 Two quick observations before I get into my discussion. First of all, and you'll hear more about this from Tremaine, you're 3,000 times more likely to be killed by an American with a gun than you are to be killed by an American who happens to be a jihadi terrorist. And yet, paradoxically, 50% of Americans are very worried about a possible terrorist attack. Imagine, do the thought experiment where every school shooting in this country, somebody shouted Allah Akbar in the middle of it, and how we would have very different reactions, both the media, the government, and society, to this. And so somehow, we've inert ourselves to this epidemic of gun violence. 41, in 2010, in Britain, 41 people were murdered with guns. 10,000 were murdered with guns the same year in the United States. So that's all by way of saying we domestic terror, I mean, I'm supposedly a terrorism expert, and I have every, perhaps, professional interest in exaggerating the threat. But this is really not a big problem for this country. It's a problem we've managed and contained. Now, politically, we saw with Benghazi, even a relatively small attack. Benghazi obviously happened in a country where it was in the middle of a civil war. This wasn't a consulate, really. This was an undefended American facility. So the political costs of even really relatively minor terrorist attacks in the grand scheme of things are very large. So the two things that are politically very hard to say in this country, but both are true. One is we've managed and contained this problem, and I'll explain why in a minute. And secondarily, by the law of averages, terrorist attacks are gonna happen. These appear to be contradictory. They're both, in fact, not contradictory, but you're not gonna hear politicians say either of them because the political costs are saying either of these true things are very high. So my new book, United States of Jihad, is about a puzzle. And the puzzle is why 15 years after 9-11, do American citizens sign up for ISIS or al-Qaeda or other like-minded groups? And in fact, last year, we saw more Americans sign up for jihadi groups than at any time since 9-11. The Department of Justice indicted 60 people for joining ISIS or attempting to join ISIS. And so this puzzle, I have four answers to the question. I mean, first of all, who are these people? And David Sturman who is here and Lisa Sims and Albert Ford and others at the International Security Program, helped me put together a research database which is on our website. And the who question is in a way relatively easy to answer. It's not, they're not the young hot heads of popular imagination. The average age of the 330 cases we looked at since 9-11, average age of 29, a third are married, a third have kids. They are, interestingly, their rates of mental illness are below the general population. They are not career criminals. Their likelihood of going to prison is about the same as the general population. They are average incomes, average education is the same as the average American. They are ordinary Americans. And so that brings you to the why question, which is a lot more complicated. Why is it that you would sign up for one of these groups? And in the cases that I looked at in some detail, there were kind of a mix of motives. Islamist ideology, which has something to do with Islam to pretend otherwise is crazy. Obviously it's a cherry-picked version of Islam, but it does have something to do with Islam. After all, the Quran is not a book. It's the word of God and selective cherry picking of verses produces an ideology close to what Bin Laden has been propagating. Secondarily, a lot of the people in this sample may have suffered personal disappointments. Many of them objected to American foreign policy. Many of them were searching for something to belong to, for some of them, and quite a number of them, joining a jihadi group was tremendously exciting. Now, as I spent two and a half years on this book, and the more I got into the why, the more I hit a brick wall because lots of people object to American foreign policy. Lots of people have personal disappointments or some kind of crisis in their life that may take them down a different path. Lots of people wanna join something bigger than themselves. Lots of people are Islamist fundamentalists. But very few go out and kill an eight-year-old boy at the Boston Marathon or a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student attending the Boston Marathon or a 29-year-old female restaurant manager attending the Boston Marathon, and also then leaving 17 people without limbs for the rest of their life and destroying the lives of the families who either have lost a loved one or have a loved one who is severely injured. And if you, if Jahasani of the younger brother was on the stage in the Boston Marathon attacks and you asked him, why did you do it? He wouldn't have a very good explanation. And I think this gets actually to the nature of evil, which is you can explain it to a certain point, but you reach a brick wall. Jahasani of would have a very half-baked explanation about objecting to American foreign policy. By the way, not an expert on Islam by any stretch of imagination. A guy who was failing in college, smoking weed, drinking a lot, drinking a lot. And so in this debate about, you know, what role does Islam play in this, I found in my research that an explanation of ideology only gets you so far, because in another generation, these people might have joined the weather underground or the Black Panthers or some other revolutionary utopian movement that claims through violence they will get their goals. And for some, I think this is just a convenient way to kind of paper over their own excuses and their own problems in life. And I'll give you a concrete example. Major Nadal Hassan killed 13 people of Fort Hood, Texas, very middle-class background, army