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March 24, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:00
The Left’s Lies About “Whiteness” And Gun Control | Ep. 1222
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In the aftermath of a mass shooting in Colorado, the left trots out its usual propaganda about gun control and whiteness.
But the evidence just isn't there.
Plus, Joe Biden pushing massive change.
But just how fast?
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Alrighty, so in the aftermath of this horrific shooting in Colorado, the left went into An almost mechanistic call for gun control.
Just like clockwork.
Every time there is a mass shooting, and that mass shooting particularly is a mass shooting that cannot be blamed on white supremacy, they make it about gun control, right?
So there's a certain formula the left likes to use.
If a mass shooting is performed by a person who is not white, they talk about gun control.
If the mass shooting is performed by a person who is white, they talk about white supremacy with like a little taste of gun control.
Well, right now, it turns out that the shooter in this particular case was not white.
He was apparently a Syrian immigrant who had serious mental illness problems.
And so this became immediately a call for gun control.
And understand that the call for gun control for the media is based on emotional appeal.
It is not based on a factually reasoned argument in favor of gun control, why gun control would work in a country that already has 300 million guns in circulation.
It is not a case that makes any sort of logical sense, any evidentiary sense.
Instead, it is a case that is solely and completely driven by a desire to cram down a moral premise on the rest of the world, which is that if you disagree with the left, then this means that in some way you're morally deficient.
This is the case members of the media make, and the way they make it is by getting very emotional on TV.
Now, I'm not denying that people on TV, the people you watch every night, get emotional about stories.
All I'm pointing out is that they only get emotional about certain stories, right?
They don't get emotional every time they talk about violence in Chicago over the weekend, which they barely talk about at all.
And there's ongoing violence in Chicago every weekend.
Dozens of people shot every single weekend in Chicago, and they don't seem to care very much about that.
You don't see people welling up on TV over that.
But every time there's a mass shooting, That is not to be blamed on sort of the regular dose of violence that you see in America's major cities.
If we're not talking about the increased murder rate around America's major cities, that is largely driven by lack of police, then they start to get very emotional.
So you'll see anchors get very emotional about the George Floyd situation, but you won't see anchors get emotional about small children being shot in the middle of gangland wars in Chicago or Washington DC or Los Angeles.
And you won't see anybody mourn the folks who are dying because there's lack of police in these cities.
So the emotion is part of the agenda.
Again, the emotion can be genuine and also part of the agenda.
I'm not questioning the genuineness of the CNN anchors when they get very sad about mass shootings, because we should all be very sad about mass shootings.
All I'm pointing out is the performative sadness that you see on your nightly newscast is in fact connected to a political agenda.
What they choose to air in terms of their own emotional vulnerability is deeply connected to the idea that if you don't agree with them on policy, it's because you aren't caring.
And that's what happened last night on CNN.
You had Brianna Keller of CNN and Stephanie Elam near tears on CNN over the mass shooting.
Again, I'm not doubting the sincerity of their emotion.
I'm just pointing out that the emotion only appears on TV with regard to particular kinds of stories because it is being used as a wedge in order to suggest that if you don't agree with CNN's preferred solutions, you just don't care enough about bad things happening.
You know, Stephanie, as I'm hearing you report this, I just wonder, can you count how many times you've covered a story like this?
Have you lost count?
I don't.
I don't know anymore.
And it makes me sad.
It makes me sad to even sit here and think about that, Brianna, that there's been so many times that we have had to go out and cover these stories and talk to people who are devastated.
Okay, so here's the thing.
In the United States every year, there are over 19,000 homicides in the United States every single year.
The number of people who are killed in mass shootings in the United States every year Is generally, I mean, any number, any one of these is obviously a tragedy.
It should never happen.
We all agree.
OK, but the number of people who are killed in mass shootings of this kind, these sort of spectacular on TV blanket coverage mass shootings, it's probably not even 100 a year in terms of these kinds of shootings.
Okay, but the way that the media treat these shootings, as opposed to the other 19,000 homicides that happen every single year in the United States, does tell you something about their approach to these issues.
So the left will tell you, for example, that the right focuses, when there's a terror attack, the right will focus far too much on the terror attacks because your risk of actually dying in a terror attack is pretty low.
Your risk of dying in a mass shooting in a country of 330 million people is actually quite low.
Okay, your risk of being killed in a generalized homicide is higher.
Even that is pretty low in the United States, which is overall a pretty safe country.
But the way the media cover this stuff is to suggest that these particular shootings are a grave threat to every single American citizen.
This is anecdotal data being presented as systemic data, in the same way that the George Floyd death was presented as systemic police violence, even though we don't know that it actually was racist, even though we still have to find out whether it was, in fact, a homicide or not.
