CZM Rewind: Harlon Carter: the Man Who Militarized the Cops and the NRA

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey everyone, Robert here, and we're on reruns this week.
So we're deciding to rerun two episodes with you, cutting
multiple parts into a single episode, reducing some ads and
getting some ears on some topics that have unfortunately only
become more relevant as time has gone on. And this
week we're talking about one of the founders of Border
Patrol as an organization and institution, and one of the

(00:27):
men who was behind the start of the NRA and
its growth into what it has become today. Like with
the DHS, these episodes have only gotten more relevant as
time has gone on, and it's very important that we
get them in front of as many people as we can,
So please listen. And I don't know, enjoy seems like
the wrong word, but enjoy. Matt salieb, how are you

(00:54):
doing today? I'm good man. I just got married. You
did just get married? Married For former guests France Osco Fiorentini,
you know, yeah, one of our favorite guests with our
least favorite. Oh shit, Oh, I'm just being an asshole.
We love you. That's why I've brought you on to
read you a twelve thousand words script about oh a script.

(01:15):
Oh a script that's right, Matt, because because I do
love you and we have such a good time. Yeah,
and I wanted to celebrate that you you have embarked
on this new chapter of your life. Yeah, making it
very sad. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Actually this is the perfect palate cleanser to a weekend
of joy.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
That's right, coming on this podcast and just being just
torn to shreds emotionally.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Because there's gonna be no joy here, Matt. Yeah, how
do you feel? How do you feel? First off, I
guess have you ever heard of a motherfucker named Harlan Carter?
Harlan Carter? I don't think so. Okay, Okay, Jimmy Carter's brother,
Oh boy, not at all. That would be Billy Carter.
And Billy Carter will be on our episode behind the Hero.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Because I thought you're going to ruin you know that guy,
because he seems pretty dope.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Can you imagine back when like the biggest scandal a
president had was that like his brother made bad beer?

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Right, what a time? Yeah, administration. Yeah, it was just like, hey,
his brother's too cool. Yeah, dudes, dudes were not supposed
to rock this much. That was you know, that was
the biggest kick.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
This guy out of the White House and put in
a dude who's gonna do part of a genocide anyway. Matt,
how do you feel about the proliferation of firearms in
American society?

Speaker 3 (02:41):
I'm proka. I think you know, the more guns the better. Obviously,
uh nothing. You know, the only thing that stops a
bad guy with a gun is a good guy with
a gun. I think we all know that, and I
think it's.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Good guys with guns stacked outside of a classroom for
seventy eight eight exactly.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Dude just kind of sitting around waiting to be like,
as I can't wait to be a hero.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
I'll just give it another forty five minutes. You've got
to clock in first. Yss. So it's interesting, it's fun
that we got to the military the incompetent militarization of police,
because this is a thing one of the things that's frustrating. Obviously,
you and I may have some slightly different attitudes towards firearms,
but I'm I'm I'm frustrated with American gun culture, which

(03:33):
I think is primarily toxic, and also the culture of
police militarization, which is one hundred percent toxic. YEP. And
the guy we're going to talk about today, Harlan Carter
is the dude who started both of those things. He's
the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the
guy who made the NRA. So it is Sophie's got

(03:54):
a picture of him. He looks like he looks like
who you would cast if you were putting king in
that villain. He looks like Kingpin. Like he literally looks
exactly like Kingpin.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
He looks Oh my god, and.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Guy, I would prefer any gangster too. It's not even
body shaming. He just looks like like his his neck
is the width of his ears.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
No, he's like a literal dickhead. It is the most
I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
He is a chowed someone poured into a suit.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 4 (04:26):
I'm pretty sure that this is what Joe Rogan was like,
I want this and then.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Joe Joe Rogan. Someone has been cutting Joe Rogan's HGH
with lemon juice just to try to keep him from
getting too huge. But if Joe got the amount of
HGH that he intended to shoot into his testicles, this
is how he would look. Yeah, he would look like
this guy his would be even thicker.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
He's exactly the way you are picturing him in your mind, listeners.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
He does kind of look like because Alex Jones has
that thick neck, but he's like not that, he's smaller. Yeah,
and Joe Rogan's got that that big muscle muscle guy head.
If like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, if you like
in vitro fertilized, like cut their sperm in half and
like merged them together with the egg from like a
dead California condor, you would get Harlan Carter.

Speaker 4 (05:17):
What's better is this painting of him where he literally
looks like Doctor Evil.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
He does. He does look like Doctor Evil who painted him?
I don't know a lot of people. He's a very
important people.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
That we would not get drinks with.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Fair. So we're going to have to start by discussing
the history of gun control in the United States. And
because this is the United States that also started with
white supremacy.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
I can only yes, I like just from this is
just a guess, but I bet you gun control laws
that have been enacted were mostly racist.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, it's those when you get these you get these
arguments online where like people will be like gun culture
is white supremacist, and it's like, yeah, an awful lot
of it is. And then folks who our pro gun
will be like, well, gun control is white supremacist, and
you're both right, because it's the United States of America.

Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
It's like if you try, it's like people talking about like, oh,
well the Democratic Party used to be like was a
white supremacist party for a very long time, and it's
like yeah, yes, yeah, both major US parties are primarily
rooted in white supremacy.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
And always it's always super weird that, you know, whenever
someone is just like no, awe, and it's like what
why are you? You don't need to be so attached
to being a Democrat that you're just going to refuse
to believe that.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
It's this doesn't make an argument one way or the
other about gun control, because like you could say, like
zoning laws have a lot of their rooting in white supremacy.
It doesn't mean zoning shouldn't exist, right because fundamentally, yeah,
factories maybe shouldn't be in the same place as apartment complexes.
But that also that like, yeah, anyway, whatever, we're going

(06:58):
to do our.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
Right, well, yeah, we're doing gun control. We're doing CRT
on this podcast. This is gonna make a little bit.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, we're getting into a lot of stuff, but we're
gonna be talking a shitload about the border patrol. But
first let's talk a little bit about the history of
gun control in the United States. Obviously, sixteen nineteen thereabouts
is when the first African enslaved people are brought to
the United States. Well, it wasn't the United States then,
but you know what I'm saying, right, the colonies against

(07:24):
their will, and not that long after, in sixteen eighty,
which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back then,
the Virginia Assembly passed one of, if not the earliest
gun control laws in the colonies. Now, this law did
not restrict the ability of white people to be armed.
It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't
gun control but weapons control. But this law passed in

(07:46):
sixteen eighty it made it a crime for any African
American to carry a weapon or weapon like object. Now
that last term there is interesting, Matt, because you could
I mean, I like, as a man, right you're out
in the world, you think about all the different things
you could use his weapons, everything. It's just a thing
that happened.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
I gature every room going, what could I use for
self defense? And or if I just felt like harming someone?

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, if I had to defill myself against the eighty
four year old man next to me in the post office,
how hard could I hit him with one of these
empty cardboard boxes?

Speaker 3 (08:20):
Seriously, in the genes of every dude is just Mark
Wahlberg going, I would have stopped nine to eleven if
I had been on that plane. God, and you know
that's that's all of us.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
It would have been so funny. It would have been
really funny if he'd, like if he'd stopped it, but
then he'd had to try to land the plane and
had accidentally crashed it into the White House, Like, oh God. Anyway,
So as you might guess, the vagueness around the term
weapon like object mean that meant that this law it
didn't just like ban black people from carrying guns. It

(08:53):
meant that they could be punished brutally for holding any
object if it could be used to hit somebody. This
started what wound up being like a more than a
century long tradition of elderly black people being banned from
having canes. Oh my god, because you can hit someone
with the cane, right as Gandalf showed us. You know, yeah,
oh yeah, yeah, they weren't being fooled by that. In
Virginia sixteen eighty, Yes, we will pardon old man for

(09:15):
this walking stick. I know a wizard staff when I
see one, you think, I don't know, you gonna cast
a spell? Now, this being sixty years after the forced
importation of African slaves to the continent. The sixteen eighty
law was aimed at slaves, obviously, but it applied equally.
There were some freed black people in the colony of
this period, and it applied to them as well. The

(09:37):
law was amended in seventeen twenty three to specify that
Africans African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for
any purpose, be it hunting or self defense. And again
seventeen twenty three, it's kind of important to be able
to use a gun, you know, just if you're living
in the Virginia frontier.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, there's a lot of other people with guns, and
it seems just like a time to have one.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
You need food and stuff, you know, and there's bears
like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, how do you
catch your food?

Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yes, if you are not allowed to use a gun.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
You can trap. But I think the purpose here no
one's thinking about, like they're not They're doing whatever they
can to make these people's lives harder because like they're
terrified of the existence of free black people. Yes, and
under this law, a free black person who defended himself
from a white person using a firearm was committing a
crime technically with any weapon, any like, any tool they

(10:32):
were to use to defend themselves would be illegal. So
gun control in the early colonies, most of the time,
these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the
exceptions of the rule because as a rule, like there were,
the laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things
and more just kind of generally trying to make it
possible for black people and slave to free to challenge

(10:54):
white supremacy in any way. So it wasn't just guns.
And in fact that because guns were like not as
good back then, those were less of a focus than
some other objects that might surprise you. Possession of dogs
by black people was heavily regulated in this period. They
couldn't have dogs, well, it was not impossible, but it
was very hard if you were a black person who

(11:16):
wanted to own a dog. In Maryland in the early
seventeen hundreds, for example, you were forced to get a
license from the Justice of the peace who was going
to be a white man. So it was not easy
to get a license from a justice of the peace
for this, and if you managed to get one, you
were still restricted to owning no more than one dog
at a time, Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for

(11:36):
black people under any circumstances, and even allowed slave patrols
to kill dogs found in the house of a black person.
So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is very old.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
Indeed, of course I should have known. Of course, dog
control also, you know ties directly to white supremacy.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Well, and it's one of those that you have to Again,
weapons firearms are a lot less deadly back then. So
like a gun, you get one shot and it's not
easy to reload. I think there are But yeah, dog,
a dog you don't need to reload, right, A Doberman
will keep fucking going until you go. Yeah, So that's
what you know, white folks were particularly scared of. And
again it's also worth noting. Obviously, the prohibition against black

(12:18):
people carrying guns or their weapons make sense if you're
afraid of a slave or you know, just an uprising,
right because a group of people with guns can do
an uprising. You can't really effectively organize a bunch of
dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together. It's
hard to do.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
I'd like to see it though.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
It would be cool, But clearly what they're doing here
they don't want black people to be able to defend
themselves from like mob violence, right like individual and families.
They don't want them to have any kind of defense
if like somebody wants to do a murder, you know.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
Jesus Christ just like inventing inventing laws that are completely useless,
the idea that somehow this is like, oh well, we can't,
we can't kill that guy. He lives in a cannel
filled with having US dogs surrounding him, like he's fucking
Ramsey Bolton, just like ready with hungry dogs to bite.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Off if I'm Yeah. So in the late seventeen hundreds, spoilers,
the American Revolution broke out. Yeah, and by seventeen eighty
seven we have us a constitution, you know, we get,
we fight them English, we beat them, and then we're like,
oh boy, this first government we tried as a giant
shit show. We should probably like give another shot at this,

(13:33):
and they constitution, and eventually this Constitution comes to include
a bill of rights in the now infamous Second Amendment.
We're going to be talking a lot about the changing
ways this has been interpreted through time, and despite what
people on tend to say on either side of the
modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to
interpret how the so called Founding Fathers intended it to function.

(13:54):
And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in
agreement about pretty much anything, but one thing is perfectly clear.
They did not see the right to bear arms as
extending to black people. Now, black people were not categorically
forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States, but
in those states where it was legal for them to
own arms, they were always required to register those weapons

(14:15):
with the government. This was not the case for white people.
While there was some hope during the Revolution among black
Americans that independents would bring about an improvement in their circumstances,
and that was not unreasonable. Again, the British Empire allowed
slavery too. So at this stage in time, it's not
like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that like, well, maybe
things will get better when they don't have a king anymore, right,

(14:38):
Obviously that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, there's
some uprisings in the New United States. In eighteen eleven,
Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed, and in response to this,
New Orleans made it a crime for black people to
carry weapons. And this was again primarily even more than guns.
Banned them from stuff like canes, crutches, wheelchairs. Yeah, any yeah,

(15:02):
definitely with an assault wheelchair. Yeah. So, as we've discussed
in our Behind the Police series, many Southern police departments
started as slave patrols, made up of armed white dudes
searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a
boot on the neck of even free black people. In
eighteen twenty five, Florida gave slave patrols the right to
enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition,

(15:26):
or any other weapons found. And obviously these kinds, as
is the case with no knock raids today, these often
were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes
right by saying you felt threatened. Yeah. Now, in the
early eighteen sixties, obviously we have US a civil war
over slavery, and broadly speaking, this goes pretty well if
you think slavery is bad, US civil war broadly speaking

(15:48):
goes all right. Yeah. Now, one of the most kind
of revolutionary aspects of the Civil War is that, for
the first time in US history, a shitload of black
men are legally carrying guns in an organized way. One
hundred and seventy nine thousand black people serve in the
Union Army, which is roughly ten percent of its total,
and you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men

(16:10):
with guns marching across the US South, which really freaks
out people in the South.

