Judd Ehrlich
Film Director Judd Ehrlich and Film Participant Mary Anne Franks Discuss Judd’s Film “The Price of Freedom”

Film Director Judd Ehrlich and Film Participant Mary Anne Franks Discuss Judd’s Film “The Price of Freedom”

- Welcome back, everybody. Good afternoon, good evening. It’s my great, great pleasure to welcome Judd Ehrlich and Dr. Mary Anne Frank, who will be discussing the documentary, “The Price of Freedom.” Thank you very much, both of you for joining us today. I have to say it was an absolute pleasure. I mean, I watched your documentary with, well, actually, I was gobsmacked at the power of the NRA and I was just blown away by the power of incredible documentary. I’m going to hand over to Carly to introduce both of you and just to say a very, very warm welcome and thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Over to you, Car.

• Thank you very much, Wendy. Judd, Mary Anne, it’s really great to be with you both. So Judd Ehrlich is a winning director and producer who clearly knows his craft. And for those of you who watched over the last two days, that was very obvious. He’s mastered the art of exposing compelling and honest stories. Ehrlich has premiered five films at the Tribeca Film Festival, including “The Price of Freedom,” which was acquired by CNN Films and will have its own broadcast tonight, Sunday night on CNN at 9:00 PM Eastern Time. This will immediately be followed by a round table, anchored by CNN’s Chris Cuomo to discuss issues examined in the film. Ehrlich had Flatbush Pictures and award-winning Brooklyn-based film, television, and content studio.

Dr. Mary Anne Franks holds the Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar chair at the University of Miami School of Law and is the author of the award-winning book, “The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech.” A constitutional scholar with particular expertise in the First and Second Amendment, Dr. Franks is also the president and legislative and tech policy director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to combating online abuse and discrimination. She frequently serves as a policy advisor to legislature’s tech industry leaders and advocacy organisations on issues relating to gun violence, privacy, sexual exploitation, and threats. Dr. Franks hold a JD from Harvard Law School as well as a doctorate and master’s degree from Oxford University, where she studied as a Road Scholar. She previously taught at the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow fellow and lecturer in law and at Harvard University as a lecturer in social studies and philosophy. So I’m very happy now to hand over to the two of you for a conversation. I hope everybody had a chance to watch the film, and if not, you can catch it tonight on CNN.

• [Wendy] And I think we’ll just take as many questions from the audience that we can. So if you’re listening now and have a question for Judd and Mary Anne, please write into the Q&A, and Judd and Mary Anne will try and get to it. But while everyone is typing, Judd and Mary Anne, if you could start us off just about what interested you in this subject and why now?

• Sure, well, first of all, I just want to thank Wendy Fisher and everybody at Lockdown University. You have built something incredible over the pandemic, this network of folks who speak and tune in to these discussions. I’ve followed it closely and it’s incredible and I’m honoured to be part of it today. So thank you so much. This is a special day for us because, as Carly mentioned, later tonight at 9:00 PM Eastern, 6:00 PM Pacific Time on CNN, we’re having our broadcast premiere of the film. After the film, Chris Cuomo will host a roundtable discussion featuring Mary Anne Franks and other interview subjects from the film. So I would encourage you, if you saw it and you liked it, to tell other people to watch. If you didn’t get a chance to watch, it’s a great opportunity to watch the film. To your question about why did we make this film and why now? It really began with this question of, how did we get here? How did we get to a place in this country in America where the rate of gun violence is out of control and there are so many guns in circulation, and yet, so few federal gun laws. And at the same time, the American public, gun owner, non-gun owner, Republican, Democrat, wants common sense gun reform, and yet, we don’t have those laws in this country. And how did we get to this place?

And just starting to dig in all of these roads led us to the National Rifle Association and the NRA and their outsized influence for decades in really framing this debate and steering the conversation in this country around guns. So that’s really how it began. I think the fact that we made this film during the pandemic, during the summer of 2020 when we saw uprisings around the country, and this is something that I think Mary Anne Franks, who speaks so beautifully about in the film and maybe can talk a little bit about it, when we see that rising up of folks asserting the rights that are due to them as Americans, we see the backlash and that is reminiscent of what we saw in this country in the 1960s. And so that was part of the framework, I think, in the storytelling of the film. And it’s something Mary Anne that you really speak incredibly about in “The Price of Freedom.”

• Thanks Judd, and to answer that broader question of, why now and why this story? When I heard about Judd’s project, I thought this is exactly the right time to have this conversation. We are seeing our nation really fraying at the edges to put it mildly. And a huge part of that is because of the NRA’s influence, it’s because of the ability of the National Rifle Association to take an issue that many sensible people could have sensible conversations about and to turn it into a conversation that invokes the Constitution as this kind of divine scripture that they alone understand the secret meaning to, and that everyone who disagrees with is somehow a heretic, somehow unpatriotic, somehow un-American. And the invocation of the Constitution in this sense is such a powerful, unique to America, I think kind of tendency.

