Editor’s Note: We hope you enjoy the video above. If you’d rather just listen to the podcast, click the button below to Apple Podcasts: The Common Bridge. It is also available on all other podcast platforms. We have included the transcript to this program below. We offer this program in it’s entirety to our paid subscribers, and welcome all to subscribe below.
You can also help the show by contributing in any of these methods:
• Shop. https://thecommonbridge.com/subscribe-shop/
• Zelle. rich@richardhelppie.com
You can also send an email to Editor@TheCommonBridge.com
Thanks!
Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. We've got Ryan Busse back with us today. He, of course, is the author of "Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America " a definitive chronicle of the gun industry, how the NRA rose to power. As a man who frankly has devoted his adult life to putting safe and excellent firearms into the right people's hands, today we're going to talk about some of the policies that might interrupt the gun carnage. Why don't we just start off with the assault weapons ban being proposed by the President and members of his party. Let's just dive right into it. Is this assault weapons ban the answer to gun violence in America?
Ryan Busse
Certainly not. Let me start by...so there's the hammer but a lot of my friends are proponents of an assault weapons ban. I appreciate...I think, at least in my opinion, they're very sincere. They mean to do well. I think of my friends like David Hogg and Fred Gutenberg, like so many, I get why they want it. But if I could, having been inside the industry, I'd like to step back for just a second. Let's start with the 1994 to 2004 - the ten years, September 13, 1994 to September 13, 2004 - the United States had what was referred to as an assault weapons ban. I need to dispel a few myths. First off, you could buy as many AR-15s as you wanted to during the - air quotes here - "assault weapons ban." What the assault weapons ban did then was outlaw AR-15s with some additional features on them. If I showed you, or any of your listeners, from 10 feet away, a gun that was legal during the assault weapons ban and then showed you a gun that was legal after the assault weapons ban, I would be shocked if any of them could tell me the difference between the two. In other words, that features-based ban honestly did not do much with regards to banning anything back then. Now, importantly, it did codify a social norm about what was cool and what wasn't cool. It wasn't cool to go marching around towns with an AR-15 strapped to your chest and march into the Michigan capitol and scream at lawmakers with 30 round magazines. That was not cool. After the ban was not renewed by George Bush, I feel like we've had a lot more of that armed intimidation being accepted in our country. So it did codify social norms but it wasn't a very effective legal ban, or prohibition - I don't think. So now I don't spend time talking about or supporting the assault weapons ban because I think it takes the air out of the room for so many other things that can get done and that do have bipartisan support and that don't progress the boogeyman of "people want to take away all your guns," which again is a complete fallacy. When the Right says that, that is just flat stupid. I think of the things as we talked about on our last episode; universal background checks polls at 85 percent. For something to poll at 85 percent do you know how many Republicans have to support it? I'm sorry, but the technical term is a shitload. A lot of Republicans support that. Raising the minimum age to purchase semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21, which is a strange hold up...the fact that we don't have that is a holdover from the time when almost all guns that were sold were for hunting purposes; that polls in the high 70s sometimes over 80. Again, for that to happen a ton of Republicans have to support it. Basic common sense things that aren't about taking anybody's gun rights away but will help the situation, those things have lots of support, I think, and they're attainable, they're do-able. Why don't we focus on that stuff? I guess that's where I'm at.
