Speaker 1: Now we turn to you. What's your reaction to the recent mass shootings, and have you grown numb to them? Or what changes do you want to see?

Speaker 2: I live in Colorado where we are hyper-aware of mass shootings here. A friend of mine for nearly three decades was killed in the shootings in Boulder this week. I taught at one of our local universities where many of my students were enrolled in Columbine when that shooting happened. One of those former students now has sons enrolled at the STEM school, where they had a mass shooting two years ago. I've lived down the street from the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant when that shooting took place in 1993. One of our state reps, Rhonda Fields is a friend of mine whose son and his fiance were killed in a drive-by shooting. Lastly, I had two friends in the Aurora theater shooting. One had injuries so serious that she still struggles today. Yes, gun control is a very big issue here and most of my friends have been impacted in one way or another.

Doris: This is Doris from Greenville, South Carolina. I haven't grown numb. It's shocking and tragic every time a mass shooting happens. What I can't understand is why meaningful gun ownership reform doesn't ever seem to pass in Washington. What does it say about this country that we have 4% of the world's population and over 40% of the world's guns? That we need our heads examined? Sadly that's how it appears to me.

Sherry: Hi, this is Sherry from St. Louis. I hate to say that I'm almost numb to mass shootings. I'm really frustrated and angry that the government won't do anything to help stop these.

Chris: This is Chris from Lebanon, Missouri. While every one of these mass shootings past and present are tragic, the Democrats are constantly using them as a jumping-off point for greater gun control. How's the gun control going in New York and Chicago? Not well. Period. They need to stop, they need to look at the real problem. It's not a gun problem, it's a people problem.

Speaker 3: I haven't grown numb, I'm just angry about the denial of the dangers of people owning high-powered rifles and magazines. Congress should pass an assault weapons ban and background checks. I don't understand why those who support gun rights are so adamant about keeping assault rifles in the hands of people.

Susan: Hi, this is Susan from Vashon, Washington. It feels almost worse every time I hear of one of these mass shootings. It pierces my heart and exacerbates my frustration with this country's love affair with guns. What would I like to see change? Honestly, I would like to see all Americans put their guns down and melt them into roadways.

Pablo: Hello, my name is Pablo Manriquez. I'm in Washington, DC. I unfortunately am totally numb at this point to the reality of mass shootings in the United States. I know that's wrong to say and callous, but it's like my mind becomes immediately incurious when there's a mass shooting. I immediately go into these assumptions about how, "Well surely it's white terrorism." It always seems to be white terrorism. Frankly, I'm just so over white grievance that my brain just revolts.

Speaker 4: I wouldn't say numb, but it is the new reality. Gun ban won't work because there's simply too many guns already. There's been no talk of disarming the police, which would have to be a pillar of any agreement going forward. No one wants to ask why lone wolves have declared war on society.

Maxine: This is Maxine from San Francisco. I've been horrified by the recent state of mass killings. Although I personally do not have a gun in my home, I do understand that some people may want a handgun or a hunting rifle. However, it is incomprehensible to me that assault weapons are not banned in this country. I believe banning assault weapons and increasing funds to support mental health will save many innocent lives that otherwise are bound to be lost in the next year.

President Biden: I don't need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common-sense steps or save the lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act.

Speaker 1: In the wake of the mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boulder, Colorado president Joe Biden has proposed a ban on assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and an expansion of background checks for gun sales. It's an issue that Biden has been forced to deal with throughout his political career, most notably when he was vice president, after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 people, including 20 children were killed. Even then a proposed bill on gun control failed to get bipartisan support. Now, Biden is once again, calling for action as president, but he faces a divided Senate where Democrats only hold a slim majority. Sahil Kapur is a national political reporter for NBC News and he joins me now. Welcome back to The Takeaway Sahil.

Sahil: Great to be back.

Speaker 1: Biden has been through this before. What is he proposing now? I'll admit when I heard him call for the ban on assault weapons I had flashbacks to the '90s having remembered that attempted doing that. What is Biden proposing, exactly?

Sahil: It's funny you bring that up. There are some similarities for sure, to the 1990s. This is the first time since the 1990s, that moment that you pointed out, that an all democratic government, the White House, the House, and the Senate controls those levers and is attempting to do gun control. It's a very significant thing because the last time they had those levers of power in 2009 and 2010, they made no attempt to do gun control. That's one of the most significant things that's different between now and the 2013 attempt to do gun control.