Speaker 3 (16:15):
Yeah, that's got to be the scariest thing. They looked
at that and they're like, see, this is what I'm
talking about.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
This is a scary shit I did not want to happen. Yeah,
this is why we're losing. Started this war that we're losing.
So post Civil War, black people are not immediately entitled
to the same rights as white people. So, starting in
eighteen sixty five, which is the year the war ends,

(16:40):
States like former you know states that had lost basically
start enacting black codes and these are kind of okay,
these people aren't slaves anymore, but we want to treat
them that way. So let's just write new Let's just
we'll take the old laws that we had that restricted
slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control,
and will replace the word slave with servant or you know,

(17:02):
something similar, so that we can try to hold them
under the same laws. In Mississippi, black people were still
banned from possessing weapons or ammunition, and if white people
turned them in for this crime, they would be given
their firearms as a reward. And again this is after
they've been freed, so they like should have the right
to bear arms and whatnot. I want to quote now
from a twenty twenty one Honors thesis by Alexandra Lenzetta

(17:24):
from the University of Colorado. Quote. Other Southern states to
enact their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana.
Both states prohibited African Americans, not including veterans, from owning
guns without a license or special permit. Not surprisingly, these
permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it
virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally
obtain a gun. This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns,

(17:46):
making the potential penalties of exposure even greater. Punishment for
having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of
the weapon. Old slave patrols re emerged to enforce the
Black Codes and to terrorize African Americans. This, along with
a combination of great incentives to catch black with weapons
and a hatred over their newfound freedom, created a white frenzy,
making it extremely difficult to height a gun as an
African American. White frenzy is the worst frenzy. It's it's

(18:11):
it's it's the most common frenzy.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Took Yeah, it's it's. It's their most traditional American frenzy.
But it is not is not a fun one.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
We do love us a frenzy. We love a frenzy.
We love a good frenzy, we love a bad frenzy.
So eighteen sixty five, right bunch of black codes come
into effect to basically try and keep black people in
similar positions to how they've been during slavery, even though
the war was over. So in eighteen sixty six, the
US Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which this is

(18:43):
like there's a big old fight over this, and this
is the this is the law that basically says, hey,
you actually have to these people have the same rights
that white people have on the bill front, right, Like
that's what that does, you know, And you know, things
do get a lot better for a while, you know,
we talked about.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Point was like, look, do you ever just like read
up on reconstruction and go like holy shit, for a
hot second.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
There we seem to be on a good track.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
We were on a good track, Like it seemed like
shit was gonna like work out.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, things made a lot better for a while. And
then there's a violent reaction from the reactionaries and they
do an insurgency which is kind of centered around the KKK.
We have talked about this in other episodes. It ends
with a series of demeaning, bigoted laws aimed at maintaining
white supremacy in the former Confederacy. These are you know,
Jim Crow laws, right, And these these come into place

(19:36):
alongside a wave of lynchings which kill at least like
five thousand black Americans. Obviously, there's no way of knowing
the actual total good chance it was significantly more, but yeah,
at least five thousand. So in response, black people do
what you would expect. They form militias, you know, they
start carrying guns for what. I don't think I need

(19:57):
to explain the logic here, right, organized to stop lynchings.
This culminates in Louisiana in eighteen seventy six where a
bunch of klansmen who are also government officials, these are
like elected leaders in Louisiana who are also in the KKK,
are charged with conspiring to disarm a meeting of Black Americans. Basically,
like one of these groups of black folks had gotten

(20:17):
together with guns to like figure out how to protect
their community, and these state officials like try to take
their weapons away. A bunch of court shit happens. It
goes to the Supreme Court who rules in favor of
the ku Klux Klan, saying that the state had the
legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common
good God. And you know, in this period of time,

(20:39):
there's also one of the things that's happening during the
lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person
who is attempted to be lynched has a gun and
they shoot the people trying to lynch them. And when
that happens, a number of laws are passed in different
towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms,
and in fact, those are some of the first specific
laws against the carrying of concealed handguns. Now, this is

(21:01):
an area where like the kind of the anti gun
control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff. It's
very much worth noting all gun control in the United
States in this period is not based in white supremacy,
in part because a lot of it is put in
areas where like most of the population is white, and
there was it's worth noting significantly more gun control in
portions of the like the so called wild West, than

(21:24):
there are in a lot of those same states today.
In places like the Dakotas and whatnot, it was common
for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted in
many towns. If a visitor came into town, they would
be expected to leave their guns with the local police
before entering. They'd get like a little card or something
you weren't supposed to like like there were it's it's

(21:45):
and there's you know, a lot to be said about
like why this is being done, but in general, it's
being done because they see that it's it's perfectly reasonable
to say that, like, well, there should be restrictions on
what you can do in town with a firearm, right.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
Right, Yeah, and it went down with a gun, seen,
I don't know threatening.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah, they certainly don't want you doing it openly. And
then like there's a bunch of there's laws about carrying
concealed and those kind of vary from place to place.
But it's worth noting that the infamous gunfight at the
OK Corral actually occurred because a guy, like it was
over gun control, right, Like, a guy was openly carrying
his guns in the city, and you know there was
as far as I'm aware, like everyone involved in that,

(22:24):
I'm pretty sure was like a white dude. So I
don't think there's anything particularly racist in the gunfight. You
could talk about it, be it involving like police overreach, sure,
which people will make the case that like this was
this was a case of like a fucking early cop
going bug fuck on some people. Yeah, yeah, but don't
tread on me.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
And yes, people, you see this whole time, I didn't
know that that was a real gunfight at the okay cost?

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah? Oh no, no, no, it's a pretty cool story,
as it perfectly accurately described in the documentary Tombstone starring
Val Kilmer.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yah see yeah, I thought the reason was, you know,
like a card game got lost or something, or someone
had like extra aces up their sleeve.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
But it turns out gun control. No, that would be
the that would be the documentary. Shit was it, Maverick?
What's the document about the card guy who gets like yeah, yeah, yeah,
I need to rewatch that. That was a good fucking
that's a good movie.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
My other guest was going to be a giant metal
spider who tries to take over.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
My third favorite documentary. And this is what brought about
the famous US law against the carrying of gigantic metal
spiders right right right, which I considered to be the
civil rights era of the day. I think, of course,
I think access to giant metal spiders should be democratized.
I mean, that's just a legit.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Well, the only thing that stops a bad guy with
a giant metal spider is a good guy with a.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Giant would argue that you can't be a bad guy
with a giant metal spider agreed, because look, no matter
what it's doing, if I get to see a giant
metal spider trumping around town, my day's improved. Don't care
what that spider's.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
Going, everyone feel safe.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Everybody feels better with a giant metal spider.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
So this podcast is brought to you by Giant Spider
dot Com promo code Giant Metal Spiders Today.

Speaker 4 (24:05):
You're actually right on time because it is that it
is about that time.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Wow. Well, look, everybody's talking a lot about AR fifteen's
You know what's more powerful than an AR fifteen A
metal spider spider the size of the Chrysler building. Uh
that is scary. Yeah, yeah, Uh we're back, so you

(24:35):
have you know again the Wild West, how common gunfights
and stuff were, especially in like cities and towns is exaggerated.
But also there was a lot of like there were
a lot of robberies, there were a lot of crimes
like and it's it's the same as it is today.
Like the gunfights that have kind of come down to
history were like the ones that the media went nuts

(24:56):
on in the day, like the gunfight at the Ok Corral.
But broadly speaking, by the end of the eighteen hundreds,
most places in the United States had banned the concealed
carrying of handguns, although open carrying remained legal in a
lot of places. We'll talk about when that ended. In
eighteen ninety three, the government of Texas said that quote

(25:19):
the mission of the concealed deadly weapon as murder to
check it as the duty of every self respecting law
abiding man. And again, he was probably saying that primarily
because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns.
This is the governor of Texas in eighteen ninety three,
so do keep that in mind. But US gun control
in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the

(25:39):
specter of armed black people, and even where laws were
perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy,
even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law,
Lanzetta writes. Quote. Another example of discrimination is found in
legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era. Involved an eleven
year old black boy with a toy gun in Saint
Louis in nineteen hundred. It was illegal to fire a

(26:00):
gun within city limits, and the boy was charged for
violating this law. However, when his case was being reviewed
by a judge to determine his guilt. It was discovered
that the gun was fake. Knowing this new information, the
judge should have dropped all charges, given that it is
not possible to fire a fake gun, but this was
not the case. Instead, the boy was found guilty and
the judge fined him ten dollars almost three hundred and
ten dollars to day, which is interesting. I did again,

(26:23):
another thing that goes back very far is black kids
being penalized for having toy guns, right exactly, quite quite
far back.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yeah, I mean it's literally just these are like rulings.
It's like, well, yeah, scared me. Yeah, that's that's the
entire thing that has been the I believe the explanation
for the deaths of countless, countless black people.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Well, and it's also just like this, I was scared.
Perhaps we don't like, perhaps we're fundamentally frightened by the concept,
even if it's a toy, of like black people having guns,
because that's how we maintain our power over them, right right,
Which is again, even in these areas where concealed carrying
or open carrying is illegal, it's generally not illegal for
white people to do. If they're being vigilantes right. This

(27:10):
is a key aspect of this period, and this brings
us back to the glorious state of Texas. Like much
of the South, after the Civil Rights Act, legislators had
to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm
black people were not motivated by racism. Brendan Rivus from
Texas Christian University Rites quote the post eighteen sixty five laws, however,
used race neutral language to accomplish a racially motivated goal.

(27:32):
Most of these laws attempted to disarm Black Texans, but
some from the eighteen seventies stopped to curb the racial
violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone. For instance,
a part of the Texas Slave Code prohibited slaves from
carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer,
and a law passed in eighteen sixty six prohibited laborers
from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent
and race neutral language. The eighteen sixty six law achieved

(27:56):
the same result as the Slave Code without specifically declaring
that African americ and should be disarmed. Their arming was conditional,
subject to the authorization of an interested white party. Similarly,
the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use
racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of
local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks
or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those

(28:18):
local offices. And you can guess which of those happens
more often. And this is the state of affairs legally
in the state of Texas. When Harlan Bronson Carter is
born on August tenth, nineteen thirteen, in Granbury, Texas. Now,
at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that

(28:39):
it was the home of Davy Crockett for a little while.
And every town in Texas was Davy Crockett's home for
a little while. Not super impressive, and yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Every town is just he stayed at a motel here
for two weeks.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, and he's fucking all our hookers. He's like a
celebrated hunter and frontier guy. And Harlan certainly like I
heard god knows how many fucking stories about Davy fucking
Crockett when I was a kid in my mandatory Texas
history class. I am going to guess, in like nineteen twenty,

(29:15):
young Harlan Carter is growing up and learning even more
of these stories. Yeah, and obviously he's also en meshon
the local gun culture of the time. Pretty much everywhere
is semi rural, so he's you know, he does a
lot of hunting, He does a lot of target shooting.
He becomes an excellent shot from an early age, and
he develops an intense affinity for firearms, shall we say so.

(29:39):
When he's young, the family moves to Laredo, and Laredo
is a border town, right, and his father they moved
to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent
and in fact is one of the very first Border
Patrol agents. So the year that they moved to Laredo
is nineteen twenty seven, Harlan's fourteen, and it's the same
year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes

(30:02):
a trip to the town and expresses in an official document,
has shocked to find that quote, Laredo was strictly a
Mexican town. Probably ninety percent of the people were either
Mexican or of Mexican descent. He adds with horror. The
only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself.
And this is an interesting like Lareda at this point
because it's it's so heavily Mexican. Is not a town

(30:24):
controlled by white people and the police are not a
white force. Right. You'll note that quote I read earlier
states that like kind of the laws against gun control
were usually mainly like put into force against like armed
black people, but depending on politics, could be used to
try to stop white vigilantes. Well, this is one of
those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police
force is not white. So the border patrol, however, is

(30:49):
not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican
folks are running things, right that does not thrill them.
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
Well next you know, they'll start inviting other Mexicans still
live here, and they won't stop the border. I mean,
I love the idea of these like people going to
a town right on the border of Mexico in Texas
which used to be Mexico and being like, what the
hell are all these Mexicans doing.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
Yeah, these communities that had been there for decades before
a state of Texas was a thing that anyone had
thought of being Like exactly, these people are going to
change the nature of Texas.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Yeah, yeah, now this is not the Texas I know
that we invented about twenty years ago.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
We invented when I was fifteen. Yeah, exactly. So this
inspector Guy Perkins, again as exactly as racist as you
might expect, and he decides that Laredo's immigration cops are
not going to be able to enforce US immigration restrictions,
which are again geared towards enforcing white supremacy, if the
state of affairs in Laredo remains the way that it is.

