Speaker 1: Pushkin. In June of twenty twenty two, just after Memorial Day,
Speaker 1: President Biden gave the first major gun control speech of
Speaker 1: his presidency. He had just come back from Uvaldi, Texas,
Speaker 1: where twenty one people had been killed by a mass shooter,
Speaker 1: and twelve days before that, he had gone to Buffalo,
Speaker 1: New York, where a gunman had murdered ten people in
Speaker 1: a grocery store.
Speaker 2: At both places, we spent hours with hundreds of family
Speaker 2: members who were broken. Those lives will never be the same.
Speaker 2: They had one message for all of us. Do something.
Speaker 2: Just do something, for God's sake, do something. I know
Speaker 2: that we can't prevent every tragedy, but here's what I
Speaker 2: believe we have to do. Here's what the overwhelming majority
Speaker 2: of means. Here can people believe we must do. Here's
Speaker 2: what the families in Buffalo and Uvaldi in Texas told
Speaker 2: us we must do. We need to ban assault weapons
Speaker 2: and high capacity magazines.
Speaker 1: President Obama made the same plea here. He is talking
Speaker 1: about the twenty twelve shooting in Aurora, Colorado, where a
Speaker 1: gunman with an assault rifle killed twelve people and wounded
Speaker 1: another fifty eight.
Speaker 3: Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place
Speaker 3: in a movie theater. A majority of Americans agree with
Speaker 3: us on this, and by the way, so did Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 3: one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment, who
Speaker 3: wrote to Congress in nineteen ninety four urging them. This
Speaker 3: is Ronald Reagan speaking, urging them to listen to the
Speaker 3: American public and to the law enforcement community and support
Speaker 3: a ban on the further manufacture of military style assault weapons.
Speaker 1: Not to mention Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton went on about
Speaker 1: assault rifles so much he got sick of it.
Speaker 4: But I'm telling you, it's amazing to me that we
Speaker 4: even have to have this debate. I mean, how long
Speaker 4: are we going to let this go on?
Speaker 1: And then Clinton concluded with something close to despair.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry to be so frustrated, but sometimes it seems
Speaker 4: that the president's job, i'll to be dealing with things
Speaker 4: that are not obvious.
Speaker 1: For the past thirty years, banning assault weapons has been
Speaker 1: the rallying cry of the gun control movement. Every time
Speaker 1: a mass shooter attacks somewhere in the United States, dressed
Speaker 1: in full army camo with a full on military assault
Speaker 1: weapon slung over their shoulder, the issue comes up again.
Speaker 1: And next week or next month, when another mass shooter strikes,
Speaker 1: you will hear this speech again.
Speaker 2: A few years ago, the family of the inventor of
Speaker 2: VAR fifteen, he would have been horrified to know that
Speaker 2: the design was being used as slaughtered children and other
Speaker 2: innocent lives instead of being used as a military weapon
Speaker 2: of the battlefields as was designed. That's who's dying for
Speaker 2: enough enough.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about assault rifles, the most hated gun in America. Because
Speaker 1: midway through this miniseries on gun violence, I realized that
Speaker 1: I didn't understand why this gun, out of all the
Speaker 1: guns in America, was the weapon that so many people
Speaker 1: wanted to ban. There are a hundred proposals out there
Speaker 1: for confronting gun violence, should this one be at the
Speaker 1: top of the list. So I looked for someone who
Speaker 1: could give me an assault rifle tutorial, and I chose
Speaker 1: as my teacher, Greg Waller, gun enthusiast, competitive shooter, college professor,
Speaker 1: hockey fan, big friendly guy with gray hair, author of
Speaker 1: a number of scholarly law review articles on assault weapons
Speaker 1: and their implications. And I should point out one of
Speaker 1: the leaders of the other side of the assault weapons battle,
Speaker 1: which is what I wanted, someone who would tell me
Speaker 1: things I didn't know, and, given all my predictable liberal biases,
Speaker 1: maybe things I might not want to know. Greg Wallace
Speaker 1: and I didn't talk politics or the Second Amendment or
Speaker 1: the NRA. We just talked guns.
Speaker 5: Close up wind over there that son maybe come here?
Speaker 6: Got it?
Speaker 1: The tutorial began in his office at Campbell Law School
Speaker 1: in Durham, North Carolina. Wallace put a large black nylon
Speaker 1: bag on his desk and took out the gun in question.
Speaker 7: It is a.
Speaker 8: Because I told you it was a felony to bring
Speaker 8: a firearm on educational campus in North Carolina.
Speaker 5: But there is a nice exception for educational purposes. And
Speaker 5: I have my get out of jail free letter here
Speaker 5: from the Dean.
Speaker 1: It was an AR fifteen, the most popular brand of
Speaker 1: assault rifle sold in the United States.
Speaker 5: Does the AR stand for Armor White Rifle?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 5: Armley, Yeah, yeah, the company that laid it.
Speaker 1: In the Second World War, American soldiers used a rifle
Speaker 1: called the M one. You've seen one, I'm sure in
Speaker 1: war movies. Long, slender, unadorned. The body of the rifle
Speaker 1: is made of walnut with a metal gun barrel poking
Speaker 1: out of one end. An AR fifteen belongs to the
Speaker 1: generation of military weapons that followed the M one, made
Speaker 1: out of metal with plastic in the stock in the
Speaker 1: handguard black, much lighter than its predecessor, firing a less powerful,
Speaker 1: smaller bullet.
Speaker 5: It's a trade off.
Speaker 7: Do you go with more rounds of a perhaps less lethal,
Speaker 7: still lethal, but less so, and allow the soldier to
Speaker 7: carry more rounds, or do you go with the larger,
Speaker 7: more lethal round but they can't carry as many and
Speaker 7: that's the trade off, and the military decided to go
Speaker 7: with the smaller round.
Speaker 1: The thinking was a lighter, less powerful weapon makes less noise,
Speaker 1: produces less of a flash, so it's harder to spot
Speaker 1: on the battlefield. It has less recoil compared to say,
Speaker 1: a shotgun. Spend an afternoon hunting with a shotgun and
Speaker 1: your shoulder will get all bruised. That gun has a
Speaker 1: savage kick, not the AR fifteen, which makes it a
Speaker 1: little easier to get the gun back on target and
Speaker 1: fire off a second shot. Do you know I've never
Speaker 1: seen one of these.
Speaker 5: Never seen one. It is unloaded. That will check again,
Speaker 5: so you want to hold one.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just that I'd never seen an assault rifle before.
Speaker 1: I'd never held a gun of any kind before when
Speaker 1: I was growing up in Canada. I don't think I
Speaker 1: even knew anyone who'd held a gun, not to mention
Speaker 1: that the AR fifteen wasn't a hunting rifle, something you
Speaker 1: shoot rabbits or deer with which I could rationalize away.
Speaker 1: It was a weapon of war. Ugly, unsettling. I think
Speaker 1: Wallace was a little amused by my discomfort. He tried
Speaker 1: to reassure me. What I was holding, he said, was
Speaker 1: the civilian version of the AR fifteen, not the military version.
Speaker 1: They looked the same, but they were fundamentally different weapons.
Speaker 1: So if this was an actual military AR fifteen, it
Speaker 1: would have what how would it differ from what I'm
Speaker 1: looking at right now?
Speaker 5: Right would do?
Speaker 7: Is you would have This is the switch here that
Speaker 7: selects fire and safe.
Speaker 1: The switch was on the side of the gun, small
Speaker 1: but clearly marked safe is locked, fire is ready to go.
Speaker 7: There's only two options on this because it's a semi
Speaker 7: automatic only, so you switch it to fire and it
Speaker 7: fires one bullet for each pull of the trigger.
Speaker 1: The Army's AR fifteen has a different switch.
Speaker 7: With the military weapon, it is capable of what's called
Speaker 7: selective fire, which means there would be a third option
Speaker 7: on here. One option would be full auto, which is
Speaker 7: you pull the trigger and hold it down and it
Speaker 7: fires continuously until it either runs out of ammunition or
Speaker 7: that you let the trigger up. It can also fire
Speaker 7: semi auto. There would be the semi auto select and
Speaker 7: then there would be the safe.
Speaker 9: That's the principal difference.
Speaker 7: Yes, the real, the material difference between the two is
Speaker 7: that one is a machine gun and the other is not.
Speaker 1: He showed me how to hold the gun, handle it,
Speaker 1: brief me on its history. Then we went downstairs to
Speaker 1: his stuv and drove forty minutes to a shooting range.
Speaker 1: He belongs to. Nothing. Fancy a little shed in the
Speaker 1: midst of some piney woods where you sign in a
Speaker 1: series of long shooting alleys scooped out of the side
Speaker 1: of a hill. We set up cardboard targets in the
Speaker 1: shape of a man's head and torso put on ear protection.
Speaker 8: All right, we're gonna start off with this one right here.
Speaker 8: This is a it's a custom built AR fifteen. It
Speaker 8: has the adjustable stock. It has a fourteen and a
Speaker 8: half inch barrel. But with this right here, this muzzle
Speaker 8: device is pinned and welded on it, so the barrel
Speaker 8: is sixteen inches long. If it's not sixteen inches long,
Speaker 8: if it's shorter than that, it's called a short barrel rifle,
Speaker 8: and you have to register it with the ATF and
Speaker 8: pay a two hundred dollars tax.
Speaker 6: Snap.
Speaker 8: Okay, uh, this is legal, I mean obviously.
Speaker 6: All right.
Speaker 8: You want to shoot it? Yeah, okay, all right, I will.
Speaker 8: Let's get you comfortable on this here, so see if
Speaker 8: that works. Now, what you need to do is to
Speaker 8: hold it up here, okay, all right, and then you
Speaker 8: need to lean your head over a little bit where
Speaker 8: you can see with your You keep looking with.
Speaker 6: Your right eye. You want to see that. You want
Speaker 6: to find the red dot in there. You see it?
Speaker 9: Yep?
Speaker 8: This time you want to come out here and take
Speaker 8: this one up and hold it right here. Okay, put
Speaker 8: your finger up on the side. There we go.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 8: I want you to bring your left foot forward, get
Speaker 8: in that like kind of boxing stance. There you go,
Speaker 8: there you go, all right, bend forward, just a little bit.
Speaker 8: All right, now we're going I'm gonna take it off
Speaker 8: of safety. Now, once you touch that trigger, once the
Speaker 8: safety goes off, it will fire. Okay, all right, yeah,
Speaker 8: so aim it?
Speaker 6: Who?
Speaker 9: Lord?
Speaker 6: That would What did you think about that? Jesus kicked it?
Speaker 6: Did it kick a lot? Well?
Speaker 9: Wasn't that?
Speaker 1: It's just the sudden awareness of the there's.
Speaker 6: A Yeah, it's a surprise.
Speaker 8: I mean it is. The very first time you do it,
Speaker 8: you get used to the sort of what would you
Speaker 8: call violence of it, you.
Speaker 1: Know, cussive?
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My first question for Wallace was what makes an assault
Speaker 1: rifle an assault rifle? What was it that I was
Speaker 1: holding when I fired it? It sounded like I imagined
Speaker 1: a gun would sound like, and felt just like I
Speaker 1: had imagined and a gun would feel like. So what
Speaker 1: made this gun different from other guns? I thought there
Speaker 1: would be an easy answer. It turns out there wasn't.
Speaker 7: One of the things about the AR fifteen is some
Speaker 7: people have called it the Lego of modern rifles because
Speaker 7: you can put a lot of different things on it. Yes,
Speaker 7: so this has got a scope on it rather than
Speaker 7: just the red dot site there, It's got a scope
Speaker 7: one to ten scope. It also has this red dot
Speaker 7: here that I can flip it to the side and
Speaker 7: aim it if I'm going from scope to red dot
Speaker 7: like that. It has a flashlight on it, and it
Speaker 7: has a little handstop here, a little grip stuff.
Speaker 1: What he meant by that phrase the lego of modern
Speaker 1: rifles was that the AR fifteen was endlessly configurable. It's
Speaker 1: not like a Smith and Wesson six shooter from the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, or a colonial musket, or even the shotgun
Speaker 1: that your parents might have had. We all have a
Speaker 1: picture in our mind of what those guns look like,
Speaker 1: but an AR fifteen is more like a firearm platform
Speaker 1: than a specific kind of gun. Its most distinctive feature,
Speaker 1: which you can always use to spot an assault rifle,
Speaker 1: is a tube that runs along the top of the
Speaker 1: gun barrel. It's an ingenious system that redirects gas is
Speaker 1: expelled from the bullet, leaving the gun to reload the
Speaker 1: next bullet in the chamber. But that platform supports a
Speaker 1: virtually infinite number of add ons and upgrades. You can
Speaker 1: replace the gun sight and gun jargon, the optic to
Speaker 1: let you see the target better, a place the trigger
Speaker 1: with something that feels more comfortable upgrade what's called the
Speaker 1: bolt carrier the guts of the rifle. To reduce the
Speaker 1: chance of jamming, put a muzzle flash hidher on it
Speaker 1: so the gun doesn't light up when it fires. A
Speaker 1: suppressor to reduce sound to dust. A salt rifles can
Speaker 1: have what's called a pistol grip. When you pull the trigger,
Speaker 1: the balance of your fingers rest on the same kind
Speaker 1: of handle you would typically see on a handgun. There's
Speaker 1: also something called a forward grip, dropping down from the
Speaker 1: barrel of the gun, where you put your non shooting hand.
Speaker 1: You can, if you want keep both, have just one,
Speaker 1: or have none at all. The part of the gun,
Speaker 1: the stock that rests against your shoulder, can be adjustable,
Speaker 1: so you can fit the gun to your own dimensions.
Speaker 1: On and on and on. So when you ban an
Speaker 1: assault rifle, what's being banned. The assumption of most people,
Speaker 1: I think is that the gun control movement intends to
Speaker 1: ban the platform, But they don't. No one's looking to
Speaker 1: ban the distinctive gas to reloading system, or more ambitiously,
Speaker 1: the category of light, easy to carry and handle semi
Speaker 1: automatic rifles. What is called an assault rifle ban is
Speaker 1: simply an attempt to specify which lego pieces you are
Speaker 1: and are not allowed to add to the platform. Even
Speaker 1: the federal ban on assault rifles in place from nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four to two thousand and four was just a
Speaker 1: ban on some of the add ons in that law.
Speaker 1: Congress made a short list of the most problematic modifications
Speaker 1: to the rifle platform and said you could only have
Speaker 1: one of them. The Senate bill, introduced after Biden's speech
Speaker 1: makes a slightly longer list of problematic modifications and says
Speaker 1: you can't use any of them. Now, do the lego
Speaker 1: pieces on those lists actually make the gun more dangerous?
Speaker 1: Not really more comfortable maybe or easier to clean and handle.
Speaker 1: But ninety nine percent of the lethality of an assault
Speaker 1: rifle is in the platform. When we were at the range,
Speaker 1: for example, Wallace went on at some length about another
Speaker 1: of the modifications that comes up in assault weapons discussions.
Speaker 1: Magazine size magazines are the rectangular metal boxes that hold ammunition.
Speaker 1: In keeping with its status as a lego of rifles,
Speaker 1: you can go on the Internet and any number of
Speaker 1: replacement magazines for your gun that hold thirty rounds or
Speaker 1: even fifty rounds. So one of the things that assault
Speaker 1: rifle bands tend to do is prohibit the sale of
Speaker 1: magazines that hold more than ten bullets. The thinking is,
Speaker 1: why make things easier on the mass shooter. Make him
Speaker 1: change magazines two or three or four times. Wallace showed
Speaker 1: me what this means in practice. He held his gun
Speaker 1: with one hand and reached for a spare magazine on
Speaker 1: his belt.
Speaker 8: What you would do is you would have like a
Speaker 8: magazine change. So let's say he's out, so he's going
Speaker 8: to do this right here, and he's ready to go again. Now,
Speaker 8: how long did it take to change that magazine? Just
Speaker 8: a couple of seconds. And one of the things that
Speaker 8: the people who say, well, we gotta make magazine changes
Speaker 8: more often make smaller magazines, so he'll have to change
Speaker 8: more often. If you were lying down on the ground there,
Speaker 8: could you get up and attack me in the time
Speaker 8: it took me to change that magazine? No, probably could.
Speaker 8: I mean you probably could, so.
Speaker 6: I'd have you do it, But don't want you to
Speaker 6: get to close all already.
Speaker 8: But when you're in a closed area and people are
Speaker 8: down on the floor, it's going to be a rare
Speaker 8: situation where somebody is going to be able to jump
Speaker 8: up and subdue the shooter while he's changing a magazine.
Speaker 1: Well, it's this point, was it? Limiting magazines was the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that sounded like a good idea to
Speaker 1: people who didn't know anything about guns, or who were
Speaker 1: too squeamish to think about the way mass shooters actually behaved.
Speaker 8: And then you have mass shooters with several guns, different guns,
Speaker 8: multiple guns, and if they're done with one, they just
Speaker 8: drop it and they pick up the other one. It's
Speaker 8: about as fast as a magazine change.
Speaker 1: How is a mass shooter being deterred by this kind
Speaker 1: of legislation? And by the way, have you ever looked
Speaker 1: at the appendix to a typical assault rifle ban. Right
Speaker 1: after they catalog the short list of guns that will
Speaker 1: be made illegal, they run a very long list of
Speaker 1: the guns that will remain on the market, the guns
Speaker 1: you can still buy. There are hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: weapons typically on the exemp list, stretching over many pages.
Speaker 1: Let me just read to you from the appendix of
Speaker 1: the Senate assault rifle ban introduced after Biden's speech. I've
Speaker 1: chosen at random the section that deals with guns made
Speaker 1: by the Browning Arms Company of Ogden, Utah. Browning bar
Speaker 1: Mark two, Safari Magnum Rifle, Browning bar Mark two, Safari
Speaker 1: semi auto rifle, Browning bar Stocker Rifle, Browning High Power Rifle,
Speaker 1: Browning Long Track Rifle, Browning Short Track Rifle. But the
Speaker 1: Browning High Power Rifle no one has a problem with it.
Speaker 1: Same for the Browning bar our, Safari Magnum rifle. Do
Speaker 1: you know what Browning says about the origins of their
Speaker 1: bar rifles on their website. This rifle was commissioned by
Speaker 1: the US Army in an effort to break the stalemate
Speaker 1: of trench warfare in the battlefields of France and Belgium.
