05/09/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so first guest today is the great Sheldon Richman, the plumb line.
Even Anthony Gregory says this guy's more libertarian than him, which is almost impossible.
But here he is.
He's got a modest gun safety proposal for us at FFF.org, home of the Future Freedom Foundation.
Welcome back to the show.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
And once again, glad to be with you.
Well, good.
Happy to have you here.
The only person in the world more libertarian than Anthony Gregory.
Well, I have to disagree with that.
Is Anthony more libertarian than you, do you think?
You know, I think anybody can be as libertarian as you can possibly be.
It's not some sort of high jumper, you know.
Yeah, it is, too.
I just don't want to hear talk like that.
Okay, well, you're very modest.
You know, I call myself an Anthony Gregorian, and he says, oh, well, I'm a Sheldon Richman-ian libertarian.
So there you go.
You have your own brand within libertarianism.
Little did you understand, I guess.
Well, I'm a left Rothbardian, so this is like, eventually it's going to be some big circle, right?
Yeah, there you go.
Well, Anthony tells me I'm a paleoliberal, which is different than a classical liberal and different than I don't know what.
What do I know?
Whatever Anthony says, basically, is what I know.
I think a paleoliberal is a liberal dinosaur.
I don't know what that means exactly.
Yeah, I'm not really sure either.
Is just a vegetarian, maybe?
I don't know.
All right, hey, listen.
So you have a modest proposal to, I guess, satisfy all sides and take care of the problem of guns in America.
We're trying to end the ugly differences and unite everybody.
It's about time.
What would we do without you, Sheldon?
So let's hear it.
Well, I just think the gun safety people, that is, the ones that are pushing expanded background checks, and they'd go further, they would want to ban on the manufacture of certain ugly rifles, at least ugly in their eyes, and also high-capacity magazines.
Their problem is they're not thinking big enough, because it seems to me people can get around background checks.
It's not acknowledged, but there are background check-free zones.
In other words, places you can go and buy a gun and not have your background checked, and it's not because the law doesn't cover it.
It's because these people don't want to have their background checked, and that will always be the case.
So I think that we need to think bigger and not just go – I think it's too small to go for background checks.
What we need to do is whenever somebody buys a gun, they have to sign a declaration of intent.
In other words, they have to check off whether they intend to use the gun criminally or not criminally, and then they check one of those off and they sign.
If they say they intend to use it criminally, then they can't be sold a gun.
And if somebody does sell them a gun, they can be charged with accessory before the fact.
And then the government can have a website listing all the names of people who declared that they intended – or tear them down for a gun because they intended to use them criminally.
So this would get publicized, and then you'd even threaten black market sellers with penalties if they sell to someone who is on that website.
And so this will smoke out most people because – That sounds like a perfect solution to me.
They'll honestly – look, they have to swear, so they'll honestly put down whether they're intending to use their guns criminally or not.
So that's the first part of it.
So you're convinced?
I'm glad to see you're convinced by that.
Good, good.
I got one person on board.
Well, I don't see why that wouldn't work.
Well, I don't see why either because if the other side, if the background check people say it wouldn't work, then they'd have to also concede that their solution won't work.
So I'm not sure they're going to want to do that.
So I think I can get almost unanimous consent on this idea.
Yeah, yeah, there you go because you know how people don't like admitting that they're wrong about things.
Well, that's right because any objection that they make applies to their own plan because if they say, well, look, people aren't going to confess or admit that they want to use their gun to commit a crime.
But I can say, but they're not going to go to where a background check is required.
So you may call it a universal background check, but if a guy's selling guns out of his trunk in some deserted area, the government's not watching that.
So that's obviously not going to get covered by a background check.
And you might say, well, we can threaten that guy with a penalty if he sells without doing a background check.
Well, I'm threatening people with a penalty if they rely on their criminal intent declaration form.
You can't object to mine without also objecting to their point.
So I think we can all come to agreement on this.
And this is the thing, too, and you talk about this in the piece that the gun controllers are up against.
They even have to rename themselves the gun safety crowd because the idea that you're ever going to get rid of hundreds of millions of privately held firearms in America is just beyond stupid.
They don't even have a case to make there.
