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Jan. 14, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:07

2298 Gun Ownership Is Self-Defense - Spanking Is Not!

www.riseupradio.com Stefan Molyneux discusses gun control, spanking and peaceful revolution on Rise Up Radio with John Bush.

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	Welcome back.
	Welcome back to the Rise Up Radio Show, where every Monday through Friday, you need to get used to that.
	That's right.
	Five days a week, ladies and gentlemen.
	Monday through Friday from 7, 8 a.m.
	Central Standard Time.
	I'll be bringing you news, views, and tools you can use to live a free, prosperous, and sustainable life.
	And you'll be able to hear us on LRN.FM. That's the Liberty Radio Network.
	Big shout out to Ian Freeman and everybody up there at the Free State, the Shire, the so-called Shire, for making this possible and for inviting me on to this wonderful network, doing a lot of good things, spreading the message of liberty worldwide.
	Right now, I am very pleased to bring on...
	The first guest here on the Rise Up Radio show, who is a Rise Up Radio favorite, none other than Stefan Molyneux.
	He is the host of FreeDomainRadio.com.
	It's the largest philosophical conversation in the world, and I'm very grateful that the largest philosophical conversation going on in the world is about liberty.
	So, Stefan, thank you for coming on the program.
	How are you doing this morning?
	Well, I must tell you, I feel that the congratulations on the new show.
	Of course, John, I just feel that your tagline should be, Liberty, it happens while it's still dark outside, because it is the grip of death winter here.
	The claws of ice are closing around my brain, so it's early, but fortunately I can slip in a radio show before I have to go and milk the cows.
	So congratulations.
	Please get an afternoon show next time.
	That's my only request.
	Other than that, I'm entirely behind you.
	Well, to overcome the cold weather, I strongly advise people moving to Central Texas, where it's a little bit cold outside, but it's not too overbearing.
	So if you ever want to make the flock down south, Stephan, we'd love to have you down here in Austin.
	John, when you say it's a little bit cold outside, could you put that in perspective for my Canadian listeners?
	Because we may be using the words in a slightly different context.
	Are your livestock actually freezing to the ground and need to be chipped away with little winter elves?
	Is that what's happening?
	No, they're not.
	Is Santa on his way back to the North Pole actually frozen in a cloud stuck to the top of a Christmas tree?
	That's what I want to know.
	No, we've actually only had about seven freezes, six freezes this winter here in Texas.
	So it's 36 degrees right now, which is actually really cold for how the weather has been.
	But I imagine, what's going on up there in Canada?
	Well, it's actually, we had a warm day yesterday.
	And that normally would be a good thing, except when you've had a fair amount of snow, a warm day turns pretty much the entire country into what looks like a recreation of a World War I trench movie.
	So you sort of go knee-deep in frozen mud and all that.
	So given the temperatures here, if you need to take a commercial break, I'm afraid this is the time in live radio when the philosopher cries, weeps gently, and hugs himself slowly.
	But anyway, let's get on with the topic.
	Congratulations again on the new show, and what's on our brains this morning?
	Thanks.
	Yeah, the show is only an hour.
	It used to be three hours, so me and you had some one-hour conversations.
	They'll have to be condensed, so as you said, let's go ahead and get with it.
	I believe today we're going to be chatting about gun control.
	And then I'd like to steer the conversation towards exploring alternatives to using violence in order to solve problems, whether the problem is a tyrannical government or an unruly child, because I feel far too often, most Americans, most anybody, Canadians included.
	Even libertarians seem to often continue to use violence as a means of solving problems, even with their children.
	We want to get into that.
	But first, let's chat gun control.
	Of course, the Sandy Hook massacre took place recently with 20 children dead and six adults dying as well at the hands of a gunman who was, of course, on psychotropic drugs.
	But that has reignited the discussion and the call for gun control across the country.
	So I guess we'll just start with this question.
	Do you believe keeping firearms, banning firearms, banning semi-automatics, handguns, registration, is this going to prevent these violent atrocities from happening in the future?
	Well, no.
	I mean, the tragic fact, of course, is that the school was already a gun-free zone, which you can't make American society.
	That's 300 million guns in America already.
	I mean, they're not going away.
	And, you know, even if you were to try to get them away, 80% of the gun-related homicides in the United States are committed by people who already have a criminal record.
