Good afternoon. I am David Clark and I'm chair of the American Bar Association standing committee on gun violence We hope you will find this program today presented in conjunction with the office of the mayor of Philadelphia to be timely and useful With gun violence continuing to be such a terrible problem in our country much worse here and in the rest of the developed world People continue to ask what if anything can be done about it you know, I grew up in a home with guns hunting from an early age In a rural state and I understand the issues and We must find a way to investigate and discuss The problems that we're having in this country and that's what we hope to do and to discuss possible solutions This program is designed to review the problem of gun violence in America from a public health perspective and To consider what can be done about it taking into account the requirements of the Second Amendment Certainly some important considerations are What impact does the Second Amendment have on measures designed to reduce injuries and deaths from guns? Is the Second Amendment a complete bar to all measures to reduce gun violence as some would say or Does the Second Amendment as defined by the court's interpretations allow reasonable laws and regulations designed to reduce gun violence? Even if they affect or limit gun ownership possession or use What have the courts including the Supreme Court said about this and What has been done here locally in? Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia to combat gun violence and what further can be done these are some of the things we will examine and We hope to advance the discussion of in the time available this afternoon And thank you for braving the traffic. I understand there are some things going on in the city and That have backed things up Quite a bit and so there will be people trickling in and we appreciate your efforts to to get here today As the program schedule and the speakers biographical sketches indicate we have distinguished speakers First on public health issues then on the law including the Second Amendment Then on what has been done locally With a panel discussion following each set of speakers to keep things moving along. We will take questions Only in writing we have handed out cards for your questions If you need another or some more Let us know and we will we will hand out some more We will collect those at the Before each of the panel discussions And give them to the moderator We'll have people at the if you at the end if you pass a question down to the end of your row either aisle We will collect them there With that I give you rich negrin the managing director and deputy mayor of Philadelphia And we appreciate your being here today. It turns out there is a big day in Philadelphia. They have Budget hearings and as I understand it's not just budget hearings. It's a big deal That's part of the reason I understand for the traffic perhaps downtown, but the But we have Mr. Negrin there's a piece on his background outside And he will be followed by Jim Silkin it whose president the American Bar Association and a partner in the New York law firm of Sullivan and Worcester And they will give us some introductory remarks. Mr. Negrin I'm a half of mayor Nutter in the great city of Philadelphia. First of all, welcome to Philadelphia What better place to have this conversation than right here in the cradle of liberty where many of our rights? Most of our rights were obviously created I The the the circumstance that David was talking about is this is if there's a state of the Union In Philadelphia today is that day where the mayor gets to stand up and give his budget address around his priorities for the 2015 fiscal year budget so you can imagine there are people with all kinds of interests around what's going to be in that budget and what's going on And they all want to have their set. So we're getting a great deal of protests And different things going on around Philadelphia was actually much quieter than it was last year, which was a little spooky I kind of expected, you know, you build yourself up for these And the mayor actually gave the speech this morning just just about an hour and a half ago Totally uninterrupted, which was the first time that's happened in a long time So I was pretty worried about I know David's worried about that happening right now during this speech, right? And at some point today There could be some of that activity and that's what you know free speech and what Philadelphia in the city of brotherly love is all really about I Want to I want to give Dave a round of applause. Let's let's congratulate him for what a great program as I We talked about the possibility of bringing this here Obviously to a great place like Philadelphia in the Constitution Center I could not have imagined such an impressive agenda throughout the day some of the best Most talented scholars on this subject are going to be here in Philadelphia, and I'm incredibly incredibly proud of that I want to besides welcoming you generally. I want to talk Just briefly just for two minutes about two aspects of because we have so many experts in the room You guys know more on this issue than I do. I Want to talk about two aspects of the gun violence issue that often doesn't get discussed the first one is the cost of violence and I want to describe what I mean by that and maybe it's because today's budget day and I'm thinking about You know a four and a half billion dollar city budget here in Philadelphia Get you know one third of that budget is for public safety Think about that one third of four and a half billion dollars Here in Philadelphia Going to combat violence and public safety Think about that and it's not just about that shocking number for me It's about the opportunity cost that we don't talk about a whole lot That's the cost of violence that I'm talking about you know We're gonna have another several police classes Because we have to get our police numbers every day. We're losing 25 to 30 police officers to retirement 6,000 police officers for a city of this size is way too small So we're constantly fighting and fighting to keep those numbers up In light of what's happening to our changing workforce when we look at the investments that we're making on public safety Every dollar spent on public safety is a dollar that we can't spend on our children Every dollar spent on trying to combat this issue is a dollar We can't spend on poverty on opportunity on a workforce development. We don't talk about that a lot, right? That's the cost of violence. We've done some great things in Philadelphia. I'm incredibly proud You know a new law enforcement strategy great programs like focused deterrence Philly rising Community, you know really a community neighborhood initiative improving quality of life taking community policing to a whole new level winning awards Around innovation in terms of what we're doing in our neighborhoods a 40% reduction in Homicides since this administration took office the lowest numbers around homicides and crime since 1968 here in Philadelphia, and that's all great news. That's all positive But here's some of the stats That I think are still there that we still have to talk about in 2013 here in Philadelphia Guns were used in 3000 robberies 2200 aggravated assaults in 2013 here in Philadelphia adult shooting victims over a thousand a thousand and fifty here in Philadelphia folks who died as a result of that 189 Philadelphia Juvenile shooting victims last year alone 78 nine of them died Guess what? We've got some of the best trauma centers in the entire country There are five critical Highly rated Trauma centers in Philadelphia that save lives every single day better than most cities Those numbers would be far worse if our doctors were an experts in saving their lives and treating gunshot wounds Here in Philadelphia the US Army sends their doctors to learn how to deal with Traumas and violence because of what we've experienced here in Philadelphia So despite the progress that we've made there's a lot of work that's left to do But I want you to think about that cost today as we talk about these issues It is easy sometimes an environment as as sort of pristine and as beautiful as the Constitution Center to forget the real cost of What we're talking about today, and that's why I want to close briefly with with the second phase The first one obviously is the cost of violence. The second one is really the faces of violence And the faces of our victims that that that it's easy to forget We've got mothers in charge here that I know you'll be hearing from Dorothy later They feel this viscerally In their soul because they've experienced this personally I want to talk to you about some of our stories in Philadelphia just a year and a half ago a Dispute that began on Facebook something stupid amongst kids Resulted in an adult shooting a carload of children Inside of a car killing two of them, right? That's the gun violence that happens in Philadelphia. Just last year in Logan a two year old girl I want you to imagine this at a block party 200 people present A dispute arises amongst people who are at the block party, so you know everybody has to know who they are right in the Logan section That two year old girl toddler caught in the crossfire shot in the abdomen Not one person came forward 200 people present We solve our problems with gun violence still too often despite our numbers And that's a huge issue. Those are real stories That little girl was in the hospital for nearly two and a half months trying to save her life and Her organ functions for the rest of her life And she still has a long long recovery a two-year-old girl You know, I was so outraged and the mayor was as well There was a big cover of the Daily News or we said speak up, you know, that is Just unfathomable to me that a child will be injured like that as a result with people that you know Know who did it and don't come forward, right? That's part of the conversation here as well So let's make sure we remember that I want to close by talking about a 13-year-old boy whose father was murdered by a Mac 10 submachine gun, you know Our officers are outgunned in Philadelphia, right since the assault weapons ban has has gone away a Mac 10 That you could buy at a gun show That really has no legitimate sporting purpose. You guys know what gun that is really short submachine gun with a long clip Easily adapted to be made, you know a machine gun not just a couple rounds and Someone drove past in the drive-by and shot That 13 13 year-old's father on a Sunday morning It was it was the first time that father was going to see his son play football Pop Warner And I never got there because he was shot dead and that 13 year-old held him in his arms as his father died Right there in the street. I Was that 13 year-old? That was me many years ago This issue is real for me. It's personal for me guns like that have no place in our society Think about those issues think about those victims think about the cost of violence and let's have a great discussion Thank you very much Very powerful start to the day Want to welcome you all to this program at the National Constitutions Constitution Center for a very important And constructive form on gun violence issues in America This is a perfect place this building is a perfect place to hold this program What does our Constitution require in terms of the Second Amendment and what does it not? Lawyers have an important role to play in that discussion and in informing the public and Informing our state and national legislators About how we can all be safer and still maintain our important Second Amendment rights Most gun owners are responsible and law abiding they use their Weapons for for hunting you know like I did growing up in Kansas for sport for other lawful purposes projected by the Second Amendment But as we have learned from mass shootings in Columbine Aurora Sandy Hook and a number of other locations This is not always the case and which is why we are gathered here today We may not be able to prevent every shooting But I believe we have an obligation to try to do more to stop gun violence in this country Since the Kennedy administration the American Bar Association has promoted policies to reduce gun violence and advance public safety through greater enforcement and existing gun laws and in adoption of reasonable gun regulations as Allowed by the Second Amendment The first ABA policy related to gun violence Was adopted in 1965 supported Amending federal law and a number of important respects to address Interstate sales of firearms through formerly unregulated Mail order purchases including the rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald To kill President Kennedy these reforms were later enacted as key provisions of the gun control Act of 1968 the principle federal law regarding firearm sales transfers and possession which Those provisions are still operative today As a national voice of the legal profession the ABA has been and should be at the table For important conversations that involve our nation's laws But the ABA should also be at the forefront of discussions About strategies to reduce gun violence across a wide range of disciplines Including many that are going to be represented and discussed here today our goal this afternoon is to examine the current state of the law and The undeniable violence we see in our cities We are proud to include local voices that are less often heard Including voices from the local faith community here in Philadelphia We hope today's discussion will begin a conversation on ways that we can all come together To reduce gun violence endemic to our communities gun violence is a difficult and Oftentimes emotionally charged topic, but I hope that we can use this common place as a starting point for a fruitful discussion Conversations on this issue like the one we are having today are very important for the sake of those We have lost through gun violence for those left behind and Out of respect for the long tradition of responsible gun ownership in this country Today's event is one of many discussions. The ABA is convening around the country on This set of topics we hope to engage all perspectives as we move forward towards common-sense policies that work to prevent gun violence and Protect our second important second amendment rights So thank you for joining us today.  