The International Black Market for U.S. Firearms – Topher McDougal

Topher McDougal

The drug trade is a problem that is specifically facilitated by our trade in arms, and in fact, we are very, very much part of a system of illicit trades that is circulating throughout the Americas and really throughout the world.

Andrew Chand

Welcome to solving gun violence, a student led podcast from the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions project. We are dedicated to finding effective strategies to combat one of America's most urgent issues, gun violence. Each of our episodes feature experts sharing actionable solutions to improve public safety while upholding individual rights. My name is Andrew Chand. I'm a fourth year student at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of leadership and public policy and your host for today, for this episode, I'm being joined by a very special guest, Dr Topher McDougall. Dr McDougall is a full professor of economic development and peace building at the University of San Diego's Kroc School of peace studies, where he both teaches on and researches economic development, environmental peace building and most relevant for today's episode black markets and illicit trade, especially in firearms, while this podcast often looks at Gun Violence Prevention at the individual or community level, Dr McDougall will Help us bring an economic lens to the problem. To zoom out a bit and suggest potential solutions on that level. If you're interested in practical solutions and the future of gun violence prevention, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Andrew Chand

Dr. McDougall, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Topher McDougal

Thank you so much for having me, Andrew, this is great to be here.

Andrew Chand

Yeah so I wanted to start off just talking about, you know, I know that you've written a lot about gun violence and gun markets in general, but what really got me interested in your research was the international lens that you take, particularly the research you've done on the relationship between American gun markets and the American gun supply and the gun violence that we see going on in Mexico. Could you tell us more about that work, sort of how you got interested in it, how you conducted it, and what you were able to learn?

Topher McDougal

So how I got interested? I mean, I think that these sorts of questions are interested. You could answer them from like, a bunch of different angles and a bunch of different sort of levels, right, personally or professionally or, you know, whatever, I grew up in New Mexico, so, you know, that's, that's a place where a lot of cultures are sort of mixing and mingling, and we're very, sort of aware of the of the border and the trans border nature of a lot of the American economy. It's also a place where gun violence is, sadly, pretty common. So I grew up sort of, you know, in that milieu, and a little bit sensitized to it, but I hadn't really turned my attention to this exact problem. I had been focused on economic causes and consequences of violence, cost of Conflict Studies, and especially work around trade routes and how trade routes incentivize non state armed actors to predate or not on objects of their of their trade. And there was a colleague who was just mentioning, you know, how many gun stores seem to cluster around the US Mexico border.

Andrew Chand

Its something like 15% isn't it?

Topher McDougal

Yeah it's really, it's really incredible when you and when you control for the population at the border, you control for the population in general that each each store might be serving, and you control for everything else, right? You control for distance, the nearest hunting grounds, and whether you know how that county leans Republican or Democrat, or like, how many military bases there are all of these sorts of things that influence the demand for guns in a particular area. You find this really pretty striking monotonic decline in demand for guns as you get away from the Mexican border. And so it just occurred to me, like we could, we could quantify that we can see that we can detect it, we can quantify it, and we can sort of put a put a percentage wise number to the percentage of arms that are sold in this country with the intention of being trafficked across across the border.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, in reading some of your work and others work in the past, I found it pretty striking. It's something like, there's only a single legal gun store in Mexico, and in 2019 though, there were 3.9 million crimes in Mexico committed with guns that were traced back to the US. It's like 70% of guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, correct? Come from the US. I mean, that's just a staggering amount, isn't it?

Topher McDougal

It is. It's a staggering amount. And it wasn't until 2022 the end of 2022 that the sort of hacktivist group guacamaya leaked onto the internet. This like treasure trove of those e traces. Now we we have, like all of these, that these data on, you know, individual guns that the Mexican authorities have. They've curated these data sets, sent them to the ATF for E tracing, and that the list of those e traces was then sent back to Mexican authorities, and due to the, you know, the 2000 3t hard amendment and other things, they are legally barred from making that information available to the public. Mexican authorities didn't make it available, but this hacktivist group most certainly did. And so this is, you know, there's been a kind of resurgence, and a colleague and I, Sean Campbell and I recently wrote a series of articles that was revisiting this issue. It's like 10 years on from the original article that I had read trying to quantify the clustering effect of stores, these FFLs, these federal firearms licenses to retail around the US Mexico border. And, you know, 10 years, 10 years on, we're able to revisit it with really specific, granular data.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, that's fascinating. Almost a stroke of luck there with the hacktivist group, but I had not heard about that. So it's very interesting. I want to ask more on this front about the trafficking. Obviously, in the United States, the gun stores, for the most part, are legal, and we focus on, you know, perfectly legal, as you said, FFL, certified gun stores. How do firearms from those stores sort of turn the corner from being legally purchased to trafficking, like, sort of, what's the trafficking mechanism? Can you explain that a little bit?

