07/25/12 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

All right, Shel, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is the website.
Keep all the interview archives there, including quite a few with my friend Sheldon Richman, who's next on the show.
Welcome back, Sheldon.
Thank you for having me back.
It's always an honor.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Everybody, you know Sheldon Richman.
He writes at the Future of Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, and also his blog, Free Association, at SheldonRichman.com.
And so I'm glad you're here to talk about guns.
We can say I'm the editor of The Freeman, too.
Oh, yeah?
Okay, good.
He's also the editor of The Freeman, which you ought to read.
It's about being free.
All right, don't let Aurora shooting curtail right of self-defense.
All the usual suspects, Gun Control Incorporated and everybody else who agrees with them, I guess.
They always take every opportunity that they can.
Every time something bad happens with a gun, really, that gets enough publicity, becomes another example to them of why we should ban guns.
You know, one thing I got to hand it to the gun controllers is I don't think that they have reason on their side, and I'll let you get to that part, but they do have reasonableness on their side.
Oh, this plague of gun violence must end.
And so they don't really have a sequitur where their emotion somehow gets tied to a policy that's effective at carrying out their will or anything like that, but they certainly have a case that it really sucks that sometimes people take guns and shoot each other with them, and sometimes en masse, and something's got to be done right.
Come on.
Isn't that what Steve Colbert calls truthiness?
Truthiness, exactly, is what that is.
Yeah.
Well, you know, a few years ago, I saw an interview with Rosie O'Donnell.
It was probably after one of the shooting incidents, and a reporter astutely asked her, it was on television, well, what about concealed carry laws?
That does seem to suppress crime.
Of course, logically, that makes sense.
If a criminal doesn't know if his victim is armed or not, that would tend to have some deterrent effect.
We can talk more about that later, but her answer was, oh, no, I don't want to arm everybody.
I just want to get rid of evil or bad people.
And unfortunately, the reporter did not follow up, but my first thought was, what do we do in the meantime, Rosie?
Fine, go out and try to rid the world of evil, but do we have to be at the mercy of criminals in the meantime?
I mean, people have been promising to get rid of evil from the beginning of time, I guess, so it's a ridiculous position.
Sure, they can wish for all kinds of things, but what's the individual person, what's the battered wife, the battered girlfriend, the battered anybody, or the person being stalked supposed to do in the meantime?
They never give us an answer to that question.
Well, you know, you look at this Aurora shooting.
You point out in your article, the guy's wearing body armor and whatever, so even if people in the crowd did have guns, they might not have been able to stop him.
They may or may not have or whatever.
So forget them for a moment.
Just pretend the cops got there sooner.
Yeah, right.
911 being a joke and all that.
So if the cops had got there sooner and they had come in that same emergency door, what would we have expected of them?
But for them to, if it came down to it, give up their lives in order to stop that guy from killing any more innocent people, get in a gun battle with him until they won, until he was stopped is what we would want from them.
So why would we want to deny that to anyone else in the theater and give them that same fighting chance, you know?
No, that's a fair question, because when people do say, well, if there had been armed people in the theater, perhaps they could have cut the incident shorter or stopped them.
And then the other side will say, oh, sure, we would have had people shot in the crossfire and all kinds of wild scenes.
But you're right.
Would they object to police going in when you'd have the same possibility?
I mean, police are not that well trained, especially under that kind of circumstance.
Yeah, nor are they that brave.
I mean, if they did get there in time, they would have waited outside anyway, like they did at Columbine while little children are being killed.
Someone made a great statement about 911 I saw on Facebook.
It said, when every second counts, the police are mere minutes away.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing.
Well, now, so, I don't know.
Where I'm from, this is not a loaded question at all.
I guess it depends where you are when you hear this or whatever.
But so, are you concerned if you're out in a public place and people are carrying guns everywhere, do you want to live in a society like that, Sheldon Richman?
Well, I think of the words of the great science fiction writer who had a huge libertarian streak in him, Robert Heinlein, who said, an armed society is a polite society.
