Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy is a coalition of stakeholders who represent many perspectives on firearms in America—gun owners, gun rights and Second Amendment activists, advocates for gun regulations, firearm dealers, firearm instructors, legislators; the list goes on. The goal of this coalition? To create a sustainable, broadly supported policy roadmap that improves gun violence prevention while protecting constitutional rights. On this episode of Policy Outsider, we explore the work of the group with Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium scholars Michael Siegel, the group’s facilitator, and David Yamane, a member of the coalition.
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Joel Tirado 00:02
Welcome to Policy Outsider presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. I’m Joel Tirado. On this episode, we showcase a project that is an antidote to our polarized world. Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy is a coalition of stakeholders who represent many perspectives on firearms in America—gun owners, gun rights and Second Amendment activists, advocates for gun regulations, firearm dealers, firearm instructors, legislators; the list goes on. The goal of this coalition? To create a sustainable, broadly supported policy roadmap that improves gun violence prevention while protecting constitutional rights. Our guests are Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium members Michael Siegel, a professor at Tufts University and project lead on Bridging the Divide, and David Yamane, a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University and a member of the coalition. The discussion is facilitated by Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium Executive Director Jaclyn Schildkraut. That conversation is up next.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 01:25
David Yamane and Mike Siegel. Thank you both so much for joining us today.
David Yamane 01:30
Thanks. Great to be here. Thanks
Michael Siegel 01:31
for having us.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 01:32
So, want to talk to you guys about an initiative that you’ve been working on called Bridging the Divide. Can you tell us a little bit about the project and what the impetus for it was, the
Michael Siegel 01:42
project was initially an idea that I had. It was a hypothesis, actually, and the idea came from it, came a lot from the work that Dr. Yamane has done on gun culture, and one of the things that I learned from from reading his work is that there is, there are a lot of aspects of gun culture outside of what we typically hear, you know, we typically hear about shootings and gun violence, but there’s a whole world of gun culture that encompasses many other, you know, lawful and safe activities, and it started to get me thinking about whether or not we’re missing something in, in public health, and specifically in gun violence prevention, and that is having gun owners at the table and considering gun culture in our formation of public policy, and that’s really what sparked the idea of, you know, can we can we bring gun owners to the table, can we get their expertise, and you know, that’s the other thing, is I realized I don’t have a lot of expertise on guns, people in public health tend not to, to really know a lot about guns, and so you know, I realized that, that we can probably make a better policy if we have gun owners at the table. So that was, that was really the impetus, and again, a lot of it was based on on on David’s work studying gun culture.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 03:19
David, you have done a lot of that work, and you’ve done a lot of work around gun owners. Why do you think it’s so important to bring these folks to the table?
David Yamane 03:27
Yeah, I think that it’s important because this is the kinds of policies that are often proposed are things that really do directly impact gun owners more than people who don’t own guns. You know, it’s easy for me to propose regulations on things that don’t affect my daily life, right? I could impose lots of regulations on marijuana use, for example, like that wouldn’t affect my daily life at all. So, you know, I think that people who own guns, whose lives are impacted by the regulations that we’re seeking to impose. I think they should have a voice, and they may see things in ways that are different than people, even who spend their entire lives analyzing certain policies or processes.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 04:16
Has the research historically sort of separated these groups, which creates the divide that you guys are now trying to bridge, or you know, you’re saying that gun owners’ voices have been left out of the conversation. Have non-gun owners’ voices been more prominent of a part?
David Yamane 04:33
I mean, I really think that the.. sorry, Mike, I’m going to just jump in.. that I really think that there.. there are these two different worlds of scholarship that you know, we most of the research that’s been done around guns focus on public health, criminology, and epidemiology, and there really is very little scholarship that directly looks at gun owners who are not immediately involved in sort of criminal or harmful. Activity now, this this has changed a lot. When I started in 2012 researching gun culture, you know, I basically argued that there is no sociology of guns today. There’s a lot more, which is great. I think a lot of people, like Mike, started surveying gun owners to figure out, you know, what do you do, why do you own guns, how do you own them, how to use them, and those kinds of things, so I think the field has come a long way. I couldn’t really make the same argument today that I could 13 years ago, or 14 years ago, which is awesome, but I think when it comes to taking, going, moving from research into policy, then I think we, we see more, more of that gap again, with, with not just I think gun owners, but I think what Mike did in this group was he took people who were, I would say, Second Amendment advocates, right? So it’s one thing to say, you know, I own guns, but, but these people, you know, some of the people on this panel were truly committed to protecting Second Amendment rights, not just being a generic gun owner.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 06:05
So, Mike, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, the convening of this group, what your goals were, and how you worked to achieve those goals?
