Melody Vaccaro, executive director of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence and Jay talk about Nebraska LB77: “Provide for carrying of concealed handguns without a permit, change provisions relating to concealed weapons, and prohibit certain regulation of weapons by cities, villages, and counties.”

042.mp3 (1h 15m 31MB)

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Editing note:

Melody: Can you change the title from constitutional carry to permitless carry or gun law changes or whatever else? Const. carry is actually a propaganda slogan used to spread the idea that gun laws are not allowed by order of the constitution, which is very much untrue.

Jay: Yup, back at a computer in 30m, thanks.

Transcript (via OpenAI Whisper):

We can talk about anything you want as JFLONS is ignorant. Welcome to JFLONS Ignorance, Episode 42. I’m with Melody Vaccaro, Executive Director of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence. I had some questions about a mailer that they had sent out in their blog post, and she was gracious enough to answer all those questions, and much, much more. We talk about the Nebraska legislature, and a bunch of gun issues, and how citizens can try to engage with their local democratic process. So I hope you enjoy the episode. If you have any thoughts or feedback for us, you can leave a voicemail for the show at 1-402-577-0117. Thanks. Apologies for the hum behind my microphone when I start talking in this episode. We’ve had Windows problems, and the audio engineer has been sacked. It’s not behind Melody’s microphone. Her mic sounds better than mine, ironically, because she’s over Discord. And I’m sitting on the mic, but I was having Windows problems. Apologies. Her audio is better than mine. Stick it out for a second. How I first heard, I think, about all of the things that we talked about last week at all was through the Nebraskans Against Gun Violence newsletter. So I’m subscribed, so I get an email, and I was trying to process one of the emails that went out. That is a substack, I believe, which we’ll link to. And the article that got me going was an August 18th article, which is titled, Great Job, Omaha Metro, We’re Kidding. And it was about the passing of LB77, which is Permitless Carry and Firearm Preemption. And so I just asked a question related to my local—I’m trying to become an engaged citizen in our democracy. And so in my ignorance of how— Easier said than done. How these things actually work on the ground is I was like, OK, well, Justin Wayne is my representative for the house that I live in. So let me go see how Justin Wayne voted to get LB77 passed or not passed. And that opened a whole can of worms about the history of how votes have gone all the way back to 2017. We’ll link to another article on your—oh, no, back then it was a Medium post. So back in 2017, April 2017, Nebraskans Against Gun Violence posted to Medium how the NRA punked Nebraska’s District 13. And it talks about how voting patterns that can be used for a senator that sits on a committee, how they can choose or not choose to pass a bill out of committee. Select file is before it goes to—no, it goes out of committee into select file. Is that right? Is that the Nebraska nomenclature? Well, so this is all getting, like, maybe too messy too fast. Let me take you just a step back. So we’re—let’s just, like, set the ground here what we’re talking about. We’re talking about this policy idea, which recently passed in Nebraska, which is—it is a firearm preemption policy. And preemption—you can have preemption on all kinds of things. This one’s specific to firearms, but it doesn’t have to be. And what preemption is, it’s a legal framework where a higher level of government takes away governing authority from a lower level of government. And so sometimes this makes sense, right? So if you say, I want—perhaps you are concerned because you think that lower levels of government are not providing the right levels of education for children. And at this higher level of government, you want to say, hey, you know what? Actually, you don’t get to opt certain children out of public education. And, like, you have a duty to do all these things, and you don’t get to decide that at a lower level of government, right? Or maybe you say, we have certain environmental protections that we expect as a state. You can have more environmental protections at the local level or not, but for sure you’ve got to have this minimum level, right? So that’s like an example of a preemption where you might be on board with. You’re like, you know what? We probably should have some sort of driver’s license. This is a great example of preemption. It doesn’t really make sense for 93 counties to have a driver’s license policy, right? Like, you just go and you get your driver’s license, and you expect that it’s some sort of standard across the state. So that’s what preemption is. It kind of flies in the face of this idea of local government being the best kind of government possible, where you get the most control when it comes to things around industry. So industry, they love preemption. They love preemption because it is really easier to make deals with 49 state senators. That’s not that hard. It’s not easy, but it’s not that hard. What’s really hard is to make a deal with 93 county boards, or you just exponentially grow every single city council, right? Every single whatever government board we’re talking about. So if you’re industry, you want to do things like let’s ban tracking bans, right? So this is something in oil industry. In Oklahoma, they’ve banned fracking bans. Only the state can make fracking policy. So that means if you’re like Oklahoma City, and there’s fracking happening near you, and it’s messing up things in your city infrastructure, too bad for you. You can go to the state legislature and ask them if they care about Oklahoma City’s problems. And maybe they will, and maybe they won’t. And that’s where we’re at for this gun issue. So there’s now firearm preemption for guns. And what that means is that cities around the state have enacted firearm policy to address things that happened in their city that at some point they found concerning. Firearm preemption says absolutely not. You cannot govern on this topic anymore. I think cities are allowed to have banning discharge of firearms within city limits, and that’s about the only kind of policy they can have now. And that’s it. And places like Omaha, they have a handgun registry, right? So when people have a handgun in Omaha, you have to register it. They have no guns in city parks kind of rules. Omaha has a really interesting policy where if you want to openly carry a gun in public outside of your clothes, it’s not hidden, you have to have your concealed carry permit. So that the public, law enforcement, there’s some sort of agreement between the person who decided to carry and the public that, like, we could have police ask for your concealed carry permit, just like a driver’s license, right? If they think you’re doing something a little weird, maybe not illegal, but maybe a little weird, they can be like, hey, are you even allowed to have that gun? Let me see your concealed carry permit. So Omaha’s got laws like that. Lincoln’s a college town, right? Next biggest city in the state. We’re a college town. That’s where I live. And what happens in college towns, a lot of sexual assault, right? We all know that. We’ve got young women away from home. We’ve got young men away from home. And that’s just, you know, we see that in college towns everywhere. And that’s something that college towns are always trying to come up with creative solutions to protect young people who are away from home for the first time in places they’re not generally from so that they can be safe and thrive as they explore their pathways into adulthood. Right? That’s college town stuff. So Lincoln has an ordinance that if you have been convicted of stalking because this had been a problem in Lincoln, you don’t get to have guns in the city for 10 years. So that’s interesting. Lincoln has an ordinance. You can’t have guns in drug rehab or domestic violence shelters. Now, these places, with or without a policy like that, you can still ban guns. But the difference is when it comes to actually enforcing a ban, for you to have committed a crime, I need the government to say it’s a crime to do this action. Otherwise, you’re saying these people who already have really hard jobs keeping really vulnerable people safe, people trying to do drug recovery, recover