![Emergency personnel gather at the entrance to a Brooklyn subway stop on Tuesday, April 12, 2022, where multiple people were shot and injured.](https://media.wnyc.org/i/800/0/l/85/2022/04/AP22102518859602.jpg)
( John Minchillo / AP Photo )
Ann Givens, public safety editor for WNYC/Gothamist, and Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and the author of Glock: The Rise of America's Gun (Broadway Books, 2013), talk about the gun used by the subway shooter, and how systems failed the alleged shooter and New Yorkers.
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Speaker 1: This is WNYC, FM, HD, and AM New York.
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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. The alleged subway shooter, Frank James is in custody. Now, what about that gun? Police say they recovered a 9mm Glock handgun that they say James bought legally in Ohio in 2011. Maybe you've heard that much. Despite a lengthy criminal record, he was never convicted of a felony, so he was able to buy the gun legally. Here's John DeVito from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms speaking yesterday at the joint press conference, announcing Frank James' arrest.
John DeVito: The timeline on this gun's life spans 16 years and 5 states. I've very proud to say that late yesterday evening, about 12 hours after this attack, ATF agents were able to close the loop on that extensive time span and determined that Frank James purchased said firearm from a federal firearms licensee in Ohio in 2011.
Brian Lehrer: That gun was fired 33 times in a very short amount of in that subway car, nobody was killed amazingly. What can we learn from it about guns used in crimes in New York and the US more generally, and what can be done about them? We'll talk about the gun in other emerging aspects of this crime too now, and also by the way, for all the focus on this horrific incident, crowded rush-hour subway train Tuesday morning, there were eight shootings in the city on Tuesday night that left 3 people dead and 13 others wounded in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Those numbers, according to police and other sources quoted in the New York Post. Mayor Adams commented on those shootings yesterday, too, overall the NYPD says there were 296 shootings in the city in the first 3 months of this year compared to 260 in the first 3 months of last year. For all of 2018 and all of 2019, the 2 years before the pandemic, there were about 760 shootings per year in New York City. This year so far we're on a pace were nearly 1200. Let's talk about all those guns with two guests.
WNYC and Gothamist, public safety editor Ann Givens, and is pretty new at the station. She came to us this year from The Trace, the only news organization devoted solely to covering gun violence. She has a lot of experience with this kind of story. Also back with us as Paul Barrett. His current title is deputy director of the NYU stern center for business and human rights, but you may know him from earlier appearances on the show as the author of the book, Glock: The Rise of America's Gun. First of all, Paul, it's been a few years welcome back to WNYC.
Paul Barrett: Thanks, Brian. Glad to be here. I wish it was on a happier story, but I'm glad you invited me.
Brian Lehrer: Indeed. We wish it was on a happier occasion, and Ann we've spoken off the air, but a public welcome to WNYC, and thanks for coming on the show.
Ann Givens: I'm happy to be here. Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Let's start with Frank James' legally purchased weapon. To background, our listeners, most of whom I'm sure are not gun owners. What is a 9mm Glock? Paul, since you wrote a book called Glock, what does it look like? What can it do?
Paul Barrett: Well, a 9mm Glock I think is sort of the basic model. It was the first type of gun that Gaston Glock designed and sold back in the mid-1980s, 9mm is a reference to the ammunition. It is in a very standard type of round comparable in diameter to a 38 caliber, round that might be fired from a Smith and less revolver, but the 9mm generally has much more energy or force.
It's effective up to about 100m. The Glock looks like pretty much all of the other pistols that you would see on the hip of a big city, police officer, or in the hands of an actor playing a cop or a bad guy on TV. It has a black matte finish, generally speaking. It's made out of industrial strengths plastic for the most part, except for the slide, the metal part on top, and the Glock, one of the ways that it was distinctive when it was introduced, is that it has a relatively large magazine capacity, meaning you have a lot of rounds in the gun to shoot.
The basic Glock 17, 9mm has 17 in the magazine, and you can carry an 18th round in the chamber. You can also use an extended magazine as apparently, the shooter did in the subway incident. You have more rounds to fire before you have to reload. The reason I said it looks like every other gun is that when the Glock came out, it was a sort of industry leader and within a period of about 10 years, almost every other manufacturer of pistols began making Glock knockoffs. Such that today, the Glock is basically the model for the entire pistol marketplace.
Brian Lehrer: Paul, I saw this gun described as a semiautomatic. What does that mean in this case? When the public debates, whether to ban assault weapons, would this gun as a semiautomatic qualify?