So you'd think they would just find a new hobby.
Because what is their point, even, in trying to, you know, attack the gun dilemma from, you know, just by picking at the margins like this?
I mean, for example, I can remember being, I don't know, 12 or 13 years old or something and sympathizing with the position that, geez, a lot less people would die of gun violence if there were a lot less guns around.
Right?
But that's childish thinking, right?
I didn't think that, you know, after certainly beyond 15, I knew better than that.
You know, it's impossible to do that.
All you're going to do is have a bunch of armed storm troopers coming around taking guns from people, and then they'll be the only ones armed at the end.
And who wants that?
And how safe is that?
And whatever.
I mean, the logic completely breaks down.
So I can see the motive in their, you know, utopian imagination.
Wow, a world without guns.
Wouldn't that be nice if everybody had I Dream of Jeannie to make it their own way?
But since they don't, then what's even the point of all of this stuff?
Background checks at gun shows and whatever.
Well, what if I go outside the gun show and buy a gun in an alley then?
Well, it's not enough to wish for a world without guns for those people.
I think we've talked about this before, but I once was in a conversation with a person who actually was a libertarian and said the best of all possible worlds would be a world without guns.
And the second best would be a world where there's freedom to buy guns so that people can defend themselves.
And then, you know, the worst of all possible worlds would be gun control, where only the bad people have guns.
But I disagreed and said the best of all possible worlds isn't a world without guns because guns are not the only way to kill and hurt people.
So there'd still be bad people.
So it's not enough to wish for a gun-free world.
You have to wish for an evil-free world in order for a gun-free world to be safe because just a gun-free world still leaves the evil people.
Well, they have fists and clubs and knives and ropes and automobiles and, you know, I don't know.
I'm looking around my room here.
They could pick up a laptop and hit you on the head with it.
They could pick up a lamp and hit you.
I mean, it's unlimited, right?
It's unlimited.
And the thing is, the gun controllers say, yeah, but guns just make it really easy to kill.
But that's what makes them the equalizers so that the weak can protect themselves.
Right.
It also makes it easier for a person to defend him or herself.
And don't forget, in a world without guns, good people who are smaller and less strong than the bad people who are bigger and stronger are going to be at a disadvantage.
And a good part of the first group, the smaller, weaker people, physically weaker now, would be women because we know for a fact that just in pure physical terms, men tend to be bigger and stronger than women.
It's just the way things are.
So a world without guns would be a very bad world for women.
Yeah, you know, I just saw this website.
I should have bookmarked this thing.
It was kind of a right-leaning site, but they had an entire category that was just news stories of law-abiding citizens defending themselves by brandishing and or using a firearm against a criminal.
And there's, whatever, a dozen stories a day like this from all around the country.
And those are the ones that make the news.
Right.
The media, especially the national media, never report them.
Now, first of all, they don't make the news a lot of the times because sometimes the person who uses a gun to scare off a criminal doesn't own the gun legally.
So he's obviously not going to report it.
Plus, if he scares the person off and that's the end of it, he may not report it, thinking what's the point of telling the police about an event that's passed and the person disappeared and I can't describe him or, you know, whatever.
Right, and even then the local news might not care or even send the guy out anyway.
Yeah, those are the reasons why that number is understated.
But we know what happens thousands and thousands of times every year.
And some of those people would be dead.
Maybe a lot of them would have been dead if they didn't have a gun.
So that never gets put into the accounting.
We only look at the number of murders by gun, by, you know, by firearm every year, which number, by the way, has been falling.
If you go on the Reason magazine site, you can see the statistics.
Right.
That number has been falling for decades.
The number of mass killings have been falling for decades.
Gun violence is way down.
But, you know, they never acknowledge that.
They act like, you know, things have never been worse.
Right.
But we shouldn't be satisfied with even the lower number than it is today.
I totally agree.
But you don't lower that number by taking away the inexpensive and efficient means of self-defense from law-abiding people, from peaceful people who will never do harm with their gun.
