Deconstructing Misconceptions about Gun Violence

Are you ready to challenge long-held beliefs? Brace yourself as we take a hard look at the deeply ingrained myths of gun violence, with Devin Hughes, the founder and president of GVPedia, a nonprofit that specializes in gun violence research. Together we unpack and challenge the notion that defensive gun use is widespread and beneficial to society, trace back the origins of the myth "an armed society is a polite society" to the  science fiction from which it came, and we dissect the inherent lethality of guns and the dangers of using this flawed narrative to shape public opinion and policy.

You can find GVPedia's substack here.

Further reading:
The NRA’s Biggest Back-to-School Sale: The Safety of Our Children (Armed with Reason)
GVPedia explains...Defensive Gun Use (GVPedia)
Debunking Myths the Gun Lobby Perpetuates Following Mass Shootings (CAP)
Guns in the Home Don't Make Us Safer (Colorado Ceasefire)
Countering the gun lobby's firehose of falsehood (the Hill)
The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood (Armed with Reason)
Is an Armed Society a Polite Society? (Armed with Reason)

Transcript

Devin Hughes: 0:00

Hi, my name is Devin Hughes. I'm the founder and president of GDPD, a nonprofit that collects and disseminates research on gun violence. We have the Gun State database, which is the largest publicly available in existence, with more than 2,000 academic studies. We have GDP University, which is a collection of white papers and fact sheets on various gun violence topics. Several years ago, we released the Facts about Fire and Policy Initiative, which monks more than 40 gun violence myths, and then we also had the Countering the Fire Hose of Falsehood project, which I was on earlier this year to discuss, so it's great to be back.

JJ Janflone: 0:41

And it's great to have you back. I think I probably use GVPD resources at least once a day, if not more. Especially the like. Being able to search all of those academic articles very quickly as well is really helpful, because I don't know how listeners, how much time you spend on Google Scholar, but that can be a nightmare to search through, so it's just helpful to have everything collated in one spot.

Devin Hughes: 1:03

Yes, yeah, and all the resources are searchable. So if you want to author or title or copy or even like what journal it's from and what year like, you can search by those factors to get things narrowed down very quickly On both that and the Facts about Fire and Policy Initiative.

JJ Janflone: 1:21

And so our conversation today is half talking about those myths themselves, but also talking about something that I've been grappling with, which is how do you convince people that a lie that they've really bought into is actually a lie Like? How do you even go about debunking a myth?

Devin Hughes: 1:39

Yeah, and that's very much like one of the major questions, because so often with all these myths, the initial urge and my initial urge as well is to go into.

Devin Hughes: 1:50

It's like all right, here's this 10 page statistical analysis where all the end, the summary of all the research, and I'm going to get several books and then bash you on the head with them until you agree with me. He's sort of thing. And that approach just doesn't work. But at the same time, like just sticking with pure soundbites, all you're getting is the NRA has this soundbite and we have this soundbite, but who's to say which is correct? Oh, we'll never know. And so there's trying to find the middle ground between those two extremes of here's all the data and going into the weeds versus how do we get placed on a bumper sticker or in a TikTok video? And that's something that I've been working on and I know a lot of other people in the space are trying to figure out how best to do that, because countering the gun, lobbies, firehose or falset in that fashion is crucial work and it's definitely challenging to do.

JJ Janflone: 2:52

I think there's an added layer of difficulty too, because I think the gun lobby had a lot of lead time Like they've had decades to really perfect this messaging around the myth that, like defensive, gun use is the most common form of gun use and that it's effective. And not only have they had all this lead time, they have way more money and the message is sexier, because if it's not a nuanced message, as you said, me with a bibliography, versus a really slick ad campaign, unfortunately the ad campaign is going to beat me with a sheet of paper every time.

Devin Hughes: 3:23

Yeah, and the gun lobby has spent decades honing this message and there was I think it was released last year, but the trace reported on internal documents that had been released from the NRA.

Devin Hughes: 3:36

They have their own information division director stating that no matter what the policy is, they're always going to return back to defensive gun use, and so they've been focused on this singular narrative that a gun makes you safer. And very core of that is the idea that defensive gun use is widespread, effective and beneficial for society, and we can get into each of those points later, but it's all centered around that and it has the bumper sticker slogan that like, oh, this is the best way to protect yourself. And then there is the patina of other academics that have went some form of support for it. But then you have a whole broader literature that refutes that. But in those refutations you're getting down into the weeds of like how is defensive gun use similar to cocaine, which are two things. That that's bizarre, why are you putting those together? But is actually like a core element of the debate. And if you go deeply into those weeds in a casual conversation, half the audience's eyes is going to glaze over and the other half is checking their tip top sort of thing.