And it really does help explain why it is that this message that the NRA has promoted for so long has gotten so much traction, even though it goes against people’s own interests, it goes against people’s safety, it goes against everything people would know sensibly if you blocked out what the NRA was trying to say. So that was such a good opportunity, an important opportunity to talk about the way the Constitution is being abused in the sense and how it is being propagandised in the sense to start that conversation and to encourage people who have fallen under the spell of that kind of rhetoric to step back and think about what it has actually done to the country, to their communities, to the people around them.

• [Carly] Thank you so much. Do we want to take any of the questions that have come in, Judd? Or did you want to respond to Mary Anne?

• We can definitely go to the questions for sure. How would you like to do? Should I read them or?

Q&A and Comments:

• [Carly] Sure, yeah, that would be great. We’ll start with Bun Lee’s question, ‘cause I think that’s a great question.

• Great, okay. “The film is brilliant, tragic, convincing,” thank you very much. “But the moral outrage and the moment won’t get to legislation that endures without clear cut ongoing enforcement. What do you think of learning from the Texas anti-abortion law and to use vigilante lawsuits by individuals against individuals to enforce the legislation, not the government?” I’m going to defer to our lawyer on the panel.

• Oh, that’s a very compelling question. So for those who aren’t familiar with what is going on in Texas at the moment with their recently passed legislation, the short version is that the Texas government has done something incredibly clever, and I use that word descriptively, not in praiseworthy sense, which is to try to escape judicial review for what is clearly an unconstitutional law. It takes the right of a woman to have an abortion and effectively gets it. But instead of enforcing it through state officials, in an effect, deputises private citizens to enforce it. And the reason why that’s important is because that makes it very difficult for anyone to go to court and say, “This law is constitutional, you have to stop it from going to effect.” So it has been raised before that we should imagine, at least, at least as a thought experiment. What if someone did that with another highly controversial constitutional right, namely the right to bear arms? What if some state passed a law that said, “It’s illegal to own a weapon and if you know someone who owns a weapon, report them. Here’s a hotline, let’s set it up so that you can go out and enforce this law that says you can’t have a weapon.”

Now obviously, the same people who would be fighting in favour of the legislation against abortion rights would not be in favour of the same thing happening for gun rights. And that’s really an illustration of what I call constitutional fundamentalism, because it’s that selective pick and choose which parts of the constitution and which rights you actually support. So there would be some interesting rhetorical and other strategic value in doing the same thing to a right that, let’s say, the conservative part of the country takes very seriously as opposed to a right that may be more progressive sides, think of as a serious matter. The danger though is that I think we should all decry what the Texas government is doing. That kind of vigilantism is exactly what we want to avoid. Part of what’s going to happen with the Texas abortion law is that you’re going to have private citizens turning on each other, reporting on each other, turning into almost like a, you can imagine different countries, different times where you reported on your neighbours if they were engaged in any kind of activity that the government didn’t like.

And that entire manoeuvre of evading judicial review, it just seems like a very terrible thing to happen. It’s a terribly cynical, terribly unconstitutional way of trying to deal with a problem. So I would not suggest that the same tactic should be taken on this side, but it is certainly important to point out that that is to take away the substance of it for a moment, and say, “If that’s how you think constitutional rights can either be won or lost, is just by a clever piece of legislation that tries to avoid the courts, well, what if it happens to a constitutional right you actually care about?” And I think the greater lesson from what Texas has done is that it’s of appease with what Judd’s film talks about so effectively, which is that the NRA’s game is entirely about winning at all costs, that it isn’t about the Constitution, it isn’t about principles, it’s not about values, it’s about winning. It’s about your side winning, your tribe being taken care of. And that’s the last thing we need, I think, in the United States is more of that. I think we need to be responding very, very negatively to those types of tactics. Of course, it puts us in a precarious position because there is a side of the country that’s willing to do that, to win at all costs. And it does raise very serious questions about what happens to the side that doesn’t want to do that, that doesn’t want to throw out the rule of law just so their tribe can win.

• Thanks, Mary Anne. I can go to Clive’s question now. He says, “It’s so depressing that the Second Amendment has been so twisted and purposefully misquoted, cited by those in the know and power. But if the NRA is declared bankrupt as it may be, do you feel the gun lobby’s power will decline, especially after January 6th, et cetera?” I can start on this one. It was important to include the quote from the former president of the NRA towards the end of the film, David Keene, who says that the NRA has been counted out many times before. And they have, they’ve been scandal ridden, they’ve had all sorts of issues over the years and they’ve been written off and they’ve come back. But I think it’s important to really pay attention to what he says next because what he says next is, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a NRA member or not. Those people who are fundamentalists about the Second Amendment, when that bell is rung, they will heed that call and they will come out.” And we’ve seen that with, we’ve seen that time and again in recent history in this country. So I think even if the NRA were gone tomorrow, their message has become so saturated into a segment of the American population that it goes beyond the NRA now, that they have been pushing this message for decades. And that’s really what we try to trace in the film since 1977 in the Cincinnati Revolt. They have been pushing this message and it has seeped into a segment of the American population. And so, again, I think even if the NRA were to disappear, that’s what everyone needs to be aware of, that this politics is not going to go away. You see it with Trumpism. If Donald Trump were to disappear, there are still folks out there that will carry that torch. So it is something to really be aware of.

