Stephanie, good morning to you. I'm so sorry this has happened to you again. I'm so glad that you can join us for this conversation. As difficult as it is, I would imagine, Stephanie, that you never thought that this could happen to you again. [00:00:15] Yeah. I mean, I never thought it would happen to me for the first time. And here we are. And unfortunately, this is this is America for you. That was Stephanie Horowitz, an FSU student who has now lived through two school shootings. [00:00:32] First, Stoneman Douglas High School, parkland, Florida. And the second one just yesterday at FSU, Florida State University, in which two people were killed tragically. Her response there, saying, This is America is one that a lot of people had yesterday and every time there's another shooting. [00:00:50] Stephanie also revealed to CBS how these traumatic shootings have impacted her life. The reality that you're thinking every day, this could be the day when there's a school shooting. - Report late last night. - I mean, for a while I had thought that. [00:01:06] I never thought that before. I was 15 years old. And then after surviving the Parkland school shooting at Stoneman Douglas back in 2018, I was a freshman. After that day, I kind of woke up every morning thinking that it could be my last day. I was afraid for my life, every step that I took. [00:01:23] And I've come a long way over that time. And I've gotten to a place over these last couple of years where I didn't fear for my life anymore. And I was able to walk around campus and feel safe. And here we are yet again. And that was taken away from me for a second time. Yeah, that feeling of being less safe is going to continue being taken away [00:01:42] from Americans across the country, thanks to lawmakers who refuse to take any action to curb gun violence. Enter Donald Trump, who last night, just hours after the shooting, made it clear he was more concerned about protecting gun rights [00:01:57] than he was about protecting Americans. Is there any changes that you want to see to gun legislation? - Anything you see broken with gun laws? - Well, I'm going to have to. Look, I'm a big advocate of the Second Amendment. I have been from the beginning, I protected it, and these things are terrible. [00:02:15] But the gun doesn't do the shooting. The people do. It's, you know, a phrase that's used probably too often, I will tell you that, it's a shame we'll have more to say about it later on. We'll see what happens. - There will be more to say about it. - Only in terms of what happened. [00:02:33] As far as legislation is concerned. This has been going on for a long time. I have an obligation to protect the Second Amendment. I ran on the Second Amendment, among many other things, and I will always protect the Second Amendment. I probably have more respect for Donald Trump if in that moment he just said not [00:02:50] my issue, I wasn't there, not my problem. You know, I'm old. I'm old enough that I didn't have active shooting training in school. My daughter has had that, and it's like, no big deal to her. You know, this is just the world that she was born into. [00:03:08] Junk thoughts on, I guess, his reaction to it. And even when I watch Stephanie Horowitz there, I don't know her, so I don't have a baseline, but I see someone who is impacted in a way that is PTSD trauma. She's talking about when she's 15. Now, here she is again at Florida [00:03:27] State University, and it's not safe. And you can't guarantee that she's safe when the next person with a gun, whether it's their mom's, you know, handgun that they find or a long gun, it's just this is America and it's disgusting. [00:03:45] Yeah. So I'm going to give you some context on that in a second. You know, yesterday on the show, I said, look, you know, about a decade ago, I told you there'd be a mass shooting near you. It was inevitable. Because if the rules are set in a way [00:04:02] that creates, this situation. You have to change the rules. The rules in this case are the laws. If you don't change the laws, you're going to keep getting the same result over and over and over again. So then yesterday I was saying about, hey, soon we're going to see a lot of people who are talking about their second shooting. [00:04:19] So here we are now talking about or she's talking about her second mass shooting. So all of you, if you've been in an area that has had a mass shooting, I have terrible news for you. You'll probably get another one if you're lucky enough that you were never been in an area. There's been a mass shooting. First of all, you're becoming increasingly rare. [00:04:35] The rest of us have usually experienced something along those lines. And, soon you'll get one, too, because that's what happens when you have the wrong laws. So now Trump realizes this in his first term in a terrible mass shooting. And on the first day he said, well, there's too much gun violence. [00:04:53] We've got to do something about it. And you know what? A lot of the guys around here, they take money from the NRA or something, or they say he said something along those lines, or they're too controlled by the NRA or too worried about the NRA. But, you know, I'm going to take care of it. So the next day, he had a meeting with the NRA, came out and said, never mind. [00:05:10] No, gun rights are more important than