David Hemenway is a professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the author of Private Guns, Public Health, which argues that there are many practical ways to significantly reduce the epidemic of American gun deaths. In his book While We Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention, Hemenway provides case studies of previous efforts at reducing injuries and deaths, showing 60 different success stories that have made us all safer. Hemenway previously worked for Ralph Nader and compares the situation with guns to the situation before auto safety measures came about. He has produced a great deal of research on what interventions would actually work to stop people from getting shot. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss what we know (and don’t know) about firearm deaths and how to stop them. 

Nathan J. Robinson 

Let’s start by laying out the scope of America’s gun violence epidemic. Obviously, we see the major publicized mass shootings—these are the very dramatic events. But of course, there’s the somewhat less dramatic, everyday gun violence in the United States. When we’re talking about the crisis of gun violence in America, what exactly are we talking about? How many are murders or suicides? What is the nature of the problem here?

David Hemenway 

Nobody knows exactly how many people are shot every day in the United States, but it’s something probably on the order of well over 300 citizens shot, with likely 110-120 dying. Most of the people who are shot, are shot in assaults each day. But in terms of deaths, 60 percent or so are suicides, at least compared to the other high-income countries. We are a complete outlier in terms of violent death by guns.

Robinson 

How much has this changed over time? Has this been pretty constant?

Hemenway 

We’ve always been an outlier among developed countries. The homicide rate goes up and down, and we’re now in an up cycle. It was very high in the early 1990s. When homicide goes up and down, it’s really the kind of homicide that’s going up and down because two-thirds to three-quarters or more of homicide deaths in the United States are firearm deaths. Suicides have also been increasing recently.

Robinson 

In your book, you advocate the “public health” approach to this problem. What I understand that to mean is to start with the premise that it is bad when people die unnecessarily or are subjected to horrific injuries, and then working from there to figure out what we know would reduce the numbers of people who die and are injured.

Hemenway 

I’ve been advocating the public health approach for the past 30 years, and I would say that it’s a broadening approach. It asks everybody to get involved and first admit that we have an enormous problem, and then try to get everybody to work together to solve that problem. It’s a harm reduction approach. If I had one sentence to try to describe the approach, I would say, “Let’s make it really difficult to get injured, shot, or killed, and make it really easy to be safe.”

If you wanted to apply this approach, for example, to obesity, which we have a big epidemic of in the United States, you’d try to make it easy to get really healthy food and difficult to get junk food, and make it easy to get healthy exercise and really difficult to be a couch potato. In the United States we do completely the opposite, and lo and behold, people are surprised that we have an obesity problem in public health. What we’re trying to do is think of all the things that the government can do. People have this narrow view of what the government does, by whether it passes laws or not, but there are so many different things it can do, from creating good datasets and doing good research about firearms, and so forth. There are so many things that groups, universities, the faith community, foundations, and the media can do. It’s particularly things which gun owners, retailers, and manufacturers could do that could make an enormous problem much less of a problem.

What we’re trying to do is harm reduction. It’s pretty clear in the United States that we’re going to have plenty of guns, and so then the question is: how can we learn to live with the guns right now without dying from them? People understand examples. There are so many successes in public health, but one which resonates with people is the big success we had in motor vehicles. I worked for Ralph Nader, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the focus was on trying to reduce the horrendous motor vehicle fatality rate we had. The focus was initially on the driver: if all drivers obeyed the law, we’d have very few fatalities, and if all drivers never made mistakes in driving, there’d be very few accidents. And so, the focus was on “let’s fix the driver.”

And it wasn’t until public health physicians asked a different question, not who “caused” the accident, but what caused the injury. People were being speared by steering columns, their faces were lacerated by the windshields, and they were getting thrown from the cars. Why can’t we have safer cars and roads and a better emergency medical system? Over time, we did. We forced the car manufacturers to put in seatbelts and airbags, and made the road so much safer. We used to plant trees and lampposts along the sides of the major highways, and it’s obvious we’re not planting them along the sides of airport runways. When you look 60 to 80 years later—however long you want—fatalities per mile driven have fallen about 90 percent, and we have drivers that know better.

Robinson 

As I understand it, one of the important principles of public health is that you take the public as they are, rather than trying to find who to blame and saying, “It’s because people behave this way that this problem is happening.” Instead, we’re going to take people as they are, with all their flaws, and then ask: what are the factors that, given what people are like, can change the outcome in this situation? So, if people drive this way, how can we change the car so that the fact that they drive this way won’t lead them to all die?

Hemenway 

Yes, but I would say it just slightly differently. And that is, for any injury, including firearm injuries, there’s probably a dozen or more things that had to happen for that injury to occur, and if any one of those hadn’t had happened, the injury wouldn’t have occurred. And what we have found through all sorts of injuries is that it’s usually most cost-effective to focus less on the individual. The clear chance to make a difference is to go upstream. It’s so much easier and more cost-effective to make the car safer than trying to change people. We do try to change people a little bit, but it’s just very hard.

One of the big problems public health has in the United States is there’s this notion that if you can just find somebody to blame, then you’ve solved the problem. But you haven’t solved a problem at all, and instead you’ve just blamed somebody. Public health is all about prevention and about how we can prevent bad things from happening. The problem with blame is, too often, it means people then wash their hands—”it’s not my fault, it’s their fault”—so we don’t have to do anything. Whereas in terms of being cost-effective, if everyone plays a little bit of a role, you can make an enormous difference.

Robinson 

Guns seem inherently different from cars in that guns are a weapon designed to cause harm, unlike with cars, which we don’t design to hurt people. But even with guns, you do point out in your book that while the idea of a “safe gun” almost seems paradoxical, it’s not. You give, for example, the fact that when kids come across guns, it’s too easy for the gun to go off. Oftentimes, it’s difficult for a child to know whether the gun is loaded because they take the magazine out, and assume there’s nothing in the chamber. A product can be designed more safely and made less likely to cause an unintentional catastrophic accident.

Hemenway 

Yes. For example, we’ve done a lot of work about unintentional firearm injuries, and a group of people who have a fairly high risk are 2 to 4-year-olds. Whereas most kids are shot by their friends or their brothers and so forth, the 2 to 4-year-olds tend to shoot themselves. In public health, we had a similar problem 30–40 years ago, where 2 to 4-year-olds would find aspirin bottles, eat all the aspirin, and die.

You could blame the parents—it was probably their fault—or you could blame the kids. Or you could solve the problem, and we basically did. We didn’t eliminate the problem entirely, but we reduced it by 80-90 percent by having childproof safety bottles. Wesson of Smith and Wesson fame, about 130 years ago, was worried about kids and guns, so he created a gun which was childproof. Certainly, we could do a lot better than he did, but what he did is made it so that to shoot the firearm he manufactured, you had to not only pull the trigger, but put a little force on the handle at the same time, and 2 to 4-year-olds couldn’t figure out how to do that. It’s the same way with the aspirin bottles—you have to now push down a little bit and turn rather than just turn, and this solved a big problem.

You mentioned the magazines. The most common instance of children dying is when another child finds their dad’s semiautomatic, takes out the magazine and puts it down, thinks that’s where all the bullets are, and then they pull the trigger. And unfortunately, there’s a bullet left in the chamber, and most, not all, semiautomatics can go off. Often, nothing bad happens, but sometimes they unintentionally kill their little brother or their best friend.

And again, you could blame people, or you could really solve the problem, which is make them have magazine safeties. Some semiautomatics are like this. In effect, when you take out the magazine and pull the trigger, it won’t work until you put the magazine back in. What we’ve done in many areas in public health is we try to figure out what is the easiest way to reduce the problem, and often it’s changing the product rather than changing people.

It’s not only for accidents. We can do numerous things with guns that will help reduce homicide and suicide. For example, when guns are trafficked, it’s easy to deface, or make it difficult or impossible to read the serial number. Why? Because the gun manufacturers don’t really care one way or the other. We could have ballistic fingerprinting, if we spend a little time, money, and energy. It’s not high-tech. What you really want to do is not only know when you have a bullet that’s consistent with coming from a certain type of gun, but know the exact gun that came from, and that’s what really helps police solve crimes. Mostly, we don’t have that.

There’s just so many things that can be done, at the manufacturing level, retailing level, and by gun owners. Gun owners claim that they’re responsible, and yet something like, we guess, 350,000 guns a year are stolen, which is one of the many ways they get into the wrong hands. So, if people got together and really try, as a goal, to reduce the problem, we could make an enormous dent.