major, psychiatrists earning $90,000 a year. His double first cousin is a very successful lawyer in Northern Virginia. Double first cousin, two brothers from Palestine, married two sisters from Palestine. And they moved to Arlington, Virginia. One had a son, Nader, who's a successful lawyer in Northern Virginia. And the other, then we have Nidal, who's a mass murderer. Now, they basically had genetically very similar and they had the same set of cards growing up. What prompted one to become a success, the other one to become this mass murderer? Now on the face of it, Major Nadal Hassan is very observant Muslim and you could say Islamic etiology had a big role to play. But when you dig deeper into his life, he was 39, he probably never had a relationship with anybody. He was unmarried, he was unmarried and unmarriageable. He was very afraid of deploying to Afghanistan. And when I interviewed his family, their explanation, which I think there's a lot of truth to this, essentially he went postal and dressed it up in the garb of Islam. So that's a little bit about the why and the difficulties of the why. Two other points. If we had had this discussion in 2002, and I said to you that 45 Americans are gonna be killed by jihadi terrorists in the United States in the next decade and a half that would have seemed like an absurdly optimistic prediction. But that's what's happened. And so why is that? And I think there are three baskets of reasons for that. One is our defensive capabilities, which are very large. On 9-11 there were 16 people on the no fly list, now there are 47,000. There are a million and a half on a larger list. On 9-11 the FBI and the CIA didn't talk to each other essentially. On 9-11 you might find it irritating to go through a TSA checkpoint, but that is a pretty big deterrent to a terrorist trying to get a weapon or a bomb on a plane. On 9-11 there was no DHS, which is the largest federal entity outside the Department of Defense. On 9-11 there were relatively few joint terrorism task forces. So we've created a huge defensive capability, which makes it very unlikely for a foreign terrorist organization to carry out an attack in the United States. Then add to that public knowledge, which is a giant force multiplier to everything I've just said. It was the passengers on Christmas, on Northwest Flight 253, on Christmas Day 2009, who noticed that there was a passenger with smoke pouring out of his crotch who disabled him, because they understood this was not sort of appropriate behavior in any national flight. It was the street vendor in Times Square on May 1st, 2010, who noticed there was smoke pouring out of an SUV parked at the corner of 46 and 6, which was a bomb built by Geico Faisal-Zazad an American citizen whose previous job, interestingly, had been a financial analyst for the Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics Company, not usually seen as a hotbed of international terrorism, but it was the street vendor who said there's something wrong with this picture. So defensive capabilities, public knowledge, and finally our offensive capabilities. The group that attacked us on 9-11, Al Qaeda, Central, is basically out of business. I mean, and the best witness for that is not me, it's bin Laden himself. We have thousands of pages have been released from the Abadabad compound. He was very aware that his group had been severely damaged by the drone strikes, running out of money, no successful attack in the United States. So we are pretty safe, I mentioned earlier where the problems be managed and contained. So what does the future look like? The future looks like San Bernardino can happen not infrequently. And I want to zoom out a little bit further and just when bin Laden died, when the Arab Spring happened, I thought I wouldn't be up on this stage talking about these issues because I thought the game was largely over. I didn't think terrorism was gonna disappear, but there are three very big trends which luckily because of geography and also the American dream, we are somewhat insulated from, but they are very big trends that I think are not gonna be reversed in my professional lifetime. The first one is a regional civil war between the Sunni and the Shia that could go on for decades. And we're seeing it playing out in Iraq and Syria, we're also playing out in Yemen. The principle funders and backers of this have no interest in dialing this down. In fact, they're amping it up. The Saudis invaded Yemen, they executed a prominent Shia cleric. So that is one big stream of this. The second big stream is a collapse of so many Arab states and whether in Libya or, I mean, interestingly, both parties made the same mistake twice. It's like they didn't read Hobbes. So we overthrew a dictator in 2003 and there's produced anarchy and civil war. We overthrew another dictator in 2011 in Libya. We produced anarchy and civil war. So we are somewhat indicated in this, although it's not our fault, necessarily, but the collapse of these Arab regimes, the collapse of Arab governance is driving this forward. And finally, the rise of European fascism and its call and response with massive immigration from these regions. This is gonna, these three big factors are gonna produce a very fertile ground for groups like ISIS. ISIS is not the problem. It's a symptom of these much bigger problems. ISIS we could destroy or contain two years from now. There will be other groups that basically thrive in this circumstance. So you could see a Paris attack, a Brussels attack. We don't know what happened with Egypt there, but it probably looks like it is terrorism. You can see that going on for the foreseeable future. We will have lone wolf attacks here in this country. They're hard to stop, but ultimately they're not, they're, individually, the deaths are a tragedy, but they're not national catastrophes like 9-11 or even like Paris. Good