As Students Demand Gun Control, Arms Manufacturers Continue Targeting “Next Generation of Shooters”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In Parkland, Florida, students returned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Sunday afternoon. It was their first time inside their school since February 14, when a 19-year-old former student, Nikolas Cruz, walked into the school and opened fire with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, killing 17 people. The students’ return is part of what school officials are calling a phased reopening of the school.

This comes as lawmakers return to Capitol Hill today after a vacation. Congress is facing massive pressure to pass gun control measures amidst the rise of an unprecedented youth movement, led by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who survived the mass shooting.

Meanwhile, President Trump has reiterated his calls to arm teachers with concealed weapons. This is Trump speaking at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, on Friday.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The beauty is, it’s concealed. Nobody would ever see it, unless they needed it. It’s concealed! So this crazy man who walked in wouldn’t even know who it is that has it. That’s good. That’s not bad, that’s good. And a teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened. They love their students. They love those students, folks. Remember that.

AMY GOODMAN: According to the Gun Violence Archive, at least 69 kids under the age of 18 have been shot, and 26 of them were killed, since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School less than two weeks ago.

Well, to speak more about firearms, gun manufacturers and the unprecedented youth movement for gun control, we’re joined now by The Intercept’s investigative reporter Lee Fang, his new piece headlined “Even as a Student Movement Rises, Gun Manufacturers Are Targeting Young People.”
Lee, welcome back to Democracy Now! How are gun manufacturers targeting young people?

LEE FANG: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.
You know, we took a look at investor reports from gun manufacturers and other gun industry companies, and there’s a number of reasons why, but gun executives say they’re making a new push to target younger generations, teenagers, millennials, mainly because gun sales have been plummeting over the last year. That’s partially because, with a Republican president and Republicans in power in Congress, there has been little fear of gun control. And what the gun industry has done historically is that they’ve used the potential for gun control to spur panic buying, often using third parties like the NRA to kind of whip up hysteria. And without that kind of fear of gun control, there’s been less gun sales, so they’re attempting to grow their market.

Also, there’s new analysis from the gun industry showing that young people are not buying guns like older generations for hunting. They’re mostly kind of emulating video game culture. You know, they’re going to gun stores, buying targets of vampires and zombies, and going to the gun range and buying really sophisticated weapons, lots of ammunition. This is really, as one gun industry executive said, the Xbox generation that they’re trying to target. So, even as there’s a new youth-led student movement calling for gun control, this is coming at a time when the gun industry is hoping to grow their market share by selling more guns to young people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lee, could you also talk about the Koch brothers and guns and the network that the Koch brothers have built up to fund campaigns, both advocacy campaigns and political campaigns?

LEE FANG: Well, you know, the interesting thing here with the Koch brothers and guns is that I don’t believe that the Koch brothers have a strong interest in gun control or no gun control. But they do understand that this is an issue that whips up the conservative base, that Republican voters are very likely to vote on gun issues. So, you know, historically, we’ve seen the Koch brothers use their undisclosed money organizations to fund the NRA. That’s because the NRA will go out and engage in election efforts to activate Republican base voters to get them to the polls. So, you know, when you see television advertisements from the NRA, that money does come from NRA members, from gun companies, but it also can come from groups like the Koch brothers, that are hoping to use them as kind of an identity group to activate their base voters.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk a little about American Outdoor Brands? It used to be known as Smith & Wesson, right?

LEE FANG: That’s right. This is a company that sells a number of different rifles, formally known as Smith & Wesson. They manufactured the AR-15 that was used in the Parkland massacre. And this is a company that has donated millions of dollars to the NRA. They’ve engaged in kind of marketing practices with the NRA, saying that, you know, if you buy a certain number of weapons, if you buy guns from us, a portion of the sales will go to the NRA. They’ve gone out and provided big checks to the NRA, as well, kind of celebrating their partnership. And it’s a major company that sells weapons in retail stores all around the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And tell us about James Debney, the CEO of American Outdoor, talking further.