• I would agree with that concern that the NRA is obviously incredibly influential, has brought us to this current historical moment. But they have said in motion a kind of machinery that can’t be stopped and can’t be identified with just one organisation. When I say can’t be stopped, it doesn’t mean they could not be controlled or defeated, but it means that even if the NRA disappears, this identity politics that the NRA has produced, this combination of all of these elements telling a certain segment of our population, everything you’re upset about, you’re feeling of being superfluous, the feeling that you’re not a provider, the feeling that you as a white man are no longer in charge of the culture or that other people criticise you for things that you used to be praised for. Using all of that, combining it with fear about everything, uncertainty, deadly virus, climate change, put all of that fear together and tell people there’s one beautifully simple answer, and that is to arm yourself, instead of dealing with any of the complicated, nuanced thought that is required by those issues. It’s incredibly seductive and it’s not just the NRA. And we need to keep in mind that the NRA wasn’t even enthusiastic about the initial legislation that led to the Supreme Court giving us this ahistorical, completely unsupportable interpretation of the Second Amendment as being the individual right to bear arms.

The NRA was actually opposed to that legislation because they worried that they wouldn’t be able to keep people fearful enough if the Supreme Court came out and said, “Hey, everything the NRA has been saying is true, where were the NRA’s entire tactics going to go? Seeing us how they’re based entirely on fear and victimisation, they’re coming for your guns, they’re going to come tomorrow, the next day, the next day.” So there’s always been a part of the NRA that loves being victimised, that loves being the underdog. So if they’re on the skids right now, they can use that, right? They can use that to say, “That just goes to show how much the mainstream culture is trying to push us out. And it shows how under attack all of you who identify with us might be.” So whether it’s that institution or something else, that feeling of resentment, that feeling of entitlement is not just going to go away. If anything, it could actually be worse as you saw when Trump is defeated, right? It actually unleashes something more violence because people are now absolutely convinced that there’s no way forward except to use violence. And this is a group of people who’ve been told violence is the answer, violence is justified, the firearm is everything about your identity and about you standing up for yourself and your community. So I would be very concerned that regardless of what happens with the NRA, those forces that have been unleashed by their propaganda and their lobby, they won’t simply disappear.

• The next question is about whether the film is available in the UK. The answer is not yet, but we are planning for it to go internationally so stay tuned. And then the next comment is here, “We can’t believe people in the U.S.A. don’t seem to want stronger gun control.” I would just say they do, they absolutely do. And opinion poll after opinion poll shows that 80, 90% of Americans, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, no matter whether or not you’re a gun owner, want common sense gun reforms and gun safety measures in this country. And that is why this disconnect between what Americans want and what we have is so important to dig into. And I hope this film can start to show folks how we got here so that we can unpack this and come up with solutions to understand that it hasn’t always been this way, that this is a really relatively recent phenomenon, even in the history of the NRA, that the NRA for a century was mainly about marksmanship, gun safety, hunting, conservation, things that are actually positive about gun culture in this country.

And things change. Again, going back to Mary Anne Frank’s in the film, she posits the question towards the end of the film, “What if this didn’t happen in Cincinnati in 1977? What if Harlan Carter didn’t take the NRA in this radically different direction? And what if we actually had a gun organisation in this country that represented gun owners and their interests? How different would history be?” And I think on the one hand, it’s tragic and it’s sad and it’s frustrating. On the other hand, it’s hopeful to say that, “Look, it hasn’t always been this way that there were gun laws in this country since the time of our founding and that predated that.” And so it doesn’t have to be this way. And there there is some light if people who care about these issues actually act and vote and get out there and take action.

• Yeah, and I’d want to add to that this alternative reality that we could have had that we should really think about it quite seriously, that imagine the vast majority of gun owners of being united, not by fear and resentment, but by expertise, by common knowledge that they can share with people who don’t know as much about firearms. Imagine an organisation that actually did want to promote when and where and how you can use firearms safely, that actually took pride in being careful, being good, being skilled with a firearm as opposed to shoving a firearm in everyone’s hands, and saying, “Let’s see what happens.” Many of you may know gun owners who are appalled by the way that the NRA infused idea of guns, this cartoonish view of it, which would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. You’re probably aware of how every time you see someone who is claiming their second amendment rights at a public rally, the way they’re holding their weapon, the fact that they brought it to a crowded place to begin with, the members of Congress who are opposing with their guns out near their children. People who know anything about firearms, the ones who are actually skilled in firearm use are appalled by this because they know that’s not how you treat a weapon.