(31:51):
So he carries out what he describes as a quote
full scale house cleaning. Now in the Wonderful book Migra
Kelly Hernandez writes, quote, he charged local officials, the chief
patrol inspector, and border patrol officers in the Laredo station
with immigrants smuggling, and forced just under half of Laredo's
twenty eight border patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector
to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select border

(32:13):
patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo
sector because all were experienced, well disciplined fighters who knew
the country well. Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was
a strategy used to divorce the Border Patrol station from
the local Mexican American political elite. Tension quickly mounted between
the ex Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo
Police Department, while the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with

(32:36):
the local police in most borderland communities. In nineteen twenty seven,
several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol got in their
Model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling
and shooting up the police station. Holy fuck, so he
Klean's house brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which
is like the most racist police force in the United
States of this period, and has them shoot up the

(32:58):
police station. Fucking A.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
I mean, like, on the one hand, a cab.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, I mean it's like on the one hand.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
But on the other hand, I don't think it's a
I think it's just these particular cabs, you know what
I mean, they're going after specifically an armed group of
Mexican Americans.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
It's also probably worth noting but that in this period,
if you're being a fucking being a Mexican American police
officer in Laredo in nineteen twenty seven is a bit
different from being a police officer pretty much anywhere in
the United States at this point, which is part of
why the Border Patrol is purging them, because he's like, you, guys,

(33:41):
they're not stopping im, they're not stopping immigration. They're not
like violently cracking down on people who aren't white. They're
not enforcing white supremacy. So we have to get rid
of them with guns. Yeah, and they get rid of
they do get rid of the Laredo police force with guns.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
So only time in American history that the police have
been able to be fired.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yes, yeah, this is the one time that happened. This
is what it took for the one time. So it's
safe to say that Laredo was a pretty wild place
when Harlan Carter was an adolescent. His father, Horace, was
among the first cohort of Border Patrol agents hired in
nineteen twenty seven, and he was transferred to Laredo in
nineteen twenty seven as part of this process. It's entirely

(34:23):
possible that Horace Carter was one of the guys shooting
that police station, and in this period of time, Harlan's
father would have seen his job as explicitly to use
violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most
people were not white quote from Migra. Although most local
stations developed their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo
station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal

(34:46):
racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the
bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican American leadership.
The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge
for white violence within Mexican dominated Laredo. So they've turned
the border patrol prior to this, and they're all like
local guys, right, so they don't really care about like

(35:08):
Mexican America, like Mexicans coming into America because like that's
how they got there, right, That's like their family everybody, like.
And again they also probably don't see the border as
this solid thing because they believe the relatives have lived
here for forever. It used to not be like a
thing to cross. But this is the period where the
border is really is becoming a thing in a way
it hadn't been before. And part of how they do

(35:29):
that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of
white people and have them shoot anybody who disagrees, right
like that. That's how the border becomes real in Laredo.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
The American Way, and it's all borders are enforced everywhere.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
Yeah, in that white borders are bad. Yell yep. Yeah.
Although today, I mean there's a long conversation to be
had about the fact that the border patrol today is
extremely diverse. Like one of the things people on the
left particularly have gotten wrong about Evaldi is like the
assertion that like, well, they probably didn't go in because
those kids were Hispanic. And it's like, have you I've
seen pictures of the Uvaldi police. A lot of them

(36:02):
are Mexican American it's and the border patrol guy like
it's it's the whole thing. Like if you go down
to border communities, you'll see, Yeah, it's not that simple.

Speaker 3 (36:11):
And yeah, it's always as like superficial and simple as
it seems.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah. So in nineteen thirty, Harlan, aged sixteen, joins the
National Rifle Association and again the NRA is rightfully again,
I'm more pro gun than most people on the left
tend to be, but the NRA is like, undoubtedly, for
we'll be spending hours talking about this incredibly toxic. It's

(36:37):
not at this point, right, right, there's nothing wrong with
the NRA at this stage really, And in fact, the
NRA has its roots on the correct side of the
Civil War. There's these two Union generals who are like,
because again Civil War one of the things early on
the South is doing pretty well. And part of why
they're doing pretty well is that like all the boys

(36:57):
who like wind up fighting in the Confederacy's military, Like,
they're country boys, right, They've grown up shooting and hunting.
They're like and using guns to enforce white supremacy. They're
good with firearms, whereas most of the northern boys who
get drafted are like city kids, and many of them
had never had any chance to use firearms, so they're
like they suck with them, right, And these two Union

(37:19):
generals are like, boy, our soldiers are really bad at shooting,
and it takes a long time to train them up.
Maybe if we should get ready for the next war
by having an organization where boys who grow up in
urban areas can like go in and learn how to shoot,
you know, Like that seems like a good thing to encourage.
So that's in the NRA up until the early twentieth century,

(37:40):
is like a sportsman's association. You're doing it for target shooting,
you're doing it for hunting. Now, it is worth noting that,
like from the beginning, and this was not seen as
problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect
to it as well. It's not like a military organization,
but part of the purpose of the NRA is to
prepare people to be part of the military if necessary.

(38:00):
And this is also the military is a really different
thing in this period. You know, we have a big
standing army during the Civil War, but we hadn't before
and we don't quickly afterwards. Right, Like this is again,
when World War one happens, they have to like make
an army. When World War II happens, they have to
like make an army in a way that like it
had not hugely existed prior to this. So there's this
understanding that like, if there's an emergency, we're going to

(38:23):
need to activate all of these civilians and they need
to be ready to like fight and whatnot. So, Yeah,
the US Defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons
and other equipment to the NRA, which would sell them
to members quite cheaply. This used to be able to
get like World War two guns like Garrens for really
cheap from the NRA. It was a bunch of stuff

(38:43):
they did like that. So in February nineteen thirty one,
the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of
their house. Right now, they have no idea who does this?
The origin story of so many races go on. Oh boy, Matt,
so again. As far as I know, it was never
figured out who had done this. But a couple of

(39:03):
weeks after their car is stolen, on March third, nineteen
thirty one, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harlan's
mother sees three Hispanic boys quote unquote loitering out in
front of the house. Now, she says, loitering. We have
no idea. They may have just been like walking around
or what like. Even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this.
But like racist white lady sees people who are not

(39:23):
white vaguely close to her house, and she decides that, like,
these boys must have been who stole my car?

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yes, yes, yes, The earliest recorded incident of Karen. Yeah, yeah,
So Karen Carter calls the cops.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Karen Carter, Well, you can't really call. It's nineteen thirty one.
Some people do have phones, I don't know if they do.
It's not easy to call. It's not as easy to
call the cops.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
They send a pigeon or whatever. Those guys did that.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
No, her son winds up taking this into his own hands.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
Ah, yes, that's right.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
I'm going to quote from a write up in Timeline. Here.
The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn't be
home for hours. The son picked up his shotgun and
walked out the door. It didn't take him long to
find the boys, who were between the ages of fifteen
and twelve, at a swimming hole nearby. He demanded they
come home with him. When they asked why, he wouldn't say,
fifteen year old Ramon Casiano responded, hell, no, we won't

(40:14):
go to your house, and you can't make us. Carter
and Casiano started swearing at each other. Casiano pulled out
a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter
lifted his shotgun to Ramone's chest. According to testimony from
that time, Ramon told him not to do it and
pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back
and laughed. Annoyed by Ramone's lack of fear, Carter asked
if he thought he wasn't going to shoot then he did.

(40:35):
Casiano lay dying on the ground with a two inch
shotgun wound in his chest. Jesus, So that sounds familiar, right,
There's shades of Rittenhouse, There's shades of Zimmerman, you know,
like this is again not obviously, I'm sure like if
we had been around at the time and paying attention
to the news, we'd say, oh, there's shades of like

(40:57):
this thing that happened like nineteen twenty and this thing
right which happened the most recent incidents. Yeah, you know,
this is a very familiar incident, right, and you can
imagine if this happened today, it would be a massive
culture wars. Well, he had a knife, what was you
kid supposed he was just defending his family, you know,
yeaha YadA YadA. So it's worth noting talking about why

(41:17):
Harlan felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which
there are some like obviously it's not entirely legal to
carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff,
but this is you're not supposed to like walk out
to try and solve the robbery of your car with
a twelve gage shotgun, Like that's not explicitly legal. But
there's a long history of vigilante violence by white people,

(41:38):
and so whether or not this actually is legal is
gonna come down heavily on the local courts, right and
so the fact because this is happening in Laredo, if
this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city
of Hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue.
But because it's happening in Laredo, this is going to
be a problem for Harlan. Did you called Dallas the
City of hate? That's literally it's nickname. Yeah, that's the

(42:01):
next name of Dallas, Texas is the city we killed JFK. Yeah,
I mean good point bully shit.

Speaker 3 (42:08):
Yeah, the city of brotherly hate.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
That's wow, I mean not anymore, but like that is
that is the nickname of Dallas, Texas. Like, oh yeah,
So because this happens in Laredo, the law is not
as on his side as you might expect if it
had happened in some other parts of Texas. Harlan Carter
is arrested, he has tried, and he is convicted of murder.

(42:35):
He's sentenced to three years in prison. Again, you can say,
like he should have been sentenced to more. I I'm
mixed because he was a child, right, Like this is bad,
but also like I think you have to if you
believe children are not culpable in the way that adult.
But anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years.
His family appeals the judgment and they complain for about

(43:00):
number of things. They say the judge is related to
the prosecutor, that that self defense had not been adequately
explained to the jury, that one of the witnesses was
like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy. A bunch of
racist shit.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Yeah, well the judge failed to consider that the victim
was no angel.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Like that's based Yeah, although they focus more on like
the the kid who watched his friend get his brother
or whatever get murdered was no angels. Yeah, it was
a angel, so eventually legally allowed to kill no angels.
That's right, that's right in the Bible. That's right. That's
why anytime I see a bunch of floating eyes, I
just start shooting.

Speaker 4 (43:39):
M M.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, that was a biblical angel joke. Was so. Eventually,
a judge with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agrees that, like,
the case was bad and he overturns Harlan Carter's conviction
on these grounds. And because quote, several of the material
witnesses for the state have been discredited having been convicted

(44:00):
of infamous crimes, it does not seem accurate that they
were convicted of infamous crimes. But you know, it's also
worth noting that, like Harlan's dad helped run law enforcement
in Laredo, it's impossible that some of the people who
had witnessed the shooting were like targeted by the police
to provide plausible deniability for his kid, and if not likely,

(44:22):
So Harlan gets led out of prison, his conviction is overturned,
and he proceeds with life now as a young adult.
As a free man, he enrolls in the University of Texas,
but he changes his name. So his original name had
been Harlan h A R L A N, and he
swaps out the A for an O. And he does
this basically under the understanding that like, well, this will

(44:43):
make it hard. If people go looking for Harlan Carter
is criminal record, they won't find anything.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
Wait, so he changed it to Horrorlan or.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
Harlan Harlow h R L O N as opposed to
h R L A N right, and again it's it's
a marker of like how different the time is. Like
this works perfectly for him for decades. Like people they
swapped today with it O no another we can do.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
Yeah, it was like, well, the search engine doesn't do
other letters, so fuck it.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
It was so easy to get away with crimes back
in the thirties. My god, was it easy.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
Speaking of getting away with crimes, if.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
You walked fast, like if you could walk pretty fast,
you could get away with a crime.

Speaker 3 (45:27):
Oh man, those are the days.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Those were the days. Let's bring back.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Robert who else gets away with crimes?

Speaker 2 (45:34):
The corporation when they hired those mercenaries to gun down
union organizers in Latin America.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
That was a lob and you took it. I'm very
proud of you.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, yeah, drink ah, we're back and I'm just gonna
have a nice refreshing sip of.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Oh it's a classic drink.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
You know that joy is like locking a bunch of
nuns and HUGEN organizers in a church and lighting it
on fire. God, that's good stuff. Yeah, me love it.
So again, it's one of those things. If this had
kind of been the end of Harlan Carter's story, I'd say, like, well,
that was a fucked up thing that happened. But I
guess I don't believe a sixteen year old should be

(46:17):
locked in prison for their whole life. So but that's
not the end of the story.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
It sucks that, Like there are cases where I'm like,
it would be sick if he had.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
It's like with Kyle Rittenhouse. I don't think the right
thing was to throw him in a hole for forever.
Certainly the right thing is not to turn him into
a celebrity and give them millions of dollars. That's right,
maybe even worse. But like I think fundamentally you have
to believe that, like, well, if a child does something,
even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused
on the possibility of rehabilitation because otherwise you don't actually

(46:53):
believe that children are less responsible than adults.

Speaker 3 (46:57):
And anytime you like try to set up, anytime you
you know, try to be more punitive. It always affects
you know, brown people and people of color way more.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
And obviously, yeah, like Raymond Caseano suffers even more for
you know whatever, however questionable you want to think his
call to pull a knife might have been, although I
again you could argue justified because the other kid had
a fucking gun. Anyway, whatever, it's like, it's it's one
of the problems with guns in America is how often
angry teenage boys get a hold of them. And this

(47:32):
is again quite an old story. Yeah, but regardless of
like what you think of should be done when kids
commit murder, Harland definitely committed murder. It's not self defense,
and anyone who says otherwise is probably racist. But it's
worth noting that even modern sources, and this is something,
this is where things get really income. Even modern sources

(47:54):
that are like very pro gun control, very anti Harlan Carter,
who will attack Harlan for his work with the NRA,
tend to tell the story of what happened with him
in and Raymond Cassiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce
Hardlan's claims of self defense. This is a very strange
thing I've noticed in a couple of sources. I've read
a lot of articles about this guy, and his actions

(48:16):
can be framed in fascinating ways. I want to highlight,
particularly a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler.
And Gunfight, there's actually like five books titled Gunfight. I
think one of them is like seemed to be slightly grifty.
It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who like does
an anti gun book because I think maybe that's where
the money was. I don't know. I'm not going to

(48:36):
go in to date because I haven't read it't I
haven't read it. But like there's a bunch of books
with this title. The good one, the one that you
would actually be worth reading, is Winkler's Gunfight. He's a
he's a UCLA professor, and Gunfight is a critical history
of the battle over the Second Amendment in US politics
that has a lot of really useful context, including some
of what I went over about, like the early racism
and gun control. It's a good and again very much NRA.

