March 25, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:09
4037 The Ugly Truth About The March For Our Lives
“March For Our Lives” held a major rally in Washington, DC with approximately 800 sibling marches across the world and an estimated hundreds of thousands in total attendance. Stefan Molyneux looks at the postmodernist roots of the gun control debate, important facts which are omitted from the debate and the lack of comparative mobilization from the Republican/conservative establishment. Source Links and Articleshttp://time.com/5168272/how-many-school-shootings/https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/21/its-too-late-broward-county-school-board-beginning-to-admit-their-mistakes/Your 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
Reason and evidence have been pushed aside and displaced by radical relativism, subjectivism, postmodernism, you name it, for one simple reason, which is to elevate passion and random political power-thirsty energy to the status of the winner.
So those who are the most emotional, those who are the most reactive, those who have the least capacity to defer the gratification of self-righteousness because of the mere impediments of reason and evidence, that is why all the reason and evidence has been pushed aside.
And we saw that going on very clearly in the March for Our Lives rally, which occurred recently.
There was a major rally in Washington, D.C., of course, about 800 sibling marches across the world.
It's tough to gauge, of course, the total attendance, but we're talking about tens, likely hundreds of thousands of people speaking out against the Second Amendment and for gun control.
Now, of course, the proximate cause for all of this was the shooting in Broward County, recently the shooting of the children.
And because there is an emotionally reactive group of people who either have never been exposed to the facts and the truth about that shooting, about guns as a whole, or simply have ignored it if they have been exposed to it, or are simply useful, happy, bleating idiots, the puppets of the puppet master speaking out against the elemental freedoms in the United States, the fact is that it was not fundamentally a gun that killed those kids in the school in Florida.
What killed those kids was political correctness.
What killed those kids was political correctness.
So very, very briefly, there was concern going back in the day about disparities in arrest records for different racial groups.
So East Asians were arrested very little, whites arrested a little bit more, Hispanics arrested more, and blacks arrested even more.
Now, of course, because nobody wants to deal with root causes, or very few people want to deal with root causes these days, the answer was white racism.
White racism. And because nobody wants to deal with root causes, then what happens is you just try and play whack-a-mole with the symptoms rather than address the causes.
So there was concern over these disparities and what was called the school-to-prison pipeline.
So what happened was, under the Obama administration, financial incentives were provided To schools that lowered their numbers, that arrested fewer blacks and Hispanics.
So what did they do? Well, they put in quotas.
And they said, okay, after this time of the month, you can't arrest anymore.
And I guess like teachers penciling in the right marks, it makes the numbers look better, but doesn't deal with the problem.
At all. And of course, gangs knew this, so they started using students after particular times in the month.
So you get fewer arrests, you get more lawlessness, and then what happens is people who are actually engaged in criminal behaviors don't end up with a record that would show up in background checks.
So we've got Nicholas Cruz doing, I mean, completely illegal things.
He's holding guns to people's heads, he's making death threats and all that.
But you see, he can't be arrested, and you've got to keep your numbers down and fulfill the quotas.
What happens is then Cruz can go out and buy a gun.
And he is not helped.
If help was even possible, who knows.
But it was not the gun that did it.
It was political correctness and the quota system and the exclusion from the rule of law of particular minorities.
And this is to some degree the Ferguson effect, but this is the reality.
I guess the young people, and there seems to be mostly young people out there, not particularly experienced in understanding what guns are.
See now, if you're rich, if you're privileged, then you live in a rich and privileged neighborhood.
And what that means is that you live in a generally higher IQ neighborhood, which means there's going to be less crime.
IQ is the greatest single predictor for criminal activity.
And so you live in a safe neighborhood, and so you might say to yourself, well, what do I need guns for?
Well, you don't need guns because you may live in a gated community.
There may be security guards.
There may be who knows what. But guns are self-defense for people who can't afford to live in your rich suburban neighborhood.
Because if you're rich, you've got armed guards, gated communities, alarm systems, you've got close ties to the police, and you're pretty much kept protected by demographics.
But if you're not rich, then you need a gun for self-defense.
So this young man with the spider arms, David Hogg, he says, well, what we want to do is keep guns out of the hands of crazy people.
Well, of course, it was political correctness that caused that to not happen in the case of Nicholas Cruz.
But I think that he shares that goal with patriots and defenders of the Second Amendment in the United States.
Yes, they too would say we want to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people.
And the crazy people who do the most damage with guns...
Our governments. Because governments murdered 250 million of their own citizens just in the 20th century alone.
That doesn't include wars. That's just slaughtering their own citizens.
So yes, it is very important to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people, which is why there's a Second Amendment and why Americans want to keep their guns, because they may just know a little bit more about history than your 17-year-old self.
And it is kind of funny how the left says, well, we want to turn to a 17-year-old to make the case that 17-year-olds are too immature to talk about guns.
I don't know. How do they do it?
How do they go through the day? I don't know.