Thank you We'll now have our first group of speakers and panel On the public health side and I'm not going to say a lot about these or the other speakers We have biographical sketches out there if we spent time going over that we would be here for a lot longer They tell us we have to get out of here at 5 o'clock the next group is a on public health perspective Jan Vernick is from the John's Hopkins School of Public Health and from their Center for Gun Policy and Research Susan Sorensen University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia and Matt Miller from the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and with that I Give you the group well, thank you very much David and thanks to The ABA and to President Silkenit for its leadership on this issue. We're very grateful and Thrilled to be here. So it's my job once my first slide appears There we go Well, do we go? All right to to provide a brief overview of guns and public health and So as David said, I teach at Johns Hopkins and co-direct the Center for for gun policy and research So what do we mean by a public health perspective on? on gun violence Well, one thing we mean is to consider all different kinds of deaths from gunfire homicide suicide accidents and all of the different kind of victims and Dr. Susan Sorensen will talk about one kind of a victim Victims of inner partner violence, but but we consider all different kinds of victims We focus on prevention trying to prevent these deaths from happening in the first place rather than primarily on punishing the The perpetrators not that that's unimportant, but but the public health perspective tends to emphasize Prevention we consider the the important role of the vector that is the firearm if this were malaria We would consider the role of the mosquito or the virus, but here here it's the firearm we design implement and evaluate interventions and We tend to take multiple approaches using many different disciplines So So one of the things that we ask ourselves is what are the relative risks and benefits of of guns? And it's important to acknowledge that guns do have benefits associated with them Not just the recreational benefits that David mentioned, but but guns can be protective They they are used in self-defense. How often that happens The estimates vary a great deal from relatively small numbers to to much higher Numbers and there's even more maybe controversy about whether some or even many of those defensive gun uses are in fact socially desirable or are they Are they undesirable some? High-risk person or criminal defending himself or herself against another person and we balance those things against the the risks That is the the public health burden and that's primarily what I'm going to be talking about another way of flavoring if you like that risk-benefit equation is this Advertisement from Beretta some years ago saying that a gun will in this case in the home environment will tip the odds in in your favor If that's accurate then probably there are some kinds of things that we wouldn't choose to do if on the other hand The data suggests otherwise as some of our panelists will will cover then then maybe there are Important things consistent with the second amendment that we need to do to to reduce the risks associated with guns in the United States So those those guns out there are associated every year. This is the pie chart of gun deaths with In 2010 with 31,000 gun deaths in United States 31,000 and maybe it surprises at least some of you that the largest share of those deaths in yellow more than 19,000 are actually suicides. There are still 11,000 Homicides, but but 19,000 suicides and that's why Dr. Matt Miller from Harvard will be presenting on that precise part of the Problem so I'll say less about suicides as we as we go forward if you instead of looking just at a one-year snapshot if you look over time in this case from 1962 to 2010 you see that we're relatively fortunate if you want to say that in that Gun deaths over the last few years at least haven't been going up. We've been relatively stable at about 30,000 deaths It's obviously far too many and we need to be thinking about ways to to reduce that number But if you look back only a few years, we had almost 40,000 such deaths 25 percent more In 1993 and so it's critically important in addition to trying to reduce those 30,000 deaths to make sure that we don't wind up back in the bad old days of 1993 when we had 40,000 deaths so it's again critical to understand what works and what doesn't to Prevent these kinds of deaths and to make sure we don't God forbid wind up worse than we than we are now Similarly again if you look over time at the homicides the recent peak again was in 1993 Close pushing 20,000 homicides again compared to the 11,000 that we have now too many But certainly we don't want to be back in a world where we have that many homicides gun related homicides every year Here are the unintentional deaths or what you might more colloquially call the the accidental deaths and there the chart looks very very different there We've had massive success over time again. We're down to about 600 unintentional or accidental deaths every year compared with Well more than 2000 if you go back some number of years for my money We haven't fully explained that that decline. It's an it's an impressive success story There are a number of possible explanations, but but I don't think we've really nailed it If you saw this kind of chart first for a chronic disease for for an infectious disease And we didn't know the reason you can be sure that we would be flooding Research centers with funding to try to answer that question But one of the reasons again for my money that we don't have a clear answer is that we haven't devoted the kind of Research funding that's proportional to the nature of the problem so as the saying goes the deaths are the tip of the iceberg and The non-fatal injuries are important as well for every fatality in 2012 we had about two and a half non-fatal Firearm-related injuries more than 80,000 and then more than 400,000 violent crimes that occur with with a gun every year So how many guns are there again? It's my job to give you the sort of big big picture background our estimate and I'm sad to say that it's an estimate because we don't For the most part register guns in the United States the way we register cars You can't just count up if you want to know how many guns there are in the US You can't just count up the number of registrations We have to engage in estimates and in fact this estimate of 300 million Guns in civilian hands comes from a survey that comes out of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and Matt Miller's group Of that 300 million guns Again, maybe it surprises you that the majority of those are long guns. That is hunting guns rifles and shotguns Only about 40% roughly speaking are our handguns and that translates to about a third of US households That have at least one gun in them that number has been going down over the years And that's something else that we could talk about now despite the fact that handguns are are 40% of The US gun stock if you look at the share of firearm related homicides So now we're talking about gun homicides the share of gun homicides that are committed with a handgun is approaching 90% So even though they're not the majority of all guns They're the vast majority of the homicides with guns and that figure has been very very stable over time when we talk about a Gun homicide problem in the US. We're largely talking about a handgun problem now for other kinds of gun deaths Like suicides and accidents the picture might be a little bit different, but for homicides. We're largely talking about a handgun problem We heard the importance of considering the cost of gun violence Estimates here to vary some a recent estimate is About 170 or so billion dollars when you add up all of the different costs not just the medical costs But the kind of opportunity costs that that the former speaker was mentioning and if you divide that by the number of guns out There you get around $600 for every gun in the US and and the guns that are out there are not carrying that cost that That that's as an economist would say that's an externality that's being pushed on to all of the rest of of us so The reason that again, I'm so pleased that the ABA is has taken such wonderful leadership on this is that law is such an important an important and effective tool for for gun violence prevention whether we're talking about legislation which Julie left which in the next panel we'll talk about or or litigation which John Lowey and the next panel will talk about or Or even regulation although regulation at the at the federal level is tough to come by So let me just give you a quick example from an area that I work on about how how law can be an enormously powerful but unfortunately under underutilized I would argue tool and that has to do with The regulation of gun dealers and it's important to ask yourself. Where are the guns that are being used in crime? Where are they coming from and I think people don't fully appreciate that basically every gun that's ultimately winds up in private Hands even the private hands of someone who ultimately uses that gun in crime was first sold by a licensed gun dealer federally licensed gun dealer really the only exceptions are those guns that were stolen directly from a dealer or Or stolen directly from the manufacturer. That's the That's the bad news further bad news is that really we have most gun dealers most of the 50,000 gun dealers in the U.S. Are our businessmen who want to follow the law and do follow the law? But we have a small number of gun dealers the best the best research which is not that new anymore But suggests that about 1% of those 50,000 dealers or around 500 dealers Sell more than half of the guns that are ultimately traced to crime and recovered by the by the police So so one thing you could do about that is to have better better Licensing and oversight of gun dealers make sure that we focus on those on the small number of problem Gun dealers. I mentioned that gun dealers are federally licensed, but states could license gun dealers as well So let me ask you all a question. How many U.S. States? License the person who cuts your hair the the cosmetologist Out of out of 50 u.s. I won't make you this is not my classroom. I promise. I won't call on you The the answer is all of them. So 50 50 u.s. States license License cosmetologists. How many u.s. States license? The person who who sells your your gun to you the answer is 18 And and why is that important? I mentioned that gun dealers have to be licensed at the federal level Well, if they're licensed at the state level We can we can have a lever to pull at the state level if we engage in adequate oversight and inspection of those dealers To maybe take their license away if they're not doing the right thing and criminals do get their guns from licensed dealers sometimes even even directly this is Data that was produced at my center With the help of dr. Kate vitties who's here and Daniel Webster showing that 11 percent of of People who are in prison and who used a gun in their most recent crime 11% got the gun directly from a licensed dealer This doesn't even count the people who got it indirectly from a dealer. So again, what can what can law ultimately do about this? So research that That we've done suggests that if a state does have strong dealer regulation That is if it does license gun dealers and engage in some of these other things that you see here record-keeping rules Inspections in fact does regular inspections of those gun dealers that you can have much lower levels of a measure of of gun trafficking that not surprisingly if you If you send the message to these dealers that that we're looking out to make sure you're following the law more of them Will ultimately follow the law so again That's just one example of many more that will come today of how law can be an enormously potent tool and again Why it's quite appropriate. I would argue for the ABA to be to be part of this But of course as you'll hear from from Dean Chemerinsky later on laws have to be constitutional It's It's appropriate in our democracy of course for for laws to comport with the Constitution But it also it also just makes good strategic sense You certainly do not want to be spending a lot of your political capital advocating for a law that ultimately The courts have to strike down So no one wants that the gun violence prevention groups least of all So So let me conclude by saying that I hope I've persuaded you if you weren't already that that guns do pose an Unacceptable public health burden, but that we can do something about it Sometimes there's a sense of hopelessness about this issue, and I hope today's Group although it will talk about the obstacles will give you a sense of hope that that we have had successes And we can have more in the future Especially if we bring multiple disciplines together public health law medicine law enforcement is enormously important Public policy psychology sociology And as long as we're careful to avoid violating protected rights, and I'll finish by saying that a year ago We brought together a group of scholars to produce the book that is on the left there And just today actually hot off the presses. We have an update to that book chapter writers producing Information about what's happened over the past year and both of these for free are attainable on the Center for Gun Policy and Research's website So thank you very much Good afternoon, and being based here in Philadelphia I'm going to borrow from mayor Nutter and welcome you to the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection We're glad to have you here And that's what I'm going to be talking about today Love and affection gone horribly wrong Because when we think of guns we think of in the street we think poverty we think men and Less often do we think about guns in the home and how they're used in the home? And this topic is a bit different as well because it's not just some amorphous individual or stranger But it's a specific known person Who is a risk to another specific known person in my short time today? I'm going to figure out the slides in my short short time today. I am going to talk to you about a Few key points one is that there are several solid specific policies that are in place The implementation enforcement of these policies is uneven and The eval evaluation of these policies is difficult, but it's promising Also to tell you why these things are important for women's health and safety and to close with a few suggestions That might provide some room for improvement you all may have heard of Prohibited purchasers and possessors the 1968 gun control act specified that convicted felons People who had renounced their citizenship people who were dishonorably discharged from the military were not allowed to purchase or possess a firearm in 1994 with the violence against women act they added persons who are under certain domestic violence restraining orders Those restraining orders by federal law were those in which the person who was to be restrained to be Kept back from to protect the other person It was somebody who had had the chance to appear at a hearing and defend him or herself So a judge had said this person is a specific risk to this person And we're not going to let that person have a gun which makes sense In 1996 Then added what was called the Lautenberg amendment And it added misdemeanors felons were already prohibited purchasers and possessors they added misdemeanors of Domestic violence because it's really hard to get an aggravated assault a felony charge in a Case in which there are intimate partners even the injuries are the same as if it's strangers It's really hard to get an ag assault charge conviction as of 2008 13 states Had laws that went beyond the federal law Usually by extent expanding the class of victims to include dating persons and such Also in 2008 President George W. Bush Signed into law the next act it provides resources to states Not a an unfed funded federal mandate, but a funded federal mandate to improve the amount and quality of information About domestic violence that is submitted for use in the national instant check system So that's helped and in some ways purchase is easy Okay, because it has to do with people go and getting a gun and acquiring one possession Which involves either the person relinquishing a gun or a gun being seized in its removal is more of a challenge And there's law enforcement resistance to this for a variety of reasons as of 2004 work that was done by on vernic our first speaker 18 US states had laws authorizing police to remove guns when responding to a domestic violence incident So at the scene 16 US states have a lot allowing courts to order the guns removed When a restraining order was issued 17 states had both laws and 26 states had neither law I'll encourage you to look at the law center to prevent Gun violence as website in 2008 They reported similar numbers and they just updated their website with this information or this information on their website I should say just a few weeks ago The laws themselves are not uniform in Pennsylvania for example in 2005 the law that was enacted here