That was presented as systemic, even though the data don't support that.
Mass shootings are presented as systemic, even though the data really don't support that.
And not only that, because they are presented as systemic, the idea is that this is a high priority for the United States, and it requires massive restrictions.
In order to massively restrict the individual rights of Americans to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, you have to say that this is such a grave threat to the life and liberty of Americans that it justifies an encroachment on one of the fundamental rights held by 330 million Americans.
And so you have to say that the threat is supremely grave.
Not just that these incidents are acts of evil, that the people who commit them should be punished, that we should take every measure available without invading individual rights in order to stop them.
That's not enough.
Because what the left wants to do here is to invade your rights.
And so what you have is the media attempting to play up the idea that this stuff is happening like all the time in the United States.
So you have a piece from Philip Bump over at the Washington Post that says, the mass shooting in Colorado is probably only one of scores that have occurred during your lifetime.
He says it is with some grim irony that the United States had relatively few mass shootings last year.
The country had been averaging about seven such events annually since 2012, using the Washington Post's relatively conservative definition of such incidents as those in which four or more people are killed.
In 2020, there were only five, but then much of the country spent a decent part of the year isolated from one another and out of school because of the COVID pandemic.
Okay, so, number one, if a country averages seven incidents annually, this is according to the Washington Post, since 2012, in a country of 330 million people, that does not present a systemic risk to every American sufficient to justify a gun seizure on hundreds of millions of Americans, obviously.
So instead, what you'll see is playing with the data.
Because there are certain places the media can't go here.
If they were to talk about the generalized homicide problem in the United States, which actually is a broader risk to Americans, they would have to talk about the need for more police.
That's not a solution they want to talk about.
If they were to talk about where the risk of homicide is highest, they would have to talk about the fact that it is not being driven by quote-unquote Trumpian white supremacy, but that it is being driven by gangland violence and broken families and real problems that exist in America's major cities and that are exacerbated by lack of police.
That gun control in the middle of rural America would not actually stop this stuff.
So they pick a specific subset, a certain type of shooting, and then they declare that that type of shooting is the highest priority to stop for some yet-to-be-explained reason, as opposed to the other 19,000 homicides that occur every year in the United States.
And then they say that you are bad and unsympathetic if you don't agree with their solution to a problem that, on the list of problems facing everyday Americans, is not number one, it's not number two, it's probably not number ten.
Okay, it is, again, every one of these incidents is a tragedy.
That does not mean that the tragedy is sufficient to justify the seizure of guns from some hundreds of millions of Americans or banning the ability of Americans to obtain weapons to defend themselves, their rights, and their families.
So, you will see a couple of tricks that are played here.
One is the idea that Europe doesn't have stuff like this.
That Europe doesn't have mass shootings like this.
The United States is the only place on Earth that has mass shootings like this.
There is some level of truth to that, but not as much truth as the left would have you believe.
The idea here is that somehow gun control is the real solution here.
Well, I mean, that's not true.
The reality is that some of the safest states in America have extraordinary levels of gun ownership.
Vermont has extraordinary levels of gun ownership, very lax gun laws.
And yet Vermont happens to have pretty much no murder.
Chicago has extremely onerous gun regulations and very high levels of murder.
Washington DC has extremely onerous gun regulations.
Baltimore has extremely onerous gun regulations and very high levels of murder.
So the correlation just doesn't even hold as far as that goes.
But the Washington Post, I mean, by the way, Philip Bump will even acknowledge this in paragraph, what, six of this piece?
He says, it's important to maintain perspective.
Mass shootings are the cause of only small percentages of death in the United States, and only a small percentage of gun deaths, most of which are suicides.
No other country experiences such incidents at the same rate as the United States, and the shootings play a disproportionate role in our culture, both because of the fear they invoke and the complicated systems we've developed to prepare for them.
Okay, well, but that's being driven by the outsized media coverage.
One of the things we do here at The Daily Wire is we don't cover the names of shooters because we don't actually want to incentivize shooters who believe that they're going to get famous off the back of this sort of stuff.
I wish members of the media would do the same.
But it is, I mean, Bump here is acknowledging that this is the number one story at The Washington Post, right, is the importance of gun control, this particular shooting.
And the reason for that is because they want these shootings to play a disproportionate role in our culture because they justify the kinds of policies that they're looking for.
Again, if they were to focus on the broader murder problem in the United States, they would recognize heavy gun controls in major cities have not stopped the murder problem.
You know what stops the murder problem in America's major cities, which is predominantly where these murders happen?
More cops.
They don't want more cops.
They want to defund the cops.
So they've got a couple of priorities.
One, you can't have any sort of reportage that leads to the Objectively true conclusion that we need more cops?
You can only have reportage that leads to the conclusion that happens to be wrong, that gun control is justified.
And you need an emotional response that is broadcast on the air by pretty much everybody, because that emotional response is an attempt to say to everybody that if you disagree with us, it's because you just don't care enough.
Again, two things can be true at once.
The emotion can be genuine on the part of the left, and also, the genuine emotion is rather selective in its application to particular circumstances.
So as Philip Bump says, he says, let's conduct an experiment.
If you had to guess, how many mass shootings would you estimate have occurred in your lifetime?
Have your guess now.
See how close you were to the actual number.
The phenomenon is pervasive, both geographically and across time.
Except that, I'm sorry, in a country of 330 million people, seven incidents according to the Washington Post per year.
That is not extraordinarily pervasive.
It's a country of 330 million people.
You cannot say that incidents that happen seven times a year on average since 2012 are quote-unquote extraordinarily pervasive across time in a country of 330 million people.
This is not to downplay the evil at all.
This is to point out the statistical rarity of events like this, which is why they make the front pages.
Hey, and this is all part of a broader agenda, right?
Because the Washington Post has a piece today by Adam Taylor and Amanda Coletta, same day as the Philip bump.
I mean, they're right next to each other on the Washington Post website that says, here's how other countries have responded to mass shootings.
And of course, the answer is they banned a bunch of guns because this is what the media would like.
The media are pushing this stuff extremely, extremely hard.
In Britain, they decided that they were essentially going to collect firearms.
The 1997 Firearms Act ended up restricting ownership of almost all handguns.
The Washington Post isn't just reporting on this, because that's not New Reportage.
It happened in 1987.
Or 1997, rather.
If it happened in 1997, it is by definition not news.
So now they're just reporting what other countries have done to remind you that we could do the same here.
And presumably that would lead to this giant decrease in mass shootings, except for the fact that the baseline level of mass shootings in these countries was also rare.
You hear this about Australia.
Well, look at Australia's had a drop off in the number of mass shootings since their massive gun buyback program.
One, only one third of people actually turned in their guns in the buyback program.
And two, the number of actual mass shootings in Australia was statistically marginal in the first place.
So any decline in the number of mass shootings cannot be attributed directly to gun confiscation.
Okay, but this entire Washington Post piece is all about basically why gun seizures are a good idea.
They cite Britain, they cite New Zealand, they cite Australia.
They cite Canada, but the idea is that in the United States, we just don't have the moral wherewithal to do all of this.
It's not about the moral wherewithal.
We have a different calculation of risk, reward, and rights in the United States than they do in many of these other countries where the government is overbearing or public safety is, in some cases, much more problematic.
For example, the rape rates in Great Britain are apparently significantly higher than they are in the United States.
In part, because in the United States, a lot of women own guns.
You wanna know the great equalizer for women in the United States?
It's amazing.
The same people who will say that America has a deep and abiding rape culture in which women are in constant danger of men, wants to take guns away from women.
You're gonna have to explain that one to me.
It also happens to be statistically untrue that the United States leads the world in mass shootings.
According to John Miltimore, writing for the Free Enterprise, for the Foundation for Economic Education, He says, the dominant narrative is that we as a country have to reckon with the fact that mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.
But that is not right.
John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that the U.S.
trails many other advanced nations in mass shooting frequency as well as death rate.
If you compare the annual death rate from mass public shootings between the United States and other countries from January 2009 to December of 2015, Norway ranks one, then Serbia, France, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium, Czech Republic, and then the United States.
And when it comes to the frequency of mass public shootings, the ranking goes Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, France, and then the United States.
So yes, the U.S.
rate is still high, and it's nothing to be extremely proud of, as Investors Business Daily noted.
But the reality is that mass shootings do happen in other places.
And a lot of this is definitional.
So the way that you increase the bar for how many mass shootings happen in the United States is by decreasing the number of people who are shot in a mass shooting.
But the problem is once you do that, you then have to go into the type of crime that is actually being committed.
If you set the numbers for mass shootings at like two or three people, you're going to include a lot of gangland violence.
And then that completely screws up the left's narrative, because the left's narrative is that it is basically white people with long guns who are committing a huge number of these mass shootings.
And on the homicide rate, that actually is just not true, which ties into the second narrative, which we are going to get to in just one moment.
And the media jumped into this one, I mean, completely unprepared for the reality of the situation.
And that is every mass shooting is a white guy.
Okay, that is the other part of this.
So the media has a dual narrative when it comes to mass shootings.
One, it's guns' fault.
Two, it's whiteness' fault.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so in the aftermath of this particular shooting in Colorado.
And remember, this comes in the aftermath of this awful shooting in Atlanta, where a white guy shot eight people, including six Asian Americans.