Topher McDougal

So we have a lot of evidence. Mostly the evidence that I have seen is from US court cases. So through the PACER system. You can look at these court cases, and you can read through cases that have been brought in federal court against people who have lied on their application to this is the most common, the most common thing that people are brought up on charges for is saying they're ticking the box that says this firearm is for my personal use, but it's not they turn around and they sell it on. So they are straw purchasers. Right since midway through the Biden administration, they also created a federal statute against arms trafficking. Strangely, we didn't really have one before that, so you had to, like, bring people up on this weird charge of, like, lying on a federal form or other things. But a combination of these two things has has given us a, you know, kind of a glimpse into what oftentimes goes on, and it's usually, you know, it's a very small minority of of FF else, you know, most FFLs are law abiding stores, and they it's perfectly legal to sell guns in this country. A small minority of them sell guns in a way that is fairly irresponsible. They will look the other way. If someone comes in with $60,000 in cash and they're looking to buy, you know, 3040, 50, ar, fifteens, they say, Well, you know, I guess it's your legal right to buy these weapons. And, you know, say like a woman is walking in with a man, and the woman is looking around and doesn't know anything the man is asking the questions. But then the woman buys the, you know, is actually the one who hands over the ID to for the background check. There are all of these sorts of, you know, Telltales that ought that certain FFLs not and by by no means the majority will overlook.

Andrew Chand

I see. Thank you for sort of illuminating on that straw purchasing idea that sort of comes up the literature around this. I do want to say, you know, obviously the violence that goes on in Mexico, just the loss of human life, you know, is reason enough for us to care about this. Nonetheless, there are some people that might listen to this conversation, read some of your research and basically say, I don't live in Mexico, so this isn't very high up on my priority list. Could you explain how gun violence in Mexico affects our listeners, mostly in America, and why they should care about it?

Topher McDougal

Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, so there are lots of different ways to address this question, so take it on face value. We can start by just by saying violence in Mexico, yes, it affects people in Mexico. It also affects people all throughout Latin America. You could probably do a gravity based model and look at how this trade affects all sorts of countries. You know, Haiti recently collapsed. It has now the last vestiges of democratically representative government in Haiti have been swept away. The country is controlled by gangs. That has largely happened with us sold weapons, many of them coming through Puerto Rico. The same sorts of things are happening as far south now as Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, and we see what's, you know going on in Venezuela at this point, and all of those create conditions where people want to leave. So if you are, you know, if you are one of these people who is really interested in in border enforcement, stronger. CBP. The stronger immigration controls and are worried about caravans coming to like violence in Latin America is one of the primary, probably the primary driver, of out migration from many of these countries, from Guatemala, from El Salvador, etc. So that's one answer.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, I really appreciate expounding on sort of the migration lens of this. I'm pretty close with a lot of immigrants. It's an issue I care deeply about. And a predominant narrative is, do you think it's fun to pick up everything you've ever known and leave track across the jungle to America? People aren't doing that out of some malicious or even some banal reason. It's driven by factors, one of which is, as you said, the violence. And I think another thing I've found interesting is, sort of, by arming, to an extent, the cartels and the criminals in Mexico, we also worsen our own Fentanyl crisis. Because I remember reading in the news, example, the Mexican cartel shot down an army helicopter, a Mexican army helicopter with, you know, in our 2015 Yeah, powerful weapons that you get only from America. So there's also that lens of the issue,

Topher McDougal

Yeah now that was a the first thing that brought it down was a Barrett 50 caliber rifle manufactured in Tennessee, and then as it started spiraling, they took it, you know, they took it out with an RPG. But you're absolutely right. One of the things about the small arms trade in particular, is that it's kind of a keystone species for every other form of illicit traffic, right? So whether you're talking about endangered species, for instance, or whether you're talking about human trafficking, whether it's labor trafficking or sex trafficking or others, whether you're talking about drugs, narcotics, etc, whether you're talking about counterfeit all of these illicit trades are founded upon a this basis of being able to enforce property rights and to enforce contract rights, and usually in a developed economy, or in any economy, you have A government that steps in to enforce those things in these illicit trades, no one is going to enforce those contracts, and so you need to enforce them somehow, and usually it's at the barrel of a gun, right? I think it was Mao who said that all power comes from the barrel of a gun. That lesson has is has been very well learned by non state armed actors across the globe, whether they are mafias, whether they are alternative governments or rebel parties or cartels or whomever.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, on sort of the subject of those illicit markets, I just want to dive into your work on those types of markets more generally, and from the gun violence perspective, I think it's really interesting, because at least in America, when we talk about solutions to gun violence, a lot of it is focused around regulations. It's about reforming these visible and legal markets. However, as your work shows extensively, there's this whole other level to the gun violence epidemic, and that is the illicit market. And so as an expert on these markets, can you tell us a bit about the features of the illicit firearms market and what special challenges it may pose to public safety.

