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Feb. 20, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:12
The Children’s Crusade | Ep. 479
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The Left trots out students as their point people, everything is about race, and the media spin wildly for gun control in every possible direction.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So this is our last day of the week until Friday, broadcasting from Los Angeles.
We're headed off to Washington, D.C.
for CPAC.
I will have some notes on CPAC because a little bit of controversy has broken out about one of the invited speakers.
Suffice it to say, I disagree with the invitation, but I also don't control the invite.
I am looking forward to seeing everyone at CPAC.
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All right, so the debate over gun control continues.
And as I said yesterday, I think there are some things that we actually can do.
There is what has been called the gun violence restraining order.
This is something I talked about yesterday.
David French at National Review spoke about the possibility of having laws on the books that allow immediate family or close friends to go to the court and petition to have your capacity to own a gun temporarily removed from you if a court finds that you are a threat to yourself or others.
That would be a useful measure, in my view.
Another useful measure would be dramatically heightening security.
I talked about this on Fox & Friends this morning.
I've talked about it this week.
The idea here would be that you have to harden the defenses around schools.
Our banks have tremendous security.
There's no reason why our dollars should be guarded more closely than our children.
There's been a lot of talk about arming teachers, and some people object to this.
Well, I don't understand why a trained armed teacher would be a threat to your child.
You trust your child in the classroom with that teacher every single day.
And right now, we are leaving teachers at the whim of mass killers.
There's that coach in Parkland who was shot to death while he was attempting to defend students.
Wouldn't it have been better if he'd actually been licensed to carry a handgun and had a gun with him, so he maybe could have done something about it?
They should build schools.
From now on, they should build schools with fail-safe mechanisms, so that if a mass shooter were to enter the school, there would be a capacity to actually lock down separate parts of the school.
They have this lockdown capacity at a lot of hospitals.
There's no reason why they shouldn't use it when it comes to schools as well.
And another thing that ought to be done is something that we here are now doing at Daily Wire.
So at Daily Wire, as I've said on the show, I said it in the last week that I wasn't going to name the shooter on the show.
I wasn't going to show pictures of the shooter on the show.
And somebody emailed me and said, well, then why is your website naming the shooter and showing pictures?
And I thought, well, that's a good point.
And so we at Daily Wire will no longer be showing the names or the faces of mass shooters.
The reason being that studies tend to show that mass shooters are driven by a need for media attention.
And so this time we are going to try to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The media, the race to show faces, the race to show names in the media is obviously ratings driven.
It's obviously click driven because people are curious.
People want to know what the guy looks like who went and shot up a school.
We're not going to be part of that game because we can give you all the relevant information as we have been doing on the show.
We've told you who the guy is.
We've told you everything about him.
We've told you what you need to know for the public policy debate.
We're just not going to put a name and a face on him because we don't want to give him any sort of unearned notoriety.
We don't want him to be unintentionally given levels of exposure that will drive the next mass killer.
There's no reason why we should know the names of mass shooters particularly except out of just normal human curiosity or why their pictures should be flashed across the news.
We can give you all the information that you need to know without that pictorial evidence behind it.
The reason we're doing this is because there are a series of studies that have shown, again, that mass shooters tend to feed off media attention.
So, Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the APA, that's the American Psychological Association, in 2016, quote, media contagion can help make mass shootings more common.
Unfortunately, Johnston says, we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame.
They say that the rise of such a trait in mass shooters So, some studies say that the dramatic reduction won't be that dramatic, but there is a similar conclusion, which is that a lot of these shooters are driven by the need for fame.
during the same period.
So Johnston recommended a media pack to no longer share, reproduce, or retweet the names, faces, or long-winded statements of killers so that we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years.
So some studies say that the dramatic reduction won't be that dramatic, but there's a similar conclusion, which is that a lot of these shooters are driven by the need for fame.
So we're going to do our part.
Again, we can give you all the details that you need to know without speaking the name of the person who did it, because again, there's a lot of people out there who want the world to know their name.
Well, we're not going to help them in that quest.
That's not something that we think is a worthwhile thing.
The media, of course, are not going to—a lot of other outlets in the media are not going to do this, unfortunately.
Cable News is not going to do this.
CNN shows the names and faces of the shooters.
Fox News shows the names and face of the shooter.
The Washington Post, The New York Times, all the major outlets, I believe, still show the names and faces of mass shooters.
Because they said the public has a right to know.
Well just because you have a right to know doesn't mean that I have an obligation to show you.
And I do not feel the obligation to show you the face of a shooter outweighs my obligation as a human being to prevent the dissemination of material that helps possibly create the next shooter.
That's not something that I want to be a part of.
Speaking of media malfeasance and the left's malfeasance on the gun control issue and the fact that every mass shooting now has become a cause celeb, that this has become the club to wield against law-abiding gun owners, the media have really done an outsized job here.
I just want to show you some of the things the media have been doing because they're truly insane.
So, ABC News had a tape of a guy named Scott Pappalardo.
You've never heard of Scott Pappalardo.
Scott Pappalardo is some dude who they found on Facebook.
Why are they putting him on ABC News' Twitter feed?
Well, because he's a gun owner and he decided to destroy his gun for some odd reason.
Here's a video of him talking about it.
Hi, my name is Scott Pappalardo and this is my pre-ban.
Legally registered AR-15, which I purchased over 30 years ago.
Now, I'm a firm believer in the Second Amendment, and I even have it tattooed on my arm.
And a lot of people have said to me, well, what do you need to own a weapon like that for?
It's only purpose is to kill.
And I'll be honest, it's a lot of fun to shoot.
I remember, after Sandy Hook happened, I said to my wife, I'd gladly give this gun up if it would save the life of just one child.
I've decided today, I'm gonna make sure this weapon will never be able to take a life.
