#1606 Gun Violence in America: A Conversation with Richard Rhodes

He's become my friend, I'm going to be seeing him at Seattle during the phase two of my John Steinbeck Travels with Charlie Tour. I saw something that he wrote, and so I wrote to him and asked him a couple of months ago. Would you be willing to come on the program to have a series of conversations about America at 250?

Essays are an interesting form they need to be, they need to have a little breathing space in them, they need to try out some ideas. That, in fact, is the technical meaning of a say to try to send up a trial balloon. In a sense, there has to be an essay style, and he, he has it.

I mean, he, he was born to be an essayist, but he also wrote in at least 900 to a thousand page books. On the hydrogen bomb, on the atomic bomb, on the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and so on. So now we're having these conversations and I just want you to have the sense of how amazing it is that. A person of that stature, who has earned the right to be heard, whether we agree with him or not, is neither here nor there. I mean, he has earned the right to be heard because of the extraordinary work that he has done in his career. And I'm just thrilled, you know, violence is something that's just entirely bewildering.

How the most extraordinary republic in the world can routinely accept the level of gun violence in the United States. And of course, it's not just gun violence, but a gun changes the entire equation. Of course, the rest of the world looks on us with perplexity, you know? Why would a major nation tie itself so completely to an absolute interpretation of an amendment written in 1788 or 89? Why would a nation in the 21st century tie itself to an 18th century concept of?

Firearms. I get it that the Second Amendment has a great validity in American law because the founding fathers deliberately articulated a certain number of rights that they felt that the government of the United States must not trample upon free speech. Right not to incriminate oneself, the right to trial by jury, a speedy jury, to be able to have counsel in a court of law, etc. And one of the amendments, the second, in fact, produces a very strong constitutional right to keep in bare arms. And just because we might think that gun violence is a horror, you can't just undo that. That would require probably a counter constitutional amendment.

It's hard to believe that that could pass. It's a very deeply embedded American legal right, and more than that, it's extremely deeply woven into the souls of millions of Americans. And I mean, when I meet people, as I do, who say, out of my cold, dead hands, they mean it. They believe that standing up for their Second Amendment rights. To have essentially as many firearms as they might wish is the fundamental right of what it is to be an American. And that all other rights, in some sense, are guaranteed by my ownership of firearms. That's what they believe, and the Constitution seems to support them.

So if we're going to get at the problem of violence in American life. We can't lead with guns, we have to lead with mental health, we have to lead with a gun. Education. We have to lead with change in the way we think about conflict resolution, we have. In other words, there has to be a whole series of conversions of the way we see the world, in the way we think.

Anyway, it's fascinating. And this is the kind of person you want to be talking about. Because he has knowledge, evidence, data, and he's not a knee-jerk. This or that. So it's now midsummer 2024, and later this week I get back on the road for phase two of the Great. John Steinbeck travels with Charlie Tour. Today I had the most extraordinary day. I went with Nolan, my friend and videographer, and and our friend Brian Jackson, up to Lake Sakakawea, about a two and a half hour drive from here, near Twin Buttes.

He brought his boat and we took that boat about ten miles west on the reservoir, to the confluence of the Little Missouri River and the Missouri. So at the point where the Little Missouri empties into the Big Missouri was once this unbelievable thing. It's been inundated by this reservoir for the past 70 years. And so we can't possibly know what it looked like at the time of Lewis and Clark, we can only imagine. And though I had taken photographs of this site from every direction on land, I've never been there on water. And Brian volunteered to take us there and it was an extraordinary day, a perfect North Dakota summer day. We got to the exact confluence.

It turned out to be a hundred and four feet deep there. We took lots of pictures in some video and I'll be writing about it so you'll see more about that. It's an important moment for Lewis and Clark studies because this was one of the big events. In the spring of 1805, when they left Fort Mandan into the but, they took to be Tara incognito. And so this helps me as a Lewis and Clark scholar, as a Lewis scholar, and as a patriotic North Dakotan. Because I've now seen for myself something of really significant importance to me, and I think, to Lewis and Clark studies. So stay tuned for all of that.