(49:01):
But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter
and Ramon Casiano, which I find very peculiar. Quote, Carter
loved guns from childhood. He was an excellent shot and
would go on to win two national shooting titles and
set forty four national shooting records during his lifetimes. His
most infamous shot, however, came at the age of seventeen,
when in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun

(49:22):
into the chest of a knife wielding Mexican teenager. Nope,
not how much weird way to describe that. That's not
what happened at all. That's such a weird way for
and again, Winkler is like he's a professor of law
at UCLA, Like he's all over the New York Times
writing about this kind of stuff. It's like really weird
that he describes it that way.

Speaker 3 (49:43):
Maybe it was just like, oh, man, I've done all
this other research. I'm just not gonna I'm just gonna
go with the autobiography that he wrote.

Speaker 4 (49:52):
This.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
It's just it's like calling Ramon Casiano a knife wielding
Mexican teenager. It's such like an unsettling way to choose
to fras.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
It was just like people forget that Cassiano was guilty.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
Because he had a knife. Yeah, jail, you're bringing a
knife to a gunfight. It is. Yeah, yeah, it's again,
the book is not at all right winger reactionary. There's
a lot of good stuff in there. The fact that
he describes Cassiano's murder in this way, though, makes me
question some stuff that like, maybe I missed in vetting
this thing because it's it's a really weird passage. Now,

(50:25):
let's compare that to this write up by a right
wing dude, Dave Koppel, from an article he wrote explicitly
defending Harlan Carter's legacy. Now, in this article, he's critiquing
a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that acts
accurately noted quote. Fifty years ago, Carter shot and killed
a fifteen year old boy and was convicted of murder.
Arguing against this, Kopel writes, the letter admitted the fact

(50:46):
that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang
of intruders led by the boy, and that the boy
was menacing Carter with a knife. Again, this is also
not true. He was not defending his mother's ranch. They
were swimming.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Yeah, you're swimming and having a good time and being
accused of doing her crime.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
That they did, I mean, did they do the crime,
even though I don't think there's ever been any evidence
that they did it. Kind Of, again, this is a
little murky, but it kind of seems like what happened
is their car was stolen. A couple of weeks later,
she sees some Mexican kids walk past their house towards
a swimming hole and six her son on them. Right,
that kind of seems like what happened. That seems And

(51:27):
it's it's weird because Winkler and Koppel could not be
more apart ideologically, but their description of this murder is
very similar in way, Like I just it's I don't
want to harp too much on this, but it's like
really weird to me that that happened.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
Yeah, do you have any like inkling as to why
that may be?

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Or is there just a most people don't dwell too
much on it. It took me a while actually to
find good specific details about what happened that day, mm hmm.
And I think most people take the attitude that just like,
h well, he said he was defending his mom, and

(52:07):
like that that's the I don't know. I I think
in part, you know, Winkler's covering a lot of ground, right,
because his book is a whole is not it's not
focused on Carter. It's a whole history of like kind
of the how the Second Amendment has been interpreted and
ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries. So
he does have a lot of ground to cover. It's
just very and I guess that one of the things
he did was just kind of brush over what happened there.

(52:30):
It's right, Yeah, like the way I would do it, right,
because it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history
to not go into detail. But I would have just
said something like he confronted you know, another teenager over
like you know, something his mother said and like or
he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicious

(52:50):
even that would be better, right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
And also this is you know, you do a podcast.
This guy's a UCLA professor.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Yeah, it's it's again. I don't want to like shit
him too much because it's like, there's a lot of
good stuff of the book. It's it's just that part.
I don't get it. I don't get why you would
sprite about it though.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah, so Harlan Carter commits murder, does two years in prison,
goes to college, and then he decides to follow in
his father's footsteps and join the Border Patrol. He becomes
an agent in nineteen thirty six, three years after leaving prison.
Carter's rise was rapid, if not meteoric, so he joins
in thirty six, having been in prison two years earlier.

(53:28):
In nineteen fifty, he's running the entire Border Patrol. Wow.
Now again, Border Patrol's a lot smaller back then, it's
a lot newer. It's easier to become head of the
Border Patrol.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
And also his murder was definitely something on his resume,
you know what I mean, Like.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
I probably unlike the secret. I don't think he put
it on his paper resume, but oh sure, certainly because
he's known in Laredo. Is like, I'm sure the guy's
giving him his first gigs, all know about it and
think it's bad, right, right, Yeah, But he also he
does keep it a sequt it publicly, right, Like, he
doesn't rag about it in public. Again, when he's hanging
out with his buddies. I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly,

(54:07):
but it's not like a part of his public persona
as a you know, once you're the head of the
Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know, right.

Speaker 3 (54:15):
Right, Yeah, It's not like today, in which that would
be something he would be celebrated for and talk about
on you know.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
Oh yeah, he would like the shotgun that he used
to kill Raymond Casiano with an auctioned off for tens
of thousands of dollars, and he would have used it
to buy an F three fifty with.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
The Daily Wive him his own column.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he'd be making documentaries with Matt Walsh.
Times were a lot more chill back then. Which is
it is? It is when we were talking about the
story of this guy who does like a racist murder
as a teenage boy, and like wow, he really was
less proud of it than he would be today, right exactly.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
Yeah, that's where we're at, where we're like, oh wow,
he didn't make that like his whole brand.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
Yeah, wild. So the Border Patrol had shifted at this
point from being geared mainly towards policing the border to
being a force for policing Mexican Americans inside the United
States on the pretext of them being potentially undocumented migrants.
As a result their work strayed further and further from
the border and increasingly into American cities, factories, farms, and

(55:22):
anywhere expected of harboring illegals. Some Border Patrol agents had
difficulty with this, right, This was not a lot of
the folks who had signed up earlier. This was not
like the thing that they had signed up for. Specifically, Harlan, though,
is hugely supportive of this change, and in fact, he
wanted to expand the Border Patrol's perview even further and
use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely. This

(55:45):
was justified in his mind by the fact that a
large number of undocumented migrants were living and working, or
this was justified publicly, right. So, Harlan, there's like a
racial motivation, but you can't use that, as we talked
about earlier, right, like you have to hide when you're
long racially motivated. So the justification is that a large
number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches

(56:06):
and other businesses in the border lands, often under nightmarish
slave like conditions. Now, this is a real problem that's happened,
right like as it is today, right, And yeah, there's
this like suggestion of a new a thing called the
Pressro program that will provide kind of like a legal
way for these people to like work, but they'll have,
you know, there will be more control over the conditions

(56:28):
that they can work in, which obviously the people who
would be hiring them don't like It's it's a whole thing.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
Uh, just so fucked fucked every which way.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
For from the perspective of Harlan Carter, though, this is
primarily a humanitarian pretext for carrying out like a purging
of Mexican Americans and from like the border lands, and
I'm going to quote from Migra again. Carter had convened
a meeting to request the assistance of the US military
and the National Guard to purge the nation of undocumented
Mexican nationals and seal the US man Xico border. The

(57:01):
Border Patrols proposal was titled Operation Cloudburst and consisted of
three basic steps. First, an anti infiltration operation on or
near the border would seal the border with the assistance
of twenty one hundred and eighty military troops. In addition
to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned
to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic.
Two metal picket barbed wire fences eight feet high and

(57:23):
eight feet apart, with rolls of concertina wire in between,
and one roll of concertina wire on top of the
fence nearest Mexico built several miles along the border would
form the fence, but previous experience had taught the Border
patrol that fenced areas still needed additional security. Therefore, the
concertina fence would be reinforced by officers in jeeps who
will be directed to the scene of any attempted fence

(57:43):
or canal crossing by observers in radio equipped towers. So
this is the first modern this is the wall, right,
This is the start of This is the beginning of that.
Not that there hadn't been like fences and stuff in
different areas before, then, this is the first time someone's like,
we need to build a wall, and like a concerted
vision of that and specifically a vision of using the

(58:04):
of the wall as a system of violence in order
to keep the borderlands white. Right, That's that's what he's
doing here. And he invins that ship.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
You know, wow, Wow, he's like the Thomas Edison of
making racist borders.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
That's right, yeah. Wow. Yeah, he's the He's the Elon
Musk of border racism. Sure. Yes, So to continue that quote,
race X, I wanted to do it. I wanted to
do it. Yeah, sorry, good good, good work. Yeah, so
I'm going to continue that quote. Second, a containment operation

(58:43):
would maintain roadblocks on all major roads leading from the
Southwest to the interior of the United States. These roadblocks
would be used to inspect traffic, including railroad traffic, for
the purpose of detecting illegal entrants, and to maintain safety
patrols around the checkpoints. The roadblocks were planned for strategic
locations that would prevent a leans from fleeing to the
interior of the nation when the mopping up operations, the

(59:03):
third phase began. The mopping up operations would be conducted
in northern areas such as San Francisco, where the task
forces would raid designated locations such as migrant camps or
places of business. So San Francisco, I don't know if
you've ever been, Matt, Yeah, not super close to the border.
Oh yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, well I guess close to
like a sea border, right, No, no, we're building towards

(59:25):
but yeah, exactly, I mean those are the other aliens
that they also want to put a fence around, and
I'll watch out for all those turtles and fucking you know,
don't worry, we'll get rid of those in a couple
of decades.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
Right exactly, Just put a few more of those soda
you know, fucking soda rings in the water. But yeah, no,
not close to the border. I lived in San Francisco,
and I'll tell you it was a trek to get
to north exactly.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
So the primary downside to his plan, right, this is
a pretty good idea if you're a white supremacist, right
solid plan. The only only problem with it is that
it is wildly unconstitutional. So there's this thing, right, this
law that that kind of gets in the way of this.

(01:00:11):
So right, at this point in time, nowadays, the Border Patrol,
like you see those guys fucking walking around and they
look like soldiers, right, They've got their plate carriers and
their their ar fifteens and all their fucking cool tactical gear.
At this point, the Border Patrol is like slightly better
armed than a modern boy scout troop, you know, Like
they're not they're not They're not packing that much heat

(01:00:32):
compared to what they're going to be packing.

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
And they have a lot of merit badges.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
They have a lot of merit badges in racism, but
there's not a ton of them, right, so they're not
They can't do this without the US military, and in fact,
the military is going to wind up being a significant
portion of the effort if they try to do this.
But here's the problem. There's this stupid, fucking bullshit ass
eighteen seventy eight law called posse coomatatas right, and that
means you can't use the military to enforce domestic laws

(01:00:59):
without congress is approval. Oh damn yeah, I know, I know,
we all hate posse Coomatatas. Yeah, I for one think
the military should enforce all of the laws, yes, particularly
j walking exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
They're the best at it. You don't want to you
don't want a bunch of you know, boy scout border
patrols getting a merit badge for walking Mexican old lady
across the board.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Should have that roans making sure watching for people to
cross the street illegally, and we should have MLRS rocket
systems to just barred the area if they cross the street,
not at a crosswalk.

Speaker 3 (01:01:35):
Exactly, dude, we want more robocops and we want them absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
Yeah. Yeah, reinstate the draft and use it to stop
jaywalking and littering.

Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Yeah, someone you know, absolutely, someone like cuts you off,
someone speeding Agent Orange immediately.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Absolutely absolutely. So this this fucking law posse commatatus, really
really grinds Harlan's gears. So obviously I should also note
here that like the fact that it's the military's not
supposed to be used to enforce the law doesn't mean
it isn't right if he casually googled the Watts riots.
You know, the government has a way of finding out

(01:02:13):
figure making it being able to use soldiers to do
cop shit when it needs to. But in this case,
the government wasn't willing to like push things that far right.
And the general who's like, job it is to like
basically the general who's liaising with Carter is this guy
named Swing who really wants to do this, like he's
a racist too, but he's like, hey, we can't make

(01:02:37):
this work legally right now, but we could do it
if the President issued a proclamation like it's not impossible
to do, but like it's you'd have to get Eisenhower
on board. So Harlan Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's
people and he tries desperately to get approval, but Eisenhower
isn't quite willing to deploy troops. Now. He again not
to give Ike any credit. He agrees with Harlan's basic goals.

(01:02:59):
He just this, like using the army in this way
is a little too far for him. But again he's
not against this. So in May of nineteen fifty four,
Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be Commissioner of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service. Rights we don't have IS anymore
now we've got whatever, But these guys are in So

(01:03:19):
he's basically now he's Carter's boss. Essentially. This like general
and Swing had a long history of commanding troops in
battle from Mexico to Korea. Obviously you could see the
fact that now a general is in charge of IS
is like the start of the militarization of the border patrol.
And Swing is a bastard in his own own right.
But this is really happening in part because of like

(01:03:41):
what Carter is pushing to turn the border patrol into right,
this is this is not just the start of the
militarization of the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is going
to become the first large police agency to militarize.

