Oct. 20, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:31
3865 Gun Control | Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas Shooting, the calls for gun control, increased regulations and the repeal of the second amendment were loud and vociferous. Bill Whittle joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss common misconceptions related to gun violence, how to know if somebody is willing to have an honest conversation about gun control and the true purpose of the second amendment. For more from Bill Whittle, please check out:https://www.billwhittle.comhttps://www.youtube.com/BillWhittleChannelYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Back with our good friend, Bill Whittle.
He is the host of Firewall, a co-host on Right Angle with Stephen Green and Scott Ott.
And you can check him out at BillWhittle.com, like your grandfather used to do on the back porch, and YouTube.com forward slash Bill Whittle channel.
Bill, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Great to be back, Stefan. It's been a while.
Hope you've been doing well.
It's been, as we said earlier, kind of a slow news year, huh?
It's, you know, hard to come up with stuff to talk about when it's just, you know, you open up the news and it's just a blank page with some ads.
Yeah, nothing. You know, we're doing our best.
We're doing our best. Unlike the left, we don't get to invent the news.
We just have to roll with what is.
That is a significant disadvantage, I've noticed.
There is something that's interesting, and I want to sort of get your thoughts.
We're going to talk about gun control today, which is a topic I've certainly dealt with in the past, but, you know, it feels a good time for circling around.
Like, I was just reading the other day about a restaurant that posted some support for Donald Trump and ended up being deluged with, like, we're going to burn down your restaurant with you inside it.
We're going to kill your family.
We're going to put your dog through a wood chipper, like, all kinds of crazy stuff.
And the left has this kind of feral aspect to it, you know, can't win the argument, but sure can get hysterical and violent online or sometimes in person, as we see with conservative speakers around America and other places.
And at the same time, they say...
That the cops are horribly corrupt and that the cops will shoot you just as soon as look at you if you're a minority in particular and so on.
So they surround you with violence, threats, death threats, danger, and claim that the cops will never help you.
And at the same time, they say, you know, it'd be a great idea giving up your guns.
And this strikes me as a rather odd sequence of reasoning, to say the least.
And for people that are not willing or able or...
I think we're good to go.
Then guns, in terms of a criminal encounter, give you much more of an equalizing advantage or situation.
And these kinds of topics generally aren't discussed, I think, as much as they should, because generally the way things work is there's some tragedy involving a gun, some mass murder involving a gun, and so on.
And then the reaction is, well, let's just ban guns.
Ban guns! Although the immigration policy doesn't change no matter how many crimes are committed by illegal immigrants.
It's just guns. And the left's drive to de-arm the population is almost perpetual.
And I can't help but look through history and see, well, the number of times that leftists have taken power after disarming the population and the resulting pileup of conservative bodies seems almost without exception.
I couldn't agree more. I thought this was going to be a debate.
I am 100% in agreement with you.
Absolutely. You know, if you look at the history, especially of the 20th century, just the huge numbers of murders of citizens by their own government.
That's the main reason why I'm armed.
I don't need an AR-15 to protect myself from some deer coming through my window at four o'clock in the morning.
I'm not so much worried about that.
And people say, well, that could never happen here.
Well, you know, they said that about Germany, which was an extremely civilized civilization, said it about Russia, said it about China, said it about everywhere.
It's not a question of whether or not it could happen here.
We know it could happen here.
We know that the government's been weaponized against conservatives.
And if we're at the state where the federal government is used to suppress conservative organizations, where the FBI basically is looking into just things like the Tea Party as a terrorist organization, there's no question that the government is capable of doing that kind of thing.
And another conflation, this is sort of my first test for the honest conversation about gun control, which is, are they lumping in suicides with homicides?
Like, just as far as a basic, can you be critical of data?
Can you think your way out of...
A paper bag, right?
So 2012, right?
So firearm deaths, right?
Are they just saying, well, firearm deaths without...
And so 35% homicides, 62% suicides.
And to me, if you're going to say, well, we need to ban guns because people shoot themselves thinking that it's somehow going to eliminate...
Suicide is a completely irrational position.
And if you're lumping suicide in with homicides and then saying that this just makes guns, I guess, triply dangerous, that is disingenuous to the point of outright dishonesty.
Well, categorically, and there's a few things to say about the suicide angle.
I did a quick little bit of research in 2013.
Forty people jumped off at the Golden Gate Bridge.
No one's talking about closing the bridge.
The act of suicide is a tremendous tragedy, and nevertheless, it is probably—and I don't mean this to sound as callous as perhaps it does—but it is the ultimate act of self— Of self-responsibility in a way.
It's the ultimate act of an individual.
It's a terrible tragedy.
But if you're dealing with somebody who's determined to kill themselves, that is not something that getting rid of guns is going to do much to do.
I mean, look, it certainly makes it easier.
There's no question about that.
And there's no point in denying obvious facts in this discussion.
But The elimination of guns does not eliminate suicide.
It simply doesn't.
When a person's filled with that kind of despair, then they're going to act on it.
I wish it weren't true, but there's a lot of things that I wish weren't true that are true.
Well, and this is from 2012 as well.
Look at firearm suicides versus hanging or suffocation.
51% in the U.S. firearms and 24% hanging or suffocation.
If you look at the U.K., very, very strict gun control there.
Okay, 2% of suicides are by firearms and 60% by hanging or suffocation, which I guess means banning ropes and belts and just about anything else that you could use to choke off.
