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June 6, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
43:25
What makes you feel good will not always heal you: An honest discussion about Guns
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Today I'm going to do a deep dive.
I've been promising this in several of our episodes before with the shootings in Texas, Buffalo, the just untold sorrow that's going on in Yuba, Texas right now with the school shooting.
It has brought back again the light that everybody wants a solution to a problem, frankly, that none of the solutions that are being offered would actually help.
Now, there's a lot going wrong here.
There's a lot in these issues that we're going to talk about today that need to happen, and we need to be more aware of those surroundings, our family members.
I mean, many times we see in these, quote, mass shootings, there are signs, there are signals, there are things that have happened before that give indication that something may be wrong here.
And that's something that we need to focus on more, helping with our families, helping strengthen those issues.
Mental health is always an issue that needs to always be addressed for those who have struggles.
But at the end of the day, it comes back to guns.
And this is the discussion that we're having again in the United States.
This is beginning.
I hear this all the time.
And I see it from people, and as I've been in office when I was the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee in Congress, it was always, well, if we just pass a law, if we just do this, then we can solve these problems of gun-related violence.
Now, let me just say something here.
The issue that we deal with when it comes to guns and we deal with these issues of these deaths is, number one, we don't treat them all the same.
The high-profile cases, such as the school shootings, which deserve every bit of outrage, every bit of scorn, every bit of frustration, every bit of sorrow, every bit of things that we can muster, are very real.
The problem is that everything, one of these mass shootings, as they're called, come up, especially at schools and especially maybe in workplaces, is the solutions offered will not have fixed the problem.
And so instead of saying, okay, is there something that actually fixes these problems, which again, if there were, answers were becoming a lot differently.
The answer is, let's just do something so that we can say we've done something.
My problem here is this, is why when something happens like this, is the solution to take from me, who had nothing to do with it, who's never acted inappropriately, to take something that is a right out of the Constitution from me, to take it away from me.
Why is it that when the bad actor who uses a gun does something, the first answer is to take it away from everybody else because somebody did something wrong with a gun?
Now, for some of you are saying, well, that just makes it easy.
Then we don't have any guns.
We don't have violence.
That's just not true.
Violent acts and violent crimes still occur in countries that have basically shut down all use of guns.
Australia, everywhere else, those numbers, you know, violent crimes have actually arisen.
They just don't use guns.
There's issues there that just revolve around this.
And also, you said, well, why can't we just, you know, ban guns or put more control on it like we do in Europe and other places?
Well, number one, that's not the culture of America, number one.
That's another area that makes this very difficult when you have as many guns.
Both liberals and Democrats and conservative Republicans who have this have ownership of guns and firearms that they've had for many years.
The hunting culture, the culture that has been raised around guns in our country make it a lot different.
The question though still is abiding.
For these who choose to do bad things with guns, why does the first answer always seem to restrict the rights of those who did not do bad things with guns?
And I think that's one of the things that we want to talk about.
I want to lay into this today.
This is going to be heavy statistics.
We're just going to talk about facts.
You can then make your own opinion.
You can disagree with the fact that you can say, yes, we need to assault weapons ban.
Yes, we need to ban handguns.
Yes, we need to...
Okay, let me just make it very clear that in some of the cities, in some of the areas, that in urban areas are your highest, that these gun crimes are the highest, are in some of the areas in which the laws are the most restrictive.
Okay, let's understand this.
I'm going to start from a premise that I'm going to give you statistics of what is actually happening.
Make your own assessments as we go forward.
And in my assessments, as we look at this, you're going to see that making people feel good does not heal them.
It doesn't cure them.
And if you make them feel good that I'm doing something that makes you feel good, but doesn't cure them, then when the next incident or something comes along, then you're going to have an even worse problem.
So the first thing I want to talk about when we're framing this issue of guns, and when we talk about gun deaths, we're always throwing these larger numbers out.
Now, some of the most recent statistics that we have on gun...
Related deaths or firearms related deaths was 2019. I have seen some in 2020. Again, they do lag behind a little bit and there was a study recently done That showed the homicides by death.
One of the areas of concern is firearms deaths over 39,000 or almost 45,000 for 2020 coming along.
Now, understanding.
If you understand this is firearm deaths, We in America do something that is unusual around the world.
We count suicides as firearm-related deaths.
And if you look at this in 2020, and if you go back to 2019, the numbers are very similar.
