John Fineblatt is the president of every town for gun safety. Welcome to fast politics, John. Oh, thanks

very much. Thanks for having me. I

feel like so many things make me depressed. But your organization makes me a little bit hopeful. So talk to me

about every town and what you're working on right now. Well, you know, I think the interesting thing is when we started every town 10 years ago, we said we needed to build a counterweight to the NRA. We said that for a simple reason, which was, you know, the NRA really treated Congress and the White House like its clubhouse and outsized power. Many people say it was the second most powerful lobbying organization in the country. And the truth is that they at that time could block most common sense gun laws and interestingly, block laws that the American public at least according to polling widely supported. And so we felt like you had to clear the brush and you had to really focus on what the obstacles to making progress were. And there's no question about it. The NRA was one of the biggest obstacles. I

feel like last week was a bad week for the NRA.

No question about it. In fact, it's not just last week. It's really the last couple of years when the onions started to get peeled on the NRA and we started to see that they really treated the NRA like a personal piggy bank. And we've all heard the story about the Breony suits and the yachts and the private plane. But I think what we don't hear enough about is the fact that when we've all forgotten about the extravagances, there are many families across this country who will never forget the fact that they lost their children and their loved ones. And in many ways, to tie that back to the NRA, which has blocked at every juncture the most reasonable gun safety legislation. And I really can't help it going back to the days after Sandy got where everybody in the country thought, well, this is the moment that we're finally going to have a common sense gun legislation. And it was a pretty modest bill that was in front of the Senate. It was a background check bill. And it was, as you might remember, was supported by Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania and Joe Manchin from West Virginia. Pat Toomey, who's retiring because he can't stand this. We thought this was the dream team of sponsors. And yet at the last minute, this very modest bill, which in fact, I'm almost embarrassed to admit had some giveaways to the God lobby in it. With Republicans voting against it, but a handful of Democrats voting against it, which is just a good reminder of the fact that while Republicans were opposed to this, Democrats were too. And not because Democrats weren't sympathetic, by and large, but because the NRA really had disproportionate power at that point. And those days are over. And in many ways, those days are over because we've seen firsthand what the NRA is really about. But just to give you some sort of sense of it, in 2012, said Vindy Democrats running for the House or Senate received A's from the NRA. You don't receive an A without filling out a questionnaire. Today, zero. And so you can see how things have changed so dramatically. And as you might remember a year ago or so, we finally passed a bipartisan bill in the Senate. It was the first really gun safety buildup be passed in 27 years. And it had every Democrat on it, unlike the days after Sandy Hook, and it had 15 Republicans on it, including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn, who was the actual lead Republican negotiating. So the political calculus has changed significantly on this issue. The NRA's letter grades, which used to be a king and queen maker now are a little bit more like a scarlet letter. And the NRA itself is just a shadow of its former self. I think I think they knew our times last week called it a ghost ship, which I thought was very descriptive. But when you look at almost any measure, when you look at the money they spend on lobbying and politics, it's down like 75%. If you look at their membership dues, I think they're down 40% spending $5 on legal fees to defend them in court. They're in very bad shape. There's no question about it. And interestingly, you have to ask the question, well, does that translate to a loss of political power? And I think the most recent interesting example is the elections in Virginia. It's November because that's their home. That's where their headquarters are. And from a reputational point of view, if nothing else, Virginia is very important to them. And every town outspent them 10 to 1. And it wasn't just that we outspent them. We actually denied them what they were looking for, which was control of both houses of the legislature, so that they could actually roll back the gun safety legislation that had been passed there. And so they're broke and they're down on their influence.

Yeah, it's such an interesting and also well-deserved position for them to be in. The thing that I'm sure by the polling on this issue, people don't actually want to live this way. But we're stuck here. Tell me how we're not actually stuck here. Explain to me where we are. It's

a good point, you raised, because this was always the conundrum that we had to deal with 10 years ago when we started, which is, you know, how can after Sandy Hook you lose on a background check, on a background check bill, when you poll it and you see that 85% of Americans support background checks. I mean, I think that our lowest number, which was somewhere, I think it was in Wyoming, was 72% approval. And I think because the NRA in those days had a real stranglehold on elected officials, and it was an interesting example of the fact that, and this isn't the only time we've ever seen this, where elected officials really aren't representing their constituents. And so that's why we thought it was so important to really shine a very harsh spotlight on the NRA. And as I say, really expose what they're about, which is actually not a gun rights organization, certainly not a gun safety organization, which they proclaimed in many years passed to be, but they are a personal piggyback. And that's what they are. And I think that in many ways that harsh spotlight has helped significantly to change how people see the issue of gun safety, and most importantly, how politicians do. And so I gave you the example of Virginia, but I can give you lots more examples. You know, in 2016, the NRA was probably Trump's largest outside donor. They put $30 million into his race. By 2020, they could only spend half of that on politics because they were hemorrhaging money, and they only made three bets. One was Trump and the other two were the two Georgia runoffs, and obviously they lost both. But so much has changed. 21 states now have universal background checks. 21 states have red flag laws. I think 30 some states have laws barring domestic abusers from being able to buy guns. And so what we've seen is at the state level, we've made a significant amount of progress. And then just about a year ago, that progress extended to the US Congress. And the truth is that the NRA opposed the bipartisan bill that was passed a year plus ago, but Mitch McConnell and

Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn didn't care anymore. They don't have the power they used to, right? So there's the Rahini case. This Supreme Court is pretty antagonistic to any kind of, you know, they feel that if the framers had muskets, then everyone else should have, then everyone in the world should have AR 15s. It's quite a leap. Yeah, it's quite a leap, but it's called, but I don't know if you know this, it's called textualism.

