Episode 8: Disinformation and gun violence, with Nick Suplina

CONTENT WARNING

This episode of Unchecked deals with the sensitive topic of gun violence.

SYNOPSIS

Nick Suplina, Senior VP for Law & Policy at Everytown for Gun Safety joins Rachel and Dan to talk about the long-standing and persistent disinformation campaign by the gun lobby. Nick highlights the main messages and techniques in use, and we explore the challenges of celebrating prevention. Rachel describes the Lens of Despair and Dan digs into the Lens of Status Quo.

STORIES OF DISINFORMATION

Did moldy bread cause the Salem witch trials?

• Debunking the moldy bread theory (Salem Witch Museum)

Pushing back against disinformation

• George Stephanopolous cuts off the VP (Rolling Stone)
• Airports refuse political video at TSA checkpoint (CNN)

INTERVIEW WITH NICK SUPLINA

• Everytown for Gun Safety
• About Red Flag laws (Everytown)
• Colorado’s new assault weapons ban (CBS News)
• 2022 Safer Communities Act (Wikipedia)

LENSES

Lens of Despair

• How does the system alleviate or exacerbate or manipulate the feeling that nothing can be improved?
• How does the system create a sense of hope?
• How does the system intentionally give agency to its users?

Lens of Status Quo

• What role does status quo play in this domain? What is this system’s role relative to the status quo?
• How does the system discourage users from questioning the status quo?

_____________________________________________________

Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host
• Emily Duncan, Editor

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

_____________________________________________________

Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Transcript

Rachel 0:00

Heads up. This episode centers around guns and gun violence. So if this is not a topic you're in a headspace to dive into, you may want to save this episode for another time.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

You're listening to Unchecked, the podcast about the architecture of disinformation with Dan Brown and Rachel Price.

Rachel 0:28

Dan, we are back.

Dan 0:30

It's nice to see you again, Rachel.

Rachel 0:32

It is nice to see you.

Dan 0:33

Rachel, we have a special guest, which no one can see, but I'm gesturing too. This is my cat Willow, and the reason why this is important to me is that a few years ago I did a podcast called A Lens a Day about information architecture lenses. I had a different guest every time. And for about two-thirds of the episodes, Willow was down here in my office with me. And I think she was my good luck charm.

Rachel 0:59

Okay.

Dan 0:59

Since then, we've acquired numerous additional pets. And she has decided that the basement is no longer a place where she can spend a large amount of time, except right now. She's here with us right now.

Rachel 1:12

I mean, we have a very comforting vibe. Who else can make you want to think about misinformation for hours at a time?

Dan 1:22

Right, it's true. She seems on the edge of her seat and excited to hear what we have to say. Do you have a good story for us?

Rachel 1:30

I do. Dan, did you know that? The Salem witch trials were just kind of a rave gone wrong.

Dan 1:38

Uh the only thing I know about the Salem Witch Trials is from The Crucible. I was in a production of The Crucible in fifth grade.

Rachel 1:46

And did it involve LSD?

Dan 1:48

I did go to a very progressive school in New York City in the 80s.

Rachel 1:52

And you're not willing to go on the record about what the crucible involved.

Dan 1:56

No, even that school would not allow us 10-year-olds to take LSD.

Rachel 2:00

That's a real shame. But uh I'm intentionally being reductive here, which isn't necessary because this story is so bizarre. I didn't know this, but I came across this tidbit. There was a theory that became very popular at one point that moldy bread actually caused the strange behaviors noted in the Salem witch trials. Apparently, this kind of started spreading in the 70s and stayed pervasive for quite a while. So this idea was proposed in 1976 in an edition of Science Magazine. Basically, seemingly kind of a random undergraduate student who decided to write an article and then Science Magazine published it, proposed that ergot, which is a fungus that can grow on rye crops and can make you hallucinate and convulse and do all these crazy things. This student wrote this article that proposed that ergot had infected the rye, which was then in the bread, and then these girls were eating this bread, and then like hallucinating and convulsing and all these crazy things, and that that's at the root of like why people thought witches were doing things. And I mean, I I'm laughing at this idea, but what I'm actually laughing at is I I guess it really took root like for a while in academic circles around the Salem Witch Trials. And it seems like this idea has kind of died out mostly now. But according to the Salem Witch Museum, it took decades to try and undo this weird misinformation about Ergot and the Salem Witch trials. So I brought this story because it is October 24th at the time of recording this. It is almost Halloween, and this episode was really heavy, and I needed to bring something that really didn't matter. So here's a little bit of misinformation that probably didn't really matter.

Dan 3:59

What's crazy to me about this is when you said I was gonna do the Salem witch trials, I thought you meant you were gonna do the disinformation that women were witches. Because obviously No, I'm just kidding. We should tell that story. It was featured by Harari in that book, Nexus, about sort of when print happened when there was printing. One of the most fast-selling books was a a book about witches, how to recognize them and how to fight them. So that's what I thought you were gonna do. I didn't realize you were gonna do the layer of disinformation that got spread on top of that disinformation.

Rachel 4:38

Yeah, this is academic misinformation centuries afterwards.

Dan 4:43

Fascinating. Do we know if that student was just trying to play a prank? I grew up in the 70s, so that feels like a 70s style prank.

Rachel 4:50

I don't know. It seems to me like she was just kind of a passing undergrad, like not a researcher, not good for her. Yeah, like television shows, documentaries, blogs, articles, podcasts, according to the museum, still propose this is a likely theory. So it's like the spiders swallowing spiders. Yeah. Nothing to it and impossible to remove from the record.

Dan 5:16

You know, in retrospect, I think I also chose an uplifting story given the topic of our interview. And that is that I'm starting to see some people push back against disinformation. Tell me. Just in the last month, there's two examples that I want to talk about. One is that during an interview on ABC with J.D. Vance, George Stephanopoulos, the anchor there at ABC, cut off the interview entirely. He was pressing J.D. Vance, the vice president, on this bribery thing that happened with the head of Homeland Security, and J.D. Vance was not answering his questions in a truthful way, and was trying to spin it as something else. And Richard Stephalopoulos just cut him off entirely, which was a big deal in that moment, and maybe it's still a big deal, because I think it was I don't want to use the word unprecedented, but it is not something that we see a lot, have seen a lot in the last couple of years. And so there was something that made me think that maybe we are becoming less tolerant of misinformation.

