The McDonald's Massacre (1984) w/ Cari Babitzke
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s July 19th. This day in 1984, a gunman killed 21 people at a McDonald’s in San Isidro, California. It was one of the earliest public mass shootings in this country.
Jody, Niki, and Kellie are joined by Cari Babitzke of Boston University to discuss the public and policy response to the event at the time — and the many lessons about mass shootings that we still haven’t learned today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia. |
| 0:07.0 | My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:10.0 | This day, July 18, 1984, a lone gunman walked into a McDonald's in San Eseidro, California, |
| 0:17.8 | armed with a semi-automatic pistol, a semi-automatic rifle, and a shotgun. He began shooting and killing 21 |
| 0:25.4 | restaurant patrons and workers in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in |
| 0:29.5 | modern US history. Nearly half of the victims were under 21 years old, 5 were under 12 years old, one was 8 months old. |
| 0:37.5 | The event made the news, obviously, it shook the country and in some ways and that moment felt new but so many of the factors and |
| 0:45.6 | details in the story don't feel new anymore and they feel very relevant to |
| 0:49.2 | so much of the gun violence that we encounter seemingly every week in this country now as are the political |
| 0:55.6 | and policy dimensions to this story. |
| 0:58.4 | So here to discuss all that are as always Nicole Hemmer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. |
| 1:03.5 | Hello there. |
| 1:04.5 | Hello Jody. |
| 1:05.5 | Hey there. |
| 1:06.7 | And our guest for this episode is Carrie Babitsky lecturer at Boston University, a researcher |
| 1:11.8 | on gun violence and gun politics and the NRA and |
| 1:14.7 | lots of the other issues around this. |
| 1:16.3 | So Carrie, thank you so much for joining us on this. |
| 1:18.3 | Thanks for having. |
| 1:20.3 | There's a policy conversation here. |
| 1:22.0 | There's lots of big things to get into. I just wanted to sort of say that this morning I was looking around something to go and look for like podcast episodes about some of the topics we discussed and I was just sort of searching for this and you know |
| 1:34.2 | There are dozens and dozens of podcast episodes about the Sanicidro massacre and they all |
... |
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