And so I'm curious where you are now. They seem to be backtracking a little bit, but again, we never know with this court. The decision that Judge Thomas wrote has basically just created so much chaos in the federal courts. That's the Bruin case we're talking about. The

idea was that New York state was not allowed to make the kind of gun laws it wanted.

Yeah, basically what it required, as you said, was in historical underpinning or historical context for laws. And if a judge couldn't find some sort of historical precedent for the law, then the law actually violated the Second Amendment. But I think it's created just chaos. I mean, you've got judges basically saying, can I hire an historian? I'm a judge, not a historian. I don't know what the laws were in England before this country was founded. I don't know what the laws were in the late 1600s or the early 1700s. And so you've got real chaos in the federal courts with judges in one part of the country deciding one way, another part in the other way. And why that is so damaging is because courts are supposed to actually provide predictability. That's why precedent is so important from our courts. But in fact, what we've got is just unpredictability. But the case that you are actually referring to this most recent case that the Supreme Court heard arguments, the Rahimi case, is one where you sort of at the far outreaches where the challenge was, could you actually bar a domestic abuser from owning guns? And this was a Fifth Circuit case with judges basically saying, well, there's no historical precedent for such a bar, which is crazy. Because what's historical precedent that women were property, not even human beings? Right. And so there was no question about it when this case was argued before the court you had. I don't want to be somebody who's a prognosticator of Supreme Court decisions. But clearly there was a lot of sympathy across the bench for the idea that, of course, you would bar a domestic abuser from owning gun. I mean, what could be more dangerous? And so my hope is that we'll start to resolve what the Bruin decision really meant because right now nobody really in the judiciary

knows what it means and they're sort of grappling with it. Yeah. It is such an incredibly crazy time right now. So let's talk about this online hub dedicated to holding the gun industry accountable. This is one of the really interesting things the NRA has worked really hard on protecting gun manufacturers. Right. That's sort of which makes sense because corporations are people. It's really interesting to me because I think the NRA and this is this was in their sort of height of their power.

I think they learned some things probably from other fights about industry, whether it be tobacco or auto. But what they did was they persuaded Congress to bar research. Can you imagine where we would be with tobacco if we didn't have medical research? They convinced Congress to give the industry blanket civil immunity. I mean, where would Ralph Nader be if the auto industry had blanket civil immunity, meaning that you can actually sue them? And so what they did was they built sort of a fortress around the industry because in many ways really what is the NRA? It's really it represents the industry. It's their protector. And so it used Congress to really build this sort of impenetrable fortress around the industry. And it sort of took away some of the tools that are normally used in fights against corporate malfeasance such as research. Very important such as the ability to sue. Very important. Now, we've been able to do some very creative workarounds around that blanket civil immunity and actually have been quite successful very recently in suing the industry. And there are a number of cases that have given substantial awards to plaintiffs. But more importantly, many of the settlements that we've reached have actually changed the industry's practices. For instance, requiring online sellers of ammunition to embed an age verification system in their platform or barring ghost gun sellers from selling in the state of California or shutting down manufacturers and dealers who were responsible for disproportionate number of what we call crime guns and those are guns that are recovered at crime scenes. But there's much more to be done in this area, but you've got to bring the industry to the table. And I think the only way you're going to bring the industry to the table is by actually holding them accountable in court. But just think of some of the things that the industry could do. What if you had a palm print recognition gun that could only be by the rightful owner? We wouldn't be waking up in the morning and reading about a four-year-old playing hide-and-go-seek and finding their parents' gun in the sweater drawer and accidentally killing their civil or hurting themselves? Or we wouldn't be reading about which sadly we are reading a lot about teenage suicide. Where did teens get their guns? They usually get them from their parents or their relatives who have negligently stored them. But we're here something that most people don't realize. In fact, there was a point where I didn't realize this, which is when you ask, well, how did guns get into the black market? One of the most reliable ways is through home burglaries and car break-ins. Well, those guns would have no economic currency in the black market if they could only be fired by their rightful

owner.

I mean, there are other even simpler things. Like, you do, when you read these stories of a four-year-old firing a gun, you think, like, well, how can a four-year-old actually pull back the trigger of a gun? Well, it's because of the way it's weighted, but couldn't the gun industry re-weight the trigger? So

it's harder to pull. Yeah. So this database that you guys have, right, you'll be able to sort of point to... I mean, this is like a gun-mock or institute a little bit, right, that you give the evidence to people to see just what the numbers are, right? Yeah, I

think that the gun industries, I hate to say it this way, but I'm going to. The gun industry has gotten away with murder. And somehow, nobody really puts the gun industry right in the center. Yeah, why not?

I think it's because

there have been so many protections built around them, truthfully. But think about when a police department does a press conference, you know, and they lay out the guns that they recovered, and they talk about actually the, perhaps, the caliber of the gun, but they never talk about who made the gun. So it's a very simple thing about naming the gun that's so important. And so truthfully, what we are trying to do is use some of the same tactics we use with the NRA by shining a harsh spotlight, by feeding the facts to the public. We're trying to do that about the gun industry as well, because the truth is they are getting away with murder. It has been hard to hold them accountable, but time's up. Yeah. And I

think we should end there. Thanks so much, John. Thank

you very much.

And now you're a moment of fuckery. Jesse Cannon. Molly Jung fast, I have to tell you this story really sent me into a rage that my usual numbness does not allow, but I am pretty angry about this situation here at the border. Tony, what you're seeing here.