Topher McDougal

Yeah, so the firearms market, you know, as I said, it undergirds all of these other all of these other trades, and so most networks that are instrumental in bringing fentanyl or methamphetamines or cocaine to the United States, oftentimes through Mexico, but not always, entirely. Most of these networks that are distributing throughout the United States are also buying weapons, right, like they turn around and and a certain, you know, a small portion of their net profits are then going back in to sort of, you know, purchasing or, well, I guess I should say, of their revenues goes back into funding their their organization, and part of what they need to fund is the purchase of weapons. So you have these incredibly well funded and incredibly well armed groups, like, if you think about the zest, for instance, right? They started out as, you know, basically like hit men for other cartels, sort of like a special forces unit of the cartels. But they grew and to the point where, yeah, they were putting banners over bridges. They were recruiting people from the Special Forces. You know, tax money had gone into training these people. It seemed all above board, like the fact that they could even put up a billboard to advertise this in a public space, on a highway in a major in a major metropolitan area. But that's sort of blending right? Like the fact that Mexico now is really struggling. It's a very strong state. It has a strong military and a strong tradition of democratic governance, and yet it's struggling mightily with what's increasingly this kind of hybrid governance. You know, that you have, you have the government, whether it's federal or state or municipal, but you also have this like parallel governance structure that isn't has been for the past, you know, two decades now, very prominent in inst. During everyday life. And it can be, you know, it can be, frankly, terrifying, right? You hear all sorts of stories about shootouts, mass killings. Now, what you hear a lot about is the sort of like rampant killing of journalists throughout Mexico, right? With killing with with a fair degree of impunity at this point, right? So, so we don't even, we don't even hear much about it, but, but much of this, as you say, about 70% of these, of these arms, come from the United States. Another thing that we might just mention is that the fact that the United States has such a large civilian legal market for by far the largest civilian market in the world, for, for for weapon. And the fact that it's legal means that a lot of weapons that are being trafficked illegally, oftentimes do so under the aegis of coming to the United States. Right? So I'm thinking of a story of a colleague of mine, Cathy Lynn Austin, who runs the conflict awareness NGO, and she tracks these weapons from different types of crime scenes, sometimes battlefields, sometimes crime scenes around endangered species. So she was in Kruger National Park looking at the poaching of rhinos there, and found a bunch of, you know, large, high caliber hunting rifles that had been manufactured in Czechoslovakia. So they're not coming from the US, but by cz So, and CZ has now has purchased US corporations, US firearms corporations. They have a US branch, and these were purchased, or these were sold from Czechoslovakia with the CZ USA imprint, ostensibly destined for the US market. So the fact that they were able to travel through European customs was because they were coming ostensibly to a US market, and then were diverted and we're and we're sent to South Africa.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, well, that's just like a fascinating display of how these, these illicit markets work. And on that note, I'm sort of curious, how do you measure an illicit market? Because by definition, it's not supposed to be a recorded trade. It's not like you can pull up the receipts. And so obviously, this podcast where we're very much evidence based. And so I'm really curious about how you can arrive not just to descriptions or accurate observations, but even to solutions around these illicit markets with sort of this inherent tension of, how do you measure them?

