WHO CAN STOP MASS KILLINGS? LOOK IN THE MIRROR.
As 'leaders' posture over the 2nd Amendment, a study shows that most mass shooters were telling us what they were going to do. We were not listening, and we damn sure were not speaking out. It's time.
YOU, meaning each one of us, can actively prevent mass murders. You can do it even if there are no more gun control laws. But it takes guts. Do you have them? Here is a shocking new report. The Big Conversation with Prof. Garen Wintemute, US Davis
As always, you can enjoy The Big Conversation on video, audio and text.
READ THE BIG CONVERSATION:
Mike Lee, The Big Conversation
This is a conversation that will cover some largely under publicized ways in which, according to the professor, the federal government, states, and each one of us can help prevent a large percentage of mass killings. There's a lot here worth listening to and learning from. Like most of my ‘Big Conversations,’ this one is long. And that's the point. The Big Conversation is not for fans of lightweight news media. If you want sound bites, you might stay on top of the news. But if you want to better understand how things work in this world, and be prepared, you sometimes have to find a pair of deep dive tanks and get to the bottom. You've come to the right place. But don't worry, most of this is very eye opening.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute, Gun Violence Researcher, UC Davis
Our focus has been on mass shootings or threatened mass shootings here in California. And our focus was on the use of ‘Extreme Risk Protection `orders,’ as they're called nationally, in efforts to prevent those shootings. We have accumulated a series of 58 cases in which ERPO's were used in an effort to prevent a mass shooting. And in none of those 58 cases did the threatened mass shooting occur.
What makes this important is that most mass shooters declare their intentions in advance, they tell acquaintances or they talk trash on the internet, which gives everybody both the opportunity, and I would argue the obligation, to do something when they become cognizant of such a threat, to pass the information on to somebody who can do something about it.
Mike Lee, The Big Conversation
That sounds almost too easy, too simple.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute, Gun Violence Researcher, UC Davis
It does seem very hard. It requires being willing to be that sort of everyday hero who goes to law enforcement and says, “Hey, I know somebody who is threatening to take down a school” That's not an easy thing to do. It requires law enforcement to act on that threat, or that information, which doesn't always happen. But it works.
Mike Lee
So let me clarify, in all these cases, the shooter signaled what he was specifically, or generally what he was going to do, aside and apart from just being unhappy, or depressed or exhibiting signs, and somebody might later say, Well, you know, if I'd only thought of that he there was something specific in each case.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Yeah, you want me give you an example? Okay, so this is a real case. This is not made up. A disgruntled employee has just been fired, and tells his co-workers, “I'm going to come back and get you all, and I'm going to buy a gun to do it.” The co-workers pass that information to company security, who calls local law enforcement. Local law enforcement doesn't react, and some time passes. The company security then contacts our Department of Justice, which quickly goes into action; reviews these records and discovers, to the best of their knowledge, this person does not own a gun, but he has, in fact, bought one. We have a 10 day waiting period in California. And that 10 day waiting period has almost lapsed, by the time the information gets to DOJ. So they move very quickly. They write up a petition, they contact the the judge who issues the restraining order, they contact the dealer and say “Don't you release that gun.” And they go to the man's house and search it, where they discover that indeed, he didn't have other guns. But he had 400 rounds of ammunition for the gun he had purchased, but not yet acquired. a Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun. This is a real, that is a real case. That's how it works.
Mike Lee
What happened?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
He went to jail and nobody died. That's how it works.
Mike Lee
So how can we implement this?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So there are, last count, 19 states, and the District of Columbia, have these laws on the books. Last year’s crime bill made, if I recall correctly, $750 million available to incentivize other states, or states in general, to adopt this legislation and implement it, because implementation is expensive. It requires gathering information, and filing a petition, and going to a home and serving an order of maybe a search warrant. So this isn't one unarmed Community Services Officer. These are cops in numbers, expecting trouble, who are not available to do other work, because they're doing this. So it costs money to implement this. People need to be trained in how to do it.