I don't know. And also, you know, let's say somehow, oh, well, if you have a history of mental illness, you can't buy a gun.
Okay. I mean, why don't people ever think through that magical Hogwarts spell and see what the dominoes are that are going to happen from that?
Okay. If you have a history of mental illness, you can't have a gun.
What that means is that crazy people will not seek help for their mental illness because they know...
That if they seek help for their mental illness, they will be denied the right to have a gun.
Excellent! Wonderful!
Now you've just excluded crazy people from getting any kind of help.
And, I mean, just you have to think it through.
Just think through the next five minutes.
What if somebody's just depressed?
Do they get a gun? What if they're depressed?
And then they want to kill themselves, so they come in and they say to the doctor, I feel much better, and they fill out that inventory, and it's all like glowing, happy, happy, twinkle-toes, stardust time, and then the doctor says, oh, okay, well, you're happy again, so...
Off you go. Here's a gun, and then he goes and kills himself.
Is the doctor liable? Well, how can the doctor know?
Mental health is generally a self-reported phenomenon.
What if someone's anxious? Do they get to half their gun?
Who knows? There's no blood test for mental health.
It's not like you've got a broken arm.
So it's a subjective judgment.
Which is why 9% of kids in America are defined as ADHD, often medicated in crazy ways, whereas it's a tiny, tiny fraction of that in France, because France looks at root causes.
Deals with the family, has psychological interventions, doesn't just say, hey, let's just fire adult stimulants into the brains of children who don't seem to enjoy the school as a prison.
So, it doesn't take...
I mean, you can't... You can't just take away people's rights based on the subjective evaluation of some doctor or some form that they fill out.
Nobody then will end up filling that form out, honestly.
And this hysteria about guns...
Look, violent crime is down and has been going down for decades.
This is from the Washington Post.
In 1993, there were seven homicides by firearm for every 100,000 Americans.
By 2013, just 20 years, that figure had fallen by nearly half to 3.6%.
Well, alright. So there was a total of 11,208 firearm homicides.
The number of victims of crime involving guns that did not result in deaths, such as robberies, declined even more from 725 per 100,000 people in 1993 to 175 in 2013.
So gun violence is already enormously on the decline.
So just stand aside.
Let nature and society and whatever is driving that continue to take its course.
The biggest safety concerns with guns and illegally owned handguns are not mass shootings but suicides.
Suicides are the majority of gun deaths in America.
Based on a time analysis, I can put the links to all this below, school shootings have killed 41 people in the U.S. since 2013.
But 63% of the over 33,000 deaths due to injury by firearms in the U.S. were suicides.
So almost two-thirds suicides.
And do you really think that somebody who can't get a gun, who desperately wants to kill himself, and it is usually himself, male suicides vastly outnumber female suicides, although female suicide attempts outnumber males, somebody who really wants to kill himself, can't get a gun, is going to say, well, I'll just live there, right?
I'll just find some other way to do it, as, well, we can all imagine the list.
And it's not American culture, it's specific American locales that are the issue.
According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, over 50% of murders occur in just 2% of the nation's 3,142 counties.
So where you live is an important factor.
It's not random for a lot of people.
If you're in a gang, you're involved with drugs, you're also much more likely to become a victim of gun violence.
Between 15 to 33% of shooting victims are linked with gang and drug activity.
And they're gonna keep their guns, just so you know.
They're already breaking the law, so they're not worried about that.
And now it's much more advantageous for criminals to have a gun when they know that their victims are legally disarmed.
Right? So when you...
Like, if you don't know if there is a gun in a house that you're gonna go and rob, but the owner can legally have one, that's risky.
But if you know that they're not gonna have one, well, you know how this goes, right?
And gun ownership is not...
The criminal predictor.
I mean, gun ownership is a lot higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but urban areas have enormously more gun violence.
So gun ownership in rural areas is not correlated to higher crime.
According to CNS News, and I quote, Switzerland and Israel have much higher gun ownership rates than the United States, but experience far fewer homicides and have much lower violent crime rates than many European nations with strict gun control laws.
Also see immigration policy.
Now states that have pretty relaxed and open gun control laws like New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, and Oregon have some of the lowest Homicide rates.
Again, you can look at the demographics.
States with more extreme gun control laws, such as Maryland and Illinois, have the highest murder rates.
And guns save far more lives than they cost.
According to a report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, firearms are used defensively hundreds of thousands of times every year, drastically more than they are used for murder or suicide.
And for the Democrats to be for gun control is truly astonishing.
I mean, so from 2016 to 2017, the murder rate did rise 8%, but this was primarily due to just a handful of cities.
We're talking Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and all three of those cities have been run exclusively by Democrats for decades.
So, of course, they don't have the facts on their sides, but they have the passion on their sides And they have the energy, and they have the focus, and they have the free buses, and they have the party atmosphere, and they have the socializing, and they have the isn't it fun, we're doing something great for humanity.
There's no such thing as objective truth, but guns are bad.
