How the NRA Radicalized America: Ryan Busse
October 13th, 2022
“Democracy cannot exist at the barrel of a gun.”
Ryan Busse is a former firearms executive, Senior Policy Advisor to Giffords, and author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America. We discuss how guns are intricately interwoven through our democratic division and radicalization in our everyday lives and in our politics.
The assault weapons ban helped codify societal norms. In the years after the legislation lapsed, the culture of hatred, division, fear, and conspiracy became widespread. In fact, this culture became useful to the NRA to drive political outcomes. Legislation that re-establishes norms of responsible behavior is critical to controlling radicalization. Busse argues that we can start with outlawing open-carry armed intimidation across the nation.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Ryan Busse
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Ryan Busse Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. For a free trial, go to Shopify.com/hopeful.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:21] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. Guns are a fact of life in America. There are more guns than people in America. Latest estimates put the number of firearms in this country at about 400 million. In 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death in children and young people aged 1 to 19. Guns and gun culture are increasingly showing up in parts of our lives where we didn't see them before. The Supreme Court's decision in the New York gun case Bruen earlier this summer now sees states scrambling to post "gun-free zone" stickers and posters in an attempt to carve out public spaces that will be free from guns. But stickers or not, our schools are not free from guns. Our grocery stores are not free from guns. Our politics is not free from guns. And this week's guest is going to talk about this tension, the tension between guns and democracy. Ryan Busse is the author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America. He's also senior policy advisor to Giffords. Ryan is a former firearms executive who left the industry two years ago, after helping to build one of the world's most iconic gun companies and was nominated multiple times by industry colleagues for the prestigious shooting Industry Person of the Year Award. Ryan, welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.
Ryan Busse: [00:02:15] Yeah, thank you so much, Mila, and I really appreciate your introduction in the lead in. I too believe that guns are intricately interwoven through our democratic division and chasm and radicalization right now. And I think the topic is everywhere in our lives. So I appreciate being with you here today.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:33] Thank you. So I thought we'd start with the fallout from the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, at Robb Elementary School back in May. The horrifying death of 19 children and two adults were just that, right? Horrifying and too familiar. But this time, gun safety legislation actually got passed. Not perfect. Not everything we need, but something. And so what can Uvalde and the new legislation tell us about where we are regarding guns in America?
Ryan Busse: [00:03:05] Yes, I think you're right to point out this sort of illustrative and important nature of that legislation that passed the Senate. It passed with 65 votes. That means 15 Republicans voted for it. And I'm quite sure we couldn't get 65 senators to agree on whether ice cream was good or not. And so I think that the fact that they came together on gun legislation is very illustrative about where we are in the country. There's something boiling up in the populace. There is this, as Steve Schmidt calls it, a vast frustrated majority. I think many people would think that guns are perhaps the last thing that will be tackled because it tends to be the most politically prickly. Nobody wants to touch this thing the last few years. Yet that's the first thing that 65 senators came together on. And so I think on the Republican side of the aisle, there are folks in leadership who understand that many Americans are becoming very frustrated with what I think is now an imbalance between our freedoms and responsibilities. And that legislation will at least take a small step or a few small steps towards re-establishing some sort of responsibility.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:08] Right. Well, we had Ian Bremmer on the show a couple of weeks back and he described America's gun violence problem as sadly, quote, "just how it is in America" and not a big enough problem affecting enough people with power to actually galvanize folks into action. And you're sounded to me, though, as though you might have hope we can get even more done.
Ryan Busse: [00:04:31] To be honest, I alternate between hopefulness and extreme concern. And I think that's sort of where our country, that's where our country is, that we have these weird vacillations. I'm certainly there. I think that Mr. Bremmer is correct. But also a little off base. It doesn't affect enough people, perhaps, but sadly, guns and the authoritarian nature of guns and the sort of power structure that they represent are also very useful to a large part of our political ecosystem. Nothing changes the power equation like guns or a bunch of people with guns or people with open carry. Right. And so I think the reason that this isn't tackled sooner than it is is because guns and the authoritarian nature and power structure that they represent are interwoven through the DNA of the Republican Party. That's what makes it so very difficult. And that's what makes those 15 Republican senators voting 'yes' a hopeful sign. At the same time, I'm also very worried about the trajectory that we have put in place with guns and gun
advertising and the politicization of gun politics. I think we have some ugly days in front of us.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:39] Right. Well, speaking of the interwoven-ness of guns and gun culture, I want to turn to the cultural shift, because I think this is where your book is such an important contribution to the debate. We've witnessed a big shift over the past ten years or so that seems to be in hyperdrive now where the Second Amendment became an extremist article of faith. Right? I'm thinking of elected Representatives' Christmas greetings featuring children wielding weapons of war or armed militias occupying the Michigan State Capitol. Political ads featuring candidates casually emptying high capacity magazines for no apparent reason at all. Where did this bubble up from?
