Shifting Perspectives

have is change. And yet those that are in power, those that have been elected as our representatives, or those unelected bodies like the Supreme Court, refuse to recognize the present and reconcile that with policies from the past. We just saw this week that the state of Arizona passed legislation from the eighteen hundreds to ban abortion. They're referring to a law that was in existence before women had the right to vote and before Arizona was even a

state when Lincoln was president. How do you look at laws from the eighteen hundreds and think that they will work in the twenty first century. What I realize more and more is that those that are in power are so stuck and stagnant without imagination and the ability to reconcile with the reality of our current present times. What

do I mean by that? I mean that you're looking at gun legislation, for instance, through the lens of a time and space in this country when AR fifteen's machine guns, bazookas, magazine clips didn't exist, where we didn't have police departments, where people lived miles in miles apart from one another. When those gun laws were created, America didn't have a population of three hundred and thirty million people. We didn't live inside of a country at that time when there

were more guns than there are people. So how does it make sense then that we continue to use the same lens from centuries ago on today? We use the racist lens right of the twentieth century and prior to dictate our future because we refuse to recognize that America is not a white Christian nation. It was founded by puritan zelots and founded I use that in quotation marks. It was ransacked, pillaged by right wing zelots that didn't want to pay taxes because they wanted the freedom to oppress.

That's the true story about the founding of America, right, And so I just realized that when you don't have the ability to change the systems in world around you. The best thing that you can do is begin to change yourself, to begin to open up the aperture to see things in a different way through the lens of today, and elect people who do the same. Because this stance of make America great again lacks the imagination, the innovation, and commitment that is actually going to continue to make

America one of the major powers in the world. We are at a critical tipping point in so many ways, and if we don't begin to shift our perspective and ask real questions about what does freedom look like, what does it taste like, what does it smell like? When we talk about gun reform, what do we mean, what kind of society, what type of country, what type of world do we want to live in? Let's get specific.

So in my conversation today with our dear friend after Jonathan Metzel, we get into the ways in which his book What We've Become is about recognizing that the path that gun reform activists have been on is not the right one, and it is okay to stop, reflect and pivot because staying the course when the course ain't right is just fucking dumb. And at this point dangerous. So the question is how do we shift perspective in order to create the reality that we all want. That conversation

is coming up next with our friend, doctor Jonathan in Metzel. Folks, you know that whenever I have the opportunity to sit down with our friend, our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, I am always pleased because each week we get into conversations about, you know, everything that is happening, what we are feeling, and trying to bring you some clarity in the crazy, in the chaos. So, Jonathan, how are you today? This week?

think the night people may be here. I can't remember when they hear this, but but that, And then I'm going to Louisville on Monday to talk about race and race and health in America, which I think will be cool. Then just a couple more stops it's been. It's been an amazing, amazing experience. Great to talk to people across the country. I've you know, it's been. It's been interesting to be on a book tour at this time of

the world. So we'll see, but I think, I think, you know, I need a little bit of a vacation.

every conversation has been really urgent. But you know, what I've been thinking about a lot is something that you said that I think, I think really stuck with me, which is when we were in the back room at green Light Books, and you said, because I said, this was a hard book to write, and it's a hard book to it's a hard book to message.

going to understand ten years from now. And it still kind of feels that way, Like I'm still it's so interesting. The book's been out now for a couple of months and I'm still like either defending the thesis or like that just weird things have happened with the with the message itself, that predictable stuff, was a lot of pushback from liberal gun control, like my colleagues in the liberal

world who didn't want to understand. What I still hold is the argument, which is we have to understand how we got here to understand like why we're in a particular predicament. But like here, here's my question for you. This is a kind of a long winded question. Like here's an example of one kind of reception, which is, there's a gun blog that this guy kind of defines. You know, here's what the books, here's all the gun books,

and here's what they're about. And he had like point by point on my book, and I was, you know, any publicity is good publicity. I was glad he read it. It was thoughtful that somebody was out there talking about it. But the point was, like on page ten, he uses the wrong term for a gun for a bullet, which is we don't say clips, we say you know, loads

or something like that. And then on page twenty he said AR fifteen and he means XM fifteen, like really paying attention to the terminology of you know, his specialty, which is guns. And so I understand people read for like kind of their own expertise. They want to make sure you got their thing right. But there was nothing in the entire critique about the fact that the book is actually about, Like race was not mentioned once in the entire critique, And so I understand, like you write

a book, you want to get it right. But it's weird when you have a book out there. Everybody sees like their one little part and they want to make sure you get their thing. But you kind of want to say, like, hey, how about the bigger argument. How about the bigger argument of the entire book, which is

not about that. So part of the question is, you know, that's what you do when you write a book, but it's interesting that everybody sees their one little part and not the bigger part, and that maybe that's a problem of me as the author.