Your own windpipe.
So it is sort of pushing one side of the balloon, the other side of the balloon goes out.
I mean, I have a feeling that if people are hellbent on self-destruction, the methodology that they end up taking is not really their primary concern.
It is the destination, not the journey that they care the most about.
I think the real operative issue here is something you mentioned at the beginning about how feral leftists can be and violent.
And I'm not trying to blame all of this on them, but I think basically what happens is this.
I think people look at guns in a very fetishistic way.
And I mean that kind of in the original use of the term.
Progressives tend to put all of the insanity and evil and murder in the world onto an inanimate object because they feel that they can control the inanimate object.
In other words, if the gun is responsible for all of this murder, then all we have to do is throw the guns into the volcano and murder will disappear.
And that is what they believe, and you can see why it would appear to be so, but it's not so.
You cannot do anything about these things.
Murder and suicide and all of the rest of it are part of the human condition.
They're built into who we are.
It's a structural failure of the psychology and of the human heart.
And as a structural failure, in terms of the number of models produced, Human beings, especially American human beings, is the one I have the most information on, is a remarkably well-made product.
We have Six Sigma sanity in this country.
I mean, if you were to take this manufacturing idea of one defective part, a Six Sigma manufacturing means one defective part per three or four million.
That means there should be 1,040 mass murderers in the country pulling triggers, not just thinking about it, actually pulling triggers.
And that would be a Six Sigma manufacturing standard, which is the highest manufacturing standard there is.
I bring this up, and I want to say this once, and I want it to apply for the rest of the conversation today.
When I bring up figures and statistics and try to put perspective on things, this in no way means I don't have enormous compassion for the people who are the victims of this.
I certainly don't mean to be sounding like I'm trivializing or it is no big deal.
It's a catastrophe. It's a disaster.
It's a human tragedy.
And that's not just lip service.
But if you look at it as a failure rate in the human condition, modern Americans It's a silly thing to say, Stephan, but honestly, pretty much every day there's 320 million people in this country with easy access to firearms and no one's going around shooting up crowds as a general rule.
Well, it is one of these aspects that when we see a shocking demonstration of violence such as we saw recently in Las Vegas, there is a natural human impulse to try and figure out the cause, to try and find some way to manage the anxiety and insecurity.
That is engendered by such brutal displays.
And to your point, this is kind of magical thinking.
Well, if we get rid of the weapon, somehow the murderous impulse won't manifest in some other way.
And who knows what happens?
I mean, could they poison water supplies?
Could they put something in the air?
I mean, these guys could go. I mean, in Japan, they poison people in a subway or something.
There is so many different ways.
And the other thing, too, of course, is that for a society that claims to be, as is the West and countries around the world, Societies that claim to be very shocked by the prevalence of gun violence still seem relatively eager to enter into overseas wars of questionable utility and questionable morality, wherein guns are deployed pretty regularly.
So it is just a piece of magical thinking.
You know, like, well, I was tasting soup when the volcano exploded, so I'm never going to taste soup again because that was the coincidental factor.
And it's almost like an IQ test for me.
I think one of the reasons, too, that something like Las Vegas is so shocking to most people is because for the majority of the American population, here's finally some murdering that they can connect to only because they realize this could have been them.
But the horrible news is, if you look at 60 killed in that attack in Las Vegas, In Chicago, in September, there were 59 people murdered.
That's September for Chicago.
That doesn't include Baltimore, Detroit, or any of these other murder pits where these ongoing murders are happening.
And people look at the horror of Las Vegas because, for many people, that's something they can connect to.
They can understand, hey, that could have been me.
That's the particular horror of something like that.
But it's not the source of the murder problems in this country.
The source of the murder problems in this country are what's happening on a daily basis in these inner cities, which have become killing zones as a result of four decades, five, six, seven, eight decades.
I think it's been 80 years in Chicago of uninterrupted democratic rule.
Of all the people that have saved lives in this country, I think the person who saved most black lives in my lifetime is Rudy Giuliani.
And I think by a fair margin, New York used to be the leader of the national murder rate until Giuliani and Braxton came in and basically said, no, we're going to enforce the law here.
We're going to arrest the people that we know are committing these murders.
The murder rate in New York plummeted compared to these other cities.
And innumerable lives were saved because somebody decided to get serious about the law and not just pretend.
That if we make guns harder to get, then this problem is going to go away.
And that's why they do it, by the way.
They want to focus on the guns because they do not want to look at the causes, the actual underlying causes of what makes these things, including these mass murders, so prevalent today.
And that is the policies of theirs that have destroyed the moral fabric of this country.
Guns were infinitely more easy to obtain in the 1950s and 60s, infinitely easier.
Walk into any hardware store, walk out with a weapon.
Most high schools had a rifle range on premises, maybe down below.
You would take shooting in class.
We all grew up with guns, cowboys, Indians, pop guns, cap guns, BB guns, all of it.
And this didn't happen when we were young.
And it didn't happen when we were young because there were still families and there was still some sort of moral structure to channel what are inbuilt violent tendencies into constructive And productive modes of behavior.
It's astonishing, and people who don't know this history will be startled at what you just said, that there used to be gun rangers, rifle training, and all of that in high schools in America, right there, right there in the high school.
You could sign out a gun, you could go practice, you could go shoot, you could get training, and there weren't school shootings.
That is something that people just, like, blows back their mental apparatus.
And this will put an extra little boost to that explosion.