the, than the victims of these shootings. I mean, he's so stupid in how transactional he is. Then why did you say, hey, they're controlled by the NRA. If you're going to go in and meet with the NRA the next day, and [00:05:26] you're going to get controlled by the NRA. But, you know, that's what's so frustrating about his supporters is that you saw that with your own eyes. A lot of them didn't, because Fox News, of course, didn't talk about their that their media didn't talk about that. But for those of you who saw that with your own eyes, why would you believe [00:05:41] anything this guy says? So, I mean, to Sharon's point, at this point, he's not being quite as honest as Sharon wanted him to be, but he's almost getting there where he's like, yeah, yeah, dead people, I get it. But I care more about the Second Amendment rights than he cares [00:05:57] about average American citizens. And is it because he's, like, emotionally wedded to the Second Amendment? He's shredding the Constitution in every other way, right. Detaining American citizens, not listening to courts, talking about running for a third term. [00:06:13] You love the Constitution? No. You love the money, dude. You love the money that the NRA gives you. So what he's actually saying is, I like the money. I'm getting more than I like your lives. - Let's be honest about it. - I don't know. I've known you during 20 years and I can't, I can't count, [00:06:30] I've lost count of how many times we sat here and gone through this. We've talked about these stories. The chances are that young woman will be in a third shooting. She could very possibly be in a third shooting. She's young enough. She's got a lot of life in front of her. And she could, go to a baseball game, a restaurant, a bar. [00:06:50] You know, chances are in this society that where guns are so threaded throughout our culture, it's a there's a good chance that she could be in another shooting. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know, we we have this perennial thing. [00:07:09] It's like spring. Every spring, there's, like a shooting, I don't know, and nobody I don't I don't want to say that nobody cares because people do care. People really, really care. I think there's a real failure in the political machinery to make this issue [00:07:27] so pivotal, so center to why we vote. You could almost make it a single issue vote. Do you like guns and can anyone have a gun? Are you sick of your family members being threatened in a public space? [00:07:44] Have you been touched by gun violence? I mean, my God, it's everywhere. And it's not just shootings like this. It's in the local news every night in Atlanta. How does the political machinery that wants to moderate gun violence [00:08:01] make it something other than just. Another one of these things that we don't get around to dealing with. It's like a broken step on the back porch. It's always there every time I step on it. And oh, that darn thing. I'm going to fix that one day. [00:08:19] We just don't get around to fixing it one day. And I wonder what will it take? What will it take? I Brian, when you say people do care, I agree with you. [00:08:34] People. People do care. You know the people I talk to. I care. But when those real little kids were slaughtered in Connecticut, I mean, I remember where I was. I was on a ladder in Saint Louis putting something up, and I think it was John [00:08:50] Miller hesitated, but delivered the news, kind of bracing the audience for. And these are, you know, real small kids. And there's this many that we believe he already had it confirmed, but we just I could not look at their pictures after seeing them one time [00:09:09] and on the anniversaries. I mean, it's just horrific. And yet, if anything would spur us to vote and be committed. Look how many of us are parents. I mean, I don't think you have to be a parent, but I don't get it. [00:09:25] I really don't get it. And if you're writing Jenks writing. Oh, it's going to touch everyone. I mean, I chills went up my spine when you said. And if you haven't been, you I haven't been and I'm. Yeah, that hit home. [00:09:40] If you're now on people who are twofers and then there'll be it's this is bananas. So why it forget the politicians for a minute and their manipulation. Why haven't people said, oh, hell no. Yeah. So. Well, the thing is, we keep saying hell no, but. [00:09:59] But no one ever listens. And that goes to the frustration of the American people on all the issues. So, look, So there's two different factors at play here. There's the hard right that says don't move an inch on gun rights ever, ever ever. [00:10:14] Right. And then there's the money. And the NRA bought a lot of our politicians for a long, long time. They actually used to also fund the Democratic Party, give credit to the Democratic Party, that they finally stopped taking the NRA money. And then all of a sudden they were for gun control, right? Like so you could see it as soon as the donor money goes away, they become [00:10:32] much more active on that particular issue. Right. So the Republicans are completely bought and paid for 100%, the entire party. They're all corrupt on this issue. Now. They also do have voters in that direction. And so for some of those voters, they can't deal with reality. [00:10:47] Why do you think Alex Jones did that