Washington National Cathedral

Dean Sam Lloyd: Good morning and welcome back to the Sunday Forum after a couple of weeks of Holy Week. It’s great to be back, engaged in these important conversations of the intersection of faith and public life. When we set the topic for today’s forum on gun violence some months ago we had no idea how the dates would coincide to say this was the right time to talk about this. The 10th anniversary of the Columbine School shootings in Colorado is tomorrow; the 2nd anniversary of the Virginia Tech mass shootings was on Thursday.

If you opened up the newspaper this morning, you saw yet another newspaper report of another shooting, this one in the D.C Metropolitan area, a father killing his family. Day by day, the newspapers report one after another of these incidents of tragic killings. How is this happening and why? Paul Helmke is here to explore these questions with us. He’s the president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in America, and a three-time mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana where he first became involved in gun violence issues. Paul, it’s great to have you with us today.

Paul Helmke: It’s good to be here, thank you.

Dean Sam Lloyd: Well, in this past month alone there have been eight mass shootings across America, two of them involving ten or more victims, two involving the death of several police officers. What on earth is going on?

Paul Helmke: It’s always hard to analyze something as complex as violence in America, but I think a number of things are going on. One, we got more stress in society than we’ve had in a long time. We got the economy in bad shape that adds stress to marriages, that adds stress at work. You combine that with just the general stress in society, but then you add the easy availability of guns to an already stressful situation, and I think what we see, and shouldn’t be surprised by, are mass shootings. The bottom line is, in this country we make it very easy for dangerous people to get guns; we have very few laws or regulations on the books restricting access to guns, and when you combine that with the stress of unemployment and domestic discord, we end up with problems.

Dean Sam Lloyd: What do you think the economy is really doing? Is it just a general anxiety, what is it about this moment that seems to be intensifying it so?

Paul Helmke: We wait for the academics and we don’t have those studies yet, but what we are seeing very clearly at The Brady Center is, again, people that feel that they have no other answer. And I think, especially in the context of today’s discussions, people have failed to turn to God for answers, as they’re suspicious of government for answers, they see no one except themselves as the one that could provide the answer. And the thing that empowers them, the thing that gives them meaning or capability in their lives is, often times, a gun. And they’ll will that out of anger, they will that out of stress, they will that just as a way to make them seem like somebody. And again, we make that very easy to have.

Dean Sam Lloyd: There’s some talk too, I gather, on 60 Minutes last week—one of the segments was about guns being purchased in these gun shows. People are talking about the fact that they fear new gun control, so people are buying more armaments than ever. Do you think that’s part of this?

Paul Helmke: I think we are seeing more guns being purchased, and I think that’s a dangerous result of what’s been going on. The estimates of the number of guns in society range from—in this country range from 200 to 270 million guns already. Now, a lot of those are older guns, collector's guns, they’re not all—that’s close to one per American, but only about 35% of American households have a gun, so it’s centralized a lot of ways.

I think what’s been happening lately with gun sales is the gun lobby spent a lot of money during the last election, trying to tell people that if Obama got elected that he was going to take their guns away. They weren’t successful in affecting the election, but they were very successful in helping to make money for people that sell guns and manufacture guns. It’s the classic—supplies are limited, come out and get yours now. And what scares me the most with this is that people who have no idea how to use guns, the responsibilities that go with guns, might be buying guns, and then those guns are likely to be misused, likely to be stolen, likely to cause even more violence in their family and their community.

Dean Sam Lloyd: It is a fact, isn’t it, that if a gun is in the home, the chances of somebody getting hurt with the weapon go up significantly.

Paul Helmke: There’s conflicting studies, but the one that we rely on the most is an academic study, a published academic study, from ten years ago that showed that if you have a gun in your home, it’s 21 times more likely to be used against you or a family member than it is to protect you. And it’s the classic situation where somebody gets angry, somebody gets drunk, the child finds it, the neighbor kid finds it, somebody doesn’t think the gun's loaded, it becomes stolen, you wake up at three in the morning thinking it’s the burglar and it turns out to be the brother-in-law. Those stories all happen on a regular basis, and I know I’ve talked to—I’ve known a lot of people that have seen tragedies or near tragedies in their homes because of a gun. And you see that a lot more than you see people actually using that to protect themselves in any way.

Dean Sam Lloyd: And beyond the gun purchases, and I gather, the ammunition purchases—there’s a shortage of ammunition in America, or something close to it.

