Armed With Reason: The Podcast - Episode 32
Moving into 2025, GVPedia's leaders discuss how to gain victories in a seemingly lost era for gun violence prevention
As we stare down a particularly dour January, GVPedia is going into 2025 hoping to spread hopeful news and stamp down disinformation.
To wit, our new podcast today featuring a talk between GVPedia founder Devin Hughes and Executive Director Caitlin Clarkson Pereira, about how the Gun Violence Prevention movement can go forward. True, for now the Federal outlook for any progress on GVP looks grim, but fruitful state-level action has already been happening, and we can try to incite personal positive conversation to chip away at the currently negative moment.
“In 2025, that's one of the things that GVPedia is going to be striving towards — making sure that disinformation is seen as a root cause of gun violence and is treated as such. And that the academic research on what can effectively counter disinformation is widely promulgated and adopted, because there are relatively simple steps that both organizations and individuals can do, and something everybody can do. Everybody in the movement and everywhere can have conversations with people.”
You can listen to the podcast via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
Caitlin: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us here on the Armed With Reason podcast brought to you by GVPedia. This is our first podcast in 2025, which is already shaping up to be an eventful year, for better or worse. Although at the moment it certainly feels worse. And a deadly terrorist attack on New Year's Day in New Orleans and the country's second largest city currently engulfed by flames, have hardly made for what we would consider a happy New Year. And in terms of gun violence, in the first week of 2025, Gun Violence Archive reports that there were 303 gun deaths, including seven mass shootings.
Last year, 2024 gave us less than desirable federal election results. 40,000 firearm deaths and many more firearm injuries. A few days after recognizing the 12th anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, the world watched in horror as a school shooting unfolded at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin.
Yet, while I might be doing a terrible job of illustrating this, there were some good moments for the gun violence prevention movement in 2024. Most notably that in June — while we, those of us in this work already know this — the U.S. Surgeon general issued a statement declaring that gun violence is actually a public health crisis in America. And as of January 1st, some new state laws are now in play, including Colorado's safe storage law for handguns stored inside unoccupied vehicles. So today Devon and I wanted to do a bit of reflecting back on 2024, and also take a few minutes to look ahead to 2025. Of course, it's often easy to focus on the negative, and that is certainly what the media usually highlights. But to start, I figure it might be a good idea for everyone's mental health to get into a bit of good news. So, Devin, thanks for being here with me for our first podcast in 2025.
Devin: Yeah, New Year. I need to remember how to do podcasts.
Caitlin: Right, exactly. Can you tell us a little bit about the incidence of gun violence last year? And is it true that we have seen a decrease?
Devin: Yes, from all of the data that we currently have. So typically with the CDC, it takes them a year or two in order to provide official figures. And so we won't know for certain on suicides. But in terms of homicides and basically all forms of gun violence and crime overall saw a decrease last year, which was continuing a decrease from 2023 and 2022. So the trend's been down for a few years. And if the numbers hold in terms of homicides or murders, 2024 was the largest single year decrease on record. So it's not just a mild decrease, it's a substantial decrease.
And there're any number of reasons for this decrease. You had community violence interruption programs getting large swaths of funding, and also being able to pick up their work that they just weren't able to do during the pandemic. You've had in many places, a slow rebuilding of trust between communities and police and some attempts at reform. Now, there's still a long way to go there, but a lot of research does show that police, when properly policing, do help reduce crime. And so that's another part of the story. We had the bipartisan gun violence prevention bill of 2022 that helped. And then just a return to some form of normalcy after the pandemic.
Now our normalcy is still catastrophically high. So while the decrease is good, still gun violence is at insane levels. So there shouldn't be too much celebration on that. But at the same time, consistent decades of doom and gloom doesn't really help anybody either. So we should focus on the at least small wins that we've had, and then like how to help preserve those wins or just recognize them before things might go horribly, horribly wrong in the next 40 years.