Richard Helppie
Well, I agree with you. I have no problem if you have a safe full of AR-15s; you're never going to hurt me or anybody else with them. There are people that might live a stone's throw from me and I don't want them having a 22 with six shot capacity loaded with snake shot, because they're going to find a way to do something bad with it. As I've examined this problem, it always is the bad person or the person that shouldn't have the firearm coming together with the firearm that creates disaster. I know people will cite the Second Amendment incorrectly about the restriction on arms not to be abridged but they forget the first part - well regulated. Again, I'm not a constitutional lawyer at all, not any kind of a lawyer, but in terms of applying common sense, I look at it like this. In this country today, if you're 16 years old and you get your first driver's license, you're not allowed to jump into the cab of a semi-truck and take off down the road because you're going to hurt people if you do that. In fact, in a lot of states, we have graduated licensing: the young person gets to drive only in the daytime, in good weather, then progressively as they gain more experience, they're given more rights to drive. If you are an airplane pilot you get your first license that allows you to fly a single engine airplane in good visibility conditions, in good weather; you don't get to get that first license and jump into the seat of a 777 because you would kill and hurt people. When you look over at medical care, somebody coming out of medical school does not get to be the lead surgeon on a brain surgery; you're ten years into practice before you're the lead, you get progressively more responsibility. Yet in this country, in many states, until recent legislation, an 18 year old could walk into a gun store and legally buy the most powerful weapon, let's just call it a semi-automatic rifle, and as much ammunition as they want with the proviso that they pass the simple nine question background check. One of the nine questions is are you a fugitive from justice? Interesting, if anybody's ever check the yes box on that.
Ryan Busse
They probably have and they probably corrected it, but yeah.
Richard Helppie
When I think about policies that when back tested would have stopped Parkland, would have stopped, Boulder, would have stopped Buffalo, would have stopped Uvalde, the only one that I know of is something I call graduated licensing. It works like this; for your first gun purchase you get some training, you get some range time with an instructor and you can then have a revolver with a limited capacity, perhaps a hunting rifle with limited capacity. Over time, just like airplanes, if you show that you're a safe operator in a period of months - might be six months, might be 12 - with more training, examination by an instructor, maybe you can now move up to a semi-automatic pistol, maybe a little bit larger rifle. If you want to go to the next level, more training, more certification, and at some point a mental health check before you get that next most powerful weapon. The reason I think this passes constitutional muster is this. Nobody's being restricted about owning a firearm, period, but we also have some sensible regulations about who gets to do that. What I'd like to hear from you is where are the holes in this logic? And what could the role of the NRA be? To me it's like, oh, that's pretty easy, let's become the advocate for safe gun usage and storage. What could you do if you were a gun shop? How about offering classes and certification. It seems like it's an economic opportunity, too. But Ryan, you're the expert on this, let me stop. Could this work?
Ryan Busse
Well, could it work today? The simple answer is no. Not today. Just because the NRA, and now several radicalized groups, have the situation so volatile and on fire that rational thought is...
Richard Helppie
Setting aside the political powers, if you were the firearms czar today and you could hit the gavel and put that in place; let's just imagine it was in place.
Ryan Busse
Well, there are parts of that that have long been supported by the NRA and by the firearms industry. This is a total digression, but I think about this sort of genius - it's hard for me to say this - but the sort of genius in the MAGA phrase "make America great again." It's that last word that is this sort of genius because that tells people that they can go back to something they already experienced and already accepted. So if I'm going to steal a little bit of that, as much as I detest that phrase and detest what it means, I'm going to steal a bit of that and go to the "again" part. In the firearms industry...like, I'm not going to delve into the particulars of your proposal - this capacity, do we have a revolver now, I get the general gist of it - I just want to say it's not crazy because the industry, for a long time, accepted and promoted and advertised and funded large parts of that. When concealed carry became ubiquitous across the country, everybody who I knew in the industry was like, okay, concealed carry is good but we've got to have firearms classes and permitting when they get a concealed carry license. Exactly. There's no infringement in there. People will say, when you use cars as a comparison, which I often do, people say well, you don't have a right to own a car. I'm like, okay, I got it, there's no second amendment for cars but the ability to use and drive cars, I think most people would say is right now wrapped up in - our general purpose for the constitutional government - the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. You need to be able to get from point A to point B, to get to your place of work, to maybe drive to an airport for vacation. You don't have a specific right for that car but that car is part of your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. So it is sort of a right and do we think it would be a good idea to throw a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds in Formula One race cars without licensing and throw them out on the street with no stop signs? I think that would end in a frickin' disaster. Yet, we're kind of doing that with guns, we're throwing 18 year olds out with no training. The AR-15 isn't powerful, the cartridge of the AR-15 isn't powerful, in fact, it's a very small cartridge, but the system of the AR-15 - built to deliver rounds downrange very quickly and efficiently with almost no recoil and stay on target - is very much like a Formula One race car. A great big truck is more powerful than a Formula One race car but if you've got to get from point A to point B in town and corner and accelerate to 105 miles an hour in 300 yards, a Formula One race car - if that's your tool of choice - is very similar to an AR-15. We don't put unlicensed kids by the dozens in towns with $150,000 Formula One race cars and think it's going to end well. So the NRA has has supported testing, they have supported training, they have supported all this stuff and yet now they're telling us we should just do away with that because those are somehow infringements. I say, are you kidding me? No freedom is unfettered because people who are impacted by that freedom must also be protected. As we talked about in our last episode, nothing has the potential to impact the freedom and rights of others like the freedom to own a gun. That's why we must treat it like the serious thing that it is.