But the answer is to provide the funding to make it available for legislatures to adopt this legislation.
Well, I'll tell you something else about this policy here in California. We did some research, because it hadn't been implemented as often as we thought it would be. We surveyed the general public here in California. And it turned out that very few people in California knew that this option existed, (or) knew that this new policy was available to them. So when, in the course of the survey, we explained in a little paragraph what the policy was, and then asked people, “So do you think this is a good idea?” 70 To 80 to 85% of them said, “Yes, great idea.” When we further asked, under several different sets of specified circumstances, would you be willing to serve as a petitioner; somebody you know is threatening to kill themselves; somebody you know is threatening to kill a bunch of school kids, whatever it might be. Again, 75 to 80% of people said “Yes, I would be willing to serve as a petitioner.” And in some cases, support for serving as a petitioner was higher among gun owners than non gin owners, because they understand the risks.
Mike Lee
Wow. So what do we expect to happen with this information now? Realistically?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So here in California, in part, because of the research I just described, there is a large scale effort underway to inform the public, to train law enforcement, on how to do this new thing, to train judges on how to do this new thing. People need to know. San Diego has been a leader in this, and people in San Diego are training their colleagues in law enforcement all over the state. Other states are hearing about the success that states with this policy are having.
So I suspect over the next couple of years, additional states will adopt the policy and will start using it. The sad thing is there are going to be states where the legislature won't be willing to adopt the policy in states where there are going to be conservative counties where law enforcement is going to say, in Colorado, they already have said, “We won't enforce this policy.” And people are going to continue to die. But that's not the policies’ fault.
Mike Lee
You said Colorado? Right? What is their rationale for not enforcing it?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So in Colorado, there are what are known as Second Amendment sanctuary counties. And that's a name that they've taken on for themselves. And basically, the position is, as I understand it, and I don't endorse this position, is “We in law enforcement don't think we should be taking guns away from people who are threatening to harm themselves, or making threats in general, that the Second Amendment doesn't allow us to do this.” I think that position is bunk, frankly. But I'm not the Sheriff of a second amendment County in Colorado.
Mike Lee
What else have you studied prior to this about mass shootings in California, that you think it's important to go on the record with?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Well, we've studied a lot of individual mass shootings, it's just part of what we do here. And we follow the literature on mass shootings, and there really is a core set of information about mass shootings, that is worth communicating.
One is that for all that they grab our attention. They're tragic. They, they grab our attention because a lot of people die all at one time. And because they they happen in ‘it can't happen here’ kinds of places, right? Part of the first 24 hours reaction is always somebody saying, “I never thought it could happen here.” But that's the kind of places where they happen.
So mass shootings are the one kind of firearm violence, about which nobody can tell a story that leaves themselves out. Everybody understands that. I might not know the people who got killed in the latest mass shooting, but I know people like them. This could happen to people. I know this could happen to me. We are a country now where people make escape plans when they go to the mall. It applies to all of us. And that's why focus on mass shootings is sort of driving policy.
But we also need to understand that fewer than 1% of deaths from firearm violence in the United States result from public mass shootings. We need to we need to keep our eyes on the other 99% of fatal firearm violence,
Mike Lee
…Which you, I apologize for interrupting, which raises the irony that California probably has more gun control laws than anybody else.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Well, I'm very glad you brought that up. Yeah, I'm very glad you brought that up. We also have more mass shootings than everybody else. But we're a huge state, they're almost 40 million people in California, our mass shooting rate on a population basis is much lower than that of other states. Our firearm homicide rate is well below average for the the 50 states. Our firearm suicide rate is among the lowest in the country.
And I'll quantify this for you. The firearm violence death rate in the other 49 states in 2020, which is the most recent year for which we have information, was 64%. Higher in the other states than it is in California.
