Stefan Molyneux discusses the recent shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, Aaron Alexis's mental issues, the banning of firearms on military bases, gun control, a previous shooting, and a previous pattern of misconduct.
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Mullen from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| As I'm sure you heard, Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old black man, has shot up a Navy base in downtown Washington, killing 13 people. | |
| I think there's some very interesting lessons and cautionary tales to be learned from this appalling murder spree. | |
| So, Alexis was a veteran of the United States Navy. | |
| He had been honorably discharged for a series of pretty severe misconduct issues and had been hired back as a contract employee and had been given fairly high security clearance and got into the Navy Yard using a legitimate security pass. | |
| This is what the FBI has said. | |
| The story seems to be, it's sort of unfolding now, the story seems to be that he started off with a shotgun and then he shot security guards and took their weapons and then continued on to the shooting spree. | |
| Now, one... | |
| A person who claims to be an eyewitness says that he tried to double jump the gate by somebody else getting through the security, was apprehended by the security guard and went on the spree from there. | |
| But the FBI does say that he used a valid security access to get in. | |
| Apparently, some people say he'd recently been fired and was going up to the fifth floor but couldn't get there and therefore went to the fourth floor and shot or went on a shooting spree instead. | |
| Now, about Aaron Alexis, hindsight is 20-20, but nonetheless, there are a few things that are worth mentioning. | |
| He had been suffering and was known to be suffering and was being treated by the Navy for suffering from a host of serious mental health issues, including paranoia, a sleep disorder, and he claimed that he had been hearing voices in his head and those voices in your head just rarely say, make a quiche and have a nap. | |
| So since August, he'd been treated by the VA, the Veterans Administration, for his mental health problems. | |
| And what that means, of course, is that he was almost certainly receiving the brain-frying psychotropic SSRI meds, or antipsychotics, which have been labeled by the FDA with a black box warning label, the most serious warning that there is for drugs, that they can cause homicidal ideation and hallucinations and paranoia and all of the stuff which, It's kind of what you're... | |
| It's like saying, oh yeah, your insulin will cause your foot to fall off. | |
| Isn't that sort of what you're being treated for, is to reduce these things? | |
| But these pseudo-medical responses, they actually exacerbate the very problems that they're supposedly trying to solve, at least in a minority of people. | |
| The Navy... | |
| Despite the fact that he was hearing voices, was unable to sleep, had paranoia, and a whole host of severe mental health issues, the Navy had not declared him mentally unfit, because if they had, immediately, then Mr. | |
| Alexis would have had his security clearance rescinded, and that would have solved that. | |
| Now, strange though it is to say, the military bases are actually gun-free zones. | |
| So 90-95% of mass shootings in recent US history have occurred in these gun-free zones. | |
| And the movie shooter, you may remember from Aurora, he actually drove out of his way to go to a theater which explicitly banned guns because, of course, he didn't want people in the audience with guns to prevent his vengeful acting out of his own evil impulses. | |
| This actually occurred in Clinton. | |
| One of the first acts that President Clinton took on taking office was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. | |
| Clinton's actions gave birth to army regulations, quote, forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection. | |
| As the Times editorial put it, quote, because of Mr. | |
| Clinton, terrorists would face more return fire if they attacked a Texas Walmart than the gunman faced... | |
| At Fort Hood. | |
| Fort Hood, sorry. | |
| I'm sure you know about this, but there was a guy named Hassan. | |
| He was an army psychiatrist who shot up a bunch of people in the worst attack in a military base. | |
| I think this was in 2009. | |
| The Joint Terrorism Task Force had been aware of email communications between Hassan, the shooter in 2009, and the Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been monitored by the NSA as a security threat, and that Hassan's colleagues had been aware of its increasing radicalization for several years and so on. | |
| So what's the history of the Navy shooter? | |
| Well, in 2010 in Fort Worth, Texas, the police arrested him for discharging a firearm within city limits. | |
| So he had a neighbor, and he kept yelling and screaming at his neighbor because she made too much noise. | |
| And then what happened was the neighbor heard a pop sound and found a hole in her floor and ceiling. | |
| The bullet passed from the floor through to the ceiling. | |
| She believed, not without cause, of course, that someone had shot into her apartment. | |
| The woman also reported that she was terrified of Alexis, who had confronted her for making too much noise. | |
| A spokeswoman with the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office said, quote, After reviewing the facts presented by the police department, it was determined that the elements constituting recklessness under Texas law were not present, and a case was not filed, said this woman. | |
