Can America fix its gun problem?
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2022
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, it’s easy to feel discouraged about guns in America because we’ve been here before, and little has changed.
But one person who remains hopeful in times like these is Dr. Garen Wintemute. He heads the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, and has been studying gun violence for decades.
“Violence is a health problem,” he said. “It kills more people than motor vehicle injuries. And, yes, I’m constitutionally hopeful. But my hope is born out of having done this for 40 years.”
On the show today, Wintemute walks us through some of the policies that could make a real difference, from “red flag” laws to universal background checks, and discusses why this time could be different despite the gun control gridlock in Washington.
In the News Fix, the nation’s highest court is going to great lengths to find the person who leaked the draft opinion on overturning Roe v. Wade. Plus, if you’re tired of paying high gasoline prices, get used to it. We’ll explain why.
Then, listeners sound off on Uvalde, and we all get smart about bourbon!
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Heavily outspent, gun control groups still press their case” from Marketplace
- “The two paths Congress could take on gun control” from Vox
- “Meet the Doctor Who Gave $1 Million of His Own Money to Keep His Gun Research Going” from ProPublica
- “What research shows on the effectiveness of gun-control laws” from The Washington Post
- “Exclusive: Supreme Court leak investigation heats up as clerks are asked for phone records in unprecedented move” from CNN
- EU’s Ban on Russian Oil Adds Stress to Region’s Economies from The Wall Street Journal
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart |
| 0:11.5 | as all of us. |
| 0:12.5 | I'm Cara Rizdala, it is Tuesday, me at the time for a weekly single topic deep dive. |
| 0:17.3 | Today we're going to talk about the Vivaldi shooting and more importantly where we go from |
| 0:22.0 | here on the issue of guns in America, I guess. |
| 0:27.8 | You know, like we talked about last week, it's really easy to get caught up in just sort |
| 0:32.1 | of the horror and almost the hopelessness of the moment. |
| 0:36.0 | But we can also be focused on solutions because every time there's one of these mass shootings, |
| 0:41.8 | there's talk in Washington about gun reform legislation, but then it just doesn't seem |
| 0:45.5 | to go anywhere. |
| 0:47.5 | And yes, that's partly because gun rights groups have spent five times as much on lobbying |
| 0:52.9 | as the gun control groups. |
| 0:55.6 | So let's do solutions today. |
| 0:57.6 | Kimberly said the other day when we brought this up and when we decided to do this topic, |
| 1:00.8 | which I think we did like on the air so that all y'all could hear us thinking out |
| 1:04.1 | about this, we're going to focus on solutions, right? |
| 1:07.2 | And areas where there can be compromised and joining us to talk about that is Dr. |
| 1:10.7 | Garen Wintemuth. |
| 1:11.7 | He's the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis. |
| 1:15.3 | Dr. Wintemuth, welcome to the program. |
| 1:16.6 | Good to have you on. |
| 1:17.6 | Thanks for having me. |
... |
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