Mike Lee
That includes all kinds of firearm use?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
That is correct; suicide, homicide. If the country, in 2020, if the country had had California's firearm death rate, we would have saved almost 16,000 lives. So to the people who say California has such strict gun laws, so you had two mass shootings, I say both of those things are true. And our gun laws are working. If your gun laws looked like ours, people would be alive in your state who are dead.
Mike Lee
So some critics ,glad you pointed that out, but as you know, some critics of the California system say that those many laws, gun control laws are not working properly in terms of letting offenders get through the net. Is that so or not?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So that is the reverse of the truth. I'm gonna put it this way. The policies aren't perfect, no policies are perfect. I'm a I'm a practicing physician. I'm an ER doc. So we put this in a medical perspective that I think will resonate with listeners, viewers. If somebody gives me a new drug for a fatal disease, and that drug reduces the death rate from that fatal disease by 35%. Is that drug of failure? Because it doesn't reduce it to zero? Or is to the success because it reduces it by 35%. That's what California is gun policies are doing. They are reducing our rate of fatal firearm violence by about 35%. That's a success. So do criminals get guns in California? Yes, they do. But not as often as in other states. We, for example, prohibit people who've been convicted of violent misdemeanor crimes, from getting guns for 10 years after their conviction. In most of the country. It is simply a myth that violent criminals can't legally buy guns, they can all the guns they want, unless that conviction is for a felony, or for a domestic violence misdemeanor. We also require that all transfers of firearms, including between private parties, or right be routed through a licensed retailer, so that the waiting period applies: the retailer takes possession of the gun. The waiting period applies. The background check is conducted.
I could drive across the border to Arizona or Nevada, people do this and I've seen it happen. I could drive across the border to Arizona to California, a prohibited person and just walk up to a private party at a gun show, offer them what they're asking for their gun and have the gun in less than a minute. I photographed this happening hundreds of times. I don't tell the seller that I'm a prohibited person and they're too smart to ask. In California, you can't do that.
Mike Lee
But it doesn't stop those guns coming across state lines.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Ah, but at some point, everybody asks, “What's the one thing that we should do to prevent gun violence?” And I say “wrong question.” The public health approach to gun violence, as with other problems, recognizes that the one thing to do is a lot of things at once. So correct. The law does not prevent people from driving to gun shows in other states and bringing guns back. But we also have this. Law enforcement knows what I just described to be true, about driving across the border. So I'm not the only person it at gun shows in Nevada and California walking around doing a little bit of surveillance and to be honest, I don't do it anymore. But if you if you go (from) California to a gun show in let's say Reno, I'm in Northern California, and you load up on with merchandise that is illegal in California, and you put that merchandise into a car with California license plates, and you drive back across the border, there's a good chance that you're going to be stopped once you get into California. (Mike Lee) Why?
Because because California and Nevada, and the feds, are watching.
There's a joint law enforcement operation. Let me quantify. So this is something that I did when I was doing this work, I would carry a hidden camera, I would take pictures. I had a little recording. I would make notes of what I saw. I was doing sort of field observational work. One of the things I did was walk to the parking lot and look at the license plates. And at a Reno Gun Show, more than 30% of the cars in the parking lot are from California. It doesn't take rocket science to infer what was happening.
But I'm not the only person who does that. There are cops out there at the gun shows. And they see people loading up on more stuff than a legitimate customer might want. They see that stuff get into into the back of a car with California license plates. They make a phone call. And on the California side of the border, people are waiting. (ML) What’s the arrest rate? (GW) I don't know that. The program does not publish its operational details. But I know that it happens,
Mike Lee
Do you have reason tobelieve that it works successfully.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
I have seen individual cases written about where, for example, there was a trafficking operation pathway that flowed from Reno to the Bay Area. Because it's hard to buy guns, relatively speaking, hard to buy guns in the Bay Area. It’s very difficult to buy them. There is no legal private party market, you know, not involving retailers in the Bay Area, because there isn't in California. So what you do is you go across the border and buy illegally in Reno. And there was an operation that blew up that trafficking pipeline to the Bay Area, because they would simply see the purchases happening, let people get down to the Bay Area and then arrest them before the merchandise got resold and into the criminal market in California.
Mike Lee
I want to be careful about leaving out anything so I'm just going to ask her blanket question. What other data and results have you come up with that we should be aware of these in preventing these atrocities.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Okay, specifically mass shootings?
Mike Lee
Well, let's start with that.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Oh, okay. Blanket question. So I think going back a little bit in the in the flow of the conversation, one of the the other two little known things about mass shootings is the extent to which they involve, or arise from, domestic violence or ‘intimate partner’ violence. In about two thirds of mass shootings, either the perpetrator has a history of domestic violence, or the event is itself a domestic violence event. So we need to keep this in mind.
Public mass shootings, the ones with the huge body counts and place names that we all come to recognize; not only do they account for a very small percentage of deaths from firearm violence, they don't even account for most mass shootings. Most mass shootings, whichever definition we apply, are not public events.
(ML) Supermarkets or train station or whatever?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Correct? Correct. 23:51 hey are ‘somebody wipes out five family members at home.’ They’re domestic violence events. So one of the strategies that would help prevent mass shootings is to work to prevent domestic violence, to recover firearms from people who have been convicted of domestic violence.
Here's a huge loophole, and policy, that we haven't talked about just yet. It's been in the process of being closed in California. Let me set it up. Almost everybody in the country agrees that we should prohibit some classes of people from purchasing firearms; people who've been convicted of violent felonies and so forth. Almost everybody agrees that we should have background checks to identify those people, so they can't simply ignore the law. The problem with the private party markets in most states is that's how you ignore that law. But we've already talked about that. What we don't have in any state, except California, is a policy designed for the reverse set of circumstances, where a person buys a gun legally, and then becomes a prohibited party. I legally buy a gun. And a few years go by, and now I'm convicted of a violent crime, or now I am served with a domestic violence restraining order. In most of the country, there's no program to go get those guns back. And think about this. The event that made me a prohibited person, a conviction for a violent crime, domestic violence restraining order, those are huge markers for risk, high risk of violence in the near future. And we don't do anything about getting the guns back, except here in California, where there is a program. It's not adequately funded. But there is a program to systematically statewide, identify those people who have recently become prohibited and knock on the door: “Hi, I know things are tough for you at the moment. But you've got guns, and you're a prohibited person. So we'd like for you to give those guns to us now.” And actually, we're not leaving without them. I’m being glib here. But but that's how the program works. It's called APPS, the Armed Prohibited Persons System.
Appropriately, I think, restraining orders are only ‘prohibiting’ only while they’re in effect. That’s the current law. There is some discussion at the moment about about this: that if my behavior is such that I've done something to merit a restraining order, out of concern that I might harm other people. Because I'm at increased risk, that increased risk probably has not reverted to baseline when the restraining order expires. So there is some initial conversation about should the prohibition last beyond the term of the restraining order. And that's just conversation.
But I'll give you a historical example: the extreme risk protection orders that we talked about. The first order lasts only for a few weeks, because it's issued in an emergency without a hearing. A longer term order that can last for a year requires a hearing. But this is a new policy. And relatively speaking, it was it's been in effect since 2016. What we've learned in implementing it over the last six years, is there are people who just remain at risk. So the order gets was being renewed and renewed and renewed every year. So the law has been amended, such that in selected cases in California, the order can be issued for five years, because it's understood, there's really no chance of risk decreasing to an acceptable level.