afternoon. In Father Flager's absence, I would like to say it is actually our loss. Father Flager is a gem in his community along with countless other folks whose names you wouldn't know in places like the South Side of Chicago or New Orleans who are fighting for people who don't have many advocates in places like New Orleans and Camden, New Jersey and Baltimore. He is a selfless individual. I've spent so much time with him in Chicago and to see his engagement with young people who so many other people have written off is quite amazing. When I was a younger reporter, I'd often arrive at a crime scene minutes before the homicide detectives would arrive. When I'd get there, I'd find young black men, my age or younger, dead from gunshot wounds with a halo of blood around them. I'd watch as their families would stumble into the scene trying to make sense of how quickly life was taken. From across yellow police tape and from living room sofas and kitchen tables, sometimes from the shadows, I'd try to translate the pain heaped upon these families and these communities. I'd look in their faces and I'd see the faces of people I love and who love me. I'd see the face of my mother in her tears. I'd see my uncles and my aunts. I'd even see my brothers and his boys aching for revenge that I'd been the one gunned down. Every time I told these stories and I've told these stories hundreds of times, it was as if I was telling my own family's story. Because an act of gun violence is the reason why I stand here today, you know, why I exist. In 1923, in a place called Dodge County, Georgia, in a small town called Rhine, my grandmother's older brother, who was 12 at the time, was shot and killed by a white man who had some problem with my great-grandfather. There was never an arrest of any charges because that's simply not the way the law worked in Dodge County or places throughout the Jim Crow South. So soon after the killing, my family joined the Great Migration, the mass exodus of black folks from the South to the North, the so-called Promise Land. My family found themselves in Philadelphia first before moving across the river to Camden County, New Jersey. But the specter of violence wasn't far behind. In 1951, another of my grandmother's brothers was shot and killed by a white man, this time a state trooper. The officer thought my great-uncle was in the process of stealing a radio out of a car. And though he was unarmed, he later say in the newspaper that they tussled over the officer's gun and bang, it went off. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? In New Jersey, my grandmother would meet my grandfather and they'd have eight kids, including their baby, who was my mother. And they owned a small apartment building in the city of Camden. And one day, a prospective tenant came by and dropped off a $160 security deposit and then vanished for several weeks. By the time he came back, the apartment had already been rented and my grandfather told him that unfortunately it was non-refundable. So one night in December of 1976, after my grandfather returned from a late night shift at the Pipe Insulation Factory where he worked, he heard a knock at the door. When he opened that door, there the man stood with a .32 caliber automatic handgun and shot my grandfather once in the face and once in his stomach. He died the following day. Decades later, a young woman put a gun to the back of my step brother's head and pulled the trigger. Years after that, I had a pair of cousins who were brothers. One was murdered in the streets of Atlantic City. The other is serving a long prison sentence for a botched robbery turned murder. Gun violence has followed my family from the south to the north and through the generations but we're not alone in how often we've been touched by gun violence. There are more than 300 million guns in America. Nearly as many guns as there are Americans and every single year, millions more are manufactured. More than 30,000 people a year die by these guns. Many are homicides, others are suicides but that number doesn't even include the 100,000 or so others who are injured by gunfire, some gravely so. The cost to these families, to my family, has been great but as a society, we all pay a cost for gun violence. The bullets that injure and wound our fellow Americans cost just cents to manufacture but each year as a society, we spend upward of 220 billion dollars, billion dollars, 220 billion dollars on gun violence related costs, both direct costs and indirect costs. That's more than Apple's revenue in most years and almost as much as we spend on Medicaid. Those costs include medical bills, the cost of rehabilitation, lost wages, businesses and taxpayers moving from gun-weary communities. We pay a cost to investigate those crimes and for the criminal justice system and we pay a cost to incarcerate those who perpetrate violent crime. In the aggregate, each gun death cost us as a society six million dollars. That's six million for each gun related death. Yet we don't have the policy or the tools in place to properly regulate these machines that are behind these costs. Congress has defunded the study of the public health implications of gun violence. It is illegal to keep a digital database of gun owners and common sense gun legislation like universal background checks for all gun sales remains far out of reach. Each year, 500,000, a half a million guns are lost or stolen, yet only 11 states require by law that the owners report those losses, only 11 states. And even after the umpteenth mass shooting, Sandy Hook, Charleston, San Bernardino and the steady drum beat of everyday gun violence, many states have made it easier to get guns rather than more difficult. Many of these same states are erecting barriers for people to vote, but lowering them for people to get a gun, even though research shows that easier access to guns and the availability of guns equals more gun death. But gun death is not a black urban issue alone. While blacks make up 57%, that's 57% of gun homicide victims, whites make up the majority of those who turn a gun on themselves. Of the 30,000 annual gun deaths, two thirds are suicides and 93% of those victims are white. It's the ease of access to those guns for people in their most fragile and vulnerable emotional and mental state. Guns are simply too easily accessible and extremely efficient as the only thing they've been created to do, and that is to kill. Backed by the gun industry and the gun lobby, state lawmakers are emboldened to walk in lockstep with an agenda that puts politics and profits ahead of the safety of the American people. There I say the debate over gun control is not simply about your constitutional right to bear arms, but again, about politics and profit. Congress has not exhibited the political will or courage to stand up and take meaningful action on the plague of gun violence in this country, or done anything to keep these killing tools out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them. The costs to all of us are high, but the question remains, what is the cost of doing nothing at all? Thank you. The rights issue that our country is dealing with today, we look all across this country and see violence is rising up in all the major cities, and unfortunately, Chicago has become like the poster boy of violence throughout America. We see the results of this violence, and we see teddy bears and balloons are now becoming our new landmarks and communities in our neighborhoods. We see the fact that helicopters and sirens become the sounds of summer streets. We find young people and whole communities in post-traumatic stress. We don't have people that are coming back from war. We have whole communities that are living in war zones. Finding young six-grader girls when asked to say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And they say, alive. Finding young teenagers, say, does anybody care about us? Or in town hall meetings, finding all sorts of children who are in schools are talking about their graduation ceremonies. They're now having parts of the graduation ceremony that is talking about children and classmates they lost while they were at school. So what do we do about this violence, and what is it the causes that are making it? Well, the first thing we gotta realize is that it's not one easy issue. We wanna point the finger and say it's the police or it's the parents, but it's a much more comprehensive issue. The reality is that if we have the courage to do this, we have to do what Carl Stokes had back in the 70s. He said, the reason America doesn't deal with violence and address it, because it means addressing the realities of America that have failed to address in poor communities across this country. We have abandoned communities. You go to Chicago, the 10 most violent communities we have had the same scenario. We have double digit unemployment. People who can't get jobs, when they say in America that the unemployment is 5%, that tells me I don't live in America. Here in our community, we have 28 to 35% unemployment. So in communities like this where I live is 25 to 30% unemployment. You look at the poverty in communities like this and see that the poverty that Dr. King was calling the war on in 1968 when he was murdered, that poverty is worse down communities today than it was in 1968. You cannot build communities where poverty consistently be a reality throughout our urban cities of America. You look at economic development and look in communities like I live in and across this country where there is no economic development. Communities that are filled with empty lots but boarded up buildings with the most people that are coming back from prison with nothing but $20 in a bus card and no opportunities. And you look at neighborhoods like this and say they are third world countries. When you try to get businesses to come in the first thing they'll look at is say, number one, can the economic level of that community support me and allow my business to be successful? Secondly, when I buy a point of destination where other people will come into the community and be able to help support my business to grow. Well, when you see a community with 30% unemployment, they say my business can't make it here. And you're not gonna be a point of destination to bring people in while communities like this are deemed as dangerous and people aren't gonna walk into them or get into them to do their shopping or to go to their stores. So you see the unemployment, you see the poverty, see the lack of economic development, see a total broken bridge between law enforcement and community. And yes, there's a code of silence in our neighborhoods but there's a code of silence in the police department. And until there's an equal ground of respect for each other and there is a sharing of honesty with each other and there's accountability, not just with the brother on the street but accountability with the police officer who may he or she not doing what they're supposed to do right, you can't even talk about building that bridge. And unless that bridge is in place, people are not gonna communicate and help solve crime together. So we've got to deal with the broken bridge. We got to deal with the educational systems that are broken. And most of the communities where there are violence across America and certainly here in Chicago, the school system is underfunded and underperforming. So our children cannot go to school and get the education they need to compete and to get the jobs and to be able to grow up and take care of their families. When you look and see it with Chicago, we know how to do it. We have some great schools. We just choose where it's gonna be. And in America, your education system should not depend on your zip code