ludicrous thing with. Oh, they were crisis actors. And and the shooting didn't really happen because it's so hard to defend extreme gun rights when you see kids slaughtered. So you have to pretend it didn't happen so that you could live with yourself. [00:11:04] Even if you're an Alex Jones fan and even if you're the most zealot gun rights owner, when you see those dead children, you have to pretend that it's not. No, no, no, no, it wasn't that. We just hand out guns like they're candy to everyone, including the mentally ill. [00:11:21] Right. It's not that we don't have. Like, our laws are in sane in how permissive they are. Right. No. It must be that it didn't happen. That's why they did that nonsense. So now when it gets to the corruption issue, that's super real, [00:11:37] because over 90% of Americans in one poll was 97% of Americans want universal background checks. So it's not a zero, 1 or 0. It's not a binary thing. It's not hey, you either take away all guns or you have no gun control at all. [00:11:52] Right. So over 90% of gun owners want universal background checks because they're not planning to kill anyone. So they're like, I don't mind if you know the serial number of my gun. In fact, I want you to know the serial number in case it's stolen. I want it back. Right. So the only people who don't want universal background checks are either [00:12:11] people paid by the NRA or criminals like terrible, terrible criminals or people that want to be criminals. 97%? No, we can't get it done. And so and then red flag laws, very popular. [00:12:28] Do I mean the the bare, bare minimum when people have been adjudicated to be so mentally ill that they might harm themselves or others. Do not let them buy a gun. Of course, of course. Can't get it passed in so many places. Why? [00:12:44] That's the corruption. Because when you go to the Republicans, go, hey, even though 90% of your voters want this, they go, yeah, but 90% of my donors don't. Ha. And so in in so many cases, it's corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans working together and good cop, bad cop, as we've talked [00:13:02] about a million times on this show. But in this particular case, since the Democrats stopped taking donor money from the gun industry. This one is 100% Republican politicians. False. So if you hate the mass shootings, you look, you can say, hey, I don't hate [00:13:19] him so much that I want higher taxes, or I want this or that or whatever it might be. But understand that when you vote for a Republican, you are actually voting for mass shootings because every one of them votes against every gun control, no matter how reasonable, and no matter how much the American people want it, [00:13:38] they will always vote against it because they are deeply corrupt. So that's just one of the consequences. Maybe you could live with it, but I can't. That's why I don't vote for Republicans. I almost think that, it's a too nuanced of an issue for voters. [00:13:53] I mean, we had a recent presidential election where both candidates bragged about their gun ownership, and it still didn't make a difference because folks here in Georgia thought these people were going to take their guns away. And so if you say, I'm a hunter, I love hunting. [00:14:11] Here's my ride. Here I am hunting with my dog. Kamala Harris talking about owning, a handgun. The message becomes, these people are taking your guns away. And so then Democrats are faced with, no, I'm trying to get [00:14:29] universal background checks. So right there, you have now split a hair, and it's almost too nuanced for voters. And I wonder if it's just an issue that people can't quite wrap their heads around, that there are limits to gun ownership that we could all live with. [00:14:49] Whether you like guns or not, there's something we can live with. There's some middle ground there. Is it too complicated of an issue? No, it's always about. Look, they have such a megaphone. All of these politicians, especially a presidential candidate, you could just pound the message home and you could make it crystal clear and you could [00:15:08] say, hey, listen, if you're Kamala Harris. Hey, listen, I have a gun. This is not taking away gun guns because you're not going to take my gun. I'm not going to take my gun away. Right? But at the same time, I despise mass shootings. And I'm a reasonable person, and I. And I want to do what the American people want. Universal background checks and red flag laws. [00:15:25] So if you're if you're saying, no, I don't want those laws, then you're saying you're for mass shootings. So let's have a let's have an argument about it, okay. You want to have an argument? Oh, take my gun. Oh, you want to take guns away? Well, I have a gun. How many times do I have to say it? Are you stupid? [00:15:41] Right? Right. So, like, there's a way to make your argument super forcefully and drill it into people's heads. But that's another giant problem. Which is Democrats are afraid of their own shadow. So they're like, oh my God, it's a gun issue. Run, run! No! Don't run. [00:15:56] Stand your ground and fight back politically, rhetorically, and win the goddamn argument. Otherwise, this is never going to win. This is never going to end. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true. But it does keep you updated on our live shows.