Authorizes, but it does not require the removal of guns at the scenes And if so it's limited to the gun that was used in that incident Person could have an entire arsenal on the wall But it's only the gun that was used to threaten or used against the person that could be removed and Then also as of 2008 about 18 states had laws about removing the guns or am an ammunition at the scene and Some research that we did found that public support for this is really high In fact, there's much greater support for removing guns at the scene of a domestic violence than there is for Arresting the perpetrator in a scene of domestic violence so as I mentioned implementation and Evaluation They're challenges to the evaluation largely because there's uneven implementation and enforcement the laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction And also because luckily there's a low base rate of intimate partner homicide The few evaluations that have been done to date And there have been just a few Ones by Victor and mercy Dugan at all and zeolian Webster They have found modest effects Which is a good positive step With things that are this uneven in implementation and enforcement So some of these policies may have promise I'll talk more about that at the towards the end But why are these things even important and why are they important for women's health and safety? Well as we can see Good news like other forms of homicide Intimate partner homicide in the United States is down. It's down substantially in the past 30 years The risk of homicide is highest In intimate partner homicide when the woman is trying to end the relationship When she's doing exactly what we tell her to do which is to leave so What we do see and we separated out by gender is that Intimate partner homicide is dropped radically for men and somewhat less so for women and men's intimate partner homicide By guns have dropped by over 80 percent Their non-gun homicides have dropped by about half and for women Their intimate partner homicides by guns have dropped by about 40 percent So let's take a look at those numbers. I Pulted the data from the FBI for the most recent years available and from 2006 to 2011 As you can see, I'll just walk you through this chart The bars on the left for each year because we have two thousand six seven eight nine ten and eleven at the bottom The bars on the left side under each year are By an intimate and what weapon that person used on the right are Strangers by all lethal means So you can see on the left side that red bar is the handguns They've been used The darker blue bar is long guns and then the lighter blue bar There's the ones that are a gun, but it was unspecified what type and so we've Confirmed here something that was noted first about 20 25 years ago that women are about two and a half times as likely To be shot and killed by their husbands or another male intimate as they are to be shot Stabbed strangled Legend to death are killed in any other way by a stranger and Among abused women themselves because this is just the general population But if we look at abused women and who have a chronic history of being abused Okay, even after taking into account a range of victim suspect abuse and incident characteristics Abused women or over five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if the abuser has access to a gun so We've been looking up at talking about fatalities now. Let's look at what we in public health called non-fatals and We'll see that firearms are used to coerce as well as to kill From a survey that was done in the late 1990s We found that About three and a half percent of the women in the United States had had a partner threaten them with a gun and Slightly under one percent had a gun used against them by an intimate partner This is the entire population of the United States Okay, and it's public health folk, you know, I might look at these percentages and shrug But the numbers themselves suggest otherwise So calculating these out for our 2012 estimates. It's our most late the latest population estimates to do That means about four point three million women adult women Alive in the United States today had been threatened with a gun by their intimate partner And about 850 of the adult women had either been shot or shot at by their husband or someone who they At least at one time loved That's roughly every adult woman in Boston Denver New Orleans who's celebrating Mardi Gras these days and in Sacramento So again, these are estimates from a representative sample of community residing adults battering in ongoing Multifaceted type of Violence is different and coercive control is at its core So I'm going to tell you a little bit about a survey that we did of 417 residents of 67 battered women's shelters And we found on the left side of these bars is a general population on the right side Are those who were the residents of the shelters and we can see that guns both long guns Any gun at all and handguns are far times are far more common in the homes of Women where there has been battering so it's almost three times more common so a weapon is used and In about two-thirds of the homes with one or more handguns the partner used the gun against the woman Over 70% had threatened to shoot or kill the woman and 5% had actually shot or shot at her What we also found interesting is that if a firearm had been used against her There had been many many different types of weapons used against her over eight Compared to about four for those who had not had a gun used against them Which to me I take that if If you beat a woman if you want to coerce the woman You don't have to do that if you you have a gun You don't have to beat her you don't have to use other weapons The gun and its presence and the threat of its use Can get her to do what it is an abuser wants her to do So just to reiterate the key points that I had There's several very solid specific policies in place implementation and enforcement is uneven but the challenging evaluations that need to be done Have shown promising results Guns are important to women's safety and health and There's room for improvement and with that I'm going to offer a few closing thoughts one is we might be able to say a bit more in a few years because the With Obama's executive actions of last January he ordered the Centers for Disease Control to Begin conducting research on gun violence. They had basically stopped doing that for a long time The Institute of Medicine at the request of the Centers for Disease Control developed a national research agenda and research priorities Did they in record time since then the National Institutes of Health? National Institute of Justice have issued Calls for proposal to fund proposed or fund more research in this area the Centers for Disease Control Have yet to act But perhaps we will have more to say Also, I think what's important is I've talked about these specific Laws that are specific to intimate partner violence But there are other laws that are important to For example when people say stand your ground laws, what do you think? I think Trayvon Martin in Florida, right George Zimmerman There's another Florida case That's not Trayvon Martin, but Marissa Alexander in 2010 Her husband was after her. He was pushing. He was trying to he refused to leave He was threatening her and such she fired a warning shot into the corner of of the room by the ceiling She was arrested and in 2012 she was convicted and sentenced to 20 years Okay, and that was for threatening Seeing that that that shot is a threat to her husband and her two children a September 2013 appeals court threw that out Because they the jury had been told she had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had abused her Okay, so it sort of shifted what the focus of the trial actually was well on Monday of this week The Florida State Attorney said that she will retry the case and seek the maximum sentences and The these and will ask that these if convicted the sentences be served consecutively Which would be 60 years and essentially give this woman a Life sentence No one was killed No one was hurt So we have to talk about how these stand your ground laws are being implemented Another thing we might want to look at is internet sales Zena Houghton had a restraining order against her husband, but he got a gun online from an online dealer and Those sales are not required to have a background check Okay, he shot and killed her and three others at a spa and then wounded several others and then killed himself in October 2013 Like many other people who have been Touched by gun violence. Her brother was moved to action and Elvin Daniel presented a petition of 60,000 signatures to Congress So these are just some of the other things that are now and current that we can also look at and consider and trying to make the world safer and marriages Not as bad For some. Thank you. Good afternoon My name is Matt Miller from the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. It's an honor to stand here before you One year ago this past January at the invitation of my friend colleague and co-panelist Yon Vernick, I spoke at the Johns Hopkins University in an assembly convened in the wake of the Sandy Hook Massacre where Adam Lanza killed 20 little children and ate adults beginning with his mother and ending with himself Today's conference is animated by the memory of those Children and adults as well as by the memory of Many others who have died outside of Sandy Hook before and since by gunfire It's worth Making an observation about what was typical and what was atypical about that fateful day in December That more children and adults Died by gunfire in the United States that day than in any other any other high-income nation is typical That an assault type weapon was used to kill them is not That children died in one place All at the the hands of a single person is not typical What what is far more typical is that? young men especially young men of color are being killed one by one in Obscenely disproportionately large numbers here in this country every day But for our nation as a whole as has been said The number of people who die by gunfire every year at their own hands by suicide Out numbers the number of people who are killed by other people with guns by almost two to one There are almost twice as many people who are dying by gunfire At their own hands as are dying by gunfire at other people's hands and if what we're thinking about here today is the total of Lethal firearm violence we have to think about suicide as well in this country in this country There are over 300 million guns and civilian hands over half of all suicides over half of all suicides are firearm suicides And a third of all homes contain firearms So we can't really have a conversation about preventing suicide in the United States without having a conversation about household gun ownership and When we talk about suicide and guns and this is the take-home message the risk is Not only assumed by the gun owner It's also imposed on every other household member. This is like cigarette smoking Except in this case as opposed to secondhand smoke the imposed risk is At least as great in relative terms as the assumed risk and the data that I will run through This afternoon will give you some insight into possibly why that's the case Okay, well there you have There you have a picture of the United States everyone recognizes that and When I talk to in grand rounds to psychiatric audiences I first show them this slide and they recognize yes That's a slide of the United States and there's variation Indicated in the rate at which suicide is distributed in fact rates vary more than threefold Which is much much more variation than you see for almost any other cause of death any other leading cause of death And when I asked them, why do you think rates vary like that? The first the first response that I usually get is oh, I didn't know that that's interesting And then the next is well There must be more depression or other mental illness or substance abuse in those places where suicide rates are much higher Then in other places that turns out in fact not to be the case I guess you can't read my mind when I want the slide to change so There we go. Okay, so this is a slide one among several I could have shown you that That depicts Suicide rates increasing it at the state level as you go from the left to the right of the graph What you see below that is this Tremor of a line that doesn't really change that much It's basically a little bit of noise that goes right across all 50 states What that represents is the amount of serious psychological distress That is reported by people who live in each of the 50 states. It doesn't vary People who live in Montana are a lot more likely to die by suicide Than people who live in my state, Massachusetts, but they're not more likely to have serious psychological stress They're not more likely to have depression. They're not more likely to think about suicide plan suicide or even attempt suicide So how can we have more variation in rates at which people are dying by suicide across these 50 states? Then we have for almost any other leading cause of death When the rates at which people are suffering to the point that they make attempts It's pretty uniform How can that be? If I was showing you a slide of motor vehicle crashes and I told you there are more motor vehicle crash deaths in Montana than in Massachusetts You would probably say people just drive faster on the roads in Montana because we have a lot of cities in Massachusetts And that would be true the rate at which people are getting into crashes is not that different But the rate which they're dying in crashes is higher the same is true when you think about Intentional injury whether you're talking about homicide or suicide The rate at which people are dying in their attempts is higher in the United States when they live in States as it turns out not surprisingly given the talk in states where gun ownership is more prevalent Okay, so in the up what we see here is the distribution of methods used in fatal versus non-fatal Suicidal behavior as you can see slightly more than half of all suicide deaths are by firearms When you look at non-fatal attempts the vast majority four out of five are poisonings and The other another 15% or so are cuttings the likelihood of death with poisoning or cutting is less than 5% The likelihood of death if you shoot yourself is over 90% this little Picture up in the right-hand corner is one from a movie by Ames would call the powers of ten and it's meant to remind me to tell you that there are ten times as many Non-fatal self-harm as there are suicides one out of ten acts proves fatal because most acts are With pills or cutting But nine out of ten acts with firearms prove fatal and that's an important concept to bear in mind Okay, so here we have Seven states that gave gave us data to look at the distribution of suicide by method In relation to household gun ownership. I show you this slide I'll show you one of 50 states as a as a plot because it really makes the point pretty clear what you see here is that Vermont and Maine and New Hampshire have much higher gun ownership rates than do New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island The rate at which people are dying look in the last column by non-firearm suicide is about the same whether you live in The high gun or the low gun states But when you live in a high gun state Rates at which people are dying by firearm suicide is a lot higher and that's what drives the overall rate of suicide That's why you can have similar rates of attempts across the 50 states and huge variation in the rate at which people are dying by suicide Here's a plot a scatter plot And and it's sort of in felicitous that the the color I've chosen in the left lower corner is green in case you're colorblind