LEE FANG: Right. James Debney has been the longtime chief executive. And as he kind of explained in investor presentations throughout the year last year, he talked about the need to grow their market share among young people, that the company is doing more marketing towards younger generations and targeting millennials. Again, if you look at just the stock price of the major gun companies, of American Outdoor Brands, but also Sturm Ruger, Vista Outdoor—these are the largest gun and ammunition companies—they’ve really tanked over the last. So these companies are hurting. They’re hoping to bring in new consumers, and they’re noticing that young people are very particular types of consumers. They’re buying guns to try to emulate first-person shooters. And the gun companies are very conscious of this and trying to market their weapons to them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what do you make of the decision by some of the major corporations in America now to sort of cut their ties with the NRA, get rid of credit cards, NRA credit cards, by some of the financial Institutions? What’s your sense of what that represents?

LEE FANG: You know, I think it’s an interesting development. But the NRA is organized through multiple 501(c) tax entities. We don’t really understand their financials, because they don’t disclose their donors. How much of a hit this constitutes, we don’t know. It’s certainly not a positive development for the NRA to see so many major corporations, from airlines to car rental companies, cutting their financial ties with the group. But at the same time, you know, the NRA is a big-money organization. They can fundraise, not just from their members, but from gun companies and other Republican donors. I think it’s too early to be seen what this financial impact is. I think the NRA is going to spend a lot of money this year, especially if states or Congress picks up gun control. They will use those political developments to kind of activate their base and likely receive even more donations.

AMY GOODMAN: Lee, as you write about the efforts by gun manufacturers to market to young people, through magazines like Junior Shooters, we’re showing some of the magazine—the covers of the magazine, for our viewers, which show young people holding rifles and handguns, with cover lines like “Glocks Are for Girls” and “Meet Spud: Fast Draw at Age 11.” Other companies, including gun manufacturer Hogue, Inc., sell things like green glow-in-the-dark handguns and shotguns and accessories, marketed to kids so they can, quote, “hunt zombies in style,” what you referred to earlier. Explain the whole push to go to younger and younger people.

LEE FANG: Right. And this is not something that’s particularly new. The gun companies have been doing this for a while. We’re just seeing kind of an increased effort. But, you know, just like any other major consumer industry, the gun company knows that they will have more loyal and more active consumers if they target people who are very young, to kind of lock them in as buyers who will repeatedly go out and buy weapons and accessories and ammunition.

So we see these marketing efforts targeted explicitly to children, you know, with guns that kind of look like they’re from a video game, or they’re pink and very friendly-looking weapons. There’s been partnerships even with video game companies. Electronic Arts, several years ago, had a partnership with several gun companies, where, you know, for a first-person shooter, players could play the game and then go be directly connected to a marketplace where they could buy weapons from the game directly from the manufacturers. So there’s a multitude of marketing efforts that are geared towards young people. And, you know, I think if Congress is looking towards enacting gun control, the marketing efforts might be a part of that larger national conversation.

Democracy is decaying worldwide. America isn’t immune.

By Fareed Zakaria

A few weeks ago, the Economist Intelligence Unit published the 10th edition of its Democracy Index, a comprehensive ranking of nations that looks at 60 measures in five categories, ranging from electoral process to civil liberties. For the second consecutive year, the United States failed to make the top bracket of “full democracy” and was grouped in the second one, “flawed democracy.” 

It would be easy to focus on the state of American democracy under President Trump, but the more worrying aspect is that the United States’ slide is part of a global trend. In this year’s report, scores dropped for more than half the world’s countries. What Stanford University professor Larry Diamond described 10 years ago as a “democratic recession” shows no sign of ending. The nature of this recession is perhaps best seen by looking at the state of the free press worldwide.

Take Kenya, until very recently considered a hopeful story of democratic progress. Last month, President Uhuru Kenyatta instructed the country’s main television stations not to cover an opposition event, and when they refused, he took them off the air. The government then ignored a court order that the stations be allowed to resume broadcasting.

Kenya’s violations of press freedom are trivial compared with those of Turkey, which is now the world’s foremost jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Let me underscore that fact. The government that has imprisoned more journalists than any other country is democratically elected. It used to target the media in ways that at least had the veneer of the rule of law, such as issuing a massive tax fine against a critical organization. But that changed after the unsuccessful coup attempt in 2016. One year later, a United Nations report found that at least 177 news outlets had simply been shut down.

