04/10/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show, y'all.
I'm Scott Horton.
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All right, next up is our good friend Sheldon Richman, vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, and it's always great to be with you.
Well, good deal.
I'm very happy to have you here and very happy to see you writing about gun rights.
This one is the absurdity of universal background checks.
And so, geez, I have not been following this as closely as I should be, but I think I'm under the impression that the assault weapons ban, so-called, meaning the pistol grip on your semi-automatic rifle ban, has been dropped.
But then, maybe in a dialectical kind of way, that's all right, because option two is still there, the compromise.
Well, we'll just do the universal background checks.
And this is something that they've been pushing for forever.
The Democrats call it the gun show loophole.
It needs changing.
Can you please explain what the hell it is they're talking about?
Well, I'll do my best.
I'm not sure there's any logic there, so it makes explanation difficult.
Right.
Yeah, if you know what they're talking about, then you're doing better than they are.
First of all, there's no gun show loophole.
Under the law, which is bad law, any licensed gun dealer, whether he's selling from his store or out of a van or at a gun show, has to do a background check on the buyer.
That came in some time ago.
That's the Brady Bill, right?
Yeah, I was part of that.
That's right.
And for a lot of people, that's sort of the baseline, right?
Like the NRA, they have a holding action against anything new, and as soon as something's adopted, it becomes part of the baseline, and they accept it.
I don't accept it.
I would turn all that stuff back.
So what isn't covered by background check are so-called private sales, whether they happen at a gun show or they happen in your garage.
I mean, you could sell a gun to your neighbor down the street.
Guns have always been an object for hobbyists, right?
So they buy and sell, just like people buy and sell smoking pipes or stamps.
And so people collect, and they decide after a while they don't want to have one.
They want to have another model, and then maybe they sell the gun.
Those are not covered by background checks, but they're not specifically a gun show sale.
So to call it a gun show loophole is a myth, and it's an attempt to make people think that anything that goes on at a gun show is simply a private sale when it's not true.
There are an awful lot of licensed gun dealers at those shows.
It's just a typical distraction.
The problem with universal background checks, which is what there's now a new bipartisan consensus on, Toomey and Manchin have now joined together and have a bill which is acceptable to them, and that means Reid's bill may go forward now in the Senate.
The problem is, I'm not talking about the moral problem from a libertarian standpoint.
You can get to that if you want.
But just the practical problem is, once again, even if they pass this law, if I sell a gun to my neighbor, how is the government even going to know about the sale?
So the idea that this is going to be a really universal check is ridiculous.
It's a promise it can't keep.
If my neighbor is a fine, upstanding person who has no desire to harm anybody and never uses the gun in a violent crime, then it's never going to come to even the light that the sale occurred or that the transfer occurred.
So why are they promising that it's a universal check when it can't be a universal check?
And that leads to the next point, that criminals will obviously gravitate to channels for gun buying that don't require the checks.
They can make this announcement, all criminals or all people who have a criminal intent, please step forward for your background check before we let you buy a gun.
And they think then all the criminals and people with criminal states of mind are going to step forward.
Well, that's laughable.
It's going to lead to an increase in gun thefts and armed robberies, because if you're going to steal guns, you better bring one with you.
It could well lead to increases in theft.
The black market in guns has always thrived.
We know what the first-oldest profession is.
The second-oldest profession or the third-oldest may be gun running.
I mean, there's always been gun running.
So this idea that they can stop it by passing a national law against trafficking, whatever they mean by that, and how they're going to define trafficking, isn't trafficking just selling?
It's a joke.
It's a joke because it's not going to prevent crimes.
And if anybody would just look at what happened in the Newtown massacre, they would realize that none of the proposals would have prevented that crime.
He didn't even undergo a background check because he just took his mother's gun.
She passed the background check.
So, you know, they make a big deal of this stuff, and they somehow try to tie it to the Newtown disaster, but it wouldn't have mattered.
It wouldn't have mattered a bit.
Well, and it seems like what this really ends up doing is criminalizing the law-abiding, right?
None of this really has, I mean, how are you supposed to stop an armed criminal anyway with a law?
As you point out, they already have laws against murder and that kind of thing.
If people want to carry a gun on their own, they can fight back that way.
But what this really all does is it gives the cops a thousand new ways to charge regular law-abiding people who aren't committing crimes with their guns for committing crimes with their guns just for having them, you know?
Well, that's right.
The danger is that just like perfectly innocent people get on no-fly lists and can't fly without a lot of hassle, it's possible that someone who wants to buy a gun is perfectly law-abiding and has a perfect legal record because of some glitch can't get a gun.
And a lot of times people buy a gun when they've been threatened.
They don't think they haven't thought about a gun up until then, and maybe a wife or a girlfriend who's threatened by an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend goes out and tries to buy a gun and maybe feels that she needs one quickly.
If there's a glitch in the system and she can't get it, she may be dead as a result of that.
She may be reluctant to go into the black market because law-abiding people tend not to like to go into the black market.
It's illegal, and they just have this sense that, you know, I guess I shouldn't do this.
Well, in the black market for guns, that's probably people who are pretty shady for dealing with.
It's not quite the same as just getting a bag of weed from somebody.
Yeah, you might be reluctant to do that, but those people will be forced to do it because of this.
So it won't keep any evil person from getting a gun, but it may stymie a perfectly moral person who has no criminal intent from getting one.
So, you know, the people that say, well, if it would save one life, isn't it worth it?
Well, I say the other way.
If not having this would save one life, isn't it worth it?
Yeah, exactly.
It's the same thing, the same argument, and only without new laws, which, by the way, how is it that anybody in this society thinks that we need one new law of any kind at all other than the great repeal of the 21st century act?
I mean, are they crazy?
Well, look, they think that a killer or a would-be killer who's perfectly willing to commit murder will be, you know, if we just passed enough gun laws, finally that person will be deterred.
And this is kind of ridiculous when you think about it, right?
The person's not deterred by the law against murder.
He's not deterred by the threat of life in prison and capital punishment in some states.
Okay, that person's not deterred by that.
But darn it, if we just increase the penalty for bringing a gun into a no-gun zone, a gun-free zone, or if we, you know, increase the penalty for buying without getting a background check, maybe we'll just put it over the top and that person will say, whoa, I don't want to run afoul of that law.
Murder is one thing, but heck, I don't want to get in trouble for having a gun, you know, without a background check.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
And the fact that the American people fall for this, you know, doesn't build a lot of respect for that.
I mean, look how they keep saying 91% of the people think this is right.
Well, 91% of the people can be wrong.
How about when 91% of the people were against marriage equality?
I didn't hear the progressives back then saying, well, that's what the people want.
We need to do what the people want.
Yeah, how about when George Bush had a 91% approval rating because 9-11 happened on his watch and somehow that made him the world's greatest hero?
Well, yeah, that's right.
It's funny when they appeal to the polls because it's only, you know, it's only when it's convenient.
And it's funny how, you know, I'm glad some of the Republicans are holding out against this stuff.
Not that I agree with them usually, but whatever the reason may be, they're right in this case.
But I love how people like Chris Matthews and these other pundits bash these Republicans that are holding out for defying the 91% of the public.
Now, I thought at other times standing against public opinion was considered courageous and not doing what's politically popular was considered admirable.
But in this case, it's not.
Now you're supposed to go with the 91%.
Well, that's because they're sticking up for the Bill of Rights.
That's right.
It's all whatever's convenient at the moment, whatever furthers your agenda.
One thing, if it's courageous, if it furthers your agenda, it's not courageous if it goes against your agenda.
Which, by the way, I saw my Facebook feed this morning.
Nobody has any principles whatsoever in this discussion.
Nobody has any principles.
Yeah, yeah.
I saw my Facebook feed this morning.
There was like a, you know, all Facebook communications now have been reduced not even to sentences but just to JPEGs with slogans on them going back and forth.
And this one had the faces of, I don't know, a half dozen or so Republicans who have vowed to filibuster the gun thing now that Rand Paul has made the talking filibuster trendy again or whatever.
And then this is going around with the label heroes.
And I'm going, come on.
You found a half a dozen Republicans who are willing to stand up for gun rights and that's heroic?
I mean, let me know when these conservatives, you know, vote against the Patriot Act and vote against the authorization for the Pentagon next year.
It's easy as hell for a Republican to be good on guns.
What's heroic about that?
But somehow, and it's not even, you know, what, half, not even a quarter of the Republican Party in the Senate that's willing to say that they'll sign up to join the filibuster.
Well, what does that say about the party in general?
If they're the only ones that we could count on for gun rights to protect their gun rights at all in the first place.
No, I know.
And like I said, they accept as the baseline everything that was passed.
You know, up until recently, they're not questioning any of that.
And that is how the NRA has always been since I was a kid, was always, look, we're not saying that the Second Amendment is the Second Amendment or anything.
All we're saying is please don't pass any new laws.
Just vigorously enforce the ones that you've already passed.
And that's their word, vigorously.
Another thing we can throw in here is that all these Republicans that are, you know, so gung-ho about guns, why haven't they learned that one of the biggest things that fuels the war on guns is the so-called war on drugs?
First of all, that's what, you know, enables gangs to have lots of money, and the money and the need to buy guns because they're fighting, you know, they're in a very dangerous business.
So the two are very intimately linked, but the NRA and the conservatives in general don't want to ever say, well, let's end the drug war, too.
And, you know, people wouldn't be complaining so much about guns if the drug war were to disappear.
But that's, you know, they're not principled in that regard.
The other thing that really annoys me is the ruthless and cynical exploitation of the dead kids from Newtown and the survivors, the parents of those kids.
Because, number one, you know, and I feel terrible for the survivor.
It was a horrible thing, obviously.
But the fact that you've suffered a trauma from a gun crime doesn't make you automatically an expert on what would be a good response, a good policy.
Okay, this is just blind emotionalism, attempting to get people to go along simply because they feel so bad for these people.
I mean, no, I didn't hear anybody saying, well, let's listen to Suzanne Hupp of Texas.
You know, she was the one who witnessed her parents being killed by a, you know, a berserk gunman in Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas in, what was it, 1990 or something like that.
She could have stopped that guy, but her gun was in her car because she was against the law for it to be carried into the restaurant.
She then, you know, helped, we've talked about this before, you and I.
She's the one who helped get a concealed carry law passed in Texas.
So how come, you know, if trauma makes you an expert, why don't they ever bring this woman on?
And why isn't she talking to Congress and the American public?
Why isn't her voice as credible as the parent of a child who, you know, tragically died in Newtown?
Well, I'll tell you, the easy answer to that is because she's not just right on the issue.
She's as good a spokesman on the issue as anyone in the world.
And she's not just using emotion.
She's not just saying, hey, my parents were killed.
We've got to do something.
She goes beyond that.
She gives you a good logical reason why her idea makes much more sense than the ideas coming out of, you know, again, the parents who tragically suffered in Newtown.
That's just ridiculous.
I mean, the other side has zero arguments.
I mean, I told you earlier about this.
There was a great moment on the morning Joe, okay, Joe Scarborough show with Mika Brzezinski as the sidekick.
They had on Ralph Reed, who's not normally a person I'm a big fan of, right, but they had him on about the gun issue.
He's the guy from the Christian Coalition, the boy-faced man.
Right, right.
And he was so eloquent and logical and calm in explaining why every one of the proposals currently talked about, from universal checks to banning high-capacity magazines and so-called assault weapons, which were really just a matter of cosmetics.
He just demolished it in the calmest, clearest way.
Nobody could say anything, and Mika finally looked at him and said, but Ralph, answer me this.
Don't we need to do something?
That was it.
Now, he was on the show that day, but that's it.
He left.
You know, he left.
He was a guest.
He wasn't there the next day or any of the days following up to the very day.
Today they talk the same way about the proposals as if Ralph Reed had never been on the show and never said those things.
They just forgot it the moment he left.
They forgot the fact that they had not a single answer to his argument besides this idiotic plea, don't we have to do something?
This is the state of the other side.
It's totally bankrupt.
They cannot make a single solid argument for the position, and so they rely on emotion instead.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's really too bad.
It's sort of like that whole, I don't know if this is appropriate or not, but it seems like the middle of the road leads to socialism kind of argument where once you have so much government intervention, it's so much easier to come up with all these new arguments for why, first of all, it's already legit.
You've already conceded that, and secondly and thirdly, why we need this, this, and that other solution to solve the problems that our lack of freedom have caused us.
For example, the, well, having a foreign policy that creates enemies or having all the restrictions on guns that we already had, as Ron Paul has stated numerous times, if the pilots had just been allowed to carry a 38 or whatever, if it had been no big deal at all because, hey, this is America, man, we're willing to take a risk on freedom here.
And people that had guns, well, they would have just shot Mr. Red Headband to death and there would have been no war.
You know, those planes would have landed safely that day.
That would have been the end of that.
But instead, of course, government creates a problem, trains everybody that you're supposed to obey your hijacker's commands, and if you're lucky, you'll be eating burritos in Cuba tonight kind of a thing and not fight back.
And then we have all the rest of the worst consequences from there.
No, your point about the – you're referring to the old Mises argument about the one regulation causes problems and then that's used to justify further regulations.
That works perfectly, that argument, perfectly applicable in the case of guns.
Because let's say they pass the universal background check and let's say we have another school massacre.
So they're going to say, well, okay, obviously we didn't go far enough because remember the case of my selling a gun to a neighbor.
The government can't know that's going to happen.
But they could say, okay, but we could fix that.
Here's how we fix it.
We register every gun to the owner.
So now we have a big database of guns and people and what guns they own.
Now if a gun gets transferred without a background check, well, we could just do spot checks and see whether the Sheldon Richman still owns the gun that we have him previously owning or can he present it to prove that he still has it.
Isn't that the only way to find out whether I transferred it without a background check?
So aren't they going to have to come up with some draconian measure?
The other side likes to say it's paranoia to think the government is going to register guns and maybe even confiscate.
But it's not paranoia.
It's logic.
How are they going to put teeth behind it unless they register everybody's gun?
And then once they have a registry, the state knows who owns guns.
That's a very bad idea, having the government know who owns guns, because in the past it has led to confiscation.
And in the future it could lead to confiscation.
It's not paranoid to point that out.
That's the nature of states.
And the other side is disgraceful for trying to make that look like some kind of crazy attitude.
Oh, someday the government may do something bad.
Oh, right.
It's like it's not ever done anything bad in the past.
Pass it.
Why would we possibly think that?
Right.
Well, and here Biden mocks gun skeptics.
Oh, yeah, we're going to swoop down with special forces folks and gather up every gun in America.
So, in a way, he's taking, like, you know, a million-man U.N. army of blue helmet, gun confiscation, all at once, sort of worst red herring.
But he's completely ignoring, of course, the fact, as Will Griggs pointed out this morning, that every single sheriff's department in America, all 18,000 of them have paramilitary SWAT teams.
And they use them all the time.
And if gun registration is good for anything, it's good for informing the police whether they ought to take a chance on not using a SWAT team on this one, boys.
And we're already so militarized, we don't even need a standing army in this country.
We've got such paramilitary forces around.
Anthony Gregory and his piece on the totalitarian implications of a background check shows how there were episodes in American history where they compensated guns.
They did it after Katrina in New Orleans.
They did it after the Civil War.
They disarmed blacks.
It's happened in the United States.
Okay, Katrina wasn't that long ago.
It was 2005.
To act like that's crazy and that we don't have to worry about anything like that in the future, you know, is just pure demagogy.
And, of course, I would expect somebody like Biden to say something like that.
He'll say anything.
He's just horrible.
And really, I mean, and this is what's funny, too, is I saw a couple of responses to this or really this whole idea.
It's liberals who, for the most part, if you had to take your average liberal or your average conservative, liberals tend to be more concerned about things like police brutality and police militarization and that kind of thing where the right tends to lean more toward law and order in that case.
But a liberal completely give up all of his skepticism of policing when it comes to the gun issue.
Oh, yeah, right, like they're going to come violate your rights all of a sudden is the attitude of a liberal on the cops, right?
The very same liberals who think we need the national Supreme Court to nationalize each and every little part of the Bill of Rights in order to prevent the locals from violating it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, this is bad, and it looks like people are caving in Congress who we might have thought would hold out.
This idea that, oh, come on, people are owed a vote, we should have a vote on this, and filibusterism is improper.
To them, I say, you know, my rights are not up for a vote or should not be up for a vote.
They wouldn't want to vote on First Amendment matters.
You know, they would be in favor of filibuster there saying it's not appropriate to vote on our right to free speech or our freedom of religion.
Well, same thing.
There should not be a vote on one's right to defend oneself.
That's not just a constitutional right.
That's a natural right.
Ah, come on.
If the legislature can override the Fourth Amendment, they can override the Second.
No problem.
Let me ask you about this, and I know you'll have a complicated and interesting point of view on this question of mental health as it intersects with right to bear arms.
Because it sounds to me like this legislation, and maybe it's already like this, I don't know.
But it sounds like what they're talking about is deputizing every psychologist in America to be able to sign someone up for their they're not allowed to own a gun list.
And, you know, what's that going to do for people to, I mean, you can see right there.
People who are prescribed particular drugs, does that mean they're going to be right on the list?
Well, it says here you're prescribed antipsychotics, so you're definitely got to be on the list.
And it says here that, you know, you've got some anxiety issues, and how itchy is that trigger finger?
Maybe you need to be on the list, too.
And how much power are we giving psychologists and psychiatrists over people's rights like that?
No, that's a great point.
I will here invoke the memory of a man I have a huge amount of respect for, a great libertarian, and a great critic of psychiatry, Thomas Sasse, who himself was a psychiatrist, so he knew what he was talking about.
We already have a therapeutic state, which is his term, for the state exercising a great deal of power over health matters.
The state is able to get away with things in the name of health and medical and mental health that they would never be able to get away with if it were put in terms of religion and just morality.
If you call it health, then they can do it.
And this is a great example.
It's just an extension of powers that the so-called mental health people already have and already possess.
They hold a great deal of power already.
If you're going to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist and they begin to fear that you may be suicidal, they actually have a duty, a so-called duty to protect, which means they can commit you against your will, at least for observation.
Because if they don't and you do commit suicide, the family can sue the practitioner and say, why didn't you do something?
Didn't you have some clue that this person was suicidal?
So you can see that they have this burden on them because they could get wiped out in a lawsuit to do stuff like that.
So you're right.
Any new legislation regarding guns and the so-called mentally ill will just make their power even greater and impinge on the rights of these stigmatized people even more.
Despite everything we hear, it's just wrong that the diagnosis of mental illness is some sort of objective scientific finding.
It is not.
It is not.
It's a fuzzy, unscientific thing.
There are no objective markers for mental illness.
I refer people to the work of Thomas Sass about this.
And I know you can find plenty of stuff in the public prints by people who work inside that industry who say the opposite.
But if you read what they say to themselves, like in journal articles and things, they're not nearly so confident of the scientific status of what they say as they are in public.
So this is a very dangerous extension of the therapeutic state for them to be tying it to the gun issue.
There's been some pushback about this because even people who don't take Sass's position think that the so-called mentally ill have been stigmatized in all this, made out to be violent.
And even by the conventional definition, so-called mentally ill people don't commit most of the crimes.
It's like 4%, according to an article I read in the Huffington Post today.
Wasn't it the official psychological establishment that said a few, I don't know, maybe a month or two ago that they have no means of determining?
They admit themselves.
They're the first ones to admit themselves.
They have no means of scientifically predicting who is going to be violent.
You could have someone who's crazy as hell who would never lay his hand on somebody else.
Right.
Yeah, we're headed toward the movie Minority Report, the department of pre-crime.
They will predict who's going to commit a crime, and then they'll arrest those people.
I don't know if you remember the Tom Cruise movie.
It was a science fiction story.
And everywhere you go, they're photographing your irises.
Right.
Well, there they had psychics who were predicting who was going to commit crimes.
And on the basis of what those psychics predicted, they went and arrested people.
That's what the psychics were doing.
It was what psychiatrists were doing.
Look, you know, there are people who have real problems, whether you want to call them mental health ones or just personal problems they need to work through.
Some of them really need some counseling, and a lot of them are going to now no longer go and seek that counseling.
Because, geez, I didn't know that if I went and asked for some advice that I was going to get on the never-allowed-to-defend-myself-again list, screw that.
That's a very good point.
Look, when Sartre denied mental illness, when he called it a myth, he didn't mean people did not have problems.
He called them problems of living.
Life is complicated.
Human beings are very complicated, and they can have very complicated problems.
That was not his purpose, and he's misunderstood when people think that.
So, yeah, very often.
I mean, he was a talk therapist for many years and also a professor of psychiatry.
So people talking to other people can very often work out their problems, and you don't want to discourage people from doing that.
But you're right.
The more power you give to the therapist, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, the more they're deputized by the state, the more you discourage other people from going to talk to them.
Absolutely right.
Well, and there are some people, and I'm no expert on all the different kinds of therapy and whatever, but I am expert on I've known people who are absolutely, completely out of their mind, nutso nuts, and they need severe medication in order to not be nuts and in order to not destroy their own lives.
Those people do exist.
I've met them, and I've known them.
Hell, I was a cab driver, shelled it for eight years or something, man.
So those people exist, too, but just because they're crazy doesn't mean they don't have a right to defend their own life, you know what I mean?
And for them, in fact, some people that I care very much for, to think that they would have to make the decision now that, man, as much as I really need to go see this guy about adjusting my medication, I'm really afraid that I'm going to end up on some list now where I'm not going to be able to own a gun anymore for certain parts of the population of this country.
That's going to be a major thing, and that's going to lead to some real problems for, again, innocent people who have nothing to do with crime in America whatsoever.
Well, that's true, and another group that we're neglecting here are people who are convicted of, say, felony drug charges or other felony victimless crime charges.
It's already against the law for somebody with a felony conviction to own a gun, which seems to be absurd.
I don't know why a – imagine a felon who has paid his debt to society, as they said, whether it's a victimless crime or not.
Why shouldn't that person be allowed to defend himself?
Is that part of the punishment, that you become defenseless for the rest of your life?
But particularly in the case of a victimless crime, a nonviolent crime, so-called, which shouldn't be on the books as a crime, I don't understand why that person is barred from life from a means of self-defense.
And already those people have to go into the black market to buy a gun, but these people that want a universal background check want to make sure those people can't get a hold of a gun.
Right.
Well, you see, the thing is, these terrible violent criminals that you would – violent felons that you would want to keep guns out of their hands, there's no room for them in the prison.
They had to be released because their space is being taken up by some law-abiding guy who happened to technically violate some offense against the state on a gun charge or somebody else who sold a little bit of cocaine to somebody else or something like that.
Well, that's right.
That's the problem with having those laws on the books.
It's one of the problems anyway.
But why make this penalty while those people should suffer even more by being forced to be defenseless?
Look, let's face it, when it comes to self-defense, a gun is an economical, efficient way for a person to defend himself against a stronger person.
I knew a libertarian who said the best of all worlds would be no guns, and then the second best would be freedom to own guns.
So I said to that person, I think that's wrong, because imagine if all guns just disappeared tomorrow, who would have an advantage?
The bigger, stronger thugs versus the smaller, weaker innocent people.
And on average, women tend to be smaller and physically weaker than men.
That's just a fact.
So that would put women at a disadvantage especially, and then also smaller and weaker men as well.
Why would that be a good world?
Making guns disappear doesn't make bad people disappear.
That's what people think.
You're at all guns, and then people are nice.
That's ridiculous.
One of the things about Facebook that I like is the way – well, obviously there's a confirmation bias in my list of friends.
The people who have friended me tend to be people who have heard the show before, that kind of thing, so we share interests.
But for example, local stories of police abuse become national news stories to me on a daily basis, that kind of thing.
And the same thing for local news stories of a 12-year-old girl uses mom's rifle to wound, kill and or scare away criminals breaking into the house, that kind of thing.
Those stories become national news.
Peter Jennings would never tell me – well, he's dead now, right?
Anyway, whichever clone filled in for Peter Jennings after he was gone, those people never tell those kinds of stories.
But with some of this new social media, that kind of stuff is just right at your fingertips all day long.
And it reminds me of back in the 1990s, I used to like to read the New American magazine of the John Birch Society back when Will Grigg was the editor of it.
And they would have a thing – I forgot the title of it now – but they would have a thing every month that would have at least a half-dozen stories of regular law-abiding American citizens who used or at least brandished a firearm in order to protect themselves from crime, and it happened all the time.
And I remember one of them was an old lady whose husband had come home from the war, from World War II, and put his .38 under the bed.
And it had been sitting there the whole time.
It had never budged the whole time.
And some insane, drugged-out lunatic came bashing down her door – I think it was one of her neighbors on crack or meth out of his mind or something – came crashing down her door.
And little old lady shot him, blam, right in the heart.
Some gigantic guy, like you're saying, the epitome of what you're saying, the strong versus the weak.
And little old lady picked up her husband's .38 and blam, she's okay and he's not.
Now, who could possibly say she didn't have the right to put herself in that situation if it hadn't been his gun?
She didn't have the right to go buy one from whoever she felt like in order to have a gun to protect herself in that situation.
And there's a thousand examples like that.
And people who defend their stores without firing a shot, just, you know what?
Bad idea.
I know you got a knife, but my gun says you better turn around and leave now.
And then they do, and nobody dies.
No, that's right.
And you raise a very good point there, because guns are used every day to protect innocent life, most of the time without firing, sometimes just showing the gun or brandishing the gun is enough to scare off a criminal.
But that doesn't typically get reported.
It may get reported in the locale where it happens, but it doesn't get nationally reported.
So people don't have a sense that guns save lives.
They only hear, you know, where guns have taken innocent life.
And so that's the general impression people have.
Oh, guns, yeah, that's bad news.
And so they have no sense of how many lives are saved.
And, you know, while we don't have a precise number, because most of the incidents don't even get reported, sometimes the life is defended with an illegal gun, right?
A gun that, by law, the person's not supposed to have because, you know, for whatever reason, so they don't report it.
So I suspect the number is way understated, but Cato has a paper on this if people want to look at it.
Clayton Kramer, I think, was one of the authors.
They make some attempt at estimating how often this happens.
It's not an insignificant number of times.
We just realize that.
We know that's a fact.
You know, I mean, it's just common sense.
But that doesn't get counted.
That doesn't get counted.
One of the good things the NRA used to do, I don't see their magazine anymore, but I think in the back they used to have stories from local newspapers about people who used their guns to defend themselves or others, just to try to balance it.
But, of course, only NRA readers were seeing this, so it didn't make a difference in the larger public.
But if you look at the way guns are portrayed in the national news, it's overwhelmingly negative.
I mean, it's almost entirely negative.
I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say you don't get any news of guns being used constructively.
It's just ridiculous.
It's just, I guess, the prejudice of the people who decide what gets on the news.
They just don't think it's worthwhile showing the story.
We weren't even told about the couple of incidents where there would have been mass murder at a school except a gun stopped it.
There was a law school at the Appalachians some years ago where there could have been a very bad incident.
I think a couple of people ended up getting shot, but two students ran to their car because they couldn't have their guns on campus.
They ran to their car to get their guns and stopped the shooter before he killed many more people.
But that doesn't get ever mentioned when they talk about mass murders.
Well, and, you know, you'll hear from time to time just living your life off-duty cop because they're allowed to carry guns, stops robbery in progress at the local Cici's Pizza or whatever.
That kind of thing happens all the time, you know, movie theaters, this, that, and the other thing.
And by the way, I wanted to mention for people, I think that this is really telling.
This is important.
This headline ought to be shocking.
The ACLU says Reeds, that's the majority leader of the Senate, Reeds gun legislation could threaten privacy rights, civil liberties.
And now, I mean, I guess really I should defer to you.
You know a lot better than me about the history of this kind of thing.
But the ACLU has been uniformly bad on the gun issue and just they don't care about it at all, right, like the producers of the TV news you're just talking about.
It's never been their thing to stick up for the Second Amendment, has it?
And then so does this mean that, wow, this law really goes beyond the pale because the ACLU is, they're opposed to ten parts of it or something, according to this piece in the Daily Caller.
Yeah, they have not been attentive.
I used to kid about the ACLU that here's how they count, one, three, four, five, six, because they don't know the Second Amendment.
They don't know the number two.
But this is a good sign.
They're concerned about the part of Reid's bill that mandates the background checks for a couple of reasons.
One, they say that the information, there's no provision that the information gathered during a background check on private sales be destroyed after a certain number of days, 90 days or whatever it is.
I think most of that information in a regular background check by a licensed dealer is not kept.
They used to be slow at getting rid of it, but I believe that information is supposed to be destroyed, and I guess it has been because I haven't heard people complaining that it's not been.
So, in other words, regular background checks with a licensed gun dealer has not so far resulted in a national registry because it wasn't supposed to.
There aren't the same kind of restrictions on the information gathered at a background check in private sales.
So the ACLU is very concerned about that.
They said this could definitely lead to a registry and perhaps even confiscation someday.
So this is the ACLU.
The other thing they're concerned about is the word transfer.
I haven't read the definition, but I guess in the bill it's very vague, and they said it's just bad because an average citizen, it would be hard for an average citizen to know whether he's violating the law or not.
It's so complicated, and so they're concerned about that.
So it's great.
It's great that they're speaking up.
I hope that's the start of a new recognition that people have a right to keep and bear arms.
All right.
Well, we'll leave it there, but thanks very much for your time, Sheldon.
As always, great to talk to you.
Anytime, Scott.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's the vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
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