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April 22, 2018 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
43:21
Get Off My Lawn #119 | First Lady, First Mom
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Live from New York.
It's Get Off My Ron with Gavin McInnes.
When the sun and the air All the shiny scratches come on earth and golden And sun and air But nothing Mmm.
one.
There's Morrissey.
I am human and I need to be loved just like everybody else does.
Boy, I would kill to get Morrissey on the show.
Wouldn't that be awesome?
That was the Smiths, Knowing You or something like that.
Just look up, I'm Human, I need to be loved, and it'll pop up.
How soon is now?
How soon is now.
Now, the Smiths were a big band in the 80s, and it was because of Morrissey.
And when he went solo, he did just as well.
He's still touring now.
But Morrissey is kind of right-wing.
He doesn't like Trump.
He's a vegetarian.
And when he plays Madison Square Garden down the street here, he won't allow you to sell hot dogs.
So he can be a little pedantic with his veganism.
But as far as multiculturalism, he's dead on.
And he doesn't like what's happening to Britain.
He did an interview with Spin, I think, that was published on his website where he said, halal meat is evil, Khan is a fool, and basically attacked the whole notion of multiculturalism, where he said, if you try to make everything multicultural, you end up with no culture at all.
And here's my favorite quote, although that's a good one.
Diverse opinion is banned in England, he said.
Debate is over.
The most offensive thing you can do in modern Britain is to have an opinion and to talk clearly.
Could you sum it up any better, Morrissey?
Could you possibly have said a more succinct sentence that just sums up this whole show, my whole life, my whole career is in that sentence.
So true.
And of course, he's being pilloried as evil and everyone's freaking out, talking about how he's fallen rock bottom.
He's always had these views, by the way.
He's always been wrapping himself in the UK flag and the union jack, both literally and figuratively.
This is nothing new, but these kids today, they see Trump as a reality star because they don't know what he did in the 80s and 70s.
And every time I see this, if I see someone's a white supremacist or someone's gone off the deep end, I used to get excited.
Back in Vice days, when I was looking for freaks everywhere, I used to get excited and go, oh, good, we got a loony, a Nazi.
And then you go find them and you go, no, you're not a Nazi.
You're just a non-liberal.
And that happened also today.
Everyone's talking about this Richard Cohen guy who wrote an article for the Washington Post saying, look, I understand women have it hard.
Visible minorities have it hard.
But this idea of hiring just because they're women and just because they're black, Dave, you should leave it up there when I'm talking about the guy.
We don't need to see my logo all the time.
Privilege is real, but being a white man shouldn't disqualify me.
And he says, talks about the New York Times op-ed where the Metropolitan Museum of Art should not have appointed, quote unquote, yet another white male director.
He said he recoils when he sees that and says, that's just another way of saying that white and male is a disqualification.
Diversity in the workplace is an overdue goal, sure, but it can amount to a quota by another name.
Choose a woman because she's a woman and you've eliminated a man because he's a man.
Perfectly logical, but no one can shut up about this.
It's like the top Twitter moment today.
And Vox did a whole article about how he's become accustomed to privilege.
And when you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression.
Similarly, this is also linked to Morrissey, this woman, Kristen Hatton, she's a pro-life activist.
Her husband's a Marine.
She's kind of hipstery, has tattoos.
And she's been called anti-abortion leader, emerges as a white nationalist.
Now, my brain, when I read that, went back to Vice Days and I went, ooh, juicy, we got a weirdo here, someone colorful, someone exciting.
And then you read it, and there's a rather consequential sentence in this takedown of this white nationalist, and that is, she does not identify as a white nationalist or a white supremacist.
Isn't that kind of a major detail when you're exposing a white nationalist when they say, I'm not?
But of course, as Morrissey said here, diverse opinion is banned in England.
The debate is over.
The most offensive thing you can do is to have an opinion or talk clearly.
She just said, I admit to being a racist by today's standards, which by the way, you know what that really means, right?
It means I'm not scared of the word anymore.