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
This happens decades before. You know, we talked about the
Watts riots, which happened like a decade or so from now,
and then the La Right which were a big you know,
decades later, which were a big pusher. This happens way
before all of it. This is nineteen fifty four. So
this is like, in a lot of ways, the beginning
of police militarization happens because Harlan Carter and General Joseph

(01:04:14):
Swing want to cleanse the border lands of Mexican Americans.
Quote as promised. One month after joining i INS, Swing
announced that he would lead the US Border Patrol in
an intensive, innovative, and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to
end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the US
Mexico border. No one questioned how in four short weeks

(01:04:35):
he had prepared the officers of the Border Patrol for
such a massive campaign.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
I mean, at this point, too, what was even the
the like.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
What were the migration numbers like? Was it even that?

Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
I mean, certainly it's not as much as it was now,
But I'm thinking about like what nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties
Mexico was, what they had, you know, social.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
The civil wars not that long ended.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
Yeah, the PRIs and power. It's yeah, isn't it fairly
stable at this point? I feel like yeah. So it's
like it's like what they were doing this pretense of like, oh,
we got to stop the illegals. I mean, we're not
even talking about like you know, uh, we're not talking
about modern uh Latin American immigration that we have today,

(01:05:26):
which is used as a pretext for all sorts of
racist laws against Latin Americans here.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Legally we're talking about there's a lot like, yeah, labor
stuff that's taught, and again they have to like do
moral panic and stuff about the treatment of migrants. But like,
this is all very messy because like some of the
biggest people opposing the government doing this crackdown are these
different ranchers and other employers who are like wanting emploit,

(01:05:52):
to exploit people's Like, it's not there's a lot that's
that's going on overall in this issue. But when it
comes to Harlan Carter, it's pretty simple, right, He's he's
a racist. You know.

Speaker 3 (01:06:03):
Yeah, he's trying to do a racial purge under the
pretext of like, oh man, you know they're not paying
fair wages. Like he gives this ship.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
And it's you know, he's he's also like starting the
process of justifying, figuring out ways to justify uh this,
that and that are like palatable to large chunks of Americans.
And yeah that's uh, that's what's happening in this period
of time. And you know what else is happening right now? Man,

(01:06:35):
what I'm gonna ask you for your pluggables?

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
Oh hell yeah, so my pluggables are. I just finished
the entire series The Sopranos. Pot Yourself a Gun is
a podcast that I do with Vince Vancini, and we
just did our very last episode. We watched all of it.
We watched all the Sopranos. Uh, and uh, you can
listen to the series finance wherever you get your podcasts,

(01:07:02):
So check that out and also follow me on Instagram
because uh, you know, I feel like that's where all
the like cool kids hang out.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
So yeah, you know, hit me up, hit me.

Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
Up there, and also be be excited because me and
Vince our next show we're going to be talking about
the Wire. That's right, twenty years after the wires come out,
finally two white men will break down the wire because.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Finally someone's got to do it. I mean, that is
the right group to break down the wire. Season two.
Oh for sure, for sure, you got to make sure
at least one of you is a poll.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
Oh yeah, we're gonna get some We got some holes
who are going to come on. We got a bunch
of Greek Baltimore friends who are gonna come on. It's
gonna be great. But uh yeah, look look look for that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
What do you call it?

Speaker 3 (01:07:53):
Probably when you pod through the Garden? Uh you know, which,
you know kind of continues our tradition of having a
really bad title for a TV rewatch podcast. Yeah, so
check it out whenever that comes out. But for now,
listen to pod yourself a gun. You can go back
listen to the whole thing telling to.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Know who your favorite character on the Wire was.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
I mean I relate the most to Bubbles because I
used to love Heroin. But other than that, Ship probably
Clay Davis. Clay Davis is cool. He's he's the state senator.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
Yeah, who says ye?

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
Who says?

Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
Ship?

Speaker 3 (01:08:32):
A lot. She she You know, for a show that
is like lift Lifted up as one of the greatest
TV shows of all time, there sure certainly are a
lot of catchphrases. It's a weirdly catchphrase heavy show for
something that is it is incredibly serious.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
What then, did I do? You got? You know?

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
You got a proposition? Joe Is I got a proposition
for It's like, this is a serious show, but they
love catchphrases. Anyways, I'm excited. Sounds awesome me too.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
Boom, I guess.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
Welcome to the Wire. The podcast created the hit TV
show The Wire Before first our idea was stolen by
that hack David Simon.

Speaker 3 (01:09:22):
We went to HBO in nineteen ninety eight and you said,
have you ever considered making a show about wires?

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):
Yeah, and we said, you know who understands Baltimore Me
and Matt Leed. That's right exactly, That's right, baby.

Speaker 3 (01:09:35):
We understand Baltimore more than anyone understands Baltimore.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
I stopped there once for gasoline on a road trip,
so yeah, I get it, I get it. I was
I played for the Baltimore Orioles. That's a lot of
people are talking about that right now.

Speaker 3 (01:09:50):
Yeah, yeah, and you know, yeah, I feel I feel
like I mean, it was in Los Angeles, that's right,
and I was in fifth grade, but I was an
oriole so.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
And you know, we famously Season two was based on
the fact that I once bought a sandwich from a
Polish man. That's right, That's right. I said, what if
this was a whole show, But if this was a
whole season about longshoreman?

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
Yeah, yeah, just like longshoreman, like Steve Doors and like,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
That's a word that doesn't get used enough. I love
the word Steve Adore. It is ancredible job title.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
It's the coolest job title. I don't know, like what
about moving like it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:29):
Makes no sense to me based on what the job is.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
Why I imagine there was just like the first guy
to ever do that was named Steve.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
Steve, and he was just so good at it that
they were like everybody's we're all Steve Now, yeah, Steve Adoors,
You're like, is it moving cratesving? Shipping crates? Like Steve did?
Oh man, I want that job. This was a meandering
way of introducing the podcast Behind the Bastards. Matt Leeb
guest also host of a podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:10:58):
Yeah Yeah, Pod Yourself a Gun, which is a Sopranos podcast,
and then soon to be a Wire podcast coming out
shortly so, which is why cited for that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
We were talking about the Wire.

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):
Yeah, it's a good show.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
Also, soon to be the host of a baby.

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):
I know, I'm having a baby dude.

Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
Will subsequently launch a podcast called the Goo Goo Gay.

Speaker 3 (01:11:22):
I can't wait to do a Barney Rewatch podcast. Yeah,
with my little baby. It's like analyzing, like, you know,
the role of American imperialism in The Happy Purple Dinosaur.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
Well, you know, there was that whole season of Barney
that took place in a contra camp in Nicaragua. Yeah,
that was great. Yeah, you have to give it to them.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
Yeah yeah, yeah, Barney was like teaching, you know, classes
over at the School for the Americas.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that he worked
hand in glove with Oliver North ex sell those missiles
to Iran exactly because the only person the Shaw trusted
or the shot totally trusted exactly Dinosaur. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
he did sell a lot of craft, but that was
that was completely unrelated. We should probably talk about where,

(01:12:07):
you know, when we last left off, We were about to.
We were talking about Operation Cloudburst, this attempt by Harlan
Carter and the Border Patrol in the Sky General Swing
to cleanse the border area. We should probably gi a
little bit more background about what's happening short order in
this period. So this is kind of again I think
Harlan's primary motivation is racial, but there's other stuff happening.

(01:12:27):
So in the early nineteen forties, the US government had
created this thing called the Brasero program, which is like
a guest worker visa program that would let Mexican farm
workers enter the country legally temporarily to work for American farmers.
This get started during World War Two because like, we
don't have any we don't have any dudes left in
the country, right, we send them all over there, you know,
like we need some more dudes.

Speaker 3 (01:12:50):
The shortage of dudes at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
But it also one of the reasons why it's popular
even with people who like are pretty racist, is that
it it by providing kind of a legal, regulated way
for them to work here, it also provides a legally
regulated way to get them out of here. They can't
become residents, right. The Bressio program does not these people
are supposed to leave, but in fact, part of the
deal is that like ten percent of the migrants wages

(01:13:14):
are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an
account that are given to them when they come back
to Mexico. Right. So that's part of why this is popular,
is that it allows them to do the work that
the country can't function without, but it also ensures that
they don't stay right. That's why this's just such a
big deal for a lot of folks. So it's actually

(01:13:35):
very popular. And one of the things about it is
it doesn't limit the number of workers, because why would
you write because they're not anyway. Millions and millions of
Mexican workers use the Bresso program over the years, and
from the perspective of the US government, it works pretty
well for a while, and it certainly keeps workers in farms,

(01:13:57):
and so by like the early nineteen fifties, there's like
two million of these workers, or there's like five million
people have worked in through the Bressero program. But also
like unauthorized migrants continue to cross into the border, and
by the early nineteen fifties, there's like two million of
these people, and part of one of the things like

(01:14:18):
that happens in this period is that there's suddenly like
a big surge of folks coming and unauthorized in the
early nineteen fifties. And this is part of what inspires
Operation Cloudburst, is that like border patrol has never had
to deal with like these kind of numbers of people
crossing post war, and they're not really capable of handling it.

(01:14:39):
So by the early nineteen fifties, the number of like
voluntary departures had raised in nineteen forty six, like one
hundred and one thousand undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United
States in nineteen fifty two, more than seven hundred thousand do.
And you can, like these numbers are just kind of
useful in seeing like how many folks are coming in sure,

(01:15:01):
so this a lot of people are not wild about
this because again, you know, racism and such. Yeah, So
Joseph Swing part of his motivation here is that, like
he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers
to cooperate so that they can like increase the number

(01:15:24):
of folks who are working there under the Brasero program
and shrink the unauthorized workers. And so his justification for
like participating in some of the stuff that that Harlan
Carter is building is that he wants to cut down
the supply of unauthorized workers in order to get more
of these employers on board with the Brassero program. So again,

(01:15:46):
a lot of there are a lot of like kind
of wonky aspects to what's happening with migration here that
you can as always justify as like not based in racism,
is based in like, well, there's a lot of these
undocumented people coming over and it's like, great, the problem
for the border control and the conditions they're working under
are like really bad, and we want to reform this
program so that you know, everyone is documented and legal

(01:16:08):
and like we're not trying to stop them from coming over.
But also one of the things you're trying to do
by expanding this program is making sure that they don't
stay right. Yeah, And I guess again, you can look
at what's happening with the Bracero program in a couple
of different ways. But if you really want to know
what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and
Swing eventually in act, the main thing you need to

(01:16:32):
know is what they call it, and this is Harlan
Carter's name for this is Operation wet Back. That is
the official name of this immigration purge that they're going
to do. And again, did they invent the term or
was no? It existed for a while? Okay, so they
did just explicitly name it after a slur, yes, yes, okay, yeah,

(01:16:54):
that's exactly it. And obviously, like again for folks who
maybe are not aware of this, I know we have
a lot of like European lists, Canadian listeners who may
not have heard this, Like weep back is a racial
slur for Mexican immigrants to the United States. It takes
its name from when people would cross illegally. They would
do so through the Rio Grande often and like so
you you know, you get wet when you do that, right,

(01:17:16):
and so like that's the that's the origin of the slur, right.

Speaker 3 (01:17:19):
The part I don't I don't know why they specify.

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
I don't know why they specify, but this happens. There's
like a history of this. Like an old anti Italian
racial slur is WOP, which means without papers. I don't
think it was entirely just for Italians, but like, you know,
this is like the late eighteen hundreds, I think, right, yeah,
so yeah, and Carter again, so Swing Swing is the
kind of guy who can sit down and explain to you, like, well,

(01:17:43):
this is where the presserra program is broken down, and
like these are the problems that we're having, and these
are the different violations that we're seeing, and like we
need to get these, you know, employers on board with
this program to reform the system, and the only way
to do that is to cut down on the like
so he can get very wonky with it in a
way that doesn't sound racist, whereas Harlans like, yeah, operation
wet Back, Let's get out of here. And Carter is

(01:18:04):
not great. It's like he says, he just kind of
says the loud part loud. In interviews with the press,
he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens
in history. He tells the Los Angeles Times that he
intends to deploy quote an army of border patrol officers
complete with jeeps, trucks and seven aircraft in order to
declare quote all out war to hurl Mexican wetbacks into Mexico.

(01:18:26):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (01:18:27):
So he's not added a subtle man, he added yeehaw
after every sentence.

Speaker 2 (01:18:33):
Yeah, you have to imagine he's shooting his six guns
into the air as he gives these speeches to the press.

Speaker 3 (01:18:39):
He's in the middle of burning across as has he
lit a cross on fire on someone's lawn.

Speaker 2 (01:18:47):
Statement to the La Times. So what followed was close
to again, Operation Wetback is kind of he tried. It's
a lot of what he had tried to do with
Operation Cloudburst, only just toned down a little bit so
that they could get the federal government on board. Obviously,
this is follows like a massive hiring campaign of border

(01:19:07):
patrolmen and they take thousands of border patrol agents and
they separate them into mobile task groups and they set
up mobile immigration systems to block roads. So they basically
doing like this. They've already put this, like started putting
these fences up, but they do like kind of a
you could call it a kind of like racist defense,
like defensive white supremacy in depth, where they're setting up
blockades deeper into the country and they're also carrying out

(01:19:30):
raids on factories and restaurants and just through whatever mean
they can, arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican migrants
and I'm going to quot from Migre again. To hold
the detainees, the officers turned to public spaces into temporary
detention facilities. For example, in Los Angeles, the Border Patrol
transformed Alesian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary
holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals were processed for deportation.

