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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie, and we have a very important guest with us today from Montana. We have Mr. Ryan Busse, he is the author of the book "Gunfight." This is a book that I would encourage everyone to read. We're going to dive into the topic of guns and gun law in America. Now if you're tuning in today to hear someone opine that the Democrats and the political left want to take away all the private firearms and destroy the Second Amendment, or you want to hear that the Republicans and the political right are in favor of slaughtering innocents, then you're not going to like this episode at all - and that's exactly why you should be listening to this because the partisan fight is getting us no place. The best voice on this topic, Mr. Ryan Busse, is with us today. He is the author of "Gunfight." He is an avid hunter, outdoors man and conservationist, and importantly, he built a very successful career in the firearms industry. [He is the] first person that I've had the pleasure of reading about who's actually been there, meeting with the NRA, insider on how guns are manufactured, sent into the distribution system, ultimately end up with the retailer. Today's episode is the first part of a two part series - next week, we're going to talk about the idea of graduated licensing and other policies for guns. but today, for an insider's look at guns and gun laws in America we welcome from Montana, Mr. Ryan Busse. Ryan, welcome to The Common Bridge.
Ryan Busse
Thanks for having me on, Rich, appreciate the kind words about the book and agree with you; It's an important topic. As we chatted about before we hopped on the air here, the book, I didn't ever dream of writing this book. It's not something I wished I had to write, but it's something I felt I had to write, so here we are.
Richard Helppie
Well, thank you for writing it and being bold. Again, I encourage everyone to please read the book "Gunfight," I picked up my copy on Amazon. You're going to read things about the gun industry that you just can't get any place else and frankly, some great personal sacrifice that Mr. Busse made. But Ryan, tell us a little bit about yourself. What were your early days like and what was your career arc like and a little bit about what you're up to today?
Ryan Busse
Sure, and I detail a fair amount of this in the beginning of the book. As you know, it's kind of a complex story but I grew up on a rural ranch where most of the best days of my life were spent with guns, hunting and shooting with my grandfather and my father and my brother, my friends. So for me, guns, even as a very young kid, the association with guns was a positive thing, not a negative thing. But it wasn't the sort of thing that you wore on your sleeve. It wasn't your identity. Gun responsibility was something that was drilled into every kid that I knew, certainly, including myself and my brother. You didn't do irresponsible things, you damn sure didn't march into towns with AR-15s to intimidate people like we've seen in this country in the last few years. You didn't have bumper stickers and hats and celebrate armed intimidation. But we did participate in hunting, we did a lot of shooting, trap and skeet competitions and things like that; very wholesome. I graduated from college and I was getting ready to go to law school, thought better of that. My wife still tells me I would be an excellent lawyer and I don't think she means that as a compliment. I ended up getting into the sporting goods industry because I thought this is a thing I love, it'll be like a dream for me. I'll get to be around the things that I love to do. I played baseball as a kid and I liken it to somebody making it into the major leagues, like holy smokes, I get paid to do this. That's a bit what it felt like to me at the beginning. I ended up getting a job, became a sales executive at a very small fledgling firearms company named Kimber, and we ended up building it into one of the largest in the country. In the first part of my career, all of that responsibility, imperfect as it was but responsibility and norms of behavior were really evident - that was 1995 - inside the industry. The industry didn't allow AR-15s or tactical gear to even be displayed in the main part of its own trade shows; again, not laws, those were voluntary prohibitions. Those were social norms of behavior. Much like our politics back then had some imperfect but very obvious norms of behavior, so too did the firearms industry. Over time I saw that breakdown as the NRA figured out that fear and hatred and conspiracy, combined with firearms, could drive political outcomes. So I saw the industry change around me and I ended up - the last over half, two thirds of my career - trying to hold to the dream that I had as a kid of the sorts of guns and gun ownership and gun culture that I thought was healthy and responsible versus what was being built by the industry.
Richard Helppie
And you were very successful with that, indeed, you were nominated the gun industry's person of the year. You were recognized by people as being very capable and very knowledgeable. So it was a great career, it's not like there was a falling out. I could sense the reluctance in your book, and indeed, the despair about the changes that you witnessed.