Ryan Busse: [00:06:22] Well, interestingly enough, I think those people are emptying those high capacity magazines for a very good reason. And that is the sort of authoritarian power that is conveyed by gunfire and by use of guns. And where it came from, it really originated in this weird marriage. And I try to describe this process in my book, but it started after Columbine when the NRA decided that they needed political symbols and could use everything, even the most terrible tragedies, including that first really notable school shooting that most of us remember to drive politics of hate and conspiracy and fear. Right? The legislative reaction to Columbine could be used -- and they debated whether to do this or not, and they decided to do it -- could be used to drive ever more hatred and conspiracy of people attacking a culture or the symbols of culture. In this case, it became the AR 15 that, to borrow your phrase, really started to enter the hyperdrive. In about 2007, when Barack Obama started to lead in the polls, you had everything coming together just right. America's first Black president, Harvard law professor, you know, you had the conspiracies of birtherism and everything else floating around that really entered the ethos of the United States, had never purchased more than 7 million guns in a single year before Barack Obama was elected. By the time Barack Obama left office, America was purchasing over 16 million guns a year. So it more than doubled in the eight years during Obama's presidency. And then in that year, when most of us can now remember, sadly, the most sort of hate-filled angsty time of our lives, 2020, America purchased almost 23 million guns in that year. So you see how hatred, conspiracy and fear are interwoven through our politics and how it meshes perfectly with guns in America.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:12] Well, I think what's super important to note here, you know, you're reciting all these numbers is that this is about an industry generating and driving a culture, but it's really about selling more guns, right?
Ryan Busse: [00:08:24] Well, it's both. And that's, that's sort of the point of my book, is that the culture of hatred and division and conspiracy became useful to the NRA to drive political outcomes. Because if you can get people ginned up enough on those components, they can vote in irrational ways or or political entities hope that they can control them. And I think we've seen people vote in very emotional and angry ways, just so happened that those exact things also drive gun sales. The more fearful you are, the more prone to conspiracy you are, the more apt you are to buy into racist fears about BLM or whatever it is, then the more likely you are to buy guns. So this is a unique situation where the same things that drive political outcomes on the radicalized right also drive an industry. Save social media, save like Facebook, which has some of these same components. The worse it gets, the better business gets. I don't know of any other industry like the firearms industry that is almost invested in outcomes that aren't great for the country because they're good for business.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:24] You're highlighting the NRA as front and center in the culture wars with Wayne LaPierre's kind of riffing as unleashing a wave of radicalization, starting, as you said, post Columbine, and then ginned up even more during the Obama years. How did it really start after Columbine? Because that's a really good part in your book, which I think deserves highlighting.
Ryan Busse: [00:09:46] Yeah. So we now know, thanks to enterprising reporters from NPR who uncovered tapes and transcripts of leadership meetings that the NRA held after Columbine, they canceled the main part. For those that don't remember, Columbine happened just about ten days before the scheduled NRA convention, and Columbine happened just a few miles south of Denver. The NRA convention that year was scheduled to happen in Denver. This weird, frightening convergence. The NRA, I think, wisely canceled the largest part of the convention, but they held their business and strategy meetings in the Adams Mark Hotel in downtown Denver that year. And they debated in that meeting whether they could be a part of the solution, whether they could come to the table and talk about legislative fixes. At that point, the main concern was closing the gun show loophole, which contributed to the Columbine shooting. That
was 1999, by the way. It's now 2022. And the gun show loophole is still wide open -- for anybody tracking. And the NRA decided "No. Tell you what, we think that there'll be a reaction here. We can use it to really infuriate and anger our members. They will become even more dedicated to the cause. They will become even more hell no." And from there, the sort of "hell no"-ism of NRA, "hell no" to any sort of talk of responsibility became ingrained in American politics. And I argue in my book that these were the seeds of what we see now in the political right. Almost nothing that we're experiencing now in the political right, I didn't experience ten or 15 years before in the firearms industry. That was the farm team for this stuff. And this "hell no"-ism, which now infects so much of our politics, including like right down to our local school board elections, where we often see this. Bunch of parents get together and they can't have their way 100%, then they're just going to like raise hell until they get it. Like, that started with NRA-ism. I think that you can point to those few days after Columbine as a really pivotal point in our democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:33] Mm hmm. Well, speaking of gun shows and the NRA convention, for those of us who have not been to a gun show or to an NRA convention, can you talk about this slice of America? It's not monolithic. Right. And how has it changed?
