What We've Become LIVE

it was amazing. First of all, I want to shout out the hardcore, wonderful WOKF fans that came out to support myself and to support Jonathan and his book. It was so great to like meet real people in person.

I said to a couple of people that I oftentimes feel like I'm just like recording into an abyss right like I work from home, I record with guests, you know, via remote And so to know that the show is impacting people, that it is helping people through dark times, that folks not only listen to WOKF but apparently do an overdose of me and listen to all three pods is just like I can't express to you all how

much that means to me. And to be able to put you know, comment section names to faces was really beautiful and really truly truly meaning, and so I just wanted to thank those folks that came from near and far places like Yonkers. Shout out also to Holly who asked me, who got permission from Jonathan for me to be able to sign Jonathan's book next to Jonathan's signature, which was really a treat for me as well. So

I just wanted to say that. And so this episode that you're going to be listening to today was recorded at green Light Bookstore with a live audience, which was just again such an amazing treat. I also encourage folks, if you are what is the term bibliophile like I am, and you are drowning in books, to make sure that you support independent bookstores and booksellers if in when you can, because they're really important, right and they get gobbled up

by the Amazon's, you know, and the big corporations. So this conversation you will hear is on our friend, doctor Jonathan Metzel's new book, What We've Become, and it is out now. So I tell folks to go and pick it up, gift it to folks, share it with folks, start a book club, do all of those things to help us support Jonathan. And you will also hear our conversation as well as questions that were posed from the audience. So I hope that you guys enjoy this special episode

of WOKF. Like Jonathan said, we've been in conversation for the last four years, right, which is hard to believe that you can speak to somebody every week and have not seen them in person in four years. But one of the things that I have appreciated about Jonathan and the conversations that we've been able to have on wok F is how honesty is about the fact that look, and this is going to shock everyone. I don't think

we're getting it right. So maybe we should pivot and not double and triple down, which is what our politicians are doing right now. Maybe he's saying we're looking at public health and I was one of those people who said this is a public health crisis. I'm not a doctor,

but I could see it. I'm like, you're looking. When you look and you say that the number one thing that is killing kids is not cancer, it is not you know, blood disease, it's not diving, it's not heart attacks, it's guns, right, And so when you think about that, you would say that any normal quote unquote civilized society wouldn't want their kids turned into Swiss cheese on a regular basis and that be a normal part of their lives. So we said, well, we need to pull out the

heart strengths. And that's what I think that the public health epidemic started out as. But the question that I have for you to start than is why don't you think that the pulling at the heartstrings narrative that democrats have been trying to do and doctors have been trying to do has taken hold in the way that we thought that it would.

long answer. The long answer is that there was a playbook that was in place in the nineteen nineties when all of this happened, and the playbook was what does public health do. Public health is really good at getting health data on the injuries and deaths caused by commercial products. It's good at making policies that can circumvent those negative health negative health effects. And then it's good at kind of bringing corporations and you know, industries to their knees

by liability lawsuits. Now, if that sounds familiar, that worked for cigarettes, that worked for asbestos, that worked for cars and seat belts. So that was the playbook we tried, and in the nineties it made absolute sense. We're going to do this thing. We're going to do this same thing for guns, because guns, you know, consumer product killing people, industry right for you know, those kind of attacks. But the problem was guns are totally different cultural and social

and political symbols. Number one, they are imbued with the history of race and privilege in this country. They are also imbued with regionalism. Right, Southern guns means something different from northern guns. So part number one is we thought a particular playbook was going to work, and that's kind of what I show in the nineties, we thought, oh, we're just going to cigarette these guys into mission. Now.

The problem with that is gun makers are protected from liability, and they're also tied into a particular history of power

and privilege that people aren't going to give up. And so while everybody all over the country has an ant that got lung cancer from smoking, or doesn't like to go into a to a restaurant and he smells second at simok, or know somebody who got into a car wreck, that wasn't true for guns, right, guns that you had conservative gun owners in the South, and the people who were making the policies were people like liberals, very often

liberals from blue states, because only blue state universities could afford because gun research wasn't very profitable, so only the Harvard UCLA, Johns Hopkins other places. So it was a lot of liberals making policy that was then going to be imposed on Southern, conservative white people. And so that's different cigarettes, where everybody has the same relationship to it.