(01:19:54):
And countless fields and along many country roads, border Patrol
officers set up mobile immigration stations to process us UNS
sanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation. They used trucks on
loan from the Armed Services to transport the apprehended immigrants
from California to No Gals, Arizona for deportation to Mexico.
To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for
forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise Mexicano communities,

(01:20:18):
leisure spots and migrant camps, ranches, farms, and parks. They
also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ
undocumented Mexican immigrants. Between June seventeenth and June twenty sixth,
nineteen fifty four, twenty eight hundred and twenty seven of
the four thousand four hundred and three migrants apprehended by
the task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry.
After border patrol raids during the summer of nineteen fifty four,

(01:20:39):
three Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of
workers and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, border patrol
officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business,
which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen help waiters, etc.
Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known establishments such
as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills, Hood Hoel, Hollywood, Roosevelt Hotel,

(01:21:01):
Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times,
border patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants
when migrants attempted to escape by running through the servant area.
Everywhere they went, the officers were chased and photographed by
journalists who had come to witness what General Swing had
promised would be a spectacular show of US immigration law enforcement.
Swing pledged that the Border Patrol would deport or otherwise

(01:21:22):
purge the one million undocumented Mexican nationals estimated to be
living in the United States at the time. Oh, that
sounds like a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (01:21:30):
Just yeah, they're just going buck wild with journalists in
the back, like this is great footage.

Speaker 2 (01:21:37):
Yeah, and it's interesting because a huge number of these
guys are immediately let back into the country. Like a
lot of times, what they're doing is they're pushing them
across the border and then making them recross under like
the Brassero program. So again they can be because they
need the labor, right, they don't want the brickyard shutdown.
They don't want these places to go to business. They
just don't want these people to be able to actually

(01:21:58):
build a life in the United States, right, they want
to guarantee that they go back. So that's like a
huge chunk of what's of what's happening here, Like it's
it's basically taking it's taking the natural movement of people
across an area where like their ancestors and relatives had
been moving freely for centuries, and it's stopping that, stopping

(01:22:19):
like the ability of populations to move and build lives
and turning them entirely into economic units. Right. Yes, you're
not a member of the community, you're your labor.

Speaker 3 (01:22:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're an entirely different class of citizen,
which is non citizen, which means.

Speaker 2 (01:22:36):
Uh, you have your rights, Yeah, you have no rights.

Speaker 3 (01:22:38):
You're you're not entitled to any of the human rights
that we give to our citizens. Super super normal and
definitely a natural state of things, certainly.

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
Not definitely the way things are supposed to.

Speaker 3 (01:22:52):
Go, exactly, not an invention of humans at all.

Speaker 2 (01:22:56):
No. So at the same time as they're doing and
obviously the media is a big part of like why
this is such a hit because you know, I in
s says, hey, we're going to raid the biltmore like yeah,
you're going to show up there, and like that's like
who doesn't want to see that as like a journalist,
So like part of like what part of like what
increases sort of the because the people hadn't really the

(01:23:17):
border patrol had not been probably most Americans have only
been kind of vaguely aware of its existence up until
this point. This is part of what turns them into
like an institution within the United States. Is like all
of the press around Operation Wetback.

Speaker 3 (01:23:31):
Right, it's like the uh, you know, they took a
cue from the FBI. They're like we need we need
to be flashy, we need to we need to look
cool as shit doing a bunch of horrid shit to people.

Speaker 2 (01:23:44):
Yeah, I mean, like and you're talking about like what
the FBI does against anarchists and socialists and like the
late you know, the early nineteen hundreds. Yeah, this is
this is like the Border Patrol's equivalent of that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:54):
Yeah, and creating like, you know, an entire propaganda arm
that made like, yeah, you know the g man cool.

Speaker 2 (01:24:00):
Yes, you know. Yes. And at the same time they're
doing this, Carter and Swing are like meeting with these
influential ranchers and farmers and industrialists, the people using the
undocumented migrant labor, and they're getting them in line between
like a revamp of the Brasero program that is again
like supposed to fix some of the issues the programming had.
I'm not going to get terribly into the weeds on

(01:24:22):
that kind of stuff. There's plenty of places to read
about that if you'd like, there's a pretty good article. Yeah,
we'll have some sources in here, but the book Migra
goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So
in the end, it was a wild success more than
one million people are deported, potentially as many as one
and a half million people are deported beyond that, the

(01:24:44):
precedent was established that the US Border Patrol could and
should conduct operations from deep within the United States. Border
Patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within
one hundred miles of the border right, any border, Like
that's the exactly of any border right, which includes the
coasts in Canada. So basically all of the places where

(01:25:07):
most Americans live are covered by the two. About two
thirds of the US population are in this area, which
is why the Border Patrol has like the whitest ranging
purview of any law enforcement agency pretty much. I guess yeah,
Like the FBI technically has more, but like their mission
is more limited anyway. It's whatever, Like this is like
the Border Patrol. This is what turns them into what

(01:25:28):
they are, to this monster, this juggernaut they are today
as opposed to like some dudes literally on the border,
you know, like say which like again and not that,
Like they weren't getting up to problematic shit earlier in
their history, but their ability to do harm was limited
by geography. It's not after Operation Wetback and we can
thank Harlan Carter for that, and it's it's it's worth

(01:25:50):
kind of noting here. I'm not going to get too
much into Trump, but he Donald Trump consciously looks back
to Harlan Carter's period of time running the border patrol
as an inspiration. Yeah. During a twenty fifteen presidential Republican
presidential debate, Donald Trump said, quote, let me just tell
you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president. People liked him.

(01:26:12):
I liked him. I like ike, right the expression I
like ike. Moved one point five million illegal immigrants out
of the country. Moved them just beyond the border. They
came back. Moved them again beyond the border, they came back,
didn't like it, moved them way south. They never came back.
Dwight Eisenhower, you don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier.
They moved one and a half million people out. We
have no choice. We have no choice. Just so, first off,

(01:26:33):
obviously it's probably not gonna surprise people. That's again, as
we've said, completely wrong, for among other things, nearly all
of them come back.

Speaker 3 (01:26:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
Oh, under like the pressera program, Like that's part of
the point, Like they're not but yeah, it's it's so Carter.
And again there's the kind of folks who like again
Swing I'm sure has his racism, Ike, there's racism, and
like his motivations, but it's also there's a lot of
economic and just like they're the kind of people who

(01:27:00):
believe all of this stuff should be done based on
a set of laws. So they're like kind of fundamentally
if they're probably more offended by the fact that people
are undocumented than they are necessarily about the racial element
that's chunk of these people.

Speaker 3 (01:27:12):
Absolutely, lack of documents alone is just like Jesus.

Speaker 2 (01:27:16):
Carter's doing it for white supremacy. And that's the thing
you'll notice. The thing Trump takes out of Operation Wetback
isn't the way they established this kind of like system
in order to like document and like make these workers
legal in order to provide labor a labor for it. Like,
that's not the thing he takes out of this. The
thing he takes out of this is they got one

(01:27:37):
and a half million Mexicans to leave, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Like that's the thing that has come down in history
from Carter's period, is the.

Speaker 3 (01:27:43):
Right he's cutting to the heart of really what's going
on here behind all of the you know, I don't know,
respectability politics or whatever of it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:50):
Yes, that's what has lived on that and of course
the militarization of the border patrol and the fact that
it gets to work every We get all of that
from Harlan Carter. And here's the thing, Harlan's just getting started.
This ain't even this ain't even his whole thing, right this,
like this isn't even his main gig.

Speaker 3 (01:28:07):
Yeah, I know, we haven't even gotten to the beginning,
which is like we're going to talk about some n
ras and some gun shit.

Speaker 2 (01:28:14):
We're not even into that ship yet. Like this is
just his first gig, right, damn. This is his like
the equivalent of the time like the rest of us
spent like working at a Windy's or something that, right,
this is this is Hitler at painting school. Yeah, this
is Yeah, this is Hitler at fucking like hanging out
in Austria and opera houses exactly arguing with homeless people

(01:28:36):
about the Jews, which was like a whole chunk of
his life. But anyway, because he was homeless, dude, it's whatever.
They were living in a men's shelter anyway, Hitler. So
I should note before we move on to the NRA
that while Harlan Carter was massively expanding the reaching power
of the Border Patrol, he was also robbing it blind
for his own benefit. See Harland loves shooting right, Like,

(01:28:58):
he's not one of these NR like like Wayne Lapierre,
the current head of the NRA. I don't think Wayne
particularly cares much about like a lot of these guys
like it's a political thing as opposed to them, like
Harlan Carter is you have to say, loves to shoot guns. Yeah,
but here's the thing about shooting guns. Bullets cost money.
So three years after Harlan Carter retires from government service

(01:29:18):
in nineteen fifty seven, the Justice Department opens an investigation
into what are termed quote various allegations against him, including
the claim that he had stolen forty to fifty thousand
rounds of ammunition from the Border Patrol quote, with the
sole intent of converting this property to his own use
after he retired. Wowow, so he steals like a pallett
of bullets to go shoot privately.

Speaker 3 (01:29:41):
I would love it if we found out that he's
the one who stole his mom's car.

Speaker 2 (01:29:45):
Yeah, joy, I mean, oh fuck, I gotta find some Mexicans.
Fifteen year old gets murdered. So yeah, it's not that funny,
but that's not impossible, right, Yes, So I'm going to
quote from the New York Times here about this theft
of tens of thousands of bullets that Harlan Carter perpetrated. Quote.
Asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations, mister

(01:30:06):
Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand
jury in San Diego for some hours, and they covered
a lot of things, none of which I'm ashaved of
and none of which I had any difficulty asking. He
added that he did not quote know anything about the
disappearance or a misappropriation of government ammo. The missing ammunition,
worth several thousand dollars, was never traced, according to an
agent who worked on the investigation, and no charges were
fired filed. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very fun. Now,

(01:30:33):
obviously Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's
about to get a new job that is never going
to let him run out of ammunition. So, as we
stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when
he joined the NRA, whether it was before or after
he killed Raymond Cassiano. Probably he was like sixteen when
he joins. And in nineteen fifty one, the year after

(01:30:53):
he becomes head of the Border Patrol, he joins the
NRA's national board. And again at this point in time,
there's obviously there's people who are right wing in the NRA.
There's who want it to be more of a conservative institution.
It's not really a political organization point right, right.

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):
It's almost at this point from does this just from
what I remember, it's almost an apolitical, just kind of
gun lobbying group that kind of.

Speaker 2 (01:31:17):
They're not lobbying. There's no lobbying. They do not lobby
in this period of time. They have the Sierra Club
at this point. Yeah, they're they're just kind of like, yeah,
they're there to provide training courses for people. They're there.
They're there so that One of the things they do
is when the government demilitarizes weapons, right, they're like, okay,
we're not using like the inn one garrand is no
longer the gun that the army uses. So we have
a couple of million of these things. We will sell

(01:31:39):
them at a discount to the NRA who can sell
them very cheap to their members, and like it's part
of this. So there's like stuff that they're doing, but
they're not they're not getting in there. And there are
they have some involvement politically, we'll talk about that in
a little bit, but they are not like lobbying on
behalf of the Republican Party or something, right, like, that's
not really a thing that the NRA is doing yet.

(01:32:00):
Harlan Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing,
but they're not. In nineteen fifty one when he joins
the board, they're still not very political. But now that
he's on the board, he starts to see the organization
with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol right because
he can help get people hired, he can put in
a good word. So he starts all of his buddies
from the Border Patrol who are like wanning a cushy

(01:32:20):
job and the private sector after, you know, working for
the gut like, he starts filling them, filling the NRA
with them. So he finally leaves government service in the
early nineteen sixties. He stops running the Border Patrol in
fifty seven, but he does some other shit not really
that important for our purposes, but he's he retires from
working for the government in the early sixties and he

(01:32:42):
gets pretty much immediately elected presidents of the NRA from
nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty seven. But that doesn't
mean he's actually running the NRA, like, right, it's just
like a job within the organization. You've still got this
board of directors. So he's an influential figure in the NRA,
but he's not actually like directing it at this point point.

Speaker 3 (01:33:00):
Right, he's collecting a check and he's probably getting like,
you know, a bunch of free bullets, which is.

Speaker 2 (01:33:05):
All even more free bullet. Well, he also wants he
wants the NRA to get more political, and again we're
gonna we're going to chat a little bit about why
in a second. But one of the things that happens
is like the folks at the NRA, who kind of
don't necessarily want that, know, they have to do something
with Harlan Carter, right, like, you can't like ignore him,
so they stick him. They create a lobbying arm for

(01:33:27):
the first time of the NRA, the Institute for Legislative action,
and they put him in charge of it. And again,
this is the first time the NRA had had a
lobbying arm. In the early nineteen sixties, it was like
not they barely funded it. So there's this, you know,
there's kind of this growing fight, and Harlan is one
of these guys saying that, like, hey, the NRA needs

(01:33:48):
to get more political. We need to be lobbying, we
need to be focused on Second Amendment advocacy. That was
not had nothing like the NRA's planks, Like they're like
stated purpose as an organization didn't include like protecting or
defending the Second Amendment at all, Like that was not
on there even on their radar. Wow, he thinks it
needs to be. And the old guard who run the

(01:34:09):
NRA don't see it that way. They see themselves as
essentially in partnership with the government to ensure the development
of a heavy of a healthy shooting sports culture in
the United States, right, And part of what that means
is that when gun control laws get passed, they work
with the government to formulate those laws. So again they're
certainly like they're not anti gun, right, but they're not

(01:34:30):
anything we would recognize as like in like a modern
political context.