Ryan Busse: [00:11:48] I think that political demographers would label it as more monolithic than the NRA wishes it to be, although that is changing now. But for a long time, you know, there was an average NRA member that was somewhere, middle aged, white guy, or white families. That was, that's largely the makeup of the NRA membership. Now, in the past couple of years, certainly since COVID, I don't know if NRA membership has changed much, but gun ownership has changed in that there's now a much broader demographic sort of slice of America that owns guns. Again, because 2020 was so tumultuous for our country, lots of people who heretofore never thought they would purchase a gun became fearful enough to purchase one. And many of those people, they're not right wing extremists. They're not, they're not NRA members. They were fearful of a race war or some sort of civil war where they may need to defend themselves. And it's this ever spiraling the worse things get, the better the gun business gets, sort of nature of things that frightens me. And Kyle Rittenhouse is a perfect example, right? Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, went into this riot, essentially where there were people on the opposite side of the political aisle of him, at
least a couple of them that were armed. There ended up being an armed interaction. He killed two of them. Right? So there you have three more guns that were sold. I think that's a very tragic outcome. I think we should work to diminish those sorts of things. But the truth is, the more of those things that happen, the more guns are sold and the more profit is made. And so if that's the case, then somewhere in the gravity of the firearms business, you almost hope for more terrible outcomes like that because you sell more guns because of it. That frightens me.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:30] Yeah, it's frightening and it's spiraling. And our gun debate is so clearly politically divided now. It's simply polarized. And I think you trace that polarization to several weapons bans that made the NRA lose face, right before Columbine. So the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban, both under Clinton. And then the assault weapons ban passed with NRA's sunset provisions that George W. Bush let lapse. Is that when the political contours of this culture war were set in stone?
Ryan Busse: [00:14:02] I just don't really think there's any debate about that. Many people point to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America after the 1994 assault weapons ban. It was actually a crime bill which contained the assault weapons ban. But Gingrich himself and Bill Clinton himself, after the election the following year, when the House flipped and the Senate flipped, they held press conferences where they said it was the gun issue, it was the assault weapons ban. It was the NRA reaction to this that caused this tumult in our politics. So people point to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, but guns and gun politics were the things he used. Now, they did weave other things into it. Abortion and other culture war things, but guns and the way in which guns were this sort of cultural signal to people. And I think because of the power that they convey, I think it was very central to to our tumult in America.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:52] Mm hmm. So what was the impact specifically of the end of the assault weapons ban, the return of black rifles, especially culturally?
Ryan Busse: [00:15:01] So this is a often errantly reported component of the assault weapons ban. First off, people should understand that the assault weapons ban, which was in effect from September 13, 1994 to September 13, 2004, did not outlaw AR-15s as people think it did. It did not outlaw AR-15s. You could purchase and sell and build as many AR-15s as you wanted to during the ten years of the assault weapons ban.
