Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today in our London office by Dominic Green, who is Life and Arts Editor for Spectator USA,

and we're going to be asking what can America do to stop mass shootings?

Don, we've had three awful mass shootings in America in recent days,

and it feels like America's on a sort of loop in which these things happen on a regular basis,

and the debate never seems to move anywhere. What do you think when you look at these debates?

Well, Freddie, to me, this is a pre-political question, which is as much to do with the

psychological health of a population as it is to do with political parties or the

law. The problem seems to me that it immediately hits the buffers because in America nothing is

held to be pre-political in that the foundation of American life is a document, a legal document,

it's the Constitution. And therefore, you're going to come up against the Constitution at some point.

And once you unpick one part of it, you're effectively saying you have the right to unpick all of it.

And the only thing worse than a logjam where nothing can be changed because of the Constitution and the party system

is a situation when anyone can change

anything they like if they hold the levers of power.

I mean, this is why there are arguments that America needs a new constitution.

Well, certainly somebody like Lawrence Lessig of Harvard pointed out a few years ago that this

was an 18th century system and it's beginning to creak in all kinds of ways.

And there are people who would say that if the founders were alive in 2019, they would probably

agree that it would be time to have a technocratic managerial constitution.

But I don't think most people would feel that way at all.

I think politicians invariably are trying to take more power for themselves and a greater right to tell

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