I like the idea that a criminal doesn't know who's armed and who's not armed.
That's one of the nice things about concealed carry.
I'm not against open carry.
But one of the advantages of concealed carry is you get a good kind of free rider phenomenon.
In other words, I don't have to carry a gun, but if other people are carrying guns under their coats or shirts, a criminal can't be sure that I'm not carrying a gun.
So that's a good kind of free rider issue.
That's what's known as a positive externality in economics.
It's a neighborhood effect, a spillover effect that has benefits for people.
We haven't, look, more than half the states have very liberal concealed carry laws, and this has been going on now for a long time.
This is not some new thing.
We haven't, the predictions that the Indian people have made have not come true.
They said there was going to be shootouts over card games and fender benders.
Remember all those predictions?
That has not happened.
I'm here in Texas, and I was pointing out to the crowd that this is how George Bush Jr., who was the pathetic sock puppet of the pathetic Karl Rove, who was nobody, who was a joke, who was a son of a Bush that nobody ever even liked, this is how he became the governor.
Because he said, you know what?
I'm not going to veto your concealed carry law.
And Ann Richards had vetoed it twice.
And the people of Texas said, you're fired, lady.
You're not going to veto this thing twice.
We want it, and it's our right, and so screw you.
And that was how George Bush Jr. became inflicted on the world in the first place, was trying to, or at least playing on, people's resentment of her politics on that issue.
And you're absolutely right that that was what everybody said, was that every road rage now is going to be a shooting on the side of the road.
And it just didn't happen.
And of course, road rage is toned down quite a bit now too, because just like you said, you might really piss off somebody with a bad temper and a firearm, and so maybe you should just go ahead and deal with being cut off at this point.
People become more polite, if anything, and none of those bad predictions came true.
They just didn't.
I mean, I don't know the exact stats for gun crimes in Texas or whatever, but there certainly is no epidemic where now our Texas society became that much meaner and crueler and more deadly or whatever.
That just did not happen.
I think we would have been hearing about that.
Another thing about the Texas case is that one of the reasons they got their concealed carry law was a woman by the name of Suzanne Hupp.
That's her married name.
This was before she was married, but she was sitting in Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, one day when a guy drove through the plate glass window, popped out of his car, and opened fire on people.
And she and her parents ducked under a table, and her father then tried to stop the guy.
He didn't have a gun.
He was shot.
Her mother was shot.
She luckily survived it.
But guess what?
She had a handgun in her car.
Now, she couldn't legally carry that into the restaurant because Texas did not have the law permitting that.
And she had just gotten an occupational license, and she was a little afraid that if she got caught with the gun, she'd lose her license.
So she left it in her glove box, went to eat lunch with her parents, who then never left the restaurant alive that day.
And she was under the table.
Everybody was ducked down.
There was only one person standing in that restaurant while the shooting was going on, the shooter.
And she had a clear shot at the guy.
Unfortunately, her gun was in her car.
So, you know, the accounting is totally illegitimate.
All we hear about are people who are killed, innocent people killed by criminals with guns.
And so people get the impression that guns only kill innocent people.
Right.
Because the media hardly ever tells us about all the defensive uses of guns.
Usually the defensive use doesn't even require firing the gun.
But we don't learn about that stuff.
And it's kept basically quiet because the national media are not interested in it.
Yeah, what's cool is if you ever hear about that, then it becomes so shocking and glaring how you never hear about that.
The New American Magazine always has a piece about peaceful citizens defending themselves with firearms mentioned in small places but otherwise ignored, you know?
Right.
Anyway, we've got to go.
We'll be right back with Sheldon Richman in just a sec.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, ScottHorton.org.
Keep all the archives there.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richman from the Future of Freedom Foundation and the Foundation for Economic Education where he's the editor of the journal The Freeman.
He's also the author of Separating School and State, How to Liberate America's Families, Your Money or Your Life, Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax, and Tethered Citizens, Time to Repeal the Welfare State.