| So at the time, Alexis claimed that his hand slipped while he was cleaning his gun while cooking at the same time, and that he accidentally fired his weapon, to which one can really only rationally say... | |
| Oh, double facepalm. | |
| What is the first rule of firearm? | |
| Safety, ladies and gentlemen, check the chamber before you touch the gun and do anything with the gun. | |
| The chamber should not have live ammo in it unless you're about to shoot something. | |
| So an ex-Navy guy cleaning a loaded gun while cooking, I mean, there's no possibility that that could be believed. | |
| And so he was... | |
| Detained, but not charged, and that, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. | |
| There, of course, has been a rule since about 1963, I think it is in the United States, that says that it's illegal to sell guns to people with mental health problems, but it's kind of hard to find out if people have mental health problems if the Navy doesn't report him As having mental health problems and if these kinds of laws are not enforced. | |
| So, oh, I was cooking and cleaning my gun, which was loaded. | |
| I mean, this is simply not believable. | |
| If that's true, then the man should not be allowed anywhere near guns. | |
| Of course, right? | |
| If it's not true, then he's lying and shot the gun on purpose to frighten a neighbor and therefore should go to jail. | |
| But this is relying on the government for your protection. | |
| So this man, Alexis the shooter at the Washington Navy Yard, also was arrested in Seattle in 2004 for shooting out the tires of a parked car in what he himself described as, quote, an anger-fueled blackout. | |
| So two construction workers building a new home told police that Aaron Alexis walked out of a home next door on May 6, 2004, pulled a pistol out from his waistband and fired three shots into the rear tires of their parked car. | |
| Alexis later told the police he thought the victims had disrespected him and mocked him earlier that morning after he discovered that his own vehicle had been tampered with. | |
| Alexis also told detectives he didn't remember firing his weapon until about an hour later, according to the police report. | |
| Court records show he had a hearing and was released on the condition he not have contact with any of the construction workers. | |
| This is after Alexis had been basically getting up early in the morning and staring at the construction workers for some time each morning and apparently had been complained about the parking situation around his house and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So this is a guy who blacks out and shoots. | |
| We don't know, of course, because he had blacked out whether he meant to hit the people and only hit the car with his delusions. | |
| Maybe he thought he was in a life-or-death struggle, but the Michelin man is hard to say. | |
| A defense official said Mr. | |
| Alexis was pushed out of the military because of repeated incidents and arrests, yet the military did not give him a dishonorable discharge which would have prohibited from legally purchasing a gun. | |
| I mean, this is exactly the same, similar to the Fort Hood shooter, Major Hassan, who was heard verbally dissing the U.S., even at seminars he conducted for the military, and yet they did nothing to discipline him. | |
| They moved him around in a sort of Catholic priest manner to get rid of... | |
| The problem, the Veterans Administration failed to report Alexis, the shooter, to the FBA database as someone who had major mental illnesses. | |
| They're required to by law, but they didn't follow the law. | |
| They didn't do even that which is necessary for them to do, to stay in compliance with the law. | |
| And, of course, the gun control people are all up in arms, so to speak, saying this is an example of why we need to have more gun control. | |
| The problem is that just over the last decade or two, gun murders are down 40%, even though gun ownership has increased enormously. | |
| So, I just wanted to sort of point these things out that... | |
| Everybody will think, well, we need more safeguards, we need more controls, we need more laws, we need more security checks, we need more vetting, we need more this, we need more that. | |
| I mean, it's nonsense. | |
| I mean, all of the information that was necessary to deny this guy Legal access to weaponry and a security clearance at a government base was available. | |
| Reporters found it within 20 minutes of the story breaking. | |
| They googled this guy and found what they needed to find, and this was ridiculously easy to do. | |
| Why this guy was rehired with huge mental health problems, why he was given security access, why he was allowed to legally... | |
| Purchase a gun? | |
| Well, because he had a significant history of violence. | |
| And these things never come out of nowhere. | |
| There's always a massive amount of evidence prior and a massive amount of failure, usually on the part of the government, to intervene and to stop this stuff from escalating. | |
| Now, of course, the government will say, well, you see, there's all these dangers and we need to institute more policies and procedures and so on, as if the probably dozens of laws that the government failed to enforce in the past And therefore led to this kind of shooting that they weren't enough. | |
| You know, if the government ignored 24 laws, I really, really strongly doubt that passing a 25th or 26th is going to solve the problem. | |
| We need to start looking elsewhere. |