or on your race or on your class. We've got to deal with the education system. We've got to deal with the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry continues to foster and glorify violence with the drill music and the rest. And yes, we can blame the young rappers who many times are living out in gated communities and are still talking about the atmosphere in the inner city. But the reality is these young rappers are being paid millions of dollars from Sony and Interscope and Universal and other companies that are really pimping our young people and using them to continue this kind of music so that they can make money and they can sell their wares. So we've got to face the entertainment industry from right choices that rappers are making in the neighborhood but also from those that are paying those rappers and continue that music to become the norm in music and hip hop today rather than the consciousness. We've got to deal with parents. We've got to make sure that parents are responsible and not their friends, but are responsible raising their children. And we've got to help parents, not just condemn them and demonize them but help our young people by raising them in families and in homes where there is support, where there is love, where there also is expectations and there's discipline. We've got to fix the broken safety net in our communities. There used to be a day that we were grown up and we were taken care of by the village where the village is broken. Neighbors don't know each other, they don't talk to each other. And if they don't even speak to another child because they're afraid that parents are gonna respond to them and say, why are you talking to my child? You cannot, we cannot raise our children alone. In the old days, it was over backyard friends. It was on the front porch. It was walking down the street. It was a store owner, it was the police officer. We've lost that safety net and we need everybody to work together in blocks and in neighborhoods and in communities to help raise our children and create the atmospheres. We need positive alternative for our young people, things to do. If right now a young person says, I want to get out of a gang, I want to change my life, what do we have for them? What's the option? I did a funeral a few months ago of a young person who was involved in a gang here at St. Sabina. At the end of that sermon, I asked how many young brothers in that church wanted to come forward right now and say they wanted to make a change in their life. And I said, maybe nobody will come, but maybe somebody will come. This is the 152 young brothers that came up. The tragedy is that I realized as they were coming up and I was standing and looking at them that I could offer them GED classes. We teach that. I could offer them programs to be in like a peacemaker's basketball league and the rest, but I can't give them the jobs and they're gonna survive. So if we can't offer them something else to do with their lives, but lock up, and we just keep demonizing them as they're gang members and they're throwaways, they're disposable, if we treat young people like animals, they're gonna respond like animals. We gotta treat them like they're our sons, like they're our brothers. Offer them the love, offer them the respect, offer them options, and at the same time hold them accountable and hold discipline in their lives. We've got to deal with the concern for them and the care for them and give them alternatives to do with their lives and just demonizing them or just ignoring them or waiting to lock them up and send them to prison or send them to a cemetery. We've also gotta be real and deal with the gun issue in this country. There's a proliferation of guns and the NRA continues to fight to try to make guns accessible. The number one consumer of guns in America, are the illegal guns. If we don't set up an atmosphere to stop that flow of illegal guns, we're gonna continue to see guns as being the first line of offense and the first line of way we defend ourselves. It's not gonna be conversation, it's not gonna be words, it's not gonna be fists. If I say I'm gonna mad at somebody or I'm angry at somebody, we pull out guns now and we shoot one another. And we have to understand, no one's trying to take away guns, but we need to hold people accountable. I've been saying for 15 years, title a gun like a car. If I own a car and I give it to somebody else, I don't transfer a title and they're in an accident, I'm responsible for the damages that they did. The same thing with a gun. If we start putting titles on every gun and you have to get a title when you buy a gun and you have to transfer a title when you sell a gun, that now stops the person going to gun shows and gun shops buying 100 and 200 guns to sell on the streets of Chicago and across this country and makes them accountable that if you sell those guns, you don't transfer a title, you're gonna be held responsible for that crime. You can be sued for the damage that that gun was involved in. We've got to make people accountable for guns and we've got to fight this NRA that understands they have one thing in mind. See, if you stop easy access of guns, that means less guns are being sold. That means gun manufacturers will make less guns, make less money from selling guns, which means less money to the NRA in order to make their money and live in the million-dollar houses they live in now while blood is flowing through the streets of Chicago and all around this country. We've got to be able to deal with this violence comprehensively. In the Bible, there is a passage where Jesus comes to a man sitting by the pool and he says to him, do you wanna get well? The man starts to tell all the reasons why he hasn't gotten in the pool. Jesus simply says, do you want to get well? That's the question we got to address it with in America. We can't go across the seas