At any rate, this is quite a time in my life. I'm having an extraordinary summer. You know, I've been at Jack Kerouac's grave, I've been at Big Bone Lick Kentucky, where Jefferson got his mastodon bones. I've been to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, I've been to Wounded Knee in South Dakota, I've been throughout Wyoming. To where the Teapot Dome scandal was centered, and to the Fetterman fight, and to the Wagon Box fight, and to Laramie, and then on to Vail.

I've been to the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca in Minnesota, I've been to Pipestone, South Dakota, where red clay pipe material is so important to Native Americans that it has been a kind of a peace zone, demilitarized zone for hundreds of years. And tribes that are traditionally enemies or in struggle with each other, put down their weapons when they get to Pipestone. And everyone's free to quarry this amazing material. It's been an amazing summer and we're really only getting started here, so stay tuned and help us if you can. We need money to make this work, it's not an inexpensive thing.

And again, as you know, I take none from this. All the income is psychic, and my goodness, it's huge. But come the 4th of July, I'm going to get the airstream out of storage, spend a day getting all the systems working. And then on the 5th of July. I will be off on Steinbeck Phase Two. And the first night I will spend in the Badlands of North Dakota, out on the western edge of the state. In fact, in Beach, North Dakota, where Steinbeck himself stayed on the night of October 12th, 1960.

So buckle up everyone, you're joining me on the road. I couldn't be more excited. Let's go to this program. Richard Rhodes on Violence in America.

He wrote Dark Sun, which is about the hydrogen bomb, a book on how to write Amazing, and in addition, a book on the S.S. Masters of Death, The Origins of the Holocaust, a novel about the Donner Party, The life of Hedy Lamarr of All People, and a biography of E.O. Wilson. And that's the short list. Welcome Richard Rhodes.

Since the making of the atomic bomb won a Pulitzer prize. I've had the support of a marvelous foundation in New York, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. To write books to the intersection between science and technology and and our life in the world. So without that, I am not sure I could have many books. It's very tough to be a writer in America. Today, the average income from writing in America is down to about 10,000 a year.

That's for the people who are successful, well, 10,000 a year. They're all teaching for a living, actually, and writing on the side. I'm lucky enough to be able to write full-time, so in that sense, I've been able to continue writing because I've had support to do so.

But you know, writing is like every book, is like doing a P.h.D. Without that, without the fear. If you will, there's always anxiety because you're writing something you don't know about at the outset. But it's a great challenge and it's a great education. I have felt all my life that every time I write a book, I'm learning more. I've never understood the people who write on the same subject all their lives. I don't know how they do that.

I would get bored, I think, rather rapidly. There is a subject, however, which is central to all most of my books, and that is violence, American violence, human violence, the larger violence in the world. Atomic weapons and the Einsatzgruppen. Who were the perpetrators of the so-called bullet Holocaust? And that's because I think my childhood was was interrupted by a period of considerable violence at the hands of a stepmother. Right out of the Grimm's fairy tales. So that I ended up my adolescence at a boy's home, a wonderful place, a farm. But even there, one is involved with the violence of killing animals for food.

So it's, it's perplexed to me, let's call it that. And and therefore, in all its variety, it has been a consistent theme in the books I've written. So let me back up and just say that I.

We were also celebrating.

It's fourth page news, or eighth page news. Because it's become numbingly so common that it can't any longer sustain the the sensational aspect that it had in the beginning. And foreigners, when they look at America, or think of coming here, actually do have a debate about whether it is a wise thing to come to a country that is so addicted to gun violence as the United States. And when I hear that, and I know such people, we've had these conversations, it's. It's deeply upsetting and depressing to think that. The United States of America is now known, of course, as a land of opportunity, in a land of great technological innovation. And, you know, the Hollywood and our soft power, and so on. But also, as a nation that is addicted to violence and has not, doesn't seem to have the will to deal with it.

