This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 29, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Many of the attendees of various protests to end gun violence spelled out a

number of policy proposals. Trevor Burris, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, describes

what those policy proposals might mean in terms of reduction of the number of deaths by firearm.

It seems like every time we have one of these horrible tragedies where a lot of people are

killed in one place at one time, most typically by one person with a firearm, the

immediate response is very emotive.

It's not particularly substantive. But you know I was in D.C. sort of milling around

when this March was going on. And there were some policy proposals actually put out there.

There were universal background checks, a ban on certain,

let's see, additives or things you would attach to guns to make them more powerful and

that sort of thing so so you've sort of looked at well what if we wanted to reduce

death by firearm by half and evaluated a lot of these proposals based on that.

So what are your just general thoughts on these marches and the substantive policy content?

I don't know. I really have a problem with the marches. A lot of the people on the right wing

and of course Fox News have been very much laying into them in a variety of ways and

I've called using astroturfing and saying they've been coached and prepared well of

course they have and that's how democracy works so if you're going to support the NRA to do political action

and to do the same thing, then you should, in principle,

support these organizations talking about the other side.

That's how democracy works.

People don't spontaneously get up out of their chairs and go march on Washington, D.C.

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