Michael Siegel 06:13
Yeah, so, so you know, one of the things that troubled me in, you know, doing research on on gun policy was that it was presented to me as this intractable divide between these two sides, these two camps, and when I looked at the public opinion data, it just didn’t match that that rhetoric. The public opinion data show that there’s actually not that great a divide, there’s a lot of common ground between the two sides, and when it comes to actual policy, there aren’t tremendous differences. The differences are largely in ideology and in identity, and there’s a huge identity divide. And so I was kind of struck by some of Ezra Klein’s writing in his book, Why We’re Polarized, and his hypothesis is that these divides are largely due to identity differences, that there’s an in-group and an out-group, and each group is kind of in these in its own echo chamber, but when it actually comes down to concrete policy, the divides kind of dissipate to some extent, and so the hypothesis between for this project was, can we demonstrate this? This was a proof of concept to see, is that is that concept true? Can we find common ground between gun owners and non-gunners, and specifically, if we focus on policy rather than, you know, talking about identity or just talking about the ideological differences that we have in our philosophies about guns, what if we just focus on policy and on the basic principles that we agree with? And right from the start, in my research, I found that the one thing that everybody agrees on is that people who are a danger to themselves or others should not have guns. There’s, there’s no one I could find, even the most staunch Second Amendment, you know, defenders. No one would say that, you know, they think that people who are dangerous should, you know, should have free access and be able to walk around with guns. There’s some limits, and so based on that principle, we thought that we could build a policy that was both effective and that would protect gun rights. We didn’t see this as an either or, and so this, this was really a proof of concept to see if you actually bring people together and you do it in a certain way, which is having a facilitated deliberative dialog, can it work
Jaclyn Schildkraut 08:45
very interesting. So, what were some points that the two – I don’t want to call them the two sides, right, because that puts them back on a divide, but the gun owners and the non-gun owners, or the gun rights supporters versus the gun control supporters, however you classify them, what were the points that they really agreed on, besides, you know, keeping hands out of those who were going to harm others, and where this was there anything that was really a point of divide where they just didn’t come to consensus on.
Michael Siegel 09:11
Well, I’ll, I’ll give you a couple of examples, and then I’ll let David, you know, David was actually on the panel, so he was a little closer to where the disagreements are, but I think that the, you know, there were a couple things that were pretty much in uniform agreement. Number one, everyone wanted to do something about gun violence. Nobody wanted to see, likes to see the problem of gun violence. Everyone is torn and shaken by, you know, the mass shootings and by the everyday gun violence. So everybody wanted to do something about the problem, number two, everyone agreed that that people shoot who are at high risk, you know, especially because of previous criminal convictions for violence, there should be limitations on on gun possession, and so based on those principles, we were able to logically build a set of power. Policy starting out with what should the prohibitors be for gun possession, since we all agree there should be some prohibitors. So, let’s talk about that. Then, how do we do background checks? How do we.. there needs to be some way of checking to see if someone has those prohibitors or not. So, building out some sort of background check system, and then third, having a way to intervene, if somebody maybe they were approved and they were safe, but now they become unsafe, they become unstable, they become suicidal, having a way to intervene in that situation, that was the backbone of the policy, and then from there we went into some other areas, like gun dealer practices, safe storage, and safe, safe staging education, and then community violence intervention programs. There was wide agreement on, on really, you know, in each of the areas. There was wide agreement on the general principles. There were the disagreements were really on the details, and I think that was the thing that was so striking to me was the care and consideration that the panel gave to these, these real details, that was where the differences were, and that, you know, that’s accords with the survey research that we did, where we find that, you know you can ask a gun owner, do they support background checks, and you can get anywhere from 20% support to 80% support, depending on how you ask the question and what’s included in the, in that, that background check. So, my impression, and David can, can, can comment on this, but my impression was that where the differences arose were not really principal, but when we really dug into the details,
David Yamane 11:45