Rachel 6:29

There's something specific about this too, where it's not just pushback and being intolerant of disinformation from any source. Right. Because you can imagine a reporter, you know, interviewing some random person on the street who's spouting misinformation. Right. It doesn't seem wild that they would be like, okay, we're done here. But for a journalist to be doing that with an authority figure, like a person in power.

Dan 6:51

Yes, good call. I mean, and then similarly, the head of Homeland Security had recorded a video that was blaming Democrats for the government shutdown that we are experiencing right now and expected that video to be played in airports around the country, and the airports flat out said no. And they didn't say no because it was misinformation, so to speak. Right. Framing a shutdown as one party's fault or another party's fault is misinformation, just a lie. But the reason that they gave was that it was a partisan, right? That it was it was a political message in a space that really should be dedicated to safety. And in some ways I find this as an information architect a little bit more of an interesting case study because we're talking about an information space. Standing on the security line is many things, and it's an information space. And I don't travel enough to have committed to memory, like what I need to be doing in the different moments. So I'm actively paying attention to where I should be, what I should be doing, what I should be removing from my person, what I should not be removing from my person, and to think that it's permissible in that space to disrupt it with a political message is just hopelessly irresponsible. And I'm grateful to the airports that decided not to include that message for recognizing what it was of a political message and recognizing the role that they are meant to play here. It gives me some hope that people sort of acknowledge that there's some spaces that should be free from politics altogether.

Rachel 8:32

I appreciate you bringing those stories because I could certainly use a little hope. This conversation with Nick was really illuminating and very real. I think that the the the topic of gun violence is high stakes. And it felt like a high-stakes conversation. It did. And a lot of stuff to learn there.

Dan 8:53

When I reached out to him to see, he responded almost right away and said that he really wanted to do this. He's an attorney, he focuses on policy, but he acknowledges the role that misinformation has played throughout his entire career in dealing with gun regulation, gun policy, and gun violence. And so he really brings kind of this multifaceted sensitivity to the topic. So let's talk to Nick. Today we got to talk to Nick Suplina. He is the senior vice president for law and policy of every town for gun safety, the nation's largest gun violence prevention organization. In this role, he oversees the organizational strategy for policy, research, and investigations, and leads the group's work confronting the disinformation spread by the gun lobby and its allies. He has served as a government fraud prosecutor and as an advisor to the New York State Attorney General, has testified before Congress and regularly appears in the news as a gun policy expert. Nick, thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

So good to be here. Thank you.

Dan 9:58

There's so much disinformation about gun violence. And when Rachel and I first started this podcast and we first started talking about the kinds of domains that we wanted to cover after climate, for me anyway, gun violence was a really big topic that I feel like has so much disinformation associated with it. And I know you've dealt with probably so many different kinds, but when you think about sort of the most pervasive disinformation about guns, sort of the most prominent or the most egregious, the most salient disinformation about guns, what is that and what kind of impact has it had on your work?

SPEAKER_00 10:37

You are quite right that there is no shortage of disinformation to choose from, and it comes in different flavors and types. I mean, when you're talking about what is, at the end of the day, a public health crisis, right? That takes 125 lives a day, that is now the number one killer of children and teens in the country. You gotta talk about solutions, you gotta talk about policy and how we're going to rein in those tragic numbers and save lives. So the way you do that is through policy change. And the most pervasive and sort of deeply internalized view of gun safety policy that the lobby has promulgated is sure, maybe that doesn't sound so bad, but that's just a slippery slope to confiscation. Everything, by the way, is a slippery slope to confiscation because they can't really fight on the common sense laws. These are very, very popular and very simple approaches. So they have to go to confiscation. And we have over 400 million guns in this country, but we don't know anything about who owns them, in part because there is a slippery slope argument that if you had a list of gun owners in America, that that would lead to confiscation of guns. Like as if that was a one-to-one, definitely gonna happen. Any awareness of who has the guns will lead to those guns being taken away. And actually, I tend to think that like disinformation and conspiracy were the tools of this particular movement long before they were so in vogue in other areas of politics. But like that particular conspiracy, like if you have a list, then it will lead to conversation. I was thinking, am I dating myself to reference the movie Red Dawn? Do you know this movie? 1984. Yes, you know, Charlie Sheen debut, Patrick Swayze, right wing fever dream. There's a scene in the movie where you know they've touched base after the nuclear first strike in this uh town in like Colorado area, and the guys take out, they say, Oh, good, we have a list of all the gun owners, so we can go round them up. And like in 2025, I'm dealing with misinformation that started in a movie from 1984, and I'm like, listen, we have lists of a lot of things, and it doesn't lead to confiscation, but that gets in the way of these simple, simple things that we know that the science shows uh can save lives, and it's probably their most impactful uh bundle of lies.

Dan 13:17

What's amazing to me is as you just said, we have lots of lists of lots of things that people have, and none of it has ever led to these things being confiscated.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

They didn't come for the cars. You know, they and again, there's always the the why, right? There's the why behind it, and a lot of it is anything that leads to more of an understanding of, okay, I have to, you know, register my firearm or get a license or anything like that, that just gets in the way of commerce. So if you imagine how much easier it would be to buy cars if you didn't have to have a license, it would lead to chaos, of course, right? A bunch of people who don't know how to drive, no understanding when you do crash, who owned the car that crashed into, right? We we couldn't even imagine a world like that. But you would probably, at least in the short term, sell a lot more cars because you're lowering the barriers to entry. Of course, you'd have more death, less justice and compensation for harm. That's what we have on the gun side, right? We have gunfire every day across the United States, enormous economic and human impact every single day, but not a sense of where the guns are coming from, who owns them, who should not, and that that leads to this public health crisis that we're in.