Paul Helmke: Actually one of the interesting things, in the gun control issue, has always been maybe there’s so many guns out there, we ought to be looking at the ammunition a little more closely, and I think that point has been stoked now too. Obviously, the ammunition is the replaceable item, the item that’s used up. During the campaigns, the gun lobby came up with some unsupported story from the late 1990’s, supposedly, that Obama wanted to raise the ammunition 500% on ammunition, so everyone started to go out buying ammunition now. I think at the base level though, what’s going on is not so much a fear of Obama, a fear of gun policies, because we really don’t have very many policies. I think it’s, again, a fear of society disintegrating, not knowing what to hold onto, what can government do, what can religion do, what can the individual do, and this idea that maybe I need to just focus on myself, so they grab all the guns and all the ammunition they can and they don’t realize the negative consequences that can come from that.

Dean Sam Lloyd: So they really are putting a stash of weapons, waiting for the social chaos to come. That’s some of it.

Paul Helmke: That’s what some people are clearly doing. And this is what makes the whole debate on guns I think such a tricky one, because I’ve got no problem with someone who’s a legitimate gun owner, wants the gun for hunting, wants the gun for sport shooting, wants the gun for collecting, even wants the gun for self protection and knows the responsibilities that go with the gun.

But I think what we’ve done as a society is we’re almost pushing guns. I sometimes refer to some of the folks on the other side as gun pushers. They’re trying to get more of these out there, sort of the way that drug pushers push some things, because it’s addictive, because it gives a sense of power, because it gives a sense of control. And then, the more guns that are out there, the more violence we see. The more violence we see, the more people get afraid. The more people get afraid, the more guns they buy. And then, the cycle just keeps continuing and that’s great for business, but it’s bad for communities.

Dean Sam Lloyd: America has probably always had something of a love affair with guns, is it really worse now then ten, 20, 30 years ago, and if so, why?

Paul Helmke: I think clearly what’s worse now are the number of guns and the power; the value of guns. Guns have always been an issue in our country, but you go back to the revolutionary time and you had a gun that took a long time to reload, to fire, it was one shot, basically, at the time. You know, at Lexington and Concord, you weren’t getting many rounds off. And then as we’ve gone along we’ve used technology to make guns more serious, we haven’t used technology to make guns any safer.

And I think when we see our gun laws being so weak in this country we really only really have, at the national level, three sets of laws. We've got laws restricting machine guns. That goes back to the Al Capone era. And actually, that’s been fairly successful; you don’t see machine guns, fully automatic weapons used that often. We've got a gun control act of 1968 that said some people shouldn’t be able to buy guns like felons and the dangerously mentally ill. And we've got the Brady bill that says, let's double check on this, but that’s all we’ve got on the books.

We allowed an assault weapons ban to expire in 2004. We’ve made it harder for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to release data on how illegal guns are trafficked. We’ve made it impossible, nearly impossible, to sue gun manufacturers and gun dealers, even if they’re negligent. They’re the only industry in the country that you can’t even go to the court house and file a law suit against. They’re not regulated by the Federal Trade Commission; they and tobacco are the only two industries not regulated. So, we’ve taken steps, while the guns have become more powerful and more accessible. We’ve taken steps that make it harder to regulate them or restrict them in any way. With that, when you combine it with the popular culture, the idea that any person can take care of themselves, I do think we have a greater problem today than we had certainly 30 years ago, 50 years ago, and 100 years ago.

Dean Sam Lloyd: It does seem that there is such a turning of, a hardening of Americans, with all of the violence and media violence and all the interactive video games, all the rest of them, that somehow, killing doesn’t mean what it used to mean. I was so struck to learn that the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago many years ago, that famous killing of a vast number of people, killed seven people, and that’s happening several times a month in America these days. But we seem blithely to absorb that as part of our life.

Paul Helmke: The question of whether we’ve come to accept this level of violence is one of the ones that scares me, because we certainly have. You mentioned the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the other one I mention sometimes to people is the shoot out at the OK Corral; five people killed. You know, in the Wild West, rather than everyone having a gun, actually, you brought in the law enforcement, the Gary Cooper, the John Wayne, the guy with the badge, Wyatt Earp to clear the guns out of society. And when we use to see those sorts of shootings—either in OK Corral or St. Valentine's Day Massacre—we took steps as a community or as a country to do something about it. Now, we see Columbine ten years ago and other than Colorado and another state out west passing rules restricting sales of guns at gun shows, as a country, we did nothing. We saw Virginia Tech two years ago, and while we did see legislation to encourage states to put records of dangerously, mentally ill in the background check system, we saw nothing.