and build up countries. We can't go across the seas and say assault weapons are banned in Iraq because we're there, but not take care of home. Does America want to get well? Do we really want to stop the violence in America or do we want to just ban it or worse yet confine it to certain neighborhoods and certain groups of people as long as it doesn't move into the wealthy and it doesn't move into the upper class? That's what we did with drugs. We said with drugs, we didn't care about them till they started hitting the backyards of wealthy people and of senators and congressmen. Then all of a sudden we wanted a war on drugs. We have to understand, do we really wanna get well, America? Do we really want to save all of our children? We understand that there wasn't even a care about violence in America until Newtown happened. I remember marching with a woman here in Chicago and asking her, why now? Why are you involved now with the violence issue while children are dying all over Chicago for years? She said, well, frankly, she said, when I saw those children, those babies at Newtown, I thought of my children. When I see children killed from the west and the south side of Chicago, I don't identify with that. And that is until we deal with the race problem, until we deal that all children are valuable and their lives are valuable and their communities are valuable, until we stop accepting the tale of two cities whether it's downtown and then there's a south side or a west side, until we start deciding that lives are valuable whether they're black, whether they are rich, whether they are poor, whether they are gay, whether they are straight, it makes no difference, they are a child. Every Sunday and this week in America with George Stephanopoulos at the end of that show, they say, now we're gonna remember all of our military who've lost their lives. And then they put the scroll of people who have lost their lives in the military that week. They don't ask if they're rich or poor, black, white, brown, male, female, gay, straight, what class there, what race there, what religion there, they're simply military. Until we start to think that way about citizens of America and we deal with the race issue and we deal with the tale of two cities issue, until we decide that we really wanna get well in America, how dare we, how dare we decide that we're gonna be a country that be the moral conscious all across the world and our own backyard is burning up. Violence is not something that we wonder if we can solve. Violence can indeed be solved. It's not that we lack the resources, it's just that we lack the will. And when we decide that we comprehensively want to cure this cancer, instead of just bandating it or hope that cancer doesn't come in our house or in my family, when we decide that then we'll get serious about ending violence in America and saving lives. I look forward to meeting Father Flagler in person. So these are just so tough, these issues. And I have two questions. The first really goes to the issue that Father Flagler raised at the end which both of you talk about in different ways but Peter, it keys off your point initially that we put violence from terrorism in this box over here and we devote all this time and all this attention to it. And all this other violence which is killing more Americans is somehow separate. And so my first question is, is there a way of reframing this cluster of issues as violence against Americans that the government as the fundamental part of the social contract, the core of the social contract, let's go back to Hobbes, is the government provides security. Without that, you have no government. The citizen says, I give up my ability for self-defense and the government provides it. And so that it's violence rather than this kind of terrorism here, violence against white people here, violence against black people here. And do you see a way to reframe this so that that's the political issue? I mean, I think part of the problem is the second amendment is the second amendment, it's not the 63rd amendment and this is kind of embedded in the American story and history. So, but leaving that point aside, we at New America have tried to change the conversations a little bit in the direction you're asking about, Amory, which is we also look at right wing, extreme right wing violence because there are plenty of right wing neo-Nazis who are very violent and they kill people at about the same rate that jihadi terrorists do. And so this has been, we've had a lot of media attention as a result of this research because it does try and put into the public discourse that I mean, it's ahistorical to think that jihadi terrorism is this. In the 1970s, we had 100 hijackings, many of them were political. We had an epidemic, Puerto Rican nationalists were blowing up bombs 85 times in the 1970s. If people forget this, there was the weather underground, there was Black Panthers. So the point is political violence is very much part of the American story. And I think part of the reframing is just to recognize that jihadi terrorism is not something, obviously 9-11 was one of the hinge events of American history and we tend to filter a lot of information through that lens. But that said, I think part of the reframing that you're discussing is to say, we're ignoring our own history and actually what's happening if we think that this is the only form of violence we should be concerned about. And I think to pick up there, I think that, especially when it comes to Black Pan America, we have yet to realize our full citizenship. People don't really understand the history of the slave gun cycle, that it was guns that fueled war, that led to kidnappings, that led to trade for more guns to go at war with your regional enemies. And to get to America, and you look at the Georgia and Virginia slave patrols, the militias, the predecessors of the