The Truth About Gun Violence: Rafael Mangual Breaks Down Bondi Beach, Brown & the FULL Data

When you look at the Bondi Beach massacre, how could this have happened exactly? >> I find it interesting that no one in the wake of that mass shooting called for a re-examination of the immigration rules. >> Is America uniquely violent? >> The kind of gun violence that actually drives our homicide rate looks nothing like what we saw on Bondi Beach or at Brown. The gun violence problem is is disproportionately impacting low-income minority communities. The idea that we can legislate our way out of these kinds of atrocities is just kind of silly. And this is really my biggest beef with the gun control crowd. And welcome back to the brief. We are joined today by Raphael Mangual. He is a senior fellow and head of research for policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice. He joins us here today. Raphael, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. Real problem. So the the impetus for this conversation is of course the horrific Bondi Beach massacre as well as the attempted mass shooting at Brown University. Before we get into the specifics though I I do want to ask a question kind of as what we say in Hebrew big adul broadly speaking just for a moment. I have been redpilling for the last few years but one of my political impasses um as it pertains to the conservative movement is that of gun control, gun culture and gun legislation broadly speaking. So, I just want to ask you, the argument on the right has typically been that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And more than that, guns actually make people safer. So, I'm just curious, and I do want to be convinced, I really do, if that is true, that guns objectively make people more safe. If you look at the United States, we have 450 million registered firearms in our country, a country of 330 million Americans. We have more guns than people. Well, shouldn't America be the safest country in the world? But it sort of seems like we're actually leading the world in mass shootings, particularly school shootings. So, what am I missing here? Can you sort of extrapolate this data and tell me why it is that guns actually can make people safe? >> Yeah, I mean, one of the things uh that you're missing there is just on the numbers themselves, right? I mean, let's zoom out for a minute. You talked about, you know, somewhere around 450 million firearms in the US. That number sounds accurate to me, but that number has grown substantially in the last 20 to 30 years. Um, and what hasn't grown substantially in the last 20 to 30 years has been our homicide rate, which has actually shrunk a a great deal in that time period. So, if you look at 1990 to 2014, for example, we had about a 50% reduction in the homicide rate in this country. That was a period in time in which we saw somewhere in the range of 200 million guns enter circulation um in private circulation. In the United States over that period, we saw a massive liberalization of gun rights in this country. In 2008, you had DC versus Heler decided by the Supreme Court, which recognized an individual right uh to keep and bear arms at least in the home. In 2010, that right was extended um to the states uh beyond just the federal government uh in a case called McDonald versus City of Chicago. And then of course in Breuan, that right was recognized to extend outside the home. But even before those Supreme Court cases came down, you had state after state liberalizing their gun rights, expanding, you know, the scope of things like concealed carry laws, eliminating license requirements altogether. I think we have more than two dozen states now that are are some version of constitutional carry states. Uh, and what you find is that gun violence varies quite a bit between and among those jurisdictions. And that's really the point that that kind of turned me on this issue because I will say when I was a teenager I was very skeptical of this idea that you know having a ton of guns around was just you know was an unalloyed good unto itself. Um but what really kind of brought me around on the gun issue are the realities of gun violence. Now, you mentioned two really horrific uh uh cases, and we tend to center our debates about this topic around these kind of sensational instances, but the reality of gun violence on a day-to-day basis in America. You know, the kind of gun violence that actually drives our homicide rate and our shooting rates looks nothing like what we saw on Bondi Beach or at Brown. Um the vast majority of it is what researchers call community violence. These are, you know, violent uh interactions between individuals, usually known to each other, um that take place on the streets of our our urban enclaves. And that violence problem is hyper hyper concentrated. And when I say hyper concentrated, I mean like you wouldn't believe it if I told you. I mean, you know, for for example, every year in this country, somewhere around 2% of all of the counties in America, and there are about 3,000 counties, account for well over half of all of the homicides in this country. And more than half of the counties usually don't see a single homicide uh in a given year in this country. And within those counties, gun violence is incredibly hyperconentrated at the micro geographic level. So that in a city like New York for example, you can have a situation in which you have 82,000 street segments, but only about 4% of those street segments see about 50% of all the violence. About 1% of the street segments see about 25% of all the violence. And so when I learned those things um and then you know coupled that with the demographic concentration right when you see the reality that you know the the gun violence problem is is disproportionately impacting low-income minority communities particularly African-American males significantly more than everyone else you