yeah, I agree 100% You know, this is one of the, again, challenges of moving from x percent of people support y policy to doing an actual policy, is that I mean, I sat on this panel for a year. I can’t even say that I’m an expert in any of these things that we talked about, much less if someone just calls me up on the phone and asks me, you know, should there be universal background checks, and I say yes. I don’t even know what that means in practice. So, it does, you know, the devil is in the details, and we spent a lot of time, we spent probably a couple months just getting to know each other and learning to trust each other, and then when we started moving forward into the policy, I don’t know what Mike expected in terms of timelines, but we, you know, have a lot of subgroup meetings, kind of committee meetings to work out details, those were brought back to the big group, and we had two face-to-face meetings, so this, you know, none of this policy came together quickly or easily, and a lot of it was, you know, whether you want to call it horse trading, of, you know, if we do an extreme risk protection order, then we want these sorts of protections, but also, you know, I think some things in the, in the ERPO, which everybody’s doing urpos now, right? But the thing, there’s some things in this particular ERPO which are truly unique, which are like, hey, if someone is seen to be a threat to themselves or others, maybe we should figure out some way to get them some kind of mental health support, and not just say, hey, we’ll take the guns now and check back with you later, and I think that’s something that I haven’t seen come out of, and I’m not expert in her post, but I haven’t seen that in many proposals, but I think that was something, as you have, you know, people who are gun owners are committed to Second Amendment rights, saying, hey, if you’re going to take the guns away. Let’s really think about what that looks like in practice, and even down to the details of, you know, if you have, if you’re going to take the guns in 48 hours, then when the ERPO expires, then the person should get their guns back in 48 hours. Some, you know, these kind of parallels. So this policy is very long in it, but it’s loaded with sort of details like that, which on the surface it’s like, oh yeah, Who hasn’t seen background checks and ERPO proposals before? But this is loaded with lots of different nuances that really I think came about only because of the diversity of the people who are at the table.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 14:19
You guys are both separately mentioned background checks, and so you know one of the things that I’m a little bit curious of, and I don’t know if this came up in the conversation, is we know from the public or public opinion literature that there has been very high levels of support for universal background checks, whatever that may mean, you know, across so many demographic stratifiers like gender, race, gun ownership status, NRA status. Why are we seeing still such a stalemate when we have so much public support? Did the committee tackle that at all?
Michael Siegel 14:55
Yeah, and that was something that came out in the formative research, and basically what. We found was that if the devil’s in the details, so most gun owners, if you just say, do you support universal background checks, the general concept, you know that’s right, but as David said, you know what is a universal background check, what does that actually mean in practice, and so what we found is that some of the details behind it are really what gun owners are concerned about, so for example, when you do a universal background check, do you create a registry of gun owners? Do you record, you know, the make, model, serial number of their guns, and all you know personal identifying information? How long do you keep those records? Another important issue is, do you have to go to a, to a dealer, to a licensed federal dealer? If you live in a rural area, you know, say four hours away from a big city, there may not be a licensed dealer, and so to have to go, you know, drive four hours to a dealer is something that really interferes with, you know, people’s ability, and beyond that, a lot of gun owners may not comply, you know. If you’re a private seller and you know you’re four hours away, there’s going to be a lot of noncompliance, simply because it’s not, it’s not accessible. So those are the kinds of things, and I think the biggest thing actually with background checks is, does this mean that if my friend comes over or my brother comes over to go hunting. I have to do a background check on him. I can’t just say, okay, well, let’s, you know, here’s my gut. You can use this gun to go hunting. That is a big concern of gun owners, because they, they don’t want to be considered felons and have a permanent, you know, potentially permanent mark on their, on their lives as felons, simply for, you know, wanting to go hunting with somebody, so, so those are the kind of details that our panel really thoughtfully examined, and in fact came up with a very unique idea, which I’ve never seen before, which is the idea of an automated anonymous background background check system, which is an instantaneous check, so that, and so that private sellers have access to a database, a state database that will give them an immediate green light or red light as to whether a person is eligible for gun purchase or not. That’s not something I’ve seen before, but it’s something that will greatly enhance people’s ability to comply with the law, because you know you don’t have to go to a, to a dealer, it gives you a mechanism to conduct these background checks that doesn’t exist anywhere right now.