And in the last month, with all the shootings we’ve had, including the police officers in Oakland and Pittsburgh, our elected officials are afraid to bring issue up. They’re afraid of the gun lobby; they’re afraid of how this might affect their elections. And I think what happens, then, is that the media and the politicians sort of say, “Oh, just another shooting.” It’s kind of like we had another tornado in Iowa, we had another shooting in New York, and we treat it as a natural disaster that we can’t control. And I keep pleading with people, trying to get through to people that this is something that doesn’t have to happen.

We’ll always have violence. We’ll always have—humanity is going to be sinful. But, there are things that we can do to make it harder for dangerous people to get these guns. There are things we can do to make our community safer. Other countries have figured this out. Other countries react to mass shootings by taking steps that really help make their country safer. We react to mass shootings with “Gee, that’s too bad, and now’s not the time to talk policy,” and then by the next day, you’re on the next news cycle and talking about the president's daughter or something.

Dean Sam Lloyd: But, to look at this closely, some of you may have seen Bob Herbert’s editorial in the New York Times just this past week called “The American Way”, which the American way is shooting guns at each other. Eight young people are shot to death every day in America and every 17 minutes someone is killed by a gun in America. It is just staggering. Since 9/11, 120,000 Americans have been killed with guns, 25 times more than died in 9/11; and we sail blithely along with this. Why is it that our political leaders can’t respond to this?

Paul Helmke: They should respond to it and some do. There are some people that are courageous and continue to fight for this, although often times even they get frustrated and concerned. We need the faith community. We need individuals to speak up. Any time that we’ve done polling on the issue and we asked specific questions, support for requiring background checks at all sales, restricting assault weapons, saying you shouldn’t be able to buy an unlimited number of guns at one time—these get support in the 75-85% range. Even when we did an exit poll, gun owners and McCain voters support these things in the 65-75% range. You would think this would be a no-brainer for a politician, but, they’re afraid. And I used to be a politician. And understand how they think—it’s a different way of thinking—they need to hear from their public. They need to hear from us that this is something that makes sense.

When we see peanut butter killing four people or maybe injuring four people everyone goes into a tizzy and we’ve got to do something, but we don’t see that with guns. Thirty-two people were massacred at Virginia Tech two years ago. Thirty-two people are murdered every day in this country. And it’s going to take the rest of us, the general public, saying “Enough’s enough, we can do something about this, let’s focus on the gun issue,” and then we can move on to all the other issues that face our communities. This one is solvable, not completely, but we can seriously reduce the amount of gun violence that occurs in this country by doing a few simple things. And we’re just afraid to take those steps and it’s the politicians that are partly to blame, but it’s also us for not pushing them to do more.

Dean Sam Lloyd: Another startling incident to me was a relative of one of the people killed at Virginia Tech went to one of the frequent gun shows in Virginia where there is a loop hole. You have to show a proof of identity and be registered if you buy something in a gun shop, but if you go to a gun show where guns are sold out of people's trunks, you don’t have to do that. So he spent—I don’t know how much money, but walked away with an armful of weapons and never was once asked for an ID.

Paul Helmke: People don’t realize how weak our laws are. Again, we pretty much all agree, I don’t care where you are on the spectrum of guns, but pretty much everyone agrees that if you’re a felon, you shouldn’t be able to buy a gun. If you’ve been found by a court to be dangerously mentally ill you shouldn’t be allowed to buy a gun, but yet, the way you find out if someone’s a felon or dangerously mentally ill is to do a background check. A background check takes eight to nine minutes. The computer system is set up so that this goes quickly. But when Congress set up the background check system, they said that you only had to do this if you were a federally licensed dealer. So that means you got a store front. So, if you don’t have a store front, but you go from gun show to gun show, week by week, with all your guns and say that they’re from your private collection, you don’t have to do a background check.

And there’s actually a great story in the Post this morning on page three that talks about gun shows in Texas. Because a lot of those guns now are being bought in Texas and going down to Mexico where some family goes to gun shows every week and sells their “private collection” and they’re not required to do any background check, they’re supposed to check to see if the person is a Texas resident; but, they indicated in the article that they sometimes just rely on trust, when the person tells them that. They’re supposed to only sell to—you’re supposed to be a citizen, and you’re supposed to be the one who’s buying the gun, but they talk about how there will be someone speaking—someone asking questions in Spanish, holding the gun, and then they have someone who speaks only English, who’s never picked up the gun, fill out the form when they do have to do a form.