Well, and, you know, it should be pointed out here, too, that most of us, like I live in Texas, where it's perfectly legal to walk around with a gun, and, in fact, the Bill of Rights in the Texas Constitution says the only power that the legislature has over it is to decide whether you can carry it openly or whether you have to carry it concealed, depending on their opinion of which would be the best way to deter crime as far as that goes.
But my point being that if you go out to a crowd somewhere, and especially like in Austin, you could have thousands of people and no guns whatsoever.
Nobody has a gun, and nobody's worried about anybody killing them.
And we're not all carrying a concealed weapon just in case.
Most of us actually have very little concern that we live among predators or whatever, you know?
The scariest people I ever encounter is the APD driving behind me down the road.
They're the armed criminals that scare the hell out of me.
So, you know, you could be completely and totally for the right to bear arms and also think that, you know, in this era, in this town, it's mostly unnecessary and there's no reason to feel like you need to exercise it, you know?
It's just a matter of opinion.
Well, right, and another thing about concealed carry is, and, again, I think we've talked about this, is what I'm calling the free rider virtue.
You know, in economics, there's the free rider problem, but here it's a virtue because if people can carry concealed, I'm not against open carry, but I think concealed carry should also be legal.
The nice thing about it is if you don't carry, if you don't want to carry for some reason, the criminal doesn't know that.
So you're actually getting the benefit of the fact that other people do carry concealed and may carry concealed, and therefore, you know, you're raising the cost, the potential cost to a would-be mugger because he can't be sure that you're not carrying because you're allowed to carry concealed.
That's pretty neat.
I don't know why the other side doesn't see that.
And, again, that's the biggest help to women.
It helps the men too, a lot of men too, because there are some men who are much bigger and stronger than other men.
But it's especially helpful to women who can be at the mercy of big, strong, bad people.
Now, the advice given to them often is, oh, well, get mace or learn the martial arts or something ridiculous like that.
Martial arts, of course, take years, and you've got to be kind of close to your assailant, right, for the martial arts to work.
And mace, if you're not quite on target with mace and you really piss off the guy, then you're probably dead.
And so, you know, nothing is better than a firearm for efficiency, and they're not terribly expensive.
All right, and now we've got to talk about a democratic future where most firearms are banned and most firearms sales are black market sales.
Can you imagine what America would be like if we really had a war on guns the way we have a war on drugs right now?
Well, sure, and, you know, when they talk about banning high-capacity magazines and so-called assault weapons, which is a bogus category.
We all know it's just semi-automatics that have a couple of ugly features, like a collapsible stock or a bayonet lug.
You know, we do have to do something about drive-by bayonettings.
I mean, that's getting out of hand.
I mean, even in Chicago that's happening every night, right, so we definitely have to have bayonet control.
I'm being sarcastic because some people didn't catch that the op-ed was sarcastic.
But, okay, so they talk about a ban, but they don't really mean a ban on those things.
They mean a ban on new manufacture of those things.
So there's already millions of AR-15s with the offending cosmetic features, and there are millions of high-capacity magazines around, which, you know, people will be able to buy in the aftermarket, secondary market.
No one is calling on confiscation for confiscation of existing things, those things, because we know the owners aren't going to surrender them.
So what are we going to do?
Are we going to send the cops or the FBI or the ATF door-to-door to look?
People can hide them behind the walls should they do what they did when they did.
When they do a drug search, go take their hatchets, their fireman hatchets, and start bashing in the walls to look for caches of magazines in the AR-15s.
So, no, nobody is calling for that.
Not even the worst gun control is calling for that, which means there are going to be millions of those things out there.
So it's not going to put an end to possession of those things, which means they'll still be potentially available for criminals, which means we better be able to defend ourselves.
Well, you know, it also means that all those millions of American law-abiding AR-15 owners will all be suspects in need of proving their innocence.
Where did you get that rifle and when did you get it, right?
Were Feinstein's version of the assault weapons ban to pass again, right?
If you have one, well, now just prove to me that you passed it before the Feinstein law and just turn masses of people into suspects.
And, of course, it would mean a massive increase in black market sales, where even regular law-abiding plain old people who want a gun to defend themselves have to go to a friend of a friend who knows a guy who knows where to get one on the black market because those are the only people that you can get a firearm from.
And then you're dealing with people who enforce their position on top of the local gun black market with their guns, right?