Approximately 60% of firearm-related deaths are suicides.
Suicides using a weapon.
In 2020, it was 24,292 compared to 19,384 in use of a firearm.
Let's continue to break this down a little bit further.
As we break this down further and understand, also there is legal interventions, you know, people, self-defense, other things.
There's also law enforcement.
There's others that do count into that number.
Those are typically about 1,000.
So as you break this down, the first thing as you go in is of the, quote, gun-related violence, the things that we actually deal with are...
Over 60% are suicide-related.
They're not just random shootings at schools.
They're not just random shootings in cities and places.
They're suicides.
We count that in our gun-related death.
Now, the other thing that I want to point out here is that when you're dealing with murder and you're dealing with homicide in this country, let's talk about the weapons that are actually used.
The number one is by weapon use is handguns.
Okay, this is handguns, not rifles.
In fact, firearms of other that are not stated has about 4,800.
So really around 10,000 to 1,000 of these total overall deaths are committed with handguns.
These are handheld guns.
They're not rifles.
They're not shotguns.
These are handheld guns.
Actually 1,700 are committed by knives or other cutting instruments.
Other instruments, personal, hands, feet, etc.
662, this was in 2020. Other weapons, not stated, was 983. Blunt objects, clubs, hammers, etc.
were 393. Now look at this.
When you're looking at cutting instruments, 1,700 were used knives to kill someone.
When you're dealing with rifles, these are long guns.
This would fall under the AR-15 that we're always seeing, the assault weapons, which we're going to get into in a minute.
There's only 455. In fact, blunt instruments such as clubs, hammers, and others almost equal rifles.
Shotguns were 203. The reason I put this out there is there's all this discussion about the term assault rifle and the use of assault rifle and the use of these in these shootings, such as school shootings and others, that make the difference.
Now, understand something.
When you look at gun-related deaths as a whole, handguns make up by far the most usage, you know, over almost 10,000 of these numbers, when you also clarify some of the other firearms that didn't have a specific state.
But when it comes to rifles and shotguns and these, quote, assault rifles that many are looking to ban, The numbers are in the small percentages of what is actually used.
They're just not used in criminal acts.
Let's discuss, not only from the weapons procedure here, and this is the actual numbers that we talk about, let's go back and talk about what is an assault rifle.
I've made a mention on this podcast, and some of you asked about this, or asked me about this, asked you that nothing, you walk into a gun store or somewhere and ask for an assault weapon, They're not going to point you to a particular gun.
If they want to, they say, are you wanting a rifle?
You're wanting an AR-15?
You're wanting an AK-47?
What does it look like?
Here's what is actually the origins of the assault weapon ban can be traced all the way back to 1988 when the Violence Policy Center released assault weapons and accessories for America.
In a group, it stated, assault weapons, just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, plastic firearms, are a new topic.
Here it is.
The weapons menacing looks coupled with public confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons.
Anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun and can only increase the chance public support for restrictions of these weapons.
In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.
This is back all the way in 1988. By folks who wanted to get rid of certain weapons, they said the only way we can do this is to make them scary, in essence.
The only way we can do this is to make them...
Look, act, or talk like something that people are scared of.
And everybody can associate it to machine guns.
Now, let me just stand up very clearly up front, and let's do this again for many people.
The AR-15 and these other guns that are being spoke of are not machine guns.
They cannot spray bullets.
Not a normal person who does not have a Class 3 license can own these guns.
And I'm going to tell you right now, the amount of people who have a Class 3 license, which is a distributor or dealer license, the amount of people who are involved in gun-related crimes is almost non-existent.
It takes so much to be able to get a Class III license, to get a federal firearms license, to be able to sell and buy firearms, that it is something that people who are doing this for a living and are not going to sacrifice their living because they're going to use guns in the wrong or misused way.
So, as you understand this terminology, you've got to understand that the guns that are purchased today that you may think look like machine guns are not.
Why does this matter?
Because people are ignorant of really guns.
There's a lot of guns in the United States, but there's a lot of people who've never been around guns, raised around guns, or even shot guns.
This is just a fact that we come into.
So as we look at this, we have to understand the terminology.
Gun control advocates and those who want to take guns prey on the fact that we don't get the differences.
A semi-automatic assault weapons are nothing more than semi-automatic rifles with certain cosmetic features, such as the...