The assault weapons ban was a feature-laden piece of legislation and essentially said if you have a gun like the AR-15 and then you add these additional features onto it, it becomes an assault weapon. That gun is illegal. But what people think of assault weapons, which is the basic AR-15, they were not illegal. The answer to your question, I think, is that the assault weapons ban, more than making it difficult to purchase those guns, lent a social stigma to our country where it just wasn't cool to be in this sort of tactical culture, to own a AR-15s, to have them be your identity, to have them be the symbol of the political right. Again, you could buy them legally. Companies could have produced them legally. The industry could have produced millions more than they produce right now. There was no legal prohibition to that, and yet the industry did not. And yet consumers did not purchase them and they were not advertised. Why was that? That was because the assault weapons ban, as is the case with so much of our legislation, helped codify societal norms. And to me, it's our norms that have been broken down in politics and in guns, which are probably more frightening and damaging than any extra legal changes that have happened.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:38] Hmm. So if the current administration or going forward, if we could pass something similar, you know, it can't be the same thing obviously. The, you know, the times have changed so much. What should it look like?
Ryan Busse: [00:16:51] I am a proponent of legislation that re-establishes norms of responsible behavior because to me, that that has been our most critical component controlling this sort of radicalization. And we have to get back to that. So I'll give you one that I often espouse that I would like to start with. We need to outlaw across the nation open carry armed intimidation. You mentioned people marching into the Michigan Capitol and people can probably conjure up in their memories these angry bearded men loaded AR-15s on their chest, standing in the Michigan Capitol screaming at lawmakers and security people. They're obviously there with loaded AR-15s to intimidate people. Democracy cannot exist at the barrel of a gun. Try it. It doesn't work. You're not going to make broadly important democratic decisions with a gun to your head. It's not going to happen. And neither can our country exist in this way. We can't have kids who are protesting and whatever there is protesting on the corner, be intimidated by people with guns. It just, that's just not the way democracy is going to function. So I would like to go after the use of guns to intimidate people. So we re-establish some of the social norms
that we just discussed. I think those sorts of de-radicalization laws or legislations would be most helpful at this point.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:07] We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Ryan Busse on growing up with gun culture and then watching as it became a radicalized political wedge for the right, and his fears about political violence as we head toward 2024. But first, can we talk about notifications for a second? Who actually leaves those sounds on anymore? [cashier sound] Well, besides that kind. That's another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run, and grow your business. Shopify has all the sales channels sorted, so your business keeps growing from an in- person POS system to an all in one e-commerce platform, even across social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Whether your thing is vintage tees or recipes for ghee, start selling with Shopify and join the platform simplifying commerce from millions of your favorite businesses worldwide. Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere. You'll create an online store in your vibe. Discover your new customers and grow the following that keeps them coming back. And thanks to 24/7 support and free libraries full of educational content, Shopify got you every step of the way. It's how every minute new sellers around the world make their first sale with Shopify. And you will too. When you're ready to launch your thing into the spotlight, do it with Shopify, the Commerce platform backing millions of businesses down the street and around the globe. This is possibility powered by Shopify. Shopify makes selling simple so you can put yourself and your ideas out there. Whether your thing is making ebooks or earrings, Shopify makes your success possible. Making your idea real opens endless possibilities. I love how Shopify makes it easy for anyone to successfully run your own business. It's never been easier to start and grow a business, thanks to Shopify. Go on, try Shopify for free and start selling anywhere. Sign up for a free trial at Shopify.com/Hopeful. Go to Shopify.com/Hopeful to start selling online today. Shopify.com/Hopeful.
Maya Shankar: [00:20:28] Hey, I'm Maya Shankar, host of A Slight Change of Plans, which Apple chose as the best show of the year. The podcast combines science with storytelling to help us better understand how we can navigate change. I recently sat down with the civil rights icon Ruby Bridges, who at age six became one of the first students to desegregate an all white elementary school. It would take Ruby years to understand how her experience changed the course of civil rights. In our conversation,
she reflects on the protective power of childhood innocence and how, as an adult, she started to reckon with what she'd endured.
Ruby Bridges: [00:21:01] I wasn't aware that it was so important that it changed the face of education and that people around the country were familiar with it. I did not realize that my story was a part of a much bigger family. The civil rights family; the civil rights movement.
Maya Shankar: [00:21:21] Find the episode and more from a Slight Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:28] And now let's return to my conversation with Ryan Busse. I'd like to talk a little bit more about your journey and your own fear and aggrievement in the early days and how that informs your understanding of NRA's radicalization. When you wrote about the Smith and Wesson boycott, I thought that was really interesting and how you felt in the end, maybe used and maybe that's how people continue to feel about gun culture as an everyday gun owner.