Caitlin: We absolutely, in some of those situations, have the possibility to preserve, but maybe even to duplicate, right? So that's probably the most important reason to celebrate, not necessarily to give ourselves pats on the back when we've made progress, but to figure out why that progress was made, how it was made, and how to make sure that we can enact that in other places. So we know here at GVPedia that disinformation is a big part of the gun violence prevention movement. And we focus a lot on debunking any of this misinformation/disinformation that may come up, whether it's things that are brought to our attention by outside organizations, or individuals, or things we see in the news. So if you could maybe give us a little bit of insight into what you feel is the impact on disinformation and the gun violence prevention movement in 2024.
Devin: Yeah. And I'm going to kind of bridge it with a connection to some of the wins states like — well, I think it's mostly New York City, and then I believe California is experimenting with it as well — are having gun stores put safety warnings on their products saying like, Hey, purchasing a gun is likely to increase your risk of homicide, suicide, unintentional shootings, and so forth. Which is a good way to go in terms of informing people who are just like, Oh I need to be safe, where's the nearest gun store, that they should probably do some more research and check before making that impulse buy at the very least. And getting that important, accurate information out there is crucial because I think sometimes — and I'm very guilty of this — like we kind of assume the general population knows more about a specific topic than they likely do. It's like, Oh everybody's heard that guns double the risk of homicide, triple the risk of suicide; and that defense of gun use is a myth; and like all this stuff. And whereas no it's probably only 1 to 2% of the population that might be paying attention at any particular moment.
So there's a lot of open territory for educating people in a positive sense. Now that also means there's a lot of room for disinformation to run rampant. And unfortunately, 2024 was a perfect highlight of this, particularly when it came to the presidential campaign, where the statistics we mentioned mere minutes ago — where gun violence and overall crime were decreasing over the past three years — you had John Lott and the entire Trump campaign arguing the opposite, that crime was actually surging recently. And that messaging was amplified everywhere. There are conspiracy theories about the FBI covertly editing their statistics that made its way on to every single right wing media outlet that one could find and probably a whole host of ones that we couldn't find. And there is minor evidence that it swayed polls slightly. When you look at people who believe that crime was increasing versus decreasing, that was the widest split between Trump voters and Harris voters last year, with Harris voters being much more likely to get the answer correct than Trump voters. You also saw on issues of crime, Trump's numbers ticked up in the couple months before the election, when this massive disinformation campaign was being waged. And the research on disinformation is quite clear that simply ignoring it does not work. You have to be able to address it and also point to where it's coming from, its source. You can't just say, Oh that's wrong, but there needs to be a narrative of that's wrong, why it's wrong, where it's coming from, and so forth, to give people a picture of like, Oh wow, this really is an intent to deceive me. And unfortunately, very little of that was done on the national stage in the later portions of 2024.
Now, there's a whole host of reasons for this. There're a lot of important issues elsewhere outside of gun violence and crime that the election was also concerned with. But it was still one of the top 4 or 5 issues on voters minds during the election. And even when there was the occasional fact check saying, No, actually crime is going down, there would be no mention of where the numbers were coming from and how those numbers were being grossly manipulated in terms of the narrative that crime was increasing. And that just opened up the entire playing field. And it's not hard to imagine some undecided voter thinking, Well, do I feel safer now than I was? I've heard that crime is increasing. I'm going to vote for change from that. And now would that alone have flipped the election? Probably not. I mean, with the election as it was, any number of reasons and kind of all of those reasons played a contributing factor. But not addressing disinformation — which the research again says is absolutely essential to do — is vital.
And one of the more interesting things after the election to come out — I actually had one of GVPedia's academic advisory board members forward us this report from the National Academies of Science, who each year publish this 400-page long report on the topic of their choice. And for 2024, the topic of their choice was disinformation. And they broke down all the research and stuff, I'm still wading my way through it because, again, this is 400 pages of academic material, and I do plan on writing something for the Substack. But as a brief preview, as it were, like they go into the research on disinformation, how it can impact things in the scientific community, whether it does, which they find it does, and then provide examples of which areas of science seem to be some of the hardest impacted. So you have climate change, tobacco, basically on down the line. If you can think of a scientific topic in which disinformation is a problem they mentioned it, except for one subject. In the entire report, the words "gun" and "firearm" do not appear a single time.