JJ Janflone: 4:57

Yeah, and I think OK, and so to take even a step back, I think maybe before we even dig into the lie you pointed out, it's a three pronged thing that's coming at us, which is one that defensive gun use works for one. And what I say when I mean works is that the defensive gun use is common, that a gun in the home makes you safer, that kind of messaging right, and that's valid. So that's message one. Message two is that it's good for society. It's the whole, like an armed society is a polite society which makes a great tweet, like that sort of thing. And then that defensive gun use is the best form of self-defense. It's not a dog, it's not a ring doorbell, it's that again. So we've got this three tiered thing of defensive gun use is widespread, it's beneficial for society, it's an effective use of self-defense. Why those three? Right, not even like how the myth works, but like why have? Why has the gun lobby or why have gun manufacturers really pushed for those three things to be like accepted in the American mythos as true?

Devin Hughes: 5:58

Right and to take even another step back and go into an armed society is a polite society.

JJ Janflone: 6:04

And.

Devin Hughes: 6:05

I think this kind of story highlights the ridiculousness of it. It's often held up as a bumper sticker argument. You'll often hear poking advocates like oh, an armed society is a polite society, they say, is they wear the T-shirt with that and glazed into cross. And what people generally don't know is where that comes from and where the actual phrase an armed society is a polite society comes from is a science fiction book in the 1940s by Robert Heimann, who's a famous science fiction author, and the society that he's describing in there is this futuristic society that you have a bunch of genetically altered super humans who are bored with their lives and constantly go around armed and have to be exceedingly polite with each other, otherwise they'll end up in a gunfight. And one of the classic cases from this is that two of the characters in this novel are going out to dinner. They're on this second floor of this elaborate restaurant. They order their dinner and accidentally they fling a crowd leg off their table and falls on a table below them. The people on the table below them almost have their guns drawn because it's like how dare this insult? And so the next page or so of the narrative is them trying to talk each other down and make sure that this was in fact an accident. Nobody needs to shoot somebody else. And then, after they resolve it, another guy from the table across the way is like how dare you cowards resolve this with words? And so then there actually is a gunfight and once the gun fights over, everybody laughs and goes back to eating. That is the polite society being described in armed society as a polite society, and we actually do have a post on our sub stack.

Devin Hughes: 7:59

Going into that and highlighting like the source of the quote is insane. It was a work of fiction in the fictional society that was being represented. And yet here it is, as this crowned myth emblazoned in pro-Gun rhetoric, and it serves how little actual intellectual support there is for the myth. So then, to return to the why those three points widespread, effective and beneficial for the society. Because defensive gun use needs to be all of those in order for the pro-Gun narrative that guns make people side and safer to be the case. If defensive gun use is rare, then there's no real way that it's going to be able to reduce crime. If it's not effective than any other mechanism, then the myth will have the national baseball bat society for self-defense instead. Or if it's not beneficial for society, then it's harming society, and all the pro-Gun arguments around that collect, and so the pro-Gun narrative relies on each of those points, and, as it turns out, each of those points is completely false.

JJ Janflone: 9:17

And I think and it articulates too that it's set up, if a myth was set up with, that guns are either good or they're bad. They can't be a neutral item, and if they're not good, then they're by default bad, and if they're bad you wouldn't buy them. But if everyone has one again, if a crab leg is the thing that's going to set it off, then you should be hard to keep up, yeah, and so one of the interesting aspects of this is just how unsupported it is number one.

Devin Hughes: 9:57

So Tobacco comes from the 1990s. Gary Klutch research on defensive gun use. He conducted a series of surveys that found that they'd survey 5,000 people and of those 5,066 would say they'd had a defensive gun use. And he then extrapolated that out to that means there's 2.5 million guns. So gun use is in, which is the way to do it. But it also quickly revealed that the results were mathematically impossible. For example, his numbers on burglary predicted around 800,000 plus burglaries are stopped by defensive gun use. And when you look at the number of burglaries from verified prime sources where people were at whom and away at the time with the burglary, it would turn out that you would have to have people sleepwalking and defending themselves of firearms when they're sleepwalking in order to make the numbers even possible. And that's before considering that only 42% or so of households at the time had a fire.