Ryan Busse: [00:22:01] I think it's very important you must first understand that there are large numbers of people who view guns as symbolic of their culture. And so when gun legislation is discussed or we have talks of bans or all of the sorts of things that we're going through as a country right now, remember that many people in the country have been told that that is not just a discussion about like a tool or a spoon or a hammer or a rake or a car. These guns, these things, are symbolic of people's cultures. I grew up in a culture like that. I grew up where many of the best parts of my life as a kid involve guns because we didn't have a lot of time for fun. I grew up on a ranch, and when we did have time for fun, it was often shooting with my brother, hunting with my friends or my father or my grandfather. And so throughout my childhood, the best parts of my culture came to be associated with guns. And then guns became symbolic of our culture. And I recognized the power of this when I got into the industry after college. And Smith and Wesson did a backdoor deal with the Clinton administration, and I instantly rushed to sort of defend my culture. And I, you know, the analogy I use is very much like a young 17, 18 year old kid when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Right. You just rushed to sign up for war. You didn't think about it. Your culture, your country were being attacked. You didn't really have time to consider the rights and the wrongs and the intricacies of it.
You just knew that this thing that was important to you as a kid and your family and the places where you grew up, you must defend it. So I think I have a first hand knowledge and hopefully, you know, an open minded kind of knowledge about the ways in which culture can be, or threats on culture, can be created and then manipulated to make people act in very aggressive and what looked like irrational ways. I certainly experienced that.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:51] Mm hmm. Well, in your book, you say you thoughtlessly donated. I'm quoting you directly here, your "personal power and boyish dreams to the NRA," describing yourself and most others in the gun history, just as rag tag gun enthusiasts who are unwittingly perhaps helping the NRA. But can you tell us about your turning point that you experienced in 2004 with Kyle Weaver? Who was Kyle and where were you?
Ryan Busse: [00:24:19] Yeah. So Kyle was the number two in command at the NRA. He ran the field programs and I took him to what has become my sacred place and sort of my turning point. It's a, it's a wild place in Montana, named the Badger Two Medicine. It's where the creation myth of the Blackfeet Indian tribe originates. It has become very sacred to me, as well. I took Kyle there and we were hiking, and at the time NRA supported politicians and the NRA were supporting people and policies that would have industrialized the place with regards to oil and gas and energy development. And I found that just incredibly egregiously irresponsible. And so when I brought him there, I was trying to make a case for why the NRA should change its policy, should not support politicians that were preparing to do this. And he explained to me that for the NRA, it was bigger than these places. And so when I gave a speech at the National Press Club decrying the Bush administration over there and this was, again, remember, an election year. George Bush was running for re-election, and here I was from this conservative industry who was supposed to always support Republicans. I was very critical of the Republican administration. I gave that National Press Club speech and the industry came after me, I guess, to use a phrase, with barrels ablazing. Right. They tried to get me fired. They had me trolled. I was never again trusted. And so then I sort of had this epiphany like, "wait a second, you people say you're for this culture. You say you're for hunters, but you're not really. This is just a political power game. You'll sacrifice anything, including these most wild, iconic places." And the scales kind of fell from my eyes. And I realized "just a second, I've been hoodwinked all along. This is not about
any value system. They've told me it is. This is about power and money." And I guess to put it in simple terms, it pissed me off and I never stopped fighting against that again. For the remaining 16 and a half years I was in the industry.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:14] Yeah, I mean, you were in the industry for a long time afterwards. You know, from everything that you've written in your book, you really, you really applied yourself to make sure that people hewed to the old norms that were fast disappearing. But it was really a losing battle until you had, you know, no place to go, but to go.
Ryan Busse: [00:26:34] Yeah, I'm stubborn. I believed that I had every right to fight for responsible gun ownership. Sort of the culture that I had grown up in, the culture that was represented by my father and my friends and so many people that I still know now. And frankly, by my own sons, I didn't believe that I had to give in to this dangerous tactical sort of radicalized political culture that has overtaken the firearms industry now. Early on, I thought I could argue and fight and more people would join me. But the truth is, as you just enumerated, it became too big for me. I became the only voice. The industry was exceptionally, exceptionally good at trolling and weeding and persecuting and putting any naysayers out of the industry or changing their minds. They all became true believers. If this sounds a lot like modern politics on the right side of our country, it's because it's exactly what it is, right? There's Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. Everybody else has been scared into silence, pretty much. And they no longer have their jobs, or they neither one of them will, here pretty soon. And that sort of marginalization was sort of grown and fertilized and then handed off by the firearms industry. I experienced it firsthand.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:42] Right. Yeah. It's the blueprint for today's right wing politics. Essentially, the radicalization that you've just described has profound implications for our democracy. You talked about this a little bit earlier. We are starting to see those implications in terms of political violence or the threat of violence. What worries you about the health of our democracy when gun culture has shifted in the ways you've described?