And so what I show in the book is that was a structural imbalance that just made it way too easy for the NA to be like, these liberals are coming in and they say what we're doing is common sense. They're telling you you have no common sense, and they're just like, in a way, we made it too easy for them by using this very paternal model that was also incredibly aligned with red state blue state politics.

that our opposition is actually going after power. Donald Trump, with the help of Mitch McConnell during the Trump administration, elected more federal judges than any other first term president at that time, and that was purposeful. It was purposeful for Roe, and it's purposeful for guns and all of the other things that they want to do. When you're telling people to make the shift between public health, the moral we're good and power, what are you seeing as the pushback to that shift?

But imagine one political side is saying, I'll just summarize the Democrats message, we want we want communal safety, and how we're going to get that is we're going to have a federal government database and you have to enter your name into that federal government database every time you purchase a gun. And if somebody is looking like they're a little cuckoo, we are going to then empower the police to come to a welfare check on your family, and if the person has seemed to be odd, then

you take them in front of a judge. So that's what we're saying when we say we want background checks and red flag laws, and we also say that is common sense. To me, again, it's common sense. I personally do not like guns at all. I really don't like guns, So I think that's great for me, and I believe in blah blah blah. But the other side, imagine you're like somebody in the South. The other side is saying your guns are your power, and I'm going to let you keep your guns, and I'm going to let you

keep your power. In fact, there shouldn't be any regulations on you whatsoever. So one side is the Biden platform, the other side is the Trump platform. Which one do you think people are going to gravitate toward more? And so part of the reason is this is what I'm saying, is not a surprise. Right, We've been seeing this play out for a long time, except that there's a mass shooting and we rush in and say it's common sense, it's common sense, and we don't understand why half the

country doesn't agree with us. And this is what I'm trying to explain, which is the half the country doesn't agree with us because what they hear is government regulation and you're going to put regulations on my power. And the other thing they hear is the bad guys have guns,

so why shouldn't we. And that's another important part of the narrative because if you think about the things that gun I'm just going to say a gun gun control for shorthand, even though I don't really like that term, but gun control is background checks at point of sale purchase, when you buy a gun, that's when you background check, assault weapons ban, if you have to be registered, safety lucks. These are all things for legal gun owners, like registered gunowners.

But what they say is that doesn't do anything for crime because the criminals have guns, so we want guns or something like that. So there's all these these reasons why I guess the point I'm trying to make is public health is not common sense. In where I live and people you know, when I'm here, it seems total

common sense. But part of what you can hear what I'm saying is we have these moments of rupture, and sometimes the moments of rupture are after mass shootings, when it's like, oh my god, how come they cannot see that. Another time, for example, is in the pandemic. Right, yeah, yeah, the pandemic, public health comes in, But the gun debate had already That's another thing I should in the book.

The gun debate had already set the stage for the pandemic, mistrust of government, regulation, public health, all those kinds of things. So the pandemic is a huge player in the book. And again this is not to say that I don't believe in gun laws. I do. But what I argue in the book is we had a strategy for health, but we needed in this debate, we needed a strategy for power. Right. We should have had our own federalist society,

We should have had our list of own judges. We actually should have thought beyond health regulations to think about communal structural incentives, what I talk about in the book. So in this one case, the health and you know, maybe fifteen years ago, if we would have had liability for guns, they would have been a different thing. But that wasn't happening. They're protected by Congress. You can't sue a gun manufacturer for the way you if your blunder

kills somebody, and so it's just it's a lot. But I think in a way, what I'm trying to explain is people wonder like, how do we get here? And that's part of what I think the story of the shooting shows.

that that that there is a mass shooter. We wanted to appeal, I think, to people's common sense in that way, but to their heartstrings. And at the end of the day, it was this idea that democrats, which they consistently fail at, which is power, which is saying no, it's the judges that make the policy. It's the judge, because the judges are the ones that are passing and saying, you know, we live in Tennessee. Your gun is your right and

that's it. And for a country where you have a man like Trump, a white man that is feeding into this narrative that they're taking everything away from you. They've taken your jobs, they've taken your home right, it's all take, take, take, and now they want to take your gun. This conversation

about power is inextricably tied to race. Is there a way for us to part and parcel it, like you offer solutions and ideas, But this is more so The book is about like a conversation switch, a narrative switch. And this is something that Democrats are desperately bad at, which is the narrative switch. But here you're saying, look, the conversation was never about public health. The conversation is about power. Donald Trump appeals to their need to hold

on to power. What does Biden say to that? What do Democrats say to that? In nine months?