Devin Hughes: 11:07

And also, the numbers were just factually impossible.

JJ Janflone: 11:12

And it's also too, I think, remembering his survey and the way that it broke down. Also, when we talk about even what defensive gun use is, it was people self-reporting on what they felt the gun had had an, or the presence of a firearm had an impact on.

Devin Hughes: 11:25

Yes, and also it relies on the self-recording, and so that kind of goes back to the point where it's like well, our gun's good, bad or neutral. And the point that I would bring up is they're not really any of those, they're lethal. So it increases the lethality of any encounters. But having something be more lethal doesn't necessarily mean it's going to prevent injury or deter people even more. It's just when you have those encounters it's going to be more likely that somebody dies as a result. So the whole our guns good or bad, that's not really the factor here. They're lethal and we see that come up in the statistics where I mean then the home doubles your risk of homicide, triples your risk of suicide, for instance.

JJ Janflone: 12:16

Because I just think of when I used to live in a rural area. We would hear things in the night on our back porch or something, and if I ran out didn't have a gun so I had pans. If I ran out, banged a pan and was like go away, and then nothing happened, I could argue that was defensive pan use because then nothing bad happened. But the reality is it could have been the house settling, it could have been a raccoon, it could have been a burglar. Who am I to know? Nothing happened. You can't report on a non-occurrence.

Devin Hughes: 12:46

Right yeah. And also let's say in that defensive pan use that there actually was somebody there and they were just walking down the street and all of a sudden they see somebody coming at them with a pan.

JJ Janflone: 12:59

With a pan.

Devin Hughes: 12:59

yeah, With a headache and they run away. Is that a defensive pan use or an offensive pan use? And so one story that we encountered when doing this research comes from Mark Bryant of the Gun Violence Archive, and he was talking about how he was perusing one of the innumerable gun forums out there and he ran across this story and this was several years back, where this guy had posted on there a story of like you won't believe what happened to me. So last night I was at the movies with my wife. We were exiting the movies it was in the small mid-western town we were coming out and all of a sudden three black men were approaching us and they, in his words, looked up to no good and so he went ahead and brandished his firearm. They scattered and he congratulated himself on preventing a crime that day.

Devin Hughes: 13:56

Mark Bryant's on a call with the assistant district attorney for this same small town in the mid-west and he was like yeah, so you won't believe what just happened to me. Last night, me and two my brother and his friend from Vanderbilt, who are medical students there were going to this movie and as we're approaching the movie, all of a sudden this crazed white, this whole white guy, pulled his gun on us and we didn't know what was happening, so we just ran away because we didn't want to figure out.

Devin Hughes: 14:29

Now, if Gary Klatt had surveyed or anybody had surveyed the old white guy in this encounter, we'd been like absolutely I had a sense of gun use, I probably saved lives with my action. And yet when the full context is revealed, it's pretty obvious that was an aggravated assault and offensive gun use. And one of the more important studies out there actually looked at the responses in these surveys. So it took the survey responses and then sent them to a panel of judges and told the judges all right, assume this person can carry here and take them at their word. For what happened?

Devin Hughes: 15:09

Are these cases likely offensive or defensive? And they're only looking at cases of report defensive gun use in the survey. And the judges came back and found that in over half of these cases the defensive gun uses weren't reality crunch or offensive gun uses. And so even when looking at the defensive gun use numbers themselves, I reported, when he's here, 2.5 million or figures like that more than half of those are gun crimes. And so even in that case, solely looking at defensive gun uses, there's more offensive uses than defensive uses. And when you look at any other data source with guns, including both record offensive and defensive. There are vastly more offensive uses than defensive uses.

JJ Janflone: 16:03

Do you then see, when you're looking at this three-ponged myth, the rise of folks that we've seen reported across the US being shot when they pull in someone's driveway to turn around, or they come to the wrong house because they're lost, or someone knocks on the wrong door and they're shot by the homeowner or the tenant? Do you see a correlation there between this push of messaging?

Devin Hughes: 16:27

It's hard to tell whether there's an official correlation or causation there, but there have definitely been an uptick in those stories where just what would otherwise be a misunderstanding or even harsh words leads to a terrible tragedy and people constantly being on guard thinking, oh, the bad guys are right around the corner. And it turns out the bad guys in this case is a fifth grader who's looking to pick up as the under brother, and basically the added lethality of the firearm means that what would otherwise be an interaction that would be passed over becomes a lethal interaction.