And they know that a weapon is not the right answer in most situations, and it certainly is not going to be the right answer when you don’t know what you’re doing. A gun is a complicated thing. Using a gun is a complicated thing. Imagine an organisation that celebrated people who were good at this, this very difficult skill that takes nuance, and understanding, and judgement . We could imagine this. That is something that I think of many gun owners who actually know what they’re doing would be in favour of. I’m from Arkansas, which is gun country, and my family members, my neighbours who know about how to use guns for hunting and what you do and don’t do with your weapons, there’s real potential and value in that for people to take pride in this. But it’s the opposite of what the NRA is promoting. It’s the opposite of just take a gun and use it whenever you want. It’s about very complex understandings, good judgement , good skills. And that is a real shame that we don’t seem to have that healthy firearms culture, subculture in our country. And instead, we’re being held essentially captive by a really small minority of people who don’t really understand anything about guns and think that they’re the answer to everything because they’re scared of everything.

• The next question says, “I was so surprised that many years ago, the laws about gun ownership and gunpowder were very strict.” Yeah, I mean, it was a revelation for me as well making this film. There’s an incredible database out of Duke University that is available online. You can search, if you’re in the States, you can search your hometown. You can see the laws that were in place there. And there were literally thousands and thousands of laws since the founding of this country. So, as I said before, I think it’s at once frustrating but also hopeful. I will say something else that we touch upon in the film that Mary Anne can talk more about is the reality that there were racist gun laws in this country since the beginning. And like many aspects of American society, it was about maintaining power and control in the hands of white men. So the same was true of firearms in this country, and it was keeping those weapons out of the hands of everyone else. So that is also something that this country needs to look at. It’s a different kind of history and it complicates things in a way. But the NRA has been basically on the wrong side of every issue here and been able to, as Mary Anne said, exploit fear at every turn. So they claim to be about the right of everybody to carry a firearm in this country, but you see time and again that the cases that they choose to champion are about when white men are threatened and not when Black men, for example, are asserting their right to carry a firearm. So we look at the Mulford Act in the film in 1967, which was supported by then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and drafted behind closed doors by the National Rifle Association. But Mary Anne, maybe you can talk a little bit because I’ve heard you speak about this and we couldn’t include everything you had to say in the film.

• Right, I mean, that part of it being always part of our country, first of all, that comes as such a surprise to people because the NRA has been so effective and so has Hollywood and so many other misunderstandings about what the Wild West used to look like, which was not that wild compared to today. And it’s interesting to even think about the terminology that we call it things like gun control or gun safety, we didn’t have those terms back in the 1800s, not because people didn’t have those ideas, but because they were so obvious to people. It’s obvious that you need to store your gunpowder somewhere safely and not in your house. You wouldn’t call that anything other than that’s just sensible. So this whole idea that we’re talking about the default being guns and ammunition everywhere, and you have to explain yourself if you want to restrict that, that’s such a testament to how powerfully the NRA has managed to make us believe that something that was never historically true is the case. They flipped it entirely for most of our country’s history. Use of firearms, use of weapons was something that was supposed to happen exceptionally, that you needed to justify those as opposed to justify not having weapons or access to weapons. But yes, we have this very, very unfortunate history, not just about guns, but about all of our constitutional rights that effectively they were promoting the interests of a very small group of people in the United States. We know this now, right, that the founding fathers were not meaning it when they said we, the people.

They didn’t actually believe that everyone should be entitled to the same rights. Imagine having slave owners who are saying, “Oh yes, there should be a right to bear arms,” when we know that you wouldn’t even let enslaved people speak back to those who had enslaved them, much less resist against them. And so much of our modern day law enforcement and policing comes from policing the fear that enslaved people were going to rise up and defend themselves, or they might escape or they might try to find some way to become free. So that’s so much of the history of gun control in the United States is that. It’s about making sure that certain people never have guns. So we have to confront that history, we have to confront how our country as a matter of history, has been perfectly fine with regulating weapons, either on the one hand for public safety or to ensure that certain people never get to have them. So that when people speak of the right to bear arms, especially if we’re talking about the NRA, they really do mean they’re speaking in code for mostly white men, right? That’s why they don’t speak up when Philando Castile was killed, It’s why they don’t speak up when Marissa Alexander goes to jail for using a weapon to brandish against her abusive estranged husband. They’re not there to talk about domestic violence victims or to talk about Black men. They’re there to talk about their tribe and whether they feel safe enough wherever they go. So that has to be confronted. We got so close during the Trump presidency in his campaign, he was so much an example of saying the quiet part out loud, right? If you wanted to see it on display, he told you. He makes a comment about how we should just stop them and take their guns away, sort of talking about crime control in general and what the police should do. And the NRA doesn’t freak out at all. The NRA doesn’t say, “Oh, that’s alarming that a president is saying we should just stop people and take their guns away,” silence from them. And then he clarifies afterwards that he was talking about Chicago. Now again, what does he mean he’s talking about Chicago?

If not just as clear as day to say, “I meant Black people. I meant the people we would take guns away from are those the ones that we call the criminals.” Whereas we’re trying to protect the rights of those who are trying to fight against criminals. We know who the good guys are, we know who the bad guys are. We know it before anything ever happens. So we really do have to think about how it has been absolutely put on display for us that the Second Amendment interpretation that the NRA has is completely influenced by race and by gender and by status and that it has never been the case that those who are championing the NRA’s version of the Second Amendment have done it in the name, in the actual name of equality because they don’t stick up for anyone else. They stick up for a very specific group of people.

• Where does the NRA get its money from? They have about four or five million members. Membership dues are one way they get their money. They have magazines that have a lot of advertisements. Most of those advertisements are from gun manufacturers. That’s another place that they get their money. In addition to the advertising, those gun manufacturers donate to the NRA and there is a lot of money in it, and that comes from gun manufacturers and the gun industry. And it is to the NRA’s benefit when more guns are sold in this country. And so by knowing that fact, their motives become clearer because their answer to everything is more guns. More guns are going to make you safer. More guns are going to defend and possibly save your life. And that’s the answer to every problem. If you feel uncertain during a pandemic, go out and get a gun. That’s why sales have gone through the roof in America, because the NRA has been so effective at making the gun a security blanket, making the gun the thing that you need when you feel afraid. Mary Anne talked about it earlier. So I think it’s important to really be aware of that relationship and aware that the NRA does get a lot of support from gun manufacturers.

• I’ll just add to that, one of the other peculiarities that kind of escapes notice because it’s been with us for so long, is what the entire sort of ideological framework of this is. The idea that a constitutional right, something fundamental to your existence and your protection can only be protected by a product that was sold to you. And it is hard to imagine what other industry has managed to so successfully constitutionalized its product in this way, right? This idea that something, a product that is delivered to you for a cost is the only thing that stands between you and chaos. It’s brilliant. I mean, it’s brilliant marketing on the part of the manufacturers and it’s brilliant on the part of the NRA to say these things are intertwined. The only way you can defend yourself, the only way you can vindicate your rights is not just this thing that is incredibly deadly, but this thing you have to pay for. And that can actually get quite expensive if, as the NRA tends to encourage you to do, you have multiple weapons, lots of ammunition, and more and more gadgetry because so much of the propaganda that the NRA puts out is about the kinds of accessories you need to have in addition to the gun itself.

• I know we have a lot of questions. I don’t know that we’ll get to all of 'em, but I’ll keep going. “How can we impose gun laws at this point when good people could give up their guns, but criminals will still have guns and the problem will escalate even more?” Well, this is a question that I feel like you hear a lot from the NRA and gun rights folks, that any type of gun safety measure, any type of gun reform will lead to the registration and confiscation of firearms in this country. That’s the slippery slope that Wayne LaPierre popularised and talked about, that Harlan Carter talked about, that any gun law will lead to the confiscation of guns in this country. It’s just not true. It’s just not the case. You need a licence to cut people’s hair in this country. And yet, the NRA has been pushing a law in state after state that they call constitutional carry. It really is permitless carry. It means that you can get a weapon without a licence, without a permit, and without any training. And so if that is what we feel like we want that, to be able to carry a weapon that can be used with deadly force that you should have no training, you should require no licence to carry that, then that’s the way to do that.

But there are regulations that can be put in place that will actually protect those law abiding gun owners, and so many law abiding gun owners know it. That’s why they support those types of reforms and laws. They know that that will protect them. They know that they’re willing to take a class if that’s what it takes, that it’s not simply their God-given right to have a firearm with no training. That having some training, getting a licence helps everybody, it helps them. And so this is not an assault on gun owners. It’s not an assault on the gun. There are so many interviews in the film, so many people in the film who are gun owners who don’t identify as such in the film, but who are gun owners. And so there are people, again, of all political stripes, of all beliefs who are gun owners. And there is nothing wrong with owning a gun. But being a responsible gun owner means understanding what it is to have something that can cause lethal harm in your house on your person to understand what that responsibility means.

• I would want to add too that the force of this question sometimes is, if we start taking people’s guns or if there are fewer guns or it’s harder for people to have them, and this is a very common talking point with the NRA if only the criminals will have guns at that point. What’s amazing to me about that rhetorical point is this idea that we know who the criminals are, right? We’re back to this idea of who we mean. What Judd has described, what we know about the status quo in this country, if we’re worried about a moment where, oh no, the wrong people will have guns, that moment is now. This is the moment we have produced through the approach that the United States has taken with regard to guns, that fear that all of us should have that we might get shot, hurt accidentally, or otherwise, that’s what we live in right now. That’s what the current system has produced. So when we talk about this, oh, this terrible thing that could happen, that’s where we’re living right now. The idea that who a good gun guy is until he becomes the bad guy, right? I mean, at what point does the person who’s the lawful gun owner with 17 weapons shows up and starts shooting in a movie theatre. When has he become a bad guy, right? So we have to think about that. And as Judd said, people who actually know what to do with guns don’t need to have 20 guns. And they certainly don’t need to have and would not want to have a weapon that is capable of hurting themselves, their families, and those around them without knowing how to use it. So why not just say, “If you want to keep your gun, here are the permit requirements. Here are all the training requirements. Here’s how you have to test to make sure that you are still good enough with your gun to not kill somebody else or yourself.” Because after all, we’re not just talking about can you hurt others? You can hurt yourself. And that’s not just in terms of the massive numbers of suicides that we have in this country, but also accidental firings and injuries. So all of us should be invested if we’re starting from the goal of, can we have a safer society? Well, the number one way to get there is to have fewer guns in the hands of fewer people and far more education and training about those and for those people who actually do have them.

• Next question is, if the right to bear arms is written into the Constitution, but overruled and gun control brought in, how long before the whole Constitution is brought down? I think Mary Anne, if you’re okay, I’ll let you take a first stab as the legal scholar.

• Well, we really have to unpack that question, right? So the right to bear arms is in the Constitution. It was not interpreted to mean in an individual right to have firearms in the home until you got to 2008. So for the majority of our time as a country, Second Amendment, right to bear arms meant essentially collective right, right of the militia. So we were actually dealing with a very recent history of this idea that individuals have a constitutional right to have weapons. So that’s the unusual thing that probably needs to be defended rather than the other way around. But if the question is, well, now that’s the law because the Supreme Court has said so and that is how things work for better or for worse. And again, pointing out that those who recognise that when it comes to the Second Amendment and this controversial right, notice how sceptical they tend to be of rights that are interpreted like the right to an abortion, which are also constitutionally protected as of right now, but we need to be consistent about those things. Supreme Court has said something very narrow.

They have not said you have the right to carry a gun in public. They have not said everybody who wants a gun can have one. They have not said all uses of firearms are protected by the Constitution. So we’re living in a world where we have a very narrow ruling so far, that may change this coming term, of what the Second Amendment right means. And as to whether that right could be further narrowed, we’re looking at many states right now who are saying, “Hey, the right to an abortion, we know that’s protected, but we want to get rid of it and we’re going to keep trying every year until we do.” If we’re not asking the question when that happens, hey, what’s happening to our Constitution? Isn’t the whole Constitution going down the drain and we’re only getting upset when it’s something like the Second Amendment, that probably tells us something about how selective we’re being about our attachments to the Constitution. And I would suggest that when we’re being selective about it, then we’re already betraying the Constitution. We can’t pick and choose. It’s not that you get to stand up for certain rights and let the other ones fall by the wayside and claim that we care about constitutional rights. And in situations like this, I always point back to a part of the Constitution, well, two parts of the Constitution that tend to get ignored because we focus so much on the First and Second Amendments, Fourteenth Amendment’s right of equal protection of the laws. That’s one that if we’re worried about there being an assault on our constitutional rights, look at all the ways in which people are having their rights denied or laws are being applied to them unfairly on the basis of their race or on their gender.

That’s something we could maybe get very upset about and ask what even does the Constitution mean if we’re not honouring that? The other part I would point to is the preamble of the Constitution, which commits us to domestic tranquillity and the collective welfare. All of our rights have to be read in the light of those particular commitments. The entire reason to have a constitution is partly this really grand philosophical idea of living in a society, a social contract in which each of us gives up some of our individual natural rights in order to live in a society. Otherwise, we’re basically in a state of nature where we’re shooting people over anything we feel like shooting them over. If we want to live in a society, if we don’t just want to live in a state of nature, all of our rights have to be tempered by consideration of that right, of all people to live peacefully, and our commitments in the Constitution to the collective wellbeing.

• And to that point, Mary Anne, and we play the clip in the film of Justice Antonin Scalia, who in this 2008 Heller decision, which is the decision that you’re speaking of, for those who know, the late Justice Scalia was a very conservative justice, an originalist. And yet, he said, “The Second Amendment, like other amendments, is not without limitations.” That means that there can be gun laws, there can be laws that put limits on firearms. It doesn’t mean that everybody gets a bazooka and there is no regulation because those regulations will be unconstitutional. So I think it’s worth noting that even in that landmark Supreme Court decision that gave people the individual rights and reinterpreted the Second Amendment, even then, Justice Scalia had that opinion. I can go to the next one. How is it that Americans fail to look north of the border to Canada and note how few homicides and mass shootings happen there? Is there not clear evidence from Canada and other countries, the UK that were guns and assault weapons are carefully controlled, the number of shootings is not a major issue.

Why is it that the NRA wields such enormous power when so many ordinary Americans, possibly the majority are appalled by the number of shootings? It’s a great question. It’s a big question. I think a couple of answers I’ll throw out is what Mary Anne said earlier that we talk about in the film this idea, this sort of axiom of politics that a small but vocal minority can rule the day over a large but largely apathetic majority. And that that’s really the story of the NRA. They’ve been able to whip up this small segment of the population to have an outsized influence because they’re the people that show up, they’re the people that vote in primary elections. They’re the people that will show up at state houses and capitals and the capital in D.C. And I think really in gun safety side, it really wasn’t until the 2018 midterms that people said, “Let’s take a page out of that playbook and make gun safety and gun reform our number one voting issue, and come out in the same way that gun rights people have been coming out for decades.” The other thing that this goes to is why America when so many other industrialised nations can handle this and we can’t? And and that was something that I wanted to get at in the film and look at this question from maybe a bit of a different way than that has been looked at in other films on this issue that I’ve seen. And I think part of it is this unique frontier mythology that we hold very dear as Americans. And this idea that we won the West through gun through a good guy with a gun, through John Wayne on a horse, through Ronald Reagan on a horse, and that this is part of sort of our founding mythology. We know now and we’ve seen in recent history that people are starting, people have always interrogated this myth. But more broadly now, people are interrogating these American myths and realising that it’s just that, that this is a myth about how this country was founded.

That in fact it was founded on subjugation and genocide and that the gun was used for not noble means, but really nefarious means. And so there is a disconnect there and there is a strong desire to hold onto this mythology more vigorously when that is challenged. And so I think that’s why, as Mary Anne talks about in the film, when we see incidences like what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, that it’s not a surprise that this is in reaction to a Black Lives Matter protest, because when people feel that their vision of America is threatened, that their understanding, that their framework for what it means to be an American is breaking down, they are driven into the streets and they are driven to defend this idea with sometimes, as we saw in Kenosha, lethal consequences. I don’t know, Mary Anne, if you have anything to add or we’ll go to the next.

• No, I don’t think I can add to that.

• Really, 'cause I paraphrased you. So where is the Supreme Court in all of this? What is the opinion of the court on this amendment? I think we talked a bit about this. I don’t know if you have more or we want to keep going. Okay. I think we talked about that one. Do you think the pressure of young people after Florida will make a difference? The answer is yes. It already has. I mean, as we trace in the film, the midterm elections of 2018 ushered in something like 40 candidates who ran on an explicitly gun safety gun reform platform. State laws across the country began to shift those maps that we see in the middle of the film that are going in favour of things like permitless carry in favour of stand your ground laws. Those start to shift to gun reform and gun safety even in states with Republican governors, so that’s a great sign. But we still, even with the Democratic administration, even though we have a 50-50 split, we’ve yet to see legislation happen, of course, on the federal level. Time is ticking until the midterms. And we know historically, the party in control has often lost control in the midterm elections. So it really takes all of us who care about this issue to, again, be out there in the same way that this small segment on the gun rights side feels that they need to be out there making sure that they are voting and making their passion for this issue known. It has to be an equal thing. That happened after Parkland, but the energy needs to continue.

• I do think we’re already seeing the impact of a lot of what happened after Parkland that it was a little bit of a turning point. And as much as we get turning points in the United States, especially considering that we didn’t get one after Sandy Hook, but it is a bigger fight. It can’t just be that any one group or one situation is going to change it. There really is, it is such a testament to how powerfully the NRA holds our imagination, holds the imagination of state legislatures and the Congress as well. That, again, if we think about how narrowly the Supreme Court up till this point has defined the right to bear arms, there’s nothing to stop states from enacting laws that say, “You cannot have a gun in public, you cannot carry a gun in these places. We are going to close,” Congress can say, “Close the gun loopholes right now.” We can start having states saying, “Look, if you want a gun, not only do you need to have a permit, you have to submit to all this training.”

Nothing is stopping any legislator from doing these things except concern about the political fallout, but there’s nothing constitutionally to stop it and that’s the kind of innovation and activity we need to see if people are going to get ahold of this. And this is one of those uncomfortable moments of looking at, look at the attacks on abortion rights over the last few decades, not to suggest that that is something that those who want more gun safety should necessarily emulate. But think about what it means to really put your legislators under the microscope and say, “If you care about this issue, start legislating,” right? There’s plenty of space to do so legitimately. Don’t touch the core of what the 2008 decision has said, but that’s just the right to have a firearm in your house for self-defense. So there’s all these other things you could get regulating and ensure that other people are having their rights protected. Don’t let the NRA and its propaganda tell you that this is the only way to protect constitutional rights. Point out how when you let people carry openly in public, you are silencing other people, you are chilling their First Amendment rights of expression, you are making everyone less safe. If we don’t have a constitutional right to live peaceably with our neighbours instead of being in fear that they might shoot us at any point, then what’s the point of any constitutional right? Make an affirmative stance if you are a legislator to say, “We are actually going to protect everyone’s rights.” Everyone’s rights means sometimes, we’re going to inhibit the feelings and the fears and the kind of immaturity that a person wants to carry a gun anywhere they want because they’re scared of everything. So we need more rigour and we need more determination on the part of our legislators.

