 Welcome back to Teens on Topic. I'm your host Emma Arnson and today I'm joined by Sarah and Issa and today we have a topic that is unfortunately in the news quite a bit and it's pretty controversial all across America and so let's see what the adults in Davis have to say about it. So our question this week is, do you believe the federal government should bring you a tax? No, not totally. Well because like all the shootings that are happening everywhere and especially like in our schools like I don't want to have, if I have ever had kids I don't want them to like feel afraid to just like go outside or like, I don't know, for my safety too. It's like no one's trying to take guns away, we're just trying to make it like you know, regulated. You know I think that people when they hear gun regulation they're like oh my gosh I'm not allowed to own a gun at all. You know we want to make it safer. I mean like the way like not everyone can just get a driver's license like you have to go through steps. I don't really know a lot about like gun control or any of that but I think there has to be some degree of like regulation. Yeah I agree with that. I don't know a lot. I know people who own guns and stuff but I feel like they, like I feel like you should be in a further background check instead of before you actually get a gun. There should be more regulations, higher standards when getting guns I feel like but I'm not really sure in how everything works out. Alright, go. So our question this week is do you believe the federal government should bring you a gun? Yeah I do. I think that if lethal weapons get into big hands of wrong people it's definitely a dangerous thing. But you know if your mental health checks out and you have a permit to use them like recreationally at like a range you know that's okay. But having it like just being able to carry them out in public it doesn't sit well with me because you know if someone could be walking down the street and have a gun at any point in time it's kind of a little unsettling. Absolutely. Absolutely. Why do you think so? Because we just look at the news. We have too many shootings. We're the only country in the world who slays each other. You know, they have to be taken care of. I'm Alan Hirsch. I'm at the Department of Market. This is my resistance news and the number one of the action item on how to resist is on December 14th at the Sandy Hooker Remembrance Day vigil at the State Capitol at 5.30. So gun control is important. We need to have a rational gun control because basically we... if everybody has a gun and nobody's safe you lose your freedom of speech. If your neighbor has a gun you don't know how they're going to react. You don't know how they're going to react if your neighbor's had a bad day. So it really impinges the first amendment rights if everybody has guns because everyone's afraid of one another. Well, it seems like the people in all the adults at least had a pretty similar opinion. They all talked a lot about how, like, there's a lot of mass shootings and how they don't want to ban guns but they want more regulations on guns. Do you have any opinions on what they said? Well, so I saw a lot of uniformed video. But there were a bunch of factors that we saw similar. There was a lot of people who were not really sure of what the current process to get guns are. They were kind of confused about whether mentally ill people could get guns, which is... they can't. And there was pretty much a uniformity against guns. But there were kind of contradictions. Like, if you don't have mental illness you can have guns. But then that same guy he went on to say, but I don't want to see everybody having guns in the streets. And then there's that perspective which I've never heard before, which is that the Second Amendment is a danger to the First Amendment, which is that people with guns is paid to the First Amendment, which I've never heard before. It's interesting. Yeah, I think, again, I saw a lot of pretty uniform ideas in terms of what regulations they believe should be in place for an individual to be able to own a firearm. Yeah, I think it's really interesting because I mean, I personally don't know a lot about what it takes to get a gun, but I know there is a lot of steps that you have to go through to get a gun currently. So I think it's interesting that it seems like the people talking didn't seem to... or they said that they wanted regulations, but it seems like those regulations are, for the most part, already in place. Yeah, I definitely think that a lot of people brought up regulations, and I guess the counterpoint to that right would be if these regulations and if the status quo is enough, why do we keep on hearing such awful news come up in our news stream every day? And so I think that's a point that is pretty valid or should be brought to the table as well. But I think a big deal of why we see so much in our news feed on cable news is at the same time that we've seen gun violence, homicide rates shoot down where at the safest point in history, we've seen a lot of mass shootings come up. So I think to clump it all into one issue of gun violence is kind of dangerous because there's this crazy trend of people going out and shooting up schools, churches, synagogues, which is not in line with the overall numbers where it comes to gun violence. Do you think that the solution to that would be to put more script gun laws? Personally, no, because when we're talking about gun laws, a lot of it is assault rifle bans. The assault rifle is a made up term. It means nothing. Part of the definition for an assault rifle is that it's black. So if you want to go say let's ban AR-15s. First of all, that would be, I guess, a second amendment because a well-regulated militia, that's where people usually argue about. But what's the definition of an arm in the second amendment? The courts have told us over and over again that it's something that's in common use for lawful purposes. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America and it's rarely used in crimes. Fists and knives are more commonly used to kill than any type of rifle. So I think there's a lot of hysteria, but if you even want to start banning guns, work on the second amendment first. Let's repeal that if you want to do anything. I would argue that it's not about banning guns as it is a matter of looking at screenings and looking at who and how people are able to get firearms with the potential to harm others. Well already you have to have a gun permit, you have to have a hunting permit. In the majority of the states you have to have a background check. There are different types of background checks that people have to go through. But it doesn't do anything. You look at Chicago, which is a hellhole. It has some of the country's toughest gun laws. California has very tough gun laws, yet we recently saw the shooting in Southern California. So I think there's the idea that criminals will follow laws. It just doesn't make sense because even if you're going to make guns tougher to get, if you're going to make higher capacity guns, more powerful guns harder to get, that criminals are not going to find illegal ways to get this. I mean heroin is illegal, but there are still people who have their hands on it. And so when you're stopping, when you're making it illegal to get those guns, you're not just making it illegal for the criminals who will find ways to get their hands on it, but you're making it illegal for the people who want to defend their families, who want to defend their property lawfully. I think against that though, I think that the point is that under the status quo, what we're experiencing today and what we see today and the amount of fear that is sparked in student and school communities because of potential threats, I think that that is a huge problem. Firearms are coming in conflict and are interfering with the way that people live and how safe they feel when they go to public spaces or public events, whether it be a concert or to school every day. I think that that is something that absolutely needs to be addressed, even if that doesn't mean banning firearms. I don't think that is the possibility and I do think that that never ends while it just opens up unsafe ways to gain the materials. But I think that if we don't do anything and if we let it be, I don't see a possible solution kind of coming up that is any better than what we currently see today. For sure, I think there's a lot of fear but I think there's the problem of a lot of it being unfounded, mostly because of lots of media attention for these huge events, which didn't happen in the past, the big shooting, mass shootings. However, everybody is safer right now. You're less likely to die of dead death than you did in the 80s, for example. But you're talking about screenings. What would you propose? I would say, I know that to get a concealed carry, there is not a significant amount of steps that someone needs to go through. It's like you hit a piece of white paper this many times and it doesn't matter if you miss. And so I think if that is the status quo, something needs to change because I think if people want to own firearms, there needs to be a safe method to do so. And I don't think whether it be screening for someone's mental health and how that is affecting them, I think that there are so many different factors that absolutely need to be taken into account when you're dealing with an item that has ended people's lives and that affects someone in so many different ways. And I think as a society, we've become numb to these events in a way because they happen so frequently and they happen so often in every aspect of our lives today. And I think that's something we have to address. And I know a lot of people bring up that there's a lot of other countries that have very strict gun restrictions and that they have very, very low gun violence in those countries. Do you think that would ever work in the United States? No, for multiple reasons. Let's take the second amendment first of all. None of those countries has a charter that has a second amendment in it which ensures they're public to the right bear arms. And then Australia has lower gun deaths than ours. But when you look at the trend lines, our line has been going lower and lower and since Australia has had that mass, this is an example that everybody likes to use, the mass buyback of guns from the Australian public, their rate has actually been slowly, slowly increasing. So I don't think that we can just look at today's numbers. There are examples of us for how to deal with mental health in other countries, how to deal with broken communities that other countries are doing better at. But I don't think that you could copy other people's ways of dealing with gun violence just because, mostly because of the second amendment. Yeah, I definitely think that it would be difficult to implement a plan like that saying no guns at all like other countries in the world have done. I think that that's pretty difficult to do in this current state that we have now. And I'm not sure how you would even begin that process, but I think that there's things that we can do moving forward as a society to make sure that everyone feels safe. I know there's a huge divide between the people who want much stricter gun laws or having guns spanned together and the people that feel that they want their gun laws protected. In the future, there could be any change into what the current state is or is it just going to be a feud that keeps on going and no change will happen? Well, I think a feud is, it's healthy, not in the way that we're doing it right now because of how mean we've gotten, how divisive we've gotten, but it's healthy to flesh out our issues in public. There's the originalist view of the second amendment and there's people who are legitimately scared for their lives, maybe without due cause, but I think it's just, especially in urban areas like Sacramento, like Davis, we don't really see the need for guns. I don't know anybody who owns guns that I've met in Sacramento, for example. But that doesn't represent the entire country. There are cities farther out, there are towns, rural areas, even in poverty neighborhoods where you feel like you need to protect yourself. And so in our relative safeness, which is nationwide, we're thankfully saying a lot of safeness, we're forgetting that there are people who need to defend themselves. And gun ownership, it's not just a violent thing, owning an AR-15 does not mean you're going to have to use it. It's something that makes you first of all feel safe and scares away someone who's going to harm your family. So I remember I was interviewing this guy the other day and he told me when crack cocaine hit Cobb did, this guy, he put out a gun in front of his house and he said there will be no crack on this block. And so there's that passive use of guns to prevent stuff from happening to you, to your community, to your family. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. It was a really interesting topic to see both sides, like when you're talking about how the Second Amendment is a big part of how it would be hard to have stricter gun laws and about how guns can make some people feel safe and like detract from crime and then also on the other side that there's so much gun violence in the country that we should do something about it and I think it's something that's going to continue to play out until the end of time. I don't think, obviously I don't think there will be a nice end point to it but I think it will be really interesting to see how this discussion continues in the United States. So tune back next time.