from sexual assault, domestic violence. We’re saying they have to talk to people armed and say, I’m sorry, sir, could you please not have a gun in this space that any reasonable person would not think to bring a gun into unless they were planning something violent? Could you please not? We have a rule. That’s what it requires now to have broken the law. The way the ordinance is written, you know, York, this is a really interesting thing about York, Nebraska. They have a city ordinance that says you can, if you have a gun store in town, you have to have a security system that alerts police in case you’re robbed in the middle of the night. So that we don’t have a bunch of guns just showing up in the criminal market from a gun store because people didn’t realize it until morning and they cleaned out the whole gun shop. So these are the kinds of things that are happening around the state. And the kickoff of this conversation between you and I really happened because that is passed. Preemption is passed and all of those ordinances are going to be nullified. It doesn’t mean cities will get rid of them, but it means they can’t enforce them. They can’t be on the books. They can be on the books. They can’t be enforced because they’re nullified. They don’t have that authority anymore. So I’m familiar, I think, with the Nebraska State Patrol guidelines for concealed carry. What is legal and what’s not legal as far as posting that you can’t carry a firearm into a location has the force of law. I assume all of that is still valid statewide because that’s the Nebraska State Patrol set of guidelines. Is that true? So the other piece of policy that was passed, they coupled two policies together. There’s preemption and then there’s the concealed carry permit. The concealed carry permit, there already was preemption. Local communities could not have a higher bar for concealed carry than the state, which is very similar to the driver’s license. But now the concealed carry permit is no longer required. So if the concealed carry permit is no longer required, the prohibitions that existed in the concealed carry permit, they have to exist elsewhere in statute for them to still apply. So when I was a concealed carry holder, though, what I was taught in the NRA-driven class, right, that you have to go and take the class, is that if they’ve posted it in the state of Nebraska that you can’t have firearms, including concealed carry firearms, any business owner anywhere in the state, my understanding was, can post, hey, no firearms here. And that holds the force of law in Nebraska. At least it did. I’m trying to understand, like, if I run a donut shop and I don’t want guns in my shop and I say, and I post it the way that the Nebraska State Patrol said that I have to, is that still going to be valid this November? Or has that also been? Well, let’s, let’s untangle all that. First of all, the state, there is no way you’re supposed to post it. There is no guidance from the state on here is how you post that you don’t want guns in your place of business. Or your, so that’s, let’s, that’s one thing. Really? There is no standard. No. There’s not like a specific, like, PDF that you print, but I thought. No. No, there’s not. But if you find a statute and prove me wrong, I am, I love to learn. So, you know. Well, I think I’m just repeating what they taught me in the concealed carry class. I mean, if you’re, if you’re telling, if you’re telling me that the gun industry wants people to believe that public safety policy exists, that doesn’t exist, color me shocked. Oh, no, I don’t, I don’t think the gun industry wants that to be true in Nebraska, but, but what our instructor educated us on in the state of Nebraska, at least eight years ago or whatever, when I did this was that, hey, you can be cited for a gun, a gun violation. If you enter a premises that posts like this in the state of Nebraska, you’ve broken the law, you’ve broken a gun law and you there’s consequences for that. You know, if they. So the way it works. Here’s let’s untangle it of like how that would actually play out in a court of law. One, you have to prove that you saw it. Which is pretty hard to prove that you actually saw the sign. And if you didn’t see it, you didn’t break the law. Okay. Now, and if they ask you to leave and you say, no, I’m not going to leave, then you broke the law. But absolutely just having a sign and then you not seeing it or pretending you didn’t see it. That’s not really an actionable thing by the justice system. Oh, really? Okay. Like they would have to prove you didn’t see it. Which would be pretty hard to do. Versus a prohibition on types of spaces. You know, you cannot bring guns into schools. Absolutely not. It doesn’t matter if they post it. It doesn’t matter if they’ve asked you to leave or not. You cannot do it. They could. It’s a very clear they can train this at a class. You cannot do it. It does not require you seeing a sign. It does not require someone asking you to leave. Therefore, you can actually hold someone accountable to the rules. Okay. Yeah. Are probably not in line with what the NRA would prefer the instructor do. The instructor really put the fear of God into us about concealed carry and making sure that nobody saw anything. Because he was very worried. And that’s so ethical. And I’m glad that they did that. Because that is how people should behave. And I definitely don’t want to dispute that. Like people should behave in that way and people should be taught. Do not fuck around with your gun. Do not go to places where you’re not wanted with your gun. Right. Don’t do it. Be a good person and don’t do it. That is reasonable. I will also say the chances that you’re going to be held accountable in a court of law. When you can easily claim, oh, I didn’t see the sign. I, you know. Oh, yeah. I don’t know how. I don’t know if there’s ever been a case where someone said, oh, I don’t know. I didn’t see it. And I just walked in. I don’t know if that’s ever been brought before a judge to see what they would do. I have no idea. Yeah. I mean, I just don’t. I can’t even imagine. Like, and then you’d have to stay there long enough for the police to come. And then it would just like be a whole thing. So thank you for educating me on that. Because all I know is what I was told. And I didn’t, I didn’t realize that. Okay. Well, as a practical matter, that’s not really. It doesn’t really have teeth, which I didn’t know. So that’s, that’s very useful to me. But here’s the thing about guns that I think that we lose sight of when we have these debates, because people feel this debate in their bones. People align their whole identity around a for-profit consumer product. They align their identity with it. And so to talk about it, it’s like trying to discuss whether or not Jesus is a mystical figure who saved you from your sins, right? Yeah. It’s not a rational conversation for a lot of people. And, you know, so this is, this is very real. I went to a public health class at a college and I was talking to these young people. And this, this young woman said to me, my family, I’m a runner and my family keeps encouraging me to get a gun so that I’m safe when I’m running. And I just don’t know how to argue their point because they are really persuasive about how dangerous it is and how I need a gun. And I said, okay, well, let’s break it down. Let’s break it down into real life and take the heat out of this debate. Are you willing to regularly go to the gun range and learn how to use that gun and stay on top of your learning? Right. And she said, no. I was like, okay, well, then you’re not safe to carry a gun. I said, are you, I said, where do you wear like a little tank top or a sports bra and like little running shorts or leggings or something like that when you run? And she was like, yeah, I do. I said, okay, where are you going to put your gun? Like on your person, where, because she’s a runner and she needs to be lightweight and she’s trying to get in her miles every day. I was like, where, how are you going to hold the gun? Do you want it clunking around in a fanny pack? Do you want to wear a whole like strap to your side of your body that we can see through your leggings? Like, what do you think in here? And she was like, oh, God, I’m not doing that. I was like, okay. And I was like, how many, you know, like if we think about statistically, like, what is the likelihood that you are going to be in such a dangerous situation that you are going to be willing and have the space to kill somebody with your gun?