Topher McDougal

Yeah, it's a really good question. It's like, and it's oftentimes a really tough empirical kind of nut to crack. I guess what I'll say is, like these illicit markets are kind of, I like to make a sort of analogy to a black hole, right? The black hole is something that is there. It's massive. It affects its environment, and yet we can't see it, right? Obviously, the reasons that we can't see a black hole are different from the reasons that we don't see an illicit market. But in some ways, we can think about in sort of like parallel ways, as to, you know, say, like the event horizon team that finally took that first picture. I don't know if you remember this the first picture of a black hole, right? It looked like a fuzzy donut, and the fuzzy donut was the accretion disk around the black hole, and then inside is the black hole itself. What you don't see is the black hole itself and and because of the ways that they were able to triangulate a number of different telescopes and gravimetric sensors, and over time, create this image has like, great, I think it has great applicability to the ways that we have to maintain and cultivate a sense of, like, creativity in the social sciences, for how we look at things. So, just like a black hole, sort of, like, brings things near it, right? You know, it has this accretion disk, the gravitational field, brings things towards it. We can sort of do the same thing with demand, right? Like this is, this is my, the first paper that I did back in 2014 about this was looking at essentially that, right? Like are, are our FFLs gravitationally drawn toward the US Mexico border? And if so, like, can we measure that? And it turns out like we can actually measure that. Like those are they might not intentionally locate there some some do like, and is that super clear? But they're also just responding to price signals and to demand, right? So that's one thing. I think. Another thing that's really interesting for me is that just as a just as a black hole might bend rays of light, right, and as those bend around it, we can sort of detect that the black hole is there. The same thing happens with prices, right? So if you think about the prices for arms and ammunition on an illegal market, you can measure those price fluctuations. So this is something we did at one point in Haiti. I've already mentioned. 80, sort of the country that's kind of near and dear to my heart. But we, we got this really amazing actually, as a colleague of mine built an amazing data set of prices for ammunition, individual rounds of ammunition of all different calibers all over Haiti. So she would call up these shops. They're like, you know, hardware stores, basically, but that, you know, in addition to, like, nails and screws, they also sell some ammunition, because Haiti is a pretty, you know, like, violent country, and so she would call them up, and she would say, like, okay, here you are in Germany or wherever you are. Tell me about, like, what's your price for a, you know, 22 pistol? What about, like, 32 What about whatever? She goes through the whole list, and they give her these prices. And every month we have these prices for every caliber all over Haiti. And then we get to go back and say, Okay, wait a minute, like Haiti's under an embargo during this whole time. It's not supposed there's, there's no there are no guns or ammo that is supposed to be coming into this country. The only legal shipments are and it's actually pretty well patrolled. They're all coming in through the UN Stabilization Mission, which is called minus at the time. And the UN Stabilization Mission just also has a partnership with the Haitian National Police. And we know exactly when and how much ammo comes into the country, because it's all above board through the UN and we can look at that like, when does it happen? It all comes through Port au Prince. And then we can see every time that these shipments come in, price fluctuations ripple outward. The prices dips because the supply has risen to the price dips and it ripples out throughout the country. And you can see that so clearly the firewall between the military market and the civilian market has been breached.

Andrew Chand

That's so interesting. And I really like the black hole metaphor. It's you may not be able to observe the black hole itself, but you can see everything going on around it, and that's such a great example, because, yeah, that you know basic supply and demand. If there's more supply, the price should go down. Theoretically, if you were expecting everything working as it should, those arms destined for the military should not affect the civilian supply. But clearly they do, because the price dips. It's so fascinating.

Topher McDougal

Exactly and if we, you know, to extend that, you know, if we were to this would be like a kind of holy grail in this area, like we were to put some kind of like web crawling, amazing, you know, AI on the case, and do a whole bunch of machine learning for prices on the black market, say prices on Tor or wherever black web, and pull all of those prices and different countries together. Then theoretically, if we could control for demand in all of those countries. And we also already have above board data sets compiled by the Peace Research Institute at Oslo and others of licit transfers. So now we have, we have demand on the one hand, we have licit supply on the other. And now on a global scale, you could say, if we know these two things, and we would predict, in the absence of an illicit market, that the price should be here, and yet the price is much lower than that, if it's lower like there, and if you know the elasticity of demand, in that case, you can transfer the price difference there into a quantity difference, and say, there's this much quantity coming into the into the economy that we didn't know about.

Andrew Chand

Fascinating and also a very good point. You know, a lot of people say supply and demand. Why does this matter? Why am I learning this in high school? And we are using this to address some of the biggest issues facing, you know, the international community? So shout out.

Topher McDougal

Absolutely study economics, especially micro economics.

Andrew Chand

Oh, absolutely. I'm more of a macro person, but that's okay. We can agree to disagree. Now I want to sort of ask about, you know, on this topic, again, of illicit markets, what are some of the safeguards that we might be able to put in place to mitigate or even eliminate this type of illegal trade? And do you think that should be a primary goal of violence prevention advocates?