Dan 14:37

Let's nip this in the bud early on, but I feel like this might be connected to interpretations of the Second Amendment as well. There's no amendment to the Constitution saying that I'm allowed to have a car, right? But there is presumably, potentially, sort of kind of an amendment that mentions arms, guns. Is there a connection there between this slippery slope to confiscation and the infringement upon the Second Amendment or the interpretation of this Second Amendment?

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Yeah, I mean, it's not an interpretation ever given by any court that the Second Amendment means that all efforts to regulate who can carry what kind of gun and where. There are very many people who uh who say that the Second Amendment means the last four words shall not be infringed, and it's emblazoned on the t-shirt and it's on the website. There are several other clauses, which the courts have also like ignored a fair bit. But the key thing is that you know, even the courts that have recently expanded what the Second Amendment means, and again, not to date myself, I hope this shows recency, but when I went to law school, there was no private right to possess a firearm for self-defense. That's how recent a court acknowledged right to own a firearm is. And we had a couple hundred years of American history where there were also a lot of firearms owned and in circulation where that right was not articulated by a court. But that was 2008 when the Supreme Court first announced the right, and it since has expanded that right at least once. But you're absolutely right. I mean, being able to speak from a place of a right gives you a lot more moral gravity to say, you know, you can't do this, Second Amendment, you can't do this, Second Amendment. But the right to possess a firearm for self-defense is not incompatible at all with, say, understanding who owns what guns where. Right. There's also a right, many people do argue, an absolute right uh to free speech, but that doesn't mean I can organize a protest outside of my congressman's office with no notice to anybody ever, right? Right. Or that I can engage in inciting speech or, you know, fighting words or the like. So the recourse to a right is, I think, earnest for many, but isn't necessarily accurate for what even you know this Supreme Court has said, but it is often the veneer around the misinformation that gives that misinformation that much more credibility.

Dan 17:14

Right. It's almost like these two things become so intertwined that we also sort of come to assume that there is a connection between the right and then the no inhibition or no sort of regulation around that right. Speaking of recency, another sort of piece of misinformation, I mean it's really propaganda that has gone around for a while is this idea that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I just read a tweet or something somewhere where someone said, basically, we just have to assume everybody running the country is essentially a 12-year-old kid. Everything you see them saying and doing is sort of like what a 12-year-old would do. And I feel like that's what is sort of behind this sentiment. But anyway, I feel like this good guy with a gun thing, it feels like it's been around for a while. But when we were talking before, you said that it it's actually a relatively recent, let's call it, bit of propaganda. Can you recount where it came from and how do we know it's not true?

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Like all good catchphrases and propaganda, it seems like it was written on stone tablets, but it was actually first uttered by Wayne Lapier in late 2012, early 2013, which you'll remember was right after the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting. And it was really a remarkable moment that that phrase kind of was birthed into existence, at least on a national stage, because you know the NRA went into lockdown after that shooting. There was a lot of internal discussion of what they were gonna do, how they were gonna respond, should they offer compromise. And honestly, a lot of elected officials in Washington were waiting to hear from them to see if they have latitude to act in response to this horrific tragedy. And so when Wayne stands up there and says this is a battle of good versus evil and man versus monsters, and the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, he encapsulated this fiction that was so simple and folksy and good sounding that you almost can't even argue with it. Like, seems fair enough. And in a lot of ways, that line has birthed a lot of other worldviews and phrases and myths and disinformation, because when you can drop somebody into the worst moment imaginable, you can convince them to think that a gun is the only solution, right? A policy that came out of that speech and was popularized after that speech that Wayne gave, and it was seen as defiant and doubling down, and these are key principles for the gun lobby, right? Like never back down. But they put forward a policy of arming teachers, which when you talk about that in the first instance, most reactions are like, oh, that doesn't seem like a great idea. And then they say, but wait, imagine this. The gunman is walking the hallway, and he's about to walk into your child's classroom. And as they walk into that classroom, you know, what do you want? Do you want the teacher to throw an eraser or do you want them to have a gun? And you're like, oh, well, now when you put it that way, the only thing that's going to stop that bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Let's not think about how hard it is for law enforcement to hit what they're shooting at in a gunfight, let alone your science teacher. Let's not talk about whether the first person through that door isn't another student who is in the bathroom. Let's not talk about that. The stats show that the person who's coming through that door even with a gun is likely a current or former student. So you're telling a teacher to shoot one of their students. Not to mention, let's talk about the 364 other days of the year where that gun is liable to be found, discharged unintentionally, et cetera, et cetera. So, like that's the key to this level of propaganda is to focus you on sometimes quite rare moments and interactions, sometimes more common fear in the streets and the like, and tell you the gun is the only solution you've got. And that good guy with the gun, you know, you hear it all the time.

Dan 21:31

Right. I mean, it's everywhere now. We talk a lot on Unchecked about framing as well. And I like that you brought up this example because it's so much about how we frame this hypothetical. And now that I've been thinking a lot about it, you know, maybe my first instinct before would have been like, well, maybe more guards, maybe someone in the school. And now I'm like, well, wait a minute, why is that the solution that? And not how do we make sure no one can walk into the school with a gun in the first place? Right, which it seems like maybe less people would get shot if there were no guns in the first place. But because they framed it in this way, you seem like, well, this must be the only way we can solve the problem.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

It's a much more technical example, but a related version of what you're describing is kind of this notion that like the criminals will always get their hands on guns. You often say that. I I've given testimony where there's been like, but Mr. Sabine, isn't it true that the criminals always find a way to get a gun? So you're just trying to disarm law-abiding Americans and da-da-da-da-da. It's like, okay, wait, hold on. Who said that a criminal can always get their guns? Criminal can always get out of guns because we don't have uniform gun laws that stop criminals from getting easy access to firearms. In fact, the exact opposite is true. We seem to be deeply committed to allowing prohibited individuals to find easy loopholes and paths around gun acquisition. But that's another framing issue. It's like, oh, sure, yeah, now that you mention it, it sure must be easy to go up the street and buy an illegal gun. It's like that gun came from a place. Right. And that place could have done something about it, or that gun store could be complicit. Like we can do things to stop the horrific moment. It's the difference between prevention and a kind of faux heroism. Heroism is compelling storytelling, you know?

Rachel 23:22

Heroism is sexy. Prevention is not. Yeah. This framing really is like a very quiet way to let folks off the hook for not having prevented the situation and to just throw up our hands and say, well, because it is an unquestioned truth that the bad guy will always get the gun. Therefore, that's why we're thinking about downstream reactions and not upstream prevention.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

I think you're absolutely right that it's like a little escape hatch. You know, it's like, now it's okay that we haven't done anything, and it's also okay that we're not going to do anything to fix it. What we need is heroes. We don't need common sense, we don't need science, we don't need collective action, we need heroes. And, you know, again, uh, as a storytelling vehicle, it's compelling, but it's not the way to keep uh Americans safe from gun violence.

Rachel 24:11

Yeah, I guess we don't tell stories about the wars that were prevented. Yeah. Right? We tell stories of the heroes of each war. Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Well, or even, I mean, we deal with this all the time because they're selling a highly attractive commodity. We're arguing for stopping bad things from happening. It's not an even playing field in the messaging wars, as it were. But the fact is, is like every day in the United States, there are laws that are stopping horrific acts of gun violence from happening. Every single day, I say that completely confidently. There are ones that are pretty acute, and there is a story to tell, like red flag laws where you can temporarily remove a firearm from somebody's possession who poses a risk of harm to themselves or others. Like we have countless stories of, you know, red flag saves where a kid who's despondent, who's having a hard time, who has a tough home life, who's really upset about the kids at school making fun of him, who has access to an AR-15 because his dad keeps it unsecured in the home, who writes in his notebook, they'll find out what I'm made of. And teachers, law enforcement, sometimes family members coming together to find the way and get this gun out of the home or or take interventions. Like that's happening every day where we have those laws in place to allow us to. And where we don't, it's much more likely that it's going to happen, that you're not going to have an off-ramp or some other intervention point to stop tragedy before it happens.

Dan 25:43

Nick, I had no idea that that was a thing. I'll just be honest with you. I had no idea those laws existed, much less that they were working. I mean, this could be just about Dan. But I do, I mean, this is an issue that I follow, but I I'm sort of curious. Talk to me about sort of the disparity in the messaging around this.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

The efficacy part, I think, definitely goes to what we were just discussing, right? Prevention isn't a front-page news story. The New York Times isn't going to say 15 people not killed in a mass shooting yet, right? Because you don't know, and maybe it wouldn't have happened, and it's it's hard to say. But what I will say is like, you know, policy works. There's a lot of policies, I bet you and I and Rachel don't know about that are saving your life every day. There's Food and Drug Administration policies where they're pulling some food off the line, so you're not getting E. coli, or at least that was the way it used to be.

Dan 26:40

You had not been. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

But you know, like I don't know the details of like what the processes are at the meat packing facility to find the bad, bad. I don't want to know about that. I want it just to work. And I want to have confidence that like when I go and buy food, it's gonna be safe and you know, for me to consume. I I think it's okay that you don't know necessarily about red flag laws, up to the point though, where we do get a lot of pushback from the gun lobby. Guess what they say? Oh, sure, but that's just a slippery slope to all gun confiscation. Right. And they've doubled down and said, actually, even the act of removing the firearm is a violation temporarily and with due process, by the way, is a violation of the Second Amendment, which again, courts have not found that to be the case. I could talk gun policy all day. There are dozens of laws that have been proven to be effective. And the states that have the majority of them that have what we call like foundational gun safety laws, have rates of gun violence that are two, three, four times lower than the states with the worst laws. And that's in a country where guns are constantly moving between states, you know, the the state borders aren't real things. Like there's a enormous difference in mortality and injury in places that have enacted these laws. And that's a story that we we try to tell, that we try to get out there. And again, we've got the ear of a lot of legislators across the country who, even some that used to be reluctant, I should say, just to be positive about it, who are embracing it now, and in some places that you wouldn't expect, but we got a lot more work to do. Oftentimes we're we're swimming upstream against the disinformation and the conspiracies and the like that are so saturated uh in the discourse.

Dan 28:24

We talked about some of the messages that are out there, like good guy with the gun and the slippery slope to confiscation, but maybe you can talk to us a little bit about some of the techniques that you've run up against from the gun lobby to manipulate the public, to manipulate policymakers. What are some of the other things they do besides get these messages out there to manipulate folks?

SPEAKER_00 28:45

Again, it's a playbook that pre-existed, the current moment of defiant disinformation, but it's a proven playbook. So one thing is to never ever let the truth go unchallenged. There's always a response to the new piece of social science that shows efficacy of a law. They'll do everything they can to introduce their own fake science to counteract it. I'm sure in your episodes on climate, you've uh covered that. An example of this in my last job, I was at the New York Attorney General's office, and we were doing some prosecutorial work on interstate gun trafficking, but we also put together like a report. Where are the guns coming from? Like, are these guns that are being recovered in violent crimes in New York City from New York City, from New York State, someplace else? The spoiler is they're coming from elsewhere, largely states with weaker gun laws down the I-95 corridor. They call it the iron pipeline, right? The guns come up from these states and are sold illegally in New York. And so we were very proud of our data analysis. The particular data that we used, not always easy to come by. Again, one of the techniques of the gun lobby is to suppress data. And so a lot of federal data and this kind of data is hard to get your hands on. But we were the attorney general, we got our hands on it, we were issued this report. It's an exclusive in the daily news, it's a front-page article, it's a full two-page spread. It's like everything you want as somebody trying to get the word out there on this problem about how fast these guns are traveling up the eastern seaboard. And in that issue, which is remarkable in its own right, because you know they have access and power, in that print issue of the Daily News was an op-ed from the gun industries or the gun lobby's like favorite fake scientist, this guy, John Lott, uh, who's been discredited over and over and over again, responding to our report, which we did, which we did not give him an advanced copy of, as saying, you know, like trying to dismiss it, trying to be like, ah, you know, lots of things travel interstate people travel and cars, and it's same same, and like has like a fake chart. I remember then, and that was before I was full-time on this issue, being like, wow, the resolve probably had to put that article together in like two hours, right? Like there was not a lot of advanced warning, and he got it into that issue, which means they had power, and make sure, you know, make sure that this doesn't go unchallenged, even in the very newspaper on the same day.

