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know we all saw this. this is what we used to call the topic sentence. i think this was the most telling action oriented piece of what the president said last night up in connecticut. let's listen to it now. >> in the coming weeks i will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this. because what choice do we have? we can't accept events like this as routine. are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage? that the politics are too hard? are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom? >> chuck todd, you know, gun control was probably not in many politicians' song book going into this coming year but now it is. reality, reality checks, reality bites. do you think the president has given any sign he will do something about gun safety in this next term? >> well, if he wants to -- that speech was a powerful speech, it w


to some useful resources on our website. we hope it can be of some help today in the wake of this devastating tragedy. we move now to tonight's discussion. and joining me on the panel are aarti kohli, senior fellow at uc berkeley's warren institute on war and social policy. paul rogers, environmental writer with the "san jose mercury news." stephen sock, investigative reporter with nbc bay area. and from los angeles, david lazarus, columnist with "the l.a. times." aurti, let's start with you. uc berkeley announced a new scholarship program for undocumented students. why did the university feel it was necessary to support these students? >> well, yes it's very excites news. $1 million from the foundation. and the university really feels strong obligation to these students because they're one of the most vulnerable set of students that we have. the average family income for these students is $24,000 a year. they're not eligible for federal financial aid. they're not eligible for pell grants. and so they've overcome great odds just to get to berkeley and we want to keep them



that the ideas are not working. they're dragging us down. when washington hits a wall, which we know they will, the friends of freedom here in south carolina and all over the country are going to be ready, not with political ideas but with american ideas, ideas that we know are working and can point to and show that they're working for 100% of americans. that's what i'm going to be doing the next few years. i'm not getting out of the fight. i'm raising my game. i know that i have got a partner now in tim scott as well as lindsey graham and governor haley and all of you that are here today. i am so grateful for the opportunity to serve. i promise you and i'm going to keep serving and fighting in the same way that you have seen in the past. thank you. [applause] >> and i can tell you that one of the things as i travel across the country, everyone always wants to know how in the world we got the best federal delegation in the country. all i tell them is that south carolina is blessed. we have a great group of legislators that fight every day, that get what we want and they fight for it. they just

there, and they are analyzing that to see what they can get out of it. >> what can you tell us about what happened if what was the scenario? >> well, it all starts friday morning when he takes his mother's guns. she had purchased them legally. this is a woman who grew up in rural new hampshire, comfortable with guns, collected them. he killed her. takes three of the guns to the school. drives there in her car. forces his way in, apparently by shattering a window. they had a buzzer system. he forced his way in. the principal and the school psychologist tried to stop him. he killed them. and then concentrated his firepower on two classrooms with devastating effect. and, david, the detail that was show sho so shocking is he used an assault-style weapon. a term that bothers some people. but a bushmaster 223, the same weapon that the washington snipers used 10 years ago, and shot these children several times, some as many as 10 and 11 times. so you can only imagine the devastating effect that that had. >> the shooter, adam lanza, who took his own life. we have an older picture of him, the

, in afghanistan people are watching the u.s. presidential inauguration. they've all come there. there is a big crowd on the mall. ayaan going to speak to you today about this great historic subject, this great american institution. and i am going to do it in the same way in which i organized the book. the book is not chronological. it's not divided that starts off with george washington and then john adams and guinn for the president. instead, its slash the various parts of the day, and within each part of the day i sprinkle with vignettes some of the very serious and some of them traditional. a lot of them are all events because i'm always looking for those. i'm also going to cover some things that we are not going to see in the of coming inauguration in january because this time we don't have a change of power so we are not going to have that transition as we see sometimes but nevertheless at inauguration when a president does leave office here is the white eisenhower thinking the staff at the white house. at the same time the incoming president they are leaving the house getting ready for t

trouble. >> host: what was one of the cases, walk us through. >> guest: an interesting case called cantwell against connecticut involved a group of witnesses that had gone into a catholic neighborhood in new haven on a sunday morning and began playing anti-catholic records on portable phonographs and distributing literature, and they were arrested for disturbing the peace and preaching without a permit, and appealed their case all the way to the supreme court which said that because connecticut said, well, individual city administrators would decide what a valid program was for religious organizations and would allow them or not on to the streets, they said that allows too much discretion by the state government, and they applied for the first time part of that first amendment, this time, the free exercise clause, as against the state of connecticut, and overturned their law that allowed city officials to license or not as they saw fit. >> host: and did that lead to any nationwide movements, or was it a well publicized case at the time? >> guest: it was a relatively well publicized


in the u.s.? >> guest: well, one of the issues that i try to deal with in the book is the process by which slavery ended, and the geographical reach of slavery. i think the view that tends to be handed down is by the 19th century, certainly, a country neatly divided between the so-called free states and the so-called slave state, and, of course, the civil war growing out of that conflict. my issue is not whether slavery's at the root of the civil war, which it certainly was, but what interested me was the relationship between the early emancipation of slaves in the northern states, and the later emancipation of slaves much larger in scale in the southern states. slavery was legal in all of the british colonies and all of north america at the end of the 18th century, and gradually, northern states and northeast and mid an lat tick states began to abolish slavely, but i learned it was a gradual process. it took a long time. what we discoveredded there were laves in new jersey in 1860, and most of the states that abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, the period we customarily looked at, ha


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