And right now we're talking about gun rights, which is really, Sheldon, correct me if I'm wrong, it's just human rights.
It's just, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about a gun or a knife or something else.
It just means that people have got the right to defend their own life with proportional force, you know?
It comes down to it.
I agree.
I agree, and here's the fact of life.
And as I point out in the article that you mentioned, I don't like these rules any more than anyone else, and I wasn't there when they were voted on, but the way things work, the criminal gets to pick the time, place, and manner of the crime.
And so they're probably not going to attack you when there's a policeman standing right next to you chatting, you know, with his gun drawn.
So they're going to pick a time when they think a victim is vulnerable, which means you are the only person who are with you 24-7 and who can look out for your own safety.
In other words, no matter what political theory may tell us, there's no way, in a metaphysical sense, there's no way you can really delegate your right or responsibility to self-defense.
That stays with you no matter what you think you are doing.
No matter what the fairy tales politicians tell you, there's not going to be a policeman with you all the time.
Besides, there's no guarantee the policeman won't decide to shoot you.
And third of all, there's not even a legal obligation for the policeman to defend you.
There are court cases that say if there was a policeman on the other corner and you're being beaten or shot by a robber and he doesn't do anything, you can't sue.
Maybe politically they'll fire the guy, but you don't have a legal right.
It's not like you have a contractual relationship with your local police department.
You do not.
So therefore, you cannot really give up, delegate your right and responsibility to your own self-defense, period.
Yeah, but the Second Amendment just says that the state governments have the right to bear arms, and so no other argument matters.
No, the Heller case in the Supreme Court a few years ago, which looked at the D.C. gun ban, said that's not true.
I mean, the majority opinion said that it is an individual right.
And so that's been cleared up by the court.
Yeah, but George Costanza wrote a thing for Salon.com that says...
Are you going to believe George Costanza?
Well, yeah.
In fact, he does a great job in the article saying, well, you might say I'm just stupid George Costanza, but I don't care, I'm still right.
So that gets to protect him from the accusation that he's just George Costanza.
Well, until Newman rebuts it, I'm not convinced.
Well, but he had a quote from Alexander Hamilton.
What else do you need?
Yeah, the guy was a monarchist.
You're right.
Only His Majesty George Washington has the right to bear arms.
So what about all these politicians and actors who have armed bodyguards?
How come they get to have something we don't have?
We can't afford that, but we can afford a revolver or a handgun.
Because, Sheldon, in their imagination, if you had a gun, you might use it on them.
But if they have a gun or they have a guard, the guard's not going to use it on them or anybody else.
No, only for defensive reasons.
Look, we should get to another point before we run out of time, but there's also a basic thing that the other side never wants to confront.
Someone who's willing to break the law against murder is not going to have much of a hesitation to break the law against gun possession.
Once we establish that fact, I don't see any answer to that, where does the other side go from there?
The bad guys will have guns no matter what.
The good people, the law-abiding people, probably will be a little sheepish about going into the black market to buy a gun.
So they probably won't have guns, most of them, some will.
So that leaves the rest of us defenseless.
The bad guys will have no reason not to go into the black market.
Look, this guy in Aurora, he passed all the background checks.
What do they want to say about that?
He passed the checks.
Boy, and in a black market you think the drug wars are bad.
Imagine the merciless killer warlords that would have to be, how bad they would have to be in order to be the king of the small arms black market in America.
Look, anybody who knows that the drug war is insane should realize that any war on guns is equally insane, and vice versa.
Anybody who knows that a war on guns is insane should realize that the war on drugs is insane.
How come so many people are lining up on one side or the other?
By the way, I'd like to pay tribute, while I'm thinking of this, to the great late, unfortunately, Alex Coburn, who, while a great one of the best of the lefties, anarcho-libertarians, knew that gun control was totally stupid.
Let's put that on the record.
I think it was Angela Keaton, actually, who said, back when I met her in the late 1990s, you can't have a revolution without guns, stupid!
But get back to the drugs versus guns.