And the media immediately, without any evidence, declared this as evidence of broader Trumpian white supremacy.
Again, evidence that this is a hate crime?
Still completely absent in that particular case.
Maybe it'll be found.
Haven't been found yet.
You'd figure you probably have found it by now, if you were looking for it.
But the media immediately jumped to the conclusion, after the Colorado shooting, the identity of the shooter was not immediately released to the media.
Now, there's a pattern in the media.
And the pattern in the media tends to be that when the shooter is white, this is why conservatives held off on this.
When the shooter is white, the identity is immediately released to the media, generally.
Almost immediately, like within a couple of hours.
Because once the guy's in custody, you got the guy in custody.
So then it's just a question of when the police decide to reveal the identity of the person in custody.
When the person is non-white, not only will the police wait on actually breaking the news, the media will then downplay exactly the race or ethnicity of the person.
Because again, all of this plays into broader narratives about what the country should do, not with regard to things like immigration or things like race, God forbid, but what the country should do with regard to things like more policing, what sort of measures should be taken.
But for the left, because every problem in America can be attributed to quote-unquote white supremacy and whiteness, they immediately jumped into the story and got the story completely wrong.
You have to understand that for the left right now, whiteness is what atheists say about religious people.
They call it the god of the gaps.
So atheists will frequently say about religious people that religious people Can't prove God.
They can't prove that God exists.
So what they'll do is they'll look at the universe, and then if there's something unexplained, they'll say, ah, God.
Right?
So quantum mechanics happens, and it completely throws off some Einsteinian theories about how the universe works, and religious believers will go, ah, God.
And atheists will say, no, that's not God.
You just don't understand how that works.
And God doesn't necessarily fill in that gap, right?
That's the God of the gaps.
Okay, well, for the left, They have whiteness and white supremacy of the gaps.
If there is a story they don't like, they just explain it with regard to whiteness.
We saw this with regard to discrimination against Asian Americans.
If black Americans are beating up Asian Americans in disproportionate numbers, that is because of white supremacy and America's systems of power.
If Asian Americans are succeeding too well in the system, that's because Asian Americans are buying into systems of white supremacy.
And if white people are targeting Asian Americans, that's also because of white supremacy.
So no matter what, the grand unifying field theory of American politics for the left is white supremacy.
So they tried to apply this without evidence to the Colorado shooting.
This was their immediate jump.
They immediately jumped into this was a white guy because there was a picture released and the guy looked white.
Well, it turns out the guy's not white.
The guy's actually Syrian.
And it turns out that mass shooters are not always white.
In fact, according to Statista, of the 120 or so mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and March 2021, about half of them are done by white people.
But the other half are not done by white people, which is roughly the racial distribution of the United States generally.
And so that myth is just not true in the first place, that all mass shooters are white.
And that is something that is promulgated by the media because the media wishes to suggest that white people with guns present the true threat to the United States.
And blue checkmarks jumped into this immediately.
They started jumping into this, like, right away.
They started tweeting out over and over and over that the shooter was white, and this just demonstrates that America is a white supremacist country.
And also, because the police arrested this guy after wounding him, as opposed to just shooting him dead, that's because they liked him.
The police were racist.
It doesn't matter that a cop was actually shot to death by the guy.
The police were racist because they like the white guy, but they never take the black guy alive, which is just a lie.
It is just overtly untrue, okay?
But you have some comment, some blue check, Julie DeCaro, who wrote, extremely tired of people's lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.
Okay, again, untrue.
We have Alex Cole tweeting out, a white man walked into a grocery store in Boulder, not true, killed 10 people and was apprehended by the police and walked out of the building completely unharmed.
Right down the street, police killed Elijah McClain while he apologized for not doing anything wrong.
Okay, again, untrue.
They thought that he was, they thought that they had to give him a drug because he was responding in incoherent ways to their commands.
It may, in fact, be a homicide case.
I believe it's being brought as a homicide case right now.
But what these two things have to do with each other, the answer is nothing.
Kasim Rashid, Esquire, another blue check, he tweeted out, Beyond infuriating that the Colorado terrorist killed a cop but was arrested alive while cops shot Tamir Rice dead for holding a toy because the cop feared for his life, how is an unarmed black child more frightening than a grown white male mass murderer?
Reckless.
I don't understand.
Were you there?
Did, like, what?
What?
Okay, so this is just the narrative that builds up every time, right?
When the shooter in Charleston Well, the police tried to arrest a lot of people without killing them.
If the police killed everybody who presented a general threat to the public, there'd be a lot more dead people in the United States, of all races.
But that doesn't matter.
The narrative has to be promulgated.
The narrative is always again.