Caitlin: And how many pages did you say it was?
Devin: 400 or so.
Caitlin: Wow. That's. It's kind of intense that they're able to make it through 400 pages without saying that at least once.
Devin: Yeah. And it's one of the areas where, as we know and have been shouting from the rooftops for the past four to five years, disinformation is one of the most ingrained portions of the gun violence discussion. It's one of the most prominent and prevalent, one of the most bought into by people. And yet not a single word in a report generated by dozens of respected academics that's heavily funded, that took probably years to research. And so there's this weird venn diagram of sorts almost where even in the gun violence prevention space, there has been a hesitancy to tackle this information head on, for understandable reasons because we didn't know what we didn't know like a decade or so ago. And you also have science recognizing that disinformation is a problem, but unwilling to mention the gun violence space. And so it's this like ignoring of disinformation on one hand, and disinformation is a problem, but ignoring of gun violence on the other hand -- and they combine to where it's just not addressed substantially. And it's one of those things as well, where I am by no means advocating that every single organization should stop what they're doing and focus full time on disinformation. That's not necessary. It's not even necessary for 50%, 20% of efforts to be on there, but maybe 5 to 10% can be worth addrssing what the main root causes causes of gun violence, which is people thinking that gun will make them safer, and obtain that firearm and that increases the risk. And it's one of those root causes that just isn't seen or addressed as such.
In 2025, that's one of the things that GVPedia is going to be striving towards — making sure that disinformation is seen as a root cause of gun violence and is treated as such. And that the academic research on what can effectively counter disinformation is widely promulgated and adopted because there are relatively simple steps that both organizations and individuals can do, and something everybody can do. Everybody in the movement and everywhere can have conversations with people.
Caitlin: Yeah.
Devin: And it's just about how best to not only deploy facts, but make sure that you're not challenging somebody's identity at a core level. And like adopting relatively common sense ways of communicating and opening those forms of dialog. And in the past couple of years, it's — well, more than the past couple of years, for almost the past decade — it's been very tempting to isolate ourselves from people we disagree with. And the one thing that countering disinformation kind of requires of us is to not do that, at least with everybody.
Now, if you have somebody who's like pure QAnon, the Democrats are eating babies or whatever the current theme is like, yeah, it's probably not worth wasting time on a discussion with them. But if you have a friend or relative who's like, Hey, I'm considering getting a gun for self-defense, or Hey, like crime has been increasing and that's terrifying to me — being able to have a respectful conversation with that person can very likely alter their mind on it, as long as it's done properly. And so that's going to be a major focus going forward. So, Caitlin, what do you feel the lessons from 2024 and on into the new year are and like how we should go about things?
Caitlin: Certainly the Buddhists reminder that nothing is permanent. And for me, that comes in the shape of probably the Office of Gun Violence Prevention out of the White House. And it was fall of 2023 when the Biden administration created that office. And there certainly was this like burst of of energy and invigoration around folks thinking, Okay, here's a real institution that has the potential to not only admit there's a problem, which is why we need the office in the first place, but come up with with real, tangible ways to make positive change. And we have seen the progress and to know, I mean, it was probably before even all the votes were officially counted that there were articles out there stating, you know, this, you know, pro-gun organization in that pro-gun organization is going to urge Trump to disband or dissolve this office. Or in some ways, maybe worse, keep the office in place, but certainly clean house and have individuals who do not have the same mission in mind for an Office of Gun Violence Prevention that the Biden administration did when it was created. So it's one of those things like, you know, what's the saying like "rather to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" sort of thing. Like would you rather it not have been there in the first place? Like no, of course not. It's it's great that it was there, even if it was for a truncated period of time. Yet it's still it's just really unfortunate that the chances are it won't be around for the long term, even though it's something we needed way before fall of 2023. But at least we had something started.