for a long period of time. Mothers gave their lives to this issue. So I'm not trying to say everything sucks. What I am trying to say is it's interesting if you talk to a lot of conservatives and liberals about this issue, which I've done for now over a decade, and liberals will say, you know, they will talk in moral terms, which is a moral issue. It is a

very moral issue for a lot of people. But even like like I remember it was when I was interfering people for dying of whiteness, and it was like twenty something or other, like before anybody, and there was really sick guys I was interviewing and I'd be like, hey,

do you want your own healthcare? And he's like, well, no, I don't want to get signed up because if I sign up for this and this program stays, my side will get addicted to this program and then we're going to lose, and the most important thing for me really isn't my own life. It's that we control the Supreme Court to overturn row and have the Second Amendment be nationalized.

Like the people at the very bottom understood that the bigger project was control, and I mean that is like I mean, people in like low income housing communities, white men were telling me this. So top to bottom people, I think understand that what they're doing has real power implications.

And that's why it makes sense that I mean, how many, I mean, maybe the one protest I can think about is the one remember when the governor of Virginia he got elected, Ralph whatever, his name was, the doctor Orton whatever, and he said we're going to do tight gun laws, and all these gun guys came out and they had a huge rally in the Virginia state Capitol or something like that. But largely Democrats are protesting. We all protested after my shootings, as we should have. But Republicans are

like playing the power game. They are like yeah, and so for them it's about that, it's like using those marches, and so for them, the strategy is the power of guns is in the courts, and that's what I write about the gun movement that the gun safety movement gave us many many important things, but it did not give us judges. That's kind of one of the core arguments. And without judges, it's we're at the whim of opinion,

which I think is scary, and it's scary now. But as you see what I was saying in the time piece today, it's really scary if you think about what the Supreme courts look like with guns if Trump wins in other term. And so for me right now, shifting this is a long way of saying, what do we do about it? I had a piece in having to post last week that I thought were the five pivot

points I thought Democrats should make. I've been getting a lot of grief from my liberal friends about it, but I said, there are ways you can make gun safety more material. Now. I don't think we're going to change the minds of the most hardcore people, but I do think the election is going to come down to purple, swing state voters, and so those are the people I'm

trying to target. The five points in my plan, if I can remember them, one is what's called gun entrepreneurialism, tie gun safety, to capitalism in much more overt ways. And there are really clear ways you can do that with AI, with smart guns, in collaboration with building communities, commerce, all these things. So one is tie gun safety to commerce, make it economically viable. Second is, for these voters, you have to do a better job talking about crime than

we do. We often try to talk them out of crime by saying, well, gun safety laws, there's more crime in red states than blue states, and gun you know everybody, There actually isn't a ton of research that shows that, for example, background checks lower homicide. There actually isn't because they're not designed for that. And so we need a

better narrative for crime. Not that I think I need it personally, but I think for these particular voters, talking about guns and crime is not self evident and they feel like they're talked down to if you just tell them, well, if you just had gun control the way New York did. And so two is crime. Three is be wary of who you're talking to about government regulations. Government regulations are

really poison for a lot of people. So background checks is it's a federal database, right, So just telling everybody we need background checks, it doesn't work on particular audiences, and I'm trying to remember a winning is not just we're going to win and we're going to make everybody do background checks. Winning is actually trying to upend the

gun debate and trying to find common cause. And there's some fifth one that I'll think of it in a second, but it's really like, it's not just rechain framing the narrative,

it's actually reimagining, reimagining what we're doing. I think it had to do with the building safe, safe neighborhoods, like what kind of investments in neighborhood There's a lot of literature out there that is from like South Chicago that says, you know, if you fix the street lights and build parks and fix the internet and all these things, that actually gun crime goes down. And so for me, that's a nationalizable model that if you actually invest in local

communities in material ways that people see. So none of that is about regulations or mandates. It's all about like material things that have different kinds of alliances.