Topher McDougal

Yeah. I mean, this is such a tricky question in this country, right? Small Arms, or guns, are such a big part of the national culture. For now, hundreds of years, they have been seen as a safeguard against the, you know, a possible rise of tyranny. I think that there are lots and lots of different policies out there that can be effective. So one in certain societies, people have used buyback programs, right? They will buy guns back off of the civilian market. It is difficult to see that working in a country like the United States, at least on a on a on a large scale, because we have such a great amount of supply, it would probably just induce a lot of a lot of sort of replacement, right? It depends on how much you're paying for the guns. You have to be very careful about that. If you pay too much, people can sort of, like, give up their gun, get a load of cash and then go pay for a better gun, or, like, alert, right? Or get the same gun, and then I'll have cash left over, whatever it might be. So these buyback programs, when used elsewhere, you have to be careful about it, and you also have to make sure they can't resupply. So this was done, say, in Sierra Leone, after, in the demilitarization phase of that after that conflict, we don't, we want all of these ex combatants to get rid of their guns, and we don't have any more supply. After, after the fact was done in Liberia, was done in lots of places. After, after civil wars in this country, we, you know, I've just said, you know, we have the largest civilian, honest market in the world by far. So we have plenty of supply. In fact, we're oftentimes referred to as the world's gun store, right? We are where people go to when they want guns. So that's probably not going to work. But in California, California recently implemented an excise tax is the first ever State level excise tax on on firearms. So often, excise taxes are oftentimes called sin taxes, right? And the federal government has excise taxes on a few things, including firearms and ammunition. Rate 10 to 11% depending on what kind of gun you're getting, a long, long gun or a handgun. So California did the same thing. They basically took those exact same figures and just doubled them, but at the state level. And so now California, ever since, you know, they this went to it into effect in July of 2024 they the state government is able to use those funds to offset and to mitigate some of the damages caused by weapons in the first place, so that these funds are directly tied to victim therapy programs, are directly tied to adult reentry programs, gang desistance programs, things like of that nature. And at the same time, they are decreasing, right? They're decreasing the quantities that are sold because it's more expensive. And so it's, I mean, another shout out to all the economists out there. This is called a Pigouvian tax, right? And it's when, when something has a negative spillover effect, and you're trying to tax the spillover effect, like we also do it with carbon or some, some places do it with carbon tax. So that's, this is one thing that I think is is pretty promising. When you put a like you respect the price signals on a market, then you quantify this negative spillover effect, and then you create a mechanism to capture that and to internalize those externalities. So I think that that's a that's one promising way to go. I'd actually like to see it probably higher than even that right now, California, in doing this, brought the total tax on firearms to roughly where alcohol is taxed. Like alcohol in this state, in most states, is, you know, is taxed, I forget it's like in the 28 to 29% range in total. But cigarettes, for instance, all tobacco products in many states are taxed, and in California included, are taxed. Much more than that, it would be great to tax, I think, like at least a bit more like to bring it up to the level of tobacco products.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, that makes sense, obviously, as an economist, and I study economics as well, that discipline usually wants to favor market mechanisms and incentive structures over, you know, command and control or traditional enforcement. I want to push a little bit on what you think can be done, though, about FFLs failing to report straw purchases, I think it's some interesting numbers, like in 2022 the ATF found about 38,000 cases of FFLs failing to report suspicious behavior that they should have done, that they should have reported, or failing to keep records entirely. How do you think we can sort of incentivize better cooperation on a part of these FFLs with existing policies that you know, policies that are at least du jour already on the book.