As of January 21, a search for the link to the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention leads to a blank apge that states: “Page Not Found.”
And I guess along the same lines that nothing is permanent is the ability for states to make progress in their laws. The state rankings come out every year. I have Everytown's [ranking] that I was looking at this morning related to, the state rankings are related to a variety of different factors, but there are a couple of states that improved in their 2024 rankings. And, you know, like Massachusetts improves because they have comprehensive bills that were passed regarding ghost guns and purchasing age for semi-automatic firearms. And Colorado, the same thing I mentioned earlier, the legislation related to safe storage; and they have continued to make sure that they're doing things as far as like taxes engaged. So an excise tax on all firearms and ammunition. And we think of Colorado and Massachusetts as places where gun violence is typically important and taken seriously in the state legislature, but a place like Maine — which is not always a place that we organize in the same category — was able to make improvements. So unfortunately, probably a lot of that is a product of what happened in Lewiston, right? So change was a result of tragedy there.
But to know that there are changes related to background check requirements, which we know so many Americans are in favor of, that really is sort of like one little glimmer of hope. And if a place like Maine, which I think would probably be rated quite a bit lower if it wasn't surrounded by states that have strong gun laws and maybe it wasn't like abutting Canada, it might rank lower. So that's just like a matter of geographics. But if a place like Maine can make improvements, then it gives me hope for other places as well. So that's the theme, right? Like nothing is permanent, for better or unfortunately for worse.
Devin: Yeah. And kind of on that as well, it's one of those things where in many states that, well, it certainly can get worse in terms of legislation. There's not all that much room left because you have more than half the states having adopted permitless carry. And like you have Oklahoma where it's like anti-extreme risk protection order, and we'll make sure that everybody who is a member of the militia gets their free AR-15 on their 18th birthday, which I'm sure they'll try to push again.
Caitlin: Don't give them any ideas.
Devin: No, that's already been an idea. They just keep trying. And even the super, super majority of Republicans are like, that's a terrible idea. But in a lot of states you've seen like this where basically half the states you've seen this extreme push towards enshrining irresponsibility around their gun culture. And the depths that they can plumb are not much further. Like they'll still find a way. But the rapid decrease in gun laws has kind of passed, and then it's more of like a marginal thing there.
So in a way, for some of those states, a lot of the only remaining room is improvements potentially, like people recognizing that, Hey, extreme risk protection orders are a good thing. Child access prevention orders are a good thing. Or laws are a good thing. Stuff like that, where there can be elements of forward movement there. And then for the other half of the states, you've seen more of a push towards stuff like permit-to-purchase, even though there's always the looming threat at the Supreme Court saying like, Yeah, what the founders really meant was everybody, no matter what, can get guns everywhere at any time. Like I mean in their previous decisions, they've already shown that they couldn't care less about accurate history. So, like, who knows what they're going to do? But there's still that sort of division there. And in certain areas, like there's room for the improvement.
While it can definitely be depressing — and I know this firsthand being from Oklahoma — words like defeat after defeat after defeat after defeat, it's like, what's the point? And I think that's where, like our doom and gloom around the power of disinformation can also provide a spark of hope. Because when countering disinformation, as a movement GVP's kind of already starting at zero or something close to where the only way to go hopefully is up. And if you're in a state that's suffering all these defeats, the best thing you can do is have conversations with the people you know, who might be open to changing their minds and slowly building that base of support for the next election cycle and the election cycle after that. Recognizing that, yeah, things aren't going to change overnight. But in a decade, if you convince two people and then those two people convince two people, it's the whole kind of pyramid scheme, but in a good way because nobody's going to lose money at the end. You can have an exponential impact just with conversations never needing to step foot inside of a state house, but raising awareness among people and changing those minds and changing behavior. Even if, like the person that you're talking with still disagrees with you at the end, but might recognize, Hey, I should probably invest in a gun safe to make sure that my kids don't get a hold of it. That's a win. You potentially saved a life there with a conversation.
