Episode 13: Disinformation and gun culture, with JJ Janflone

CONTENT WARNING

This episode of Unchecked deals with the sensitive topic of gun violence.

SYNOPSIS

JJ Janflone, who works on culture change and narrative strategy at Brady: United Against Gun Violence, joins Rachel and Dan to unpack the Big Lie at the center of gun violence disinformation. JJ explains how that single falsehood generates cascading misbeliefs — about storage, risk, and identity — and describes Brady's efforts to shift gun culture. Rachel identifies the lens Accidents Happen and Dan suggests the lens Wild Imagination.

INTERVIEW

• Brady: United Against Gun Violence — gun violence prevention organization where JJ works on culture change
• This is Our Lane – Brady initiative amplifying healthcare professionals' voices on gun violence
• Show Gun Safety – Brady program to depict gun safety in entertainment
• The Dickey Amendment — 1996 legislation that banned CDC funding for gun violence research for over two decades (rescinded 2019)

LENSES

Wild Imagination

When a core premise goes unchallenged — like the idea that guns make you safer — information systems without guardrails allow users to spin that premise into increasingly untethered conclusions. The result is a cascade of misinformation that distorts risk perception and makes it nearly impossible to reason toward accurate, proportionate responses.

• Does the system provide any framing or guardrails that help users interpret broad claims responsibly?
• How does the system help users accurately assess where risk actually lies, rather than where they imagine it to be?
• When users construct false or exaggerated threat scenarios, how does the system correct or contextualize them?

Accidents Happen

Once an action is taken in an information system — sharing a post, liking content, amplifying a story — it sends signals that are difficult or impossible to fully reverse. Even well-intentioned interactions can feed an algorithm in ways the user didn't intend, with consequences that outlast the original act.

• Does the system provide a meaningful undo mechanism, and does undoing an action actually reverse its downstream effects?
• How does the system handle users who want to signal disagreement with content without inadvertently amplifying it?
• When users change their minds about information they've already shared or engaged with, how does the system support them in communicating that change?

(Show notes drafted by generative AI and edited by a human.)

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Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host
• Emily Duncan, Editor

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

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Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Transcript

JJ Janflone 0:00

You are carrying around something, or you have something in your home that has the capability to kill someone quite easily. And that was intended for that purpose. It is a tool that was made to destroy. That is what a gun is for.

Sarah 0:18

You're listening to Unchecked, the podcast about the architecture of disinformation with Dan Brown and Rachel Price.

Rachel 0:31

Dan, why on earth are we talking about gun violence again?

Dan 0:35

Gun violence is an epidemic in this country. There's just no doubt about it. I mean, even since having these conversations, you and I have had closer brushes with gun violence personally than you and I ever thought we would, right?

Rachel 0:50

Yeah.

Dan 0:51

And obviously everyone's fine, but it's getting closer.

Rachel 0:57

Thank you for being respectfully ambiguous. But I'm not afraid to say we had the first episode on gun violence, and right around that time, my daughter is four, and there was an incident at her daycare that resulted in a lockdown, and everyone's fine, but it was not good.

Dan 1:18

It was not good.

Rachel 1:19

It was very not good. And it was traumatic for our family.

Dan 1:22

When you texted me about that, here I am all the way on the literal other side of the country, and I climbed into bed and pulled the covers over my hand. Yeah. Because it's sad and terrifying.

Rachel 1:31

Yeah, and this is a thing that I will think about for the rest of my life and look back on not fondly, forever. It has marked our family and it has marked our community. And during that first episode, you know, Dan and I have talked a lot about whether we should record video for these podcasts. And I've always been like, no, because we record these on Friday afternoons when I finally can like let my guard down and just like, yeah, I don't want to be on video. But I'm especially glad we didn't release video for that podcast because if you had I went back and watched it, and it was just so obvious I was trying not to cry and completely break down like that entire time. And so this is all to say, I'm not bragging about how hard this topic is and how like it's really hit my family. And so I'm gonna like go and make you all think about it. I have realized that if something makes me react that strongly, it's clearly important, and it's I think a valuable thing to delicately and carefully explore. Yes. And for me personally, one of the safe ways to explore this topic has been looking through this misinformation lens, working with this topic through this podcast has been like a productive way for me to kind of sit with something that affects my community very deeply.

Dan 2:56

Right.

Rachel 2:56

And then you can see as these topics accelerated, we've covered some other topics that have that same kind of impact.

Dan 3:02

I mean, the sad part is like we have to go where the disinformation is. We can't just stay in silly conspiracy theory world the whole time, you know? And the disinformation is in these extremely sensitive, complicated areas of society.

Rachel 3:18

Yeah. The other thing I've appreciated about coming back to the gun violence topic a second time is it's coming from a totally different angle.

Dan 3:26

Oh, yeah.

Rachel 3:27

One of the things we talked about early on with misinformation is like this what I believe is to be a outdated or non-productive belief that if you just release facts, that will ease the disinformation. And JJ, you know, her take on this and the work that she really works on at Brady is a very different angle. And it's not trying to like take on the whole topic, it takes on a very specific part of one strand of the web of disinformation around gun violence. And that was really helpful for me to get in close enough to understand that and to see that there are lots of different angles we can take for some of these challenges.

Dan 4:07

On that note, let's listen to the interview. There she works on programs like This Is Our Lane, Amplifying Healthcare Professionals' Voices, and Training Providers on Firearms Safety, Secure Storage, and Risk Reduction, while also serving as a subject matter expert for Showgun Safety to support accurate portrayals across film, television, and theater. JJ, thank you so much for joining us.

