The Truth About Guns In America They Don't Want You To Know! - Mike McIntire
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What happened at Sandy Hook would have been that moment. And for a little while, it seemed like it could have been, but it very quickly, I think, evaporated. That was the point where America decided that the deaths of little children were acceptable losses. If that didn't do it, I'm not quite sure what would, because that was such a horrific tragedy. There's been others since. They're too numerous to even itemize. But it seems like that to some extent, that type of thing has resulted in what you might call acceptable losses in our country. We don't seem willing to move the needle when these tragedies happen.
Well, I think that... Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Mike McIntyre. He's a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He's an investigative journalist and author. And man, what a book. You can hear the cracking sounds coming out of this book, Ricochet, Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence. And I really appreciate you accepting our invitation, Mike, because I want to talk about all this. But before we get into Ricochet, Tell us a little bit about yourself. You spent an entire career uncovering complex stories through investigative journalism. I think this could be your opus, by the way. I mean, you know, I'm just looking at it. It's a major deal in our country, but what got you into all this?
Well, thanks for having me here. It's good of you to say that, Anthony. And I'm actually talking to you from the New York Times building, hence the warm, personalized, fuzzy background that I'm sitting in front of here.
You can blink twice if you need an evac.
All right, I'll come. And, you know, reporting on gun violence and gun issues has been something I've been doing since my earliest days as a young newspaper reporter. I was on the cop beat on my first daily newspaper job. And I used to carry around a scanner so I'd know what was going on with police calls. I remember one day, I'd only been on the job maybe a couple of weeks, and a call came in for a body on the side of the road. And I happened to be out nearby. So I drove over there and sure enough, there was a body of a young black man laying in the grass and no one else was around. I was literally the first one there. The cops hadn't even shown up yet. And for a little while, it was just the two of us and I'm standing there looking at him and he looked almost peaceful, like he's taking a nap, but he had a small round bullet hole in the side of his head.
And, um, pretty soon the cops showed up and shooed me away and it wound up not even being a very big story, which I think probably speaks to some of the issues that we're talking about here. It was not uncommon. But what struck me was I thought the first time I'd see a murder victim, it would be a blight, you know, sort of a bloody violent affair. But this was so clean and efficient and clinical. And it got me thinking that was really because of the gun. You know, guns made it so much simpler and easier to kill. You don't have to look somebody in the eye while you're extinguishing their life. You can do it from a distance. You can do it from behind. And so, you know, we treat these things, even though they fundamentally change the exercise of aggression and they're uniquely dangerous, we treat them almost as sort of any other consumer product, you know, to be bought and sold and marketed and kept on your person around the house.
And I think that's one of the things that really kind of propelled me to go ahead and write the book is just drawing upon my years of experience, observing this, noticing this and reporting on these issues.
But we also, in the age of the video gaming, we've got young kids that have totally disassociated what they're doing because they're playing Fortnite or they're playing Call of Duty. And what do you do in the game? You shoot at people with guns. Am I wrong about that or am I missing something?
No, and the gun industry is well aware of that. You know, they started concerted effort probably in there, I'd say the early 2000s to begin trying to sort of plant their products in violent video games and in movies and in TV shows.
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