Robinson 

As we have conversations about what to do about gun violence, you, probably more than anyone or as much as anyone, know the empirical literature that we have on which interventions work or don’t work. What are a few particular ways in which the biggest difference can be made?

Hemenway 

I want to push back on that because I don’t think we know enough, and [finding one or two especially “big” interventions] is not what we would like to do. In terms of motor vehicles, when I was working for Ralph Nader, we really pushed for the air bag. There’s no question that this is something that’s really useful. But of the 90 percent reduction in motor vehicle deaths, that maybe accounts for now 10-11 percent, and doesn’t account for 50 or 80 percent. Seatbelts matter a lot, but the cars are so much better in so many ways. They don’t burn up, or turn over, and the tires don’t burst as easily as they used to. Side impacts aren’t as dangerous as they used to be. The roads are so much safer. It used to be, if you left the road, you could die. Now it’s so much easier because you won’t hit a tree which has been planted along the side of the road. It used to be that if you left your lane, like if you fall asleep and go off the road, you die—it’s your fault. Now, if you start leaving your lane, a beeping sound will start—”Wake up stupid!”—and you get back in your lane and nothing bad happens. Instead of blaming someone because people occasionally fall asleep in cars, what happens is now we’ve saved everybody—nothing bad has happened, and it has cost nickels.

So, here’s what I say. In most areas in public health we can get, and try to create, good data systems and do good research—that’s what we did in the motor vehicle area. We know so much about motor vehicles—we don’t always do what’s right, but we do mostly what’s right because we know so much. We’ve tested and figured out how each intervention matters or doesn’t matter. In the gun area, there is a concerted effort not to collect data, and when we collect the data, there is a concerted effort not to share that data with researchers. For 25 years, there has been a concerted effort to not let the federal government do any research or fund any research about guns. We know much less than we should. We’ve scratched the surface, and only know a little bit.

One of the things we know is that in areas in the United States where all other things are equal, where there are fewer guns and stronger laws, there’s a lot less violent death. We can say that, overall, stronger laws are really effective at reducing violent death. To say which law is the most important, I would like to see numerous things. I’d really like to see licensing of gun owners and registration of handguns—for many reasons, I think that’d be really useful. I would love to see what we have in motor vehicles, which is that we have a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration where people wake up every day and their job is to try to figure out how to reduce motor vehicle deaths and injuries, and it’d be nice to see the same thing for firearms.

The insurance companies actually did something really useful when they created the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. When you buy a car, we know which car is safer and which isn’t because they do crash testing and collect all the data on the cars. Perhaps it’s not as easy with guns to find out information. I would love to see “smart guns” which is when only the official user can use it, and it would mean stealing the gun wouldn’t be so beneficial. Years ago, someone stole my car radio, and the next car I bought had a little sign in the window that said you can take the car radio, but if you take it out of the car, it won’t work anymore. That really reduced car radio theft.

You do the same thing with guns. Many guns are stolen and are used by people who should not have access to them, by the children or the spouses of gun owners. One of the things we know for sure is that a gun in the home increases the likelihood of death in the home, mostly from suicides, but also from gun accidents, and then some from gun owners shooting and killing their spouse. There’s almost no evidence that it increases the safety in the home.

Robinson 

One of the things you said there is that we know pretty well that a greater concentration of guns leads to greater concentration of gun deaths. That directly contradicts a conservative talking point that the places with the highest gun ownership have the lowest rates of gun crime.

Hemenway 

If you’re trying to understand cause and effect, what you want to do is the gold standard of a randomized control trial, where everything is the same, and then you just change one little thing and see what happens. You can’t do that in social science because everything is changing all the time. You don’t want to, for example, compare a rich rural place in Vermont against a poor urban place in Louisiana—they’re very different. There are many things which make a difference, so you want to compare likes and likes, like urban areas to urban areas, poor urban areas to poor urban areas, rich white rural areas to rich white rural areas—then you begin to see the effect of guns.

You’ll see that in areas where there are more guns, there’s clearly more suicide, and when there’s violence it’s much more likely to be deadly. Guns don’t cause the violence typically. Occasionally, guns enable violence that wouldn’t have occurred, like assassinations or killing the police. But violence is out there, and if you give people lethal weapons, they will use them and then somebody will die, and if you don’t, they’re much less likely to.