The first of the mass shootings in the modern era happened at the University of Texas.
I always want to say Mark David Chapman, but I'm pretty sure that's the guy who shot John Lennon.
I forget his name.
But in any event, a guy went to the University of Texas bell tower with a high-powered rifle, started firing, and killed a lot of people.
But what's not known about that incident is, I hope you're sitting down, Professors at the university left their classrooms, went out to their cars, opened their trunks, removed their own personal hunting rifles, and began to put suppressing fire on him.
And once they started shooting back, he didn't get a single...
Hit after that.
They were able to basically suppress his fire long enough for the policeman to come up the staircase and basically get him from behind.
But the idea that professors on college campuses had rifles in their cars for just sport hunting afterward that they simply went out and got is an indication of how much more available these weapons were.
And these things didn't happen then.
We didn't have these kind of murder rates in cities then because people enforced the law then.
And there was structure and family and morality and all the rest of it.
It's just interesting to me, Bill, to think of university professors sport hunting or hunting for shooters rather than, say, conservatives.
That's, to me, quite a fascinating phenomenon, a little bit less utilized these days on modern campuses.
And that aspect of, well, guns are the problem, let's get rid of guns, is one of these False solutions to a very significant problem.
And to me, it's a kind of a cover solution to the issue.
So we talked about sort of inner cities and so on.
And when you have a situation wherein you sort of young black men, you know, three to four percent of the population responsible for close to 50 percent of the murders.
That is such a wildly disproportionate concentration of criminality among a very small section of the population, and people don't want to look at the causes of this.
They don't want to look at the why this is happening.
That is a relatively new phenomenon, and as I've talked about before, black families were more stable in the 1920s, much more stable in the 1920s than they are now, and of course there was much more institutionalized racism.
People don't want to look and say, okay, well, we have a huge crime problem in particular communities.
What are the sources?
Because the sources are going to be, you know, family breakdown or IQ differences and so on.
Who knows? But you can't even go down that path because that might threaten Democrat control of minority voting.
Yes, which is why conservatives have to be demonized, because if they're not, people will take a look at the neighborhoods that Democrats have created and come to the pretty much unavoidable conclusion.
The reason I don't take the Black Lives Matter movement very seriously is because for the last year I could get statistics for, I think it was either 2014 or 2016, it turned out that of all Black people killed in this country, 4% were killed by policemen under all circumstances.
That's not unarmed confrontation.
That's a total number of black people killed in that year was 4% by policemen.
And virtually all of those were cases of exchanges of gunfire and so on and so on.
So what's really the problem is, is that the economic opportunities that used to be available in cities were We're manufacturing opportunities, and you could essentially be an immigrant, come off the boat, and basically, I mean, no disrespect for people who work on assembly lines, but you could get a job in manufacturing relatively easily.
In the assembly line, you've got to learn how to do one thing correctly.
And there were cities like Baltimore that were booming.
One of the most amazing books I've read is called The Corner, and it was the basis for the TV show The Wire.
And of all the things in that book that are so heartbreaking, and it is heartbreaking, you see people just stripping electrical wire out of buildings to sell for a few pennies to get $6 so they can get their speedball for the day.
But Of all the things that are heartbreaking is to hear the description from the grandparents of the people that are dealing drugs now in those communities.
Because these neighborhoods used to be beautifully maintained.
They were beautifully maintained houses.
They were essentially black and white neighborhoods.
They were extremely well mixed racially.
Pretty much everybody was working at the factory.
People had come up from the South.
A lot of Black Americans had come up from the South after the war and had formed these communities.
And for 20 years, they were going to the same churches, going to the same libraries, and generally being good neighbors with each other and getting along just fine.
These houses were beautifully maintained.
When those manufacturing jobs left the cities, The people didn't leave the cities.
And so they have literally no options in terms of what they can accomplish economically.
And I suspect that if I found myself in a situation like that, I probably would have ended up as a drug dealer, too, because you have a little initiative and some...
What other opportunities are there?
I'm not trying to blame the society for this.
I'm just trying to say that there's really only been three things ever happened in human history.
You know, agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the information age.
We're sitting directly a beam, a transition from manufacturing into information, and that is displacing huge numbers of people in the same way that the move to industry did from agriculture.
So these upheavals are creating the environment For progressive policies to come in and say, hey, look, the problem is we need to give you subsidies and welfare in place of jobs, and instead of looking for more jobs, they just give them the dependency, and that leads to the boredom and the rage and the despair and all the rest of it, and there you go.
But nobody talks about these issues, because these are the issues that could actually make a difference.
It's just so much easier to paint people as racist or not caring, when in point of fact, the murder rate in this country, if you took the murder rate of Plano, Texas, which is probably the most heavily armed place on planet Earth, I mean, every single house in a place like Plano, Texas has, you know, 45s, 22s, they've got 30-odd 6s, they've got, you know, sharp rocks and pointy sticks, they've got everything.
And the murder rate in Plano, Texas is lower It's lower than it is in every European Western society, lower, significantly lower.
It's a third of Belgium's.
What does that tell you?
It basically destroys the entire theory on its face.
The place that has the most guns in America per capita has the lowest murder rate per capita, and it is lower than it is in these European socialist paradises.
So how do you explain that?
Well, and even just looking at the timeframe over the United States, you're looking from 1994 to 2011, the number of guns went up from 170 million to over 300 million, and the homicide rate Went down from 9 per 100,000 to a little under 5.
