Colion Noir, a Black NRA member and lawyer, debunks the 30,000 annual gun violence statistic, revealing 65% are suicides and 15% justified homicides, while critiquing media stereotypes like John Oliver’s omission of him in anti-NRA satire. He argues systemic poverty—not guns—drives inner-city violence, comparing gun-free zones to unenforced airports, and defends carrying firearms as a tool for preparedness, not paranoia. The Advocate, his 9mm handgun, is banned in California despite similar models being legal, exposing arbitrary restrictions. Rogan agrees the debate needs nuanced solutions over soundbites, but Noir dismisses past anti-gun guests as ill-equipped, leaving the centuries-old conflict unresolved. [Automatically generated summary]
And I hesitated a little bit because my background growing up, like, I didn't grow up with guns in the house.
No one in my family had a gun.
And for me, the idea and the notion of being a young black male with a gun, it's always...
I saw it through, exactly, through the lens of, you know, gangbanger, drug dealer, so forth and so on.
So that's the mindset I had with respect to firearms.
Unconsciously, right?
I didn't even realize, I wasn't even conscious of it until I started getting into this very heavy and realized, okay, wow, I was thinking like that, didn't realize it.
And so, but at the same time, I told myself, Why am I afraid of essentially what is an inanimate object, right?
So I think to myself, I'm like, all right, I really don't want to go.
I'm a little terrified, but you know what?
I'm going to go ahead and do it.
And so I remember getting to the range.
We get to the range, and we walk into the door, and then I hear the door for where the actual bays are, and I hear the pop, pop, pop go off.
And I'm like, holy crap, this is actually happening.
And so I kind of had this nervousness, but I'm with my friend, right?
And so I don't want my friend to feel like, okay, you're acting kind of like a bitch, right?
So I kind of kept it to myself.
We get to the counter.
We do all the paperwork that, you know, requisite paperwork, liability forms, all that.
And he has his gun.
We get some ammo.
We go to the lane.
I remember it was the very last lane.
It was, maybe the range was Top Gun in Houston.
And so we go to the very last range.
He gives me kind of like a brief instruction about how to shoot the gun, how to load it, so forth and so on.
And so at that point, I remember picking up the gun, terrified, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what was going to happen.
So I remember picking it up.
It was a little Taurus PT-11, PT-111 Millennium in.40 caliber.
The thing that people are bothered by is what comes with it and how people use it.
And I think an analogy that's a fair analogy but people reject is driving cars and a lot of these fucking psychos that have been running over people in the street.
And I think it's—so the biggest problem that a lot of gun owners, especially NRA members, have is people—like, the conversation that's being had is— Basically coloring or actually forgetting the human element behind those three letters.
Like the NRA isn't like this demigod that just sits in the cloud of Olympia and it is just one big guy that's just orchestrating this entire thing.
And I've said it before, I think we are a victim of our own success in this country.
I do think this is the greatest country in the world.
But the problem with that is this country was built on an ideological foundation that I think aids in our ability to be as great as we are.
But we live in a world now where people don't see the necessity for something that was never supposed to be seen through the lens of necessity in the first place.
The Second Amendment doesn't give me a right.
It preserves something that already existed.
But what happens is we have a culture of people who look at the Second Amendment as a privilege.
Not a right.
They look at it as a privilege.
So that's why they say, well, why do you need that?
Well, why do you need more than 10 rounds?
Why do you need this?
Why do you need that?
And I'm like, first of all, we're framing the entire conversation under need when that's not what the Second Amendment is about.
It's a right that I've already had.
It's a natural right that I had the moment that I stepped foot on this earth as a person.
Yeah, and, you know, people say, okay, it's a right, but obviously there's a problem, so we have to do something about it, so you're going to have to give up your guns.
This is the common conversation, and it's very flippant, and it's not well thought out, and there's no consideration whatsoever to mental health issues.
Look, There's something wrong when you have this many people on mental health medication, and then when you look at the number of mass shooters, it's almost universal.
Almost every single one of them is on some sort of psychiatric medication.
But that's not a part of the narrative.
That's not a part of the conversation.
The conversation is always get rid of guns.
