All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Jim Bovard, this time writing at the Daily Caller, but he writes regularly at USA Today and of course, The Future of Freedom, and he wrote a whole ton of books.
The last one was Public Policy Hooligan, which I know you guys will really like.
Oh no, that wasn't the last one.
There was a more recent collection of something since then.
But before that, though, we'll get to that in a second.
Before that, though, he wrote Attention Deficit Democracy, which is a masterpiece!
And also, before that, other masterpieces, such as The Bush Betrayal and Terrorism and Tyranny, and Freedom in Chains and Feeling Your Pain and the Fair Trade Fraud.
This is all off the top of my head.
I don't have the list in front of me, that's why I left out half of them.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for your kind words.
I'm sorry, man.
What's the name of the most recent one here?
Public Policy Hooligan is the memoir essay, which has a Santa Claus riff.
I don't know when this interview is going to air, but if people want to read about my time working in Boston, all the horror stories, all the laughs, hey, it's all there.
It is.
It's such a funny book.
Really good stuff.
But, no, you had a collection of essays that you put out since then, right?
FFF put out a collection.
You're putting me on the spot here, dude.
What's the frickin' title?
What's the name of your book, Jim?
Well, it's a collection of articles.
Hard Lessons on Freedom, maybe?
Yeah, something like that.
JimBovard.com if you want to read it.
Freedom Frauds, Hard Lessons in American Liberty.
There you go, man.
I was close enough for government work.
You have such great titles.
I'm not sure why.
That one's a pretty memorable one, too, even.
I don't know.
We're all getting old.
Hey, Scott.
Well, yeah, Scott, but it didn't stick in your memory or mine, so what the hell?
Yeah, I was making a memory joke to Peter Van Buren.
He said, yeah, memory is the second thing that goes after the hair.
Funny guy.
Yeah, man.
I got the hairline to prove it, too, man.
I'm catching up with you, Jim.
Okay, it'll be a long time until you catch up with me, either, but okay, as long as you've got your wit.
And luckily I have a pen so I can write down all the things I think before I forget them.
Like I ought to interview you about this article that you wrote.
This is kind of a scary article, Jim Bovard.
This is kind of a serious article by you.
Richard Jewell, Carter Page, and the Illusion of the FBI's Power and Competence, but that's only the half of this piece here.
But obviously a couple big pieces in the news here, the Richard Jewell movie, and of course the IG report about the Russiagate investigation, at least the FBI's role in Russiagate there.
And you're just confronting head on, as you often do, the reputation of the FBI that's forged mostly by television, I guess, TV dramas, as well as the news, that these are the most competent, freedom-protecting, law-enforcing, crime-solving, most wonderful people in America, the G-men, and that what would we ever do without them, Jim?
That's a rhetorical question, right?
Yeah, man.
So what ever caused you to not believe in the FBI?
Well, you know, it goes way, way back.
Now, you know, I was someone who came of age in the 1970s, and there was a lot of evidence back then of FBI misconduct with the Nixon administration, and the COINTELPRO report came out that documented how they'd done all kinds of sabotage of freedom, targeting dissidents, trying to smear people, Martin Luther King, a lot of other people.
But it's funny how the lessons from that, from the Senate investigations and other investigations, have basically been forgotten.
And at some point, the FBI got its halo back.
Scott, since you're living there in Texas, not too far from Waco, you've talked about how the FBI action at Waco in 1993 had a big impact on you.
It's interesting that the media's first reflex after Waco was to make a saint out of Janet Reno, the attorney general.
I mean, she was given hero's treatment because she said, well, the buck stops here, or some such BS.
At the same time, she was carrying out a cover up of what the FBI had actually done at Waco.
But you know, twists and turns here and there.
Back three years after Waco, you had the Atlantic Olympics, and you had a pipe bomb that someone had left there, and a security guard, Richard Jewell, found that pipe bomb, sounded the alert, and saved a lot of lives.
But then a few days later, the FBI decided that, well, you know, Richard Jewell was the pipe bomber, and he actually planted it there.
And that created a media stampede, which basically destroyed Jewell's life.
A lot of vicious slander against him.
You had Jay Leno making jokes about him being a dumb, fat guy, basically.
And then you had the FBI doing all kinds of tricks.
The FBI agents lured him to their office in Atlanta and asked him to help them make a training film about detecting bombs.