White supremacy is the answer, even if it's clearly not white supremacy, as we'll see in a second.
Michael Harriot of The Root, who's just awful, he tweeted out, pointing out how white suspects get the benefit of the doubt without being stopped, frisked, beaten, shot, or killed is not a call for harsh treatment.
It simply means we know cops are capable of treating people humanely, just not us.
Y'all could use a few more ass whoopings, though.
He's just a bad person.
I'm sorry, just a bad person.
First of all, there is tape of white people being beat to death by police officers unjustifiably or shot unjustifiably by the police.
In fact, there are studies done, it says that actually police tend to disproportionately shoot white suspects in dangerous situations as opposed to black suspects in situations.
And that does not matter apparently at all.
Not only does that not matter, it does not matter that the suspect in this case was not white.
The suspect, Kamala Harris' niece, tweeted out about this and actually had to delete her own tweet about the white shooter.
She tweeted out, the Atlanta shooting was not even a week ago.
Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.
Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.
And then she tweeted out, I deleted a previous tweet about the suspect in the Boulder shooting.
I made an assumption based on his being taken into custody alive.
And the fact that the majority of mass shootings in the United States are carried out by white men.
Okay, so in other words, you made an assumption about some shooting based on general racial statistics?
Interesting.
Interesting you should do that.
If you're on the left, you can get away with anything.
Anything!
By the way, solid apology right there.
That is not even an apology.
That's like, well, you know, I made an assumption.
First of all, you know what?
The majority of people who live in this country are white, which means that for virtually any stat you can choose, the majority of people who do it are white.
Okay, like, so?
The majority of people who eat hot dogs in the United States are white.
So, I saw a guy eating a hot dog.
What color was he?
Well, he's probably white because, like, what?
What are you even talking about?
It's statistical, statistical incompetence.
Okay, so as it turns out, all of this immediately fell apart because, unfortunately for the left-wing narrative about how whiteness is the greatest threat to America, This particular gunman happened not to be white.
He was a Syrian-born person.
And not only that, he ranted about Islamophobes hacking his phone.
He was apparently suffering from mental illness.
The person's brother told the Daily Beast he was very antisocial and has been paranoid since high school.
The brother described him as mentally ill, said he'd been bullied in school and it was not politically motivated.
His sister-in-law said she'd seen him playing with a gun recently but did not suspect him of violence.
And also, he tweeted out a bunch of stuff that was kind of supportive of ISIS over the past few years.
He tweeted out about how Trump was terrible.
This seems like a mentally ill person.
He ranted about Trump, he ranted about refugees.
He happens to have been a Muslim, although we don't know that Islam was actually the motivation in the shooting.
Looks more like mental illness.
But in any case, this does not comport with the fact pattern that the left would like to promulgate.
But that does not matter.
And the left never acknowledges its own hypocrisy on this score.
Ilhan Omar had just the best set of tweets on this.
So Ilhan Omar tweeted out two things, right?
So, a week ago, after the Atlanta shooting, Ilhan Omar tweeted out, And then, like, a week later, Ilhan Omar tweeted out, The shooters race or ethnicity seems front and center when they aren't.
They aren't white.
Otherwise, it's just a mentally ill young man having a bad day.
Narratives drive our responses to awful crimes committed against innocent people.
Pay attention to these responses and who is targeted.
Literally a week ago, she was targeting the Atlanta shooting as race-based and talking about the race of the shooter.
Now, you can't mention the race of the shooter because if you do, then you're targeting people based on race.
It's unreal.
So, notice something here, okay?
Notice that when the left uses racism as a charge, or when they bring up white supremacy as a charge, all of this seems to be politically motivated.
Pretty much all of it.
It is a tool.
They can charge their opponents with racism and then be as racist as they could possibly want to be, even if the evidence doesn't back the position.
This is twice in the course of two weeks that the left got the narrative completely wrong, and it's still gonna be rammed down America's throat.
In Atlanta, the narrative was that it was white supremacy that was behind the shooting and that it was connected to Trump and the Wuhan virus and all of this kind of stuff.
And it wasn't true.
There's no evidence of it.
And then the entire media jumped on the idea that this guy was treated in Colorado with kid gloves because he was white.
And it turns out he wasn't even white.
Again, it's all about power.
Whatever is the brick bat at hand, you have to use it.
And because it's all about power, and because the Democrats want transformational change, they are now, of course, calling, like clockwork, for gun control.
Alright, we're gonna get to the actual call for gun control, which was inevitable.
It was going to happen.
It's like clockwork.
Every time something happens, the left immediately twists it to their advantage and to push their agenda.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
First, if you haven't heard by now, But honestly, if you listen to the show, you would have heard Candace Owens has a brand new talk show with us exclusively at DailyWire.com.
