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TSA Explosive Detection Dogs; Science Behind Mindless Scrolling; Interview With Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired December 17, 2024 - 11:30   ET

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

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Another school shooting in the United States has left a community in mourning.

Police are still searching for a motive after a 15-year-old girl opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin. A student and teacher were killed, six others wounded. The shooter then turned the gun on herself. Officials say it's not clear how she got the firearm.

[11:30:06]

Joining us now is Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

As we have been talking about on this show, look, this is the 83rd school shooting of 2024. That's the most of any year since CNN began tracking school shootings back in 2008. Just given the lack of concrete action in this country to stop these school shootings, do you think this country is at a point of just tolerating this as sort of the price you pay to live here?

SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (D-NY): I certainly hope not.

And as a parent with school-aged children, it's deeply worrisome that our kids can't feel safe going to school. We need to do much more to keep illegal guns out of the hands of potential shooters. We need to do much more on funding mental health and violence disruption.

This particular shooter, we don't know her story yet. It was obviously a murder-suicide. And I -- as a parent of a teenager, I can tell you the number of teens, young teens, girls and boys who are succumbing to suicide, who are using guns and other violence is -- it's unacceptable.

And so we have to do much more to protect our children. Last year, we passed a bill to ban gun trafficking. That's resulted in thousands of weapons being confiscated, hundreds of traffickers being prosecuted. But we didn't quite do enough on the red flag laws, and we need to do much more on banning this, particularly military-style weapons, assault weapons that can result in many people getting killed very quickly.

And so there's a lot more work to be done. And we have to put our kids first. We have to put their safety first. And so I hope we can have some bipartisan solutions in this next Congress.

BROWN: I want to talk about what's happening on the Capitol Hill today. RFK Jr. is back there meeting with senators.

Yesterday, president-elect Trump to calm concerns about RFK Jr.'s vocal skepticism of vaccines. Let's listen to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: What do you say to people who are worried that his views on vaccines will translate into policies that will make their kids less safe?

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (R) AND CURRENT U.S. PRESIDENT-ELECT: No, I think he's going to be much less radical than you would think. I think he's got a very open mind, or I wouldn't have put him there. He's going to be very much less radical.

But there are problems. I mean, we don't do as well as a lot of other nations, and those nations use nothing. And we're going to find out what those problems are.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Does that ease your concerns at all? Are you willing to consider voting to confirm RFK Jr. to be head of HHS?

GILLIBRAND: Well, I'm going to look at his full record.

Obviously, again, as a parent, we want to make sure our children are safe. We want to make sure parents have the right to know that when kids go to school, they are going to be safe and have access to vaccines and access to health care. So that's very important to me.

But RFK Jr. has also spoke about food safety issues, which I care a lot about. I sit on the Agriculture Committee, testing food, particularly food that goes into our school systems. We do very little food testing. A very small percentage of food that comes into this country is tested. And so I appreciate some of his views there.

I also appreciate some of his views on clean air and clean water. He used to run an organization in New York called River Keeper, a preeminent environmental organization trying to clean up the Hudson River and trying to protect people who live along the Hudson, and from toxins in the environment.

So I think there's a great deal of issues where we may find common ground on with Mr. Kennedy. And I look forward to exploring those before I decide how I'm going to vote.

BROWN: What would he need to say to you to reassure you enough to vote to confirm him? As you point out, there are policies and things he's advocated like on food, on clean air, and water that people like yourself find appealing.

What would he need to say to you to get you totally on board? GILLIBRAND: Well, I just want to make sure there's going to be no

reduction in access to vaccines for school-aged children.

We know that vaccines work. We know that it keeps our children safe and it has eradicated massive disease that decimated our country hundreds of years ago. So, the science has continued to progress and continued to protect our young children. And I want to make sure those protections are still in place.

But I will explore all the issues before I make my decision.

BROWN: Well, that's as any senator should.

I want to ask you about an issue that's really important to you. And this has to do with the ERA. You are petitioning for the ERA to be added, to be ratified as part of the Constitution, to be the 28th Amendment. Tell us about why this is so important to you, because, I mean, it would likely -- if this happened, would likely be immediately met with legal challenges that would end up in the Supreme Court.

Why now?

GILLIBRAND: Well, the issue is ripe. That is a legal term, and it means it's ready to be added to the Constitution.

Article 5 of the Constitution requires two things. It has to pass the House and Senate by two-thirds vote, has to be ratified by three- quarters of the states. Both of those things have happened. The vote happened in the '70s, and the ratification was finally completed in 2020, Virginia being the 38th state.

[11:35:13]

Unfortunately, at the time, President Trump was the president. He directed his Office of Legal Counsel to issue a memo saying that it should not be added to the Constitution because it took too long. My reading of that memo and a lot of legal scholars' reading of that memo believe it's deeply flawed and wrong.

We don't think it took too long. There's no artificial timeline for how long constitutional amendments have to take. The 27th Amendment took 203 years. And the seven-year deadline that was in the prefatory language isn't constitutionally operative because it wasn't in the actual Constitution amendment. It was in the preamble language.

So, by the law, it should be now signed and published by the archivist. The archivist has paused before doing that because of the Trump-ERA Office of Legal Counsel memo. I believe, if President Biden calls on her to sign and publish, as the commander in chief, as someone who has precedence over the Department of Justice, that will give her enough basis and enough courage to do her ministerial job, which is to sign and publish when the two things that I mentioned are completed.

And they are completed.

BROWN: And, really quickly, have you heard from the White House on it?

GILLIBRAND: So we have been asking the White House to consider this. If the president does go ahead and do this and we have an Equal Rights Amendment, we believe, like state equal rights amendments, it will protect women.

It will protect their reproductive freedom. It will protect them on equal pay. It will protect them from discrimination. And so we believe this is timely and urgent, especially in light of the abrogation of women's rights over the last couple years.

BROWN: I want to ask you, before we let you go, about these mysterious drone sightings across the Northeast, including in your state of New York.

The House Intel Committee will receive a classified briefing on the situation later today. You were on with my colleague Jake Tapper yesterday. And I was going back to that interview. You said -- quote -- "I don't think we do know who they are or even what technology they're using."

So, when the Biden administration says that these are commercial drones, hobbyist drones or law enforcement drones operating legally, do you buy it?

GILLIBRAND: I think some of the sightings are aircraft, are commercially available drones by enthusiasts, are helicopters, but, some, they don't know.

And the reason why I know this is because we have had drone occurrences over the last couple of years that we cannot identify. We have had them over military bases. We have had them over arsenals. We have had them in New York. They were over Stewart Air Force Base. They were over an arsenal in New Jersey. They were over Wright-Patterson Base. They were over Langley in Virginia.

These are highly sensitive military sites. They have also been seen off the coast where nuclear capabilities are located. We have seen them across the United States in sensitive areas. And in those sightings by military personnel, we have them documented, but we do not know what technology they are.

They are not something that in many of these instances we saw coming via radar. So they use detection that radar doesn't pick up. They use technology that radar doesn't pick up. And so these are serious questions about national security that should not be dismissed.

And I don't know that New York and New Jersey should feel satisfied that all of the sightings are known.

BROWN: But, bottom line, is U.S. airspace safe?

GILLIBRAND: So we don't have full domain awareness. I don't know if it's safe or not safe because we don't have full domain awareness. We don't know whose the drones are. We don't know whether they're adversarial or run by a foreign entity. We don't know what their purpose is. We don't know if they're spying.

When they are located for two straight weeks over Langley, that is definitely not enthusiasts. That is definitely not without risk or without a national security concern, because any drone can carry any type of technology.

It can carry detection devices. It can carry weapons. It can carry jamming devices. It can harm our interests in multiple ways. And so these drones should be reviewed more quickly. We should have FAA work with the FBI and Homeland Security to bring these drones down, where they can safely identify who they are.

And then they can assess if we're safe or not safe.

BROWN: All right, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, thank you.

We will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:43:44]

BROWN: Brain rot. It was this year's Oxford University press word of the year. It refers to both the low-quality, low-value content on social media and the Internet, as well as the state of your brain after scrolling over and over.

But is it real?

On call this week, our very own brain surgeon and chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Can scrolling really rot our brains? Because, if that's true, that is terrifying, because most of us, let's be honest, do that.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

And, look, besides being a doctor and a journalist, I'm also a father of three teenage girls.

BROWN: Oh, yes.

GUPTA: So, this is a really important topic.

The short answer is, it can change your brain. There's a reason why this has become the word of the year and so many people are talking about it. You know, we have known for some time that sort of scrolling or doom scrolling social media for more than three hours a day can double the risk of depression in teenagers.

That's something that we have known for some time. But I think what we're now seeing is some studies that are actually looking at what's happening to the brain specifically, noticing there's a thinning of certain areas of the cortex. That's the outer gray matter area of the brain that can cause problems with your ability to focus. There's also white matter changes in the brain as well, which are sort

of the roads connecting various parts of your brain. And that can slow down the rate at which you think. There's all these other issues that it could potentially cause.

[11:45:04]

It does seem reversible. That's the good news. But the idea that there's changes in your brain in responses, not just short term, but longer term, that is becoming increasingly real.

BROWN: Why is it so easy to get sucked in? Is it a chemical reaction in your brain? What's going on?

GUPTA: I think there's a couple of things.

One is that the platforms are designed to be pretty addictive. Most people have access now to smartphones or some sort of device like that. And there isn't a huge difference, but this is U.S. teens. That's the data you're seeing for teens, 95 percent access to a smartphone, 46 percent using it almost constantly.

But if you look at adults, you have sort of seen similar statistics. So it's -- a lot of it has to do with access and the way these platforms are designed to keep you scrolling. You're more likely to keep scrolling if you have watched five things of the same sort of nature versus if you have just watched one.

So the more you watch, the more you're likely to continue watching.

BROWN: All right, so what restrictions should we put on ourselves? I, for one, was like, OK, my New Year's resolution, one of them is to stop it, right, because it just doesn't add value to your life, usually, to go down these rabbit holes on social media.

But, like, what should the limit be? How much a day do you think is OK?

GUPTA: Well, I think it differs based on the quality of the content.

If you look at the brain rot sort of definition, it was excessive use of low-quality content. So both those things need to be true. But I think there's a first sort of step here, which somebody who -- Catherine Price, who's wonderful, you should read her book -- talks about, every time you pick up the phone, to sort of ask yourself, what for?

Why did I just pick this up? Why am I doing it now? And what else could I be doing instead? That makes a huge difference just to create that sort of pause in your thinking. Every time you pick up the phone, ask those three questions.

BROWN: Yes.

GUPTA: I will say as well, for yourself, for kids, there are ways to put time limits on the phone. So, for certain social media apps, create these time limits.

Now, you can go in there and expand the time limit, increase it. But, again, it's adding a step towards what you're doing. Simply bringing the brain back online and away from that doom scrolling seems to make a huge difference.

BROWN: Yes. I love that, taking a step back. How can I better use this time?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, I appreciate it.

Don't forget to submit your questions to Sanjay about how this affects your brain. Just scan the Q.R. code on your screen. We're going to have him back on tomorrow.

And we will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:52:05]

BROWN: Well, if you're traveling through Baltimore's BWI Airport this holiday season, just remember that this 9-year-old black Lab will be keeping you safe.

His name is Argo, and he's one of 12 dogs that are part of TSA's Canine Calendar for 2025.

Joining us now is TSA explosive detection canine handler Jonathan Lilly and the one and only Argo.

All right. So, I got to say, Jonathan, I have a black Lab named Bingo, and all he wants to do is just lie around the House. But you say Argo is not a typical black Lab in that regard. Like, he likes to work. Tell us about him.

JONATHAN LILLY, TSA EXPLOSIVE DETECTION CANINE HANDLER: Yes, he loves working. He's currently 9 years old. He just turned 9 in September. And he loves work. He loves to hunt for it.

Training and anything we're doing, he's super excited. He's always happy and willing to work. At home, he's probably like your Lab, a lot more laying around and napping. But when we're at work, he's definitely on the job.

BROWN: Usually, Labs love people too. But his job is to search for explosives and to be skeptical that's -- that there could be a risk, right?

LILLY: Yes, definitely. He's super inquisitive and he's very curious. And you can tell when he's -- when he's not working, he's definitely a people person.

He loves saying hi to people and he's very sociable. But you can tell that, when he's working, he's on the job. I have had people that have seen him at work that know him outside of work and they're like, oh, he's definitely working now. You can tell he's on it.

BROWN: He knows how to switch from play mode to work mode.

In terms of skill sets, how are TSA...

LILLY: Most definitely.

BROWN: Yes, that's impressive.

I mean, obviously, he's been trained well. In terms of skill sets, how are TSA dogs different than normal police dogs?

LILLY: Well, our dogs also do people as well. A lot of police dogs will just do standstill objects. They will do unintended bags or unintended vehicles, cargo.

But Argo is also able to do passengers. So that way he can get people moving around and work through a crowd. And he loves doing it.

BROWN: What about any moments where he like saved the day, where he actually detected something of risk, of concern?

LILLY: We do a lot of training. So he's very proficient. We get tested every year, and he's good at his job. And then we have had some big events. We have been out to a couple of Super Bowls, Super Bowl LVI and LVIII. So he -- good experiences there. And he was able to do a lot of good work out there.

BROWN: But anything specific where he caught something?

LILLY: I mean, he is pretty proficient. And, like I said, he will -- their noses are so good. Like, a lot of times when he does get somebody, it's -- he can smell just a component or a little piece of it that, so they don't need the whole thing.

So he's just good enough to where, if someone had been touching something, not necessarily something bad or anything, it's just they might have been touching something that could be a part of it. He can smell it. And he -- that's enough for him to say, hey, that's what I'm looking for right there. But...

[11:55:10]

BROWN: How much training did he get?

LILLY: So, back when we first started training together, it was a 16- week course at our canine training center. That's down at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. It was pretty rigorous, so...

BROWN: Yes. Well, it's paid off.

All right, Argo, thanks for coming on. Jonathan Lilly, appreciate you coming on too.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Thank you, everyone, for joining us.

LILLY: Yes, thank you for having us.

BROWN: Absolutely. Thanks for keeping us safe at the airport.

I'm Pamela Brown. You can follow me on Instagram, TikTok and X @PamelaBrownCNN.

Stay with us. "INSIDE POLITICS WITH DANA BASH" starts after a short break.