Laura Carno joins the podcast to discuss this month’s policy focus: Gun Control Doesn’t Keep Us Safer. We expose the realities of increasing crime across the country, the common misperceptions about gun control, the solutions that have worked, and why public safety should be the first responsibility of elected officials.
Laura Carno is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Forum, a political media strategist, and the Founder and Executive Director of FASTER Colorado, an organization that trains armed K-12 school staff at no cost to the school. Through her media company, I Am Created Equal, Laura helped to recall the Colorado State Senate President in 2013 over his gun-control agenda and his refusal to give his constituents a fair hearing. Laura also founded a local government watchdog organization in Colorado Springs, called SpringsTaxpayers.com, that protects the interests of taxpayers from government overreach. Laura is the author of Government Ruins Nearly Everything: Reclaiming Social Issues From Uncivil Servants.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, we feature this month’s policy focus entitled Gun Control Doesn’t Keep Us Safer. We’ll look into the realities of increasing crime across the country, the common misperceptions of gun control, the solutions that have worked, and why public safety should be the first responsibility of our elected officials. And joining us is the author of this policy focus, Laura Carno. Laura Carno is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Forum, political media strategist, and the founder and executive director of FASTER Colorado, an organization that trains armed K-12 school staff at no cost to the school. Laura is the author of Government Ruins Nearly Everything: Reclaiming Social Issues from Uncivil Servants. And it’s a pleasure to have her on She Thinks today. Laura, thank you so much for being here.
Laura Carno:
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I want to let all of our listeners know that if they’re interested in reading more about the policy focus, again entitled Gun Control Doesn’t Keep Us Safer, you can go to iwf.org, read it there, share it with people in your life, because this is such an important issue, especially as gun control continues to be this phrase that we’re hearing over and over and over again. But I just want to start first by thinking about crime as a whole. As we look at the midterms coming up, crime is one of the most important issues that people are concerned about in the country. And I thought we’d start by just breaking down how bad crime is. Is it really getting this bad or is this just the nature of 24/7 news that likes to be very hyperbolic in their news coverage? What is the reality?
Laura Carno:
Yeah, it’s actually getting worse, and it’s getting worse really across the whole country. There’s a little bit of difference between policies in different big cities versus other big cities. But by and large, crime is getting out of hand. And this actually, it’s not just today, it’s not just this year, but this has really been an upward trend since 2020. During the COVID lockdowns, we’ll remember that there were many areas where they let prisoners out and that sort of thing. So, it’s been a little bit longer trend than just now. But gosh, people have been trying to figure out how do they take steps to make sure that their own family is safe?
Beverly Hallberg:
And are we seeing crime go up, not just in cities, not just New York City, DC, et cetera, but also in small towns across the country, too? Is there an uptick as a whole?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. And so, it’s an interesting question. I’m sitting here in Colorado right now. And Colorado, which you wouldn’t look at as the crime capital of the world, but Colorado is now number one in auto thefts. And you say, “What the heck is going on in a state like Colorado,” which maybe it’s leaning a little bit more blue these days, but it’s a pretty purple state. And so it’s not just in the big cities, the Chicago, Detroit, Washington, DC, that we typically think of when we think of the highest crime cities.
Beverly Hallberg:
And something that has been surprising to me, and I’m sure to others as we see these videos that go viral, security footage of crimes taking place. One recently that I saw this week was a woman who was working in the New York subway system. A homeless man ends up attacking her, continues to kick her. A man tries to stop it, but then that man gets scared off by this violent man. I feel like, as a woman these days, it’s even scarier because it doesn’t seem like there are as many concerned citizens helping people out who are being attacked. Is that an additional concern, not just that crime is going up, but fewer and fewer people are helping their neighbors?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. We’ve all been locked down for quite a while. And so, you ask yourself the question, have we lost that ability to interact the way that we used to with our neighbors? But you’re right, it’s interesting when you look at the numbers on new concealed increases in women and it’s not…. The term mama bear is a thing, and moms believe that it’s their job to keep their children safe when they’re out and about. And so, it is of significant interest to women. The other interesting thing, specifically for firearms, because we’re seeing this big increase in concealed carry permit holders among women, guns are the great equalizer. So, if you’re a 130-pound woman and your assailant is statistically a man, statistically is going to be bigger than 130 pounds, how do you save yourself with just your fists or whatever else you have? And a lot of women are looking at owning a firearm — getting well trained is a key point there — so that they can defend themselves and their family.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, let’s talk about, then, just gun control as a whole, and those as well who are interested in buying guns. I want to get down to some of the data on that. Now, when we see horrific mass shootings take place — Uvalde, Texas, of course, is the most recent one that comes to mind — there are all these then echoes that we hear from people about gun control is so needed. We need to get guns out of the hands of people who want to do harm. First, want to just talk about gun control, the rise of gun control. Where are we legislatively, both on a federal level and on state levels, maybe some states you want to highlight as far as getting tougher, making restrictions tougher for law abiding citizens to be able to have a gun to protect themselves?
Laura Carno:
Important just to back up to the term you used, getting guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. We can all agree — let’s focus on some things we can agree on. We can all agree that we don’t want people with criminal backgrounds, especially violent felonious criminal backgrounds, to have access to firearms. Flat out, we all agree. We don’t want to see any more crime. Nobody wants to see it, whether it’s committed with a firearm, with a knife, with fists, with a car running somebody over, nobody wants to see more violent crime. So, let’s just agree on that. So, what we need to look at is, what are the things that have been proven to reduce crime versus the things that sound good on paper? Because there’s some things that sound really good like, “Let’s just take all of the guns away from everybody,” and that’s just not a fact out there when we look at what happens around the world.
So, let’s start with federally, what’s going on. And this switches with every administration, with every majority. But right now in Congress, there’s a one-party majority that is pushing gun control. What’s interesting, though, is the U.S. Senate, which does have a majority of Democrats, isn’t passing gun control. Something will pass the House, it goes to the Senate, and by and large, it’s not passing the U.S. Senate. And that’s because, I believe, that the United States is a fairly pro-gun rights…. You know, leans in that direction. And so, there is such a thing as a Democrat Senator from a state that would boot them out of office if they voted for gun control.
So, not much is going to happen likely at the federal level, but state by state, that’s definitely a different story. And it really depends, does there tend to be more of a pro-gun rights majority or a pro-gun control majority? And that tends to go along party line. Democrats tend to not be in favor of gun rights, and Republicans tend not to be in favor of gun control. And those are just broad tendencies.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I was hoping you could dispel some of the common misperceptions about gun control. When there is talk about gun control, we often hear about assault weapons, AR-15s come up. We also hear about “we need background checks.” What currently is the standard on background checks? Are we checking everyone, and should we be calling the AR-15 an assault weapon?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. So, thank you for bringing that up. “Assault weapon” — and I’ll always put scare quotes around that because there is no firearm called an assault weapon. There’s nothing in laws saying that this is the definition of one. It tends to be whoever the lawmaker is, they don’t like that particular firearm so they call it an assault weapon. They tend to use that term with… Most of us just call them rifles. But in the 1990s there was — and this was during the Clinton administration — there was a so-called assault weapon ban, and it sunsetted. And so, there was an opportunity to say what happened before, what happened during the ban, and then what happened after. And there’s all kinds of analysis out there. There’s the piece that I always quote, it’s from the Los Angeles Times, their analysis of the actual study, there was no difference. It didn’t make anybody safer.
The reason that the LA Times article is interesting is they also talk about the California magazine limitation. And they found that that didn’t make any difference in crime. So, you have to ask yourself the question at the federal level. The president for sure keeps talking about a so-called assault weapons ban. But at state legislatures that are saying, “We want to ban these guns,” here in my state of Colorado, it’s not happening at a state level but at a municipal level; there are cities that are saying you can’t have that sort of firearm in our city. So, you could be standing in the middle of the street and be legal over here, illegal over here. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially because these bans have never been documented to make people safer.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so, I want to turn now to what have we found to work? What are the solutions that do work? I think both you and I would agree that the gun control does not lead to less crime and to make people safer. How should we view something like the tragic death and mass shooting that took place in Uvalde, Texas? If taking away guns isn’t the answer, what is?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. Uvalde is such a horror to all of us. And it seems like every time new news comes out of there, it leaves us scratching our heads like, what the heck? If you look at what happened before that massacre, what was known about the killer, what people knew about him, what they didn’t take any action on, there was so much that could have gone into the database, so that when he went to a gun store to purchase a firearm, he wouldn’t have been able to buy one legally. And you’d asked before, and I forgot to answer this [inaudible 00:11:51], a national standard for instant background checks. So, some states use the federal system and some states use their own state system, but it’s been law for a very long time that every state has to have some method of being able to do instant background checks.
Now, the key is, is what is going into the system to flag who shouldn’t have access to a firearm. We saw the same thing in Fort Hood, Texas, and in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where there were things that happened in these killers’ pasts that absolutely should have put them in that next database so that they wouldn’t have been able to legally buy a gun. But let’s not kid ourselves. If all of those things were followed in the beginning and those killers weren’t able to legally go and [inaudible 00:12:41] gun, they could have figured out how to get it somewhere else.