Robinson 

What you mean by “guns don’t cause the violence” is that they change the degree of harm. It’s like how in China they have school stabbings where nobody dies. It’s the same kind of violent assault, but the consequence of that is very different from an assault rifle.

Hemenway 

Yes. And that’s true in the military. If all you have is a spear, you’re not going to kill as many people compared to using an atomic bomb. It’s how lethal the weapon is. And particularly, certain types of guns are incredibly more lethal than other types of guns. A .22 is not nearly as lethal as an AK-47.

Robinson 

The NRA’s favorite slogan is “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It’s more the case that while guns alone don’t kill people, people without guns hurt people, while people with guns kill people.

Hemenway 

That’s largely the case.

Robinson 

You have a stunning statistic on suicide in your book, where you point out that non-firearm suicide methods tend not to be deadly, while gun suicides almost always are deadly.

Hemenway 

Having a gun in your home significantly increases the risk. We don’t know if it increases the likelihood that you will attempt suicide, but if it does, it doesn’t do it by very much. But it really increases the likelihood that, when things are going badly in your life and you feel like you want to die, and then you try to commit suicide, if there’s a gun handy, you will die. If there’s not a gun handy and instead you take 100 pills, medical science can help you and will. Then virtually everybody who doesn’t die is happy that they didn’t.

Robinson 

If you can get a gun away from people during that period where they’re contemplating suicide, it can really help.

Hemenway 

Yes, and Cathy Barber and my group have been working a lot with gun shops, ranges, and trainers, talking about what they have been calling the “11th commandment of gun safety,” which is similar to “friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” If your friend is going through a bad patch—he’s getting a divorce, talking crazy, and angry—he and you should know that it’s your responsibility to babysit his gun for a while, until things get better.

Again, there are periods that people go through where they’re really high risk for suicide. That’s why we have suicide watches in prisons. People are always either suicidal, or they’re not. And so, you really want to make sure that when people are going through a rough patch, that they don’t have lethal means around them.

Robinson 

And you write that when there are gun safety trainings, including a mandatory unit on suicide prevention, you can reduce gun violence without even going near gun control or restrictions on who can can own guns. 

Hemenway 

Yes, we would like to see gun training be very different from the current training. It’s hard for us to see what the gun training does in terms of what we’ve looked at. For people that have had good training or haven’t, they don’t seem to store their guns any differently. Sometimes people with training actually store their guns less safely, which is very scary. We’ve sent people out to take the basic gun training classes throughout the Northeast, and some of the trainers are great and just wonderful and cover the right things, and other trainers are terrible. One of the trainers was saying if you have kids, you can just hide your gun, like in the closet. Kids will never find that—they never know where you’ve hidden the Christmas presents!

Robinson 

If there’s one thing kids don’t like, it’s looking for things that have been hidden from them! 

Hemenway 

Nobody would ever think to do that! But, you want to understand how dangerous the gun is. You will really want to understand what it’s like if you think you’re going to be a hero and use it in self-defense. If you haven’t practiced enough, not at shooting, but how to respond when you have literally half a second or so to make the right decision, and your adrenaline is pumping like crazy, heart is beating, and supposed to aim well and to figure out whom to shoot or not to shoot—we want training in how to deescalate arguments, not how to start pointing your gun at people.

Robinson 

What are the things that have nothing to do with firearms at all that you feel like could reduce firearm deaths and injuries?

Hemenway 

We need to make it so people are less likely to have mental health issues, less likely to be depressed, get people into anger management, and have a much better mental health system than we do. We need to make it so that gangs aren’t such a draw in the inner city, and that there’s better parenting and education is much better. There are countless things we can do to try to reduce suicides and assaults.

Again, all the guns are doing is making all the problems we have more lethal, and that’s a huge thing. It’s not just people dying. One of the things that’s been really shown is that anyone exposed to violence throughout their lives, either as a witness, a perpetrator, and even if they’re a block away from it, they are more likely to have physical and mental health problems throughout their lives. It’s really a huge risk factor, and it’s much more so than witnessing a car crash, or witnessing two people beating each other up with their fists. There’s something about gun violence that’s so fast, so lethal, and so antiseptic when you recognize you can just be killed instantly.

Robinson 

In that way, we underestimate the full costs of gun violence when we hear about it in the news. It actually doesn’t capture it because even people who saw it might have post-traumatic stress disorder that they have to deal with for years. There are costs to this kind of violence that spiral out. Talk about the broader costs of gun violence that we don’t consider.