Ryan Busse: [00:28:07] I'm very worried now. These aren't the majority of gun owners, but there is a vocal subset of gun owners who have been marketed to by the firearms
industry. And I'm fearful actually really believe that the reason they have purchased their guns and are ready to use their guns is so that they can use them against fellow citizens and representatives of our government when the time comes, when they deem that there is something that has happened that is no longer sustainable. In other words, when the time for civil war comes, they are ready for that civil war. And not only are they ready, they believe it is their patriotic duty to be ready and to use the guns to kill people. And this is not something they've just made up. The firearms industry has tapped into this almost religious, cultish, interpretation of the Second Amendment and has told these people that they must buy the guns and they must be ready and they must have their high cap mags ready to go and they must march down. And, you know, we saw flashes of this with the resistance to Black Lives Matter and Antifa and our 2020, we saw flashes of it January 6th. There was a couple types of flags. On January 6th, there was Trump and political flags. That was one type. And then there were come and take our AR-15 flags, lots of them. There weren't barbecue grill flags, there weren't Nike shoe flags, there weren't Chevy truck flags. They were "come and take our AR-15 flags." Why? Because guns, owning them and using them, is symbolic and critical to the political right in America. And I think here in the next couple of years, certainly leading into 2024, we're going to figure out how serious this is. And I'm, I'm pretty worried about how seriously these people take it.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:48] Mm hmm. Well, exactly as you said, guns give these folks who are, to be clear, a minority, an outsized voice. I listened to you on Chris Hayes' podcast, and Chris described the Second Amendment swallowing the First. These gun toting, very vocal groups have a real chilling effect on free speech and exercising their own, of course, and swallowing other people's.
Ryan Busse: [00:30:11] Yeah. So the best analogy I use and I think people really grasp this if you want to understand what gun radicalization is and can do to our politics and to our democracy, I want you to think about being at a dinner party with nine of your friends where you're waiting on the 10th friend and you have this sort of understood civility at your dinner parties. Right? You can have lots of wine and you have political discussions. You may even have arguments, maybe even loud arguments, but nobody jumps over the table and stabs anybody with a knife. And, you know, because there's a certain understood civility about the way decent people act at dinner, even if it's spirited. And then the 10th person shows up and that person has an AR-15 strapped to their
chest with a 30 round magazine and finger near the trigger. And they sat down at the table and everything stops, right? The only opinion that matters now is that person's with the guns. They supersede all of your civility, all of your rules, all of your conversations, all of your arguments. None of them matter anymore. Only they matter. And I think this is exactly what armed extremists are trying to do to our democracy when they show up at the Michigan Capitol or on January 6th or across our country. The Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Boys, I could go on and on. Here they are trying to usurp all of the understood rules of civility of our democracy. Elections don't matter, persuasion doesn't matter, lobbying doesn't matter. Understanding the issues doesn't matter. You just show up and your opinion is the only one that matters. That's what armed extremism. That's why it's so central to authoritarian governments and movements across the country. That's why it was so central to fascism and that's why it is so embraced and interwoven in the GOP right now, because it can just usurp all of the hard work of democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:50] Yes. So this may be an unfair question. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but having been in the middle of this ten, 15 years ago, what should we or could we have done then?