Our laws are so weak. It shouldn’t be surprising. The other one—it’s not funny. When we allow someone to buy 87 of the same make and model hand gun at a time at a gun store in Dayton, Ohio, are we shocked that that person turns around and sells those guns out of the trunk of his car? Eighty-seven of the same make and model, not collecting, not hunting, not personal protection, it’s obvious that if they’re buying in bulk they’re going to be selling out of the trunk of their car to people that they’re not checking on. And that’s totally legal—and actually happened a few years ago—and ended up killing people in Buffalo, New York; homicides, near homicides, robberies. Happens everyday in this country.

Dean Sam Lloyd: What are the pleasurable uses of AK47s? [Laughter]

Paul Helmke: I’ve wondered that for some time, too. I’ve actually shot some pretty heavy military-style weapons. When I was mayor, I was able to go to our police range, and I wanted to see what sort of weapons there are. And I guess you can get some sort of a thrill out of that, but it’s something that shouldn’t be available to the general public. It isn’t something that should be used in hunting. It’s not something that’s even good for self protection. It’s good for one thing. It’s good for killing a lot of people quickly.

And again, there are no restrictions on those. You can go to a gun store and—without a background check—I mean you can go to a gun show and find the dealer, find the private seller, and with no background check, you can buy 25 of those and carry them out on your back. And that is totally legal in this country. And that’s what frustrates me too. We get so many of our politicians—when we see these shootings and they say, “Well this is a tragedy,” or “We’re upset, lets enforce the laws on the books.” And I say, “What laws?” We don’t have any laws in the books. It is totally legal to do these things, to buy these things. We might as well say that we don’t need any new laws since the Ten Commandments, because it’s against the commandments to kill. But we should set up laws to make it harder, to try to prevent these things instead of just punishing them afterwards—and we don’t do that.

Dean Sam Lloyd: I have to say, I find this conversation as befuddling as any that we’ve had, because of the obvious human carnage taking place and that we, as a society, are afraid to address it. Bob Herbert, in his column said, “We are not yet a mature or civilized enough country to create a country where people can be safe from this kind of public violence.” What’s the Brady Center’s strategy? Obviously, you need more support from the ground up. What are you trying to do and what are some ways that we can be involved in this?

Paul Helmke: I think first thing is just to get people aware of the scope of this problem. Again, most people should be aware just from watching the headlines, but I know when I started this job three years ago and moved from Indiana, a lot of folks that I talked to said, “Well you know, shooting’s something that occurs on the other part of town, people that aren’t like me, you know bad guys shooting bad guys,” sort of that attitude. And then we realize that, again, those shootings—even if they are bad guys shooting bad guys—that’s still a cost to society, still takes on a lot of innocent people, kills 30,000 people a year, injures 70,000 people a year. We pick up the cost as a community; the healthcare cost of just the fabric of the community being rendered.

So the first thing is to let people know this is a real problem. It affects all of us, and when we see shootings in the nursing homes in North Carolina and across southern Alabama, and with the police officers in Oakland and Pittsburgh, we realize that it can touch anybody—the new citizens in Binghamton. So number one, realize there’s a problem. Number two, realize that we haven’t really tried to do anything about it. It’s not like gun control has failed in this country; we’ve never tried gun control. And a city doing something or a state doing something is great, but if you can cross the boundary lines from D.C. to Virginia, or from California to Reno, you’re going to get the guns in those communities. So let’s talk about restrictions nationwide. The next thing is for you then to push this issue with your elected officials; get it out there. And it’s not trying to take people's guns away. It’s not about the 2nd amendment.

The Supreme Court ruled last year that you do have an individual right to have a gun. I think they got the court case wrong, but, they said that you have an individual right to have a gun and have a gun in your home for self defense. But Justice Scalia has said that you can restrict who gets guns, where they take guns, what kind of guns they are, how they’re sold, how they’re carried, how they’re stored—this is something we can deal with. And it just is going to take us pushing it, but there are a lot of people that get very uptight when you even mention the word guns and a lot of politicians are fearful of that crowd.

Dean Sam Lloyd: Seems that just about every politician—immediately, the survival instincts kick in, because there has been a lot of metaphorical carnage that people who try to take a courageous stand on that are out of office now.

