“Living and Dying in a Country of Arms”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, Texas was also second in the country for mass shootings last year. Despite pleas for tighter gun laws, public possession of firearms has only gone up in recent years. And in his new book, “What We’ve Become,” Dr. Jonathan Metzl lays out the social and political issues that get in the way of preventing these recurring tragedies. And he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what more needs to be done.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Dr. Jonathan Metzl, thanks so much for joining us. In 2019, you and I talked about your last book, “Dying of Whiteness,” which looked at the policies in the rural south and how they were kind of working against the very people that were voting for them. And now, you’re out with a new book called “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms.” Another gun book. Why go down this road?

DR. JONATHAN METZL, AUTHOR, “WHAT WE’VE BECOME”: Well, it’s great to be back. I actually didn’t think I was going to write another gun book. I felt like the research I did in 2019 through Southern Missouri had really told me so much. And it’s not that there’s ever — you know, you’ve said the final word on this topic, but then a mass shooting happened in my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, a very racially charged mass shooting, a naked white man with an AR-15 went into a Waffle House in South Nashville that was really full. It was kind of 2:00 in the morning, full of celebrating young adults of color. Killed four people, injured four more. And I’m somebody who studies race and gun violence and mass shootings and mental illness. And I just felt like this was kind of a story that had to be told, both because of the local connections, but also because it became pretty clear pretty quickly for me that this was a parable of many larger issues that are facing America.

SREENIVASAN: You spend a couple of hundred pages here just kind of taking apart that one story, and it is fascinating how many different layers you kind of unpack. I guess one of the first things that people wonder is, how did this guy, who clearly isn’t in his right mind, if he’s, you know, running barefoot to a Waffle House at 2:00 in the morning with a semi- automatic weapon, how did he get his gun in the first place? And you kind of illustrate that this was not by any stretch the first red flag that the systems that we’ve set up failed.

DR. METZL: Right. I mean, this shooter, who I talk about in the book, I — what I do in the book, for most of it is, I track the story of how the shooter and the gun got to the Waffle House on that night. And as you say, there were so many red flags. He’s — he was from kind of suburban rural Illinois. He had bought his gun legally, like many mass shooters do. But over the years leading up to the shooting, he had had multiple police encounters, first with local police, you know, had done things including jumping naked into a public pool in Illinois, where he was from, shaking an AR-15 in the face of one of his father’s employees. And it leads up to the point where he ends up in Washington, D.C. at the White House, demanding to speak with President Trump, tries to kind of jump through security, gets arrested. So, he had police files every step of the way. And as I show in the book, at every step, they say, this guy has at least four semi-automatic weapons. But again, and again, and again, his guns get returned to him, or they get returned to his father, who gives them back to him. And so, part of the story is a story about race. What does it mean to disarm a white man who is displaying this kind of symptoms? And as I show, is you almost want to scream when you’re reading the book because at every step he’s basically telling people what he’s going to do. And then ultimately, he drives to Tennessee and commits this mass shooting.

SREENIVASAN: I’m hard pressed to think if It wasn’t a six-foot tall white guy and if it was a person of color, if it was a woman, all of these different kinds of demographics, that any of those red flags would have been enough to trigger a different type of, I guess, a societal immune response. But somehow he’s able to evade one after another just because we kind of give him the benefit of the doubt.

DR. METZL: Yes, that’s exactly right. I mean, I have a kind of alternate reality I talk about in the book, which is imagine this same shooter, but as a six-foot-tall black man, and I say, he certainly wouldn’t have made it probably past the first police encounter, but in the second police encounter this — the shooter, Travis Reinking — the real Travis Reinking, jumps naked into a public pool and then gets out and turns out he has these guns. And so, part of the story is how he’s repeatedly — he and his parents, actually his father, are repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt because, as I argue in the book, even a clearly disturbed white man is seen as somebody whose rights are to be repeatedly defended. It’s more about the right of somebody like him to carry a gun, even in this extreme instance than it is about any kind of disarmament. And that’s true in Illinois, and it’s certainly true when he moves to Tennessee and then, ultimately commits the shooting.

SREENIVASAN: You know, throughout this book, you also kind of pull on the thread of the consequences of race when it comes to how we see policy, how we see gun violence overall, because one of the kind of immediate reactions after a mass shooting, et cetera, the defense is, well, look at Chicago, look at the crime that’s happening here. That’s where the gun violence is, et cetera, right? That we need to be tackling this from a — well, maybe a conservative point of view. But then you end up — you also show that there’s actually an increase now, it says, I think, 52 percent of majority of Americans now own guns. This includes liberal Americans. And 41 percent of black Americans, that’s a 17- point jump from just four years ago. What does that say to you?