And she was like, I mean, probably not. I was like, okay, well, now you know. Now somebody else might have different answers and they might actually say, you know what, I’m going to figure this out because that’s really important to me. Oh yeah. There’s a thousand products on the market that will sell you solutions to those problems. The first problem that I think is extremely valid in that, in my opinion, if you’re ever going to think about using a firearm for protection, yeah, you need to be at the range quite a lot because it’s a very fungible skill. I used to do competition shooting years ago and it was stunning how much time the fastest, most accurate people put into it. Like you know, crazy. For me it was just a hobby, but for them it was like a lifestyle hobby. It was like their main thing they do, you know, and that’s how you get to regional competitions and the national competitions and you know, your skillset is just insane. Like these guys are 20 times faster than me and more accurate and I’m like, holy smokes, that is an amazing skillset that they have. But it does, it definitely degrades. Like just because I was okay six, eight years ago, whatever it was, you know, I would be starting over again, you know, if I wanted to get back into the hobby, which I don’t currently have any interest in doing. So it was always insane to me that Nebraska had, we had, which I thought was a bare minimum of safety. Just go take one class and then show that you’re not going to probably shoot, you’re probably not going to shoot your foot if you try to fire your gun under no time pressure, no adrenaline at all, right? That’s what Nebraska required. And in Iowa, you know, your grandpa can stick a gun wherever, grandma in their purse, whatever, and just have it loose rattling around in a purse. And that’s legal in Iowa. And I was like, that is so stupid that Iowa does that. I’m so glad Nebraska has our thing. It’s not hard. Like, if you’re worried about self-defense, our Nebraska, getting a concealed carry permit was not hard in Nebraska. All you had to have was basic mechanical ability and basic mental capacity to kind of understand, you know, what you’re signing up for. And I thought that was a bare minimum, which wasn’t, you know, at all an enormous hurdle for self-defense if you feel like you need it, you know, so sure. And now LB 77, okay, well, Nebraska, I guess, you know, we’re Iowa now, so right. I mean, this is the thing. And this is their argument. Was that like a one day class to bring a lethal weapon into the public square, into the grocery store, into everywhere, that there is, that’s too high. It’s too high for the public to ask an individual to do literally anything so that the public could be assured, well, at least I know they knew the rules. At least I know somebody had a look at them and was like, okay, you know, I don’t like, it’s just gone. It’s that was too much to ask of individuals. And I don’t understand how anyone can think that both we need voter registration to stop vote fraud, which basically doesn’t happen. And yet now we don’t even need you to go to a range once to carry a gun. It just boggles my mind that we think both these things simultaneously, that one, the government has to be involved in voting to make sure people aren’t vote frauding. And yet the government should not, cannot be allowed to have any effect at all on carrying a deadly weapon. And the people have both of those things in their head at the same time. I just, it eludes me how that makes sense, how people can say both of those things. So I can understand. I was talking to a friend about voter registration and they kind of lean, they lean kind of in the libertarian kind of viewpoints. And you know, we’re talking about, talking about voter registration and at some point they said, you know, if people have not given any consideration to voting, the consequences to the public can be pretty dire. And he’s right, you know, of course he’s right. Your votes have consequences for sure. And so I totally get that. And he’s like, if you’re not even willing to just go get a state ID, why should we let you participate in this really kind of almost like a secular sacred thing that we do where we choose the leaders? If you’re not even willing to do this really basic thing, what’s kind of his point? And I said, you know, okay, I can kind of get on board with that thinking, right? Like I’m not a, I think that’s pretty pragmatic and that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw. And I said that to him and I said, okay, so now let’s take what you’ve said about harm to the public good as a reason to need people to meet some sort of minimum standard to participate in civic society. Let’s apply that to guns. And he took a big deep breath in and said, I don’t have to think about that. Did he say he was going to think about it? Yeah. Like he just like, it had not occurred to him that there was a conflict in his logic. Oh, that’s exciting. That’s exciting that he had that epiphany, hopefully. You know, like if your reason is like that an individual owes the public some sort of minimum standard to participate in some types of civic engagement, I actually agree. We’re not in disagreement there. I think you do have to, you do owe a minimum effort. I don’t disagree, but I think we can very much disagree about the nuance and the details of that, how that plays out in real life. But I just generally agree with the statement, but yeah, you got to apply it all the way through. Was there another conversation after that one? Was there any follow up on that? No, there wasn’t. Oh, bummer. I really want to hear when people, when they hit a thing, right, which it works very well when it’s their thoughts, not you trying to convince somebody else, but it’s their thoughts. And then they’re like, well, how does that apply in this situation? And yeah, I listen to a lot of podcasts about persuasion, like how do you ever change anyone’s mind about anything ever, right? And usually it comes from helping that person see from inside their own head, their own conflicts of their own opinions. It usually has nothing to do with an external opinion coming at them out of the blue, no matter how well argued or statistically backed or anything, none of that really matters. All that matters is if you can get a moment of clarity where someone is like, oh, wait a minute. What I’m thinking inside my own brain isn’t congruent. That’s the only time anyone ever changes their mind about anything. You know, this is why I really like to take time. I mean, one, I never went back to him because I wasn’t trying to do any, I mean, this is a friend of mine. We just were on a conversation, but I mean, nobody wants to be trolled by their friend who runs the gun control group. And then every time you talk to them, they’re going to push to see where you are on guns. Like nobody wants to be friends with that person, right? That sounds annoying. I don’t want a friend like that. Every time they’re trying to persuade me of something. But I think when the topic comes up, it’s really important to take apart the rhetoric, think it through, like really think about pragmatically, does this hold any water when I, you know, does it? I don’t know. Like think it through. Think about it pragmatically because a lot of, a lot of the gun lobby rhetoric, it just really falls apart. It really falls apart. Let me give you an example. When I’m watching the gun lobby testify on whatever bill, it doesn’t matter what the bill is really. When I’m watching them testify, it is, I think people don’t understand how ludicrous what they’re saying is, but I’ve just heard all their nonsense so many times that I just hear it. There was once a guy and they were trying to get rid of the hundred dollar fee. No, they were, I think they were trying to get rid of the concealed carry permit. It was one of the times they were trying to do that. And this guy was, I mean, really deeply upset. He was really upset because he has some young woman in his life who is disabled and she can’t afford the concealed carry permit class, but she was in a bad relationship and he wants her to arm up to be safe. Why wouldn’t he buy it for her if money’s the problem? Right. Nobody asks him that. And nobody ever