Rachel 31:24

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

But I could go as recently as this morning, for a more recent example. Yesterday we released a report called Dual Tragedies, uh sort of domestic violence, homicide, suicides. This is a very common thing. It's a very deep and heavy topic. This morning, like in two gun lobby, you know, online publications that have real coverage, like real readerships, they were responding to that. This is like a social science article. There's not even like a lot of policy in it. It's talking about the phenomenon, talking about some of the intervention points, talking about the relationship between self-harm and harm to a loved one. And they came for us and they said, Oh, this is all, you know, just bringing gun control into a tragedy. I was like, wow, well, first of all, thanks for reading. But also, they're deeply committed to that concept. And I think, again, you see that play out in other areas of current public life, where when somebody says something that really lands the punch or that's particularly compelling, come out, deny, undercut, attack the author, and they do that really quite well.

Rachel 32:35

The accusal of like being uncouth. How dare you try to associate these two clearly associated things? You monster.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

The temerity. Yeah, exactly.

Dan 32:48

This is something that we observed pretty soon after we started looking at disinformation, is because there's so much demand for real-time information, when something happens, there's a void, right? As we try and figure out what it is. And so there's a push to fill the void, and usually that push to fill the void of you know, lack of information is whatever someone can cook up. And I always thought of that as just sort of a function of time. But what I'm hearing is, in a sense, by publishing this thing, the other side, the gun lobby, perceived a void in a sense of like they're trying to fill in a second part of the conversation that you never even really imagine. Like this is not really a conversation. This is just a study that we did, and here's the data that we found. But they're immediately turning it into essentially a dialogue where none existed.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

I think the technique is also a kind of classic rule of electoral politics, which is like when your opponent comes and accuses you of something, it's like immediate denial, forcible denial, right? Pushback, counterattack, right? You know, in the fight uh before an election, right? That's like kind of like known thing. And the reason you do that is you don't want the story to be just the attack. You want your counterattack in the same breath. And this is old enough to be true before there was instant, you know, online conversations to your point.

Dan 34:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

The window is narrower, but that can be a good thing, especially if somebody's lying about you or saying something salacious, and you know, so you hit back right away. But you can also fill that counterpunch with lies. And I think a lot about this, I'm curious your your thoughts. The counterpunch from what is at the end of the day, pretty extreme, small minority of the American populace, the way it bleeds into the mainstream conversation is really remarkable. And it's something maybe I've only recently started to appreciate how a loud and persistent attack and counterattack, often miss and disinformation, really doesn't stay in the little pocket of the internet or of Twitter or whatever that that it starts in. It does really carry over such that then you read what are trying to be fair-minded recitations of the of the case, and they're quoting the crazy, they're quoting the disinformation as if it had as much a right to be there as you know, a report written by PhDs who are studying CDC data. So I do think it's really powerful. It's a pugilistic tool to discredit even the best ideas, even the simplest notions, and they'll they'll never miss an opportunity to do it.

Dan 35:35

You brought up earlier, and I'm glad you did, because I don't think we had a chance to talk about it last week, the suppression of data. And this is something that I've always heard about. You know, this country collects data about everything, and there's just this dearth of data about gun violence, gun usage, all of that kind of stuff. Does that also go back to the it's a slippery slope to confiscation? Or have they used other techniques, other untruths to prevent us from collecting data about gun violence?

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Some of it goes back to the slippery slope, but but mostly it comes back to like a very clever way to defend yourself from ever having to face the music for the harm your product is causing, right? Like if you don't measure it, then you can't study it. And if you can't study it, then it's like, well, maybe violence is up because we're losing religion as opposed to we're actually selling more guns in more places to ever younger populations or whatever the case may be. In my view, especially at the federal level, suppression of data and research is very much a cynical tactic to protect the gun industry from being exposed for its role in gun violence. I mean, it is making a lot of money selling guns. Many of those guns are ending up in crime scenes. And I'm not just talking about mass shootings, right? I'm talking about daily crime going right from a manufacturer to a dealer to a prohibited person who has every intent of using that gun for harm. And they're making money off that gun sale too. Maybe it's a small portion of gun sales, but it's millions and millions of dollars, and they don't care. But they know that you would care, so they made sure that the federal government should track guns that are used in crime and try to figure out where they came from, who sold them, when they sold them, and to who. But no, you can't share that data with anybody. And on this one, they have a little bit of a more clear reason because when that data was made available to academics and to cities, they said, wait a second, this one gun store is like responsible for a lot of the violence in my community. I want to sue it, I want to shut it down, I want to do something, and it's in another state. And that's when the gun industry said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't do that. So it's an infamous amendment that's re-upped every year in the budget called the T Art Rider, which prevents crime gun trace data from being shared, except for in its most sort of abstracted forms, outside of uh of law enforcement. There are other similar provisions that stopped the CDC from studying gun violence, its causes and effects that dates back about 20 years. It's been loosened over that time, but it's still meant that we're way behind in understanding cause and effect. And this one isn't even about data, but there is something called the Protection of Lawful Commerce and Arms Act, which is a mouthful. We often refer to it as placa, but it is essentially an immunity shield for the gun industry that tries to limit the ability of civil complainants to sue gun manufacturers and dealers unless they've clearly broken some pre-existing law. And so it's been a shield from the kind of data and insight and accountability that you do get in the civil legal process. And we've been starved of that for a very long time in this country as well. We're finding our footing, we're actually doing really creative work in the courts and in legislatures to soften the impact of that law. But, you know, as compared to, again, pick a field where there's some externality, some harm coming from an industry, pharmaceuticals, cars, smoking, all of the things that you have come to know about those areas that came out of big lawsuits, we don't have that.