JJ Janflone: 17:10

So, instead of being a lady in glasses holding a pan chasing you from a back porch, it's somebody with a firearm.

Devin Hughes: 17:16

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot harder to run from a firearm than a pan typically.

JJ Janflone: 17:23

So one of the things that you've mentioned a few times now is that, as we've been talking, we pointed out bad academic studies and I want to be really clear. It's not bad because the gun violence prevention movement disagrees with the findings. It's straight up bad methodology in a lot of these places. I'm wondering if we can talk about and you just had a beautiful piece on Substack that I think actually was an up of an old block you had done but I'm wondering if you could explain for our listeners how can they, in the world where maybe they don't have a long academic background or they don't have time to look up, when they hear a study from Harvard and they go okay, then this must be valid. That's an impressive institution. That like how to tell good, a good study, a good stat, like how to tell a good from the bad or the poorly done.

Devin Hughes: 18:12

Yeah, yeah. It is challenging, I do think, for individuals. You want to see if something's peer reviewed, but even that's not going to catch everything, and so then it's a question of whether it sounds plausible. If you take the 2.5 million defensive gun use, for example, and put that on a per day basis, you're getting something in the realm of 6,000 or so per day. If there's that many, somebody would have noticed There'd be empirical evidence of some sort for that.

JJ Janflone: 18:46

From law enforcement, from insurance agency from your local newspaper, it'd be somewhere.

Devin Hughes: 18:52

Yeah, somebody somewhere would be picking that up, not all of them perhaps, but say 50%, as may the surveys themselves indicate maybe 25%, maybe 10%, but we have that data from the Gun Violence Archive and it's under 2,000 verified defensive gun uses annually. So even if you make the really extreme assumption that, oh, the police, media, the NRA, all pro-gun groups are only picking up 10% of cases which, to be clear, all of the surveys done on this indicate that 50% or more of these cases are the police find out about, if you take that, you get to 20,000 defensive gun uses annually, which is still a far cry from the 2.5 million that is being advertised. And to illustrate the difficulties with figuring out what's factual, what's not, even academics have a problem with this.

Devin Hughes: 19:56

So one of the things that we uncovered in our deep dive on defensive gun use which you can see at both GBPDIA and the armed with threes and sub-stack was the 2013 National Academy of Sciences report. This was commissioned in the wake of Sandy Hook, when President Obama pushed out an executive order saying, hey, we need to review what the current evidence suggests and where there should be more research. Now, typically, these sort of committee-based reports from the government agency take a couple years to put together. This was pushed together in a couple months, given that they wanted to put something out quickly after this take, and so they convened a committee and produced this 100-page report, which received very little fanfare, as maybe these 100-page government reports do. However, there was one page that was seized upon, and that was the one page on defensive gun use, and pro-gun advocates pointed to it and said look, it agrees with us that there's lots of defensive gun uses. And when you look at it, it summarizes the research and says, hey, there's the potential for 2.5 million defensive gun uses.

Devin Hughes: 21:13

There's a national crime victimization survey that produces a lower estimate, but then it said that there are almost all sources that showed that there are more defensive gun uses than offensive gun uses. And, to be clear, this is a lie. There are zero sources, using the same methodology, that look at offensive and defensive gun uses and find more defensive uses. If you look at private surveys, all of them find more offensive uses than defensive uses. If you look at the national crime victimization survey, it finds more offensive than defensive. If you look at empirical data or gun violence data, again more offensive than defensive. So how did this objective lie get into a government report that was then cited by the Supreme Court of the United States as well as the CDC going on to last year? And the reason this happened, as it turns out, was that Gary Cleck himself, the author of the 2.5 million defensive gun use claim, was on the committee, and so it's like where did it come from? He cited himself.

JJ Janflone: 22:24

Gary, why Come on?

Devin Hughes: 22:27

Yeah, and how did it pass through everybody else? They only had a couple of days to review the entire project, as I found out from interviewing other academics involved with it, and they did see this, and they provided criticisms of this defensive gun use section where they're like where are you doing here? This is an unbalanced summary and inaccurate, and those concerns just did not carry through In. The leading theory among the people I talked to and I interviewed like 10 academics involved with it was that this was a consensus-based report where all of the committee members had to agree on it. This basically gave Gary Klepp the topel over this one section and so he was able to keep these inaccuracies, these objective lies that then influenced the Supreme Court of the United States, the CDC and data-sense thing. Going back to the original question is like how do you tell whether something is good science or bad science? Even the government and academics themselves occasionally don't catch this stuff. It can have profound impacts years and decades later.