Back then the Republicans controlled the House and no matter what happened in the Democratic-led Senate, it was understood that it was probably going to fall in the House. What president Biden is proposing is several things. The first is universal background checks. Everyone who gets a gun has to get a background check. There are loopholes in the system right now. People can buy a gun online, people in certain states can buy a gun from a federally unlicensed seller at gun shows, and the transaction can go through without a background check. That's the single biggest thing that is in the context of a debate in Congress at the moment because the more aggressive things that president Biden has pushed, like the '90s, an assault weapons ban, a prohibition on high capacity ammunition that has been used in a number of these mass shootings, that doesn't have even a majority in the Senate, let alone a supermajority to get the 60 votes.

Speaker 1: The White House has said that they're also considering executive actions. How successful do we expect those would be?

Sahil: The President certainly has authority to use executive action to put certain limits, but it's very, very, let's say constrained what the President can do by himself. What he can do is things like classify certain guns, what's known as ghost guns, under categories that have to follow the rules. People build a gun through parts and it resembles another gun that is subject to certain regulations, you can classify them that way. Beyond that, there's very little he can do. This has to be done through an Act of Congress.

Speaker 1: Sahil, when he was on the campaign trail, President Biden promised that he would send a bill to Congress, day one, repealing liability protections for gun manufacturers. Where does that stand?

Sahil: He's so supportive of that policy. It's something that he campaigned on, it's something that's become a matter of Democratic consensus. It is not clear where that stands in the context of a debate in the moment. The senators I've spoke to, are focusing much more on universal background checks as the basis of the debate. President Biden continues to support that policy, which essentially removes a special layer of immunity for gun dealers in the event that their guns are used criminally. The idea is not the punished gunshops that didn't know that they were selling to a dangerous person, but to punish gun sellers who know that, on some level, criminals are buying their guns and then who use that extra layer of immunity to try to protect themselves from liability.

Speaker 1: Sahil, of course, we talked about this in the previous segment with Congresswoman DeGette, but there's been some legislation on background checks that's already passed the House. We know the Senate has very, very, very slim margins here. Is it likely to make it through the Senate?

Sahil: The House pass bill is unlikely to get through the Senate. The reason is Democrats don't appear to have 50 of their 50 members on board for it. The most notable holdout is [crosstalk] Senator Joe Manchin.

Speaker 1: Democrats don't.

Sahil: -Joe Manchin.

Speaker 1: Tell us about what Manchin's issue is here because Manchin wields a lot of power. What is Manchin's issue with this?

Sahil: I've asked him that exact question. I've spoken to him a number of times about this. His issue is that he believes the House pass bill goes too broad. He wants more significant exemptions for gun transfers between family members and person-to-person transfers that are not commercial. For instance, you sell a gun to your cousin. That in his view, should not go through a background check. In the view of the House bill, that should go through a background check. The House bill has much more narrow exemptions for things like a gift between a

father and a son, that sort of thing. That's as far as House Democrats want to go, but Manchin believes that exemptions should be broader. His bill does include broader exemptions, a bill he's written with Pat Toomey, the Republican from Pennsylvania. That bill, or a version of that bill, if anything is going to get to 60 votes, it's going to be something that because the Democratic proposals have no Republican support.

Speaker 1: Well they don't have the support of Joe Manchin, who's been playing the swing-role here for quite a while. Sahil, when we look at what's happening, and we've just talked about this in the previous segment with Congresswoman DeGette, who remembered Columbine, and Sandy Hook, and we mentioned the Pulse shooting. I mean, there has to be some humanity understanding going through this process right now. Holding up this bill for what Manchin's doing, in particular, for saying we can't transfer firearms to family members just seems insignificant in light of the death toll that we've experienced in this country.

Sahil: A very significant death toll, constant mass shootings happening in the United States all the time. Here's the problem, every time an attempt at gun control comes up, no matter how modest the bill is, no matter how popular it is, it ends up being portrayed by gun rights activists as a first step to repealing the second amendment and taking it away. That gets people scared, it gets people worked up, it gets people calling their members of Congress and saying, "Stop this, oppose this, oppose this." Republicans, in particular, tend to answer those calls pretty reliably. That's the problem. If people want gun control, they're going to have to elect more senators and more members of Congress who agree with them, and they can't just point to polls to do that because one party, the Republicans are very dug in against doing much about this.

Speaker 1: The epidemic of gun violence in the United States goes beyond mass shootings. In 2020 alone, almost 20,000 people in this country died as a result of gun violence. Sahil, let's talk about that. How would the proposed legislation even affect gun violence generally, not just mass shootings? We focus a lot on assault rifles, but there are also a lot of gun violence that happens with handguns.