says like, here’s the thing, when we don’t, when children go home hungry and we know children go home to houses where they don’t serve dinner and they barely eat on the weekends, we know this, we know this. And the solution society has come up with is therefore we have to have nonprofits and people with open hearts have to give their money or we have to have children go around the neighborhood collecting canned goods. And we have to do all this work to make sure there’s enough food for children. You cannot live without enough food. You cannot grow up healthy. You will have a lifetime of struggles if you did not get to thrive as a child, right? And including a good nutritious set of meals every day. We know this and yet that’s the solution for society. But the solution for violence against women by the gun lobby is like we have to get rid of all the laws about guns because men, women are afraid of men with guns. And therefore we can’t have any rules because that’s what keeps women safe, getting rid of the rules. There’s more guns. The answer is always more guns. And it’s funny, but like it’s not funny. No, I know. It’s crazy. But it’s not. That is really, that is really their solution that really, and they believe it. And they have not done any hefty analysts. They’re like, well, we can’t have policy that requires people to lock up their guns and keep them away from kids because poor people can’t afford gun safes. The gun industry is a billion dollar industry. There is literally no reason they can’t be given away gun safes as, and then get a tax write off. All that infrastructure exists. They just have to do it and they don’t. This is not a problem. This is not a barrier. Poor people can’t afford a gun safe. Absolutely not. Because when you take it down to its roots, you look at, um, think about school shootings. Everybody’s afraid of school shootings, right? Who’s not afraid of school shootings? When we had a school shooting in Omaha at Millard South, I think it was like 2010, 2011. Yeah. 2011. My son was in school when that happened. That gun showed up because the dad, a police officer, didn’t lock up his gun and he didn’t have to, by the way, that’s not the rule. He didn’t lock up his gun. And so that kid took dad’s gun, brought it to school and expressed his emotions of the day and it killed people. And when we look at that, we’d go, well, that kid, what a rotten egg. You can be a disaffected youth and not kill a bunch of people at school. All we have to do is not arm you. And all we have to do to keep guns away from kids is lock them up. It’s like literally not hard. It is actually the easiest thing possible. In Lincoln last year, an elementary schooler brought a gun to a local elementary school. I think they brought a handgun, put it in their backpack, whatever. And the school sends out a notification to parents to let them all know, don’t you worry, this kid will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Don’t you worry, we’re going to solve this problem. A child who has such shitty decision-making powers that we won’t leave candy on the counter because we know they’re going to grab it and eat it when we don’t want them to. But someone who we literally don’t leave home alone because we don’t think they have the capacity to keep themselves safe because they’re too little, that’s the problem? That kid’s the problem? No, the problem is their parents left a gun laying around and they took it to school. Because kids do that kind of stuff. And we don’t have any space in the conversation to go, adults need to be responsible for their actions. They need to keep their guns away from unauthorized users. They need to take their training classes. They need to, they owe the public a standard. They just do. And we can argue about what it is and how that looks like and what that feels like. And those are worthwhile arguments to have, hash out the details. But this idea that we just get rid of all the laws, it is totally bananas. It’s just totally bananas. And my totally bananas idea is America would be much safer with millions of fewer guns in America. That’s my totally bananas idea. I don’t understand how many decades and how many thousands of lives we’re going to lose before we realize what the Australians realized in the 90s. And I thought for sure when Sandy Hook happened, I was like, holy shit, okay, well, this is our moment. This is when America is going to realize that we can’t, that more guns is not the answer, right? And I was just devastated that as a nation, apparently our political apparatus has decided that no, more guns is the answer. That’s how we’re going to solve the problem of guns is more guns. And I just, I don’t understand. So I don’t think there should be no guns. I think there should be millions of fewer guns and you should only have access to one if you have, if you’re being stalked, if you’ve gotten death threats, that sort of thing should put you on a very special, like, oh crap, okay, this person actually needs, needs this. So, and if we would. Sure. And, and here’s a more like middle of the road position, right? Like I can hold actually a lot of practical positions in my brain, right? I have my own kind of thoughts on the matter, but like practically as a society, how do we move through? Maybe, maybe there really is. Maybe you’re in such an extreme minority. That’s not even viable, right? Maybe, but maybe it is. And people should advocate for the policies that they want. And but like, what if here’s a, here’s something like totally radical. What if when you were dangerous and you were identified as dangerous by people who know you and like, there was like a way to go like, oh man, we’re very concerned about this person. What if we could disarm you? And what if we held gun sellers, private and gun stores to a higher standard about who they sell guns to? Yeah. That’s part of my bananas plan. What if, what if instead of like by default, everybody’s approved to buy any gun they want for any reason at all. What if the first step is like, you have to go to your gun class and do your background check. You get basically your concealed carry permit and then you can go buy your gun. What is that? I mean, there’s ways through it, but like, this is really sad. So whoever’s listening, if you’re not feeling sad, don’t, you know, maybe turn it, skip a couple minutes. But I was, I had a mom reach out to me last year. She had an adult son who had his guns taken away by the sheriff. And she begged the sheriff, and this is rural Nebraska, you know, somewhere like somewhere near Kearney-ish, I think, and the sheriff had to give the guns back. And she begged him and she said, please, please, please, please, we need, don’t give him his guns back. He’s not okay. He’s in crisis right now. And they said, well, we just don’t, we don’t have a way to keep the guns away. There’s no process for this. So I’m going to give them back even though I don’t want to. Okay, so he does. That guy threatens to kill his own children and his parents. His dad talks him down and he goes out to the back to the trailer he was living out on the farm. So he goes back to his little trailer where he’s living. And he ends his own life in the backyard. And that could have been prevented if we had a process to keep the guns away from that guy, right? Like everybody knew he was a danger to himself and others. And almost an entire family was slaughtered. And she lost her son, who maybe could have got better and been there to help raise his kids and whatever all. But same, similar story in Omaha, a mom called me a couple weeks ago. And she has an adult son. And he’s not, he’s been in and out of services all through high school and has some pretty serious problems that everybody knows about. But somehow he’s not flagged as like being a prohibited person to buy a gun, maybe. Don’t exactly know the details, but we do know he was able to buy a gun and he did. And then he thought something scary was happening. It wasn’t. But he thought and then he shot a gun in public and a bullet like grazed some woman’s arm. And she was just like riding her bike, like just going by, wasn’t interacting. He was like shooting at someone else that wasn’t, you know, but anyway, his mom called and was like, how did he even get a gun?

