiculous as a political strategy. I mean, I know there's a lot of people like me who spent our careers focusing on it. But I think we have to admit that what we're doing is not working. And so I think it's a horrible political strategy. Um, you know, we

need to we need to reboot the whole thing. So that's my sense. But is it but is it a horrible strategy? Because like, here's the thing, because this is the reality, Jonathan. It's not working because the people that are in power don't want it to work. Exactly right, it's not it's not because how the how it's and this is this is I think where where I end

up wanting to throw my hands up. And I'm grateful for the fact of people like yourself that don't throw their hands up, that keep trying to find different ways, different avenues, different footholds to kind of get in. But it's it isn't about so much the framing around gun violence as is that everyone knows that you shouldn't be able to access in AAR fifteen. Everyone knows that, like you should have longer waiting periods and background checks and all of these laws that are in place to make

accessing guns safe. Like we know all of this, but the people that are in power don't care. And so is it that you just need to frame the villains for who the villains are instead of trying to convince people of what they already know, which is that these are weapons of mass destruction. They cause so much harm. They have us living on edge and fear for our lives, going to the grocery store, going to school, basically disrupting

our ability to have and live normal lives. And so is it just that we need to frame the conversation around the villains, because no, the logic that we're offering isn't going to permeate people that are choosing to be willfully ignorant. Well, my argument, and we'll see if it works in my argument in my forthcoming book, Puppies in the Springtime, is that is that public health provides a framework, a moral framework. It provides a framework of common sense,

but it doesn't provide a framework of power. Right, And so you said it exactly in your question, which is which is that all of the common sense in the world will not impact the law if you don't also have a strategy for power, which means figuring out how to win elections and seek judges. And public health doesn't bring any of that. And so part of kind of what I'm going to argue is you also need a theory of power, because the other side has a very

developed theory of power. And so we're arguing in a way you're you're doing framing a resistance movement. Um but um but and you know, we'll see, we'll see where

this goes. I mean, I've got four hundred pages to make this claim, but I would just say that without attention to like how you win elections or how you see judges, or how you raise funds or how you bring in donors beyond Mike Bloomberg, you're always going to be protesting because the other side has a very developed theory of power, which is very good at suppressing the will of the people. And so we're always in this position of like protesting against mass shootings when really we're

not going farther upstream. That's my personal feeling. And we'll see how how it goes, and so um in my forthcoming book I Love Balloons, I will just be saying that that, you know, we'll see how it goes. But I just think it's time to start thinking hard about like how we how we reboot this. Maybe you should just change the title of the book to power and then have your subtitle, because if that's what, if that's

what it's about, that's a different conversation. It isn't about talking specifically about gun control and legislation, and it's about it's a conversation around power, who has it and who doesn't, which times into race and everything and all and all of and all of those things. UM, last question for you, Jonathan on this uh for for today? UH is you know, for people who are feeling increasingly powerless, UM, who are waking up every day and are exhausted by the headlines,

are just they're exhausted by their grief. They're exhausted by this sadness. Like what do you offer to those people? What do you offer to your students that come in and they're just like so again, like we're doing this again. You know, there's a shooting on a Monday, there's a shooting on a Friday. I don't even know which hashtag I'm using because you know, to to air my grievances because I can't keep pace with the violence that's happening. Well,

I mean there is, there are. I mean, it's it's so hard rate because we're doing what people in war zones do, which is we habituate trauma in order to move on with our lives. So we're doing what we do what people with war zone people do, and that's really a human defense mechanism that people who are faced with this kind of situation that we're faced with now. But but it's important it also that it's not the same for everybody that I'm on Vanderbilt's campus here in

New York. If you're living in South Chicago right now, your risk is just considerably higher than any location that we're in. And so I just personally feel like I just personally feel like nobody's safe until everybody is safe.

And I think we really need to mobilize to build a really broad based coalition that brings together everybody who's at risk of gunfire and not have it be just after mass shootings in places that we can and recognize, which are horrible and horrible, horrible, horrible, But until we build this broad movement that treats every gun violence victim the same, I just think there's power in the numbers we have, we just don't use them. Yeah, well, we'll

leave it there for today. Doctor Jonathan Metzel, thank you as always for bringing perspective and your time and analysis to woke F And one of these days we're going to talk about a cheerful topic. I don't know what day that's going to because we've been doing this for three unclear, but you know, here's open. Yeah, all right, Hi guys, thank you. That is it. For me today, Dear friends on Woke f as always, power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.