And the United States is homicide per hundred thousand prior to the pandemic was only five point four deaths per hundred thousand. Compared to Europe, where, generally speaking, in Western Europe, the homicide rate is much lower. It's about one point. It for many countries was around one per hundred thousand. It's gone up slightly with the influx of immigrants from parts of the world where homicide rates are higher.

So it's up to about one point, five across Europe now. Well, I was curious if you take out guns which are pretty much not available in Western Europe. If you remove guns from our homicide rate, gun deaths, what's left? And before the pandemic, we were still at about three point, five per hundred thousand, which is more than double what it was. What it is in Europe. Which meant to me that there was something more going on here than simply the presence of guns. Now, guns facilitate violence, whatever else people feel about guns.

The fact is, people who want to commit a violent act have an easier time when they can get their hands on a gun, then if they have to use a knife with their hands or a club. And obviously, in the case of school shooters, they can do a lot more damage, a lot more quickly than they ever could. With a knife or whatever. What's in a while? In Japan, there's a mass killing with someone using a knife. And the numbers don't go that hot. They go up maybe to ten or something, which is horrible, but it's so.

So the question then, to me was, what, what makes up that difference? That has nothing to do with guns? So I looked at just before our program. I looked at today's homicide rate in the United States, and it's gone up a bit since the pandemic. It went way up with the pandemic. Because, I presume, because people were all home together and had occasion to get into fights with each other. And if they were violent people?

Then they tended to use violence. But it's gone down a bit since it, but it's actually up now to six point three, and that is probably not a here-or-there. A lot of this kind of homicide comes from drug groups fighting each other over territory and so forth. But I looked at Europe, I looked in at what our rate would be if you remove the gun deaths and we're down to 1.5. We're sort of like where Europe would be.

So gun deaths have become the significant difference between the homicide rate in Western Europe, where the guns are basically under control and not allowed, and homicide deaths here. I find that very interesting because it points to what I understand to be the way people become violence. All right, but it's not mental illness, despite the efforts of the medical profession to medicalize violence. The people who have mental illness don't use violence at any higher rates than people who aren't judgmentally ill. So the only time you have people with mental problems showing higher rates of homicide is when they use street drugs.

And there, I think one can understand that they're putting themselves in a more dangerous situation and act accordingly. So, mental illness is not the cause of violence. Mental illness has its own problems. That's not one of the violence, violent, the use of violence, learning to be violent, and people do learn to be violent. they're not born violent.

We're all born innocent. Fortunately, unfortunately, we don't get to stay that way, but we're born that way. People learn to be violence through a socialization process. Socialization is the process whereby someone is is has his identity changed in the process of becoming. How can I say this?

Becoming whatever it is, if you want to be a doctor, you don't only go to school, you don't only do an internship. You're also put down and mistreated, to a degree, ridiculed as incompetent while you're going through your training to break down your previous identity. And then rewarded for behaving like a doctor's is supposed to be by the doctors who are training you until you learn to behave and to think, and to identify yourself as someone who is a doctor or a lawyer, any, any specialty field has its process. The most classic one, and the most similar to the private one I'm talking about is becoming combat soldier, and the way soldiers are conditioned, socialized to be combatants is almost identical to the way it's done privately and off the books, as it were. When someone is socialized to be violent in a private context, a school shooter, for example, they go through a period of being brutalized by someone who is credibly violent in their life.

They go through a period of immense emotional turmoil as they try to find a way to cease being mistreated. The person or other people who are credibly violent coach them that violence is the answer to their problems. Every one of us, at some time or another, is probably told a kid, Don't let that bully push you around next time that bully, well, violent people will typically say, don't let that bully push you around. The next time they attack, you pick up a brick and hit him in the head. It's that kind of coaching that leads the person who's trying to find a way out of the dilemma of being a victim to decide to try violence as a solution to the problem.