Oh he's a billionaire. He is enticing because he gives them this power, this long lost power of whiteness that they want to reclaim that liberals told them right, push them back to the corners and said this is bad. You're bad. You need to make more space. And that's what they heard, and then Trump reinforced it. And so those pivot points are not about telling people it's common sense. Are not about saying background checks are going to save us.

It is so much more than that. The last question I have for you, because we going to have questions from all of you, Jonathan, is what do you hope that people take from your book? What do you want them to walk away with? This book took you so many years to write, It was difficult for you to write, and you're getting, you know, people pushing back against you, your colleagues and friends. What do you hope that people take away from it?

so quickly. What happens when we slow it down and tell one story? This is what we lose these stories. Second, I'm Glad Norton talking to me out of it. But the initial title was going to be how we lost, and it is about I do feel like in some ways my side lost the gun debate. I'll just be really honest about that. We won the popular opinion debate.

But over the course of writing this book five years, we went from two states that had open carrie to twenty eight twenty eight states about to have open carry, which is unimaginable. For we just in October passed five hundred million guns in circulation, and the rates of death go up every year and so and we have a lot of friends. My friend Mike's here on the front

were from Michigan. We have a lot of friends who because of the gun policies are shifting from being Democrats to being Republicans in a way, so we're winning in some ways, right, we have won. This is an argument I had with Morning Joe at four am their day because he's like, well, ninety percent of people support background checks, and I'm like, yeah, but ninety percent of people don't vote based on background checks. You know, one hundred percent

of gun rights people vote because of guns. But people will tell you on to poll they support background checks, but that doesn't mean they're going to vote out a politician who doesn't support background checks. And so the second part is people understand like where we're at because I think the stakes are really really high. And then I guess the third is kind of personal, which is this is the TM portion. But this was just a really hard book to get published. Honestly, my last book, Dying

of Whiteness, sold I think two hundred thousand copies. It won the BRFK Book Award. I didn't think I was going to have to make this claim, so I'm like, my next book's going to be about a mass shooting. It got rejected for young writers out there, got rejected by twenty three publishers, including my own publisher from Telling of Whiteness. They said, nobody's going to buy a book about guns. Nobody really cares about this issue. It's like a done deal all the things and at every step

along the way, and it's not sour grape. So I'm just saying, like people think, like, oh, a book about guns is a book that tells you we need more background checks. And I really wanted this to be a book that got people talking that maybe was uncomfortable for people, but that made people think. And so just the fact that like we made it, you know, to me, has been I mean, my agent, Tany McKennon, is just phenomenal.

We worked so hard because I mean, when your own publisher is like, nah, thanks dude, you know, it's an uphill battle, and so we're trying to you know, it's just a very personal victory, honestly to get this book out and to say, look, we can have a debate about this that isn't just reinforcing what people know.

about a fifty thousand. That's all gun does together, which is I mean one gun net is one gut to gundt too many? How many? I said this before. How many guns are owned in this country? Five hundred million. So if you talk to liberals about guns, which I'm a liberal and I talk about guns, I will always my first question is always about a shooting, a death of mortality. But just I think before we even go there,

it's important to remember, as horrible as they are. That that's the fifty thousand, which is horrible and impactful and as I show in the book, traumatizes communities. But we're speaking to this right this side. The NRA is never talking about mass shootings and gun sellers and Trump. They're talking about gun owners. What does it mean to own a gun? What does it mean to carry a gun? So you just remember that's like two hundred million people

they are talking to. So there's just a balance of one side's talking to fifty thousand and the other side is talking to two hundred million. So when I speak, I'm now again trying to get on Fox News. But they never asked me about shootings. They never do. They're like about power, and so it's just important to remember we are already limiting who we're talking to because we have the NRAs had just and Trump have a totally open field to talk about what it means to own

and carry a gun. Now that is not what you asked, I realize, but I just think it's important to remember that there's an imbalance even in what we focus on. And then what we define as a mass shooting is incredibly political also, and I say that because in the book, I have all this data, which is until twenty ten, there were forty five mass shootings a year in this country. Mass shooting four more people killed. Now it turns out there weren't forty five mass shootings in this country year.

