This is the Tom Hartman program.

And welcome back on the line with us, our old buddy, Professor Richard Wolff.

The economist, world-famous economist, co-founder and democracy at work done info the author

in numerous books is late as the sickness is the system when capitalism fails to save us

from pandemics or itself, also now available as an e-book, democracywork.info, R.D. Wolff

with 2Fs.com, and you can tweet him at Prof. Wolff, PR-OF-W-O-L-F-F.

And Professor Wolff, welcome back to the program.

It seems to me that in a capitalist society, when something that is intuitively wrong keeps

happening over and over and over, and particularly in bigger and bigger ways over time, that there's

money behind it, that there's economics behind it.

And I'm wondering your thoughts on the economics of mass shootings and police shootings, and I

realize those may be two separate things, but your systemic analysis of capitalism and

of our society, I would love to hear your take on those topics.

OK, I think about it a lot, like I'm sure most Americans do watching these horrific

headlines over the years, and as you say, getting worse.

Here is the way I look at it through a lens of economics.

We have a very large industry in this country that produces guns, ammunition, all the paraphernalia

that go with having weapons.

I'm not here talking about people who have weapons because they like to go hunting.

That's a very old tradition in this country, and that was not for much of our history associated

with anything like the mass shootings that we have witnessed in recent years.

So here's my take.

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