How do we stop people like my son from getting guns, because now this kid who is severely mentally ill, like he sees things that aren’t there, he hears people who are not speaking to him, right, like he’s not, he does not have a healthy brain, but now he’s sitting in jail. Right? And it didn’t have to end that way. If we could have just kept that guy disarmed, this wouldn’t be the situation, right? And we are not, because we are still talking about nonsense like the concealed carry permit class is too big of a leap, because we can’t get past these violent fantasies, which are predominantly spread by men, not entirely, but predominantly, there’s these violent hero fantasies where if I just have enough, enough weaponry, and I’m tough enough and strong enough and brave enough, I’ll be able to kill anyone and then we’ll all be safer. Like violence doesn’t create peace. It just doesn’t. So we have to be talking about something different than these violent fantasies where people think they’re going to save the day, because it’s terrible. That guy in Omaha recently, there’s a third story with the AR, and he’d already had his guns taken away a bunch of times and his family kept taking away his guns, but he kept getting more guns. And then the police killed him in the target, right? And it was really tragic because that guy was not okay, and he shouldn’t have been able to keep getting guns, but because we won’t have a serious conversation about this, people are, people are losing their lives and they don’t have to be. So under our system in Nebraska, if you’ve been convicted of a felony, you can lose gun rights. Is that true? That’s true, right? It’s true. Okay. And that’s, is that the only mechanism? There’s no, there’s no way, any mental health, anything until you’ve committed a felony, is there no mechanism? There is, there are certain domestic violence misdemeanors that you can lose your guns. And there is a process where you can be marked as like having such profound mental health problems that you become prohibited. So it’s really hard, it’s really hard. It’s really hard to get that designation. And it should be, you know, you don’t want the government just going around declaring people lose their rights willy nilly. And it’s really hard to undo it once it’s done. What you need is some kind of mechanism that renews, that has a due process where people can have a lawyer that advocates for them and you know, you need a robust, healthy process. But those are the only, really the only three ways that you can be prohibited. And here’s the thing, you’re prohibited. You end up in the Brady background check system, somehow, someway, right, okay, cool. But private sales in Nebraska, if it’s a handgun sale, you do have to see their handgun permit, and which is awesome. That’s a great policy. But for long guns, if I, if you have an AR, and you want to sell it to me, you don’t have to verify that I’m allowed to buy it from you. We put all the onus of accountability on the end on the buyer. And if you’re a private seller of a long gun, that’s it, you can do whatever you want. So you’re telling me if I sold a handgun, I would need to see their purchase permit that’s valid, right? Their ID shows me it’s them or whatever. But yeah, I can sell any long gun to anyone privately. And the legal problem is the buyer’s problem, not my problem. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. Yeah, that’s the law. Wow. That doesn’t seem sufficient. Right. Now, if you are an ethical person, you’re going to see that handgun permit, any gun that leaves your hand, you’re going to do a little diligence to check, right? And you’re going to see like, hey, did they, if they have their purchase, those renew every three years, they include a background check, right? It’s kind of like a driver’s license. You’re not going to let someone drive your car if you like, you have a license, right? Like, can I see your license? Oh, sure. Yeah. It’s not hard to get that purchase permit. It’s not hard to keep it renewed. And I’ve only had one private purchase event in my life. And I think he went above and beyond what he had to do and did all the things that you would expect him to do. And I don’t think legally in the state of Iowa that he had to do that. I don’t think he was mandated by law that he do that or anything. So I mean, a lot of states don’t have any regulation of private sales at all. They don’t do anything private sales. And there are loopholes to that background check, the private sale for handguns. There’s loopholes. Like, so let’s say you want to give all your guns to your kid. Okay, cool. But your kid might be prohibited and you didn’t know and they didn’t tell you. People don’t know everything about their kids. Oh, there’s no, I mean, like, say a private seller wants to see if they’re prohibited. There’s no search. I can’t do a search to see if someone’s prohibited. How would I? How would I do that if I wanted to? Well, if you if they had a handgun permit, then you would know, right? You would know in the last three years they were allowed to buy guns. Yeah, I would know three years ago that they hadn’t engaged in domestic violence at the time and gotten on some list that I don’t have access to search. But I wouldn’t know that that happened a month ago. And that’s why they want the gun is because now they’re on this list. I don’t have any way of verifying that. Seeing the list. Yeah. I don’t. So I’m, I’m a data guy. Unless if you went to, if you went to an FFL, like a federal firearms license dealer, they might be able to run it for you there. Oh, but nobody’s going to do that. Nobody’s going to go into Cabela’s and say, Hey, Cabela’s do this thing that isn’t going to make you any money. I’m trying to do a private sale. Can you do a background check for me real quick? Cabela’s is busy trying to make money. So they’re not going to do it. Like, why would they? You know, right. They’ve got a business to run. It’s not, yeah, I’m making them any money anyway. Yeah. I mean, we do have some big loopholes, like, you know, I just always like to bring up violence against women as an issue, because this is a really slick talking point that the gun lobby uses that we have to, we can’t have laws because it hurts women. But here’s what actually the law is right now. There hardly are any laws. If you beat the ever living crap out of your partner, right, and this doesn’t matter what gender your partner is, if you beat the ever living crap out of them, and they’re sitting in a hospital because you have hurt them so badly, that does not bar you from guns, because you have not been convicted of anything, right? You’re like in that weird gray period, and there’s no great mechanism that can be engaged to go, you know what, we’re going to take all the guns out of this family’s home. And we’re going to just put a ban on this guy for a little bit while we just figure out what the hell’s going on. Because something’s not right. No, no, that guy can go out and arm up because there’s no rules. He’s not been convicted, and we don’t have like a temporary stopgap measure. So I’m beaten to a pulp, I’m in the hospital, the police show up, I want to press charges. They go to my partner’s house, right? They walk in there, they’ve got 37 guns, maybe or maybe not they get arrested, but under no conditions can they take the guns? They could take them if they chose to, they don’t have to. Oh, they can take them? They can seize weaponry out of a household of an abused abuser? They can kind of, they can seize anything that they want to seize for a temporary measure if they want to. I mean, police have a ton of power. They can kind of do what they want in the