Sahil: The background checks bill comes in here. Basically, there are gaps in the system now, where certain people can buy guns without the completion of a background check. We saw that most notably in Charleston several years ago. A shooter walked into a predominantly black church and ended up killing a bunch of people. Basically, one of the House-passed Democratic bills deals with this by saying, "If a background check doesn't go through within three days, the transfer cannot go through." That's a loophole in current law. It closes that. That's an example. There are other things such as buying guns online or buying guns through the provision of gun shows where you don't have to complete a background check, The House bills would close those loopholes.

Speaker 1: The NRA was one of the biggest lobbyists against, I would say, gun control, but they've lost a lot of power, particularly financially. What influence do they have at this point, Sahil?

Sahil: The NRA is certainly weaker today than it's been in a long time. They have all sorts of financial troubles, they're under investigation. They don't quite have the power to make Democrats quake in their boots as they did maybe a decade ago, but the influence they have is largely a mailing list that can be activated very quickly, that can start, the moment Congress considers gun control, they send these activists out, they ask them to make calls to Congress, they try to flood offices with calls of opposition to any kind of gun control. That's the power that the NRA has ultimately wielded. They don't have the financial strength that they used to, but at the same time, they haven't really lost much strength in terms of being able to persuade Republicans to their side.

Speaker 1: Finally, Biden portrayed himself on the campaign trail as a unifier, but the topic of guns is one that we know is polarizing and it's been an issue that he's struggled with. How do you suspect he's going to handle it this time around, Sahil? We've got about a minute left.

Sahil: Sure. President Biden has increasingly refined and redefined his vision of unity. He talked on the campaign trail about an epiphany among Republicans once he was elected, once president Trump was out of the way, that they would work with him more cooperatively. That has not happened, but what has happened, what he has done is talking about his vision of unity in terms of what the public supports. He has pointed to polls, national surveys that show broad public support for his initiatives, including on gun control. There's large public support for stricter limits on guns.

He has pointed to that as evidence that he is governing in a unified way and argue that Republicans are the ones being obstructionist, that they're purposefully trying to divide the country. There is no uniting Americans on the issue of gun control because it is a divided country, at least in terms of their elected representatives, but public opinion is on his side here.

Speaker 1: Sahil Kapur is a national political reporter for NBC News. Thanks so much.

Sahil: Thank you.

Speaker 5: I am sad, and every time I hear about another mass shooting or any shooting, and it angers me that the NRA has Congress in its pockets. It makes it all the more necessary to set term limits for Congress and the Senate. I just can't say that enough. We need term limits for the Congress and the Senate to actually make change happen with regards to gun laws.

Speaker 6: In regards to the most recent mass shooting, I am quite disturbed at how little the event fazed me. I saw the breaking news on Twitter. I read the headline, I paused for maybe 10 seconds, and I kept scrolling. I worked the following day in retail and it wasn't until maybe 3:00 PM that day that a colleague asked if I've heard about what happened in Colorado. It wasn't breaking news. It was just news. What I'd like to see differently, that's tough. I guess we just need to humanize these victims, but ultimately I just don't want people dying at the hands of cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel people.

Wendy: Hi, this is Wendy Stenberg from Farmington, Minnesota. My reaction is horror. I can not be numb to the simplest evil violence that mentally ill people have inflicted upon innocent people in this country. In every instance, there are people who knew that the perpetrators were unbalanced in every case they got their hands on weapons. With documented mental illness on the rise during this pandemic and during this incredibly divisive past year we've had, it's time for Congress and all the state legislatures to craft solutions to some very well-defined problems. Namely that we need to fully fund mental health services. There need to be limits on guns sold without background checks. We need to expend funds for serving teens with the very programs that build assets and give them reasons to live and national solidarity that America will harshly prosecute hate crimes of any kind. By the way, our family owns guns and we do support hunting and gun ownership. These crimes have nothing to do with the second amendment.

Laura: Hi, this is Laura from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. My reaction to the sick shooting was, "Enough is enough." COVID has taken so many innocent lives and we still have to worry about being shot. How many mass shootings will it take until real gun legislation is enacted in every state? It's shameful and heartbreaking and yet I feel powerless as a citizen to make any real impact on gun laws.

Chris: Hi, my name is Chris and I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am just exhausted by our government's complete lack of action on gun control. We need universal background checks. We need to stop the sale of assault rifles to private people, to private citizens, and we need to deal with the mental health issues that are just rampant in our country.

Cindy: This is Cindy from St. Louis. I'm a gun owner. I don't have a problem with people owning guns, but I do have a problem with them owning weapons of war. It's totally unnecessary and we need to enact other common-sense gun laws as well. We definitely need to close the gap on background checks. We need to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. The situation is just going to continue to get worse in this country until we take action.

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