Richard Helppie
In your book you actually make the parallel with machine guns, that it is legal to own a machine gun in the United States with the proviso that you've demonstrated that you know how to handle it. I am ignorant on what those requirements are but I'm just taking that concept and running it back to that first firearm...there would probably be a way to grandfather people in. When I think about would this stop everything because there are so many guns in circulation, well, no, but it would slow down the ease of that new gun owner getting a hold of something they can't handle, akin to your parallel with that Formula One race car.
Ryan Busse
People should understand; terminology is important because we're talking about regulating stuff we should all...I tried to do this in my book. I think this Rich, part of my book is education for folks about terms and terminologies and technicalities without it being preachy or some boring book; I wanted to educate folks. So semi-automatic means you pull the trigger once, the gun goes bang once; fully automatic is you hold the trigger down and it keeps going like that zipper spray sound you hear in movies. That's a fully automatic gun. The surprise here; fully automatic guns were regulated by the 1934 National Firearms Act - it's called the NFA, the National Firearms Act - people think it's not legal to own fully automatic guns. Not true. It's totally legal to own fully automatic guns and has been, even since they were heavily regulated by the NFA since 1934, and so your neighbor might own a fully automatic gun. I mean, Rich says he doesn't but for all I know, maybe he does own one, I don't know, he could, legally he could. But do you know how many mass shootings have been propagated with fully automatic guns since 1934 when they were heavily regulated? Big, fat zero, not one, even though they are thought to be the most effective weapons of war. Why is that? That's because there is a very stringent national background check. It takes a long time, like it's several months to get the background check through and you have to buy a federal tax stamp, which is kind of an arcane thing, a couple hundred bucks, then you can own one of these fully auto guns. So here's a perfect example of how you can have an exceptionally huge amount of freedom, the freedom to own a fully automatic gun, if you just exercise the proper amount of responsibility. We can limit the bad outcomes, we've done it with fully auto guns and continue to do it.
Richard Helppie
I'm with you one hundred percent on that. The other thing that you see coming through in the legislation is a couple things; one, requirements for storage, it has to be in a safe, and then we're going to lift the restrictions on the liability of gun manufacturers. The argument that I have to have my firearm in my nightstand - or horrors, underneath my mattress - I think is nonsense. Given that today there are so many fingertip safes that you can undo sight unseen, they're not as secure as locking it away in a safe, but they are secure from children to a degree. Then this notion that we could make gun manufacturers liable for the misuse of the guns. Are any of the storage requirements or the product liability that you hear being propagated, are any of these good public policies?