heat of a moment, you know? So that becomes evidence in the assault case against me that’s pending, right? And so now that’s in the evidence lockup at the police station or whatever, until some future court date, right? Maybe, maybe, unless there’s like a defense lawyer who’s able to lobby, like, listen, this guy’s innocent until proven guilty. We don’t, we’re not going to admit that we did, we hurt this person. We think it was some other way that they got hurt. You know, there’s no, it’s just complicated, right? We’re not talking through these complications as a matter of policy because we don’t actually want to keep anybody safe from violence when it comes to guns. And I’ll give you, I’ll give you an example. My own sister was, you know, severely harmed by her spouse. And that guy went to jail and, you know, the sheriff came and watches, she like packed a bag and we had to get her out of there. And I said, Hey, can you take, you know, there’s a couple of guns here. Can you take these and take these giant hunting knives and just get all this out of here? Because he’ll be back from jail in a couple of days and they come home. That’s where they go. And they’re only in jail a couple of days. If that, right. This was a holiday weekend. So he was there a couple more days than that, but, and the deputy in Cass County, he said no. He said, no, he wouldn’t take them. So legally they have discretion you’re saying, but they chose not to, and they could have chosen to do it or not to do it. It was just up to the officer to do whatever he wanted or the deputy. Now, thank God this didn’t happen. But if that guy would have gotten out of jail and then used his guns and killed my sister, which definitely happens to people every day, then there’s no recourse for me to like hold them accountable and say, you didn’t do the right thing. And you put my sister in harm’s way because you wouldn’t take these guns because he didn’t have to. This is the thing about laws is that they hold, you can hold people accountable if you have the right laws on the books and we can argue about exactly what the right laws are and exactly how to word them and exactly how to carve them to both protect the public and protect due process. We can have those arguments. And what I’m telling, you know, what’d you call it? The dozens of listeners of your podcast, what I’m saying is we’re not having those conversations. We are having conversations about like, well, should we get rid of all the laws or not? Those are the conversations we’re having and they’re not, it’s not reasonable. It’s not reasonable. And to start to go very, the beginning of this conversation that you and I’ve been having when you were reading the newsletter for Nebraskans Against Gun Violence and we said, we made some kind of pithy title about, you know, being, you know, the Omaha Metro, congrats to Omaha Metro or something, you know, like a lot of Omaha senators, including yours, Justin Wayne, greased the bill through that nullified local ordinances around the state and removed the requirement for training and background checks that come with the concealed carry permit. It was if Omaha, just the city of Omaha, Omaha senators had said, you know what, Omaha’s the biggest city. We have the biggest population and we actually think there may be some Omaha city ordinances that we probably, we don’t like. Maybe we think they’re unjust. Maybe we think they’re not legal. You know, sure, there may be, there may be. But we want to handle this at the Omaha level because we don’t want to lose the right to govern Omaha. We don’t want to lose the right. But that’s not what they did. That’s not what many Omaha senators, including yours, Justin Wayne, that’s not the road they took. Instead, the road they took was to some of them actually actively push it forward, you know, and then other ones fought it. But the way Omaha votes and the way they picked their senators, this is what you get. Like it really sucks. It sucks a whole lot. And the whole state is going to be, is going to be a worse place. And Omaha specifically is going to have the biggest increase of violence because Omaha is the biggest city in the state. And black people will be disproportionately impacted. They’re already disproportionately impacted when it comes to homicide rates around the country and including in Nebraska and Omaha. And that will just exacerbate and get worse. I hope to be wrong. There may be somebody who says, well, you don’t know. Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know. But I can see trends and statistics and what happens in other states and we’re all human. So why would Nebraska be wildly different than every other state in the country? As a general principle, does it feel like committees should kill bills that they think they’re going to lose on a general vote? Like is that? So what the committee does, the committee does two things. One, the point of the committee process is for the members of the committee to become policy experts in the topics their committee covers, right? Because state government, and this is true of any governing board, right? They have a lot of things that they govern and you can’t be an expert on everything. So you’re a generalist on most things, but you really get an expertise. And judiciary, where this bill sat, is full of lawyers, right? Because it sees things around criminal justice, constitutional issues, things like who goes to jail and for how long and for what. Those are the kind of things that are placed in front of judiciary. Those are complex legal questions. And you need to be really familiar with the law and make sure that you don’t push out things that are contradictory, right? So once you are an expert, the thing about bills, like your question is a little too binary. The thing about bills is like some bills are really good ideas and probably everybody thinks they’re a good idea, just generally. But they might not make it out of committee because the bill is written poorly. It is written in a shitty way, right? And that’s not even through malice. It can take a long time to get a bill churned out that’s really good. And the committee has to work really hard. They have a whole team of legal scholars. And this is true of every committee. This is what they’re doing. And they say, okay, I see this is what you’re trying to do and the language isn’t working. It’s not constitutional or it’s too broad. It’s too specific. You put in the wrong agency to address this. It actually should be this other agency. We have to have really thorny policy debates about exactly where we think this bill should go. So that is what committees do. And then also, for sure, committees can say, I do not think this topic is good for Nebraska. And when you vote a committee, a bill at a committee, you are at some level giving it its first stamp of approval. Sure. So when we talk about preemption, we’re talking about LB77 preempting all the city ordinances, county ordinances, if there are any, all over the state of Nebraska and deciding there’s one- Most of them. Yeah. Most of them. And deciding, hey, look, if you want anything on this topic to be done, it has to be done in the Nebraska state courthouse. You can’t decide it locally. You can’t decide it in your county. And the committee structure is also saying, hey, we’re not going to let all 50 senators vote on this. We’re going to kill this. And it doesn’t get out of committee. And whether or not 50 people think this should pass or fail, the committee decides. So these seven senators decide that the other 50 don’t get to vote on it. Right. And this happens all the time in every legislature across the country. But yeah, it’s