Rachel 39:24

As you're talking, I just feel like there's this like neon light blinking in my brain that is just maintain the status quo, maintain the status quo. And all of this work being done, whether you're talking about framing of information explicitly or very, very quietly, or laws and all this stuff about like don't reopen what we consider to be normal and okay. We consider it more important to care about the commercial aspect of gun sales than the value of human life. And we want to do everything possible to not open up that status quo, like keep it the default.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

I think that that is exactly right. And I I think that that status quo, more guns in more places with more gun violence. Guess what that's really good at doing? Selling more guns. Because people get afraid, and when they get afraid, when fear takes over, the gun industry says, Well, have I got a product for you? And so that status quo is actually the key to their growth, the key to their sales, as you said. And that's one of the reasons why it's important to, you know, keep guns as the thing the good guy has and not uh the you know the source of an American public health crisis.

Rachel 40:41

You know what I think is really interesting about this too, is a lot of the other topics we've explored, what we see disinformation doing is explicitly trying to reframe and upend the status quo to tell a new narrative. And this is a case where from what we're talking about today, it seems like the opposite is the thing happening, where the misinformation, the disinformation is to try to keep people from opening that back up and saying, like, wait, are we thinking about this the right way?

SPEAKER_00 41:06

I think that's a largely a product of the huge head start that this particular mis and disinformation campaign has had. There's a lot of folks that think that disinformation is a relatively new phenomenon and one maybe brought into at least the American vanguard by like Trump in the social media era and all of that. But the folks working around the clock at the NRA and through their marketing firms to like message, you know, in really effective ways, to manipulate in really effective ways goes back a very long time. Like I said in referencing Red Dawn in the early new era of the NRA when it decided it was going to become part of the like political right-wing vanguard. It's been there and it's had a decades-long head start on any kind of formal scientific rebuttal or organizing or advocacy, you know, counter. We've made up a lot of ground, you know, in the 10 years since every town was was formed, but there is this like huge head start, and it's like I said, it's almost doctrinal. Like you almost don't need to teach that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And by the way, like the NRA is not what it was even when I started this work, and we'd like to think we have something to do with that, but like they don't need to vax over the talking points, you know, to their allies. It's like in who they are. And I I do think a lot of these tactics, the some of the things I was discussing earlier, the commitment uh to pounding falsehoods over and over again until they take hold. There is a book to be written about the NRA being one of the first mainstream organizations in 2015 to endorse Donald Trump. And the 2016 election was his largest single outside contributor. Interestingly enough, like his ascendancy and the art form that he's perfected in his commitment to myths and disinformation, I I can't prove that it came from the NRA, but they really came together, and that was the NRA at its peak of influence and power. I would say it peaked at that moment and then ran into a whole lot of other problems in the in the subsequent years. But the the style, the uh defiant kind of uh approach to beating up your enemies and you know, attack the messenger is something that they perfected long before Donald Trump was in American political life.

Dan 43:38

You said something in our pre interview, and I really liked this framing. You said the the real lie is that a gun is a solution to what you are afraid of. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how the gun lobby has used fear. We talked a little bit about it earlier, but but is there is there more to like how they've used that to kind of continue to further? Their agenda.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

Yeah, I mean, it is sort of derivative of the the good guy with the gun sort of theme, but it's the flip side. What's going to happen when you don't have your gun on you? What are all the horrible things that are going to happen to you on that walk to the parking lot or that dark alleyway or whatever it is? The industry literally uses this imagery and messaging in its ads, right? One that leaps to mind is it's a woman in the background with a shattered cell phone on the floor that's dialing 911, and it just says, when seconds matter, like minutes are too slow, or whatever. And it's a it's an ad for a pistol. That's just one of a thousand different examples of like again putting you in that situation, that impossible, horrible to think about thing, and saying what you really need is a gun. But it goes broader and more cultural than that. Advertising more recently really taps into the culture wars more. And so there's this generalized fear of the other, and how a gun is your solution to that. I mean, there's literally gun industry ads with the tagline, not today, Antifa. Some are more subtle, some are like a little bit more like, hey, when you really need this thing, it's going to be there for you. Others just like right on the nose. So they're using the fear to sell guns, and it really is like fill in the blank. Who is it that you're afraid of? What population or subgroup really keeps you up at night or that you've heard enough about on the news that you're worried about them? Well, here's a solution. Buy my product. Just like any other product that's kind of overpromising, a change in your life and lifestyle, except for this one has a very violent and gruesome end with a lot of external risks. They don't tell you, for instance, that when you bring a gun into your home, you've just increased the likelihood of a homicide in the home by two times and a likelihood of a suicide by three times in that moment. They certainly don't talk about the need to securely store your firearm, especially if there are children in the house, or what it would look like if your son's friend got access to the firearm and used it at school the next day, right? They're not they're not interested in those warnings. You know, what would be the equivalent of the cigarette warnings that we have now? That's not part of the sales pitch. It's not about the risks. It's all about uh sort of imagined upside. But that fear is very, very powerful. There's a reason why after high-profile mass shootings, we see gun sales spike. Part of it is a little bit of this bubble of like, oh, they're definitely gonna come and confiscate our guns. That's not as true as it used to be because gun owners have heard that one so many times, even they start believing it. It's like they're still using like Nancy Pelosi and their messaging. And it's like, guys, I mean, you know, I'm not so sure Nancy's coming for the guns at this point. Like, but the real reason on a broader marketplace is fear. And by the way, just to show you the equal opportunity nature of the gun industry, they are more than happy right now to be you know marketing and messaging to people of color, to LGBTQ communities that feel under siege, feel like this moment in America is scary for them. And they've started an intentional effort to market to them too. We have industry documents that say we've grown too pale, male, and stale, meaning old, and they're trying to market to new audiences with new fears and new sense of like, what we will honor any fear you have as long as you solve that fear uh with the purchase of a firearm.

Dan 47:37

Right. You don't have to be a white nationalist to be afraid of the other, right? You can be anybody and be afraid of another. It really sort of sheds light on the fact that we associate this with a right-wing view, but really at the end of the day, it's as you said earlier, it's about commerce and anything they need to do to open new markets to sell guns to whomever. It really sort of changes one's perspective on all of this messaging to some extent.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

I think it it opens up a whole new way of understanding. It's one that I talk a lot about, is the industry. And there are some typical market forces, some things are just different about the gun industry because it has this right-wing rights-based sort of core, but it still is a business. They still have struggled to stay really afloat uh and have faced numerous moments in the last several decades where they kind of were confronting their own end and had to innovate, had to come up with new ways to market new guns to new people. And they've been really cynical and savvy in doing so. But when you do see it as a business, you start to see more clearly, like, you know, who benefits.

Dan 48:44

Nick, this has been great. Where I think trying a new thing where we're trying to end on a little bit more of an optimistic note in this space, it is very challenging for us. But what approaches has every town found most effective for real change? Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Yeah.

Dan 48:59

Go for it.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

Maybe even more than any uh disinformation from the industry, probably our chief adversary is despair, the notion that there's nothing to be done. And that, of course, is why you do the disinformation, because you want it to seem so hopeless and messy that uh I guess we we are just signed up for this forever. But we have a lot of uh examples that we can point to that are signs of hope, that's signs of progress. Our movement space has grown enormously in our 10 years. We have 11 million supporters across the country and an enormous volunteer base, probably the best organized grassroots army in the country, and moms demand action and students demand action. And they're spending most of their time advocating in state houses, which is where the real fight is every day, right? Congress, this issue comes up, it comes down, it comes up, it comes down. But, you know, Congress is not the curtain raiser, it's the closer. And we've made enormous progress uh in the last decade passing sort of the foundational laws that I was telling you about earlier, the red flag laws, uh, domestic violence prohibitors, secure storage laws, these things save lives, and the states that have passed these laws are safer for it. More people are alive today because these laws were passed by people that embraced the science, embraced the policy, and did the right thing. And a lot of new states that like were definitely not on the list in 2013, let's say, are leading the way. Colorado, this is a gun-owning state. They are still a gun-owning state, but they are enacting laws, including most recently a regulation of assault weapons, that is a meaningful change and a positive uh development for the state, along with a battery of other laws. Michigan, Minnesota, these are states that were not on the list not that long ago. And now you've got at least half of the chambers in those states saying, hey, we want this to be done, and real signs of progress. And in a movement space that is still relatively young, in 2022, we passed a bipartisan law. So we started by talking about Sandy Hook and Wayne La Pierre's cynical speech after it. And that after that cynical speech, what happened was a compromise bill was floated in the U.S. Senate. Uh, the NRA whispered behind the scenes that it was going to be okay with a compromise and then killed the bill at the last minute. We had no Republicans on that bill, and I think seven or eight Democrats who voted against it. Cut to 2022, also in the wake of tragedy, this time in Uvalde and Buffalo, we passed a bipartisan piece of legislation in Congress, got 65 votes in the Senate, including 15 Republicans. It was very much a compromise bill. Nobody uh on our side of the ledger was happy about it, but it funded mental health and uh helped uh increase background checks on people under 21 and helped close an important domestic violence loophole and gave money to community violence intervention programs. It did a lot uh and gave funding for red flag laws that we talked about earlier. It's a very important moment to get a bill across the finish line. The sky didn't fall, the confiscation didn't come. The sad part is the radical change in the composition of Congress in the White House is definitely a setback for our issue and really any other issues of import, but you can't take away that progress. You can't take away the organizing that occurred to make that happen, the infrastructure that's built up by that support. And the the simple fact of the matter is that where you do the work and you face down the disinformation and you create the platforms for communicating in more effective ways in more places to more people, we're wildly popular despite the disinformation. You know, if you do a poll on background checks, you're gonna be plus 80% on it. So for all of their effort, when you actually make it about the issue, we win. And so we continue to do this research, to get the facts out there and be relentless in our effort. And, you know, while it's hard to be optimistic when you see so much pain and suffering around you, the the science shows that since that 2022 law and all the laws we passed in the states, we had the most significant reduction in homicide in a generation. The work matters, the battle never ends. That's the unfortunate part. You don't get to take a break, but the work matters, it's saving lives, and and there's a lot of really amazing committed people who do this work uh every day.

Dan 53:55

And I think we'll leave it there, Nick. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been really great.

SPEAKER_00 53:59

My pleasure. Thank you.

Dan 54:07

Well, that that was something.

Rachel 54:10

I am left with both very many, many thoughts and also a kind of silent pit. Yeah. Which does bring me to my lens if you want to get right into it.

Dan 54:24

If we don't talk about the lenses, we're just gonna cry. Yeah.

Rachel 54:27

I mean, I'm probably gonna cry anyway.

Dan 54:30

Let's get into the lens.

Rachel 54:32

My lens is despair. It's a heavy lens.

Dan 54:38

It's a heavy lens.

Rachel 54:39

Okay, this lens asks us how does the system alleviate or exacerbate or otherwise manipulate the feeling that there's nothing that can be improved about whatever. This came to me when Nick was saying that really our chief adversary in the gun violence space is despair, the belief that you can't do anything about it. That really stuck with me on a human level. And then in an IA lens, this feels like a superficial application, but the example top of mind for me is I'm honestly thinking about like the difference in the IA and the structures represented in the UI between something like Airtable and Workday. Wow. Like in Airtable, I feel like anything is possible. And I think it's because it has a lot to do with the structures that I can manipulate and my visibility and the clarity of the structures. But also it's like about what structures are available for me to manipulate. And in workday, I feel like absolutely nothing is possible. Not to pick on workday, although I am picking on workday.