Ryan Busse
I was like anybody else who wanted to drive a business and be successful and I feel like we did that, I was proud of what we did. And at the same time you're not exactly producing bubblegum, like, it's an important, immensely impactful freedom, the Second Amendment freedom, to own firearms. So I always had, in the back of my mind, this idea that we can do this, but you can't do it unfettered, you can't do it unchecked, you can't do it without responsibility, you have to have a balance between this... Let's face it, it's built around taking a life away. That's what a gun is. We target shoot with them and we defend ourselves with them and we hunt with them but in the end, it's a tool to efficiently take a life. And that sort of immense freedom and responsibility must be counter-balanced with an immense responsibility instead of social norms. I always felt that, in the back of my head when that all started to break down around me, it was a bit of despair. I kind of felt like I was the last man standing because eventually, almost every company in the industry built and sold AR-15s. So I never did - or my company never did - I fought like crazy to keep it from happening. Many of the people who I got into the industry with ended up embarking on very, in my opinion, very irresponsible advertising campaigns and marketing schemes. I kind of like felt like I was standing around looking at all these people saying, hey, remember, we agreed we weren't going to do this, right? And people looked at me like I had eight heads or something. So yeah, it was kind of a tough existence.
Richard Helppie
I was horrified in my examination of gun laws and gun practices over the years that there were pop-up ads and first person shooter games for semi-automatic rifles and large magazines. One of the things that you set out in your book, you talk about the quality versus the quantity of guns in America. I'm old enough to remember when the scourge was Saturday Night Specials - cheap hand guns - and trying to get those out of circulation. You talk about defensive versus offensive guns; I've never heard a division like that. Is there an easy way to explain to our listeners, our viewers, and our readers the difference between a defensive versus an offensive firearm?
Ryan Busse
Well, the simple answer is no, there is no easy way because, like a lot of things, the definitions kind of blur as you get around the lines and the edges. I will say though, I let the industry do that for itself. Here's an example: up until about 2006 or 2007 the industry itself would not allow anything that was deemed or marketed tactical; that word "tactical," [they] would not allow it in their own trade shows. You had to have either military credentials or be a credentialed law enforcement officer to get back in this cordoned off, curtained off place where the tactical gear was. The reason is because the word "tactical" to everybody that I know means planned offensive military action. In other words, if you have a tactical gun, that means you're planning to go do something offensive, you're going to attack, you're going to barge into a building and take back hostages. So it's not a defensive thing; you're not at home watching TV and a robber breaks in and you grab your tactical gun, you have a defensive gun for that. Now, again, the definition is blurred around the edges but to fast forward to where we are today; today if you walk into the industry trade show, it's 85-90 percent tactical, the word "tactical" is everywhere - everybody discusses how hot the quote/unquote "tactical market" is. There are tactical magazines, tactical guns, tactical scopes, tactical pants, tactical boots, literally - even tactical underwear - everything is tactical. What we have done is marketed to a group of people - largely young men in the United States - where the industry used to know that it was irresponsible to do those things because not marketing tactical gear, that wasn't a law, that was a voluntary prohibition. Today, where we are just 15-18 years later, everything is tactical. So we are essentially telling everybody that you need to buy these things for planned offensive military operation. Now what sort of gear is tactical - and these are just sort of broad, soft around the edges definitions - they tend to be higher capacity, they tend to be higher power, longer distance, these sorts of things. A self-defense firearm, the sort that I sold and the sort that a lot of people still consider effective self-defense firearms, they're 6, 7, 8, 9, capacity; a polymer frame tactical pistol might be 20, 22, 25 round capacity. There is no easy definition but if the industry itself markets the things as tactical, then I guess I take that definition from them.
Richard Helppie
You write about the market on the customer side being "couch commandos;" I love that term, by the way, in a sad way. Also you talk about emotions and guns really being dangerous. I know that, in my experience and talking with people, that if you have more untrained people out there, it's more apt that somebody's going to pull a gun at the first provocation in anticipation that someone else might do it. I've been in places in Texas, I'm trying to get a chicken dinner and there are ten guys walking around outside on a suburban street; they're strapped up with side arms and with semi-automatic rifles. Even in my home state of Michigan, we had guys standing around the Capitol grounds with AR-15-style firearms and I remember when that occurred, I'm like, where's the safe shot? Who is it you're going to be shooting? And by the way, stupid guy carrying that gun, the State Police sharpshooters that are on the buildings have you in their sights first, if anything breaks out. So tell me, did your customer change over your time in the gun industry? Was there a such thing as the "couch commando" or people that are just overly emotional about it?