It might be possible to brush these stories aside as the inevitable backtracking of developing societies. But what then to make of the turn of events in Hungary and Poland, two countries that wholeheartedly embraced democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union? In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s administration has used a series of clever tactics to muzzle the free press. The government has effectively taken over public broadcasting, exerting pressure on outlets and installing party loyalists in key positions. It has showered friendly media with advertising money and drastically cut advertising spending in critical platforms. After Orban’s government starves, harasses and intimidates independent media, friendly oligarchs buy out the media companies, thus ensuring favorable coverage. Many of these same tactics are now being employed in Poland, which has been a poster child for its stellar political and economic reforms since the fall of communism.

Even in long-established democracies such as Israel and India, we are witnessing systematic efforts to shrink the space and power of independent media that is critical of the government. In Israel, the criminal allegations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he denies, include his dealings with press barons to ensure favorable coverage. In addition, Netanyahu’s efforts to keep public broadcasting weak have earned him condemnation even from right-wing politicians. In India, Narendra Modi’s government has launched a highly questionable fraud and money laundering case against NDTV, a powerful and persistent critic of some of its policies. Recently, a journalist who exposed an embarrassing vulnerability in a government database was referred to the police rather than hailed as a whistleblower.

More than 20 years ago, in an essay in Foreign Affairs, I warned that the distinctive problem facing the world was “illiberal democracy” — elected governments that systematically abused their power and restricted freedoms. I subsequently worried that America could head down this path. Most people dismissed the danger because American democracy, they said, was robust, with strong institutions that could weather any storm. Press freedom, after all, is guaranteed under the First Amendment. But consider Poland and Hungary, which not only have strong institutions of their own but also exist within the embrace of rule-based European Union institutions that have explicit constitutional protections for freedom of the press.

In just one year in office, Trump has already done damage. Besides denigrating critical media outlets and lauding friendly ones, he has threatened to strengthen libel laws, strip network licenses and tax the owner of a particular newspaper. His administration has blocked the merger of a news organization he considers biased, while facilitating the merger of an organization with more favorable coverage.

“An institution,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Institutions are collections of rules and norms agreed upon by human beings. If leaders attack, denigrate and abuse them, they will be weakened, and this, in turn, will weaken the character and quality of democracy. The American system is stronger than most, but it is not immune to these forces of democratic decay.

This column is adapted from Fareed Zakaria’s Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles.

How US gun culture compares with the world in five charts

By Kara Fox, CNN
Graphics by Henrik Pettersson, CNN 

(CNN)The United States. Home to liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the most mass shootings in the world.

America's unique relationship to gun ownership -- enshrined as a right in its constitution -- is also in the middle of an emotional and divisive debate about the meaning of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. Twenty-seven words that give its citizens the right to own guns and also, in the views of many critics, helped usher in a culture that sees more of its own people killed by fellow citizens armed with guns than in any other high-income nation in the world.

Gun-related deaths unfold in tragic circumstances across the country daily, with more than 1,800 people killed by guns this year alone, according to Gun Violence Archive, a not-for-profit group. But it is often mass shootings that reignite the debate over gun control in the US and that shine the spotlight on its position as a global outlier.

The number of firearms available to American civilians is estimated at around 310 million, according to a 2009 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report.

India is home to the second-largest civilian firearm stockpile, estimated at 46 million.

The most updated estimates -- now more than a decade old -- place the worldwide civilian gun cache at around 650 million. According to Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, the number of civilian guns has most likely risen since 2007. Firearm production continues to proliferate worldwide, outweighing the effects that gun destruction might have.

According to the Small Arms Survey, the exact number of civilian-owned firearms is impossible to pinpoint because of a variety of factors including arms that go unregistered, the illegal trade and global conflict.

Americans own the most guns per person in the world, about four in 10 saying they either own a gun or live in a home with guns, according to a 2017 Pew Center study. Forty-eight percent of Americans said they grew up in a house with guns.

According to the survey, a majority (66%) of US gun owners own multiple firearms, with nearly three-quarters of gun owners saying they couldn't imagine not owning one.

Yemen, home to the world's second-largest gun-owning population per capita (and a country in the throes of a three-year-old civil conflict) trails significantly behind the US in terms of ownership.

When it comes to gun massacres, the US is an anomaly.

There are more public mass shootings in America than in any other country in the world.

On Wednesday, Nikolas Cruz, 19, arrived at the halls of his former school in Parkland, Florida. Armed with a rifle, he allegedly carried out a massacre that left 17 people dead.

In October 2017, 64-year-old gunman Stephen Paddock fired into crowds gathered at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 500 people were injured. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.

In 2016, an attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando left 49 people dead. In 2012, Adam Lanza went on a shooting spree in Newtown, Connecticut, killing his mother before murdering 26 students and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School; in 2007, 32 people were killed in the Virginia Tech massacre.

Such massacres have prompted debates about gun control, but they also increase demand for guns. And regulations covering the sale of firearms are looser now that they were a year ago.

In February 2017, US President Donald Trump signed a measure that scrapped an Obama-era regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of some severely mentally ill people.

Exclusive: Gun lobbyist helped write ATF official's proposal to deregulate

The original rule was part of a series of moves taken by the Obama administration to try and curb gun violence after other efforts failed to advance in Congress.

Globally, restrictive gun laws have proven to make a difference in curbing massacres.

In Australia, for example, four mass shootings occurred between 1987 and 1996. After those incidents, public opinion turned against gun ownership and Parliament passed stricter gun laws. Australia hasn't had a mass shooting since.

The US has one of the highest rates of death by firearm in the developed world, according to World Health Organization data.

Our calculations based on OECD data from 2010 show that Americans are 51 times more likely to be killed by gunfire than people in the United Kingdom.

Opinion: America's unyielding plague of gun violence

Most American gun owners (two-thirds) say a major reason they own a gun is for their personal protection, according to the Pew study. However, the majority of America's firearm-related deaths are attributed to self-harm.

Gun-related suicides are eight times higher in the US than in other high-income nations.

Globally, the US sees fewer gun-related murders than many of its southern neighbors.

According to the Small Arms Survey, El Salvador is currently home to the most gun-related murders in the world (excluding active war-zones) with guns killing more than 90 people for every 100,000 of population.

From 2010-2015, Honduras saw the highest averages of gun-related homicides, with guns killing 67 out of every 100,000 people there.

Venezuela and El Salvador are close behind over the same five-year period, with 52 and 49 gun-related deaths, respectively, for every 100,000 of population.

The US rate over that period is 4.5 gun-related homicides per 100,000 people. US law enforcement agencies are not required to report on gun killings by police. Often, such incidents are recorded as "justifiable homicides," and may or may not be included in official homicide statistics, according to the Small Arms Survey.

CNN Town Hall 9PM 2/21/18 Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action

Made in the USA: The Real History of the MS-13 Gang Trump Talked About in State of the Union

 

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: In his State of the Union address, President Trump mentioned the MS-13 gang four times by name and told the story of the two young teenage girls who were murdered by members of the gang in Long Island. Let’s go to that part of the State of the Union.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They’ve allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans. Most tragically, they have caused the loss of many innocent lives.

Here tonight are two fathers and two mothers: Evelyn Rodriguez, Freddy Cuevas, Elizabeth Alvarado and Robert Mickens. Their two teenage daughters, Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens, were close friends on Long Island. But in September 2016, on the eve of Nisa’s 16th birthday—such a happy time it should have been—neither of them came home. These two precious girls were brutally murdered while walking together in their hometown. Six members of the savage MS-13 gang have been charged with Kayla and Nisa’s murders. Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter the country as illegal, unaccompanied alien minors, and wound up in Kayla and Nisa’s high school. …

Tonight I am calling on Congress to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13 and other criminal gangs to break into our country.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump last night, as he talked about young people coming over the border and joining MS-13. Daniel Denvir is with us from Providence, Rhode Island, writer-in-residence at Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project. Last year, he wrote an article for The Washington Post headlined “Deporting people made Central America’s gangs. More deportation won’t help.”

Daniel, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about one his—

DANIEL DENVIR: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: —one of his central focuses last night, MS-13.

DANIEL DENVIR: I mean, political rhetoric around immigration so often functions to obscure the reality and history of immigration—though Trump is a rather extreme case. And what his obsessive focus on MS-13 does, aside from scapegoating and facilitating the mass criminalization of Latino immigrants in this country, is obscure the origins and reality of gangs like MS-13.

MS-13 was born in Los Angeles amidst the refugees fleeing President Reagan’s dirty wars in El Salvador, and became a transnational gang that ultimately did so much to destabilize El Salvador precisely because of deportation policies pursued by President Trump’s predecessors. This is a problem that’s American-made through and through. So, to treat it as though it’s some external threat being foisted on Americans, it not only entirely takes out of proportion and exaggerates the criminal threat that MS-13 poses to Americans, it obscures the fact that it’s our foreign policies, our military interventions and our long history—that, unfortunately, well precedes Donald Trump—of mass deportations and criminalization of immigrants, that created MS-13 in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk more about that, as you fully develop it in your piece, in your work, even why it’s called MS-13, but to explain that history, Daniel.

DANIEL DENVIR: Yeah. So, Mara Salvatrucha was formed in L.A. in the 1980s. Older viewers are probably fully aware, and many younger ones, as well, that in the 1980s President Reagan was backing a right-wing government in El Salvador that was waging a brutal dirty war against leftist revolutionaries in that country, that sent huge numbers of refugees fleeing to the U.S. He also had similar dirty wars in Guatemala, as well as a Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But in the case of Salvadoran refugees fleeing to the U.S., Reagan made a point of denying that they were refugees, because how could his friendly government in El Salvador be sending refugees fleeing from their country if they weren’t committing massive human rights abuses? Which they were. And so, coming into segregated neighborhoods in the U.S., where, like many poor people of color in this country, they were denied access to good jobs and good schools, people gravitated—young people gravitated towards gangs, gangs that were a thoroughly American phenomenon at the time, not one that they were bringing with them from El Salvador.

And then, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s harsh anti-immigrant policy, which he was using as part of his general strategy of triangulation, attempting to placate rising right-wing, anti-immigrant sentiment, to ward off the right and consolidate white support in advance of—to advance his own political ambitions, launched a mass crackdown on so-called criminal aliens. And those same policies were followed by George W. Bush and also by Barack Obama. And the result was that enormous numbers of people have been deported to Central America, including El Salvador, some of them alleged gang members, many of them not. But those people being deported back into El Salvador brought Mara Salvatrucha and other gangs to that country and turned what was a homegrown L.A. phenomenon into a transnational criminal empire.

Again, Trump entirely exaggerates the criminal threat that MS-13 poses to the U.S., but those gangs have played a major role in wreaking incredible violence and destabilization in Central America, in El Salvador. And that violence, that destabilization, along with U.S.-backed mano dura crackdowns in the region, have pushed a new generation of refugees to come to the U.S. And now Trump has the gall to say that it’s this new generation of refugees, young, unaccompanied minors, who are a threat to us as Americans. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s offensive. And it’s, you know, an insult to history, because U.S. policy has created MS-13 through and through. I think, for Trump, it’s just a convenient way to scapegoat and facilitate the criminalization of ordinary immigrants, which is something that he has been doing since he announced his campaign and said that Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Maru Mora Villalpando, your response to that trajectory he made, the thread that wove through the fabric of his speech last night, young people coming over the border, MS-13, killing young women in Long Island, New York?

MARU MORA VILLALPANDO: Again, it’s just plain racist, hate rhetoric, that is trying to blame us for what [Daniel] just explained. There’s many different reasons why there’s violence in this country. He obviously left aside all the other violence that white people have generated in this country, a lot of terrorist acts, but a majority of them being done by white people in this country.

To me, it’s really, really offensive, too, that he—even the way he described children. We actually are working with a young man in the detention center in Tacoma. He’s being detained. He came from El Salvador precisely escaping gang violence. He came as a minor. And as soon as he turned 18, he was sent to the detention center. He already won his case. And the government, the U.S. government, decided to appeal his winning in court, in immigration court. And they still kept him in detention.
He’s still detained, along with another young man that we’re working with, Manuel Abrego, that won his case, also from El Salvador, under the Convention Against Torture. The U.S. government appealed his case. He won back in November. He’s still detained right now in the detention center.

So, this is just another way of keeping us in detention, making sure that our bodies, our brown and black bodies, are being used for profiteering, for, in this case, GEO Group to make more money, and for ICE to claim that they are supposedly creating a safe environment for us, when what they’re doing is continuing destroying our communities.

AMY GOODMAN: As you talk about violence, I wanted to turn back to Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota state representative, the only Somali-American Muslim legislator in the country. Back in 2016, State Representative Omar, in Washington, D.C., you were attacked by a cab driver, who called you “Isis” and threatened to rip off your hijab as you were leaving a policy training at the White House. Shortly after the attack, you wrote on Facebook, quote, “the most hateful, derogatory, islamophobic, sexist taunts and threats I have ever experienced. … I am still shaken by this incident and can’t wrap my head around how bold [people] are becoming in displaying their hate towards Muslims.”

If you can talk about the atmosphere in this country over the last year? Of course, I couldn’t help noticing last night, in the chamber, as President Trump spoke, many of the African-American legislators, congressmembers, were wearing African kente cloth, whether it was scarves or bowties, whether it was ties. Ilhan Omar, your response?

REP. ILHAN OMAR: I mean, the rhetoric surrounding Muslims and Islam in this country has become a very dangerous one. When you sort of dehumanize and you normalize people’s ability to take a violent action against individuals because they don’t agree with the god they pray to or they don’t, you know, where a clothing that you might approve, it sort of—it starts us down a path that becomes very dangerous. And for our a lot of our young kids, in the schools, in workplaces, and just like I was, roaming around the streets in D.C., trying to do the work I was elected to do, you are faced with not only hate that comes in the form of verbally, but it gets very physical at times. And a lot of our communities are living in fear.

It’s the same thing with what’s happening around the conversation with immigrants. With all the lies that are being told by the president and the Republicans, we are forgetting that immigrants, in a lot of our communities, are contributing economically. They are making the cultures of those communities thrive. And they, you know, are not in that category of criminals, solely the contributors to criminal activity in this country, as the president makes it seem. I mean, if we think about our prison system, you know, over 10 percent of the American population is imprisoned, and it’s less than 5 percent of them are immigrants.

We don’t see a conversation, an outcry, about what to do when it comes to white men who are being radicalized, who are going into our schools, in our churches in our movie theaters, terrorizing our communities. There isn’t a plan. There isn’t a conversation. There isn’t an outrage. I didn’t hear a peep from the president last night about what he plans to do to keep Americans safe, so that they are able to go see a concert, so that they are able to feel comfortable sending their 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds and 10-year-olds to school.

And so, when we are thinking about what makes America great, what keeps our country safe, it’s about having a principled leader who is seen as someone who cares about and is going to work in collaboration with other world leaders and really talk about the values of this country. Far too long, I feel like, we’re letting fear drive our foreign policy. We’re letting fear drive our domestic policy. And that makes us away from the actual values and the leading with our morality that has gotten us to be the greatest nation in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: State Representative Ilhan Omar, the Virginia Democratic Congressman Bobby Scott tweeted, “Wearing kente cloth to the #SOTU with my fellow @OfficialCBC Members”—you know, Congressional Black Caucus members—”to stand in solidarity with people from you-know-what countries.” And I’m wondering if you, very quickly, before we go to break, could respond to that comment, as a Somali refugee, when President Trump made that comment about the continent of Africa, talking about these “s—hole countries,” and if it—what kind of blowback did you feel?

REP. ILHAN OMAR: Yeah, my home country is included in that bleep-hole countries. And I am proud, have never been ashamed, of where I come from. And I know that so many people have appreciated the fact that Africa and many of the countries within Africa are considered the birth of civilization. And we bring so much culture and enrichment to this world. And it is really important for people to have conversations about that and to not only stand in solidarity, but to also speak up and speak out about those kind of vulgar words that the president might use.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to go to break and come back to this roundtable discussion in response to President Trump’s State of the Union. Stay with us.