There were like three hundred mass shootings a year. But initially we only counted white victim and white shooter mass shootings, and so the data self, we only counted mass shootings as like the stuff that gets on the news. But if there was a shooting in South Chicago or East New York or something like that, what do we call it. We called it a gang shooting or a revenge shooting

or something like that. So even what we called a mass shooting was incredibly that the sociological term all use as sample bias, right, We were just focusing on shootings that were horrific and terrible and sensational and killed on average between three hundred and four hundred people a year. But we didn't focus on all these other shootings. And

so these shootings are I agree, a particular phenomenon. They are a particular phenomenon, and within the realm of like we're on the TV race, within the realm of fucked up white male masculinity. There is a phenomenon here, which

is that there's a copycat phenomenon there is. It's incredible how similar, like the manifesto, all that kind of stuff, but even now, like it's that trope, like the Covenant school shooting was a transitioning woman and then there was a whatever like it just it becomes a performance of aggrieved. It's the performativity of it. And so I do agree. I do agree that there is something about masculinity here, and I agree that there's something about guns and masculinity.

But as I say in a lot of things in the book, Trump celebrates that masculinity and we pathologize it, and he's just speaking to a lot more people.

designed to shoot. And what has always confused me and I hope you could speak to this point is if we as a society long ago made the decision that to drive a car one must have a driver's license, they must prove they know how to operate the car, drive it, safely, operate it, why do we not have

licenses to own guns? You know, in a way, because that I think would facilitate ownership of guns, and because I'm not sure about this night in fact, okay, another question, I would think many of the crimes are in fact done by people who do not have legal ownership of guns. That you spoke about fifty thousand people killed by guns when we have five hundred million guns in America, So most of those guns are not being used in crimes.

But it would still make things easier and safer for all of us if we had standards through simple gun licensing the way we do cars.

Daniel was saying, that everyone killer of kids. But the issue is power, right, So if you're building an entire political party on power, then the government is the antithesis of that power. Regulation is the unpower.

is nothing's going to happen without judges for anybody. Here followed the Bruin case that overturned our gun laws here in New York. It made pretty much any It made ninety percent of the gun laws in the country unconstitutional. States across the country now are having to overturn all their gun laws. There was a prohibition on carrying gun into a post office that just got overturned because in eighteen seventy nobody was prohibited from carrying gun into a

post office. So to win anything here, it's not just winning the common sense battle, it's actually winning the Supreme Court battle. That's kind of the whole point. That's why the book ends with the Supreme Court. And so I hope get to the point where that common sense matters. But to get there, we have to win all these other battles first. Unfortunately, and brother, let me just say, I went to camp the NRA. I have a certificate stall of shooting. Like, you know, my dad was in

the Air Force. Like, I've learned how to shoot a gun at camp. Like it's not like I'm afraid of guns. I'm from Missouri. But that's not the er. The NRA, as I say in the book, really got addicted to the power game, not the training campers like me game a doctor.

of Chicago thing. But I do have many friends that can go right across the border to Indiana and just get a gun for whenever they, you know, whatever they wanted. And this is back in the nineties. You know, you could go to a gun show. You can go to the parking lot, particularly outside of the gun show, and get guns from people's trunks and come right across the border. That has always been our issue on the South Side is that we are surrounded with this little blue drop,

surrounded by red. So my question more so and then I want to speak to you ask you a question as a psychiatrist. Is it not driven by fear?

It seems to still carry. But now being that we are I wouldn't say New York, but like, there are so many cities like you're from Missouri, so Saint Louis, for instance, and you can go anywhere outside of it, you know, right across to I guess Tennessee or Kentucky

or whatever, and just get a gun. So how to as cities where most of us are in terms of liberal, BIPOC, LGBTQIA and so forth, where we might reside, how do we combat the fact that you can go ten minutes from where I grew up to any gun show, illegally or legally, probably purchase a gun and bring it right back over. And that's how the cities are now flooded with these guns.

there's a lot invested. Like Trump and I talk about in the book, how often Trump uses Chicago as an example of sewing gun control will never work, which is all these like very thinly coated racial stereotypes about like unruly masses and.

And so it's posterous and a conservative UH councilman weekend Illinois gun laws anyway, over over the years it had it had actually a pretty good gun law system about thirty years ago. And so but part of the point I make is that they need the foil of liberal cities as being like remember escape from New York with State.