Ryan Busse
It definitely did change over time. I think that the firearms industry played a role in changing the customer. The thesis of my book is that the radicalized politics that have divided our families and our workplaces in our entire nation really have their genesis in guns and the "all or nothing-ism" of guns and gun politics. I think this when the debate about policies breaks down - as you mentioned in your lead in to this segment - when it breaks down to this: they're going to take everything or we're going to have everything. It's like this sort of black or white, all or nothing, on a scale of one to ten: ten or one. That's not how a democracy works. So you have the industry, mostly led by the NRA, over time slowly realize that this all or nothing extremism, and creating fear around it and conspiracy around it, basically tell people that the evil libs are going to take their rights from them. Now you have a group of people - like those guys in Michigan that marched into the Capitol screaming at lawmakers with high cap magazines and AR-15s - they believe that they are soldiers in an existential war and that there is no responsibility in that, there is only the thought that they must march in...In fact, they are being told that they must tactically be ready to own those guns to kill fellow citizens. That's why they're there. That's why they're trying to intimidate people because no responsible gun owner marches to a capitol square with a loaded AR-15. That violates every single rule of responsible firearms ownership anybody was ever taught; period, end of story. It's not defensible and yet they're doing it and is the Right or the firearms industry uttering one single word of criticism? No, they're not. That should tell you how dangerous. I think that's akin to taking a bunch of lit matches and waving them around open gasoline; it's way too dangerous to do that. But it's because the the views about why Americans can and should own guns have been changed by the NRA and by the industry, from one where we have the right to own guns for hunting and self-defense to where you must own a gun to be ready to kill people in an armed civil war. And that's a frightening place to be.
Richard Helppie
I want to come back to the Second Amendment and some of the broader issues a little bit later but one of the things that I really enjoyed about your book is that not only did you have your perspective, but you drew the basis - and I'm a numbers guy, so I love the statistics - when you started your career, national gun sales were about 250,000 units per month, by the end of 2020 more than 1.8 million a month. Fascinating statistic: 8 million new gun owners - and I can just kind of connect those dots - new gun owners, sales of very powerful high capacity rifles. We've got a lot of inexperienced people out there owning these things. And then the way that you did the timeline - and it was throughout the book - after 9/11 and the Iraq, Afghanistan wars, gun sales went from about five to eight million a year to 13-16 million. When President Obama was elected, sales went up 52 percent, 43 million units - could have sold more if the backlog could have been fulfilled...that was the other thing, that you couldn't make them fast enough. (Ryan Busse: That's correct.) And then after the tragedy at Sandy Hook there were talk of restrictions, gun sales went up to 8,000 a day and high capacity magazines were selling out. When President Obama left office, more than 101 million guns had been sold; it was a 75 percent increase over the Bush 43 administration. Then paradoxically, after the election of Donald Trump, the Trump slump: 17 percent decrease. As you were in the middle of this industry experiencing these political and social changes, sales of guns go up, sales of guns go down. I know there are people that said President Obama was the best gun salesman ever. What were you thinking and what was the reaction of some of your peers in the industry during this time?
Ryan Busse
Well, I guess the most eloquent, simplest term for what I was thinking was...I effing hated it. And I hated it because of the irrationality of it. You lead in to this and I'll get to the core of your question, but I think a very interesting thing is that folks who observe the firearms industry and the firearms situation in America often accuse the firearms industry and the NRA of either wanting or propagating inner city violence or suicide or things that happen with guns, and I'm here to tell you, they don't; it's not that they want that to happen but the truth may almost be worse. Those are just sort of unfortunate by-products of what the industry does, because what the industry and what the NRA want are political power and money. And so whatever the unfortunate...it's like, I mean, think of it this way: I want lots of fast cars and if people die in traffic accidents, so what - that's kind of the way it is. So what disgusted me and what pissed me off was that I wanted to do well by doing the things that a company has to do well: building a good product, marketing correctly, having a good sales team, doing something I can be proud of. Instead of that, so much of our success or failure was driven by these irrational...I mean, whether the guy leading the presidential race was black or white, that drove sales; whether kids in a school were murdered with an AR-15 or not, that drove sales; whether a crazy orange man with a strange comb-over from Florida was elected president or not, that drove sales. You see, none of these things are things that you can be taught in Harvard Business School or be proud of as to how proficient you are at doing your job. And so for me, it pulled that pride of professional achievement away and just sort of handed it off to these ancillary, irrational events that drove me nuts. Of course, the irrationality led to, in some cases, very frightening outcomes of increased polarization, radicalization, and lots of these people that are now very pissed-off - irrationally so - because of the conspiracies driven by the NRA about having guns. In the national soup, it's just not in good taste.