The barrel of this gun will never be pointed at someone.
Is the right to own this weapon more important in someone's life?
A weapon like this that can cause so much death and destruction.
And then he goes ahead and he takes a saw and he proceeds to saw the gun in half essentially.
So he actually walks out there.
You can see him doing this routine.
Now people have always said there's so many of them out there.
Okay, so first point here is that what he actually just did is sort of illegal, you know?
Saw off long weapons and make them into shorter weapons.
Second of all, it's stupid.
The reason it's stupid is because that gun was not going to be used to shoot a child.
I mean, it's been in his hands for 30 years.
Has it ever been used to shoot a child?
Has it ever been used to shoot anyone?
Listen.
Would I be willing to give up my Mossberg 500 and my 9mm Glock?
Would I be willing to give those guns up to save the life of a child?
Sure!
I'd be willing to give those guns up to save a life of a child, right?
You have a guy standing next to me and he says, I'm going to shoot this child unless you give up your guns.
Obviously, I give up the guns.
It's a no-brainer.
But that's not the choice.
That's a false choice.
My guns are not going to be used to kill the child and nobody is blackmailing me to give up my guns or they're going to shoot a child.
That gun had never been used in anger against another human being.
And this guy seems like a decent fellow.
My presumption is that if he saw a mass shooting taking place, he would go grab his gun and try to take down the mass shooter.
He wouldn't go and join the mass shooter.
But this is the false binary that's been created.
Every gun is the threat.
That gun was not a threat.
Because the guy who owns the gun is not a threat.
My gun is not a threat.
It's locked up in my safe.
My gun is only a threat to somebody who would harm my family and hurt people I love.
And this is true for the vast, vast, vast 99.9% of law-abiding gun owners.
This is the truth for.
And yet the media pushed this out as though this is some sort of great act of heroism, Olympic gold in virtue signaling for Scott Pappalardo, who made no one safer in this act.
No one was made safer in this act.
But he got his name on the news, and the news got to put out this sort of propaganda, which I guess is very exciting.
I'm going to show you some more media malfeasance on the gun control issue in just a second, plus we still have to get to the Children's Crusade, which is something that the left is now pushing.
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Okay, back to the media coverage of the gun control issue.
The media obviously have a deep and abiding agenda.
The media, as I say, What's something the media could do to actually help prevent shootings, according to studies?
They could do what we're doing over at Daily Wire and not mention the name or face of the shooters.
That they could do.
They're not doing that.
So instead what they do is they put out a bunch of people talking about how gun control is obviously the thing that has to happen here.
So CNN is having an entire special, I believe it's tomorrow night, and that special tomorrow night is going to feature all of the students over at Parkland basically talking about why they want gun control.
And the reason this is stating the news is because the media have decided to use the children over at Parkland in order to push their agenda.
And we'll talk about whether it is moral to use children in order to push an agenda, teenagers to push an agenda in just a second.
But first, I'm going to show you some more elements in the news that are just plain false, that are just fake news.
So CBS News put out this promo saying that in Florida, it's easier to buy an assault rifle than it is to obtain cold medicine.
This is just not true.
It says, here's what's more difficult to purchase than a gun in Florida.
Sudafed contains pseudofedrin, which can be used to legally manufacture methamphetamines.
Federal regulations require it be sold behind the pharmacy or service counter, and customers need to show they're over 18 years of age.
Okay, and then it says, customers are limited to purchases of 9 grams per month about two 15-dose boxes of 24-hour Claritin D, or three 10-dose boxes of Aleve cold and sinus, or six 24-dose boxes of Sudafed.
In Florida, you can buy as many guns as you want at one time, according to the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action.
Right, but there's no federal background check for cold medicine.
There's no federal background check for Sudafed.
It says you don't need a permit to purchase a rifle or shotgun.
Right, but there is a federal background check that happens at every federally licensed firearms dealer.
It says there are restrictions on the amount of fertilizer one can purchase because ammonium nitrate, when mixed with other substances, can become explosive.
Right, because you don't have a right to explosives, you do have a right to keep and bear arm for your own safety.
But the headline here that it's easier to buy a gun than it is to buy Claritin-D is just not true.
Try buying Claritin-D.
Go to a pharmacy, try to buy Claritin-D.
It is much easier to buy Claritin-D than it is to go to a gun shop and buy a gun.
In California, you actually have to take a test.
In California, in certain other states, you don't.
In Florida, you have to have a federal background check.
They check you through the system.
That doesn't happen with cold medicine.
By the way, I think that from a libertarian perspective, there's a solid argument that I should be able to buy as much Sudafed as I want at a given shot.
And I'm not sure that the government has a place in regulating how much Sudafed I can buy.
So I have problems with that on a libertarian basis just automatically.
I know I should have to go back to the store every so often to buy Sudafed if I just want to stock up and use it later.
And if I'm producing meth, then the government can bust me.
And the government can prosecute me.
But again, this is the media pushing falsehoods, the idea that it's difficult to buy guns, that it's easier to buy lots of other things in the United States than it is to buy a gun.
Just not true if you're doing it legally through a federally licensed firearms dealer.
That's not the only piece of propaganda being put out.
CNN has a commentator named Gagliano, and this person says that James Gagliano, who's the FBI supervisory special agent, retired.
Who says that the Founding Fathers never could have envisioned an 18-year-old kid buying a gun.
Invented gunpowder in 700 A.D.
The first guns were mid-14th century invented.
The 1791, the Second Amendment comes online, and here we are in 2018, and we're hanging on to this and we're going, we just can't talk about this because if we do that, we're somehow going to tick off the Founding Fathers.
The Founding Fathers could not envision that an 18-year-old kid could go into a gun store He can't buy beer, but he could buy a semi-automatic weapon, and it's a weapon of war, Dave.