DR. METZL: It tells me that owning a gun and carrying a gun has become our de facto response to moments of uncertainty, and it also tells me that those feelings of uncertainty are very profitable. I mean, what I talk about in the book, for example, is after the police murder of George Floyd, the gun manufacturers and gun sellers specifically targeted black and Latino Americans saying, you need a gun and the police aren’t going to protect you. And also, that was based in real fear of what people were seeing in that video. More recently after October 7th, all of a sudden, we’re seeing Jewish-Americans go out and buy guns who have never bought guns before. And so, in a way, to me, it kind of is a structural problem that when we destroy the interstitium that keeps us feeling connected, when we destroy, really, the materiality of thinking we’re in the same network, that all of a sudden everyone is out for themselves. And that’s in a way, again, why I fall back on a, we need to rebuild civic and democratic infrastructure argument in the book, because this mass proliferation of guns, it’s just becoming this de facto response, but it’s also, for me, a bigger symbol really of the demise of our infrastructure that makes us feel like we’re all connected.

SREENIVASAN: What you point out in this particular really tragic case is that this act of violence that he perpetrated on these people led to the purchase of more weapons.

DR. METZL: When I was interviewed by the media right after the shooting happened, I gave what I thought was the standard line, which is, we need more red flag laws. We need more background checks. We need assault weapons bans. That’s kind of the standard line for people like liberal public health people. And I still do believe that. But in the book, I unpack why that doesn’t work. And I really — I mean, part of what’s been controversial about the book is I really take on the arguments of both sides and critique the arguments of both sides and try to imagine a different gun debate than the one we’re having. And so, part of the book is about what it means for liberals like me to get on television after every mass shooting and say, we need more background checks, more red flag laws. It was just so clear that they wouldn’t have worked in this case or many other mass shootings because they involve government databases that many gun owners distrust because, as I mentioned before, just the politics of race really impact who gets to carry a gun and who is seen as a patriot and And also, because the other side — the — for me, the — you know, the NRA side has been so good at rallying the liberal response by people like me into scaring people that people like me are going to go take their guns. And so, that leads to more gun sales. It leads to more institutions that are dominated by, for example, NRA anointed judges. And so, really what I’m trying to do in the book is use this shooting to show certainly why the NRA side has used these tragedies for its own purposes, and that’s part of it, but also the limitations of what I thought was my standard approach for thinking about new ways forward.

SREENIVASAN: You pointed out that during the shooter’s trial, what was happening in the Tennessee legislature was pretty counterintuitive. Explain.

DR. METZL: You know, that’s part of the race story I tell in the book. You know, we had this — I mean, the pathology of a naked white shooter with an AR-15 killing young people of color, young adults of color, it just could not have been more clear. And what I talk about in the book is Tennessee had two ways to go, we could have either said, let’s come together, learn from this tragedy and figure out a way, or we could have said, well, this means we need more guns. And I really center a lot in the book on a gubernatorial election that happened right after the mass shooting, 2018 governor’s election in in Tennessee. And there were public health candidates. And there was one candidate, Billy, who said this means we need more guns. I’m going to actually do away with all the gun laws. And what happened was right after the shooting, Tennessee elected a guy who did the opposite of what it would have done to stop the shooting. And then the book ends with another example in 2022, where when the shooter went to trial, you know, five years after the shooting, they couldn’t charge him with a gun law because between when he committed the crime and when he went to trial carrying the gun the way he did wasn’t a crime anymore. And so, when we keep doing the thing that’s the opposite of what we should be doing in a way, and I really try to ask, what does that mean? What does that tell us about what we’ve become as a society?

SREENIVASAN: You know, along with taking apart kind of how the public health argument has, in some ways, failed us, you also take a look at mental health and how, you know, our focus right now on mental illness as the reason to blame for what these perpetrators do. I mean, where does that fall short?