A scope, a different style scope, a barrel, a flash suppressor, a pistol grip.
These are kind of things that make the semi-automatic rifle look, in the terms of gun control, folks, that they have Extraordinary fear because of what they do.
So again, semi-automatic weapon is simply one pull, one fire.
One pull, one fire.
That is what is legal to buy in the United States.
A fully automatic weapon is not legal in the United States and has not been for years.
And how old is a semi-automatic weapon since 1885?
The concept of one pull, one bullet is...
What these rifles are.
Now, has the AR-15 and its progeny and the style of that grown?
Yes.
Since 2010, there were 444,000 modern sporting rifles, if you call them.
In 2010, 1.3 million in 2015. Again, when they ban these weapons, and we'll talk about this a little bit more as we go along, they're discussing weapons and shotguns that have certain visual characteristics many times.
It has been shown in Canada a few years ago when they banned, just a short couple of years ago, when they banned the assault weapons again.
You go back to the 1990s when we had the assault weapon banned for a short time.
The distinguishing characteristics of an assault rifle were those cosmetic characteristics.
They were shown many times the same gun without those...
Accessories was not labeled a assault rifle, but with them was labeled an assault rifle.
Again, one pull, one fire, same basic core, but yet when added into it, it did not.
It changed it, quote, into this scary term called assault rifle, which we see came all the way back from the 1988 as we look at this.
Assault weapons ban.
Now, let's take this set.
I'm wanting to walk you through this, and I'm not going specifically to just different events, and you can say, well, Doug, how do you solve this problem?
Well, first, you've got to understand the issues around this before you can solve the problem.
I was in a hearing in Washington, D.C. a few years ago on H.R. 8, which was re-brought back into this Congress.
And we'll talk about H.R. 8 here in just a minute.
And the solutions proposed, of which none would actually do what they said that they would do.
And there was a panel.
And we were asking from, many of us on the Republican side were asking questions and breaking the point that this bill would not solve the problem that everybody wanted to talk about, whether it be at the time.
At that time, it was Parkland, Sandy Hook.
You could go back to many other school shootings.
And we were saying, look, what you're proposing You may feel good about, but it doesn't help solve these problems.
You're saying that this would solve a situation such as Parkland or a situation in Texas as we've just had.
And the reality was it wouldn't help until finally Art Acevedo, who was the Houston police chief at the time, said, okay, I'll grant you that it won't solve the problems that have been listed, but if it just helps to try and solve or save one person.
And that became their whole argument that if it just saved one.
No matter what the cost it may take, no matter what it may do to legal law-abiding gun owners, if it could just, quote, save one from a madman or madwoman who takes a gun and uses it in the wrong way, then they were comfortable with that.
But let's talk about this assault weapon that Joe Biden has brought up and many in the House and Senate.
We're going to see this again coming up and have come up here in the House probably this week.
And did it work?
Okay, here's the conversation.
Did it work?
Did the assault weapon ban that was in, that came out in the 1990s, actually work?
And here's a quote from the Violent Crime and Control Law Enforcement Act.
Congress required Justice Department to examine the effects of the, quote, assault weapons ban.
And the study was mandated, and this is what they came up.
The banned guns were never used in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders.
Before the ban, and the ban's 10-round limit on new magazines was not a factor in multiple victim or multiple wound crimes.
A follow-up study in 2004 concluded that assault weapons and others were used only in a minority of gun crimes prior to the 1994 federal ban, and relatively few attacks involved more than 10 shots fired.
Okay.
Bye.
Thank you.
It actually doesn't work.
You can go back to other studies, and this was from a study back in 2004 as well, in which it was coming before a committee, and the fact checkers basically said this was...
In general, we found very, really very, very little evidence, almost none, that gun violence was becoming any less lethal or any less dangerous during this time frame.
So on balance, we concluded the ban had not had a discernible impact on gun crime during the years it was in effect.
This is, you know, again, looking at these studies, looking at the fact checkpoints, which actually you can look up online if you want to, is did it really affect The issue.
The answer is no, not in the overall sense.
We still saw crime.
We still saw violent crime.
We still saw gun death.
Why?
Because the assault weapon ban goes after a weapon that is rarely used in homicides.
It's just not there.
The discussion of handguns, which up until recently has never been discussed, even from most liberals, except the very ones who just do not like guns at all, has never been discussed.