We've spoken about this.
Okay, this is absolute sheer nonsense.
The Founding Fathers were fully aware that 18-year-old kids could buy weapons of war.
Who do you think was in the American Revolutionary Army?
Well, the Founding Fathers would mostly be shocked by his regulations on age of consent to buy beer, right?
They would be like, wait a second, you have to be 18 to get a beer?
You have to be 18 to get an ale around here?
What kind of nonsense is that?
There are people in the Revolutionary Army who are 14 years old, 15 years old.
If you actually go and watch Mel Gibson's movie, The Patriot, there are a lot of kids in there.
The reason that they're in there is because that was true.
There were a lot of kids who were in the American Revolutionary Army.
And by the way, virtually everybody in the United States at the time of the founding owned a weapon and brought it home, and then they would drill on the green together as part of a well-regulated militia, but it was personal gun ownership.
Everyone owned a gun back in the day, including people who were young.
18-year-old kids, by the way, were not kids in 1791.
In 1791, 18-year-old people were expected to be looking to get married and have a family already.
We're only considering 18-year-old kids because this is our modern society where 18-year-olds are considered kids, except if they have something to say about gun control, in which case we consider them adults, as we'll get to in just a second.
That's not the end of the propaganda.
Simone Sanders, commentator on MSNBC, said, well, you know, what this is really about is race, because everything is always about race.
Invariably and always, everything is about race.
- It's a favorite talking point. - No, it's not a favorite talking point.
- All I wanna say is, my point is, hold up, hold up.
- Had the Parkland shooter been black or brown, we wouldn't be talking about the types of legislation we could and could not make happen.
Because if he was yelling Allah Akbar, Congress and the President, one would have been tweeting about it and they would have swooped in and did whatever they felt needed to.
That's not true.
They didn't change the gun laws after Islamic violence.
Did they change the gun laws after San Bernardino?
We have a Muslim ban, dammit!
Did we change the gun laws after San Bernardino?
What I am saying is this... You know, you don't have to demagogue this.
No, I'm not demagoguing anything, but what I am saying is... You don't have to make it about race.
Okay.
Okay, Bill Kristol here actually doing Yeoman's work is on CNN and MSNBC.
Of course, he's exactly right.
That's him saying, we didn't change any of the gun laws after San Bernardino.
We didn't change any of the gun laws after the Orlando massacre.
And it's worth noting that when everybody says, well, there was a Muslim ban after that, you're messing up the timeline.
OK, San Bernardino happened.
The San Bernardino shooting was, I believe, in 2015.
That was two years before any Muslim ban was actually attempted.
And it wasn't a Muslim ban anyway.
It was a travel ban from particular countries.
The vast majority of Muslims all over the world can still get into the United States.
The same thing is true of the Orlando shooting.
Not one gun law was changed as a result of those shootings, but they're attempting to demagogue the issues because, again, these issues must be demagogued according to the left.
The reason that the issues are demagogued is because the left wants to push this notion that anyone who disagrees with them is a bad person, demagogues.
David Brooks has a good column on this over at the New York Times.
It's rare that I recommend a David Brooks column because he's one of the in-house conservatives over at the New York Times, which means he's not particularly conservative.
He's a fan of gun control.
But what he said today is basically correct, but the left is fighting angry over it.
They are spitting mad over this.
What David Brooks said today As he said, many of us have walked this emotional path.
We may end up doing more harm than good.
If there's one thing we've learned, it is that guns have become a cultural flashpoint in a nation that is unequal and divided.
The people who defend gun rights believe that snobbish elites look down on their morals and want to destroy their culture.
If we end up telling such people that they and their guns are despicable, they will just despise us back and dig in their heels.
So if you want to stop school shootings, it's not enough just to vent and march.
It's necessary to let people from red America lead the way and to show respect to gun owners at all points.
There has to be trust and respect first.
Then we can strike a compromise on guns as guns and not some sacred cross in the culture war.
This, of course, is 100% true.
One of the reasons that no agreement has been reached here is that gun owners will say, why don't we talk about these issues that have nothing to do with guns?
And the left will say, I don't want to talk about any of those issues.
You're just doing that because you want to distract from guns.
And the right will say, gun owners will say to the left, well, the only reason you want to talk about guns is because you hate guns.
It's not because you actually think this is going to prevent school shootings.
And you've provided no evidence that this will prevent school shootings other than a mass gun confiscation, like a regime in Australia or Britain, where the sample size is too small to really identify it anyway.
The number of school shootings in Australia prior to the gun ban, the gun confiscation, the gun buyback program was so low that when it went to zero, that is within margin of error.
But the left has a real stake in avoiding the consequences of having real discussions about real issues, and the right knows that.
People on the right, gun owners, feel insulted by this, as well they should.
When ABC shows that video of that guy cutting his gun in half, and then suggests to me, a law-abiding gun owner, that if I were a good person, I would saw my gun in half, my answer is no.
If I were a good person, I would maintain my gun, keep it in good working condition, and shoot bad guys when they attempt to shoot innocent people.
It's always the cops who take down these folks, by the way.
It's always people with guns who take down mass shooters.
It is always the threat of another gun that stops a mass shooter in the end.
That's why it's so foolish to cast doubt on all law-abiding gun owners.
Now, you want to talk about measures that you can take because you think that they are reasonable with regard to buying guns and owning guns.
You're going to have to show, number one, how that connects to the issue at hand, school shootings.
And number two, you're going to have to explain why it is that gun violence in the United States has been dramatically declining for the last two decades, despite skyrocketing numbers of guns in circulation in the United States.
The rate of gun ownership has gone down overall, I believe, among households.
But the number of guns in the United States on an absolute level has gone up pretty tremendously over the last 20 years.
Meanwhile, the rate of gun violence has gone down.
So if the absolute number of guns were supposed to be a good measure of how much gun violence was taking place, it simply is not.
It just isn't.
But in their drive, their desire to ignore the evidence in front of them, the left seeks to avoid the consequences of these discussions.
And instead, they cast aspersions at people on the right.
When people on the right say, guys, we're all on the same side here, people on the left say, no, we're not, because the NRA kills people.
They've—there was literally a tweet yesterday asking how many people the NRA had killed today, how many children the NRA had killed today.
The answer is zero.
There's not one documented case of a mass shooter being a member of the NRA.
But it doesn't matter.
You know, who cares?
New York Daily News ran that headline.
Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?
Again, the answer is zero.
But we're never going to hear conversations, by the way, about organizations that actually do kill children like Planned Parenthood.
How many kids did they kill today?
Well, on average, they kill about 1,000 children a day, 1,000 unborn children a day.
So that seems like a good place to start if you're going to talk about dead kids because of organizations.
Not the NRA.
OK, we're going to get to the student crusade, the children's crusade in just a second, and whether we should listen to the children, whether the children should lead us, because this is the new pitch from the left.
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Okay, so, the left has been calling now for a children's crusade.
They know they've been making these gun control arguments consistently for a long time.
And they know that these gun control arguments have not been particularly effective.
The gun control laws have not been put on the books.
The gun control laws that are on the books have not really been enforced well.
So now the left is looking for new spokespeople.
Because they figure that it can't be the message that's wrong.
It can't be that the American people don't particularly like the message.
It has to be something else.
And what it probably is, is that we've been using the wrong messengers.
The messengers that we truly need in this crusade are children.
As you know, this is a pet peeve of mine.
When Jimmy Kimmel trotted out his small child, his baby, who has no political views from what I can see, to talk about Obamacare and suggested that his child's heart surgery at Children's Hospital with Dr. Von Starnes was an excuse for maintaining Obamacare, I said that this was immoral.
I said it was immoral because my daughter had the same surgery at the same hospital with the same—well, a different surgery, but an open-heart surgery, same hospital with same doctor.
This did not confer expertise upon me regarding Obamacare.
You actually have to study the issues.
I objected when Democrats under President Obama would routinely trot out children and use children's letters as an excuse to talk about public policy.
They did this a lot on guns.
They would find a letter in the mail from a seven-year-old, probably written by mommy and daddy, about gun control.
Why can't we just make all the guns go away?
It's really interesting.
The other day, my parents brought over a box of old papers, stuff I'd had from when I was a little kid.
And I went to a public school, and I found a paper in there that I'd written when I was maybe six or seven years old.
And the entire thing was about environmentalism and how human beings are ruining the environment.
And the reason that I was writing that paper when I was six or seven years old is because this is basically what they teach in public school.
They teach you that you're supposed to care about the environment, which is fine, but then they teach you that man is ruining the environment.
Man, responsible for the death of all the geese.
This is the routine that they teach in public school.
It's not necessarily true.
In fact, the facts don't tend to back up the idea that human beings are solely responsible for degradation in every aspect of the environment.
In many ways, the environment has gotten better in the last few decades.
But this is what I was writing when I was seven.
Should I have been deciding gun policy?
Probably not, because what I'd probably be parroting is what I'd heard from my teachers and from my parents.
Because this is what children do.
Adults teach children, and then children parrot what the adults have to say because they think adults are smart.
It's only later, when children become adults, that they realize that adults are just as stupid as kids most of the time.
One of the great disappointments of being an adult is realizing that all the people who have houses and cars are just the same stupid kids, but a little bit more mentally developed.
That said, Adults are adults and children are children.
But because there are a bunch of high school kids who are now speaking out about gun control and the media wants to confer upon them virtue, the media wants to confer upon them the capacity for leadership, it's quite shocking and quite fascinating and quite stupid.
So here, as I showed you before, is these kids chanting, hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?
from the New York Daily News.
I don't know if we actually, so they did that, and then there was a picture of all these kids lying in front of the White House because that means something.
If children lie in front of the White House, that makes a difference.
If it's 17-year-olds lying in front of the White House, that makes a difference.
There was a kid named David Hogg who is apparently, according to his Twitter feed, he was pro-gun control long before this happened, which doesn't change anything.
It just suggests that he had a political agenda and still has a political agenda.
It wasn't like he was pro-gun and then flipped because of what he saw in front of him.
You know, new evidence changing his position.
This is always his position.
But David Hogg, he came out and was ripping anybody who has taken money from the NRA and, of course, being treated with full seriousness by the anchors on this show, even though there is no credibility to the actual words that this human being is speaking.
Emma Gonzalez, another shooting survivor, doing the same thing.
We would hope that you have the decent morality to support us at this point.
And not take money from people that want to keep lessening gun legislation and making it even easier for these horrifying people to get guns.
because if you can't get elected without taking money from child murderers, why are you running?
And there's Alison Camerata kind of shaking her head softly and giving full credibility to idiotic comments like this.
I'm sorry, whether it's said by a 17-year-old or whether it's said by a 35-year-old, stupid comments are stupid comments.
This is a stupid comment.
If you can't take— Who are the child murderers that he's talking about?
Is it ISIS?
Who are the child murderers?
Is it Planned Parenthood?
No, it's the NRA.
And the NRA gives money to politicians because they think that the politicians are going to support gun rights.
One of the memes that was going around yesterday that is an absolute falsehood, it's an absolute lie, there was a meme going around yesterday suggesting that the NRA had paid for the gun training of this kid.
No, of the shooter.
No, what actually happened is that the NRA gave money to the Junior ROTC, which is a training program for future military members.
JROTC is a fantastic program.
ROTC is a great program.
This kid, this shooter, this terrible human being, went to some of these shooting programs with JROTC.
And the media ran with this as NRA had a training program for the kid.
That's not remotely true.
That's not true.
That's what the media was pushing, because again, the message matters more than the actual truth of the message.
And just because these kids experienced pain and suffering, Our hearts go out to them for experiencing pain and suffering, but it doesn't mean that what they're saying makes any sense.
Lots of people experience pain and suffering.
Jim Garrity was making this point yesterday with regard to the Jersey girls.
These are the women whose husbands were lost in 9-11.
They were very radically left, and they were conferred what some people on the left, I think it was Maureen Dowd, suggested was absolute moral authority.
Give them absolute moral authority.
Now, there's no such thing as absolute moral authority for any statement.
Either a statement is true or a statement is false.
Moral authority means nothing.
You don't have moral, moral authority to say something simply because you've suffered.
The question is whether what you are saying is effective and truthful and whether it forwards a proper agenda for the American people, not whether you have personally suffered in doing this.
There are lots of people who have personally suffered and then do terrible things.
It doesn't mean that they're allowed to do terrible things or say terrible things.
Personal suffering does not make something more legitimate.
It's a real pet peeve of mine.
But what Gary was pointing out is that the Jersey Girls were treated with this tremendous respect by the media.
They would go on national television shows and say things like it was an inside job, like 9-11 was an inside job.
There were certain members of the Jersey Girls who said that.
And members of the media would give exactly the reaction you're seeing from Alison Camerota there, the kind of shakehead, serious tone, like pretending that this is OK, what you're saying, just because you went through something terrible.
Well, you going through something terrible doesn't make what you say any more or less true.
It's either true or it's not.
But again, the left has an agenda here, and the agenda here is to put up the most sympathetic faces possible in order to push an agenda that the left already wants.
As I said yesterday, CNN's town hall they're holding tomorrow night, with regard to gun control, I don't remember them doing the same thing after the Boston Marathon bombing.
I don't remember them doing the same thing after San Bernardino, at least not for people who are stumping for a travel ban.
They would never do the same thing with regard to people who are looking for better screening of illegal immigrants.
I don't remember them doing a panel with Kate Steinle's family talking about why we need Kate's law.
Instead, they push stories about sanctuary cities every day.
One of the things that happens in the media that people tend to ignore is selection bias.
So CNN will say, yes, we covered the pro-gun control position and the anti-gun control position.
Yes, but how did you cover it?
What stories did you choose to cover?
Fox News is biased in a particular way because they choose what they want to put on TV.
And CNN is biased in a particular way because they choose what they want to put on TV.
The segments that you choose to put on TV are just as important as how those segments are actually presented.
So CNN spending blanket coverage on a bunch of students who don't know anything about gun control or gun laws or the efficacy of various proposals being trotted out because they're sympathetic faces, I just find really disheartening.
It gets even worse than that.
In a second, I'm going to show you what a Harvard law professor, Lawrence Tribe, who's gone completely crazy, had to say about what he called the so-called children's crusade.
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So Harvard professor Lawrence Tribe is pushing what he calls now a children's crusade.
And what this crusade is, is letting the children speak for us.
Now, it's always interesting to watch as folks on the left trot out children in support of certain propositions but not others.
So if we had, for example, a bunch of 15-year-old girls said, listen, I think that we should cut back on pornography.
Pornography is really bad.
It's turning boys into pervs.
It makes boys more likely to treat us badly.
What we need is a crusade against pornography across the country.
Then all of a sudden it would be, these kids don't know what they're talking about.
These public policy experts, really?
Like 15-year-old girls?
Come on.
When you talk about children, when whenever people in the pro-life movement show pictures of aborted babies.
Or show pictures of non-aborted babies, and they say, this is what you are killing.
Then it turns into, how dare you use children as a crutch for your argument?
Even though it's children's lives that are really at stake.
They're calling this gun control march, they're planning a gun control march for March 24th, and they're calling it the march for our lives.
The thing about the unborn is they can't have a march for their lives, because by definition, they are unborn.
But the march for our life is really stupid, at least in the way that it's termed.
You can march for whatever you want.
It's a free country.
The terminology, March for Our Lives, is silly, because nobody is suggesting that they want you to die.
The March for Civil Rights mattered, because there were a lot of people who wanted to actively deprive you of civil rights.
I don't know a single person in the United States, outside of some evil mass shooters, who actually wants to deprive any of these kids of their lives, their liberty, or their pursuit of happiness.
I don't know anyone in the United States who actually wants to do that.
We're all talking about different ways to assure that these kids can be protected, even if the left refuses to acknowledge that fact.
Lawrence tried, because he's so eager to push the idea that kids can lead us, a child shall lead us.
He suggested, quote, This is certainly not true.
This is certainly not true.
If that were true, it would not be easy to get kids who are 14 to smoke pot.
Kids who are 14 are dumb.
Okay, I speak to lots of kids who are 14.
At some point, my daughter will be... I remember being 14.
Kids between 14 and 18, when I say they're dumb, I don't mean they don't have the capacity to be smart.
I mean, they literally have underdeveloped brains.
Brain science suggests that your brain does not stop developing until you are 25.
Your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that is responsible for higher function, it's the part of your brain that is basically the brakes on your amygdala.
Your amygdala is your emotional response center.
That is really overdeveloped when you're a teenager.
And then, your prefrontal cortex, because it's underdeveloped, doesn't stop you from doing stuff.
So you say, Hey, car surfing.
Your amygdala goes, car surfing, that sounds awesome!
That'll be fun!
And adrenaline!
Yeah!
And then your prefrontal cortex, when you're an adult, goes, right, but you'll die.
And that's stupid.
When you're a teenager, the prefrontal cortex goes, well, maybe.
And then you do something dumb.
There's a reason that 16-year-old drivers are the worst drivers on the road.
There's a reason that teenagers make the worst sexual decisions imaginable.
There's a reason that teenagers make dumb life decisions about drugs.
Teenagers are not known as a typical matter, especially in our infantilizing era where we don't actually confer responsibility on children.
In that infantilizing era, kids are not capable of making good public policy decisions as a general rule.
This is not necessarily true for every individual, but it is certainly true as a broad generality, which is why the age of consent in most states is 16 years old or higher.
It is why the age for voting is 18 years old.
There's a good case to be made.
It should be raised back to 21 based on modern brain science.
But anyway, Lawrence Tribe says, wouldn't it be great if the voting age were lowered to 16?
Just a pipe dream, I know, but Children's Crusade?
Couple notes about the Children's Crusade.
If he's talking about the original Children's Crusade, which took place in the 13th century...
That was a giant fail.
The idea there was that a bunch of children were going to go to the Middle East, and they were going to convince all of the Muslims in the Middle East to become Christian, or at least give up control over Jerusalem.
It ended, variably, by various accounts, with the enslavement of thousands of children, or with them becoming homeless on the streets of Rome.
So that was a giant fail.
If you're talking about Martin Luther King's Children's Crusade, in which a bunch of children marched for civil rights, the idea there was to demonstrate just how evil the anti-civil rights forces were by showing Bull Connor sticking dogs on eight-year-old children.
I mean, honestly, there are some questions about whether it's moral to do that, really, but not the sickening of the dogs.
That is immoral.
There are questions about whether it is moral to put children in the line of fire, to push even a useful political agenda, but at least there was a use here.
If there were a children's crusade now for gun control, which apparently there's going to be, no one is going to stop them.
No one is stopping these kids from lying down and getting on TV and making whatever point they want to make.
But the left has a very bifurcated view of when children are responsible for their actions.
So when children parrot the left agenda, then all of a sudden, they're responsible for their actions.
When they don't parrot the left agenda, then they are not responsible for their actions.
That's the way that this works.
So the left is constantly pushing more sexual autonomy for youngsters.
They say that laws restricting minors' access to abortion and contraceptives are unconstitutional, that children have a capacity to declare themselves men or women, even if they are members of the opposite sex, and that they should go through gender transitioning, regardless of what their parents have to say.
This week, a judge in Ohio ruled that a custody of a 17-year-old girl So, you want to lower the voting age to 16, but you want to increase the gun purchase age to 21.
rather than her parents because she wanted to become a boy and her parents said no.
Well, that logic is likely to be utilized more rather than less in the future.
But the same people who say that children are fully capable of making grown people decisions, they will say that the legal age for gun purchases should be raised to 21.
So you want to lower the voting age to 16, but you want to increase the gun purchase age to 21.
Weird how that works.
If kids are so good at stuff, if kids are so capable of making fully grown people decisions, then why would you not lower the age of consent for buying a gun to 16?
After all, these kids have far better BS detectors on average than adults.
They're more responsible than adults, apparently.
They're really good at things.
So why shouldn't we have a children's crusade?
Let's arm up all the kids.
I mean, if the kids are the ones who are the best among us, but of course the left doesn't want to do that.
So they want to say that 16-year-olds should vote.
Why?
Because when you're 16, you're on the left.
And then they want to say that 16-year-olds should not be able to drink or have a gun.
So responsibility without any accountability is, I guess, the order of the day.
These are the same folks who suggest, by the way, that children are disadvantaged if they are not on their parents' health insurance until they're 26 years old.
They actually say that the criminal justice system should try you as a juvie until you're 25, because it's not until you're mid-twenties that your brain finally reaches complete maturity.
So which is it?
Are kids fully autonomous agents?
Or are kids actually innocents to be protected?
Now my perspective on this is pretty clear.
I think that children are innocents to be protected.
I don't think that children and teenagers are fully rational actors.
And I think that it is adults It is the job of adults to stand up and teach children.
It is adults' jobs to lead.
Now, what the left would say is adults aren't leading.
They aren't leading.
That's why we need children to lead.
No, what the left means is adults aren't doing what you want them to do, and therefore you want to get a bunch of sympathetic, cute faces to do it.
Listen, my kids are really, really cute.
As I've said before, they've been judged by an objective scale as the cutest children on planet Earth.
But they don't get to make policy in my house.
I make policy in my house because my kids are not good policymakers.
If my kids were good policy makers, then I'd listen to my son every time he waddles out of his bedroom at 8 o'clock at night, waddles over to the refrigerator, opens it up, and then says, ice cream, ice cream.
Okay, he doesn't get the ice cream.
I'm the parent.
It's bad parenting, and it's bad adult responsibility to say that children should lead the way on this stuff.
Again, if these kids are capable of making a good argument, make the good argument.
Then I'll respect the argument.
But I'm not going to respect your authority to make the argument just because.
This is why it's so weird.
Like Nate Silver, who is somebody who believes in expertise.
He spends his life talking about why expertise matters.
He's somebody who spends his life analyzing numbers.
He was very angry because there was an argument that was made Over at the Federalist about shooting survivors don't have additional legitimacy when it comes to public policy arguments.
And here's what Nate Silver tweeted.
He tweeted, quote, Parkland students aren't credentialed to talk about the gun debate is one of the worst takes of all time, especially when it comes from people who don't have very much relevant life experience themselves.
What relevant life experience is it to actually see a shooting?
Does that make your life experience...
Does that make it more relevant when you make a statistical argument?
Nate Silver is captain statistics, and yet that all seems to go out the window when there's a personal experience that is had.
Personal experience is not an argument, it's an emotional appeal.
If we all understand that, then we can withhold the emotional appeals.
I mean, we can stand up to them or we can take them as they are, but to use that as a substitute for actual logic is really, really dumb.
Now, speaking of really, really dumb, there are a series of articles over the last couple of days about homelessness in California.
This is something I know a little bit about because there's a serious homeless problem in my community.
There's a serious homeless problem in Los Angeles.
Last check, I think there were 53,000 homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles, so basically Dodger Stadium filled with homeless people.
In San Francisco, it's just horrifying.
Apparently, in San Francisco, the NBC Bay Area investigative unit surveyed 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco in search of trash, needles and feces.
The investigation revealed trash littered across every single block.
The survey also found 41 blocks dotted with needles and 96 blocks sullied with piles of feces.
Just beautiful.
Just how glorious.
It's wonderful that they've really done a good job with one of the most beautiful cities in the world by littering with needles.
I mean, again, this is happening everywhere.
A block from my house, right on the street, we saw a needle the other day.
And that's because there are homeless people who are wandering around.
They're drug users.
There are some of them who are drug users.
Not the overwhelming majority, but certainly a significant percentage of homeless people are drug users or alcoholic or mentally ill.
And there are a bunch of people who are saying, in the richest cities in the world, San Francisco, should there be this homeless problem?
A couple of things to note about that.
One, if you are a believer that homeless people are created by the price of housing, then maybe it's the high level of regulation in San Francisco that's driving the homeless problem.
When you create rent control, when you prevent developers from actually building new buildings, that sends the prices skyrocketing.
And that means that if you are a believer that it's people who are on the fringes, people on the economic margins, who end up homeless, if that's your take, then you should really be against regulations with regard to building new units of housing.
But folks on the left aren't.
They foolishly cling to this idea that rent control is going to somehow bring about cheaper housing, which it never has done anywhere for any large scale of people.
Only additional development does that.
I'm not a believer that that's what causes the homeless problem.
What causes the homeless problem, in my view, and there are a number of good books, about mental illness and the homeless crisis is that from the 1960s on, including the 70s and 80s, there's been a tremendous state and local underfunding of mental health facilities.
The laws have been tremendously loosened.
So people are not arrested for sleeping on the streets, and they are not put into treatment facilities if they need treatment.
Instead, they are left to be on the streets.
The ACLU has actually sued to allow people to keep their stuff on the streets in Los Angeles.
So there have been judges in the state of California, of course, who have suggested that you have a state and federal constitutional right to sleep on the streets in Los Angeles.
And then we wonder why the streets are littered with feces and needles.
That's why.
When you leave mentally ill people on the streets, when you leave people who are drug addicts on the streets, you end up with poop and drugs on the streets.
It's just something that happened.
And it is not mean or cruel to people who are mentally ill to suggest that they ought to be given treatment that they need.
The whole point of a functioning republic is that we are seeking to allow people rational choice.
When you are not in your rational mind, you cannot make good choices.
When you are a drug-addled person, you cannot make rational choices.
When you are a mentally ill person, a severely mentally ill person living on the street, These are not good choices in a very high percentage.
The studies vary, but a very high percentage by every study of people who are living on the streets are mentally ill and or drug addicts.
And yet the laws have been specifically constructed by the left to allow those people to live in their own filth on the streets.
It is not good for them.
It is not good for the society.
It's not good overall.
This is a result of bad left policy, not just poverty.
Left wants to make it about communism, as though there are no homeless people in communist societies.
It's not about that.
It's about bad policy that is happening in our nation's democratic cities, which is where the vast majority of homeless people are living at this point.
Okay, so, time for a couple of things that I like, and then some things I hate.
And then we'll do a Federalist paper, since we did not do one yesterday.
So, things I like.
So I am currently reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie by David Nassau.
Andrew Carnegie was, at one point, the wealthiest person in the United States, which is to say, probably on Earth.
One of the great industrialists.
And all the myths about him as a robber baron who decided to give back to the poor as he was old and dying, that's not true.
From the time that he was middle-aged, he knew he wanted to give away all his wealth, which is why the Carnegie Endowment is so large, it's why there's Carnegie Hall, it's why there are libraries named after Andrew Carnegie.
It demonstrates, again, that just because you become wealthy doesn't mean that you become non-virtuous.
Now, the way that he got his wealth is a little more controversial.
So Carnegie was involved with a lot of insider deals.
He got wealthy the way a lot of people got wealthy in the Gilded Age, which is to say that he got a bunch of insider contracts from government-connected players.
I'm not in favor of that sort of cronyism, obviously.
But the historical read on Carnegie is that he was a bad man, a cruel man.
At the end of his life, he had sort of a Scrooge-like Reformation.
Then decided to give away his money.
That's not factually true.
The biography is quite good.
David Nassau, Andrew Carnegie.
Check out the book.
Okay, other things that I like.
So Fergie has now apologized for her version of the national anthem.
She says, I've always been honored and proud to perform the national anthem, and last night I wanted to try something special for the NBA.
I'm a risk taker artistically, but clearly this transition didn't strike the intended tone.
I love this country and honestly tried my best.
Okay, well, that's fair.
That's fair.
You know, I got enjoyment out of it.
I'll say that.
I found it hilarious and enjoyable.
It was less about being disrespectful to me than it just being bad.
But good for Fergie for at least recognizing that the anthem that she sang was garbage.
So kudos there.
OK, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So the controversy over Laura Ingraham continues.
As I said yesterday, this is a deeply intellectually dishonest conversation.
Laura Ingraham said to LeBron James, shut up and dribble.
She literally wrote a book called Shut Up and Sing.
Okay, this is 15 years ago.
This has been part of her shtick for a very long time.
When she says that celebrities should shut up and do whatever it is that they do, what she is saying is that we don't really think that your opinion matters very much.
Not that you have to shut up, not that you don't have a right to speak, but that why would we take your opinion that seriously if you don't have any expertise on the issue?
Yet, the entire media decided that it was time to call her a bigot on this basis.
So, Kevin Durant, the star player for the Golden State Warriors, he says that this was racist.
He says, quote, like I said, our president made it cool for people to kind of speak their truth and kind of show what they're really about.
It's cool to uncover that now.
So we know it's coming.
We know if we use our voice, and it's not what some people may agree with, of course they're going to say ignorant things like that.
But we are the American dream.
We come from nothing.
We rose up in our profession to be able to take care of our families forever, all of which is fair.
But then he says, I kind of feel sorry for her because she's not looking through the lens of being free and what that's about.
It feels bad that she doesn't know what we came from or who we are personally.
She might actually enjoy being around us, but might actually feel inspired by being not just around me or LeBron, but guys in our position, anybody of color who has risen up and done something positive in life.
This is putting some accusations on Laura Ingraham that do not exist.
I'm sure that Laura Ingraham knows a lot of black people.
I'm sure she would enjoy hanging out with a lot of NBA players.
I'm sure I would enjoy hanging out with a lot of NBA players.
They seem like pretty cool folks, some of them.
But that doesn't mean they have any political expertise, or that if I criticize LeBron James for not knowing what he's talking about, that's somehow a racist take.
Michael Wilbon was doing the same thing on ESPN.
He's a columnist for The Washington Post.
And he says that Laura Ingraham comes off like a bigot.
Shut up and dribble.
And I realize she was playing off the title of something, whether it's a book or lecture or whatever she's getting.
But shut up and dribble.
You take yourself that seriously?
You're that smart?
It's interesting that all these, again, uber-conservatives who talk about how, what stable geniuses they are, but yet they sound like morons when they try and dictate to other people what they should talk about, what they're intelligent enough to talk about.
And she comes off like a bigot.
I don't know her.
I don't know her work.
I turn as frantically off Fox as I can.
OK, well, if you don't know her and you don't know her work, then why are you calling her a bigot?
And she says she comes off like a bigot.
And then he acknowledges at the very beginning of that statement that Laura Ingraham wrote a book called Shut Up and Sing about the Dixie Chicks, who are as white as white can be.
Now, I will say that there are a bunch of people on the right who say, why should celebrities have opinions on politics?
And then when it's Kid Rock running for Senate, then suddenly they're fine with it.
That's silly.
There are people on the left who are doing the same thing, by the way.
They're saying that Kid Rock running for Senate is super crazy.
Why would he do that?
And now, today, at Drudge Report, he's linking to Showbiz 411.
George Clooney is talking about running for president, apparently.
Apparently, they're going to speak.
He and his wife Amal are going to appear at the March for Our Lives.
He says that only kids will be speaking at the event, but he's going to show up anyway.
And then he says, would I like to be the next president?
Oh, that sounds like fun.
Can I just add, like, anybody to be the next president of the United States right away, please?
And Clooney took in an Iraqi refugee last September in Kentucky.
The refugee is now a student at the University of Chicago.
And so there's a good case to be made that they're going to try and push George Clooney or some other celebrity into the presidency.
Listen, I'm not happy with the emerge of celebrity in politics.
I think it's backwards.
I think that celebrity, when people take people's fame as a measure of their aptitude, that's foolish.
One of the great lines in Fiddler on the Roof, the musical Fiddler on the Roof, is Tevye, he's talking about if I were a rich man.
He's talking about if you were rich.
And then people would come to him, and they'd ask him questions that would cross a rabbi's eyes.
And he says, and it would not matter if I answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know.
Okay, the same thing is true about fame in the United States.
When you're famous, people think you actually know what you're talking about.
Usually when you're famous for something, that doesn't mean that you know anything about any other topic.
I'm not an astrophysicist.
Neil deGrasse Tyson knows more about astrophysics than I do.
By the same token, Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a politician, and he doesn't know anything about politics, and when he speaks about politics, he sounds like a doof.
So, areas of expertise do matter.
Okay.
Quick Federalist paper.
We didn't do it yesterday.
So we are on Federalist 16.
Alexander Hamilton continuing to talk about the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation and why they should be replaced by the Constitution.
He says, confederacies tend to devolve into civil war because there's not a strong enough centralized government.
If there's not enough that the federal government does, if it's basically just there, then the only way to enforce the rules is with a large standing army, whereas if there's a broad A broad federal government with large pockets of agreement, then people actually have a stake in the preservation of that government.
And he says, if a confederacy breaks down into civil war, then it's going to get really bloody.
Now remember, all of this is 80 years before the Civil War, or 70 years before the Civil War, and it all comes true.
He says, once the sword is drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.
The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the states against which the arms of the Union were exerted.
Of course, it very nearly did.
He also said states cannot be trusted to do the work of the federal government.
of submission.
He said the first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the union.
Of course, it very nearly did.
He also said states cannot be trusted to do the work of the federal government.
So if you were to have a confederacy where you'd say the federal government will pass a law and then we won't have any federal bodies, any federal bureaucracy, any federal forces in the states to enforce those, then the states will just ignore them.
The states will just not enforce those laws.
And then it'll be very hard to enforce them because what are you going to do?
Invade a state to force it to abide by federal law?
Better that you should have an independent federal government that can enforce its own sphere of law.
And then if a state impedes that, then you actually have a conflict as opposed to a state just refusing to enforce federal law.
That's a distinction that still has some relevance for today's constitutional law, particularly when it comes to the federal government roping states into doing their work All righty.
We will be back here tomorrow from Washington, D.C., where we are headed for CPAC.
I ran out of time to talk about CPAC.
I'll hopefully talk about it a little bit tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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