Yeah.
Real criminals running the gun business instead of Joe Bob and his son.
Well, see, this reminds me of an earlier modest proposal I made some years ago, or actually probably last year.
The problem is the black market, so I think we need to outlaw the black market.
Why isn't there a bill saying black markets from now on are illegal?
Wouldn't that solve the problem?
Again, sarcasm, folks.
I wonder what would happen if you said that to a Democrat on Capitol Hill.
Would their brain just explode or what?
They'd say that's a great idea.
Why don't we have it?
Why haven't we thought of that?
And while we're at it, let's outlaw drugs.
Oh, wait a second.
We did that, didn't we?
And yet I understand drugs are more available and cheaper than ever and more potent.
Right.
Well, so let's talk about that here in the last few minutes because you've got this great piece, and I know it's from earlier in the year.
It ran in the Future Freedom and is now online at fff.org, Time to Nullify the Drug Laws.
And you really do a good job of going through the history of the way things got the way they are.
And this is something that caught my eye way back when, I guess when I was in high school, that when the federal government first outlawed pot, they had to use this loophole.
Speaking of the gun show loophole and all that, they had to use this loophole that, well, they're just putting a tax on it.
But then they had the whole double jeopardy thing where you have to bring us the pot to get your tax stamp, but if you have any pot without a tax stamp, you're guilty of having pot without a tax stamp, and so we'll take you to prison.
And Timothy Leary ended up defeating that in the Supreme Court in the 70s.
By then, the Constitution had already been completely beaten to death and left in the gutter for nothing, and so there was no limit on the number of laws that the national government could pass to regulate this, that, or the other drug.
And I just thought that was interesting, the evolution of the Constitution that took place in the meantime, where they knew they didn't have a leg to stand on to outlaw pot on the federal level back in 1937, even in the midst of the New Deal.
They knew that they were kind of loopholing around the Constitution to do it.
By the 70s, the Constitution was a completely dead letter and irrelevant.
Yes, and I got that insight from Thomas Sass, his great book, Our Right to Drugs, that everybody should read.
And his earlier book on this matter called Ceremonial Chemistry is also worth reading, a lot of very good history in there.
After 1917, you could buy anything you wanted at the local pharmacy.
Old ladies used opium tea to calm themselves down, and some other drug to give to their child who was teething or something like that.
It never did any harm to anybody.
In 1917, we get the first move against, I guess, heroin with the Harrison Act, I think it was called.
But he shows you points in time where no one thought the government had the constitutional authority to regulate such substances.
And then, like a very short time later, it's like unquestioned.
Of course, they've always had this power.
So the views change, and freedom, therefore, is never safe.
Right, that's all the Constitution says is there shall be a Congress, a president, and a court, and they can do what they feel like.
But, of course, the Constitution was the result, and we're moving to a different subject, really.
The Constitution was a political document.
It had a lot of compromise in it and a lot of vague language.
So, you know, the general welfare can mean anything.
It's a Rorschach, it's an inkblot, and it can mean anything to anybody.
So, you know, one year it doesn't mean the ability to regulate drugs, and another year it does.
We should also remind ourselves that in 1920, the prevailing view was that Congress had to pass a constitutional amendment to regulate or prohibit the manufacture of booze.
But they never passed a constitutional amendment, and that was repealed, of course, 13 years later.
But no one ever that I can think of has called for a constitutional amendment to give the government the power to regulate drugs or to ban the manufacture of certain drugs.
People don't understand the difference.
Why do they think with alcohol they needed it, and with drugs they didn't need it?
Because they all learned in government school that the people, through their democracy, decided in the 1930s that they wanted President for Life Roosevelt to do what needed to be done, and they were sick and tired of that stuffy old Constitution holding them back.
Sheldon, everybody knows that.
And then Ike Eisenhower came in after Truman and ratified the whole damn thing by not repealing a bit of it.
Yeah, but one of the few good things that happened in the Roosevelt years was the repeal of Prohibition.
In the beginning of the federal drug war.
There was a book that came out in the last few years which took away our ability to celebrate that as libertarians and said the real reason they repealed Prohibition was they realized all the revenue they were missing out on.