Richard Helppie
The way that you portrayed the NRA and the role of single issue voters, I think, was very clear and very articulate. As I pondered a lot of what you reported in your book, I'm like, it's almost like a chicken and egg: I don't know what came first, that single issue voter or the NRA. But one thing that you did call out, is that the NRA was ruthless in shutting down dissent. I mean, they took Smith and Wesson and made Smith and Wesson capitulate to the agenda of the NRA. How did they go about doing that? I mean, just how did they get so powerful?
Ryan Busse
Well, it was very useful for me to study this as I went back through all my notes and files and history about this, but what I think we should take from it is that none of this happened. It really started to coalesce after the 1999 Columbine incident. That's really where I draw a line; directly from that to where we are. We now know - because of enterprising NPR reporters, Tim Mack especially, who has become a friend, who's written a book about this - he uncovered secret recordings of the NRA business meetings after Columbine. And just to remind people, the NRA convention was scheduled to happen just a few days after the 1999 shooting outside of Denver, Columbine, Littleton, Colorado. Afterwards the NRA sits down in a hotel conference room - all the leaders, people I knew: Jim Baker, Wayne LaPierre, all these folks were in there - and they essentially said, well, should we be a part of the solution here? This looks bad. We've got dead kids. Should we talk about policy? Should we be a responsible citizen? Should we engage and see if we can work through policies that make this less likely to happen? Or - and here's where it like a little light bulb goes off over their heads - could we use these incidents to drive fear, to tell people that the evil libs are going to come get their guns? Could we make up conspiracies that make people so fearful that they might start acting irrationally and voting irrationally? And this is before national politics became all of this, but they were like, you know what, that second one just might work; we might be able to use fear to drive conspiracy, so they opted for that. It didn't immediately take hold. It took, honestly, really 10-12 years until Sandy Hook, when Sandy Hook happened. Again, Wayne LaPierre waits a few days and then comes out and says, the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun; and they're going to try to take your guns from you. They had perfected the system by then. Now, everything on the Right is fear, fear, fear; fear about gay people, fear about trans people, fear about taking your guns, fear about...good god, what else can you be fearful of? And so the key, when you ask how did the NRA do it? Fear - they drove fear.
Richard Helppie
When you look at human motivation there's a school of thought that says the two greatest motivators for people are fear and greed. Fear is generally transitory, where greed lasts forever; I could see the fear having to be restocked. I think you make a really good case that we see that fear - and now we see that in retaliation coming from the Left - splitting the country. I've had authors on my show explaining how the news is presented and what Fox News pioneered as the affirmation programming that was then mimicked on the other side. Now we can't get people to talk, to say can we all come together under a common set of policies that are good for everybody. We'll be talking about that in the next episode but you had some things that you were very specifically trying to get done that got thwarted, like the gun show loophole, the development of smart guns, and perhaps some other things. Tell our listeners and our readers and our viewers, what were some of the important policies? How did they get thwarted and how things could be different today had we had the political unity and the courage to actually put some of these policies in place?