So go ahead, scream it at me.
It doesn't mean, we found a racist, we got one.
It means, stop with that witch hunt.
It's boring to me.
But I also think almost everyone is a racist by today's standards.
It's racist to live in a majority white neighborhood.
It's racist to send your kids to majority white schools.
When I was a kid, racism meant hatred for another race and or acting on that hatred.
Now you're a racist if you touch a black person's hair because you think it's pretty.
It's so true.
So you didn't find me Nazi like you promised in your headline, as per us.
This guy, Richard Cohen, wrote a very benign article about prejudice.
She's just saying rational stuff about white farmers in South Africa, basically, and Israel.
And Morrissey is just saying, I'd like to debate.
I'd like an open forum.
Please.
No way.
We have a very special show for you today.
So there's this guy, Richard Reich, and Robert Reich, sorry.
It's spelled Reich.
Very tiny, tiny man, 4'10 man.
He used to be Clinton's Secretary of Labor.
And he, I think he sums up Everything I'm talking about right now, and in general, which is the left's purposely disingenuous modus operandi, where they lie.
They lie, they're lazy, they make up stuff, they play dirty pool.
And that's why I want us to do the same.
So I'm going to take a video he did with John Lott, and we're going to go through piece by piece, because this video has about 2 million views, and it's about how guns are evil.
And John and I are going to break it apart piece by piece and show you why it's false.
Because it's worth just stopping, time out, and analyzing exactly what they're saying so we can sort of be refreshed and be reminded of how dirty they are.
And by the way, what's my solution to all this?
We play dirty.
For example, first lady, first mom.
She passed away.
That's George Bush Sr.'s wife, Barbara Bush, 1925 to 2018, 92-year-old.
I know she doesn't look great there.
You're not going to look great when you're 92.
She was a very attractive young lady.
But a professor was very rude about her death.
What did that woman say?
Outrageous California prof calls Barbara Bush amazing racist and says she's happy the witch is dead.
She says, what does she say?
Go down to her quote.
Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.
F-word out of here with your nice words.
I want her fired for that.
I want her to lose her job.
Now, Roger Stone said something similar.
Roger Stone called her a nasty drunk.
He also said that if you burned her body, it would burn for three days because it would be so saturated in alcohol.
And he calls her the head of the Bush crime family.
I don't want Roger Stone fired.
I want us to ignore the hypocrisy of that.
I want us to ignore...
That's called dirty pool.
That's called rules for radicals.
I'm not fair anymore.
I'm done with fair.
I'm done with the high road.
We take the low road now.
We are dirty fighters.
We go for the nuts.
We bite your eyes.
And that's what Robert Reich does on a regular basis.
Remember the Milo riots?
You know what he said about that?
He said at Berkeley that Milo and Breitbart worked together for made-for-TV images of a riot.
His proof, of course, is that it looked very aesthetic.
Remember when you had like trans rights or real rights, that woman person, trans woman with the shield and all that stuff?
That was all orchestrated by Milo.
All these incredibly talented actors in really elaborate costumes.
That was all Milo.
This is Robert Reich's brain.
I don't know if he believes it or not.
That's a very good question.
But that's an absurd belief of Robert Reich, but doesn't discredit him.
He also pushes for a minimum wage, $15.
Everyone gets a minimum wage.
This is one of the less leading economists.
He says, even if $15 an hour for minimum wage risks job losses, it's still the right thing to do.
And what's his proof?
Another time, he said that Henry Ford raised the salary of his workers so they could buy his cars.
And he was paying them three times what anyone else would pay.
Hey, Reich, it's an assembly line.
It pumps out thousands of cars a day.
You think the workers can afford to buy them all?
Every worker there would be good in two days of production.
And now what?
Now who's buying the cars?
You thick head?
Thick head, that's my new insult.
You thick-headed dunce, that would have been better.
Forbes gave him an F for that ridiculous mistake.
But here's a more interesting one.
I think this sums him up.
He did an article called, I did a book, sorry, called Locked in the Cabinet.
