Melissa Harris-Perry: This is the takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. President Joe Biden was in Buffalo Tuesday speaking at a memorial site for the victims of the racist mass shooting. This took the lives of 10 people and wounded 3 others. The massacre in Buffalo was only one of at least six other mass shootings that took place this past weekend.

President Joe Biden: This venom. This violence cannot be the story of our time. We cannot allow that to happen. Look I'm not naïve. I know tragedy will come again. It cannot be forever overcome. It cannot be fully understood either, but there are certain things we can do. We can keep assault weapons off our streets. We've done it before. I did when I passed the crime bill last time and violence went down. Shootings went down.

Melissa: Now that claim by the president about the 1994 federal assault weapons ban leading to a decrease in shootings has been disputed. What is undisputed is the current violence and loss caused by guns. On Friday 17 people were shot in downtown Milwaukee after an NBA playoff game. On Sunday two people were killed and three critically injured in a shooting at a flea market in Houston. That same day a man opened fire in a church in Laguna woods California killing one person and wounding five. According to the gun violence archive there have been more than 200 mass shootings so far this year in which four or more people were shot.

Following the shooting in Milwaukee, the city's mayor Cavalier Johnson instituted a curfew, and Chicago's mayor, Lori Lightfoot also announced a citywide curfew in response to a highly publicized fatal shooting of a 16 year old boy in Chicago. Lightfoot announced that she's changing the citywide weakened curfew for unaccompanied minors from 11:00 PM to 10:00 PM. To talk about these policies and this history I'm speaking with Jonathan Metzl the professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and director of the Department of Medicine Health and Society at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for being here Dr. Metzl.

Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Thanks so much.

Melissa: When I'm just reading through those numbers, I feel like I almost have to dissociate a bit, excuse me for using a psychiatry term there, but I guess I'm just a little stunned that this is still happening. You and I have been talking about this for at least a decade and why am I still reading these kinds of numbers?

Dr. Metzl: It really does feel like we're going backwards and that's because we're going backwards. There was a CDC report that came out just a few weeks ago that looked at the first year after the pandemic hit and had found that there were over 45,000 recorded gun deaths in the United States. That's a number that I certainly as somebody who studies this never thought I'd see. I would also guess that's probably an undercount because many gun deaths are not reported. In so many ways, we feel like there's more gun death around because there literally is more gun death around.

That happens in the context of just pornographic sales of guns that have been happening over the past three years, in particular. Courts and particularly the Supreme Court, considering really taking off all the breaks on who can buy a gun, where you can carry a gun, and so it does feel like this issue that many people on many sides of this "gun debate" have been fighting for so long. It just feels like it's getting away from us and I share that frustration and I think it's real.

Melissa: All right. Let's dig in on this idea of the gun debate for a moment. One of the things I've learned from your research that I think is so stunning and challenging then when we get to this question of the gun debate, it's become such a separate ideological issue that you demonstrate that even those who have directly experienced loss as a result of gun violence, whether it is someone taking their own life by the use of a gun or being victimized by someone else who's shot a family member, it's so ideologically connected that even those survivors of gun violence often will continue to support almost unrestricted access to guns. What is going on with that?

Dr. Metzl: Yes, I found that when I was particularly doing my research on gun suicide for my book Dying of Whiteness. I was living in Southern Missouri and with-- people called gun culture. It is gun culture very much. I was interviewing people who had lost spouses or children, parents to gun suicide. Initially, during my research, I would ask people who had suffered the most horrific loss. Somebody who loses a child-- honestly such a predictable way and I would say, "Did this change your attitudes about guns at all?" And it was really the wrong question because time and again the answer I would get is, "It's not the gun's fault."

They were almost sometimes offended that I would ask that. As if going through this tragedy would convert them from being Republicans to Democrats or something like that. On one hand, I kept thinking, of course, these were the people who I think would be the most willing or urgently "able to switch sides" but it did also make me realize just how much guns have become such deep identity issues and almost religious symbols for a lot of people that in this moment of despair they were holding onto the ideology. That was the most powerful for them. In a way, at moments like that, they were probably the least likely to say, "Everything I've believed in my entire life is wrong," or to think about possible culpability and factors like that.

It was very, very complicated. I certainly think we see that in a bigger scale after mass shootings, where people who are pro-gun become much more pro-gun and people who are more for restrictions become much more for restrictions. We have these debates in moments of crisis where people are really holding onto their ideological positions. These are moments of tragedy. There are moments when people are paying attention, but they're also the time where people, I think, are the least able to form any kind of consensus about how to move forward.

Melissa: I'm wondering if that's also what's going on when you're talking about holding on to these beliefs about what works even if there's a lot of evidence that it doesn't because it also seems like that's what's going on with policymakers. Why curfews? What difference does it make, first of all, to go in by 10:00 PM versus 11:00 PM? Especially, we are reeling from Buffalo which happened in broad daylight on a Saturday.

Dr. Metzl: This is the level-- I don't know what went into the curfew decisions. I don't want to really speak to the specifics except to say that it does seem like such a move of despair or frustration. The issue is that communities are not getting the help they need. Places like Chicago has reasonably solid gun laws, but if you can't stem the flow of guns coming in from Wisconsin or Indiana, anybody can just drive 20 minutes and load up their car with guns and come back, and many other factors as well that are leading to really what we're seeing in this country. It does seem like a desperation move in a certain way.