But when I show these slides that the axes are sometimes hard hard to read And there's one of these that that doesn't go with the other as the Sesame Street Diddy goes there's one of these that really doesn't fit and I think you can all see that it's This one here in the lower corner the green one the other two show a clear pattern of increasing Increasing rates of whatever the y-axis is as you move across the x-axis Is this gonna okay? There we go. So here no pattern This is the relationship between gun prevalence in a state and the rate at which people are dying by non-farm suicide Just what we saw on the other slide This slide is the rate is the relationship between gun prevalence household gun prevalence and The rate at which people are dying by farm suicide very tight correlation. The net effect is a tight correlation between gun ownership and rates at which people are dying by suicide across the 50 states Okay, this is a somewhat self-aggrandizing slide because it's work that I did with a student of mine that basically runs Regressions and tries to account for differences and rates at which people Attempt suicide what what you can see here by the clearest example here This is the relationship between the rate at which people are dying by suicide with guns and Suicide attempt rates as you could have seen you could you could you can imagine from what I've said previously There is no correlation between rates at which people are attempting suicide and rates at which they're dying Because people are attempting at the same rates basically everywhere and what determines what drives What causes higher rates? Suicide in high-gun areas or in households with guns is the presence of guns. Okay this slide is a simple depiction of the toll of Suicide in this country in the high gun versus a low gun state So you've seen regression analyses and correlation coefficients and scatter plots and rates But this is the number of people who are dying in high gun compared to low gun states to illustrate the real toll That we're talking about Okay, so the high gun states have the same population as the low gun states We took the states with the lowest gun ownership and we added them up and the states of the highest gun ownership And added the population up and just got an aggregate that balance the total population So all you have to look at are the numbers of people who are dying So let's look at let's look at all adults in the in the high gun states There were over 7,000 firearm suicides There were 4,000 non-farm suicides in the low gun states. There were 1,600 firearm suicides and About the same number of non-farm suicides the net effect the net result more than 5,000 more people are dying in the high gun states compared to the low gun state over this Excuse me two-year period. It's a lot of people Okay So what do we know about these guns? We know that guns are much more likely to result in death when used in an attempt than any other commonly used method We know that most of these come from people's homes These are not guns that are by and large illegally trafficked They're guns that have been in the homes for a long time and they're not guns that are bought with the intent of Killing oneself we know that because not only the gun owner, but everyone else in the household is put at risk and We've talked about the 300 million guns and civilian hands, okay So why why why would making it harder for people to gain access to a gun?  Wouldn't somebody serious enough about Killing themselves to use a gun find it another equally equally lethal way To die by suicide Well, you wouldn't have the variation in rates of suicide that I've shown you and you wouldn't have differences in suicide rates in gun owning compared to non-ongoing homes in the same neighborhood if that were the case It's not an unreasonable Hypothesis if someone's serious enough if I truly have intent that serious enough to kill myself with a gun Wouldn't I wouldn't that intent persist long enough and for me to find another equally lethal way the answer the empirical answer to that reasonable speculation is no We wouldn't have the patterns that we do if that were the case and Here and so What's the rationale there there are three? well-established clinical observations and then one additional observation that helps undergird the idea that Making it harder for someone to reach for a gun in a moment of impulse of suicidal impulse can save the life Not only in the short run, but in the long run and those are that many suicidal acts, especially among younger people Are impulsive to suicidal crises are often ephemeral Three people who survive even near nearly lethal suicide attempts have a very good Prognosis with respect to whether they're going to die by suicide or not. I'm a physician I trained as an oncologist and the type of patient that I most hoped for in a clinic was a young man Like Lance Armstrong who had testicular cancer because the likelihood that that could be cured even in its wide menostatic state Was better than 90% well, that's the prognosis that people have when they've attempted suicide Seriously, they have as good a prognosis have not died by suicide as Lance Armstrong had to survive his cancer and This method specific case fatality rate means what we've said before guns are a lot more lethal than other culturally acceptable Commonly used methods here in the United States there are lots of what are called case control studies individual level data that that that that cooperate Both in direction and magnitude the kind of information that I've shown you at the at the level of What at the level of states and cities and? These studies have controlled are lots of different factors and you basically get this is a meta-analysis a Strong relationship between living in a home with a gun the likely you're going to die by suicide because you're more likely to die By firearm suicide without any difference in the rate, which you're likely to cure the likelihood at the risk of non-farm suicide All right, so here's one of the many studies that was done This by Art Kellerman back in 92 and what you can see is it Whether you have a handgun or a long gun you're at increased risk for suicide if you live in a home with a gun The way you store a gun matters if it's loaded it's worse than if it's not loaded if it's locked It's better than if it's not locked. There's this hierarchy of risk That's consistent with the exposure to guns the likelihood of being exposed to guns and that's particularly True when you're thinking about kids This is a study of five to 19 year olds who lived in homes with guns and the question was does the way you store it Make a difference the answer is it does? If you store it more safely the kid is less at risk, but even a safely stored gun Puts kids at higher risk than not having the gun at home, and it does by by a considerable amount the question has come up often and It's relevant to the sort of litigation in in in trials about firearm ownership and the relationship between guns and Suicide it's come well Maybe gun owners are different from non-gun owners in ways that put them at higher risk for suicide again a reasonable proposition But not one that stands up to empirical scrutiny gun owners are no more likely than non-gun owners to have depression anxiety disorder you name it That doesn't distinguish them sure they're different. They bought guns, but they're not different in any way that we know is related to the risk of suicide Okay The time series analysis that I have up there simply says if you look what happened in the mid to late 1990s the United States What we know is suicide rates dropped and they dropped Because firearm suicide rates dropped in tandem with declines and fire ownership over that time period Non-farm suicide rates did not change the net effect was a decrease in suicide rates, especially among younger people Of of almost 30% over that time period and studies that we've done using panel data have Cooperated that or these have demonstrated that controlling for various other factors the other thing to note is over that time period rates at which people were Reporting depression or suicidal ideation or making suicide attempts also didn't change So you see over time the same sort of pattern that I mentioned across space at the beginning of the talk Here's a slide from the New Yorker back this past December and when I saw this, you know, it made me think yes This looks like a homicide. Okay, but it the data are just so much better When it comes to suicide, I wish we could save some and apply it because it's actually a lot harder to do the research on homicide To studies involving involving homicide the data are overwhelming the incontrovertible But we're forgetting about the toll the Gentlemen who spoke earlier so movingly about his father dying in his own arms It it's it's a very powerful statement and there are spokespeople for Those who die in in in homicidal though mostly disenfranchised There aren't the same stories for people who died by suicide and yet the toll is enormous All right What are we doing? Are we acting on what we already know? Well, the short answer to that is no this is a study of Psychiatrists and they were asked do you talk to your patients who are Suicidal about the risk of having a gun in the home and as you can see only one out of five talk to their Suicidal patients about having a gun in the home. This is a study that we did in emergency departments where we asked Attendings and nurses and residents. Did they speak to people who came in with suicidal behavior? About whether they had a gun in the home Oh, if they had a gun if they said they had a plan with the gun Then two out of three spoke with them. I don't know why the other one out of three didn't but if they had a plan with something else And they were suicidal, but it didn't involve a gun only one out of five talked about having a gun And that's the strongest risk factor that you can do anything about All right, we We asked in the same survey People what did they think would happen? There are more than a thousand people who died by gun suicide every every month What would happen if it was impossible for that person to get a hold of a gun during a suicidal impulse? And these are physicians and nurses and residents oops And and as you can see two out of three nurses two out of two out of five Physicians said that most or all of the people who died by firearm Suicide would have found another equally leth away most or all about 20 percent About 30 percent of the general population thinks that not a single life could be saved So that's the mindset that we are up against In in thinking about the role of firearms and suicide Okay, two more slides Suicide can be prevented Without necessary without necessarily doing anything about underlying mental illness means restriction is in fact the strongest the Approach that has the the greatest potential to immediately and and largely reduce rates at which people are dying by suicide in this country There's no generic antagonism between trying to attend to people's suffering and Making it more likely they're going to live through that suffering by putting distance between them and they're gone And we're not doing it nearly enough. Okay, this final slide is A picture of Ulysses bound to bound to his ship's mast It epitomizes the forward-looking action that anticipates sort of actuarial risk and take steps to avoid calamity This metaphor works as an illustration of the kind of enlightened self-interest That health professionals should Strive to have their patients consider and deed act upon The metaphor may work as well more broadly as an illustration of societal actions that integrate science into public health policy Preventing suicidal behavior and the suffering that leads to suicidal acts has been extremely difficult But we can save lives still both in the short run and in the long run By enabling the kind of enlightened self-interest That Ulysses choice exemplifies After all Ulysses survived or others perished not because he was less compelled by the sirens calls towards death But because he recognized his potential incapacity to resist those calls and took steps to avoid disaster Thank you very much domestic violence Situations do we have any solutions? Do we have any? Answers what what can we do just quickly or the things actions we can take proposals we can adopt Yeah, I think one of the things that can be done Better okay, one of the things that can be done doesn't involve changing any laws, but it's simply Implementing them it can be done in an administrative level. They say okay. We are now going to report all of our restraining orders and our Domestic violence misdemeanor convictions to the national instant check system There are a number of states that still don't do that don't have the capacity to do that Haven't done that is similar with mental health records and it does not require any new law on Any level but simply an agency saying, okay, we're gonna do it Pennsylvania did that and Quickly went from very very few to over a quarter of a million mental health records in the national incident check system within the space of a Few days last year. We can do the same thing with restraining orders and domestic violence Just misdemeanor convictions and that would be a good start that does not involve legislation and dealing with elected officials and their hesitance in terms of addressing some of these issues, so that's one thing Matt any any other solution you did get in a Group of them at the end there any any ideal solutions on suicide? I mean for example, you mentioned the gun storage due to the safe storage laws make a difference Are there studies? there are studies and There's a suggestion that they they may but most of the we're not gonna We're not gonna legislate our way towards huge reductions in suicide through direct direct legislation But but legislation or societal action more broadly Can have an educative role if it helps shift the way people think about what responsible Behavior is storing guns safely for example if if legislation supports that sort of social shift Then then then I think you're gonna see that there'll be a much greater chance that people are going to People's lives will be saved. I mean you have other you have other Possibilities like smart gun technology if the only the dad's hand can pull the trigger or release the bullet You've protected the other people in in in the home so there are But get getting physicians and other Healthcare workers and people like you in the audience to recognize that suicide is preventable that the evidence is extremely powerful and That and that it's it's not inevitable that somebody who's made an attempt is going to die just getting those ideas out there and having discussions about Helping people make enlightened decisions in their own enlightened self-interest Will probably be the the surest way to reduce The toll can I can I jump in on safe storage also for a second? So in the late 1980s Florida? Not not known as your most rabidly anti-gun state Became the first state in the country to adopt what's called a child access prevention law That's a law that says that if you do have a gun in your home You have to store it safely so that young children can't gain easy access to it since Florida enacted its law 17 more states have enacted these cap child access prevention laws 18 states and the research shows pretty substantial reductions in accidental shootings among children and as Matt says more modest reductions among In teen suicides so clearly we're not going to safe store our way out of the teen suicide problem But safe storage can have an important effect on both Child accidents and maybe even a modest effect on teen suicides. Oh, yeah, definitely safe storage certainly can and the extent to which the extent to which the law actually affects that is Is