And someone at Chicago Tribune went through it, and it was just chalk-a-block, not of exaggerations, but of out-and-out lies.
He says that he was berated by a frothing Republican committee chairman.
And then this journalist, Jonathan Rauch, who went through the whole book, says that he talked to the congressman, and the guy was very courteous.
Oh, he checked the transcripts of this conversation and found that the congressman was very courteous and even found the sentences that Reich attributes to him, and they weren't as Reich portrayed them.
Reich, again, Reich recalls giving a speech to a cigar-smoking all-male audience of National Association of Manufacturers, which jeered and cursed him.
And then the journalist Rauch, I know it's getting confusing, discovered that a third of the attendees were women, and there was no smoking in there, and then the comments that Reich attributes to questionnaires were never made.
He lies about a portrait of Francis Perkins he took out of a closet and put on the wall.
Anyway, this is who we are up against.
And when you see a video from one of these guys, know that you're being bombarded with lies.
And I'm going to prove that on today's episode.
Now, there's one tiny thing here that I was even shocked by and that John Lott, he's not shocked by, but it's difficult to explain.
92% of Americans are for background checks.
That sounds crazy to you and me, but here's the clincher.
When the Gallup poll asks that, they say, do you want the police to have resources to stop mass shooters?
That's really what they're getting at here.
Sorry, the exact question is, please tell me whether you favor or oppose each of the following approaches to prevent mass shootings at schools.
So really what they're saying in the question is, if the police hear about this cruise guy and he sounds like he's going to be a threat, may we just check his background?
So of course 92% say yes, because that's the way the question is phrased.
However, in reality, when it comes down to voting, it takes tens and tens of millions of dollars to try to get people to get even close to 50% wanting background checks.
So don't be deceived by that.
The rest of the video, by the way, it's incredibly obvious where he lied, how he's wrong, how he's being deceitful.
All right, we're out of time.
Let's get to this totally disingenuous piece of propaganda.
And I'm devoting my entire show to it because I think it shows you the kind of radical liars, the kind of frauds that we are up against, and what a total waste of time it is to debate them.
We have to start playing dirty, we have to follow rules for radicals.
We have to follow Sololinsky because these people don't play fair.
Let's take the low road with Robert Reich and John Lott.
John, are you there?
I certainly am.
How are you doing?
Wonderful.
I love talking to the primary academic, the leading source of information when it comes to gun laws because we get drowned in all of this rhetoric and lies, and it gets overwhelming.
You see the NRA side, it sounds good, and then you see the Vox.com or the Robert Rice side in this case, and you go, wow, that sounds good.
So I want to go through this left-wing video with you so we can refute it easily.
Right.
Well, I mean, it's just amazing to me that they don't seem to have any standards in terms of what's true or not when they put these things out, but I'm happy to go through it with you.
All right.
So let's just do brief talking points on why these facts are wrong so we can keep the whole thing short.
And the truly curious can go to crime research.org.
Sure.
All right, let's start.
Here we go.
Five points to counter the evil NRA.
The next time you hear someone repeating pro-gun NRA propaganda, you can respond with these five points.
Number one, gun laws save lives.
Consider the federal assault weapons ban.
After it became law in 1994, gun massacres, defined as instances of gun violence in which six or more people were shot and killed, fell by 37%.
The number of people dying from mass shootings fell by 43%.
All right, that sounds problematic right there.
Because he said gun, not assault weapon.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's one of the big problems that they have there, that the number of attacks with assault weapons is actually a small fraction of these mass public shootings.
And there's no change that occurred over that period of time, either before, during, or after the assault weapons ban.
But, you know, you look at, there's lots of academic studies by criminologists and economists that have looked at this.
What they try to do is to see whether there's a change in mass public shootings in the states where the federal law made a difference relative to the ones where it didn't.
And they just don't find any evidence of the types of claims even with regard to mass shootings.
And there's lots of studies, even ones paid by the Clinton administration, weren't able to find this benefit that he's claiming.