Recently, there was a discussion in Canada, which they're going to be looking at it, but here in the United States has never been discussed.
There's starting to be more and more calls to say, okay, well, let's deal with handguns.
Where the vast majority, by statistics, say that the gun's related.
The problem is that, one, there's so many.
How do you actually enforce that in light of the Second Amendment, which allows us to own firearms?
This has become more and more of an issue in dealing with how do you solve these problems.
Now, I bring this up because there has been...
A lot of issues on what is actually being done.
So what I want to do is take for just a few minutes and say, okay, this is the statistics.
We've shown statistically that, again, if you're trusting the science of this, so to speak, that the banning of these, quote, assault weapons, again, semi-automatic weapons that have had accessories added to them to make them look more menacing, which is, again, where the whole terminology came from the late 80s, came into being and being used.
Number one, when it was used here in the United States, it did not make a discernible effect in violent crime.
Did not.
Why?
And frankly, you could have known this up front.
The numbers that were used, it was not used in that many crimes to start with.
And again, not a factor when you look at overall violent crime gun deaths.
So the question actually becomes, and this discussion, is for those who say, well, especially I hear this argument all the time from the left saying, oh, we just want to ban these weapons of war or assault weapons, whatever term they want to come up with.
We're not worried about hunting guns.
We're not worried about, you know, we're not going to come after handguns.
Well, the reality is if you're If you're serious about your only answer is to get rid of the guns to solve these problems, then you've got to go somewhere else besides the assault weapons that you claim are assault weapons because some of the hunting rifles and some of the shotguns that you would ban if they have certain accessories added to them are still going to be around for hunting because they just don't have the accessories.
Still the same lethality, but still know the accessories and the handguns that are present.
Let's look at this because, folks, I am not saying that if we can find solutions for this, then we need to find solutions to help.
How do we help communities with mental health illness?
How do we harden schools?
How do we make it less likely that somebody would go into a school and especially a business and begin to shoot people at random?
Now, this is irregardless of how we deal with these many times in our big cities and others, where you're having gang-on-gang violence, you're having murders in the streets, and nobody is coming up with the answers there, and that is a problem of where we are as a country.
In the sense of saying, look, you can ban one and expect it to do everything else.
It just doesn't do that.
There is a determination, and I understand this.
And as conservatives, I have a deep compassion for those that have lost life.
The question is, though, is what can you do about it?
And it actually worked.
And the problems that have been laid out here so far is that the answer always seems to come back is that they want to punish those who do it legally, who have no problem in criminal activity.
To take from them is the ones that will actually affect the most.
And you say, well, Doug, what does that mean?
That means that me or you, if you're a law-abiding gun owner, will have your guns taken from you.
You will have your abilities taken from you because of the actions of others.
Then you will be removed of your chance of self-defense and others, which self-defense is a large use of guns and a deterrent if someone knows you have guns.
One of the reasons that the targets such as schools or workplaces many times are the target for gunmen is they know that they're not going to be confronted by anyone with a gun.
So again, if you take my way of self-defense out, my deterrent away, simply because others don't know how to do it, then we're not helping here.
In other words, why are we going first to what takes it from those who didn't cause the problem to try and fix it from those who would have gotten the guns, especially if you're going to deal with handguns and others?
Anyway, criminal statistics show that those incarcerated Well, up to 90% of them do not, the guns that they use, they get illegally.
They do not get them legally.
Criminals who are going to go out and commit an act do not go to the store and buy their guns.
They fine them, steal them, do other things to get them.
So let's look at a few things.
Number one, we've talked about the assault weapons ban.
And, uh, that is something that I want to, you know, to talk about here is we've listed out why the assault weapon ban doesn't work.
Now, the other thing that is, and we can revisit that all you want, looks like they're going to try and do it again in Congress.
Even if they pass it again, it would not work.
And that's the problem that we're dealing with.
The next thing that's coming out of this, again, with school shootings is the use of weapons, of rifles and others by students, not students, but those who are just out who are younger than 21. Now, let me go back and catch up something that I need to do.
In fact, let's do this before we discuss some of these issues.
Because one of the things is, if you're going to go out and make laws, then let's discuss what laws are actually out there and what actually is, frankly, if you have to take it by the assumption of these shootings, are not working.
Here's things that federal law currently prohibit.
Just a little bit of what currently we have.
