Eight School Shootings in U.S. so far in 2018; Inspiring Stories of Young Innovators.
GORANI: Let's return now to our top story, that school shooting in Florida. Seventeen people killed in a massacre. The suspect, a former student of the school. He appeared in court just last hour. CNN's Kyung Lah was inside that hearing. Here's some of her reporting.</s>KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: We heard from the top public defender here. He became so emotional, he had to step away from the camera a couple of different times as he described the young man that his office will be defending. He said that this defendant is on suicide watch, that this is a deeply troubled young man, that throughout his entire life he has suffered from -- and this a quote, "significant mental illness," that while they are in the process of gathering all of his mental health history, they say that he suffers from brain development and that -- and he suffers depression and that all of this came to a head, that one of the moments that really came to a head is the loss of his mother in November of last year.</s>GORANI: Kyung Lah reporting there. Seventeen people dead at a school. And by the way, some of them are so on very much critical condition in hospital. Teachers were killed, students were killed. In most countries, the scene is unthinkable, right? Once in a lifetime, once in a generation atrocity. But in the United States with grim regularity. It happened eight times this year, 48 times last year. Young survivors of Wednesday's shooting are describing the horror they witnessed. They're also reacting with anger and perhaps unsurprisingly, they're predicting that these rampages will continue.</s>KELSEY FRIEND, SCHOOL SHOOTING WITNESS: People said there's gunshots downstairs. I'm like, I talked to my teacher and I said I am scared, I don't know what's going on. And then we heard the gunshots.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And then you turned around and you went back to your geography classroom?</s>FRIEND: Yes.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And then what happened?</s>FRIEND: My geography teacher unlocked the door and I had ran in and thinking he was behind me, but he was not.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What happened to your teacher?</s>FRIEND: He unfortunately passed away in the doorway of our classroom.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Did you see him get shot?</s>FRIEND: I did not. I heard the gunshots and I've heard the shooter walk down the hallway shooting more kids. I've heard a young man crying for his mother dying. And it was just hard, because you don't imagine this happening to you. You see it on the news, you see it everywhere and you don't think -- this is not -- you think it's not going to happen to you but until it happens. You just like -- this is terrible. We had rumors going around the school that the police would do a fake code red with fake guns, not actual, but sounding real. And I thought at the beginning that this was just -- it was all a drill, it's just a drill, until I saw my teacher dead on the floor.</s>DAVID HOGG, SCHOOL SHOOTING WITNESS: And people are going to keep saying, oh, this is just another shooting, it's never going to happen to me. But what happens is when you don't take action, things like this eventually will happen to you. And that's not acceptable. And that's why I'm calling people to stand up. Talk to your congressmen, talk to people and don't stop fighting, because children will continue to die if we don't take a stand now. What we really need is action. Because we can say, yes, we're going to do all these things, thoughts and prayers, what we need more than that is action. Please, this is the 18th one this year. That's unacceptable. We're children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role, work together, come over your politics and get something done.</s>GORANI: And it's interesting that this is really the youngest generation, the ones that will be voting in the future saying, do something, because clearly politicians have not done enough to prevent these. Now, the young man in the interview said it was the 18th school shooting. It's not incorrect. But it's the eighth school rampage of the year in the United States, so far. So there have been eight. To discuss, I'm joined now by two guests, Brian Klaas is a fellow at the London School of Economics. He's with me here in the studio. I'm also joined by David French. He's a constitutional lawyer and a writer with the National Review. He is in Nashville, Tennessee. I want to start with you, Brian. So we heard from that young man, do something. Politicians, get over the politics and keep us safe, we're only kids. Why in America -- this is what many people around the world ask -- do these shootings happen time and time again?</s>BRIAN KLAAS, FELLOW, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS: Well, there's easy access to guns for people who shouldn't have guns in the U.S. And it's the major outlier where the U.S. is out of step with the rest of the world. You think about this country. We had 26 gun murders in the U.K. last year. There are 11,000 in the U.S. and there's a five times the population of the U.S., but 423 times the gun murders.</s>GORANI: So it's not just easy access to guns. You have almost just as many guns in Canada per capita.</s>KLAAS: Well, there's much more regulation around them. And I think there's also the aspects here where you have a series contagion effect that's happening where people are copy catting. They're getting more deadly, because also no political will to solve this. It was only 139 days ago that somebody in Las Vegas shot over people, 58 of them killed, 850 wounded. And that person used a device called a bump stock which turns a semiautomatic assault into a fully automatic weapon. There was chatter for maybe three or four days about banning that and they did nothing. And every single time this happens there's discussion and then nothing. And my point of view is simply, we have to stop this. There has to be some way. It's not good enough to just say this is part of life now.</s>GORANI: David French in Nashville, what is the right approach in your opinion here, more regulation, more laws?</s>DAVID FRENCH, WRITER, NATIONAL REVIEW: No, I don't think more regulation, more laws, unless somebody can point to me what additional regulation or which additional law would have mattered. So for example, if you look at this case, like, many, many cases, what you will have seen is that people actually did take action as that young man rightly urged and somebody drop the ball. There were reports of at least one report to the FBI about this individual, perhaps up to two reports to law enforcement about this individual, obviously nothing effective was done. If you look at the Sutherland Springs shooting, what you have is the circumstance where the actual background check system failed because the military didn't report a disqualifying conviction for this shooter. And you go through these shootings time and time again and we'll see that there are existing policies, there are existing laws, and time and time again they fail.</s>GORANI: But David, there's empirical evidence. You have countries that had their own school massacres, whether it was Britain was done blaming in Scotland or in Australia where they offered gun amnesties and tightened gun control laws and then you didn't have any more shootings after that. That can't be a coincidence.</s>FRENCH: So there's a couple of things in play. Number one, if you're talking about confiscation, which is something that happened in --</s>GORANI: No, an amnesty, not a confiscation.</s>FRENCH: What happened in Australia was there was --if you tried do in Australia what you did in the -- if you tried to do in the United States what you did in Australia, it would break this country, because you would be running straight up against the second amendment of the United States constitution. You would need to amend the constitution. It would be an unprecedented intrusion of the government into the private sphere in this country. And there might be parts of America that would be acceptable to that. It would not be acceptable in the large part of the country. And that's why not even democrats propose this. Not even democrats. So when you're talking about the United States of America, you have to talk about a public debate that is conducted within the bounds of the second amendment. And you also have to understand that this public debate occurs against the backdrop of a 25-year long drop in gun violence. The gun violence has dropped significantly over the last 25 years, even as access to guns has been liberalized.</s>GORANI: I'm not familiar with that particular statistics, but school shootings and mass shootings have increased. That's undeniable, right?</s>FRENCH: Right.</s>GORANI: Brian Klaas, what is your reaction to that, the fact that known you restricted gun laws and in fact what was done in Australia and in Britain couldn't be done in America because it would be technically unconstitutional?</s>KLAAS: So I think that there has been a decline in gun violence, but still to the tune of 11,000 murders a year, which is too high. And in terms of actual common sense legislation, universal background checks are a no- brainer. They need to be fixed. I mean, the idea that this is just a failure of the system, well, there's no real discussion about how to fix it even. Right? Universal background checks, 90 percent of Americans support it. They're still not enacted. The idea that we can actually enact other common sense goals that most people have like assault rifle bans, right? 70 to 80 percent of Americas straight with that. And the AR-15, by the way, is commonly used in these mass shootings. It can be banned. It was banned until 2004 and that was repealed.</s>GORANI: But, David, I want to ask you that, because is it going against the constitution to say these semiautomatic weapons that can kill 20, 30, 40 people in 10 minutes, the constitution was not written when those weapons existed. Why not adapt to the legislation to these new weapons? How can a boy, 19 years old who can't buy a beer passed a background check to buy this assault rifle? I mean, in the entire world, people are saying this is nuts.</s>FRENCH: Well, the entire world's opinion about what is or is not nuts is not terribly relevant to the American debate, to be honest. The fact of the matter is, what we have seen happen is since 1999 when the Columbine shooting occurred, there has been a very complex, very troubling social cultural phenomenon where young men have been increasingly likely to engage in these spree killings. Now, the problem is when you talk about common sense gun restrictions, not one of these common sense gun restrictions has been shown to have any effect or would have any effect on the actual mass shootings. And why is this? These killers are some of the most pre- carefully premeditating killers alive. They plan for this for months. Sometimes they planned for this for years.</s>GORANI: I get that. David, I need to pick your brain on this. What then is the particularity of the United States' problem? Why is it -- if you say there's no law that can prevent -- because this is a premeditated crime, no law could prevent these crime from happening, why then in America and literally nowhere else? What's the reason?</s>FRENCH: Well, since Columbine in particular, because if you look before Columbine, these kinds of things -- that's referencing a 1999 school massacre, it actually created a weird cult following in the United States, a kind of cult following to that to my knowledge doesn't exist elsewhere. If you look at before Columbine, these kinds of spree shootings were remarkably rare. Post-Columbine, they were more common. And then what begin to happen is we saw that time and time again existing laws failed to stop the most determined killers. And then when you go into Congress, these marginal additional changes such as, quote, unquote, "universal background checks" -- I don't think anyone's arguing that universal background checks would have stopped anyone of these spree killers. Enforcement of existing laws would have stopped a few.</s>GORANI: I need to get one last, because you've been shaking your head, Brian.</s>KLAAS: When the idea that the rest of the world thinks that the U.S. is nuts when it comes to guns is relevant. It should be a wakeup call. We have children in Florida in November who are buying inserts into their backpacks that are bulletproofs so they can survive a massacre like this. That is not normal. These children had to go to drills to figure out what to do when an active shooter comes in and then they came in yesterday. It is totally crazy. But are the state of our debate is such for around the edges discussing this when we are the only country that this happens regularly. And the attitude of politicians that nothing can be done when it's been sold everywhere else is insane.</s>FRENCH: What's the proposal? What is the proposal?</s>KLAAS: So the proposal is universal background checks, way less easy access to guns --</s>FRENCH: The universal background checks wouldn't have stopped one of these things.</s>KLAAS: 300 million guns in circulation? This 19-year-old kid had a very easy time obtaining a weapon of war legally. That is nuts. Because an AR- 15 can kill dozens of people in a very short amount of time. We cannot solve every problem with every law, but we can make it harder to commit massacres and we should try to do that. The Republican solution to this has been nothing. And that is --</s>FRENCH: That's not correct. That's not correct. The Republican response is to enforce existing law. Many legislators say it would be better --</s>GORANI: We need to end it there. We need to end it there. And some Democratic politicians were also in charge at times when no significant laws were passed as well. But we want to keep this decision going another time. Thanks to both of you. Brian Klaas and David French in Nashville, Tennessee. I'll have more news ahead for you. But first, I want to share and because -- just refocusing the issues on the victims. I want to share some of the names and photographs of some of the people who were killed.