interesting to try to understand. So my bias is always towards, well, if I like a thing, of course I want preemption at the top because I want that thing for everybody. And if I don’t like a thing, of course I want local control because I want to be able to influence the people who want that thing. So that’s my sarcastic answer to the question of states rights or whatever version of preemption that we’re talking about. I mean, the thing about the thing about committees is that, you know, there is this really easy rhetoric, right, where it’s like, listen, if a senator brings it, the whole body should get to vote on it. And that’s very easy. That is an easy thing to think and an easy thing to say. But let’s break it apart and talk about the pragmatics of what that means. Right. I just I always want to break things apart. So there were like around a thousand bills last year or just this year. Right. And every every year, actually, there’s like, you know, between like eight hundred plus bills because senators can bring a bill on anything they want and they do. And that’s fine. If the committees pushed out every single bill that came through. Do you actually think they have time to thoughtfully consider each bill that comes before them? No, they don’t. And their job is to be experts on the statute that they’re pushing out. They should be an expert on it by the time it comes out of committee. They pragmatically do not have that kind of time. And so then there’s nobody who’s an expert on that piece of policy by the time it comes out. So how is the rest of the body going to be an expert when there’s nobody who’s given it careful study before it hit the floor? OK, so there’s that piece. Maybe that resonates and maybe it doesn’t. The other piece is. The point of politics is to. Figure things out.

So, if you are a senator who wants your bill out of committee, perhaps the adult professional thing is to work with the committee and say, what is your problem here? How can we address it? And in Omaha, on the bill we’re talking about, Omaha senators could very well have been like, we are concerned you don’t have any buy-in from our city police department. You don’t have buy-in from our county sheriff. You don’t have buy-in from the Lincoln Police Department. You don’t have buy-in from Omaha City Council, Lincoln City Council. You don’t have the mayors on board. The League of Municipalities is working against you here. And we think that they’re really important stakeholders in governance in Nebraska. And we want you to work with them and then find a solution that even if I don’t personally like it, at least you’ve addressed these big governmental concerns that I have. That is something committees do all the time. They say, until you get the buy-in of this really important stakeholder in Nebraska, right, like I want an environmental state law. Okay, that’s great. We want you to work with the natural resources districts and make sure they’re on board with this change and that we’re all working together and collaboratively. Because this is not supposed to be a process where one piece of the government shoves it down to the rest of the government pieces. We should be working together and collaboratively. And committees are the first protection to ensure that work is happening. And I would argue strongly on this bill, the committee abdicated their duty to government and to the public when they just greased it through. It strikes me as an impossible job. Maybe I’m wrong. The job of state senator is you get paid whatever it is, $40,000, $30,000 a year and- 12. It’s 12. Okay, $12,000 a year you’re going to pay me. And there’s going to be 1,000 bills and some of them are trivial, like a local whatever wants to rename it, the memorial, whatever, and if local sport has it, great, I’m done. You know, five minutes, I’m done, I can vote. But some of these things require decades, I think, of experience in the field and months of my time, full time, trying to understand, well, where is everyone thinking on this and what is all the background about it and what are all the legal precedents about it? And I just, I don’t understand how a state senator can possibly do their job. Like I don’t understand these- Well, let me- The bills that come before them are so fundamental, you know, they’re affecting millions of citizens. Like how do they do it? Yeah. How does a state senator feel like they’re doing their job when their job is impossible by definition, it seems to me? I don’t understand how it can be done. So here’s what happened. Let me tell you what happened. Here’s how it used to work. And here’s how it works now. It used to be that you would have a state senator, and they would be your state senator for like 20 years. They were there a long time, they knew who all the stakeholders were, they deeply under- It would, and it takes, if you want to do something like overhaul the foster care system, which we need to do, right? If you want to work on something as complicated as the overcrowding prison issue, you cannot do that being a state senator for two years, four years, honestly, even six years. It’s not until your seventh and eighth years that you really even understand what’s going on and how what you do in the Nebraska State Capitol impact everyday people. You just can’t understand because you don’t have enough tenure. And now, we give you the boot after eight years, just when you’re getting good at your job. Imagine like, you know, you have a professional career that takes a lot of time. You’ve been an engineer for a long time. How long did it take you until you were like, actually pretty good at your job? It took you years. It took you years. It took you years, and you still make mistakes all the time, right? Like this is the reality of people. I’m an expert on a sliver of a sliver of one sliver of technology. You know what I mean? Like my expertise, like what I think I’m really good at is such a small, tiny, microscopic thing, which thankfully a lot of businesses find very valuable, and so they pay me and I can pay my mortgage. But to think that a state senator can be an expert across the broad topics that they’re debating, it’s just amazing to me. Well, I think, yeah, the committee focus, hopefully. And the thing is, we lost all that expertise when we enacted term limits. That’s how you get expertise. You have to be there long enough to develop it, and then you have to be there long enough to use your expertise. And so now the only people who have expertise are people outside of the legislature, and the actual institution of the legislature is full of people who don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t understand how these policies work. They don’t understand how different government agencies work together. Every single two years, about 25% of them are new, which means every four years, you’re working with about half of your senators are in their first term of service. Given the way that we fund government, $12,000 a year, how is it that you could possibly do that job unless what you’re doing is finding the money that you’re going to survive on to buy groceries with, and becoming a professional politician whose job, apparently, is to gather the money to be able to stay in office? I also don’t want people that have been sitting there for decades because they’ve learned how to play the game, and the game is just, okay, well, hey, the NRA will kick me $12,000 for this decision or whatever. That’s an opposite that I also don’t want. I understand what you’re saying, but I also don’t trust politicians to sit there for decades. We can fix that money problem if we want to. We can say the limits for how much money