DR. METZL: Well, I’m a psychiatrist and I think that there is an important role for mental health, just not the role that we’ve been put in a lot of times. In other words, what I show in the book is that after many mass shootings — for understandable reasons, many mass shooters, including Travis Reinking and the Waffle House shooting that I write about, suffer from symptoms of mental illness. But as I show in the book, that’s not the same as saying that mental illness was the only thing that drove them to commit their crimes. In fact, when I start to list out all the factors that lead to mass shootings, mental illness often isn’t in the top 30. It’s, you know, loose gun laws, history of violence, history of substance use, all these other factors. And so, I try to be very aware of that. I do think there’s a role for mental health, but what we saw for a long time is that mental health was the one thing that the right and the left could agree on. In other words, people on the right would say, it’s not a gun’s problem, it’s a mental illness problem. But people on the left would say, well, look, we have the New York Safe Act, for example, or in Tennessee, where I live, legislation after a mass shooting that said mental health practitioners are the ones who need to be the ones who are alerting authorities if patients are being threatening. And really what I do in the book, I hope by the end of the book, people will realize why it’s important to have mental health as part of this conversation, but why putting mental health practitioners at the front by themselves of this issue, in a predictive role, really is statistically just doesn’t really do the job we wanted to in a way it’s based on stereotypes of mental illness. Many, many people come to mental health practitioners voicing some kind of hostility, but only a minuscule percentage of them go on to commit crimes. And the other point is, I just think mental health expertise is very useful at looking at the bigger issue, which is the polarization around guns in America. And that is never part of the formulation.

SREENIVASAN: So, what are some of the new ways forward that you figured out, I guess, in the writing of this book, doing the research? I mean, what can we kind of learn from how the NRA was able to communicate their viewpoint to people? Because they seem to capture the essence of what it feels like to own a weapon or the freedom that that in — that sort of brings about versus kind of the public health argument that we kind of heard from saying, oh, you know, we really have to look at this as a public health issue and as a health problem.

DR. METZL: Part of what I saw, of course, in the shooting that I studied, but then in the hundreds or thousands of mass shootings that happened while I was writing the book, is that there was this divide where one side channeled even recently by President Trump at the NRA convention a few weeks ago, said, I’m going to let you keep your guns and keep your power. He’s aligning guns with power, and guns are very tactile, and telling people that your self-defense is your own — the gun is your own first responder, as somebody told me. It’s your it’s your tactile material response. And then people like me who are arguing for abstract government regulations, databases, rules and regulations, which I think are important, and I wish we had them, but they end up just playing into the hands of people who are saying, look, those guys are promoting big government. And so, what I do in the book toward the end is I try to imagine a new kind of gun debate that’s based in building infrastructure. I argue for making public safety an entrepreneurial project, bringing in — I use research, for example, that talks about how there are these small studies that show that if you fix streetlights and open up green space and invest in education and jobs programs that actually that reduces gun crime. And that — those are just tried in little areas. And I try to imagine what if that was our national policy? What if we weren’t arguing about the Second Amendment, which, you know, we still will be. But also said, how can we build infrastructure in ways that make public space in particular feel safe, make it feel well-lit in a — to use that metaphor. And I kind of go down that path that if we could come together on this infrastructure, I think that’s part of it. But I also argued that the Democrats need a broader coalition than they have right now, in a way, a lot of people say that they believe in things like background checks, but that doesn’t mean that they will vote on those issues. And so, ultimately, it’s building a broader coalition of people who feel like they’re under this umbrella.

SREENIVASAN: Near the end of the book, in part of your recommendations, one was develop a better southern strategy. What does that mean?

DR. METZL: What I try to show is just why a lot of the interventions that, I think, were well-intentioned that when they were devised, probably in the heyday of public health in the 1990s and early 2000s, you know, government databases, regulations, empowering police and judges to disarm people even temporarily, they probably made sense in the context of the blue state of America where these were being framed. And then, in light of other things that had worked, you know, against cigarettes and cars. But I think we need policies that understand the histories of guns in the south, the meanings of guns in the south and that, in a way, try to intervene. Let me just be clear. I think a lot of this is happening, right, because what I learned from sitting the NRA in this book is that they really did start as a grassroots organization and they didn’t start by wanting to take over the Supreme Court. They learn they — that they got their power by grassroots groups and running for school board and election or all these other factors. And in a way, I think a lot of that is happening. It’s happening in Tennessee right now. David Hogg has a new organization that’s running — using the frame of gun safety, but having people run for run for office all up and down the board across — in a way red state America. I do think that — that’s what needs to be happen. And again, I do think there are ways we can form alliance in more sustained ways than we have with people who are gun owners who also want to see this problem changed.

SREENIVASAN: Author Jonathan Metzl, the book is called “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms. Thanks so much for joining us.

DR. METZL: Thanks so much.