Only 1.3% of criminals who are in prison for having used a firearm violently got their firearm at a gun store. So, that’s almost everybody got their guns somewhere else. So, let’s not kid ourselves that if everything goes through a background check, that criminals aren’t still going to be able to get their guns. And then you go up to the moment of what happened at Uvalde. And as somebody who runs a program where we train armed school personnel, this is what I do, the horror that those two teachers were stuck inside a classroom trying to protect those children with their bodies, because that’s all they had, while law enforcement waited outside. Carnage in that room or less carnage in that room? And I think the answer is obvious.
If they were in that room with the ability to save those children and save themselves, there was at least a chance that they could do something. So, that’s another law that makes people less safer because the killer didn’t care that it was a gun-free zone, but those teachers and other school staff members in there were federally unable to have a firearm there to protect children.
Beverly Hallberg:
And what do you say to especially women out there? You said that women are buying guns in record numbers, but let’s say one of those teachers, or I know I spoke to a teacher recently and she said, “I don’t feel comfortable having a gun and learning how to use it.” So, not every teacher is going to want to have a gun. I think it’s a reasonable thing to talk about teachers having that ability should they want to. But do you think that the solution, especially in schools, is more than just teachers having the ability to be armed? Do you think it’s also about security personnel on the campus of the school too?
Laura Carno:
Yeah, I’m a fan of all of the above. Whatever it takes to secure our children. We keep our Congress people, our money in the banks, we keep so many things safer than our children, when I think arguably our children, and I’m a grandma now, so my grandchildren, the most precious thing to me on this Earth. And I’ll just clarify a term because we often hear about armed teachers. In the six years we’ve been running our training program, only 40% of the people we see come through [inaudible 00:15:08]. The other 60% are principals and janitors, and coaches, and lunch ladies, and school nurses, and people who might be at any time somewhere else in the school as opposed to just one classroom. So, just to help people understand that, that it’s not necessarily just the teachers. But you’re right, I’m in favor of school resource officers who provide security in addition to helping students have a good relationship with law enforcement throughout their lives.
Additional armed security is great. What I like about the addition of an armed school personnel program is that they can be anywhere and they are concealed. And we’ve seen so often in these school killings, that school resource officer is across campus or leaves for lunch, or they’re not going to start their killing right in front of the school resource officer or other uniformed security. So, it’s good, just like in the rest of society, to have additional backup in the form of concealed carry holders, and that happens in school. To your point about a lot of teachers don’t want to carry, great, a lot of people in society don’t want to carry a concealed firearm. And not everybody should. It’s a big responsibility and a big decision if you make that decision to carry a concealed firearm with you, and being a school employee is no different.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I want to take a brief moment to talk to you, our listeners. You may know that Independent Women’s Forum is the leading national women’s organization dedicated to enhancing people’s freedom, opportunities, and wellbeing. But did you know that we are also here to bring you, women and men on the go, the news? You can listen to our High Noon Podcast, an intellectual download featuring conversations that make a free society possible. Hear guests like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin discuss the most controversial subjects of the day. Or join us for a happy hour with At The Bar, where hosts Inez Stepman and Jennifer Braceras chat on the latest issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture. You can listen to past episodes at iwf.org or by searching for High Noon or At The Bar in your favorite podcast app.
Well, Laura, I want to talk about another news issue that I have seen related to guns. And I think it’s been concerning, especially as we are seeing first time gun owners, the numbers for that increasing, is that credit card companies want to do a certain line item for those who purchase guns. So, not just putting in some general purchase category, but making it very specific. What do you make of credit card companies wanting to figure out how people are spending their money, especially in relation to guns? And how do you think that may be used by government?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. And this is one of those policies that I look at and say, “Why are we targeting what goes on at gun stores when nearly 99% of those transactions are ordinary people like me and my neighbors who are going to buy a firearm? And we are the most law-abiding segment, so why all this scrutiny? Unless there is some interest in the future in making law-abiding citizens the subject of scrutiny ourselves. So, a little background on this story is there’s a gun control group, a Giffords group, maybe missing that second word, that it was founded by Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman who was shot and badly injured at one of her campaign events.
And so, she founded a pro-gun control group. And so, one of the things that they do is they pressure companies to do certain things. So, in this case, they are pressuring credit card companies to say, instead of just calling a purchase at a gun store general merchandise, it needs to have its own separate code so that the credit card companies and ostensibly so that it could be information subpoenaed, will easily be able to see what was [inaudible 00:19:25]. So, some interesting things. So, if I go into a big box sporting goods store, for example, that sells firearms, but it also sells tents and shoes and all kinds of things. If I buy a firearm in that sort of a store, it’s going to say general merchandise.
If I go to an actual gun store, it’s going to have this different code for gun store. But what if I don’t purchase a gun? What if I go in to purchase targets for a firearm I already have? What if I’m purchasing ammunition for a firearm I already have, maybe a trigger lock, maybe a gun safe to keep my firearm safer in my house? It doesn’t distinguish between any of that. So, all of these credit card companies just caved one after another. And it’s up to law-abiding gun owners like us to say to our credit card companies and start paying cash. And I think that’s what gun stores will start seeing if this goes through, is people withdrawing cash to go purchase anything at a gun store so that the government’s not in your business.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. And I want to focus on a couple of more issues before I have you go today. One is that, and you talk about this in the policy focus; again, that is called Gun Control Doesn’t Keep Us Safer. They can find it on iwf.org. But you talk about those who use guns as self-defense and how it often saves lives, but yet we don’t hear about those stories. What can you tell us about gun saving lives, because we only hear the news stories about when somebody kills using a gun?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. There’s a famous study by the Centers for Disease Control, and you have to look kind of hard for it because they didn’t publish it. They did this study and then didn’t publish it because they didn’t like the results. They didn’t like the answers. So, there is a range that in this CDC study that says, between 500,000 and 3 million times a year, firearms are used in self-defense. That is a very broad range. There’s been some analysis on it. But if we just take that at its base of 500,000 times a year, people use guns in self-defense. And by the way, it’s not necessarily every person using a firearm in self-defense had to fire it. Maybe they just had it, maybe they showed it, maybe they threatened the use of it and it stopped a crime. So, you can see why there’s that range, because if a crime didn’t happen, doesn’t get reported. But really big numbers.
And then you look to round up, well, when somebody gets murdered in your neighborhood, in your state, it is more interesting for the news to say, “Well, we’re going to get a lot of eyeballs on this if we talk about somebody being killed in our area, versus look at this hero that stopped something from happening.” It’s just not going to make as many headlines. And so, this is sort of separating the fact from the rhetoric, is we see all this stuff, all this bad stuff on TV, but we almost never, unless you go looking for it, we almost never see these stories of the crimes that were stopped. So, website that’s on the last page of the policy focus, crimeresearch.org, I’m going to mess up all the words for it, but crime research.org, where they document all kinds of stuff, but they have these articles…
Crime Prevention Research Center, there’s the words. But they have all of these articles from all over the country about people who stopped crimes by having a firearm. And they’ve even got a section on when mass shootings were stopped by an armed citizen. So, there’s a lot of great information, but you have to go look for it, which is why we put that on that last page of the policy focus.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah, it’s an important part of it. And the last thing I want to talk about, because you brought this up and I thought this was important, and you said that our elected officials should make public safety the number one thing they focus on. So, two questions on this. Why do you think that is the case? And number two, what are some signs that an elected official is doing their job in relation to public safety?
Laura Carno:
Yeah. And that’s a great question. So, I call them public servants, other people call them elected officials or our leaders, but [inaudible 00:24:05]. When we look at all of the different things, let me look at like a city council for example, what they might be focused on, I think they should be focused on police, fire, keeping all of us safe. When I look at local government and I see this imbalance where they’re saying, “We don’t have enough money for police, but look, we’ve got new statues in the park and we’re putting new bike lanes in.” And I look at that and say, how do you not have enough money for police and fire when you’re spending on all of these other things that seem not to be priorities? And I would look at that at every single level. So, they need to be focused on that.
And when politicians who are doing the right thing and are focused on public safety, what they’re doing is they’re looking at actual causes of crime and they’re looking at the types of things that we’ve been talking about today, that taking the ability for law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves never has ever made anybody safer anywhere in not just the country, but in the world. The Crime Research Prevention Center also has information about what’s happened in countries that have completely removed, well, all of the guns, they didn’t get them all, obviously, as we’ve seen from some recent international stories, but that never works. So, when your public servants are making sure that law-abiding people aren’t losing any rights, and the laws are only going after criminals, then you know that your public servants are doing the right thing.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I think this is such an important policy focus for so many people to, first of all, have that measure for our public servants to see if they’re upholding what they ought to be doing, but also to really help dispel a lot of the misperceptions about guns and gun control. We hear so much out there in the news and even from the people in our lives, it’s important to have the factual information in front of you. And this policy focus does just that. Again, it is called Gun Control Doesn’t Keep Us Safer. Author of that, Laura Carno, thank you so much for joining us today and your work on this important issue.
Laura Carno:
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and well-being for all Americans. So, please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review. It does help. And we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.