We need to take a short break.

Then you have these incredible human beings like Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves and Richard Feynman, an amazing book. And if you had done nothing but that, it would, but that would be cementing your reputation as American writer. You won the Pulitzer Prize, and, of course, you richly deserved it. But then when you look at the rest of your achievement, Richard, it's stunning. Of course, it fills any other writer with a kind of envy.

You look in the mirror and think, what's wrong with me that this guy can do this? Well? This often with so many different sorts of books, and you're still writing, which is amazing to me because you no longer need to, you know, Samuel Johnson said. No one but a blockhead writes, but for money, but you write now because it's a habit. Have you ever reached a point where you had a sustained writer's block where, for months, you just couldn't do it?

I had so much anxiety all the time. I was underweight, I weighed about 130 pounds, and I'm almost six feet tall, I guess so, like Oppenheimer.

Women, I think, are often diverted towards sexuality rather than violence. In any case, when he reaches the point where he realized he has a choice he has to make. He's gonna spend the rest of his life being violently dominated by other people. And this is what the coach tells him as well. Or he's going to learn to use serious violence himself. And the violent personal revolt is one version of the first time this person tries serious violence, typically in adolescence. The revolt is toward the person who is currently dominating and violently trying to dominate them. And it has a classic form it's the worm turns as it were, suddenly someone.

I'll give you a classic example, and that's Bill Clinton. Bill. Clinton's mother was being abused by her, Clinton's stepfather, and I presume Clinton was too. He usually focuses the story on his mother's problem. But at a certain point, Clinton was big enough that he turned to his stepfather and said, Okay, that's it. No more, you keep this up, I'm gonna beat them out of you. And the guy backed off, so he really.

Whether there was a physical altercation, I don't know. But this is typically the kind of thing that happens with the school shooter, who first kills his parents and then goes to school and does. Something else is characteristic about learning to be violent and socializing to become a violent person. And that is discovers the immense power that one feels. That the criminologist whose work I'm describing to you calls violent notoriety. When you use serious violence, people change their behavior toward you from being someone who other people ignored or bullied, or in other, in other ways, showed contempt toward you. Suddenly become someone who everyone pays attention to. Because they're afraid of you and give you space and give you respect, so violent notoriety.

When I hear newscasters say we'll never know the reason why that kid did that, I always wince because the reason is self-evident. They did it because they wanted to be known, as many of the school shooters have said, either before or after. I wanted people to know me, I didn't want to just disappear in the world.

For the king, the homicide rate in medieval England was around 15 to 20 per hundred thousand. That's like our worst inner cities today. It was a violent world, and it was a violent world for a very interesting reason. You had to deal with with resolving your disputes on your own. There was no central authority that took that over.

Yet that would come, that would come in the early modern era. And you can trace the decline in violence in the West. With the centralization of government, with the development of specialized, most of all, with access to courts of law, that was the big breakthrough. Rather than go out and beat someone in the head with a stick, you could go to court and adjudicate your disputes. That is where the change really came. And it came about because with the rise of the middle class, middle class people didn't want to have to spend all the time watching their backs. They wanted to make deals and make money. And their exchange to the King for paying their taxes was that he came up with some way to deal with the violence in the world.

Imagine a modern corporation Imagine a modern corporation. If everyone was a seriously violent person, bodies would be flying out the windows. I mean, it would be a different world. So there had to be some way to get this under control. And the king in exchange for collecting taxes.

That this was, this is. This is something that the United States picked up immediately from the Enlightenment. And then, when Tocqueville came here in 1832, he came to study the American penal system because he thought it was the most innovative in the world. At the time, he went on to do much, much more. But you see how the these, these streams are moving together towards modernity.