Ryan Busse
Well, let's start with the storage thing. We talked about in our first episode, the degree to which fear is an effective motivator for humans. And it's true, it got us through a few hundreds of thousands of years of evolution - some big predator marching through the savanna, you get fearful very quick and your body has a fight or flight response and you snap into action. So it's down deep in our DNA, it's very effective and it can come to the surface very quick. Fear can also be used as an effective political motivator, as we've seen so it's hard to get away from that. When people say I have to have my gun on my nightstand or stuck under my mattress, I'm not even going to go to that. It's their responsibility or their place to understand how fearful they are. I don't know, I don't live in their house, maybe there's a gang of criminals banging on your door every five minutes and you really do need that, I'm not going to judge you. What I am going to judge is, it's time to understand that you have a responsibility to store that thing and keep it away from kids or anybody else. Again, your business about protecting yourself is your business, totally your business. But god dammit, somebody has to be responsible for the kids and the innocent; what about their rights? So I think safe storage laws are important, liabilities are important. Again, it's your business if you need to protect yourself, but if you buy a gun and a kid gets a hold of it - your kid, like this Oxford, Michigan kid and as you know, they're close, the parents basically bought him the gun or allowed him to take their gun - you are going to be held liable and I think you should be sued until the cows come home. Somebody has to stand up for the innocents rights too. Again, if that family thought they needed that gun for safety, fine, it's their business. I'm all for self-defense. We have to do something to help to hold the gun owners legally responsible for what happens if they're not responsible with the gun.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. Oxford, Michigan, the parents violated the first law about straw purchases because you have to say on your federal firearms - nine questions - are you buying this for yourself or someone else? They falsified that, bought this firearm for this emotionally distraught kid and put it in his hands. It's a tragic case that this little boy was in emotional need and the parents just abandoned the kid. His grandparent died, his best friend moved away, his pet died; I mean, it's one thing after another and zero emotional support. No one thought to look in his backpack when he was drawing pictures of blood and people being shot. If I ever had David Hug on my show - I don't have any idea how I could get him - but one of the questions I'd want to ask him: when you found out who the shooter was, was it a surprise? I'm in agreement that the individual needs to be responsible for care of that firearm but what about the manufacturer?
Ryan Busse
Well, having been a manufacturer and having lived through these liability wars as I detail - and I participated in some of them, as I note in the book - do I think that manufacturers of any product in general should be held generally liable for irresponsible or illegal actions of somebody using their product? No, I don't, that doesn’t seem to make sense. But if you knowingly market, if you encourage those behaviors...15 years ago we didn't have any guns or marketing campaigns like we do now. We have a gun now, heavily marketed - you can go look up the website today, if you don't believe it - it's called the Urban Super Sniper. What the hell are you supposed to do with an Urban Super Sniper? It's marketed to take it downtown. We have a company called Rooftop Arms. You remember July 4th last year, a kid in Illinois jumps up on a rooftop and starts shooting people at Highland Park on Fourth of July - we have an AR-15 company called Rooftop Arms; we've crossed a Rubicon. Do I think that firearm companies should be held generally liable for illegal actions? No. Do I think they should be held liable if they have marketing campaigns that encourage them? Hell yes I do because they are no longer [acting] responsible if they're doing those sorts of things.
Richard Helppie
I think that's a great distinction right there because today President Biden says we need to have liability for the manufacturer. I was trying to apply legal constructs to that. If I buy a car and it has a safety defect and I hurt myself or someone else then I have the ability to go sue that manufacturer because they're not supposed to sell me a car that breaks. But I'm thinking if I had a firearm, how can I sue the manufacturer if it killed somebody because it is designed [for that]. I guess I could only assume if it didn't kill somebody. I like the way you put that; if they're marketing it, that's horrible. As I said in the earlier episode; pop-up ads in first person shooters for the stereotypical overweight kid playing video games in their basement, that "couch commando," and then saying, I'm 18 years old, I can go buy that weapon. To me, it's horrible.
