October 2 - Last Night's Worst Mass Shooting in American History; Spain's Brutal Overreaction to Catalan Independence; The Woman Who Founded American Counterintelligence

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with last night’s worst mass shooting is U.S. history carried out by a 64 year-old man armed with 23 guns, mostly assault rifles, who fired on a crowd at a country music concert from the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, killing 59 and wounding 527. Joining us is an expert on the impact that high-powered firearms have on the human body and a researcher who studies death and injury statistics in America where 92 Americans die from guns every day with American kids 14 times more likely to die from guns than children in other developed countries. Dr. David Hemenway, the Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center and author of “While You Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention,” will examine the folklore and romanticism surrounding guns. We discuss the myth pervading our gun culture than firearms offer security, when it is increasingly clear from repeated mass shootings that the greatest threat to our life and liberty is the NRA who place the right of gun owners to acquire unlimited unregulated firepower over the right of American citizens to be safe with the right to bear arms envisioned within “a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” as the 2^nd Amendment promises.

Part 2

Then we get an update on the overwhelmingly negative reaction around the world to the Spanish government’s brutal suppression of the Catalan referendum with riot police beating up citizens trying to vote in a democratic country. Dr. Luisa-Elena Delgado, a Professor of Spanish, Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the European Union Center at the University of Illinois and author of “A Singular Nation: Fantasies of Democratic Normalcy in Spain” and “Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History”, joins us to discuss how Spain’s heavy-handed overreaction has increased support for Catalan independence.   

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Jason Fagone, the author of “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies”, a new book about a poet and Shakespeare scholar, who along with her husband, laid the foundation of American counterintelligence. Today as the FBI and the NSA lead a highly visible and potentially regime-changing counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, we discuss how Elizebeth Smith and William Freidman later became estranged from the agency they helped establish after their home was raided by the NSA.