JJ Janflone: 23:39

And it seems to. Once that misinformation train gets going with academics, it's really dangerous, because then someone like Lot can cite Klepp and someone like Klepp can cite Lot, and then it just becomes a self-referential, bad academic work machine that is largely based on survey data.

Devin Hughes: 23:58

Yes, yeah, it all comes back to these small private surveys, and even some that are slightly larger. So before the Supreme Court decision in Bruin, there was another survey conducted by an academic by a name of William English of Georgetown who, to my knowledge, I was saying anything on guns before, but he produced a couple amicus briefs for the Supreme Court with his own research indicating that there's no use of defensive gun uses. And basically he took Gary Klepp's approach in the 90s and then made it work. Because Gary Klepp asked people over the last year, did you have a defensive gun use? He asked over your wise time, have you had defensive gun use?

Devin Hughes: 24:45

And as anybody who studied psychology for a bit and I was like, our memories get hazy after a while of previous events. So let's say you wanted to report defensive pan use, for example, and 10 years later, not only was it just a sound, there was actually two guys trying to break down my door and I fendent the law off with my pain. Now you might not know that you're lying Looking back on the memory. That's how it appears, but memories evolve over time, they aren't snapshot, and it made this whole false positive problem that's endemic in these surveys even worse, and yet again it's being cited by Supreme Court justices.

JJ Janflone: 25:28

The reboot is always worse than the original. It's just what I'm learning. It's the complicated nature of this, though, because I could see how maybe someone listening to this, who maybe is new to gun violence prevention or sees the work that maybe Brady does or GDP does, and says, ok, fundamentally, those people are gun grabbers. They're not interested in the real science that says that it's safe, and I don't know how to articulate to people that, for example, after I know in the last few years that there's been a peer reviewed studies that say that lots initial argument that more guns make us safer was wrong, that there's been multiple peer reviewed studies that say that guns don't deter crime from happening in an area. But, as we talked about with the bibliography, I can say that and then start sharing these other pieces of work that are from very well respected academics, but what I'm going to get back, I'm sure, is they're just part of the liberal education machine. Does that make sense?

Devin Hughes: 26:25

Yeah, it definitely is a problem. And if somebody tries to have this conversation on Twitter or X or whatever it's called, with somebody with like five users and this airs.

JJ Janflone: 26:36

I'm sure it'll have a different name, but yeah.

Devin Hughes: 26:38

Yes, yeah, but like having that sort of conversation there, neither person's going to change the other's mind. It's just not going to happen. And for the effect of changing somebody's mind there has to be an element of trust and kind of mutual respect beforehand, and if there isn't that, it's going to be incredibly hard to change somebody else's mind. Now that doesn't mean that potentially debates can't be productive, to where there's an audience that gets to hear both sides of the evidence and then make up your mind if you genuinely don't know. But if somebody is hearted in their belief that, yes, there are millions of defensive gun uses each year, first you're going to have to build up record with that person understanding and then what I find tends to work is asking them directly. So is there any evidence that would change your mind? And if there is no evidence that would change your mind, the conversation is like they've just admitted that they're not willing to change your mind and there's nothing you can do about that.

Devin Hughes: 27:40

But there are lots of other people out there who might be. Oh yes, if you could show me empirical data that can show this number or actual flaws with these surveys or stuff, then you have room to figure out all right. Where's the false belief stemming from? And how can we correct that false belief without causing the other person to feel bad about being misled about? You can't go. Oh, you're just a neanderthal and a complete idiot for believing this. And how dare you? And here's my book of facts and take that.

JJ Janflone: 28:14

Yeah, Sort of Like your rub. Who bought into the line? It's your fault.

Devin Hughes: 28:18

As opposed, you got wet because this is the water that falls on us.

JJ Janflone: 28:20

It happens.