And having those conversations doesn't require everybody to become an expert. It does require a bit more knowledge, but it's stuff that GVPedia stands ready to assist with, and there're lots of resources and opportunities out there. And it's also like a way to record and notch wins for yourself to say like, Hey, while our state legislature sucks, I had ten conversations this year that were productive and shifted. If everybody in the gun violence prevention movement had ten successful conversations with people, we would win like in four years. So the bar isn't that high, but it's very crucial to go across, and it's a way of making forward progress at a time when it seems like all the national institutions of government and maybe institutions at the state level are going to be against our efforts.
And it's also a way to recognizing the impermanence of everything, being able to create our own institutions. Recognizing that, yeah, the gun violence office going away, or worse being mutated into something horrible, like that's bad. But there's nothing stopping the gun violence prevention movement from holding on to the lessons of that, creating a time capsule of sorts, and accumulating that knowledge, and spreading that knowledge, and building our own fact-based institutions outside of governmental whims and such. And in so doing, when the tides do eventually turn again, being ready to be able to push forward and to have built that strength; and also making sure the foundation is strong and swelled with ever more people; and just pushing forward with that rather than adopting a doom and gloom process.
And in a way, I mean, the election results were bad, there's no way around that. However, if there is a silver lining is that there're now four years to be able to build, and improve, and reconstitute efforts, and make sure that our foundations as a movement are strong, and that we're focusing on what we know will save lives and work. And we have four years — or if you're thinking of midterms, two years — to get that right. And that in itself is an opportunity. And hopefully it's one that we don't squander. And GVPedia is going to be doing everything in our power to help us move forward on that path. So that's my attempt at being an optimist. Like I've been practicing for weeks here.
Caitlin: I'm impressed. You mentioned building before. I apologize if anybody can hear the the house being built next door. The nice gentleman just got back from lunch, so I can hear the circular saw and all sorts of hammering going on. But yes, for 2025 here at GVPedia we certainly will be focusing on disinformation, as you've mentioned a couple of times, and myth busting. These are not new to us. But at the moment they — I feel like I've said this before — right now it feels more critical than ever. But really right now it really feels more critical than ever. And to take the opportunities that we have to share the facts. We have access to the research. We have the fact sheets. We have individuals who are curious to learn more, who want to know the truth. And that's a really powerful thing, right? So now it's just up to us to share what we have in order to help make change.
So as always, we would like to ask our listeners if there are any ideas or thoughts on certain topics that we should cover in 2025. Of course what's most important to us is that our allies and advocates, whatever is most important to them, they bring [that] forward. We want to cover what you want us to cover. So if something pops into your head, whether it's big or small, please reach out to us so that we can figure out how to tackle the subject together.
Some things we have really easy access to, things are already prepared, and others might take a little bit more legwork, but that's totally fine. We're happy to do that. So please certainly do not be shy. So here we are. Devin. It's January. I certainly don't have a crystal ball, so I'm not sure what's going to unfold in the next year, but I am certain that GVPedia will be here ready to take on whatever disinformation campaigns we need to. And we look forward to continuing to work with our partners in the movement and saving lives at the end of the day. That's why we continue to do this work.
Devin: Yes. [There's] some famous scientists somewhere who basically had the quote, "I'm neither smart enough nor dumb enough to predict the future." And I definitely fall into that category. Like, we can't predict what's going to happen, but what we can do is try our hardest to make sure the outcomes ar positives, learn from our mistakes, and keep moving forward.
Caitlin: Right, absolutely. Well said. On that note, thanks for chatting with me, Devin. And again, if anyone's listening who has any ideas, please pass them along. And we look forward to working together in 2025.
Devin: Happy New Year.
Caitlin: Yes. Hopefully happy-ish at some point.
Devin: We'll get there.