Transferring of a firearm to anyone known or believed to be prohibited from possessing a firearm.
So even if you're not sure, but you believe that they're not supposed to own a firearm, it's illegal to make that transfer.
Anyone without a federal firearms license, an FFL, from acquiring a handgun outside their state of residence.
So in essence, if you do not have an FFL, you cannot go from Georgia and go buy a gun in Tennessee.
You can't go...
That's the...
Something that you can't do is already a problem here.
Anyone with an FFL acquiring a rifle or shotgun from someone without an FFL outside their state of reference.
So you can't go the buying and selling stuff.
Individuals from transferring a gun across state lines to someone without a firearms license.
Anyone from acquiring firearms on behalf of another person who is prohibited from possessing firearms.
Anyone providing a handgun to a juvenile.
Dealers from selling rifles or shotguns to individuals under age of 18. You can't sell also pistols to those under 21. Many times the left want to promote gun control.
Folks want to say 97% of Americans favor supporting gun control, except when it's actually put on the ballot.
When it was actually put on the ballot in Maine, it was failed outright completely.
Also, this dealing with the idea of the gun show loophole, if you would, the universal background checks.
This is already there.
If you will hear that, and we'll talk about this in a few minutes, this is dealing with private sales.
Now, out of everything that we're talking about and the things that are being proposed, and H.R. 8 was one of those bills that proposed several things dealing from red flag laws to other areas.
here's your biggest problem.
With everything that we have seen that has been proposed so far, they would not work, as I have said before.
They would not have worked at Columbine.
They would not have worked at Virginia Tech.
They would not have worked at Fort Hood, in Tucson, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Colorado, Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., Emanuel Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, San Bernardino, the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Las Vegas, First Baptist Church Sutherland, Texas, Marjory Stoneman Douglas at Parkland, Florida, or the latest shootings in Buffalo or in Texas. or the latest shootings in Buffalo or in Texas.
these laws that are being proposed would not exist.
One of the ones that is being proposed right now is raising the age for rifles and shotguns from 18 to 21. Again, we've already discussed this a great deal that this is a type of weapon that is not, a type of gun that is not used that often in murder and homicides.
This is just not used.
The question becomes is if you raise this restriction, is this going to help?
And the answer is no.
I mean, it also brings up the question of it is already prohibited to own a gun under these rifles under age 18. Once you're 18, you can then purchase it.
A handgun cannot be purchased until you're 21. Long guns are not the problem.
But what it does do is it says that an 18-year-old who can serve in the military, who can do a lot of other things, that simply because of age, which we do this on a lot of things, we're going to say that you can't buy it.
This becomes a problem when you hear the logic of those who want to do this.
They say, well, an 18-year-old shouldn't be equipped to handle a gun.
Do you realize that over 83% of Marines that enter the Marine Corps are under age 20?
And you're willing to put them, and you say, well, they're being trained and supervised.
They're not trained and supervised all the time.
They learn how to use the weapons.
If they've never been around weapons, they now know how to use them.
And, you know, they should know how to control them.
However, they're still 18. Your logic that an 18-year-old cannot properly handle these weapons is faulty.
But also, if the question becomes, is 18 this number?
We already have raised the drinking age to 21. They can come into the military but can't have a beer.
But these are issues of age that similar ideas apply.
That if 18 is a certain age that they're not capable of handling this, then why, number one, do we let them drive at age 16?
And I will show you statistically that younger drivers, 16, 17, and 18, are the worst drivers on the road statistically for accidents, wrecks, and death.
But yet no one is rushing to say, well, a 16-year-old can't handle a car, in which if they have a wreck and they have a wreck with others, then they are causing the deaths or causing the injury to other people.
Again, the actual idea of just simply raising the age is not going to affect the overall issue of crime and violence with these long guns that you're looking at.
It's not already, you've already got it raised to 21, yet handguns are the most common use of Gun in these deaths, found in urban cities and found in areas of gang-related violence and others.
That's where these crimes come.
Number two, it also is another issue of ages, is that the same folks who advocate age requirements for guns and others also advocate that 16 years or younger, 18 years younger, can do health care decisions such as abortion or others on their own.
Again, I'm just simply pointing this out, that simply looking for an answer that you believe makes you feel better is not always the answer that will heal you and cure you.
And I brought this up before on the House floor, and I'm bringing it up here today.
Other issues that are out there that are being discussed, red flag laws.