Hemenway 

Yes, it’s very hard to measure because most of them aren’t easily defined by measurement, but there are great costs of trying to save yourself from gun violence. In the schools now, all these poor kids have to take this training where you have to prepare for a school shooting. This is really traumatizing. There’s police in the schools, which is traumatizing and may not be necessarily good for the schools. Gun violence can destroy communities because once it starts to happen, the community loses social capital: people are afraid to go out, anyone able to move begins to leave, and companies don’t want to come in to the community, so there aren’t any jobs, which makes things worse. It’s a vicious cycle.

And you also have, in certain parts of the gun area, really this terrible contagion, like an infectious disease. We’ve done all these studies of high school city kids and talk to them about guns and ask whether they have carried a gun, and if they say yes, it’s always illegally. And then the question is, “Why have you carried a gun illegally?” and the overwhelming answer is: they’re afraid. We then asked, “Why are you afraid?” and they would answer: it’s because other kids have guns. And finally, we asked, “What kind of world would you like to live in? Would you like it to be very difficult, somewhat easy, or completely easy for teens like you to get guns?” They live in a world where it’s easy for teens like them to get guns, and the overwhelming majority of them answered they would like to live in a world where it’s impossible for teens like them to get guns. Indeed, a majority of the teens who have said they’ve carried guns illegally would have liked to live in a world where it’s impossible for teens like them to get guns.

That’s a world that most parents in most other developed countries have created for their children, and we haven’t. We’ve created just the opposite. And then we want to blame the children. If you leave a loaded gun lying around for a 12-year-old, and they do something wrong, you don’t necessarily blame them—they’re 12. If anyone is to blame, it’s the parents, but you don’t even want to do that. You just want to make it so even if you left the gun lying around, the 12-year-old wouldn’t be able to use it.

Robinson 

I think you cite in your book those experiments that show that if you leave a gun in a room with a group of kids, they will pick it up and pull the trigger, no matter what they’ve been taught.

Hemenway 

There have been great studies. The Eddie Eagle program, the NRA program, says these things you’re supposed to do: if you see a gun, don’t touch it and leave the area. And then people have tried to figure out: will children do this? And the answer is: no. Kids are just curious, especially boys—boys love guns. They even have these videos of the kids saying the NRA mantra, “don’t touch the gun, tell their parents” while picking up a gun, pointing it, saying those words, and pulling the trigger.

The goal in public health is to make the world safe for children, not to try to change children into rational, safe adults. That doesn’t work. It’s just not effective.

Robinson 

You mentioned what people say when they’re asked about the kind of world they want, and you cite the public opinion statistics on the kind of policies that people want. Even if Americans generally believe that there should be a Second Amendment right to own a gun, there are pretty overwhelming majorities supporting many different interventions that would reduce the rate of violence.

Hemenway 

Yes, there are, and it’s such a disconnect. It’s really very sad. And I’m not the expert on that; I’m not a political scientist. I just I try to do in public health the research on what we know, and what could work. It really is a disconnect in our system that 90 percent of the people want universal background checks and don’t want people to be able to get guns without having them, and yet don’t have them in most states, and certainly don’t at the national level.

I think it has something to do with single issue lobbies and with our two-party system, where one of the parties has allied itself with the gun lobby. There are plenty of reasons for it, but still, we the people are not getting what we want, which is a much safer world at incredibly low cost. Universal background checks would not be that costly to have. Gun licensing would not be that costly. We have gun licensing in Massachusetts, and universal background checks in a number of states. It’s not that hard.

But even in states like Massachusetts, where I’m from—we have fewer guns, strong laws, and always the first or second in terms of the lowest rates of gun deaths—criminals get their guns from other states. And then when this happens, the gun lobby says, “Look at the laws, they don’t work very well.” And of course, they don’t work very well if you make it so you can just drive five miles and get a gun easily—it doesn’t matter what your laws are. It helps a little, but it would help a lot more if it was national.

It’s like if you have cockroaches in your apartment and live in a big apartment complex, and then you have the exterminator come, and then five days later, you have cockroaches again—”I guess extermination doesn’t work.” No, you really want the whole building to be exterminated. You really want federal laws because the evidence is overwhelming that crime guns are moving very rapidly from states with weak laws to states with strong laws.