Ryan Busse
I want to say I think that none of what I'm stating is anti-Second Amendment or anti-gun. In fact, I think it's pro Second Amendment and pro-gun to be stating these things. Why? Because responsible people will do what it takes to maintain the rights so that all other people in our country can maintain their rights too. It's not patriotic, it's not responsible to think that one right can usurp all others; the Second Amendment right, it's so important that if I have it and lots of people get killed and lose their rights, that doesn't matter? That's not patriotic, in fact eventually that's going to cost everybody all their rights. If these people - who espouse this idea that you must own guns for this weird idea of some armed civil war - if they get their way, do you want to quick guess about how many constitutional rights will matter? Yeah, I can tell you - zero. So the responsible thing is to do is what it takes to maintain our fragile system now, before it gets to that point,
Richard Helppie
Ryan, let me respond to that. I had a conversation with someone that was adamantly pro-gun about the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. I said, why do you need that? Well, if we have to face tyranny because that was the intent of the framers and the founders, they didn't just get back from a hunting trip. They were afraid that 200 years in the future they weren't going to be able to use a gun to go hunt deer, they said, this is a bulwark against tyranny. So I posed the question, how long do you think you would last against a professional army? You can get the best over the counter semi-automatic rifle against someone 40 years younger than you, superbly trained with better scopes, night vision, etc. How many seconds do you think you'd survive against that? I never did get an answer. I asked that [same] question to some contacts I have within various security agencies of the country and this is the answer I got. It's kind of a dilemma, he said, but in the event that something like that happened the authorities would have to turn out in force if people possess these rifles. That left me in a quandary; which way do you turn here? That led me back to this graduated licensing; I don't care if you've got a stash of AR-15s in your house, just keep them in there.
Ryan Busse
Well, I think we talked about this earlier. It's obviously true that there are millions, tens of millions, of people in the United States who own firearms and do so responsibly. Because as horrific as some of our firearms violence numbers are, they're not tens of millions of occurrences. So lots of people are owning guns and doing so responsibly, or at least responsibly enough that nothing bad happens with their guns. In the privacy of their own home they may do crazy things that I disagree with with their guns, but they aren't doing it in a way that cost other people their rights. It is in those people's interest to stop the bad things from happening so their rights are maintained. It wasn't very long ago that the industry, the NRA and everybody else, agreed with this. We wanted to do what we could to keep the bad folks from bad occurrences happening with guns. Instead, many people are now espousing that we do things which are obviously going to increase those occurrences. That's not conservative, that's not patriotic, that's not pro-gun. It's crazy.
Richard Helppie
I think you speak a lot of common sense, I'm in strong agreement with you that there has to be reasonable regulations; we regulate everything else. With something as powerful as a firearm, we do need to regulate it. When I walk outside my house today, I don't really think that an airplane is going to fall out of the sky and land on top of me because of the regulations by the - wait for it - Federal Aviation Administration, Federal, our United States government, making sure that the aircraft and the person flying it know what they're doing and it's been maintained properly. Yet we have schoolchildren literally going to school and wondering are they going to be able to walk out of class [safely]. That is an insane position for us to be in. It's just astonishing to me that the NRA wouldn't take the posture of look, we have a responsibility to the greater society by talking about responsible ownership of firearms, not letting people that shouldn't have them get access to them, and in some cases, removing firearms from somebody who's lost the capacity to operate the firearm. During the course of having The Common Bridge...I have a lot of contacts in the healthcare industry, an elderly man, he has dementia, family took his firearms and put them away; he was able to go out and buy another one in a day and he's literally not there mentally.
Ryan Busse
Espousing that system, I want to know, who does that advantage? Come on, no good is going to come of that. It was not very long ago that the industry itself, including the NRA, would have said absolutely we need to make sure that never happens. Now we're so far down the radicalized political path that you can't say anything bad about your tribe. So nobody, nobody on the NRA or firearms side, wants to say anything about that as evidence. On the other side of the age spectrum we had Kyle Rittenhouse - a year and a half, two years ago - take an AR-15, a Smith and Wesson M & P (military and police 15) rifle into a very dangerous situation in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killed people with it. Do you know how many times the firearms industry or the NRA or anything associated with the gun industry has criticized that? Exactly, zero, not once, and I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about - I realize the kid was found not guilty, I understand that, I understand the legality of it. I'm not picking with the jury - it was an immoral, stupid thing to do and the industry ought to be saying that as well.