Devin Hughes: 28:22

Yeah, if you start out insulting somebody's core identity, you're never going to get anywhere. But if you're figuring out the truth together and piecing together where their specific false beliefs are coming from and then exploring together why they might be false and highlighting the absurdities that come up with that, and to provide an example, with defensive gun use, if somebody's yeah, I believe it, and 2.5 millions, clearly the case, it comes from these peer reviewed studies, and there's 80 the credit and surveys that show the same thing. Like one of the things is like all right, where's the hard evidence? And so the media is trying to hide it? Okay, so all the police departments are trying to hide it too, and that might be, oh yeah, since, okay, the NRA itself trying to hide it. Because, let's be clear, if there are 6,000 defensive gun uses every single day, somebody somewhere's going to notice and there's a massive lobby out there with a major incentive to find every single possible case of defensive gun use that there is out there and touted to high heaven.

JJ Janflone: 29:31

Yeah, because it's such a beautiful ad and so do not use it.

Devin Hughes: 29:35

Yeah. So if you believe that, oh, nobody's recording on it, first, you don't believe the very surveys that indicate that there's 2.5 million defensive gun uses. And two, the conspiracy goes far deeper than just the liberal media and the Brady podcast trying to make us believe myths and stuff Like no, like the NRA would have to be in on it, gun owners for America would have to be in on it, because there's no way something happens 6,000 times a day that involves a lethal weapon and people don't know about it or can't find evidence for it. And if there's, like, all right, nobody's really trying. Yeah, there are people trying, and it's.

Devin Hughes: 30:15

If you think the gun bones archive is missing thousands of defensive gun uses every day, it should be trivially easy to prove the rule. Like I'm going to accept that I could be wrong on defensive guns. All I'm asking for proven people who tell, like the 2.5 million defensive venues is find me hard, empirical evidence for 1% of your claims, just 1%. I'm not even requiring the full, 100% or 50%, just 1. That should not be difficult. And yet nobody has. And when you point to the empirical evidence, you'll get claims by certain program academics like oh, surveys are the only way, even though there's lots of evidence that surveys on defensive gun use and outside defensive gun use have these flaws, and so just pointing out the inherent absurdities of what those numbers would actually mean if they were true, I think can chip away at the oh yeah, that might not actually be the case.

JJ Janflone: 31:18

And it makes me. I think probably one of the things too is that I think it's really hard because I get upset. I have an emotional response because I'm like, how dare you? To the folks who put these studies out. Because I'm like you have a respected position in society, people trust you, you have letters after your name and, whether intentionally or unintentionally, you're putting out bad information. It's like being a snake oil salesman in the old time. You asked. Only, instead of selling liquid opium, you're selling something, I guess, equally lethal.

Devin Hughes: 31:47

But yeah, or even more.

JJ Janflone: 31:49

Yeah, I haven't played the Oregon Trail game in a while, so I might be, I might be off on that. I think that these are all really good. One of the things that I've enjoyed about reading your sub stack is I think that again, it gives a nice approachable thing to link people to say no, this is the actual information. Here's how this particular academic report that gets cited. A lot is wrong, but I wonder if you have any sort of just general tips and tricks for folks out there in the world for that, if they see something to go immediately, okay, no, that's just wrong. Like where should they go? What should they do? Yeah, just solves. America Devin.

Devin Hughes: 32:29

Yeah, and the next step, one to fixing America, yeah, and this is one of the things that the GPD is strung with as well, because we produce these very long, carefully researched documents that, in the end, maybe a couple hundred, a couple thousand people will read in their entirety, and so that's nice. There's 300 million people in the United States and there's definitely a struggle between the TikTok version or the bumper sticker version and then the careful research portion, and so with GVPD, what we try to do is provide the careful research portion and then try to break down that down further into bite size pieces, so like our defensive gun use report overall is 30 pages, which we just published on GVPD itself, but before that we had published it in 12 parts on the Arma 3's and sub-stat, under the kind of Netflix theory of would you watch a 12 hour movie? Of course, and I'm already saying, will you watch a 10 hour mini series? Oh, and when was it in the showing? Absolutely, of course I will.

JJ Janflone: 33:38

Yes, happily, I will pay extra for the privilege to do yes.