people can spend on a certain race. We can say who can donate money and who can’t and how much. We just choose not to. The fact that these elections and that the incentives are so awful, that’s a problem we can fix. We don’t want to fix it, but that is a problem we can fix, and we could still retain the expertise of senators. Obviously, I want Mitch McConnell to go away. I would love him to be termed out and to go away forever. Of course, I would. I don’t see the federal government’s even more nasty and thorny than the state government. I don’t want people turning over in those seats every 10 years. I want people who are experts on policy making decisions about policy. I want expertise in the room. I think it’s a little more complicated than the term limits are the solution. No, I’m not. Actually, term limits are the problem in Nebraska state legislature. What I think I’m saying is we need to fund our full-time politicians differently so that they’re not spending 90% of their time chasing the money to survive and stay in the job. I think that’s what I’m saying. I don’t know that I have an opinion about term limits one way or the other, but it seems to me that before there were term limits, I mean, if you have to look pragmatically at what’s actually happened in our state, we have a very special form of government. It’s super unusual. Really before Pete Ricketts started dumping money into state races, this wasn’t really done for most of the races. Omaha would have really competitive races from time to time. Lincoln would have some competitive races. The rest of the state was not quite like that. They generally moved at the slowest pace possible. They almost always were able to find consensus in the way through. Many of their bills, if not most of their bills, passed with 49 to 0 once it got to the end because they worked so hard finding solutions forward because they’ve been working together 10, 15, 20 years. You couldn’t just blow someone up because they’re going to be around next year and the next year. They were really independent. Are they independently wealthy? All of them? Is that how they can get paid $12,000 a year to do the job? I think a lot of, I think it was just definitely there’s an equity issue there, right? There’s an equity issue there, but what I’m saying is we definitely should pay them more. I don’t disagree with that at all. But what I’m saying is we have destroyed the collegiality of our legislature. We have destroyed the expertise of our legislature. We let Pete Ricketts do it. We have a state that has classically like purple state policies. They’re not super blue. They’re not super red. We kind of land right in the middle where people carefully, thoughtfully were like, you know what we should do? We have all these crumbling bridges. We should do a tax so we can afford to fix the bridges. And when Pete Ricketts became the governor, he vetoed a bill just like that and they overrode his veto and they were like, dude, okay, you just got here and maybe you don’t understand, but like we are going to fix the bridges around the state. We are actually going to do that. We’re going to fix these rural roads. Like come on now. Now we don’t have that kind of legislature anymore because now it’s like no tax increases. Yes, tax increases. That’s a ridiculous binary. The binary, like the question is what are the problems that we need government to solve? And they’re the only institution that can really solve them like bridges and roads. And how do they solve them? Let’s argue about that and come up with the right solution and then do it. Let’s partner with the roads department. Let’s partner with whatever institutions, who are the construction companies that actually can do the work? How do we figure all this out and make sure that when we figure out the funding mechanism, this all works together? That’s their job and they’re not doing it. And they’re too busy passing like preemption of guns, right? They’re too busy trying to get rid of abortion and they have lost sight of their actual job as the governance mechanism of the state. I’ve only been paying attention for a couple of years, so I have no pre-Ricketts knowledge of Nebraska at all, so I apologize that I can’t commiserate with you on that issue. No, you’re fine. I will just say what they used to do is you couldn’t count on party. There was no evenly divide where we’re like, okay, well it’s always 16 to 33 or whatever. It was like a mess of you really had to lobby them because they voted independently and you really had to convince them that your position made sense to them and you could do it because they didn’t take their orders from political parties. They voted how they wanted to and some always voted, you know, kind of Republican, some kind of always voted Democrat. And then there was this huge bunch in the middle, which represent really most of us. We’re just like, well, I’m kind of here on this, I’m kind of there on that, and I guess it depends on how you structure on where I’d be on that. And that’s how they used to function and it’s just gone. It’s just raw. It’s just a raw power grab by the Republican Party. They got the majority and they’re going to pass anything they want no matter the cost. It’s just the rawest form of authoritarian power is what we’re seeing in the state government. With very vocal voices fighting that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this conversation was awesome. Well, I’m glad you liked it. I appreciate you backing me out because I tried to dive very deeply into my very specific questions about Senator Wayne without all the background, you know, that you gave. I do not have the history in my head about how Nebraska used to work versus how it works today. I’m just trying to get engaged for the very first time and feeling frustrated that I don’t understand what my rep is doing. Because if I’m a citizen, I vote for my rep, but I don’t understand what my rep is doing. And there’s no way for me to figure out what my rep is doing except, you know, after the fact. Like I can see everything he did, but I can’t see what he’s going to do. I can’t hear what he’s thinking, you know, and maybe he has very good reasons for doing some of the things that he did and I just don’t know them, you know, and I can’t figure out how to be an effective democratic citizen of our fine state here. So I help you. Well, I appreciate you trying to piece some of that together for me, this historical context and your far more educated background on a lot of these issues. I appreciate you spending the time. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. I deeply love talking about all of these things. Oh, okay. Well, in that case, I have more stupid questions for you for next time. I’ve got to get to an 11 o’clock meeting here, I think shortly. So thank you so much for your time on this one and you can have the recording if you want it. And I really love seeing Red in Nebraska’s podcast feed. That’s great. I’m learning a ton from, you know, two plus years ago in your back feed there. You’ve got like 70 episodes on that. I lost you. Oh no. We lost Melody. Oh, she’s back. Hey there. Hello. Hi. Sorry. I just wanted to thank you for the Seeing Red Nebraska podcast. That’s an amazing back catalog that I’m diving through, trying to understand a lot of that stuff. So I appreciate you guys recording those and putting them on the internet. You’re welcome. It was a labor of love. Is that possibly going to reappear at some point in the future? Has that ship sailed? Oh, did I lose you again? Oh, I lost you again. If you have any thoughts or feedback for us, you can leave a voicemail for the show at 1-402-577-0117. Thanks.