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PoliticsNation, Friday, November 22nd, 2013

Read the transcript from the Friday show

POLITICS NATION
November 22, 2013
Guest:



(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(MUSIC)

REV. AL SHARPTON, MSNBC HOST: Just as 50 years ago it started in
Detroit, we are here because Detroit represents the real reflection of
where we are in this country.

REV. CHARLES WILLIAMS II, KING SOLOMON BAPTIST CHURCH: Fifty years
ago today, hundreds of thousands of people marched here in Detroit. Today,
in 2013, we`re still doing the same thing.

SHARPTON: Martin Luther King came to Detroit. He was inspired and
started talking about a dream he had. That was the first time he publicly
talked about his dream before little children, his dream for a better
America, his dream to break down segregation.

It was that speech that he brought to Washington when he was first
made here in Detroit.

WILLIAMS: His whole premise of marching was to continue the spirit of
Mahatma Gandhi, which is a nonviolent movement.

SHARPTON: How old are you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Seventeen.

SHARPTON: Seventeen.

All right. I`m trying to talk about a lot of the violence just as you
see it and I know your friends deal with it all the time.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

SHARPTON: You lost any of your friends?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. That was him.

SHARPTON: How old was he?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He was about 17, 18.

SHARPTON: What happened?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He got shot.

SHARPTON: I think that the gun issue is unique in how it manifests in
this community. If the people in the different areas saw the commonality
of pain, even though it may manifest and come different ways, then we can
stop this. If we can hook the suburbs with the urban and understand that
the mother in Detroit that`s got a teddy bear hanging up is no different
than the mom in Newton, if we connect that, then we can make changes.

What happened? Tell me about what happened with your son.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My son was shot at 22 times.

SHARPTON: Twenty-twenty times?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hit 12 and two in the back.

SHARPTON: Everywhere I go around the country, it`s some symbol like
the teddy bears in Detroit, where people have put together their own
markers on the violence and after you see so many you almost become immune
to it. It becomes where it doesn`t bother you anymore. That is the worst
thing, that we`ve become accustomed to kids dying, accustomed to gun
violence. And that is where society breaks down.

And these are people killed?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. Absolutely. There`s more than that, too.
Trust me. A whole bunch of them.

SHARPTON: Wow. I mean, people keeping books on children killed not
children graduating.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Absolutely.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMLE: Yes.

WILLIAMS: This right here used to be a very bustling area, used to be
houses everywhere.

SHARPTON: Right in this area.

WILLIAMS: Yes, sir. Houses all over the place. Businesses were
bustling. Right here you could see some abandoned, boarded up windows and
houses. And that`s the factory plant.

SHARPTON: I don`t see a lot of activity. What happened to this
factory?

WILLIAMS: Well, you`ve got hundreds of thousands of jobs that have
moved overseas.

SHARPTON: These are about people underground that could no longer go
get a factory job, therefore couldn`t feed their family, therefore couldn`t
consume from the store. That`s how this went down to nothing. Then, guns
and drugs and all of that was proliferated.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I raised my son not to play with guns. I talked
to my son six hours before he was murdered. My son told me he was coming
home. He went home, but not to me. God called him.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., CIVIL RIGHTS ICON: Mine eyes have seen the
glory of the coming of the Lord!

MARTIN LUTHER KING, III: My father and my grandmother were gunned
down by gun violence, taken away from me as a child. I was traumatized. I
used to have bad dreams. And it took a long period of time before I was
able to overcome, if you will.

(SINGING)

MARTIN LUTHER KING, III: Every week, every week we are gunning down
our brothers and sisters. Every day someone is being killed over
foolishness.

SHARPTON: I grew up a single parent on welfare but we didn`t even
know we was poor because there was hope and there was -- the community that
enveloped us. And we believed we were headed somewhere.

I started preaching when I was a little boy. I said I wanted to
preach. All the other kids laughed. They stood me on a platform and I
preached to 900 people.

But the reason the gang leaders and the drug leaders in Brooklyn
weren`t my role models is I was accepted and nurtured by the leaders of the
church.

The biggest problem I see is that when you break a community like
this, where do people get hope from? Where do these kids even start to
have a dream? There is nothing to look up to.

Do you know how sick it is when you can see babies shot, even children
in the suburbs -- I never thought I`d live to see a community like Newtown
shot up -- and they would sit up in Washington and say, we`re not even
going to have background checks.

It`s like lives don`t mean anything. Children are no longer dreaming
of being stars. Motown used to sell dreams of stardom. Now, our kids are
growing up wanting to be thugs and hoodlums and they gauge and measure
their life by how many guns they have.

Respect for human life is lost because you see no respect for human
life. If no one cares that you get a job, no one cares if the schools
work, no one cares if your children, babies walk by abandoned buildings and
liquor stores every day, no one cares drugs is being traded openly, your
life becomes so devalued that once it`s devalued that low it doesn`t mean
nothing to take a life.

We must put value back in human life! We must put hope back in our
children`s brains.

When I was growing up, Martin Luther King made me feel I was a valued
-- saying I am somebody, self-esteem, teaching me people that looked like
me could be something.

We must rebuild the spirit of hope, the spirit of promise, the spirit
of dreamers in our children. They were not born to be gang bangers. They
were not born to be shooting each other. They were not born to kill. They
were born to heal!

What`s your name?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jarvis.

SHARPTON: Jarvis, I`m glad to meet you. I`m out here talking to you
all. I like your dress.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought I heard shots. Do you confirm that?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I got a man with a gun in the parking lot.

(GUNFIRE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are learning more about the man who carried
out the mass shooting at a Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee on Sunday. A
40-year-old neo-Nazi army veteran was the lone gunman who shot and killed
six people.

AMARDEEP KALEKA, SIKH TEMPLE OF WISCONSIN: He came in through these
front doors as people were fleeing and just shot, shot, shot, shot, shot.

One of the elderly was hit right here. And then he crawled later and
tried to make it to the outside. He noticed somebody running in here and
that was the only woman that was killed that day.

This is a prayer hall in our faith, and it`s full of peace. But that
day, it was -- I mean, it was dread and awful. People screaming and
running, and she died in that corner right there screaming for help.

My dad attacked the shooter at one point when he was exchanging clips
and tried to fight with him with a butter knife. Under my dad`s arm pits
were the bullet holes, in his thighs. So that fight was intense.

SHARPTON: Give me a sense of your loved one that you lost.

KALEKA: My father lived the American dream but died an American
nightmare. He came here with lint in his pocket, a turban on his head, a
wife, and two kids, and became a community leader. And he became the
president of that temple.

SHARPTON: And he came to America to escape this kind of hate.

KALEKA: He came to America to flee racism and then here is where he
found it, in the worst, the most horrible way.

You`ll never be able to answer why this happens, right? Because there
are too many. It`s too complex. But you can answer how it happens. How
does it happen? It happens with guns.

This area right now, the guns are more than accessible. We have a
carry-and-conceal permit people can get and then they brandish it. I feel
like I`m going back into the Wild, Wild West, back into medieval time when
people walk around with swords and are ready to joust. That`s not a
civilized society.

CARLEE SOTO, SISTER OF NEWTOWN VICTIM: Hi.

KALEKA: How are you?

SOTO: Good. How are you?

On December 14th, 2012, my older sister Victoria Soto was gunned down
in her first grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut.

I`m here today in Oak Creek for the one-year anniversary of the temple
shooting that happened.

KALEKA: How is your mom doing?

SOTO: Taking it day by day. You know, you would know. You have your
good days. You have your bad days.

KALEKA: You have your bad showers. You`re like sitting in the shower
and all of a sudden you`re just --

SOTO: And you just start crying and --

Thirty-three Americans are murdered with guns each day in this
country, and it is time for our leaders in Washington to take meaningful
action to stop the bloodshed and to save lives.

SHARPTON: The issue of civil rights also encompasses gun control.

KALEKA: Absolutely.

SHARPTON: How do you see that?

KALEKA: That right to organ practice your religion, that`s what
America was founded on.

We actually told people, come to our land so you can have this
freedom. When they come to the land to have the freedom, this ability to
have that gun starts to influence.

Because we were different, people came and desecrated a temple on a
Sunday morning and I always liken it to this. In `63 in Birmingham,
Alabama, four little girls were murdered at the hands of the Klan with a
bomb. When you ask me how does that -- what does that make me feel about
our American experience? It makes me very sad, because America is not
supposed to be that.

SHARPTON: I remember I was in primary school in Hollis, Queens. My
teacher, Ms. Barken (ph), walked in the class crying and said somebody just
shot the president.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he
is dead of bullet wounds.

SHARPTON: I mean, we walked home, totally confused. The president
shot?

My parents loved John Kennedy and they were Republican. My parents
changed to support Kennedy over civil rights. If you told me 50 years
later that there would be guns permeating this country and we`d have a gun
culture I would tell you, no, you got to be kidding. We see what guns do.

KALEKA: I tell you one thing, you need a year full of grief, right?
Every birthday, every holiday, everything that you remember -- after a year
it seems like something happens and it starts to kind of lift off.

SOTO: Yes. I talked to a mother that lost her son in the war and I
asked because everyone keeps saying that. It gets easier. And I asked
really?

She goes, it really does get easier, tell you the truth, but you learn
to deal with it.

Every shooting is different, but we`re part of this, like, club I
guess you could say of people that have lost people to gun violence.

KALEKA: Years ago tragedy struck our community where a gunman opened
fire in a dormitory in a classroom killing 32 people, injuring 25 others,
physically and emotionally scarring thousands more.

COLIN GODDARD, VIRGINIA TECH SHOOTING SURVIVOR: My name is Colin
Goddard. Six years ago when I was in college I survived the shooting at
Virginia Tech and received four gunshots, different parts of my body.
Years later, I`ve turned into an advocate and activist for background
checks on all gun sales.

KALEKA: My healing process is finished. Now it`s time to uplift.
Now it`s time to go to other communities that are affected by this.

GODDARD: I think what happened at Virginia Tech was not just a
failure of gun policy but school policy and mental health policy.

And this was someone who was told to get therapy. He needed out
patient therapy but he was never followed up with. Instead of getting
therapy he got a Glock and a Walther 22 and came on our campus with a
couple hundred rounds.

KALEKA: Coming together we can find good from evil. We can create a
lasting memory of those who came before us and make things safer for the
next generation. Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE)

KALEKA: When this person came in here and attacked us, he wanted to
start a war. He wanted to ignite a flame of racism and bigotry that just
spreads over this land. And it could happen. I mean, we have a lot of
racial tension. Instead we decided as a culture was extend our hand out.
Instead of closing our doors that day we opened them up wider and people
showed up.

SHARPTON: That`s when we make change, when people reach beyond their
circle and beyond their comfort zone and say, you appear to be the opposite
of me, but you come to the same conclusion in terms of a problem. And
maybe we`re not as different as we thought.

KALEKA: In the wake of the tragedy, I mean, the whole community has
come together. That`s probably the best in America. That is the melting
pot. That is where we should be and where we could be. We`re not there
yet.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MAYOR MITCH LANDRIEU, NEW ORLEANS: Our young men are being taken to
catastrophic levels. One death is too much. But the number of deaths that
we have on the streets of America is intolerable.

When people sense and feel the pain they want to be moved to action.
You know, what moves us in the country, as I said Newtown moved us as it
should. Columbine moved us. But one of the things happening on the
streets of urban America is kids killing kids. And that`s not moving us
the way it should.

Nice to see you.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good to see you, too.

LANDRIEU: It`s a pleasure. Reverend Sharpton.

SHARPTON: Hi. How you doing?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi. How are you?

SHARPTON: Hello.

Everybody will say we need somebody to help rebuild the city and bring
us together. That`s when you were elected and you started with your
commitment in terms of this gun violence and the culture of violence.

LANDRIEU: I wanted you to meet Lester just driving by and I was
telling him that we just caught the 31-year-old man that shot a 14-year-old
boy on Sunday night and then tell me what you said before.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My little cousin was the one that was shot.

SHARPTON: The 14-year-old was your cousin.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Exactly.

LANDRIEU: You know, we talk about guns, which is important, but there
is a culture that`s developed about where life is useless and everybody has
taken everybody`s life over nothing, over (INAUDIBLE) pop, that`s not as
thick as you needed to be.

Even though the overall murder rate has gone down in the country from
20,000 to 13,000, in the neighborhoods in this country, it is a hundred
times the national average. And those are mostly African-American
neighborhoods and mostly young boys killing young boys and guess what?
Here`s the thing -- 88 percent of them know each other and they are killing
themselves over something that you would just hang your head and cry.

So, we got to get down to the root of that.

SHARPTON: That`s right.

TV ANCHOR: There are local news reports down in New Orleans. Several
people have been shot, 12 people according to local news reports. At least
12 people shot at a Mother`s Day parade there.

LANDRIEU: On Mother`s Day, we have a cultural event with moving
parades and bands and kids.

SHARPTON: It`s a big day.

LANDRIEU: It`s a big, big day, and a sacred day for the community.
They had a young man that was evidently interested in shooting someone else
and he knew he was walking in the parade and just nonchalantly walked up
where 400 people were standing and unloaded his gun and hit 20 people.

SHARPTON: Wait a minute. The parade is going on and he walks in
among 400 people.

LANDRIEU: Four hundred people and just decides to unload on them.

When something is important to Congress they`ll find the money to do
it. We found the money to fight the wars, a couple trillion dollars.

SHARPTON: Right.

LANDRIEU: During that time we spent $14 billion on police departments
but none of those police departments were in America. They were in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Colombia.

SHARPTON: Wow.

LANDRIEU: Because we were nation building.

And so people are calling for a surge on the border, a surge in Iraq
and Afghanistan. We need a surge in the inner cities -- a surge in early
childhood education, a surge in job training, a surge for police officers
to become community policemen.

CDR. CHRISTOPHER GOODLY, NOPD: You ready, sir?

SHARPTON: I`m not used to getting in a police car without being
cuffed.

GOODLY: Come on.

SHARPTON: This is a different -- this is a different seat for me in a
cop`s car.

GOODLY: These communities, you want to protect your drugs and from
being ripped off then naturally you get into the gun aspect. That`s where
the gun violence starts to manifest.

SHARPTON: Where do these kids get the guns from? Do you all know?

GOODLY: Well, there isn`t one magic answer. It can come from a
variety of sources, though. They could actually steal their parents` guns,
break in a car, get a gun, break in a house, get a gun -- things of that
nature.

SHARPTON: How does an officer deal with the possibility of his own
danger and when does the -- it escalate to where they can use force or even
deadly force?

GOODLY: We can use what is called one degree above what the force we
intend to perceive. So if we feel they are about to fight we can have the
option to go hands on. We can have the option to use our taser or our
baton. If that person is armed with a weapon, we have the option to go one
step above which is our firearm.

SHARPTON: Give me an example.

GOODLY: A knife, (INAUDIBLE), a shank, which fabricated iron they can
make and sharpen down.

SHARPTON: As I rode around with the commander in New Orleans in the
7th Ward, I had a feeling of these police have to have the view of, does
that guy have a gun and want to take my life?

The policeman is saying, I`ve got to take action. I`ve got to stop
crime. But I want to go home to dinner, too. And the guy on the street is
saying, I am on my way home to dinner and I don`t want to be assumed to be
a criminal because of the color of my skin.

LANDRIEU: You got to find the right mix and it involves policing and
the criminal justice system, but it also involves all of the other things
that make a community safe.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The parents have to get involved. We was coming
up, you couldn`t bring anything or anybody in your parents` house. So, it
starts at home first, parents.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You cannot afford to be at home anymore because
they`re working multiple jobs. Both parents. And so the children are left
quite a bit to themselves.

SHARPTON: And the streets.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the streets. So who takes over as the
parent? The bad people.

SHARPTON: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And that becomes their role model which is very
unfortunate.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. I`m going to say for people that go to jail -
- you go serve your prison time, when you are released from prison, you
can`t get a job because you`re a convicted felon.

So what is the only thing a convicted felon can do?

SHARPTON: Go back in --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go back to do what he been doing to get to where
he was because they won`t give us no jobs.

LANDRIEU: It`s about guns but not just about guns. As you heard from
people on the street, one person said it`s family. One person said it`s
education.

SHARPTON: Right.

LANDRIEU: These are people that the country hasn`t really wanted to
care about for a long time.

SHARPTON: We love to put Band-Aids on our sores rather than healing
the ailments and the real problem that keeps causing us to go from one
emergency to the next. And we have come to the point we`re going to have
to deal with it from Newtown to New York to New Orleans. We`re going to
have to deal wit this problem. A Band-Aid won`t cover it anymore.

LANDRIEU: You got to find the answer. You know why? It involves
race. It involves class.

SHARPTON: Right.

LANDRIEU: It involves taboos.

SHARPTON: Right.

LANDRIEU: It involves a whole bunch of stuff that we haven`t been
able to comfortably talk about as a country.

SHARPTON: We`re going to have to talk about it.

LANDRIEU: Some people get stuck on guns. Some people get stuck on
that, which is a worthy discussion. Some people get stuck on race. Hardly
anybody gets unstuck about the whole thing.

I just think we have to have a national discussion about what that`s
going to take.

SHARPTON: I think change must come from the streets and from the
bottom. We`ve got to rebuild the values and rebuild the thinking of this
country on violence from the bottom up not from the top down.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHARPTON: When people think of Miami, they think of South Beach,
glitter, clubs all night and the sand and the bikinis. The city is the
exact opposite -- squalor, unemployment, hard, drug-infested, with hundred
degree heat.

MICHELLE SPENCE JONES, CITY OF MIAMI COUNCILOR: Miami is a very
unique place. Unlike Chicago where you have these organized gangs, Miami
is really an unorganized group of young kids that really have lost purpose.

They literally live one block away from each other, you know, 12th
Avenue, 13th Avenue. They basically grew up together. For whatever
reason, there is a dispute between the two blocks and they resolve the
disputes by using guns.

SHARPTON: Hey, Ron. How you doing?

Good. You going to talk?

All right. I want to talk to you.

One of the things that happened with Ron in Miami, you`re trying to
break through their whole life of learning how to insulate themselves. You
can`t in one conversation break through a wall a kid spent all of his life
as young as it is but all of his life building that wall up.

Tell me what happened with your brother. What was done to you?

Let`s talk. Forget all them. Just talk to me.

RON: I can`t believe it. It happened too fast.

SHARPTON: How old was he when he died?

RON: Fifteen.

SHARPTON: Was it just a street thing?

RON: Yes.

SHARPTON: Tell me what happened, mom.

TONYA LARRIVORE, RON`S MOTHER: It happened on a day that I was at
work. And I got a phone call that was every mother`s worst nightmare. Got
a call saying that my son was shot.

First, when I got the call they told me it was Ronald. And when I got
to the scene, I saw Ronald so I`m thinking, OK. Ronald`s OK. Coming to
find out it was my son Marquis.

JONES: The word is on the streets that the gun or the bullet was
really intended for Ronald and not for Marquis. So, now -- now, Ronald is
living with not only fear, not only grief and loss, but he`s also dealing
with guilt.

And one of the challenges is that feeling that he has to either be
associated with a gang to be protected or have a gun on himself because if
not, he may die on the streets. You know, the media and other folks look
at these kids and say these are bad kids. This is what they`re out doing.

No. They`re doing it because they have no choice, because if they
don`t stand their ground, in their own neighborhoods, then they get taken
out. And that`s real.

RON: The way it went down, we were both walking across the street.
He said, go to the store for me. So I walked to the store. I said, no,
let`s walk together, but he yelled at me and said, no, you go to the store.

He was just looking at me with a strange face, so I made it to the
middle of the road and I heard the gunshots.

SHARPTON: Your brother, whatever reason, sent you away from danger.
And you got to finish the trip.

I was trying to say to him that the meaning of your brother is not
that he is just another casualty. Maybe the meaning of your brother could
be that he sent you away from danger to go ahead and finish living the life
he wasn`t going to live.

You got to give in the middle of all this madness, insanity, some
meaning, some cause that they can hold on to.

Do you think about it or try not to think about it?

RON: Try not to think about it. Sometimes I think about it in the
middle of the hard day.

SHARPTON: A lot of the gang members are grieving themselves and not
recognizing it as grief. And a lot of them get caught up in the culture of
gang culture where you`re not supposed to show that. Now, part of grief
counseling with them is to suddenly but firmly make them have to deal with
the fact you`re grieving. And it`s all right.

At some point we got to stop and say, this don`t make sense. I mean,
we kill each other for what? We`ve got to have a dream bigger than it`s
just my day to catch a bullet.

If you had your chance what would you do about it, get out of it? Get
out of the neighborhood? I mean, what do you think you`re asking?

RON: Get my mama and family out of the neighborhood.

SHARPTON: When a kid in the street loves his mother, there is a light
that you can work with. He`s not insensitive and not having feeling. He
loves his mother.

He didn`t say my goal is to get out of here. Get my mother out of
here. Which shows me this guy has some base decency that he wants to get
out and get out with the one that he felt cares for him.

I know that because I always wanted to succeed for my mother first.
So I really related when he said that.

I know you`re hurting. I mean it`s lonely and it`s hurting. It`s
your brother. But you got to make it with your brother. You really know
your brother, he don`t want you to come where he is. He wants you to live.

I`m going to check up on you. I catch you wrong I`m going to put you
on TV and say, Ron is wrong.

Oh, I got him to laugh. All right, man.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(GUNFIRE)

CHARLES LONG, ARIZONA STATE RIFLE AND PATROL ASSOCIATION: This is the
AR-15 rifle. It is a semiautomatic rifle. It is the civilian version of
the M-16.

I don`t know anybody who doesn`t own one practically in my circle.

I was for 20 years an opera singer. Then, I was a symphony conductor
when I retired from the stage, so I not your typical gun nut.

I am about liberty. Liberty is my game.

NOHL ROSEN, GUN OWNER: This is a Second Amendment flag. The flag has
a lot of meaning to me. You know, the Second Amendment, you know, is under
assault right now by the liberal left. And basically people that want to
have gun control laws, I don`t think they realize they`re trouncing all
over our flag and our Constitution.

SHARPTON: I`m not against the Second Amendment. Preserve it but
adjust the application to the time that we`re in where everyone from
terrorists to criminals are exploiting and misusing the Second Amendment.

ROSEN: The liberal left from what I have seen as well as the media
has made it look like guns are a bad thing to have, that you shouldn`t have
one because the crazy people are going to get them. And that`s not true.
OK?

A majority of the people in this country that have guns that carry
guns like myself are responsible gun owners.

SHARPTON: It doesn`t make you a bad person to say that I support the
pioneering tradition of America. It doesn`t make you wrong to say I want
the Second Amendment to protect my right to have arms. But let`s regulate
it, given where we are in American history. That`s all.

ROSEN: When they wrote the constitution, they basically said, I have
the right to keep and bear arms. They didn`t say I have the right to keep
and bear arms as long as I go through a background check.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We`re located in the city of Peoria, Arizona in
the suburb of Phoenix. The specific place is cow town range which is a
movie studio and shooting range.

We`ve trained at least 200 different military police agencies here. I
am a lawyer and I have a degree in public administration with honors from
Harvard. I don`t consider myself to the hard right. Center right would be
a simplistic way to say it.

Let me do what I need to do so long as I don`t harm others.

LONG: When I went to school in western Pennsylvania, it was not
uncommon to see rifles in the back of everybody`s pickup. First day of
deer season, school was closed. People owned guns, carried them, and then
something happened.

There was a deformation, an aberration. Something occurred in society
that altered people`s perception of how they would resolve conflict. And
those of us in the gun culture have noticed that that change in society has
been blamed on our sport, on our passion for firearms.

SHARPTON: If you want to love guns, that`s fine. You should love
them enough to make sure the wrong people don`t have them, that the wrong
people can`t misuse them.

LONG: We have lots of regulation. We have 20,000 gun laws in this
country, far too many as far as I`m concerned.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The question is as it relates to firearms can you
just pass another law that says you can`t own these, pass another law that
says you can`t sell drugs. It`s just not going to work.

ROSEN: You know, the term assault weapon actually makes me laugh,
because I`ve never seen a weapon jump out of its case and assault a human
being. It`s a person that does that. You know? The gun is a tool.

SHARPTON: What do you need to have all of these weapons that you can
kill and over kill? That those kinds of things are not necessary for -- to
protect your family and your house because you have to have a hundred-round
magazine.

LONG: Every gun is destructive. Automobiles are destructive.
Swimming pools are destructive. Ladders. People die all sorts of ways
every year.

A man killed his wife with a power sander the other day. It can be
anything.

Your chance of being a victim of a mass murder are less than your
chances of going down in a plane. Far less.

So do we change? Do we alter? Do we restrict the rights, infringe
the rights of 99.9 percent of the American people for that fraction of a
fraction of a percent who misuse them?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SALLIE BADGER: As usual Saturday morning. I was going direction he
was going another. He told me he was going to the congresswoman on the
corner event. He expected to be home in a very short period of time.

TV ANCHOR: We are cutting into our program with breaking news.
Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has been shot.

COL. BILL BADGER, U.S. ARMY (RET.): I had been at events l this
before. People would throw fire crack tires disrupt what was going on. At
first, I thought it was a firecracker. I heard, bang, bang consistent
bang.

And he was shooting at point-blank range everybody that was sitting in
the chair.

TV ANCHOR: Welcome back to the breaking news coverage of the tragedy
that happened in Tucson, Arizona, this morning where 18 people were shot
and wounded in a Safeway parking lot. Six people are now confirmed dead.

BADGER: When he looked at me, he pointed his gun at me like that.
And then he grabbed it like that. When he grabbed it with his second hand,
I dropped to the ground. And when I dropped to the ground, I felt the
bullet hit me right in the back of the head. I went down and laid on the
ground. I was dazed.

When the shooting stopped, I stood up. When I stood up, I didn`t
realize it, but he was right in front of me. That`s when somebody hit him
with one of the folding chairs. His left arm flew out. I just clamp down
on it like that. I just came up like that and hit him as hard as I could.
He hit the sidewalk.

And, he, he -- he, said ow, ow, ow. I said if you move I will choke
you.

SALLIE BADGER: I was in the shower, and got a phone call. It was
Bill saying, "Sallie, I`m shot. I`m shot. I`m OK. I took the guy down.
Get here right away."

It absolutely changes you. It changes your thought process. Once it
hits home you have to think about it. You have to take some kind of
action.

BILL BADGER: I started hunting when I was 6 years old. When I was 9
years old, I started shooting pheasants. So, I have shot guns my whole
life.

I was from South Dakota. And most of the people from South Dakota
were Republicans and I was a Republican.

SALLIE BADGER: Both of us conservatives, feel that this is not a
political or should not be a politic issue.

This we believe should not have anything to do with being a Democrat
or being a Republican. I think everyone in the United States would have to
say that violence is not a good thing.

RYAN DALTON: I am Ryan Dalton, a former gangster, a former drug
dealer, a former gun toter.

I was once that demographic, I was at risk, I was high risk. And now,
I`m just trying to switch the game up, flip the script, and get other
people to do the same thing.

This is the neighborhood where I kind of ran drugs and what, this is
also the neighborhood I was shot three times with an AK-47.

SHARPTON: You were shot three times with an AK-47?

DALTON: Yes. About five feet away from the shooter.

SHARPTON: Wow. What happened? Was it a beef over drugs?

DALTON: So, somewhat, it was a mixture of drugs and females.

SHARPTON: What gets people to a point of no hope?

DALTON: If you don`t have one person that cares about you, if you
don`t feel look one person cares about you, there is no hope. I found some
one to care about me, because I was detoured to a program that deals with
at risk individuals.

Tyrone Walker, when he was my mentor, he still is a mentor to me. He
helped me. Let`s go out to eat.

First off, nobody ever asked me to go to eat. People don`t know.

SHARPTON: It gives you`ve a sense of -- of worth and value for some
one few of invite you out to something that was beyond your experience.
Wasn`t the food? Wasn`t the restaurant? It was somebody`s inviting me,
somebody is taking time with me.

It`s -- it`s that kind of affirming that you are of value that you are
not something that could be easily cast away.

DALTON: He just kept telling me. There is something better for you.
He helped me see a real goal. He helped me set a plan.

SHARPTON: How did he do that?

DALTON: So, first off, he found out what I wanted to do. He found
out.

SHARPTON: So, he didn`t tell you. He found your passion.

DALTON: And that`s the most important thing. I am a firm believer of
that. You need passion to live, elevate. Passion comes from within.

SHARPTON: Everybody wants to blame everybody else. We all have a
responsibility.

LANDRIEU: Right.

SHARPTON: We may not all be totally at fault. We are all are
responsible.

LANDRIEU: We need to refocus on rebuilding the infrastructure, right?
I`m not just talking road. I am talking family infrastructure, churches,
communities, the kind of, the kind of environments that created a culture
where people got along together not a culture of violence.

SHELLIE BADGER: We absolutely have to have some way to keep guns out
of the hands of people who simply shouldn`t have them for, whatever reason.
You don`t have to have a certain income. You don`t have to beep a certain
race. You don`t have to be anything other than a person who walks out of
your house one morning and all of a sudden everything in your entire life
changes.

DALTON: The opportunity that came up for me to be, the program
manager for Midnight Basketball, which is a program under NOLA for Life
Strategy, working in the mayor`s office, hired by the mayor.

I want to have the power to say you need a job. Oh, come with me. I
think I could help you out.

I am living proof. It`s about how you look at your mistakes. How you
build from it. How you grow from it.

And if I could just send that message to three young men, I`d feel
good.

SHARPTON: Tell me about your bracelet and the optimism. What do
these mean?

KALEKA: It is meaning, no matter what happens to you on the face of
tragedy or whatever happens, you need to have the optimism, which
translates to most people as hope, you know?

SHARPTON: Relentless optimism.

KALEKA: Yes.

SHARPTON: The hope is that as overwhelming as it is, this gun
culture, this gun mentality that is now jumped the boundaries of every
community in this country, there have been things overwhelming before that
seem natural that we thought.

It was natural at one time -- human beings to own other human beings
in this country because of the color of their skin. It was natural.

Overwhelming, women had no rights, couldn`t vote, had to stay in the
kitchen.

Overwhelming, that gays and lesbians were considered just them.

And people fought.

And great movements and great people of the movements are chosen by
those that faced what seem impossible. If you want to only fight battles
that are easily won, they`re usually not worth fighting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY
BE UPDATED.
END

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