Mike Lee
I keep coming back in my mind to your study. For those several dozen cases in which in every case there was a red flag that could have been spotted and acted upon. I think a lot of us would have the general impression that as we hear about mass shootings around the nation, we often hear that this guy, you know, was quiet, never said anything and then boom. So is it not conceivable that some of these and I don't know if you know, how many don't show those flags, if somebody just keeps it all bottled up and suddenly exposed and none of these rules you're talking about do any good, question mark.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So, yep. Right. So we do know that in at least two thirds of cases, those prior warnings exist. And so just the simple math is maybe a third of the time that they don't, but let me come back to that third. But again, like if, if a strategy would work two thirds of the time, if if we could reduce mass shootings by two thirds using these restraining orders, that's a huge win. Do I need to find something else to go after the other third, okay. But that's no disincentive for going after the two thirds that I can go after with restraining orders.
Now, for the other third, let me again, give you a real example. No warnings, nothing that a member of the public could have responded to. This is another real case in which a young man in the Bay Area was a known affiliate of members of religiously oriented terrorist organizations. He had traveled to the countries where these organizations were headquartered. He had taken a job at a gun store, where he wasn't doing very well at customer service, because he was always working the guns to figure out how they worked. He was asking his co workers, how exactly does this gun work? He had moved to be within your walking distance of a venue that hosted events with tens of thousands of people. But he hadn't said anything. And the FBI were monitoring this person, as a person of concern, for I think, obvious reasons. I've left some of the details out.
Mike Lee
But, sorry to interject. The FBI monitoring, they would have known what you're telling me now?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Yes. Okay. Everything I've everything I've just told you is information that came from the FBI.
Mike Lee
And we're in real time?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Yes in a document in a document that they filed with with local law enforcement, because the FBI, as a federal law enforcement agency, does not have access to extreme risk protection orders. There was nothing they could do. This man had not committed a crime. But what they did was to work with local law enforcement in the Bay Area, which could ask for an extreme risk protection order. And they (FBI) provided their information to local law enforcement, which became part of local law enforcement is petition to a state judge who said, “Oh, you bet,” and issued an order. So this was a case in which state policy could help and federal policy didn't exist. And I can't say for sure that this man who was training to use firearms, and had terrorist connections, and had moved so that he could be near a venue which held large scale public events, and had several of them scheduled a few weeks before after he moved there: I can't say for sure that that's what he was going to do. And I don't I've never seen the court record. But I think that's grounds for saying this guy doesn't get to buy guns.
Mike Lee
And I have to say this low hanging fruit because the circumstances are an obvious surveillance issue for the FBI. That this, I don't know what part of that 1/3 that kind of person makes up. But I'm talking about the metaphorical kid in the library, who never talks, never makes waves ,and then kills 40 people.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So that is distinctly uncommon. For especially for a child, actually a young person, not to say something. But keeping it all bottled up, is actually more what older people do than younger people do. So it's that the, the propensity for oversharing is more common among younger people than older people, among mass shooters.
Okay. So the difficult part is persuading other people to step up because it takes sheer courage to step up and go to somebody with the information. And as your mentioned, there are alternative means of surveillance. So kids who aren’t necessarily declaring an intent to, let's say, shoot up the school to make up some facts here. Kids who do mass shootings, even if they've made no threat, which is not common, tend to, for some reason or another, be on the radar of people who might be in a position to help to begin with. The case that is occupying my, my left side of my brain, as I talked about this, is the six year old in Virginia who shot his teacher. Not a mass shooting. But people knew about that six year old. People actually even knew that he had brought a gun to school that day. And there was a failed search, among other things. But the the truly ‘out of the blue, nobody had an inkling’ is distinctly uncommon.
And, and, again, I'm a pragmatist. I'm a practicing physician. If I've got one tool in my toolbox that will take care of most of the instances of a bad thing. I will use that tool until it's worn out, all the while coming up with additional tools to deal with the ones that the one tool I have will not address.