Speaker 3 (01:34:34):
They just want to So it sounds like they just
want to make sure that gun control doesn't affect hunting
and or like regulation of people owning actual rifles or yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:46):
Yeah, and it's again everything is different, right, Like nothing
the AR fifteen exists in this period, but it's not
what it's going to become, right like, because it's it's
harder to make. They're much less common like today an
AR Like. One of the things that has made the
AR fifteen is is that it's a perfectly modular platform.
So it's basically like gun legos. So there's like a
million you can customize it infinitely. You can make the

(01:35:08):
basic gun itself for a couple one hundred bucks if
you have some stuff. It's not like that at this point,
right that's it's now it's like the Honda Civic of guns. Yeah, yeah,
so they just haven't Like part of why it's not
political in the way it will become is that there's
not really a need to you know, like no one's
there's not like there's not the culture that the NRA

(01:35:31):
helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that. So, yeah,
their primary focus is like hunting and target shooting right, right,
and again. Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment,
and in the nineteen seventies he's going to go to
war with the NRA's old Guard in order to change it.
But before we get into that, we should probably have
some ads. I love ads, Oh I do too, including

(01:35:55):
this ad for guns, the concept of uh yeah guns. Sure.
How about the life card? The life card. It's a
gun that's built into a little credit card. Can it shoot? Well? No?
Is it accurate? Of course?

Speaker 4 (01:36:12):
Not?

Speaker 2 (01:36:12):
Is it? Is it a stupid thing to carry in
your pocket? Yes? Enjoy it's a real thing. Look, look
it up. Very oily gun of the of the of
the of the meme guns, easily the memiest. Wow, that's
the whole thing we have these days. There's no meme guns.
In the nineteen sixties. We haven't invented memes, you know,

(01:36:34):
but we had one. But yeah, which was the meme
from the nineteen sixties. Well it's it's earlier than that.
You know that this is getting way off topic, But
you've just heard of Kilroy was here. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
there's memes. But yeah, I was thinking, I was like,
was this is the Suppruder film. Was that a meme?

Speaker 3 (01:36:53):
But I guess that came out in the second case.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
Yeah, no, it comes out a little late. O. That's
like the sixties or mid sixties, right, But when what.

Speaker 3 (01:37:00):
Did the did people see this Zappruder film? I thought
that was like, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:37:05):
I mean, I will tell you my entire life. I
have specifically picked houses with a floor plan where the
bathroom is kind of like back into the left of
the living room, so that when people ask where the
bathroom is, I can say, oh, just take a Kennedy well,
you know, go back into the left a JFK getting
murdered joke. Anyway, here's ads. Oh we're back. Noo, he's

(01:37:31):
having a good time. You know. Robert Kennedy was killed
with the twenty two, which is the same caliber as
the life card. Ah, the gun that's built into a
credit card. Look, there's a credit card gun. Yeah yeah,
I mean, honestly, if Sir Hunt and Sir Hanna had
one of those, RFK would probably be alive. Life card
is a really stupid gun. Anyway. The Second Amendment, well, actually,

(01:37:53):
weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument. Harlan Carter
will later make but I don't want to. I don't
want to get ahead of things. So the Second Amendment is,
I think it's fair to say, the most politicized part
of the Bill of Rights today. Right, That's probably not.
Maybe the First Amendment gives it a run for its money,
but even then it's usually people differing over interpretations of

(01:38:14):
the First Amendment as opposed to the argument over the
second is really should it exist or does it exist
in the way that it's like currently being interpreted, right,
because the awful lot of Americans think it shouldn't be
the law of the land at all, which is difficult
to square with actually doing something legislatively because it does exist.
But anyway, in two thousand and eight, the Supreme Court

(01:38:36):
ruled in DC versus Heller that the Second Amendment establishes
an individual right to bear arms. Now, obviously, a lot
of liberals see this as terrible Jewish prudence and claim
that an individual right to bear arms was basically invented
by the NRA. Conservatives will say the opposite, that this
was clearly what the founders had intended, and the reality
of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the

(01:38:59):
Second Amendment at federal level is only like twenty years old.
Different courts have ruled very differently on the Second Amendment
for quite a long time. And also the Supreme Court
is stupid, So yes, like I don't personally give a
good goddamn about what the Founders intended.

Speaker 3 (01:39:13):
Yeah, that seems like the weirdest standard to uphold to
this day, where we're like, well, the Founders intended, and
it's like the Founders, first of all, none of them
had teeth.

Speaker 2 (01:39:23):
None of them had and it's one of those this
it's comprehensively wrong because again liberals will often be like, well,
the Founders would never have wanted people to have AR fifteen's,
and it's like, did you know some of those guys, Yeah,
a lot of those duds would have been like this
will kill so many more, like digitous people, we should
have these.

Speaker 3 (01:39:37):
They all wore power powdered wigs because they all had
like herpes on their heads and they you know, they
were all syphilitics, so yeah, they were insane being like
the Founders wouldn't like that. It's like no, no, no,
don't defend the Founders.

Speaker 2 (01:39:53):
Well, and they would have they would have liked it
for a variety of different reasons. Thomas Paine would have
liked it because it would allow you to shoot government
agents much y right, Like Thomas Jefferson would have liked
it because he was scared of how many slaves he had,
you know, exactly different different people would have liked it
for different reasons. They all would love to have that gun. Yes,
So obviously, again, as regards my personal standing towards gun control,

(01:40:17):
I don't care about what the Founders thought about anything,
including free speech, because they didn't actually believe in free speech. Yes, yes,
because a lot of the moans, well, Thomas pain did.
Again he's he's our one, good one.

Speaker 3 (01:40:31):
He was, you know, although kind of in a reactionary
during the French Revolution. You know, they locked his ass up.

Speaker 2 (01:40:38):
They did lock his ass up during the French time,
because they locked a lot of people up. They really
just kind of went overboard. As it's still left. So
I think it's probably valuable to discuss how interpretations of
the right to bare arms have varied over time in
the United States, because again, if you're ever saying it's
always meant this thing or that thing that's not you're

(01:40:59):
not going to be correct. Because a bunch of different
courts have found a bunch of different things. So the
Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison, And
in portraits he's the founding father with just massive bags
under his eyes, Like you look up a drawing of
this dude. He looks fucking exhausted in every and he
was every sketch of it.

Speaker 3 (01:41:15):
He probably was literally dying at all times in his
famed career.

Speaker 2 (01:41:20):
He was dying all the time. If only every American
political leader had followed in his footsteps of Dye.

Speaker 3 (01:41:26):
I know, I know, you know, he's yeah, he didn't.
He was supposed to write way more of the Federalist papers,
but he was so sickly he couldn't.

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
We are getting to that. So obviously he's a he's
you know, on that side of the federalist anti federalist divide.
But he drafts the Bill of Rights because the anti
federalists are worried, and they have a very good point
that like, Okay, well, we're establishing this supposedly democratic government,
but if we don't place limits on the powers of
the federal government, they could get the power to do
anything one day, which is a very reasonable thing you're

(01:41:56):
pcerned about right. Broadly speaking, one of the ideas the
founders had was having a Bill of rights. Yes, so
most of them are terrified of the idea of a
permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to
be frightened of. And if we had stuck with that idea,
maybe things would be a little bit better. One of
the things that like, these guys are all ancient Roman

(01:42:16):
history nerds, right, and they are well aware that, like
the history of the Roman Republic includes so many times
where just like a guy gets an army and takes over, right,
or tries to take over, and there's a big fucking
fight over it. So they don't like the idea of
like this big centralized standing army because it's very dangerous.
So the Second Amendment was initially drafted to guarantee people's

(01:42:38):
right to form a militia. The original text and this
is not what's in the Bill of Rights now, but
this is the original text. Madison rights is quote the
right of the people to keep in bear arms shall
not be infringed simi colan, A well armed and well
regulated militia being the best security of a free country colon.
But no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be
compelled to render military service person. Now this is interesting

(01:43:02):
because if that had been in the Bill of Rights today, right,
this would have done a couple of things. Among other things,
it would probably have made a draft impossible, right because
that second clause is like you cannot force someone to
render military service, which is like you would think would
make a draft impossible. That said, it also might have
made it impossible to do things that a lot of
liberal support, like banning weapons like the Era fifteen, because

(01:43:26):
when you have well armed in there, it does kind
of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the
current text of the Second Amendment does. That interpretation could
at least be argued. Now this is all academic because
the wording winds up being changed to the present text,
which puts well regulated upfront and fun times, also makes
it legal to draft people. Obviously, people will have argued

(01:43:49):
for years and will be arguing for years what the
Second Amendment should mean about gun control and how it
should function. I'm not an originalist. I think the Constitution
is too old for anyone to care about. But obviously
it does matter because it is the law of the land,
and how it's written and how it's interpreted has a
huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation.

(01:44:11):
And so I think the context of how the Second
Amendment was seen at the time is helpful to have,
even though again I'm not an originalist. Please don't take
this as me arguing because the Founding Fathers felt this way,
this is how people should act.

Speaker 3 (01:44:26):
But yeah, I think we've said we can stress enough.
We do not care what the Founding Fathers thought about
literally anything.

Speaker 2 (01:44:34):
My stance broadly in support of civilian arms ownership has
nothing to do with the Constitution, because it's a stupid
document written a long time. Well again, given the time,
not a stupid document problem better than anyway, whatever, I
don't need to have this conversation. I am going to
quote from the New Yorker here because I think it
gives some helpful context. None of this, this being the

(01:44:56):
Second Amendment, had anything to do with hunting. People who
owned and used long arms to hunt continued to own
and use them. The Second Amendment was not commonly understood
as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As
Gary Willis once wrote, one does not bear arms against
a rabbit. Meanwhile, militias continued to muster. The Continental Army
was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, but
the national defense was increasingly assumed by the US Army.

(01:45:18):
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the US had
a standing army after all. And this is one of
the things I think is interesting because again, the kind
of especially on Twitter, common takes on one side or
the other. This is that like, well, you don't need
these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of
the Second Amendment, which no, it's absolutely not. But at
the same time, the idea of the Second Amendment as

(01:45:40):
referring to an individual's ability to stockpile in arsenal is
not really accurate because it was within the context of
a militia. However, if you're bringing that up, it's one
of the things that they meant by like, one of
the things that the founding fathers wanted with this militia
was for it to be the primary method of defending
the country, as opposed to a massive standing army. So again,

(01:46:02):
if you are if you are for one reason or
the other, if you're arguing that we should do things
the way the Founding Fathers argued, probably the most accurate
thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of
the context of a militia, and also ensure that the
militia is the only armed force in the country, including police,
so that like a massive civilian militia is the only
armed force. There's no federal power to deploy a massive

(01:46:25):
military and there's not really federal policing in any meaningful way,
because that's how things were in the eighteen hundreds, right, Yeah, yeah,
if you're or seventeen, if you're arguing that, that's probably
closer to an originalist interpretation than anything being argued right now, right,
Which is not to say that that makes much sense
in the current day at all, although I would argue
there's a number of you could look at, like what

(01:46:46):
Switzerland does, right, which is often brought up by Second
Amendment advocates. Do they do? I don't even know what
Switzerland has. Like basically, if you want to own a
weapon in Switzerland, the government will give you one, but
like there's training and you're part of a militia to
get it. It is a military assault rifle, right, And
a lot of Switzerland's are the percentage of Swiss people

(01:47:09):
who own guns is not significant compared to the United States,
but it's one of the highest in the world. Right,
But it does come as you don't it's not, well,
you can buy some arms in Switzerland. It's not like
you're not like just stockpiling guns for your own personal thing.
You are being armed by the state as part of
the state's defense apparatus. Right, But also not in a
way like the Swiss, Like the civilians who own guns

(01:47:32):
in Switzerland are not like deployed for obviously Switzerland, right,
they don't do that shit famously. But anyway, I mean,
this is again when I talk about like Rojava and
like what I think about in terms of the value
of the state not having a monopoly on the use
of force. These are some of the things that I
think about broadly speaking. You know, stuff has been different

(01:47:54):
about the Second Amendment a little bit, and kind of
as a result, the Second Amendment, as heavily politicized as
it is now, was kind of like nobody it was
like the Third Amendment, Right, nobody talks about that anymore.
Nobody fucking talked about the Second Amendment on a national
level for like a century or so, Right, we talked

(01:48:15):
about like gun control earlier, but it was basically all
state level, right, different states, different cities would have like
different rules based on shit that was happening there. The
federal government left them alone. Like, there was not really
any kind of federal interest in regulating the Second Amendment
until the early nineteen thirties, and that is when we
get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now,

(01:48:37):
the NFA or National Firearms Act, was a response to
the era of the gangster right. In particular, you get
this weapon starting in like I don't know exactly when
it was invented, I could have looked it up, but
like it becomes popular in the thirties, the Tommy gun, right,
which is the Thompson submachine gun. And it is broadly speaking,

(01:48:57):
kind of like at least in terms of the way
it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used
in crime, kind of like the AR fifteen of its day,
because it is Thompson. It's an automatic forty five caliber weapon.
It's a submachine gun, right, so it's not like a
full sized rifle. This will be one of the most
popular squad weapons that the United States uses in World
War two. Right, a very effective weapon for what it does,

(01:49:17):
which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets
very quickly at people at close range. So super good
if you're, for example, a gangster who wants to murder
a bunch of people in an enclosed room. Right, if
you're like fighting a bunch of other gangsters up against
the wall, you can kill a shitload of people with
a Tommy.