it this way. Right, So we're having conversations and you know, we talk about democracy, we talk about health, we talk about guns, we talk about all of these different pieces, and I mean we as in like the greater we of progressis and democrats and we say, what is going to be the thing that draws people into this election? And so the abortion rights people are going to say it's abortion. The healthcare people are going to say it's the attack on Medicaid and medicare the you know, the

gun folks are going to say it's guns. Like so it's like, while everyone has their specialty, their focus, their area of concern, right, what is the bigger picture? And I think, to me your book, the bigger picture is because we have refused and continue to refuse to have real, critical, thoughtful,

engaging and hard excruciating conversations on race. And by we, I actually am talking specifically about white Americans refuse to have a conversation where they don't center themselves as the victims, like we don't get anywhere, right, and so like if everything everything in America has to do boils back down to race and racism, and because we refuse to address that very thing, we make up all these other stories

and narratives. When if you were to just tackle and it not like a just like it's so easy, but if you were to have honest conversations and critique about race and racism and how it shows up in any given moment policy, whether it's sports and what happened with the NC Double A and the women's game, and how the white team is being Iowa's being framed in the press versus the black led team of South Carolina, and

all of these things. We would be in a better place, but it's because we choose to ignore it, right and make it be about anything else, because we've told ourselves that conversations about and racism are too complicated.

what was interesting after this thing? So this guy posts he uses the wrong terminology on page twenty or something like that, and his audience is a bunch of people who really care about guns, Like that's really his audience. So it's great, I'm happy to talk to those people. But what happened then is none of those guys read the book. They were all like, yeah, this is another liberal guy who doesn't use our terminology and all this

kind of stuff. And then I'm getting bombarded with like all these gun owners who just saw their one piece, which is one guy realized on page twenty I used the wrong term for bullets, and in their world like then that became the metaphor, so they only so the guy who read the book only saw his little piece, which I think you're right, everybody's reading for their one piece. And then the people who then sought on social media,

they didn't even read the book. They were then riffing off of this guy's critique, which reinforced their own critiques of liberals not wanting to go there. So one guy, I feel misread the book, and then ten thousand other people went off of his misreading to then categorize me and rift back on me. And so again that's how our algorithms work. Now, the question I have is should

the gun guy have been reading for racism? In other words, was his blindness not saying racism or was it me as the author who didn't use.

you wrote it in that way. But if I choose quote unquote not to see race, then like, that's not the area that I'm going to dig into, right because these people, I believe, will make up an excuse about anything as to why that man that shot up all of those black people in a waffle house, like why like oh, well, you know, and just pull out some obscure shit as to why this wasn't about race, as to why it was just a madman. Oh he was just crazy. Oh it was just this, Oh it was

just that. Because they're not they're not willing and or equipped to do the heavy lifting around race and racism, so it is so much easier to excuse it, to make it be something else.

like the title of the book. And I'm like, first of all, I don't want to be the guy who wrote dying of Whiteness and then killing like I don't know, it's like I'll never get you know, I'll never that's like, you know, so I didn't want to be that guy. But I also, as you know from the book, there are a lot of things that are really complicated about race happening in the book. It wasn't just a story.

In other words, after the waffle house shooting happened, the story was hijacked by Sean King and other people I write about this in the book to say this is just overt racism. Shooter was racist. And what I argue in the book is there's a much more nuanced story about race and guns happening that's kind of why I want people to read the book, because the story isn't

just the shooter was racist. It's actually a much bigger story about what kind of bodies code as protectors and what kind of bodies code as criminals, About how somebody who codes as a protector, even if they're telling people they're going to be a mess shooter, the system rewards that particular body. So it's a much bigger story. So I didn't want it to be like some simplistic thing. I expressly didn't mention race in the title because I wanted people to like under see how the story unfolded.

And let me just say the point is, if I would have said, like, this is about gun racism, I would have sold a zillion more copies, because there are just like racism is its own way of reading also, and so it's also sometimes I feel like harder to complicate that story. And this isn't me complaining as an author. I'm just telling you what it's been interesting to see.

of all these things. So half the stories about the

story of the waffle House mass shooting. The other half of the story is about how that recognizing that that the story I was telling about whiteness and guns was too simplistic made me rethink a bunch of stuff about liberal gun control that liberal gun control similarly had a bunch of assumptions embedded about what our policies were meant to do, who we were trying to regulate, what it meant to involve the government, for example, all these other things.