You have to protect your turf and so forth. When you're dealing with inner cities, where the police basically stay out and you don't have much access to courts because you're poor. Or on Indian reservations in America today?

So at the bottom. And it turns out that Harris's father was an air force officer, and Harris was bullied on the air bases where they live. Klebold's older brother was a football player, and he and his pals used to beat up on Klebold all the time.

That kind of thing is there in the background, but it's facilitated by access to a lethal weapon. And that, I think, is the reason why gun violence is an issue. Not because I know this is a very fraught question for people, and I'm not talking about people with hunting and so forth. I am saying that if you're not, let's say, physically strong enough to beat up your parents or the bully who's dominating you all the time. You are immensely increased in your violence ability by having a gun. So people who would otherwise probably go through this process much greater risk to themselves, in fact, have the chance to do major damage without it.

That's not to say it doesn't out it, but but guns are a very significant part.

So he uses shrimp. Of course, this is way before the kind of violence we think about in our cities now. But you know, he's right that guns are the great equalizer, so it's the ubiquity of access to guns. I mean, these young people you're talking about who are 18, 19 years old, they broke up with their girlfriend or they were bullied at home.

Something went wrong and they somehow they get an AR-15. Either their parents allowed them to have it, or they find another means. And now suddenly they're not going in to the school bully to do fisticuffs. Now they simply get away.

You can shoot an AR-15 from a long distance and do unbelievable damage to the other. But here's my. Here's a question for you. Once, once I shoot my father or the principal, or whoever it is, it's, it seems, to release a chain of violence that it doesn't end there. It's not like, Okay, I put down my gun, go back to my life.

It seems to invite a greater sense of retribution.

I remember afternoons as a as a young adult, going out with a 22 rifle to a junkyard and and shooting glass bottles all afternoon. I mean, we, I and my friend didn't want to stop. It was just such fun seeing things blow up all over the yard with this little 22 rifle. It's a rush it is, and I can see how that could combine with. One of Dr. Athens's points about this process is when you do this, turn and try violence. If you're successful with, if it solves the problem for you in the immediate situation. If the bully stops bullying you, if he dies and therefore stops bullying you, whatever. Then there is an enormous feeling of transformation that is almost impossible to resist to someone who thinks of himself as a violent human being.

The difference between our soldiers? our soldiers are conditioned, are socialized to be violent defensively only. And there's a whole structure of military law, of codes of conduct, of codes of honor, against using violence offensively against people who aren't threatening you. And that, of course, is criminal violence, it's criminal violence in the military, too, it's criminal violence. Look at what's happening with the Israelis and their bombings, where they're.

They're having causing a lot of collateral damage to civilians, everyone is upset by this, and properly, so that's offensive violence. How whatever they frame it as, and look also that they're framing it as collateral damage, unintended consequences. When I wrote when I wanted to test this model, and I deeply believe that this is a universal model of how people become violent. When I wanted to test it, I decided to try to find a context as different from.

Athens developed this model by interviewing about 50 violent criminals in prisons over a series of years for about 10 hours each. Really get deeply into their whole history of violence, as far back as they could remember it, and then look for what they all had in common. This is a kind of the process whereby medical breakthroughs are made. You look for people who have the disease and then you try to see what they all have in common. That's related to that situation, and it doesn't take matched millions of samples on both sides. This is not a correlational process.

This is a causal process, it is tested every time you look at a new case, and you don't always have all the things put together. When malaria was first identified, based on one case, because the doctor found the malarial parasite swarming in the blood of one of his patients, that was the cause. But then there were a few patients who showed up with no malarial parasites of the blood. And he had to revise his model. And what then was discovered was that the parasite sometimes stays in the liver for periods of rest, as it were before it comes back to the blood.

So this process, which is basically the way medical breakthroughs are made, was what Athens used to identify. The model for how people become violent and soldiers are deliberately kept. At stage three, I decided to find a place where where there was mass killing of innocent people, and I settled on the SS. Einsatzgruppen, These were the special forces, that's what Einsatzgruppen means, who went followed behind the German army when it went into the Soviet Union.