I think we should consider anything that helps and works right now, but as the research we've done at Vanderbilt shows, so much of "gun crime" is really linked to upstream factors, structural factors that are not about who's on the street at 9:00 PM versus 11:00 PM. It's much more about other feelings of guns, obviously, but also housing insecurity, economic insecurity, food insecurity all these other factors. There are so many factors that go into this that it feels like with respect to everyone who's trying so hard on these issues, it feels like window dressing if these bigger structural issues aren't addressed at the same time.

Melissa: We talk about these bigger structural issues. I guess I'm still trying to understand the different kinds of gun death. You've written about death by suicide using handguns. We're talking here about street violence occurring in urban centers, and then, of course, we have something like this racist mass shooting in Buffalo. These seem like dramatically different causes and purposes for the person making use of the gun. Is that part of the pushback of, "Well, guns didn't do it," and also, "Social structural change can't fix it." Clearly, these are such different kinds of acts. Because it does all end with people gone as a result of a gunshot wound and yet they do feel very different.

Dr. Metzl: Yes, I agree. They are different in so many ways. The common denominator is the outcome. I think that's exactly right. I think that the point that we should push back on though is that, again, we have these debates understandably after shocking, horrific mass shootings. The problem I think we've fallen into sometimes is that we conflate mass shootings with all gun crime and then people will say, "Well, there was nothing we could do to stop this one shooter, and therefore there's nothing we can do." I think that's really the problem. As I was saying before, we have now well over, I think 45,000 gun deaths a year in this country, mass shootings are horrific. They kill anywhere from 400 to 1,000 people.

That leaves a lot of other kinds of gun deaths. Gun suicide is overwhelmingly every year the most common cause of gun death, about two-thirds on average. Then you have gun homicide, partner violence, accidental shootings. I think the important point about these other kinds of shootings is that they actually are predictable in many ways. They happen within social networks, you can predict who the high-risk people are going to be if somebody has, for example, a history of violence in the past are more likely to be violent again, in the future. Many other factors go into this.

I think that the issue is, if we look at the totality of gun deaths, I think we can see that there are things we can do that are based in prevention strategies and safe storage, or what are called Red Flag laws. I think the issue is we need a national push to stop those other kinds, the more common kinds of gun deaths, but we don't do that, in part because of gridlock, and in part, because mass shootings come to stand in for all shootings.

Melissa: We are, however, moving towards potentially some big changes in gun laws and access. What's going on with the Supreme Court and gun control right now?

Dr. Metzl: Yes, it's not it's not good, honestly. The Supreme Court is debating a case that is using a century-old gun law from New York that basically says that a city like New York and blue cities and states across the country have a right to regulate who carries a gun in public and that makes sense. If you think about New York, you don't want people with a AR-15 on the subway or going to Times Square on New Year's Eve and things like that. A number of gun owners actually, not that many just two, have filed a suit supported by the NRA basically saying that that's an infringement on their rights and that cities shouldn't be allowed to regulate that.

If the case goes against New York, it's really going to lead to, I fear, almost an arms race in places like New York, because the city won't have any way of regulating who gets to carry a gun in public. Now we have a two-tier system, or not even a tier, just a split system in this country. Places like Nashville, and other red cities you can already pretty much carry a gun wherever you want. Really, this is going to impact blue cities and states and the question will be do blue cities and states have a right to regulate who carries a gun in public?

From a public health perspective, generally speaking, you see less shootings overall on an aggregate level in areas where you can have this regulation.

It's not that they're problem-free but I do think that if the Supreme Court goes against New York in a convincing way, it really will have profound negative implications, not just for New York, but really for the future of the American gun control movement that has based so much of its efforts on the notion that people have a right to have a gun in the home, but that carrying guns in public spaces is something that we should really think about on a case-by-case basis.

Melissa: Just one more on this, the shooter in Buffalo was 18 and he purchased his gun legally. He wouldn't be able to purchase alcohol legally, what's going on with 18 to 21-year-olds and access to legal guns?

Dr. Metzl: Yes, it's not a mystery. It's certainly not a mystery. There's a pretty good body of public health evidence that particularly people ages 18 to 21 are in a pretty highly volatile group, not just about mass shooters, but about shootings in general. You and I both teach college. I love college students, so the best, but I wouldn't want to go to a college party with weapons and beer laying around and things like that. I think that a lot of the data is that particularly people who are just figuring out the world in a certain way are also among the more, I don't want to call 18-year-olds dangerous, but l would say from a gun crime level, they're more likely to shoot first and ask questions later, I guess would be the gentle way to put it, I think that particularly people 18 to 21.

Now people on the other side would say, "Well, you can be in the military when you're 18 and you can-- all those kinds of things so why not?" But I would say that there's been a big red state push in Tennessee, for example, and other places to lower the age of public carry from 21 to 18. We really just made it easier for people in that age demographic, not just to get guns without a permit, but to get really any kind of gun, long gun, handgun, things like that. I'm trying to be wary because I don't want to conflate this horrible mass shooter with everybody in that age group.

I would say that just demographic trends, not just about gun homicides, but also about gun suicide, I think that this is a particularly risky group. Thinking about other kinds of gun injury and death, we really should think hard about what the impact is of lowering the age of carry from 21 to 18. I think we should reverse that if nothing else.

Melissa: Jonathan Metzl is Director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University and author of Dying Of Whiteness: Why The Politics Of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland. Thanks for being here, Jonathan.

Dr. Metzl: Thanks so much.

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