really hard to pin down When we did a study where we asked people to the do they think they lived in a state Which had the kind of laws that that yawn mentioned and almost everybody thought they lived in a state that had those sort of laws And there was no correlation with thinking that you've lived in a state like that and actually in on the individual level How you stored your gun? But again, there may be something about the way these laws are promoted and the way it induces Certain type of societal norms that could shift So behavior and that that's part of the role of legislation. I would imagine Let me it's one more here that a couple of people have written from the audience a Yawn vernic or anybody else can pitch in it's anything been done to address or even shut down the 1% of firearm dealers that are Leading to over 50% of the crime gun sales great question. Yeah, actually some cities have done wonderfully innovative things They've used their crime gun tracing data The data Associated with the guns that are recovered from police then they get traced and you figure out which dealers are selling them They figured out which are their problem dealers and a handful of cities have done very innovative things They've done undercover sting operations of those dealers to catch them So illegally selling their guns they once they've caught them doing that they've brought lawsuits And maybe John Lowy will talk about this also lawsuits against those dealers and research that That we've done has shown that the the cities who do that. Well, Chicago, Detroit, New York City the target those Problem dealers Sting them and sue them Seem big changes in illegal gun trafficking and changes in the number of their crime guns They're coming from those precise dealers. So yes, they're absolutely our enforcement strategies that that can work Yon you had mentioned not spending the resources you've mentioned a decline in certain types of Gun accidents or deaths and indicating that this were disease We would be studying it a lot more. We haven't been putting the resources Someone specifically asked, you know, why the Center for Disease Control has not done more why it stopped studying gun violence well, so it's a story that Takes place beginning around the mid 1990s the CDC had been studying not just the Not just a number of gun deaths, but risk factors for gun deaths and had been looking at gun policy and very explicitly the National Rifle Association Felt that that research was inappropriate They lobbied their friends in Congress and Congress took money away from CDC's budget and redirected it The precise amount they had been spending on guns They redirected towards towards other things and they introduced a rider in CDC's annual appropriations That says that CDC can't use money to lobby for For gun control now they couldn't lobby for gun control even before that but The action of calling this attention to it and forcing CDC officials to come to Congress and testify Ultimately wound up as a chilling factor now as Susan mentioned We have good reason to hope that that's changing President Obama in an executive action in 2013 Instructed federal agencies that do that fund research to begin funding research on gun violence prevention again CDC Commissioned the Institute of Medicine to recommend to it What the major areas of gun violence prevention funding ought to be and we're hopeful that that that money will become available soon I first got involved in the issue of gun violence on July 1st, 1993 On that day, I was working at a law firm in the 101 California Street building in San Francisco I am my former office was on the 23rd floor And I was it was a day like any other than at about three o'clock an announcement came over the loudspeaker Saying there's an emergency in the building. Everybody lock your doors. I Had never I didn't know there was a loudspeaker. I'd never heard any announcements We also didn't have any locks on our doors. So it was it was kind of a shocking thing to hear We didn't hear anything else from the building that day about what was happening But my firm had a moot courtroom which had a TV in it So those of us at the firm gathered in the moot courtroom and turned on the TV and we learned that there was a gunman Who was loose in the building? Subsequently I learned that a former disgruntled client of the law firm of Pettit and Martin Which was located on the 35th floor had come into the building with a couple of assault weapons and a handgun and Began shooting and when he was done. He had shot 14 people eight fatally I Was lucky that day. I didn't know anybody who was shot. I didn't lose a loved one or a colleague But the event really shook me up both personally and professionally. I learned within a few days that lawyers at Pettit and Martin had Immediately moved to form a new organization to use the unique skills of lawyers to do something about our nation's epidemic of gun violence I Reached out to them and started volunteering and then a few years later. I was able to come on staff So just to tell you a little bit about what the law center to prevent gun violence does We provide free legal and technical assistance to legislators who are either seeking to enact or to defend laws to reduce gun violence we draft model laws we testify at hearings and through our Network of pro bono attorneys around the country we file amicus briefs in second amendment cases we track all second amendment cases nationwide and And we also secure pro bono defense counsel for cities that are being sued We also track all state gun bills nationwide So before the 101, California Street shooting, I really didn't know much about gun violence or about our nation's gun laws I tend to have progressive views about things So I thought yeah gun control that that seems to make sense, but I really had no idea About the toll that gun violence takes on our nation The last panel did an excellent job of describing that And essentially, you know, we all read in the papers about these horrific events that take that take place the new town shooting The Aurora, Colorado shooting You know these these things that are the sandy hook But they aren't representative of what's happening in our country each and every day and 80 people are dying each and every day In communities all around the country Like Philadelphia I was also shocked to learn once I got into this issue how weak our nation's gun laws are When I went to law school and learned about the law generally I would say that most of the laws seem to make sense. They were they were rational But when it comes to our federal gun laws, they are completely Irrational and they don't make sense and they are filled with loopholes In fact, the US has the weakest gun laws of all industrialized nations in the world And we also have the highest rates of gun death The biggest loophole in federal law and the one that's been in the news is the private sale loophole So essentially under federal law private I mean federally licensed gun dealers and yawn mentioned the concept of somebody having to have a federal license They have to conduct background checks on prospective gun buyers But you don't have to be a federally licensed gun dealer to sell a gun In fact about 40% of all gun sales are made by unlicensed sellers So they are completely outside the system. There's no background check. There's no private sale. There's nothing so in the requirement that Dealers conduct background checks was imposed as part of the 1993 Brady Act But prior to 1993 even though the 1968 gun control act sets forth various categories of People who aren't allowed to buy guns. There was no enforcement mechanism whatsoever So before 1993 a gun dealer would ask a person they fill out a form Are you a convicted felon? You know, have you been dishonored dishonorably discharged from the military these type of things? And if the person said no, that's like, okay. Well, that's good enough for me. You know, here's your gun So at least there's been improvement, but we still have this massive loophole We also have no licensing of gun owners and no registration requirement for guns Personally, I think that guns should be regulated the way that cars are regulated if you're gonna drive a car You need to get a license to show that you know what the laws are and that you're capable of driving and you need to register Your car so that if something happens to it The authorities know who the vehicle belongs to well We don't have anything like that at the federal level even though actually most people think that we do but we don't in fact under federal law federal gun purchaser records are Destroyed within 24 hours, and there's a provision in federal law that prevents the creation of a federal registry So not only do we not have it, but federal law specifically says that we cannot have it We also don't ban assault weapons or large capacity ammunition magazines And those are the type of magazines that are used in all of the mass shootings that we hear about In 1994 one of the first things that my organization did was to work For the passage of the federal assault weapons ban So that bill did pass in 1994, but it had a sunset provision and it expired in 2004 So we did have a ban on those things at one point, but no longer We also have no waiting period As part of the Brady Act initially there was a five-day waiting period in California We have a 10-day waiting period and that allows law enforcement time to conduct a thorough background check And it also gives people time to cool off so that if they Are thinking about suicide or some sort of other rash behavior that there's some time for them to to stop But under federal law the five-day waiting period expired So we have what's an instant check now Also, if a background check is not completed within three days The dealer can go ahead and transfer the gun Even if he or she has not heard from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms whether the person is prohibited or not So these so-called default transfers happen and thousands of guns are put on our streets and Law enforcement if they later find that the person was prohibited they then have to go out and try to retrieve those guns One of the things that I found particularly shocking when I learned about this area was that guns are exempt from the consumer Safety Act, so that's the federal agency that is supposed to ensure that the products that we all use are safe But guns are the only product now that aren't governed by that act or governed by any other regulatory Agency so you have the bizarre situation now where a toy gun If it's found to be defective and hurting a child that can be recalled by the federal government, but a real gun cannot Also, we have a federal immunity law which bestows upon the gun industry manufacturers and sellers almost complete immunity For their negligence, and I know John Lowey will get into that a little bit later And no other industry receives such preferential treatment under federal law So under our federal system states are free to adopt stronger laws than we have at the federal level But historically most have not in fact what we've seen over the last 30 years is a gradual a gradual weakening of state gun laws Some of the laws that states have been adopting in the past few years have been pretty crazy some of them have gotten into the news For example, there have been a lot of laws passed to allow guns in churches and in bars and in courthouses A bill in Georgia just passed the house recently and is expected to pass the Senate there Hopefully the governor will veto that bill, but that's an example of one of these guns anywhere bills There's also a bill that was passed in in Florida Which prohibits doctors from asking their patients about gun ownership and advising them about gun safety That law was challenged and was struck down by a lower court as being in violation of the First Amendment It's on appeal now to the 11th Circuit another Crazy law or I call crazy laws and these laws that purport to exempt states from federal gun laws So Montana was the first state to adopt this kind of law And it basically says if a gun is manufactured in Montana and it stays within our borders the feds need to stay out We don't have to follow any federal laws including the laws on background checks or anything else So that law was also challenged and was struck down by the 9th Circuit But despite the fact that these laws are being struck down they in some states They're very politically attractive and so they keep getting passed Some of the laws though that have been passed over the last 30 years are more insidious And more dangerous than the laws. I just mentioned a Big trend has been a weakening of our state's concealed carry laws So in most states you have to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon It used to be that law enforcement had discretion in all states to decide whether or not it was appropriate for an individual to have a gun But the NRA promoted the repeal of those laws So now we've gone from having a majority of what are called May issue states where law enforcement is vested with discretion about the issuance of policies to having shall issue states Where unless a person is a convicted felon or otherwise prohibited that person can get a gun and carry a gun in public The lax concealed carry laws are particularly dangerous when combined with other laws Such as this down standard ground or what we call it shoot first laws that have been adopted in most states And Susan mentioned Mentioned those laws earlier In Florida alone. We've repeatedly seen how dangerous these laws Can be you had the Trayvon Martin shooting when George Zimmerman who was a concealed weapons holder Michael Dunn who shot Jordan Davis in the gas station over a dispute about music in a car He was carrying a lawfully carrying a concealed weapon and then there was the case in the Florida movie theater where The man shot the person sitting in front of him who was texting While the previews were going on He's asserting a standard grandma because he alleges that the guy threw some popcorn at him So these laws are Really outrageous, but again with the standard ground or shoot first laws It isn't so much the concept that people don't have a duty to retreat in public Which is kind of how they started It's the fact that not only do they not have a duty to retreat But they are then emboldened to act aggressively and to take the lawn to their own hands when Concealed weapons permits are basically given out like candy Another area where there has been a weakening of laws is around the concept of preemption. So Under as I said under their federal scheme states can adopt stronger laws than the federal government can and Typically local governments can adopt stronger laws than the state government can Unless that authority has been taken away by the state legislature And it used to be that local gun laws were very common in this country but again the the gun lobby started promoting laws to Prohibit local governments from regulating guns and so now they're only about a handful of states that can regulate guns at the local level Fortunately where I live in California local governments have a lot of authority And in fact over the last 20 years cities and counties have adopted over 300 strong gun laws and many of those have trickled up to the state level so they've served as the models for state legislation So even though I've said all these negative things about the state of our nation's gun laws When you look at the big picture Things are finally starting to change and things are getting better The Newtown tragedy last December really triggered a cultural shift in our nation And people have you know for me I was kind of surprised or I wasn't surprised I just didn't know how people gonna react to Newtown Because we have seen so many mass shootings in this country and after