start to ask the questions well if guns are really the driving force behind this why aren't guns affecting all communities in the same way especially the communities where gun ownership is significantly more prevalent So that that's an interesting point then and I think it'll be further uh elucidated when we talk about Bondai Beach. So 1996 you have the Port Arthur mass shooting, the largest mass shooting in Australian history. More than 35 uh civilians are gunned down. Almost immediately, Prime Minister John Howard implements pretty strong and comprehensive gun control. So things like a national gun buyback program, the criminalization of essentially uh all assault or semi- assault weapons, the criminalization of any type of unregistered firearm. And I guess those on the right will say, well, you have very strict gun control. In fact, some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. So when you look at the Bondi Beach massacre over Hanukkah, where more than 15 Jews uh were killed, how could this have happened exactly? Yeah. I mean, well, the the way that it happened is that they were able to legally purchase firearms that fit within the limitations of Australia's very strict uh uh gun control laws. Um, and, you know, use those for bad purposes. I mean, it the idea that we can legislate our way out of these kinds of atrocities, I think, misunderstands the role that motivation plays. When you have people, particularly, you know, Islamic religious fanatics who are intent on on murdering as many people as they can, the idea that they are not going to be able to find workarounds to whatever kind of laws you you can think of is just is just kind of silly. The other thing is here is that, you know, look at the penalties, right? I mean, what are the penalties for homicide? They are the most harsh penalties that our criminal justice system can muster in a given jurisdiction. If someone who is committed to mass murder, they are already willing to risk those penalties. So the idea that some lower level of of of penalty that attaches to whatever, you know, criminal uh uh uh sanction has you have on uh on some kind of gun restriction that that would deter somebody, I think, you know, also uh uh is is is misguided. Now, that that is not to argue that we shouldn't have these, you know, um lower level gun restrictions in place at all. Um but we should be clear about why we have them. We have them to create the conditions to allow us to identify who the risks to our communities are so that we can target those individuals for prosecution before they actually do the thing um that we all want to avoid them doing. And this is really my biggest beef with the gun control crowd. And you know, I I hate to kind of make these things partisan, but you know, we can't ignore or shut our eyes to the reality that the gun control debate is largely one that is uh existing between left and right in this country, right? So most of the gun controls are being pushed from the left onto the right. The reason I think that's important is because there's a ven diagram with a massive middle section where you have people who are progressive leftists who want more gun controls and want to further restrict gun rights, but who also are big advocates for the kinds of criminal justice reforms and policing roll backs that we know make those uh uh gun control legislation that make that gun control legislation harder to enforce and and you know give takes away the teeth that it would otherwise have. And that has always been kind of one of my biggest beefs with the left on this issue. And so, one of the first questions that I tend to ask people, particularly who are on the left when they propose new gun control legislation, is, well, what kind of mandatory minimum sentencing scheme would you be willing to attach to this new rule that you want? And very rarely do I ever get an answer because those laws don't really mean anything in a jurisdiction where you have bail reforms that almost guarantee that somebody who breaks these laws is going to end up on the street pre-trial where you have restrictions on proactive policing that make it significantly more difficult for police to actually discover these guns which often get discovered through low-level interactions like traffic stops for example. Right? So, in New York City, about 42% of all illegal gun um arrests that were made in 2020 began as a traffic stop. Why is that important? Well, because New York City just elected a mayor in Zoran Mandani, who actually wants to take the NYPD out of traffic enforcement altogether. And yet, this is also someone who immediately called for additional gun control uh legislation in the wake of the mass shooting that we had at 345 Park Avenue earlier this year. And so you there is this this kind of inongruity on the left where you have a lot of support for these new kinds of rules and laws but nowhere near enough support for the kinds of uh policing and criminal justice approaches that would actually give those laws teeth and effect. And so one of the first I think the first time I ever uh got an op-ed through the editorial board at the Washington Post was actually in response uh to Mayor Mike Bloomberg who I think was running for president at the time. Um because he was someone who had begun this sort of apology tour for backing the NYPD as it took a more aggressive posture during his tenure as mayor uh particularly with respect to stop and frisk which was driven by a desire to get more illegal guns off the street. And yet his major campaign issue was gun control. And I just wanted to point out to the American public that hey, you can't actually have it both ways, right? If you want to get illegal guns off the street, when you have to give police a mandate to be aggressive and that appetite just doesn't really exist on the left anymore today. >> There was a lot there to unpack. I think a lot of interesting