JJ Janflone 4:48

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Dan 4:51

So when we start here, when we were talking before, you said that there's a big lie and that lots of misinformation around gun violence kind of comes back down to this big lie. So why don't you share with us what that big lie is and some of the effects of people believing that lie?

JJ Janflone 5:08

Yeah, so in short, this is one of those lies that's like the Russian nesting doll of misinformation, right? So the the lie, the root of everything is this idea that guns make us safer. And when you have to confront that, there's a lot of things that follow. So if this were true, it is not. I don't want to see an audio clip uh elsewhere, someone on TikTok. But if it were true that guns made us safer, then America would be the safest country in the world. We would have a far less homicide rate, we would have lower rates of robbery, we'd have lower crime rates overall. That's not the case, especially when you compare it to other nations that are similar to us in terms of like population or GDP. We're one of the unsafest. So that fundamentally is untrue. Also, if guns made us safer, then you know, gun ownership having a gun in your home would lead, you would think, to better health outcomes or better, just like general life responses. But we know it's not the case. So you have a gun in your home, it increases your risk of suicide and your risk of loved ones' suicide that are in the home threefold. We see an increased rates of homicide, especially for folks going through domestic violence situations. And then we see really high rates of accidents, but there's kind of two things that get wrapped up in the title of accidents. There's accident accidents, so those are misfires. You know, oh I dropped it while I was cleaning, or there are a number of people every year who get shot by their dogs. That is because they like leave the gun like on a couch or on a chair. Oh my god. And the dog will jump up and play it. I will send the article you can link to in the show notes because it's happened enough and it happens enough that it is studied. Oh my god. That's an accident. Misuse or an unintentional shooting is when someone like has left a gun, maybe say in their purse, and so a kid picks it up, the gun goes off, the child obviously didn't intend to shoot it, but that's not actually an accident. That's a misuse of it. The gun's made to be fired. But like all of these ideas that, hey, guns make us safer, it's not a true statement. On top of that, guns are a part of American culture, guns are here. To be a defender, to be a protector, you know, these are items that you need. If that then is true, the idea is then that I need to have easy access to my firearm. I need to have my firearm with me all the time. Every home needs a gun. And then that changes the behavior that people have when it comes to things like how they store their firearms, uh, whether or not they support legislation for what I would consider to be common sense gun laws, like regulations on what type of firearms people can be able to purchase, or rules for things like do you have to undergo a background check to buy a firearm? You know, things that actually, when it comes especially to things like background checks, that the majority of Americans when surveyed actually do support, but then in practice go, well, if guns make me safe, then I need access to it. If a gun doesn't make me safe, then why would I bring it into my home? Why would I make sure I always have it, for example, like in my bedside table? And so from this one core lie, you see kind of these ripple effects that spiral really, really quickly into things that unfortunately can lead to very serious injury and and death because a gun is a lethal tool.

Dan 8:27

You've quoted a lot of statistics to us, but in some ways you didn't even need to do that. Like we all live in this country and we see the news, we see the stories, we feel the effects of gun violence very directly. So I'm sort of curious: do you have a sense of why people believe the big lie? It's not just data that we're throwing at them, right? It's not just anecdotes, it's people living this stuff, and yet the lie persists. Do you have a sense of why that is?

JJ Janflone 8:58

I think that there are a couple of different reasons, and I think each one of them is really rich and kind of says actually a lot about America. I think the first one is there is always this sense of individualism of I'm an American, I'm the master of my own fate, right? I control the sphere of my life, I'm a rugged individualist. I'm sure you can do a whole other podcast on that misinformation and how that narrative of America got drafted. But I think because of that, there's this thought that it'll never happen to me. I never have to worry about my child, I never have to worry about going through a crisis of suicidality, I would never do that, I would never respond this way, etc. And so I think because of that, it's really easy to believe that owning this thing will keep me safe. Because we like the idea of the cowboy who just with his horse and his six-shooter can ride out into the sunset and kind of master the world. So I think that's kind of sitting there. I think the second part is just the length of time culturally. When you ask me that question, the first thing I think about is people thinking kind of in some ways that they're John Wayne. It's that for decades we've had it reinforce to us again and again and again, both in fiction and nonfiction, this idea of, you know, the hard-boiled detective who can go in and do it on his own, the Lone Ranger, this idea that if you are smart enough and if you have your weapon, you can move throughout the world in a way where you are the protector, you are the hero, and you are never the victim. And then I think the third thing is that the gun lobby had really great marketing. I'll give them credit where credit is due. They had their act together long before folks in the gun violence prevention or the violence prevention movement more broadly had their act together. So while maybe different groups were talking about what terms to use or how to define a mass shooting, or as you said, is this statistic the right statistic or not? They went really quickly more from a what can we sell marketing perspective and had, you know, all the different groups, very similar terminology, very similar advertisements, really cohesive and careful management year over year over year of that, which then just reinforces the culture, which then reinforces this idea of what it means to be an American or, you know, a human walking around the US. And then it all kind of circles back on itself because the more people buy into it, the more they're purchasing, the more they're donating to those groups, the more that then they're pouring into legislation that you know amplifies their ability to do that, the more they're pouring into advertisements. And that's why, you know, we continue to see rates of gun violence in the US, and we continue to see, like after a lot of the big ones, you'll see there'll be like a congressional hearing or something. And I'll see scholars and researchers and activists, survivors, folks who I know have worked in gun violence for decades and who are fantastic at their job. And they'll come up and testify. And they have personal lived experience and they have science that backs them up. They'll be there with a binder of like 15 peer-reviewed studies from across the nation from different scholars that all have come to the same conclusion. Which, for folks listening, that's generally how science works. You test something, you get an answer, other people test it, see if they get a similar answer. If everyone's in agreement, we go, hooray! Right. We move on. But I will see typically the same small handful of scholars, I'm doing your quotes, who have a lot of buy-in with the gun lobby, who will come out and do kind of these statistics or these studies that have been debunked, but sound really good. And they're things that people want to believe if you've already bought into those other three steps that I've discussed. And so now there's this one-to-punch of fake science. Right. And then it sounds good and it combines with the marketing. And then meanwhile, here, you know, there are nonprofits that are much, much smaller, are working on millions less who are showing up every day and saying, but no, like I did my homework and they're competing with like a giant parade float. And so I think that's kind of where we've created this like really toxic rain that we're all now, as you said, Dan, like we're standing under. Everyone's gonna get wet from this. You know, it doesn't matter how many citations I have, that doesn't change the fact that like I can name you people in my own personal life who have been impacted by gun violence. Like, that doesn't offset that at all.

Dan 13:36

It's almost hard to reconcile this kind of preoccupation with personal safety with the fact that guns themselves are not safe, right? It's almost feels like an inherent contradiction for people who are so worried about safety. Do they exhibit safe behaviors elsewhere? I guess what are some of the behaviors that you have seen people do with their guns that make them even more unsafe?

JJ Janflone 14:06

I want to be really clear. It's not that you can't use a firearm safely. There are lots of ways to do that. It's not that inherently having a firearm is an unsafe activity, and it's not that going out to use it, whether you're going to a shooting range or you're hunting or you're doing anything like that. I would certainly like to think that when I go to the range, I am behaving in a way that is appropriate. But when it comes to kind of like unsafe handling and storage, if you believe that it needs to be on you at all times, or at least accessible to you at all times, people will go through kind of all of these justifications of ways to make sure that it is accessible without being locked up. There is this perception that if I have it in any kind of secure storage device, so whether that's a safe or a trigger lock or a cable lock or even a biometric safe, which like are a fraction of a second, and the price points always come down, and there's some really cool ones on the market now. That if I put the gun in there and if I don't have my gun loaded, in the second that I need it, I won't be able to access it, and that will make me a bad person because that will make me unprepared. That will make whatever happens to me something that I could have prevented and I didn't. And so as a result, I'll see things like parents who will hide a gun on the top shelf of the closet in their bedroom. There are people who will keep it under their pillow because they think that it's right there and it's with them. There are lots of folks who will carry it with them 24-7 almost in places where that is permitted. And then when they have to, you know, maybe say they're going to a place that's a gun-free zone, like a school, leave it in their car, but just put it in the glove box, not leave it in a locked safe inside the car, which do exist, by the way. Car safes are great. I highly recommend them. And so people will do these sort of stutter steps, like baby steps, into safe storage, but not secure storage. Because people will swear up and down, I'm the only one who knows where the gun is. But I will also then ask, do your teenagers know where the alcohol is in your house, even if you've hidden it? Has your sibling ever found your diary? Have kids ever found Christmas presents at your house? Like what our perception is and what other people in our household know is very, very different. And all it takes is a grab or one opportunity to get access to a firearm.

Dan 16:28

So just to reflect this back to you for a sec, if I'm a gun owner and I believe that the gun is meant to keep me safe, if I keep it locked safely and securely, that diminishes the gun's ability to keep me safe.

JJ Janflone 16:43

Yes.

Dan 16:44

So I compromise on that and I justify it to myself by saying, well, I'll just put it in a place where I think no one will find it. So it's not safe and secure by their standards, but by my standard.

JJ Janflone 17:00

Correct. What I've heard directly from people is how is a gun in a safe gonna help me in a home invasion?

Dan 17:06

Right.

JJ Janflone 17:06

How is a gun in my car going to help me if there's a a mass shooting event at my church and I'm inside? And it all kind of comes down to that, which again is kind of tied up, I think, a lot in Americans' ideas and perceptions of how we keep ourselves safe, right? That it is always almost an offensive act. You need like these things with you, you need to have it. And what I would love in a perfect world, what we know that will keep people the safest they can possibly be is if you store your gun locked and unloaded with the ammunition separately. This is particularly true when it comes to suicide prevention because the pause of time to get into a safe, collect the firearm, go to the ammunition, load the gun is incredibly helpful for that brief pause to help people reassess the moment of crisis they're going through and reach out for help. And the means for suicide matter so much because over 90% of firearm suicide attempts are fatal. For a lot of other folks, if you are going through a moment, if you take pills, jump other methods, there are still chances there. I can get you to a hospital, I can get you medical care, there's a moment that you can even, in some cases, reach out for help yourself. That is incredibly rare with a firearm.

Dan 18:32

Right, right.

JJ Janflone 18:33

It's lethal. So getting that extra pause step, incredibly helpful. It's incredibly helpful if someone comes into your home and steals the firearm. It's not loaded already. You don't have to worry about it being turned on you. You don't have to worry about a child getting access to it or a teenager. So that's what I would love. But if you can't get someone all the way there, keeping it at least locked is exceptionally helpful and dramatically uh decreases the risk.

Dan 19:01

I like that we're talking a lot about culture, and I want to dig into that a little bit more because I I think that we see this play out in the media. You've talked about Cowboys, you've talked about, you know, John Wayne. That being said, I play a lot of video games, and so I've got a little bit of worry because they always seem to want to come after the video games before they want to come after the guns. And so I'm a little reluctant to admit that media is wholly to blame for violence in our society. Maybe you can help us understand a little bit. What role does media play in reinforcing the big lie?

JJ Janflone 19:40

You'll hear this after shooting, right? It's the TV, it's the music, especially sometimes though, there's a racial component where they'll go on, it's the rap music. There's been no proof at any time that media representations of violence make people more likely to commit acts of gun violence or interact with them. And in fact, if that was the case, countries like South Korea, who play the same video games that we do, who actually watch a lot of the same programs that we do, would have exceptionally high rates of gun violence, especially when you consider the fact that they have a mandatory military service for their men, during which time most of them handle firearms and therefore are trained on them for a period of two years, right? You would think that they would have at the at the very least the same rough levels of gun violence that we do. They don't have hardly any.

Dan 20:27

Right.

JJ Janflone 20:28

And the reason is that they have really strong gun laws, and guns are very hard to get or access amongst the general population. You can still participate in like sports shooting and things, but you've got to pass exams, you've got to have licensures, you've got to go sign it out from a police station, you can only keep it for a certain amount of time before you have to return it. And as a result, we don't see firearm suicides and we don't see firearm homicides or gun crimes because their culture has adjusted to say that, like, yes, we will participate in a game where I'm I'm very out of touch. I don't know if the youth still play Grand Theft Auto or the equivalent. I'm definitely aging myself. But where you can like run around and and and shoot things, shoot things. Yes. But that is a video game. That is not something I have in my home. Where it gets kind of sticky is that what media can do is it can reinforce and normalize existing behaviors. So it's not that it's creating anything, but when we see something again and again and again, we get kind of habituated toward it. And this works in ways that are good and ways that are bad. I mentioned smoking earlier. We saw how suddenly it became not only are we not showing smoking on like television or film or in advertisements, but now we're actually actively maybe having an episode where a character references that it smells. Or there's an episode where one of the children starts to smoke and she gets really sick, or we're starting to see even character arcs where somebody gets lung cancer, and it we're just kind of showing. The reality of you still have the right to smoke. That is still a personal choice, but there is a danger to it, and you need to be aware of it. That was incredibly powerful in getting people to stop smoking simply because it was then showing the reality, which was then reinforced by things like legislation and messages from their doctor's office. But you don't have to worry, the video game is not going to make someone more likely. The only downside is, especially for younger children, it gives people an inflated sense of, oh, I could do that. Right. Or I know what I'm doing with it. But that is incredibly dangerous. It's why after I watch like three TikToks, I think I can make a souffle. Uh, we've all fallen into that hole, right? We get this false sense of confidence. And that's basically the similar thing, but it's it's very, you know, small compared to other ways that you you get ideas.

Dan 22:48

Right. Can you compare the depictions of violence, which, as you say, the consequences of violence are somewhat unrealistic? Compare that to some of the other things that have been constrained or limited in television, like sex and nudity.

JJ Janflone 23:07

Yeah. So, I mean, it's completely different now because we're in the the realm of 9,000 streaming services and they all have different roles versus kind of like traditional cable TV and studios and such. But when we think about how gun violence is shown, much like kind of this image of a cowboy, when I think about gun violence and TV, I think of Rambo. Right? I think of character gets shot, bandana goes on over the wound, ties it on, back in the fray. Right. No risk of bleeding out, no reality of what an AR-15 bullet actually does to a body. Very rarely are children shot. Very rarely, if there's a shootout between uh police and the bad guys as a civilian hit by a stray bullet, they'll show someone breaking into a house, which we could go into that because defensive gun use is exceptionally rare. But if you watched 24 hours of American TV, you would think that there are masked villains just breaking in everywhere. Yeah, you would think everywhere you turn, there's a ski mask.

Dan 24:09

Forwarded by a gun under a pillow.

JJ Janflone 24:11

Exactly. And when the reality is most folks have very little to no training for a scenario like that. When we look at the rules for television, there are really strict rules for what type of nudity can be shown, what type of language even can be used. You know, how many swear words can you use before the rating goes up? What are those swear words? What is the list? Same with nudity. What type of nudity can be shown? We don't have, and it's very rare that for networks to have similar rules when it comes to violence, especially gun violence. And I think that the reason for that really is as things developed, no one was really prepared for a world where we had more mass shootings than days. I don't think anyone was really prepped for, okay, well, how are we going to show a mass casualty incidents at an elementary school? Because who would?

Dan 25:02

Right.

JJ Janflone 25:02

But when you're doing now any sort of content that features kind of this idea of like slice of life Americana, guns tend to work their way into it because it's such a part of our lives. It's such a part of our news cycle. Everyone has a story, everyone is concerned about it. And so I think it pops and people kind of see it because not only is it something that's allowed, it's something that almost everyone has an experience with. So why not show a workplace altercation instead of it ending with a fist fight? Why not jump and kind of put a bead on the end of the episode by having it escalate all the way up with a firearm? And I'm not saying that that can't exist as a story and have it be a good, valid story. I'm just saying what I would personally, as someone who works on Shogun Safety, say is I would want the writers to have a moment and think, is that worth it for what we're trying to do? Is there something better that we can say here? Or if we are going to show it, can we show kind of what the actual implications of that are?

Rachel 26:03

Yeah, it feels like the problem I see here is the glamorization and the smoothing of the edges. Because what I heard you say earlier is like, we know like just exposure to guns in media, you know, playing video games, all this stuff like that doesn't suddenly mean you are a violent person who's just gonna go do this. But I think the nuance there is in when we don't show realistic depictions of the consequences of violence, what it looks like, who is impacted. It's the same thing, you know, resuscitation doesn't actually work as often as TV would lead us to believe, right? Like so the similar thing, that glorification of it and the glamorization and the softening of it feels uh pretty pernicious.

JJ Janflone 26:48

It is like it's a softening or a polishing of what it is. I think it makes it also seem normalized. So, for example, I referenced the cowboy because it's kind of hard not to, but there were actually quite strict gun laws in the old Wild West. Like the fight at the OK Corral was about people refusing to follow the gun laws that have been instituted by the city. You don't see that in like the old spaghetti westerns, and you don't see that reflected now. And as a result, that even trickles down to folks when they go to vote now who are like, well, we didn't need it then, we don't need it now. And the reality is that one of the reasons that they saw a decrease in actually homicides and fights in the ye old Wild West is that they actually had really strict firearm restrictions. We've had firearm laws in the US almost since its conception. And so I think that also is then part of kind of that polishing or that glamorization. It's that there hasn't been restriction in the past and that you can shoot your way out, if you will, of this problem.

Dan 27:50

So I'm not a gun owner. I live in Maryland. We have among the strictest gun laws in the country. For reasons we don't have to get into here, my children do not go to uh public school. So I feel like I'm off the hook. Like I can rest easy here that I'm in a gun-free bubble here in Montgomery County, Maryland. How wrong am I about that?

JJ Janflone 28:13

So, in some ways, you're you're kind of right. So, stronger gun laws have correlation to less firearm death, period. We know that stronger gun laws work. Maryland has lower gun death rates than other places, there's gonna be fewer firearm accidents, particularly household-based, there's gonna be less misuse, and there certainly is a lot less rates of youths getting access to firearms. Where I think the sense of safety gets maybe misplaced is that there's still exposure, particularly in the world we live in now where everything is accessible 24-7. So it's not that gun violence in the US is just public schools or in like the neighborhoods that uh unfortunately see a lot of violence or are highlighted only for their violence on the news. And it doesn't just happen to gun owners and gun-owning families. Like, that's not true at all. We see it in firearms suicide, which can affect anyone. We see it in spillover. So Maryland is surrounded by states, some of which do not have strong gun laws, and it's not like you get stopped at the border to every state and questioned about what you're bringing over state lines, increasingly road rage incidents, you know. I presume that your kids are in the car at some point in their daily lives. And so violence can happen anywhere, and by the sheer fact of the number of guns we have in the US, gun violence then can happen anywhere. It doesn't mean that like everyone is equally at risk, it doesn't mean that violence is inevitable. I'm not trying to tell people who are listening to this right now or to you to like go to the bunker.

Dan 29:46

Right.

JJ Janflone 29:46

But what I am going to say is that the fact is that guns are the leading cause of death now for children ages one through 19 in the US. And people will sometimes quibble on that and be like, 19-year-olds aren't children. And I'm like, absolutely they are. They are.

Dan 30:00

My son is 19 and yes.

JJ Janflone 30:03

Love them, but absolutely they are. That to me means that this is an exceptional risk for anyone who is running around in the US because we all have children in our lives. We all probably know at this point one in five Americans know someone who's been affected by gun violence, either directly or indirectly. So it's almost at this point, this is a structural issue. And unfortunately, that you can't outrun by moving to a different district or switching school districts.

Dan 30:33

How dangerous is this misinformation that I can protect myself from gun violence by being as separated from it as possible. In some ways to me, it seems just as dangerous. Ignoring the threat that's out there or believing that you're safe from the threat that's out there is just as dangerous as owning a gun in some ways.

JJ Janflone 30:56

I think that they are related because I think it all comes back to this idea of what makes us safe. So I think then this idea of like guns make us safer, or completely maybe kind of like checking out almost of this particular part of the culture or the American experience will make me safer. I think that that all kind of actually ties in together. It's kind of like the stepsister to that first one. The difference there is that firearms ownership or having a firearm in your home, because it has such a level of increased risk to the folks in the home, especially from the suicide angle. I think that would be kind of the difference in your statement that I would want to point out, which is you are carrying around something or you have something in your home that has the capability to kill someone quite easily. And that was intended for that purpose. It is a tool that was made to destroy. That is what a gun is for. A bullet projectile comes out, it is supposed to kill the thing it hits. But what about sport shooting? It's a symbol of that thing that you're doing, right? There's a reason. Right. I say this as somebody who has been getting into sport shooting. So come at me, bro. But when it comes to that big lie again of like guns making us safer, I think that that pulls into the, well, okay, I can't check out of American society. Like, I can't go into a bunker. Doesn't matter if I've moved my kids' schools, it doesn't matter if I switch what grocery store I go to, it doesn't matter if I stop going to church or to temple or I only go to one that has an armed guard. I'm still at risk. So the solution to that is I must find a way to protect myself. And if obviously repatriating to Mars is not an option, what am I gonna do? For a lot of folks, what they'll find because what they see in advertisements, what they see people on TV using, what they see people in films using is all right, I'm gonna get a gun. That will be my mode of protection. And so I think increasingly, too, when we've seen kind of new populations of gun owners, so folks who have never purchased a firearm before, we saw during COVID-19, we saw a rise of first-time Asian American gun owners. We also saw kind of post-row a lot of women going out to buy firearms for the first time, citing protection. That's where kind of they connect. This is why I get mad. So the gun lobby sells you and creates a world that is incredibly unsafe. It is dangerous. And then they tell you that the thing that will save you from the dangerous world that they helped create is the very thing that created the dangerous world in the first place. There was a really good study in 2023 that said about like 73% of people cited personal protection as one of their top reasons for buying a firearm. And that's pretty, I would say, like on average now. So they create a problem, they tell you that the solution to the problem is something that they are selling, and it is the very thing that created the problem in the first place. And they make so much money off of doing that. And the cost of it just happens to be over a hundred lives a day, an additional over 200 shot. And that to me is what gets me really upset, and is why I think kind of the work that Brady's been doing around culture change, this idea that we can change this culture simply by reformulating what it means to be a responsible gun owner, and that is simply securing your gun. It's all you have to do.

Dan 34:29

That's it.

JJ Janflone 34:30

It's not that gun owners are naive or that people are stupid or that they didn't know, like it's it's not that at all. It's the same way that for years as a kid, my parents drove me around in a car that didn't have seatbelts in the front because it didn't require it and we didn't know. Now we know. Could you imagine though, if when that happened, all the major automobile companies came out and said, Absolutely, we're not getting seatbelts, and in fact, that's an attack.

Dan 34:58

Right.

JJ Janflone 34:58

And put all of their money and muscle behind it where we would be now.

Dan 35:02

It's a slippery slope. First, you want us to put seatbelts in and then airbags.

JJ Janflone 35:07

And now booster seats for every child of every weight. But it turns out the horrific stories my mom used to tell me of high school when she'd be flipping through her yearbook and she'd be like, and then he was in a car accident, and then he was in a car accident. Oh, yeah. Our parents and grandparents' stories of just like horrific trauma from like basic public safety things that were not instituted. That's why kind of I think fighting this misinformation is so important. Why I'm so glad, like, kind of podcasts like yours exist of like, what are people getting wrong? Because it's not their fault, but it's kind of like a and now you know. So what sort of secure storage device do you need? Let's get that going.

Dan 35:45

Rachel and I like to end these on maybe a more optimistic note. So I'm sort of curious if you have any stories of work that Brady has done to try and move the needle a little bit on this to help correct some of the misapprehensions or to shift the culture in a way that makes people more responsible.

JJ Janflone 36:05

Oh, yes. Again, it's like a little three-pillared thing. So on the front, when it comes to research, we didn't have stats or research for a really long time in gun violence prevention. Are either of you familiar with the Dickey Amendment? No. All right, great, fun, exciting. It banned the CDC for 23 years from help funding anything that had to do with gun violence research. And that trickles down then to funding that is available through other government projects and also like period in the wider world for gun violence prevention. So for like a good two decades plus, there were still folks who were doing great work in this, but you were not going to get funded. There were also limits on what kind of studies you could do or what kind of work you could do. So folks working in suicide prevention would be doing like suicide featuring implement to try to like get at gun violence statistics and things like that. It was like dark time. Dickey, thankfully, um in 2019 ended. It was rescinded and suddenly there was funding for the CDC. And in the last five years, I have seen an explosion of really, really good research from academics who've been working in this field but suddenly had stuff for like big end studies and like new academics, folks coming into this and saying, Oh my gosh, I've been doing this for 26 years. Now suddenly there's money in the coffers, let's do more. So the fact that there is research that like directly contradicts like the one study from 1993 that the gun lobby will always pull up that like defensive gun use happens hundreds of thousands of times in the US when the reality is we think roughly around maybe 2,000 times a year. So all of like the commercials you've seen of like you need the gun under your pillow because there's a guy breaking into your house, very rare. And normally you know the person. So that being true, the defensive gun use is a lie, it's not there. The fact that Brady has been able to really, along with a bunch of other partners, let that kind of start trickling into the outside world gives me a lot of hope. The fact that new research is there, the fact that researchers who have been working in this field for a long time got funding makes me really happy. Brady is currently fighting to try to maintain that funding because right now that's one of the things that may go away. Again, we might see a return to Dickie, but we're fighting to keep it. And the fact that people know this research now, the fact that I have stats to throw at people when I'm like ruining Thanksgiving, we have all of that because of, you know, this kind of wealth of research that's happening now. I think the second thing when it comes to culture change is with the Shogun Safety work, we have had such success with folks in the media signing on to it. Whether it was major motion picture studios, whether it was networks, even like now talking about reality TV, that has been incredibly encouraging because I honestly was afraid when we went into it. You never want to tell a creative person you have to take this away, you can't do this. With Showgun Safety, though, we roll up with a whole bunch of options and say, just think about it. The writers' room's agents and the actors have been so engaged. And so I think one of my favorite projects was the TV show SWAT, largely because it has Shamar Moore in it. And for a lot of gun owners, his character in that is a he runs a SWAT team, he's ex-military, he's a family man, he cares about his team. Like he is kind of what you would assume like a hero. He's also the beautiful human. But they featured in a scene for the first time that when he comes home to his house, when he walks through the front door, his gun goes in a safe. And it was blink, and you'll miss it. You know, he's walking in, his wife pours him a glass of wine, in the gun goes, he's talking about his day, he pivots to talk to her. But the fact that it was there, and that that's now part of it for the same way in the Barbie movie, when Barbie jumps in the getaway car, they all put their seatbelts on before they race away, because that's just what you do. That sort of normalization, and then for Shamar Moore and the director and a bunch of other folks from that production actually came out and spoke publicly about why they included it, which got a lot of attention and got kind of some other studios and other shows to start talking to us about, you know, why that matters. That kind of stuff gives me a lot of faith and hope. Because then a few weeks after it aired, I was at the range taking shooting lessons, and the gentleman who teaches me, not realizing kind of what I work on at Brady, was like, I don't know if you saw, but they had one of those biometric safes on TV, and he mentioned the show. And I was like, that is exactly what I want. I want a guy to watch something and go to the range next day and talk to his friend and say, it was kind of cool, I hadn't seen one like that before. Yeah. And then get one. That's that's what I'm hoping for. So that's kind of what makes me personally from a culture change angle at Brady really, really happy and really pleased.

Rachel 40:59

I think a lot about how some of the more negative cultural expectations feel like, you know, we're frogs slowly being boiled in a pot of water. And I always think of that as like the bad things that become normalized. And I appreciate you helping us to see that there are good positive things that can also become normalized, too.

Dan 41:23

It seems like the misinformation is what it is, and it's like whack-a-mole. We're sort of in a cold war of misinformation. The gun lobby has this down pat. They have this down so well. We've heard that from you, we heard that from every town. So, is there a move to sort of focus less on the gun lobby's disinformation and focus more on trying to shift behaviors through these models in media?

JJ Janflone 41:57

For the work that I do specifically, it's on that behavior modification. So, for what I do at Brady specifically under the culture change, it kind of focuses on that. I would say some of the other initiatives that we have at Brady through our policy and legislative arm, through some of the campaigns we have, and Family Fire is very closely aligned with what we do. That's directed at gun owners specifically and is all about secure storage and suicide prevention. And then like our combating crime guns work. And so, through some of our other work, we're actually combating that disinformation in the courts, going after manufacturers, going after bad gun dealers, going after bad legislation, writing amicus briefs on the legal end. So there's a lot of that actually still happening. I just, as I am not a lawyer or a policy expert, or anyone who should be allowed near any of those things, am not engaged with that at Brady. I'm a narrative person.

Dan 42:56

Right.

JJ Janflone 42:56

So when it comes to the work that we're doing, you compared it to kind of whack-a-mole, something's always popping up. I think the Brady perspective has been GVP has been fighting whack-a-mole for a really long time. What if we just unplugged the machine? What if we just did everything all at once and we just said we're not playing the game anymore and addressed it that way? I think that it's a really smart and robust way to do things because it doesn't rely on wins all at once in every single category. It doesn't require that you win in Maryland and the federal level and in a court case out in California, and on the culture angle, and on passing a crimes bill in Pennsylvania. It doesn't rely on all that happening on the exact same day at the exact same time. What it does say is that if we attack kind of from all angles and if we include gun owners in this fight for safety, we're gonna get a lot farther than we were.

Rachel 43:56

Wow.

Dan 43:56

So, what do you think? I mean, that was now our second conversation. About gun violence. You were saying that part of the appeal here was getting from a different perspective. What was your big takeaway from that conversation?

Rachel 44:09

I have experienced a small enlightenment as a result of that conversation.

Dan 44:15

Do share.

Rachel 44:16

I will admit that because I find gun violence to be a really painful subject, I always have, and that's especially escalated recently, that my response has been pretty black and white. Outlaw guns. I don't care. Like this is unnecessary. No one can argue to me that they are necessary for civilian life. Get them out. And I still feel like that's not completely wrong, but talking to JJ about like the yes and of it, like yes and let's talk about storage. Let's talk about normalizing secure storage. Yep. That is, first of all, very smart. I'm glad there are other people working on this problem who are not me.

Dan 45:02

Yes.

Rachel 45:03

I don't know. I feel like I have a lot to sit with now that I didn't have before, and I'm grateful for that in thinking about how like there are grades of improvement available here, not just a black and white. They exist or they don't, they're on the street or they're not on the street.

Dan 45:19

You touched on this, but she talked about destigmatizing responsible behavior. And that is just like, as you say, that was a moment of enlightenment for me. It takes a so much more nuanced view of the situation. And I'm with you. It seems like there's a pretty simple solution when you are through to your core anti-gun. But that's not the world we live in.

Rachel 45:44

Yeah.

Dan 45:44

And so how can we take a more nuanced view? And part of that nuanced view is saying it's cool to lock up your gun, right? And exploring what that means and how that resonates.

Rachel 45:56

So what did your lens end up being?

Dan 45:58

This is really interesting because we're looking at a new information system with Brady's agenda to move the needle on culture a little bit. And so they're slowly injecting gun safety into mainstream entertainment programming is fascinating and great. There are a couple sort of observations that she made that I I thought would make good lenses. So I called one wild imagination, which is where the big lie that guns make you safer doesn't come with any framing or frameworks that help you understand what that means or what the responsibilities are. And so the the wild imagination side is the system doesn't include any guardrails so people can spin wild stories. The only way for a gun to make me safer is if I keep it loaded on my bedside table with the safety off, right? Suddenly I've taken this big lie and I've turned it into a series of other lies, a series of other misinformation that doesn't actually acknowledge what would genuinely be safer. Because of that, there's also this ability for a system without guardrails to support mischaracterizing risk for us to kind of really misunderstand where the risk is. You have greater risk of harming yourself accidentally or someone in your house harming you accidentally with a loaded, unsecured gun than someone breaking into your house, right? Because we were able to spin out this wild story, we have a misunderstanding of what the real risk is.

Rachel 47:42

Do you think there's a way to objectively characterize risk? Or is there an act of characterizing risk a framing mechanism?

Dan 47:49

There are percentages, right? We know that you're more likely to get struck by lightning than bit by a shark or something. Like we can calculate those things, but those don't take into account the, let's call it, emotional component of being in the moment. And I think a system that doesn't help us take that step back to be realistic about risk is contributing to misinformation. We can quote those stats, but if you're at the beach, you're more worried about getting bit by a shark than struck by lightning.

Rachel 48:28

And what you should be more worried about is getting sunburned.

Dan 48:31

Right. Or in my case, I tore my ACL jumping over a wave.

Rachel 48:37

So Oh damn.

Dan 48:39

I think there's a really interesting, complicated relationship between risk assessment and misinformation. And systems could have a responsibility to correct those things, to prevent the wild imagination. And that's the lens that I'm suggesting.

Rachel 48:57

I love that. My lens is a little bit snarky. Okay. My lens is called accidents happen with a shrug emoji. So this lens asks us how does the system or does the system keep users from distributing, amplifying, or publishing bad information? I'm not defining bad information in this lens, just accept that. Does the system provide an undo mechanism? Does the system support users changing their minds about signals they've already given about information and like signaling that change appropriately to an algorithm? So the the reference for this, this is why this is snarky. I feel weird turning this reference into a kind of snarky lens, but like children picking up guns at home and accidentally murdering their siblings. There's no undo button there. I I take this lens in a couple ways. It made me think about actions that you can't take back and the reverberating impact of those actions. So, very concretely, this is things like if you share content on most social media, even if you meant to share it because you think it's terrible, you are providing signal that that content is interesting or worthy of being passed around. And the algorithm picks up that share and is like, aha, boost. Boost, boost, boost. Right. Or if you like something, but then you're like, wait, no, I don't like it. I was just like marking it like does unliking it actually, does the algorithm accept that signal? Like, oh wait. So I have a lot of questions and blind spots here. And I think that this is a thing we don't often talk about. I can imagine when these systems get designed, we talk about the best case and the intentional use of things like sharing, liking, and redistributing and amplifying information. We don't think about accidental use cases and how to undo them, or kind of this opposite case where people are sharing not because they think it's good, but sharing like as an alert. You know, I I see this a lot in blue sky where people will take screenshots of things and share the screenshot so that the thread itself doesn't gain traction.

Dan 51:09

I really like this because you're talking about undo to some extent.

Rachel 51:12

Yeah.

Dan 51:13

But I think you're also acknowledging that liking and then unliking something, you have to ask yourself, is the damage already done by liking it the first time? And are some things actually impossible to undo, even if they look like they've been undone?

Rachel 51:32

Yes, I think you got to the heart of that's the important part of this lens.

Dan 51:36

And we all have a control Z, right? We all have an undo in our various design programs, but when that controlled Z gets move ported into a new context, like a social media site or an information sharing site, you can't simply undo.

Rachel 51:51

Yeah.

Dan 51:51

Can I challenge you for a sec?

Rachel 51:53

Yeah.

Dan 51:54

We literally just posted the conversation with Oshma about abortion and you had retraction. And I just wonder, just to put you on the spot, do you feel like there's a difference between retraction and accidents happen?

Rachel 52:10

I think the nuance to me, retraction is about like actively and explicitly being able to communicate. We did think this was solid information and now we don't. And we would like to retract our original sponsorship of this thing.

Dan 52:31

And we want that flag, yeah. And to Dr. Oshma's point, we want that flag to follow that content everywhere.

Rachel 52:38

Yeah. I think that this accidents happen one is more about personal actions that have resounding impact and whether or not you can pull that back. The case where I think this lens is really interesting isn't thinking about signals to an algorithm. And so I I think there's a lot there.

Dan 52:55

Aaron Powell By taking an action, you are sending signals to the algorithm. And so it's not just taking back the action, it's taking back the consequences of that action too.

Rachel 53:07

Can the butterfly unflap its wings to uncause the typhoon?

Dan 53:11

I mean, I'm gonna this is hard to say out loud, but it it's really sensitive, I think, to talk about this in the domain of gun violence.

Rachel 53:18

Because as you point out, there's no take sees backseas there.

Dan 53:22

There's no undoing. There's no undoing. The damage is done, no matter how big or small that damage is.

Rachel 53:28

Dan, this episode, this is heavy.

Dan 53:30

So heavy.

Rachel 53:31

Can I end this episode? I need a little bit of hope from you, just like a little bit. So after the conversations we've had, after the conversation with JJ, what leaves you hopeful?

Dan 53:42

A couple things. I'm glad we spoke to two people about this in retrospect, as hard as it was for us. I'm glad we spoke to two people because we got two very different perspectives. From Nick, we got the policy side of things, and from JJ, we got the sort of narrative, moving the needle on culture side of things, which suggests to me, as you said earlier, there are very smart people thinking about this very complicated problem from lots of different perspectives, and they're not treating it like you or I would, which is can we just turn the whole thing off? Right. They understand that there's a need to be subtle about it or gradual about it or chip away at it. So to hear some of those efforts from the very people who are doing it, that gives me enormous hope. And there's a second thing, and this is maybe a little bit naive on my part, but here we are. The naively optimistic part of me says you and I are raising a generation of kids who have lived with this. It's permeated much of their lives. But I think it creates a sensitivity to it that will maybe make society in the future more amenable to the kinds of changes that Brady and every town are suggesting.

Rachel 55:04

That is optimistic. But I asked. So I'm gonna I'm gonna sit with that. I worry that it's normalized. I have a much more cynical view on my four-year-old daughter being familiar with the sound of gunfire and knowing how to do a lockdown drill. That freaks me out. But you know, we have a long life ahead of us. A lot of things freak me out. And I don't know, man.

Dan 55:34

What gives you hope then?

Rachel 55:35

What gives me hope is that, Dan, when you and I sat down for our pre-interview with JJ and we ended that pre-interview and walked out going, wow, like how is she so happy? And I would say that I I'm okay with this being on the record because we actually talked about this with her. How is she still upright? How is she so full of energy and enthusiasm about this work? That the fact that she and people like her can work on this, chip away at this huge problem, find an angle, get some traction, and still show up every day. Not just show up, but show up with hope and optimism. I am willing to give that a little bit of uh blind faith. Blind and that I'm telling my cynic to just like be quiet for a second, my inner cynic.

Dan 56:21

Right. Let her cook and let her say letter.

Rachel 56:24

Yes. And that does give me hope. If that's possible, then there is good there.

Dan 56:35

And that was unchecked. Thanks so much for listening. We really want to hear from you. If you've got ideas for topics or guests or stories, drop us a line at unchecked at curious-squid.com. If you made use of the lenses that we described today in your practice, we want to hear about that too. Hey, check the show notes for any of the links that we talked about today, and it would really mean a lot to us if you shared this episode with a friend and rated and reviewed us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.