Well, this is a common trick with the left, too.
They'll say the Air Quality Act was enacted in this year and the quality of air went up.
But then Stossel pulls back on the map and you see, wait a minute, it was going at 45 degrees 50 years before this.
Right.
No, I mean, and that's going to be important for one of the other discussions that he brings up with regard to the Australia laws, where firearm homicides and firearm suicides were falling for 15 years prior to the buyback that they had in 96 and 97.
And it continued falling afterwards, but actually at a slower rate.
So if you just look at the after average and the before average, the after average is lower.
But anybody who actually looks at the year-to-year changes will say, well, this doesn't seem to have improved it.
There was no big sudden drop.
It didn't start falling at a faster rate.
The opposite was true.
Okay, let's get back to this tiny man, Robert Reich.
But when Republicans in Congress let the ban lapse in 2004, gun massacres more than doubled.
Number two: The Second Amendment was never Is that him making the same mistake, just saying guns?
Exact same point.
You know, if you look at assault weapons, you don't see the change.
And if you try to compare the states where the law made a difference, getting rid of the law made a difference versus the ones where it didn't, you just don't.
Even looking at total mass public shootings, you don't see the change that he's talking about.
Also, he's throwing around the number 200%, 47%.
We're talking about three mass killings, two mass killings.
So it's not like you went from 300 mass killings to 600 mass killings.
You'd go from, say, two to four.
Right.
Well, actually, he's dealing with an even smaller number than what's normally dealt with.
The traditional FBI definition of mass public shootings is four or more killed.
And he's using a number of six or more killed.
And just, it may not seem like it, but when you go, each additional person that you require to be killed has a big reduction in the number of these mass public shootings.
You have a lot of, let's say, four or more killed, four people killed, because six, you've lost a lot of cases there.
So six or more killed.
I mean, I know from reading the newspaper my whole life, it's like two a year.
Right, it's not very many.
I mean, I haven't memorized the six or more definition, but it's less than what we would normally have for quite a bit less than the four or more that's here's a million-dollar question.
You probably won't be able to answer it just today briefly, but the real question I always ask when I watch this is you're clearly being manipulative with the stats saying 200% based on a couple cases.
Are you doing that maliciously or are you naive?
You know, it's hard to get into anybody's mind about what's going on here.
All I can tell you is the amount of just purely, obviously false information here is just overwhelming.
That's not in this video, but in the Vox one that you mentioned or the New York Times.
It seems the thing is I've talked to some of these people and I've explained to the problems that they've had with this stuff and it doesn't change their behavior at all.
And the thing that's interesting is they don't address the problems that are raised.
They just try to ignore them.
That's what's different about you.
You will say, other people will say this, but that's because of that.
They Don't have that sort of a fair balance.
Right.
Well, I mean, I could just tell people conclusions for stuff, but I don't think that's the way you learn or understand the debate because then you just have each side going and yelling, well, here's my conclusion.
What good does that do most people?
You know, they don't just place to their pre-existing biases.
You have to understand how these claims are created and what's behind them.
I'm done with good.
I want to start winning.
Let's play Dirty Pool.
This guy is, Forbes calls him economically illiterate.
He's been caught making up stories about his career, completely fictional events like Jason Blair level.
He's playing Dirty Pool.
You have to fight fire with fire.
All right, let's go to...
All right, let's go to number two here.
Burr intended to permit mass slaughter.
When the Constitution was written more than 200 years ago, the framers' goal was to permit a well-regulated militia, not to enable Americans to terrorize their communities.
Number three, more guns.
Whoa, whoa, who you can't just throw that out there and then jump to number three.
Here's a common myth that you keep hearing about the Founding Fathers.
They seem to think all you had was this black powder gun.
It's the only thing anyone could conceive, and there'd been no evolution of guns.
But we had all kinds of automatic weapons back then, did we not?
Sure.
Well, I mean, there was something called the pocket gun, which was kind of a machine gun type.
It was more of a gatling gun type weapon.
You know, so who knows?
I mean, people, it really doesn't matter to them what type of guns.
Just listen to him talk about what the Second Amendment is.
I need to say I'm an economist.
I've taught in law schools, but I'm not a lawyer.
But the basic points that he's bringing up are pretty easy and simple to deal with.
The Second Amendment uses the term the right of the people.
And that's in other amendments, and it's also in the body.
And each time it's used, it's meant to talk about individual rights.
But look, to me, the ultimate question here isn't what the Second Amendment means.
It's whether or not guns make people safer or not.
Or these gun control regulations, do they unintentionally disarm the most vulnerable people in our society?
Those are the issues that I think need to be addressed here.
And that's what got me interested in this debate, and that's why I deal with it.
I don't deal with sex guns.
But even by his laws, even by his thing, a well-regulated militia, I live in New York City where I'm looking at five years for a paintball gun, a BB gun, a rifle, any kind of gun, and I'm doomed.
How am I supposed to form a well-regulated militia?
I couldn't even get a black powder gun in Manhattan without going straight to jail.
Yeah, well, even the term well-regulated meant something quite different 240 years ago than it means now.
Well-regulated just meant disciplined, just meant that people were being careful and doing what they were doing.
Right, right.
So it doesn't mean regulated in terms of regulations as we use the term now.
I love how he says it wasn't intended for individuals to terrorize citizens.
I can agree on that.
Yeah, we're on the same page, Tiny Rice.
Have not and will not make us safer.
More than 30 studies show that guns are linked to an increased risk for violence and homicide.
In 1996, Australia initiated a mandatory Okay, we got two things going on here.
So before we get to Australia, he says that more guns Scientific American says more guns have been linked to more crime, thereby contradicting your book.
Right.
Well, I dealt with that author.
I actually had a letter to Scientific American just pointing out that she only seemed to pick studies that were on the other side of the issue.
I mean, I can tell you dozens of studies just in terms of right-to-carry laws that show that passage of right-to-carry laws reduced violent crime rates.
She didn't seem to be able to go and deal with anything past the first edition of More Guns Less Crime in 1998, even though I gave her lists of dozens of authors, academic peer-reviewed studies that have been done.
And she couldn't even deal with the second and third editions of More Guns Less Crime.
Did she claim to refute the first edition?
Well, she just said she cited a couple people who had been critical of it after the first edition and then didn't even bother to deal with any of the responses that I had to those authors or that others have had to those authors pointing out mistakes that they have made in their arguments.
So it's just, look, I can find even more studies on the other side and people can go to our website at crimeresearch.org where we list out and have links to the academic studies so they can go and look at them.
And the types of studies that she's referring to anyway are public health type studies, which are typically very poorly done.
I mean, my book, The War on Guns, basically goes through and talks about what's involved with these studies.
And you and I could spend an hour or two talking about them.
But if you look at studies by criminologists and economists, people who deal with crime type issues and deal with them.
I can give you one quick example.
Okay.
The type of problem with the public health research.
Probably the most famous claim from the public health research is that owning a gun in the home is more likely to result in the death of you or somebody else that you know than it is to result in the death of an attacker.
What they do is they'll look at people who died in or near residence over the course of a year and ask the relatives of the deceased whether or not a gun was owned in the home.
And then they'll just assume that if you died from a gunshot and a gun was owned in the home, that it was that gun that was used in the death.
In fact, If you look at the first study that was done there, they had 444 homicides.
Only eight of those were due to the weapon that was in the home.
The other 436 of them were actually due to a weapon brought in from outside the home.
That's like under 2%.
Yeah, it's pretty small.
Right.
And so, you know, just fixing that one issue there reverses the claim.
And there's so many other things that I could go through there.
I can give you one other issue with it if you want.
So what they'll do is they do that survey, and then they'll have a control group of people who are the same age, sex, and race who live within a mile of the deceased and ask them whether they own a gun.
And then they run a regression on whether you die on whether you own a gun.
Let's do the same thing for hospital care.
Let's find people who died in the city over the course of the last year.