Paul Barrett: Semi-automatic, is a reference to the way the ammunition is stored and made ready for firing in the gun. People [unintelligible 00:05:58] are familiar with the revolver, a handgun that has a round cylinder that moves slightly to line up each round as after the last one has been fired. That kind of gun, generally speaking, can hold five or six-round. A pistol is a different kind of handgun that has a box, a magazine spring-loaded magazine in the handle of the gun and the rounds of ammunition are stacked up in that box.
It is semiautomatic in that as each round is fired, the slide moves back towards the shooter then moves forward, grabs the next round from the stack of bullets in the magazine, and puts it into a position to fire again. The general nomenclature is semiautomatics with magazines are referred to as pistols. The guns with cylinders are referred to as revolvers and overtime in the United States, there's been a big move from revolvers to pistols semiautomatic pistols, and that was all initiated by the Glock.
Brian Lehrer: Does this count as an assault weapon when we debate assault weapons bans?
Paul Barrett: Yes, maybe yes, maybe no. Assault weapon is a pretty vague term. It's not really a technical term. In the assault weapon ban that was enacted in 1994, the Glock actually was affected not because of the functioning of the frame of the gun, but because it had that large magazine capacity, the assault weapons ban in '94, made it illegal to acquire magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds.
In that sense, the Glock was affected by that assault, weapons ban, but most people, I think when you say assault weapons really think of the military-style rifle, that can have even a greater magazine capacity up to 30 rounds in a single magazine. Does it fall under the category? If the legislation were written to ban assault weapons and part of the definition was that, it would be a gun that would accommodate more than 10 rounds, say, then the Glock would be covered by that and would be affected and restricted.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your phone calls for WNYC public safety editor Ann Givens, and Paul Barrett from NYU, also author of the book-- not the trace, The Trace is Ann's former news organization, author of the book, Glock: The Rise of America's Gun. 212-433 WNYC. As we talk about the gun used in the subway shooting and policies to stem gun violence and illegal gun trafficking and we'll talk about some of the other shootings in New York City that took place on the same day as the one on the N train.
212-433 WNYC, 433-9692, or tweet @brianlehrer. Paul was also quoted in a New York Times article. You may have seen about why nobody was killed, only injured by the subway shooter. We will get to that. Ann, do you know how long it took the subway shooter to fire 33 shots in one car on the interim?
Ann Givens: Boy, that's a better question for Paul, I think. I don't know. I'm going to let Paul [unintelligible 00:09:34] that one.
Brian Lehrer: Paul, how quickly could a Glock fire 33 rounds?
Paul Barrett: Yes, I would say in about 33 or 34 seconds, if you were just firing as fast as you could, one of the features of the Glock is it has a very light trigger pull, meaning it doesn't take a lot of force to pull the trigger back, and if you just continue, kept firing as fast as you could, you could that offer around a second.
Brian Lehrer: Our engineer for the show, Juliana Fonda, who was on that train in the next car, just said to our producer that she thinks it took about under two minutes to fire that many rounds. Maybe, it wasn't just consistently pop, pop, pop, 33 rounds in 33 seconds, but almost that much. The ATF agent in the clip we played also said the timeline of this gun's life spans 16 years and 5 states. Do we know anything else about the life of this gun? Did they tell us anything officially?
Ann Givens: They have not told us anything officially about the life of the gun. It is interesting. He purchased the gun in Ohio. He had, as you know, several misdemeanor convictions at that time in his life, but nothing that would have risen to the level of a felony, that would have prohibited him from legally purchasing the gun.
One question that someone mentioned to me that I thought was interesting was, it was unclear to me whether he spent time actually living in Ohio. I believe that residency is a requirement to purchase a gun in Ohio. I'm curious about how he established residency.
Brian Lehrer: He may have bought that gun illegally, even though technically it was a legal purchase if he fudged his residency at that time. Ann, as you mentioned, he was able to buy it legally despite a long criminal record. None of those convictions were felonies, however. Based on your knowledge of gun laws in this country, would a felony conviction disqualify someone from legal gun ownership in Ohio or in New York, or is that federal law that covers the whole country if you know?
Ann Givens: Gun laws do vary from state to state, but in Ohio and in New York, it's not every felony, but violent felonies are always prohibitors from legally purchasing a gun.
Brian Lehrer: Is there any other--
Paul Barrett: Just to clarify [crosstalk]
Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Paul.
Paul Barrett: That's a matter of federal law under the background check law that was initially enacted in '93. Conviction of a felony, whether violent or not, should knock you out of contention, out of eligibility for buying a gun. That would come up on your background check. If it was even a white-collar felony conviction, you would be barred, assuming that the gun dealer was following the federal law.
Brian Lehrer: I mentioned in the intro that there were reportedly eight other shootings in New York City in the 24 hours following the subway shooting where 3 people reported killed and 13 others wounded. The N train shooting, horrific as it was didn't kill anyone and injured 10 from the actual gunfire. That's fewer people than were wounded by the actual gunfire on the train, but only the N train shooting got any real publicity.
Let's take both halves of that. Paul, you were quoted in that Times article that asked why nobody was killed. Allegedly, it was Frank James's shooting spree, 33 shots in under 2 minutes. Why wasn't anyone?
Paul Barrett: As I told the Times, my best response to that is it was a miracle, just the best of good luck in a horrible situation. I can't imagine someone firing 33 rounds in a crowded subway car and hitting only 10 people and killing nobody. I have no explanation for it. If he was just firing randomly, as opposed to aiming, I would think that he would hit more people, and some of those injuries would be fatal. I don't have an explanation for it.
Brian Lehrer: We had a caller who suggested that he might have been out to injure people and not kill them, that it might have been intentional, that he might have even gotten it from some old television show. I forget what show it was, the caller theorized, but some old television show where somebody was purposely shooting people in the legs. I don't know if you're familiar with what show that might have been, or if there's any possibility that he was shooting to wound and shooting not to kill.
Paul Barrett: It seems highly unlikely to me.
Brian Lehrer: Ann, have you heard anything about this?
Ann Givens: I have not. The only thing that springs to mind is that he had released these smoke canisters and so visibility, I could imagine, would be quite poor, but I agree. I think the precision without being a gun expert, the precision that it would take to shoot people in a crowded train and not kill them seems quite extraordinary.
Brian Lehrer: Maybe, on this weekend of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan, the word miracle winds up being the explanation. Bob in Sussex County has a question about the Glock. Bob, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.
Bob: Thank you, Brian. I listen every day. Just a question I've had for quite a long time. I can see from watching westerns how a revolver works and the hammer reach the end of the bullet and bang, but I can never understand how a Glock makes the bullet go. Is there a hammer in a Glock? Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Paul.
Paul Barrett: There's a mechanism inside the gun, you can't see it from the outside, called the firing pin. The trigger pull sets off a series of movements within the gun that results in the firing pin striking the back of the round of ammunition very forcefully and sets off a small explosion and release of gas that propels the gun out to the barrel.
Brian Lehrer: Amy in Ocean Township wants to add something about New Jersey's gun laws that may be relevant to everywhere else as well. Hi, Amy, you're on WNYC.
Amy: Hi, Brian, and hello to your guests. I'm not sure which guest this would pertain to, but it is true that the Glock does hold 17 rounds or cartridges, which are in all intensive purposes bullets. In New Jersey, it became a law that the magazines have to be what is called pin. I'm not sure which expert would know that, probably the Glock expert or the legal expert.
By law, we have to pin our magazine so they only hold 10 bullets or cartridges, whether it be a 9, a 40, a 380. That became a law. We cannot by law have 30 rounds.Whatever this alleged suspect had in New York, New York is I think only nine they can carry legally in a magazine [unintelligible 00:17:46]
Brian Lehrer: In a magazine, so that much would have been illegal.
Amy: Correct. In New Jersey, we have to get our magazine, they call it pin. It's like a little pin. They stick in the magazine, and it can only hold 10. It comes with 17 or 15, depending on the style of gun, a 17, the 34, or whatever style it is, the smaller, the handgun, the Glock style, it can only be 10 by law.
Brian Lehrer: Ann, I think in New York, it is 9 or 10 also. That's the maximum that a gun is allowed to hold after the gun reform that New York enacted following the Newtown Elementary School Massacre a decade ago. I think then under Governor Cuomo and the state legislature at that time, they enacted a gun law that limits magazine sizes to 9 or 10, right?
Ann Givens: That sounds right to me. I know the limit magazine size have been passed in states across the country. Yes, that sounds to me right about New York.
Brian Lehrer: And those extenders?
Paul Barrett: Nine states in the District of Columbia have limits on magazine capacity and New York [crosstalk]
Brian Lehrer: And those extenders? He apparently had an extender on this gun that adds additional magazine capacity. Is that even legal to sell in New York or New Jersey? I realized he wouldn't have bought it here, but is it legal to sell around here?
Paul Barrett: No.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. This is going to be, I think about a Supreme Court case that might come down having to do with gun possession in New York City and when it is legal. Steven in Pearl River, you're on WNYC. Hi, Steven.
Steven: Good morning, Brian. The Supreme Court heard a case that was brought by gun activists
who are asking them to overturn all of New York's rules and regulations regarding concealed firearms. Now, I'm wondering if the guests and you guys would give your opinion as to what would happen if this case is ruled on by a majority in the Supreme court that says that New York City's gun laws are too restrictive. I just have to say that I could not help, but notice the comment by the oracle of ignorance, her name is Marjorie Taylor Green, maybe you've heard of her.
Yes, the Oracle of ignorance. She said, "Well, the problem was that the people on the subway didn't have guns to shoot back." This whole wild west attitude is exactly what Eric Adams is speaking out against and rightfully so. I think that people should be very concerned about how the court will rule on this case.
Brian Lehrer: Steven, thank you very much. Marjorie Taylor Green, I've heard that name somewhere. I'm not sure exactly where, but Ann, are you following that Supreme court case? I think the caller characterized it correctly in terms of what's at stake, people will have their opinions one way or the other, but that concealed carry permits that you get by being a resident of another state, even if it doesn't meet the requirements that New York would impose to carry a gun around in this city that those rules from the other states would enable the person to carry in New York, right?
Ann Givens: Yes. I'm not intimately familiar with the case, but I have read about it as well. I think that many people are quite concerned about what that would mean here. It's a little bit hard to imagine what it would be like if a concealed carry were legal here.
Brian Lehrer: What about the argument that he's cited from Marjorie Taylor Green? Have people raised that in New York to your knowledge Ann, and what would Mayor Adams or anyone else say about it? If they were good guys with a gun in that car, they would've gotten the bad guy with a gun in that car before he shot as many people?
Brian Lehrer: Yes. I think in any major shooting incident like this, and I've covered a bunch now over time, that argument is almost always raised. There are always going to be the rare cases that people can point to where that did in fact play out and there was a good guy with a gun who was able to prevent other gun deaths, but I think that research shows and Paul can check me on this if I'm wrong, but research shows that overall multiple people shooting guns in any kind of a situation like this tends to lead to more death and not less.
Brian Lehrer: By the way on why nobody was killed, and I referenced a caller who brought up an old TV show, a few people have tweeted to clarify that it was the movie The Terminator, or somebody saying Terminator 2 which I didn't see in which Arnold Schwartzenegger, The Terminator, uses smoke canisters and shoots police officers in the legs so he will not kill them.
Assuming that's an accurate description of what happens to that movie Paul, that's pretty eerie using the smoke canister as this gunman did on the N train and then shooting people in the legs. Yikes, it's that exact same scenario.
Paul Barrett: It is eerie, but personally, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that that was his method, but I agree it's eerie, and I didn't see that movie either. On the Supreme court case, Brian, just to clarify, the Supreme court can always take a given case and go very broad with it, but the actual question put before the court in this case which should come down in coming weeks or certainly by June is whether when New York denied applications for certain gun owners for concealed carry their second amendment rights were violated.
The Supreme court has already ruled that a city or municipality cannot completely ban gun ownership in the home, meaning that under the second amendment, Americans are allowed to keep a handgun in their home. This case takes the next step and says, when the second amendment refers to the right to keep and bear arms, what about the bear part?
Can a municipality arbitrarily deny people's applications for a concealed carry license to take it out of their home under the second amendment? That could be answered in a very narrow way that knocks down New York's law on that question but does not necessarily affect the laws of many other cities and states, or, they could go very broad with their 6-3 majority and make a very broad statement that could conceivably knock down a lot of gun control laws.
Brian Lehrer: By the way, I see that the person who originally called in to talk about that TV show scenario is calling back, and I don't want to dwell on this because we have so much else to cover at the policy level and what happened in this crime and some of the other crimes that took place on Tuesday, but Derek in Manhattan is calling back to say, yes, it was a TV show that he referenced.