Topher McDougal

Yeah, yeah. That's a fantastic question. I think you know, part of it is to to acknowledge that the work that the ATF has traditionally done actually does work. The ATF has been chronically underfunded, chronically understaffed, doesn't have as many policy mechanisms at its disposal as it could or should arguably have, and yet, when it does act, those actions actually have an effect. And so a paper I Sean Campbell and I recently did looked at number one, the relationship between these illicit sales that are going to Mexico, the illicit transfers to Mexico and Mexican homicide rate. And sounds that for every 1% increase in our estimates of illicit flows across the US, Mexico border, homicide rates in Mexico increased by point 5% so there's, like, there's already this, like, pretty strong evidence. Yes, that that is that that's the case. We then looked at enforcement mechanisms. What if you bring enforcement to bear? We have through the Brady center that they keep a whole data set on violations that have been issued to specific FFL, so a violation will be on a specific point of code, and that is then presented to an FFL and a warning letter. And those warning letters, like can contain anywhere from one to, I don't know how many violations on average, it's like 4.5 or five that they average per warning letter. And so we looked at this, we said, Okay, now that we have this amazing data from the guacamaya email hacks that I talked about earlier, we now know exactly, not just you know what the make and manufacture and model of the gun was that was used in a specific place, we also know exactly where it was sold and when, right. And so we can go back and we can say, okay, that FFL was issued a warning letter in 2019, now, can we estimate based on this, you know, sort of large regression model, how many guns from that store are going to show up in crime scenes in Mexico the following year? And one of the things that we, we found there is that, like, we can, you can actually quantify that, and you can say, oh, like, for every one of these citations that's issued, there's a 45% reduction in likelihood that a gun will show up in Mexico the following year, with an average of, I forget, like four or whatever, citations per warning letter. That adds up to, like, somewhere around 90% like a 90% reduction in the probability of a gun coming from that store the following year per warning letter, the fact that over the course of three years, fewer than 10% of FFLs are actually even audited, and a much smaller fraction of those are then issued warning letters. Right? That speaks to lack of capacity, perhaps lack of political will, or whatever it might be, but when they act, you know, enforcement works, right? I mean, maybe that's that should not be, like completely mind blowing, but it does work.

Andrew Chand

Well that is heartening, in a way, and a very interesting point about the ATF. We've sort of spoken at length about this sort of American exceptionalism, and that exceptionalism being for firearms. You know, we have our second amendment that's sort of unique and in constitutions and so considering all of that, like, how much of a responsibility does America, or Americans sort of owe to this issue of firearm related violence in other countries?

Topher McDougal

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, like, one of one of these, like the early papers that was looking at the effects of of US Armed sales on Mexican violence was called exporting the Second Amendment. Right? You might, you might remember this paper, and we don't have the right to do that, right? That's our, that's our constitutional amendment. It's not theirs. So I think that it's, it's, in some ways, very hypocritical right to be cracking down so much on on immigration, and say, justifying or attempting to justify the bombing of drug boats, in summary, sort of ways right in the Caribbean and now also in the Pacific. But like these are problems like the drug trade is a problem that is specifically facilitated by, as I said, by our trade in arms, and in fact, we are very, very much part of a system of illicit trades that is circulating throughout the Americas and really throughout the world.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, interlinked, historical and systemic sort of responsibility is something that I think Americans broadly should understand. It's something I prescribe to, and I really appreciate your expansion on that. I do have one last question for you. We asked everybody this question, but it is an indescribably big one, and there's definitely no right answer. But what the podcast aims to do is sort of collect ideas and perspectives from a wide range of people that, when taken together, can hopefully teach us something. So considering your work on illicit markets and also the international element to all of this, what does the solution to gun violence look like to you?

Topher McDougal

What does the solution to gun violence look like to me, that is impossibly large. And I think that that is so large that in order to cover it, it's going to take a sort of patchwork quilt, right, like a bunch of small solutions in some coordinated way, linking to one another and covering a much larger problem. So yes, I think that there are all sorts of, you know, we've talked about some of the policies that we can put in place. I think that that's great, but I honestly think at its core we need to be introspective. We need to ask ourselves, like, what kinds of people we want to be, what kinds of values we want to enshrine in our institution? And what kinds of of values we want to promote in our in our children. And I think that that kind of thinking sets a good like even if we feel that the headwinds are against this right now, we have to sort of lay a good substrate, something a foundation to build upon when conditions are more auspicious, and oftentimes the conditions won't be auspicious until some crisis or breaking point. You know, I think of like the poet Robinson Jeffers, who, in the lead up to World War Two, writes the bloody sire and sort of says all of the world's values have stemmed from violence. And what could have been more true, like World War Two was horrendous, and yet, out of World War Two grows the largest global concatenation of institutions ensuring peace during that time that we'd ever seen. Whether that's those are the international financial institutions, the Bretton Woods institutions, the UN and all of the UN architecture the modern world, in some in a very real sense, like grew out of that colossal failure and that colossal amount of violence. And so I hope that we can sort of internalize the the violence that we are, that we have caused to ourselves and to others, and that out of that crisis can come something beautiful.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, I really like that answer. Dr McDougall, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast today. Really appreciate it and just thank you so much.

Topher McDougal

Yeah, thank you for having me, Andrew, it was a pleasure.

Andrew Chand

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of solving gun violence. For more information on Dr McDougall's work, you can visit his website, tophermcdougal.com to learn more about the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions project. You can visit us at gvsp.virginia.edu Please make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, so you can be notified as soon as we post our next episode, we'll see you next time you.