Ask their relatives whether they've been to the hospital.
And then we'll have a control group of people who are the same age, sex, and race who live within a mile of the deceased and ask them whether they've been to the hospital.
And then we go and look to see whether people who went to the hospital were more likely to die than those who didn't go to the hospital.
My guess is you'd find a very strong relationship between people going to the hospital being more likely to die than those that didn't need to go to the hospital.
But that doesn't tell you.
It just tells you that sick people go to the hospital and healthy people don't go to the hospital.
So sick people are more likely to die even though they've been to the hospital than healthy people.
Are we going to go around and try to ban hospitals based on that?
It makes no sense.
It's like saying, look, there's a reason why some of these people own guns.
Some of them may have been gang members.
Some of them may have had their house broken into multiple times.
Just saying that they live within a mile of the other people and are the same age, sex, and race isn't going to control or account for whether or not they were at risk.
And so it's true maybe that people who are gang members have a higher chance of dying.
And if they didn't have a gun, they'd have an even higher chance of dying.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so, you know, there's so many problems with it.
Okay.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but we're running out of time here.
We're only halfway through.
I'm going to present you one that I know is going to annoy you, but I'm a sadist.
I'm going to subject you to this one.
For a buyback program to reduce the number of guns in private ownership, their firearm homicide rate fell 42% in the seven years that followed.
Number four, the vast majority.
Okay.
Australia, they've had a buyback thing and they had crime go down.
Yeah, well, that's what we referred to earlier.
I mean, it's really a ridiculous claim.
You have to take into account that firearm homicides were falling for 15 years prior to the buyback.
The buyback reduced the number of legally owned guns from about 3 million to something a little bit above 2 million guns that were there.
But afterwards, people could go and buy guns again.
So they re-bought guns after giving up their guns.
Right.
And the gun ownership rate by 2010 was back to where it was prior to the buyback.
So even if they were right, what you should have seen is a big, sharp drop and then an increase over time.
That's not what you see.
It was falling before.
It fell at a slower rate afterwards.
And he's just, when he's talking about 42%, he's just taking the average before and the average after.
But if it's falling over the whole period, let's say it was a perfectly straight line.
You wouldn't say that just looking at the before and after average would prove that it had an impact.
You couldn't even see any change.
No, that's totally disingenuous.
In fact, if it's consistent, you say there was zero change.
Right, exactly.
But the fact is, it fell at a slower rate afterwards.
And so, you know, it's kind of the opposite of what they would claim if you look at it carefully.
It's just reading a graph wrong.
All right, let's jump to number four here.
Stronger gun safety laws.
According to Gallup, 96% of Americans support universal background checks.
75% support a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales.
And 70% favor requiring all privately owned guns to be registered with the police.
Even the vast majority of gun owners are in favor of common sense gun safety laws.
Wait a minute.
Okay, that last line is irrelevant because common sense is subjective, but those numbers seemed really high.
Right.
So here's the deal.
Are there polls like the Gale poll that show those types of numbers?
Yeah, there are.
But the question becomes, are these questions being asked in a useful way?
And one of the ways you can look at that is to see Bloomberg had initiatives on this universal background check in 2016.
He spent like almost $30 million trying to pass a background check, universal background check initiative in Maine and Nevada.
He lost by four percentage points in Maine, and essentially it was a tie in Nevada.
And so he had huge amounts of money, outspending his opponents by like six to one in Maine, and it got less than 50%.
So when people have actually had to vote on this, it's nowhere near 96% over there.
It's never even been closed.
And when you look at surveys that ask people about specific bills like the Manchin-Toome bill that came up in 2013, rather than just these general, vague statements, most people were happy that they didn't pass it and that they thought the Senate should move on and deal with other legislation rather than that background check bill.
So it's sort of like the climate deniers thing, where they say, do you believe in climate change?
They find a group that does, and then they re-ask the question with that isolated group and they get a 96.
You could ask this gun control question on the upper west side of New York City and you'd get great numbers.