Lots of people who think the drug war is idiotic want to press a war on guns, and vice versa.
And they must realize the two are intimately related.
Conservatives have not learned the very elementary fact that the war on drugs fuels the war on guns.
Because the black market drug lords have guns, and that causes people to say, yeah, we've got to do something about guns.
So they don't even realize they're working against themselves when they're committed to the drug war.
Both of those things have to go.
They're intimately related.
They're two sides of the same coin.
It really is an interesting phenomenon, isn't it?
How a typical liberal completely understands the black market economics and the failure of the drug war and prohibition on that end, and completely fails in the same logic when it comes to guns, and how it's the exact opposite on the right.
And it's just the libertarians in the middle who get it, that it's the exact same phenomenon at play.
It shows you how compartmentalized people can make their brains.
The same people that are so concerned about privacy, as they should be, government intruding as well as private companies intruding, or for Obamacare.
How can you be concerned about privacy, sensitive to privacy issues, and want the government to have such control over medical care?
One of the most personal things we engage in is medical attention, and yet with the government paying the bill for a lot of people, and some people would have it pay for all of it, privacy would go down the drain.
I don't understand people that don't integrate issues.
You've got to look at these things together.
Well, I don't know, I have this imagination that says as soon as a human becomes a government employee, they become angels.
And they become only a protector of things, and never the violators of it.
And it doesn't matter how many examples you can point out to the opposite.
You know, that's just going to be the way I see it, because I'm an American.
Well, they should read Hayek's chapter in The Road to Serfdom called Why the Worst Get on Top.
That would be a good education.
Yeah, well, why do the worst get on top?
Because the best are busy barbecuing, drinking beer with their friends.
Because of the incentive system.
It's what the government does.
The government spends other people's money.
And to get in office, you need to be a good liar and a good actor, and you need to create a mood.
There's no relationship to what you'll do in office.
You just need to create the right mood, push the right button.
People that are good at deception and acting and being shysters, they're the people that get attracted to politics for the most part.
You can find an exception here and there.
There's an obvious one that you and I would both name.
But that's why politics and government are the way they are.
Yeah, what's funny is people are so used to it when they see somebody like Ron Paul, who is actually a decent human being, they think, well, he just doesn't fit in up there.
And they don't even really see what it is.
He's decent.
The rest of them are devils.
That's what you're noticing.
One of these things does not belong, so they don't vote for him.
They vote for who's the worst of these people.
That's who I want to be my leader.
That's what we equate with leadership skills.
It's like, who's the most...
Who had someone else do his hair the best this morning?
Well, people are afraid that in the private sector, it can't be unregulated by government because people are self-serving.
And yet they think people in government are not self-serving.
That's a big joke.
But I would say, look, Ron Paul in a sense doesn't break that mold.
Ron Paul is self-serving.
He just attaches such a high value to liberty and his own liberty.
That's the self he wants to serve.
Right.
Get freedom for everybody, not just him.
So in a way, he's being as selfish as anybody in politics.
It's just he has different values.
Right, right.
He's determined to stay consistent for human liberty.
Yes.
For his own selfish interest, which also benefits the rest of us.
Yeah.
Good for him.
I love that guy.
Of course, good for him.
So this is just nuts.
I mean, any policy that comes out of this Aurora case, unless it's liberalization of getting rid of gun laws, is going to be bad policy.
And, you know, I think it's bad politics at this point.
I forgot where it was, but I think there's a pretty mainstream Democrat strategist type person one time said that they really learned the lesson from 2000, that Al Gore had this reputation of he's against your gun rights, and that was just the worst brand name for Democrats, that they're the anti-gun party, and they just wanted to be rid of that thing for their own selfish reasons.
You know?
And so I think, you know, the Republicans probably wouldn't dare without the Democrats pretending to make them so.
Well, the polls are for against tighter gun laws, so we have that going for us.
That's good.
All right.
This is Sheldon Richmond, FFF.org, and check out The Freeman at FEE2.
Thanks, Sheldon.
Thank you, Scott.