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So naturally the Biden administration is calling So naturally, the Biden administration is calling for gun control.
Understand, this is all part of their broader pitch, which is that Joe Biden needs to rule the world.
This man who is falling apart, This administration that has 50-plus Kamala Harris in the Senate is going to try to ram everything they possibly can through.
Axios is reporting that now Joe Biden, you know, Captain Propriety, you know, the lion of the Senate, this longtime institutionalist, he's now looking at nuking the filibuster.
According to Axios, President Biden recently held an undisclosed East Room session with historians that included discussion of how big is too big, how fast is too fast, to jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America.
Four things are pushing Biden to jam through what could amount to a $5 trillion-plus overhaul of America and vast changes to voting immigration and inequality.
One, his full party control of Congress.
Two, his party activists egging him on.
Three, he has strong gathering economic wins at his back.
And four, he is popular in the polls.
Naturally, presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who's a big government hack, told Axios that FDR and LBJ may be the closest analogs to Joe Biden.
People close to Biden say he is feeling bullish on what he can accomplish.
He is fully prepared to support dashing the Senate filibuster rule to allow Democrats to pass voting rights and other trophy legislation for his party.
One, because he loves the narrative that he is bigger and bolder than Obama.
It's making him happy.
The Obama administration is ticked about this, by the way.
Obama is unhappy at this because he wants to be Captain Transformation, but it turns out that it is Biden, the old man, who is coming in and just showing him up.
Mitch McConnell says this will create such a fissure between the parties that it will be Nuclear winter.
But that's basically right.
By the way, that is really not the risk.
The risk is not that nothing gets done in the Senate.
The risk is that a bunch of stuff gets done in the Senate and that state governors just say, we are not going to go along with any of this.
You want to exacerbate the country's national divides.
You want to make sure that red states just stop helping out the federal government.
You want to make sure that the country starts to fracture at all of its seams.
Do exactly what Joe Biden is doing right now.
And by the way, do it on the issue of gun control.
If Joe Biden tries to nuke the filibuster in order to cram down federal gun control, In complete contravention of the Constitution of the United States?
Good luck.
If you think that citizens of Texas or Alabama or Tennessee or Florida are going to sit still and let the federal government tell them what to do with their guns, the federal government's going to have another thing coming.
You want to exacerbate conflict to the point of possible violence, that is the exact way to do it.
See, here's the thing that the left needs to understand about gun ownership for people who are not of the far left in the United States.
It is a fundamental right in the United States to be able to protect yourself, including with guns.
The reason to own guns is to stop people from violating your fundamental rights.
And the first sign that your fundamental rights are about to be violated is when someone comes to your door and demands your guns.
Okay, so this is a completely self-defeating proposal.
Nonetheless, this is exactly what Biden is apparently pushing for.
And now he's talking about nuking the filibuster in order to do all of this stuff.
So Jen Psaki announced yesterday that Biden is considering executive action on guns.
She apparently said, putting in place common sense gun safety measures has been a passion of the president since he was in the Senate.
By the way, common sense gun safety measures, that is a euphemism for gun control measures that have no evidentiary backing, right?
Like the 1994 assault weapons ban, which studies demonstrate did nothing to stop mass shootings or to decline the rate of homicide in the United States.
Apparently, according to Jen Psaki, Position on the filibuster has not changed as of yet, but we are considering a range of levers, including working through legislation, including executive action that has been under discussion, will continue to be under discussion.
Joe Biden himself came out and called for gun control yesterday.
Of course he did.
I don't need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps that will save the lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act.
We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country once again.
I got that done when I was a senator.
It passed.
It was law for the longest time.
And it brought down these mass killings.
We should do it again.
No, it did not bring down the mass killings.
The evidence on that is scanty to nil.
Okay, and again, watching this incoherent president try to push forward a massive gun grab is pretty impressive stuff.
Now, by the way, the first notion that you should have that the government is about to invade your rights is when they tell you they're not about to invade your rights.
When they assure you that they're not about to come for your wallet, they're coming for your wallet.
And when they assure you that they are not coming for your gun, pretty good time to start buying rifles from Bravo Company Manufacturing before the government tries to make it illegal to do so.
So when Vice President Kamala Harris says, don't worry, you know, they keep saying we're coming for your guns.
Yes, because you keep saying you're coming for our guns.
That would be why.
I remember when Hillary Clinton said this in 2016.
In the 2016 campaign, she was like, they keep saying that I want to come for your guns.
I don't want to come for your guns.
I just want an Australian gun buyback program.
Oh, you mean the mandatory gun buyback program in Australia?
Where they came for the guns?
Like that?
Here's Kamala Harris saying, you don't need to feel threatened.