Ryan Busse
Well, I use that gun show loophole, or universal background checks, as a good one to examine. That particular policy, which essentially...this is a problem we have, if you buy a gun through a licensed firearms dealer, you have to do a background check. If you buy a gun through someone who is not a licensed firearms dealer, you do not have to do a background check. So it's referred to as the gun show loophole, because let's just say you have ten guns to sell, you go down to the gun show, you're not a licensed dealer, you can legally sell them to the first ten people you see; it's totally legal. That's what's referred to as the gun show loophole. That was exploited by the kids and their friends around Columbine, 1999. And if you haven't noticed, it's a long way past 1999 and we still have not closed or corrected the gun show loophole. Now, the policy that would do that, which is universal background checks, polls still today and have since then it, consistently, polls above 80 percent nationwide, oftentimes brushing up to 90 percent. And I will assert this; I don't think you will find anything else that polls consistently for 25 years at above 80 percent. It doesn't happen, as I've mentioned on other podcasts, like ice cream does not poll at 85 percent, it just doesn't. Why is it that even after 25 years of something polling above 85 percent we can still not get it passed? How is that even possible? So if you don't believe that guns and gun policy aren't at the center of our national divide I'm about ready to tell you why you're wrong. This is the thing around which the Right decided to build its totem and it's a dangerous thing. The Right, the Republican Party now, the radicalized part of the Republican Party, think of it like a beam in your house. They look up at the beam and they say, yeah, it's made of asbestos and yes, it is flaking off and yes, over time, we are all going to get cancer; maybe we should replace the beam. And then somebody says, hey, hold it. If we yank that beam out, and replace it with a better one, the whole house is going to fall down. And they go back like, yeah, we'll just leave it, we won't replace it. That's sort of the way the Republican Right looks at the gun issue. They know there's an issue. Republican moms are just as concerned about dropping their kids off at school as Democrat moms are and yet because we have wrapped ourselves around this totemic symbol of power and division in fear - guns and gun politics - we refuse to address it. The second thing...so that's sort of the reality of it, I think. The other part of this is, there is no fix. We live in a democracy. Nothing in a democracy like ours is perfect. There is no like, oh, let's pass three things and it'll be fixed next year. No, it's not going to happen. We have guns in the United States, we're going to continue to have guns in the United States; a responsible democracy would choose to make things marginally better, instead of choosing to make things marginally worse. Notice there is no perfect in there, there isn't going to be a perfect, there's going to be rational people that make decent decisions instead of making worse decisions. That's what we need to work towards. So things like universal background checks, will that solve everything? No, but it'll fix a few. Raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles, will that solve everything? No, but it would have fixed Uvalde, would have stopped Buffalo, would have stopped Highland Park where kids all below the age of 21 went out and bought AR-15s and committed heinous crimes with them. They bought them illegally through licensed firearms dealers. So you see, again, will that stop everything? No, it won't. But it will dial back the temperature and the radicalization to a place sort of like - I explained in the book - back when I got into the industry, when things weren't perfect but there was an agreed upon set of norms and rational behavior. We still had gun violence and death but we didn't count mass shootings, like 1.8 a day, like we are now. I assert, that's what we have to do.
Richard Helppie
I find it hard to quarrel with your logic at all. The divide is growing deeper in that you have some states doing what they call "constitutional carry," which is no training or certification to carry a concealed pistol. This has been a great tool for law enforcement; if they have an encounter with someone and they have a firearm that's not appropriately licensed, registered, and they don't have a license to carry it, that was cause to get that gun off the street or separate that person from the firearm. (Ryan Busse: Correct.) I don't think I feel safer knowing that anybody can go in and get that firearm. When we talk about graduated licensing and other...
Ryan Busse
Just a second, Rich, here's an interesting little...and I think I mentioned this in the book...when I was at trade shows with all the firearms executives, almost all of whom are my friends, we would meet up at some restaurant or some bar late in the evenings after the show to yuk it up or talk about old times or catch up on our family stuff. Oftentimes, other executives - including me - would joke about some of the folks who we saw in the trade show that day. And somebody would say, would you be okay, if like every single person you saw today was armed to the teeth while in a grocery store with your family? And people would look at you like, are you some alien, are you freaking kidding me? Of course not, I would get my family out of there in two seconds. So the industry and the participants know that, they know it's not a good idea to do these things unfettered. Do they support the right to self-defense and concealed carry? Yes. But that doesn't mean you do it and remove all facets of responsibility, this is sort of like crafting policy in the middle thing. Where we are headed in many states now - 28 states, I think you mentioned with constitutional carry - they're basically saying, yeah, whatever, who cares about training? That's not responsible.
Richard Helppie
I'm appalled, frankly. What is the role of private firearms in a free society? I'm going to preface this by saying that when you look at the history of disarmed citizens, it isn't good. Oftentimes I'm struck by the illogical position; people say, look, the government isn't responsible, it's not populated by great people and it's taken over our lives [but] let's have that group be the only people that have firearms. You look at what happened in Australia during COVID, how they used the military to control their citizenry. And while you can argue whether that was a good thing they did or not, is there a good articulation of the role of private firearms in a free society?