Paul Helmke: The gun lobby has been very successful, and always trying to pause at this is the fight of the extremes. That we’re out here trying to tell you, Sarah Brady wants to take all your guns away. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to say, do a background check on every sale; don’t allow some of these military style weapons to be generally available to the public; don’t allow somebody to buy 100 at a time; give the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco and Firearms the authority to shut down corrupt gun dealers, the 1% that supply 60% of the guns traced to crime. Learn the lessons of Britain and Australia and other countries that have taken steps. In Britain last year, 52 people were killed by guns. We do that in two days—in a weekend—in this country.

And if we can get people to start pushing those issues and getting the politicians, I think they’ll respond. The politics is fascinating, too. The gun lobby tries to hold itself out as all powerful. We’ve shown that in the last two election cycles—’06 and ’08—there wasn’t a single campaigner, or somebody who campaigned for gun control, that lost an election at any level because of being for good gun control measures. They might have lost on other issues, but did not lose on gun control. So I think the politics has shifted; the politicians just seem to be behind on the people I think here.

Dean Sam Lloyd: We want to go to questions from the audience, but I’d like to come back home first to D.C. D.C. has found itself fully in the mix of this. First of all, having its very strong gun control laws overturned and now with the whole movement toward voting rights, having the amendment to that bill attached that would significantly affect gun control in the city. What do you see happening here, and where do you see all of this going?

Paul Helmke: I’m very hopeful that the House leadership’s going to be able to separate these two issues, because really they should be separate. To say you can have a voting right, but we’re going to take away your ability to write your own gun control laws, is ridiculous. It’s not a constitutional issue. Other states have laws stricter than the ones that they’re trying to get rid of for D.C. D.C. is a special case in terms of all the politicians—the elected, the prominent people that are here—and having some registrations and having some restrictions on assault weapons being on the Mall are certainly legitimate.

So, I’m hopeful it can get separated. It’s really a cynical attempt by some of the politicians, now. In the Senate, where they put this amendment on that said, you could only get the voting right if you get rid of your gun laws, the senators who voted for that amendment then turned around and voted against the bill for voting rights even with that on it. They don’t want D.C to have voting rights and they want to get rid of the gun restrictions here too. Very cynical.

Dean Sam Lloyd: Questions from the audience on this very difficult issue.

Producer: First question here, Mr. Helmke, is, what does the 2nd amendment really have to say about the right to own guns?

Paul Helmke: The 27 words in the 2nd amendment it said—and the Supreme Court seems to have decided that the first 13 aren’t very relevant anymore—but the first 13 say, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of our free state,”—that’s the part they now ignore—“the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” And the court's interpretation last year is the most extensive interpretation. And basically, they say that this right, like other rights in the constitution, is “not unlimited.”

You've got a right of free speech but you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theatre, you can’t libel somebody, you can’t print obscenity; so, the same thing with guns. You've got a right to have a gun in your home for self defense, but beyond that, the government has interest in watching who gets the guns, what kind of guns there are, and where you are taking them. So, the 2nd amendment really shouldn’t be an issue anymore. And I think if more of the public, and the media, and the politicians, understood that the 2nd amendment debate—other than for near total gun bans—is off the table then maybe we could have a discussion about what could really work here. But a lot of people—I’ve learned in politics—don’t like to try to figure out what’s going to work.

Producer: We have several questions here that have to do with school gun violence, gun violence among youths, and the general thrust is, why are we seeing so much gun violence among youths and is it a greater proportion of the gun violence in America than among other age groups?

Paul Helmke: It’s a number of things. I think there is a copycat effect that comes into play sometimes with school violence. You see Columbine ten years ago and there were some copycat shootings after that; you see the Virginia Tech two years ago and there were fears with that too. Basically, it’s not very hard—it’s pretty easy for young people to get guns. And when you look at where the Columbine killers got their guns—had somebody buy them at the gun show.

When you look at where the Virginia Tech killer got the guns, he was able to pass a background check because Virginia didn’t send in the information that he had mental—that he was dangerously mentally ill. Most kids know where they can find a gun. If there’s a gun in a person’s home, I bet the child knows where it is. Studies have shown that the child’s going to find that gun, just like they find the Christmas presents or whatever it is that they’re looking for in the house. So, children get the guns, they don’t understand the seriousness of the guns, the media help make this seem like it’s not real, and they take them to school. And kids get angry. Kids have always gotten angry and upset about things and now they have a way to act out with it that’s very serious.