This is in addition to that scenario and Terminator 2, TV show called Person of Interest in which all the people were shot in the legs and the gunman did so to disable them and accomplish his mission without killing them. For what it's worth, that movie and that TV show are out there, we'll continue in a minute with Paul Barrett from NYU and author of the book Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, and Ann Givens, WNYC and Gothamist public safety editor, stay with us.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue to talk about the gun used in the subway shooting, also other crimes that took place on the same day, and other emerging aspects of the investigation into the subway shooting with our public safety editor Ann Givens and Paul Barrett from NYU who is also author of the book Glock: The Rise of America's Gun. I want to get to these other shootings, eight other shootings in New York City in the 24 hours following the subway shooting.
With 3 people reported killed and 13 others wounded, it's only the subway shooting that stops the presses and becomes everyone's topic of conversation at lunch and horrified as they walk around the streets and scared as they walk around the streets. I get it, it's different when a public place like a rush-hour subway car is a target, terrorism in its way, not just crime, and the suspect has been charged with terrorism, but the smaller shootings are the bigger problem.
Overall, I think you'd agree, how did you cover those at The Trace when you worked at that news organization that covers gun violence in America and is dedicated to just that? How did you make those newsworthy when it was really the mass shootings that would dominate the headlines?
Ann Givens: That's a really good question. I think that you're right that in the mainstream media, the mass shootings get so much more attention. Perhaps because people who don't live in communities that are very affected by gun violence, don't feel like it could happen to them, but in a lot of these mass shooting incidents, it feels more like that could have been me. At The Trace, there was a real focus on not losing sight of the fact that the vast, vast majority of gun deaths in America are from community violence.
That is not these kinds of stranger mass killings, but what you mentioned that happened in New York since then, and often there was a story or a line in our Trace stories that since X mass shooting, so many more people over the course of a week or so had been killed just in everyday community gun violence. I think The Trace makes a real effort to keep their eye on the ball in that respect and to really look at solutions that are actually impacting community gun violence and preventing community gun violence and how community gun violence affects people
in so many ways. I think the struggle is that when a big event happens that gets a lot of press coverage, those are the moments that people go to The Trace the most.
The Trace always wants to respond to those as well. Of course, they are also important, and people are deeply impacted by them, but I think a lot of the gun deaths in America, we don't think about at all. Another thing that I always come back to is that two-thirds of gun deaths in America are suicides. I don't think we think about that very much, but it's the vast majority.
Brian Lehrer: We've mentioned that on this show a number of times, but you're right, it doesn't land because people are worried most about what somebody else might do to them. People are worried most about stranger danger, even though even when we're talking about shootings, most of those violent crimes are committed between people who know each other, right?
Ann Givens: Absolutely. I think one thing that always really struck me in my reporting for The Trace, I spoke to a lot of people who had been personally affected by community gun violence, and when you spoke to people who had been affected in many cases because they were living in those communities, it wasn't just, "I was shot when I was a teenager."
It was also, once you talk to them for a while, they would have, really, a handful of other people in their lives who had been killed by guns, convicted of killing other people with guns. I think, for the people who are living in communities that are saturated with gun violence, this is an omnipresent thing. For people who are lucky enough not to live in those communities, it can remain largely invisible.
Brian Lehrer: Mayor Adams talks about how so many of the shootings in the city are concentrated in a few neighborhoods or a few police precincts. We're going to talk more about that with a City Council member from the Bronx coming up in our next segment. Jim in Brooklyn has a call along these lines, I think. Jim, you're on WNYC. Hi there.
Jim: Hi, how are you? I just wanted to point out that New York City and Chicago have some of the most restrictive gun laws in American cities, yet they are at the top of the list of cities with gun violence. The legislative approach isn't really effective, it doesn't prevent most of the guns-- Probably all eight shootings this weekend were with illegal guns. The legal approach is really not effective in a place like New York.
That goes to what your caller was just saying where there's something going on in these communities that tells people to acquire the guns for their own protection or there's just a lot of violence. Maybe the callers can talk about the ineffectiveness of the guns control laws in New York City when you have so much crime with-- Predominantly, it's all pistols, not even long guns.
Brian Lehrer: If that's how you see it, are there certain policies that you would have the city or anyone else lean into to prevent gun violence as much as possible?
Jim: I think Mayor Adams is going back to what was done before, which is, you're really trying to get gun enforcement in this to get these guns off the street. There was a segment, I think, maybe on your show, maybe [unintelligible 00:34:04], where people were talking about, once the cops pulled back from searching folks and stopping folks, those who would have left the gun at home because they didn't want to be stopped and arrested for possession would essentially carry.
Now you have all of these folks that would have not carried all carrying, then an altercation happens, it escalates. There's just more guns walking around on the streets. Getting those guns off the street, I applaud Mayor Adams for going back to really trying to get these guns off the street, and he should do that more effectively. These are guns that are illegal to have in the City of New York, and enforcing that is going to help really bring that down.
Brian Lehrer: Jim, thank you very much. Paul Barrett, nevertheless, I talked about the crime stats, the shooting stats this year compared to just before the pandemic. About 300 shootings in the city in the first quarter of this year, about 760 shootings for the entire years of 2018 and 2019, each of those years. That 760 shootings per year at the height of the de Blasio administration who was moving away from stop-and-frisk and the Giuliani-Bloomberg types of neighborhood patrols, so-called anti-gun or anti-crime units.
Now we're on pace for 1200 shootings in a year, but the real comparison would be in the decade before de Blasio when all those things were going on at the level of enforcement, and even after the stop-and-frisk era, the number of shootings, the number of murders continued to go down. I think it calls into question the theory that the caller was just laying out that that's what stops gun violence.
Paul Barrett: With all due respect, I don't accept the caller's premise that gun laws don't work and all tough on crime measures have some kind of direct, easy-to-identify effect on the amount of shootings or homicide. The fact is that criminologists have a great deal of difficulty in answering the question of why crime rates generally, violent crime rates in particular move in the directions that they move. It's a phenomenon that has multiple causes, that's something that people do agree on.
It is simply very difficult to predict whether enacting, for example, a bail reform law or changing a policy of a police department in terms of how aggressively young people in certain neighborhoods are stopped and frisked without any real suspicion of a particular crime being committed-- Most recently, all across the country, not just in New York, there was a big spike in homicides in 2020, and in many cities, the increase had continued into 2021.
This is across a lot of the different kinds of cities, places where so-called progressive prosecutors had been put in office, places where there may have been bail reform or questions about police budgets, but also cities where none of those things happened. In all of those cities, crime went up in 2020, violent crime and shootings and homicides went up.
It's a very interesting question to ask, why did that happen in 2020, and has it continued in many places today? Was there some relationship to the pandemic, economic, social instability caused by COVID-19? I don't know the answer to that, but it's a hugely complicated question, and it is simply not true that you can simply state that gun control laws have no effect on the level of crime.
Brian Lehrer: Let me just get one other thing in here quick, coming back to the subway shooting and what Mayor Adams said might be one solution to guns at least in the subway system. He said yesterday on WNYC, on Morning Edition, that there's a high-tech way to screen people for guns as they enter subway stations, he said it'd be a passive system, not like an airport metal detector or a sports stadium pat-down. Listen.
Mayor Adams: We have identified several new technologies that are not like the metal detectors that are used at airports where you have to empty your pockets and go through a long line to get in. No, we just walk normally through the system, it is not even detectable that the devices are there. We think there's a great promise in this technology, and we're going to continue to explore that.
Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, is that anything that either of you know about or that already exists? Ann?
Ann Givens: We have been looking into it, and I just heard this morning that our science team confirmed what type of metal detector it is with City Hall last night. It's a brand that is being used already in some museums and other venues in the city, but I don't have a lot of details about how it works and how likely it is to pick up things that are not guns, and what the privacy concerns are. Those are all questions that we are still looking into.
Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry, WNYC's Matt Katz did an article
that, you edited. Am I getting that right, about Mayor Adams planning to look for guns on passengers arriving on buses at the port authority bus terminal, which apparently is a way that gun traffickers get weapons into the City? Do you know if anything like that has been implemented and if that's a similar passive system already in use?
Ann Givens: That has been a real mystery to us, and we've had a lot of trouble since we wrote that story confirming whether or not these checks are actually happening. It is a really complicated thing, how guns get into this city. I have certainly heard from multiple people in law enforcement that they believe that a certain number of these guns are being transported on these interstate buses.
I'd be curious if any of your listeners know or have ever been checked for guns as they come into the city, I would love to know that because we have had a difficult time confirming with what regularity and in what way these checks are happening.
Brian Lehrer: All right, listeners. There you go, call our newsroom tip-line with that if that includes you. Ann Givens is WNYC and Gothamist public safety editor, Paul Barrett is deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and author of the book Glock: The Rise of America's Gun. Thank you both so much for being here today.
Ann Givens: Thank you, Brian.
Paul Barrett: Thanks, Brian.
Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, much more to come.
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