Mike Lee
In a moment I'm going to ask you to talk about what we in the public can do. But before that, are there other takeaways that we need to put into this mix b efore we talk about what we in the public should be doing?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
I'm going to get really broad here, there is a pretty substantial list of firearm violence prevention policies that have survived rigorous scrutiny by scientific experts and in the scientific community, or are broadly thought to be effective in preventing interpersonal violence or suicide. shootings in the home. Most of those policies are not in place in most of the country. Almost all of them are in California. And I'll go back to the point that I made earlier, California's firearm violence death rate is 60% lower than the rate in the rest of the country. It's not a coincidence that we have a strong policy regime. There are the last thing I'll say, there are about half a dozen other states that have rates that are even lower than ours. Every one of those states has a firearm violence policy regimen that is as restrictive as ours, or even more. So. It's not a coincidence.
Mike Lee
You framed this as a moment ago as scientific based policy options. What are the headlines? What is science saying about these options? What are they?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
That requiring a background check for all purchases of firearms works; that waiting periods work; that adding a permitting process to purchasing (guns) works; that, to the extent that we have the evidence, banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines works. Or maybe I should say, probably works. Child access prevention laws work. And there's a longer list. (ML) What do you mean? (GW) They are the laws that hold an adult criminally responsible if they store a gun, such that a child can gain access to it, and some tragedy ensues; the child gets the gun and takes it to school and shoots others the child shoots him or herself.
Mike Lee
And these policy options when you spoke of science, I gather we're talking about data science. We're not talking about medical research or psychiatry. It’s not neurological medical or psychiatric?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
No, I'm talking about public health or social science quantitive research. In the best of cases, and we're responsible for some of those large scale controlled observational studies.
Let's go back to data science just for a second. We've been doing some work on addressing the general question: is there something that that big data science can do to augment traditional methods of threat assessment? Is there something about firearm purchasing patterns, for example, that might be a tip off that something bad is going to happen? And, and we're interested in mass shootings, but we've also been studying suicide. And we've published a study that found this based on records for millions of people here in California, that there is a very small subset of people who buy guns in California; 100%, of whom, every single one of whom ,commit suicide in the months following purchase. And that group can be identified at the individual level, based on information available at the time of purchase,
Mike Lee
What kind of information?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Demographic information, criminal history information, firearm purchasing pattern. But the upshot is, and this is just as an initial test of concept project, but the upshot of it is that, in some hypothetical future, as you were pointing us toward, that a background check process might discover that the person who's who's interested in purchasing a gun has characteristics that put them in a group of people 100% of whom are going to kill themselves, or 50% of whom are going to kill themselves. And the question is going to arise, should we allow that purchase to go through?
What I'm going to hope is that as medical science gets better, we get much better at identifying precursors to serious mental illness, because my interest is in preventing suicide. By the way, we need to keep in mind mental illness is not a major risk factor for perpetrating interpersonal violence. People with serious mental illness are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. When we talk mental illness, I go immediately to suicide. But we've become much better at predicting the development of serious mental illness. So hopefully, we can alter the trajectory. Hopefully, our treatment for mental illness will get better because it's not very good right now. Same thing for substance abuse, alcohol, and in particular, which is a huge risk factor, alcohol abuse, for both interpersonal violence and self harm. If we could identify early and somehow modify the life course of people who are going to drink to excess, we would save millions of lives over time.
Mike Lee
Somebody can't arrest somebody for being drunk, because they may go out and shoot somebody. And that happens. So there are many country songs are written along that very line.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So country songs notwithstanding, I'll give you this. This is work that we did. We followed almost 100,000 gun owners, forward in time through records. To answer the question; are people who've been convicted of a DUI at greater risk than others for committing serious violence down the road? After taking into account age and gender and race, ethnicity, whatever else might be in a criminal record. Is a DUI itself evidence of increased stress? And the answer is yes. And there's what we call a ‘dose response phenomenon.’ The more DUI convictions you have, the higher is your risk of violence in the future. So California, has actually entertained legislation to prohibit firearm purchase based on DUI convictions, and there are other states that have sets legislation in place. So alcohol misuse is a risk factor for firearm violence. DUI is a marker for alcohol misuse.