All we're going to do is, you know, massive gun legislation.
And I believe that it is possible, it has to be possible, that people agree that these slaughters have to stop.
And this is, again, reject the false choice and stop pushing it for sure.
Stop pushing the false choice that this means everybody's trying to come after your guns.
That is not what we're talking about.
Then who's, and I love the report there, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but then whose guns are you coming after?
Like whose?
Whose guns?
That should be the question.
Not what kind of guns.
Whose guns?
Because what I've noticed is that you are not targeting criminals.
Right now, they want felons to vote, but they want you, the law-abiding citizen, not to be able to get a gun.
This is the Democratic agenda at this point.
Again, the evidence that the 1994 assault weapons ban did a damn thing is just not there.
According to the Foundation for Economic Education, These studies demonstrate that there is no evidence assault weapons ban reduced the homicide rate.
Between 1994 and 2004, the federal government banned the manufacture, sale, or transfer of assault weapons in large capacity magazines.
A DOJ study found no evidence the ban had any effect on gun violence and stated it should be renewed, that should it be renewed, the ban's effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for a liable measurement.
Because again, if you're going to look at the kinds of guns that are most frequently used in homicides, they are not long guns.
They are not rifles.
And they are certainly not rifles that are used in mass shootings.
The number of mass shooting homicides involving assault weapons between 2007 and 2017, that's a 10-year period, was 253.
The number of total homicides in the United States was 150,000.
The number of gun homicides in that period was 104,000.
The number of total homicides in the United States was 150,000.
The number of gun homicides in that period was 104,000.
253 mass shooting homicides involving assault weapons happened during that period.
So your notion is that you're going to take the 100 million right.
There are 100 million long guns in circulation in the United States, and that's what you're gonna target?
It doesn't even make any sense!
Again, the notion that assault weapons bans somehow generated an impact on the frequency of mass shootings, it's just not there.
The prior to the ban, on average, five people were killed with assault weapons in the mass shootings per year.
During the ban, the number went down to four.
Post-ban, it rose to 22.
But mass shootings with assault weapons didn't rise until 2012.
That was eight years after the ban ended.
In the seven years after the ban, there was an average of four people killed in mass shootings with assault weapons every year.
So maybe it turns out it's not the kind of weapon that is the problem.
Maybe it turns out that it is a bunch of different factors that are the problem.
Okay, but they have to lie, okay?
They have to lie about how easy it is to get a gun.
They have to lie about the threat of mass shootings in American society generally.
They have to lie about the efficacy of gun control generally.
Because again, if you actually told the truth about the efficacy of gun control, you know where you might be looking.
Chicago, Washington DC, New York City, LA.
And it turns out gun control there has not been wildly successful.
The only thing that has tamped down homicide is heavy policing.
It is precisely the opposite of the policy proposals the left likes.
Okay, so instead, they just have to maximize the way that they talk about the problem.
So you'll have Chuck Schumer talking about the epidemic of gun violence.
First of all, gun violence is not an epidemic.
We actually have been through an epidemic in the last year.
An epidemic is defined by the contagiousness and transmissibility of something.
Gun violence is not transmissible.
It is not an epidemic.
It is an act of individual evil.
Those can be tamped down by adding more police force to places that are high crime.
But what Democrats are basically trying to say is that the gun infects you.
The gun does not infect you.
It is a piece of machinery.
It is a tool.
But here's Chuck Schumer saying we're going to address the quote-unquote epidemic of gun violence.
Republicans seem averse to even wanting to talk about the epidemic of gun violence.
Like the start of the COVID epidemic, their strategy is to downplay and hope the problem goes away.
This Democratic-led Senate will be different.
The Senate is not going to hide.
We're going to debate and address the epidemics of gun violence in this country.
Okay, but here's the thing.
If you look at the number of homicides in the United States over the past 30, 40 years, we've had an unprecedented drop in the murder rate.
An unprecedented drop in the United States murder rate since basically 1994.
And yet, the idea is that we're now experiencing this mass epidemic of gun violence.
The national murder rate in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, the national murder rate in the United States in 1992 was 9.3 per 100,000 population.
Okay, it reached its highs in about that period.
It was really high in the late 70s, and then kind of stabilized, and then its modern high was 1991.
9.8 murders per 100,000 residents.
Currently, in about 2016, 2017, the lowest it hit was about 2014.
4.5 murders.
It went in half.
In half!
Okay, but the idea is that now it's an epidemic.
And, again, it is not an epidemic.
That's not how epidemics work.
But it's all a power grab.
And so they have to lie.
So Senator Padilla, he says, in a majority of states, this is Alex Padilla, Democrat of California.
He says, in a majority of states, it is easier to obtain a gun than to vote.