Ryan Busse
I don't have a particularly poignant descriptor here. I will just say, so much of what is happening in the United States is kind of a first of its type experiment. I mean, we - those of us our age - often feel like, well, this country has been here for 10,000 years. No, it's not, no, it's not. We're a couple of centuries old, we're still experimenting in this sort of multi-racial, multi-religious, broad, very diverse sort of democracy with a lot of freedoms; it is really an experiment. I think guns are one, if not the penultimate, indicator as to whether our experiment is working or not. I won't really go to the role because I think the role - what's legal or not - is constantly being massaged and trimmed and expanded. And that's part of that, the democratic experiment. Where are the lines that make things safe, and balance the safety of the rights of everybody, and maintain the constitutional rights? So I think this gun thing is a test for us because there is no other right that is so potentially, immensely impactful to other people so fast. If you have an AR-15 and a bunch of 30 round magazines, you're just a minute or two away from potentially impacting the rights of lots of other people very dramatically, very quickly. There really isn't another right that you have that's potentially that impactful. So we are going to figure out a way to deal with this right first or I'm fearful that we will deal with none of the other ones either. There's this balance of freedom versus responsibility; it's front and center right here on the guns, man. It doesn't get any more dramatic than this. We either figure out a way to deal with this or if it gets out of hand, the repercussions are not going to be pretty.
Richard Helppie
I am in strong agreement with you on that. I think the notion that we have congress people like Lauren Boebert posing with her family all holding firearms. My reaction to that is, what the hell, and who's voting for this? That someone thinks, gee, now I know who to vote for because I have a family holding rifles. We do have a proud history in our country, the...
Ryan Busse
I'd like to say Rich, just real quick, sorry...I think what pisses me off most about that, Lauren Boebert...come on, she's a fool, she's an idiot, she's irresponsible, she should have never been elected. It's easy for me to pass judgment on her and Marjorie Taylor Greene and anybody else that uses guns in their campaign to intimidate people. If you want to go out and show that you're a hunter with a gun or that you can defend yourself, fine. But they're doing that Thomas Massie holding an M60 in his Christmas card. M60 is the gun of Rambo. It's a fully automatic gun of war and he's cradling it in his Christmas card. There have always been idiots in politics, there will continue to be idiots in politics. What pisses me off most is responsible gun owners are so tribal, have been told to be so quiet, that they do not criticize that. There was not one single word of criticism about any of that stuff from the firearms industry - the people who are supposed to know and be experts and be most responsible. That's what pisses me off. The people who know better are not shouting that down. I'm here to try to empower responsible gun owners to just say, look, no, that ain't us. They're going to brand gun owners with that if we do not shout it down.
Richard Helppie
My experience with gun owners is that, by and large, most people are pretty responsible.
Ryan Busse
There are millions of guns out there and we have a gun violence problem but we don't have millions of gun accidents and gun crimes, so obviously, the vast majority of people who own guns are doing so responsibly; all the more reason to tamp down the irresponsible, radicalized, bad by-products - it's in our best interest to do it.
Richard Helppie
One of the things in your book that I really enjoyed so much was the first person experience and talking about your travels, going to a sporting goods store, or some other gun retailer. You've talked to the people behind the counter that are doing the federal background checks, that are helping people choose a firearm for whatever they want to do. I can only imagine...I'm in South Florida and an 18 year old kid comes in, barely past his birthday, and wants to buy the most powerful semi-automatic rifle he can get and a thousand rounds of ammunition. I can't imagine that the clerk behind that counter didn't get a bad feeling about that, like this can't lead to a good outcome. Am I wrong about that or have people put their emotions and their common sense so far down that it just doesn't affect them? Someone else, they had money, you passed the background check, and in this case, the kid that went into Parkland, he passed the background check because all the stuff that would have flagged him happened when he was a juvenile - which wasn't available to the background check.
Ryan Busse
Here, we butt up against this balance of freedom with responsibility. If I remember correctly, I don't remember if that's Nicholas Cruz you're talking about, the Parkland shooter (Richard Helppie: Indeed.) put his gun in a case and hopped in the backseat of an Uber and literally just had the Uber drop him off in front of Parkland High School and walked right in with it. He had been denied purchases, I don't remember how it was on that day for that gun, but he had been denied purchases. I believe one or two other retailers had voluntarily turned him away from buying ammo or something else previous to that. But on this particular instance, they didn't. So here we have this balance of rights and responsibilities. There are people who would say - in the firearms industry now and running even more radical gun rights groups than the NRA - who would say a citizen who is 18 has every right to buy whatever gun he wants or whatever ammo he wants, whenever, and I don't care if he looks disturbed or whatever, he has the right to do it - don't you dare infringe upon his freedom. And I say well, what about the rights and freedoms of those kids in that high school, do they not have rights and freedoms? You see here, if you have rights and freedoms that start to outweigh the responsibility and the rights and freedoms of other people, we've got a problem in a democracy. I'm here with a newsflash, we've got a problem in the democracy because that's a case where responsibility somewhere, somehow should have stopped that and for whatever reason, we have not put enough weight on the responsibility part, we put too much weight on the freedom part.