Well, I don't know if that's the case.
I mean, I assume Gallup is trying to get a nationally representative Sample of people.
The question is: how is the question phrased?
And is there a difference between when they actually put a bill out there and people look at the actual language, how they want to try to do these things?
I mean, this is Bloomberg's initiatives.
You've got to write them exactly the way you wanted to have it.
If there was 96% support, he wouldn't have to outspend his opponents six to one.
I see, yeah.
It's the lose.
30 days.
30 days is very rare.
You hear that outside of, you know, New York City and Los Angeles.
That may be for machine guns.
It's not even 30 days in California.
It's 10 days.
But it's just, you know, here's the problem with all these types of rules, whether it be universal background checks or these waiting periods, is that they have real costs.
So you take the background checks.
In Washington, D.C., where these politicians are, it costs $125 to privately transfer a gun because of the background check on private transfers.
In New York City, it's even more in virtually all the places you can go to do it.
You can find it as cheap as $55 in Oregon, but whether it's $55 or $125 or $150, those are real costs.
The question is, who are you keeping from buying guns?
And my research indicates it's basically poor minorities who live in high-crime urban areas, the people who are most likely to be victims of violent crime, who benefit the most from being able to go and protect themselves.
And having that type of cost is like a real tax on making it so those very law-abiding citizens can't defend themselves.
There's also this issue of what we call false positives.
We'll frequently hear in the media, 3 million dangerous, prohibited people have been stopped from buying guns because of background checks.
It makes it seem great.
I mean, who'd want 3 million dangerous people walking around with guns?
But the problem is it's just a lie.
That when you actually go and look at that, virtually all of those denials are false positives, that they stop a law-abiding citizen who simply had a name similar to a thing from being able to buy a gun.
And the people who are hurt again are the most vulnerable people.
They're basically poor blacks.
Black males.
Isaac Jackson.
Right.
The thing is, people tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups.
Hispanics have names similar to other Hispanics.
Blacks tend to have names similar to other blacks.
30% of black males are legally prohibited from owning guns because of past criminal history.
Well, who do you think their names are most likely to be confused with?
Other black males.
And so you have this very high false positive rate among people, minorities.
Why should we have a system like that?
There's no reason why we shouldn't.
And you and I could go into a long discussion with it.
But the point is, you know, in the background checks, I mean, the waiting periods, what about a woman who's being stalked or threatened?
Should she have to wait 30 days to be able to go and get a gun, to be able to go and protect herself?
I mean, you got to have some notion of costs and benefits here, and that's completely lost in a lot of the discussion that gun control advocates have.
All right, number five.
You ready?
Sure.
Number five, the National Rifle Association is a special interest with a stranglehold on the Republican Party.
In 2016, the group spent a record $55 million on elections.
Their real goal is to protect a few big gun manufacturers who want to enlarge their profits.
America is better than the NRA.
America is the.
Yes.
Okay.
So accepting his $55 million number, people can go to places like opensecrets.org and see how much Bloomberg spends on these things.
So in 2016, Bloomberg spent $24 million on congressional and Senate races, basically, in the country.
He spent almost $30 million on these two initiatives in Maine and Nevada that we just talked about.
So just on federal races and two initiatives, Bloomberg basically spent almost $55 million, you know, over $50 million just on those two types of things.
Same as the NRA, that's one guy and two cases.
Right.
And that ignores all the state races.
Bloomberg spent apparently even more money on state legislative races across the country than he spent on federal congressional and senate races.
So that's a lot more money than the, that's another $20 million, probably more than the NRA spent.
Well, I was sure I looked up the lobbies, specifically on Capitol Hill, and I was comparing it to the teachers' unions, and there's quite a huge vacillation with these.
But the biggest I saw the NRA get up to was $5 million on a big year, and it seemed like the teachers' unions were $10 million.
I'll have to double verify that, but it seemed like their biggest numbers were twice the NRA.
Yeah, no, I mean, the NRA is nowhere near the biggest in terms of spending on lobbying federally.