David Yamane 17:31
Yeah, can I just add, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting, because currently, if you want to run a background check, you have to go to an FFL, and it almost seems like sometimes people want these things to be done at a business as if that makes it somehow safer, but from the gun owner perspective, and I have privately sold a firearm before, legally, in the state of North Carolina, I just want to know that the person I’m transferring the firearm to is not a prohibited person, which is all going to an FFL does for me, and so if we could make that much easier to do, as Mike was explaining the proposal, then I think you get a lot of gun owners on board with that, and even some two A advocates, some to A advocates are going to be like, there shouldn’t even be background checks, right, so we have to kind of take those folks off the table, but if there’s there’s a system other than, for example, you know, a lot of people I know will just take a driver’s license and someone’s concealed carry permit as evidence that they’re not a prohibited person, but if we could do instant background checks, perhaps using the blockchain on our phones, you know, so the person is their identity is protected beyond just seeing if they’re in the system. I think you know that’s ideal, as well as, you know, being able to transfer firearms to people who are known to us, you know, family members, close friends, members of our gun club, and that sort of thing. So, you know, it’s.. I know a lot of times the policies seem designed to create friction, and you know, these, I think, from the gun owner perspective, these can also be used to reduce friction where we don’t want it.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 19:13
So, you guys both also kind of mentioned this agreement between the camps, if you will, about keeping guns out of the hands of prohibited persons, and obviously we know that the legal landscape and the policy landscape of firearm legislation has changed drastically since Bruin. Right, we just saw the Supreme Court weigh in on the Rahimi case involving domestic abusers. What is the sense about how this, this new legal landscape that we find ourselves in, in this new policy space we find ourselves in? How is that going to impact the ideas of this group and trying to bridge this divide further?
Michael Siegel 19:56
One of the things that we did, um. In the charge of the panel was, we considered whether these policies would stand up under Bruen. That was one of the considerations. We did not see any point in just recommending a bunch of policies that are going to be overturned, so we were very specifically cognizant of the Bruen decision, and the policies that are in our proposal are policies that have largely been either already upheld by this by the Supreme Court or that are likely to be held under under Bruin scrutiny, hold up under under Bruin scrutiny, and the things we avoided were things that I think may very well be overturned eventually, if not very soon, by Bruin. So, for example, I think one of the greatest examples is taking guns away from people who commit felonies that are not violent, that have no violent aspects to them. It’s very likely that that’s going to be overturned, there’s already a couple circuits that have expressed skepticism about that. It’s easy to see the Supreme Court could easily decide that that’s just, you know, that there’s no, there’s no precedent for that, no historical precedent for taking guns away from people who are not dangerous in terms of violence and the use of the firearms, so in our proposal we actually emphasize, not, you know, we didn’t codify that into state law, but instead we extended this prohibition to violent misdemeanors, which, you know, from an evidence-based perspective, there’s really no, no, there’s a lot of evidence that people who are at high risk for violence because of a violent conviction, conviction that it doesn’t matter what determines their risk for future violence, is not whether it was, you know, prosecuted as a misdemeanor or as a felony, but the fact that they are, that they were convicted of a serious violent crime, so we kind of had a trade off where we include violent misdemeanors as prohibitors, but we don’t include nonviolent felonies, so that’s an example of a provision that we think number one makes the law stronger because it’s much more evidence based, but number two really has a much greater chance of upholding scrutiny under Bruin,
Jaclyn Schildkraut 22:23
so you guys have invested a lot of time into this formative research, both Mike from the research side and David from a panelist side. What’s next with this project? Where do you go from here?