Red flag laws are those that are extreme risk protection orders.
Here's the part.
Could that possibly help us in dealing with some people?
Yes.
There's a possibility that could.
If proper precautions are put in.
The problem is, is we don't typically see that.
Many times these red flag orders, which are in 19 states, including the District of Columbia, allow somebody to go petition to court to have someone's guns removed because they are considered themselves, or consider them to be, uh, In a way that they're unstable to actually own a firearm.
It allows law enforcement, family members, or other close relationships to an individual to petition a state court to temporarily remove firearms from an individual who they deem to be a present danger to themselves and others.
The problem with this is, if he comes at it, is due process of taking an individual's right, the Second Amendment right of firearm ownership, taking it for the word of someone else who believes that they are We're good to
go.
These are all real-world situations in which a fundamental constitutional right can be denied.
And if there's not adequate protections for due process, then this, again, will it solve the problem?
Probably not.
There's some evidence to say, and again, I'm one who believes that mental health, folks who have mental health issues, and if you see these issues, you need to get these people help, and we need to provide better help.
Is this going to actually be the solution to that problem?
I don't believe so, because really the statistics don't back that up.
This is...
The problem that we're having many times in these discussions is that the solutions offered don't solve the problems.
Remember, in many of these situations, the guns were purchased legally.
They would not have tripped.
In fact, many of them had background checks done, and they would not have been caught that way.
Others got the purchases by others who bought them for them.
Those are straw men that, guess what, are already illegal.
So this is the discussion that we need to continue to have here.
The other issue is hardening of schools.
Now this is one that both Republicans and Democrats can get a hold of, except Joe Biden just said that he is not in favor of hardening schools.
President Biden says he does not believe in proposals to harden schools against potential gunmen.
The White House Press Secretary Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday of this past week, he said, I know there's been conversations about hardening schools.
That is not something that he believes in.
He believes that we should be able to give teachers the resources to be able to do the job that they were meant to be able to do in schools.
What does that mean?
That means that things that actually work, that came out of Parkland, things that actually work in a school environment in which it makes it difficult for a gunman to enter or to stay in a school, such as single-way entrance, a double door entry, an entry through the office, keeping outside doors locked, making sure that there's a school resource officer, those kind of things which we could spend money on to actually help these situations, frankly, Joe Biden has now said he's not interested.
Why is he not interested in it?
Because he's interested in the assault weapon ban.
He's interested in raising the age to 21. He's interested in all these things that we have shown today statistically do not work.
Now, I know many of you are sitting out there and you're frustrated.
Some of you, even conservatives, are saying, well, Doug, we've got to do something this time.
Hard and soft targets.
Okay, they're soft targets for a reason.
The problem with all these solutions that are being offered so far is that they won't work.
And is that the kind of message you want to send to someone who's grieving over the loss of a loved one in one of these incidents?
You're gonna tell them, oh, we're gonna do this and it's gonna work, knowing full well it won't.
Is it because you don't like the guns?
And you see that is the way to do it.
You'd rather take the guns, the Second Amendment rights away from lawful gun owners and those who have it?
Would you rather take it away from them because it's easier to do and it makes you feel good?
Or do you actually want to see things that may or may not solve the problem?
Hardening schools will do it.
The president has already said, we don't want to do that.
We want to give the teachers what they need to do their job.
Does that mean that you're, you know, again, that goes back to the political argument that we need more money for our schools.
And then that's a whole different political argument we can talk about.
We must deal with a society that enforces laws.
This is the one that bothers me the most.
I've read out what's already illegal.
It is illegal.
Mayor Lightfoot in Chicago talks about all the time these guns purchased from other places and brought into Chicago.
Okay, if it is, why are you not having a concerted effort to shut down in these communities the people who have bought and handled these weapons illegally?
The laws are already on the books.
You can do it on a state level, you can do it on a federal level, but they're not being enforced.
We saw this when I was in Congress.
That in Chicago in particular, there was very little gun cases actually prosecuted.
If you look across the country, there are very few gun cases that are actually prosecuted.
This is illegal already.
Take the guns as best you can out of the hands of those who should not have them.
We all agree should not have them.
And then you will have a chance of starting to make your streets safer.
But instead, we focus on the higher profile, the ones that are gut-wrenching, they're hard to deal with, and there's no easy answers.
But as long as you do not enforce gun laws, as long as you don't go into these communities and arrest those who have guns illegally and take the precautions to do so and have DAs who are willing to put time, resource, and effort, and energies into prosecuting these cases, then you're going to continue to have the same problems that you've been having.
Now, you may not like to hear that.
You may not think that's the right answer.
Fine.
Find a better one.
But putting new laws on the books, we're still at the problem of violence in this country, and it is growing.
And these laws are currently on the books.
This is not something that we wish were on the books.
They're on the books.
They're just not being enforced.
So you think that adding more laws is going to help this?
As if the law against murder is not enough to deter somebody from using any kind of a weapon to kill somebody else?
Again, laws that are there are deterrents only when they are enforced.
And most of our gun laws, many times, unfortunately, are not enforced.
It's easier to continue to restrict my rights as a legal gun owner than it is to enforce the law on those who are breaking law.
The last one is mental health, and I could go on mental health.
And again, some of this is just watching.
Many of these instances we've seen, they were signs and triggers given off, but yet those in the family and those around them would not enforce.
And then, as we saw in Parkland, even when reported, they were ignored.
Folks, we've got to take this seriously.
These instances that pop up, especially these mass shootings, and when the impetus is out there that you know that there may be a problem, you've got to talk about it.
You've got to get the person help.
You've got to make sure law enforcement is aware of it, and law enforcement needs to take the action.
They already have that action and ability to do so under many state laws in this country, and this is what needs to happen.
We've got to pay attention more to those around us.
So as you look at this, passing what feels good may make you feel good, but it doesn't heal you.
And I wanted to break down this subject, and I don't want this to be one in which, oh no, I just want to keep my guns.
No, there's things that we can do to help this.
But then there are things that are not working that we continually go back to, just as we do a bad golf swing or a bad decision in our life.
We just keep going back to it because we think if we keep saying it over and over again, that it's going to get better.
Folks, it's not going to get better when you have the wrong solutions to the wrong questions.
Look at it from the perspective of what actually is being seen.
An assault weapons ban that didn't work.
The answers that are being given would not have solved any of these that you're going to hear over the TV and in congressional hearings saying, if we just pass this, things like Parkland and all these should not have happened.
They shouldn't happen.
They're wrong.
The people that do them have issues and they use guns to carry it out.
But folks, if you think that the assault weapons ban would be the start and the end of it, they're going to find out it doesn't work.
So what are they going to do back and come back next?
Then they're going to have to come back and say, well, we're going to take all handguns.
I mean, it's a slippery slope process here.
At the end of the day, it all goes back to one thing.
The solutions here have to do with how do we restrict those who legally do it more to get back at those who do it illegally?
Folks, My heart breaks for what we see in this country.
My heart breaks for those children and families who have lost each other.
The families who have never had those kids come back home.
A community that will forever be scarred.
We've got to take time to protect these schools.
We've got to take time to protect our communities by looking out for each other.
And then we've also got to be realistic in what we're trying to say will actually work and what actually would not work.
And use the statistics of what we see to know it.
Folks, everyone in those school shootings, everyone in Buffalo, everyone in these that we've talked about this morning matter in their lives.
I care deeply for, but I also care deeply for the fact that we're not enforcing laws.
We're not prosecuting gang members.
We're not putting away those who are selling guns illegally.
We're not doing the sting operations to get those guns out of the hands of those who not have it in cities like Chicago and LA and Atlanta and Philadelphia and everywhere else.
It seems that those lives that are killed, and by the way, there was over 46 shot and 10 dead over the Memorial Day weekend or the weekend after this shooting in Texas.
You don't see that on the front page of the headlines.
Why?
Because I will guarantee that probably in most of those, the guns were illegal.
The guns shouldn't have been had to start with, and yet the local law enforcement either are overstrapped, underperformed, or whatever, and the DAs are not prosecuting the cases.
Folks, we've got to get to the point where we find things that work, use the laws that currently work, and work together to make our community safer.
It doesn't come from taking the legal right away from somebody who does it right, And then ignoring the laws that continue to perpetuate the violence that we see so many times in our streets.
This is a sobering issue.
This is one that is not fun, but it is one that needs to be had.
These are the numbers.
These are the facts.
It may make you feel good to talk about something else, but feeling good doesn't heal you.
Thanks for listening to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Share this with somebody you need to share it with, and let's find some real solutions to help those who hurt you.
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