We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. Richard Rhodes, the prolific author, my friend, a great writer, in addition to being an important historian, you were talking about the SS. I went to Rome a number of times in the last few years. And there was a famous incident where some Roman resisters shot some Nazi occupiers. And the Nazis did that sort of ten to one retribution thing. And had people gathered up in a cave in Rome and then and just told the special forces, just, you know, shoot them, just kill them all. And I remember reading that many of the soldiers had to drink almost unbelievable amounts of brandy just to be able to do it. That that even people that had been propagandized into being killers and who believed that other people's were subordinate or subhuman, found it impossible to make the leap. From defensive killing or killing in a just war to the kind of mayhem and slaughter that they were suddenly faced.

Yes.

It was shocking to walk through forest floor covered with creative wow with wild strawberries. And then here's this mouth. My point is these soldiers has all soldiers are had been conditioned to the level of defensive violence. By being having their heads shaved. Being called whatever they're called by their drill sergeant and given all sorts of hard work and drill tutorial. But slowly awarded honor. As they learn to fire their weapons, as they learn to think of themselves as.

What do you say? Japan has the lowest homicide rate in the world.

They have to confront the bully who's been dominating them, they have to confront the others who are dominating them in school. That means they have to take the risk of serious injury themselves, even death, that you don't do that by watching television. Athens found four different reasons why people use violence. A couple of those are, yes, anger, but another one is frustration. Which, for example, if someone has something you want and they won't give it to you, that's a frustration.

There are other kinds as well, there is the ultimate one, which is just pure hatred. And that shows up when to clean racial violence, where people are hate someone because they're a different color or whatever. So, and sometimes these things get combined in various ways. But the fact is, if you think about someone who uses violence in the context of, let's say, family domestic abuse. That may well be triggered by anger, but it's probably more often triggered by frustration, or some combination of the two. But if you think about a drug dealer in the ordinary course of business, using using violence, they're probably not angry about it, they're probably perhaps frustrated about it.

They may hate someone because they don't like the way they look or whatever, but there are lots of different reasons. Plus, people make decisions always before they use violence. It isn't. They don't snap, that's a strange idea that we're sort of, I don't know, some kind of bug that can fly quickly into the air and snap. When people don't snap, they make a decision.

Sometimes with people who are comfortable using violence, the decision is very fast. And the reason Athens found that to be true is because a lot of the violent criminals he interviewed talked about having decided not to use violence. In a context, as the police like to say, there are very few homicides committed in the presence of a uniformed police officer, and.

I'm a North Dakotan. it used to be richer that every young male North Dakotan took. Gun safety, learned how to hunt, learned how to use guns responsibly, learned how to put them in the right places. Between uses of them, kept ammunition away, prevented children from having access to them. You know, most most gun owners are perfectly reasonable, responsible human beings, and that includes hunting too, of course, but we need reasonable gun restraints. And there's a solid majority, almost a super majority in America, that wants that, and yet we can't get there. So that, of course, takes us to the paralysis of Americans in Congress, the paralysis of our political system.

It's rather that there's no as simple a thing as having to get insurance the way we do with our cars, which are certainly lethal weapons potentially would make a great deal of sense. And similarly, I think, a period of training. Just to know how to use this weapon, how to take care of it, what to do with it, how to keep it safe, and all those things. There would still be occasional, of course, gun related crime and probably school shooters and so forth, but the numbers would go down. What's the bare minimum?

I don't know. Japan is probably the country that has the best evidence for how, but they have very strict gun control. It's very difficult to get a, you know, license to own a weapon in Japan, and I don't know that that's appropriate to this country. But we could certainly do all of the damage of minimizing safety, things that we do with other lethal objects.

In long, serious interviews, there would be waiting periods of many months, there would be a psychological profile made of me. I would have to find a way to justify the need for such a thing. And I said, But if you got through all of that, could you get one? He said, Yeah, but it would cost thousands of euros.

In other words, he's not going to be able to get an AR-15. I said, Well, how many mass shootings are there in Italy per annum? And he said, Duh, none, or, you know, one every decade. And so you think the Second Amendment should not be a suicide pact? We're a very civilized, advanced country, with the some of the best universities in the world, some of the greatest sociologists and psychologists.

We have brilliant historians like yourself who've looked into this and can give us evidence instead of, just, you know, ideas or perspectives. No, why can't we, as an enlightened people, face up to this? And find some middle ground? Between the absolutism of the Second Amendment types and the the desperate social need to get on top of this thing?

Is this person actually willing to use this weapon? If they are, should they be on the streets? It's a, it's a. It's a complicated question.

I don't have a problem with people having weapons, I just have a problem with weapons being basically out of control, all right.

Who would adjudicate such things? And so, they say, because the system doesn't really allow the fairness that I insist upon. I'm going to go to extra constitutional means to make sure that my guy is not denied his office. This happened on January 6th, assuming that the election is close, assuming that Joe Biden wins, which I don't think anyone can assume. I expect there will be street violence because of this very issue. That that if there's nowhere to turn for a fair adjudication, an umpire that you can really trust, then maybe, as a Nevada senator, put it, you need to take Second Amendment options.

So that was one piece, that was the first piece. But around the age of four, when the nursing program pulled out and parents were once again on their own, the hospital admission started to go up again. So then the question was, what do you do with the next group? From the school age group, let's say, up to up to high school? And the answer was the Vermont, New Hampshire. I think in this case, developed family oriented community centers.

They had outreach, you know, these are, these are communities that are kind of spread out, they're largely rural up there, so they had people visiting homes. But more to the point, there were all sorts of programs, benevolent programs that people could come to. At a community center, there were talking groups and therapy groups, and all of the state's various social welfare programs and representatives there. Recreation for the kids, basketball, whatever.

All of this to help pull people in and give them a place where they could learn to relate to each other. The focus had been on reducing teenage pregnancies. Teenage pregnancies dropped to about 5 from like 20 or 30 before a dramatic change. Basically, just by, of course, teaching people to use contraception and all the things you do. The next piece was anti-bullying programs in schools, something the Menagerie Foundation started some years ago very successfully.

Basically, a whole class was made responsible for the for any acts of bullying that were going on. And there were flags that they got to fly if they'd had no. None of this going on for one whole month, the whole school became involved. Instead of just saying shut up over there. When someone's hitting someone, the teacher would stop the whole class and say, class, we're having a problem here, let's talk about it, let's deal with it.

This worked beautifully and reduced bullying enormously, so each step of the way. There's even a program in Chicago right now where former violent felons have been trained and are paid to go out into the community and defuse potentially violent confrontations. And that works too, even when people are already violent, because again, as I said before, people actually think about when they're going to be violent, Richard.

That's going to happen, but. But generally speaking, for a broad population, this these are proven. Every one of these was tested in research, proven to work as ways of reducing, reducing specific problems. But in a broader way, they're reducing violent socialization.

Unfortunately, number one America is not uniquely violent, but America's violence is exacerbated greatly by the ubiquity of access to guns in America. That's one thing you're saying, number two, you're saying that there are ways to address this. That don't require us to go to the mat on the Second Amendment or to find legislation that can get through Congress. There are other things that we can do and they work.

They've worked in different places around the country. Those two things seem to me to be very hopeful, and it seems to me that the communities will inevitably come to these things. And some already are, because we can't sustain this level of mayhem in this civilization any longer. So thank you for your wisdom. Is there a book we should read? Why they kill your book?

I will put that up, so I'm looking forward to our next conversations. Do you have a topic in mind, Sir? Actually, I do.