Michael Siegel 22:36
So we are, you know, at this point we developed a detailed 67 page policy, as David mentioned, it’s incredibly detailed. It’s this is not just, you know, some vague recommendations for what what we should do. This is the actual policy that could be introduced as legislation. And so what we’re looking to do is to take this to the states and and to go into states and say, look, this panel, you know, of experts convene for a year, we were able to come up with a policy that’s both effective and that protects the rights of gun owners and Second Amendment rights advocates, so are behind this, as well as gun violence prevention groups, so we want to encourage states to kind of take this approach and to bring coalitions together of, you know, a wide range of stakeholders on both sides of the issue, and to try to push this forward, this policy forward. Our hope is that this is going to open up a conversation in states that previously wouldn’t even be willing to talk about it, because we are bringing gun owners to the table, and because gun owners and gun rights advocates are actually a part of the group that is pushing for this.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 23:51
So, one thing I kind of want to, you know, as our conversation is winding down, you know, one of the things that you said to me when we were talking separately about this was this idea of process versus product, and obviously you came out with a product, you know, being this new potential legislation through this very in-depth process. What role did each of those play in really the whole effort?
David Yamane 24:13
Yeah, I would say, you know, I would formulate it as sort of process facilitates product rather than versus, because you know, I think that one of the challenges that we face today is that things are so polarized, and that so much of our debate takes place online, which is designed to fuel outrage and division, or they take place, you know, in political settings, which also, you know, are revolve around difference rather than commonality. So this group, essential partners, I think we, you know, we should name them by name. They did a great job. Again, I said the first two meetings that we had, we didn’t talk about policy at all. We got to know each other. What are. Interests and values are, and then we talked about how we envisioned a safe world, and you know, by building up that trust and seeing each other as human beings, we’re able to, you know, then enter the policy debates with something that I think is lacking in a lot of times, right, which is that seeing the people who are sitting across from us as having some common interest, even if we, you know, ultimately disagree on certain things, and you know they’re some of the people on the on the gun violence prevention side, Richard Aborn, you know, dedicates his pretty much his whole professional life to banning assault weapons, and yet he was, you know, perfectly willing to set that issue aside for purposes of this, because he knew that that was not an area that we could, you know, make any progress on as a group. So I think everybody, you know, had some humility, but that was also cultivated, right, and so the way that the whole process was set up allowed us to get to the product,
Michael Siegel 26:09
and I would just add that, that you know, in many ways I think this is kind of a message of hope. This is a time when people are many people are very dismayed by the extreme polarization that we’re seeing in our society, and especially over the last, you know, the last year and a half or so, and this really gave hope to a lot of panelists. I heard many of our panelists saying over and over that, you know, wow, this is the project, this is really one one thing that’s given me hope, and this was really a demonstration that if you bring people together and they get to know each other as individuals, and especially if you have a professionally facilitated process of structured dialog, people can get past the polarization, you can break through the polarization and find wide agreement on on on common ground, and you can develop effective public health policies, and I think that if you can do this with gun control, one of the most controversial issues, it suggests that you can probably do this with many other contentious public health issues, and so we’re hoping that this project is not just, I mean, a huge part of this, obviously, is to save lives from gun violence, but I think another part of it is just to set a precedent, to set a model for civil, civil dialog and civil discussion, and breaking through polarization, and to show people that, yeah, you know, you can, we did this with gun violence, we should be able to do it with other contentious issues.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 27:38
I can’t think of any better point to leave off on Mike, David. Thank you so much for joining us today.
David Yamane 27:46
Thanks, thanks for having us.
Joel Tirado 27:50
Thanks again to Jaclyn Schildkraut, Michael Siegel, and David Yamane, for that encouraging conversation. If you liked this episode, please rate, subscribe, and share. It will help others find the podcast and help us deliver the latest in public policy research. All of our episodes are available for free wherever you stream your podcasts and transcripts are available on our website. I’m Joel Tirado; until next time.
Policy Outsider is presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. The Institute conducts cutting-edge nonpartisan public policy research and analysis to inform lasting solutions to the challenges facing New York state and the nation. Learn more at rockinst.org or by following RockefellerInst. That’s i n s t on social media. Have a question comment or idea? Email us at [email protected].
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