Mike Lee
Now the question, what do we do? How can we help?
Dr. Garen J Wintemute
So thank you for asking the question the second way. I know how to answer it. Most of the time, what people asked me is not the question that you've just asked me, they asked me, “Is this the time, whatever the tragedy might have been, when Congress is going to do something, when the state legislature is going to do something, when somebody else is going to do something?” And my response is “wrong question.” The question that matters is; “Is this the time when YOU are going to do something?” So that's the question you just asked me. And I'm going to answer it.
First off, make a public commitment to reduce your own risk of firearm violence.
If you don't have a gun in the home, don't bring one in.
If you do have a gun in the home, store it safely.
Make a public commitment to say something if you see something, because it happens to us.
Here in California, and I suspect that the answer is even more impressive elsewhere, we did this survey research: Here in California, at any given point in time: one adult in eight knows somebody that they think is at risk of harming themselves or somebody else. So do something about that, so that action can be taken to mitigate the harm.
But the other (thing to do), because we've been talking about policy, is to keep up pressure on policymakers. I do not look to Congress for leadership on this issue, certainly now. So my focus is on state legislatures here in California, in other states, and I think that's where the people should focus their attention because that's where the action is going to happen.
But to answer the question that you asked, which basically is “what can I do?,’ if all of us sit around waiting for somebody else to do something, nobody's going to do anything. And that's grounds for despair.
Mike Lee
Well, you've mentioned two basic things: Take care of your weapons, if you have them. See something - say something. You mentioned public commitment, what did you mean by public commitment?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
So as a physician, and therefore a health educator, I know that whether we're talking about smoking or alcohol or or firearm behavior, it's one thing to make a quiet promise. It's another thing to tell your friends “I'm going to do this,” Because now we've hung a shingle out there, and people can hold us to account. It really solidifies, makes concrete that commitment. I think people should tell others. But the other thing it does is, it sets an example. If in any given social network, people, especially people who might be seen in positions of leadership in that network, say “You know, enough about gun violence, I'm going to do the following things that normalizes the beneficial behavior,” to get technical about the terminology, and makes it easier for other people to do it. And before you know it, it becomes the norm that people are willing to say something. And that's not Pollyanna talk. Look at what has happened in this country with smoking. I, you and I are old, I remember medical ads, featuring doctors as smokers. These days, are you kidding me? We have changed the way we think about smoking, we have changed the way we think about drinking and driving. We can as a society, change the way we think about things. And we're going to need to do that, about the role that firearms play, and the role that all of us play in preventing firearm violence.
Mike Lee
I don't know if you intended it this way when you said it, But the two takeaways at the end there that that struck me is very important. The first one being take care of your firearms if you have them. That, to my mind, is a tacit reality check. A lot of people do have guns, and whatever you think about the Second Amendment or the right or no right to do that, if you own a gun, correct me if I'm wrong, if you secure that weapon, and take care of it responsibly, in your home, wherever it is. And psychologically, that's going to make a difference. And the second point, correct me if, I'm glad you're wrong on this, see something, noticed something said, make a public commitment that goes to the human human feeling of “He's a friend, or she's a friend of mine. I don't want to make a problem,” this or that. But if you think about the 20, or 30 or 40 people you are saving, then that can balance that out. Do you agree with that?
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
I completely do. Most of us, very few of us are ever going to have the opportunity to be the kind of hero who wrestles a gun away for a mass shooter. And you know, we celebrate that when it happens. But but there is a real heroism in being willing to say, my I am part of this community, I need to represent the community and speak up for safety of community, the community and let somebody know that one member of the community is threatening to harm others.
Mike Lee
An American hero. Yeah, that's heroism. Professor, thank you very much for joining me.
Prof. Garen J Wintemute
Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.