Producer: This is a good follow up question, perhaps. Is there something deeper in the American psyche, in your opinion, that makes us want to have guns and to use them as they are so often used?

Paul Helmke: That’s a question I’ve argued with people about and it’s a tricky question. My sense is that people are people pretty much the same, around the world. And I don’t think that we’re automatically more violent than others. When you do studies that look at non-gun crimes—rapes, batteries, robberies, generally—and you compare us to other industrialized countries, the crime rates are basically the same. The one area where we diverge tremendously from other countries is in gun violence, and in my mind it’s because of the easy availability of guns. In other countries, kids see the same video games, they watch the same movies, you have the same cultural pressures, but in other countries, you can’t just go out and buy a gun real quickly or find a gun real quickly, and that’s the big difference.

Producer: This question is specific to the United Kingdom, or Britain. How did they get rid of guns, or how did they restrict the sale of guns?

Paul Helmke: It’s the United Kingdom, other countries—they strictly regulate who could get guns. They’ll register the guns, they’ll license the people—by the way, something we do right now with cars and that seems to help a little bit. Sometimes you have to have a showing about why you need the gun; sometimes you’ll have restrictions on what ammunition, how often you could get ammunition for the guns. You’ll have clear restrictions on being able to buy the military-style assault weapons, and not be able to buy much more than a hunting rifle, or something that’s clearly used for sports or hunting. Those sorts of restrictions we could learn from.

I’m not saying that we need to do every one that every other country's done, but let’s start looking at some of those options and see which ones help make their countries safer. Just one quick thing, it’s always interesting when I debate this, a lot of times you’ll hear, “Oh, other countries gun control doesn’t work, crime and gun homicides in Britain went up 10% last year.” Well if they went up 10%, that means five people. That’s the catch.

Australia, after they had a mass shooting in the mid 90’s, bought back 600,000 guns from their population, because they felt that those were the source of guns that shouldn’t be out there, and that’s a country that was sort of formed by English-speaking people that often times were fleeing the mother country because of criminal backgrounds or whatever—the explorer mentality. Canada doesn’t have those problems either. Countries that were formed by the same sort of group that we were formed by don’t have these issues, because they have sensible gun policies. We don’t.

Producer: What role do U.S. guns play in the escalating drug-related violence in Mexico?

Paul Helmke: Clearly, the violence in Mexico is something that we play a part in. Not only are we buying the drugs from Mexico for use up here, but we’re providing a large number of those guns. There’s been arguments lately, whether it’s really 90% or maybe it’s only 50%, but it’s clear that because we have 2,000 gun dealers within 100 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border, because we have gun shows all along the border where you can buy without a background check, it’s clear that much of the guns being used by the Mexican drug cartels are coming from the U.S. It’s very easy. It’s very legal and they come here they buy the guns, they bring them back down there.

The article I mention in the Washington Post this morning is a good one, because it refers specifically to this. There was a gun dealer in California who moved to Arizona because the California laws made it a little harder for him to sell guns quickly. He moved to Arizona. He had 700 guns traced to crimes used by the Mexican drug cartel. Prosecution brought against him in the U.S. and the judge threw it out saying, “Hey, our laws are so weak you didn’t break any U.S. laws. It’s entirely legal for you to have sold these 700 military-style assault weapons to the Mexican drug cartel.” That’s what’s scary here.

Producer: This question reads it seems that there are extreme factions on this issue. What are some of the ways that we can find common ground to get a conversation going about this topic?

Paul Helmke: I was very hopeful that one of the sort of unattended results of the Supreme Court decision last year might be to help bring us together on the issue. The court, in effect, took away the extremes of the debate. They said on the one hand that you can’t have near total gun bans like the District of Columbia did. But they said, on the other hand, this idea that anyone could have any gun, anytime, anywhere, for any purpose was also off the table. So that took away the extremes of the debate. And I hoped after that, that we could move toward the middle. But the problem is, is that the politicians don’t seem to have noticed that part. A lot of the media hasn’t noticed that part. And clearly the gun lobby hasn’t wanted to talk about that part.

In fact, it’s interesting they rarely bring up the Supreme Court case anymore, because they don’t know how to handle Justice Scalia's sort of endorsed restrictions. My hope is that if faith communities and people around the country push their elected officials to sit down, then we could get something done. I’ve been willing to sit down with the gun lobby at any time and I hear nothing back from them. I’m willing to work with anybody on this. There are things that we could do, and I think President Obama’s talked about it the right way. There’s no reason why you can’t protect the rights of the hunter in southwest Ohio, but still take the AK47s off the street of Cleveland. We need people to take away the edginess of this issue, if you will. Take away the passion and sit down, say this is a public health issue. This is a public safety issue. What can we do to make it harder for dangerous people to get guns and make our community safer?