each one I would think well Okay, now. This is you know Columbine all these kids This is finally gonna do it or when people were shot at a movie theater or actually when Gabby Giffords was shot I thought okay. Well now Congress is gonna do something because one of their own has been taken down So when that didn't happen, you know, even though it was just horrific when all these little innocent little kids were shot Last year I just didn't know what was gonna happen So, you know, I was pleasantly just surprised to see that it seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back And that people finally said enough is enough. So we have seen that change And public opinion polls show that Americans are sick of the bloodshed and they want something to happen And when you look at the policies just universal background checks requiring background check for all done sales Polling shows that 90% of all Americans support that and think how many other types of policies Can you think 90% of the public supports that we don't have? So we have 90% of the public supporting that 80% of gun owners and 70% of NRA members So the NRA came out in opposition to the federal bill that was proposed last year They they opposed universal background checks Which just shows that they don't represent their members and they certainly don't represent the American public in general So we were disappointed of course to see the background check bill fail last year even though it was not a particularly strong bill Just showed that Congress would not do anything on this. So we were disappointed Given the overwhelming public support but not terribly surprised And we just hope that if Congress continues to ignore the will of the people that those members who've done that will get kicked out of office In the meantime, the good news is that more and more states are stepping up They are not waiting for Congress to act in this area so as I mentioned earlier we track all gun bills and In in the past say over the past five years typically the ratio of good bills to bad bills has been two to one in favor of Bills to weaken existing state law. So last year we saw that Flipped and so for the first time there were twice as many good bills than bad bills We received requests for assistance from 30 states last year wanting to adopt commonsense gun laws and 21 states past gun laws and eight of those laws were very significant involving background checks Mental health reporting domestic violence issues bans on assault weapons bans on large capacity ammunition magazines This year we're tracking over 1300 state gun bills and Although that the pace has slowed a bit and now it seems that it's about even as far as the ratio of good bills to bad bills There's a lot more momentum than there used to be and people are a lot more organized At the state and local levels So there's really been historic progress when you look at the shift in state gun laws over the last even five years It's been historic progress So the final point I want to make is that strong gun laws work The Brady bill alone even though it has a loophole. It has stopped over two million Prohibited people from buying guns. So the law has worked There's also a strong correlation between the strength of the state's gun laws and its rate of gun deaths One of the we did a joint publication with the Brady Campaign where we score all state we rank all state gun laws and we found that out of the ten States with the strongest gun laws seven of those states also had the lowest rates of gun deaths So there's a clear correlation between the strength of the state's gun laws And its rate of gun deaths. So California is a great example of how this can work Since the 101 California Street shooting California has adopted 30 strong laws to reduce gun violence We've closed the most glaring loopholes in federal law and also adopted several other types of cutting-edge laws and the laws have had a huge impact in the last 20 years our rate of gun deaths has dropped 56% which is nearly twice as high as the rate of gun deaths has dropped nationwide So of course what we really need are strong uniform Federal laws because it's easy for guns to go from State to state they typically flow from states with weak gun laws into states with strong gun laws In fact the shooter in the 101 California Street shooting bought his assault weapon in Nevada because assault weapons were already illegal in California But until Congress acts and until we get those laws it's crucial that the states continue to step up So in closing I just want to say that although. I know it will take time I'm convinced that eventually we will get the type of laws that we need in this country to address the nightmare of gun violence As Jan mentioned earlier there is hope so even though it's the statistics are very bleak We don't have to we don't have to live this way We can change our nation's laws And there are things that you who are here today can do if you're interested in helping that making that happen If you're new to this issue Stay involved Make your voice heard Contact your elected officials at the federal state and local level and let them know that this issue matters to you And ask your friends and family to do the same thing Speak out Also stay informed about pending legislation And speak out so that the NRA isn't the only one that our legislators hear from most people Support stronger gun laws, but there's this passion gap Those who are opposed to these laws are extremely passionate and so they are Motivated to speak out to write letters to make the phone calls And so those of us who are on the other side who are in the silent majority Need to do the same thing. I would also say support Organizations that are dedicated to reducing gun violence like ceasefire of Pennsylvania and the other groups that you're gonna hear from today Change won't happen overnight, but if we all work together it will happen. Thank you very much our first panel today dealt with Public health perspectives and Provided us with a wealth of facts a wealth of information on exactly what the problems are The second panel is dealing with the legislative Perspectives legal perspectives on all of these issues and our next speaker is Dean Erwin Chermarenski From the University of California Irvine really one of the outstanding scholars constitutional scholars in the United States Thank you so much for the kind introduction It's really an honor and a pleasure to be here as part of this important and terrific conference from 1791 the second amendment was ratified until 2008 the Supreme Court always had said that the second amendment is about a right to have firearms solely for the purpose of malicious service For example in 1939 in United States versus Miller the Supreme Court appell the federal law prohibiting sought our shotguns the Supreme Court said Just in passing that of course what the second amendment was about was a right to have guns for purpose of malicious service It didn't have anything to do with the right to have guns for one's own personal safety When I began teaching constitutional law 34 years ago in 1980, I spent very little time on the second amendment There was no dispute to the meaning of the second amendment It was just what it said a right to have guns for the purpose of malicious service After all the second amendment says a well regulated militia Being necessary to free state there are the people to keep in their arms shall not be infringed There was though a very organized campaign involving gun rights activists and academics to convince courts to change the meaning of the second amendment and That occurred in June of 2008 in District of Columbia versus Heller What I was asked to talk about this afternoon is the meaning and myths concerning the second amendment in light of where the law is today Want to address two questions first what has the Supreme Court said about the meaning of the second amendment? Second what are the unresolved issues with regard to the meaning of that amendment? This to the former there are really two relevant Supreme Court cases at this point in time District of Columbia versus Heller that already alluded to from 2008 in McDonald versus City of Chicago from 2010 I want to talk about each of them District of Columbia versus Heller involved a 35 year old DC ordinance that prohibited private ownership or possession of handguns And impose significant restrictions on long guns a Challenges brought by an individual Private security guard who want to continue to have possessed his firearm The Supreme Court five to four ruled in his favor and declared the DC ordinance unconstitutional I don't know when in American history views about guns came to be so ideologically defined With guns rights activists tenning more conservative gun control activists any more liberal But that's exactly how the Supreme Court divided on that June day Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the majority It was joined by Chief Justice Roberts Justice Kennedy Justice Thomas and Justice Alito Justice Stevens and Briar wrote dissenting opinions joined by Justice is suitoring Ginsberg Justice Scalia began by saying that there's a prefatory part in an operative part to the second amendment He said the language that speaks of a well-regulated militia being necessary to a free state is just prefatory language He said that the operative language of the second amendment is ready people to keep in bear arms shall not be infringed Justice Scalia said prefatory language cannot undermine the meaning of operative language He did his textual analysis of the words the right to keep in bear arms as well as what militia meant in 1791 and included it as a right of individuals to have firearms for the purpose of personal safety He looked at contemporary understandings of the second amendment He looked at writings about the second amendment He looked at historical interpretations of the second amendment and included that the second amendment protects right of individuals They have firearms at least in their homes for the sake of security But very importantly Often overlooked the Supreme Court emphasized that the second amendment is not an absolute right Justice Scalia said the government can regulate who has guns Such as keeping those with a felony conviction or a history of mental illness from having firearms He said the government can regulate where guns are located Such as printing guns in airports in schools He said the government can regulate the types of weapons people possess There'd be no second amendment right to have an assault rifle a bazooka or other kinds of high capacity high-damage weapons The court ended simply by emphasizing that what it had found was a right to have Handguns in the home for the sake of personal security So I mentioned Justice Stevens wrote a lengthy dissent He took Justice Scalia on with regard to the historical evidence Justice Stevens writing for the four dissenters rejected the notion that there's a Prefectory part in an operative part of the second amendment He said all of the language in the second amendment is operative and the second amendment is Unique among constitutional rights and that it states its purpose The second amendment says that the purpose is to make sure that there'll be a well-regulated militia The second amendment was meant to keep Congress from regulating guns where they would keep states from protecting themselves But it was not about a right to have personal ownership of guns Justice Stevens too looked at the text of the second amendment What the phrase keep in bare arms meant in 1791? He looked what militia meant in 1791 And he stressed the importance of precedent after all from 1791 until June of 2008 without exception The Supreme Court had said that the second amendment is just about a right to have guns for purpose of militia service Justice Breyer wrote the other dissenting opinion He said that the government should be able to regulate guns so long as it is acting reasonably Justice Breyer said if we're gonna look at historical practice all of the states That a state constitutional provisions with regard to the right to have guns allow reasonable regulation So should reasonable regulation be permitted when it comes to federal laws Justice Breyer reviewed the epidemiological studies The kind of evidence you've heard this afternoon that gun regulations do decrease crime and do decrease gun violence He said based on this the DC ordinance should be upheld as a reasonable regulation The law that was involved in district of Columbia for his heller was a federal law The district of Columbia obviously is a part of the federal government The Supreme Court had no occasion therefore to consider whether the second amendment would also apply to state and local governments The day after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in district of Columbia versus Heller the National Rifle Association Filed lawsuits in federal court in Chicago in San Francisco challenging those cities gun ordinances the National Rifle Association and Highly publicized press conferences said it wanted to bring to the Supreme Court as soon as it could the issue of whether or not the second Amendment limits state and local governments as well for all never in American history from 1791 through 2008 had the Supreme Court ever found that the second amendment limits what state local governments can do But in the second case that I mentioned McDonald versus City of Chicago in June 2010 the Supreme Court held that the second amendment does apply to state and local governments Here Justice Alito wrote for plurality of four His opinion was joined by Chief Justice Roberts Justice Glee and Justice Kennedy Justice Thomas concurred in the judgment Now all five of these just believe that the second amendment applies to state and local governments They just have a different way of getting there The four and the plurality would say that the second amendment applies to state and local governments through the due process clause of the 14th amendment That's the way the other provisions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to state and local governments Justice Thomas would use the so-called privileges or immunities clause the 14th amendment the provision that says no state Canine citizen the privileged immunities of the United States citizenship There were again for dissenting justices Justice Stevens Ginsburg Breyer and now Sotomayor all argued that the second amendment should not apply to state and local governments Just the Stevens Knowing they'd be leaving the court very soon after this decision were to lengthy dissent Defending his view that it's a living Constitution not surprisingly that produced a response from Justice Scalia who defended his view of I guess what could be called a dead Constitution But the result of these two cases is that the Supreme Court held that the second amendment can be used to challenge Federal state and local laws that it does protect a right of individuals to have guns in the home for the sake of security Justice Alito's plurality opinion of McDonald reiterated what the court had said in Heller That all the court had found was a second amendment right of guns in the home for the sake of security that the government could regulate Who had guns where the guns were located and what type of weapons people possess So when you hear people talk about the law of the second amendment, I have now described it to you I've tried to describe it to you is Nutrally and as fairly as I can but that's all the Supreme Court has said to this point Anything else about what this means in terms of regulations What's allowed and what's not is matter of argument matter of interpretation a matter of lower court decisions But not a matter of Supreme Court rulings So this brings me to the second question that has been asked. What are the unresolved