Ryan Busse: [00:32:02] We have to understand, in any sort of complex democracy, the magic happens in the gray areas and reasonable, responsible gun owners ten or 15 years ago bought into the fallacy developed in these statements of conspiracy that anybody on the Left just wanted to take everybody's guns away. And so it became this all or nothing thing. And far too many centrist gun owners bought into that and voted like they did. And it's damaging our democracy. Now, lots of those centrist gun owners now are reaching out to me saying, "okay, it's gone too far." They're worried about our democracy coming apart. But to your to your question, what we should have done is understood then there always has to be a balance of responsibility and freedom. You can't have these exceedingly powerful freedoms and have them not be balanced by responsibility. So to say no, no, no, no to every bit of legislation, those legislations are essentially codifying responsibilities in a society. They say, "fine, you can own a gun, but you have to do a background check. Yes, you can own a gun, but not if you're a felon. Yes, you can own a gun, but not if you're an 18-year old that wants to go buy AR- 15s, the day after you turn 18. And you live in Uvalde, Texas," right? You have, it's not outlawing guns. It's just instituting responsibility. What we should have done as a
society ten or 15 years ago is operate in that gray space. And instead we let the NRA and the firearms industry force us into the blacks and white spaces. And we're living with the repercussions now.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:27] Mm hmm. Well, I like the way you put that. That we're codifying responsibility. So that's a question for now. What should we be doing now? This feels utterly entrenched. But you say there are ways of reaching some of those on the, quote "other side."
Ryan Busse: [00:33:43] Yeah. So we probably haven't had this this phrase or topic much on your podcast. I've listened to several. I haven't heard it. I'm an elk hunter and there's a saying in elk hunting that you hunt elk where they are, not where you wish for them to be. And I think what the silver lining, if there is any, to this dangerous radicalized situation that we're in, there's so many centrist people and many of them gun owners are now very worried about guns and gun politics being the thing that undoes our democracy. In other words, the reason I say elk, where they are, not where you want them to be. I think many progressive advocates wanted these gun owners to be energized after Sandy Hook, after Las Vegas, after Sutherland Springs. I could go on with all these horrific mass shootings. After all the horrific violence that goes on in our inner cities in Chicago and New Orleans and everywhere else. They weren't. And that can tend to frustrate many progressive activists. Like, I get it. But the truth is, many of them are energized and worried about guns in our democracy. So I say meet them there. Meet these people there. If that's what they're worried about, then let's come together to save the democracy. The spillover effects will be that we lessen the incidents of Uvalde and Highland Park and Buffalo. And I could, I could back up on down the line if it, if it is saving our democracy from guns and gun radicalization that brings people together. I mean, perhaps we let it get too far down the line. I don't think there's a lot of doubt about that. But let's come together and do it now.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:13] Yeah. Hear hear. So I feel like I need to ask you this question because one of the incredibly frustrating things about legislative efforts to tackle gun violence in the U.S. has been this kind of one step forward and two steps back cadence. We mentioned earlier the sunset clauses on the assault weapons ban. How and why do we allow sunsetting on something like that? Like, how does it work?
Ryan Busse: [00:35:39] Well, that was a political negotiation to get enough Republicans to vote for that bill in 1994. That was a last gasp Bush administration thing. They added that sunset provision so they could get just enough Republicans to vote for it, for it to pass in 1994. That's why it happened. And a very interesting thing about that legislation that most people do not understand or remember. The reason that bill passed was because Ronald Reagan himself, the Gipper, the hero of the conservative movement, personally lobbied and sent a letter to every member of Congress begging them to pass that legislation. Were it not for that and the sunset provision, it never would have happened in the first place. So we had that sunset provision because just like we discussed, the magic of a democracy happens in sort of the inglorious gray spaces of policymaking. It wasn't perfect. And that sort of leads me to going forward and where we are, we should stop kidding ourselves that we're going to fix this issue, that we're going to solve gun violence. We're not going to. If we're smart, if we're dedicated to the country, we're going to institute policies and decisions that make things marginally better, instead of making things marginally worse. But we shouldn't set ourselves up for failure by saying, "Gosh, next week I hope we come up with a policy that's going to fix this." That's silly talk because nothing in a democracy is ever really fixed. We don't fix poverty. We try to make it better. We don't fix cigarette smoking. We try to make a little better. Think about that. 1987 was the first tobacco legislation. It outlawed smoking on flights of 2 hours or less. If it was an hour and 59 minutes, you couldn't smoke. If it was 2 hours, you could. On a plane! Now it's just not really that cool to smoke anywhere. You don't go into a bar, a plane, an airport. It doesn't happen anymore. So 1987 to now, we didn't outlaw it. We didn't fix it. We didn't make lung cancer go away. We changed the way in which our society views smoking. And by doing that, we made things marginally better. But you still have the freedom to go buy 100 cartons of cigarettes tomorrow if you want. I think looking at that sort of example is a way we can look at guns in our society. We're going to have the freedom to do it. There's going to be some bad outcomes. We can start making it better.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:50] Mm hmm. That's a great analogy. So what are two things everyday people can do to move the needle on this cultural war around guns to make AR-15s a little bit more like cigarettes, you know.
Ryan Busse: [00:38:05] Most people in their circles, not everybody, but most peoples in their circles of influence or their family knows of people that are radicalized or speak in
radicalized ways or threatened radicalized things to do with guns. They have bumper stickers on their cars or they go to certain rallies or they speak at Thanksgiving dinner in ways that you think are dangerous. But because their family members or friend members just sort of look away like, you know, the term I use is like the pejorative, like crazy Uncle Bob. "Oh, I mean, he's not really going to go kill Joe Biden. He just says he is." Like, no. I mean, with all due respect, decent, responsible people have to stand up and stop that shit. I get that most normal people don't like to confront other people. They don't like to be in loud arguments. They'd rather not talk about guns. But we must do it. We have to stand up and push back. We have to reestablish the norms, just like we did with cigarettes. I mean, I'm sure people can remember back 20 years ago, like, "oh OK, you know, Uncle Bob, he just wants to smoke out there. Just let him. He's only here for a day." But now you don't do that, right? You stand up like, "Come on, Bob, you can't smoke in here." So you see how you can influence people personally in your social circle. The other one, I think, is we have to stand up and demand that the definitions of legislation are not set by the other side. Right. It's not anti-gun to be in favor of background checks. We have to just stop allowing that to be said. In fact, it's pro-gun. If you want to preserve your freedoms, you will be in favor of making sure that responsibility is inserted and everything. So those are pretty easy things because those are things that every single citizen can do. It's about the way we talk and interact with our social circle. And I really do believe from that sort of cultural influence flow all of our other policies and politics.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:49] Yeah, I agree. I think everybody could do it and I hope it really does change the way we think about gun culture in our country. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Ryan Busse: [00:40:02] Well, the thing that makes me hopeful is when I released my book, my family and I were very worried. Given what we know about threats of violence and what might happen to us, we were worried about our personal safety. We were worried about our digital safety, our social media, everything. I expected to be trolled. The ratio of trolls to support to be like 50 to 1, 50 trolls to one supportive message or interaction. But the truth is, it's been almost exactly the opposite. And that's been very, very heartening to me. And it's not just progressive anti gun activists who have reached out. Of course, there has been some of that, but largely and the most touching have been a ranch family from West Texas who says they've been NRA members forever
and they can't take it anymore in our country is not going to exist if they don't stand up and they're done. And thank you for writing the book. And these are long like I know what it takes to send a message to somebody like even like, thank you. That's not even that easy. But I get these 300, 400, 1000 word messages from people with their family history and why it's so important and how they're worried and how their dad had guns. And, you know, just on and on and on. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. That tells me that there is this vast frustrated majority of people who really do want to do the right thing and who just need a voice of leadership to help them. They don't take to the loud political bashing and fighting and gnashing of teeth that seems to be in vogue in this country now. But they really do want to do the right thing. And so I'm heartened by that.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:31] That is indeed hopeful. And thank you for sharing that. And thank you for your beautiful book.
Ryan Busse: [00:41:36] Thank you. Very kind of you to say that.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:38] Thanks again for being on Future Hindsight. Ryan Busse is the author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America. He's also senior policy advisor to Giffords.
Ryan Busse: [00:41:50] Thank you so much, Mila. It's a very honor to be on here.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:58] Next week on future Hindsight, we're talking to Orly Lobel about equality and the algorithm. She's the Warren Distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego, and her latest book is The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future. That's next time on Future Hindsight.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:20] Have you checked us out on Instagram yet? We've got a bunch more tips to help you build your Civic Action toolkit. Follow us on Instagram at @futurehindsightpod to get special updates, episode clips, and everything in between. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sarah Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:42:47] This podcast is part of the democracy group.