“Things are changing.” Why Garrett Graff has hope for curbing America’s gun violence
In Guns We Trust details how the country got so divided on firearms, but shows it’s not a lost cause.
Long Lead’s Long Shadow podcast is built on big swings.
In season one, Pulitzer finalist, journalist, and historian Garrett M. Graff marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks by addressing lingering questions about that day and the mysteries that persist decades later. Season two explored the rise of the American far right and its move from fringe to mainstream by chronicling catalysts that included the 1993 Waco siege and the January 6th Capitol insurrection.
Now Graff, in collaboration with The Trace, takes Long Shadow’s biggest swing yet: Season three, In Guns We Trust, examines the uniquely American problem of gun violence. Episode one, available today wherever you get your podcasts, chronicles the Columbine High School massacre, which occurred 25 years ago this month. It was the mass shooting that changed everything.
Graff recently sat down with Depth Perception for a chat about how Columbine changed everything, being a gun owner, and why, despite the subject matter, the full series isn’t a downer. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. —Parker Molloy
Tell me a bit about what we have to look forward to in season three of Long Shadow.
The premise of Long Shadow is, with a little bit of distance, how America got to be the way that it is. And to revisit stories that people think that they know really well, but to put them into some broader context and help explain how they fit into modern America. This April is the 25th anniversary of the Columbine shooting, which marked a real turning point for the country in terms of the arrival of the age of mass shootings.
Listen to episode one of Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust.
So this season is less about Columbine than it is about everything that followed. Can you give me an example?
I was in my last couple of years of high school when the Columbine shooting happened, and I just had an incredibly different experience in school growing up than kids who came even a couple of years later. We didn't have active shooter drills. We didn't have lockdown drills. Even much more basic things: School doors weren't usually locked and you didn't normally have to wear school IDs.
That, and all of the subsequent terrible tragedies in schools and churches and synagogues and movie theaters and the places where Americans were supposed to be able to feel safe, no longer were. Guns have transformed daily life, and our goal with this season is to go back and look at the daily epidemic that [shootings] actually are.
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To focus a bit on the reporting you did for this season, was there anything in particular you learned during the creation that surprised you?
I grew up in Vermont. I live in Vermont now. Vermont has a very strong gun culture. I grew up shooting. I am a gun owner now. And the gun culture that I grew up in, I think largely exists in the northeastern United States. It’s pretty distinct from the gun culture that exists in the rest of the country, particularly the South and the West, which is where guns are much more tightly tied to politics. As one of the former NRA lobbyists says to us in one of the interviews for Long Shadow, guns have become a real religion. That change is in some ways pretty unrecognizable to me as a New Englander and Vermonter.
I think what really surprised me in reporting on this was understanding just how carefully and deliberately the NRA changed the way that America thinks about guns: the way that they loosened gun laws, the way they very deliberately stoked fear among American gun owners, and the philosophical choices that they made to encourage Americans to embrace more guns.
The story of guns in America today is a story of fewer people owning ever more guns. That’s a really weird and also dangerous trend.
Now when you say fewer people, do you mean as a portion of the population? I wouldn’t have guessed that. I know people who own guns own more today than they did in the past, but it didn’t occur to me that the actual percentage of gun owners has shrunk.
Yep. And gun culture is in many ways removed from traditions like hunting more than ever. Vermont and a lot of New England and northern states actually struggle to attract enough hunters to do the herd management that is necessary in things like deer hunting. That used to be a very proud and strong tradition in the northeast, and there are even fewer people hunting even though the number of guns in America continues to soar.
Let’s talk a little about the NRA and how it’s changed over the years.
The way that gun politics have changed is dramatic and very directly related to events like Columbine. I worked for Governor Howard Dean on his presidential campaign in 2003 and 2004. He was a Democrat. He was in the top tier of the presidential race that year and had an “A” rating from the NRA that we were really proud of as a campaign, because even as late as the early 2000s, the endorsement from the NRA was actually quite helpful even in Democratic politics.
Is this podcast going to make me depressed?
What’s actually interesting is that it ends up being a much more hopeful podcast than I had imagined. I had thought the arc was in some ways unrelenting doom and gloom because this seems like an issue that America is so paralyzed and polarized around.
In the last two episodes of the season, I think I pretty strongly make the case that things are changing in America. Change is slow, it’s not as fast as we would like, but there is hope for America to be smarter about guns and to enact some smart gun safety legislation and rules. There is a generation coming of age now pushing for smarter policy that I think has been and will likely be more successful than it normally gets credit for. Or more successful than we might generally give it credit to be.
This is a podcast about the people who helped change the way that America thinks about guns. Some names you know, some names you don’t, and then there’s the new generation of activists and leaders who are attempting to bring America back from the brink.
Want to know more about Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust? Read Long Lead editor John Patrick Pullen’s thoughts on putting together the third season in the Long Lead updates newsletter.