issues? There were literally now say dozens and dozens But hundreds more accurate of lower court opinions ruling on various questions concerning the meaning of the second amendment What is striking is that the Supreme Court has had many occasions in the last four years To review these decisions and without exception has denied review in all of these cases Most recently just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court denied review in a second amendment case Sooner or later the Supreme Court is gonna have to resolve all of these subtle unsettled issues with regard to the meaning of the second amendment But it's clear that the Supreme Court is in no hurry to do so We can speculate as to why not Perhaps a strategic choices on the part of the justices being uncertain of where the court will come out Perhaps a desire to allow the issues to percolate more in the lower courts But time and again over the last four years His cases have come to the Supreme Court guarded the meaning of the second amendment the justices have denied review Well, I want to focus on three somewhat interrelated unresolved issues with regard to the meaning of the second amendment What level of scrutiny is used in evaluating government regulation of firearms? Does the second amendment protect a right to have farms outside the home? And what types of government regulations are allowed? Let me start with the first of these questions What level of scrutiny is used in evaluating government regulations of firearms? If you're not a lawyer this phrase level of scrutiny may not have meaning your context But it's really the most important question in terms of deciding what kind of laws will be allowed with regard to government regulation of firearms To understand this you need to know that not all claims of rights Not all types of discrimination are treated the same under the Constitution There are times when the court is very deferential to the government and Times when the court is very suspicious of the government Let me start with equal protection to illustrate this. I have a 15 year old daughter There's nothing in the world. She wants more than her driver's license Imagine she were to bring a lawsuit saying that the California statute that says you have to be 16 to have a driver's license Denies her equal protection laws She says she's discriminated against. I assure you if she could she would bring that lawsuit in an instant She would lose Now the reason is the Supreme Court would say when it comes to age Discrimination like this the government should be upheld so long as it's acting reasonably in fact the technical language here is that a Rational basis test is used so long as the government action Is rationally related To some legitimate government purpose the government action will be upheld Now at the opposite end of the continuum If a state would adopt an abhorrent law saying no African-Americans can have driver's licenses The court would be highly suspicious Undoddily declare that unconstitutional and use what is called strict scrutiny That is the government action will be upheld Only if it is necessary To achieve a compelling government purpose Notice that the government's goal is something more than just legitimate for the government to do it has to be truly vital compelling The means have to be necessary The government has to show there's no less restrictive alternative to achieve its goal Now in between what I call the rational basis test and strict scrutiny The Supreme Court has crafted what it's called Intermediate scrutiny So for example the Supreme Court has said that gender discrimination has to meet intermediate scrutiny And the test of an immediate scrutiny is that the government action has to be substantially related To an important government purpose Well, the same framework is used with regard to claims of rights Is somebody for example would acclaim a right to welfare under a state law or a federal law Since no such right exists the court would say the distinctions that the government draws is to get welfare And who can't are appellate so long as they're reasonable If one of my students wants to challenge the restrictions that are imposed and who get a license to practice law The court will say there's no right to be a lawyer Restrictions are upheld so long as they're reasonable, but if somebody invokes a fundamental right Like say the right to vote The right to interstate travel Then strict scrutiny has to be met the government act to be necessary to achieve a compelling purpose. I Go through all of this because it's an unresolved question as to what level of scrutiny will be used in evaluating government regulations of firearms The more differential the level of scrutiny The closer to rational basis review the more regulations that will be upheld The more exacting the level of scrutiny the closer to strict scrutiny the fewer of the government regulations will be upheld and The Supreme Court in Heller and McDonald Simply does not say the level of scrutiny There is a footnote in Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Heller which indicates that more than rational basis review will be used But that still leaves a great deal of territory How much deference how exacting will the review be? The lower courts are split on this To my knowledge, there's only one court a federal district court in Utah that has Explicitly said that strict scrutiny should be used for all government regulation of guns There are a number of federal courts of appeals The third circuit the fourth circuit the DC circuit that has said that Intermediate scrutiny should be used for government regulation of guns Some courts have tried to avoid this by saying some kind of sliding Scale or balancing test will be used the second circuit the ninth circuit has said this Now where is the levels of scrutiny tend to be used both for equal protection claims and claims of rights One exception to that is in the area of abortion rights in 1992 In Planned Parenthood versus Casey the Supreme Court said that the government can regulate abortions before viability So long as not place an undue burden on the right Some commentators said well, perhaps that's the test that should be used with regard to guns Others have argued for some form of Reasonableness test, so I think that would be the hardest to reconcile with the footnote in Justice Scalia's opinion So when I raised issue of what's the level of scrutiny? I know I'm talking about a relatively seemingly technical question But it is the issue that will make an enormous difference how courts evaluate gun control laws and gun regulations of all sort My own sense of where the court's likely to go is Both to reject rational basis review and to reject strict scrutiny. I already mentioned Justice Scalia as a footnote Heller rejecting rational basis review I think the language in Heller and McDonald talking about the ability to regulate who has guns where they have them The type of weapons also would be incompatible with strict scrutiny, so I think something either akin to Or exactly like intermediate scrutiny is likely to be what emerges which ultimately be a Balancing test between the government's justification for having the regulation and the intrusion on the right of individuals to have guns Well that leads to the second unresolved question. Is there a right to have guns outside the home? In Presenting Heller and McDonald to you I emphasized that the Supreme Court held only that there's a right to have guns in the home for the sake of security The issue is unresolved by the Supreme Court is where there's any right of individuals to have guns outside the home The lower courts are split on this as well. I count at least nine lower court decisions Primarily at the federal district court level that it held that the second amendment is only a right to have guns in the home For the sake of personal security But there are a number of courts Including at the federal court of appeals level that has said that there is a second amendment right to have guns outside the home. I Think there are strong arguments on both sides of this dispute Think with regard to the former the home is treated differently under the Constitution The fourth amendment for example provides special protection of privacy in the home Also to the extent that the court is concerned about safety and security the home is a special place If the court is going to be originalist There's an argument that the drafters of the second amendment to the extent they were concerned about security were focused on the home On the other hand The courts that reject this and find a second my right to have guns outside the home Argued that what the Supreme Court is focused on is a right to have guns for the sake of security Security interests exist even when people are outside of their home and thus it should be extended to a right outside the house Now talking about the meaning and myths of the second amendment The meaning at this point is that the second amendment is just about a right to have guns in the home If I was to offer a prediction though, I think it's likely the court will at least in some limited fashion say there's a right To have guns outside the home though that can be regulated Well, this then leads me to the third and final question that I want to address What types of government regulations are allowed? Now I put this last because obviously the answer to this question is going to turn on the prior to What regulations will be allowed will depend on the level of scrutiny what regulation be allowed will depend on whether it's a right only in The home or outside of the home There are dozens and dozens of different kinds of gun regulations that exist in the United States It shouldn't surprise you that have been lawsuits challenging all of them. And so as I said, there are hundreds of lower court decisions What is most striking to me is that the vast vast majority of the decisions have upheld the regulations I Can probably count on less than the fingers of one hand the number of cases that have struck down government regulations of guns Again when we talk about the meaning and myths of the second amendment the myth would be that most gun regulations are Unconstitutional the meaning has been that most gun regulations have been upheld Let me give you six examples of types of gun regulations and what the lower courts have said about them I'll cover them relatively briefly because time is short One type of gun regulation is laws that limit carrying of concealed weapons The California The California law is typical in this regard California has a statute that prohibits the carrying of concealed weapons But allows counties to grant permits to individuals to have concealed weapons where they live or they work a County can grant such a permit if three requirements are met First the person has to be shown to be good moral character Second the person has to have firearms training and third there has to be good cause for concealed weapons permit As I said such laws are common throughout the United States Many circuits have upheld exactly this kind of a law The second circuit for example has upheld this kind of a statute however Just a couple of weeks ago the ninth circuit in Proudha versus County of San Diego Declared unconstitutional this California law and specifically the requirement that a person has to have good cause to get a concealed weapons permit It is quite important understanding this case to know that the two judges in the majority of the two-one decision were quite conservative Judge Derrimato Scanlon who wrote the opinion is one of those conservative judges on the ninth circuit in any federal court of appeals And also one of the judges been most consistently pro-gun rights He's joined by judge Consuelo Callahan the dissent was by judge Sidney Thomas Judge of Scanlon's majority opinion for the ninth circuit said that the second amendment does create a right of individuals To have guns outside of the home He said that California prohibits the open curing of weapons Therefore to also restrict the curing of concealed weapons to those with good cause violates the second amendment Judge Thomas wrote a very strong dissenting opinion He pointed out in 1897 the Supreme Court of Appell laws that prohibit the curing of concealed weapons Also in Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Heller He specifically gave laws that restrict curing of concealed weapons as an example of the type of regulations that would be allowed Concealed weapons pose particular dangers that when the supreme court in terry vs. Ohio In 1968 upheld stop and frisk under the fourth amendment Justice Harlan a concurring decision gave us a reason the need to check for concealed weapons because of their greater danger I am always reluctant to make predictions about what the courts will do I long ago learned that he who lives by the crystal ball has to learn to eat ground glass But I will make a prediction here And that is that the ninth circuit will grant en banc review of this decision That is reviewed by in the ninth circuit is not the whole court It's 11 judges of the ninth circuit and I believe that in all likelihood the ninth circuit will overrule the panel decision Though obviously that will depend on who the 11 judges are The matter will then whether through this case or another go to the supreme court Harder to predict what the supreme court will do My instinct is that the supreme court will allow the government to ban curing of concealed weapons I can't see the supreme court finding a second amendment right to have concealed weapons And also the language and justice Scalia's opinion and heller remember said that laws prohibiting concealed weapons Are an example of the type of statutes that are permitted Second there were regulations of who can you have guns? These laws almost without exception have been consistently upheld in the lower courts So as was already mentioned, there's a federal law that prohibits those have been convicted domestic violence crimes Including misdemeanor crimes from having guns This has been consistently upheld in the lower courts There are laws that prohibit those who have felony convictions from having guns These have been consistently held in the lower courts There are laws that prevent those have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution of guns These have been consistently held in the lower courts I think so long as the regulation of who has guns is reasonable The lower courts are likely to uphold them A third type of regulation are background checks and registration Already been talked about how there are laws requiring background checks Those significant loopholes in them for private sale of guns and gun shows And there are also possibility of registration laws Again every lower court to my knowledge to consider the constitutionality of background checks and registrations Have upheld those forms of gun regulation It is easy to see why they're constitutional under Heller and McDonald Once the supreme court says the government can regulate who has guns Keeping those with a felony conviction or those with the history of melanism and guns It then makes sense that the government also can do the background checks to make sure that it's not giving a gun permit To those who aren't allowed to have the firearms A fourth kind of regulation that's been tried safety regulations These have already been mentioned These are laws like the florida statute that was mentioned that require the safe keeping of guns To limit the ability of children to have access to it These are laws that require that individuals have training in order to have a gun that they have to go to a firing range to be able to get this kind of training Overwhelmingly these laws too have been upheld The only exception being a seventh circuit case A zel versus city of chicago Chicago had