Today on the show, a law in Alabama would outlaw abortion in almost every case, making no exceptions for rape. The left is of course panicking. I sense that the tide on the abortion issue is turning in America. Am I being too optimistic? Well that would be a first. Also, someone emails and asks whether conservatives are putting their heads in the sand about gun violence. Is that true? Are we? I’ll address the question today. Date: 05-15-19
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today on The Matt Walsh Show, a law in Alabama would outlaw abortion in almost every case, making no exceptions for rape.
The left, of course, is panicking over this.
I sense that a tide might be turning in America.
Am I being too optimistic?
Well, that would be a first, but we'll talk about it.
Also, someone emails and asks whether conservatives are putting their heads in the sand when it comes to gun violence.
Are we?
Is that true?
I'll address that question today on The Matt Walsh Show.
Welcome to the show, everybody.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening.
I'm in Chicago right now because I was at Northwestern University last night for an event there, speaking to the students, and it was a great event.
It was a lot of fun.
And I thought it was a good turnout, even though there was some, I'm sure, totally coincidental issues with The university approving the event, I mean, they'd been trying to get approval, YAF had been trying to get approval for weeks, and the university coincidentally didn't approve the event until like three days before it, which meant, again, totally coincidentally, that they weren't allowed to advertise it until right before the actual event, but we still filled the room and
It was a good time.
What I want to talk about is, speaking of good times, the tide is turning, I think, in America.
Now, I don't want to jump the gun here.
I don't want to be overly optimistic.
I'm not someone who's known for being overly optimistic, but I think that maybe the tide is turning and people are waking up.
And we're going to talk about that in light of this new law that was just passed through the state senate in Alabama.
So we're going to get into that.
I gotta tell you about Bowlin Branch.
You know, we're never going to agree on everything as a country, as a society, but the one thing that we all have in common is that we like to sleep, and we—unless you're my kids.
My kids hate sleeping, but everyone else in the world—all other humans love to sleep except for my kids.
Everyone else loves to sleep, and we could all use more of it.
And getting a great night's sleep is easier than ever, thanks to the world's softest sheets brought to you by Bowlin Branch.
Everything Bowlin Branch makes, from bedding to blankets, is made from pure, 100% organic cotton.
It's the best material you can find for bedding and blankets, which means they start out super soft and they get softer with time.
Everyone who tries Boll & Branch sheets loves them.
That's why they have thousands of five-star reviews.
Just listen to what the customers have to say.
And you can look at Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company.
All of them are talking about Boll & Branch.
They want you to love your purchase, too.
So they offer a no-risk, 30-day trial, free shipping.
So you've really got nothing to lose at all.
And you're not going to want it.
You can send them back, but you're not going to want to send them back once you sleep on these sheets.
You're not going to want to sleep on anything else.
So, to get you started right now, my listeners, get $50 off your first set of sheets at Bolanbranch.com.
Promo code Matt.
Go to Bolanbranch.com today for $50 off your first set of sheets.
That's B-O-L-L-A-N-B-R-A-N-C-H.com.
Promo code Matt.
You know how to spell that.
M-A-T-T.
Bolanbranch.com.
Promo code Matt.
All right, now from LifeNews.com, an Alabama bill that would make aborting unborn babies a felony passed in the State House on Tuesday.
State House Bill 314, sponsored by Representative Terry Collins, would make an abortion, an attempted abortion, a felony.
Exceptions would be allowed if the mother's life is at risk.
Mothers would not be punished for having an abortion under the legislation, which would make killing a baby in an abortion a class 8, or class A, I should say, felony, punishable by life or 10 to 99 years in prison for abortionists who kill them.
Lawmakers approved the ban on a 25-to-6 vote, and it now heads to pro-life Governor Kay Ivey, who's a Republican.
The legislation will take effect six months after it gets signed.
So this is just on the heels of the law in Arkansas.
So we've got two major pro-life legislative wins in the span of a week, which means, among other things, that probably Roe v. Wade is going back to the Supreme Court.
I think that's where this is headed.
And pro-abortion people are terrified of that.
That's the last thing they want, because they know that the Roe v. Wade decision was—they know, if they have any knowledge at all about that decision, And they understand how the Constitution works.
They know that the Roe v. Wade decision is a total travesty and a joke, a really bad joke.
No matter how you feel about abortion, the idea that they were able to find a right to abortion in the Constitution is obviously absurd.
So that's where it's going.
Now, I don't – I talk about being optimistic about the tide turning, and I am.
Am I optimistic that the Supreme Court, with its current makeup, would actually vote to overturn Roe?
No, I'm not.
But there's a chance anyway.
There's at least a chance if it makes it there.
But as I said, the pro-death crowd is growing very afraid.
Cosmo had a headline yesterday.
Their headline was, they put it very simply, it was, it's time to freak the F out about abortion.
And NARAL's abortion Extremist group put out a tweet said this is not a drill the goal is not just to outlaw abortion in certain states It's to outlaw it everywhere all caps
Yes, you're damn right.
You are damn right.
We are going to outlaw it everywhere, that's the goal, and you should freak out.
If you are pro-death, you should definitely be freaking out because the tide is turning.
I'll tell you what seems to be happening here, from my perspective.
This is just my sense of things, alright?
This is not based on any survey data or poll data, just my own observations.
Do with them what you will.
It seems to me that there has never really been a point when a majority of the country was avidly pro-abortion.
I don't think that's ever existed.
I don't think there's ever been a majority pro-abortion.
You know, country.
The avidly pro-abortion crowd has always been small.
They've been small but powerful.
Powerful because they're in positions of power and because they have the indifference of the American public on their side.
So, no matter what people say when they're surveyed by pollsters, the fact is that most of the country is, has been, still is indifferent.
Most people just don't care that much.
So when the pro-abortion people shriek and demand their right to kill babies, everyone in the middle just goes, eh, sure, yeah, whatever.
And that's the dynamic that has allowed abortion to continue in this country.
That's what has protected the so-called right to abortion.
The problem pro-lifers have faced is that they have this indifferent mass to deal with.
And then even the ostensibly pro-life people on their own side, relatively active and aware and involved conservatives, people who are pro-life, but even a lot of those people haven't really considered abortion to be an important topic.
Now, they agree with the pro-life cause, but they just don't feel like fighting for it.
And that's what pro-lifers have been contending with.
Here's what seems to be changing.
The rabidly pro-abortion people are still rabidly pro-abortion.
That hasn't changed.
That's not going to change.
But what I sense is that people in the middle and then the disinterested conservatives, I think some of them are starting to wake up.
That's what I see happening.
That finally some of those other people who have always been up for grabs by pro-lifers, finally they're starting to come into the light.
I got a sense of that in Philly at the rally, even though, you know, it's a thousand people compared to the entire population of the country isn't much.
But I really believe that what we did in Philly, we would not have been able to do that five years ago or 10 years ago.
I think this is a reflection of a change.
And much of it, as I said, is among conservatives.
Conservatives For decades, there has not really been a wide conservative pro-life coalition.
Pro-lifers have always been sort of a subset of conservatism.
While mainstream conservatism, most conservatives would look at the pro-life cause and say, you know, yeah, I agree with you, but I don't feel like arguing about that.
I think that is really changing now.
And conservatives are starting to see, they're starting to see two things.
Number one, this really does matter because life, human life is at stake.
And I think they've been helped to that realization in seeing the increasing radicalism of the pro-abortion side.
When you've got these other laws in other states, where, okay, we can kill babies through all stages of pregnancy, and you've got Democrats coming out and saying, okay, let's kill babies after they're born, or, you know, we're gonna kill the kids either way.
Remember, that's what that one Democrat said.
We're gonna kill them either way.
Put them in the electric chair, kill them in abortion, either way.
So that kind of stuff, I think, has jolted some conservatives out of their stupor, and they're saying, wow, I mean, this is really a, These people really just want to kill babies.
We can't allow this.
this is this is horrible. When the pro-abortion case is stated honestly and
taken to its logical conclusion, which is what we've been seeing a little bit more
frequently recently, it shocks the conscience.
And so it's good that pro-abortion people have been doing that because I think other, I think conservatives and some of the folks in the middle have had their consciences shocked.
And that's what's happening.
So that's part of it.
The other part of it is that I think also conservatives are starting to realize that this is a winnable, it's a very winnable issue because our argument is so unassailable, is so self-evident, is so just plain right That we're standing up and saying, don't kill innocent human beings.
That's our point.
It's the most simple and unbeatable argument you can possibly make.
And that I think is how things are changing.
Now, a couple of things about this Alabama law.
First, much is being made of the fact that it was passed through the State Senate by exclusively white males, which of course is irrelevant.
You know, I always wonder when people say, oh, these pro-life laws are passed by a bunch of men.
Well, what's your point?
Are you saying that men are the only ones with the moral intelligence to see that killing babies is wrong?
Well, here's the good news.
We're not the only ones.
Now, if we were the only ones, that would not really be an insult to us, would it?
It would be an insult to everybody else.
But we're not the only ones.
Millions upon millions of women are pro-life.
And, as I've pointed out many times, the pro-life movement is led by women.
You know, I've been in this movement a long time.
I've been to pro-life events in dozens of different states.
I've done, you know, countless rallies and fundraisers and everything else.
I've met and talked to thousands of pro-lifers.
I can say from experience, I can tell you for sure that this is a movement led by women.
As a man in the movement, I take a back seat.
And I'm fine with that.
This is a movement led by women.
But at any rate, the gender of the person making the argument is, of course, irrelevant.
Because those awful sexist men are making the case that it's wrong to kill innocent and defenseless human life.
So, you know, once you get past, once you get done with your tantrum about their gender, maybe you could try to engage with the argument.
Yeah, I get it.
Oh, well, they're men.
They're men.
Okay, whatever.
Fine.
Yeah, they're men.
All right.
We've established that.
Oh, the bad, bad men.
Tsk, tsk.
They shouldn't be men.
That's bad to be men.
Okay, fine.
I'll agree with you there.
Let's, for the sake of argument, let's agree.
They're men.
They're terrible.
They're sexist.
Blah, blah, blah.
Fine.
Good.
Okay.
We've established that.
Now let's talk about what they're actually saying, though.
Can we engage with that?
Second, the other point being harped on is that this law does not allow exceptions for rape.
And so the pro-abortion side is making this all about that.
This is all they want to talk about.
They say, oh, the law forces women to carry their rapist's baby.
Now, as if this law was specifically designed with that in mind, which of course it wasn't, but that's all they want to do.
They want to talk about the hard cases.
They don't want to talk about the 98 or 99% of cases that have nothing at all to do with rape.
And that's what we should be talking about mainly because that is mainly what this law deals with.
And the vast majority of cases have nothing to do with rape.
Now, as for the cases of rape, which are rare, And in a very small minority.
But as for them, there are two things to keep in mind.
Number one, abortion helps rapists cover up their crimes.
Rapists love abortion.
Planned Parenthood is a rapist's best friend.
Because when a rapist rapes someone and creates a baby, most of the time, that's not what they had in mind.
They weren't trying to create a baby.
And if this is a, you know, we hear the people that are coming up with these, you know, hard case hypotheticals, well, what if a 13-year-old girl is raped and now she's forced to carry her baby?
Well, if a 13-year-old girl is pregnant, that's a very good indication that probably a crime occurred.
And once you have the baby, you know, you can do a DNA test And find out who the father is.
And if that father is an adult, then that person is going to jail.
So now we can prove.
We can prove that a rape occurred.
That's why rapists would rather just send the victim off to Planned Parenthood, have the pregnancy taken care of, and the evidence thrown into a medical waste dumpster.
And Planned Parenthood, by the way, is more than happy to help with this.
They're more than happy to just take the money from the rape victim, throw out the evidence, not call the cops.
They're more than happy to do it.
They do it all the time.
So that's the first thing.
Second thing is, it's a very simple concept here.
I, of course, have nothing but compassion for rape victims, and I have nothing but contempt for rapists.
And if you wanted to talk about a law that enacts abortion for rapists, if we're talking about executing rapists, Then I'm all ears on that discussion.
We could talk about that.
But it is immoral to punish an innocent third party.
That child didn't do anything.
The child's not guilty.
So punish the rapist.
But to punish the rapist's child is completely and totally immoral and wrong.
Obviously.
And it's not going to help anything.
It's not going to help the woman heal.
It's not going to undo what was done.
And it's not going to help bring about justice.
It's going to make it harder to achieve justice.
Alright, so that's the law in Alabama.
Let's see here.
I wanted to share this with you.
Yesterday I wrote something trying to explain the left's gender theories, and I tried to put myself into the mindset of a leftist, which is a very weird place to be, but I wanted to kind of explain gender dynamics from their perspective.
It's bewildering, and it makes your head hurt, but if you didn't see that piece, let's try to go through this, okay?
Let me see if I can do this from their perspective.
Because there are a lot of seeming contradictions and people are very confused about, you know, what is, what exactly is the left's gender theory now?
It seems like they say a lot of, first they're saying one thing, then they're saying something else that contradicts the thing they just said.
So let's see if we can, let's see if we can go through this.
Alright, again, from their perspective, just explaining it to you right-wing bigots.
So, the first thing that we have to understand is that gender is a social construct, right?
Woman and man are concepts that are arbitrarily invented by society.
They have nothing to do with reality.
A child is assigned one of these labels randomly at birth by primitive, backwards-thinking doctors who, for no good or objective reason, have decided that a human child with a penis must be a boy and a human child with a vagina must be a girl.
These words are interchangeable.
The body parts are interchangeable.
None of it means anything.
But remember that the generic people we meaninglessly call women are beautiful and powerful and their arbitrary womanhood should be constantly celebrated all the time.
Women have to band together and lift each other up.
Women must be represented equally in all of our institutions.
Women are truly wonderful, splendid, special creatures.
Remember, there is nothing special about women.
Literally anyone can be a woman.
A woman is not anything in particular.
A person with a penis can be a woman.
A person with a vagina can be a woman.
If a bucket of sand came to life and wanted to be a woman, it could be a woman too.
Anyone can be a woman.
So there is no aspect of womanhood that is ingrained or biological or inaccessible to males.
And womanhood certainly has nothing at all to do with your body parts.
That's the most important thing.
But, if you don't have a uterus, then you shouldn't be giving your opinion on abortion.
No uterus, no opinion.
That's the motto, right?
We're tired of men making decisions about women's bodies.
But there is no such thing as a woman's body.
Trans women are women.
Remember, a trans woman is just as much a woman as any other woman.
There's absolutely no difference between the two, and to suggest otherwise is the height of bigotry, okay?
But anti-abortion laws are sexist because they specifically target women, who are the ones having the babies.
If men could have babies, abortion would be completely legal everywhere, right?
But men can have babies, and women can be fathers, and fathers can be mothers, and mothers can be men, and a man can be a woman, and women can be men who are mothers.
I mean, what's so confusing about this?
How many times do I have to say it?
It's very simple.
Men and women are exactly the same in every way and anyone who belongs to one group can just as easily belong to the other because there is absolutely nothing at all that objectively distinguishes these two categories and therefore you cannot say something about the one category that does not apply just as much to the other.
But women are especially oppressed in our society.
Men don't know what it's like for women in this country.
Men have privilege and institutional power and they can't possibly relate to the struggles of women.
That's why it's so important to make sure that women are given every chance to succeed without being hampered by the unfair advantages that are given to men.
But males should be allowed in female sports.
It is unthinkable to oppress a biological male by refusing him entry into female sports.
If the other girls don't like it, then you know what?
They should check their privilege and shut their bigoted mouths.
But women must stand up and speak out against unfairness.
They must be able to claim their own spaces.
What belongs to them must not be appropriated.
But drag queens are gorgeous and amazing.
There are few things more beautiful than the sight of a man in women's clothing and fake breasts dancing around on stage.
But men are scum.
But men are women.
But patriarchy.
But social construct.
But girl power.
But I'm confused.
It's all very confused.
It's all incoherent.
Do you know why?
Because coherence is for bigots.
Okay, that's what this comes down to.
Now, do you understand?
Hopefully you do.
I'm glad that I could clear that up for you.
Alright, before we get to emails, I was planning on talking about this story.
I had set aside like 20 minutes for it because it's so great.
But I feel like the rug's been pulled out from underneath me.
Maybe you saw this online.
It was kind of going viral over the last few days.
There's a story out of South Africa about a man who reportedly had been going to KFC.
I don't know if it was the same KFC or different KFCs, but he had been going to KFC for a year, eating for free, claiming to be a food inspector from the head office who had been sent there to inspect the chicken and taste it.
And that was the story, anyway.
And apparently the guy had been arrested, which is totally unjust.
But then, as I was just doing a little bit of background research to talk about it, I saw that apparently this story has been called into question.
And now KFC has denied that such a thing ever happened or that such a person exists.
Now, I don't know if that's just them covering their tracks because they're so humiliated.
I don't know.
Maybe we'll never know.
But we can only just hope.
That this man is out there somewhere, this mythical legend of a man who, you know, you could say all you want, that it's dishonest, it's stealing, and yeah, it's all those things, but this is a man who believed in something.
You know, this is a visionary.
This is someone who had an idea and where other people would say, oh, that's crazy, you can't do that.
He said, I'm going to do it, and he did.
Unless he doesn't exist, but let's just assume that he does.
Wonderful and inspiring story.
All right, let's get to some emails.
MattWalshow at gmail.com.
MattWalshow at gmail.com.
This is from Michael.
Says, Hi Matt, I'm 23 years old and have been a type 1 diabetic since I was 17.
I work in an office buying parts and find my job absolutely miserable.
Since I was little, I've dreamed of serving my community and putting my body on the line in order to protect my community and the country I love.
I spoke with three different military recruiters during my time in college, but the conversation never lasted longer than a few minutes.
Once they found out about my condition, I plan on applying for my local fire department in the fall, but I'm worried I'll have the same result.
I know I will find value in raising and protecting a family someday, but I don't know how much longer I can work in an office.
Do you have any advice about vocation or about finding meaning in remedial jobs that don't seem to impact the greater good?
I'm struggling to see how I'm making a difference.
You're incredible.
Thanks for all you do.
First of all, I think your desire to have a job where you're protecting your community is very noble, and so you should be commended for that.
And, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm not sure what the rules are in fire departments as opposed to the military, what their, you know, what their physical standards are or whatever, but it's quite possible that that could work out.
But as for the job that you have now, I think that it is, and I'm not just saying this, I really do believe that To go into an office and work what you refer to as a remedial job, which isn't the word I would use for it, but to work a job like that in an office, working a job you don't really like, that also is a noble pursuit.
And that takes determination.
I would even say it takes courage.
In a way.
To go doing a job that you really don't like, that you hate doing, but to go in every day and do it anyway because you know it's your responsibility and because you want to have a family one day.
And when you have a family, you continue doing it to protect them and to provide for them.
Because there are plenty of people in our country today who will say, I don't want to do this job.
I don't want to do that one.
I'm not going to do any job.
I'll just live off the government or I'll live off my parents or whatever.
Because I don't want to spend my time doing something I don't want to do.
So I have a lot of respect for someone who says, OK, I'm going to go.
I don't like doing it, but I'm going to go in and do it anyway.
And so I think you can find some real nobility in that.
And I think that you are.
impacting the greater good in that sense.
That you're fulfilling your obligations, you know, you're doing your duty.
And that certainly contributes to the to the greater good.
And that also provides an example to others around you.
So what I would say is, obviously, keep doing that job for now.
But how old did you say you say you're 23 years old?
Well, look, I mean, you're doing that job, you have the sense of duty.
So that's a great sign.
There's no reason to assume, though, that you're going to be in this job for the next 40 years.
I mean, these days, nobody stays in one job for 40, even if you like the job and want to stay there, you probably won't.
So you got your whole life ahead of you.
And I would say, keep doing this job and keep whatever your dream sort of job is and whatever you really want to do.
Keep pursuing that in the meantime.
Don't give up on the job that you have.
Keep that, but also pursue The sort of job you want.
So don't give up on that dream.
You're only 23.
You've still got quite a lot of time to find that job and invest yourself in a vocation that is really meaningful to you.
And I have confidence that you will find that.
This is from Gareth, says, To the future unquestioned king, emperor, and grandmaster of this and all other worlds, recently I've been asking questions about what will happen when you take your power.
Rather than add to the growing list of those incurring your wrath by questioning your plans, I'd like to offer my service as your lieutenant in helping you to subdue the masses and setting up your theocratic dictatorship.
I vow to crush your enemies, to drive them before you, and fill your ears with the lamentations of their women.
Thank you for reading this unworthy letter.
O King, may you live forever.
Gareth, your desire to serve beside me makes me concerned that you are planning to sabotage and overthrow my regime.
Now, of course, if you did not want to serve me, then I'd be concerned that you're disloyal and rebellious.
So basically, either way, you're off to the gulag.
Sorry about that.
Fortunately, in my abounding mercy, first-time offenders will only have to serve 35 years of forced labor, unless you've been accused of treason, which is what I'm accusing you of, in which case it's 100 years.
But those are the rules.
I can't do anything about it.
Well, I could do something about it, but I don't want to because of my cruelty.
Cruelty and mercy.
It's an interesting combination.
Let's see.
It says, Dear Matt, I would first of all like to thank you for the work you do and especially for the clear and helpful arguments you make about why abortion is evil.
As a new mother and human being, that issue is especially close to my heart and it's been sickening to watch the events in New York and Virginia unfold.
So thanks for fighting the good fight.
I'm from Hungary and moved here last July to join my husband, who's an American.
I say all this to give a little context.
I'm a Christian and a conservative, and I've really enjoyed listening to podcasts about American politics, and I've found my views line up with most of those professed by the smart, thoughtful, and well-read conservative thinkers I look up to.
However, the one area in which I feel there's a lack of nuanced solution-finding is gun violence.
What I see is what we call ostrich politics, because apparently ostriches, when sensing danger, dig their heads into the sand, not realizing that just because they can't see the danger anymore, it hasn't evaporated.
How they're still not extinct is beyond me, but I digress.
That's kind of what, you know, two-year-olds will do also.
When they're playing hide-and-seek, they'll cover their eyes and they think that they have disappeared and you can't see them anymore.
So it's a similar sort of thing.
So what I see is slightly disappointing to me because every time the topic comes up, the right seems to restate their stance and then use the aforementioned tactic and end the discussion.
I have no idea what a solution might be, but I'd like to at least hear conservatives discuss the issue.
Wouldn't it be our duty to try to find ways to minimize the chance that a horrific incident like a school shooting might occur?
Even if we think perpetrators can turn to knives or other means of inflicting harm.
The analogy that came to mind for me is this.
You have electrical outlets in a house and also a child who routinely starts crawling towards them and poking at them.
What do you do?
You clearly can't remove the outlets.
They're a given.
They're here to stay.
Do you say, meh, if I stop the kid from poking this one, he'll still find another one, and even if I stopped every attempt, he would still fall down the stairs and hurt himself that way, or get hit by a car, whatever.
If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen.
I would hope not.
And if it's mental illness and not the guns, there's got to be something that could be at least attempted to try to address that.
By the way, I cannot believe that the reason there's basically no gun violence in, for example, Hungary, is because there just aren't as many mentally ill people.
The country has been completely ravaged by the world wars and Soviet rule.
It was just emerging from communism when I was born, and healthcare's a mess.
I have to think guns have something to do with it.
But let's say that that's even beside the point because of the Second Amendment, so guns are here to stay.
Okay.
Is there really nothing further to be said after that?
Is there nothing we can try to do as a society, even if it falls way short of stopping every single shooting?
Is it really more guns?
I feel very uneasy about that solution.
Also, just an added question, because I hear this a lot, if the government comes for you, you have to be able to protect yourself.
Students in Budapest led an uprising against communist rule in 1956, and they did quite well, right up to the point where the Russians sent in their tanks.
If the government wants to get you, they will not be deterred by any arsenal of guns you might have, however impressive.
Or am I not seeing something?
Hope the letter isn't too long to get tossed in the spam right away.
No, I have no problem with long letters.
Don't mind reading.
Either way, I very much appreciate your integrity and spine, something that's a very rare trait these days.
Best wishes.
Did I give this person's name?
Lilla.
From Lilla, I think is how you pronounce it.
All right, Lilla, hopefully I'm pronouncing your name right.
I appreciate that email, and I think what you express is very coherent and intelligent and thoughtful.
And there's nothing wrong with saying it.
I think that there are some—there are probably many conservatives who are so dogmatic about guns that even what you've just said there, they're just going to shut you down and say, I'm not even—you're a heretic for even saying that.
I don't take that approach.
I believe in gun rights.
I am a pretty hard line on that, but I'm not dogmatic in the sense that we can talk about it.
I mean, I can understand.
It's not like it's unreasonable to make an argument and say, well, maybe we should restrict this or that gun.
I'm probably going to disagree with the argument you make, but it's not an unreasonable argument.
And I think this is one thing we have to just, I don't want to get sidetracked and not address your question, but You know, one of the reasons why discussions, our discourse in this country, is often so fruitless is that we treat every opposing argument as totally unreasonable.
And we don't realize that it's possible to be reasonable and wrong.
And if someone is reasonable and wrong, then we should just talk to them and have a human discussion.
And we don't need to treat them like they're morons, right?
So that's the issue.
Now, there are some arguments that really are completely unreasonable, like the argument that a man can be a woman.
Well, that's an unreasonable, ridiculous argument, and so we can't treat it like it is reasonable.
We should engage with it and try to explain why the person is wrong, but we cannot treat that argument like it's intelligent or reasonable or like we understand their point of view, because it's not intelligent.
We don't understand it.
It's because it's not a coherent, rational argument.
There is nothing to understand.
So that's the point there.
As for the issue of guns, here's where I stand on this.
I agree with you that we do need to do something focusing in on the school shooting thing.
I do get uncomfortable when you have conservatives who We'll constantly point out that, oh, you know, actually there aren't really there hasn't been an uptick in mass shootings.
That's just a kind of a figment of our imagination because of the way the media reports this stuff.
And if you look at the statistics, you know, it's not any more common now than it is that it was back then.
And kids aren't any aren't at any more risk today for the school shooting than they were, say, 30 years ago.
I mean, statistically, that might be true, but.
We're not imagining things.
I mean, you do have these school shootings that happen every single year now.
And I don't think it's always been that way.
I remember when Columbine happened.
And the reason why Columbine sticks out to us, why it was this event, this kind of history-changing event, is because no one had really seen anything like that before.
Now, it seems like every couple of years there's a shooting like that.
And that's not normal.
And if it is normal, it shouldn't be.
So, we do need to accept that there's a very real problem here.
We need to do something.
In my opinion, and you might not like this answer based on your email there, my opinion is The most direct way to address that problem is to protect our children in school.
Because the fact, what you said there about, well, guns are reality, they're there anyway, that really is true.
Now, you do have the Second Amendment, which is not a small thing.
It comes right after free speech.
Obviously, our Founding Fathers found it to be very important.
And you can't just toss it out the window.
Even if you could prove to me in a crystal ball that, well, if we could just get rid of the Second Amendment, then it would cause mass shootings to go down.
Well, still, the amendment still exists.
We still have that liberty.
We still have that freedom.
It's just like if you could prove to me that, well, if we get rid of free speech, it would have this and that positive effect.
Yeah, but we still have that freedom.
And it's still there.
So we can't ignore it.
We just can't do that.
It's law.
It's liberty.
We can't ignore it.
But even aside from that, the fact is there are tens of millions of guns out there.
And it is true that if somebody gets it into their head that they want to kill mass numbers of people, they have the desire to do that.
We talked about this last week, about desire and opportunity.
The reason why most of us are never going to do a school shooting is because we have absolutely no desire to do that, and we never will.
There are people, whether through spiritual evil or mental illness, whatever you want to say, who find in themselves that desire to kill mass numbers of people.
And then once they have that desire, all they're looking for is the opportunity.
And there simply is no law That's going to deprive them of that opportunity.
That's the fact.
Which it seems like you know.
So, do we say, oh, well, they're going to do it anyway, there's nothing we can do.
Absolutely not.
I think we need to be taking proactive steps to defend and protect our children in these schools.
We need to be doing real things.
Real, active measures.
And one of those things is to make sure that every school in America has armed security.
And I know we might say, well, we shouldn't live in a country where you need armed security in a school.
Yeah, we shouldn't, but we do.
And so we should have it.
There's armed security in pretty much any other government building you can think of.
Public schools are government buildings.
And in pretty much any other government building you can think of, there's armed security.
You go to the Social Security office, When I got married, my wife and I went there, and just a little small office with a few people sitting there in the waiting room, and there's an armed guard sitting there.
And to protect what?
Documents, papers.
So if we've got armed security to protect documents and papers, and armed security to protect politicians, In Washington, then I think our children who are in government buildings also deserve that same protection.
So that's what I would do.
And that's not an ostrich in the sand.
That is taking real active steps.
Because going back to opportunity, now there's nothing we could do about the fact that people are going to develop this desire.
That's going to happen.
We can't stop that from happening.
As far as depriving them of opportunities, well, a law is not going to take the opportunity, because a law is just a concept, right?
In terms of, from a preventative perspective.
Like, if I want to kill someone, you say, well, there's a law against killing people.
Okay, but it's not going to physically stop me from doing it.
That will allow you to punish me after the fact, which is good, but it's not going to physically stop me.
I think what we need to do, on top of having laws, is we need to have actual physical barriers that may prevent, may hinder my opportunity to do the bad thing.
And that physical barrier, in this case, would be armed guards.
I think it would be very difficult to argue that, you know, a school shooting where there's an armed guard is likely to be just as deadly as a school shooting where there is no guard.
Think about Sandy Hook.
I mean, those kids, those poor kids were just sitting there in the classroom, utterly defenseless, until the police arrived.
I think it's immoral and wrong to leave our kids defenseless like that.
And so that's what I would, that's how I would address it.
And I think that is a proactive step, that we can take.
Thanks for the email.
I guess we will leave it there.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Hey, everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, repealing Roe v. Wade would be a good thing, because it might be a step on the way to not killing so many babies.
But it would also be good for the left, and I'll explain why on The Andrew Klavan Show.