I think that's really important. It's like initially it was like, oh, that stuff happens in the South, but we're safe up here. But the Bruin Case showed how much like the goal is New York and if Trump wins, like having New York be a hell hole is going to be really important to his agenda of like, oh my god, that's why we're doing all these resources. And so in a way, I just I could I could talk all night about

this point. There's so much in the book about it, and I hope you read it because it really makes a lot of those exact same points that Chicago has to be a particular way to prove to people how like laws will never work on those people and stuff like that. So it's really it's just I get mad and even talking about it, but it's incredible, how like the whole story of the book is about a white guy from suburbia who goes into like he's the dangerous guy,

you know. So that's the whole point of the book is there's the stereotype, the fear, but then looks look at the reality of like, who's actually really dangerous here? It's the guy who's not captured by that framework. And so that tension, for me is really what it's It's all about.

buy into the racism and the colonialism. We will we will for the perpetuate guns because it's like, in order for you to perpetuate the NRA, you have to perpetuate the black and round people are dangerous, and so it really ties back from I mean, I know I'm not a psychiatrist, but common sense alone and just watching would tell you that if a lot of the mashootings are not black and round people, and I would think that white people would have more common with black and brown

people just based around that one subject matter. So I don't understand why are the ovalot I mean, I think I feel like it goes back to the history of this country, and we've never really tackled that because like even just if you look at the last couple of years in places, you know, where they've had mass shooting in other parts of the world, they've clamped down here. It's like we have to find every single excuse. What excuse can you find for somebody walking up in a

school and shooting children? Like I really it drives me and saying I can't so what overlap? What overarching things have you seen in the book in your book I'm dying of whiteness. I'm like this one.

the self harm of guns for the gun section. And now even that self harm perpetuated a narrative of remember that Joiner book, like fifteen years ago, it's lonely on top. It's about like, you know, you just have to keep telling yourself this story to maintain your imagined position, even if it's like it's like killing you or something like that.

So for Dying of Whiteness, it was kind of the way that that narrative, it was bad for everybody, including the people who were ostensibly benefiting from it, except for the people at the very very top. Now this is about a different form of pathological whiteness. The white mass

shooter this is about homicide, not suicide. And I talk a lot about a similar narrative that kind of plays out with guns, which is, you know, the race story of this book is it couldn't have like how much more literal do you need about the pathology of whiteness than like a naked guy with an AR fifteen like killing young rappers. He's literally he's the what's that twenty

eighteen in netwhere Nashville? Yeah, Nashville. But the thing is, like, it's just it was, it was embodied, like, man, this system is not working for anybody, especially not for us and for you know whatever and so and so. In a way, the part of the book is about the calisthenics that the system had to do to craft a

narrative on all sides. I mean, I actually blame it's not just a conservative issue on all sides to keep the system intact, to tell the story, which is that this shooter does not represent us, but you know whatever. But again, the story of the book is the entire to mobilized. I mean again, we had a choice. We could have passed laws learning from them ass shooting to make sure it never happened again. Or we could have passed laws to liberalize and we chose the laws that

protected the rights of the damn shooter. And so that's the race story of the book.

build it from the ground up. So like, who's like supporting your message? Ry and how can we support them?

that has a lot of guns. We've already all the crappy stuff's already happened to us, and so to follow what's happening in Tennessee. First of all, in the old days, the idea of a red state blue state divide about these issues may be held true. But right now the Supreme Court is coming for the country, and so form alliances with people in red states, I think is super, super super important. We're not doing it anywhere anywhere near enough.

I talk about the global politics of this. This NA playbook is being tried in Brazil, it's supporting Ntaenyahu in Israel, it's supporting all these other things. And so in a way, there's I feel like a global alliance of've gun safety right now. And so there are all these alliances. I think that our potential, but man, so much depends on elections, and so getting people to vote, vote on vote, voting

is really key. The other side is very mobilized, right They're very, very energized about guns right now, and so you know, I don't want them with more power and with more guns and that's what we're looking at. So voting in general is important now, but follow along with me on Twitter because I'm going to be trying to do a lot of outreach on that kind of stuff.