Richard Helppie
Just a quick note on the Rittenhouse thing, which I did follow carefully and I did talk to people very close to this on background or that were said to be knowledgeable. So first of all, Rittenhouse worked in Kenosha, he had a job there at the municipal pool as a lifeguard. People didn't know that; he did not transport the firearm over state lines, it was always in Wisconsin. He was invited to guard the place of business of a car dealership that had been subjected to arson the two nights prior, [he was] invited to be there. At the time of the confrontation with the first shot, it was preventing a dumpster that was on fire from being rolled on to gas pumps which could have caused untold numbers of deaths. The first person that came at him was someone that had threatened his life earlier. These are all things as it came out during trial. Here's how we got into the situation; I asked a friend of mine - a lawyer, well-known, leans left - said Rittenhouse should go to prison for life. I said okay, in our town - if the town is being burned and the police are standing down - would you want a guy like Kyle Rittenhouse there? Well, of course no. Alright, if they come to the corner store and now they're burning down the corner store would you want a guy like Rittenhouse? The police are saying, we're not responding - which is what happened in Kenosha. No. I said okay, now they come to your next door neighbor's house, same thing, setting it on fire, police saying we're not responding. Do you want a guy like Kyle Rittenhouse there? Finally, in your yard? So that's the kind of dilemma we get into. Had the Kenosha Police Department and the National Guard contained the situation, we wouldn't need individual vigilantes; you'd never want to hurt the kid. That's the kind of thing that gets missed, it was reported that it was a kid that had no business in Wisconsin, that crossed the state line with the firearm, that wantonly shot three people. In fact, the New York Times ran a great piece on this, where they strung together all of the cameras and the timing; it was a tragic situation but it was pretty clear why he was acquitted.
Ryan Busse
All those things, pieces of them certainly are true, maybe all of them are true and yet, there hasn't been a firearms instructor of note in the last 50 years who ever once has said, look for a dangerous situation and take a loaded AR-15 and go down there - not once. What the kid did was stupid and deeply irresponsible.
Richard Helppie
He was invited in, the owners of the business said hey, the police aren't doing anything, you guys sit here. So I mean, you can argue should he have done that, and I guess what would the other case have been? That the city continues to burn? Maybe that would have been okay, maybe it would have been okay if the dumpsters set those gas pumps on fire and maybe nobody else would have been hurt. We don't know but there was an intervention. I don't think Rittenhouse is a great example about firearms, particularly if you want to get...you know more about this than I do about trigger discipline and the like. I think he was acquitted, justifiably, but his life is basically over, he's always going to be this caricature. The untruths that were talked about throughout the media system are out there; they're going to keep getting repeated. So, Ryan, when we look at how to keep firearms out of the hands of the people that shouldn't have them, what are the best tools we can use today? Millions of guns in the country, we should have millions of events every day, it's relatively few [yet] it's far too many, one is too many. How do we keep those firearms away from people that shouldn't have them?
Ryan Busse
Well, background checks work. For those folks who are attacking background checks now, which there are, you're going to see lawsuits, after the Bruen case and the Supreme Court case, you're going to see lawsuits coming that will try to attack or rollback the idea of federal background checks on firearms purchases. I think that's foolish; background checks work. They stop lots of bad folks from buying guns every year. We need to strengthen that system, not weaken it. Will that stop all them? No. Does it make everything perfect? No. I mean, I care about that. I care about making things better where we can, not try to make them perfect because I know we'll never make them perfect. The second thing that works, red flag/ERPO (Extreme Risk Protection Orders) laws, as imperfect as they can be, will help stop the Nicholas Cruz thing in Parkland, Florida. If we had a better red flag system could that have stopped that and others? Yes, because there are people and professionals and teachers, and colleagues that people work with that recognize when there are - as we call them - red flags; they're called red flags for a reason. Will those help? Yes. There is funding in last year's Senate bill to help strengthen those around the country. I hope all states utilize that funding and strengthen those laws. It might be your kids' school...if we stop and identify a shooter...or your workplace or your wife or your husband or whatever; these things impact all of us. I guess the last thing I'll say is those two are examples of things that make things marginally better but don't make anything perfect. We need to stop thinking...I've heard a lot of speeches and a lot of talking, I read a lot of articles about - air quotes here - "how do we fix the gun thing or what's the solution to gun violence" and there really isn't one. There are lots of small things that we can do to make it marginally better. Those are the things we've got to do.