Now, I don't want crazy people to have guns, and I don't think you do either.
So the first thing I say is, because one thing a lot of people on the side like to say is, well, you guys just don't want any gun laws, and you say no to everything, but you have no solutions.
And I actually have to check myself about that a little bit because how am I any better than the people on the other side if I have the same energy that they have towards me?
And then when you drop your guard, you can take in information more objectively.
more so than waiting or looking for confirmation bias or instigating your cognitive dissonance because you just don't want to hear the thing that's contrary to what you already believe.
I think there's some really good conversations to be had on Twitter and I've had really interesting moments on Twitter where I've learned a lot about things, where people have sent me links and I've retweeted them and I've learned a lot of things.
But it's hard sometimes, man, because there are so many people that are just unreasonable and they're not good at communicating and they're not happy people.
But when you listen to his conversation with Piers Morgan, which Piers Morgan takes that flippant, left-wing, knee-jerk, reactionary, you know, we have to ban guns.
Yeah, he's a cunt.
And when he's on with Ted...
Ted just knew everything about the actual facts.
When you start running around with statistics of gun violence, he's like, do you know how many of those people were bad guys that were shot by cops?
Do you know how many of those people were people that were shot when they were breaking into people's homes?
Do you know how many of those people were people that were killed in self-defense?
There's a lot.
It's not.
And do you know how many of those people, when you talk about gun violence, how many of those people were suicide?
So when I started getting really deep into the advocacy component of it, everyone was screaming, 30,000 people a day die from gun violence, 30,000 people a day.
That's what they were running with, right?
And they were scaring all the suburban house moms.
Oh my gosh, we got to do something about gun control.
We got to do something about guns.
So I jumped into the pool and I just like something doesn't seem right about that figure, right?
I'm not saying I'm the one who put this out there.
But then it begs the question that you brought up before, the mental health aspect.
How many lives would we actually save if we took the same energy we applied to just making guns evil and trying to ban guns and take that energy and put it towards understanding why, as a society, we have a society.
That is so eager to really not want to be here anymore.
Expand that a little bit more because we have all the guns in the universe here in America, right?
Compared to any other country.
But yet, our suicide rates should be exceedingly higher than all the other countries that don't have as many guns.
Well, there's a lot of people that haven't experienced real violence.
If you experience real violence and you've seen what happens when you have a terrible person around people that aren't terrible.
That's a reality that people don't like to face and they don't like to look at the other side of the coin.
Like whenever there's an instance where there's a shooter and the shooter gets taken out by someone who's a trained, a person who's trained with firearms and knows tactics.
Okay, but the reality is, the absolute reality is, they have happened, they are horrific, and there's more of them here than anywhere else in the world.
But it's a different kind of violence because it's people that are actively trying to get people that are actively trying to get them.
It's gang violence.
Whereas school shootings are complete innocent.
School shootings are the worst, right?
Because it's a child and some fucking psycho decides to make the most noise possible by going into a school and shooting it up.
That's the scariest and the worst.
For most people.
For most people.
When you think about gang violence, you say, well, that's violence, it's terrible that people got shot, but it's people that are trying to shoot each other.
Alright, so then when I tell you that the remaining homicides in this country, right, at 30,000 number that I gave you annually, over 80% of that is gang violence.
But when you see Sandy Hook, when you see Parkland, when you see the shooting in Colorado, Aurora, in the movie theater, when you see these mass shootings, these are what terrify people.
People are not necessarily terrified of the gang violence in Chicago.
I'm going to Chicago in a couple of months, and not one fucking person has brought up, hey man, that place is a war zone.
I was driving down a road where there were like six, seven, eight dudes who jumped in front of the car when we were driving down, because we didn't look like we belonged there, and I'm positive every single one of them had a gun.
We all agree that gun violence, especially in terms of mass shootings, is one of the biggest problems that we have in terms of like a horrific public image problem.
Right.
It's a it's it's something that you see in every when I say public image.
I should what I should I should rephrase that.
What I mean is like public perception problem.
Like you see it and it's just death and violence and children and innocence.
And we, as people, I think...
Consider the death of innocence to be one of the most egregious and horrific deaths.
You've got to be careful because what it then does, it's like...
It becomes a de facto way of preventing people to own firearms arbitrarily, right?
So it's like, oh, well, you have anxiety.
Or even somebody who's maybe dealing with PTSD. Not everybody dealing with PTSD is a potential murderous, ravenous, evil person who's just going to go out and kill people.
So with the screening component, that's why I say yes or no, right?
If you can find a way to establish a mental screening component But even then, no, because there's a due process aspect to it as well, right?
So you can't prevent me from owning – you can't prevent me from exercising a right if I haven't done something to absolve myself from being able to do that legally, right?
So what if they come to your house and you've got – Let's say you've got like a cork board up and you got all these pictures of schools and fucking arrows pointing to the emergency exits and plans of how to block things off and then pictures of Jodie Foster and pictures of serial killers up everywhere and you're on anti-anxiety medications and the cops talk to you and you're fucking squirrely as hell.
Yeah, it's a very complex issue, which is why we're not largely not having it.
We're having it here because no one wants to have this conversation on the national scene because it's hard and it doesn't make for great soundbite and it doesn't make for good TV. Right?
Because that's why I hate doing cable news hits.
Because I have two minutes to basically deduce a complex issue that we've been debating for decades, almost centuries.
Because, like, for instance, I bring this point up, and it makes me come across as if, like, I feel some type of way because he didn't mention me, but it's not really that.
It just speaks volumes to what I've been pointing at for the longest.
They ignore rational discourse.
John Oliver did a 20-minute monologue on NRA TV, about NRA TV, right?
Well, I'm sure they could, but I don't think that's the kind of thing they're trying to make fun of, like individual personalities that say stupid shit.
I think what they're trying to do is point out the disingenuous narrative from the NRA while ignoring the disingenuous narrative from the anti-gun advocates.
So you think that you're too reasonable and too logical and that since you're not like this redneck hee-haw type character that likes to talk about you, it doesn't fit their narrative.
So let's just ignore him and concentrate on the dummies.
You talk about their platform And then you pull out all of those things that further drive that narrative while ignoring the most popular figure on the platform, which is me, who so happens to be black.
So what does that say?
It tells me that it was deliberate.
I really do want to agree with you and say, you know what?
He's white.
He didn't want to be seen as attacking the black guy, so forth and so on.
I think there's a little of that, but I think there's also he's doing a show.
Let me explain how a show works.
He's got a team of writers.
There's a ton of people back there.
They are just trying to be funny.
They're trying to make points, for sure, but they're trying to find stupid shit that they can mock.
And why would they concentrate on the guy who makes sense if they're looking for stupid shit that they can mock?
They're not trying to make a balanced, reasonable argument like maybe we would do right here, right now.
What they're doing is doing a condensed, edited down, very smooth, polished television show where that rant has been dissected and gone over by a team of writers and they have video that corresponds to it and photographs that they go to and they have clips that they show and then they mock the clips.
So that's why they didn't go after you, is because maybe you're a lawyer, maybe you're articulate, maybe it is because you're young and black and they just don't feel like it's a smart thing to do.
I think if I had to guess how many people who are watching that show are left-leaning, democratic-leaning, liberal-leaning, I would say it's a giant percentage.
Do you remember the way you felt before you walked into that shooting range and those guns were going off and you're like, holy shit, it's really happening.
It's also like when people think of America, like overseas, they think of like these fucking crazy people with guns that have jacked up trucks that are driving too fast.
You know, the funny thing about it is, when I got into firearms, I lived in Texas my whole life, and I went, what, 23 years without ever shooting a gun, touching a gun?
And when I got into it, the first thing I wanted to do was shoot competition.
And how, like, he doesn't have this sense of entitlement?
And I'm bringing it back to the gun thing a little bit.
The first time I carried a gun, remember I told you, those were two times where I felt more insecure was my first day in MMA and carrying a gun for the first time.
But carrying that gun for the first time made me realize, holy shit, I'm not the only one.
Right?
So it actually humbled me from the standpoint that knowing that you don't know who you're dealing with.
And when you carry a firearm on you, you have the ability to go from zero to 100, like that.
And so you develop a respect for that.
Also, you start to develop a respect for life as well.
But I also know that there's so much responsibility that comes with carrying a firearm.
It's unreal.
And so for people who go out of the means to learn to do it and be able to do it, there's a certain level of respect you have to have for it.
Because it comes with a lot.
There's certain places you can't go, certain things you can't do, things you have to be cognizant of.
So I actually started staying away from certain places because I knew I had a gun on me, and I never want to have to be put in a situation I actually have to go for it.
And I started training with guns and self-defense and stuff like that.
And I started realizing, you know, so the gun isn't an end-all be-all, right?
It's just a tool that I carry with me that could possibly save my life.
I could still die with a gun on me, right?
But I started weighing the disadvantages and the advantages of having one in the chamber, right?
I might find myself in a situation where, you know what?
I have time to, okay, I'm going to buy in here and I have time to rack it and do what I need to do.
There may be other times where I won't.
But if I already have a round in the chamber, those times where I will have the time and not have the time won't make a difference because there's already one in the chamber ready to go.
So, from that perspective, as I got more comfortable with the gun and realized, holy crap, the gun never just went off on its own, because there was an inherent fear there, right?
It's like, you don't want the gun to go off while it's in your pants.
Now, when things happen, whenever there's a mass shooting or something, immediately people want to blame gun owners or people that want to protect gun owners and specifically NRA members.
So you put a big red button, and I ask them, if I put a big red button in the middle of the table, if you push this button, all the guns on the planet disappear.
But that fundamentally goes back to the idea that people want to undervalue this is a constitutional right, right?
Yeah.
And so what we find ourselves doing is finding ways to limit that right because of the few bad people in our country.
And I just think that's the wrong way to go about it because we're basically devolving ourselves down to a point where we're not going to have any rights left because there are a couple of bad people here who might do something bad with the rights that you have.
But if we had no violence in this country, if something happened, human beings evolved, if our switch changed and there's no more violence, would you still want to have guns?
You want to have them for recreation because you enjoy them.
That's something people don't want to hear.
I always tell people, if you've never shot a gun, if you've never gone to a gun range, you probably should because it is actually fun.
It's fun.
Now, if you do that activity and you're not thinking about hurting someone and all you're thinking about is focusing on the target, trigger control, all that stuff, Is that bad?
So my background before I got into guns was sports.
I was into basketball, football.
I ran cross country, track, you name it.
So when I got into guns, so my dream was to go to the NBA when I was younger, right?
Clearly that didn't happen and it wasn't going to.
But, you know, there was that athleticism still in me.
So what we did on the show when we were talking about coming up with a different shooting competition was how do I incorporate some of that athleticism into shooting, right?
Which is essentially, by and large, a lot of running and just shooting in different positions and so forth and so on.
And so...
When we're doing that, I'm not thinking about shooting a person.
Like cops and robbers with a gun, pew pew pew pew, we do that.
And so, but then, so I want to capture...
The recreation involved in playing cops and robbers as a kid, but then also understanding the very definitive distinction between the good guys and the bad guys.
The people who live this lifestyle are good people.
They enjoy guns for recreation.
They also understand that we live in a world where not everybody's good.
So we also own guns for our own self-defense.
And so it's this culmination of this lifestyle that comes together and we appreciate guns in a way that some people think is perverse.
But how is it any different than me obsessing over the Aston Martin DBS for the last 20 years?
Still waiting for my gun to jump up on its own and kill somebody.
It is relatively tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, what it does is it transfers the focus, and in it I say, When a drunk driver gets behind the wheel and kills someone, we don't blame the vehicle for it.
We blame the driver.
Right.
So when somebody goes out and commits violence with a firearm, why aren't we focusing on the people who are doing it instead of focusing on the firearm?
Well, I think we should certainly be focusing on the people.
As we said, we should certainly be focusing on what happens to a person that makes them develop into the type of person that can go into a movie theater and shoot it up like the Aurora, Colorado guy.
When raising me, because she understood the limitations of her being a woman raising a young man, right?
So she was unnecessarily hard on me.
My mom has zero tolerance for my emotions.
Absolutely zero.
So what she taught me growing up was how to deal with adversity.
Taught me how to deal with failure, how to get past those things.
Taught me how to be self-assured.
And so what I think we're lacking to a degree in this country is people not having the coping mechanisms to deal with failure or to deal with rejection.
There's definitely people that feel like they're outsiders and they want to flip the board over.
They're losing the game and they just want to flip the board over.
And that seems like that Parkland kid...
I mean, there were kids that were worried about him before this ever happened, and that his whole thing was that his life was shit, and he wanted other people to experience that.
And the thing is, it's like, and the hard thing about it, too, is now I realize, and it just came to my mind, I think sometimes I don't even want to talk about the mental health aspect of it in this particular case of the Parkinson's shoot, because I just want to relegate him to evil.
There's a romanticized version of that, too, where people just want to take everybody out, take all the people out that you saw that were doing well while you were struggling.
Well, it flips if you've got a good attitude and you're a healthy person like yourself.
But if you're mentally ill and your life has been just tormented and abused and just you have mental health issues and you're all fucked up, I don't know what the answer is.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that the problem lies in the individuals that are capable of committing that and how they become that.
So when I think about what can we do to stop different types of shooting, for instance, let's start with the type of shootings that happen the most, gang violence.
So if you look at the statistics, you think, oh my gosh, America's a war zone, right?
30,000 people a year die, and then the vast majority of it that is remaining as actual homicides is gang violence.
So then we have a gang problem.
We don't have a gang problem in this country.
We have a socioeconomic problem in very specific areas in this country, right?
Because I just came from Southside Chicago, where I started in Hyde Park, where Obama used to live, and then drove a few minutes into an area that looked like a bomb went off.
They don't have the violence in Hyde Park that they had in that area.
Why?
They had the same access to illegal guns.
They don't have the same problem because there's a difference in economics.
And no one wants to address that.
If I'm a kid growing up in that neighborhood and I'm going to a school that's shitty, they don't give a damn about me.
I lucked up and was able to go to good schools.
I went to schools where my teachers cared.
I went to schools where teachers pushed me when I was slacking off.
I had the ability to take out loans to go to a good law school.
I had those abilities.
If I'm a kid growing up in this environment, And I can't find refuge in my school.
I can't find refuge at home because my mom's working three or four or five jobs.
So she's never there.
Where am I going to go find parents?
Where am I going to find that parental influence?
I'm going to find it on the streets.
So now I'm on the streets being led by people who grew up in the same exact conditions that I grew up in.
And so now I'm like, okay, well, I have to make money.
What am I going to do for money?
Well, then there's their narco economy, very conveniently, right there for me, right?
Sell drugs.
So now I'm staying on a corner selling drugs.
I got to protect my product, right?
If I don't, someone's going to take it from me.
So what do I do?
I get a gun.
I carry a gun.
Now I'm just stuck in this violent loop that feeds on itself.
And so now I'm stuck defending myself against a guy who's shooting at me trying to take my stuff, and I'm shooting back at him.
Maybe not because I'm trying to take his stuff, but because he's trying to take mine.
So that's where you get that violence that comes from those particular areas.
Now, if we would have sat back and said, okay...
We have hyper-concentrated areas in this country.
This isn't widespread.
It's hyper-concentrated communities in this country that are dealing with this that are also the result of the vast majority of our gun violence.
If we sat back and thought about it from a socioeconomic standpoint, how do we fix this?
What do we do?
How do we present opportunity?
I'm not saying go in and just hand out stuff, but how do we fix this from the standpoint of improving our schools?
How is that I can drive five minutes one direction and have a school that has everything you can name and then drive in the opposite direction?
The school can barely have textbooks to give to their kids.
Think about that.
So why aren't we focusing our energy on building that up?
Versus talking about, oh, we need to get the guns off the streets.
You did that.
You have that in Chicago.
You have every gun law imaginable in Chicago.
But yet, Southside Chicago still looks the way that it does.
Still has the violence that it does, right?
So if we provide...
When you give people something to lose or to live for, they don't throw away life so easily.
Plain and simple.
So if my socioeconomic status is in the dirt...
I don't have a problem looking at another kid down the street and shooting at him and taking his life.
I don't have anything.
I don't have anything to lose.
But if we were to focus our attention in fixing that, same way we talk about the mental health issue with respect to mass shootings and school shootings, we wouldn't have to worry about the guns because we won't have people wanting to do those things or have the capability to do those things.
Right?
So, then that deals with that vast majority of the violence that we have there.
Focusing that energy and fixing those communities.
And we've talked about this many, many times in the show that I think that if you wanted to make America a better place, one of the best ways to do it is to Make it easier for someone to succeed.
And stop pretending that it's a level playing field.
I didn't grow up in a level playing field.
I got lucky.
You got lucky.
A lot of people did.
And if you go to somewhere like the South Side of Chicago and you don't realize that you got lucky, you're blind.
What's the best way to make America stronger?
Less losers.
Less people who lose.
How is that?
Well, give them more of a chance.
Give them more of an opportunity and give them guidance, community centers, clean up the streets, fix buildings.
But that's a lot of fucking money that we're spending right now in Afghanistan and Iraq and building missiles and all kinds of crazy shit that we're not putting any money into that.
So in that sense, when it comes to gun violence, it's very complex.
When it comes to gang violence, it's very complex.
And I agree with you that there's no other way to stop that than to fix the inner cities where people are just in that cycle of constant poverty and And it's all they see around them, so it becomes normalized.
When you hear about any sort of crime or gun violence, the left-wing people in Hollywood are the most vocal, the most virtue-signaling, the quickest to jump on their pedestal.
Meanwhile, what percentage of their fucking movies involve gun violence?
And if you look at the Academy Awards, did you see the security at the Academy Awards?
You see all these left-leaning, liberal...
Actors being protected by people with flak jackets on, carrying guns with fingers outside the triggers.
I'm no more paranoid than any person that has a fire extinguisher in their house.
Think about it.
It's like I don't walk around like, oh, my God.
Who's coming to get me?
That's paranoia.
All I'm doing is being prepared.
Now, there could be levels of preparedness.
You start to hit diminishing returns where it starts to take away from your quality of life.
But me putting a gun on my hip and just going about my business, that doesn't interfere with my life enough to say, you know what, it's not quite worth it.
Yeah, technique's everything when it comes to jiu-jitsu.
Literally, you have to have some strength, for sure, and strength with technique is the ultimate, but perfect technique is where it's at, and you get that from little guys, like Barrett Yoshida, Eddie Bravo, Hoyler Gracie, the smaller guys are the ones that you want to learn from, because they've never been the big guy.
The big guys are like top-game guys, the smash-pass guys, those guys are just relying on horsepower and leg strength and shit.
Yeah, well, there's been some people that have investigated this, and there's been some inside sources that have told people that they actively target conservatives, gun owners, redneckers.
There are – so, like, there are certain people in these places that are actually – they may not even agree with my stance, but I've talked to them, and they'll help me out the best that they can.
You know, some people on Facebook, some people on YouTube, so forth and so on.
Because there are all those individuals, you know, the – I call them ghost supporters in a sense because, you know, they can't be too explicit about their – Yeah, you're not going to have just a complete uniform left-wing ideology at any of these organizations.
Release undercover footage of Twitter employees and employees, engineers and employees, admitting that Twitter employees view everything you post on their servers, including private sex messages and dick pics.
So, like, I know with Facebook, there was times where I was reaching millions of people with just a post.
But then that got cut in half, but largely that was due to monetization.
That was before Facebook was monetizing itself.
So now they want you to pay to get access to your audience.
You get what I'm saying?
So that, I don't like it.
But it isn't like some deep secret kind of like, oh, I want to stifle your reach because you believe in this.
Now, there may be some of that going on, right?
So I had, for instance, like I buy ads for my merchandise that I sell on Facebook, right?
Because if I just post a picture of it, my entire audience doesn't see it, right?
And so somebody went through at Facebook and just deleted all of our ads, like I spent such a ton of money on ads, and they just disapproved them out of nowhere, right?
And so then I called a contact and it was like, no, that shouldn't have happened.
I mean, it's pretty much what I'm dealing with right now.
So, for instance, my videos don't come out as consistently.
I do gun reviews.
I'm known for my gun reviews, right?
And I like my gun reviews to be very cinematic, voiceover.
I put thought into them.
I write scripts out for my videos.
The problem is, too, now, before where I could afford to hire someone to edit them, I can't.
And I need that now more than ever because now on the political front of the things, I'm running around, I'm traveling.
That's why I always have my MacBook with me.
I have to try to find places where I can try to edit a little bit and get things done.
But then the same people who are like, we don't care about the ads on your videos and you making money from your videos are the same people like, why aren't you making videos as much as you used to?
Well, I'm like, well, I don't have the money to pay someone to edit the videos in order to keep pumping them out the way I was doing it before.
And I'm not going to give you some quality crap.
I could just toss a video together and just throw it out there.
When you push back, she's used to being the boss at work.
She's used to just dismissing you.
And when I was pushing back with her, I was like, why is that?
Why is he a troublemaker?
You tell me what's problematic about what he says.
No answer to that, but yet able to dismissively say someone's a troublemaker when they're a very highly respected intellectual that has amazing points about a lot of different things.
It resonates with a lot of very, very smart people.
So if you want to hire an armed guard to stand there, right, with the metal detectors, because, I mean, the metal detectors are only as good as the person being able to enforce it, right?
So from that perspective, it's like even the courthouse, right?
When I go to the courthouse, courthouse is a gun-free zone, minus the fact that if you're a cop, but what do you have to do when you go to a courthouse?
You go through metal detectors, there are cops, there are people there with guns.
Well, you know, it's one of the things that they've found, too, is that it's a very strange sort of situation, but when you deal with places that have a lot of violence, when you deal with places that have gun violence and crime, what you don't have in those places is the random mass shootings.
You have one-on-one crime, but the tangible reality of actual gun violence, for whatever reason, sort of eliminates these mass shootings.
The mass shootings tend to occur in places where people think they're safe, right?
Because if you compare the violence in the inner city to the violence in the suburbs, which present themselves in by way of mass shootings, if you compare the numbers as a whole, mass shootings account for a statistic for about one to two percent of all gun violence, right?
And so...
But there's an exceedingly higher percentage of gun violence in the inner cities.
And it all really goes back down to what I said before.
It's about the economics.
So you have a situation in the suburban areas where, economically speaking, they're good.
So there's not really an incentive to just engage in random violence.
There isn't a narco economy there that feeds on itself that requires you to engage in a certain level of violence in order to survive.
Whereas, on the other hand, in the inner cities, you do have that dynamic.
So from that perspective, what ends up happening, though, even though money isn't everything, right?
Money doesn't cure all.
So you're still going to have instances of people who slip through the cracks because money doesn't cure everything.
And so when it does happen, it manifests itself in these random acts of mass shootings, right?
If I know I'm going to school and I'm going to have to inevitably deal with the violence outside of school anyway, it almost makes it unnecessary to engage in random acts of mass shootings.
It's almost kind of like this perverted distraction.
From wanting to mass shoot a place up when you have to deal with violence on an ongoing basis every single day of your life.
If the guy has a gun and he's in the room and you see one guy shooting people and you're there and he's not shot you yet, it's definitely in the options.
It's also whether or not you can keep your shit together while someone's shooting.
You know, I mean, keeping your shit together while guns are going off, but that is not a normal thing for you.
And the amount of adrenaline that would be pumping through your body, we're talking about if you were in a situation where a mass shooting was going down, the people that think they could just pull out their gun and shoot that person, you might fucking hit random people.
You might hit the wall.
You might hit the ceiling.
Like, here's the thing about, I'll tell you...
I have a lot of experience in archery, and one of the things that happens with people when they're shooting alive animals, they panic.
A big fucking moose walks in, and you might hit that moose in the dick.
The thing's as big as a building, and you might miss it totally.
I mean, it happens all the time.
20 yards away, people miss the entire animal.
They just...
And that's something that's not even going to fight back.
Well, it's also one of those things, too, where there's a real problem with the conspiracy theories.
Because one of the things that happened out of the Vegas situation was people would show up at all these different casinos and say, someone's shooting.
So they would say, the security would go, there's an active shooter at Circus Circus.
There's an active shooter.
So all the conspiracy theories were like, look, there's shooters everywhere.
There were shooters everywhere.
No, there was people everywhere that were freaking out because this fucking guy was just gunning people down from a hotel room.
I think first and foremost, this would be the first thing that we should do.
There should be some sort of a public hearing on the use of SSRIs, antidepressants, psych medications, and their corresponding instances, like the amount of instances where these shooters are on these things.
I'll say this much to piggyback off what you're saying.
If I was diagnosed with a mental disorder, the first thing I would do is I would go to a bookstore or go online and figure out every possible way that I can self-help my way through it because I won't touch this stuff.
Well, one of the things that's just as effective, if not more effective, I think, Google this, cardio, I think, exercise and running is more effective to treat depression than SSRIs.
For depression, prescribing exercise before medication.
Aerobic activity is shown to be effective treatment for many forms of depression.
So why are so many people still on antidepressants?
Well, here's one reason.
And this is not to...
Dismiss the people that are depressed, because I know people that are depressed, and it's a horrible thing, and I know people that have been helped by antidepressants.
I know people.
My good friend Ari, he was suicidal.
He got on antidepressants, he's happy as fuck now, he's off of them.
It helped him.
My friend Brian, it was the same thing.
Not Brian that we know, another Brian.
He was a jujitsu guy that I knew.
He had a real fucking problem.
Got on SSRIs, turned his life around, found a good woman, got in a great relationship, started his own business, weaned himself off of him, now he's happy.
Sometimes people find ruts in their life.
We had a podcast with a guy who wrote a book on it, a guy, Johan Hari, who wrote a book on depression.
SSRIs for depression, heart failure, patients, not so fast.
The study should put to rest the practice of starting SSRIs in depressed patients with heart failure CVD outcomes.
What's the only it's the first gun I ever the first gun I've done So this one just so happens to be one that you can't oh you see you have a company that makes them Yeah, I have a um what I did was I came out with a signature series Line of handguns.
Well, this is the first one because it's not allowed in California.
It's people that don't use guns that have this idea.
And this is where we're at now.
I think one of the things that I'm getting out of this conversation with you is that there's not really a clean answer.
There's not a clean answer.
And if there was, people would have figured it out.
It's almost like...
Society has to continue to evolve, and one of the ways society evolves is having these conversations.
You and I having this conversation where a few million people are going to listen to it, and then millions of people on their own having these conversations, and people looking at the reality.
And in that way, I think, what you're doing is important, and what a lot of people are doing is important, where they're talking about the actual numbers and the actual statistics and letting us get a look at it.
And that's the one thing that I try to convey with my videos.
I don't care where you stand on the issue.
I just will have a shit ton of more respect for your position if it's from a position of education.
If you actually have some knowledge, I'm not saying you have to be a Jedi master of firearms.
Just understand the very basics, the fundamentals.
We have politicians pushing policy based on things that make no sense.
It actually exposes the fact that they don't know anything about firearms.
And so it's like you're going to push policy on something that you don't know anything about.
And so it's disingenuous and inherently dishonest.
So that's the biggest frustration I have.
I'm going to educate you and give you the information that you need so that you can make an informed opinion about it.
If at the end of the day, I take you shooting, I tell you the stats, I tell you about how guns function and how they work, if you still are anti-gun, I can respect that.
Now, that doesn't mean you get to then push your anti-gun agenda onto me and limit my rights because of it, but I can respect that.
At least we can walk away and say, hey, look, We look at it from a different perspective.
Have you had someone on your show that made reasonable points?
Like, if somebody wanted to watch you in some sort of a debate with an anti-gun person, is there a show that you could recommend that people could go watch right now?
One of the biggest flaws of the people that were on my show that I had that conversation with is you could instantly see – it was more of an education process because you could tell they didn't know much.
So what would happen is if they make a point about why they believe this, then I would give them information and then it would be like, oh, okay.
But I think for a lot of people, especially the people who follow me, they wanted me to come on your show, not because you and I were going to come to an answer, but to educate.