points as well. I want to first follow up on the first point you made um which is Islamic fundamentalism. Are you implying or otherwise suggesting that what would be a far more effective uh political response to the Bondi shooting would not be more gun control in an otherwise heavily gun-crolled country, but would actually be something like mass deportations of radical Islamists? Is that something that you think would make more of an impact on the lives of daily Australians? >> And if not mass deportations, at the very least, a re-examination of the kinds of immigration laws that allowed individuals like this into the country. Right. I think we have to be very uh careful and circumspect about allowing individuals into the country who are not going to be able to to sort of assimilate and who are going to be hostile to the way of life in western society. Um and I find it interesting that no one in the wake of that mass shooting, at least on the left, called for a re-examination of the immigration rules. Um, and and that is something that I I I think would likely bear a lot more fruit in terms of reducing this this kind of violence. >> So, let's go to the shooting then at Brown University, which happened the same week as the Bondi Beach massacre. Rhode Island, again, like most uh blue states on the East Coast, they have strict gun control. So, are you saying that there is no type of gun control that would work and that's really not defeating the problem? Like, what? No, >> I apologize for the rudimentary uh um narrative or the the elementary way I'm asking the question, but how specifically would you tackle this problem? >> Yeah, I mean it's it's certainly not the case that no gun control would work, right? I mean, there are gun laws if they are enforced uh at the right moment in time. There is certainly a case to be made that that enforcement could uh avoid um carnage in the future. The question is is do we have the capacity for that kind of enforcement? Do we have the stomach for that kind of enforcement, the political will to engage in it? And is that the most effective and efficient use of limited criminal justice resources? Right? Right. So, one of the things that we know, for example, is that even though we have uh background check requirements for buying a firearm in a in a gun store, in a federally licensed firearm uh dealership, what happens is that a lot of times every year you have tens of thousands of people who are not legally allowed to buy a firearm, go in, try to purchase one um and are either rejected um or in some cases uh you know, there there's a failure um in the system and they're they're actually given a firearm, But there are very very few prosecutions um for those kinds of cases. So that you know having that rule in place is it beneficial? Yes, in so far as it can lead to the kinds of rejections um you know that that it obviously leads to. Um how much of the carnage is that actually stopping? I don't really know. Especially when you consider the the surveys, although, you know, some of these are are more dated because we don't really do them anymore of uh prison inmates, you know, who committed uh crimes with guns. If you ask them where they got their guns, very few of them, you know, got their guns through paths that would have allowed these restrictions to kind of do their job, right? They're getting their guns on the black market. They're getting them through straw purchasers. Um, and so the only way to avoid that is to kind of, you know, impose really draconian gun restrictions that would impact a much broader part of the population than is responsible for the kind of violence that we're all concerned with avoiding. And that's kind of one of my major critiques of the gun control crowd, which is that they are proposing solutions that are both overly broad and overly narrow at the same time. overly broad in that the vast majority of the American public, including the gun-owning American public, and I'm one of them, these are not criminal risks, right? These are individuals who don't pose a risk of future violence. And so to impose on them um a a a legislative scheme that would criminalize otherwise lawful behavior, um I think is overly broad. It's overly narrow in so far as it views the main avenue through which to attack the problem of gun violence as being gun control legislation on its own. Now again, 1990 to 2014, this country was able to half its homicide rate essentially um over a single generation. It didn't do that through gun control, right? It did that through more aggressive policing, through more uh um through harsher criminal justice sanctions, right? We saw massive ballooning in the prison population, in the jail population. We saw new investments in policing, both in terms of the size of police forces throughout urban America, but also the shift from a kind of reactive posture to a proactive posture that allowed police officers to identify who the repeat offenders were within their jurisdictions and make moves to get those individuals off the street. And the arrests that they were making, which were often not for gun-related crimes, right? I mean, there are a lot of them are for drug crimes or for robberies or thefts, but when you have somebody who is committing these kinds of offenses on a regular basis, those tend to be the people who are your shooters of tomorrow. And so that is actually, you know, taking a broader approach, a more aggressive approach to criminal justice is actually, I think, a significantly more effective way to achieve what I think the gun control crowd wants to achieve, and that is a reduction in gun violence. And that's something that we've done. we've done throughout this country. We've done in cities throughout America. And we've done it very, very, very efficiently, much more efficiently than Australia did, by the way. I mean, if you look at New York City, right, in 1990, New York City was