The whole point of that ruse was to let the FBI question him without giving Jewell a Miranda warning that anything he said could be used against him.
A later investigation by the Justice Department said that they violated his constitutional rights, but that was kind of standard procedure for them.
Well, and, you know, so I want to go see this movie.
They're saying it's bombed.
I'm not sure why it would have bombed.
I would think that the Trump, you know, MAGA types would all be rushing to support this movie because it seems pretty clear that it was made with the intent of doing this sort of callback during Russiagate here, reminding us who the FBI is.
And you know, in the case of Jewell, he's no Donald Trump, President of the United States of America.
He was just some schmuck that they did this to.
But it is the same thing that they did to Trump, really, with all these fake accusations, pretending to believe that he was compromised by Russia for three years when they knew all along what a lie that was in the first place and all of that.
So I'm not sure why it's doing so bad, but I think it's such a huge story and an important story and I'm certain to go see it or at least, you know, download it off the Pirate Bay and look at it.
There you go.
But, you know, something that you wrote in here, I didn't remember this from back then, but it was 25 years ago.
And that was that the FBI had concluded that, OK, this guy really didn't do it.
But they withheld that leak.
They didn't tell the media that.
And they let the media continue to crucify the guy for another couple of weeks after that before it finally was revealed that they no longer considered him a suspect.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure of the time lag between when the FBI determined that he was not the bomber and when they admitted it and cleared him in public.
They certainly dragged that out.
But I mean, it's the same way that the FBI did with his FISA investigation of the Trump campaign.
The FBI had plenty of reason not to.
The FBI knew or should have known that Carter Page was not a Russian agent because he was working, you know, informing for the CIA at that point.
CIA trusted him.
FBI withheld that from the FISA court.
The FBI piled in all this stuff from the Steele dossier, which was basically an Internet rumor as the CIA condemned it.
But that was sufficient to get the, you know, get the tidal wave going.
And that was that succeeded in putting a cloud over the Trump campaign, the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration.
And we're still seeing the results of that.
I mean, that was part of the impetus for the impeachment vote this week.
And you know, there's been this controversy about the Juul movie about Olivia Wilde's character, who, by the way, is Andrew Coburn's daughter.
And so they're saying, oh, I don't know that.
Yeah.
So they're saying, oh, the daughter of a journalist.
This is extra scandalous that she portrays this journalist, Kathy Scruggs, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, trading sex for a leak from the FBI.
And yet it seemed to me and they're saying, oh, this is a we're suing you for slander, this kind of deal, you know, a warning.
And yet it seems so obvious to me that that was just a metaphor, right?
He wasn't saying Clint Eastwood wasn't saying that Kathy Scruggs had sex with the FBI for a leak.
He was just calling her a whore, you know, in a metaphorical way that she would just print whatever they told her to print in order to destroy this guy's life.
I don't know.
I have not seen the movie yet.
I'm looking forward to it.
I have seen the controversy over Kathy Scruggs.
I don't know.
You know, some of the comments I've seen say that it's implied that she slept with him with the FBI source.
Others say it's more explicit.
I don't know.
But there was no question that Scruggs screwed the hell out of Richard Jewell.
And she was on the front line for the Atlantic Journal-Constitution.
I don't know how many years and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars or more that newspaper had to spend to defend itself against a libel action.
A number of places paid large settlements to Richard Jewell.
The Atlantic Journal-Constitution fought it until long after Jewell had died, and then the case was eventually dismissed.
Yeah.
So and she died, I think, in 2001 or something like that, right?
She died.
I don't know if it was suicide or what.
But some of the stories I saw said that she was troubled.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Maybe she should have just apologized to the guy or not made herself so useful to the state in the first place.
There's a lesson for other journalists there.
You know, and flip side here is that there are some journalists have done great work investigating the FBI.
I mean, it's, you know, it'd be a big mistake to assume that all journalists are toadies to the FBI or to other federal agencies, but there have been a lot of excellent stories out there exposing some of the FBI abuses.
But you know, overall, the media has still been very deferential to the FBI, which is why the FBI could peddle its version of events on the 2016 campaign.
And if you saw, you know, back in May 2017, when Trump fired James Comey, there was a rush to put the halo over Comey's head and, you know, that halo isn't looking so good right now.
Yeah.
And that really is the thing about it, right, is that even when there are really great, you know, kind of independent, you know, exposés of the FBI, and then even when, say, the legacy, you know, New York Times or Washington Post have to admit that, OK, something good was published this week that pointed out this thing, it still never changes the narrative from these are America's greatest heroes, no matter what.
And so, like you say, then on to the next one, well, gee, the FBI.
In fact, I mean, even right now, to this day, you can read over and over again that we know that Russia intervened in the election.
Usually they say, we're debunking the crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine intervened in any systematic way.
Well, huh?
Who just threw that in?
What kind of red herring is systematic way?
Yeah, they did intervene, in fact, with the Manafort ledger and all the alleged Manafort ledger and all those other things.
And then they'll say in the next sentence that that debunks conspiracy theories, nothing compared to the fact that Russia did intervene in the election.
And we know that because the intelligence agencies say so.
Yeah.
And that's it.
Well, thank God for the Coast Guard that was listed as one of the 17 intelligence agencies in memory serves.
I mean, it was such a load of crap.
And well, it's interesting that you've got the U.S. attorney, John Durham, now looking at the John Brennan.
So it's like, oh, this could get very interesting.
Yeah, it could, although I'm not counting on it, because he's the same one who let John Brennan and his friends get away with torture and murder in the George W. Bush years.
Yeah, well, that's an asterisk.
The very same guy that Eric Holder brought in to let them get away with, oh, and all the obstruction of justice in destroying the torture videotapes and all that.
Yep.
Yeah.
So I'm not saying, you know, let's see how this turns out.
But, you know, it's interesting.
You were saying you're talking about everybody putting the FBI on a pedestal.
You know, that's not quite you know, there are places where not everybody does that.
Going back to the summer of 2001, Richard Joel was no longer the news.
But the FBI had decided that Eric Rudolph was the guy who had done the Atlanta bombing, and they had him on their top 10 most wanted list.
Back then, I was vacationing in the mountains of western North Carolina, and my then spouse had the great idea that we should go to some damn chalet inn that she'd seen written about in a tourist book.
Well, a tourist book had lousy directions.
We're roaming all over the damn zip code, and I finally pulled in a parking lot in front of a hardware store in a little town out there in western Carolina, and just to cuss and recheck the map, and stepped out of my car, fired up a cheap cigar.
Two minutes later, this big old bald guy comes bounding out of the hardware store and asking the booming voice, what part of Maryland are you from?
Rockville, I says.
He starts chatting me up.
He tells me he was originally from Maryland, been living down there for 20 years, worked as a long haul truck driver.
He lost $5,000 gambling last year at the Indian Casino nearby.
I was raised in the mountains of Virginia, so I'm used to this kind of patter, but something seemed amiss with this guy.
After about 15 minutes, he suddenly announced that he thought that I was an undercover federal agent.
Holy crap.
I've got a scruffy beard, railroad cap, my just a country boy shtick.
Federal agencies often assume that I'm a redneck, and now I go back in the mountains and the rednecks think I'm an undercover fed.
I can't get a break.
So I asked Dennis why he suspected I was an undercover Asian.
He says, because you're driving a black car with a Maryland license plate.
Yeah, that's guilty on both counts, but Ford Contours aren't standard undercover issues.
So I says, are there any other signs of federal agencies?
This guy says, yeah, they got hidden tracking devices on the underside of the back of the car.
I says, feel free to check out my car.
Okay.
So he and I walk to the back of the Ford.
He gets down on his knees.
He pauses, big old hand around the Ford underside.
He finds no GPS tracker.
He gets up.
He decides I'm not a G-man.
He gives you a big old hearty handshake.
Now he explained the reason he was suspicious was because the FBI had flooded that area with hundreds of agents to try to capture Eric Rudolph, who was thought to be hiding nearby.
The FBI came in full of bluster and bragging.
This guy said a lot of his neighbors came to despise him because they were so heavy handed and condescending.
He said they showed up at a motel, decided to take it over.
Agents went around banging on doors and threw every guest out on the spot.
There were restaurants down there that refused to serve FBI agents.
They were so pissed off at him.
So it was interesting.
The Fed set their best and brightest, but people there had contempt for him.
People started wearing T-shirts that said Eric Rudolph ain't here or Eric Rudolph, 1998 hide and seek champion.
Which that really says something, right?
He was no hero.
He was a Nazi abortion clinic bomber and an Olympic Park bomber, but they hated the Fed so much they liked him in comparison, essentially.
Well, it was, you know, I don't know that they like Rudolph, but it was a way to taunt the Feds.
And Eric Rudolph was a bad guy.
It's good.
He got life in prison.
He deserved it.
But it was interesting to see.
It's interesting to see the intense animosity that the FBI generated.
You know, we can kind of think about, you know, people talk about how the federal government rules the entire country.
You know, it didn't rule Western North Carolina because the people there didn't help him.
And it took four years before Rudolph was captured.
And he was only captured by a small town, a cop in a small town about an hour away.
Feds had nothing to do with it.
Right.
Although I remember at the time they congratulated themselves on all their great police work.
Yeah.
Just like they did with Ted Kaczynski, too, where Ted Kaczynski's brother turned him in and they go, yeah, we worked this case for 19 years and it's like, yeah, you failed completely.
Yep.
But, you know, it's interesting to think about the, you know, a lot of the politicians now are, you know, calling for a gun prohibition, ban this gun, ban that gun.
And what would happen if the federal agents, instead of looking for one, you know, looking for one fugitive who had a million dollar price on his head, if the federal agents were out there trying to seize all the AR-15s, I mean, I don't know how many hundred thousand of those rifles you've got there now, but yeah, what happens if the feds try to do that?
I mean, you know, it's, it's a joke.
Since people are not going to comply and the feds can't go in there or else, or else it'd be like that classic bluegrass song about the revenuer who went up Rocky Tock Mountain and then never came down.
By the way, thank you so much for teaching me about that song.
I don't know if you know, Hey, well, you know, you're a Southerner, okay, you're Texas, but you're still a Southerner.
I mean, the South is to the East of here, but I understand what you mean.
You know, in the last interview, it was either the last one or the one before that we went ahead and tacked that song onto the end of the interview, because that's great.
It's a great song.
It's a great song.
And here's the thing too, man, you wrote a thing in the FFF about this, and this is sort of what I was getting at, at the beginning of, you know, introducing this article that what you say here about not believing in the FBI and, and citing Jewell and citing Russiagate and, and all of this stuff and citing Eric Rudolph is all that is really transitioned into this major point that, like I say, you have a whole piece on this in the FFF, that these Democrats really think, and apparently they do, that they can outlaw AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.
In other words, so called assault weapons, which just means a semi-automatic rifle with a pistol grip, or something.
Some technicality.
Grenade launcher.
Yeah.
I'm making a joke.
Go ahead.
You know what?
You might have a point when it comes to grenade launchers.
I'm not sure.
But.
Hey, I don't use grenade launchers.
You might need one someday, certainly if you're up against these guys.
But this is really coming to a head, and you're warning in your piece there, especially in the FFF, but here too, that this is the kind of thing that really could cause a war.
That regardless of what these Democrats tell themselves, that these same people who, you know, ceased cooperating with the FBI back during this Eric Rudolph hunt you're talking about and all that, that they will go to war before they give up their rifles.
And the Democrats seem to think that, no, the law is the law.
They'll turn them over.
No, they won't.
They'll fight.
And you're really warning them that, don't do this.
Don't think that you can do this.
You can't do this.
Well, yeah.
I mean, and if they did try, they'd go back in the mountains, you know, they'd get lost.
But if you start grabbing the AR-15s, you're going to have guys coming after you with long range Barrett sniper rifles.
Those are 50 caliber armor piercing bullets that can go up to two or three miles.
And it's like, yeah, or two miles anyhow.
So it's like, you know, you don't want to mess with these people.
I mean, you know, it's sort of like a, it's more like a hornet's nest.
You don't want to mess with a hornet's nest.
You just leave it alone.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, think about it too.
You got to zoom out a little bit.
It ain't just North Carolina and it isn't just Virginia.
You're talking the entire country is going to have some people, essentially in every county, all 20,000 counties in America are going to have people who would rather die killing cops than give their rifle to one who comes to confiscate it.
Well, yeah.
And there's, there are lots of cops who are principled gun owners themselves who would not want to enforce these laws.
And you know, the, you know, the situation in Virginia, they're, you know, they're talking about, you know, they're, I think about at least 70 or 80 counties now have declared their second amendment sanctuaries, but some of the Paul Democrats in the, that now control the state government are talking about, well, we'll send in the national guard.
I think like, I don't think the national guard would, would obey that kind of law.
But it's just, it's an absolutely unnecessary conflict.
I mean, because if you look at the homicides in the state of Virginia, it's not way back in the mountains.
It's in some large urban areas and it's, you know, but these are laws, these are laws which were driven not by a concern about violence.
These are, a lot of these folks, they simply hate gun owners.
They hate gun owners as a class.
And it's sort of like Hillary Clinton's comment about the, the deplorables.
Well, that's what they allow these anti-gun folks think about gun owners.
And it's like, you know, fine, but you know, I wouldn't mess with them.
I, you know, I was raised in the mountains.
It was like, you know, you don't, you know, you don't start fights with these people.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War II, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey y'all, Mike Swanson is a successful Wall Street trader with an Austrian school understanding of the markets.
And therefore he has great advice to share with you.
Check out Mike's work and sign up for his list at wallstreetwindow.com.
And that's what you'll get a window into all of Mike's trades.
He'll explain what he's buying and selling and expecting and why.
I know you'll learn and earn a lot.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
That's wallstreetwindow.com.
You know, I, I saw a link yesterday, a friend sent me a link to, I think it was law enforcement today.com.
And it's all this thin blue line stuff and they're the heroes and, and any complaints of abuse.
You can see the stories in the margin are all anyone who complains about cops are all just a bunch of communists and Tifa, whatever, blah, blah.
That's their point of view.
It's a total cop point of view site.
And yet the article that someone sent me was about, it was as libertarian as right wingers could ever be and is on this issue.
And they're cops for God's sake.
And they're saying, no, we will not go along with this.
And you know, it's essentially the threats to, as you said, I, I almost can't believe that this is happening in a real thing.
They're really pushing this, this law.
At first they were going to just outright confiscate them all.
Then I think they backed down and said, okay, well, if you already own AR-15, you'll be grandfathered in to try to, you know, make it a little less worse.
But then you still had these sheriffs, as you say, nullifying, nevermind D.C., nullifying the state government and saying, we won't enforce this.
And then as you said, immediately state legislators started pulling out the Trump card.
Oh yeah, we'll sic the National Guard on the sheriff's department.
And then the story I read yesterday was militias rising up and organizing in the name of defending their sheriffs.
And it's the sheriff's writing about it like, oh yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, these, these politicians in Richmond might not realize, I think in most of the counties, the sheriffs are elected.
So and they're going to pay a lot more attention to local voters than they are to the politicians 400 miles away.
But it's, this is an unnecessary conflict.
I mean, this is not where the murders, most of them are occurring in the state of Virginia.
But again, it's a class hatred of gun owners.
And it's, and it's Democrats, and if they push this too far, this is something which could become a, you know, benchmark for the, for next year's presidential election.
Because you've already had Democrats like the, that, that Congress, former congressman from Texas, hell yes, we're going to seize your AR-15s.
Yeah, Beto O'Rourke, the presidential candidate.
Yep.
And you got Eric Spalwell, the nitwit, you know, we're going to use nuclear bombs to enforce gun, gun laws.
It's like, you know, there are a lot of, you know, reasonable Democrats who would never say those kinds of things and, and, and don't have a desire to seize everybody's guns.
But you know, there's, there's, there's going to be a taint from this.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, I was talking with, I won't say leftist, but I guess progressive friend of mine the other day, and we were talking about how crazy and horrible the left and the right are these days, and the left with all their anti-free speech stuff and the threat of confiscating guns like this.
But one thing he pointed out too was right-wingers showing up with AR-15s slung over their shoulders to every protest, showing up to city council meetings and town hall meetings with rifles.
And the point is like, hey, yeah, open carry, we can.
And yet, I mean, if, if they had a gun on their hip, that would imply like, hey, I'm just a careful type.
But coming with rifles implies what exactly?
Like they're willing to, to throw out the premise of law and democracy and, and go to fatal blows right there at a city council meeting over what?
And what are we fighting about at a city council meeting?
The homeless problem and toll roads and crap.
What do you need a rifle at something like that for?
And I get the point being that, hey, we can carry rifles where we want, but why choose to carry a rifle at something like that?
It's needlessly provocative from the other side, for sure.
Okay.
But some people feel very strongly about dog leash laws.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, that's a point.
I mean, yeah, it's, there's, there's a lot of stuff, which is just like people, can we just simmer down and just, you know, there are a lot of reasonable or potentially reasonable people on both sides and hopefully, you know, things will simmer down and people can be more reasonable and not make threats and all this kind of stuff.
So yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot of weirdness out there.
Yeah.
Which by the way, on the gun issue, I mean, across the country, they've been, it's ironic, I know, liberalizing gun laws everywhere and constitutional carry.
Now you don't even need a permit and a lot of states open or concealed rifles or handguns and, and more and more, there's really been a lot of progress against gun control lately, right?
There has been progress, not in my state.
I mean, it's gone worse, but yeah, I mean, but, and I, I think it has lowered the, the violent crime rate in some places.
Hasn't worked out so well in Baltimore, but I mean, Maryland's got some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
So yeah, it's, there has been progress, hopefully that progress will continue.
And you know, there are folks when the, when the, some of the Democratic candidates were talking about seizing guns, they were kind of like, you know, almost like they were chomping at the bit for, you know, no final confrontation, but no, that's a bad attitude.
Let's, you know, let's just keep things peaceful as long as possible.
So yeah.
Well, you know what, I mean, got to say the reaction of these sheriffs announcing that they'll refuse to enforce it.
I mean, that ought to be, I don't know exactly what to, well, I mean, they can bluster about the national guard, but that Trump card is pulled, man.
If the local sheriffs aren't going to go along with this, you guys need a different approach.
Yeah.
I mean, keep in mind, the same thing has happened.
It happened in New York state when governor Cuomo rushed through, rushed through the safe back in early 2013.
There were sheriffs in upstate New York who said, eh, we're not going to do this.
You've had, I think some sheriffs in Colorado who said they're not going to force the new red flag laws there.
There are, I think sheriffs down in New Mexico that have made, you know, basically pro-gun comments.
So, you know, it doesn't make sense for gun owners to think that everybody's out to get them.
It's a very counterproductive mindset.
Because there are government officials who are reasonable and who also understand and respect the second amendment.
Yeah.
You know, I met a colonel way back a long time ago.
It was actually a funny story of a drunk soldier in my cab that I took to Fort Hood.
But anyway, I ended up arguing with his colonel and I said, hey, if Bill Clinton tried to outlaw guns and ordered you to go around confiscating them, I think, you know, he just made North America, he just created the Northern Command for our own continent, which for some reason we never needed before.
I was a paranoid type, you see.
And so what would you do then, colonel?
And he's like, the right of Americans is to own guns.
And no government could take that away and no army of mine would enforce a law like that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He sure sounded like he meant it.
I think if his orders actually were contrary to that, he would probably obey him.
That was certainly how he felt about it, at least.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, there are lots of ways to not enforce laws or to let things slip or kind of like, you know, but my impression is in the first couple of years of that New York ban on assault weapons and a bunch of other stuff, you know, there were very few people who were arrested and most of those cases were people that were basically caught doing other crimes or, you know, they'd been caught with some violent crime and they had a gun that wasn't allowed.
So, you know, probably a 95% rate of noncompliance, but, and I think, you know, the same would happen for any kind of national ban of AR-15s, especially.
So yeah.
All right.
Well, let me ask you this.
I know you're against gun control laws as libertarian as you are, Jim, but we do have major problems of gun violence in this country.
Suicides make up for a huge number of the gun deaths, but also, you know, I read this interesting thing, it was, I hate to say it, I'm pretty sure it was a Washington Post reporter writing about how she had been on the gun violence beat nationwide for about three years or something like that and had done all these statistics and whatever.
And it just essentially figured out that people kill each other when they're drunk on the weekends as most gun violence in America.
And you know, of course there's the drug prohibition problem and all of that.
But you know, essentially, and you do have massacres, these public shootings of strangers, including little children at school and stuff like that.
And you have people who think that somebody's got to do something to make a change.
And so clearly you reject government seizing guns from people.
But so do you have any ideas of how we can make gun owners more responsible and gun violence less worse in this country?
Well, if somebody has been convicted, felony conviction for violence, stuff like that, I mean, it's fine with me to prohibit them from owning guns.
So as far as solutions, I think getting rid of the drug laws would help some.
I think it's interesting for the city of, for Washington, D.C., there is a law there called the Youth Rehabilitation Act.
And it was, you know, it was passed, you know, to help avoid sending teenagers away for long prison terms after they committed crimes in their teen years.
But you know, D.C. being D.C., the city council extended it up to age 24.
And so you've had, the Washington Post had a great expose series in this a couple years ago.
And it turned out that half of all the homicide victims in D.C. were people who had been tied to this Youth Rehabilitation Act.
So you had a complete failure of the government to, you know, protect public safety, because you had all these people that had been violent, that had gotten a slap on their wrist and then went back to either kill somebody or get killed themselves.
And the District of Columbia government didn't even know it was that bad until the Washington Post made special software so it could go through the court records and show how often the guys involved in this Youth Rehab Act had been either killing people or robbing them and then they were, you know, they were basically either not sent to prison or sent for a brief period.
And so there was a small number of folks who were doing a huge percentage of the violence and the killing in D.C., but the city government simply ignored it, basically.
So I think you've got similar cases in quite a few other big cities.
I mean, some states have got the same kind of blinders, but it doesn't make sense if you've got people that have already shot multiple people to put them back out on the street.
So yeah, it does seem, and I don't know all the stats, whatever, I'd like to look at that report.
But overall, I think it's just kind of unavoidable, the reality that people get prosecuted all day long for things where there are no victims at all.
And all it is, is they committed an offense or they got their probation revoked or whatever.
If you know anybody who's ever been to prison, they'll tell you that most people in there don't belong there.
My buddy Darren used to talk about how this is just where we warehouse excess humanity.
These people didn't do anything to anybody.
They've just been rounded up by the state.
That's what distinguishes them, is they're the ones who are there, that's all.
And but meanwhile, they let the actual violent prisoners go free.
Yeah, I wouldn't go quite that far.
I work with the convict road gang back when I was in high school one summer on the state highway department.
And you know, it was a great job because I got to hear the convict stories like, oh, you know, there was a black guy from Richmond who was telling me that, yeah, I was a drug dealer, but I never seen the guy who showed up at trial and said I'd sold him stuff.
He got sent up the river.
But there was this big old white guy who was just kind of, you know, there was a radiance about him.
He was just he seemed like an ominous dude, you know, you know, I don't want to mess with him.
But, you know, he was, you know, we were shooting a bull one day and he tells me that, you know, so the story comes, well, why are you here?
He said, well, you know, I guess he got angry and beat the hell out of his girlfriend's husband.
You know, that he had said something or done something and there was a conflict and so and he got sent up the river.
I don't think he killed the guy, but, you know, he was a big dude.
So I don't know.
I mean, he was someone that should have been in prison.
And there was, you know, there was there was a radiance about the guy.
It's kind of like, you know, you didn't want to be turning your back to him when he's holding the big shovel.
Yeah.
And, you know, I knew a guy when I was a cab driver, Pete, the murderer, that was his name.
And he was always a nice guy to me.
I always got along with him fine, but he'd been in and out of prison.
He was still in his 30s and he'd been in and out of prison for murder.
So but there were, you know, and my buddy, Darren, he was in there for selling weed.
And he sat there and he watched rapists and murderers and armed robbers come and go all day long while he sat there doing years and years on end.
You know?
Yep.
Yep.
There's a lot of huge flaws.
I mean, the entire criminal justice system should be focusing on violent criminals and not on, you know, dope dealers.
So yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, I always like talking with you.
And I love reading your books, too, man.
And all of your great articles at the Future of Freedom and at USA Today.
Make sure you always email me everything because I can't keep up with all the different places that you write.
But we always love to run on antiwar dot com and everything, of course.
Hey, Scott, thanks very much.
And I also want to give a big shout out to you and the Libertarian Institute.
Y'all are doing great.
It's great to see how you and the Institute have raised this profile.
Y'all are, you know, y'all are up in the game and setting the standard for a lot of things.
I appreciate that.
Rad.
Thanks very much, Jim.
I'm going to quote you on that.
Do that.
Oh, yeah.
All right, everybody.
The great Jim Bovard.
Jim Bovard dot com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can find me at Libertarian Institute dot org, at Scott Horton dot org, antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