Richard Helppie
A great book about the Parkland shooter, written by Pollard, Pollack and Eden, called “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created The Parkland Shooter and Endanger America's Students.” His daughter was killed in that Parkland shooting and the shooter was a troubled kid from the get go. If a red flag law would have stopped that we sure needed to know about that. Obviously, he never should have had that firearm in his hands at all. I'm an eternal optimist and I'm hopeful that we're on a path where we're going to get in front of this. A lot of people on the Right though, are going to come back and say look at Chicago, look at how many people got shot in Chicago last night, it's a most heavily regulated space. They leave out the fact that mostly it is semi-automatic handguns that are causing the carnage there. (Ryan Busse: That's true.) Is there a solution from the gun side of that equation to bring down the violence that we have and segments of the population, like young men, who might be more prone to anger and might be more prone to using a firearm? Is there an industry solution to this or is it something else we have to contend with?
Ryan Busse
Well, there's not a solution. Some of the largest volume gun stores in the country are in the border regions of Illinois, in Indiana. Why is that? Gun manufacturers know that it's not because all of those guns are being sold and consumed in Indiana, okay. In other words, this is why federal laws are important, because the law of your region is really only as strong as the law in the next region over if these things can be transported across borders. That's always happened in the country and will always continue to happen. But together, responsible actors in the firearms industry and responsible regulators could work to identify and lessen some of this. Will it make it all go away...look, so much of what happens in Chicago, are really indicators of much larger societal, systemic problems of institutional inequities and educational problems and a wealth gap in our country; that creates a lot of angst and it comes out in firearms violence in a place like Chicago so it just happens to be the tip of the spear of firearms violence. There are lots of things that we can work on that will lessen firearms violence that don't really even have anything to do with firearms. If we make the lives of those people better in Chicago, you'll have less firearms violence, trust me. But there are policies that we can enact that will lessen distribution, and sales policies that would lessen the flow of mostly inexpensive, high capacity firearms into Chicago. People aren't going to like it but it could happen.
Richard Helppie
Of those urban things, I've had guests on my show that talk about the impact of fatherlessness and the correlation between young men, in particular, that are prone to violence not having a father, and trying to help this segment of the population defuse situations rather than escalating violence. My concern is that when there are so many guns out there, in an escalating situation somebody's going to - in fear - go for theirs first. I can tell you, I grew up in a blue collar area and I worked with a lot of people in factories and such, and a lot of folks carried; this is way before it was legal to carry. I was very young, I was a teenager, I remember listening to their conversations. It was a weird psychology because they were always talking about what they were going to do under certain situations and all led to justifying having the gun in their hands. At a time when you were expected, as a man, to be able to fight with your fists, you didn't need a weapon, yet they had all these scenarios when they were going to pull their gun, including like, the landlord came to collect rent and things like that. I look at it sometimes as just a sign of weakness in that era, because there just weren't that many guns out there, we're talking about the early 1970s. But today I could see a 16 or 17 year old saying, yeah, everybody's got one maybe I need one too.
Ryan Busse
Well, if I'm that 16 or 17 year old kid who feels threatened or is trying to protect my little brother and my little sister or whatever, I get it. I'm not not supporting that kid's right to defend himself. What I'm saying is, this is a choice we made. Is that the country we want to live in? It's not a legal thing. It's not a constitutional thing. This is a societal thing where we have chosen to put these kids in this kind of situation where they think, or where they need, a gun to fix things. I'm like, okay, that's a choice we've made.
Richard Helppie
As we move to the wrap up here; again, I've never spoken to anyone that has had the knowledge and experience that you have. I'm deeply grateful that you've given me this time to discuss this issue with you. If you were called by the president of the United States - no matter who it was - and he or she said, Ryan, we would like you to come personally to report to me and tell me what we need to do about gun policy in the United States - leaving aside the politics about what's possible and not - if you could design it, how would you advise the president of the United States?
Ryan Busse
I would say, first off, we need to defuse the sort of irrational vitriol that is around the situation. Let's start by celebrating responsible gun owners and understanding that firearms and gun owners and the culture around that can be healthy, can be safe, can be responsible; it doesn't all have to be bad. You have to do that instead of demonizing. Many on the Left do demonize or really don't understand any sort of facet of firearms ownership in the United States. We've got to start with that. I don't know exactly what policy that is but I think coming from the top and saying - which I tried to do in the beginning of my book - try to explain to people why this isn't all bad. It doesn't have to be bad. It's not all scary. Start with that and then let's start with the policies that are some that we discussed here on your segment today. There is a lot of stuff that polls 75-85 percent which means, as a president, I don't have to do any work to bring people together; they're already together; that 80 percent of people who like universal background checks. The vast majority of people think that minimum age for semi-automatic rifles should be raised. I could go through several of these instances. Would, if any, of those things, air quotes, "fix it?" No. But we could take the air out of this national chasm, and we can make things marginally better instead of having them progressively get marginally worse. I'm worried if we don't do something like that, we're going to quickly end up at a place where there ain't going to be any coming back from, like January 6, [if] that happens with a bunch of loaded AR-15s; 500 people get killed at an event like that, like, that's something the nation might not come back from so let's ratchet it back.
Richard Helppie
What I love about your response to that is you began with a conciliatory approach; let's all talk about the problem and you didn't go on the attack of one side or the other. That, in my humble estimation, is what's exactly putting our constitutional republic form of democracy at risk; that the game has become Republicans attack Democrats, Democrats attack Republicans, news media keeps us split apart because their business model is around clicks and eyeballs and if they can keep you focused, because you can't take your eye off a threat. But my experience sounds like yours; the country is full of compassionate and generous people and that we have the tools to solve the problem if we act better. I hope that President Biden and whomever the next president might be would call you and say, Ryan, come take a seat next to me and guide me in how to bring down this risk of unfettered gun ownership to the Republic. I think it'd be very valuable. Again, I want to compliment you on your bravery. I know that word gets thrown around a lot, but folks should read your book "Gunfight." Writing it was not without great personal cost to you. I think the clarity that you've given us is potentially a leaping off point to a better day tomorrow.
Ryan Busse
Well, thanks. I appreciate you having me on and appreciate the kind words about the book.
Richard Helppie
Any closing remarks for our audience?
Ryan Busse
I would just say I think that this issue is important because I think it now colors everything that you care about; like I'm a very passionate environmental advocate and I know lots of people are, I'm worried about women's reproductive rights and I could go on and on and on about all these things that people are worried about. I don't think any of them are going to get measurably better until we figure out a way to improve this gun thing because I think the gun thing is kind of at the center of our national political chasm. You may think, well, the gun thing's too hard or it's too emotional or I don't understand it so I'm just going to keep doing this thing over here. Well, I got news for you; until we can, this most powerful of freedoms...until we figure out a way to balance that with responsibilities a little bit better I don't think any of our political stuff is going to get measurably better. It's important. I guess I'm telling you and the listeners that I think this thing is important to everybody, whether you like it or it's intimidating or not, it's something we should all care about.
Richard Helppie
I could not agree more. These most divisive issues - abortion, firearms - there's a great middle that are in general agreement yet we have a system that continues to pit us against each other. Perhaps through this little program and through the books that you're writing, maybe we can make a little bit of a dent. Again, Ryan, you've been really generous with your time. I hope that my listeners, readers and viewers will take the time to look up the book "Gunfight." It is a great read, buy it for Christmas presents, for Hanukkah presents, buy it for birthday presents, but let's get this dialogue pointed in a better direction and let's celebrate men like Ryan Busse that are taking on the fight.
Ryan Busse
Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me on.
Richard Helppie
This is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
(Watch, Listen or Read) Firearm Regulation, Liability and Responsibility: