Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, Robert here, and we're on reruns this week.
Speaker 2: So we're deciding to rerun two episodes with you, cutting
Speaker 2: multiple parts into a single episode, reducing some ads and
Speaker 2: getting some ears on some topics that have unfortunately only
Speaker 2: become more relevant as time has gone on. And this
Speaker 2: week we're talking about one of the founders of Border
Speaker 2: Patrol as an organization and institution, and one of the
Speaker 2: men who was behind the start of the NRA and
Speaker 2: its growth into what it has become today. Like with
Speaker 2: the DHS, these episodes have only gotten more relevant as
Speaker 2: time has gone on, and it's very important that we
Speaker 2: get them in front of as many people as we can,
Speaker 2: So please listen. And I don't know, enjoy seems like
Speaker 2: the wrong word, but enjoy. Matt salieb, how are you
Speaker 2: doing today? I'm good man. I just got married. You
Speaker 2: did just get married? Married For former guests France Osco Fiorentini,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, one of our favorite guests with our
Speaker 2: least favorite. Oh shit, Oh, I'm just being an asshole.
Speaker 2: We love you. That's why I've brought you on to
Speaker 2: read you a twelve thousand words script about oh a script.
Speaker 2: Oh a script that's right, Matt, because because I do
Speaker 2: love you and we have such a good time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I wanted to celebrate that you you have embarked
Speaker 2: on this new chapter of your life. Yeah, making it
Speaker 2: very sad. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Actually this is the perfect palate cleanser to a weekend
Speaker 3: of joy.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 3: That's right, coming on this podcast and just being just
Speaker 3: torn to shreds emotionally.
Speaker 2: Because there's gonna be no joy here, Matt. Yeah, how
Speaker 2: do you feel? How do you feel? First off, I
Speaker 2: guess have you ever heard of a motherfucker named Harlan Carter?
Speaker 2: Harlan Carter? I don't think so. Okay, Okay, Jimmy Carter's brother,
Speaker 2: Oh boy, not at all. That would be Billy Carter.
Speaker 2: And Billy Carter will be on our episode behind the Hero.
Speaker 3: Because I thought you're going to ruin you know that guy,
Speaker 3: because he seems pretty dope.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine back when like the biggest scandal a
Speaker 2: president had was that like his brother made bad beer?
Speaker 3: Right, what a time? Yeah, administration. Yeah, it was just like, hey,
Speaker 3: his brother's too cool. Yeah, dudes, dudes were not supposed
Speaker 3: to rock this much. That was you know, that was
Speaker 3: the biggest kick.
Speaker 2: This guy out of the White House and put in
Speaker 2: a dude who's gonna do part of a genocide anyway. Matt,
Speaker 2: how do you feel about the proliferation of firearms in
Speaker 2: American society?
Speaker 3: I'm proka. I think you know, the more guns the better. Obviously,
Speaker 3: uh nothing. You know, the only thing that stops a
Speaker 3: bad guy with a gun is a good guy with
Speaker 3: a gun. I think we all know that, and I
Speaker 3: think it's.
Speaker 2: Good guys with guns stacked outside of a classroom for
Speaker 2: seventy eight eight exactly.
Speaker 3: Dude just kind of sitting around waiting to be like,
Speaker 3: as I can't wait to be a hero.
Speaker 2: I'll just give it another forty five minutes. You've got
Speaker 2: to clock in first. Yss. So it's interesting, it's fun
Speaker 2: that we got to the military the incompetent militarization of police,
Speaker 2: because this is a thing one of the things that's frustrating. Obviously,
Speaker 2: you and I may have some slightly different attitudes towards firearms,
Speaker 2: but I'm I'm I'm frustrated with American gun culture, which
Speaker 2: I think is primarily toxic, and also the culture of
Speaker 2: police militarization, which is one hundred percent toxic. YEP. And
Speaker 2: the guy we're going to talk about today, Harlan Carter
Speaker 2: is the dude who started both of those things. He's
Speaker 2: the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the
Speaker 2: guy who made the NRA. So it is Sophie's got
Speaker 2: a picture of him. He looks like he looks like
Speaker 2: who you would cast if you were putting king in
Speaker 2: that villain. He looks like Kingpin. Like he literally looks
Speaker 2: exactly like Kingpin.
Speaker 1: He looks Oh my god, and.
Speaker 2: Guy, I would prefer any gangster too. It's not even
Speaker 2: body shaming. He just looks like like his his neck
Speaker 2: is the width of his ears.
Speaker 3: No, he's like a literal dickhead. It is the most
Speaker 3: I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: He is a chowed someone poured into a suit.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure that this is what Joe Rogan was like,
Speaker 4: I want this and then.
Speaker 2: Joe Joe Rogan. Someone has been cutting Joe Rogan's HGH
Speaker 2: with lemon juice just to try to keep him from
Speaker 2: getting too huge. But if Joe got the amount of
Speaker 2: HGH that he intended to shoot into his testicles, this
Speaker 2: is how he would look. Yeah, he would look like
Speaker 2: this guy his would be even thicker.
Speaker 3: He's exactly the way you are picturing him in your mind, listeners.
Speaker 2: He does kind of look like because Alex Jones has
Speaker 2: that thick neck, but he's like not that, he's smaller. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and Joe Rogan's got that that big muscle muscle guy head.
Speaker 2: If like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, if you like
Speaker 2: in vitro fertilized, like cut their sperm in half and
Speaker 2: like merged them together with the egg from like a
Speaker 2: dead California condor, you would get Harlan Carter.
Speaker 4: What's better is this painting of him where he literally
Speaker 4: looks like Doctor Evil.
Speaker 2: He does. He does look like Doctor Evil who painted him?
Speaker 2: I don't know a lot of people. He's a very
Speaker 2: important people.
Speaker 1: That we would not get drinks with.
Speaker 2: Fair. So we're going to have to start by discussing
Speaker 2: the history of gun control in the United States. And
Speaker 2: because this is the United States that also started with
Speaker 2: white supremacy.
Speaker 3: I can only yes, I like just from this is
Speaker 3: just a guess, but I bet you gun control laws
Speaker 3: that have been enacted were mostly racist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's those when you get these you get these
Speaker 2: arguments online where like people will be like gun culture
Speaker 2: is white supremacist, and it's like, yeah, an awful lot
Speaker 2: of it is. And then folks who our pro gun
Speaker 2: will be like, well, gun control is white supremacist, and
Speaker 2: you're both right, because it's the United States of America.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: It's like if you try, it's like people talking about like, oh,
Speaker 2: well the Democratic Party used to be like was a
Speaker 2: white supremacist party for a very long time, and it's
Speaker 2: like yeah, yes, yeah, both major US parties are primarily
Speaker 2: rooted in white supremacy.
Speaker 3: And always it's always super weird that, you know, whenever
Speaker 3: someone is just like no, awe, and it's like what
Speaker 3: why are you? You don't need to be so attached
Speaker 3: to being a Democrat that you're just going to refuse
Speaker 3: to believe that.
Speaker 2: It's this doesn't make an argument one way or the
Speaker 2: other about gun control, because like you could say, like
Speaker 2: zoning laws have a lot of their rooting in white supremacy.
Speaker 2: It doesn't mean zoning shouldn't exist, right because fundamentally, yeah,
Speaker 2: factories maybe shouldn't be in the same place as apartment complexes.
Speaker 2: But that also that like, yeah, anyway, whatever, we're going
Speaker 2: to do our.
Speaker 3: Right, well, yeah, we're doing gun control. We're doing CRT
Speaker 3: on this podcast. This is gonna make a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're getting into a lot of stuff, but we're
Speaker 2: gonna be talking a shitload about the border patrol. But
Speaker 2: first let's talk a little bit about the history of
Speaker 2: gun control in the United States. Obviously, sixteen nineteen thereabouts
Speaker 2: is when the first African enslaved people are brought to
Speaker 2: the United States. Well, it wasn't the United States then,
Speaker 2: but you know what I'm saying, right, the colonies against
Speaker 2: their will, and not that long after, in sixteen eighty,
Speaker 2: which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back then,
Speaker 2: the Virginia Assembly passed one of, if not the earliest
Speaker 2: gun control laws in the colonies. Now, this law did
Speaker 2: not restrict the ability of white people to be armed.
Speaker 2: It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't
Speaker 2: gun control but weapons control. But this law passed in
Speaker 2: sixteen eighty it made it a crime for any African
Speaker 2: American to carry a weapon or weapon like object. Now
Speaker 2: that last term there is interesting, Matt, because you could
Speaker 2: I mean, I like, as a man, right you're out
Speaker 2: in the world, you think about all the different things
Speaker 2: you could use his weapons, everything. It's just a thing
Speaker 2: that happened.
Speaker 3: I gature every room going, what could I use for
Speaker 3: self defense? And or if I just felt like harming someone?
Speaker 2: Yeah, if I had to defill myself against the eighty
Speaker 2: four year old man next to me in the post office,
Speaker 2: how hard could I hit him with one of these
Speaker 2: empty cardboard boxes?
Speaker 3: Seriously, in the genes of every dude is just Mark
Speaker 3: Wahlberg going, I would have stopped nine to eleven if
Speaker 3: I had been on that plane. God, and you know
Speaker 3: that's that's all of us.
Speaker 2: It would have been so funny. It would have been
Speaker 2: really funny if he'd, like if he'd stopped it, but
Speaker 2: then he'd had to try to land the plane and
Speaker 2: had accidentally crashed it into the White House, Like, oh God. Anyway,
Speaker 2: So as you might guess, the vagueness around the term
Speaker 2: weapon like object mean that meant that this law it
Speaker 2: didn't just like ban black people from carrying guns. It
Speaker 2: meant that they could be punished brutally for holding any
Speaker 2: object if it could be used to hit somebody. This
Speaker 2: started what wound up being like a more than a
Speaker 2: century long tradition of elderly black people being banned from
Speaker 2: having canes. Oh my god, because you can hit someone
Speaker 2: with the cane, right as Gandalf showed us. You know, yeah,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, yeah, they weren't being fooled by that. In
Speaker 2: Virginia sixteen eighty, Yes, we will pardon old man for
Speaker 2: this walking stick. I know a wizard staff when I
Speaker 2: see one, you think, I don't know, you gonna cast
Speaker 2: a spell? Now, this being sixty years after the forced
Speaker 2: importation of African slaves to the continent. The sixteen eighty
Speaker 2: law was aimed at slaves, obviously, but it applied equally.
Speaker 2: There were some freed black people in the colony of
Speaker 2: this period, and it applied to them as well. The
Speaker 2: law was amended in seventeen twenty three to specify that
Speaker 2: Africans African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for
Speaker 2: any purpose, be it hunting or self defense. And again
Speaker 2: seventeen twenty three, it's kind of important to be able
Speaker 2: to use a gun, you know, just if you're living
Speaker 2: in the Virginia frontier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a lot of other people with guns, and
Speaker 3: it seems just like a time to have one.
Speaker 2: You need food and stuff, you know, and there's bears
Speaker 2: like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, how do you
Speaker 2: catch your food?
Speaker 3: Yes, if you are not allowed to use a gun.
Speaker 2: You can trap. But I think the purpose here no
Speaker 2: one's thinking about, like they're not They're doing whatever they
Speaker 2: can to make these people's lives harder because like they're
Speaker 2: terrified of the existence of free black people. Yes, and
Speaker 2: under this law, a free black person who defended himself
Speaker 2: from a white person using a firearm was committing a
Speaker 2: crime technically with any weapon, any like, any tool they
Speaker 2: were to use to defend themselves would be illegal. So
Speaker 2: gun control in the early colonies, most of the time,
Speaker 2: these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the
Speaker 2: exceptions of the rule because as a rule, like there were,
Speaker 2: the laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things
Speaker 2: and more just kind of generally trying to make it
Speaker 2: possible for black people and slave to free to challenge
Speaker 2: white supremacy in any way. So it wasn't just guns.
Speaker 2: And in fact that because guns were like not as
Speaker 2: good back then, those were less of a focus than
Speaker 2: some other objects that might surprise you. Possession of dogs
Speaker 2: by black people was heavily regulated in this period. They
Speaker 2: couldn't have dogs, well, it was not impossible, but it
Speaker 2: was very hard if you were a black person who
Speaker 2: wanted to own a dog. In Maryland in the early
Speaker 2: seventeen hundreds, for example, you were forced to get a
Speaker 2: license from the Justice of the peace who was going
Speaker 2: to be a white man. So it was not easy
Speaker 2: to get a license from a justice of the peace
Speaker 2: for this, and if you managed to get one, you
Speaker 2: were still restricted to owning no more than one dog
Speaker 2: at a time, Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for
Speaker 2: black people under any circumstances, and even allowed slave patrols
Speaker 2: to kill dogs found in the house of a black person.
Speaker 2: So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is very old.
Speaker 3: Indeed, of course I should have known. Of course, dog
Speaker 3: control also, you know ties directly to white supremacy.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's one of those that you have to Again,
Speaker 2: weapons firearms are a lot less deadly back then. So
Speaker 2: like a gun, you get one shot and it's not
Speaker 2: easy to reload. I think there are But yeah, dog,
Speaker 2: a dog you don't need to reload, right, A Doberman
Speaker 2: will keep fucking going until you go. Yeah, So that's
Speaker 2: what you know, white folks were particularly scared of. And
Speaker 2: again it's also worth noting. Obviously, the prohibition against black
Speaker 2: people carrying guns or their weapons make sense if you're
Speaker 2: afraid of a slave or you know, just an uprising,
Speaker 2: right because a group of people with guns can do
Speaker 2: an uprising. You can't really effectively organize a bunch of
Speaker 2: dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together. It's
Speaker 2: hard to do.
Speaker 3: I'd like to see it though.
Speaker 2: It would be cool, But clearly what they're doing here
Speaker 2: they don't want black people to be able to defend
Speaker 2: themselves from like mob violence, right like individual and families.
Speaker 2: They don't want them to have any kind of defense
Speaker 2: if like somebody wants to do a murder, you know.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ just like inventing inventing laws that are completely useless,
Speaker 3: the idea that somehow this is like, oh well, we can't,
Speaker 3: we can't kill that guy. He lives in a cannel
Speaker 3: filled with having US dogs surrounding him, like he's fucking
Speaker 3: Ramsey Bolton, just like ready with hungry dogs to bite.
Speaker 2: Off if I'm Yeah. So in the late seventeen hundreds, spoilers,
Speaker 2: the American Revolution broke out. Yeah, and by seventeen eighty
Speaker 2: seven we have us a constitution, you know, we get,
Speaker 2: we fight them English, we beat them, and then we're like,
Speaker 2: oh boy, this first government we tried as a giant
Speaker 2: shit show. We should probably like give another shot at this,
Speaker 2: and they constitution, and eventually this Constitution comes to include
Speaker 2: a bill of rights in the now infamous Second Amendment.
Speaker 2: We're going to be talking a lot about the changing
Speaker 2: ways this has been interpreted through time, and despite what
Speaker 2: people on tend to say on either side of the
Speaker 2: modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to
Speaker 2: interpret how the so called Founding Fathers intended it to function.
Speaker 2: And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in
Speaker 2: agreement about pretty much anything, but one thing is perfectly clear.
Speaker 2: They did not see the right to bear arms as
Speaker 2: extending to black people. Now, black people were not categorically
Speaker 2: forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States, but
Speaker 2: in those states where it was legal for them to
Speaker 2: own arms, they were always required to register those weapons
Speaker 2: with the government. This was not the case for white people.
Speaker 2: While there was some hope during the Revolution among black
Speaker 2: Americans that independents would bring about an improvement in their circumstances,
Speaker 2: and that was not unreasonable. Again, the British Empire allowed
Speaker 2: slavery too. So at this stage in time, it's not
Speaker 2: like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that like, well, maybe
Speaker 2: things will get better when they don't have a king anymore, right,
Speaker 2: Obviously that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, there's
Speaker 2: some uprisings in the New United States. In eighteen eleven,
Speaker 2: Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed, and in response to this,
Speaker 2: New Orleans made it a crime for black people to
Speaker 2: carry weapons. And this was again primarily even more than guns.
Speaker 2: Banned them from stuff like canes, crutches, wheelchairs. Yeah, any yeah,
Speaker 2: definitely with an assault wheelchair. Yeah. So, as we've discussed
Speaker 2: in our Behind the Police series, many Southern police departments
Speaker 2: started as slave patrols, made up of armed white dudes
Speaker 2: searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a
Speaker 2: boot on the neck of even free black people. In
Speaker 2: eighteen twenty five, Florida gave slave patrols the right to
Speaker 2: enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition,
Speaker 2: or any other weapons found. And obviously these kinds, as
Speaker 2: is the case with no knock raids today, these often
Speaker 2: were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes
Speaker 2: right by saying you felt threatened. Yeah. Now, in the
Speaker 2: early eighteen sixties, obviously we have US a civil war
Speaker 2: over slavery, and broadly speaking, this goes pretty well if
Speaker 2: you think slavery is bad, US civil war broadly speaking
Speaker 2: goes all right. Yeah. Now, one of the most kind
Speaker 2: of revolutionary aspects of the Civil War is that, for
Speaker 2: the first time in US history, a shitload of black
Speaker 2: men are legally carrying guns in an organized way. One
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy nine thousand black people serve in the
Speaker 2: Union Army, which is roughly ten percent of its total,
Speaker 2: and you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men
Speaker 2: with guns marching across the US South, which really freaks
Speaker 2: out people in the South.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's got to be the scariest thing. They looked
Speaker 3: at that and they're like, see, this is what I'm
Speaker 3: talking about.
Speaker 2: This is a scary shit I did not want to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is why we're losing. Started this war that we're losing.
Speaker 2: So post Civil War, black people are not immediately entitled
Speaker 2: to the same rights as white people. So, starting in
Speaker 2: eighteen sixty five, which is the year the war ends,
Speaker 2: States like former you know states that had lost basically
Speaker 2: start enacting black codes and these are kind of okay,
Speaker 2: these people aren't slaves anymore, but we want to treat
Speaker 2: them that way. So let's just write new Let's just
Speaker 2: we'll take the old laws that we had that restricted
Speaker 2: slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control,
Speaker 2: and will replace the word slave with servant or you know,
Speaker 2: something similar, so that we can try to hold them
Speaker 2: under the same laws. In Mississippi, black people were still
Speaker 2: banned from possessing weapons or ammunition, and if white people
Speaker 2: turned them in for this crime, they would be given
Speaker 2: their firearms as a reward. And again this is after
Speaker 2: they've been freed, so they like should have the right
Speaker 2: to bear arms and whatnot. I want to quote now
Speaker 2: from a twenty twenty one Honors thesis by Alexandra Lenzetta
Speaker 2: from the University of Colorado. Quote. Other Southern states to
Speaker 2: enact their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana.
Speaker 2: Both states prohibited African Americans, not including veterans, from owning
Speaker 2: guns without a license or special permit. Not surprisingly, these
Speaker 2: permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it
Speaker 2: virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally
Speaker 2: obtain a gun. This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns,
Speaker 2: making the potential penalties of exposure even greater. Punishment for
Speaker 2: having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of
Speaker 2: the weapon. Old slave patrols re emerged to enforce the
Speaker 2: Black Codes and to terrorize African Americans. This, along with
Speaker 2: a combination of great incentives to catch black with weapons
Speaker 2: and a hatred over their newfound freedom, created a white frenzy,
Speaker 2: making it extremely difficult to height a gun as an
Speaker 2: African American. White frenzy is the worst frenzy. It's it's
Speaker 2: it's it's the most common frenzy.
Speaker 3: Took Yeah, it's it's. It's their most traditional American frenzy.
Speaker 3: But it is not is not a fun one.
Speaker 2: We do love us a frenzy. We love a frenzy.
Speaker 2: We love a good frenzy, we love a bad frenzy.
Speaker 2: So eighteen sixty five, right bunch of black codes come
Speaker 2: into effect to basically try and keep black people in
Speaker 2: similar positions to how they've been during slavery, even though
Speaker 2: the war was over. So in eighteen sixty six, the
Speaker 2: US Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which this is
Speaker 2: like there's a big old fight over this, and this
Speaker 2: is the this is the law that basically says, hey,
Speaker 2: you actually have to these people have the same rights
Speaker 2: that white people have on the bill front, right, Like
Speaker 2: that's what that does, you know, And you know, things
Speaker 2: do get a lot better for a while, you know,
Speaker 2: we talked about.
Speaker 3: Point was like, look, do you ever just like read
Speaker 3: up on reconstruction and go like holy shit, for a
Speaker 3: hot second.
Speaker 2: There we seem to be on a good track.
Speaker 3: We were on a good track, Like it seemed like
Speaker 3: shit was gonna like work out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, things made a lot better for a while. And
Speaker 2: then there's a violent reaction from the reactionaries and they
Speaker 2: do an insurgency which is kind of centered around the KKK.
Speaker 2: We have talked about this in other episodes. It ends
Speaker 2: with a series of demeaning, bigoted laws aimed at maintaining
Speaker 2: white supremacy in the former Confederacy. These are you know,
Speaker 2: Jim Crow laws, right, And these these come into place
Speaker 2: alongside a wave of lynchings which kill at least like
Speaker 2: five thousand black Americans. Obviously, there's no way of knowing
Speaker 2: the actual total good chance it was significantly more, but yeah,
Speaker 2: at least five thousand. So in response, black people do
Speaker 2: what you would expect. They form militias, you know, they
Speaker 2: start carrying guns for what. I don't think I need
Speaker 2: to explain the logic here, right, organized to stop lynchings.
Speaker 2: This culminates in Louisiana in eighteen seventy six where a
Speaker 2: bunch of klansmen who are also government officials, these are
Speaker 2: like elected leaders in Louisiana who are also in the KKK,
Speaker 2: are charged with conspiring to disarm a meeting of Black Americans. Basically,
Speaker 2: like one of these groups of black folks had gotten
Speaker 2: together with guns to like figure out how to protect
Speaker 2: their community, and these state officials like try to take
Speaker 2: their weapons away. A bunch of court shit happens. It
Speaker 2: goes to the Supreme Court who rules in favor of
Speaker 2: the ku Klux Klan, saying that the state had the
Speaker 2: legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common
Speaker 2: good God. And you know, in this period of time,
Speaker 2: there's also one of the things that's happening during the
Speaker 2: lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person
Speaker 2: who is attempted to be lynched has a gun and
Speaker 2: they shoot the people trying to lynch them. And when
Speaker 2: that happens, a number of laws are passed in different
Speaker 2: towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms,
Speaker 2: and in fact, those are some of the first specific
Speaker 2: laws against the carrying of concealed handguns. Now, this is
Speaker 2: an area where like the kind of the anti gun
Speaker 2: control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff. It's
Speaker 2: very much worth noting all gun control in the United
Speaker 2: States in this period is not based in white supremacy,
Speaker 2: in part because a lot of it is put in
Speaker 2: areas where like most of the population is white, and
Speaker 2: there was it's worth noting significantly more gun control in
Speaker 2: portions of the like the so called wild West, than
Speaker 2: there are in a lot of those same states today.
Speaker 2: In places like the Dakotas and whatnot, it was common
Speaker 2: for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted in
Speaker 2: many towns. If a visitor came into town, they would
Speaker 2: be expected to leave their guns with the local police
Speaker 2: before entering. They'd get like a little card or something
Speaker 2: you weren't supposed to like like there were it's it's
Speaker 2: and there's you know, a lot to be said about
Speaker 2: like why this is being done, but in general, it's
Speaker 2: being done because they see that it's it's perfectly reasonable
Speaker 2: to say that, like, well, there should be restrictions on
Speaker 2: what you can do in town with a firearm, right.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, and it went down with a gun, seen,
Speaker 3: I don't know threatening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they certainly don't want you doing it openly. And
Speaker 2: then like there's a bunch of there's laws about carrying
Speaker 2: concealed and those kind of vary from place to place.
Speaker 2: But it's worth noting that the infamous gunfight at the
Speaker 2: OK Corral actually occurred because a guy, like it was
Speaker 2: over gun control, right, Like, a guy was openly carrying
Speaker 2: his guns in the city, and you know there was
Speaker 2: as far as I'm aware, like everyone involved in that,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure was like a white dude. So I
Speaker 2: don't think there's anything particularly racist in the gunfight. You
Speaker 2: could talk about it, be it involving like police overreach, sure,
Speaker 2: which people will make the case that like this was
Speaker 2: this was a case of like a fucking early cop
Speaker 2: going bug fuck on some people. Yeah, yeah, but don't
Speaker 2: tread on me.
Speaker 3: And yes, people, you see this whole time, I didn't
Speaker 3: know that that was a real gunfight at the okay cost?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Oh no, no, no, it's a pretty cool story,
Speaker 2: as it perfectly accurately described in the documentary Tombstone starring
Speaker 2: Val Kilmer.
Speaker 3: Yah see yeah, I thought the reason was, you know,
Speaker 3: like a card game got lost or something, or someone
Speaker 3: had like extra aces up their sleeve.
Speaker 2: But it turns out gun control. No, that would be
Speaker 2: the that would be the documentary. Shit was it, Maverick?
Speaker 2: What's the document about the card guy who gets like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I need to rewatch that. That was a good fucking
Speaker 2: that's a good movie.
Speaker 3: My other guest was going to be a giant metal
Speaker 3: spider who tries to take over.
Speaker 2: My third favorite documentary. And this is what brought about
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Speaker 4: You're actually right on time because it is that it
Speaker 4: is about that time.
Speaker 2: Wow. Well, look, everybody's talking a lot about AR fifteen's
Speaker 2: You know what's more powerful than an AR fifteen A
Speaker 2: metal spider spider the size of the Chrysler building. Uh
Speaker 2: that is scary. Yeah, yeah, Uh we're back, so you
Speaker 2: have you know again the Wild West, how common gunfights
Speaker 2: and stuff were, especially in like cities and towns is exaggerated.
Speaker 2: But also there was a lot of like there were
Speaker 2: a lot of robberies, there were a lot of crimes
Speaker 2: like and it's it's the same as it is today.
Speaker 2: Like the gunfights that have kind of come down to
Speaker 2: history were like the ones that the media went nuts
Speaker 2: on in the day, like the gunfight at the Ok Corral.
Speaker 2: But broadly speaking, by the end of the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: most places in the United States had banned the concealed
Speaker 2: carrying of handguns, although open carrying remained legal in a
Speaker 2: lot of places. We'll talk about when that ended. In
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety three, the government of Texas said that quote
Speaker 2: the mission of the concealed deadly weapon as murder to
Speaker 2: check it as the duty of every self respecting law
Speaker 2: abiding man. And again, he was probably saying that primarily
Speaker 2: because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns.
Speaker 2: This is the governor of Texas in eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 2: so do keep that in mind. But US gun control
Speaker 2: in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the
Speaker 2: specter of armed black people, and even where laws were
Speaker 2: perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy,
Speaker 2: even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law,
Speaker 2: Lanzetta writes. Quote. Another example of discrimination is found in
Speaker 2: legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era. Involved an eleven
Speaker 2: year old black boy with a toy gun in Saint
Speaker 2: Louis in nineteen hundred. It was illegal to fire a
Speaker 2: gun within city limits, and the boy was charged for
Speaker 2: violating this law. However, when his case was being reviewed
Speaker 2: by a judge to determine his guilt. It was discovered
Speaker 2: that the gun was fake. Knowing this new information, the
Speaker 2: judge should have dropped all charges, given that it is
Speaker 2: not possible to fire a fake gun, but this was
Speaker 2: not the case. Instead, the boy was found guilty and
Speaker 2: the judge fined him ten dollars almost three hundred and
Speaker 2: ten dollars to day, which is interesting. I did again,
Speaker 2: another thing that goes back very far is black kids
Speaker 2: being penalized for having toy guns, right exactly, quite quite
Speaker 2: far back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's literally just these are like rulings.
Speaker 3: It's like, well, yeah, scared me. Yeah, that's that's the
Speaker 3: entire thing that has been the I believe the explanation
Speaker 3: for the deaths of countless, countless black people.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's also just like this, I was scared.
Speaker 2: Perhaps we don't like, perhaps we're fundamentally frightened by the concept,
Speaker 2: even if it's a toy, of like black people having guns,
Speaker 2: because that's how we maintain our power over them, right right,
Speaker 2: Which is again, even in these areas where concealed carrying
Speaker 2: or open carrying is illegal, it's generally not illegal for
Speaker 2: white people to do. If they're being vigilantes right. This
Speaker 2: is a key aspect of this period, and this brings
Speaker 2: us back to the glorious state of Texas. Like much
Speaker 2: of the South, after the Civil Rights Act, legislators had
Speaker 2: to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm
Speaker 2: black people were not motivated by racism. Brendan Rivus from
Speaker 2: Texas Christian University Rites quote the post eighteen sixty five laws, however,
Speaker 2: used race neutral language to accomplish a racially motivated goal.
Speaker 2: Most of these laws attempted to disarm Black Texans, but
Speaker 2: some from the eighteen seventies stopped to curb the racial
Speaker 2: violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone. For instance,
Speaker 2: a part of the Texas Slave Code prohibited slaves from
Speaker 2: carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer,
Speaker 2: and a law passed in eighteen sixty six prohibited laborers
Speaker 2: from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent
Speaker 2: and race neutral language. The eighteen sixty six law achieved
Speaker 2: the same result as the Slave Code without specifically declaring
Speaker 2: that African americ and should be disarmed. Their arming was conditional,
Speaker 2: subject to the authorization of an interested white party. Similarly,
Speaker 2: the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use
Speaker 2: racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of
Speaker 2: local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks
Speaker 2: or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those
Speaker 2: local offices. And you can guess which of those happens
Speaker 2: more often. And this is the state of affairs legally
Speaker 2: in the state of Texas. When Harlan Bronson Carter is
Speaker 2: born on August tenth, nineteen thirteen, in Granbury, Texas. Now,
Speaker 2: at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that
Speaker 2: it was the home of Davy Crockett for a little while.
Speaker 2: And every town in Texas was Davy Crockett's home for
Speaker 2: a little while. Not super impressive, and yeah.
Speaker 3: Every town is just he stayed at a motel here
Speaker 3: for two weeks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he's fucking all our hookers. He's like a
Speaker 2: celebrated hunter and frontier guy. And Harlan certainly like I
Speaker 2: heard god knows how many fucking stories about Davy fucking
Speaker 2: Crockett when I was a kid in my mandatory Texas
Speaker 2: history class. I am going to guess, in like nineteen twenty,
Speaker 2: young Harlan Carter is growing up and learning even more
Speaker 2: of these stories. Yeah, and obviously he's also en meshon
Speaker 2: the local gun culture of the time. Pretty much everywhere
Speaker 2: is semi rural, so he's you know, he does a
Speaker 2: lot of hunting, He does a lot of target shooting.
Speaker 2: He becomes an excellent shot from an early age, and
Speaker 2: he develops an intense affinity for firearms, shall we say so.
Speaker 2: When he's young, the family moves to Laredo, and Laredo
Speaker 2: is a border town, right, and his father they moved
Speaker 2: to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent
Speaker 2: and in fact is one of the very first Border
Speaker 2: Patrol agents. So the year that they moved to Laredo
Speaker 2: is nineteen twenty seven, Harlan's fourteen, and it's the same
Speaker 2: year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes
Speaker 2: a trip to the town and expresses in an official document,
Speaker 2: has shocked to find that quote, Laredo was strictly a
Speaker 2: Mexican town. Probably ninety percent of the people were either
Speaker 2: Mexican or of Mexican descent. He adds with horror. The
Speaker 2: only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself.
Speaker 2: And this is an interesting like Lareda at this point
Speaker 2: because it's it's so heavily Mexican. Is not a town
Speaker 2: controlled by white people and the police are not a
Speaker 2: white force. Right. You'll note that quote I read earlier
Speaker 2: states that like kind of the laws against gun control
Speaker 2: were usually mainly like put into force against like armed
Speaker 2: black people, but depending on politics, could be used to
Speaker 2: try to stop white vigilantes. Well, this is one of
Speaker 2: those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police
Speaker 2: force is not white. So the border patrol, however, is
Speaker 2: not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican
Speaker 2: folks are running things, right that does not thrill them.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Well next you know, they'll start inviting other Mexicans still
Speaker 3: live here, and they won't stop the border. I mean,
Speaker 3: I love the idea of these like people going to
Speaker 3: a town right on the border of Mexico in Texas
Speaker 3: which used to be Mexico and being like, what the
Speaker 3: hell are all these Mexicans doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these communities that had been there for decades before
Speaker 2: a state of Texas was a thing that anyone had
Speaker 2: thought of being Like exactly, these people are going to
Speaker 2: change the nature of Texas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, now this is not the Texas I know
Speaker 3: that we invented about twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: We invented when I was fifteen. Yeah, exactly. So this
Speaker 2: inspector Guy Perkins, again as exactly as racist as you
Speaker 2: might expect, and he decides that Laredo's immigration cops are
Speaker 2: not going to be able to enforce US immigration restrictions,
Speaker 2: which are again geared towards enforcing white supremacy, if the
Speaker 2: state of affairs in Laredo remains the way that it is.
Speaker 2: So he carries out what he describes as a quote
Speaker 2: full scale house cleaning. Now in the Wonderful book Migra
Speaker 2: Kelly Hernandez writes, quote, he charged local officials, the chief
Speaker 2: patrol inspector, and border patrol officers in the Laredo station
Speaker 2: with immigrants smuggling, and forced just under half of Laredo's
Speaker 2: twenty eight border patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector
Speaker 2: to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select border
Speaker 2: patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo
Speaker 2: sector because all were experienced, well disciplined fighters who knew
Speaker 2: the country well. Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was
Speaker 2: a strategy used to divorce the Border Patrol station from
Speaker 2: the local Mexican American political elite. Tension quickly mounted between
Speaker 2: the ex Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo
Speaker 2: Police Department, while the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with
Speaker 2: the local police in most borderland communities. In nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 2: several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol got in their
Speaker 2: Model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling
Speaker 2: and shooting up the police station. Holy fuck, so he
Speaker 2: Klean's house brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which
Speaker 2: is like the most racist police force in the United
Speaker 2: States of this period, and has them shoot up the
Speaker 2: police station. Fucking A.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, on the one hand, a cab.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's like on the one hand.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, I don't think it's a
Speaker 3: I think it's just these particular cabs, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean, they're going after specifically an armed group of
Speaker 3: Mexican Americans.
Speaker 2: It's also probably worth noting but that in this period,
Speaker 2: if you're being a fucking being a Mexican American police
Speaker 2: officer in Laredo in nineteen twenty seven is a bit
Speaker 2: different from being a police officer pretty much anywhere in
Speaker 2: the United States at this point, which is part of
Speaker 2: why the Border Patrol is purging them, because he's like, you, guys,
Speaker 2: they're not stopping im, they're not stopping immigration. They're not
Speaker 2: like violently cracking down on people who aren't white. They're
Speaker 2: not enforcing white supremacy. So we have to get rid
Speaker 2: of them with guns. Yeah, and they get rid of
Speaker 2: they do get rid of the Laredo police force with guns.
Speaker 3: So only time in American history that the police have
Speaker 3: been able to be fired.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, this is the one time that happened. This
Speaker 2: is what it took for the one time. So it's
Speaker 2: safe to say that Laredo was a pretty wild place
Speaker 2: when Harlan Carter was an adolescent. His father, Horace, was
Speaker 2: among the first cohort of Border Patrol agents hired in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty seven, and he was transferred to Laredo in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty seven as part of this process. It's entirely
Speaker 2: possible that Horace Carter was one of the guys shooting
Speaker 2: that police station, and in this period of time, Harlan's
Speaker 2: father would have seen his job as explicitly to use
Speaker 2: violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most
Speaker 2: people were not white quote from Migra. Although most local
Speaker 2: stations developed their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo
Speaker 2: station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal
Speaker 2: racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the
Speaker 2: bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican American leadership.
Speaker 2: The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge
Speaker 2: for white violence within Mexican dominated Laredo. So they've turned
Speaker 2: the border patrol prior to this, and they're all like
Speaker 2: local guys, right, so they don't really care about like
Speaker 2: Mexican America, like Mexicans coming into America because like that's
Speaker 2: how they got there, right, That's like their family everybody, like.
Speaker 2: And again they also probably don't see the border as
Speaker 2: this solid thing because they believe the relatives have lived
Speaker 2: here for forever. It used to not be like a
Speaker 2: thing to cross. But this is the period where the
Speaker 2: border is really is becoming a thing in a way
Speaker 2: it hadn't been before. And part of how they do
Speaker 2: that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of
Speaker 2: white people and have them shoot anybody who disagrees, right
Speaker 2: like that. That's how the border becomes real in Laredo.
Speaker 3: The American Way, and it's all borders are enforced everywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in that white borders are bad. Yell yep. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Although today, I mean there's a long conversation to be
Speaker 2: had about the fact that the border patrol today is
Speaker 2: extremely diverse. Like one of the things people on the
Speaker 2: left particularly have gotten wrong about Evaldi is like the
Speaker 2: assertion that like, well, they probably didn't go in because
Speaker 2: those kids were Hispanic. And it's like, have you I've
Speaker 2: seen pictures of the Uvaldi police. A lot of them
Speaker 2: are Mexican American it's and the border patrol guy like
Speaker 2: it's it's the whole thing. Like if you go down
Speaker 2: to border communities, you'll see, Yeah, it's not that simple.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's always as like superficial and simple as
Speaker 3: it seems.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So in nineteen thirty, Harlan, aged sixteen, joins the
Speaker 2: National Rifle Association and again the NRA is rightfully again,
Speaker 2: I'm more pro gun than most people on the left
Speaker 2: tend to be, but the NRA is like, undoubtedly, for
Speaker 2: we'll be spending hours talking about this incredibly toxic. It's
Speaker 2: not at this point, right, right, there's nothing wrong with
Speaker 2: the NRA at this stage really, And in fact, the
Speaker 2: NRA has its roots on the correct side of the
Speaker 2: Civil War. There's these two Union generals who are like,
Speaker 2: because again Civil War one of the things early on
Speaker 2: the South is doing pretty well. And part of why
Speaker 2: they're doing pretty well is that like all the boys
Speaker 2: who like wind up fighting in the Confederacy's military, Like,
Speaker 2: they're country boys, right, They've grown up shooting and hunting.
Speaker 2: They're like and using guns to enforce white supremacy. They're
Speaker 2: good with firearms, whereas most of the northern boys who
Speaker 2: get drafted are like city kids, and many of them
Speaker 2: had never had any chance to use firearms, so they're
Speaker 2: like they suck with them, right, And these two Union
Speaker 2: generals are like, boy, our soldiers are really bad at shooting,
Speaker 2: and it takes a long time to train them up.
Speaker 2: Maybe if we should get ready for the next war
Speaker 2: by having an organization where boys who grow up in
Speaker 2: urban areas can like go in and learn how to shoot,
Speaker 2: you know, Like that seems like a good thing to encourage.
Speaker 2: So that's in the NRA up until the early twentieth century,
Speaker 2: is like a sportsman's association. You're doing it for target shooting,
Speaker 2: you're doing it for hunting. Now, it is worth noting that,
Speaker 2: like from the beginning, and this was not seen as
Speaker 2: problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect
Speaker 2: to it as well. It's not like a military organization,
Speaker 2: but part of the purpose of the NRA is to
Speaker 2: prepare people to be part of the military if necessary.
Speaker 2: And this is also the military is a really different
Speaker 2: thing in this period. You know, we have a big
Speaker 2: standing army during the Civil War, but we hadn't before
Speaker 2: and we don't quickly afterwards. Right, Like this is again,
Speaker 2: when World War one happens, they have to like make
Speaker 2: an army. When World War II happens, they have to
Speaker 2: like make an army in a way that like it
Speaker 2: had not hugely existed prior to this. So there's this
Speaker 2: understanding that like, if there's an emergency, we're going to
Speaker 2: need to activate all of these civilians and they need
Speaker 2: to be ready to like fight and whatnot. So, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the US Defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons
Speaker 2: and other equipment to the NRA, which would sell them
Speaker 2: to members quite cheaply. This used to be able to
Speaker 2: get like World War two guns like Garrens for really
Speaker 2: cheap from the NRA. It was a bunch of stuff
Speaker 2: they did like that. So in February nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 2: the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of
Speaker 2: their house. Right now, they have no idea who does this?
Speaker 2: The origin story of so many races go on. Oh boy, Matt,
Speaker 2: so again. As far as I know, it was never
Speaker 2: figured out who had done this. But a couple of
Speaker 2: weeks after their car is stolen, on March third, nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty one, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harlan's
Speaker 2: mother sees three Hispanic boys quote unquote loitering out in
Speaker 2: front of the house. Now, she says, loitering. We have
Speaker 2: no idea. They may have just been like walking around
Speaker 2: or what like. Even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this.
Speaker 2: But like racist white lady sees people who are not
Speaker 2: white vaguely close to her house, and she decides that, like,
Speaker 2: these boys must have been who stole my car?
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, The earliest recorded incident of Karen. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: So Karen Carter calls the cops.
Speaker 2: Karen Carter, Well, you can't really call. It's nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 2: Some people do have phones, I don't know if they do.
Speaker 2: It's not easy to call. It's not as easy to
Speaker 2: call the cops.
Speaker 3: They send a pigeon or whatever. Those guys did that.
Speaker 2: No, her son winds up taking this into his own hands.
Speaker 3: Ah, yes, that's right.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from a write up in Timeline. Here.
Speaker 2: The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn't be
Speaker 2: home for hours. The son picked up his shotgun and
Speaker 2: walked out the door. It didn't take him long to
Speaker 2: find the boys, who were between the ages of fifteen
Speaker 2: and twelve, at a swimming hole nearby. He demanded they
Speaker 2: come home with him. When they asked why, he wouldn't say,
Speaker 2: fifteen year old Ramon Casiano responded, hell, no, we won't
Speaker 2: go to your house, and you can't make us. Carter
Speaker 2: and Casiano started swearing at each other. Casiano pulled out
Speaker 2: a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter
Speaker 2: lifted his shotgun to Ramone's chest. According to testimony from
Speaker 2: that time, Ramon told him not to do it and
Speaker 2: pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back
Speaker 2: and laughed. Annoyed by Ramone's lack of fear, Carter asked
Speaker 2: if he thought he wasn't going to shoot then he did.
Speaker 2: Casiano lay dying on the ground with a two inch
Speaker 2: shotgun wound in his chest. Jesus, So that sounds familiar, right,
Speaker 2: There's shades of Rittenhouse, There's shades of Zimmerman, you know,
Speaker 2: like this is again not obviously, I'm sure like if
Speaker 2: we had been around at the time and paying attention
Speaker 2: to the news, we'd say, oh, there's shades of like
Speaker 2: this thing that happened like nineteen twenty and this thing
Speaker 2: right which happened the most recent incidents. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: this is a very familiar incident, right, and you can
Speaker 2: imagine if this happened today, it would be a massive
Speaker 2: culture wars. Well, he had a knife, what was you
Speaker 2: kid supposed he was just defending his family, you know,
Speaker 2: yeaha YadA YadA. So it's worth noting talking about why
Speaker 2: Harlan felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which
Speaker 2: there are some like obviously it's not entirely legal to
Speaker 2: carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff,
Speaker 2: but this is you're not supposed to like walk out
Speaker 2: to try and solve the robbery of your car with
Speaker 2: a twelve gage shotgun, Like that's not explicitly legal. But
Speaker 2: there's a long history of vigilante violence by white people,
Speaker 2: and so whether or not this actually is legal is
Speaker 2: gonna come down heavily on the local courts, right and
Speaker 2: so the fact because this is happening in Laredo, if
Speaker 2: this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city
Speaker 2: of Hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue.
Speaker 2: But because it's happening in Laredo, this is going to
Speaker 2: be a problem for Harlan. Did you called Dallas the
Speaker 2: City of hate? That's literally it's nickname. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 2: next name of Dallas, Texas is the city we killed JFK. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean good point bully shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the city of brotherly hate.
Speaker 2: That's wow, I mean not anymore, but like that is
Speaker 2: that is the nickname of Dallas, Texas. Like, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: So because this happens in Laredo, the law is not
Speaker 2: as on his side as you might expect if it
Speaker 2: had happened in some other parts of Texas. Harlan Carter
Speaker 2: is arrested, he has tried, and he is convicted of murder.
Speaker 2: He's sentenced to three years in prison. Again, you can say,
Speaker 2: like he should have been sentenced to more. I I'm
Speaker 2: mixed because he was a child, right, Like this is bad,
Speaker 2: but also like I think you have to if you
Speaker 2: believe children are not culpable in the way that adult.
Speaker 2: But anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years.
Speaker 2: His family appeals the judgment and they complain for about
Speaker 2: number of things. They say the judge is related to
Speaker 2: the prosecutor, that that self defense had not been adequately
Speaker 2: explained to the jury, that one of the witnesses was
Speaker 2: like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy. A bunch of
Speaker 2: racist shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well the judge failed to consider that the victim
Speaker 3: was no angel.
Speaker 2: Like that's based Yeah, although they focus more on like
Speaker 2: the the kid who watched his friend get his brother
Speaker 2: or whatever get murdered was no angels. Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: a angel, so eventually legally allowed to kill no angels.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right in the Bible. That's right. That's
Speaker 2: why anytime I see a bunch of floating eyes, I
Speaker 2: just start shooting.
Speaker 4: M M.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a biblical angel joke. Was so. Eventually,
Speaker 2: a judge with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agrees that, like,
Speaker 2: the case was bad and he overturns Harlan Carter's conviction
Speaker 2: on these grounds. And because quote, several of the material
Speaker 2: witnesses for the state have been discredited having been convicted
Speaker 2: of infamous crimes, it does not seem accurate that they
Speaker 2: were convicted of infamous crimes. But you know, it's also
Speaker 2: worth noting that, like Harlan's dad helped run law enforcement
Speaker 2: in Laredo, it's impossible that some of the people who
Speaker 2: had witnessed the shooting were like targeted by the police
Speaker 2: to provide plausible deniability for his kid, and if not likely,
Speaker 2: So Harlan gets led out of prison, his conviction is overturned,
Speaker 2: and he proceeds with life now as a young adult.
Speaker 2: As a free man, he enrolls in the University of Texas,
Speaker 2: but he changes his name. So his original name had
Speaker 2: been Harlan h A R L A N, and he
Speaker 2: swaps out the A for an O. And he does
Speaker 2: this basically under the understanding that like, well, this will
Speaker 2: make it hard. If people go looking for Harlan Carter
Speaker 2: is criminal record, they won't find anything.
Speaker 3: Wait, so he changed it to Horrorlan or.
Speaker 2: Harlan Harlow h R L O N as opposed to
Speaker 2: h R L A N right, and again it's it's
Speaker 2: a marker of like how different the time is. Like
Speaker 2: this works perfectly for him for decades. Like people they
Speaker 2: swapped today with it O no another we can do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was like, well, the search engine doesn't do
Speaker 3: other letters, so fuck it.
Speaker 2: It was so easy to get away with crimes back
Speaker 2: in the thirties. My god, was it easy.
Speaker 1: Speaking of getting away with crimes, if.
Speaker 2: You walked fast, like if you could walk pretty fast,
Speaker 2: you could get away with a crime.
Speaker 3: Oh man, those are the days.
Speaker 2: Those were the days. Let's bring back.
Speaker 1: Robert who else gets away with crimes?
Speaker 2: The corporation when they hired those mercenaries to gun down
Speaker 2: union organizers in Latin America.
Speaker 1: That was a lob and you took it. I'm very
Speaker 1: proud of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, drink ah, we're back and I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: have a nice refreshing sip of.
Speaker 3: Oh it's a classic drink.
Speaker 2: You know that joy is like locking a bunch of
Speaker 2: nuns and HUGEN organizers in a church and lighting it
Speaker 2: on fire. God, that's good stuff. Yeah, me love it.
Speaker 2: So again, it's one of those things. If this had
Speaker 2: kind of been the end of Harlan Carter's story, I'd say, like, well,
Speaker 2: that was a fucked up thing that happened. But I
Speaker 2: guess I don't believe a sixteen year old should be
Speaker 2: locked in prison for their whole life. So but that's
Speaker 2: not the end of the story.
Speaker 3: It sucks that, Like there are cases where I'm like,
Speaker 3: it would be sick if he had.
Speaker 2: It's like with Kyle Rittenhouse. I don't think the right
Speaker 2: thing was to throw him in a hole for forever.
Speaker 2: Certainly the right thing is not to turn him into
Speaker 2: a celebrity and give them millions of dollars. That's right,
Speaker 2: maybe even worse. But like I think fundamentally you have
Speaker 2: to believe that, like, well, if a child does something,
Speaker 2: even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused
Speaker 2: on the possibility of rehabilitation because otherwise you don't actually
Speaker 2: believe that children are less responsible than adults.
Speaker 3: And anytime you like try to set up, anytime you
Speaker 3: you know, try to be more punitive. It always affects
Speaker 3: you know, brown people and people of color way more.
Speaker 2: And obviously, yeah, like Raymond Caseano suffers even more for
Speaker 2: you know whatever, however questionable you want to think his
Speaker 2: call to pull a knife might have been, although I
Speaker 2: again you could argue justified because the other kid had
Speaker 2: a fucking gun. Anyway, whatever, it's like, it's it's one
Speaker 2: of the problems with guns in America is how often
Speaker 2: angry teenage boys get a hold of them. And this
Speaker 2: is again quite an old story. Yeah, but regardless of
Speaker 2: like what you think of should be done when kids
Speaker 2: commit murder, Harland definitely committed murder. It's not self defense,
Speaker 2: and anyone who says otherwise is probably racist. But it's
Speaker 2: worth noting that even modern sources, and this is something,
Speaker 2: this is where things get really income. Even modern sources
Speaker 2: that are like very pro gun control, very anti Harlan Carter,
Speaker 2: who will attack Harlan for his work with the NRA,
Speaker 2: tend to tell the story of what happened with him
Speaker 2: in and Raymond Cassiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce
Speaker 2: Hardlan's claims of self defense. This is a very strange
Speaker 2: thing I've noticed in a couple of sources. I've read
Speaker 2: a lot of articles about this guy, and his actions
Speaker 2: can be framed in fascinating ways. I want to highlight,
Speaker 2: particularly a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler.
Speaker 2: And Gunfight, there's actually like five books titled Gunfight. I
Speaker 2: think one of them is like seemed to be slightly grifty.
Speaker 2: It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who like does
Speaker 2: an anti gun book because I think maybe that's where
Speaker 2: the money was. I don't know. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: go in to date because I haven't read it't I
Speaker 2: haven't read it. But like there's a bunch of books
Speaker 2: with this title. The good one, the one that you
Speaker 2: would actually be worth reading, is Winkler's Gunfight. He's a
Speaker 2: he's a UCLA professor, and Gunfight is a critical history
Speaker 2: of the battle over the Second Amendment in US politics
Speaker 2: that has a lot of really useful context, including some
Speaker 2: of what I went over about, like the early racism
Speaker 2: and gun control. It's a good and again very much NRA.
Speaker 2: But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter
Speaker 2: and Ramon Casiano, which I find very peculiar. Quote, Carter
Speaker 2: loved guns from childhood. He was an excellent shot and
Speaker 2: would go on to win two national shooting titles and
Speaker 2: set forty four national shooting records during his lifetimes. His
Speaker 2: most infamous shot, however, came at the age of seventeen,
Speaker 2: when in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun
Speaker 2: into the chest of a knife wielding Mexican teenager. Nope,
Speaker 2: not how much weird way to describe that. That's not
Speaker 2: what happened at all. That's such a weird way for
Speaker 2: and again, Winkler is like he's a professor of law
Speaker 2: at UCLA, Like he's all over the New York Times
Speaker 2: writing about this kind of stuff. It's like really weird
Speaker 2: that he describes it that way.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was just like, oh, man, I've done all
Speaker 3: this other research. I'm just not gonna I'm just gonna
Speaker 3: go with the autobiography that he wrote.
Speaker 4: This.
Speaker 2: It's just it's like calling Ramon Casiano a knife wielding
Speaker 2: Mexican teenager. It's such like an unsettling way to choose
Speaker 2: to fras.
Speaker 3: It was just like people forget that Cassiano was guilty.
Speaker 2: Because he had a knife. Yeah, jail, you're bringing a
Speaker 2: knife to a gunfight. It is. Yeah, yeah, it's again,
Speaker 2: the book is not at all right winger reactionary. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of good stuff in there. The fact that
Speaker 2: he describes Cassiano's murder in this way, though, makes me
Speaker 2: question some stuff that like, maybe I missed in vetting
Speaker 2: this thing because it's it's a really weird passage. Now,
Speaker 2: let's compare that to this write up by a right
Speaker 2: wing dude, Dave Koppel, from an article he wrote explicitly
Speaker 2: defending Harlan Carter's legacy. Now, in this article, he's critiquing
Speaker 2: a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that acts
Speaker 2: accurately noted quote. Fifty years ago, Carter shot and killed
Speaker 2: a fifteen year old boy and was convicted of murder.
Speaker 2: Arguing against this, Kopel writes, the letter admitted the fact
Speaker 2: that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang
Speaker 2: of intruders led by the boy, and that the boy
Speaker 2: was menacing Carter with a knife. Again, this is also
Speaker 2: not true. He was not defending his mother's ranch. They
Speaker 2: were swimming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're swimming and having a good time and being
Speaker 3: accused of doing her crime.
Speaker 2: That they did, I mean, did they do the crime,
Speaker 2: even though I don't think there's ever been any evidence
Speaker 2: that they did it. Kind Of, again, this is a
Speaker 2: little murky, but it kind of seems like what happened
Speaker 2: is their car was stolen. A couple of weeks later,
Speaker 2: she sees some Mexican kids walk past their house towards
Speaker 2: a swimming hole and six her son on them. Right,
Speaker 2: that kind of seems like what happened. That seems And
Speaker 2: it's it's weird because Winkler and Koppel could not be
Speaker 2: more apart ideologically, but their description of this murder is
Speaker 2: very similar in way, Like I just it's I don't
Speaker 2: want to harp too much on this, but it's like
Speaker 2: really weird to me that that happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you have any like inkling as to why
Speaker 3: that may be?
Speaker 2: Or is there just a most people don't dwell too
Speaker 2: much on it. It took me a while actually to
Speaker 2: find good specific details about what happened that day, mm hmm.
Speaker 2: And I think most people take the attitude that just like,
Speaker 2: h well, he said he was defending his mom, and
Speaker 2: like that that's the I don't know. I I think
Speaker 2: in part, you know, Winkler's covering a lot of ground, right,
Speaker 2: because his book is a whole is not it's not
Speaker 2: focused on Carter. It's a whole history of like kind
Speaker 2: of the how the Second Amendment has been interpreted and
Speaker 2: ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries. So
Speaker 2: he does have a lot of ground to cover. It's
Speaker 2: just very and I guess that one of the things
Speaker 2: he did was just kind of brush over what happened there.
Speaker 2: It's right, Yeah, like the way I would do it, right,
Speaker 2: because it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history
Speaker 2: to not go into detail. But I would have just
Speaker 2: said something like he confronted you know, another teenager over
Speaker 2: like you know, something his mother said and like or
Speaker 2: he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicious
Speaker 2: even that would be better, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also this is you know, you do a podcast.
Speaker 3: This guy's a UCLA professor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's again. I don't want to like shit
Speaker 2: him too much because it's like, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: good stuff of the book. It's it's just that part.
Speaker 2: I don't get it. I don't get why you would
Speaker 2: sprite about it though.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Harlan Carter commits murder, does two years in prison,
Speaker 2: goes to college, and then he decides to follow in
Speaker 2: his father's footsteps and join the Border Patrol. He becomes
Speaker 2: an agent in nineteen thirty six, three years after leaving prison.
Speaker 2: Carter's rise was rapid, if not meteoric, so he joins
Speaker 2: in thirty six, having been in prison two years earlier.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty, he's running the entire Border Patrol. Wow.
Speaker 2: Now again, Border Patrol's a lot smaller back then, it's
Speaker 2: a lot newer. It's easier to become head of the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol.
Speaker 3: And also his murder was definitely something on his resume,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, Like.
Speaker 2: I probably unlike the secret. I don't think he put
Speaker 2: it on his paper resume, but oh sure, certainly because
Speaker 2: he's known in Laredo. Is like, I'm sure the guy's
Speaker 2: giving him his first gigs, all know about it and
Speaker 2: think it's bad, right, right, Yeah, But he also he
Speaker 2: does keep it a sequt it publicly, right, Like, he
Speaker 2: doesn't rag about it in public. Again, when he's hanging
Speaker 2: out with his buddies. I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly,
Speaker 2: but it's not like a part of his public persona
Speaker 2: as a you know, once you're the head of the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know, right.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, It's not like today, in which that would
Speaker 3: be something he would be celebrated for and talk about
Speaker 3: on you know.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he would like the shotgun that he used
Speaker 2: to kill Raymond Casiano with an auctioned off for tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of dollars, and he would have used it
Speaker 2: to buy an F three fifty with.
Speaker 3: The Daily Wive him his own column.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he'd be making documentaries with Matt Walsh.
Speaker 2: Times were a lot more chill back then. Which is
Speaker 2: it is? It is when we were talking about the
Speaker 2: story of this guy who does like a racist murder
Speaker 2: as a teenage boy, and like wow, he really was
Speaker 2: less proud of it than he would be today, right exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's where we're at, where we're like, oh wow,
Speaker 3: he didn't make that like his whole brand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wild. So the Border Patrol had shifted at this
Speaker 2: point from being geared mainly towards policing the border to
Speaker 2: being a force for policing Mexican Americans inside the United
Speaker 2: States on the pretext of them being potentially undocumented migrants.
Speaker 2: As a result their work strayed further and further from
Speaker 2: the border and increasingly into American cities, factories, farms, and
Speaker 2: anywhere expected of harboring illegals. Some Border Patrol agents had
Speaker 2: difficulty with this, right, This was not a lot of
Speaker 2: the folks who had signed up earlier. This was not
Speaker 2: like the thing that they had signed up for. Specifically, Harlan, though,
Speaker 2: is hugely supportive of this change, and in fact, he
Speaker 2: wanted to expand the Border Patrol's perview even further and
Speaker 2: use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely. This
Speaker 2: was justified in his mind by the fact that a
Speaker 2: large number of undocumented migrants were living and working, or
Speaker 2: this was justified publicly, right. So, Harlan, there's like a
Speaker 2: racial motivation, but you can't use that, as we talked
Speaker 2: about earlier, right, like you have to hide when you're
Speaker 2: long racially motivated. So the justification is that a large
Speaker 2: number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches
Speaker 2: and other businesses in the border lands, often under nightmarish
Speaker 2: slave like conditions. Now, this is a real problem that's happened,
Speaker 2: right like as it is today, right, And yeah, there's
Speaker 2: this like suggestion of a new a thing called the
Speaker 2: Pressro program that will provide kind of like a legal
Speaker 2: way for these people to like work, but they'll have,
Speaker 2: you know, there will be more control over the conditions
Speaker 2: that they can work in, which obviously the people who
Speaker 2: would be hiring them don't like It's it's a whole thing.
Speaker 3: Uh, just so fucked fucked every which way.
Speaker 2: For from the perspective of Harlan Carter, though, this is
Speaker 2: primarily a humanitarian pretext for carrying out like a purging
Speaker 2: of Mexican Americans and from like the border lands, and
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from Migra again. Carter had convened
Speaker 2: a meeting to request the assistance of the US military
Speaker 2: and the National Guard to purge the nation of undocumented
Speaker 2: Mexican nationals and seal the US man Xico border. The
Speaker 2: Border Patrols proposal was titled Operation Cloudburst and consisted of
Speaker 2: three basic steps. First, an anti infiltration operation on or
Speaker 2: near the border would seal the border with the assistance
Speaker 2: of twenty one hundred and eighty military troops. In addition
Speaker 2: to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned
Speaker 2: to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic.
Speaker 2: Two metal picket barbed wire fences eight feet high and
Speaker 2: eight feet apart, with rolls of concertina wire in between,
Speaker 2: and one roll of concertina wire on top of the
Speaker 2: fence nearest Mexico built several miles along the border would
Speaker 2: form the fence, but previous experience had taught the Border
Speaker 2: patrol that fenced areas still needed additional security. Therefore, the
Speaker 2: concertina fence would be reinforced by officers in jeeps who
Speaker 2: will be directed to the scene of any attempted fence
Speaker 2: or canal crossing by observers in radio equipped towers. So
Speaker 2: this is the first modern this is the wall, right,
Speaker 2: This is the start of This is the beginning of that.
Speaker 2: Not that there hadn't been like fences and stuff in
Speaker 2: different areas before, then, this is the first time someone's like,
Speaker 2: we need to build a wall, and like a concerted
Speaker 2: vision of that and specifically a vision of using the
Speaker 2: of the wall as a system of violence in order
Speaker 2: to keep the borderlands white. Right, That's that's what he's
Speaker 2: doing here. And he invins that ship.
Speaker 3: You know, wow, Wow, he's like the Thomas Edison of
Speaker 3: making racist borders.
Speaker 2: That's right, yeah. Wow. Yeah, he's the He's the Elon
Speaker 2: Musk of border racism. Sure. Yes, So to continue that quote,
Speaker 2: race X, I wanted to do it. I wanted to
Speaker 2: do it. Yeah, sorry, good good, good work. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: I'm going to continue that quote. Second, a containment operation
Speaker 2: would maintain roadblocks on all major roads leading from the
Speaker 2: Southwest to the interior of the United States. These roadblocks
Speaker 2: would be used to inspect traffic, including railroad traffic, for
Speaker 2: the purpose of detecting illegal entrants, and to maintain safety
Speaker 2: patrols around the checkpoints. The roadblocks were planned for strategic
Speaker 2: locations that would prevent a leans from fleeing to the
Speaker 2: interior of the nation when the mopping up operations, the
Speaker 2: third phase began. The mopping up operations would be conducted
Speaker 2: in northern areas such as San Francisco, where the task
Speaker 2: forces would raid designated locations such as migrant camps or
Speaker 2: places of business. So San Francisco, I don't know if
Speaker 2: you've ever been, Matt, Yeah, not super close to the border.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, well I guess close to
Speaker 2: like a sea border, right, No, no, we're building towards
Speaker 2: but yeah, exactly, I mean those are the other aliens
Speaker 2: that they also want to put a fence around, and
Speaker 2: I'll watch out for all those turtles and fucking you know,
Speaker 2: don't worry, we'll get rid of those in a couple
Speaker 2: of decades.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, Just put a few more of those soda
Speaker 3: you know, fucking soda rings in the water. But yeah, no,
Speaker 3: not close to the border. I lived in San Francisco,
Speaker 3: and I'll tell you it was a trek to get
Speaker 3: to north exactly.
Speaker 2: So the primary downside to his plan, right, this is
Speaker 2: a pretty good idea if you're a white supremacist, right
Speaker 2: solid plan. The only only problem with it is that
Speaker 2: it is wildly unconstitutional. So there's this thing, right, this
Speaker 2: law that that kind of gets in the way of this.
Speaker 2: So right, at this point in time, nowadays, the Border Patrol,
Speaker 2: like you see those guys fucking walking around and they
Speaker 2: look like soldiers, right, They've got their plate carriers and
Speaker 2: their their ar fifteens and all their fucking cool tactical gear.
Speaker 2: At this point, the Border Patrol is like slightly better
Speaker 2: armed than a modern boy scout troop, you know, Like
Speaker 2: they're not they're not They're not packing that much heat
Speaker 2: compared to what they're going to be packing.
Speaker 3: And they have a lot of merit badges.
Speaker 2: They have a lot of merit badges in racism, but
Speaker 2: there's not a ton of them, right, so they're not
Speaker 2: They can't do this without the US military, and in fact,
Speaker 2: the military is going to wind up being a significant
Speaker 2: portion of the effort if they try to do this.
Speaker 2: But here's the problem. There's this stupid, fucking bullshit ass
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy eight law called posse coomatatas right, and that
Speaker 2: means you can't use the military to enforce domestic laws
Speaker 2: without congress is approval. Oh damn yeah, I know, I know,
Speaker 2: we all hate posse Coomatatas. Yeah, I for one think
Speaker 2: the military should enforce all of the laws, yes, particularly
Speaker 2: j walking exactly.
Speaker 3: They're the best at it. You don't want to you
Speaker 3: don't want a bunch of you know, boy scout border
Speaker 3: patrols getting a merit badge for walking Mexican old lady
Speaker 3: across the board.
Speaker 2: Should have that roans making sure watching for people to
Speaker 2: cross the street illegally, and we should have MLRS rocket
Speaker 2: systems to just barred the area if they cross the street,
Speaker 2: not at a crosswalk.
Speaker 3: Exactly, dude, we want more robocops and we want them absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, reinstate the draft and use it to stop
Speaker 2: jaywalking and littering.
Speaker 3: Yeah, someone you know, absolutely, someone like cuts you off,
Speaker 3: someone speeding Agent Orange immediately.
Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely. So this this fucking law posse commatatus, really
Speaker 2: really grinds Harlan's gears. So obviously I should also note
Speaker 2: here that like the fact that it's the military's not
Speaker 2: supposed to be used to enforce the law doesn't mean
Speaker 2: it isn't right if he casually googled the Watts riots.
Speaker 2: You know, the government has a way of finding out
Speaker 2: figure making it being able to use soldiers to do
Speaker 2: cop shit when it needs to. But in this case,
Speaker 2: the government wasn't willing to like push things that far right.
Speaker 2: And the general who's like, job it is to like
Speaker 2: basically the general who's liaising with Carter is this guy
Speaker 2: named Swing who really wants to do this, like he's
Speaker 2: a racist too, but he's like, hey, we can't make
Speaker 2: this work legally right now, but we could do it
Speaker 2: if the President issued a proclamation like it's not impossible
Speaker 2: to do, but like it's you'd have to get Eisenhower
Speaker 2: on board. So Harlan Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's
Speaker 2: people and he tries desperately to get approval, but Eisenhower
Speaker 2: isn't quite willing to deploy troops. Now. He again not
Speaker 2: to give Ike any credit. He agrees with Harlan's basic goals.
Speaker 2: He just this, like using the army in this way
Speaker 2: is a little too far for him. But again he's
Speaker 2: not against this. So in May of nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be Commissioner of the
Speaker 2: Immigration and Naturalization Service. Rights we don't have IS anymore
Speaker 2: now we've got whatever, But these guys are in So
Speaker 2: he's basically now he's Carter's boss. Essentially. This like general
Speaker 2: and Swing had a long history of commanding troops in
Speaker 2: battle from Mexico to Korea. Obviously you could see the
Speaker 2: fact that now a general is in charge of IS
Speaker 2: is like the start of the militarization of the border patrol.
Speaker 2: And Swing is a bastard in his own own right.
Speaker 2: But this is really happening in part because of like
Speaker 2: what Carter is pushing to turn the border patrol into right,
Speaker 2: this is this is not just the start of the
Speaker 2: militarization of the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is going
Speaker 2: to become the first large police agency to militarize.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This happens decades before. You know, we talked about the
Speaker 2: Watts riots, which happened like a decade or so from now,
Speaker 2: and then the La Right which were a big you know,
Speaker 2: decades later, which were a big pusher. This happens way
Speaker 2: before all of it. This is nineteen fifty four. So
Speaker 2: this is like, in a lot of ways, the beginning
Speaker 2: of police militarization happens because Harlan Carter and General Joseph
Speaker 2: Swing want to cleanse the border lands of Mexican Americans.
Speaker 2: Quote as promised. One month after joining i INS, Swing
Speaker 2: announced that he would lead the US Border Patrol in
Speaker 2: an intensive, innovative, and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to
Speaker 2: end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the US
Speaker 2: Mexico border. No one questioned how in four short weeks
Speaker 2: he had prepared the officers of the Border Patrol for
Speaker 2: such a massive campaign.
Speaker 3: I mean, at this point, too, what was even the
Speaker 3: the like.
Speaker 2: What were the migration numbers like? Was it even that?
Speaker 3: I mean, certainly it's not as much as it was now,
Speaker 3: But I'm thinking about like what nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties
Speaker 3: Mexico was, what they had, you know, social.
Speaker 2: The civil wars not that long ended.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the PRIs and power. It's yeah, isn't it fairly
Speaker 3: stable at this point? I feel like yeah. So it's
Speaker 3: like it's like what they were doing this pretense of like, oh,
Speaker 3: we got to stop the illegals. I mean, we're not
Speaker 3: even talking about like you know, uh, we're not talking
Speaker 3: about modern uh Latin American immigration that we have today,
Speaker 3: which is used as a pretext for all sorts of
Speaker 3: racist laws against Latin Americans here.
Speaker 2: Legally we're talking about there's a lot like, yeah, labor
Speaker 2: stuff that's taught, and again they have to like do
Speaker 2: moral panic and stuff about the treatment of migrants. But like,
Speaker 2: this is all very messy because like some of the
Speaker 2: biggest people opposing the government doing this crackdown are these
Speaker 2: different ranchers and other employers who are like wanting emploit,
Speaker 2: to exploit people's Like, it's not there's a lot that's
Speaker 2: that's going on overall in this issue. But when it
Speaker 2: comes to Harlan Carter, it's pretty simple, right, He's he's
Speaker 2: a racist. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's trying to do a racial purge under the
Speaker 3: pretext of like, oh man, you know they're not paying
Speaker 3: fair wages. Like he gives this ship.
Speaker 2: And it's you know, he's he's also like starting the
Speaker 2: process of justifying, figuring out ways to justify uh this,
Speaker 2: that and that are like palatable to large chunks of Americans.
Speaker 2: And yeah that's uh, that's what's happening in this period
Speaker 2: of time. And you know what else is happening right now? Man,
Speaker 2: what I'm gonna ask you for your pluggables?
Speaker 3: Oh hell yeah, so my pluggables are. I just finished
Speaker 3: the entire series The Sopranos. Pot Yourself a Gun is
Speaker 3: a podcast that I do with Vince Vancini, and we
Speaker 3: just did our very last episode. We watched all of it.
Speaker 3: We watched all the Sopranos. Uh, and uh, you can
Speaker 3: listen to the series finance wherever you get your podcasts,
Speaker 3: So check that out and also follow me on Instagram
Speaker 3: because uh, you know, I feel like that's where all
Speaker 3: the like cool kids hang out.
Speaker 2: So yeah, you know, hit me up, hit me.
Speaker 3: Up there, and also be be excited because me and
Speaker 3: Vince our next show we're going to be talking about
Speaker 3: the Wire. That's right, twenty years after the wires come out,
Speaker 3: finally two white men will break down the wire because.
Speaker 2: Finally someone's got to do it. I mean, that is
Speaker 2: the right group to break down the wire. Season two.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure, for sure, you got to make sure
Speaker 2: at least one of you is a poll.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we're gonna get some We got some holes
Speaker 3: who are going to come on. We got a bunch
Speaker 3: of Greek Baltimore friends who are gonna come on. It's
Speaker 3: gonna be great. But uh yeah, look look look for that.
Speaker 1: What do you call it?
Speaker 3: Probably when you pod through the Garden? Uh you know, which,
Speaker 3: you know kind of continues our tradition of having a
Speaker 3: really bad title for a TV rewatch podcast. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: check it out whenever that comes out. But for now,
Speaker 3: listen to pod yourself a gun. You can go back
Speaker 3: listen to the whole thing telling to.
Speaker 1: Know who your favorite character on the Wire was.
Speaker 3: I mean I relate the most to Bubbles because I
Speaker 3: used to love Heroin. But other than that, Ship probably
Speaker 3: Clay Davis. Clay Davis is cool. He's he's the state senator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who says ye?
Speaker 3: Who says?
Speaker 2: Ship?
Speaker 3: A lot. She she You know, for a show that
Speaker 3: is like lift Lifted up as one of the greatest
Speaker 3: TV shows of all time, there sure certainly are a
Speaker 3: lot of catchphrases. It's a weirdly catchphrase heavy show for
Speaker 3: something that is it is incredibly serious.
Speaker 2: What then, did I do? You got? You know?
Speaker 3: You got a proposition? Joe Is I got a proposition
Speaker 3: for It's like, this is a serious show, but they
Speaker 3: love catchphrases. Anyways, I'm excited. Sounds awesome me too.
Speaker 1: Boom, I guess.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wire. The podcast created the hit TV
Speaker 2: show The Wire Before first our idea was stolen by
Speaker 2: that hack David Simon.
Speaker 3: We went to HBO in nineteen ninety eight and you said,
Speaker 3: have you ever considered making a show about wires?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we said, you know who understands Baltimore Me
Speaker 2: and Matt Leed. That's right exactly, That's right, baby.
Speaker 3: We understand Baltimore more than anyone understands Baltimore.
Speaker 2: I stopped there once for gasoline on a road trip,
Speaker 2: so yeah, I get it, I get it. I was
Speaker 2: I played for the Baltimore Orioles. That's a lot of
Speaker 2: people are talking about that right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and you know, yeah, I feel I feel
Speaker 3: like I mean, it was in Los Angeles, that's right,
Speaker 3: and I was in fifth grade, but I was an
Speaker 3: oriole so.
Speaker 2: And you know, we famously Season two was based on
Speaker 2: the fact that I once bought a sandwich from a
Speaker 2: Polish man. That's right, That's right. I said, what if
Speaker 2: this was a whole show, But if this was a
Speaker 2: whole season about longshoreman?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, just like longshoreman, like Steve Doors and like,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: That's a word that doesn't get used enough. I love
Speaker 2: the word Steve Adore. It is ancredible job title.
Speaker 3: It's the coolest job title. I don't know, like what
Speaker 3: about moving like it.
Speaker 2: Makes no sense to me based on what the job is.
Speaker 3: Why I imagine there was just like the first guy
Speaker 3: to ever do that was named Steve.
Speaker 2: Steve, and he was just so good at it that
Speaker 2: they were like everybody's we're all Steve Now, yeah, Steve Adoors,
Speaker 2: You're like, is it moving cratesving? Shipping crates? Like Steve did?
Speaker 2: Oh man, I want that job. This was a meandering
Speaker 2: way of introducing the podcast Behind the Bastards. Matt Leeb
Speaker 2: guest also host of a podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah Yeah, Pod Yourself a Gun, which is a Sopranos podcast,
Speaker 3: and then soon to be a Wire podcast coming out
Speaker 3: shortly so, which is why cited for that.
Speaker 2: We were talking about the Wire.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a good show.
Speaker 2: Also, soon to be the host of a baby.
Speaker 3: I know, I'm having a baby dude.
Speaker 2: Will subsequently launch a podcast called the Goo Goo Gay.
Speaker 3: I can't wait to do a Barney Rewatch podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 3: with my little baby. It's like analyzing, like, you know,
Speaker 3: the role of American imperialism in The Happy Purple Dinosaur.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there was that whole season of Barney
Speaker 2: that took place in a contra camp in Nicaragua. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that was great. Yeah, you have to give it to them.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, Barney was like teaching, you know, classes
Speaker 3: over at the School for the Americas.
Speaker 2: Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that he worked
Speaker 2: hand in glove with Oliver North ex sell those missiles
Speaker 2: to Iran exactly because the only person the Shaw trusted
Speaker 2: or the shot totally trusted exactly Dinosaur. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: he did sell a lot of craft, but that was
Speaker 2: that was completely unrelated. We should probably talk about where,
Speaker 2: you know, when we last left off, We were about to.
Speaker 2: We were talking about Operation Cloudburst, this attempt by Harlan
Speaker 2: Carter and the Border Patrol in the Sky General Swing
Speaker 2: to cleanse the border area. We should probably gi a
Speaker 2: little bit more background about what's happening short order in
Speaker 2: this period. So this is kind of again I think
Speaker 2: Harlan's primary motivation is racial, but there's other stuff happening.
Speaker 2: So in the early nineteen forties, the US government had
Speaker 2: created this thing called the Brasero program, which is like
Speaker 2: a guest worker visa program that would let Mexican farm
Speaker 2: workers enter the country legally temporarily to work for American farmers.
Speaker 2: This get started during World War Two because like, we
Speaker 2: don't have any we don't have any dudes left in
Speaker 2: the country, right, we send them all over there, you know,
Speaker 2: like we need some more dudes.
Speaker 3: The shortage of dudes at this point.
Speaker 2: But it also one of the reasons why it's popular
Speaker 2: even with people who like are pretty racist, is that
Speaker 2: it it by providing kind of a legal, regulated way
Speaker 2: for them to work here, it also provides a legally
Speaker 2: regulated way to get them out of here. They can't
Speaker 2: become residents, right. The Bressio program does not these people
Speaker 2: are supposed to leave, but in fact, part of the
Speaker 2: deal is that like ten percent of the migrants wages
Speaker 2: are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an
Speaker 2: account that are given to them when they come back
Speaker 2: to Mexico. Right. So that's part of why this is popular,
Speaker 2: is that it allows them to do the work that
Speaker 2: the country can't function without, but it also ensures that
Speaker 2: they don't stay right. That's why this's just such a
Speaker 2: big deal for a lot of folks. So it's actually
Speaker 2: very popular. And one of the things about it is
Speaker 2: it doesn't limit the number of workers, because why would
Speaker 2: you write because they're not anyway. Millions and millions of
Speaker 2: Mexican workers use the Bresso program over the years, and
Speaker 2: from the perspective of the US government, it works pretty
Speaker 2: well for a while, and it certainly keeps workers in farms,
Speaker 2: and so by like the early nineteen fifties, there's like
Speaker 2: two million of these workers, or there's like five million
Speaker 2: people have worked in through the Bressero program. But also
Speaker 2: like unauthorized migrants continue to cross into the border, and
Speaker 2: by the early nineteen fifties, there's like two million of
Speaker 2: these people, and part of one of the things like
Speaker 2: that happens in this period is that there's suddenly like
Speaker 2: a big surge of folks coming and unauthorized in the
Speaker 2: early nineteen fifties. And this is part of what inspires
Speaker 2: Operation Cloudburst, is that like border patrol has never had
Speaker 2: to deal with like these kind of numbers of people
Speaker 2: crossing post war, and they're not really capable of handling it.
Speaker 2: So by the early nineteen fifties, the number of like
Speaker 2: voluntary departures had raised in nineteen forty six, like one
Speaker 2: hundred and one thousand undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United
Speaker 2: States in nineteen fifty two, more than seven hundred thousand do.
Speaker 2: And you can, like these numbers are just kind of
Speaker 2: useful in seeing like how many folks are coming in sure,
Speaker 2: so this a lot of people are not wild about
Speaker 2: this because again, you know, racism and such. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: Joseph Swing part of his motivation here is that, like
Speaker 2: he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers
Speaker 2: to cooperate so that they can like increase the number
Speaker 2: of folks who are working there under the Brasero program
Speaker 2: and shrink the unauthorized workers. And so his justification for
Speaker 2: like participating in some of the stuff that that Harlan
Speaker 2: Carter is building is that he wants to cut down
Speaker 2: the supply of unauthorized workers in order to get more
Speaker 2: of these employers on board with the Brassero program. So again,
Speaker 2: a lot of there are a lot of like kind
Speaker 2: of wonky aspects to what's happening with migration here that
Speaker 2: you can as always justify as like not based in racism,
Speaker 2: is based in like, well, there's a lot of these
Speaker 2: undocumented people coming over and it's like, great, the problem
Speaker 2: for the border control and the conditions they're working under
Speaker 2: are like really bad, and we want to reform this
Speaker 2: program so that you know, everyone is documented and legal
Speaker 2: and like we're not trying to stop them from coming over.
Speaker 2: But also one of the things you're trying to do
Speaker 2: by expanding this program is making sure that they don't
Speaker 2: stay right. Yeah, And I guess again, you can look
Speaker 2: at what's happening with the Bracero program in a couple
Speaker 2: of different ways. But if you really want to know
Speaker 2: what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and
Speaker 2: Swing eventually in act, the main thing you need to
Speaker 2: know is what they call it, and this is Harlan
Speaker 2: Carter's name for this is Operation wet Back. That is
Speaker 2: the official name of this immigration purge that they're going
Speaker 2: to do. And again, did they invent the term or
Speaker 2: was no? It existed for a while? Okay, so they
Speaker 2: did just explicitly name it after a slur, yes, yes, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's exactly it. And obviously, like again for folks who
Speaker 2: maybe are not aware of this, I know we have
Speaker 2: a lot of like European lists, Canadian listeners who may
Speaker 2: not have heard this, Like weep back is a racial
Speaker 2: slur for Mexican immigrants to the United States. It takes
Speaker 2: its name from when people would cross illegally. They would
Speaker 2: do so through the Rio Grande often and like so
Speaker 2: you you know, you get wet when you do that, right,
Speaker 2: and so like that's the that's the origin of the slur, right.
Speaker 3: The part I don't I don't know why they specify.
Speaker 2: I don't know why they specify, but this happens. There's
Speaker 2: like a history of this. Like an old anti Italian
Speaker 2: racial slur is WOP, which means without papers. I don't
Speaker 2: think it was entirely just for Italians, but like, you know,
Speaker 2: this is like the late eighteen hundreds, I think, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: so yeah, and Carter again, so Swing Swing is the
Speaker 2: kind of guy who can sit down and explain to you, like, well,
Speaker 2: this is where the presserra program is broken down, and
Speaker 2: like these are the problems that we're having, and these
Speaker 2: are the different violations that we're seeing, and like we
Speaker 2: need to get these, you know, employers on board with
Speaker 2: this program to reform the system, and the only way
Speaker 2: to do that is to cut down on the like
Speaker 2: so he can get very wonky with it in a
Speaker 2: way that doesn't sound racist, whereas Harlans like, yeah, operation
Speaker 2: wet Back, Let's get out of here. And Carter is
Speaker 2: not great. It's like he says, he just kind of
Speaker 2: says the loud part loud. In interviews with the press,
Speaker 2: he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens
Speaker 2: in history. He tells the Los Angeles Times that he
Speaker 2: intends to deploy quote an army of border patrol officers
Speaker 2: complete with jeeps, trucks and seven aircraft in order to
Speaker 2: declare quote all out war to hurl Mexican wetbacks into Mexico.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: So he's not added a subtle man, he added yeehaw
Speaker 3: after every sentence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to imagine he's shooting his six guns
Speaker 2: into the air as he gives these speeches to the press.
Speaker 3: He's in the middle of burning across as has he
Speaker 3: lit a cross on fire on someone's lawn.
Speaker 2: Statement to the La Times. So what followed was close
Speaker 2: to again, Operation Wetback is kind of he tried. It's
Speaker 2: a lot of what he had tried to do with
Speaker 2: Operation Cloudburst, only just toned down a little bit so
Speaker 2: that they could get the federal government on board. Obviously,
Speaker 2: this is follows like a massive hiring campaign of border
Speaker 2: patrolmen and they take thousands of border patrol agents and
Speaker 2: they separate them into mobile task groups and they set
Speaker 2: up mobile immigration systems to block roads. So they basically
Speaker 2: doing like this. They've already put this, like started putting
Speaker 2: these fences up, but they do like kind of a
Speaker 2: you could call it a kind of like racist defense,
Speaker 2: like defensive white supremacy in depth, where they're setting up
Speaker 2: blockades deeper into the country and they're also carrying out
Speaker 2: raids on factories and restaurants and just through whatever mean
Speaker 2: they can, arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican migrants
Speaker 2: and I'm going to quot from Migre again. To hold
Speaker 2: the detainees, the officers turned to public spaces into temporary
Speaker 2: detention facilities. For example, in Los Angeles, the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: transformed Alesian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary
Speaker 2: holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals were processed for deportation.
Speaker 2: And countless fields and along many country roads, border Patrol
Speaker 2: officers set up mobile immigration stations to process us UNS
Speaker 2: sanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation. They used trucks on
Speaker 2: loan from the Armed Services to transport the apprehended immigrants
Speaker 2: from California to No Gals, Arizona for deportation to Mexico.
Speaker 2: To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for
Speaker 2: forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise Mexicano communities,
Speaker 2: leisure spots and migrant camps, ranches, farms, and parks. They
Speaker 2: also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ
Speaker 2: undocumented Mexican immigrants. Between June seventeenth and June twenty sixth,
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty four, twenty eight hundred and twenty seven of
Speaker 2: the four thousand four hundred and three migrants apprehended by
Speaker 2: the task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry.
Speaker 2: After border patrol raids during the summer of nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: three Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of
Speaker 2: workers and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, border patrol
Speaker 2: officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business,
Speaker 2: which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen help waiters, etc.
Speaker 2: Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known establishments such
Speaker 2: as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills, Hood Hoel, Hollywood, Roosevelt Hotel,
Speaker 2: Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times,
Speaker 2: border patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants
Speaker 2: when migrants attempted to escape by running through the servant area.
Speaker 2: Everywhere they went, the officers were chased and photographed by
Speaker 2: journalists who had come to witness what General Swing had
Speaker 2: promised would be a spectacular show of US immigration law enforcement.
Speaker 2: Swing pledged that the Border Patrol would deport or otherwise
Speaker 2: purge the one million undocumented Mexican nationals estimated to be
Speaker 2: living in the United States at the time. Oh, that
Speaker 2: sounds like a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: Just yeah, they're just going buck wild with journalists in
Speaker 3: the back, like this is great footage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's interesting because a huge number of these
Speaker 2: guys are immediately let back into the country. Like a
Speaker 2: lot of times, what they're doing is they're pushing them
Speaker 2: across the border and then making them recross under like
Speaker 2: the Brassero program. So again they can be because they
Speaker 2: need the labor, right, they don't want the brickyard shutdown.
Speaker 2: They don't want these places to go to business. They
Speaker 2: just don't want these people to be able to actually
Speaker 2: build a life in the United States, right, they want
Speaker 2: to guarantee that they go back. So that's like a
Speaker 2: huge chunk of what's of what's happening here, Like it's
Speaker 2: it's basically taking it's taking the natural movement of people
Speaker 2: across an area where like their ancestors and relatives had
Speaker 2: been moving freely for centuries, and it's stopping that, stopping
Speaker 2: like the ability of populations to move and build lives
Speaker 2: and turning them entirely into economic units. Right. Yes, you're
Speaker 2: not a member of the community, you're your labor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're an entirely different class of citizen,
Speaker 3: which is non citizen, which means.
Speaker 2: Uh, you have your rights, Yeah, you have no rights.
Speaker 3: You're you're not entitled to any of the human rights
Speaker 3: that we give to our citizens. Super super normal and
Speaker 3: definitely a natural state of things, certainly.
Speaker 2: Not definitely the way things are supposed to.
Speaker 3: Go, exactly, not an invention of humans at all.
Speaker 2: No. So at the same time as they're doing and
Speaker 2: obviously the media is a big part of like why
Speaker 2: this is such a hit because you know, I in
Speaker 2: s says, hey, we're going to raid the biltmore like yeah,
Speaker 2: you're going to show up there, and like that's like
Speaker 2: who doesn't want to see that as like a journalist,
Speaker 2: So like part of like what part of like what
Speaker 2: increases sort of the because the people hadn't really the
Speaker 2: border patrol had not been probably most Americans have only
Speaker 2: been kind of vaguely aware of its existence up until
Speaker 2: this point. This is part of what turns them into
Speaker 2: like an institution within the United States. Is like all
Speaker 2: of the press around Operation Wetback.
Speaker 3: Right, it's like the uh, you know, they took a
Speaker 3: cue from the FBI. They're like we need we need
Speaker 3: to be flashy, we need to we need to look
Speaker 3: cool as shit doing a bunch of horrid shit to people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like and you're talking about like what
Speaker 2: the FBI does against anarchists and socialists and like the
Speaker 2: late you know, the early nineteen hundreds. Yeah, this is
Speaker 2: this is like the Border Patrol's equivalent of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and creating like, you know, an entire propaganda arm
Speaker 3: that made like, yeah, you know the g man cool.
Speaker 2: Yes, you know. Yes. And at the same time they're
Speaker 2: doing this, Carter and Swing are like meeting with these
Speaker 2: influential ranchers and farmers and industrialists, the people using the
Speaker 2: undocumented migrant labor, and they're getting them in line between
Speaker 2: like a revamp of the Brasero program that is again
Speaker 2: like supposed to fix some of the issues the programming had.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to get terribly into the weeds on
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff. There's plenty of places to read
Speaker 2: about that if you'd like, there's a pretty good article. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we'll have some sources in here, but the book Migra
Speaker 2: goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So
Speaker 2: in the end, it was a wild success more than
Speaker 2: one million people are deported, potentially as many as one
Speaker 2: and a half million people are deported beyond that, the
Speaker 2: precedent was established that the US Border Patrol could and
Speaker 2: should conduct operations from deep within the United States. Border
Speaker 2: Patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within
Speaker 2: one hundred miles of the border right, any border, Like
Speaker 2: that's the exactly of any border right, which includes the
Speaker 2: coasts in Canada. So basically all of the places where
Speaker 2: most Americans live are covered by the two. About two
Speaker 2: thirds of the US population are in this area, which
Speaker 2: is why the Border Patrol has like the whitest ranging
Speaker 2: purview of any law enforcement agency pretty much. I guess yeah,
Speaker 2: Like the FBI technically has more, but like their mission
Speaker 2: is more limited anyway. It's whatever, Like this is like
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol. This is what turns them into what
Speaker 2: they are, to this monster, this juggernaut they are today
Speaker 2: as opposed to like some dudes literally on the border,
Speaker 2: you know, like say which like again and not that,
Speaker 2: Like they weren't getting up to problematic shit earlier in
Speaker 2: their history, but their ability to do harm was limited
Speaker 2: by geography. It's not after Operation Wetback and we can
Speaker 2: thank Harlan Carter for that, and it's it's it's worth
Speaker 2: kind of noting here. I'm not going to get too
Speaker 2: much into Trump, but he Donald Trump consciously looks back
Speaker 2: to Harlan Carter's period of time running the border patrol
Speaker 2: as an inspiration. Yeah. During a twenty fifteen presidential Republican
Speaker 2: presidential debate, Donald Trump said, quote, let me just tell
Speaker 2: you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president. People liked him.
Speaker 2: I liked him. I like ike, right the expression I
Speaker 2: like ike. Moved one point five million illegal immigrants out
Speaker 2: of the country. Moved them just beyond the border. They
Speaker 2: came back. Moved them again beyond the border, they came back,
Speaker 2: didn't like it, moved them way south. They never came back.
Speaker 2: Dwight Eisenhower, you don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier.
Speaker 2: They moved one and a half million people out. We
Speaker 2: have no choice. We have no choice. Just so, first off,
Speaker 2: obviously it's probably not gonna surprise people. That's again, as
Speaker 2: we've said, completely wrong, for among other things, nearly all
Speaker 2: of them come back.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, under like the pressera program, Like that's part of
Speaker 2: the point, Like they're not but yeah, it's it's so Carter.
Speaker 2: And again there's the kind of folks who like again
Speaker 2: Swing I'm sure has his racism, Ike, there's racism, and
Speaker 2: like his motivations, but it's also there's a lot of
Speaker 2: economic and just like they're the kind of people who
Speaker 2: believe all of this stuff should be done based on
Speaker 2: a set of laws. So they're like kind of fundamentally
Speaker 2: if they're probably more offended by the fact that people
Speaker 2: are undocumented than they are necessarily about the racial element
Speaker 2: that's chunk of these people.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, lack of documents alone is just like Jesus.
Speaker 2: Carter's doing it for white supremacy. And that's the thing
Speaker 2: you'll notice. The thing Trump takes out of Operation Wetback
Speaker 2: isn't the way they established this kind of like system
Speaker 2: in order to like document and like make these workers
Speaker 2: legal in order to provide labor a labor for it. Like,
Speaker 2: that's not the thing he takes out of this. The
Speaker 2: thing he takes out of this is they got one
Speaker 2: and a half million Mexicans to leave, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Like that's the thing that has come down in history
Speaker 2: from Carter's period, is the.
Speaker 3: Right he's cutting to the heart of really what's going
Speaker 3: on here behind all of the you know, I don't know,
Speaker 3: respectability politics or whatever of it.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's what has lived on that and of course
Speaker 2: the militarization of the border patrol and the fact that
Speaker 2: it gets to work every We get all of that
Speaker 2: from Harlan Carter. And here's the thing, Harlan's just getting started.
Speaker 2: This ain't even this ain't even his whole thing, right this,
Speaker 2: like this isn't even his main gig.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, we haven't even gotten to the beginning,
Speaker 3: which is like we're going to talk about some n
Speaker 3: ras and some gun shit.
Speaker 2: We're not even into that ship yet. Like this is
Speaker 2: just his first gig, right, damn. This is his like
Speaker 2: the equivalent of the time like the rest of us
Speaker 2: spent like working at a Windy's or something that, right,
Speaker 2: this is this is Hitler at painting school. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: is Yeah, this is Hitler at fucking like hanging out
Speaker 2: in Austria and opera houses exactly arguing with homeless people
Speaker 2: about the Jews, which was like a whole chunk of
Speaker 2: his life. But anyway, because he was homeless, dude, it's whatever.
Speaker 2: They were living in a men's shelter anyway, Hitler. So
Speaker 2: I should note before we move on to the NRA
Speaker 2: that while Harlan Carter was massively expanding the reaching power
Speaker 2: of the Border Patrol, he was also robbing it blind
Speaker 2: for his own benefit. See Harland loves shooting right, Like,
Speaker 2: he's not one of these NR like like Wayne Lapierre,
Speaker 2: the current head of the NRA. I don't think Wayne
Speaker 2: particularly cares much about like a lot of these guys
Speaker 2: like it's a political thing as opposed to them, like
Speaker 2: Harlan Carter is you have to say, loves to shoot guns. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but here's the thing about shooting guns. Bullets cost money.
Speaker 2: So three years after Harlan Carter retires from government service
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty seven, the Justice Department opens an investigation
Speaker 2: into what are termed quote various allegations against him, including
Speaker 2: the claim that he had stolen forty to fifty thousand
Speaker 2: rounds of ammunition from the Border Patrol quote, with the
Speaker 2: sole intent of converting this property to his own use
Speaker 2: after he retired. Wowow, so he steals like a pallett
Speaker 2: of bullets to go shoot privately.
Speaker 3: I would love it if we found out that he's
Speaker 3: the one who stole his mom's car.
Speaker 2: Yeah, joy, I mean, oh fuck, I gotta find some Mexicans.
Speaker 2: Fifteen year old gets murdered. So yeah, it's not that funny,
Speaker 2: but that's not impossible, right, Yes, So I'm going to
Speaker 2: quote from the New York Times here about this theft
Speaker 2: of tens of thousands of bullets that Harlan Carter perpetrated. Quote.
Speaker 2: Asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations, mister
Speaker 2: Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand
Speaker 2: jury in San Diego for some hours, and they covered
Speaker 2: a lot of things, none of which I'm ashaved of
Speaker 2: and none of which I had any difficulty asking. He
Speaker 2: added that he did not quote know anything about the
Speaker 2: disappearance or a misappropriation of government ammo. The missing ammunition,
Speaker 2: worth several thousand dollars, was never traced, according to an
Speaker 2: agent who worked on the investigation, and no charges were
Speaker 2: fired filed. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very fun. Now,
Speaker 2: obviously Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's
Speaker 2: about to get a new job that is never going
Speaker 2: to let him run out of ammunition. So, as we
Speaker 2: stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when
Speaker 2: he joined the NRA, whether it was before or after
Speaker 2: he killed Raymond Cassiano. Probably he was like sixteen when
Speaker 2: he joins. And in nineteen fifty one, the year after
Speaker 2: he becomes head of the Border Patrol, he joins the
Speaker 2: NRA's national board. And again at this point in time,
Speaker 2: there's obviously there's people who are right wing in the NRA.
Speaker 2: There's who want it to be more of a conservative institution.
Speaker 2: It's not really a political organization point right, right.
Speaker 3: It's almost at this point from does this just from
Speaker 3: what I remember, it's almost an apolitical, just kind of
Speaker 3: gun lobbying group that kind of.
Speaker 2: They're not lobbying. There's no lobbying. They do not lobby
Speaker 2: in this period of time. They have the Sierra Club
Speaker 2: at this point. Yeah, they're they're just kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're there to provide training courses for people. They're there.
Speaker 2: They're there so that One of the things they do
Speaker 2: is when the government demilitarizes weapons, right, they're like, okay,
Speaker 2: we're not using like the inn one garrand is no
Speaker 2: longer the gun that the army uses. So we have
Speaker 2: a couple of million of these things. We will sell
Speaker 2: them at a discount to the NRA who can sell
Speaker 2: them very cheap to their members, and like it's part
Speaker 2: of this. So there's like stuff that they're doing, but
Speaker 2: they're not they're not getting in there. And there are
Speaker 2: they have some involvement politically, we'll talk about that in
Speaker 2: a little bit, but they are not like lobbying on
Speaker 2: behalf of the Republican Party or something, right, like, that's
Speaker 2: not really a thing that the NRA is doing yet.
Speaker 2: Harlan Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing,
Speaker 2: but they're not. In nineteen fifty one when he joins
Speaker 2: the board, they're still not very political. But now that
Speaker 2: he's on the board, he starts to see the organization
Speaker 2: with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol right because
Speaker 2: he can help get people hired, he can put in
Speaker 2: a good word. So he starts all of his buddies
Speaker 2: from the Border Patrol who are like wanning a cushy
Speaker 2: job and the private sector after, you know, working for
Speaker 2: the gut like, he starts filling them, filling the NRA
Speaker 2: with them. So he finally leaves government service in the
Speaker 2: early nineteen sixties. He stops running the Border Patrol in
Speaker 2: fifty seven, but he does some other shit not really
Speaker 2: that important for our purposes, but he's he retires from
Speaker 2: working for the government in the early sixties and he
Speaker 2: gets pretty much immediately elected presidents of the NRA from
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty seven. But that doesn't
Speaker 2: mean he's actually running the NRA, like, right, it's just
Speaker 2: like a job within the organization. You've still got this
Speaker 2: board of directors. So he's an influential figure in the NRA,
Speaker 2: but he's not actually like directing it at this point point.
Speaker 3: Right, he's collecting a check and he's probably getting like,
Speaker 3: you know, a bunch of free bullets, which is.
Speaker 2: All even more free bullet. Well, he also wants he
Speaker 2: wants the NRA to get more political, and again we're
Speaker 2: gonna we're going to chat a little bit about why
Speaker 2: in a second. But one of the things that happens
Speaker 2: is like the folks at the NRA, who kind of
Speaker 2: don't necessarily want that, know, they have to do something
Speaker 2: with Harlan Carter, right, like, you can't like ignore him,
Speaker 2: so they stick him. They create a lobbying arm for
Speaker 2: the first time of the NRA, the Institute for Legislative action,
Speaker 2: and they put him in charge of it. And again,
Speaker 2: this is the first time the NRA had had a
Speaker 2: lobbying arm. In the early nineteen sixties, it was like
Speaker 2: not they barely funded it. So there's this, you know,
Speaker 2: there's kind of this growing fight, and Harlan is one
Speaker 2: of these guys saying that, like, hey, the NRA needs
Speaker 2: to get more political. We need to be lobbying, we
Speaker 2: need to be focused on Second Amendment advocacy. That was
Speaker 2: not had nothing like the NRA's planks, Like they're like
Speaker 2: stated purpose as an organization didn't include like protecting or
Speaker 2: defending the Second Amendment at all, Like that was not
Speaker 2: on there even on their radar. Wow, he thinks it
Speaker 2: needs to be. And the old guard who run the
Speaker 2: NRA don't see it that way. They see themselves as
Speaker 2: essentially in partnership with the government to ensure the development
Speaker 2: of a heavy of a healthy shooting sports culture in
Speaker 2: the United States, right, And part of what that means
Speaker 2: is that when gun control laws get passed, they work
Speaker 2: with the government to formulate those laws. So again they're
Speaker 2: certainly like they're not anti gun, right, but they're not
Speaker 2: anything we would recognize as like in like a modern
Speaker 2: political context.
Speaker 3: They just want to So it sounds like they just
Speaker 3: want to make sure that gun control doesn't affect hunting
Speaker 3: and or like regulation of people owning actual rifles or yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's again everything is different, right, Like nothing
Speaker 2: the AR fifteen exists in this period, but it's not
Speaker 2: what it's going to become, right like, because it's it's
Speaker 2: harder to make. They're much less common like today an
Speaker 2: AR Like. One of the things that has made the
Speaker 2: AR fifteen is is that it's a perfectly modular platform.
Speaker 2: So it's basically like gun legos. So there's like a
Speaker 2: million you can customize it infinitely. You can make the
Speaker 2: basic gun itself for a couple one hundred bucks if
Speaker 2: you have some stuff. It's not like that at this point,
Speaker 2: right that's it's now it's like the Honda Civic of guns. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: so they just haven't Like part of why it's not
Speaker 2: political in the way it will become is that there's
Speaker 2: not really a need to you know, like no one's
Speaker 2: there's not like there's not the culture that the NRA
Speaker 2: helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: their primary focus is like hunting and target shooting right, right,
Speaker 2: and again. Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment,
Speaker 2: and in the nineteen seventies he's going to go to
Speaker 2: war with the NRA's old Guard in order to change it.
Speaker 2: But before we get into that, we should probably have
Speaker 2: some ads. I love ads, Oh I do too, including
Speaker 2: this ad for guns, the concept of uh yeah guns. Sure.
Speaker 2: How about the life card? The life card. It's a
Speaker 2: gun that's built into a little credit card. Can it shoot? Well? No?
Speaker 2: Is it accurate? Of course?
Speaker 4: Not?
Speaker 2: Is it? Is it a stupid thing to carry in
Speaker 2: your pocket? Yes? Enjoy it's a real thing. Look, look
Speaker 2: it up. Very oily gun of the of the of
Speaker 2: the of the meme guns, easily the memiest. Wow, that's
Speaker 2: the whole thing we have these days. There's no meme guns.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen sixties. We haven't invented memes, you know,
Speaker 2: but we had one. But yeah, which was the meme
Speaker 2: from the nineteen sixties. Well it's it's earlier than that.
Speaker 2: You know that this is getting way off topic, But
Speaker 2: you've just heard of Kilroy was here. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's memes. But yeah, I was thinking, I was like,
Speaker 2: was this is the Suppruder film. Was that a meme?
Speaker 3: But I guess that came out in the second case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it comes out a little late. O. That's
Speaker 2: like the sixties or mid sixties, right, But when what.
Speaker 3: Did the did people see this Zappruder film? I thought
Speaker 3: that was like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, I will tell you my entire life. I
Speaker 2: have specifically picked houses with a floor plan where the
Speaker 2: bathroom is kind of like back into the left of
Speaker 2: the living room, so that when people ask where the
Speaker 2: bathroom is, I can say, oh, just take a Kennedy well,
Speaker 2: you know, go back into the left a JFK getting
Speaker 2: murdered joke. Anyway, here's ads. Oh we're back. Noo, he's
Speaker 2: having a good time. You know. Robert Kennedy was killed
Speaker 2: with the twenty two, which is the same caliber as
Speaker 2: the life card. Ah, the gun that's built into a
Speaker 2: credit card. Look, there's a credit card gun. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, honestly, if Sir Hunt and Sir Hanna had
Speaker 2: one of those, RFK would probably be alive. Life card
Speaker 2: is a really stupid gun. Anyway. The Second Amendment, well, actually,
Speaker 2: weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument. Harlan Carter
Speaker 2: will later make but I don't want to. I don't
Speaker 2: want to get ahead of things. So the Second Amendment is,
Speaker 2: I think it's fair to say, the most politicized part
Speaker 2: of the Bill of Rights today. Right, That's probably not.
Speaker 2: Maybe the First Amendment gives it a run for its money,
Speaker 2: but even then it's usually people differing over interpretations of
Speaker 2: the First Amendment as opposed to the argument over the
Speaker 2: second is really should it exist or does it exist
Speaker 2: in the way that it's like currently being interpreted, right,
Speaker 2: because the awful lot of Americans think it shouldn't be
Speaker 2: the law of the land at all, which is difficult
Speaker 2: to square with actually doing something legislatively because it does exist.
Speaker 2: But anyway, in two thousand and eight, the Supreme Court
Speaker 2: ruled in DC versus Heller that the Second Amendment establishes
Speaker 2: an individual right to bear arms. Now, obviously, a lot
Speaker 2: of liberals see this as terrible Jewish prudence and claim
Speaker 2: that an individual right to bear arms was basically invented
Speaker 2: by the NRA. Conservatives will say the opposite, that this
Speaker 2: was clearly what the founders had intended, and the reality
Speaker 2: of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the
Speaker 2: Second Amendment at federal level is only like twenty years old.
Speaker 2: Different courts have ruled very differently on the Second Amendment
Speaker 2: for quite a long time. And also the Supreme Court
Speaker 2: is stupid, So yes, like I don't personally give a
Speaker 2: good goddamn about what the Founders intended.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that seems like the weirdest standard to uphold to
Speaker 3: this day, where we're like, well, the Founders intended, and
Speaker 3: it's like the Founders, first of all, none of them
Speaker 3: had teeth.
Speaker 2: None of them had and it's one of those this
Speaker 2: it's comprehensively wrong because again liberals will often be like, well,
Speaker 2: the Founders would never have wanted people to have AR fifteen's,
Speaker 2: and it's like, did you know some of those guys, Yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of those duds would have been like this
Speaker 2: will kill so many more, like digitous people, we should
Speaker 2: have these.
Speaker 3: They all wore power powdered wigs because they all had
Speaker 3: like herpes on their heads and they you know, they
Speaker 3: were all syphilitics, so yeah, they were insane being like
Speaker 3: the Founders wouldn't like that. It's like no, no, no,
Speaker 3: don't defend the Founders.
Speaker 2: Well, and they would have they would have liked it
Speaker 2: for a variety of different reasons. Thomas Paine would have
Speaker 2: liked it because it would allow you to shoot government
Speaker 2: agents much y right, Like Thomas Jefferson would have liked
Speaker 2: it because he was scared of how many slaves he had,
Speaker 2: you know, exactly different different people would have liked it
Speaker 2: for different reasons. They all would love to have that gun. Yes,
Speaker 2: So obviously, again, as regards my personal standing towards gun control,
Speaker 2: I don't care about what the Founders thought about anything,
Speaker 2: including free speech, because they didn't actually believe in free speech. Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: because a lot of the moans, well, Thomas pain did.
Speaker 2: Again he's he's our one, good one.
Speaker 3: He was, you know, although kind of in a reactionary
Speaker 3: during the French Revolution. You know, they locked his ass up.
Speaker 2: They did lock his ass up during the French time,
Speaker 2: because they locked a lot of people up. They really
Speaker 2: just kind of went overboard. As it's still left. So
Speaker 2: I think it's probably valuable to discuss how interpretations of
Speaker 2: the right to bare arms have varied over time in
Speaker 2: the United States, because again, if you're ever saying it's
Speaker 2: always meant this thing or that thing that's not you're
Speaker 2: not going to be correct. Because a bunch of different
Speaker 2: courts have found a bunch of different things. So the
Speaker 2: Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison, And
Speaker 2: in portraits he's the founding father with just massive bags
Speaker 2: under his eyes, Like you look up a drawing of
Speaker 2: this dude. He looks fucking exhausted in every and he
Speaker 2: was every sketch of it.
Speaker 3: He probably was literally dying at all times in his
Speaker 3: famed career.
Speaker 2: He was dying all the time. If only every American
Speaker 2: political leader had followed in his footsteps of Dye.
Speaker 3: I know, I know, you know, he's yeah, he didn't.
Speaker 3: He was supposed to write way more of the Federalist papers,
Speaker 3: but he was so sickly he couldn't.
Speaker 2: We are getting to that. So obviously he's a he's
Speaker 2: you know, on that side of the federalist anti federalist divide.
Speaker 2: But he drafts the Bill of Rights because the anti
Speaker 2: federalists are worried, and they have a very good point
Speaker 2: that like, Okay, well, we're establishing this supposedly democratic government,
Speaker 2: but if we don't place limits on the powers of
Speaker 2: the federal government, they could get the power to do
Speaker 2: anything one day, which is a very reasonable thing you're
Speaker 2: pcerned about right. Broadly speaking, one of the ideas the
Speaker 2: founders had was having a Bill of rights. Yes, so
Speaker 2: most of them are terrified of the idea of a
Speaker 2: permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to
Speaker 2: be frightened of. And if we had stuck with that idea,
Speaker 2: maybe things would be a little bit better. One of
Speaker 2: the things that like, these guys are all ancient Roman
Speaker 2: history nerds, right, and they are well aware that, like
Speaker 2: the history of the Roman Republic includes so many times
Speaker 2: where just like a guy gets an army and takes over, right,
Speaker 2: or tries to take over, and there's a big fucking
Speaker 2: fight over it. So they don't like the idea of
Speaker 2: like this big centralized standing army because it's very dangerous.
Speaker 2: So the Second Amendment was initially drafted to guarantee people's
Speaker 2: right to form a militia. The original text and this
Speaker 2: is not what's in the Bill of Rights now, but
Speaker 2: this is the original text. Madison rights is quote the
Speaker 2: right of the people to keep in bear arms shall
Speaker 2: not be infringed simi colan, A well armed and well
Speaker 2: regulated militia being the best security of a free country colon.
Speaker 2: But no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be
Speaker 2: compelled to render military service person. Now this is interesting
Speaker 2: because if that had been in the Bill of Rights today, right,
Speaker 2: this would have done a couple of things. Among other things,
Speaker 2: it would probably have made a draft impossible, right because
Speaker 2: that second clause is like you cannot force someone to
Speaker 2: render military service, which is like you would think would
Speaker 2: make a draft impossible. That said, it also might have
Speaker 2: made it impossible to do things that a lot of
Speaker 2: liberal support, like banning weapons like the Era fifteen, because
Speaker 2: when you have well armed in there, it does kind
Speaker 2: of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the
Speaker 2: current text of the Second Amendment does. That interpretation could
Speaker 2: at least be argued. Now this is all academic because
Speaker 2: the wording winds up being changed to the present text,
Speaker 2: which puts well regulated upfront and fun times, also makes
Speaker 2: it legal to draft people. Obviously, people will have argued
Speaker 2: for years and will be arguing for years what the
Speaker 2: Second Amendment should mean about gun control and how it
Speaker 2: should function. I'm not an originalist. I think the Constitution
Speaker 2: is too old for anyone to care about. But obviously
Speaker 2: it does matter because it is the law of the land,
Speaker 2: and how it's written and how it's interpreted has a
Speaker 2: huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation.
Speaker 2: And so I think the context of how the Second
Speaker 2: Amendment was seen at the time is helpful to have,
Speaker 2: even though again I'm not an originalist. Please don't take
Speaker 2: this as me arguing because the Founding Fathers felt this way,
Speaker 2: this is how people should act.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think we've said we can stress enough.
Speaker 3: We do not care what the Founding Fathers thought about
Speaker 3: literally anything.
Speaker 2: My stance broadly in support of civilian arms ownership has
Speaker 2: nothing to do with the Constitution, because it's a stupid
Speaker 2: document written a long time. Well again, given the time,
Speaker 2: not a stupid document problem better than anyway, whatever, I
Speaker 2: don't need to have this conversation. I am going to
Speaker 2: quote from the New Yorker here because I think it
Speaker 2: gives some helpful context. None of this, this being the
Speaker 2: Second Amendment, had anything to do with hunting. People who
Speaker 2: owned and used long arms to hunt continued to own
Speaker 2: and use them. The Second Amendment was not commonly understood
Speaker 2: as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As
Speaker 2: Gary Willis once wrote, one does not bear arms against
Speaker 2: a rabbit. Meanwhile, militias continued to muster. The Continental Army
Speaker 2: was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, but
Speaker 2: the national defense was increasingly assumed by the US Army.
Speaker 2: By the middle of the nineteenth century, the US had
Speaker 2: a standing army after all. And this is one of
Speaker 2: the things I think is interesting because again, the kind
Speaker 2: of especially on Twitter, common takes on one side or
Speaker 2: the other. This is that like, well, you don't need
Speaker 2: these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of
Speaker 2: the Second Amendment, which no, it's absolutely not. But at
Speaker 2: the same time, the idea of the Second Amendment as
Speaker 2: referring to an individual's ability to stockpile in arsenal is
Speaker 2: not really accurate because it was within the context of
Speaker 2: a militia. However, if you're bringing that up, it's one
Speaker 2: of the things that they meant by like, one of
Speaker 2: the things that the founding fathers wanted with this militia
Speaker 2: was for it to be the primary method of defending
Speaker 2: the country, as opposed to a massive standing army. So again,
Speaker 2: if you are if you are for one reason or
Speaker 2: the other, if you're arguing that we should do things
Speaker 2: the way the Founding Fathers argued, probably the most accurate
Speaker 2: thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of
Speaker 2: the context of a militia, and also ensure that the
Speaker 2: militia is the only armed force in the country, including police,
Speaker 2: so that like a massive civilian militia is the only
Speaker 2: armed force. There's no federal power to deploy a massive
Speaker 2: military and there's not really federal policing in any meaningful way,
Speaker 2: because that's how things were in the eighteen hundreds, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: if you're or seventeen, if you're arguing that, that's probably
Speaker 2: closer to an originalist interpretation than anything being argued right now, right,
Speaker 2: Which is not to say that that makes much sense
Speaker 2: in the current day at all, although I would argue
Speaker 2: there's a number of you could look at, like what
Speaker 2: Switzerland does, right, which is often brought up by Second
Speaker 2: Amendment advocates. Do they do? I don't even know what
Speaker 2: Switzerland has. Like basically, if you want to own a
Speaker 2: weapon in Switzerland, the government will give you one, but
Speaker 2: like there's training and you're part of a militia to
Speaker 2: get it. It is a military assault rifle, right, And
Speaker 2: a lot of Switzerland's are the percentage of Swiss people
Speaker 2: who own guns is not significant compared to the United States,
Speaker 2: but it's one of the highest in the world. Right,
Speaker 2: But it does come as you don't it's not, well,
Speaker 2: you can buy some arms in Switzerland. It's not like
Speaker 2: you're not like just stockpiling guns for your own personal thing.
Speaker 2: You are being armed by the state as part of
Speaker 2: the state's defense apparatus. Right, But also not in a
Speaker 2: way like the Swiss, Like the civilians who own guns
Speaker 2: in Switzerland are not like deployed for obviously Switzerland, right,
Speaker 2: they don't do that shit famously. But anyway, I mean,
Speaker 2: this is again when I talk about like Rojava and
Speaker 2: like what I think about in terms of the value
Speaker 2: of the state not having a monopoly on the use
Speaker 2: of force. These are some of the things that I
Speaker 2: think about broadly speaking. You know, stuff has been different
Speaker 2: about the Second Amendment a little bit, and kind of
Speaker 2: as a result, the Second Amendment, as heavily politicized as
Speaker 2: it is now, was kind of like nobody it was
Speaker 2: like the Third Amendment, Right, nobody talks about that anymore.
Speaker 2: Nobody fucking talked about the Second Amendment on a national
Speaker 2: level for like a century or so, Right, we talked
Speaker 2: about like gun control earlier, but it was basically all
Speaker 2: state level, right, different states, different cities would have like
Speaker 2: different rules based on shit that was happening there. The
Speaker 2: federal government left them alone. Like, there was not really
Speaker 2: any kind of federal interest in regulating the Second Amendment
Speaker 2: until the early nineteen thirties, and that is when we
Speaker 2: get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now,
Speaker 2: the NFA or National Firearms Act, was a response to
Speaker 2: the era of the gangster right. In particular, you get
Speaker 2: this weapon starting in like I don't know exactly when
Speaker 2: it was invented, I could have looked it up, but
Speaker 2: like it becomes popular in the thirties, the Tommy gun, right,
Speaker 2: which is the Thompson submachine gun. And it is broadly speaking,
Speaker 2: kind of like at least in terms of the way
Speaker 2: it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used
Speaker 2: in crime, kind of like the AR fifteen of its day,
Speaker 2: because it is Thompson. It's an automatic forty five caliber weapon.
Speaker 2: It's a submachine gun, right, so it's not like a
Speaker 2: full sized rifle. This will be one of the most
Speaker 2: popular squad weapons that the United States uses in World
Speaker 2: War two. Right, a very effective weapon for what it does,
Speaker 2: which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets
Speaker 2: very quickly at people at close range. So super good
Speaker 2: if you're, for example, a gangster who wants to murder
Speaker 2: a bunch of people in an enclosed room. Right, if
Speaker 2: you're like fighting a bunch of other gangsters up against
Speaker 2: the wall, you can kill a shitload of people with
Speaker 2: a Tommy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, very fun for you know, pulling off
Speaker 3: some sort of Saint Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2: Mass, incredible bank robbing weapon. Great for all sorts of.
Speaker 3: Stuff, going to the local gobba ghoolery and shooting up
Speaker 3: the gabba gule exactly.
Speaker 2: You could gabba a hell of a lot of ghoul
Speaker 2: with his lots and it's it's nowadays, honestly not that
Speaker 2: impressive of a weapon, but that at the time, right,
Speaker 2: Like prior to this, most America like their experience with
Speaker 2: is like single shot rifles and lever action guns and
Speaker 2: like revolvers and shit. Right, even semi automatic handguns are
Speaker 2: pretty new and fancy in the thirties. The Thompson is
Speaker 2: just so much deadlier than anything else that's as fu
Speaker 2: and the crimes that get committed with it again, as
Speaker 2: with the Air fifteen, on like a national scale, very
Speaker 2: little gun crime involves a Thompson sub machine guns. And again,
Speaker 2: the Air fifteen not the most common gun used in
Speaker 2: crime by any like, It's not super common compared to
Speaker 2: a lot of other kinds of firearm, but the crimes
Speaker 2: that it's used in are so spectacular and kind of
Speaker 2: like horrifying that they shock the nation. And law enforcement
Speaker 2: gets nuts about this because one of the things that
Speaker 2: gangsters do with Tommy guns is shoot lots of police
Speaker 2: officers with them. So there's a whole kind of America's
Speaker 2: first panic over a gun, right is what happens with
Speaker 2: the Tommy gun in the thirties. And it's not just
Speaker 2: the Tommy gun. They're also freaking out about sawt off shotguns,
Speaker 2: which is actually pretty dumb. They're only scared about them
Speaker 2: because you can like hide them, hide them, but they're
Speaker 2: they're not even like anyway, it's dumb for saw off
Speaker 2: shotguns to be regulated more than regular shotguns. They're actually
Speaker 2: less deadly, Yeah, but whatever, they look cool as funny
Speaker 2: they look, and you see them a lot in the
Speaker 2: hands of gangsters. Right, So it's again there's this part
Speaker 2: of this is that like, yeah, the Thompson is a
Speaker 2: lot deadlier than guns that had been available before. But
Speaker 2: part of it's also just like there's this media sort
Speaker 2: of panic around the Thompson. Right. And by the way,
Speaker 2: I should note at this period of time, if you
Speaker 2: want a Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail
Speaker 2: one to your house. Like, this is not They're not
Speaker 2: like you don't have to go to a gun store.
Speaker 2: You don't do it. They're like background checks, like they
Speaker 2: just will send it to you. It's like if you
Speaker 2: order like a book on Amazon. It was that easy
Speaker 2: to get a Thompson sub machine gun. So the NFA
Speaker 2: puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the ownership
Speaker 2: of machine guns, sawt off shotguns, and silencers. Now, the
Speaker 2: NRA is again not a political organization at this point.
Speaker 2: It does initially oppose the NFA, and this is kind
Speaker 2: of the first time it gets political. The organization writes
Speaker 2: a descent in their magazine, American Riflemen, and this is
Speaker 2: a pretty like tamely phrased descent, and it prompts congressional
Speaker 2: leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to
Speaker 2: limit their bill. The main thing that it does is
Speaker 2: that like it stops the ban from being total, so
Speaker 2: rich people can still get machine guns, shotguns, and silencers right. Well,
Speaker 2: and we could tell you, I could rant about silencers,
Speaker 2: which are not what people tend to think.
Speaker 3: They're not silent.
Speaker 2: They're not silent. All of these things are still legal
Speaker 2: if you have the money. Right in the case of
Speaker 2: like a silencer or a what's called a short bariled shotgun,
Speaker 2: it takes like a two hundred dollars tax stamp in
Speaker 2: a couple of months. It's technically like a similar legal
Speaker 2: process to get a machine gun. But machine guns cost.
Speaker 2: The cheapest machine guns today are like ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: So it's that's why you don't see them like used
Speaker 2: in crimes. Yeah, I guess I don't know what a
Speaker 2: machine gun is. An AR fifteen is a my automatic gun.
Speaker 2: The legal definition of a machine gun is a weapon
Speaker 2: that will fire more than one bullet per trigger. Poll Right,
Speaker 2: this is all very wonky because like we had bump
Speaker 2: stocks a while ago function more or less as a
Speaker 2: machine gun, but legally weren't technically a machine gun. There's
Speaker 2: a couple of weird kinds of triggers you can as
Speaker 2: with anything with guns, because when you like, when you
Speaker 2: make a law to ban a thing, you have to
Speaker 2: specify what that thing is in mechanical terms, right, And
Speaker 2: so you find a way to people do this with
Speaker 2: drugs too, where it's like, Okay, they banned MDMA, let's
Speaker 2: make a drug that affects the same parts of the
Speaker 2: brain but doesn't like isn't explicitly banned, right, right, different compound, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and the same thing happens. Now there are sawt off
Speaker 2: shotguns that aren't legally shotguns because of very anyway, whatever.
Speaker 2: This is getting off of the point a bit, But
Speaker 2: the NRA works with It works with Congress, right. They
Speaker 2: don't do like a big political brujaha. They're like, hey,
Speaker 2: we want to make sure that rich people can still
Speaker 2: own these weapons. Let's let's sit down and work some
Speaker 2: things out. And Congress is happy to work with them. Now,
Speaker 2: some people in Congress are The Attorney General claims that
Speaker 2: they emasculate the bill. But broadly speaking, the NFA seriously
Speaker 2: limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have,
Speaker 2: and this is the first time anyone had done that
Speaker 2: at the federal level. And the NRA is pretty happy
Speaker 2: with the resulting bill, and they endorse the nineteen thirty
Speaker 2: four NFA. Now, there was still no massive national discussion
Speaker 2: of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this period,
Speaker 2: not that it was like particularly discussed much at all.
Speaker 2: This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period
Speaker 2: of time. It's not yet part of the culture war.
Speaker 2: Yeah it has, Yeah, that hasn't really evolved yet. The context,
Speaker 2: the discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right
Speaker 2: to bear arms doesn't really start to take off until
Speaker 2: the early nineteen sixties, and this is when the very
Speaker 2: first law review articles arguing an individualist interpretation are published. Now,
Speaker 2: this period coincides with the civil rights movement and the
Speaker 2: second big push for gun control in federal history. This
Speaker 2: time rather than will racism and crime have a role
Speaker 2: to plays we'll discuss. But one of the first things
Speaker 2: that sets it off is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Famously,
Speaker 2: John F. Kennedy is assassinated by Bernard Sanders using a
Speaker 2: manlukir Karkana rifle that he'd ordered from a classified ad
Speaker 2: in the American Rifleman Magazine, which is the MRAs magazine.
Speaker 2: So the gun that kills GfK is ordered from the
Speaker 2: back of a magazine, right, yeah, and it's not. Again,
Speaker 2: he's not killed with like anything you would consider an
Speaker 2: assault weapon. It's like an old bolt action rifle. But
Speaker 2: the fact that he was able to get it from
Speaker 2: like a magazine ad becomes like and like, you know, again,
Speaker 2: background checks are not really a thing yet, and that's
Speaker 2: that makes a lot of people very angry. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to quote now from an article by Alina Savadra Buckley. Quote.
Speaker 2: For years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had been watching
Speaker 2: television and learning how to shoot. In the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 2: when Hollywood studios were churning out Westerns, Popular Science estimated
Speaker 2: that famillion Americans had started quick draws shooting for fun,
Speaker 2: and by the end of the decade, three thousand Western
Speaker 2: style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smyth
Speaker 2: in his book The NRA The Unauthorized History. At the
Speaker 2: same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise,
Speaker 2: and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures.
Speaker 2: As a result, the NRA braced itself for new legislation
Speaker 2: in the early nineteen sixties, sprinkling the first references to
Speaker 2: the Second Amendment in American Riflemen. Eight months after Kennedy died,
Speaker 2: the magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead,
Speaker 2: the strength of the NRA, and therefore the ability to
Speaker 2: accomplish its objects and purposes, depends entirely upon the support
Speaker 2: of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep
Speaker 2: and bear arms. And a lot of this push is
Speaker 2: coming at the direction of Harlan Carter, who writes stuff
Speaker 2: for American Riflemen and who is a big believer that
Speaker 2: the NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And that's again, that's different from what they had always
Speaker 2: been pro gun because obviously it's the NRA, right, But
Speaker 2: when you look at what they're doing in thirty four,
Speaker 2: they're not advocating for the Second Amendment. They're advocating for
Speaker 2: what they see as sportsmen, right, and obviously there's problems
Speaker 2: with that. It's based heavily on like the desire of
Speaker 2: rich people to be heavily armed. But they're they're arguing
Speaker 2: for sportsmen as opposed to Carter wants to turn it
Speaker 2: into an advocacy organization for this thing. This this this
Speaker 2: idea of the Second Amendment. And when you do something
Speaker 2: like that, number one, if you if you kind of
Speaker 2: are an essentialist and you claim that this is like
Speaker 2: there's this kind of inherent, timeless, essential interpretation of this rule,
Speaker 2: and that's your your guiding light. There's not any ability
Speaker 2: to compromise there, right, Like you have to be kind
Speaker 2: of a fundamentalist about.
Speaker 3: It, right, It doesn't matter if a president was just
Speaker 3: marked yeah, in front of everyone in Dallas.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, you have to be like.
Speaker 3: Sorry, the law's the law, and this is uh, you know,
Speaker 3: this is my interpretation of it.
Speaker 2: And and and Carter understands. Again he's a very smart guy.
Speaker 2: What he'd done with the border patrol shows he understands
Speaker 2: how the media works. He understands how to advocate for
Speaker 2: white supremacy without advocating for white supremacy, right, And so
Speaker 2: he knows that it's not just enough to say that
Speaker 2: you support gun ownership. And I'm going to continue with
Speaker 2: a quote from Buckley here. In order for there to
Speaker 2: be good guys with guns, there had to be an
Speaker 2: opposing force. The NRA and many lawmakers that opposing force
Speaker 2: was usually black Now this gets into the aspect of
Speaker 2: the gun control push. Again. There's an aspect that's just
Speaker 2: based in these assassinations that's not at all based in racism.
Speaker 2: And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots.
Speaker 2: So in nineteen sixty five, the LAPD beats a black
Speaker 2: man named Marquette Fry with a baton during a traffic
Speaker 2: stop and protests erupt. It becomes an insurrection and spreads
Speaker 2: throughout the country. The militaries eventually called in to augment
Speaker 2: and overwhelmed LAPD. This is part of what jump starts
Speaker 2: the War on Crime, a period of largely racist gun
Speaker 2: or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator
Speaker 2: panic that Biden is famous for. And the NRA huge
Speaker 2: supporters of crime bills. Anti gun control support crime bills. Right,
Speaker 2: So you see what what they're doing here is you
Speaker 2: have some folks, because people are during the Wats riots
Speaker 2: using guns to fight the LAPD, and so there are
Speaker 2: like and this this is kind of there. There's pushes.
Speaker 2: This is what starts Some of the momentum for gun
Speaker 2: control in California comes from this, right, But more than that,
Speaker 2: what the NRA looks at is they see these armed
Speaker 2: black people carrying out an uprising, and they're like, well,
Speaker 2: we can take away focus on guns and on legislating
Speaker 2: guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people, right right,
Speaker 2: And that's what Harlan Carter realizes, like, well, this is something,
Speaker 2: this is the business the NRA needs to be in.
Speaker 2: And also like, this is the business of like arming
Speaker 2: the police, arguing that, like because that's where you know,
Speaker 2: that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts, right,
Speaker 2: is the idea that like you need to the police
Speaker 2: need to have more and more weapons to deal with
Speaker 2: today's like dangerous heavily armed criminals, right yeah.
Speaker 3: And also the guns don't kill people this racial group
Speaker 3: that I do not, like.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, which is an argument you still see
Speaker 2: made today. There's just a fucking Republican congressional candidate who
Speaker 2: is arguing that, like America doesn't have a gun violence problem,
Speaker 2: black people have a gother something like that, right, Like,
Speaker 2: this is an old argument, and Harlan Carter is the
Speaker 2: one who first figures out how to make it right. So,
Speaker 2: two years after the Watts Riots, the members of the
Speaker 2: Black Panther Party start assembling and openly carrying firearms, which
Speaker 2: is lawful at the time. They would assemble with guns
Speaker 2: and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure
Speaker 2: that cops did not abuse members of the public. One
Speaker 2: could argue this is in some ways closer to an
Speaker 2: originalist interpretation of the Second than anything today. Now, their
Speaker 2: activism scares the fuck out of white people, and again
Speaker 2: white people who are not pro gun right right, And
Speaker 2: we're gonna we're gonna chat about all of that, and
Speaker 2: we're gonna chat about my favorite press and Matt, I know,
Speaker 2: your favorite president, Ronald Reagan, star of Bedtime for Bonzo,
Speaker 2: Love Him, Star.
Speaker 3: The Monkey Movie. Yeah, those McCarthy.
Speaker 2: Here. We we owed Ronald Reagan a lot, including the
Speaker 2: beginning of the career of my favorite musician, John Hinckley Jr.
Speaker 2: Oh so good, dude. You got to get his mixtapes,
Speaker 2: like his early stuff better. But he's still really cranking,
Speaker 2: cranking out some solid things, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, his early stuff is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his early stuff. I'm unbelievable, unbelievable. Number one with
Speaker 2: a bullet. Here's here's here's our ats. Oh we're back,
Speaker 2: and you know, I just wanted to give a special
Speaker 2: statement from our sponsors that they completely support the career
Speaker 2: of John Hinckley Junior. Yeah, and uh, I don't know, Sophie,
Speaker 2: how do we we You're shaking your head. Probably shouldn't good.
Speaker 1: It's it's just a boring bit.
Speaker 2: It's a boring bit. You think it's boring that John
Speaker 2: Hinckley Junior is making a comeback to her?
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, he's he's touring and he's it mm hmm.
Speaker 3: It's he's got a guitar. And it says this machine
Speaker 3: almost kills.
Speaker 2: Fascist, close to killing a fascist. This machine shot the
Speaker 2: sight of an armored limousine with and it bounced and
Speaker 2: managed to penetrate a fascist chest cavity.
Speaker 3: This machine loves Jodie Foster and almost kill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this machine heads was very creepy. She did say
Speaker 2: she was impressed. She should be. I mean it is impressive, right, yeah, man,
Speaker 2: I don't know, mixed bag whatever, it was probably enough
Speaker 2: John jokes. Look, he did he did shoot Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 3: He did unarguably mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Evans.
Speaker 2: So so you get the Black Panthers start assembling with
Speaker 2: guns in public, and this scares the shit out of
Speaker 2: both kind of the progressive liberal crowd in California and
Speaker 2: conservatives in California, and so all of California gets on
Speaker 2: board the idea of banning the open carry of firearms,
Speaker 2: and the NRA happily endorses the measure. The Black Panthers
Speaker 2: assemble with their guns in the Capitol on one of
Speaker 2: the last days it would remain legal to do so
Speaker 2: it's described in local news as an invasion, even though
Speaker 2: again it was people legally protesting in a way that
Speaker 2: was not again.
Speaker 3: Whatever for the exact rights that the same you know,
Speaker 3: like white wackadoos do now.
Speaker 2: But again, fucking Harlan Carter totally on board with criminalizing
Speaker 2: this as is again Ronald Reagan is the governor at.
Speaker 3: The governor of California.
Speaker 2: Reagan's totally against. So yeah, some of these guys get
Speaker 2: arrested during their protest, and Sacramento as they are handcuffed,
Speaker 2: Bobby Seal read from their executive mandate, which protested quote
Speaker 2: the racist California legislature which is now considering legislation aimed
Speaker 2: at keeping black people disarmed and powerless. The measure passed,
Speaker 2: and it laid the groundwork for the extensive gun control
Speaker 2: that the state of California now enjoys to this day.
Speaker 2: Those laws primarily impact poor black people. Rich white folks
Speaker 2: can acquire concealed weapon permits very easily. You just have
Speaker 2: to be able to have a second home in a
Speaker 2: place like San Bernardino, and you can get the license
Speaker 2: to carry a concealed gun in the state of California.
Speaker 2: They can also purchase to so California. One of the
Speaker 2: things that they have is a handgun roster, right, so,
Speaker 2: the only handguns you can buy in the state of
Speaker 2: California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state. However,
Speaker 2: you can bring handguns into the state if you move there,
Speaker 2: as long as they don't have an illegal you know,
Speaker 2: as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than
Speaker 2: a ten round capacity, you can bring those into the
Speaker 2: state and then you can have them or you can
Speaker 2: sell them to people through an FFL. And if you
Speaker 2: are a police officer, you can buy any kind of
Speaker 2: gun you want and you can sell it to whoever
Speaker 2: you want. So is a massive industry in California of
Speaker 2: police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in
Speaker 2: the state of California to buy and less a police
Speaker 2: officer sells them to you for twice the normal price. Anyway,
Speaker 2: whole bunch of sketchy shit happens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a nice side hustle for the cops, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean because hey, there was a gig economy back
Speaker 3: then too. A lot of us are uber drivers slash
Speaker 3: gun salesman now, so I get it.
Speaker 2: And it's one of those things. There's a number of
Speaker 2: things about, including like waiting periods and stuff in California
Speaker 2: that there's a strong argument to be made in favor of.
Speaker 2: But this is where a lot of it starts, and
Speaker 2: it never entirely gets divorced from this thing of Like again,
Speaker 2: you can look at the same thing in the nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty four NFA of like, well, no, we want to
Speaker 2: we don't want rich people to be affected, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, anyway, you know they banned what is that,
Speaker 3: the Saturday Night specials?
Speaker 2: Like any like, oh, we're getting to that. That's where
Speaker 2: the handgun That's where the handgun roster starts though, yes,
Speaker 2: with the Saturday Night special. Yeah, but we're we'll get
Speaker 2: to that, don't worry. So Harlan Carter's support of an
Speaker 2: individual right to bear arms was not out of principled
Speaker 2: belief that all Americans deserve to defend themselves, or out
Speaker 2: of a desire to even check governmental power again, he
Speaker 2: militarized the border patrol. Instead, he believed that guns were
Speaker 2: a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to
Speaker 2: ensure that white people maintained the right to do this,
Speaker 2: and backing California's open carry ban, he was engaging in
Speaker 2: an intelligence strategy. You draw attention away from guns and
Speaker 2: you focus on who is carrying them. This is the
Speaker 2: origin of the quote guns don't kill people, People don't
Speaker 2: kill people argument, But when Harlan made it, the people
Speaker 2: were explicitly coded as black. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 2: Epic magazine now. The same year, American Riflemen published an
Speaker 2: editorial titled Who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like
Speaker 2: Watts as mob violence. Who then supports the police? Who
Speaker 2: then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery
Speaker 2: and pillaging. It read with home front safeguards spotty and uncertain.
Speaker 2: The armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer. Right.
Speaker 3: Nothing is more stable stabilizing for a community than a
Speaker 3: bunch of armed white people.
Speaker 2: Well, and he's he's very much making the writtenhouse argument here, right,
Speaker 2: armed citizen supports the police. The Black panthers are making
Speaker 2: what I might argue is more of an originalist interpretation,
Speaker 2: which is the armed citizen protects the community from government overreach.
Speaker 2: That's the Black panthers. He's saying, the armed citizen aids
Speaker 2: the police in enforcing white supremacy, right, right, that's the
Speaker 2: argument being made by the NRA here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, it's funny because like you know, obviously, you know,
Speaker 3: you do have your you know, right wing insurrectionists, militias and.
Speaker 2: Shit like that.
Speaker 3: But for the most part, what is being supported is
Speaker 3: like arming the suburbs, you know, and anyone who supports
Speaker 3: the police should be armed in anyone who in any
Speaker 3: ways against it shouldn't be. And that is uh, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: It is a problem.
Speaker 3: It's a issues.
Speaker 2: It's a problem that deserves a more complex series of
Speaker 2: solutions then to get suggested in debates over this. But
Speaker 2: that's a separate topic. So after RFK and Martin Luther
Speaker 2: King Junior are murdered in nineteen sixty eight, Senator Thomas
Speaker 2: Dodd reintroduces the Gun Control Act to Congress. This has
Speaker 2: been put it through it for it a couple of times.
Speaker 2: He puts it through again in nineteen sixty eight after
Speaker 2: those assassinations, and the Gun Control Act is intended to
Speaker 2: ban the interstate sale of guns, ban their sale to children,
Speaker 2: to convicted felons, and because of some bigotry mental defectives. Right.
Speaker 2: So again, like all of these laws, there's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: you don't want people to just be able to like
Speaker 2: ship guns through a mail order catalog across the country.
Speaker 2: I can get on board there, right, Probably shouldn't be
Speaker 2: selling them to children or you know, convicted, although I
Speaker 2: have issues with like who becomes a felon right, Like
Speaker 2: he's got a violent history. Sure that makes sense. You
Speaker 2: don't want somebody who's like a convicted rapist buying guns.
Speaker 2: And then like and mental defectives, well, how the hell
Speaker 2: do you define that?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 2: Right now, I've got some concerns. But this this law again,
Speaker 2: there's a lot that's very reasonable in here, and the
Speaker 2: nra rallies against it in huge numbers. Harlan Carter and
Speaker 2: his partner in the air and they are not in
Speaker 2: they don't have an issue with the mental defective's part, right,
Speaker 2: that's not the thing that's a problem to them. This
Speaker 2: is the first law that causes the NRA to get
Speaker 2: like hugely political. And Harlan Carter again, there's this war
Speaker 2: still within the NRA that hasn't resolved between the old
Speaker 2: Guard and the new Guard. Carter, because he has a
Speaker 2: lot of influence in American Rifleman magazine, he enlists like
Speaker 2: the people that he's been seeding the NRA with these
Speaker 2: New Guard folks to start like coming up with a
Speaker 2: series of blistering editorials in American Rifleman magazine that are
Speaker 2: urging people to write letters to Congress to like this
Speaker 2: is the first real concerted lobbying campaign.
Speaker 3: And I'm trying to figure out what which part of
Speaker 3: it it is? Is it the children part? Is it
Speaker 3: the fact that they're like, no children is neutral racially neutral,
Speaker 3: So they're like wait wait wait wait wait wait, you
Speaker 3: can't do that, or what is it?
Speaker 2: A big part of it this is an attempting to
Speaker 2: establish like if you're buying a gun, you have to
Speaker 2: do it through there has to be like this this
Speaker 2: legal process, Like it can't just be a dude has
Speaker 2: a gun and I get it right. And that's that's
Speaker 2: the big that's the center of the problem, right, is
Speaker 2: the idea that the federal government is now going to
Speaker 2: be involved inherent like in all legal gun purchases, which
Speaker 2: is obviously not what the Gun Control Act does. There's
Speaker 2: these things called face to face sales in a lot
Speaker 2: of states where if you're not a gun dealer, you
Speaker 2: can sell a gun to anybody without there being any
Speaker 2: kind of a background check. That is still the law
Speaker 2: in a lot of the country, but most gun purchases
Speaker 2: you have to do you have to fill out what's
Speaker 2: called a Form four four seven three, which is and
Speaker 2: you have to have like a federal background check. Right,
Speaker 2: and the government gets involved, right, That's that's the thing
Speaker 2: that they're scared about. And again, you can't divorce this
Speaker 2: from like the John Birch Society, from all of these
Speaker 2: panics about communism, about like, you know, the government getting
Speaker 2: increasingly centralized. And I guess you might argue that that's
Speaker 2: also closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Speaker 2: But anyway, so the NRA, you know, Harlan Carter urges
Speaker 2: like helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against
Speaker 2: the Gun Control Act, and it's not popular with many
Speaker 2: of the folks running the NRA at the time, and
Speaker 2: again the way they've done things before, Congress would suggest
Speaker 2: a bill, the NRA would usually have some issues with it,
Speaker 2: but they would like make those issues clear. Then they'd
Speaker 2: sit down and like hash something out, as they did
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty four. So the vice president of the NRA,
Speaker 2: a guy named Franklin Orth, figures, that's what we're going
Speaker 2: to do. Right. He doesn't want the organization to take
Speaker 2: like a really public political stance because that's kind of
Speaker 2: permanently alienated from like one party, right, And that's not
Speaker 2: his goal with the NRA. He doesn't want it to
Speaker 2: be like a Republican or a democratic thing. Short sighted idiot. Yeah, So,
Speaker 2: for what would be the last time, because again Orth
Speaker 2: and his people are still in charge of the NRA broadly,
Speaker 2: the NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach
Speaker 2: a compromise on the bill and they you know, they
Speaker 2: alter it and what not to be a little bit whatever.
Speaker 2: Orth describes it as a law. The sportsmen of America
Speaker 2: can live with the fact that anything had been passed
Speaker 2: at all. Enrages the base that Carter has put together,
Speaker 2: and they respond with a flood of hate mail so
Speaker 2: voluminous it nearly makes Orth resign. It becomes increasingly clear
Speaker 2: that the Old Guard did not speak for the increasingly
Speaker 2: radicalized masses of the NRA. And these again, these people
Speaker 2: are they're they're frightened of black mobs of the Watts Riots, right,
Speaker 2: They're also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys
Speaker 2: with like fears of Communist infiltration and invasion. This is
Speaker 2: all kind of coming together as part of it. And
Speaker 2: obviously a lot of the right in this time sees
Speaker 2: the Watts Riots is like it must have been the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union.
Speaker 3: There's is like a synonymous like you know, any kind
Speaker 3: of black uprising synonymous with communism at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So kind of what you're seeing here is the
Speaker 2: radical chunk of the NRA doesn't want, like once to
Speaker 2: oppose any like this law under all conditions. Right, there's
Speaker 2: no way in which they'll be okay with this, and
Speaker 2: they they lose the fight to the Old Guard, who
Speaker 2: works with the government to pass this law. But the
Speaker 2: New Guard, I guess you New Guard isn't really a turn.
Speaker 2: But like the Harlan, Carter's faction becomes it starts to
Speaker 2: become more dominant as a result of this, because it
Speaker 2: pisses off so many people, and because it's so much
Speaker 2: easier to electrify people with like threats of the communist
Speaker 2: government is coming to like take your guns to stop.
Speaker 2: You have to be able to protect your family against
Speaker 2: these dangerous black like that. That's easier to rile people
Speaker 2: up for than we should work with the government to
Speaker 2: come to like sensible you know, accommodations, right, that's compromise,
Speaker 2: that's not a selling point, right. So because of what
Speaker 2: Carter builds here over this fight, membership in the NRA
Speaker 2: soares to over a million people for the first time
Speaker 2: in the association's history. So this is part of what
Speaker 2: scares the old guard and makes them silo. Harlan Carter
Speaker 2: off to the ISLA, which is the NRA's first registered
Speaker 2: lobby and when they make this lobbying group for him
Speaker 2: to run, they don't like fund it, so he's going
Speaker 2: to have to raise his own money to do anything.
Speaker 2: And their hope is that, like, this guy's dangerous, but
Speaker 2: we can't kick him out. So if we give him
Speaker 2: this lobbying organization but don't give him any money, he's
Speaker 2: going to have to spend all of his time raising funds,
Speaker 2: and he's not going to be able to like cause
Speaker 2: any trouble. Sure, this proves to be a bad strategy
Speaker 2: because Harlan Carter invins the concept of right wing fund raising.
Speaker 2: Damn it. Yes, the first podcaster. Yeah, he's the first
Speaker 2: guy to figure out how everything is going to work
Speaker 2: for right wing fund raising in the future. And he
Speaker 2: does it because he figures out he uses computers, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's the thing he figures out is going to be critical.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to quote from Aleena Buckley again. Their
Speaker 2: computer could print eleven hundred lines per minute, letting Carter's
Speaker 2: team produce thousands of letters addressed to members over a
Speaker 2: twenty four hour period. It was the latest iteration of
Speaker 2: a powerful time direct mail. The medium had reached prominence
Speaker 2: by the early nineteen seventies, when it was first pioneered
Speaker 2: by Richard Vigeri, who, as a campaign worker had copied
Speaker 2: down the names and addresses of people who had donated
Speaker 2: to Burry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential bid. With that list of
Speaker 2: Republicans in their addresses as good as the gold bricks
Speaker 2: deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote Vigory had developed
Speaker 2: away for conservatives to reach the people most likely to
Speaker 2: become coveted single issue voters with the right messaging. Carter
Speaker 2: hoped to use the tool to drum up support for
Speaker 2: ila's legislative work. Vigory himself collaborated with Carter to build
Speaker 2: their database. Iola did all of this under the noses
Speaker 2: and the shoes of the NRA executives, gaining ground for
Speaker 2: a hardened line against gun control. I'm building an organization
Speaker 2: capable of public persuasion, not only in Washington, but in
Speaker 2: the States, Carter said at the time. We don't know
Speaker 2: the best way to reach all the people yet, but
Speaker 2: of course we shall.
Speaker 3: Ugh so, God damn it. He built a mailing list.
Speaker 2: He's one of the very first people to do this
Speaker 2: and is arguably the most successful of anyone in this
Speaker 2: period to do it. And uh, yeah, that's where we're
Speaker 2: gonna leave things for today. But first, Matt, you got
Speaker 2: a mailing list? You want to you want?
Speaker 3: I got a mailing list. Yeah, it's called Instagram. You
Speaker 3: can find me there at Matt leap Jokes. Please follow me.
Speaker 3: And also, hey, if you like the Sopranos, listen to
Speaker 3: pod yourself a gun and is a rewatch podcast where
Speaker 3: me and Vince Mancini talk about every episode. We just
Speaker 3: wrapped it up and it is the greatest and only
Speaker 3: sopranos podcast in the world. And I would love for
Speaker 3: y'all to check it out and tell you, well.
Speaker 2: That's wonderful. I would like to use this time to
Speaker 2: get everyone to get involved in my fundamentalist right wing
Speaker 2: mailing list NAKA, the National Anti Quartering Association. We're Third
Speaker 2: Amendment fundamentalists, Matt oh. Not only do I think that
Speaker 2: soldiers shouldn't be quartered in houses, Yeah, I don't think
Speaker 2: they should be quartered anywhere. I think soldiers should be
Speaker 2: kept awake constantly with heavy doses of amphetamines for the
Speaker 2: direction of the time that they're serving. No quartering of
Speaker 2: soldiers anywhere, not even on military basis. Keep them in
Speaker 2: the sea or in the sky on drugs at all times.
Speaker 2: That's the KNAKA line. Yeah yeah, find fight us online,
Speaker 2: give us your email, send us money and.
Speaker 3: Act blue dot com slash anti.
Speaker 2: No quartering nowhere, Good times, good times? Whats epstein my
Speaker 2: bar virus?
Speaker 1: Why was that your intro?
Speaker 4: Why we?
Speaker 2: As as with all of our podcasts, this show is
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Speaker 1: You'd just like to make our poor editor bleep.
Speaker 2: Things I do I do.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry for him. Chris.
Speaker 2: Well, once upon a time when we still went to
Speaker 2: the office, somebody dinged my car. Maybe I'm not one
Speaker 2: hundred percent sure, but I've decided it was our editor,
Speaker 2: and this is Chris.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: You don't know that, Sophie. You don't know what. He
Speaker 2: didn't come in. You don't know that he didn't do it.
Speaker 2: You did it?
Speaker 1: Do you want to know that?
Speaker 4: I've seen his dogs. His dogs are honest. He would
Speaker 4: never do that.
Speaker 2: Well, it was the it was the Union, Chris. You
Speaker 2: know who it was, and I don't know who it was.
Speaker 2: It does wrench us back onto topic, which is Harlan
Speaker 2: Carter and the birth of the National well not the
Speaker 2: birth of but the rebirth of the like this is
Speaker 2: it's it's like a racist you know how. Gandalf is
Speaker 2: like Gandalf the Gray and then he gets reborn as
Speaker 2: Gandalf the White after fighting a ball rog. The NRA
Speaker 2: gets rebirthed is a white supremacist organization after fighting the
Speaker 2: ball rog of the black Panthers assembling legally with guns
Speaker 2: to check police power. Yeah, I may have lost the
Speaker 2: threat a little. I shall not pass. All right, we
Speaker 2: figured it out. We got it.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 2: See, people, this is how the sausage gets made so disgustingly.
Speaker 2: Now we're talking about the NRA, and particularly we have
Speaker 2: this over the Gun Control Act. This this first big
Speaker 2: clash between Harlan Carter's people and the Old Guard, and
Speaker 2: the Old Guard wins, right because they're still broadly speaking
Speaker 2: in control. But but it becomes that like they kind
Speaker 2: of sack like in the course of winning, it becomes
Speaker 2: clear that an awful lot of perhaps most NRA members
Speaker 2: are actually not on board with the direction they want.
Speaker 2: They are really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards
Speaker 2: the Second Amendment and while Harlan Carter was busy building
Speaker 2: the bones of a fundraising and lobbying machine that would
Speaker 2: dominate conservative and really in a lot of ways, American
Speaker 2: politics for the next half century. The Old Guard we're
Speaker 2: wistfully looking back to the organization's past as a sporting
Speaker 2: association and figured maybe we could go back to that
Speaker 2: right And so they are the Conservatives, Harlan Carter is
Speaker 2: the radical right. Politics kind of leaves a bad taste
Speaker 2: in these people's mouths, because again, they're all aristocrats, right,
Speaker 2: They're all like they're they're kind of like Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: They want to have all of their friends right. They
Speaker 2: like on both sides of things. They don't want things
Speaker 2: to get too political because that gets nasty and it
Speaker 2: reduces the number of people who can give you money. So,
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy three, the Old Guard had purchased land
Speaker 2: in Colorado and they wanted to turn it, initially into
Speaker 2: a shooting range. It's pretty normal thing for the NRA
Speaker 2: to do, But in nineteen seventy six they decided to
Speaker 2: go with a grander plan, the National Rifle Association Outdoor Center.
Speaker 2: This was going to be a massive compound dedicated to
Speaker 2: classes on like woodcrafting and wilderness you know stuff, and
Speaker 2: conservation research. They're supposed to be like scientific research done there,
Speaker 2: and also other sporting skills, and of course there would
Speaker 2: be a shooting range there and people would be able
Speaker 2: to hunt on the land. But like guns were not
Speaker 2: the primary purpose, right. It was like a whole outdoor
Speaker 2: recreation center for the NRA. And this was in line
Speaker 2: with they wanted to expand the organization because that's obviously
Speaker 2: it's more money and whatnot. But they didn't want to
Speaker 2: like hone it on guns entirely. They wanted to be like, well,
Speaker 2: we could be like the we could be like the
Speaker 2: American go to organization for like outdoor you know, sporting
Speaker 2: and stuff. So in order to help them kind of
Speaker 2: make this shift, right, because this is at this point,
Speaker 2: but that is different from the NRA's initial vision, as
Speaker 2: is Harlan Carter's vision, right, so they're both trying to
Speaker 2: move it in different directions. Right, It's become clear that
Speaker 2: like this thing the NRA had been isn't going to continue.
Speaker 2: And the old Guard has a vision and the new
Speaker 2: Guard has another one, and so the old Guard hires
Speaker 2: a pr firm, the Orum group to help them drum
Speaker 2: up funding to make this facility reality, because they need
Speaker 2: tens of millions of dollars to build this thing. It's
Speaker 2: a pretty impressive vision, and they hope that they see
Speaker 2: Carters built this like massive fundraising arm. He's getting all
Speaker 2: these people organized on behalf of his Second Amendment absolutism,
Speaker 2: and they want this PR firm to help them like
Speaker 2: take back like power from from Harlan Carter and like
Speaker 2: get people on their side.
Speaker 3: Now here's me like, yeah, you know, Second Amendment absolutism
Speaker 3: is fun, but what if we built a rec center?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What if we had a rec center for rich people?
Speaker 2: You can see what this is kind of like how
Speaker 2: you've got like those those like old political ghouls in
Speaker 2: the Democratic at Party and like the parts of the
Speaker 2: Republican Party that turned into Lincoln Project who opposed Trump
Speaker 2: with like very slick political ads that did nothing, whereas
Speaker 2: Trump just got people angry and that works a lot
Speaker 2: better than like anyway, this is a version of that
Speaker 2: same fight, right, And part of how you could tell
Speaker 2: the ORM Group was not going to succeed in their
Speaker 2: goals is that their founder, like the guy they're named after,
Speaker 2: their founder is this wealthy New York philanthropists whose most
Speaker 2: prominent clients before the NRA were Planned parenthood in the NAACP. So, boy,
Speaker 2: this this guy maybe doesn't get the base of the NRA,
Speaker 2: and it's gonna have trouble speaking to.
Speaker 3: Them, right, Yeah, that's gonna be a problem.
Speaker 2: I might might be a problem. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean it's one thing if it's just like a
Speaker 3: we have two different branches of conservatism or whatever. But
Speaker 3: uh no, these guys are going to be politically and
Speaker 3: morally opposed with each other.
Speaker 2: It's gonna it's not gonna work out well. It's not
Speaker 2: gonna work out well for them. It may have it
Speaker 2: may be such a bad idea that literally anyone could
Speaker 2: have called it. But the NRA big wigs they bring
Speaker 2: this guy on the team and his goal in his
Speaker 2: organization's goal is to chart like a safe new course
Speaker 2: for the NRA in which they kind of keep out
Speaker 2: of politics. And this is in part because like they
Speaker 2: want to build this new facility. You're not gonna get
Speaker 2: thirty million dollars in nineteen seventies money like by by
Speaker 2: Hewing do a hard political line, right, so they succeed
Speaker 2: in roping in a bunch of big donors from all
Speaker 2: across you know, major American business interests. They get Bill Spencer,
Speaker 2: who's like the second guy at City Bank. They get
Speaker 2: Ezra Taft Benson, who's the highest apostle of the Mormon Church.
Speaker 2: They get a bunch of oil and gas industry big wigs.
Speaker 2: All of them agree to like start putting money into
Speaker 2: this project. So in order to like celebrate that they've
Speaker 2: found enough rich old dudes to fund this thing, the
Speaker 2: NRA sets up a big party on their land in
Speaker 2: Colorado for all of these these rich guys, and they
Speaker 2: basically host like a multi millionaire summer camp. People are
Speaker 2: like camping in their private jets on the land, Like
Speaker 2: they park their private jets there and like sleep on them,
Speaker 2: and then they hunt and fish in the daytime.
Speaker 3: I love.
Speaker 2: Exactly right. You see again, this just makes it really
Speaker 2: easy for Carter to be like, well, these guys don't
Speaker 2: have your interest at heart, because they don't. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not defending Carter to say that, like, these guys
Speaker 2: don't give a shit about the average person who might
Speaker 2: want to join the NRA, because most people who join
Speaker 2: the NRA are not millionaires with private jets, right exactly.
Speaker 2: They're missing the entire cultural aspect of it at this point. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so this is not going to work out well
Speaker 2: for them, right, So there's there's some backlash, and Alina
Speaker 2: Buckley describes kind of the Old Guard's vision of the
Speaker 2: association's future as quote, one in which shooting accompanied frontier
Speaker 2: abundance funded by corporations that had long bankrolled conservative causes.
Speaker 2: One in which guns were a reflection of American might,
Speaker 2: cowboy like to be sure, but still with a military
Speaker 2: like formality rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal
Speaker 2: power as a threat. So again, the NRA, this is
Speaker 2: the attitude. The NRA works with the federal government in
Speaker 2: order to ensure this sporting culture and in order to
Speaker 2: ensure a degree of military readiness, which is basically back
Speaker 2: to their old principles. As opposed to the n RA
Speaker 2: is an association that it enables individual Americans to be vigilantes, right, like,
Speaker 2: which is more what Carter's pushing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the fun the fun type.
Speaker 2: Of the guy who was a vigilante, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So while the Old Guard or hobnobbing with the great
Speaker 2: and good Harlan Carter is making a strategic alliance with
Speaker 2: a gun industry journalist, a guy named Neil Knox. Now,
Speaker 2: Knox had been educated a Christian college in Abilene, Texas,
Speaker 2: and the fact that he comes from Abilene is a
Speaker 2: red flag just in general. Don't go to Abilene. No,
Speaker 2: it's almost as bad as Brady. So anyway, sorry, this
Speaker 2: is this is just Texas lore. You have to come
Speaker 2: from Dallas. You have to ship on every other city
Speaker 2: in Texas so that people don't notice how terrible Dallas is.
Speaker 2: So I I like to throw a lot of flag
Speaker 2: Houston's way in order to ignore that They're food is better.
Speaker 2: It's whatever. So he goes to Aplene college, and every
Speaker 2: soci'll find on Neil Knox will note that he marries
Speaker 2: his wife because she was the only girl on campus
Speaker 2: who kept a rifle in her dorm room. Well, hey,
Speaker 2: you know what, that's love, right, Like he finds his
Speaker 2: he finds this person, good for him, he was interested
Speaker 2: in safe sex. I mean it is this is like
Speaker 2: getting into like how different some things are in the country.
Speaker 2: But like at the elementary school where I went to,
Speaker 2: it was not uncommon for like people, particularly like teachers
Speaker 2: to have like guns in their cars in the parking
Speaker 2: lot and at the high school, like kids would regularly
Speaker 2: have their guns in their cars in the parking lot
Speaker 2: during the hunting season and stuff. Well it's like they're
Speaker 2: hunting rifles, right, because they're like, ok, this is in
Speaker 2: like Idabell, Oklahoma, Like it's not uncommon during the season,
Speaker 2: Like you go straight from there to like whatever blind
Speaker 2: you've got. So again, this is like different, different time.
Speaker 2: But also Neil Knox is a very modern kind of
Speaker 2: gun guy who is going to help make the NRA
Speaker 2: into like the gun culture war organization that it comes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like the kind of origin story
Speaker 3: of like the first guy horny for guns. That's going
Speaker 3: to be normal, Like he's going to normalize being horny.
Speaker 2: He's gonna normally as being gun horny. But also with
Speaker 2: conspiracy baked into it, right, that's one of the keys. Right,
Speaker 2: it's not just like an appreciation for guns, it's an
Speaker 2: appreciation for guns within this like conspiratorial milieu that Neil
Speaker 2: Knox is like he's a guy on this.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a it's a yeah, he's he's read the
Speaker 3: Turner Diaries.
Speaker 2: And shit, yeah, I mean he would have been the
Speaker 2: kind of guy to help write them. Not that he was,
Speaker 2: because that's a different set of guys, although they are
Speaker 2: kind of connected by the Goldwater campaign, but that's another story.
Speaker 2: As the Dallas Morning News, rights Knox was, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: just going to quote them walking through this guy's background.
Speaker 2: In the mid nineteen sixties, Knox worked as a reporter
Speaker 2: and editor with newspapers in Vernon and Wichita Falls, before
Speaker 2: getting a job as founding editor of Gunweek, a newspaper
Speaker 2: covering five arms issues of the day. From his base
Speaker 2: in Arizona, the Bearded gun evangelists spent the next forty
Speaker 2: years raising against gun control and pinning himself against NRA
Speaker 2: leaders he saw as too compromising. In the nineteen sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies, the gun industry and the NRA were inclined
Speaker 2: towards pragmatism, said Jeff Knox, who's his kid from his
Speaker 2: home in Buckeye, Arizona, and willing to make concessions. The
Speaker 2: elder Knox believed strongly that the Second Amendent was absolute,
Speaker 2: and he especially didn't like the idea of registering guns,
Speaker 2: which to him, raised the specter of a dictator confiscating
Speaker 2: all arms. And subduing the citizenry, Jeff Knox said at
Speaker 2: one point in the mid nineteen nineties, Neil Knox even
Speaker 2: suggested the assassinations of Kennedy and King might have been
Speaker 2: staged to build support for gun control. So Knox is
Speaker 2: the start of specifically the strain of the American right
Speaker 2: and American gun culture that kind of culminates in Alex Jones. Right, yeah, right,
Speaker 2: And he's not super big about pushing that, but he
Speaker 2: is like the first kind of prominent voice to start
Speaker 2: talking about like these these these.
Speaker 3: Shootings acts exactly made specifically right for gun control.
Speaker 2: That's one of the big things that Neil Knox introduces
Speaker 2: into American culture, at least helps to introduce. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to claim that he was entirely on his own there,
Speaker 2: but he's like the vanguard of that kind of guy
Speaker 2: who winds up doing the Sandy Hook conspiracy shit later on.
Speaker 2: And it's worth noting though that, Wow, when Knox partners
Speaker 2: with Harlan Carter. Again, this is seventy six, seventy seven,
Speaker 2: so he has not yet started pushing conspiracies outright, but
Speaker 2: you can see kind of where he goes is where
Speaker 2: he and Carter helped to lead a lot of the
Speaker 2: gun culture. And yeah, so these guys the old Guard
Speaker 2: see Carter and Knox and see them as like kind
Speaker 2: of unhinged. But even more than that, they're not primarily
Speaker 2: objecting necessarily to their goals as much as the fact
Speaker 2: that they're so extreme that it's going to take away funding. Right,
Speaker 2: it's going to reduce the nays ability to attract a
Speaker 2: lot of people to give them money for this.
Speaker 3: It was a Republican establishment during like Xamstern, they were
Speaker 3: just like, listen, we agree all Mexicans are rapists, but
Speaker 3: you're not gonna get the nomination by saying it. And
Speaker 3: it's like wanna bet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly like that. That's kind of like they're arguing,
Speaker 2: like these people are too extreme. The NRA will like
Speaker 2: die out if their kind takes over. And Harlan Cutter's like, oh, motherfucker,
Speaker 2: you want to see how to make the NRA make
Speaker 2: a lot of money, I will show you some things.
Speaker 2: He's about to. Yeah. So one Friday, November of nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy six, the head of the NRA purged eighty staff
Speaker 2: members loyal to Carter. Right, they fire everybody with like
Speaker 2: very little warning because again Carter spent years getting his
Speaker 2: Border Patrol guys in there. So they try to get
Speaker 2: rid of all these people and what becomes known later
Speaker 2: as the Weekend massacre and Harlan it's the only massacre.
Speaker 2: Harlan resigns from his position in protest, and Alina Buckley
Speaker 2: continues Quote and Gunweek, Handloader, and Rifle, all publications Knox
Speaker 2: At once edited. Writers began reporting rumors about a shake
Speaker 2: up at headquarters. The ORUM Group's report on the Outdoor
Speaker 2: Center had been leaked, and gun group leaders around the
Speaker 2: country bristled at its language. And this is from the
Speaker 2: Orum Group's report. In the public mind, the NRA's current
Speaker 2: image is based almost totally on its supposed opposition to
Speaker 2: any form of gun control. This public image constitutes a
Speaker 2: weakness for fundraising. A new piece of again, very bad
Speaker 2: at being at their job. By the way, a new
Speaker 2: piece of information had gotten out too, via a brocher
Speaker 2: sent in the mail to some members. The Executive Committee
Speaker 2: was considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs, not far
Speaker 2: from Raton, where the NRA could focus more squarely on
Speaker 2: its sports shooting ties. Regional gun groups began receiving concerned
Speaker 2: notes from their members. The Shooter's Committee of Political Education SCOPE,
Speaker 2: based in New York, wrote a letter to Rich protesting
Speaker 2: the nre's recent board appointees and to let him know
Speaker 2: that they would advise their membership to write in Neil Knox,
Speaker 2: among several others as board candidate. At the annual meeting
Speaker 2: in Cincinnati. In the American Riflement, an unsigned editorial appeared.
Speaker 2: There have been charges that the National Rifle Association is
Speaker 2: being subverted. It read in abandoning its fight against gun control.
Speaker 2: So this, uh, and you see here they've built in
Speaker 2: their partnership, Knox and Carter have built a very effective
Speaker 2: both fundraising and propaganda wing. That is, they're they're building
Speaker 2: a moral panic over this right in a very modern way.
Speaker 2: In a way that is, and it's modern because this
Speaker 2: is like the the fucking this is part of like
Speaker 2: the blueprint of really everything the right will do in
Speaker 2: the future. So for the next couple of weeks, Knox
Speaker 2: and Carter call every other NRA lifetime member they can
Speaker 2: in brief, like you, when you have an organization like
Speaker 2: the NRA, every year you have to have a meeting
Speaker 2: and you have to do like voting at that meeting
Speaker 2: and stuff, and like there's people who are the actual
Speaker 2: like board and stuff, but also the lifetime members get
Speaker 2: to vote, and so the board is in control unless
Speaker 2: you can get like enough of those members to vote
Speaker 2: on measures that would like replace the leadership, right, So,
Speaker 2: and they didn't. They had never worked, No one had
Speaker 2: ever really tried to do this before the fact that
Speaker 2: the members get to vote had kind of been like
Speaker 2: like stock options voting, where it's like, right, yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean the random citizens who control twenty percent of the
Speaker 2: company's stock get a vote, but like our CEO controls
Speaker 2: forty five percent, in his best friend controls twenty, so
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter what they say, right right. That was
Speaker 2: the thinking. But obviously the NRA isn't like a publicly
Speaker 2: traded company. You just each each of these people has
Speaker 2: a vote, and if you can whip them all into shape,
Speaker 2: you could actually rest control of the organization away from
Speaker 2: the old guard, which is what knocks and Carters start
Speaker 2: planning to do. Now, there's a lot of politicking that
Speaker 2: goes on here. You can read about it in detail
Speaker 2: in Alena Buckley's article. One thing I think that's worth
Speaker 2: noting is that the whole event has something of an
Speaker 2: early Trumpy vibe. The folks carter lines up to back
Speaker 2: their plan to take over the NRA saw the Old
Speaker 2: Guard as out of touch aristocrats, which they were. They
Speaker 2: framed themselves as like Paul Revere types. Right, they're founding fathers, right,
Speaker 2: they're fighting a revolution against an unjust like aristocracy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: one person who was probable.
Speaker 3: But they're all doing the cosplay now. It's already begins
Speaker 3: with the don't tread on me flags and the three
Speaker 3: pointed you know, fucking hats and yes.
Speaker 2: And one person who was present later recalled some members
Speaker 2: were angry enough to bring rope, tar and feathers to Cincinnati.
Speaker 3: Yeah's are obsession when it's like, oh, the tea party,
Speaker 3: tarn feathering. It's just like they just have an obsession
Speaker 3: with this like patriotic forms of like you know, like
Speaker 3: old style LARPing.
Speaker 2: It's just just the same fucking God. I mean this
Speaker 2: gets into a broader issue that actually is is present
Speaker 2: in different forms everywhere, which is that like everyone has
Speaker 2: their types of violence that are like good and traditional
Speaker 2: and okay, and they're types of violence that are so
Speaker 2: black people breaking a bunch of windows during a riot
Speaker 2: or like you know, flipping a cop car and lighting
Speaker 2: and on fire. That is not okay, that's horrifying. That's
Speaker 2: that's evil violence. You know, end of some caring and
Speaker 2: feathering a guy trying to like raise taxes, like literally
Speaker 2: melting a man's skin off in order to stop him
Speaker 2: from like getting the taxes that will pay for a road.
Speaker 2: That's traditional, right, Yeah, that's and that's yeah, it's allowed.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's uh, I mean burning their skin off and then
Speaker 3: the feathers.
Speaker 2: It's just so they look like a chicken.
Speaker 3: Just the most horrifying joke that you can possibly think of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was.
Speaker 3: Like that John Adams HBO series with Paul Giamatti. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: they had like a tarring and feathering in it, and
Speaker 3: it was like the first time I was like, oh yeah,
Speaker 3: that's incredibly violent.
Speaker 2: Really really violent.
Speaker 3: Actually tatar I thought it was just like, hey, we're
Speaker 3: gonna make you look like a funny chicken, like a
Speaker 3: pie in the face. I put it on the same
Speaker 3: level as a pine a face.
Speaker 2: But it's no, it's not. It's pretty bad. No, And
Speaker 2: it's like, I mean, everyone, there's a degree to which
Speaker 2: this is very common across the political spectrum, because one
Speaker 2: that you get like whenever people suggests like, well, the
Speaker 2: cops should confiscate this or the cops should like do that,
Speaker 2: it's like, well, okay, what happens when police confiscate things?
Speaker 2: Like what does that look like? Violence wise? You know, yes,
Speaker 2: And it's it's because like I don't know, everyone's got
Speaker 2: it's it's a. It's a it's I mean, it's a
Speaker 2: common political tactic. Right to frame the violence you want
Speaker 2: to do or you want to have the government do
Speaker 2: as not violence because it's being done by the government.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, when people do a panic about
Speaker 2: like drug dealers sneaking fentanyl into things, and their solution
Speaker 2: to that is have the DEA raid more people, It's like,
Speaker 2: well the DEA kill people too. Yeah, yeah, completely, I
Speaker 2: don't know, this is just what people do anyway. Uh So,
Speaker 2: knox h takes point on the actual day of the convention.
Speaker 2: He's the one who's actually whipping votes at the NRA
Speaker 2: convention to propose a series of bylaw changes. Using the
Speaker 2: support based Carter had built, he gets them to vote
Speaker 2: in a defense of the second Amendment to the NRA's
Speaker 2: Mission for the first time, right, So he's like, this
Speaker 2: is the first time they actually add because the like
Speaker 2: they have a mission statement whatever is an organization. The
Speaker 2: first thing they do is they add like Second Amendment,
Speaker 2: you know, like we are an advocating for like the
Speaker 2: you know, this interpretation of the Second Amendment to that.
Speaker 2: The next thing they do is they block the sale
Speaker 2: of the NRA headquarters in DC, and they block the
Speaker 2: development of the outdoor center, so they put it into
Speaker 2: this plan and then uh Carter or Knox brings up
Speaker 2: a guy named Bob Kukla, who's one of Carter's people
Speaker 2: who's still in the NRA. When Carter resigns in protest,
Speaker 2: Cucla takes over the lobbying arm and he's apparently I
Speaker 2: guess the Old Guard had thought he was trustworthy, but
Speaker 2: he secretly records one of their managing committee meetings and
Speaker 2: they play this in front of the crowd, and in
Speaker 2: the tape you can hear the current head of the
Speaker 2: NRA and the other members of the Old Guard criticizing
Speaker 2: Cucla for quote going to war every time someone mentions
Speaker 2: gun control. So it pulled up Project Veritas on he
Speaker 2: does he Veritas again. These guys are really Bill being
Speaker 2: the playbook that's going to be used everywhere, well outside
Speaker 2: of guns. Goddamn. So following this, Knox and his voters
Speaker 2: stripped the board and Managing Committee of power and basically,
Speaker 2: again this is there. You can go into a lot
Speaker 2: more detail about how they do this, all legislative lea.
Speaker 2: By the end of things, the old guard are no
Speaker 2: longer in charge of the NRA and Harlan Carter is
Speaker 2: the new executive vice president. Damn. At three yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: they do it. They do it fucking street style. And
Speaker 2: at three point thirty am, Carter takes to the stage
Speaker 2: to give his first speech to his newly conquered NRA.
Speaker 2: You're America's greatest people, my friends. Don't ever forget that
Speaker 2: you are. You have afforded the NRA this wonderful, historically
Speaker 2: important reaction of yours to the way the association has
Speaker 2: been going, to the way you want it to be,
Speaker 2: to the way it ought to be. And if I
Speaker 2: have anything to do with it, you are going to
Speaker 2: win because you are the NRA. Fuck. So he did it.
Speaker 2: He did it, very trumpy speech.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I did is Trump's speech, and he took
Speaker 3: over the NRA, and I imagine now, uh, people are
Speaker 3: going to start falling in line.
Speaker 2: That's uh yeah, well the NRA is going to make
Speaker 2: a lot of people fall in line, and we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about what they do. But first, you know
Speaker 2: who loves to carry out coups. Who our sponsors, who
Speaker 2: backed a series of coups in Indonesia in order to
Speaker 2: gain access to the island that you can go to
Speaker 2: hunt kids on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what they're known for.
Speaker 2: And hey, if you're not if you're not into guns,
Speaker 2: understands you can use bows. You can use an addle addle. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Ninja stars. Ninja stars for sure, looks they can't stop you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a bow staff, literally any weapon that ninja turtles us.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The government of Indonesia has no control over this island,
Speaker 2: so it's all on. Oh we're back. So immediately after
Speaker 2: carrying out his harlan, Carter sets to work remaking the
Speaker 2: NRA in his own image. One of his first hires
Speaker 2: is a guy you may have heard of, Matt Wayne LaPier.
Speaker 2: Ah yeah, yeah, good old Yeah, there we go, w
Speaker 2: Big Wayne.
Speaker 3: Yeah, big le Pierre Pee Peppi la pew pew PuO pew.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't exists, not French, but you know.
Speaker 2: It's I mean, probably somewhere along them.
Speaker 3: Somewhere along the line. The point is, Pew is a
Speaker 3: very good.
Speaker 2: And everyone that was a good joke, you should be proud.
Speaker 2: So by nineteen eighty six, Lapierre is running the NRA's
Speaker 2: entire lobbying arm. Right, so he kind of takes the
Speaker 2: job that Carter had had basically, but by the by
Speaker 2: the eighties, he has turned it into because again it
Speaker 2: was I mean, and Carter started this process, but it
Speaker 2: becomes the most the best funded and most effective lobbying
Speaker 2: organization in DC, right in the entire country. Again insane.
Speaker 2: Carter draws kind of the blueprints, LaPier carries them out
Speaker 2: though there's no other editorial.
Speaker 3: Someday you know exists that you know, it has a
Speaker 3: lobbying arm that changed into just like a you know
Speaker 3: what I mean, it was like this was a sportsman
Speaker 3: lobby that it wasn't even a lobby, and now it
Speaker 3: is the most powerful lobbying.
Speaker 2: And again there's like critiques about well were primarily interested
Speaker 2: in like preserving rich people's right to ownership, but they
Speaker 2: were broadly speaking saw that like, okay, when a law
Speaker 2: affecting guns is proposed, we'll sit down and we'll let
Speaker 2: them know this is how we think this will affect
Speaker 2: our members. And these are some changes. And you know,
Speaker 2: again it's like broadly speaking, like like what you would
Speaker 2: kind of want to see in a democracy that's supposed
Speaker 2: to function the way ours does as opposed to like
Speaker 2: we are going to become so key to right wing
Speaker 2: fundraising that if somebody proposes any kind of law meant
Speaker 2: at curbing gun crime, we will destroy them forever, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is necessary, Yeah, by any means necessary, and to
Speaker 2: an extent that, like it doesn't matter how like reasonable
Speaker 2: the restriction might be. Like even outside of stuff like
Speaker 2: an assault weapons band, Like if you're going to propose
Speaker 2: like universal background checks, which most gun owners support, right,
Speaker 2: we're gonna come for your ass, you know, unless you're
Speaker 2: the Black Panthers, but whatever you're like. So, another nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy seven higher brought onto the NRA at the same
Speaker 2: time as Wayne Lapierre, is a guy named Robert Dowlett.
Speaker 2: Now Dowblet becomes the NRA's general counsel, and it's his
Speaker 2: job to begin wrangling together legal scholars to push hard
Speaker 2: the idea of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Speaker 2: So between nineteen sixty nineteen seventy, there's only three law
Speaker 2: review articles endorsing an individualist interpretation. Right, there are some
Speaker 2: like state level rovings, you could argue kind of endorse
Speaker 2: one earlier, but there's never been like a national, like
Speaker 2: a Supreme Court ruling on the matter one way or
Speaker 2: the other. And it hadn't really people had not even
Speaker 2: talked about it in that way until the sixties. So
Speaker 2: three law review articles written between nineteen sixty and nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy endorsing that interpretation. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 2: the period in which Dowlett is the NRA's General Council,
Speaker 2: there are twenty seven law review articles, three of which
Speaker 2: are authored by Dowblit himself, and his work would start
Speaker 2: to bear fruit. Again. There's some like lower level rulings,
Speaker 2: but it makes the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment
Speaker 2: makes its way to the Supreme Court for the first
Speaker 2: time in two thousand and one. Some people will say, like,
Speaker 2: point to DC as Heller, that's not the first time
Speaker 2: it happens in two thousand and one, and the case
Speaker 2: in question has its origins in a nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 2: criminal case in which a Texas woman divorced her husband
Speaker 2: and filed for a protective order against him because he
Speaker 2: had threatened to murder the man she cheated on him
Speaker 2: with the next year, while he's got this protective order,
Speaker 2: which he's not supposed to have guns because he has
Speaker 2: the protective order against him. Right during a meeting with
Speaker 2: his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he pulls
Speaker 2: a gun during an argument and points it at them,
Speaker 2: so he gets in again. If you're a rational gun owner,
Speaker 2: you a thing like, well, this is exactly the kind
Speaker 2: of person who shouldn't have access to a fucking gun.
Speaker 2: He gets indicted for possession of a firearm, will subject
Speaker 2: to a court order, and he files for dismissal, arguing
Speaker 2: that this had unfairly infringed on his sex an Amendment right.
Speaker 2: And the ruling what it actually rules is kind of complicated.
Speaker 2: The ruling is not entirely in favor of this guy, Emmerson.
Speaker 2: It's Emerson versus the United States. But in the ruling,
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court rules that the Second describes the Second
Speaker 2: Amendment as an individual right right. So this is the
Speaker 2: first time that happens at a federal level. And then
Speaker 2: this ruling in two thousand is reinforced by two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight DC versus Heller, which is like the big
Speaker 2: ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban
Speaker 2: like categories of weapons and whatever it's based on like
Speaker 2: a DC I think handgun ban. And then in twenty
Speaker 2: ten the Second Amendment is finally incorporated in McDonald v. Chicago.
Speaker 2: But this is all you know, orchestrated by Robert Dowlett,
Speaker 2: right starting in the seventies. And one thing you have
Speaker 2: to say about the man is he earned his salary. Right,
Speaker 2: that's a significant change in US Jewish prudence that he
Speaker 2: kind of painstakingly is the architect of pushing. It's probably
Speaker 2: worth noting here that he was a murderer, So I'm
Speaker 2: I'm going a quote from the Boston Review here. Robert J.
Speaker 2: Dowlitt was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yoakum, the mother
Speaker 2: of his then girlfriend, in nineteen sixty three. Dalitt also
Speaker 2: robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop. Like
Speaker 2: Carter dal Liitt was seventeen years old when he pulled
Speaker 2: the trigger. He confessed to the shootings and served six
Speaker 2: years in prison before his conviction was overturned on a technicality.
Speaker 2: The crimes were not made public until twenty fourteen. God damn, no,
Speaker 2: wonder it's like this is it's also he and s
Speaker 2: origin story over, He and Carter and Kyle Rittenhouse all
Speaker 2: seventeen when they fucking kill people in like these, I
Speaker 2: guess I would maybe you wouldn't call what dowlit does
Speaker 2: vigilante violence. He's really just murdering people. No, that just
Speaker 2: sounds like straight up murderer. Yeah, he just murders a
Speaker 2: woman and then shoots a pawn shop owner and a robbery,
Speaker 2: So I guess you would say he's not a vigil
Speaker 2: ande he's just straight up an armed criminal. That is
Speaker 2: fucking insane.
Speaker 3: And this is the guy who's made it easier for
Speaker 3: fucking everyone in the world in the United States.
Speaker 2: Sick. He's he's the NRA's general counsel. So at one
Speaker 2: point I assume he went to law school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: because again he gets off like like a like Carter does. Right,
Speaker 2: he gets off and then he goes to college, and
Speaker 2: I mean, yea, his career.
Speaker 3: Good for them.
Speaker 2: I guess nice.
Speaker 3: You know, we live in the land of opportunity like that,
Speaker 3: I believe firmly that people should be able to get
Speaker 3: a second chance after making a mistake, especially when they're
Speaker 3: you know, uh not a legal adult.
Speaker 2: Certain I believe in certain second chances for certain kinds
Speaker 2: of mistakes. I think perhaps if you murder your girlfriend's
Speaker 2: mom and then shoot a pawn shop owner during a
Speaker 2: robbery an avenue that we ought to close to you
Speaker 2: is representing the National Rifle Association, that's right. Maybe that's
Speaker 2: not okay?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like, listen, that guy
Speaker 3: explicitly does gun crimes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for fun. This should not be his job.
Speaker 3: I want to know what happens with the with the
Speaker 3: the relationship.
Speaker 2: Actually after the murder of the mother. It must have
Speaker 2: been hard while she was his girlfriend, So I don't
Speaker 2: think they wind up staying together. Well damn yeah. It's like,
Speaker 2: you know, with Harlan Carter. I think a seventeen year
Speaker 2: old who, in a crime of racism, commits a murder,
Speaker 2: there should be some way for like that person to
Speaker 2: be rehabilitated. But perhaps they should never be allowed to
Speaker 2: be a border patrol officer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, there's like little things
Speaker 3: like not giving them I don't know, authority over other
Speaker 3: people or requiring them to use lethful force as of
Speaker 3: the job.
Speaker 2: And maybe the guy who murders his girlfriend's mom shouldn't
Speaker 2: help to be an architect of federal gun policy. I
Speaker 2: mean it just perhaps i'm that guy.
Speaker 3: It sounds rational, but you know what, I don't know.
Speaker 3: If that's yeah, I think it'll work out fine.
Speaker 2: I'm not even arguing against an individualist interpretation of the
Speaker 2: Second Amendment because again, I don't really believe that the
Speaker 2: Constitution is something that we should treat as a religious document.
Speaker 2: But not this guy, not this guy making that case.
Speaker 2: If you're got to make that case, maybe Ross Doublets
Speaker 2: shouldn't be the man doing it. Seems like not no,
Speaker 2: So that's cool. And the Boston Review article I found
Speaker 2: does a good job of pointing out that the NRAs
Speaker 2: embrace of this specific legal interpretation does not occur in
Speaker 2: a vacuum. While doubtlets A lawyers are making their case right,
Speaker 2: so while they're and again, this is a very it's
Speaker 2: a pain. It's forty years, it's a painstaking process of
Speaker 2: well not I guess twenty ish twenty three something like that.
Speaker 2: But while they're making their case, the NRA is carrying
Speaker 2: out mass mailing campaign, some of the most extensive and
Speaker 2: political history, and they're publishing magazines that reach millions of people.
Speaker 2: They're paying for ads and all of these different gun
Speaker 2: press magazines. They're having paid spokesmen show up and talk
Speaker 2: radio stations, right. And part of what they're doing they're
Speaker 2: obviously they're arguing for this interpretation of the Second Amendment,
Speaker 2: but they're also pushing cultural change what some scholars have
Speaker 2: termed the tactical turn in US gun culture again, even
Speaker 2: to the extent that like, oh, I mean, one thing
Speaker 2: that liberals get wrong is like it is not new
Speaker 2: for civilians to own on a widespread scale military grade weapons,
Speaker 2: among other things. One of the most popular guns in
Speaker 2: civilian hands that the NRA before its political turn sold
Speaker 2: to people was the M one Garrant, which was the
Speaker 2: US service rifle of World War Two. Right, But what
Speaker 2: is really new is that it's is this kind of
Speaker 2: paramilitary turn for gun owners because people were not buying
Speaker 2: in one gharans primarily to like play act as soldiers.
Speaker 2: They were buying them because the garrant is a perfectly
Speaker 2: good hunting rifle. Right, it is thirty out to six,
Speaker 2: which is a very effective hunting round. And those were cheap, right,
Speaker 2: so it was a good weapon to buy. So people
Speaker 2: are not dressing up as soldiers with their in one
Speaker 2: gharans primarily, right, that kind of stuff, the tactical turn
Speaker 2: in US gun culture occurs. But because it occurs alongside
Speaker 2: the militarization of the police and these kind of Hollywood
Speaker 2: valorization of the militarization of police. So there's a lot
Speaker 2: that's going on here, right, and including like broadly speaking,
Speaker 2: the kind of like you could you also should tie
Speaker 2: in what Hollywood's partnership with the Defense Department, right, and
Speaker 2: the increasing degree to which like military tactical culture becomes
Speaker 2: like popularized. But the NRA recognizes, like this is there's
Speaker 2: a lot of promise in this number one. You can
Speaker 2: get more people involved, you can sell more shit to people,
Speaker 2: which means you can have more companies funding the NRA
Speaker 2: who are not selling much as guns, but all this
Speaker 2: tactical gear. I'm going to read a quote again from
Speaker 2: that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but it
Speaker 2: really ties all of this together. Quote, the story of
Speaker 2: this tactical development in US gun culture is complex. I
Speaker 2: focus in this essay on a few particularly crucial components.
Speaker 2: The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized
Speaker 2: since the nineteen seventies and diffused deeper into the interior
Speaker 2: of the country. This has blurred the boundary between domestic
Speaker 2: and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers
Speaker 2: into nearly every US town, and turned militarized border security
Speaker 2: into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization. This has also corresponded
Speaker 2: with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly
Speaker 2: worsened by the War on Terror, but which historian Elizabeth
Speaker 2: Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson
Speaker 2: administration's War on crime, which ports the NRA backs, like
Speaker 2: the nationalization of border security, it turned the nation's city
Speaker 2: streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement. Second, individuals once
Speaker 2: arming themselves for self defense, often out of racial fears
Speaker 2: or a perceived threat to their masculinity, are now frequently
Speaker 2: claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and
Speaker 2: freedom itself. The NRA has played an outsized role in
Speaker 2: this vigilante reframing by promuligating the myth that gun ownership
Speaker 2: has always been about an individual constitutional right and oriented
Speaker 2: towards a nativist version of self defense. This vigilantism operates
Speaker 2: in conjunction with extra legal violence of law enforcement officers,
Speaker 2: and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty. More
Speaker 2: dangerous than any military grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom
Speaker 2: of others is equal to one's own, and views any
Speaker 2: attempt to support such a quality as tyranny. More importantly,
Speaker 2: this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power
Speaker 2: to take life in defense not of law, but of
Speaker 2: particular social and racial orders. There are now twenty five
Speaker 2: federal agencies with special tactical units. In May of June
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty alone, sixteen deployed their tactical teams to
Speaker 2: Black Lives Matter protests, including the Border Patrol, the Bureau
Speaker 2: of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, the
Speaker 2: US Marshals, the US Coast Guard. In every one of
Speaker 2: the FBI's fifty six field offices, and at the local
Speaker 2: law enforcement level, special weapons and Tactics SWAT units are
Speaker 2: now a staple of daily policing. Their very ordinariness is
Speaker 2: to a testament to how dramatically local policing has changed
Speaker 2: since nineteen sixty nine, when a swat unit was first
Speaker 2: used to raise the Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles,
Speaker 2: pioneering what was at the time an almost unprecedented domestic
Speaker 2: use of military force. In Carter's victory speech, he declared,
Speaker 2: beginning in this place, in this hour, this period in
Speaker 2: NRA history is finished. The post nineteen seventy seven, NRA
Speaker 2: was decidedly partisan, took an absolute position against gun regulation,
Speaker 2: and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a social identity and
Speaker 2: authoritarian political ideology among its members. God damn, yeah, God,
Speaker 2: it all out like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, all of that in a row and concisely done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fucked up. Yeah, And it's again. I I there.
Speaker 2: Some of our listenership will agree and some will disagree.
Speaker 2: I'm a believer fundamentally that I don't like the idea
Speaker 2: of the state having a monopoly on violence, and I
Speaker 2: certainly don't like the idea of the police being able
Speaker 2: to own things that I cannot own. Sure, and there's
Speaker 2: there's an argument to be made, if you're again care
Speaker 2: about being an originalist, that is close to the original
Speaker 2: interpretation of the Second Amendment, right, what part of what by?
Speaker 2: And they're claiming to be originalists, they're claiming to be
Speaker 2: that the that the initial original interpretation was individualists. But
Speaker 2: what they're doing that for is not any idea of
Speaker 2: community self defense or a fear that the federal government
Speaker 2: will accumulate too much power, although it's often framed that way.
Speaker 2: Fundamentally it is about allowing regular white citizens to emulate
Speaker 2: the military and the police and to act as vigilantes
Speaker 2: in their stead right. That is where the NRA turns,
Speaker 2: and that is that is the tactical turn. Right. It's
Speaker 2: not that there's nothing evil about owning body armour, which
Speaker 2: people can do for defense, perfectly reasonable defensive purposes. There's
Speaker 2: nothing like but but what what they're what they're doing
Speaker 2: is pushing this idea of like, not just the miliity,
Speaker 2: not just that like society ought to be militarized, which
Speaker 2: you get in every kind of argument that like what
Speaker 2: we need to do is harden the schools, we need
Speaker 2: to add more cops. But it's this idea that the
Speaker 2: individual white person should militarize themselves in order to in
Speaker 2: order to protect this kind of racial hierarchy, right, supremacy,
Speaker 2: And this is and this is the thing. This is
Speaker 2: what I wish folks who are supportive of more gun
Speaker 2: control would more often do, is tie in all of
Speaker 2: this to what has happened to the police, because they
Speaker 2: cannot be extricated, right, Yeah, And that's I think Avaldi
Speaker 2: made that perfectly clear, that like, these are two sides
Speaker 2: of the problem, and and the NRA is a huge
Speaker 2: part of how we get there both how we get
Speaker 2: these cops that look indistinguishable from like marines in downtown Fallusia.
Speaker 2: Not that I think the Marines necessarily should have been
Speaker 2: in downtown Fallusiah, but you you have these guys. It's
Speaker 2: this There's this thing called the weapons effect, right, and
Speaker 2: which is a psychological phenomenon that's noted that like the
Speaker 2: presence of weapons in an area, visible weapons can increase
Speaker 2: the willingness of people to use violence, right that there's
Speaker 2: like something about that that heightens it. And that's happening here.
Speaker 2: And part of why that happens is just the fact
Speaker 2: that America has so many goddamn guns, right, right. But
Speaker 2: another part of that is the fact that everywhere you
Speaker 2: go you see fucking cops in a way that like,
Speaker 2: you don't see cops dressed as armed as heavily as
Speaker 2: our cops in fucking war zones a lot of the time, right,
Speaker 2: Like it's it's anyway whatever, No, that's what Ireland Carter builds,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I I hear exactly what you're saying, and
Speaker 3: I I agree to an extent with with what you mean.
Speaker 3: I feel like, in general, my problem with liberals is
Speaker 3: that they tend to kind of like put guns in
Speaker 3: the same category, Like they moralize guns the way they
Speaker 3: moralize like the right it will moralize drugs, yes, and
Speaker 3: kind of this idea that like, you know, if we
Speaker 3: were to just make all the guns illegal, then you know,
Speaker 3: this would solve the problem and whatnot. And that's not
Speaker 3: to say that it there isn't it wouldn't be helped
Speaker 3: if you had some serious regulation. But this like moralization
Speaker 3: of it like misses the entire point of why exactly
Speaker 3: the uh why the people who want guns and have
Speaker 3: those guns have them? You know, it's like, yeah, you're
Speaker 3: the people you're speaking to, are not it's people speaking
Speaker 3: to the choir. Liberals often just speak to themselves and
Speaker 3: go like, uh, isn't it crazy that you know, all
Speaker 3: these people have so many guns, and it's like, yeah, well,
Speaker 3: while you're talking amongst yourselves, all these guys have created
Speaker 3: an entire family filled with guns.
Speaker 2: And it's like looking at these right wing like militias
Speaker 2: that people are rightly like concerned to see militias marching
Speaker 2: around US streets like threatening people, and but also failing
Speaker 2: to see the thing that is, like, well, every one
Speaker 2: of those guys has friends who are cops, and like
Speaker 2: a significant percentage of them are cops, which is why
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of cops were president January sixth, And
Speaker 2: that's a huge chunk of it. And like, you can't
Speaker 2: you can't divorce your desire to reduce the number of
Speaker 2: guns in American culture from the need to reduce the
Speaker 2: militarization of the police, because they are both inextricably tied
Speaker 2: to the problem, which is the constant gun violence in
Speaker 2: this country. Has has two points that need to be
Speaker 2: really like hit on. It's not just civilian gun ownership,
Speaker 2: it's also the way in which the state uses and
Speaker 2: legitimates armed force, going back to even the earliest days
Speaker 2: where it's like yeah, in Texas, your right to carry
Speaker 2: guns was heavily restricted, but if you were a white
Speaker 2: vigilante who carried guns to do racist violence, you would
Speaker 2: often get off right and though you'd broken the law,
Speaker 2: right like Harlan Carter, you know. Anyway, under Harlan Carter,
Speaker 2: the NRA's membership triples from one million to more than
Speaker 2: three million. It would reach five million members underwayn Lapierre. Obviously,
Speaker 2: the NRA going to get into this a lot, but
Speaker 2: it's like well past its prime at this point for
Speaker 2: a variety of reasons, of primarily rampant corruption. There's a
Speaker 2: pretty good podcast about like what the fuck happened there?
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's to Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos
Speaker 3: podcast sect.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. So the NRA tops out at about five
Speaker 2: million members, but as of twenty seventeen, about fourteen million
Speaker 2: Americans claimed some sort of affinity for the organization, And
Speaker 2: I forget who did the poll, but whatever. And one
Speaker 2: of the things that's interesting here is that like that's
Speaker 2: like a lot of people to get around anything, but
Speaker 2: that's also not a lot of people. Is a voting
Speaker 2: block compared to the entirety of the United States, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And so looking at that, you have to kind of
Speaker 2: marvel at the success of the LDRA in making their
Speaker 2: ideas a cornerstone of right wing politics, because I was
Speaker 2: just thinking myself, that seems like a low number. It's right,
Speaker 2: because again, if you look at actually polling of Republicans
Speaker 2: on gun control issues, they are a lot less hardliners
Speaker 2: on guns. Then you would guess by how the party acts.
Speaker 2: And it's because the party's ability to fund elections for
Speaker 2: decades was heavily based on who could get the NRA's approval, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: god exactly. In twenty sixteen, they spent more than thirty
Speaker 2: million dollars on Donald Trump's campaign. And this again people
Speaker 2: often miss this, Like my parents are were hardcore right wingers, right,
Speaker 2: So it was my whole family. I had like two
Speaker 2: relatives who owned guns, like my grandpa and one of
Speaker 2: my uncles, right, And I did go shooting as a kid,
Speaker 2: but my parents didn't have any. My aunt and uncle
Speaker 2: didn't have any. There were not guns in the house
Speaker 2: of my family in Texas, you know, because like it's
Speaker 2: actually not as integral to conservatism as a as a
Speaker 2: at least I mean, this is again changed because the
Speaker 2: culture wars have accelerated so like, yes, is that there's
Speaker 2: less conservatives like the ones I grew up with when
Speaker 2: they were right there were today, but the NRA. It
Speaker 2: wasn't that everyone on the right was in lockstep. It's
Speaker 2: that the elected leaders were scared to cross them because
Speaker 2: that's where the fucking money came from. Right now, of course,
Speaker 2: that's why they were able to read will power so effectively.
Speaker 2: One of them most peculiar but also influential aspects of
Speaker 2: Harlan's time and power was his repeated and intense defense
Speaker 2: of cheap shitty handguns. And this gets us to the
Speaker 2: Saturday Night Special. Here we go, Saturday Night Special. In brief, like,
Speaker 2: there's a type of handgun that was very cheap in
Speaker 2: the seventies up through in the eighties and stuff called
Speaker 2: a Saturday It was nicknamed the Saturday Night Special. It's
Speaker 2: like a five or six shot usually thirty eight caliber handgun.
Speaker 2: These are still guns like this are still used in
Speaker 2: violent crime way more often than like the guns that
Speaker 2: are politicized, like, cheap handguns in general are the primary
Speaker 2: guns that are used in violent gun crime. Although what
Speaker 2: is a cheap shitty handgun is different now because actually
Speaker 2: six shot revolvers are kind of pricey these days. It's
Speaker 2: supposed to like a high point or something. But yeah,
Speaker 2: so this is a cheap, shitty handgun, and these are
Speaker 2: particularly low quality handguns. They were not like well made.
Speaker 2: As a general rule, they always work. They did not
Speaker 2: always we are yet that's that we're building to that, Okay,
Speaker 2: umping the gun. So you have this massive crime rate
Speaker 2: raised and starts in the seventies and really like peaks
Speaker 2: in the early nineties. And again a lot of Joe
Speaker 2: Biden's career is based off of this like violent crime
Speaker 2: panic that starts in this period. And one of the
Speaker 2: first like legislative like tsunamis that forms around the crime
Speaker 2: surge is around this fear of the Saturday Night Special.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons why people are so scared
Speaker 2: of the Saturday Night Special is that it is a
Speaker 2: gun that black people can afford, right, right, It is
Speaker 2: a cheap handgun, and so it is affordable for those folks.
Speaker 2: Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban this Saturday Night Special,
Speaker 2: although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor
Speaker 2: people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly on the grounds that they
Speaker 2: were shitty and broke easily. And this is one of
Speaker 2: the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from the from
Speaker 2: NRA on therecord dot org quote. Speaking in opposition to
Speaker 2: opposition to legislation that aimed to ban Saturday Night Specials
Speaker 2: and other inexpensively produced handguns, Carter stated in a nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two speech before the inter Raised Executive Committee, I
Speaker 2: can produce actual cases that the cheap handgun that snaps
Speaker 2: in a police officer's face instead of firing has saved many,
Speaker 2: many lives. And the question arises, what are we trying
Speaker 2: to do upgrade the quality of handguns in the hands
Speaker 2: of our criminals. God, that's an amazing logical argument. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like he has a point, a really
Speaker 3: fucked up evil point. And it's also he's getting straight
Speaker 3: to i mean, the crux of it here, which is
Speaker 3: like he's lucky to be in a situation in which
Speaker 3: he can claim like, oh, actually, I don't want to
Speaker 3: ban this because this makes me feel safer to know
Speaker 3: that they have, you know, the poor their quality of
Speaker 3: handguns is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's way worse. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a
Speaker 2: lot that's messy on this whole thing. But it is
Speaker 2: very funny, and it's going to d up getting a
Speaker 2: lot of people killed, not necessarily, not just from violence.
Speaker 2: A lot of people are going to die because of
Speaker 2: Carter's defensive terrible handguns and where it leads. But before
Speaker 2: we get into that, you know who else loves shitty
Speaker 2: handguns that break in their owner's hands and they, I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: Sophie absolutely loves it. Motto is we want you to
Speaker 2: be armed, and we want you to never know if
Speaker 2: that gun's going to fire or not. Yeah, completely inexplicable.
Speaker 2: We want a weapon that you cannot trust under any circumstances,
Speaker 2: that's guarantee. Remove drop safeties from handguns, let them free.
Speaker 3: You know I enjoy this because I am watching Sophie
Speaker 3: just shaking her head every time you do this bit.
Speaker 2: She hates it. She You're so angry.
Speaker 1: Do you know why I hate it?
Speaker 2: Why is that, Sophie?
Speaker 1: Because there's like fifty Reddit threads of people being wait,
Speaker 1: what is this?
Speaker 2: I've never read about who has a child hunting?
Speaker 4: And I just it just feels like betrayal to our listeners.
Speaker 1: I love most of my heart.
Speaker 2: I like fucking with them. Yeah, I feel the same
Speaker 2: way towards them that I do with my cat when
Speaker 2: I like, I like pick it up and I like
Speaker 2: toss it in the air, and it hates it. But
Speaker 2: it can't. It can't. It has to let me like
Speaker 2: squeeze it and wrap it in a blanket. And it's
Speaker 2: called rent. It's called paying rent. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got to be adorable for me. Sometimes your
Speaker 3: fear makes me smile. I feel the same way about
Speaker 3: our piggies.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Everyone, it's like you feed the slot to the piggies
Speaker 3: and you let them wink.
Speaker 2: But it's you're the farmer. Remember that's right, you're the farmer. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm the farmer.
Speaker 3: You are, yes, exactly.
Speaker 4: Remember, don't do that to the goats. I don't think
Speaker 4: it'll work out. Work out.
Speaker 2: Well, it's really fun to fuck with the goats if
Speaker 2: you pick them up, like they don't know what to
Speaker 2: do with their little legs and they just like kick
Speaker 2: in the air and you can hug them all.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 2: They go except for my boy goat. He's the ram.
Speaker 2: He loves it. He fucking as soon as he sees
Speaker 2: you will run up because he wants to get cuddled. Damned.
Speaker 2: His sister hates it. But yeah, anyway, we're back. So
Speaker 2: before we get onto the consequences of Harlan Carter's embrace
Speaker 2: of terrible, unsafe firearms, let's talk about his defense of
Speaker 2: the virtues of arming small children with derringers. Now, Matt,
Speaker 2: he's not a gun guy. The derringer is a tiny,
Speaker 2: ultraconcealable one or two shot pistol. They were originally made
Speaker 2: for Riverbroat gamblers, as documented in the documentary Maffick.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure I know exactly right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like little little bitty like yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, hot girl guns. This is the way I think
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 2: Here's something he said to Congress. There was a little
Speaker 2: boy and it was real cold, and he had his
Speaker 2: hands in his overcoat. He had one of these little
Speaker 2: old arangers, and four bushy guys ambled up in an
Speaker 2: arrogant manner. He stopped them, and three of them were
Speaker 2: very nice and decent, and one of them said, what
Speaker 2: would you do if I told you I had a
Speaker 2: pistol and I was going to kill you? And he says,
Speaker 2: I would kill you, you son of a bunch. These
Speaker 2: little guns have a very noble and important purpose and
Speaker 2: we should make our position clear.
Speaker 3: God, that is the first recorded incident of like someone
Speaker 3: being like my five year old just said, Daddy, why
Speaker 3: does Trump do the bad thing? And I couldn't explain.
Speaker 3: It's like a totally fake story that did nothing.
Speaker 2: There's absolutely no way this happened. But also none of
Speaker 2: it makes it Like, what does it mean by their bushy?
Speaker 2: What does that mean? He has to be being racist here?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. And I don't know how which race going?
Speaker 3: Like were they hacidic Jews?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What does this mean? What does bushy mean? I
Speaker 2: don't know what. It could be Italians. It would be
Speaker 2: funny if, like the real story is that that the
Speaker 2: Jeb and George Bush who were at this point like
Speaker 2: it was it was all of the Bush brothers, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: trying to mug children. Yeah, you know Bushy like the
Speaker 2: former head of the CIA. Yeah, I think he was current,
Speaker 2: probably would have been a current when this was. I
Speaker 2: guess it's like the late seventies. Yeah, so obviously that's
Speaker 2: probably a lie, but it's very Again, Harlan Carter is
Speaker 2: he is the kind of guy who is not just
Speaker 2: like I think, UH, children should be able to engage
Speaker 2: in shooting sports. But like I think children should be
Speaker 2: routinely carrying handguns on their person. Yeah, because why guys, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: that is out of its damn mind.
Speaker 3: Just just oh, man, a bushy man could strike at
Speaker 3: any point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you never know when a bushy dude's gonna come in.
Speaker 2: You gotta be you have to always have a derringer
Speaker 2: in your five year old's pocket. It's the seventies.
Speaker 3: Maybe he's talking about like a tom like a like
Speaker 3: a lot of chest hair type. Yeah, you know, like
Speaker 3: he disco ste shows up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a bunch of disco guys come out and start
Speaker 2: threatening children. So anyway, back to the point. Under Harlan
Speaker 2: and his successors, the NRA acted repeatedly to defend the
Speaker 2: rights of gun manufacturers to build dangerously shoddy firearms like
Speaker 2: this we talk a lot about, rightly, so the things
Speaker 2: they do, like legislatively to defend the gun industry, But
Speaker 2: this is often left out because one of the things
Speaker 2: is its primary victim is gun owners.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote here from a write up in Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy two, Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Speaker 2: Four years earlier, Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus
Speaker 2: Crime Control in Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects
Speaker 2: of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to
Speaker 2: give this agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingle,
Speaker 2: sorry a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an
Speaker 2: A plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five. He did it again when a colleague
Speaker 2: introduced a bill making a second run at giving the
Speaker 2: CPSC firearms authority. We put in there an express prohibition
Speaker 2: against them getting their nose into the business of regulating
Speaker 2: firearms and ammunition, Dnkle said in debate in Congress. That
Speaker 2: second bill was crushed three hundred and thirty nine to
Speaker 2: eighty and the issue has never been seriously considered again.
Speaker 2: And it's one of those like this is again perfectly
Speaker 2: even if you're like a gun fundamentalist, you should want
Speaker 2: there to be oversight of guns that don't work or explode,
Speaker 2: and like ammunition that doesn't work, like right right. That
Speaker 2: seems to make that shouldn't be a political issue.
Speaker 3: It's they'd be into that, yeah, And the only explanation
Speaker 3: for you not being into it is like, oh good,
Speaker 3: they can't get the good guns. I mean, like, like
Speaker 3: poor poor people, black people getting the defective guns seems
Speaker 3: to be the only excuse here.
Speaker 2: I mean, well, I mean their specific excuse is that
Speaker 2: like this will this will enable potentially the government to
Speaker 2: regulate what kind of ammo's illegal and ban types of
Speaker 2: like whatever, right, which they do anyway, like that shit
Speaker 2: happens like whatever, it's dumb. It's dumb that this happens
Speaker 2: this way. M it is worth noting that, Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: like a blue dog Democrat who is the one who
Speaker 2: like blocks this shit. So the end result is that
Speaker 2: when gun manufacturers produce firearms that, for example, fire for
Speaker 2: no reason and kill their owners, it is impossible for
Speaker 2: the government to order them to recall those weapons. Not
Speaker 2: even the BATFE, which supposedly regulates firearms, can force a
Speaker 2: gun maker to take broken guns off the market. And
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote again from that Bloomberg article, and
Speaker 2: this is actually how the article opens. Thomas bud Brown
Speaker 2: makes his way out the back door and stops a
Speaker 2: few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm pointing
Speaker 2: at something. It's where he found his boys slumped against
Speaker 2: the cold back wall of the house around seven to
Speaker 2: fifteen am on the last day of twenty sixteen. Bleeding
Speaker 2: Out Brown is telling the story now about how he
Speaker 2: was sitting in his chair in the living room when
Speaker 2: he heard the shot. His son, Jared twenty eight it
Speaker 2: had just picked up Bud's Taurus PT one forty five
Speaker 2: millennium pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting
Speaker 2: near their house in Griffin, Georgia with his best friend
Speaker 2: Tyler Haney. Bud figure Jared had fired at something for
Speaker 2: the fun of it, like he did sometimes. I was
Speaker 2: thinking I'd better go out there and tell him to
Speaker 2: be careful or something, Bud fifty four says, his voice
Speaker 2: trailing off. But what he'd heard was the pistol going
Speaker 2: off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a forty five
Speaker 2: caliber slug through Jared's femoral artery. Oh shit, my leg,
Speaker 2: my leg, Jared yelled loud enough for his father to hear.
Speaker 2: Haney twenty six rushed to the house in a panic,
Speaker 2: pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol
Speaker 2: was still in its holster, tucked into Jared's waistband. So
Speaker 2: any Bud, so he can't do nothing, absolutely nothing. Bud
Speaker 2: is one of We have no idea how many Americans
Speaker 2: died due to defective Turis guns. The company did eventually
Speaker 2: issue a recall on something like a million weapons that
Speaker 2: were potentially defective, but they didn't have to run ads
Speaker 2: anywhere to inform people of the recall. They were not
Speaker 2: required to reach out to their customers, to reach out
Speaker 2: to gun stores, to take any action at all to
Speaker 2: warn people that they'd sold guns that could fire for
Speaker 2: no reason. An unknown number of those weapons are still
Speaker 2: in people's gun saves, closets and holsters today. That's fucking crazy.
Speaker 3: Just like I don't even know that justificate it's just
Speaker 3: guns don't kill people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's this face kills people. The the NRA they are,
Speaker 2: there's this like social like uh culture war component of
Speaker 2: how they do what they're doing. But they fundamentally represent
Speaker 2: the gun industry in any industry that can stop there
Speaker 2: from being a way to sue them if their products
Speaker 2: don't work. Course will do it if they can, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just it's just it's yeah, it's so insane
Speaker 3: to get to a point where it's so clearly a
Speaker 3: manufacturing lobby mixed in with a culture war issue that
Speaker 3: just creates death everywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's and it's I mean again for among other things,
Speaker 2: don't buy tortoise guns for a practical purpose. But in
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties, more than forty US cities filed lawsuits
Speaker 2: against gun manufacturers, spurred on by a surge and violent crime.
Speaker 2: This was the super Predator era. Now, I can't speak
Speaker 2: as to the legal merits of the individual cases of
Speaker 2: these cities against these gun manufacturers, but the response the
Speaker 2: NRA shows was interesting. They used their lobbying arm to
Speaker 2: launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho
Speaker 2: and Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida to propose a piece
Speaker 2: of legislation that would end all pending litigation against gun
Speaker 2: companies and prevent any future litigation. It took a while
Speaker 2: to actually get the law, which is the PLCIA, written,
Speaker 2: and by the time it was introduced, George W. Bush
Speaker 2: was on his second term. In October two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: he signed the PLCAA and a law which blocked lawsuits
Speaker 2: from seeking damages on gun industry companies for unlawful use
Speaker 2: of a firearm right. So if the company could be
Speaker 2: sued for like breaking the law in some way, but
Speaker 2: they cannot be sued for what people do with their weapons.
Speaker 2: And I have some conflicting feelings on some of these lawsuits.
Speaker 2: But one of the things that people will point out
Speaker 2: is that the advertising of a lot of these companies
Speaker 2: like leads to the like and this is a big thing,
Speaker 2: like the Sandy Hook lawsuit, right, One of the big issues.
Speaker 2: One of the big like points that used to justify
Speaker 2: like the suing against the Bushmaster who made the gun
Speaker 2: that was used in Sandy Hook, was this ad campaign
Speaker 2: they'd just done where it was like, consider your Man
Speaker 2: card reissued, and they would like send you a man
Speaker 2: card with an AR fifteen and it's it's again, there's
Speaker 2: a again. I this is like a complicated thing to
Speaker 2: get into entirely, but there's a debate to be had.
Speaker 2: Into my mind, the area in which it's kind of
Speaker 2: most relevant to have this debate is on to what
Speaker 2: extent does the way the gun industry tries to sell
Speaker 2: weapons to people complicit in when those weapons are used
Speaker 2: for violence. So, for example, when Daniel Defense launches an
Speaker 2: ad where you have like a Bible verse and a
Speaker 2: small child holding an air of fifteen. To what extent
Speaker 2: does that help to lead to what extent does that
Speaker 2: help make gun culture in the United States more violent? Right?
Speaker 2: And this is not really what the lawsuits are, Like
Speaker 2: the Uvaldi families aren't suing Daniel Defense or that they're
Speaker 2: attempting to right now. This is all happening at the
Speaker 2: moment on those lines. But to my mind, that's kind
Speaker 2: of the most That's the thing that like, I think
Speaker 2: there's a point on sure.
Speaker 3: I mean it's like, I mean, the way cigarettes were
Speaker 3: marketed changed, you know, yes, were regulated like crazy and
Speaker 3: has actually had an effect on the amount of smokers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so anyway, again I have some complicated thoughts
Speaker 2: on like suing companies for the unlawful use of their products,
Speaker 2: but there's like, anyway, the PLCIA kind of ended that
Speaker 2: for a long time. I think this is starting to
Speaker 2: be challenged, But for fifteens or seventeen years or whatever,
Speaker 2: made any kind of like debate meaningless because it was
Speaker 2: just prohibited. And it was prohibited. Again. This is the
Speaker 2: NRA spent a lot of money on George W. Bush's campaigns.
Speaker 3: You know, I am wondering if the like initially the
Speaker 3: Hatachi Magic wand actually was a back massager. And if
Speaker 3: you could sue sue a company because it gave your
Speaker 3: wife an orgasm.
Speaker 2: Well, like again there, I think people do need to
Speaker 2: consider when we talk about, like to what extent should
Speaker 2: a gun manufacturer be liable for something about a mass shooting?
Speaker 2: There are some unsettling implications to some of that. It's
Speaker 2: not a super cut, it's not as cut and dry
Speaker 2: as certain other things are.
Speaker 3: And I'm not saying it's a slippery slope necessarily, but
Speaker 3: I am saying that I thought it was a back massager. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and now it's better at making my wife calm than
Speaker 3: I am.
Speaker 2: And that's always has been.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And well, I mean it seems kind of unfair
Speaker 3: to me to have not known that.
Speaker 2: What's really I mean, people are bringing up people into
Speaker 2: or have brought up the fact that, like you're limited
Speaker 2: to six dildos I think in the state of Texas,
Speaker 2: is that right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, there's like literal laws
Speaker 2: on how many. I mean, I don't think they've ever
Speaker 2: been in. What has been enforced though, is that like
Speaker 2: anyone you know who works at a sex shop in
Speaker 2: Texas it has to be like is like prepared This
Speaker 2: is a little little bit less the case now. But
Speaker 2: when I had friends in the early two thousands, like
Speaker 2: you get training on like what to do if you
Speaker 2: get raided because you're not allowed to sell sex toys
Speaker 2: they had. They were always called cake toppers, right, like
Speaker 2: the dildos and shit were like cake toppers or personal
Speaker 2: massagers or whatever. Yeah, but you couldn't, like you couldn't say, like,
Speaker 2: these are for fucking, in the same way that like
Speaker 2: you could sell a bong, but you had to call
Speaker 2: it a water pipe for tobacco, like if you use
Speaker 2: the ball word bong and a Texas. Again, head shops
Speaker 2: were always kind of inconsistent about how much they were
Speaker 2: paranoid about this. But like you, you could get asked
Speaker 2: to leave for calling something a bong in a in
Speaker 2: a head right.
Speaker 3: But I mean, what do you what do you call
Speaker 3: the you know that you know that silicon butt that
Speaker 3: has both the pussy and the giant. That's a sex ass.
Speaker 3: That's a sex ass. Yeah, so but you I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm just saying, how do you market that around?
Speaker 2: I don't I don't think they really had sex ass,
Speaker 2: although I know people bought fucking what do you call them?
Speaker 2: The flesh lights. So there must have been some, like
Speaker 2: I'm guessing they probably they must have been advertised as
Speaker 2: like a novelty, right, It's like this is a for
Speaker 2: joking around at a bachelorette partner you put it. They're like,
Speaker 2: it's dumb. All Texas's whole legal system is stupid.
Speaker 3: Sh that's insane. That's a lot of fun though. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, but people get around it like I didn't
Speaker 3: have access to a big silicon, you know, uh but
Speaker 3: vagina and so I fucked a big mouth billy bass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who didn't fuck a big mouth billy bass? Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm universal experience of people in the early two thousands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry. I just like eventually I just was like,
Speaker 3: we're going to start talking about com We're gonna start.
Speaker 2: Talking about Look, you know, the same year that George W.
Speaker 2: Bush signs the PLCAA and the law, that's the year
Speaker 2: that many millions of young American boys encountered a billy
Speaker 2: Largemouth bass. For the fact's right. Yeah, and thanks to
Speaker 2: the NRA's lobbying, the Billy Bass Company couldn't be suited
Speaker 2: for taking the rigidity of all those boys.
Speaker 3: Take me to your virginity. All right, I'm done.
Speaker 2: All right. The last thing I want to talk about here,
Speaker 2: and this is maybe the most unsettling thing the NRA
Speaker 2: has done, is that they have made it impossible not
Speaker 2: just to like, not only do they fight like any
Speaker 2: regulation that might potentially impact positively America's gun violence problem
Speaker 2: or America's gun death problem, they've made it impossible to
Speaker 2: research how gun violence works and like the extent to
Speaker 2: which different policies affect it. In nineteen ninety three, the
Speaker 2: New England Journal of Medicine published an article that show
Speaker 2: showing that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide
Speaker 2: in the home. Now, this is a study you'll see
Speaker 2: cited a great deal, and it's often used to argue
Speaker 2: that firearms in the home make people less safe. This
Speaker 2: study was widely reported on it at the time, and
Speaker 2: it scared the shit out of the NRA. So the
Speaker 2: NRA campaigned to eliminate the organization that had funded the study,
Speaker 2: the CDC's National Center for Energy Injury Prevention. Congress included
Speaker 2: language in the nineteen ninety six Omnibus Appropriations Bill to
Speaker 2: insist that quote none of the funds made available for
Speaker 2: injury prevention and control with the Centers for Disease Control
Speaker 2: and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.
Speaker 2: Now you may note they weren't doing that with that study.
Speaker 2: It was a study that you could use to argue
Speaker 2: gun control, supported gun control, but it was just a
Speaker 2: study on like the homicide risk and how that changes
Speaker 2: when you have a gun in the home, right, right, Like,
Speaker 2: the CDC was not like lobbying specifically, they were carrying
Speaker 2: out a study. But the NRAMA studied, yeah, how people
Speaker 2: get hurt in the home, And the NRA argued that
Speaker 2: was inherently like that's political and should be illegal. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then they make that happen, right Yeah, Like, Congress
Speaker 2: goes through with this shit. This is later referred to
Speaker 2: as the Dickie Amendment because of some dude named Dickie.
Speaker 2: Now under extensive lobbying pressure, Congress also removed two point
Speaker 2: six million dollars from the CDC's budget, as that was
Speaker 2: the amount they had invested in firearm injury research the
Speaker 2: year before. So they cut all of the money out
Speaker 2: of the CDC's budget that had been used to research
Speaker 2: firearm industry. And again, whatever you think about gun control,
Speaker 2: there are four hundred million of these things in the
Speaker 2: fucking country. There should be research into how they affect people. Right,
Speaker 2: It just seems prudent. It seems prudent, Just seems prudent. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if fucking if auto companies were blocking research into how
Speaker 2: car accidents work, right, like, you would say that's nuts,
Speaker 2: you know, because it would be And it's not even
Speaker 2: It's like, it's not even our companies tried to do that. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: it's I don't fault them for trying. It's the same
Speaker 2: way with their you know, that's what they're going to do.
Speaker 2: That's what they're going to do.
Speaker 3: They're going to try to do that, and you know,
Speaker 3: it's a fucked up capitalist system we're in.
Speaker 2: If you have the money, you can try.
Speaker 3: The crazy thing is a success rate of the NRA
Speaker 3: in these in these things that are completely like common
Speaker 3: sense ideas.
Speaker 2: There's there's a wide variety of arguments about how should
Speaker 2: you interpret this, this the you know, the findings to
Speaker 2: studies like this, to what extent should they inform policy?
Speaker 2: All that kind of stuff. But at the end of
Speaker 2: the day, I think if you're saying you shouldn't be
Speaker 2: studying this kind of stuff at all, you were the
Speaker 2: bad guy here. You're definitely bad, but defin you're a
Speaker 2: bad guy.
Speaker 3: The very least coming in bad faith. But yeah, you
Speaker 3: are one doing bad guys stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and should be stopped. And federal funding for research
Speaker 2: into gun violence and gun related injuries dried up after that.
Speaker 2: Since nineteen ninety six, the CDC's funding for firearm injury
Speaker 2: prevention has fallen ninety six percent, and similar attempts to
Speaker 2: fund research have met with further attacks and the ability
Speaker 2: to study any of these stuff, most recently in twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: And yeah, so anyway, that's broadly speaking the story our
Speaker 2: buddy Neil Knox. I should give you a little bit
Speaker 2: of context on how our heroes turned out. Yeah, they doing.
Speaker 2: Neil Knox wound up being way too radical for even
Speaker 2: Harlan Carter's NRA. He was forced out of the organization
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty two after being overshadowed by the rise
Speaker 2: of Wayne Lapierre. I think LaPier kind of helps maneuver
Speaker 2: him out. He dies of colon cancer in two thousand
Speaker 2: and five. He outlived Carter by a fair amount. Harlan
Speaker 2: died not surprisingly of lung cancer in nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 2: so the tobacco industry did us all a solid on
Speaker 2: this one. Yay.
Speaker 3: Occasionally it works out.
Speaker 2: One of his final acts in this world was to
Speaker 2: hand over control of the NRA to Wayne LaPier. Oh shit,
Speaker 2: that's the that's the Harlan Carter in the NRA. Everybody,
Speaker 2: God damn. There's a pretty good song about him called
Speaker 2: Raymond Cassiano by the Drive By Truckers, which is good. Well,
Speaker 2: that guy fucking he sucks. It sucks that he he
Speaker 2: sucks that he's dead too.
Speaker 3: I feel like one of the big reasons why I'm
Speaker 3: just like, I don't, you know, I'm not for like, hey,
Speaker 3: look to make guns illegal or whatnot, is because I
Speaker 3: feel like guns might end up being very useful in
Speaker 3: stopping all these ridiculous, you know, fucking NRA lobbies.
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, And this is I have tried. I
Speaker 2: think I've done a very good job of like not
Speaker 2: inserting a bunch of my own specific opinions on gun control,
Speaker 2: because at the end of the day, there is a
Speaker 2: history of here and it deserves to be like talked about, sure,
Speaker 2: without a tremendous amount of editorializing. But yeah, I feel
Speaker 2: similarly like my attitudes on what gun control should be
Speaker 2: around are impacted by like Number one, I don't think
Speaker 2: only rich people should have guns. I don't like the
Speaker 2: idea of a thousand percent XIZ tax on AR fifteen
Speaker 2: so that only wealthy people can afford them.
Speaker 3: Right, And I don't like the idea that like, at
Speaker 3: this point, at least culturally, the only people who are
Speaker 3: interested in having guns are people who are interested in
Speaker 3: upholding white supremacy.
Speaker 2: And that is deliberately designed. And I mean one of
Speaker 2: the things that has happened in the last couple of years,
Speaker 2: this is really accelerated since twenty twenty is the demographics
Speaker 2: of people buying firearms have changed wildly, particularly first time
Speaker 2: gun buyers, and it's gotten a lot more left laning
Speaker 2: and a lot less white. And you know, there's a
Speaker 2: variety of personally, okay, because people do ask about this
Speaker 2: because I talk about guns sometimes in terms of what
Speaker 2: I think are the number one the laws that you
Speaker 2: could most easily pass without the Supreme Court guaranteed shutting
Speaker 2: them down. And I think a federal assault weapons ban
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court will rule against, right like, it will
Speaker 2: go to the Supreme Court and they will rule against it.
Speaker 2: In their current construction outside of like talking about should
Speaker 2: we stack the Supreme Court whatever, like, by it's not
Speaker 2: doing that. So stuff that I think would not number
Speaker 2: one would not necessary. Like obviously anything as a crapshoot
Speaker 2: with the Supreme Court, So literally anything could get turned
Speaker 2: down by the Yeah, because they're about to rule on
Speaker 2: a concealed handgun carry bill anyway. But the I think,
Speaker 2: I think it's perfectly reasonable and is also there is
Speaker 2: legal precedent for raising the age at which someone has
Speaker 2: to be in order to buy a semi automatic firearm. Certainly,
Speaker 2: eighteen year olds are not full adults, and our current
Speaker 2: gun legislation recognizes that by banning them from buying handguns.
Speaker 2: Although that's also not entirely accurate because you can still
Speaker 2: buy handguns through like face to face sales or have
Speaker 2: them given to you by a parent or whatever. There's
Speaker 2: always every there's always like ways around this kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: but it is it's been established since I think nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty six that the federal government regulates STOP does not
Speaker 2: want people under twenty one buying handguns. So it's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing where if you were to pass a
Speaker 2: law extending that to semi automatic rifles. You'd have a
Speaker 2: stronger argument in front of the Supreme Court if it
Speaker 2: came to the Supreme Court in order to defend that
Speaker 2: cut piece of gun control legislation. And both of our
Speaker 2: most recent mass shootings as of this recording, there may
Speaker 2: have been another one drive there. We're eighteen year olds
Speaker 2: who bought a gun and immediately carried. So I do
Speaker 2: think just on a moral level, there's a case to
Speaker 2: be made that, yeah, this might fuck save some lives,
Speaker 2: and I think the best thing you could do you
Speaker 2: would probably not have to call it a red flag
Speaker 2: law because that term has been politicized, but a law
Speaker 2: that would allow you to take guns and stop people
Speaker 2: from buying guns if they have a history of domestic
Speaker 2: violence and violence towards women and making violent threats of
Speaker 2: mass shootings, which seems like a no brainer. Yeah, again,
Speaker 2: like everything's been politicized to a stupid degree. But the
Speaker 2: Buffalo shooter was had been doing like threatening shootings and
Speaker 2: threatening women, and like had was on law enforcements, radar
Speaker 2: should have been it should be possible to do something there, right.
Speaker 3: You'd figure and yeah, I feel like that there's so
Speaker 3: many like common sense, like law is that you're yeah,
Speaker 3: that don't exist, that you're surprised every time you find
Speaker 3: out they don't exist.
Speaker 2: I do think. I think one of the things where
Speaker 2: gun control advocates make a mistake is focusing on universal
Speaker 2: background checks. Not because I don't think it's a good
Speaker 2: idea to have background checks for buying a gun, but
Speaker 2: because nearly all of the guns bought and even used
Speaker 2: in massacres were by people who passed a background check,
Speaker 2: including the buffalo of all theyse shooters. They both like
Speaker 2: universal background checks, they passed those, So like that that's
Speaker 2: not as much of the solution as I think something
Speaker 2: like an effective kind of Again, I think you would
Speaker 2: need a better term than red flag law. But also
Speaker 2: maybe I don't know the right's going to culture or
Speaker 2: whatever you try to do.
Speaker 3: Right, but everything's poison pilled no matter what. You can
Speaker 3: use any fucking euphemistic.
Speaker 2: Nice If you hit your wife and kids, you shouldn't
Speaker 2: have a gun bill. But of course one of the
Speaker 2: issues with that is that you're going to disarm like
Speaker 2: forty percent of the police.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I could talk about like what I think would be
Speaker 2: a good idea at the end of the day, Like
Speaker 2: I don't know, like what I what actually is going
Speaker 2: to pass. That's a totally different fucking conversation.
Speaker 3: And yeah, no, I don't. I don't know what the
Speaker 3: answer is. I know that one thing that I don't
Speaker 3: think the answer is is is this like mutually assured
Speaker 3: destruction thing where we're all armed at all times and
Speaker 3: that's the society. I also know the answer isn't every
Speaker 3: like liberal and leftists being like, oh, well, I'm you know,
Speaker 3: I'm going to trust that the government and the police
Speaker 3: will keep me safe from this the bad men, and
Speaker 3: so I'm like, it's it's hard to know.
Speaker 2: It's hard to know what to do. I mean, this
Speaker 2: is a very difficult issue because again people a lot
Speaker 2: of people say, no, it's simple, just like ban the guns,
Speaker 2: but it's like, well, how are you going to do that?
Speaker 2: There is legal precedent, there is a Supreme Court, and
Speaker 2: also there's a police force that's not going to disarm
Speaker 2: certain people. Like, this is not as simple as you're
Speaker 2: making it out to be. Right, you can say it
Speaker 2: is the guns, and yeah, of course access to guns
Speaker 2: is like why a lot of this is happening, But
Speaker 2: also like that doesn't that's not the end of like
Speaker 2: the complexity of the issue because there are four hundred
Speaker 2: million of these fucking things in the country right now
Speaker 2: and a whole culture built up around being ready to
Speaker 2: immediately use them against right now gay and trans people,
Speaker 2: particularly in the fucking crosshairs. And again this is like,
Speaker 2: so I don't know. I think fundamentally, like I I
Speaker 2: argue a lot about gun control with people. I think
Speaker 2: the folks who want to see more of it are
Speaker 2: coming from a fundamentally natural and noble position, which is
Speaker 2: looking at repeating massacres and going like, we've got to
Speaker 2: be able to do something about this, Like there's gotta
Speaker 2: be some way we can do about this shit.
Speaker 3: No, I completely understand it, I mean, and yeah, and
Speaker 3: I feel I feel the same way. It's like, there's
Speaker 3: certainly got to be a fucking solution to this, that is,
Speaker 3: this is a systemic solution, that this is.
Speaker 2: Like an an acceptable state of affairs. But like so
Speaker 2: many of the problems we have, like how to fix it,
Speaker 2: and like how to fix it without having a shooting
Speaker 2: war over it, and like who does the fixing? And
Speaker 2: like I think, like one of the things that is
Speaker 2: frustrating to me is that like it is it is
Speaker 2: just a big fundraising issue in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: and in ways that I think are kind of like
Speaker 2: unhelpful and actually solving the problem. And I again, nobody
Speaker 2: knows what to do with this because it's it's so
Speaker 2: much like no one has ever had anything like this happen, right.
Speaker 2: People bring up the Dunblane massacre, the Port Arthur massacre.
Speaker 2: They bring out like you know, when Australia confiscated all
Speaker 2: those guns, like that was two hundred thousand guns, Like
Speaker 2: there are twenty million ar fifteens in the United States.
Speaker 2: There has never been a society this heavily armed, or
Speaker 2: a society that has turned the random mass killing of
Speaker 2: civilians into a meme. Yeah, both of those things have
Speaker 2: happened here, and they've happened alongside like the militarization of
Speaker 2: an increasingly unaccountable, violent police force that wants dictatorial control
Speaker 2: of American cities, and all of this stuff is pretty
Speaker 2: pretty unique historically, So yeah, I don't know how we
Speaker 2: fix it.
Speaker 3: It feels so American and unique that it feels like, yeah,
Speaker 3: if I knew the answer to it, I would I
Speaker 3: would say it, But yeah, I really do not.
Speaker 2: I mean, and again it's like one of those I
Speaker 2: don't vote. I'm not a gun issue voter. I barely
Speaker 2: a voter, right like, I do vote, but I don't
Speaker 2: believe in it. I don't believe it's going to do
Speaker 2: any vote as I vote as like a well, what
Speaker 2: if I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, and it's best to
Speaker 2: vote and vote in the people who say you got
Speaker 2: to vote. If I'm wrong and they're right, then at
Speaker 2: least I put in the vote, and I tried that thing.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's going to work. I don't think
Speaker 2: they're going to solve any of these problems. I think
Speaker 2: other things are going to be happening in the future
Speaker 2: that are not what we recognize as part of American politics,
Speaker 2: but are going to become the way things get decided
Speaker 2: in this country. And I think they're going to be
Speaker 2: uglier and weirder than our parents were used to. But
Speaker 2: I do like voting is like a well, okay, but
Speaker 2: maybe I'm wrong about that. It's the same reason I
Speaker 2: have a four oh one k right right right, right,
Speaker 2: right right. Maybe there will be an economy in thirty
Speaker 2: years so I'll get to retire. For the same reason
Speaker 2: I own half of a bitcoin.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: I'm wrong, Yeah, you know, I get it. Yeah you
Speaker 2: got just in case what if? Yeah, I just half
Speaker 2: a one. That's all I could afford.
Speaker 3: But the point is is, yeah, I I I just
Speaker 3: want to say I vote, and I also am cynical,
Speaker 3: and I have the exact same I have the exact
Speaker 3: same pessimism that you do. But you know, the real
Speaker 3: the only optimism that I have is there's going to
Speaker 3: be some someone smart who does something good. I don't
Speaker 3: want to miss the bus.
Speaker 2: I don't want to miss you know, I mean, and
Speaker 2: I tend to think we should all maybe if if
Speaker 2: people are more committed to like getting out there and
Speaker 2: taking personal responsibility, not necessarily not as a militia, but
Speaker 2: in a in a in a in a responsibility for believing.
Speaker 2: I think sometimes because we just had a mass shooting
Speaker 2: in Portland that was stopped by an armed member of
Speaker 2: the community, shooting at a protest for a police violence
Speaker 2: victim that was stopped by an armed member of the community.
Speaker 2: But I think community defense is everyone should have an eyefact.
Speaker 2: Right downside's to owning a gun, No downside to having
Speaker 2: a tourniquet and some gauze on you and some chess
Speaker 2: seals and knowing how to use them. Zero downside could
Speaker 2: be useful in a car accident. You can have a
Speaker 2: fucking piece of rebar fall off of a building construction
Speaker 2: and pail somebody and maybe you'd get to save their
Speaker 2: life with an IFAC. Million times that could be useful.
Speaker 2: Have an ifact right organized in your community, to provide
Speaker 2: houseless people with you know, defense against sweeps, to provide
Speaker 2: people who are low income with eviction defense, to stock
Speaker 2: food pantries, like all of that stuff is uh. You
Speaker 2: can wear you can wear cool uniforms if you want.
Speaker 2: While you do, you can get a plate carrier. You
Speaker 2: can put patches on it, you know.
Speaker 3: Can I wear tactical sunglasses?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Why the hell not? Yeah, be the be the
Speaker 2: be the be the tactile sunglass guy. Yeah whatever, make
Speaker 2: it make it cool, just help your help. Your black
Speaker 2: panthers look cool as ship when they were like serving
Speaker 2: food to kids, you know, yeah, they had they had swag.
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, they wore berets and they made berets
Speaker 2: look bad ass.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, look as how and protect your community. And yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah it.
Speaker 3: Doesn't mean you need to own a gun. But maybe
Speaker 3: a little more community involvement might be helpful and.
Speaker 2: All variety of things that you can you can do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, abolishing the police.
Speaker 2: That is a good idea. Anyway, Matt got.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I've had a great time. And if you
Speaker 3: love uh, the bastards and getting behind them, you'll love u.
Speaker 3: The podcast pot yourself a gun a sobranos Rewatch podcast
Speaker 3: that me and my friend Vince Mancini do. We just
Speaker 3: finish the entire series so you can re listen and
Speaker 3: rewatch the whole thing and it's great. You'll love it.
Speaker 3: And uh yeah, you look forward to us doing our
Speaker 3: the Wire podcast very soon. It's going to be great
Speaker 3: and uh, you know, speaking about cops being bastards. It's
Speaker 3: a whole show about it.
Speaker 2: So you'll you'll love it.
Speaker 3: And I promise you that, you know, well, we're not gonna,
Speaker 3: you know, be it's two white guys talking about the Wire.
Speaker 2: We're not gonna it's you know, so just don't worry.
Speaker 2: It's good.
Speaker 3: It'll be good, you'll, I promise. I don't know how
Speaker 3: to say that.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm excited to listen to it.
Speaker 3: We don't you know, we're leftists. Anyways, I'm excited follow
Speaker 3: me at matt leab jokes on Instagram.
Speaker 2: Follow Matt Lib home. You have a Twitter track, I
Speaker 2: do it's.
Speaker 3: It's it's at matt lib and you can follow me
Speaker 3: there too. That's fine, but no jokes, no jokes on
Speaker 3: that one. That's definitely serious, that one. You know, I
Speaker 3: just post whatever today. In fact, I posted something from
Speaker 3: a doomsday dried food ad that I saw good and
Speaker 3: it was really weird. It was like a Mac versus
Speaker 3: PC commercial, but they made the doomsday the like you know,
Speaker 3: dried food guy. You know, he was talking about his product,
Speaker 3: and then the other guy who was selling the fake
Speaker 3: Patriot food was very much an anti Semitic meme.
Speaker 2: Oh god, oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: They made him very clearly a Jew and he's it
Speaker 3: opened hello fellow Patriots.
Speaker 2: And I was like, holy fun.
Speaker 3: They went for it, and uh yeah. So I posted
Speaker 3: a little bit of that and you love.
Speaker 2: To see it.
Speaker 3: You love to see just straight up anti semitism on
Speaker 3: the This was an Instagram ad, by the way, but hey,
Speaker 3: it was on.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyways, follow me on all the things and.
Speaker 2: Learned to can. Look it's cheaper than food buckets, yes,
Speaker 2: learn to can and it works way better. It does
Speaker 2: work very well. Yeah.
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