	And, of course, with the drug cartels, you've got A huge pipeline of guns coming up from Mexico, some of which, of course, were deposited there by the US government.
	And so simply no possibility of getting rid of the guns.
	You already had a gun-free zone.
	Unfortunately, you know, we have this weapon in society already.
	We can't make it magically go away.
	And so you can't get rid of the guns.
	And so what you need to do, of course, is you need to have a consistent moral principle, which is that Everybody has the right to have a weapon.
	People don't realize, of course, the generally left-wing media doesn't report this, of course, but if you remember James Holmes, the shooter of the Batman theater, he actually drove out of his way to the only theater around that posted that guns were not allowed inside. he actually drove out of his way to the only And so he bypassed theaters where concealed carry permit weapons, of which there are about 3% in the neighborhood.
	So a couple of hundred people, you're going to have probably five or 10 people who have He drove out of his way to avoid people who might have weapons and made sure that he was in a theater where people were disarmed.
	If you make more theaters disarmed, if you make more of society disarmed, all you're doing is you're sending poachers out into the jungle without a weapon.
	And there are predators in human society.
	It's truly tragic, but there are sociopaths and psychopaths and people who have no conscience and people who will do great evil.
	And waving away weapons is not going to stop them from doing their evil.
	It's simply going to reduce the chances of prevention.
	I mean, I'm very strongly anti-violence.
	I believe in self-defense and in extremity, but I'm very strongly anti-violence.
	And because of that, you know, it's really important to make sure that people have the weaponry needed to defend themselves against these intraspecies predators called criminals.
	I mean, we can work over the long run to reduce the prevalence of criminality, and there's a lot that we can do about that.
	But they're here now.
	I don't think I've ever seen, frankly, a zombie film at the beginning where they say, let's get rid of all of our weapons and reason with them.
	It just doesn't happen.
	Unfortunately, a certain type of predator is simply that conscienceless, that remorseful, that violent, and we simply can't wish them away any more than we can wish the guns away.
	That's right.
	And the gun-free school zones, or this is a gun-free zone like the Luby's down here in Texas where a bunch of people were killed about a decade ago.
	It seems like you might as well have a sign that says, any crazed psychos...
	Come on here, it's a victim disarmament zone, and we'll make sure you rack up a kill score enough to get you published worldwide and to go down in fame.
	If guns aren't the root cause of this type of activity, these mass shootings happen, in your opinion, what are some of the reasons why these mass shootings seem to be more prevalent this day and age than, say, when you were growing up?
	Well...
	To be statistically fair, they're on their way down in terms of, I mean, sometimes the incidents are higher and certainly the publicity is higher and the avenues by which we can get the information about them.
	But violent crime as a whole is on a huge decrease in the United States.
	It's down by about half from 10 or 15 years ago.
	And there's a wide variety of reasons for that, demographics and, I think, better child raise and so on.
	But people, you know, it's important to remember that a situation like Sandy Hook...
	To say that we need to have the government step in and do something about it is to not understand the degree to which the government was already involved.
	So, it was a government school.
	It was government police who were supposed to respond.
	It was government administrators and teachers who were supposed to keep the children safe.
	It was government psychologists and psychiatrists who We're supposed to identify with and deal with mental health issues.
	All of the shooters, to my knowledge, went to government schools for over a decade.
	So who was responsible for their moral training?
	So I think this is not a government-free zone.
	But whenever you hear this stuff, people say, oh, we need to have the government step in.
	But the government's already all over it.
	And the other thing that's important to remember, of course, is that Nobody is against gun control as far as I know it.
	The people on the left or the people who are the most rabid for gun control should actually use the correct term, which we want a gun monopoly.
	They want the ownership of guns, the use of guns to be concentrated in the hands of a political elite that are fundamentally unaccountable.
	Boy, if you know anything about history, that never leads to a particularly good place.
	Yeah, for sure.
	And history repeats itself.
	That's right.
	They want no one to have guns except for themselves.
	And if you want people to turn in guns, let's start with one of the most violent gangs in the world, and that's the police departments here in the United States.
	We're coming up on a break.
	This is the Rise Up Radio show.
	We're chatting with Stefan Molyneux of freedomainradio.com.
	On the flip side, we're going to explore alternatives to using violence as a means of solving problems from revolution to parenting.
	We'll be right back.
	Welcome back to the show.
	Welcome back to the show.
	Thanks for the round of applause there.
	Does wonders for my ego.