But look, I mean, Bloomberg spends a huge amount of money lobbying federally.
Bloomberg does stuff like helping fly around kids around the country for the March for Our Lives rally that we just had and providing background support for them in many different ways.
And so, you know, he does lots of things.
Every town gets like $50 million a year from him.
He spends hundreds of millions of dollars on research.
And so if Robert Reich wants to go and argue that somehow the NRA, Republicans are beholden to the NRA, then the Democrats are really beholden to Michael Bloomberg.
And if that's the type of argument that he wants to make, that somehow we shouldn't vote for people that get large amounts of money from any group, then he really should be going after Bloomberg.
And that should be explaining a lot more.
The point is, the money that the NRA gives, I think, is largely given to people who believe the same things that they do, as opposed to just kind of buying their votes.
And I assume the same thing's true with Bloomberg.
He gives it to people who really want to go and disarm law-abiding citizens in many different ways.
And, you know, he's not buying their vote.
I think he's just trying to give it to true believers.
And I think that's probably true in both the cases.
It's a common myth that I think Robert Reich must know if he's been working on Capitol Hill.
But it's a common myth that the right has all the money and all the donors and the left are just these hard scrubble, you know, black people and farmers trying to get through the day.
The money is much bigger on the damn side as far as contributions go than it is on the right.
All the top donors are Democrats.
A lot of them are, for sure.
All right, let's end this and see if it's just rhetoric and he brings up any points.
He's still got 30 seconds to blab on here.
Let's see what he does.
the young people from Parkland, Florida, who are telling legislators to act like adults.
It's time all of us listen.
This is credits.
You know, I'll just say this.
People go to our website.
What we do is I show some polls that actually indicate that young people are more kind of conservative, libertarian types on gun issues than older people are.
You know, this somehow thing that we should take our marching orders from young people.
If that's the case, then we should be even more skeptical of gun control on average.
You know, I'm not saying you may have people at Parkland, but even there, there were a number of students who haven't gotten the airtime that some of them have, they've gotten from there, who are opposed to having these additional restrictions and are in favor of things like arming teachers.
You know, and yet their arguments in favor of things like arming teachers and staff haven't gotten to play as a solution to these problems.
Well, John, we've actually run out of time, and I think it's interesting that we just took a two and a half minute video from the left, and it's got almost 2 million views, and barely touched the surface on all the mistakes, lies, and misdirects that are in that video, and we filled up an entire show.
I'm sorry to subject you to this, because to be honest, sometimes you do sound like a beaten man.
Well, it's just, you know, there's just so much of the stuff coming out.
And it's kind of like, well, if they just keep on repeating these false claims often enough, then they'll win the debate.
And the media isn't open to debate now in many of the cases.
I mean, I'm glad you're there, but, you know, usually in the past, you know, you go back five years ago after Sandy Hook or whatever, I'd be on lots of different TV programs or what have you.
In recent times, they don't have the other viewpoint.
I'll get calls from a producer at CNN who will simply ask me questions about what my views are, thinking maybe they're just doing a pre-screening for having me on a show.
And instead, it just turns out that they just want to know what arguments I would make so they can give them to their panel, where everybody agrees with everybody else, so they can have some kind of bastardized form of my point that it would be making, and then everybody could say why it's wrong with nobody there trying to go and defend the argument that's there.
I mean, it's not something to go and help educate people.
It's more as if the media is just part of this campaign now on this.
Yeah, we got 60 Minutes at Morley Safer in Vietnam showing his villages being burned down.
Then he was the first journalist to report from China, from behind communist lines.
And then you cut to the other week where we had Anderson Cooper talking to Stormy Daniels about whether Trump used a condom or not.
It's all TMZ now.
Right.
Well, I'm glad there are places like you that can at least try to go into what's kind of behind the arguments.
So I appreciate you having me up.
Well, we appreciate you doing all the hard work, and we can just glean the fame.
I end all my shows with the name of my show.
John, can you just say, get off my lawn?
Okay.
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