Devin Hughes: 33:42

Yeah, and so trying to break it down there. And then one of the things we're going to be working on over the coming months is can we break it down even further to short videos or graphics that highlight points even further? So it's building this pyramid of knowledge where the top of the pyramid is the bite size like infographic or just statistic or TikTok video, and then below that is the fact sheet, that where you can generate that bite size thing, and below that is the paper outlining things and below that is the actual research itself. And every single element of that pyramid needs to be in place, because if all you have is the talking point and somebody's, where's the proof? I saw a TikTok video that's not very persuasive, whereas if it's okay, here's the fact sheet and people are like that's just citing these, how do we know if they're fat acts? Here's the research on why we know that research is case. Here's the logical explanations in detailing why this is true and why other alternative explanations don't hold longer. It's really hard work on calving the firehose of Halstead because you have to have all of those elements in place in case somebody does try to figure out the actual truth of something. Now, it might be the case in some conversations after the fact sheet somebody's like all right, yeah, I'm convinced, but you want to have the full background as well in order to have that intellectual support if needed. And one of the things we try to do at GBPD is providing the lower levels of that pyramid. So if somebody's pushed on, where do you get that statistic? Or what's the case here? People can find that and be assured that the correct information is there.

Devin Hughes: 35:27

By the way, one of the important things there and that's quite helpful is to know the other person's argument in a way better than they do themselves. Because, like with the FBI number, it's not from the FBI and but if you don't know that, that's oh, did he find something? How am I supposed to know this? How am I supposed to check this Googling FBI defensive gun use number, not getting it there? Whereas if you know the other side's argument, generally, it's okay, this is where they're coming from, here's why it's mistaken.

Devin Hughes: 36:01

It can one provide a sense of calm of oh okay, this is where this person's coming from, here's why they're mistaken so far. So you know, freeze during that interaction, but then it also allows you to, in a way, turn the table. So oh, that's interesting why do you think that he lead me through this and being able to hear them out what they think their evidence is and then, once they provide that evidence rather than having to guess where did they get this Then being able to say, oh, would you be interested in hearing this that disagrees with those numbers? And if they're not, then it's okay. There's no way that this person's open persuasion anyway. But if they are, then there's room for a conversation, potentially changing someone's mind.

JJ Janflone: 36:46

I just yeah. And then I just I think of the Stephen Colbert meme of you came into my house, tried to talk about Lord of the Rings of the Heat. Then you're prepped, you're prepped, you're ready to go, you're not afraid to say it. And again, when the gun lobbies had decades and more money than I wanna even try to conceptualize to make this argument seem cohesive, it's really good to know to have those kind of points ready, along with that deep underpinning. So I really appreciate it. I appreciate all the work that GVPDIA does. I'm hoping it makes people feel a little bit more empowered to speak out about nonsense. So not sure how you do that in a TikTok while dancing and make it compelling. I'm trying. I'm trying to figure it out. It's hard.

Devin Hughes: 37:31

Well, the moment somebody cracks that, yeah, be sure to let me know because I'll be quiet and cheap as well.

Devin Hughes: 37:37

And part of it as well is recognizing that, yes, like Caldering the Firehose of Falcet is hard work. There have been studies that have shown that people are willing to actively pay in order not to hear the other side's argument, and that's on both the left and the right. There is a very strong urge to just be like nope, that person's wrong, I'm not gonna listen anymore and shut oneself off in the knowledge that I'm completely right and living on, whereas actually listening to what the other side has to offer while it's oftentimes annoying sometimes it's barely legible and it's just painful work in general but it shows where the other people are coming from and the mistakes there. And that's going to be crucial in terms of Caldering the Firehose, because it's not like you can just provide your top level talking point and expect it to work. This is like their top level talking point is not going to work On either. You have to be able to delve deeper in order to have these longer term conversations that can eventually change mine.

Devin Hughes: 38:45

But as soon as somebody develops the TikTok quarantine that takes that entire process into 30 seconds. Everything will be fixed. The world will be better.

JJ Janflone: 38:54

I don't know how to do that yet. So hopefully someone figures it out. Thank you so much, Devin. If folks want to be sure that they don't just stay in their bubble, that they learn, that they know how to deepen their understanding and share it, where can they find you? Where can they find all of GVPD's stuff?

Devin Hughes: 39:09

Yeah, so you can find us on gvpediaorg in armwithreasonsumstackcom. Please subscribe. Subscribing is free If you want to access some of the older content that is behind the payroll, but that allows us to get even more people engaged and more authors on there. So, on those on Twitter or X or whatever it's going to be called, whenever this is released, you can still find us at GV underscore pedia, and we're also on Facebook and Instagram. We're not yet on TikTok because I don't know how to dance.

JJ Janflone: 39:48

I'm sure you'll figure it out.

Devin Hughes: 39:50

I have my doubts, but thank you.

JJ Janflone: 39:52

Thank you All right.