It’s not only true that the states with weak laws are bad neighbors to other states, but they’re really incredibly bad neighbors to other countries. How do Mexican criminals get their guns? They get them from the United States, specifically from states with plenty of guns and weak laws. How do Canadian criminals get their guns? They get them from the United States. We had a research assistant from Jamaica years ago, and he looked at Jamaican crime, when they picked up guns, and then traced them. He found that something like 80 percent of all guns used in crimes in Jamaica came from three counties in Florida. We know this, and it’s incredible that we don’t do anything about it.

Robinson 

There’s an inherent problem in having a gun manufacturing industry that has to keep selling guns to maintain its profit. You point out that guns last a long time, so it’s actually difficult to keep selling guns because once everyone’s got a gun, they’ve got a gun. But the company still has to sell guns again the next year, so there are all sorts of awful incentives there.

Hemenway 

Yes, and that’s not the only area in public health where we see this. Tobacco is similar, where the evidence finally became overwhelming, and the companies were trying to hook kids on tobacco because that was how they were going to get the next generation. In the gun area, they’ve been after women for a long time. Instead of competing on safety, they’re competing on the killing fields, on who can sell the most militarized weapons that can kill the most people as fast as possible, and that’s terrible for our citizenry, for our country, and for public health.

Robinson

What do you wish we talked more about in the gun conversation? How should we think about this differently than we do?

Hemenway

One of the things that I would like to see is—I’m an economist, and we have this model, called the “prisoner’s dilemma game.” It’s this horrible game that you play where what’s good for you is bad for everybody, including yourself, and if everyone looks out for themselves, it’s terrible for society. What you want to do is live in a world, in economics, where if people are following their own self- interests, good things happen—that’s the invisible hand. But climate change is this prisoner’s dilemma game: what’s good for you is you turn on your air conditioning as much as you want and do whatever you’d like to do, and it’s wrecking our world.

In the gun area, we actually don’t have that because more guns are terrible for society. You’re not going to have these mass shootings unless there are numerous guns. More and more people are buying guns, and the evidence grows every year, stronger and stronger, that a gun in the home does not make you safer. It makes you less safe. Getting a gun does two terrible things: it makes you and your family less safe on average, and it makes society less safe.

And so, one of the things that I would like to see is the evidence get out there about what having a gun in the home does. I would like to see the Surgeon General, for example, do what they did 50–60 years ago about cigarettes. The evidence was so strong that they could say that smoking a cigarette will increase your likelihood of cancer, emphysema, heart disease, and so forth. And I would say that the evidence right now, particularly about suicide, gun accidents, and that someone in the home will die in a homicide, is as strong as it was then for cigarettes. And since then, there’s been more and more evidence, but I’d like to clarify it for people to understand the danger, on average.

One of the big problems in public health and injury prevention is that even though this is an enormous problem, it’s still rare. Something like 350 people a day are getting shot, and when you have 350 million people, that’s not that many. So, to try to convince someone, they say, “I was raised with guns. Nobody ever got shot.” And the answer is they’re right. That’s true. A gun increases the likelihood that someone in the home will die—it may have been about 1 percent over a four-year period, and now it’s 3 percent—still very low. But when you go to the morgue, what you see is the people who had the guns.

But in terms of all these other problems, it’s not just that people are injured and dead—it affects so many people. Not only the whole family but the neighbors and the whole community. 

Robinson 

You also point out that this public health approach is consistent with civil libertarianism. Obviously, the critique that is inevitably made is that this is an issue of individual freedom, rights, and choice. However, you point out that in other countries, it is, in fact, the civil libertarians who want to reduce gun violence because they understand that you can’t have a free society when people are imprisoned in their own houses from the threat of violence in the streets. 

Hemenway

Yes. I think the progressives have been at fault for not taking the mantle of liberty. It’s not your freedom to carry your AK-47 into my school. That really seems to reduce my freedom to send my kids to school and not to be afraid of sending them there continuously. And so, my understanding is that of all the big issues in the United States, both sides have tried to say they’re on the side of freedom. I think you can make a strong case that having reasonable gun policies is on the side of freedom.

Robinson 

Yes. Turning schools into a police state doesn’t feel particularly free.

Hemenway 

It doesn’t seem like it to me.

Listen to the full conversation on the Current Affairs podcast. Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth. Transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.