Dan 55:52

Yeah. Not that any of these products, yeah, are causing that level of despair.

Rachel 55:57

No, no.

Dan 55:58

But I think that the what you're talking about is sort of like can it create a sense of hope? And even if that hope is at a very small level, like, oh, I feel very confident that I'm gonna get my work done using this UI.

Rachel 56:11

We've talked about how many lenses we have and how at some point there's probably like a an act of great synthesis that we can do on these lenses. This feels very related to, I think we had a hope lens once. I believe we might have had an agency lens, or one of us thought about an agency lens. These are very related. I think despair is almost an intentionally intense way to talk about agency or lack thereof. Yes. And how we design systems to intentionally give agency and in agency on what, and how we design systems to intentionally curb agency and agency on what. And I think this lens is really provoking us to ask like why, and like where are you giving agency, where are you removing agency, and why, and vetting that choice.

Dan 57:00

I really like where you're going, and I'm glad you call it despair, I guess is the way to say that. Because the whole point of this exercise is to bring perspectives to bear. We might have acknowledged the fact that despair could play a role in these information spaces, but have chosen to ignore it or push it aside because it was uncomfortable. And now I think where a lens like this compels us to confront that discomfort and ask ourselves: is there something about this information space that we're designing? Is there something about this product that we're designing that could potentially be used to create a sense of hopelessness? Yeah, even if it is not at the scale of the topic that Nick was talking about. Dan, what was your lens? During the course of the interview, you made this really um interesting observation about status quo and how sometimes disinformation is a tool of the people who want to disrupt the status quo. Or what you observed here was there is a status quo that exists for the possession and ownership and regulation of guns, and all the disinformation from the gun lobby is really meant to preserve that status quo, to prevent us from questioning the status quo. And just in general, I mean, this is not even really my lens. You brought this up.

Rachel 58:24

You can borrow it.

Dan 58:27

Go ahead. This is such a great observation, and again, not necessarily something that I would bring to bear normally on my design work, but it's really important, I think, for us to ask what role status quo is playing and what role a system that we're creating is playing relative. It's a status quo. Is it designed to preserve the status quo? Is it designed to disrupt or are we making a change to the status quo?

Rachel 58:55

Establish a new status quo.

Dan 58:56

Right, and not even necessarily in a malicious way, but I'm thinking now of a client that I'm working with, they're changing some, you know, fairly ingrained processes, which you might refer to as the status quo, and we're trying to design a system that is disruptive to that, right? That changes those processes, that supports those changes and processes. But at the same time, now that I've been doing this stuff, I'm like, where's the vacuum of disinformation that can kind of come in to make it more difficult for people to understand the nature of this change?

Rachel 59:33

I don't want to get too touchy-feely and stuff, but like this episode was so hard. I think this is the first time where our explorations into other domains has been deeply uncomfortable and good. Like that's a good sign. But I think like for me, I'm starting to see we've gone beyond the easy stuff.

Dan 59:56

Yes. Now we're getting into it.

Rachel 59:57

You know what I mean?

Dan 59:58

Yeah. Even you know, the anti-vax things, there is violence there.

Rachel 1:00:03

Yeah.

Dan 1:00:04

But it's not as acute necessarily. It does feel different.

Rachel 1:00:09

It does. This one felt different.

Dan 1:00:10

And this is not to say that the our previous conversations were warm-ups by any stretch, but I've been thinking about this as sort of graduate level work.

Rachel 1:00:19

Yeah.

Dan 1:00:20

And now maybe we're moved beyond the first year of our graduate program, so to speak. We're digging into much more sensitive topics. And in some ways, there's no way to avoid doing those things. I mean, we could avoid them, but I don't think we would be doing a good faith exploration and understanding of disinformation. One of the things that came up during the interview was the sense of vulnerability, and how that vulnerability is exploited constantly to further agendas. And in this case, it was a vulnerability, a fear of being hurt, a fear of being at the wrong end of a gun, and then using that as a way to make people feel like they needed to have a gun in order to combat that. More and more we're going to be dealing with these topics that put people in vulnerable spaces because that's where the disinformation takes root.

Rachel 1:01:19

I won't speak for any other IA type person, but I have felt like the practice of IA is a bit removed from vulnerability and feelings and tends to be very theoretical, tends to be pretty academic. And I feel that cloak coming off of myself now where I'm like, oh, there is so much we're actually enmeshed in that I have not been seeing or thinking about.

Dan 1:01:46

It's also easy for folks like us who work with products that don't deal directly with conveying the news as being, again, kind of absolved of any responsibility of this. Well, I, you know, I build these weird little enterprise products, but there is disinformation everywhere. There are opportunities to exploit every system for disinformation. And this is the despair side of me, right? It's just gonna keep kind of getting worse. I'll just say one more thing as part of reflection. I really appreciate it also at the end, Nick, talking about some of the things that are working, right? Some of the policy changes that are working. And one of the frustrations that you and I both sort of expressed during the course of the interview is like we didn't necessarily know about these things, or that prevention doesn't get celebrated in the same way. And I think we're going to keep talking about that. Prevention is not as, how did you put it? Like you you don't you're not a hero for preventing something, right? You don't get put on the cover of Time magazine for prevention, for quietly preventing thousands of writing a policy that prevented E. coli from spreading or whatever it is. I like hearing those stories. It makes me feel like there is an opportunity to do some good in the world, and maybe part of this as well is finding a way to celebrate those stories of prevention.

Rachel 1:03:10

I love that. Yeah.

Dan 1:03:17

And that was Unchecked. Thanks so much for listening. We really want to hear from you. If you've got ideas for topics or guests or stories, drop us a line at unchecked at curious-squid.com. If you made use of the lenses that we described today in your practice, we want to hear about that too. Hey, check the show notes for any of the links that we talked about today, and it would really mean a lot to us if you shared this episode with a friend and rated and reviewed us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.