December 1, 2022 • 32 mins
The cycle of violence not only continues, but continues to get worse.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to WIKA f Daily with
Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. Folks,
The conversation that I have coming up next with our
friend doctor Jonathan Metzel is one that I gotta tell you,
it gets really exhausting having what feels like the same
(00:34):
conversation over and over again about gun violence in the
United States, about the pervasiveness of mass shootings. You know,
over the holiday, the Thanksgiving Holiday, as you know, folks
are gathered with friends and family and chosen family. You know,
(00:57):
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
(01:20):
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
(01:42):
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,
(02:05):
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
(02:26):
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
(02:50):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:34):
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,
(03:56):
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
(04:19):
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
(04:44):
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.
(05:08):
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
(05:29):
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,
(05:49):
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,
(06:14):
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,
(06:36):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:17):
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
(07:38):
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
(08:01):
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,
(08:24):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:52):
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,
(10:15):
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
(10:36):
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,
(10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:22):
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
(12:44):
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.
(13:05):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:10):
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
(14:31):
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
(14:56):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:38):
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,
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:43):
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,
(17:04):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:13):
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
(18:34):
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
(18:58):
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
(19:19):
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,
(19:40):
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.
(20:03):
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
(20:25):
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,
(20:49):
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
(21:13):
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
(21:39):
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
(22:00):
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,
(22:24):
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,
(22:46):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:51):
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,
(24:11):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:55):
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
(25:20):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:06):
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
(26:27):
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.
(26:49):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:33):
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
(27:56):
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
(28:17):
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
(28:37):
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
(29:00):
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,
(29:22):
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?
(29:44):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:29):
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
(30:50):
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
(31:12):
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,
(31:37):
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.
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to WIKA f Daily with
Meet your Girl Danielle Moody, recording from the Home Bunker. Folks,
The conversation that I have coming up next with our
friend doctor Jonathan Metzel is one that I gotta tell you,
it gets really exhausting having what feels like the same
(00:34):
conversation over and over again about gun violence in the
United States, about the pervasiveness of mass shootings. You know,
over the holiday, the Thanksgiving Holiday, as you know, folks
are gathered with friends and family and chosen family. You know,
(00:57):
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
(01:20):
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
(01:42):
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,
(02:05):
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
(02:26):
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
(02:50):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:34):
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,
(03:56):
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
(04:19):
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
(04:44):
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.
(05:08):
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
(05:29):
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,
(05:49):
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,
(06:14):
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,
(06:36):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:17):
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
(07:38):
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
(08:01):
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,
(08:24):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:52):
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,
(10:15):
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
(10:36):
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,
(10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:22):
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
(12:44):
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.
(13:05):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:10):
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
(14:31):
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
(14:56):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:38):
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,
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:43):
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,
(17:04):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:13):
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
(18:34):
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
(18:58):
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
(19:19):
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,
(19:40):
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.
(20:03):
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
(20:25):
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,
(20:49):
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
(21:13):
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
(21:39):
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
(22:00):
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,
(22:24):
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,
(22:46):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:51):
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,
(24:11):
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
(24:32):
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
(24:55):
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
(25:20):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:06):
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
(26:27):
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.
(26:49):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:33):
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
(27:56):
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
(28:17):
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
(28:37):
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
(29:00):
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,
(29:22):
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?
(29:44):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:29):
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
(30:50):
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
(31:12):
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,
(31:37):
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.
Host
Danielle Moodie
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