an ordinance that said that a person could have a gun permit Only if they had completed firing range training But chicago prohibited all firing ranges in the city of chicago And under those circumstances the seventh circuit said this was unconstitutional But here too i think so long as it is a reasonable safety regulation is like to be upheld A fifth type of regulation concerns the types of weapons There are laws that restrict certain kind of martial arts weapons There are laws that regulate the high capacity magazine clips There are laws of course that prohibit assault rifles or semi assault rifles Without exception each and every one of these laws has been upheld by the lower courts Even after heller and mcdonald And sixth and finally there are the laws that regulate the location of weapons Prohibiting weapons in particular places There's a federal law that prohibits having firearms in national parks The fourth circuit is upheld that There's regulations the federal law that prohibits having weapons on postal service property laws have upheld that And of course laws prohibit guns in places like airports and schools Heller makes clear such laws are permissible So as you leave here today in terms of your understanding of the meaning of the second amendment It's key that you remember that almost all of the regulations That federal state local governments have tried have been allowed and are likely to be allowed in the future So then to conclude by addressing what i was asked about What's the meaning? What are the myths of the second amendment? The meaning of the second amendment at this point is that individuals have a right to have guns in their home for the sake of security The myths regard to the second amendment are when people tell you that the government can't regulate who has guns Or the government can't regulate a type of weapons they have or the government can't regulate Where those guns are located? All of those are things that can be regulated even under heller mcdonald and are likely to be regulated into the future Thank you Irwin. Thank you during the first half of urwin's comments. I spent Making a long list of questions that I wanted to ask based on his comments. I spent the last half unfortunately of his Remarks crossing each of those questions out as he as he answered them Our final speaker for this part of the program is john loy Who is director of the legal action project at the brady center to prevent gun violence john Thank you all Not sure if we can I think we need a scientist to get the powerpoint working If it doesn't I will just proceed. Well, I wanted to uh begin where rich negrin so powerfully Started this day talking about the costs and faces of gun violence I want to talk to you about some of those costs and faces and the people behind them How gun tragedies happen And what we in the legal community can do about it An eight-year-old boy in kansas his home in bed when he was shot and killed by his father A high school basketball student a high school basketball player in buffalo Is playing is shooting hoops when he is gunned down by a gang member a 15 year old A 15 year old boy in california visiting his 14 year old friend Is accidentally shot and killed And a woman in chicago walking home from work is shot dead by a stalker in the parking lot of her workplace To police officers in milwaukee shot while on duty And just a few miles away from here A young boy finds a gun literally on the streets Picks it up thinking it is a toy and pulls the trigger killing his friend Now let me tell you how these tragedies happened In every one of these incidents the shooter was prohibited from buying a gun He could not get a gun legally He needed an illegal source And irresponsible gun companies were happy to supply that source either directly or indirectly and profit off it The father in kansas for example was a convicted felon And when he went to the gun to buy to the store to buy the gun to kill a son He told the gun dealer that he was a felon So the gun dealer simply turned to the woman he was with who was his grandmother Sold the gun to her and he walked out with the murder weapon an obvious straw purchase The gang member who shot the high school basketball player in buffalo got his gun from a gun trafficker A gun dealer in ohio supplied that trafficker With over 180 saturday night special handguns all sold in cash all sold in bulk sales In fact the gun used to shoot The high school student was sold in an 87 handgun purchase The stalker that killed the woman in chicago found his illegal gun on the internet at armsless.com a virtual gun show online How can this happen? For one as julie explained Our laws allow it to happen. There are no limits on how many guns you can sell. There are no background checks required for Private unlicensed sales websites and gun shows exploit this loophole An atf which is charged with regulating gun dealers is underfunded and reigned in by gun lobby pushed restrictions And irresponsible gun companies take advantage to make a dollar Let me read you some testimony from a lawsuit That we brought you can hear straight from the gun dealer's mouth about how this happens And this is from a man who worked in a gun store in texas He's asked did you ever have occasion for customers to volunteer information of prior convictions? Answer yes, sir question. What would they be doing this in connection with? Answer well the brady form you fill out is a background check And even on the yellow form. I've had customers volunteer quote Well, I had this conviction or I've been asked Quote can this stop me from buying a gun? If the answer is yes We were directed on several occasions Find out if they've got somebody with them or can get somebody to come do the legal work to buy the gun Question and on those occasions when somebody volunteered they had a prior conviction What was your experience as to what happened then answer if management knew it That is the gun dealer management the question was put out quote Do you have someone that can do it for you and the high number salesman? It was a practice like I'll hold this gun you bring somebody I specifically was talked to one time because I did turn down Send a guy out the door and it was a high dollar semi-automatic pistol And I said it just it's not going to happen with me and I know I was told that quote Well, you know, we're dealing numbers and profit That's sworn testimony from a clerk at one of the largest gun stores in texas Now, let me tell you what we in the legal community can do About some of these tragedies to help prevent them You see these stories are just some of the lawsuits that we at the brady centers legal action project have brought over the past 25 years And we continue to bring them across the country We hold gun dealers manufacturers accountable for their contribution to gun violence We defend strong sensible gun laws and we challenge and defeat over broad or unconstitutional laws Some of the the Laws that julie referred to as crazy laws Which I Agree with her her analysis. In fact, we brought suit against some of the ones that that she mentioned We've won precedents and courts across the country Holding that negligent gun companies can be accountable for their contribution to gun violence Now to be clear Most gun dealers are responsible business people and in fact, this is an atf Chart you will see that over 85 percent of gun dealers sell zero Zero guns traced or covered In crime in a given year, but as yon vernic pointed out About one percent of gun dealers Sell over 57 percent of the crime guns These are the bad apple gun dealers and someone asked what can we do about it? Well in our lawsuits against some of these bad apple gun dealers where atf To be frank has not Done what it should do to get them out of business We've brought lawsuits and we have gotten some out of business in fact In a lawsuit here in philadelphia Against what was then one of the top suppliers of crime guns lose loans after we brought a lawsuit against lose atf finally took action and got their license revoked and put them out of business We also fight to get Gun companies to put in safety devices to prevent unintentional shootings And there was some discussion about how these devices can save lives and as julie pointed out Because guns are exempt from the consumer product safety act the federal government cannot force Gun manufacturers to put in safety devices But lawsuits can provide powerful financial incentives for them to do what they should be doing all along Unfortunately gun companies manufacturers Do not On their own Do the right thing and make their guns safer and again I'd like you to hear from The industry itself this is Testimony by an expert of bereta in a lawsuit actually on behalf of the california teenager who you Saw earlier who was shot and killed unintentionally By one of his best friends The expert was asked in this case How he weighed The risks and benefits of safety devices and firearms and he's asked and i'll Cut to the chase and a lengthy question Quote how in this weighing process do you consider the loss of life? And this is what he told the jury on behalf of The gun manufacturer quote The fact that someone may be killed based on a decision i've made As a matter of fact, I could say it in a different way that even sounds worse. I know That some people will be killed Because of decisions that I have made For instance the one we talked about with the magazine disconnector safety Some people in accident cases that i've dealt with have been killed And they wouldn't have been killed if that magazine safety had been in place But I have to try to think about all the ways that this item is going to be used Now the magazine disconnect safety that he's talking about is a device That prevents a gun from firing when the ammunition magazine is removed from it And there are many times where people think that the gun is unloaded because the magazine has been removed But in fact there's a round in the chamber So the expert goes on to explain what are the great benefits That outweigh the loss of the lives of children And he says quote If you are backpacking off into the wilderness and you're going to maybe rely on that To shoot at some snakes or shoot rabbits to eat or whatever the heck and you lose your magazine or damage it So it doesn't work if it's got a device in there that prevents you from shooting it with a magazine out You can't use the gun anymore But you could still if it was if it didn't have that device you could still Load it one at a time and still shoot it close quote so in the position the position of Beretta the gun manufacturer was that the benefit Of being able to shoot snakes and rabbits If you needed that to survive outweighed what he admitted was the certain deaths Of children that could have been prevented by these safety devices Again, that's a judgment that's made by gun many gun manufacturers in america But litigation On behalf of victims can provide financial incentives for them to do the right thing additionally We challenge laws That hinder gun violence prevention and infringing on other rights as I mentioned And julie mentioned, uh, what's called the dox v. Glock's case. That's not the official caption But that's what we call it or florida passed a law which would Authorize the revocation of doctors medical licenses if they simply talk to their patients about the risks of guns Which by the way is the recommended protocol From the american academy pediatrics. So if a pediatrician was doing Her job, uh, she could get her license revoked. We brought a lawsuit against that law and first amendment grounds Got an injunction and as julie mentioned it was argued in the 11th circuit this past summer and we're awaiting a decision Nelson georgia passed an ordinance which required Heads of households to have a functional firearm in the home We brought a lawsuit against that claiming among other things It was a violation of the second amendment because we argued that part of the Second amendment right to protect yourself in the home Included the right to keep guns out of the home and in fact most americans choose to protect their families by keeping guns out Rather than bringing them in Uh, and we got a settlement in which Nelson agreed to never enforce the ordinance and essentially and recognized our position We also helped defend Jurisdictions whose laws have been challenged usually on second amendment grounds This is some of the pertinent language, but I think dean jamerinsky summarized it much better than than I could and I would note that When we are involved in these litigations and if I assume any of you are lawyers in the crowd here We uh, don't just file amicus briefs like some uh, like many organizations. We Actually go into court In some cases represent jurisdictions. We represented in fact city of pittsburgh when the nra sued it for uh to try to strike down their loss and stolen gun ordinance We assisted philadelphia in defense of their uh gun ordinances and we continued to do that around the country And so I if you're interested and I hope you are in working in this area I would invite you to go to our website and join lawyers for safe america dot org, which is a national alliance of lawyers and law firms That is growing which invites lawyers and to Work with us and work with victims of gun violence work with cities counties states whose laws are challenged and Make a difference. This is uh extraordinarily exciting fulfilling work. It has the opportunity to really create new constitutional law In the second amendment area, but also in the first amendment area and Certainly in the tort liability area and most importantly it has the opportunity to save lives Such as Nafis jefferson this young man. So thank you very much And instead of having questions for this panel immediately We're going to have our next speaker and then come back for the questions for this panel if that's all right Please thank you very much. My name is shira goodman director of ceasefire pa. I'll be back on the next panel I'm privileged today to introduce to you somebody who probably doesn't need introduction to a lot of folks in the room He has been a great philadelphia and a great pennsylvania. He was mayor of philadelphia He was known as america's mayor his governor of pennsylvania And he has been a champion for gun violence prevention since I started ceasefire pa Every time we have asked of him to do something He has been there with us standing with pennsylvania's who want better laws and better policies He has been a leader in this and we're still lucky to have governor edward g. Rendell as a partner Hello everyone. Thank you You are way behind in your time schedule and I looked at the program And this panel was supposed to go for an hour and 25 minutes And the next panel is for an hour and five minutes And I've been allotted 15 minutes So I described to my office staff that I was like A sorbet that's given to clean your palate So given the fact that you're behind a schedule, I'm going to even shorten it a little bit My talk is entitled the need for action and For those of us who've been fighting this issue for a long time or for those of us who've been just recently to the issue Propelled by what happened in connecticut or whatever It's very frustrating to see what happens in state capitals Frustrating to obviously to see what doesn't happen in washington um but I believe there is a road that we need to get on that can produce significant action um Let me posit a question to all of you Heidi hide camp was a democratic senator elected in the 2012 election And she was one of the six democrats who voted against Universal background checks She voted against universal background checks notwithstanding the fact that the poll by the largest newspaper in north dakota found 93 of north dakotans in favor of Universal background checks including almost seve