Speaker 1: It is considered one of the first, and certainly one
Speaker 1: of the most effective of all the automatic centerfire light
Speaker 1: machine guns ever made. This gun perfectly legal, why because
Speaker 1: it doesn't look all black and metal and menacing. Assault
Speaker 1: Rifle bands are not really prohibitions on dangerous weapons. They
Speaker 1: are attempts to wrap a small subset of dangerous weapons
Speaker 1: ever so gently in red tape. Let's talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about the historical context of this. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: restind why, given all that you've set all of these nuances,
Speaker 1: how does the AR fifteen become such a kind of
Speaker 1: bogeyman for in this gun controlled debate, How does it
Speaker 1: become so notorious? What is your what is your interpretation
Speaker 1: of how this gun acquires such a kind of bad reputation.
Speaker 7: There was a fellow back in the late nineteen eighties
Speaker 7: named Josh Sugarman at the Vadace Policy Center, and one
Speaker 7: of the things that people who wanted to ban guns
Speaker 7: back in the sixties seventies eighties, they focused on handguns.
Speaker 7: Their call for handgun bands really never got any traction
Speaker 7: in the media or with legislators. So he published a
Speaker 7: paper that suggested that they change policy and focus on
Speaker 7: these so called assault weapons. And he said there were
Speaker 7: two things. He says, Number one, we can take advantage
Speaker 7: of the public's ignorance that they are machine guns. And
Speaker 7: even today, even today, there are a lot of people
Speaker 7: who still, like Helaldo Revere on the Vibe, I think
Speaker 7: that these AR fifteens are fully automatic weapons, and.
Speaker 5: That's a mistake.
Speaker 7: They're not. But and then he also said, and we
Speaker 7: can also take advantage of their scary looks, you know,
Speaker 7: sort of the scary black rifle kind of thing, where
Speaker 7: they're just terrifying the communicate some kind of sinister, you
Speaker 7: know effects.
Speaker 1: Wallace was talking about a hugely influential report that came
Speaker 1: out before the first assault rifle ban was passed in
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties that really put the issue on the map.
Speaker 1: I looked it up after Wallace told me about it.
Speaker 1: Here's the conclusion, which I have to say astounded me.
Speaker 1: Assault weapons, just like armor piercing bullets, machine guns and
Speaker 1: plastic firearms, are a new topic. The weapons menacing looks,
Speaker 1: coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns
Speaker 1: versus semi automatic assault weapons, anything that looks like a
Speaker 1: machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun can
Speaker 1: only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on
Speaker 1: these weapons. The campaign against assault rifles was predicated on
Speaker 1: the assumption that most of us don't really know what
Speaker 1: an assault rifle is.
Speaker 10: In nineteen eighty eight, as a result of an increase
Speaker 10: that we'd seen in incidents involving assault weapons, I wrote
Speaker 10: a study called Sault Accessories in America that laid out
Speaker 10: the fact that we're seeing this new trend as far
Speaker 10: as weapons being designed and marketed by the firearms industry,
Speaker 10: and really warned that this was a dangerous new shift
Speaker 10: that we were.
Speaker 1: Saying, Josh Sugreman, Executive director of the Violence Policy Institute,
Speaker 1: and that the were you one of the first voices
Speaker 1: to kind of point out the rise of assault weapons
Speaker 1: as a problem?
Speaker 10: Yes, I was one of the first voices to focus
Speaker 10: on assault weapons. That really was because of Historically, the
Speaker 10: Violence Policy Center has tracked the gun industry, tracked their trends,
Speaker 10: track what they're marketing, what they're developing.
Speaker 1: I called Sugarman up right after I got back from
Speaker 1: North Carolina. His group has been at the forefront of
Speaker 1: the assault rifle ban movement since the nineteen nineties, strategy
Speaker 1: research the thinking behind legislation. A few years ago, for example,
Speaker 1: his outfit published bullet Hoses semi Automatic assault Weapons? What
Speaker 1: are they? What's so bad about them? First chapter is
Speaker 1: a short ten point executive summary of the group's position.
Speaker 1: And let me read to you the first four points.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 1: Semi automatic assault weapons are civilian versions of military assault weapons.
Speaker 1: There are virtually no significant differences between them. Two military
Speaker 1: assault weapons are machine guns. Three civilian assault weapons are
Speaker 1: not machine guns. They are semi automatic weapons. Okay, then
Speaker 1: comes s crucial point four. However, this is a distinction
Speaker 1: without a difference in terms of killing power civilians. Semi
Speaker 1: Automatic assault weapons incorporate all the functional design features that
Speaker 1: make assault weapons so deadly. They are arguably more deadly
Speaker 1: than military versions because most experts agree that semi automatic
Speaker 1: fire is more accurate and thus more lethal than automatic fire.
Speaker 1: According to one of the leading gun control advocates in
Speaker 1: the country, the assault weapons the military uses and the
Speaker 1: ones legal for civilian use are essentially idea entacle in
Speaker 1: their killing power. Now, I had actually asked Wallace about
Speaker 1: this when we were at the range. Could he do
Speaker 1: a simple demonstration for me? How fast could he fire
Speaker 1: his semi automatic assault rifle, the AR fifteen.
Speaker 6: I actually have.
Speaker 8: We make this a little more interesting.
Speaker 6: I have a timer.
Speaker 9: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: He clipped an electronic device to his belt.
Speaker 8: All right, thirty round magazine.
Speaker 9: Now you're going to do this as fast as you can,
Speaker 9: fast as I can. Okay, that was thirty That was thirty.
Speaker 8: Wow, six point five seconds.
Speaker 1: An assault rifle can fire a lot of bullets in
Speaker 1: a very short time. Then he picked up a semi
Speaker 1: automatic handgun from his gun bag and repeated the exercise.
Speaker 1: Held the gun out with two hands, ate at the target,
Speaker 1: fired off ten shots as fast as he could.
Speaker 6: All right, yeah, see, same type of thing.
Speaker 1: You know, he was faster with the assault rifle, but
Speaker 1: only by a tick. Someone with a civilian semi automatic
Speaker 1: assault rifle can't really fire any faster than someone with
Speaker 1: a handgun, which makes sense. They work with the same principle,
Speaker 1: one bullet per pull the trigger. But how would that
Speaker 1: compare it to a military rifle in full machine gun mode? Remember,
Speaker 1: Shugelmann's group said that when it comes to killing power,
Speaker 1: the semi auto automatic divide was a distinction without a difference.
Speaker 1: Wallace said that if you were holding a military assault rifle,
Speaker 1: he could have fired close to one hundred bullets in
Speaker 1: that same six and a half second window. And so
Speaker 1: you're saying that a machine gun automatic weapon in that
Speaker 1: same period of time could have could have fired an
Speaker 1: additional seventy rounds.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, Well, the rate of fire for a fully
Speaker 8: automatic weapon is about thirty rounds in two seconds.
Speaker 1: That's a big difference.
Speaker 6: It is a big difference.
Speaker 1: Why are gun control advocates trying to pretend that these
Speaker 1: two weapons are the same. How is being able to
Speaker 1: fire seventy extra rounds in six seconds, a distinction without
Speaker 1: a difference.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Then you have a series of of points that
Speaker 1: are all about spray firing. Talk about spray firing. What
Speaker 1: do you mean by spray firing? Back to bullet hoses
Speaker 1: and to Josh Sugarman.
Speaker 10: Spray firing means laying down an indiscriminate field of fire
Speaker 10: using the capacity and firepower of the weapon. Instead of
Speaker 10: targeting an individual, you can target an area for your
Speaker 10: offensive use of the weapon.
Speaker 1: Okay, is spray firing associated with semi automatic or automatic weapons?
Speaker 10: Spray firing, which is a I would not say it's
Speaker 10: a technical term, but the term is used to deal
Speaker 10: with a refer to full auto weapons.
Speaker 1: So why is it relevant here in a discussion.
Speaker 10: You're a spray in area within with rounds.
Speaker 1: But wait, I thought this was a discussion of the
Speaker 1: assault weapons that are available for civilian purchase, which are
Speaker 1: semi automatic. So why do you have three points about
Speaker 1: spray firing when it's not relevant to civilian assault weapons.
Speaker 10: I think you're kind of just reading it. To be
Speaker 10: honest with you, there are three points that we have
Speaker 10: that defines.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote you hold on civilian assault weapons
Speaker 1: keep the specific functional design features that make this deadly
Speaker 1: firing easy. Doesn't that say that civilian assault replans are
Speaker 1: capable of spray firing? But you just said they're not.
Speaker 1: But you just said they're not.
Speaker 10: Well, I guess you've you've caught me in a you know,
Speaker 10: lack of technical Uh.
Speaker 1: I mean, wait, Josh, you're the one you're trying to
Speaker 1: educate the public about assault weapons, and you've just told
Speaker 1: me that I've caught you in on what is a
Speaker 1: really crucial point.
Speaker 10: I was actually being sarcastic.
Speaker 1: Oh, I missed that. I'm sorry I missed the sarcasm.
Speaker 1: I apologize. But at this point things were getting a
Speaker 1: little testy because Sugarman refused to own up to the
Speaker 1: game he's playing. The public thinks that a civilian assault
Speaker 1: weapon is a machine gun, So let's make a big
Speaker 1: deal about all the nasty things that a machine gun
Speaker 1: can do and just not mention that a civilian assault
Speaker 1: weapon is actually not a machine gun and that none
Speaker 1: of the modifications on the table we can turn it
Speaker 1: into a machine gun. But how do you spray fire
Speaker 1: with a semi automatic weapon? Don't you still have to
Speaker 1: pull the trigger for every bullet that comes out of
Speaker 1: the weapon, Yes, you do. So. Spray firing is where
Speaker 1: you hold the gun on your hip with the finger
Speaker 1: depressed on the trigger in automatic mode and essentially, as
Speaker 1: you say, you know whatever, hose down the area. But
Speaker 1: you can't do that with a civilian weapon.
Speaker 5: Yes you can.
Speaker 10: You can press the trigger as quickly as you can
Speaker 10: with your finger.
Speaker 1: So, but you could do that with any semi automatic weapon.
Speaker 5: That is true.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about something that's true of all semi
Speaker 1: automatic weapons.
Speaker 10: Now, what I'm talking about is that there are specific
Speaker 10: design characteristics that are common to military assault weapons that
Speaker 10: are contained or present in semi automatic versions of them
Speaker 10: that are marketed to the civilian population.
Speaker 1: At this point, Sugarman shifted gears. What he was really
Speaker 1: worried about with civilian assault rifles, he said, was the
Speaker 1: pistol grip. He said, it was the pistol grip that
Speaker 1: made it so easy to fire a civilian assault rifle
Speaker 1: so rapidly with the gun resting on your hip. But
Speaker 1: after watching Greg Wallace at the gun range, all I
Speaker 1: could think of was, why are we so worried that
Speaker 1: someone might hold an assault rifle from their hip? The
Speaker 1: big advantage of holding a rifle. The traditional way is
Speaker 1: that you have three points of contact with the weapon,
Speaker 1: two hands on the weapon itself, and your shoulder acting
Speaker 1: as a brace. Put your gun on your hip and
Speaker 1: you're down to two points of contact. You can't aim
Speaker 1: that well. Your arm's going to get really tired because
Speaker 1: the gun is a big, heavy piece of metal, and
Speaker 1: your wrist is kind of awkwardly tucked in under the
Speaker 1: gun because it's not designed to be used that way.
Speaker 1: It's not easier to shoot an assault rifle from the hip.
Speaker 1: It's harder. I know people fire guns that way all
Speaker 1: the time in the movies, but that's the movies. If
Speaker 1: I was an American citizen who was interested in doing
Speaker 1: something about gun violence, I would find it very difficult
Speaker 1: to follow your line of reasoning.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: You both say that these guns are functionally equivalent, and
Speaker 1: then you say, well, they're not functionally equivalent because one's
Speaker 1: automatic and one semi automatic. And then you say, well,
Speaker 1: actually the semi automatic one is worse. And then you say,
Speaker 1: and they facilitate spray firing, But then you say, spray
Speaker 1: firing is really associated with the automatic version, which is
Speaker 1: not the one we're talking about my head is spinning.
Speaker 1: Why don't you just say what you mean?
Speaker 10: Well, I think part of is I know a lot
Speaker 10: more about guns than you do, I think, And I
Speaker 10: think you're kind of creating a word salad from some
Speaker 10: sort of I don't know why.
Speaker 1: In the previous episode of this series, I talked about
Speaker 1: the absurdity of the stories that gun lovers tell themselves
Speaker 1: that all of us, for our own good, need to
Speaker 1: be armed before we descend into the New York City subway,
Speaker 1: or that an obscure English slave trader named John Knight
Speaker 1: is all the stands between us and tyranny. This is
Speaker 1: the same kind of absurdity, only from the other side.
Speaker 1: This is someone just making stuff up in order to
Speaker 1: rile us all up and try and win a policy argument.
Speaker 1: Now I understand why Sugarman is doing it. He wants
Speaker 1: to find a crack in the armor of the gun
Speaker 1: lobby and he thinks assault rifles are his way in.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I'm completely sympathetic to the overall,
Speaker 1: cause I'm a Canadian. For goodness sake, I don't believe
Speaker 1: anyone should have guns at all. But this is the
Speaker 1: problem with the way we talk about guns, right that
Speaker 1: in the middle of an ongoing national tragedy, we can't
Speaker 1: bring ourselves to have an honest conversation about guns. Both
Speaker 1: sides would rather just make things up. And if you
Speaker 1: can't have an honest conversation, how do you get anywhere.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, a group of ten trauma surgeons, erdos,
Speaker 1: and pathologists sat down and read through two hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty two autopsy reports from twenty three different American mass shootings.
Speaker 1: They sorted every victim according to the gun they were
Speaker 1: shot with, handgun, shotgun, rifle. The group wanted to know
Speaker 1: did the kind of weapon used by a mass shooter
Speaker 1: make a difference in the likelihood of one of their
Speaker 1: gunshot victims dying. It wasn't a question anyone had ever
Speaker 1: asked before, maybe because the answer seemed obvious. Rifles fired
Speaker 1: bigger bullets at greater velocity than handguns. They are going
Speaker 1: to be the biggest killers. The leader of the study
Speaker 1: was the chief of the Trauma Center at George Washington
Speaker 1: University Hospital in Washington, d C. Baback SERRANI.
Speaker 11: I thought when we were going to do the study,
Speaker 11: I was like, this is a slam dunk. Clearly the
Speaker 11: rifle was the most lethal of them all, and that
Speaker 11: did not bear out.
Speaker 1: The assault rifle is not the most lethal weapon in
Speaker 1: mass shootings. Seroni's group found out more people were shot
Speaker 1: by rifles and handguns, but those differences did not translate
Speaker 1: into a higher percentage of people killed. The people most
Speaker 1: likely to die were the ones hit by handguns.
Speaker 11: The handgun was the most lethal weapon because the person
Speaker 11: was far more likely to be shot multiple times if
Speaker 11: the assailant had a handgun as compared to a rifle.
Speaker 11: In addition, the victim was far more likely to be
Speaker 11: shot in the torso or the head if the person
Speaker 11: had a handgun then a rifle. And the reason is
Speaker 11: I can get closer to you so without you knowing it.
Speaker 11: By the time I'm on top of you with a handgun,
Speaker 11: high capacity magazine and multiple clips, I can expend a
Speaker 11: significant number of rounds. And because I'm close to you,
Speaker 11: my accuracy is going up, so I can hit you
Speaker 11: multiple times in the chest, belly, possibly the head, and
Speaker 11: that you're going to die, Whereas with a rifle in general,
Speaker 11: you'll see me coming, you may be able to run away.
Speaker 11: That's one number two. When I hit you with a rifle,
Speaker 11: the velocity is so high there's a good likelihood you're
Speaker 11: going to hit the ground, you're going to fall, and
Speaker 11: that means my accuracy just dropped for the second hit.
Speaker 11: And so people were less likely to be injured multiple
Speaker 11: times with a rifle than they were with a handgun.
Speaker 1: President Biden goes to the site of two tragic mass shootings,
Speaker 1: and he is told, for God's sake, do something. But
Speaker 1: what he proposes to do is the same thing that
Speaker 1: presidents before him proposed to do, A law that will
Speaker 1: make no difference at all. What's the point of that
Speaker 1: Americans are killing each other and themselves by the thousands,
Speaker 1: and the people who claim to be most outraged by
Speaker 1: this fact spend their time debating whether a rifle stock
Speaker 1: should or shit not be adjustable, all the while pretending
Speaker 1: that they are fighting in the good fight. They aren't.
Speaker 1: They're wasting our time.
Speaker 11: If I can get close enough to you, there's absolutely
Speaker 11: no doubt, none, that a rifle is far more lethal
Speaker 11: a weapon than a handgun. Just the practicality is getting
Speaker 11: close enough to you to shoot you multiple times kind
Speaker 11: of intervene. And so one of the points we raised
Speaker 11: in the paper was we don't think there should be
Speaker 11: separate laws for rifles, then there should be for handguns.
Speaker 11: We think there should be just common laws that apply
Speaker 11: to both types of weapons.
Speaker 1: There shouldn't be separate laws for rifles then for handguns.
Speaker 1: If we want to have an honest conversation about guns,
Speaker 1: that sentence is a good place to start.
Speaker 11: At the end of the day, a gun is designed,
Speaker 11: and a bullet is designed to kill something, whether it's
Speaker 11: an animal for sports, whether it's a person for homicide, whatever,
Speaker 11: the weapon's intention is to kill somebody, and they do.
Speaker 11: Whether designed to.
Speaker 1: Do a gun is a gun is a gun. The
Speaker 1: rest is just foolishness. Our revisionist history Gun series was
Speaker 1: produced by Jacob Smith, Benda daf Haffrey, Kiara Powell, Tally Emlin,
Speaker 1: and Leeman Gistoo. We were edited by Peter Clowney and
Speaker 1: Julia Barton. Fact checking by Arthur Gomberts and Kashelle Williams.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by the Waiscarra, mastering by Flaon Williams, Engineering
Speaker 1: by Nina Lawrence. Special thanks to Wilson Sayer. I'm nothing
Speaker 1: that well