So I started rethinking policies for example, like background checks that ask people to put their name in a government database, or red flag laws that invite the cops into your home to do a welfare check on your relatives. I started rethinking the race implications of who was being policed by gun control policies. It turns out a lot of

these policies were racialized in a very different way. They were actually targeting communities of color also because those were the people who were showing up on background checks more and other things like that. So I was trying to tell to interweave these two stories. It's a nightmare. I should have written a book about puppies like I started

out to do. But I will say it's interesting for me when I go on tour, which one of those two stories people pick up on, And I guess it's just been interesting that either people resonate with the story of the waffle house shooting or they bring me to task for critiquing liberal gun control. But it's I don't know the books about both, and I always want to say the books about both. So I'm glad I didn't say this is a book about gun racism because I

want people to think about it. But I do agree that it takes ten years from now somebody's going to pick it up and be like, hey, wait a minute.

whatever system. I think that the reason why we can't attack Trumpism for what it is, and the reason why we falter on a lot of issues, is because we're not interested in making the pivots in action to match the time and to match the energy that the opposition is giving us. Right like, we keep trying to appeal to people's moral center, We keep trying to appeal to well,

history will remember you. We keep trying to like do these things, and what you're offering is a big pause to say, actually, you know, we've been doing this for some decades now, and you know, while we can continue to say we need red flag laws and we need these things, we know that that's not actually going to change the outcome of a lot of the violence that

we are seeing. So what they want to do is nibble around the edges and say, well, at least if we get some win, that's better than no win at all. And your perspective is like, what actually, like, we're wasting time and energy because we could shift a conversation and a narrative that gets us actually what we want instead of a little bit of what doesn't even matter.

I knew the minute I started researching the shooting. I was like, oh man, this is going to take me someplace that's going to actually challenge what I thought I knew and what's the role of that. I mean, on the one hand, you can see why there's a good reason to not challenge those narratives. Right we live in a zero sum, winner take all electoral system. The algorithms of social media reinforce a kind of conformity. And if you're saying, like gosh, I thought differently about this, that

just not monetized in our social media world. There's a million reasons. I mean, you don't want to judge or a politician who gets in office and then says, man, I totally changed my mind about like this key issue, Like we live in a world where not rethinking those So I understand that it's a challenge, but ultimately that was what made this book for me honestly rewarding, was that I ended up at least trying to say, like, let's take a look at what we've got here. And

also the stakes of not questioning that. Like for guns, for example, they're incredible people doing incredible work. I support them, I'm one of them, but I would also say, like, if you're here in Tennessee, we're getting our butts kicked right and left about every gun bill. The Supreme Court overturned New York's gun laws. The Supreme Court is about to,

I think, legalize bump stocks. Like you can't say that we're winning right now, and so part of what I'm trying to say is you have to understand like kind of how we got here, to think about how we can maybe tweak our strategy a little bit. And the story is incredible, but you know, I think you're right. Maybe ten years from now people will be like, hey, that guy, that guy who was saying it before.

I think that you're looking at this and saying, what do we really want? Yes, And I think that and I think that too often we don't stop and say, you know, oh, we're fighting for freedom, we're fighting for this, that and the other thing. What the fuck does that actually look like? What do you actually want? You know, when we're saying gun safety, when we're saying these things like what what does that feel and look like for us? For our kids to shop, to go to school, to live,

to exist? Yeah, And I think that what you're offering is like the head tilt and the perspective to say, oh, maybe we need to look at the picture this way.

We shouldn't have injury and death. But if you're against an adversary whose aim is power, who doesn't really care about prevention at all, but they're using guns to control the courts and control you and overturn New York gun laws and overturn all these other things that aren't linked to guns, like pro gun judges are now deciding all these First Amendment cases and women's reproductive choice cases and

all these things. So if you're up against an adversary whose aim is power, the health framework is not going to be useful. And that's kind of the message for me, is that if you look, for example, at the Brewined decision, we made all these health arguments and this report was like, yeah, we don't care. And so in a way, we had the right strategy if people were everybody was operating like they did with cigarettes and cars, as if saving life

was the most important thing. But if you're up against an adversary whose aim as power, you actually need a power strategy, and the health framework doesn't get us there. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to say, is we we have the wrong strategy for the adversary we we're up against.

It's kind of like that Gary Larson cartoon where the dog only hears her name and not the million other things the dog owner is saying or something like. We all read through our own lens, right, That's how we read. And so it's it's interesting to be an author right now who's challenging those things an interesting way.