This is just an overt lie.
There's not a single state in the United States where it's easier to obtain a gun than to vote.
I mean, do these people know a damn thing about how you obtain a gun?
You actually have to go in to a federally licensed firearms dealer, and then you have to show ID, and then they have to run a federal background check on you.
And if there's a backlog, you might have to wait a couple of days while they actually run the federal background check on you.
That's at a minimum.
Okay, when you go to register to vote, you show an ID and you're registered to vote, and that's the end of it.
Here's Alex Padilla just overtly lying.
There won't be a Media Matters fact check on this guy.
In 25 states, voters must be registered and have specific forms of ID in order to cast a ballot.
But those same states allow people to buy rifles without permits and require no background checks for some sales.
Additionally, in a majority of states, new voters are able to obtain a rifle quicker than they're able to cast their first ballot.
It seems to me that we have our priorities entirely backwards when it comes to this, when we make it easier to buy a gun.
These geniuses, let's put them in charge of whether you can defend yourself.
Meanwhile, Dick Durbin, who once called American soldiers akin to pole pot, Dick Durbin said loopholes make it easier for felons and abusers to get weapons.
Okay, again.
The proof that these felons and abusers are getting weapons because of quote-unquote loopholes is extremely scanty.
Very, very scanty.
Doesn't matter.
Don't need evidence.
You just make assertions because assertions are all the left cares about.
Here's Dick Durbin making the case.
There are well-known gaps in the federal gun background check system, the gun show loophole, the internet loophole, and more.
These gaps make it too easy for felons, abusers, and mentally unstable people to get their hands on guns and harm others.
Okay, so first of all, there is no gun show loophole.
If you go to a gun show, they have to be a federally licensed firearms dealer.
The so-called gun show loophole is not gun shows.
Okay, that's me conveying a gun to my son.
In order for the government to prevent that, they would have to have full-fledged gun registries for every gun in the United States, which is something that no advocate of individual liberty should be in favor of.
Well, let's be real about this.
This is basically, in the end, just an emotional appeal.
This is why you have victims of mass shootings going on TV and saying that the NRA is a terror organization, and that every member of the NRA is apparently a terrorist.
Here's Fred Guttenberg, who's an anti-gun activist.
He's Parkland's dad, saying this on MSNBC.
They are a terror organization that is making us less safe.
You can't make up these things.
I mean, literally six days ago, the NRA achieved its goal, and they called it Victory for Colorado.
That's what they called it.
And here we are, 10 people dead, including a police officer, because of what they believe was victory for Colorado.
Okay, except that Colorado already... Stop it.
Colorado already has universal background checks, red flag laws, the city of Boulder for two years, it only expired six days ago, which is what the NRA was talking about.
They had an assault weapons ban.
They had all of those things in place.
Again, the evidence doesn't matter.
It's the emotional appeal.
And why don't we just wreck it?
We'll wreck the filibuster and we'll ram through gun control.
That's what Julian Castro is now saying.
He's saying filibuster reform to ram through gun control because the democratic agenda is the only thing that matters.
And if you don't have evidence to back it, you just say that people who oppose you don't care enough and don't have sympathy for people who have died in mass shootings.
I actually think this is going to be another indictment of the filibuster.
How do you not call something strongly bipartisan in this country When almost 90% of Americans support it.
And yet, mainly one political party stands completely against it.
It doesn't make any sense.
And this is one more example of why, in the least, we need significant filibuster reform that makes it possible for effective, meaningful legislation like this to actually get enacted.
I mean, this is, I'm sorry, these people are so, it's so ignorant.
I mean, unbelievably ignorant.
Alison Camerota just asked this morning on CNN, quote, how onerous would it be to have a gun shop owner just say, by the way, are you hearing voices?
Do you think people are chasing you?
Do you think everybody is watching you?
It would have weeded out possibly this guy.
Yes, I'm sure that if you want to weed out criminals, all you have to do is ask them whether they're mentally ill.
That would totally do it.
By the way, you know what gun shops have to do?
I know because I just purchased a gun the other day.
You know what gun shops have to do?
They ask you about your recent mental illness history.
It's a thing they ask you on the forums.
Evidence is unnecessary here.
All that matters is that they are morally right and very emotional about it, and therefore you are bad if you oppose their evidence-free agenda, which suggests that all the problems in America are based on individual rights and apparently on white supremacy or whiteness or something.
All righty, we have reached the end of today's show, but we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Knowles Show.
He's discussing Krispy Kreme offering free donuts for the vaccinated.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show.
That's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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A terrible shooting in Colorado raises bad faith debate.
A breakfast company gaslights a man who found shrimp tails in his cereal.
And a Democrat senator won't vote for white nominees.
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