So guns went up significantly, a quarter, a third or so, and the homicide rate went down close to 50%.
And it's one of these, like that one data point, one data point, one little graph.
Put that one little graph in front of people and say, okay, step me through your logic here if you think that banning guns is going to lower crime.
It seems to me, I mean...
This is a bit out there, but this is sort of the logic that I think you could make a case for.
That the people who most want guns to be banned are criminals.
Because if you want guns to be banned and you can still have them, it means that you can stride through your criminal element.
You can prey upon people you know are legally disarmed.
It lowers your risks. It lowers the capacity for retaliation.
You get to be the cock of the walk, armed to the teeth, because you're already outside the law, so what do you care?
It seems to me that the driving force behind the disarmament and also behind the...
Practical disarmament of the police through the Ferguson effect, where the police end up intervening less and policing less in difficult communities, which results in higher crime rates.
We've seen a reintroduction of higher homicide rates and crime rates and so on as the Ferguson effect has taken hold.
Who on earth, other than criminals, benefits from the elimination of guns among the lawful?
Well, that's precisely right.
If you have any kind of a gun control law passed up to and including turning them in, the only people that are going to do that are the people who follow the law.
Most law-abiding Americans look at the situation.
I've got this exact issue to face by June.
I have an AR-15 and I have to decide in June whether or not to register that as an assault rifle.
So let's just take that as an example.
For a guy like me, I suspect I will probably do it.
And the reason I suspect I will probably do it is the only crime I would possibly perpetrate in the course of my life is showing up with a rifle at a firing range that has been declared illegal after it was legally sold to me.
In other words, I have so much to lose.
That I will probably obey this awful law simply because I'd like to remain proficient with this rifle, and I don't want to be tagged with a, you have an illegal firearm with you.
Now, if I was, on the other hand, a murderer or a thief or something like this, We're good to go.
Accede to a law they find reprehensible than be suddenly made criminals in their own society.
So these are the people you have to worry about the least.
This is the whole thing, similar to the whole thing about murder-free zones, right?
Well, this is a gun-free zone, this university.
And I guess, you know, when people go up and shoot up these campuses, I guess somebody just didn't read the sign, you know?
It's like saying, well, you know, this guy's gonna come in, he's gonna murder all of his coworkers, but It turned out that he was parking in a red zone, so he decided to give it up.
He doesn't care about these things.
It's not about that anymore.
And this idea that regulations and laws will impact anything other than the most law-abiding citizens in the country is just plain fantasy.
But there's something that's really much more important.
So the question is, if all of this is true, and obviously true, and it is, What drives this progressive drive to gun control?
What is it about the progressives that makes this such a perpetually central issue for them?
And my personal theory has a lot to do with this whole arcade thing that we've talked about in the past and so on.
But even if it doesn't, here's really what I think it comes down to.
Progressives are unwilling to be responsible for their own self-defense and therefore, they don't want anybody else to be able to defend themselves either because that puts them at a competitive advantage.
If I am not willing to defend myself and carry a gun, I don't want you to be able to defend yourself because that actually improves your chances of surviving relative to mine and I'm not willing to do what I need to do in order to improve my own chances.
So therefore, you're going to come down to my level And we'll just wait for the police.
Which is another ridiculous thing, because it all comes down from all these dragnet shows we watch, right?
I mean, people still think, many people on the left, many people in general still think that the police prevent crimes.
They don't prevent crime.
They investigate crimes.
The police will arrive in time to draw a chalk outline around your dead body and try and figure out who did it.
But they're not going to burst in and kick down the door and shoot the gun out of the hand of a guy who's about to, you know, assassinate you in your house at four o'clock in the morning.
It just doesn't work that way. No, that's of course the case, as the old saying goes, when seconds count, the police are minutes away.
And if you look at the amount of time it took for the cops to burst into the shooter's room at Mandalay Bay, it was an hour, hour ten, hour and a quarter.
I don't know, the timeline keeps shifting, but the bodies were long cold by the time the police got in there.
And if he'd had more or had another desire to continue shooting, there would be even more bodies on the floor.
And I also... I think that because progressives, there doesn't seem to be any upper limit to the amount of government that they want.
I've never seen the sort of left say, okay, well...
More government would be crazy in this particular area.
It's like the free speech thing.
It's like they never say, well, you know, we're going too far with this hate speech.
We're going too far with this control of speech thing.
It just continues to escalate and more and more words get categorized as hateful and more and more restrictions get put on.
And it never ends. Well, I guess it ends if they run out of bodies, but it doesn't generally end much at all.
And so for me, if you are in a situation where you wish to expand the state ad infinitum, and as we talked about before, When socialists and communists get a hold of the government power, of government apparatus, they kill people by the millions.
Like, no fooling, you are, you know, leaning over a ditch and they'll put two in the back of your head.
And if you do want to expand the size and power of the state, a well-armed The population is one of the great limiters to your desire.
Because people say, well, you don't need this gun to hunt.
You don't think, well, but it was not about hunting.
The Second Amendment was not originally about let's hunt.
I mean, how many people are actually living off hunting these days?
It was about fear of the state.
Precisely correct. So there's a lot to say about that.
But first of all, I don't own an AR-15 to go hunting with.
It's not a good hunting weapon.
And it's not an ideal home defense weapon.
A handgun is better and a shotgun is perfect.
The reason I own an AR-15 is because this is what I expect that my government will come after me with.
And I want to deter them from this.
I don't want this to even enter their mind.
Fortunately, this is the first time in history that I'm aware of that the persecuted classes, the people who are being demonized, are the ones that are armed.
That's kind of a remarkably nice change of pace there.
But that weapon is there to deter the government from doing to me and my family what it has done to other people throughout history.
We used to have legal protections for this and we no longer do.
It's all about the erosion of the small things so that things get into crisis state.
And a great way to think about that particular dynamic, Stephan, is to say what I say to these progressives all the time.
We need a wall because you wouldn't let us have a border, right?
We need a wall now because for 40, 50 years, you have not allowed us to have a border.
You've not allowed us to protect this strip of land as a border.
And since you have not, the situation has gotten so critical now that we have to build a wall.
We used to have a border.
If you'd let us enforce the border, we wouldn't need the wall.
It's the same thing with all of this crime.
But I think a much bigger issue is something that I've never heard anybody talk about.
And I think this is the ultimate departure from the world.
And that is the idea that somehow you are entitled to 100% safety all the time.
That the world has to be constructed in a way so that anything that happens to you prior to you dying in bed surrounded by loving relatives and just gracefully falling off to sleep at age 106, anything other than that is an affront against nature and God.
That the whole thing is some kind of avoidable tragedy.
You'll hear people talk about diseases that way.
You'll hear people talk about accidents that way.
And you'll hear them talk about things like this that way.
Like we have a right to be 100% safe throughout the course of our lives.
And this is a delusion that's brought about by the success that we've had in so many areas, in medical areas and so on.
So many areas, our success has been so astonishing that the idea that we would die prematurely is simply just, it's just simply unacceptable now.
And that is the root essentially of the problem is this idea that people can expect to be perfectly safe all the time.
And if something happens to someone, we have to rebuild society to get this out of the system.
When in point of fact, you simply cannot, you cannot simply get rid of insanity or murder by gun laws or any other kind of laws.
You just simply can't do it.
Yeah, and that having been said, of course, there are tried and true methodologies for minimizing the growth of the criminal class.
And why do people become criminals?
Well, they're usually not that smart, as you point out.
Few economic opportunities.
There's a distinct correlation between, you know, severe child abuse and adult criminal behavior.
And, of course, child abuse is associated with single mother households and so on.
Like in the black community, if you normalize by single motherhood, the crime rate virtually disappears.
And we know now, of course, that in the black community, it's close to three quarters of kids born out of wedlock.
And the out of wedlock status goes straight back to the welfare state that pays women to have children with no husband, no father, to those children in the home.
If the dad moves in, they lose their benefits.
You're actually paying women to have children out of wedlock, which is one of the great predictors for future dysfunction.
And again, who wants to try and deal with that issue if you start shifting from welfare to charity through churches, through communities, through any other groups?
Well, the charities get involved.
The charities want to differentiate and distinguish between people who are poor through no fault of their own, you know, bad luck, you know, illnesses, whatever, right?
That, you know, they didn't prepare for or couldn't imagine.
And people who are poor because they've made really bad decisions.
Now, you want to help the people who are poor by accident, but if you pay people who are poor by poor decision, you're paying for the increase and extension of those poor decisions.
And the lack of personal involvement in charity has been one of these things where the government just fires checks, ends up just buying votes, and creates a system of people dependent on the state where any attempt to roll back that or shift it to charity...
Is met with ferocious resistance and no longer has anything to do with helping the poor, but rather just kind of keeping them at bay and buying their votes.
The author of The Corner, and I'm very, very sorry to say that I don't remember his name and forgive me for that, but basically what he said was this is a bribe that we pay.
Here's how the deal works.
We're going to recharge your benefits cards at the beginning of the month.
In exchange for that, you don't burn the cities to the ground.
Pray on yourselves if you want to, but that's basically the deal.
The thing I think that's most important here is that The thing that is the one coefficient that is most common among violent criminals, it's not race-based, it's not economically based, it's not even really IQ-based.
It is, in fact, the single great determiner is fatherless boys.
That is the one quality that is the most consistently found among violent criminals, is the lack of a father.
That's the one thing that is the tightest correlation to And this is not a great surprise to me or to you or to anybody else who had a father.
The entire purpose of fatherhood and manhood as we understand it is the channeling of very violent, aggressive Built-in instincts that are present not only in human males, but they're present in virtually every male species on the planet.
And it is the constructive constraint of these impulses and channeling them into societal good that is what makes parenting, parenting.
And this is not something that, it's not so much something that women can't do, but it's just that women can't do both.
You can't be the good cop and the bad cop at the same time.
And the entire traditional structure of a father is somebody who comes in, installs a little bit of fear in some of these little monsters, and slowly over time shows them through example that the way to channel these aggressive behaviors is into things like business competition and so on, and channel it into protecting people rather than preying upon them.
And if you take that away, You're left with real horror.
The Lord of the Flies is a terrific example What happens when that adult quality is removed from society?
I mean, it's fiction, obviously, but it's very, very true.
You leave these children out there alone, they're going to paint themselves and they're going to turn into murderers.
And these child warriors all around the world, these 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds with AK-47s, by far the most cruel of these murdering bands.
So what do you expect to happen if you destroy the ability to...
To mold every young man's built-in aggression into something positive.
What do you expect is going to happen?
Well, I mean, I remember when I was a teenager working as an aide in a daycare in a pretty rough section of town.
Even in a pretty rough section of town, you know, the girls would invite you to join them for a tea party with a little finger up and everything was sort of nice and flowers and so on.
And the boys, you know, you sort of wander in like...
You know that they've just made lightsabers out of their markers, you know, just jamming them end to end and swinging them wildly.
And, you know, I love that wild, exuberant, aggressive energy.
It's a beautiful thing. Left untended, it goes to seed and to seediness very often, but if harnessed...
You know, if it's left to rot, you end up with hell on earth.
But if it's harnessed, you end up with civilization.
You know, like, the reason that we have sewers is because somebody took the time to mentor boys out of their aggression and they turned to taming nature rather than thwacking bodies.
And that is a very essential task.
And yeah, you're right. I mean, fundamentally, you know, fathers can't teach daughters how to be women and mothers can't teach sons how to be men.
And... Despite what present-day feminists will tell you, the only defense against bad men is good men.
There are people in the world who are not much moved by this argument about boys being essentially defective girls who need to share everything and stop running around and climbing on things and so on.
There are communities out there in the world here and overseas where This argument makes not a slightest dent.
In many of these fundamentalist Islamic countries, the fact that a woman is even speaking is offensive to them.
Shut up and get back in the kitchen and put your tent back on.
So the only thing that stops violent aggression from evil people Is the willingness of good people to get their hands dirty and bloody by committing violence in defense of the weak.
This is the thing that they can't seem to understand.
They don't get the whole sheepdog idea.
They think that anybody who is armed or willing to commit violence is automatically going to harm them, when in point of fact, it's only highly armed, disciplined, brave, good people Who are willing to put their lives on the line to protect complete strangers that stops this savagery.
Which is why the gun, coming back to our initial premise, which is why the gun was such a breakthrough in so many ways.
If you look at prehistory, right, essentially this is the story.
You've got cooperative kind people down in the village and they're farming and they're making baskets and they're doing all of these things and they have families and they're raising their kids and all of that.
And then up in the hills, off the steps, come these mounted warriors who've spent their entire lives training to be violent, training how to use swords, how to use horses, and so on.
And a villager with a pitchfork has zero chance, zero chance against a mounted warrior wearing armor and who's been practicing his swordplay for 25 years.
However, if it turns out that that villager has a pistol, And the guy on the horse has a pistol.
You've now got a chance where the person on the ground has a very good chance of being able to equalize those odds and to defend themselves.
And if they can equalize the odds, they don't have to actually use them.
In other words, if the aggressors, if these savages feel like this raid on this village is going to cost me my life, they'll go look for another village that doesn't turn out that kind of a response.
And this ultimately gets back to the real biological issue of predation, because we have human predators in our society.
I'm sorry to break that to you, and it doesn't make me joyful to report it, but I am willing to be adult enough to face the fact that there are human predators out there, and there's nothing I can do about that except to try to protect myself.
But here's the thing about predators.
The reason that predators—just take it to the animal kingdom—the reason that a lion, for example, preys on the very weak, the very small, or the very sick is because a predator has to succeed.
And if the predator is damaged by the prey, that's the end of the predator.
If a predator goes after a fully healthy male and is gored by a horn or gets a couple of teeth knocked out, that's the death of the lion.
The lion's finished. And he understands on some instinctive level that that is too risky for him, and he will only do it in the greatest need, right?
That's a case of terrific hunger.
Same exact thing with humans.
Criminals will prey on people they perceive to be unwilling or unable to fight back because people who do fight back take them out of existence.
And this is why The ability to be armed is so important.
And this is why neighborhoods like Plano, Texas have such low crime rates.
It's not because people know that there are weapons in the house, and people could come from very different neighborhoods and steal all the awesome, great stuff they have in Plano, but they have a funny feeling that if they did that, they're going to get shot doing it.
And therefore, the deterrence value of these weapons is not ever entered into any statistics at all.
The mere presence of those weapons in that community, as an example, deters all kinds of crime, which is why you can walk the streets of Plano at night without fear.
Well, the guns are used in the visible commission of a crime.
It is Bastiat's old scene versus the unseen, right?
You know, the old argument that, well, the government spends $5 million to create a bunch of jobs.
Everyone's like, woohoo, free jobs, you know, great job.
Whereas the $5 million taken out of the hands of entrepreneurs, people don't see the jobs that weren't created.
And I've seen credible statistics that around a million crimes in the U.S. every year are...
Prevent it by the fact that people have guns and often not reported, but through surveys and so on, they can find these numbers.
And this seen versus the unseen is really important.
You don't see the crimes that didn't occur because there are weapons, but you do see some evil lunatic gunning a festival crowd.
From the hotel window.
And this kind of vividness, it's easy to impress upon us.
And as you pointed out, the security, you know, there is this depressing back and forth pendulum that happens.
And it sort of goes like this.
Wow, crime is overwhelming.
Things are broken loose. I can't walk these neighborhoods tonight.
It's time to start locking people up, right?
The Giuliani situation, right?
Time to start locking people up.
And then everyone's like, whew, okay.
Bad guys are off the streets and, you know, it's become more comfortable.
Things are better. Economic life tends to return.
You know, everyone says it's poverty that causes crime.
And the statistics seem to be pretty clear that it's, in fact, crime that causes poverty by driving out businesses and opportunities.
And then what happens is people have a certain amount of security and safety.
And then the leftist brigade of environmental determinism start rioting in and saying, oh, the poor criminals, you know, they had bad childhoods, which, you know, they did.