And it's not so much that it's impressive that the left is doing it, but what I want to point out is the unseen, that it's not the Republicans who are doing anything similar.
When was the last time Republican think tanks, Republican super PACs, the Republican Party, the RNC, when was the last time that they effectively mobilized and got hundreds of thousands of people out for an event?
I mean, over the past decade or two, these groups have received hundreds of millions of dollars.
For what? For what?
What are they producing? What are they providing?
What energy, what momentum are they producing?
They've received hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, what, a 1.3 trillion dollar pork-happy omnibus spending bill.
They've taken in hundreds of millions of dollars to produce the illusion of a movement, which is worse than no movement at all.
An illusion of a cure is worse than no cure, because if you have no cure, you'll keep looking for a cure.
If you think you have a cure, you stop looking for a cure.
It's the most dangerous thing around.
I mean, so there's one that pops into mind, right?
There's the annual March for Life protest through Washington, D.C. That's against the 73 Supreme Court Roe v.
Wade decision. But that's been going on for decades, hasn't changed a lot.
So what is the Republican establishment doing?
These pro-Trump super PACs are bringing in millions and millions of dollars.
To produce what? Can you point me to one thing?
Let me know in the comments below. Can you point me to one thing?
That these super PACs, these think tanks, these Republican establishment groups have produced that is having immeasurable impact on the political landscape.
I mean, the omnibus snout-in-the-trough pork-happy rhinos that produced this 2,200-page abomination, what you can either read through that bill once or Atlas Shrugged twice, and you'll get more of a political education from the latter.
What have they done? Are they threatening to run ads against...
All of those omnibus rhinos, are they threatening to throw them out of power for doing it?
Did they threaten so beforehand?
Are they buying up and guaranteeing venues for conservative speakers so that they don't get bike locked and have alarms pulled and so on?
Are they even offering up their own locations with guaranteed security?
Are they doing anything? Anything of value?
Are they doing anything that reflects the desperate thirst for Republican voters to have border security and reduced immigration?
No. Well, of course, because in general, the Republican establishment represents the Chamber of Commerce interest to have continued cheap labor flowing into the country.
So the one thing that they really care about, the one thing that drove Brexit, the one thing that drove Trump, was immigration control.
It was control over the borders.
And that is one thing that the Democrat-Republican unit party both agree on.
They want continual imports of third world people, the left for votes, the right to drive down wages.
I'm sorry, this is now a vice squeezing your future from both sides.
So, if you look at the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, there's massive mobilization on the left, and they don't even have the facts.
I mean, the existing laws weren't enforced, but they think new laws are going to solve the problem.
It doesn't matter. They're marching for virtue signaling, for propaganda, for companionship, for a fun day out, for something to break up the boring monotony of their lives.
When did the Republican establishment lead massive marches to secure the border after the Kate Steinle verdict or after her murder?
Any big mobilizations after the San Bernardino or Orlando terrorist attacks?
Nothing! The Republicans are losing runoff elections left and right.
Well, left and left.
Big money Republican establishment is filled more with people terrified of two syllables, racist, than preserving actual freedoms.
And the day after his presidency half went down in flames after signing the worst spending bill in American history, Donald Trump saw fit to go to his golf club.
It's fine. We live in a post-moral world.
We live in a post-truth world, which means that we have unleashed, sadly, the feral dogs of the Nietzschean, Hobbesian will to power.
Whoever wants it more gets it.
Having the facts on your side doesn't matter anymore.
Facts be damned. It is will that wins.
So there's this crazy thing.
Donald Trump's doing this completely crazy thing by saying, well, you know, the Democrats have abandoned the DACA people.
Maybe they'll vote for me.
They won't. They absolutely won't.
They're never going to vote for conservative candidates.
They're never going to vote for Donald Trump.
Not in any statistically meaningful way.
But there are people around him who are telling him this, and I guess he's...
See, you have to compare this.
The DACA recipients know they pretty much already have amnesty if Hillary had won.
You can't compete with that. You're never going to get the allegiance of the darker people.
You're only going to lose your base.
But this is where things are.
This is what people are saying. And the demographic advantage to the left is changing over time.
And it's had, well, since the 1965 Immigration Act, it's had more than 50 years to simmer.
Tens of millions of voters have been imported to the left.
And the left is still only barely winning or barely losing, which means that they're very unpopular.
They know exactly where their juice comes from.
It doesn't come from Long-term historical Americans.
The Republicans are generally dying off.
And the welfare state is paying single moms to breed more and more Democrats.
So the demographics are shifting over time.
So you have to deal with it now.
So who wants it more?
Who gets the future? Whoever gets the future is who wants it more.
If you throw a piece of treasured candy into a room full of kids who respect negotiation, they'll figure something out.
If you throw it into a group of feral kids who simply grab and punch, well, whoever wants that candy the most is going to win.
But the candy in this case is civilization, of course.
So you have only one choice.
You organize, you energize, you stand up, or you get cut down.
