#1606 Gun Violence in America: A Conversation with Richard Rhodes

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

Richard Rhodes, noted historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, returns to Listening to America for another discussion reflecting on America as it approaches its 250th birthday. In this poignant conversation, Mr. Rhodes and Clay discuss gun violence in America. Are humans inherently violent? What is the cause of the dramatic rise in mass shootings in the United States? Assuming that the Second Amendment is unshakable, are there things we can do to prevent or bring down the rate of gun violence in American life? Rhodes’ conclusions are simple and stark. We are not different from other developed countries except in one crucial way.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to my introduction to this week's podcast edition of
0:04.4	listening to America. Richard Rose is one of the most extraordinary writers,
0:10.8	thinkers, historians historians in America.
0:14.6	He wrote one of the most important books of our time,
0:17.0	the making of the atomic bomb.
0:19.2	There are 27 others.
0:21.6	He's an amazing man. He's become my friend. I'm going to be seeing him in
0:25.8	Seattle during the phase two of my John Steinbeck travels with Charlie Tour.
0:30.6	I saw something that he wrote and so I wrote to him and asked him a couple
0:37.0	of months ago would you be willing to come on the program to have a series of conversations about America at 250.
0:46.5	To my extraordinary satisfaction and surprise, he said yes immediately. and so this is the second of our
0:55.6	conversations and there will be more. His range as a writer is remarkable. I had known about his work, of course, forever, but I was reading a set of
1:06.1	his essays. They go all the way back to the 1970s, and they were so well written.
1:12.0	Essays are an interesting form. They need to be, they need to have a little
1:16.0	breathing space in them. They need to try out some ideas. That in fact is the technical meaning of
1:21.6	essay, to try, to send up a trial balloon in a sense.
1:27.0	There has to be an essay style and he has it.
1:31.0	I mean he was born to be an essayist but he also wrote in at least 900 to a thousand page books
1:38.0	on the hydrogen bomb on the atomic bomb on the proliferation of nuclear weapons and so on.
1:44.0	So now we're having these conversations.
1:47.0	And I just want you to have the sense of how amazing it is
1:51.0	that a person of that stature who has earned the right to be heard,
	...

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