What An Effective Gun Control Plan Would Really Look Like

Coming up on today’s show:

• There are dozens of gun control measures to choose from, but could they pass, and would they actually help curb violence if they did? Lois Beckett, senior reporter for The Guardian US covering guns and gun violence, discusses the different proposals, their viability, what they could accomplish, and how much they actually address America’s problem with gun violence. 

• An investigation by BuzzFeed News discovered that the pharmacy that supplied the state of Missouri with drugs used to execute 17 inmates over a two year period has a track record of providing contaminated drugs and is considered a “high-risk” pharmacy. Chris McDaniel, investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News, explains. 

• The synthetic opioid fentanyl kills tens of thousands a year. But the off-label use of a test strip can detect its presence in heroin. Can the little strip save lives in big numbers? The Takeaway puts that question to Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of Law and Health Sciences at Northeastern, whose work focuses on drug policy. 

• The Pennsylvania Supreme Court tapped Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School to help redraw the state’s gerrymandered districts. Why him? Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who runs the website “All About Redistricting,” explains why the court chose Persily, and how redistricting like this works.

• Each week this month, The Takeaway is partnering with PRI’s podcast “The Science of Happiness.” Dacher Keltner is professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, director of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and the host of the show. This week, Professor Keltner talks about the “Self-Compassionate Letter” as a practice for accepting parts of yourself that you dislike. 

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich