Ep. 112 - “Shall Not Be Infringed”: The 2nd Amendment ft. Prof. Eugene Volokh
"Shall not be infringed." Seems simple enough, but nevertheless Democrats persisted in trying to rob words on their meaning. Fortunately we’re joined today by Eugene Volokh, Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA to discuss what the Second Amendment means. Then, CNN invents a new class of firearms, Sheriff Scott Israel vindicates Jeff Sessions, and the Heritage Foundation says Trump is outpacing Reagan.
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A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Seems simple enough.
But nevertheless, Democrats persisted in trying to rob words of their meaning.
Fortunately, we will be joined today by Eugene Volick, Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA. We're good to go.
And Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Justice Scalia cited Professor Volek on three occasions, in his opinion, for the landmark gun rights decision, District of Columbia v.
Heller.
Now I know, I know, if this were a mainstream news outlet like CNN, We would bring on traumatized, know-nothing teenagers to discuss this topic.
But here on The Michael Knowles Show, you'll just have to settle for nationally recognized experts.
Then, speak of the devil, CNN invents a whole new class of firearms.
Sheriff Scott Israel vindicates Jeff Sessions, and the Heritage Foundation says President Trump is outpacing Ronald Reagan in effecting its conservative agenda.
Let's get right into it.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Professor Volek, thank you for being here.
Very much my pleasure.
So, just to begin, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The Second Amendment reads specifically the right of the people.
It doesn't say the right of the state.
It doesn't say the right of the federal government.
What does that say about the nature of Second Amendment rights?
Yeah, that's right.
The rights are rights of people, people like you and me.
That's what the Supreme Court held in D.C. v.
Heller and then in McDonald v.
Chicago.
And I think it held it correctly.
That was also the view of most courts and commentators dealing with this.
In fact, almost all of them through the 1800s and through the early part of the 1900s.
A bunch of courts adopted the so-called states' rights view or militia rights view, which seemed to be focused on preserving the rights of states to run their own National Guard-type organizations.
But that started about the late 1930s and then was rejected eventually by the US Supreme Court.
But that's an anachronistic view.
That's not something there's any evidence that the framers believed.
One other thing to keep in mind is when the Second Amendment does mention the militia, that seems to refer to Basically, the entire adult citizenry.
Back at the time of the framing, it was the adult white male citizenry.
Today, it would be pretty much all adults, because that's what militia was understood to mean, the armed citizenry, rather than some special selected army or National Guard-like group.
That always strikes me, the militia, because opponents of the Second Amendment and of gun rights will say, well, see, we don't have militias anymore and you're not in the militia, but there being a militia presupposes gun rights because people have to have their own guns.
And I want to ask you about this justification clause versus this operative clause.
It says a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, that is the justification clause, the dependent clause, And then there's an operative clause which says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Opponents cite the justification clause all the time.
What is the relation between the justification clause and the operative clause itself?
Well, it seems to me and it seems to the court, and I think this was the general understanding around the time of the framing, that the operative clause is the part that actually indicates what Right is secured.
And then the justification clause, the first clause in this case, explains why it's secured, or at least one of the reasons why it's secured.
So it says quite clearly the right of the people, not the right of the state, not the right of the militia, the right of the people.
And again, the justification clause It fits that actually pretty well once one understands what militia means.
Even today, if you look at the federal statute titled 10 U.S. Code Section 246, it defines the militia as consisting of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and under 45 years of age.
So today, in light of developments in equal protection law, I think it would also be understood as including potentially females as well.
So it basically has long been understood as referring to able-bodied adults.
To be sure, people above age 45 still have the right To keep and bear arms, they're still members of the people.
But it explains why the Militia Clause and the Right of the People Clause actually fit together pretty well.
It turns out, if you look at state constitutional provisions from around the timing of the framing, this sort of two-clause construction is actually pretty common.
Sometimes you see free press clause provisions the same way.
Like, for example, 17...
Excuse me.
The first Rhode Island constitution, which was enacted in 1842, Rhode Island was slow getting its own post-revolutionary constitution, says the liberty of the press...
They're a little slow up there.
They're very relaxed up in Rhode Island, Vermont, right?
Exactly.
The liberty of the press being essential to the security of freedom in a state, comma, any person may publish his sentiments on any subject being responsible for the abuse of that liberty.
Very similar language, right?
Being essential to the security of freedom in a state.
That explains, kind of as a rhetorical matter, because constitutions are also political and rhetorical documents, it explains why they're securing the freedom of the press.
But the operative clause is the part that's the law.
Any person may publish his sentiments on any subject.
And you see something similar in various other provisions in 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, 1784 New Hampshire Constitution.
These kinds of two clause constructions are actually pretty commonplace in constitutions of that era.
And they always say, the opponents of gun rights, they always say, well, it's such a strange constitution, or such a strange structure for the U.S. Constitution.
But of course, I think this is because our perhaps lightly educated friends haven't looked at other state constitutions and haven't looked at linguistic conventions before.
But there's even a grammatical point here, which is that there is an independent clause, which says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
And then there is a clause which is not an independent clause, which is this justification clause, this justificatory clause.
I also want to get to the operative clause, which is Shall not be infringed.
The wording of the amendment seems clear, and of course we've interpreted that to mean shall be rather infringed.
Why did the framers phrase it the way that they did, rather than saying, for instance, people shall now have the right to keep and bear arms?
Why is it shall not be infringed?
Right.
Well, the rights secured by the Bill of Rights, with a few exceptions, the Establishment Clause is one, but most rights, setting that aside, were long accepted rights.
The right to keep and bear arms had existed, has been understood as one of the rights of Englishmen long before the Constitution.
In fact, it was mentioned, although in much weaker form, in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
The same is true of the freedom of the press and the like.
So, they were taking existing rights that they understood as being secured by traditions of English law, and they were saying those rights cannot be infringed by the federal government.
And state constitutions often said something similar about no infringement by state governments.
I should say, I don't think the framers view these rights as absolute.
Just like they recognize that the freedom of the press might coexist with libel law, for instance.
So I think they were open to some restrictions that didn't count as infringements.
Unfortunately, it's not really clear what they were.
There's actually very little evidence about exactly what they understood to be covered or not at the level of specific detailed restrictions.
But it is pretty clear that they understood the big picture right as being a right of individuals to possess at least certain kinds of arms.
And I do love the idea, because of course, yes, there can be reasonable restrictions in some ways, especially if it overlaps with some other right.
But I do love in that Rhode Island 1842 Constitution, it says the liberty of the press being essential to the security of freedom in a state.
Now, so frequently, gun rights opponents, they say, well, we don't need militias.
So if that is unnecessary now, we don't need the operative clause.
But I will say, looking around at this current state of the free press, I wonder if we could question the justification in that clause of the Rhode Island Constitution.
Surely we wouldn't say, "CNN has become so ridiculous.
At this point, we no longer need a free press." I think they would be much more afraid of taking their logic to its logical conclusion.
On the question of the individual right, on Heller, you were cited three times in that decision.
Our benighted friends on the left now insist that until Heller, the individual right to keep and bear arms was considered bizarre and ridiculous in some way.
Writing in Politico, Michael Waldman of NYU Law writes, quote, the NRA rewrote the Second Amendment.
Can you clear that up?
Did the NRA rewrite the Second Amendment?
Not at all.
So if you look at discussions of the right to bear arms not long after the framing, if you look at the discussions of the English right to have arms that this right was clearly based on,
and again was an extension of, from before the framing, if you look at court cases throughout the 1800s, and you look at quite a few, especially state court cases in the 1900s, It's quite clear that the right was understood as being a right of individuals.
Now, to be sure, the right could be limited in various ways, including ones one might disagree with.
In the 1800s, for example, it was common for courts to say, well, the right doesn't include the right to carry concealed weapons, because that's something that sneaky people do, not good, upstanding Americans.
But that was understood as a limitation on the individual right.
In fact, if you look at the Supreme Court's decisions that mentioned the right to bear arms, and there were quite a few, although very few dealt with it directly, the overwhelming majority just talked about it as the right to keep and bear arms without even mentioning the Militia Clause.
They recognized that it's all about the right, and again, they mentioned it often as an example of a right that could be limited in various ways.
I think the accurate way of describing it is that the dominant view throughout much of American history was it was an individual right.
Federal appellate courts, starting with the late 1930s and up until the early 2000s, often said it was a state's right, and they were quite influential.
Indeed, among federal courts, this was the Federal appellate court's general understanding was contrary to what the court accepted in Heller.
The 1939 Miller decision from the Supreme Court was ambiguous on this.
Some other decisions after Miller actually seemed to treat it as an individual right.
But what happened was that there was therefore this dispute on the subject.
With the older authorities seeming to support more the individual rights view, and the more modern 1900s authorities, especially from federal courts supporting the state's rights view, and the NDCV held a result in dispute.
And so I guess we'd have to say it's not the NRA that rewrote the Second Amendment, it's the federal courts and the appellate courts that rewrote the Second Amendment.
And fortunately, there has been a reform of the reform.
And now, what I really want to ask you about now are these muskets.
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Professor Follick, in our last five or so minutes here, the other main argument that we hear from the left is that at the time of ratification, the Second Amendment was understood to protect only muskets or something.
These people, of course, have never heard of the Brown Bess or the Girondoni Rifle or the Belt and Flintlock, the latter of which was offered to Congress in 1777 and could fire 20 rounds in five seconds, which is much faster, I assure you, than I can shoot an AR-15.
Regardless, what do we make of this argument that the Second Amendment protects only 18th century gun technology?
I The same thing we'd make from an argument that says, well, the First Amendment can't protect the Internet because, of course, the framers didn't have the Internet.
How could those geniuses who invented our country, how could they ever have foreseen advancing technology?
No one could imagine that.
Right.
And in fact, actually, they lived at a time when they felt themselves to be in the middle of technological revolution, which they were.
That was the first industrial revolution.
They saw the world changing around them.
They recognized, by the way, that the freedom of the press was the freedom to use a particular technology, which was understood as a major invention.
It had been invented 300 years before, but it was understood as a huge technological advance.
And when they said the freedom of the press, they literally were referring to just one technology, the printing press, but the courts have recognized that, of course, that applies more broadly to new technologies as well.
And likewise, they talked about arms.
There, they didn't even limit it to one technology.
They didn't Say, even firearms, much less muskets.
They said arms more broadly.
And that term clearly covers modern arms, as well as arms that existed at the time.
Whether we see it in other situations, too.
Obviously, Congress has the power to regulate commerce, including commerce through air travel.
Congress has the power to raise armies, but also it includes to provide an air force for those armies.
Courts have long recognized that constitutional provisions need to be read in light of Their application to modern technology and not just sort of applicable as only to pre-existing technologies and again we see that in the First Amendment.
And of course the use of the word arms may have been prescient because as we know many more people are killed each year with hands than are killed with rifles of any sort.
Including the AR-15.
Maybe ARMS even includes ARMS itself.
These people, you know, Benjamin Franklin, a founding father, a founding grandfather, was a world-renowned inventor.
The suggestion that these people didn't realize that technology would advance seems to me highly suspect.
Now, on gun control as a civil rights matter, it has always seemed to me gun rights are civil rights.
They're constitutionally protected civil rights.
It's also the same that soldiers not being quartered in my home is a civil right.
Civil rights activists for centuries have recognized the importance of the right to bear arms, Frederick Douglass and many others.
Now Oprah says that gun control is the new civil rights movement.
How did a civil right come to be regarded as an obstacle to civil rights?
Well, I support gun rights, but I have to—I think there is something plausible at the heart of the Oprah claim that you're quoting, because one really important civil right is the right to be protected against crime.
And I totally understand that people are worried about crime and worried in particular about gun crime, which is particularly lethal.
That is to say, if you are shot at with a gun, your chances of dying are a lot higher than if you're punched, let's say.
So, people are rightly worried about this.
It's just that, first of all, I do think the Second Amendment makes a particular choice in favor of allowing people to arm themselves.
And if you don't like that, you can repeal the Second Amendment, but you shouldn't ignore it.
a lot of room for gun regulations, including ones that I think might be unsound.
Not everything that's unwise is unconstitutional.
But there the question is, would it really help?
And a lot of the regulations that I hear proposed, I don't think are going to be terribly effective.
If you ban so-called military-style semiautomatics, then people will switch to supposedly non-military-style semiautomatics, which, generally speaking, are about as lethal as the ones that people are proposing to ban.
Now, to be sure, fully automatic guns might be a good deal more lethal.
There does seem to be real evidence of that.
But those are already very heavily regulated and largely banned.
So I do think that there is an important right that we have to be protected by the government that we hire to do the job.
And in some situations, like in the Florida shooting, it looks like there was a real failure of government protection.
But it seems to me that trying to deny people the right to defend themselves isn't really going to make the rest of us more secure.
I see the arguments for why it might.
I think if you look at these criminological data, it doesn't seem very likely.
I always loved Justice Scalia's category of things that are stupid but constitutional.
And of course some new law, or I suppose some old law, banning a gun like the AR-15 may not be unconstitutional, but of course we've seen the effect of the so-called assault weapons ban.
The effect on gun homicide was negligible.
And so perhaps you're right.
There is a lot of feeling that one has a civil right to be secure in my person, in my property.
But when you actually look at the laws themselves, they don't seem to be able to prevent any of these mass shooting incidents or have much effect on gun homicide whatsoever, which has been declining for decades.
On the question of gun control itself, the first federal gun control law in the U.S. came in 1934, the National Firearms Act.
How did that law and subsequent federal gun control laws affect the nature of the gun control debate?
Well, I think the gun control debate historically has been mostly at the state level.
If you look at the pattern of existing gun control laws, in my own California, for example, the main form of restraint, I think, on the right to defend yourself with a gun is it's very, very hard to get a license to carry a gun.
And in many places, it's basically impossible.
In L.A., it's virtually impossible.
Right.
That's a state-level law.
And if you look at the main The most important gun-related legal change of the last 30-some years, it's been gun decontrol.
It used to be that, basically, 40 states, you either needed a license which was not necessarily broadly available.
It was on a may-issue basis, where it was all a matter of whether your sheriff liked you in order to carry a concealed gun, or you couldn't get a license at all.
Concealed carry was categorically banned.
Ten states, you were allowed to do that.
Either in most of them by getting a license or in Vermont was one state where you didn't even need a license.
Now the number is flipped.
It's 40 states where you're legally entitled to either a license to carry concealed or you don't even need a license in several states.
And only ten states in which you, essentially it's up to the government, and the government often says no as to whether to give you the license.
So most of the gun control debate really is at the state level.
Now, to be sure, one thing that pro-gun control forces say is state laws are just pretty easy to evade, because it's easy to go across state borders and get something.
Bring something right over the border, of course.
Right.
Especially laws that don't limit carrying, but laws that limit possession, essentially, can be easily evaded if they're at the state level, which is why I think they've tried to set up federal level bans.
But generally speaking, it's been pretty difficult for them to accomplish that politically, because even though there are some states which are pretty solidly anti-gun, at the federal level, it's very hard to muster political majority to restrict guns.
And when it was done, for example, in 1994 with the assault weapons ban, it was thought one reason that the Democrats lost control of Congress that fall was because of the backlash against the ban.
And then, indeed, the ban was in effect for 10 years.
It wasn't renewed.
There were studies, including by people who are not pro-gun rights, Of whether there was any visible effect, and it's not just the effect was minimal.
If there was any effect, it was too little to notice, and there's no reason to think there was an effect.
There was an experiment that was conducted, and there's no reason to think the experiment was successful.
That's a wonderful note to end on.
One, in that we don't have to worry about, you know, crazy changes in gun homicide.
But also, the Democrats have been pushing so hard for gun control these past few weeks.
One wonders if we can have another 1994, another Republican wave.
When I read your work, Professor Volek, I always feel much better about my country and the state of law.
And now speaking to you, it does exactly the same thing.
In this particularly political way.
Professor Volokh, we have to let you go teach a course, I believe, but thank you so much for taking the time.
Very illuminating.
You know, rather than, I know what we're supposed to do in the news these days is just bring on teenagers to demagogue issues, but I suppose we'll make an exception to have a national expert explain it to the audience as well.
So thank you very much.
Very much my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Is that guy just the smartest guy in the entire world?
When I read Professor Volcker, I speak to him, I just think, wow, there is a level of intelligence that I will never reach, but at least I can read him and he'll tell me what to think.
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Okay, we've got to put a button on this.
We have to get to Heritage Foundation's wonderful report about President Trump and his administration, but let's put a period on this gun control debate.
CNN is now, they've invented a new class of firearms.
They're warning Americans about the dangers of full semi-automatic weapons.
Watch.
This is what an AR-15 sounds like.
Sounds like a gun.
General Mark Irving served in the U.S. Army for 37 years, so he knows what the AR-15, which used to be a weapon of war, can do.
And he has strong feelings about the semi-automatic assault-style rifle, which is the precursor to a weapon currently used by the military, the M4. Now those are single shots.
If I wanted to fire this on full semi-automatic, all I do is keep firing.
All right, now I won't probably hit the target when I do this, when we look at the target later on, but I'm going to fire about five shots.
Okay.
I don't even know where to begin with this.
He goes and he says, this is what an AR-15 sounds like.
And then do you know what it sounds like?
It sounds like a gun.
That's what it said.
I was shocked.
My jaw hit the floor.
I said, wait, you're telling me that gun sounds like a gun?
I thought it was going to sound like a cuckoo clock or something.
Wow.
So it sounds like a gun.
And then he fires it, right?
And he fires it slowly.
As one may fire a gun.
He says, boom, boom, boom.
Okay.
And he said, okay, now I'm going to go full semi-auto.
Okay.
And full semi-auto is a contradiction in terms.
There are guns that are fully automatic.
That's when you pull the trigger once and a gazillion bullets come out.
And then there are guns which are semi-automatic, where you pull the trigger once and one bullet comes out.
And you can hold it down as long as you want.
It's just going to be one bullet that comes out.
So what CNN is obviously trying to do, very dishonestly, is conflate the two things.
That's why they always say it's military style weapons.
This is not what they use in the military.
I assure you of that.
But then he says, "Okay, now I'm gonna go full semi-auto." But it's not like he clicked anything on the gun.
But just to compare for you, what they're trying to make you think is that AR-15s, the most popular rifle in America, that they are like machine guns or like they're assault rifles, you know, guns that have fully automatic fire.
Here is a guy shooting an M240 machine gun.
The gunner will fire 10 seconds or 130 rounds.
We will then score the results.
Let's watch. - So I gotta tell you, I think not even that CNN guy's assault finger could fire at that rate of fire.
That was really, you know, just, I don't know how he could do it.
He'd have to get some much higher license of index finger in order to fire that fast.
Now here is a guy shooting an AR-15, a regular old shotgun, and a Glock 19.
Here is that.
that.
See if you can tell the difference.
See if you can tell the difference.
Now, I don't know, could you tell the difference?
Could you spot the difference there?
The giant machine gun that was shooting a gazillion rounds per second, or just the regular old guns.
The handgun, the Glock, the shotgun, a regular old shotgun, and the AR-15, those all sounded exactly the same, because you pull the trigger once and one bullet comes out.
They all sounded quite different from the gigantic machine gun that that military guy was shooting.
Those are the two things.
CNN really wants you to conflate the two.
You're going to hear the phrase full semi-automatic weapon now, I'm sure, on CNN. I think Steve Crowder actually did a joke about this.
He was doing a little bit, and someone said, is that an automatic weapon?
He goes, yeah, it's fully semi-automatic.
Fully semi-automatic.
It's like a jumbo shrimp or something.
So just wait for that one.
It is completely ridiculous.
But make sure that the reason we don't let Democrats write our gun laws is they don't know anything about firearms.
They don't know anything about firearms.
If you have ever once been to a gun range, you know much more about firearms than virtually any elected Democrat in this country.
Don't let them get away with this.
Make sure when they start spouting off and your lefty friends start spouting off on guns, just show them those videos.
Say, this is an automatic weapon.
This is an AR-15.
This is a shotgun.
Why is the shotgun okay but the AR-15 isn't okay?
They both fire at the same rate of fire.
The shotgun is going to blow a much bigger hole in the wall than the AR-15 is.
Just a few of those little, those hate facts, you know, just drop a few hate facts on them and I think it will quell down at least their hysteria.
Okay, speaking of guns not being handled properly, real gun control where the sheriffs didn't use the guns at all.
Sheriff Scott Israel, the guy who blames everyone for his own failings except for himself, the buck stops just before Scott Israel, that guy.
He apparently circulated a memo to employees instructing them to vigorously defend him against conservative calls that he resigned.
Now, I'm sure that Scott Israel will probably deny that he circulated that memo.
But regardless, he will say that somebody beneath him did it, you know, and that he can't be held responsible for things that he didn't know, even though, of course, it is his job to know those things.
But this is a reminder that sheriffs are politicians.
I'm going to go into that a little bit because people don't understand that sheriffs are politicians.
But I'm sorry.
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You know, Sheriff Israel, this guy is unbelievable.
The gall of this guy, if he were an actual law enforcement officer, he would have resigned a week ago, wouldn't he have?
Because he would have had integrity, and he probably would have done his job, actually, if he weren't.
But he's not a law enforcement officer.
He's a politician.
We don't remember this too much in the United States, but Jeff Sessions got in trouble the other day.
He said, the office of sheriff is an important part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.
And they called him a racist because people don't know what words mean anymore.
But the sheriff's office is an elected office, and it's so that civilians can have some control over their law enforcement.
To protect against tyrannical governing.
So the office of sheriff is this guy.
There are several photos of this guy, Sheriff Israel, posing with Hillary Clinton.
He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016.
If he were a regular old police officer, somebody working for the government, he wouldn't have been able to do that so publicly.
But he's just a politician, apparently a Democrat politician, who goes out and endorses candidates.
And what do politicians always do?
They pass the buck.
They do their best to avoid any sort of We're good to go.
He goes on Jake Tapper.
He says, I've done an amazing job.
Amazing leadership from me, Sheriff Israel.
He's a politician who's going to pass the buck, but he failed.
He utterly failed.
None of his excuses hold water.
And we should hold him to account, just as we hold politicians to account.
This is the reason the sheriff gets elected, is so that we can kick him out when he does a terrible job, and people should kick him out.
It is really a despicable display.
To go up there knowing That your own deputies didn't go in and fight, didn't go in and try to stop the shooter.
To know all of that and go and try to demagogue and vilify a civil rights organization.
Really awful stuff, and we shouldn't let up.
I mean, we should tweet this guy every five seconds.
Now he's trying to tweet all the good things that the sheriff's office is doing.
They caught some kid who could have shot up a school or whatever.
Too late, buddy.
Sorry, I missed your chance to quote a great man sad.
There is another point that gets lost in these debates beyond Sheriff Israel.
There is not an epidemic of school shootings in America.
There is not one.
I know if you watch CNN, it seems like there is.
And they're all saying that there is an epidemic of school shootings in America.
That's the premise of all these new gun control policies.
The data don't bear that out.
A new analysis by James Alan Fox, the Littman family professor of criminology, law, and public policy at Northeastern University, shows this is not an epidemic.
Mass murders in the United States, a country of well over 300 million people, occur 20 to 30 times per year.
Mass murder meaning when there are four or more people killed within a 24-hour period.
One of those incidents, on average, takes place each year at a school.
Now, actually, mass shootings and school shootings have declined precipitously since the 1990s.
And during the early 1990s, four times the number of children were killed in schools as are killed today.
I know, you watch CNN, it looks like these things started five minutes ago, and they've only increased, and it's probably Trump's fault for some reason.
But really, if you compare the school shootings today to those in the 1990s, the early 1990s, four times the number of kids were killed in the early 90s.
There are 55 million children in the United States.
On average, over the past 25 years, 10 school children per year are killed by gunfire at school.
10 is 10 too many.
Nobody suggests that that isn't true.
Also, the imagination of man's heart is evil from the beginning.
We protect civil liberties in this country, and there are more guns than people in this country, and those guns prevent crime.
So there is a balancing act that's required here, and in a country of 55 million school kids, to suggest a demagogue and say there is an epidemic, that there are many more school shootings now, that many more children are What?
You don't care about dead children?
What?
You don't care about dead children?
That is just a lie.
That is lying demagoguery.
We shouldn't let them get away with any of it.
Even, by the way, making schools fortresses likely won't work.
People are now saying we should have a guard or two guards or metal detectors or whatever.
In 1989, decades ago, a shooter killed five and injured 32 elementary school children in Stockton, California by targeting them on the playground.
In 2005, a 16-year-old killed 17 people You can't eliminate these things.
The imagination of man's heart is evil from the beginning.
It's a very sad thing, but we have to inform our legislation, inform our policy by data, not just by the hysterics and prostituting teenagers on CNN.
It's really irresponsible, and it's a really despicable thing to do.
So now we have to move on to a very important thing.
This is not with guns.
I wanted to end it on a high note because, obviously, this has been a long couple weeks.
We've just been arguing about guns all week and how to protect schoolchildren.
Let's end on a high note.
The Heritage Foundation has concluded that the Trump administration has already affected 64% of its agenda, two-thirds of the 334 agenda items called for by Heritage, which puts him on a faster pace of conservative governance even than President Reagan.
You know Trump, that fake conservative that a lot of Republicans still don't like because he sips Chardonnay with the wrong hand?
That guy, he is affecting conservative policy, according to the Heritage Foundation, the preeminent conservative think tank, at a faster rate even than President Reagan.
We should qualify a few things.
Reagan did have a Republican Senate, but he had a Democrat House for his entire presidency.
That obviously is going to slow down Republican governance.
Conservative governance, you've got to give him credit there.
Trump has a fully Republican Congress, but nevertheless, we should give him credit.
He has unprecedented opposition from his own party.
I still read these articles about how he doesn't sip Chardonnay the right way.
Or whatever, he's too uncouth.
Oh, he uses naughty words.
I still read that all the time, even from self-styled conservatives, even from people in his own party.
He faces opposition from the conservative wing, even of his party, that Ronald Reagan really didn't face in quite the same way, or for quite the same reasons.
President Trump also has unprecedented Democrat opposition, the calls for the resistance, the special counsels from day one of his presidency, accusations of treason, whatever, people walking out.
Politics is always nasty.
They really have upped the temperature a little bit on Trump on both sides of the aisle.
So, Heritage puts Trump at 64%.
It put Reagan, at this point in his presidency, at 49%.
So, obviously, that's no knock on the gipper, but Trump is doing very well and much better than we expected, and his agenda has hit a wide variety of conservative policy categories.
So it's not just tax reform, it's tax reform and the Mexico City policy and its strength abroad and its massive deregulation and on and on and on and on.
So a really good start and let's hope that he doesn't turn left or anything like that.
Let's hope that it keeps going on.
There's a reason that President Trump used the Ronald Reagan campaign line, Make America Great Again, and it looks like he's doing a very good job and it looks like because of the conservative revolution that Ronald Reagan ushered in, we are now in a more conservative country than we were in in the 1980s.
In many ways, President Trump is building on that.
It's a wonderful thing, and I'm glad to see Heritage Foundation is as pleased as I am with all the covfefe.
When I think of Heritage, I don't necessarily think covfefe.
I think more bow ties and things like that.
But, you know, maybe these things all go together.
Okay, that is our show.
We've got some really good people coming up this week, but I don't want to spoil the surprise, so you just have to tune in.
Until tomorrow, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Show.
I will see you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