That was the reason.
It was not a libertarian reason.
All about the taxes.
I was going to say we should take what we can get, but I don't like when people say, let's legalize drugs and then tax the hell out of them.
No, I don't want to tax the hell out of them.
Although, then again, compared to the government deliberately poisoning the alcohol and waging the war on alcohol the way they did, maybe let them have their tax revenue.
Well, see, they just spend that killing other people.
I don't know.
It is a toss-up.
So now here's the thing of it.
This drug war, even though people really don't seem to have done much thinking about it unless they're particularly interested in it.
The masses of people don't seem to have really worked this out, like theoretically why it should be this way, the way you talk.
But they can all tell that the war on drugs is a terrible failure.
Many of them have friends or family members or family members of friends or somebody whose life is destroyed, not by drugs, but by the drug war.
It just ain't fair.
And is it really true we've got more prisoners than China?
It's wrong.
And all the profit in the prisons.
People can just tell that this thing, it's got to come to an end.
And they're starting with pot.
It started with the medical pot.
And now, as you talk about in your article, you've got Washington State and Colorado have legalized pot for everybody.
And it's going to come to a head.
It really does seem like it's coming to a confrontation between the Department of Justice and at least the people of those states.
I read a couple of stories that said that the legislature in Colorado was already bending to the will of the feds and trying to undo the legalization as best they can.
But I wonder, I guess, first of all, what you think, what position, because the feds are still putting off their decision and haven't announced at least exactly what they're going to do about this.
But, you know, of course they claim, ultimately they claim the supremacy clause and that the states do not have the right to challenge the feds on this.
On the other hand, the state governments are a bit more accountable to the people who, at least in the case of these two states, are sick and tired of the war on pot.
Yeah, well, I thought it was great that the voters in Colorado and Washington did that.
I can't see the feds just rolling over because that's too ominous for them.
Other states will follow.
And how can they, I don't see how they can concede that, all right, sure, if you want to nullify, in effect nullify our federal law against marijuana, go ahead and do that.
I just can't imagine they're going to do that.
So we need to watch this really closely.
We know what Obama has done with the medical marijuana dispensaries in California.
He's shown George W. Bush to be a piker on that regard, especially when they came in and said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore, we're not going to go after the dispensaries.
And that was a total lie because they've gone after it in a way that the Bush administration never even dreamed of.
It's horrific.
Now, I have, in a way, mixed feelings about medical marijuana because, on the one hand, I'm certainly happy that ill people who have no alternative but marijuana can get a hold of it without being harassed by the police.
And I like the fact that people are able to get it even if they're not really ill.
On the other hand, I don't like the larger context.
It's an enlargement of what Thomas Suss called the therapeutic state.
In other words, okay, marijuana's fine as long as doctors that we've deputized only allow certain people to have it.
I mean, to me, that's not a libertarian solution.
I know some people argue that it's a step toward a libertarian solution, and it may or may not be.
On the other hand, it may be a step away from it because it only shows, oh, well, look, the government can be very creative.
Sure, if it thinks a drug can really help a particular part of the population, we'll make sure just that part of the population gets it.
I don't see how that's really a step toward a libertarian idea of freedom.
Right.
Yeah, although, on the other hand, like you say, though, if you go to L.A., anybody can smoke weed.
Then it's just a question of whether you want to get it at the store or from your friend.
But you could just go, oh, my back hurts.
I need a prescription for pot.
Thanks.
Right, but I wonder how long will they allow that to go on, or will they at some point say, hey, wait a second, we're getting pressure from the feds.
It's too easy.
The medical thing is a sham.
So we're going to start tightening up and really go after people who don't really need it and after doctors who prescribe it too easily.
So this is not the end of the movie.
Right.
You know, I wonder if they do close down all the legal medical pot in California, whether it will still be available on the black market.
What do you think?
Well, I think it will always be available on the black market.
Always is, man.
All right.
Hey, thanks, Sheldon.
You're the best, man.
Anytime.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that's Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of the Future Freedom, published by the Future Freedom Foundation.
You can find what he writes at FFF.org and at SheldonRichman.com.
We'll be right back after this.
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