Richard Helppie
That is a great articulation of that dilemma. And I, again, am standing in strong agreement with you. Another thing you talked about in your book - we talked about the gun show loophole - there was a movement to develop smart guns that would only fire based on the owner having possession of the firearm. How good is that technology and what did the NRA do about that potential? I don't understand why they'd want to stop it, I mean, if it worked.
Ryan Busse
Well, smart gun technology, which is essentially technology that would limit the gun to only be usable or fired by the owner or whoever is coded to use it, I don't know that it's perfect. There's a new company now that seems to have a new system that seems pretty good. I don't know that the technology back then would have been great. My point in telling the story was that the NRA was so controlling about anything that might pop up good, bad or indifferent. I mean, who knows? Perhaps if the first model was allowed to happen, innovation would have progressed so that it was perfected by now. We have smartphones that seem to work pretty damn good and everybody relies on...you can't go three seconds without looking at the damn thing, so I guess everybody relies upon them. The NRA just didn't want any sort of innovation like that to happen, to change what they held as a mantra for how guns should be used and produced. I think that's very dangerous because the NRA, again, they cared about money and political power - that's it - and they got it, they got money and political power.
Richard Helppie
By the way, your book does a great job of explaining how that single issue metastasized into political power and has led us to this deadlock and prevented us from having a reasonable discussion about what good policies might be. In our next episode, we are going to talk about that. I'm going to be asking questions, frankly, from a position of ignorance often, because I don't have your background into what the realities might be. But I do recall my ninth grade civics teacher, Lynn Early, talking about your rights and where you infringe on the rights of another, period. He used to say you can swing your fist until it reaches the point of the other guy's nose; I think that's what we're dealing with here. We have this group, the NRA, very powerful, very well moneyed, intent on one side of that debate, but not thinking about the carnage on the other. Again, like everything else we talk about on The Common Bridge, this is a solvable problem if we have the political will. Both parties do benefit from the fact that it's not solved, they can each demonize the other and each fundraise off of it, yet, we hire them to actually solve the problem. So perhaps in our next episode, when we talk about some policy solutions, we'll get some place. Ryan, as we come to our conclusion of this episode, your excellent book "Gunfight," anything about the book that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you'd like the audience of The Common Bridge to know? Again, I highly recommend the book, I know this is an oft repeated phrase, but I literally could not put it down. I stayed up late because it was so compelling. If you want to know something about the style of the book, it is very straightforward. One of the chapters is "Speaking Truth to Bullshit" so if you want to get the unvarnished look, please pick up a copy of "Gunfight," read it and think about reaching out to those elected to represent us. Ryan, any closing thoughts relative to the book "Gunfight" that is important for our listeners, readers, and viewers?
Ryan Busse
I appreciate all your kind words about the book. I thought I had to tell a good story, meaning the characters - me and my family and some of the crazy people that I worked with. It wasn't just to entertain but it was to try to illustrate that real people are behind all of the situations that we're in. As you know, there's an explanatory wide lens about the numbers and the guns in the industry, and a narrower lens on me and the characters in the company. On the NRA and the people I knew, and it alternates between those two. The second thing I'll say is my goal with the book was for people to say, look, if you want to read one book about why the gun thing became what it is in our country and how it's divided our country - it's a tough thing to talk about, there's lots of stuff that's been written and talked about - this one book will explain to you how we got here. That was my goal.
Richard Helppie
You did an outstanding job with it. Again, very illuminating, did a great job informing and supporting the points, the personal insights are something no one could possibly write unless they've been there. Thank you for the courage that you showed in authoring this. So with our guest today, Ryan Busse, we've been talking about his book "Gunfight." We'll be back next week talking about policy ideas. Let's join together and try to solve this problem. Until then, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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(Watch, Listen or Read) GUNFIGHT Unpacking America's Gun Culture: