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Dec. 24, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

27:26

2290 Gun Culture

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on gun control by Kerry Lutz on 1490 WCGH Radio.

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	1490 WGCH, this is Kerry Lutz and you are listening to the Financial Survival Network.
	Gun control is back in the news again.
	A lot of emotions, a lot of Irrationality due to this awful tragedy in Connecticut.
	But that doesn't change the underlying facts of why guns are essential to personal safety and societal safety in America and around the world.
	Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio has done an incredible presentation on the subject.
	I think it's the best one that's ever been done.
	I highly urge you to go take a look at it.
	We'll put the link on the site.
	Stefan, thank you for that fine work.
	I mean, you really made a contribution that I don't even think you know how substantive it was.
	Well, thanks, Kerry.
	I certainly appreciate that.
	I'd like to say that I nailed it, but given that it's gun controlled, I'd like to say that I hit the bullseye, I clipped it.
	I don't know, what would you say in gun parlance when you hit it really well?
	I'd say you got the target in the crosshairs and you hit it bullseye from 300 yards out with a.50 cal right through the bullseye, Stefan.
	It's the bunker buster of truth that has been dropped to the issue.
	So I appreciate that.
	It's very kind words and thank you.
	You did a great job.
	And to sum it up, what do you think the main reason guns should be available and legally possessed by the public, by the population?
	Well, like most issues in society that What is the ethical argument?
	What is the moral argument for it?
	And the second is, what are the effects of that moral argument?
	the moral argument is something that is generally overlooked and this is because we have this mythology which is that if we can get the government to pass a law the problem is solved the reality of course is you know is when you get the government to pass a law we've only just begun too troublesome yeah so what i'm hoping people will understand is that nobody is for gun control it's a misnomer what they are for is
	the monopolization of gun ownership in the hands of the state and the stripping of gun ownership in the hands of the citizenry so So they're not against gun control.
	As somebody emailed me, he said, damn right, brother.
	I will lay down my guns when the government lays down its guns too.
	And I can certainly understand that perspective.
	But nobody is for gun control.
	Like, let's just get rid of guns in society.
	What they are for is the centralization of weaponry in the hands of the state.
	And as we know from even the most cursory glance at history, That's not usually a very good thing.
	I mean, not that we're imminent dictatorship, but dictatorships always start with Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot, and they always start with stripping guns out of the hands of private citizens.
	And in fact, when Hirohito was talked about, you know, before Pearl Harbor, we said, well, maybe we should invade America.
	And he said, there's no possibility of invading America.
	There would be Guns behind every blade of grass because he knew how prevalent there's 330 million guns in the US. So the moral argument is guns can't be both good and bad.
	This is just a logical thing.
	And since you will need guns in the hands of police to take away guns from the hands of private citizens, then you're saying guns in the hands of the government are really good, guns in the hands of private citizens are really bad.
	And what you've then done is you've created opposite moral standards for two groups of people, Who are not differentiated by anything except a concept called the state, which is just a thing in our head which doesn't really exist.
	You know, there's buildings and guns and costumes and so on.
	So you've created this moral rule called guns in the hands of the state are really good, guns in the hands of private citizens are really bad.
	And this just doesn't work logically.
	So I think that's something that people should at least be honest and recognize.
	And the second issue is, well, what are the effects?
	And people believe...
	I don't know, maybe they just grew up in peaceful nirvana, suburbia, somewhere far away from maybe even barking dogs or heavily armed kestrels.
	But they believe that, well, why would you need a gun, people say, because we have the police.
	And they have this myth that the police are there to protect you from crime.
	And this is not true.
	And legally, it's not true.
	In fact, the duty to protect has been struck down in a wide variety of US courts when people say, well, the police guaranteed me protection and they didn't provide it, so I'm suing them.
	You have no legal right to any protection from the police and you can never do anything against them for failing to provide any protection, even if they promised it and it's due you.
	So the police will not protect you.
	And also the police are not there usually to prevent crime, you You know, if you're getting mugged, even if you have a cell phone, nobody's going to get there in time to do anything for you.
	So the police are basically there to, you know, draw a chalk outline, take some blood samples, file some paperwork and get on with their day.
	And that's not going to do you much good in a dangerous situation.
	So, of course, the statistics, two and a half million crimes are responded to by somebody with a gun.
	And this generally diminishes the severity of the crime.
	Statistics seem very clear that people who ward off a crime with a gun lose less property and suffer less injuries than people who try some other defensive strategy or mere compliance.
	So having a gun is better than mere compliance.
	And this, of course, doesn't show up.
	I mean, these horrible shootings that are occurring with actually about half the regularity that they used to last decade in the 1990s.
	So it is actually getting better.
	Murder rates in the U.S. are down by half, violent crimes down by even more.
	But these things are so shocking, of course, that everybody's impulse is to say, well, the problem is the gun, and we've got to take away the gun, and so on.
	But the reality is that these shootings, with the exception of the attack on Congresswoman Giffords last year, these attacks are always occurring in gun-free zones.
	So since 1950, every single shooting has occurred in a gun-free zone.
	In fact, James Holmes, the Batman Aurora shooter from the summer, had a choice of seven theaters to go to in his neighborhood.
	And he drove to the one that was one of the furthest away because it was the only one that said, you are not allowed to carry firearms into the theater.
	I mean, you know, let's do the math.
	About 3% of people in the neighborhood would have concealed weapons.
	And so if you've got a couple of hundred people in a movie theater, odds are, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 of them are going to have concealed weapons and are going to be trained to use them.
	And you would assume that a couple of them would recognize that shooting back is the thing to do in this kind of situation.
	And so he specifically went to a place, this shooter, this murderer, went to a place where guns were not allowed.
	Why does it occur in malls?
	Because malls generally are gun-free zones.
	In schools, of course, completely gun-free zones.
	And some school shootings have actually been stomped by people running out to the parking lot, getting their gun from their car and coming back in and so on.
	So it is just one of these counterintuitive things.
	You know, you have to dig a little bit deeper than the emotional, oh, my God, the gun is the problem.
	No, no, the gun is not the problem.
	Only one gun is the problem.
	Having more guns would seem to make things more violent, but the reality is, and we all know this, why did Russia and America never go to war?
	Because they both had nuclear weapons.
	This mutually assured destruction thing, we understand it works in international diplomacy.
	Why has Europe not gone to war in 60 years?
	I mean, unprecedented in European history.
	They've spent the last 2,000 years tearing each other limb from limb.
	Then they all get nuclear weapons, not just one, but all of them get nuclear weapons.
	Lo and behold, out come the peacemakers and everybody finds it's much more profitable to not nuke each other into incandescent ash, but to actually talk about things.
	So sorry for the long rant, but it's just one of these counterintuitive things that people don't understand.
	What we frankly need is more guns, not fewer guns, and that's the best way in the moment.
	There's lots of things to prevent, but in the moment, that's the best way to deal with these kinds of attacks.
	No, I couldn't agree with you more.
	I mean, you see this, you know, the media is very expert at concealing crucial facts.
	What you said about the Aurora movie theater shooter, that he went to a gun-free zone, perfect example, and that he had his choice of closer theaters and opted for the one that would have the least defenses.
	That proves the point, but that got omitted from the story.
	And every day, You have to look in the alternative media.
	You're not going to find it in the mainstream.
	There are stories about armed shopkeepers and merchants who fend off violent attacks.
	And you just have to go to YouTube.
	There was a great one here in Florida recently.
	Evidently, they have these internet cafes, which I haven't been to since my phone started getting internet.
	They're actually gambling parlors of some sort that squeezed through a loophole in Florida law and a couple of guys come in with a baseball bat and a gun And they start terrorizing the patrons and bashing the place up, and all of a sudden, this 70-year-old guy comes out of nowhere, gun blazing.
	He shoots them both, didn't kill them, but they go running for the door, falling all over each other, and he didn't let up.
	I mean, it was a remarkable thing to see, and yet the media does its best to hide the truth that There are a number of instances, and I'll just give you one other one.
	My sister had a boyfriend he always carried, and he had an ankle holster.
	And one time they're in a mall parking lot.
	They hear a woman scream, help me, I'm being mugged.
	He like goes running over there.
	He says, I've got a gun, I'm going to use it.
	And the mugger takes off.
	And so did the woman that he was mugging.
	He didn't even say thank you or anything, but that's a perfect example of a gun ending a potentially violent and criminal activity.
	Right.
	And one of the ways that they frame these kinds of incidents is that people are mentally ill, they have Asperger's, they have, you know, you name it, the psychotic episode.
	But, I mean, I had an interview with an unfortunately recently deceased psychiatrist named Thomas Sass who basically said, well, why don't we just call them what they are and what we used to call them, which is murderers.
	I mean, they are mass murderers.
	And People will immediately put mental illness in to take away the evil of what has been done.
	And what it does, it then reframes like, well, if the person's mentally ill and you're acting in self-defense, you're shooting someone for being sick.
	I mean, it reframes the whole debate.
	The reality is, and I don't know anything about the psychological profile of these killers.
	I don't know what's been determined or not.
	But the reality is...
	About 4% of the human population, 1 in 25 people, at a minimum, and the estimates go up from there, but at least 4% of the human population operate with no conscience, no guilt, no remorse, and often with, you know, hair-triggered tempers or manipulation, they're sociopaths, and sociopaths are 4% of the human population.
	Sociopaths and psychopaths, terms kind of used interchangeably, are responsible for half the crimes That occur.
	And so they are, and they have been characterized by psychiatrists as interspecies predators.
	They are not like you and I, at least I hope not like me and certainly not like you.
	They don't have a conscience.
	This has been scientifically verified.
	They don't feel remorse for committing evil actions.
	They just do calculations of utility.
	And they are an interspecies form of predators.
	So The idea that we should not have weapons when we are surrounded by potential predators and actual predators statistically is kind of like saying, well, let's you and I, Kerry, I got a great idea.
	We'll go on a safari in Africa.
	We'll go to thickly infested hungry lion park and we'll get out of the safari vehicle and we'll go for a stroll and what we'll have is a rape whistle around our neck.
	And thus, if anything 400-pound lions launch themselves from the top of their trees with their gleaming, sun-drenched fangs aiming for our jugulars.
	We'll blow a whistle and somebody will call for the game warden and we'll be fine.
	When you're surrounded by predators, it's kind of important to have a weapon for self-defense.
	But all we do is we characterize these It seems to me that they're just kind of evil, and they're just doing terrible things.
	And the causes of all these terrible things, you know, bad childhoods, bad parenting, you know, you can go into that, but the reality is they're out there anyway.
	And even if we say great parenting will get rid of them in a generation, we've still got a generation to go where we are surrounded by One in twenty-five people who will do anything they want to us and feel not a twinge of conscience.
	And so you can't appeal to their pity.
	You can't appeal to their ethics.
	You can't appeal to their good fellow Jehovah feeling.
	You kind of have to use a little cold steel if these attacks occur, in my opinion.
	I mean, this seems to be statistically and scientifically where the facts lead.
	Well, they're either going to hold you up at gunpoint, or they're going to go work for the government and go into politics because, you know, there's no other profession, if you want to call it that, and I guess kind of just like the world's oldest profession.
	But there's no other area that attracts sociopaths like political power, like honey to bees, and like white on rice, forget it.
	They just are attracted to it, and the other thing when you're talking about sociopaths, psychopaths, whatever, is that they smell weakness, they smell fear, and Where they find it the most, that's where they attack.
	And like you said, they have no conscience.
	They have no governor, no limitation on their behavior.
	And they're willing to act out just on the basis of cold calculation on whether or not they're going to be caught.
	If that's a consideration then, and oftentimes getting caught or getting killed, they don't care about that either.
	So really In that situation, your only defense is to defend yourself with a weapon.
	And when the state deprives you of your right to defend yourself, that is really immoral, and that is the worst of government.
	The city in the United States with the largest number of illegal handguns is New York City and most of those illegal handguns are in the hands of honest law-abiding citizens otherwise because they can't carry legally.
	It's extremely difficult to get a carry permit in New York and you hear about these convenience store owners, employees, bodega owners getting killed Over and over again.
	And a lot of them have taken to having shotguns in their stores and illegal weapons because they know the police will not be there to protect them.
	Because if the police were there, then the person wouldn't strike.
	They're looking for situations where the police aren't around to do their evil.
	Disarming somebody and forbidding them from protecting themselves, their body, their property, their lives, is really the height of governmental immorality.
	And the statistics back this up.
	I mean, interviews with prisoners in prison say, they say, oh yeah, I mean, if I thought there was a gun there, I'll move on to someone else.
	Of course.
	I mean, it's like...
	You know, I've been watching a lot of nature films with my daughter, so I apologize for the constant animal planet references.
	But, you know, the lions, they sort of circle the baby elephant, right?
	And, ah, yummy, baby elephant can't defend itself.
	And then, you know, the mom and the dad come out crashing through, and the whole lions are all like, ah, run away.
	You know, there's big things with tusks that weigh, you know, a ton and a half each.
	And so...
	Of course, when superior force comes along, the predators are going to back away, and they're basically just getting rid of mommy and daddy elephants and saying, good luck, go out in the jungle, you tiny little baby elephant, and good luck with the predators.
	So interviews can be somewhat subjective, but a fact which you don't see, of course, mentioned in the mainstream media is in the UK, 53% of burglaries take place when people are home.
	And in America, it's 8 or 9% take place when people are home.
	The difference being, of course, that in England, they're disarmed.
	So, you know, people are home, you know, it doesn't matter hugely.
	I mean, it's better, I guess, if, you know, you've got a mask on who knows who you are.
	But in America, of course...
	It's quite different.
	And I bet you that the 9% in America are when they didn't think anyone was home, but it turned out that somebody was.
	And so there's an example of how much crime is reduced simply by – and the great thing is you don't actually have to have a gun in your house.
	If you don't like having a gun in your house, as long as the criminal doesn't know whether you do or don't.
	Have a gun in your house.
	That's one thing.
	So, you know, somebody sent something around Facebook that I passed along, which I thought was quite clever.
	I said, look, if you're for gun control, start with your own home.
	And what you want to do is put a sign out front of your home that says, dear criminals, this house is a gun-free zone.
	We have no weapons here whatsoever.
	And stick that in front of your house and see what happens and how comfortable you feel openly advertising that you're a gun-free zone.
	Well, if everybody does that, do we not think that the criminal's behavior is going to change?
	Of course it is.
	Yeah, you'd be much better off putting an NRA sticker on your front door and your back door, along with a couple of alarm stickers, because just the sticker itself will greatly decrease your odds of becoming victimized.
	And the other thing is, gun authorities say this, that you're much better off having a concealed weapon than having a weapon out in public for the criminals to see, because If they know you have it, they'll be ready for you and might well preemptively attack you to disarm you.
	Whereas if they don't know if you have it or not, they're much more wary and more likely than not to go on to the next person who's weaker or that they perceive as weaker.
	Who has an Obama t-shirt on?
	Well, the other thing, too, that people get a bit confused about this as well, and I checked it twice because it was counterintuitive to my Canadian brain, but when criminals have guns, they end up injuring – they end up attacking people less.
	Now, of course, if they do attack and they have guns, they injure them more.
	But what happens is if a criminal has a gun and he's going up against somebody who's not armed, there's fewer assaults, fewer acts of injury that occur because you've just dominated.
	So it's funny, even if you're disarmed...
	You're better off if the criminal has a gun.
	I mean, in the worst conceivable situation, you have no gun, the criminal has a gun.
	You're actually better off than if the criminal doesn't have a gun.
	Because if he doesn't have a gun, he'll have to try and subdue you in some other way or threaten you in some other way.
	You may feel stronger and tougher, and there may be more of a scuffle, and there's certainly more injuries that result when neither party has a gun.
	But it's just one of these things.
	You're walking down a dark alley, some guy comes up behind you like, man, I hope he has a gun.
	I'm much more likely to get off without an injury if he has a gun.
	These are just things that...
	Don't make any sense at the surface, but when you dig into the data, it does become clearer.
	Yeah, well, what doesn't make any sense are the arguments to disarm the populace because, as you see, in England, their crime rate is four times as high as the United States.
	And in Australia, when guns were banned, their crime rates went up 50% overnight.
	And you can't say that's just a coincidence.
	And then you look in states...
	Where they've liberalized gun carry permits, Florida, Texas, 35 states, violent crime has gone down in all those states at a higher rate for the most part than in states where handgun possession permit is harder to come by.
	It's gone down all over the U.S., but much more so in those states that allow their citizens to be armed.
	Yeah, Chicago has the tightest gun restrictions in schools, and it has the highest number of gun shootings.
	It is just one of these counterintuitive things.
	I mean, wouldn't we all love to live in a world where you didn't need guns?
	I mean, you know, let's join hands around the campfire and sing Kumbaya, and let's work towards that world, and maybe in five, ten generations we can live in a world where guns have become superfluous.
	in the same way that we now live in a world where there's no formal slavery and women have equal rights all these you know the general march of humanity towards a better moral station is is wonderful but that's not where we live right now you know uh you know if if you're walking in central park you don't need defense against wolves but we're not in central park we're kind of in the wilderness and there are wolves there are predators and um there are ways to to equalize things as well am
	My general theory, I mean, I'd sort of dip into one thing because you sort of mentioned the UK as I did it.
	UK-US comparisons are very common.
	You know, people say, ah, well, you know, they've got 112 the murder rate in the UK. They think that the UK's banning guns has something to do with that.
	But if you go back to like 1920...
	The differences in murder and homicides was exactly the same.
	In fact, it's gotten a little bit worse over the last, what is that, 90 years.
	And this is before England had any gun controls.
	So gun control is not a factor in the different crime rates, the different homicide rates between the US and the UK. One of the things that...
	The UK, of course, historically was an aristocracy with feudal serfs, and in the aristocracy, you didn't hand out swords and bows and arrows like crazy because you wanted a monopoly of weaponry in the hands of the political elite.
	This is true throughout most of Europe, which is why Europe tends to be more into gun control, because they've had it for about 2,000 years or more, certainly since the Norman invasions of 1066, so about 1,000 years and odd.
	So they're much more used to it.
	They've been acclimatized to it.
	America, of course, settled its frontier, Indians and bears and tigers and bad guys.
	And so America couldn't have had its civilization without guns.
	And England and Europe, their civilization would have been completely different with guns.
	I mean, this is a continent where there hasn't been a successful revolution in hundreds of years, fundamentally, and even you could argue before that, for quite a long time before that.
	So, there are these different cultures and doing these apples to oranges comparisons without any sense of history really doesn't make any sense.
	The other thing too, of course, is that England and Europe as a whole, because they all had their empires, they sent a lot of their maniacs overseas to go kill people with other colors.
	On their skin.
	And so those people got a lot of fevers and you kind of, they sent their criminals to Australia and a lot of their ne'er-do-wells went to America, some of them for better.
	And so there's been a kind of depopulation of sociopaths in Europe for, you know, quite some time.
	And of course, the European wars, which cost, what is it, 50 million people over the last century, at least, not even counting the people killed by their own governments.
	This has bled off a lot of More disturbed personalities.
	It's, of course, created some more through war trauma, but there's a lot of different cultural reasons behind America and the UK as far as why there's more homicides.
	But chalking it up to gun control without looking at any of these other complexities is, you know, it's just like putting a Band-Aid on a second chest foot and saying, fixed!
	I totally agree with you.
	There's no question that gun control winds up accomplishing the opposite, which is increased rates of violence and a less safe public.
	That's what it all comes down to.
	Even though it perhaps might be counterintuitive, I think there's enough studies that have been done in the past 20 to 30 years, especially with liberalization of legalized carry permits in the U.S. to prove this fact over and over again.
	It's really beyond dispute.
	So all the arguments to the contrary take on an air of disingenuousness.
	And for that, we are grateful that you produced that YouTube video.
	Like I said, I'm going to have a link up on financialsurvivalnetwork.com.
	We definitely want people to look at it and understand why you need the right.
	You don't have to go and do it, but you need to have the right to arm yourself if you believe that it's necessary in a responsible and safe manner, of course.
	So, freedomainradio.com.
	Stefan, I know you're going to be traveling in the next few days.
	We wish you the happiest of holidays and safe travels, and enjoy yourself.
	Thanks, Kerry.
	All my best to you and your listeners, and thanks for the invitation.
	It was a very enjoyable chat.
	Always a pleasure.
	Take care.
	Okay, one last thing that I'm going to add to this.
	The show's over, but I wanted to also mention that gun control and homicides, it's very much slanted by the fact that democide, or the killing of People by their own governments is excluded from what are called homicides.
	Statistics would change a little bit if you consider things like the Armenian Holocaust, the Holocaust in Germany, the Jewish and homosexual and intellectual Holocaust that occurred.
	In the 1940s, and if you exclude war, a draft, of course, is a form of homicide, right?
	Because you're putting people into situations where they're going to get killed.
	That's kind of like a homicide, and of course, an armed population is much less likely to go for a draft, or certainly going to have more to say about a draft than...
	A completely disarmed and cowed down and beaten population.
	So in Europe, if you discount acts of aggression by governments that have caused the deaths of their own citizens and only look at sort of slave on slave violence or livestock on livestock violence That skews the numbers completely.
	If you include those other things, I think Europe actually starts to look a whole lot worse than America.
	If you're someplace you want to live in the 20th century and you had the choice between Europe and America, I think pretty much you're going to go with the good old Stars and Stripes.
	So that's just something important.
	It's not like if you get rid of slave-on-slave violence or you start control guns for slave-on-slave violence.
	What happens is the government tends to rush in to fill the void.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	And thanks again for listening.
	Take care.
	Oh, Merry Christmas, everyone.
	You beautiful people.

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