• I know we’re running out of time so I’m just scanning through the questions. I see a couple of questions about alternative organisations for gun owners. Do they exist? Will they exist? It’s a great question because I think gun owners have such an important role to play here. And it’s one of the reasons that we had a lot of gun owners in the film and talked about that in the film. Giffords, which is the organisation that was started by Gabby Giffords, who’s in the film, is starting now a spinoff organisation that is just for gun owners and is offers an alternative to the National Rifle Association. And you’re seeing more of these crop up. Wes Siler who’s in the film is a hunter. And as I as he says, “50% of NRA members still are hunters.” But he, like many hunters, don’t subscribe to the rhetoric of the NRA to the way that they have, to what they have become, this radical lobbying organisation. And so he too is saying, “Let’s form groups of hunters who are enthusiastic about hunting and conservation and guns but are not enthusiastic about lobbying for no gun laws or no gun regulation in this country.” So it’s such an important piece of the puzzle and it’s encouraging that it is happening now. And I hope really for the film that people of all stripes watch it with an open mind and that gun owners watch this film and come away with an and NRA members watch this film and come away and perhaps say, “I no longer want to be an NRA member.” We briefly allude to George H.W. Bush ripping up his NRA membership card because the rhetoric of Wayne LaPierre went too far. And this happens every day that people who have associations with the NRA of what they were a safety organisation belong. They have a real hold on when you take a class, you need to join. When you buy a gun, you get a discount. All of these ways of people just signing up to become a member without thinking about what they’re supporting.

• Thank you, Judd. I think we probably have time for the last question and then to wrap up.

• Sure, I’m just scanning now. I know we’ve gotten to a bunch of them. Mary Anne, if you see one that you’d like to take.

• I think I can maybe combine a few of them. I think part of the question is going to vote, has to do with people being concerned about, how are people going to defend themselves? Why do people want to have these guns? There was a couple of questions about suicide rates, which we didn’t really talk about. The vast majority of gun deaths in our country are suicides. About 60% of all of the deaths from gun violence are suicides, and those are mostly of white men. So when we think about, and I would just want to say here, if you’re interested in the subject, Jonathan Metzl has an extraordinary book called “Dying of Whiteness,” which goes into these questions quite a bit, because one of the mythologies here, one of the pieces of propaganda is that the gun is going to keep you safe. And something we don’t talk nearly enough about is how when the NRA combines self-defense with firearms, among the things that it’s doing is, oh, there’s the book right there, among the things that it’s doing is it’s selling you a very dangerous false idea. Even if we thought the Second Amendment meant you can have a firearm as a kind of God-given right to protect yourself, we’d have to, if we cared about people, talk about how firearms are actually an extraordinarily terrible tool for self-defense.

It is not going to keep you safe. It certainly isn’t going to keep African-American men safe when they can be shot down in the street for having a toy gun or for having a cell phone that looks like a gun to someone. It’s not going to keep them safe. It’s not going to keep domestic violence victims safe when they defend themselves and they go to jail for 20 years, it’s not going to keep a rape victim safe when she is assaulted by someone she knows while they’re out on a date together, which is a much more likely scenario than finding somebody attacking you in the alley. And the rates at which it increases your chances of committing suicide, of having someone hurt you, injure your children, they’re not safe, they’re actually incredibly poor tools for self-defense. So one of the things we could do in this country, I think as a matter of our cultural and legal understandings is support the idea of self-defense, because, of course, that’s an important right, but then separate it from the notion of a firearm because firearms will not keep you safe. They endanger you, they endanger everyone around you. So if what we’re really trying to connect with each other about is our feelings that we have the right to protect ourselves and our families, let’s go with that because that’s very much a defensible position, but it’s one that needs some kind of empirical evidence, some kind of actual knowledge. And once we realise that, we can support organisations that promote self-defense that are not based in weapons. And I think that would be a much larger and more nuanced and much more sophisticated view of collective welfare as well as individual self-defense.

• Yeah, and I’ll just say very quickly, I just see somebody wrote that, “This dialogue is too good to limit it to our select group. Could you not take it to a wider audience via CNN?” I just want to reiterate that actually after tonight’s broadcast at 9:00 PM Eastern Time on CNN, there will be a special edition of Chris Cuomo Prime Time, “Cuomo Prime Time” hosted by Chris Cuomo, where Mary Anne Franks and others will be, from the film, will be in a round table discussion talking about the issues raised in the film. So we’re very happy that a conversation like this will in fact be brought to a broader audience. But I think the bigger point is, let’s all make a commitment to have these types of conversations with our family, our friends, our neighbours, and people who are gun owners, and to continue the conversation. I think that’s the way that we can start to change what’s going on and hopefully get a handle on the gun violence epidemic in this country.

• [Wendy] Well, Mary Anne and Judd, I’m battling a bit with my internet here, so I hope you can, can you hear me?

• Yes.

• We can.

• Okay, well, I would just like to echo those exact words of the last question and I would like to thank you both so much for taking the time to really break down this incredible forum with our Lockdown University audience. It really is truly shocking how much control the NRA has had today. And honestly, it’s films like yours that will hopefully open people’s eyes the reality and help really enact meaningful change. Your thoughtful engagement is so, so very, very important. Thank you again for sharing your expertise with us and we wish you from Lockdown University all the very best for tonight on CNN. Mary Anne, thank you very, very much for your really, very insightful and informative comments. And Judd, thank you to you too and good luck. Really well done.

• Brilliant-

• Thank you so much.

• Brilliant work. Thank you everybody. And to all our participants, thank you for joining us. To Lauren and to Carly, thank you all.

• Thank you.

• Good. Thank you very much.

• Take care.

• Thanks. Bye-Bye.