seeing about 2,262 murders a year. They got that number down to fewer than 300 by 2017. That was not a gun control story, right? That was a policing, a prosecution, an incarceration story. These are the conversations that I think we need to be having. These are conversations I would welcome the gun controllers on the left to have with with those of us on the right because I do think that we're both after the same thing. You know, I think you're you're pointing out a really interesting hypocrisy of the political left that I never really considered before, which is if you truly believe in gun control because you want to lower the amount of homicides, for example, then you would actually be empowering local police precincts like the NYPD as opposed to trying to, I don't know, defund them and calling them anti-ra anti-quer and racists and all that. America, as it pertains to gun control, has a a cultural paradigm whereby gun ownership is a right. It's not a privilege. Whereas in Australia it very much is a privilege not a right and that's uh certainly because of the second amendment. The relevance of the second amendment in the 21st century is something that is always debated particularly within the political left. This is quite a rudimentary question but do you see the second amendment or its application in the 21st century as a net positive for American society? >> I do. I do. And a big part of that just has to do with the reality of life in America outside of big cities in particular. I think a lot of people who are having these debates are, you know, sort of coastal elites coming from America's largest cities with big responsive police departments. >> I feel attacked. >> Well, no, I'm I'm born in I'm born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. I live in a suburb of New York City. Um, you know, with with a very large police department, uh, you know, that that I can absolutely rely on for a relatively quick response time. But in a lot of this country, right, you know, you'll you'll be lucky if there's a police officer within 20 miles of you at any given time. Um, and part of what's at the root of America's sort of, you know, culture is this self-reliance that it's not just cultural, it's also built out of necessity, right? Because in most of this country, you do have to rely on yourself. And the reality in America is that you will sometimes as a citizen find yourself in a situation in which you have to defend yourself or your family. And the ability to do that um having the ability to do that is paramount. And that's really what's embedded in the Second Amendment as the Supreme Court has recognized, right? What's what's protected is not just a right uh uh uh you know to have this thing. It's it's a right to self-defense. It's a recognition that this thing is essential to the kind of self-defense that we all find ourselves um in need of at some point or another. Now, that that need may not necessarily rise to the level of deadly force and and hopefully it never does, right? That's that's pretty rare, but it still, you know, happens in by some estimates, you know, well over hundreds of thousands of times a year. Taking that ability away um from Americans without any kind of guarantee that you can um kind of backfill that level of protection, which I don't think that any government in this country can guarantee, I think would be a net negative. And so to that end, yes, I I do think that having the Second Amendment in place as it has been interpreted and understood throughout the 21st century is absolutely a net positive. Um particularly for the people who cannot rely on a quick response from a large and capable police department, which is most Americans. So earlier you mentioned DC versus Heler and you're right that the 2008 Supreme Court ruling affirmed or reaffirmed the individual's right to carry a firearm irrespective of any affiliation with the militia. But it also left up to Congress and policymakers what well-regulated means. So as it pertains to gun control specifically, what do you think well regulated could actually mean? Could that mean something like universal background checks? Could that mean something like, I don't know, domestic abuse registry? What does well reggulated within the context of the second amendment in the 21st century actually mean? >> Yeah. I I I don't think it means uh what we think of as regulations today. I think you know the the reference to a well-regulated militia means like a well-trained militia, a capable uh militia, a a a an equipped militia. Um you know, not one that is subject to, you know, a number of rules and regulations um you know, from from the executive branch. Um that doesn't mean that there is no room for regulation, right? I think the Supreme Court has recognized that there are um things that both the federal and state governments can do um you know to impose to some degree or another on the right to keep and bear arms. I don't think it's unfettered. Think things like age restrictions, for example, are very likely to survive constitutional scrutiny as well as background check requirements. um you know whether those background check requirements would extend to you know uh uh um every sale I think is is an open question you know uh what constitutes a transfer right in in in in some states like my state of New York right I if I'm at the range um you know shooting and you know the guy in the stall next to me you know has a a fancy new gun that I'd love to try and fire if he were to hand it to me um and let me you know pop off a few rounds that would constitute a felony. Um, you know, is that the kind of thing that that we we should want to criminalize? I I don't think so. Um, you know, but but yeah, I I do think that there is some room for some regulation. Um, but but I don't think it's as that the scope is as large as as the left implies that it is or should be. Um, and I don't think that we