	This is the Rise Up Radio show here on LRN.FM. That's the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting.
	I guess they're based in Keene, New Hampshire.
	Want to give a big shout out to old Ian Freeman up there and the LRN.FM crew and everything they're doing up at FSP. Looking forward to coming up for Liberty Forum and good old Porkfest.
	So definitely check that out.
	But for people that are looking for an alternative, you can also check out lonestarlibertopia.com.
	It's an effort to encourage liberty activists to move down to Central Texas to participate in the growing liberty movement.
	Hopefully, Ian Freeman won't mind that we're broadcasting on LRN.fm and encouraging people to check out this alternative, the Free State Project.
	But we're going to be working together to create free societies all over the place.
	And right now we're joined by Stefan Molyneux of freedomainradio.com.
	Excellent website, excellent podcast, great YouTube videos, and most importantly, it's a very powerful and insightful message that...
	Well, actually, Stefan Molyneux got number one on Gigi Bowman's 2012 Liberty Inspiration Award.
	I snuck in there tying for another person for fifth place, but essentially how it worked was people were asked to send in little tidbits of why people inspire him.
	If you look at Molyneux, the whole packet of people that were nominated, it's like 150 people, it's like...
	Thirty pages, and about ten of them is all for Stefan Molyneux, but he really impacts a lot of people's lives and causes people to think in ways that they probably had never even contemplated before, changing not only their view of the world, but more importantly, I believe, the way they live their lives.
	And for this last segment here, I guess we only got about eight minutes, it's a short program, I want to chat about alternatives to violence, practical alternatives that individuals can use in their daily life.
	In order to create a world where we no longer depend on violence as a means of problem solving.
	I don't depend on it, but it seems like so many people do.
	So let's get right into that and start with parenting.
	Stefan Molyneux, do you believe spanking has a positive effect on a child's behavior or a negative effect?
	Well, hopefully such an essential question wouldn't come down to my beliefs.
	Fortunately, we don't have to deal with our beliefs.
	We simply have to look at the facts.
	The science is very clear on it, that it is destructive.
	The Academy of Pediatrics has come out against it.
	Sorry, the AMA has come out against it, and of course it's illegal in many of the countries around the world.
	It is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	The non-aggression principle, of course, is thou shalt not initiate the use of force against others, but you can use force in an extremity of self-defense.
	And...
	Unless your child is actively coming at you with a flaming anteater and a chainsaw or something, it's hard to think how spanking a child could be an act of self-defense and therefore it is an initiation of force against a disarmed and helpless and dependent person.
	Children, of course, don't have economic independence.
	They don't have legal independence and therefore, because they're dependent, we should have the highest moral standards in our relationships.
	with them, right?
	So like if you want your wife to marry you, sorry, if you want your wife to love you, then you choose the right person, woo her well, you get married and hopefully live happily ever after.
	But if your wife was assigned to you by your culture or your government in some sort of arranged marriage, if you really wanted her to love you and overcome the involuntary nature of the relationship, you would have to treat her like super extra Hallmark card every morning rose petals in her tea special to overcome the fact that she wasn't there by choice. you would have to treat her like super extra Hallmark Children, I say this as a father myself, children are not with us by choice.
	And so we need to have the highest moral standards in our interactions with children to ensure that their love overcomes the involuntary nature of their relationship and the lack of independence that they have.
	And so we, of course, abhor the idea of hitting spouses.
	And that's of course entirely right.
	And we don't go around hitting friends.
	We don't get what we want at work by hitting people.
	If an employee doesn't do what we want them to do, we don't spank them in the boardroom.
	I mean, maybe certain places on the West Coast, but not in general.
	It's a business practice.
	And yet, we have this other standard when it comes to children where, because they're helpless and dependent, we suddenly can treat them worse.
	Whereas my argument would be the more dependent and helpless they are, the better we need to treat them.
	And so that, I think, is something that is...
	Hard for people to get, but it's just a natural extension of the peace and virtue and negotiation that we want in society.
	What do we want in society?
	Those of us who want freedom.
	We want force to not be used to settle human disputes.
	Taxes and regulation and debt and fiat currency and inflation and all the mess that goes on.
	We don't want...
	War to be a way that disputes are solved among countries.
	We just don't want violence to be used in the pretense of solving complex problems and the relationship between a parent and a child is complex and it should be negotiated and we should set aside violence in that sphere where we have the most control.
	But of course a lot of people in the liberty movement are still focusing Their efforts on areas where they have no control, foreign policy, the Federal Reserve, tax policy, and so on, whereas freedom and peace really, really does begin in the home.
	Yeah, it begins at home and it begins in the heart.
	Let me run by a couple objections that I'm getting from libertarians for the most part about spanking.
	I've been posting some provocative comments on my Facebook and they usually are along the lines of my belief that it's hypocritical to believe it's wrong for government to use violence as a means of changing people's behavior and to simultaneously believe it's okay to use violence in order to change your children's behavior.
	Let me give you two objections that I get and get your take on those.
	And then I want to chat about revolution before we wrap up here.
	Most people say, when I make that claim, they say, well, spanking isn't violence.
	So I want to get your take on that.
	And then they also say that many children are too young to reason with and to teach them between right and wrong or safe and unsafe.
	So we need to use violence to show them what's right and wrong by...
	By having them be afraid of the fear of future violence.
	So what's your take on those two objections?
	Those that say spanking is not in fact violence, and those that say children are too young to reason with, so we need to go ahead and hit them.
	Well, if spanking isn't violence, then obviously it's legal between adults, and therefore you can go and spank anyone you want, and it's not violent.
	Of course, if you try spanking an adult, you will be charged with assault, and so it clearly is violence, otherwise it would be legal among adults.
	Also, people will generally say, well, spanking, oh, it's not abusive, it's just a little swat on the butt and so on, but that, of course, is not the purpose of spanking.
	The purpose of spanking is to create such an aversion In the mind and heart of the child that the child fundamentally changes behavior.
	So people say, well, if your child is reaching for something on a hot stove or is running into the street or whatever it is, trying to split the atom in the basement, you go in and you spank them.
	So a spanking has to be something of sufficient Fear and pain that the child will fundamentally change behavior.
	So, to say that it is not violence and yet to say that it has to create enough fear and pain in the child to fundamentally change behavior is a complete contradiction.
	If you are not spanking violently, you're not doing spanking right.
	You know, because spanking is supposed to be something which the child is very afraid of and will fundamentally change their behavior.
	So, of course, it's violence.
	It's illegal among adults and it causes fear and pain and so on.
	I mean, just try it with an adult.
	Try it with an officer who pulls you over.
	Say, officer, I do not accept your legal right to pull me over because of your blue costume.
	I'm afraid I'm going to have to put you over my knee and paddle you.
	So, not only is that...
	The opening of the worst pornographic film probably in the history of mankind, but not something that is wisely advisable to do in any sort of real-world situation.
	And the idea that children are too young to reason with and therefore you should spank them, well, why is that just a principle that only applies to children?
	What if you're in a debate with somebody who refuses to accept facts and refuses to accept rational arguments?
	Well, clearly they're being irrational and therefore you should spank them.
	How's that going to go down?
	Well, of course it's not going to go down.
	That would simply be assault.
	And secondly, it's like saying, well, children don't know the words for things when they're very young.
	So what we need to do is scream gibberish at them so they learn language.
	The whole point is, of course, children are born unable to reason in an abstract sense.
	So how do you teach them to reason?
	By hitting them?
	Of course not!
	You don't teach someone to reason by hitting them.
	You teach them to reason by the magical process of actually reasoning with them, not by hitting them.
	Yep, yep.
	And many people, I mean, if you just communicate with your children, especially from a very young age, their reasoning abilities actually start popping up there very, very early, and people will be surprised when they actually look at their children as peers rather than, you know, little kids.
	Unprogrammed children that don't know any better.
	And it's my belief that the use of violence against children makes people receptive as adults to the idea of coercion and falling in line out of fear of future violence, just like what happens with the state.
	And it's my belief that if we are to break away from violence in the home, it'll make it easier for people as adults to see the violent nature of the state.
	And before we let you go, we're coming up on the end of the program just to Quick question.
	Do you think violent revolution is a way to create a free society or will we just end up in the same problem we are today?
	Violent revolution is fundamentally, given the power of the state, suicidal at the moment, and our children deserve better.
	And you simply reject violence in your own life.
	You reject people who refuse to reject violence in their own lives, and that's how we build a peaceful society.
	Revolution has been tried for 5,000 years, and this is where we've got – we need to do something different.
	Right on.
	Thank you, Stefan, for coming on the show.

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