If you’re narrowing it down to just something like Uvalde where… it’s a single person and the motive is not necessarily political; it’s not an act of terrorism necessarily in the same way we would consider something like even Buffalo to be an act of terrorism or 9/11 of course … So, there might be something unique about our current moment that’s causing these people who have a tendency to want to commit some sort of horrific act like this to do it in this way. There’s been theories about serial killers were prominent at one point, political assassinations were prominent at another point. Those things have died down and now we have mass shootings. It’s hard to know exactly because statistically, these things are still so rare that it’s difficult to come away with serious conclusions as to why they happen or what exactly would solve them. And I think that’s the unfortunate truth about it.

Blair: Now on this side in America, we’ve had words from the president about what he thinks we should do to try and curb gun violence. So Biden called for banning what are so called assault weapons and high capacity magazines, two terms that I actually don’t believe have a technical definition, is that correct?

Gutowski: Well, those are terms that vary from state to state depending on where they’ve been implemented, things like an assault weapons ban or high capacity magazines. Depending on what state you’re in, a high capacity magazine could hold seven rounds, … it could be 10 rounds or it could be 15 rounds. So yeah, it sort of fluctuates. Same for assault weapons. Depending on the state you’re in, it could be a center fire, a semiautomatic firearm that accepts a detachable magazine and has two features like a pistol grip or telescoping stock or flash suppressors. In other states it’s one feature makes it an assault weapon. So yeah, as far as those terms go, they’re pretty nebulous and it really depends on what state you’re in frankly, at this point.

Blair: So at a federal level, Biden is calling for a ban on assault weapons, high capacity magazines, as well as barring anybody under the age of 21 from buying a semi-automatic weapon. Would that do anything to curb these types of mass shootings?

Gutowski: Well, that’s where it gets very difficult to answer. Would it do anything to curb, to prevent one of these… Certainly, you can look at individual circumstance and say, “Well, if for instance…” The popular thing now is Buffalo and Uvalde, both of those shooters were 18 years old so that’s where the age restriction response is coming in. There’s a tendency, as far as demographics go, younger men are the ones who commit most violent crimes in the United States. And so there’s always the impulse to restrict their access to all sorts of weapons. But, obviously you can look at other mass shootings where the shooter was outside of that age range or they used a different kind of gun. Uvalde is an AR-15. So if we banded AR-15s, it wouldn’t happen right?

Well, there was the Santa Fe school shooting where a student used a pump action shotgun to kill 10 of their classmates. There’s not… The UVA shooting was handguns. There’s not going to be a policy, especially a ban, where you’re going to see, “Oh, that would’ve stopped all of these shootings.” And when you’re talking about a ban approach, you’re taking the broadest possible approach to that. You’re not talking about going after people based off of their specific individual warning signs that they presented. Instead, you’re saying, “well, if we just sort of stop selling this entire class of firearm, maybe that would prevent someone from buying them down the line and maybe that would prevent that 0.0001% of the population from carrying out an attack like this. So there’s a broad sword approach to trying to reduce the number of these incidents.

Blair: As you mentioned a little bit earlier in the interview, things like background checks or expanding background checks, I think the term is universal background checks, have been cropping up as an idea to maybe prevent these things from happening. What impact would that have on gun rights as a whole?

Gutowski: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, obviously we have background checks now on all commercial sales of firearms. So if you’re in the business of dealing firearms, you have to get a federal license in order to do that. And as a condition of the federal license, you have to conduct a background check through the FBI’s national list and criminal background check system when you sell a gun to somebody who’s… to a customer, someone who’s not licensed. And right now that’s how we regulate it. We regulate it based off of the commercial market. The federal government regulates the commercial market of firearms. They don’t regulate the private market, the used market, the secondary market. So if you own a gun and you want to sell it to somebody within your state who’s also not a licensed dealer, by federal law, you don’t have to get a background check to carry out that sale.

Now you can’t… there are, of course, still restrictions. You can’t knowingly sell guns to people who are not allowed to legally own them, a prohibited person is what the federal government calls them. Somebody who’s had a felony conviction or domestic violence misdemeanor conviction or has been adjudicated mentally ill, that sort of thing. And so the proposal for universal background checks is to expand that requirement to all of these sales. And sometimes actually, what the House just passed last year, HR8, that would expand the requirement to get a background check to all transfers. So even if you’re just lending somebody a gun, if they’re… usually these have carve outs for family members, but if you went lent your friend a gun, for instance, I’ll give you a personal example.

During the rioting that happened in the summer of 2020, there was my friend, his family, he wanted to have a firearm just in case something happened so I lent him a pump action shotgun and we went through all the safety requirements and all that and had a lock of course. But … if HR8 was in force when I did that, it would’ve been illegal for me to lend him that gun without first going to a gun store to get the licensed dealer there to transfer the gun between us and do a background check on my friend. So that’s what the concept of it is and so this has been something that’s been controversial for 30 years. I think everyone’s pretty well dug in on it. This is the policy where you hear a lot of polls really well. It’s 80 to 90% say they support universal background check system. There might not be very much understanding of what that would mean in practice for most people when they’re asked that question, but that’s the policy that comes up a lot as being this extremely popular policy.

But of course, there’s caveats to that too, because it’s been put to the ballot initiatives and as that New York Times piece I referenced earlier notes, doesn’t always pass, even when it polls in the 80 to 90% range. For instance, 2016 Maine referendum on universal background checks failed, even though the proponents for it outspent the opponents and Hillary Clinton won that election as well. So obviously there’s perhaps less real world political support for policy like that than shows up in polling. And obviously another big critique is that it almost never would stop these mass shootings because Uvalde, Buffalo, most of these, the shooter bought their gun legally because they didn’t have a disqualifying record, usually because nobody followed through on the warning signs that they put off.

Blair: As we begin to wrap up here, I have one final question about how gun control advocates seem to press on topics that they really don’t seem to have that much information about. So I’m going to read you a quote from president Biden that he made a couple weeks ago about hunting and guns, and he said, “What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon except to kill someone? Deer aren’t running through the forest with Kevlar vests on for God’s sake. It’s just sick.” It seems like he doesn’t quite understand why people need to use guns. How does that matter when they’re writing this type of legislation that they’re in with this impression about what guns are and the reality on the ground of how people use firearms?

Gutowski: Yeah. I mean, just like it’s a problem when media talk about firearms without even the basic knowledge of any aspects of the conversation, it’s a problem when politicians do the exact same thing and it’s frankly, just as common there. I mean, yeah. The president commonly will repeat things that aren’t true. He used to… he uses a line about how cannons used to be banned during the founding era, which is just false. I mean, it’s still false today.