should want it to be either. Again, you know, this right was embedded in the Bill of Rights for a reason. And it was a recognition that we are going to have to defend ourselves whether at the individual level or at the community level from some kind of threat at some point. Having that capability is important. It is a deterrent. It is a core part of what this country's personality is. Um that does come with downsides. We should recognize that. Um but like all liberties right we have made a conscious choice to accept those risks based on the benefits that that come with having that right in place and you can say the same thing about speech for example right I mean there is lots of violence that that comes about as a result of individuals exercising their right to speak freely um and I'm sure that we could avoid a significant amount of that angst as the United Kingdom is actively trying to do you know by limiting the ability of its citizens uh uh to speak, but I don't think that's an America anyone wants to live in. And I would extend that same logic uh and reasoning to the existence of the Second Amendment today. >> Leaving aside guns for a moment, and I think I I think your articulation of the hyperloized problem of criminality and violence is really fascinating, but is America uniquely violent? Why is America experiencing this level of gun violence, of homicide in a way that very few other countries are? particularly in response or in connection with with school shootings. What is it then? Why are we facing these problems? >> Yeah. I mean, I think well, with respect to school shootings, I think it's largely a copycat phenomenon. Um, you know, and it's it's it's a, you know, it's a it's sort of a psychological phenomenon more than anything else. Um, still I think we have to, you know, retain our perspective with respect to how common those kinds of events actually are in a country of 300, you know, 40 50 million people. um they are still extremely extremely rare statistically very very remote uh uh events. When we talk about gun violence, even when we talk about mass shootings, what we're really talking about um are the kinds of, you know, often gang related inner city urban violence incidents that, you know, drive the nation's homicide rate and have been driving it for, you know, the last hundred years. And doing something about that is a a I think requires a much different approach than the gun controlcentric approach that the left has has wanted to take. And I think the reason for that is is exactly as I said, it's it's a problem that is very hyperconentrated both geographically and demographically, right? I mean, if you look at, you know, the firearm homicide rate um of young black men in this country, it's, you know, an order of magnitude higher than the firearm homicide rate, you know, for young white men or for young white women for that matter or for Hispanic men and women. Um, it is a significant outlier. So, you know, that's part of what makes the United States an outlier on the gun violence question. It's it's, you know, it's not that the whole of our people are extremely violent. It's that we are home to a lot more small pockets of concentrated urban violence than exist in other parts of the world. Um, and and that's something that is a problem to be dealt with. Um, and I think that we have a pretty good idea of how to deal with that problem in so far as we came as close to solving it as, you know, we've ever come in, you know, the late 90s and early as the question is is whether we have the political will to retain that kind of aggressive posture that brought about those benefits. And I think what the 2015 to 2021 period showed us was that that political will is very fragile. Um, and when you have, you know, some of these other statistically rare incidents like, you know, what what happened to George Floyd or Freddy Gray or, you know, Eric Garner or, you know, Laquan McDonald, um, you know, the you can spit off the names for for a while, but, you know, again, these are statistically very very rare kinds of occurrences, but when you have those gain as much national traction as they gained, and you have that national traction result and translate into significant policy changes that undermine the systems ability to keep us safe. I think that is the significantly bigger problem that I very much wish the gun control left would concern itself with more. >> So, really last question, then I promise I I will shut up. It's >> okay. >> If if you had one hour uh if you had one hour with a liberal who was genuinely open-minded but gun skeptical, what would you want that liberal to walk away with understanding as it pertains to your position on guns, gun control, gun culture? that guns are not the getting good that it's a lot easier to go after, for example, the, you know, 2,000 most prolific criminals in an American city than it is to go after 450 million guns. We've tried banning all sorts of things in this country, um, to very little effect. Now again, doesn't mean that the bans shouldn't be in place because that gives us an avenue for enforcement. But we have to understand what those bans are there to do, what their capacity is to actually get at the problem that we're all concerned with. And I think the left is genuinely concerned with gun violence. And if that's true, then they should go after gun criminals, not guns themselves. I think that would be much more successful uh approach. And that would be what I spent the hour trying to convince them of. Wow, Raphael, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I appreciate your ability to keep up with with my skepticism. I'm trying not to be argumentative, but I am trying to understand the the position. So, I really appreciate it. I learned a lot. I'm sure our viewers did as well. Raphael Manuel of the Manhattan Institute, thank you so much again for joining us. >> Thank you for having me.