Jonathan Metzl
speaker
134 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Apr
Jonathan Metzl’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
the democrats are going to get more popular and then our politicians aren't going to take control and we won't be able to overtake the supreme court and uh you know do away with roe and all these things and so people were kind of aware that this was a price that they were paying in a way in and really what i see is our broken system which rewards tribalization and disincentivizes cooperation
Well, in the book, I tell the story of a mass shooting that happened here in Nashville in 2018, the Nashville Waffle House mass shooting.
And it was for me one of I mean, there's so many mass shootings.
There's more than one mass shooting a day in the United States right now.
Statistically, we have more guns than people by quite quite a long shot.
And so part of the story I tell in the book is about this horrific mass shooting that happened in the middle of the night in a Waffle House to incredibly just innocent people who were out enjoying a meal, which was fraught with all kinds of racial and political tensions, the shooting was.
And it's exactly what you're asking in your question, which is I asked this question of, it was really, I've studied guns now for quite some time.
And this was one of the clearest examples of how a shooting could have been stopped by red flag laws and background checks and assault weapons bans.
And instead, what happened after the shooting is what we see happen after pretty much every mass shooting, which is that half the country says we need more guns and half the country says we need more laws.
And we're literally talking about really different,
different languages, different responses, different notions of safety.
And so part of the story I tell in the book is, what have we become as a democracy?
It's really a threat to democracy.
For me, not being able to address the problem of mass shootings was a flashing sign a decade ago about the failure of our democracy, that we couldn't come together to keep people safe in schools, in
workplaces, places where you shouldn't have to worry about dying.
And so part of the story is about the failure of our democracy to find common cause after these horrible moments.
And so part of what I ask is what have we become as a democracy if we can't keep people safe in this way?
And the other part is in line with exactly what you're asking, what have we become when we habituate violence like this?
I mean, who habituates shootings and violence like this?
It's soldiers in wartime.
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