police departments, you look at the franchise, we're still fighting for the franchise. Every step along the way, our citizenship has been denied. And I had this conversation yesterday, we talked about this tale of two Americas and this tale of two citizenship, that we haven't fully realized that yet. So I think until we are able to fully, not just embrace it, but offer our citizenship to all of us and we all Americans, as Father Flager mentioned, all of the names are scrolling down. We're not gonna care enough, because as long as it's happening in certain communities that we never go to, to shop or engage or do anything, that's there. And it's almost like this kind of strange normal. I often think of it like the Twilight Zone, like what universe do we live in where this is acceptable? And we are Americans. Can I ask a romantic question here? Yeah, absolutely. I just finished reading this amazing book, Ghetto Side. And I mean, her theory, Ghetto Side. Ghetto Side. If you look at, you know, you're familiar with it. But her theory, or I think not theory, she lays it out very well, is that one of the big problems is the impunity with which people are murdering each other, that the police are not solving these crimes. And so you've got areas in this country where you can go out and murder somebody and basically you get away with it, because the police are not sufficiently invested to actually solve the crime. Do you think that's true? Oh, in Chicago, the clearance rate is about 20%. Right. 20%. That's not just cases solved with an arrest. That's just cases that they've just kind of given up on. 20%. And that's not an anomaly. Go to Miami, Philadelphia and Los Angeles is the same thing, because again, it's the normal. It's supposed to happen here. And again, we look at the level of trauma that people are experiencing. Not just those who are physically, physical victims of gun violence, but the trauma of witnessing repeated acts of violence. You know, researchers say that, you know, actually starts to rewire your brain. Absolutely. The idea of the cortisol and it's almost like, you know, you talk about your fight or flight and the bear is eating your neighbor and he's on your front step and he's across the street and he's on the way to school and he's at school and he's in your living room. And that's the level of trauma that we're dealing with. So all of these victimized people who, and then the families are re-victimized because there's never any justice for them. And so so many people don't even understand what does justice look like for us in our community or in America, for that matter. So we, time only for one more question but building on that, absolutely. We now know PTSD is a neurological syndrome. It happens if you are exposed to horrific trauma, violence, seeing your buddy killed, it affects your brain. Well, it's to your point. It doesn't just happen when you see your buddy killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. It happens to you when you see your buddy or your family member killed in any city in this country. It is the same thing. We've just got these categories. But let me ask you a final question. To the point of your book, you are trying to shift the frame in a different way. Not just to say it's all of us white, black and every other color, but to say this is an economic issue. And we've seen around incarceration a trans-partisan coalition, right? Where the right thinks we're spending way too much money and the left thinks this is horrifically unequal given who's in our prisons. Doesn't matter why you support the change. What matters is you support the change. So just talk to us a bit about how you think showing the full cost of this could perhaps build a different political coalition. I think sadly, I have to use a device to get people to care about the cost that our families and communities are paying every single day. And I'll be honest, it's a pill in applesauce. I just wanna shift the focus on the great loss that people are experiencing every single day. But we've seen it after the Great Recession when states were scrambling to figure out how do they write their budgets? And they look at the prison costs and the mandatory minimums and all the non-violent offenders, you're spending $1,000 to incarcerate. I had a conversation with Governor Deal in Georgia and he said that until recently they were spending $90,000 to incarcerate a juvenile, a year, $90,000. And so while it's clear that America does not care about poor young black people, they do care about where their tax money is going. They do care where they're losing money and spending money and will argue all day long between the right and the left. And so I'm hoping that if you don't have any moral impetus that hopefully there's a financial one because that's as American as it gets, it's capitalism. And are we spending our money appropriately? Could we spend more money on the front end? We know that mentorship works. A consistent adult in the life of a young person at risk. We know a quality education does wonders. I've spent time in Chicago when there was one school where the kids had to take their AP courses, well they don't even have AP courses. The ones they did have, they had to take it online. They had to take physical education online. They don't have physical teachers. You go to Philadelphia when they fired all of their vice principals, all of their counselors, all these kids with hopes and dreams to go to college. There's no counselors to help guide them. What do you think is gonna happen? Where are they gonna end up being? Where are they gonna pay on the front or are they definitely gonna pay on the back end? I hope you can take one additional thought. You're six times more likely to be murdered in New Orleans today than you are to be killed in the war in Afghanistan, which I think speaks for itself. Thank you. Thank you very much.