But the solution to that is not to relax the laws and let them run wild.
That doesn't help at all.
And so you get the security.
And then what happens is people have all this sympathy and they're, well, you know, we're going to try and rehabilitate and reform and nobody knows.
Nobody knows how to do that.
Recidivism is extraordinarily high in just about every area of crime.
Nobody knows how to cure a fully formed criminal.
Prevention through better parenting and better families, fantastic.
Once they've turned that way...
It's nobody knows how to turn it back.
That brain development. It's like if you didn't get enough food when you were a kid, you grew up too short, nobody knows.
You can't fix that later. Let's have more food now and you'll get taller.
It's just the way you grow up. And then when there's all this safety and security, everyone rides in with all the sympathy for the criminals and then the criminal laws are relaxed and they're put back out on the streets and then the whole cycle begins again and then it culminates in more crime and we can see this happening right now.
Violent crime has gone down since the 90s especially and in accordance with or in concordance with So now we've got to have law.
Can we break this cycle for once with some reason and evidence?
Probably not. But with that said, let's depersonalize it.
Let's take it out of the human sphere.
Many people in this country, a lot of progressives and me and a bunch of other people, look at something like the reintroduction of wolves into a habitat as kind of a good thing.
Wolves are great looking animals.
They're gorgeous looking animals.
We all have dogs or contact with dogs.
They're just kind of wild dogs out there.
And it's a shame that they've all been murdered and so on.
So most people are saying, oh good, the wolves are returning to the habitat.
That's great. And the reason they can say that that's great is because they've never seen their daughter ripped to pieces by a pack of wolves in front of their eyes.
Because if they had seen their little girl go out to the well and have a pack of wolves rip her into little shreds, their attitude towards wolves would be significantly different than what it is when wolves are a long, long, long way away.
And this is the exact dilemma that you pointed out.
The more successful we are in literally now keeping the wolves away from the door, The lower we assess the risk of wolves to the point where we become sympathetic towards them and think they're just swell and cuddly because we've never encountered them and we never expect that we will.
Sorry to interrupt, but the majestic animals you see in a documentary are things you almost for certain do not want to meet up with in real life.
Yeah, and so we can be sympathetic to wolf reintroduction, which I am within certain habitats and so on, simply because the prey animals are becoming so out of control.
But when people start saying, hey, these wolves are killing all of my livestock, a lot of progressives are, well, then just too bad for you, you shouldn't be eating meat.
It's just one thing away from, well, the wolf just ate Trevor or Jordan, you know?
This little snowflake you put all of your money and time and effort into, he was just torn up by a pack of wolves.
There's pieces of him out back.
That you can go and clean up.
Your attitude towards wolves after that would be very different and this is what we see with progressives in crime.
They understand that the murder rate is a long way away from them.
They can talk about gun control because it doesn't affect them.
The people around them aren't armed or the people around them, they live in safe societies as a general rule.
Well, their bodyguards may be armed.
That whole thing is another whole thing.
But yes, so you live in Santa Monica, right?
And life in Santa Monica, having been to Santa Monica several times, is not what I would call a survival challenge.
And so, since it's not, you can say things like, well, let's remove the means for people to defend themselves, since I don't have to defend myself.
I don't know why you would need a gun.
I don't need a gun. You live in Santa Monica.
You live in Santa Barbara.
Of course you don't need a gun.
But... Not everybody is like that.
And your discomfort doesn't trump their ability to go home at night.
A 90-pound school teacher should not have to lie dead on the ground simply so that you at a cocktail party can talk about how virtuous you are.
That's not a trade that that person is going to make or should have to make.
If that young woman wants to be able to save her life She should be given the means to do so regardless of what you happen to think that may be worth as you sit in a faculty lounge someplace at UC Santa Barbara.
Well, the whole point of guns, and this is what people, I think, have a very tough time.
They think that the point of guns is to fire them.
Now, of course, that is the technological point of them.
But the point of being armed is to not have to.
Precisely. Right. I mean, it's like, it's the old story about, you know, everyone's seen this kind of thing, like the Mr.
Miyagi thing. It's like the guy who's some, you know, 50-year-old fantastic black belt at karate or judo.
You know, he carries himself with an air and with a confidence that people don't mess with him.
And the whole point of guns in terms of crime is that their prevalence prevents, discourages, reduces criminal activity.
And the whole point is they could be fired, so they're not.
And that is what people don't understand.
It's the unseen versus the seen.
It's the unseen. It's the news report that yesterday 40,000 aircraft landed without incident all across the country, right?
And we have news reporters now at LAX, Atlanta, Hartfield, Chicago, O'Hare.
We're going to be bringing reports all throughout the day of these aircraft which have arrived safely without a single crash.
We have done that for 17 years now or 16 or something.
So yes, it's the unseen.
You count the hits but not the misses.
And that's a big part of this phenomenon.
It's a very big part of the phenomenon.
And so when you talk about taking away something that provides an unseen benefit, you will not know the consequences of this until it goes away.
And back to the predator argument Human predators, like other predators, have the ability to determine what is an easy prey and what's difficult prey.
It's a survival skill for them.
If they don't have the ability to tell who's likely to fight back and who's not, they're not going to be criminals for very long.
It's instinctual for them.
They understand it completely.
They know what fear looks like and they know what confidence looks like.
And this is another one of these unseen force fields of protection.
That come with this, that means that the gun not only is never fired, it's never drawn.
People have that confidence.
They have that ability to just simply say, hey, look.
Look, I got married not long ago, and my wife is from Russia.
And she went shooting, and Stefan, I'm deeply concerned about her.
I really am.
She's lost her mind.
She wants to go three or four times a week.
I bought her a.22 caliber pistol.
She is a shockingly good shot.
It's just astonishing. It just puts me completely to shame.
But the point I'm trying to make here is, She says that there's a fundamental difference in how she feels, and she can't quite express it.
And it's not the physical thrill of firing the gun, so much as it's the ability to have the power to defend yourself in your hand and know how to use it.
That's a very liberating and empowering experience, and those are terms that feminists often use.
We use very frequently, but everything they do is designed to disempower and enslave women to fear.
And we don't have to go much further than Sweden or any of these other places to realize that this idea, well, was it Sweden or Norway?
One of these countries said, we have a completely feminist defense ministry.
All of the people on the Ministry of Defense are all women.
Well, that's swell. The other women in your country are afraid to walk the streets at night.
And you're telling them that they have to dress more conservatively.
They can't wear a miniskirt in Sweden anymore because if they do, they're asking for trouble.
So, once again, the hypocrisy of this is almost overwhelming to me.
And there's a kind of...
It's the same thing that happens with people talking about immigration policies from the third world.
If you say, I'm for gun control, you're kind of signaling that you live in a rich neighborhood, that you're well protected by some gated community.
It's kind of like a status symbol, you know, like having a very expensive car or grills or something like this.
It's a status symbol that you get to say, like if you say, well, I'm for gun control, Third world immigration, what you're saying is, well, I don't live in any neighborhood where I could be displaced, and my job is such a high and professional degree that nobody from Somalia is going to be competing with me for work.
It's a way of sort of preening yourself and showing, well, like the Kimmel thing, right?
Jimmy Kimmel is like, oh, a gun.
Who would need gun control?
It's like, who would need guns, right?
Well, you and your security detail.
How about that? But he's saying, well, I don't need to carry a gun.
Yeah, let's start with that. Because, you know, I don't...
I can just...
I don't source that to all the folks around me.
Yeah, exactly.
And this comes down to my fundamental...
I was going to say disagreement, but I'll just go ahead and use the word I want to use.
My fundamental revulsion with the entire progressive philosophy is the idea that you say one thing and do something else.
As a conservative, I get to say one thing and then do the same thing.
I think taxes are too high, so I tell my accountant to try to take every deduction he legally can.
Within the bounds of the law.
These Hollywood stars say, oh, we should raise taxes.
We should raise taxes. I'm a rich person.
I'm going to pay more taxes than anybody.
By the way, Jim, be sure to walk it right to the line.
Put your toes over the line. And they have production companies to shield their income and all the rest of it.
So they talk about one thing.
They say the other thing. They talk about how we should just get rid of guns.
Well, they don't live in areas where there's any crime, so it's no skin off of their nose.
But it allows them to sound Virtuous to the rest of their idiot companions.
And the same thing is true with immigration.
Jessica Alba was talking about, we should have open borders.
My response to Jessica Alba is, well, that's fine, Jessica.
So why don't you tell us what your address is, please?
I'd like to know where you live.
I'd like to know your street address so that I can go through the city of Los Angeles and put posters up everywhere saying that people are welcome at your house at any time of the day or night because you don't believe in locked doors or walls or borders or anything.
So they can start doing to your house what they're doing to the houses on the southern border of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and so on, Texas.
And what you find is people like that are set up so that if you put a half of a foot on one little tuft of their yard, their private security forces, heavily armed, will be there in a heartbeat because the police take too long.
They buy their own police to keep people off of their property While at the same time telling all of the rest of us that we're savages and barbarians and knuckle-draggers because we feel like we should have the ability to protect ourselves and our homes and our families and our properties.
Well, who would have imagined that one of the people who need guns the most are Hollywood starlets who are trying to get a role?
You know, they're against walls, but I really think it might be a good idea to build walls around aspiring actresses on the casting couch so that the producers can't quite get their hook fangs into them.
Well, I really, really appreciate this time.
I want to invite people to give comments below.
Of course, we will have a look.
These are troubled times for this kind of self-determination.
You know, the leftists who constantly come, oh, there are power disparities, there are power disparities.
Well, there's no greater power disparity in the universe than that.
Between a well-armed government and a disarmed population, they can then do with you what they will.
And I've certainly seen a lot of messages on my channel, perhaps you've seen these as well, but a lot of messages on my channel from people in Europe saying, whatever you do, don't give up your guns, because then you have very little recourse when the government doesn't want to do anything.
What you want it to do or what it's in fact committed to do.
So I wanted to remind people, please check out Firewall and the show Right Angle.
The website is BillWhittle.com and YouTube.com forward slash Bill Whittle channel.
Congratulations on your recent nuptials.
I'm sure that her proficiency with the firearm will only serve to improve your lovability as a husband.
You know, there's nothing that says bring flowers like a well-armed wife.
Thanks so much for your time.
I really appreciate it. I have to just tell you that she's a professional photographer, and once she started picking up the shooting as a major obsession, I think it was a week ago or something, she says, you know what, we should go out tomorrow because I want to shoot you tomorrow.
And I thought, which one of these two things are we talking about, baby?
And yes, thank you for the kind words.
It's great talking to you as always, and I look forward to talking again real soon.
