Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - The Gun Show

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Natural Sciences, History, Documentary, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2018

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, reignited an increasingly familiar debate about guns in this country. Today, we’re re-releasing a More Perfect episode that aired just after the Las Vegas shooting last year that attempts to make sense of our country’s fraught relationship with the Second Amendment. For nearly 200 years of our nation’s history, the Second Amendment was an all-but-forgotten rule about the importance of militias. But in the 1960s and 70s, a movement emerged — led by Black Panthers and a recently-repositioned NRA — that insisted owning a firearm was the right of each and every American. So began a constitutional debate that only the Supreme Court could solve. That didn’t happen until 2008, when a Washington, D.C. security guard named Dick Heller made a compelling case.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:01.1	Okay.
0:02.4	All right.
0:03.6	Okay.
0:05.0	All right.
0:06.4	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:09.4	Radio Lab.
0:09.8	From W. N. Y.
0:11.9	C.
0:12.8	See?
0:13.1	Yep.
0:17.2	This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod.
0:20.0	A couple months ago, the more perfect team and I released a
0:24.1	doc called The Gun Show, which was sort of an off-angle look at the history that underlies how we
0:32.9	talk about guns in this country. It landed right after the mass shooting in Vegas. Unfortunately, here we are
0:39.3	again. We noticed that a lot of more perfect listeners were sharing this doc in the wake of what
0:45.3	happened in Florida. So we thought we would share it with radio lab listeners who haven't heard it yet.
0:51.2	It's reported by a guy named Sean Romsferam. At the time, Sean was a producer
0:55.9	at More Perfect. He's since gone on to start a daily podcast at Vox called Today Explained.
1:02.9	I encourage you to check out that show. Sean is amazing. In the meantime, here's the gun show.
1:09.7	I think we should start with one of the most confusing sentences in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights.
1:14.6	Not we the people.
	...

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