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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

There are a lot of discussions going on right now about gun violence in America in the wake of that horrific massacre in Uvalde, Texas.

So I wanted to talk to an old friend, Arnie Duncan, the former U.S. Education Secretary, who's committed his life to preventing and interrupting violence on the streets of Chicago.

And with him, is Curtis Toller, an ex-gang leader who, after shooting and being shot, has become Arnie's partner in the mission of stopping the shooting and saving young lives.

A conversation from the front lines in the battle against gun violence.

Arnie Duncan, it's good to see you again, my friend. We've done this before, but it was time to have another conversation.

Thanks for your opportunity. I appreciate it.

You know, the reason I wanted to sit down with you is because the whole country is focused at least for the moment on gun violence because of the events in Uvalde, Texas and in Buffalo.

But I was wondering how you processed these events, because as I was saying before we went on the air,

we deal with, we as a country focus on this issue of gun violence episodically when things like this happen.

You're involved in the work of trying to intervene and prevent violence in Chicago on a daily basis.

And I'm wondering how you, you're also a former school superintendent and obviously education secretary.

I'm wondering how you process all of this. When you saw that story, what thoughts went through your head?

Yeah, a couple of thanks, David. You'll remember this is Vivilean's I too, that the worst day of President Obama's presidency was the day of the Sandy Hook massacre.

And he went down the next day at that point. The vice president by United, I went down a couple days later and meeting with 20 families and five teachers,

you know, with the families of the teacher, you got killed going to the funeral of the principal there, Don Hux, wrong. I just never imagined that kind of horror.

And this was like, you know, a decade later that we're still here. And I stayed close to one of those families.

Actually one of the moms who sons killed at Sandy Hook and Nicole Hock, me she had come out and talked to our guys last week out in Rosin, where we work.

And I was incredibly powerful conversation. So the fact that we're still going through this and decades later, the fact that those changes didn't happen.

That's one of the things that I feel that, you know, we just didn't get done just a failing in Congress has talked, but that we got basically zero done in terms of really, you know, making the country safer decade ago.

We're still here. So that's a disbelief and a horror and a heartbreak at that.

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