Producer: Is there a clear, theological perspective on this issue?

Paul Helmke: I think it’s a very clear, theological perspective. To me, the lesson from Scripture is one of non-violence. It’s trusting in our God to help us make the world a better place and do our part in it. One of the things that I see with the gun issue often times, it's almost—one of our board members who’s a pastor talks about gundamentalism, instead of fundamentalism.

Gundamentalism, and the idea that it’s almost the other side worshipping this inanimate object and loving their gun and trusting in the gun, rather than God. And trusting in the gun rather than government to solve things. The head if the NRA said recently that the people that have the guns make the rules. So you’ve got a serious theological issue, a serious political, philosophical issue going on here.

But to me, the story of Christ and the Garden of Gethsemane and the disciple cuts off the ear of one of the high priest persons and Christ tells him to put away the sword. I think our lesson is to put away the guns; try to figure out ways to solve our problems through faith, through government, through dealing with other people. Otherwise, we’re becoming a culture that just is tied into me and I trust no one, I believe in nothing and I’m going to take care of myself. And that’s got a lot of theological implications, as far as I can tell.

Dean Sam Lloyd: Let me give an example of placing your faith, maybe not in God, but in guns. Just after the shooting of—killing of 13 people in Binghamton, New York just a week or so ago at the immigration center, this was a comment that appeared on the internet, someone wrote, “The only gun control needed is a steady hand, a sharp eye, and a smooth trigger. Had someone with a good heart been employed there, with a gun carrying permit, this episode of terror would have ended much faster.” So the argument is, arm everybody as a way to stop violence. That’s putting your faith somewhere.

Paul Helmke: A lot of people make that argument. I point out to them that having guns didn’t seem to help the three police officers that were killed in Pittsburgh last month, because they were being faced with an AK47 and the person surprised them. It didn’t seem to help the four police officers killed in Oakland last month. Again, carrying guns isn’t always protection. Our organization is named after Jim Brady, President Reagan’s press secretary. When he was shot outside the Washington Hilton, they were surrounded by Secret Service agents. Having guns isn’t protection.

I’ve talked to students who were shot at Virginia Tech two years ago, and asked the question, if you had a gun would it have made a difference? And generally it’s it happened so quickly they don’t realize what’s going on and if they made a move for a gun, they might have been the one that was shot next, is the feeling. There was a 20/20 show a week or so ago and it did an experiment. It trained young people on how to handle a gun, said, we’re going to do a scenario where somebody breaks in, and we’re going to want you to protect the class and they just had the person break in earlier. Not one of the students they trained to do this was able to get a shot off to the shooter before they were killed. And they came very close to injuring other students; they made mistakes even when they were well trained. It’s different in the real world. That’s part of what we don’t realize.

Last comment on that, I always ask people would you really feel safer going to the bar, the restaurant, the baseball game, the hockey game if everyone had a gun? And when you think about it that way, you realize that adding more guns to a situation just makes the situation worse, not better.

Producer: A couple of questions here address the issue of munitions and gun manufacturers, and what kind of regulation there is on such manufacturers, and is that a source of the problem?

Paul Helmke: Yeah there is no regulation on them. Again it’s the Tobacco and Guns are the only two industries in the country that have no regulation, and tobacco you can at least sue. So, guns basically free pass pretty much on anything. What’s very frustrating too is, while technology has made guns more lethal, technology could also be used to make guns, in a way, safer. I know that’s an oxymoron to some people, but it’s possible to develop technology that the gun is only going to recognize your biometrics—your fingerprint or your handprint or whatever, or yours or whoever else you’ve authorized to use the gun. But no money is put into it, and no legislation has been put in, very much, to encourage that sort of technology. You can require locks to be built on the guns so children can’t accidentally shoot themselves. But that’s rarely done. You can require something on the gun that shows that there is a shell in the chamber, a bullet in the chamber. Because, often times, kids think the gun is empty but there’s a bullet in the chamber, but again, we don’t require that technology. And so that technology is not developed. We could make this dangerous weapon a little bit safer, but nobody wants to do that sort of thing.

Producer: What role does the media play in exasperating gun violence and should there be more restrictions on media portrayals of violence?

Paul Helmke: If anything, I think the media should probably give a more accurate portrayal of what’s really going on. To me, the media should talk more about the issue. I think, one of the challenges we face is that often times they don’t talk about the issue. Again, 32 murders everyday in this country and unless it’s at one spot at one time, it rarely gets the coverage. And I think the media contributes to some of the ho-hum, this is just something that happens; we can’t do anything about it.

When I was mayor in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we were having increased violence, and at one stage I got a little upset with the papers, and I said, “You’re playing up this violence too much. You’re making people think it’s unsafe to live in this city." And I was saying that there are homicides but you’re treating the murder, and then the arrest, and then the trial, and the conviction. That’s a front page headline each time. And one of the editors of the paper responded to me, and I agree with him now, he said, “If we ever become the kind of community that doesn’t put this on the front page, that says something about us.”

And I think, as a country, we’ve allowed that to happen. We don’t put these on the front page anymore. Many of the murders that I read about in the Post are two sentences on page five of the metro section. We’ve lost our anger at this happening. So, I think the media could help us get angry and realize also that we can do something about this.

Dean Sam Lloyd: I would like to ask a couple of specific questions again about going forward. I understand that there are still such things as Million Mom Marches.

Paul Helmke: That’s right.

Dean Sam Lloyd: And there’s a program called God Not Guns; tell a little bit about both of those.

Paul Helmke: Right. There was—back in 2000, after Columbine—pretty much as a grass roots organization, mothers from around the country formed something called the Million Mom March. It had about 750,000 mothers and men and children on the National Mall and another 250,000 in smaller marches around the country. The Brady Center joined with that group shortly after that, and now there are local chapters. We have Million Mom March chapters basically around the country; sometimes they’re called Brady Chapters, and we encourage people to get involved and sign up in these. And these are chapters where they try to take action, write the letters, contact the politicians, get the word out what’s going on. So, it’s our attempt to grassroots activism. It’s harder to get people joined together for things these days; so much more is now done with the internet. So, a lot of our emphasis really with our chapters is to get our email alerts, and then write the folks that are involved. Our God Not Guns program is one that we started just a couple years ago, and you can go to our web page, our web page is www.bradycampaign.org, and there’s a link to our God Not Guns program. Or I think you can just go directly to www.godnotguns.com. And it talks about things that the faith community can do, and the issues you can raise, and biblical basis release things. I really do see this is an issue that goes to the heart of who we are as Americans, and what we stand for as a country, and how our faith impacts us. But, we can’t do it alone. We need as many people as we can, and we need you to tell your friends and relatives throughout the country. This isn’t just an issue for big cities. This isn’t just an issue in Washington D.C., or New York, or L.A. This is an issue that affects all of us, and I think all of us need to be concerned about it, and realize we can make a difference here.

Dean Sam Lloyd: Time for one more question.

Producer: You’ve addressed some comparison between gun violence and gun deaths in America and Britain; what about the comparison with these gun violence rates in other countries, particularly developing countries?

Paul Helmke: Well it’s always a little harder when—you are now talking about an industrialized country, but when you look at any of the similar sort of first world countries that generally we compare ourselves to when you’re looking at the economies or levels of education or anything, we, I think, have 25 times the rate of gun violence than the other 25 combined.

I mean, we have a chart of this on our web page and it’s, again, Britain might have 52 homicides a year, and Germany 40, and Australia 30 or somebody 60, and then we’re out there with 12,000 gun homicides a year, 30,000 gun deaths a year. It’s ridiculous. It’s even hard to compare. Some of the countries that are in war-torn Africa or other parts are obviously going to be in a little bit different situation, but anyone who thinks more guns is the answer, that obviously hasn’t helped Iraq, hasn’t helped Sudan, isn’t the sort of thing we want to see coming to this country. And I think there’s a reason to be fearful, as we see more and more guns here, that we could be coming to that in some parts of our country.

Dean Sam Lloyd: This has been a very helpful, if disturbing, conversation today. We hope you’ll come back next week, when we have with us former Senator Chuck Hagel, who will be here to talk about his perspective on where America is going now, and his own faith dimension for how he looks at where America is going. But for now, we hope you’ll linger for some coffee in the back before our next service begins, and our guest Paul Helmke will be back to chat some at the coffee gathering for just a few moments. And by all means, come back and join us at 11:15 for the Holy Euchar