Daniel P. Driscoll

But you have this quick dip into a bad moment.

You have access to a firearm and you take your life in this incredibly tragic way.

I don't know, though, that it's the firearms' fault.

One of the things the Army has been trying to do is, should we put weapons in where we store the rest of our weapons and just have them need to get access to that the next morning?

And so try to spread out that moment of self-violence, self-harm or community harm.

from the access to the firearm.

But the problem is that doesn't scale for the average American citizen because our Second Amendment—and this is where I think we as a nation do have a hard time sometimes acknowledging the plain English and the plain language.

We come up with this Orwellian doublespeak, and we try to talk ourselves into saying it doesn't say that Americans have the right to bear arms.

They do.

Like, it is—everyone can read that and get to the logical outcome.

that that is one of our core rights as a nation, and there are many benefits from that.

And so I think until we're willing to just have the hard conversation on the merits, we're just going to keep playing on the margins and doing things like using ATF to regulate against a right that is obviously there.

I think one of the problems is, and it's inherent in our system of government, and it does some good things.

I think it prevents us in any given political cycle from veering too far off the straight and narrow of what the amazing nation is.

has done for 249 years, which is, generally speaking, doing an amazing job of protecting the safety of our citizens at large.

But when we have these swings with something like gun regulation, I think a lot of Second Amendment people who are very passionate about that right

are right to be worried that when the political spectrum swings the other way, it could be used to decay and attack their right to have a gun.

And so I think this is one of those topics that much of my role as secretary has been just very complex issues that the only reason it's getting to you is there's no clear right answer.

And this seems to be one of kind of those same issues, because if I think about it again from a soldier's perspective,

One of the parts of this role I never expected is, and I just hadn't thought about it, we have 450,000 active duty soldiers, about 950,000 total and 250,000 civilians.