Speaker 3 (01:49:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very fun for you know, pulling off
some sort of Saint Valentine's Day.

Speaker 2 (01:49:39):
Mass, incredible bank robbing weapon. Great for all sorts of.

Speaker 3 (01:49:43):
Stuff, going to the local gobba ghoolery and shooting up
the gabba gule exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:49:49):
You could gabba a hell of a lot of ghoul
with his lots and it's it's nowadays, honestly not that
impressive of a weapon, but that at the time, right,
Like prior to this, most America like their experience with
is like single shot rifles and lever action guns and
like revolvers and shit. Right, even semi automatic handguns are
pretty new and fancy in the thirties. The Thompson is

(01:50:12):
just so much deadlier than anything else that's as fu
and the crimes that get committed with it again, as
with the Air fifteen, on like a national scale, very
little gun crime involves a Thompson sub machine guns. And again,
the Air fifteen not the most common gun used in
crime by any like, It's not super common compared to
a lot of other kinds of firearm, but the crimes

(01:50:33):
that it's used in are so spectacular and kind of
like horrifying that they shock the nation. And law enforcement
gets nuts about this because one of the things that
gangsters do with Tommy guns is shoot lots of police
officers with them. So there's a whole kind of America's
first panic over a gun, right is what happens with

(01:50:54):
the Tommy gun in the thirties. And it's not just
the Tommy gun. They're also freaking out about sawt off shotguns,
which is actually pretty dumb. They're only scared about them
because you can like hide them, hide them, but they're
they're not even like anyway, it's dumb for saw off
shotguns to be regulated more than regular shotguns. They're actually
less deadly, Yeah, but whatever, they look cool as funny

(01:51:14):
they look, and you see them a lot in the
hands of gangsters. Right, So it's again there's this part
of this is that like, yeah, the Thompson is a
lot deadlier than guns that had been available before. But
part of it's also just like there's this media sort
of panic around the Thompson. Right. And by the way,
I should note at this period of time, if you
want a Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail
one to your house. Like, this is not They're not

(01:51:38):
like you don't have to go to a gun store.
You don't do it. They're like background checks, like they
just will send it to you. It's like if you
order like a book on Amazon. It was that easy
to get a Thompson sub machine gun. So the NFA
puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the ownership
of machine guns, sawt off shotguns, and silencers. Now, the

(01:51:58):
NRA is again not a political organization at this point.
It does initially oppose the NFA, and this is kind
of the first time it gets political. The organization writes
a descent in their magazine, American Riflemen, and this is
a pretty like tamely phrased descent, and it prompts congressional
leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to
limit their bill. The main thing that it does is

(01:52:20):
that like it stops the ban from being total, so
rich people can still get machine guns, shotguns, and silencers right. Well,
and we could tell you, I could rant about silencers,
which are not what people tend to think.

Speaker 3 (01:52:32):
They're not silent.

Speaker 2 (01:52:33):
They're not silent. All of these things are still legal
if you have the money. Right in the case of
like a silencer or a what's called a short bariled shotgun,
it takes like a two hundred dollars tax stamp in
a couple of months. It's technically like a similar legal
process to get a machine gun. But machine guns cost.
The cheapest machine guns today are like ten thousand dollars.
So it's that's why you don't see them like used
in crimes. Yeah, I guess I don't know what a

(01:52:56):
machine gun is. An AR fifteen is a my automatic gun.
The legal definition of a machine gun is a weapon
that will fire more than one bullet per trigger. Poll Right,
this is all very wonky because like we had bump
stocks a while ago function more or less as a
machine gun, but legally weren't technically a machine gun. There's
a couple of weird kinds of triggers you can as

(01:53:18):
with anything with guns, because when you like, when you
make a law to ban a thing, you have to
specify what that thing is in mechanical terms, right, And
so you find a way to people do this with
drugs too, where it's like, Okay, they banned MDMA, let's
make a drug that affects the same parts of the
brain but doesn't like isn't explicitly banned, right, right, different compound, Yeah,
and the same thing happens. Now there are sawt off

(01:53:39):
shotguns that aren't legally shotguns because of very anyway, whatever.
This is getting off of the point a bit, But
the NRA works with It works with Congress, right. They
don't do like a big political brujaha. They're like, hey,
we want to make sure that rich people can still
own these weapons. Let's let's sit down and work some
things out. And Congress is happy to work with them. Now,

(01:54:00):
some people in Congress are The Attorney General claims that
they emasculate the bill. But broadly speaking, the NFA seriously
limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have,
and this is the first time anyone had done that
at the federal level. And the NRA is pretty happy
with the resulting bill, and they endorse the nineteen thirty
four NFA. Now, there was still no massive national discussion

(01:54:22):
of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this period,
not that it was like particularly discussed much at all.
This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period
of time. It's not yet part of the culture war.
Yeah it has, Yeah, that hasn't really evolved yet. The context,

(01:54:43):
the discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right
to bear arms doesn't really start to take off until
the early nineteen sixties, and this is when the very
first law review articles arguing an individualist interpretation are published. Now,
this period coincides with the civil rights movement and the
second big push for gun control in federal history. This
time rather than will racism and crime have a role

(01:55:05):
to plays we'll discuss. But one of the first things
that sets it off is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Famously,
John F. Kennedy is assassinated by Bernard Sanders using a
manlukir Karkana rifle that he'd ordered from a classified ad
in the American Rifleman Magazine, which is the MRAs magazine.
So the gun that kills GfK is ordered from the
back of a magazine, right, yeah, and it's not. Again,

(01:55:28):
he's not killed with like anything you would consider an
assault weapon. It's like an old bolt action rifle. But
the fact that he was able to get it from
like a magazine ad becomes like and like, you know, again,
background checks are not really a thing yet, and that's
that makes a lot of people very angry. And I'm
going to quote now from an article by Alina Savadra Buckley. Quote.

(01:55:51):
For years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had been watching
television and learning how to shoot. In the nineteen fifties,
when Hollywood studios were churning out Westerns, Popular Science estimated
that famillion Americans had started quick draws shooting for fun,
and by the end of the decade, three thousand Western
style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smyth
in his book The NRA The Unauthorized History. At the
same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise,

(01:56:13):
and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures.
As a result, the NRA braced itself for new legislation
in the early nineteen sixties, sprinkling the first references to
the Second Amendment in American Riflemen. Eight months after Kennedy died,
the magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead,
the strength of the NRA, and therefore the ability to
accomplish its objects and purposes, depends entirely upon the support

(01:56:33):
of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep
and bear arms. And a lot of this push is
coming at the direction of Harlan Carter, who writes stuff
for American Riflemen and who is a big believer that
the NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization. Yeah, yeah,
And that's again, that's different from what they had always
been pro gun because obviously it's the NRA, right, But

(01:56:56):
when you look at what they're doing in thirty four,
they're not advocating for the Second Amendment. They're advocating for
what they see as sportsmen, right, and obviously there's problems
with that. It's based heavily on like the desire of
rich people to be heavily armed. But they're they're arguing
for sportsmen as opposed to Carter wants to turn it
into an advocacy organization for this thing. This this this

(01:57:17):
idea of the Second Amendment. And when you do something
like that, number one, if you if you kind of
are an essentialist and you claim that this is like
there's this kind of inherent, timeless, essential interpretation of this rule,
and that's your your guiding light. There's not any ability
to compromise there, right, Like you have to be kind
of a fundamentalist about.

Speaker 3 (01:57:35):
It, right, It doesn't matter if a president was just
marked yeah, in front of everyone in Dallas.

Speaker 2 (01:57:41):
Yes, yes, you have to be like.

Speaker 3 (01:57:42):
Sorry, the law's the law, and this is uh, you know,
this is my interpretation of it.

Speaker 2 (01:57:48):
And and and Carter understands. Again he's a very smart guy.
What he'd done with the border patrol shows he understands
how the media works. He understands how to advocate for
white supremacy without advocating for white supremacy, right, And so
he knows that it's not just enough to say that
you support gun ownership. And I'm going to continue with

(01:58:09):
a quote from Buckley here. In order for there to
be good guys with guns, there had to be an
opposing force. The NRA and many lawmakers that opposing force
was usually black Now this gets into the aspect of
the gun control push. Again. There's an aspect that's just
based in these assassinations that's not at all based in racism.
And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots.

(01:58:29):
So in nineteen sixty five, the LAPD beats a black
man named Marquette Fry with a baton during a traffic
stop and protests erupt. It becomes an insurrection and spreads
throughout the country. The militaries eventually called in to augment
and overwhelmed LAPD. This is part of what jump starts
the War on Crime, a period of largely racist gun

(01:58:51):
or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator
panic that Biden is famous for. And the NRA huge
supporters of crime bills. Anti gun control support crime bills. Right,
So you see what what they're doing here is you
have some folks, because people are during the Wats riots
using guns to fight the LAPD, and so there are
like and this this is kind of there. There's pushes.

(01:59:13):
This is what starts Some of the momentum for gun
control in California comes from this, right, But more than that,
what the NRA looks at is they see these armed
black people carrying out an uprising, and they're like, well,
we can take away focus on guns and on legislating
guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people, right right,

(01:59:35):
And that's what Harlan Carter realizes, like, well, this is something,
this is the business the NRA needs to be in.
And also like, this is the business of like arming
the police, arguing that, like because that's where you know,
that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts, right,
is the idea that like you need to the police
need to have more and more weapons to deal with
today's like dangerous heavily armed criminals, right yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:59:58):
And also the guns don't kill people this racial group
that I do not, like.

Speaker 2 (02:00:04):
Yes, yes, yes, which is an argument you still see
made today. There's just a fucking Republican congressional candidate who
is arguing that, like America doesn't have a gun violence problem,
black people have a gother something like that, right, Like,
this is an old argument, and Harlan Carter is the
one who first figures out how to make it right. So,
two years after the Watts Riots, the members of the
Black Panther Party start assembling and openly carrying firearms, which

(02:00:28):
is lawful at the time. They would assemble with guns
and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure
that cops did not abuse members of the public. One
could argue this is in some ways closer to an
originalist interpretation of the Second than anything today. Now, their
activism scares the fuck out of white people, and again

(02:00:49):
white people who are not pro gun right right, And
we're gonna we're gonna chat about all of that, and
we're gonna chat about my favorite press and Matt, I know,
your favorite president, Ronald Reagan, star of Bedtime for Bonzo,
Love Him, Star.

Speaker 3 (02:01:06):
The Monkey Movie. Yeah, those McCarthy.

Speaker 2 (02:01:10):
Here. We we owed Ronald Reagan a lot, including the
beginning of the career of my favorite musician, John Hinckley Jr.
Oh so good, dude. You got to get his mixtapes,
like his early stuff better. But he's still really cranking,
cranking out some solid things, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:01:25):
Yeah, his early stuff is.

Speaker 2 (02:01:28):
Yeah, his early stuff. I'm unbelievable, unbelievable. Number one with
a bullet. Here's here's here's our ats. Oh we're back,
and you know, I just wanted to give a special
statement from our sponsors that they completely support the career
of John Hinckley Junior. Yeah, and uh, I don't know, Sophie,

(02:01:53):
how do we we You're shaking your head. Probably shouldn't good.

Speaker 1 (02:01:58):
It's it's just a boring bit.

Speaker 2 (02:02:00):
It's a boring bit. You think it's boring that John
Hinckley Junior is making a comeback to her?

Speaker 3 (02:02:05):
Now, Yeah, he's he's touring and he's it mm hmm.
It's he's got a guitar. And it says this machine
almost kills.

Speaker 2 (02:02:14):
Fascist, close to killing a fascist. This machine shot the
sight of an armored limousine with and it bounced and
managed to penetrate a fascist chest cavity.

Speaker 3 (02:02:28):
This machine loves Jodie Foster and almost kill.

Speaker 2 (02:02:31):
Yeah, this machine heads was very creepy. She did say
she was impressed. She should be. I mean it is impressive, right, yeah, man,
I don't know, mixed bag whatever, it was probably enough
John jokes. Look, he did he did shoot Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 3 (02:02:51):
He did unarguably mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (02:02:54):
Yeah, all right, Evans.

Speaker 2 (02:02:56):
So so you get the Black Panthers start assembling with
guns in public, and this scares the shit out of
both kind of the progressive liberal crowd in California and
conservatives in California, and so all of California gets on
board the idea of banning the open carry of firearms,

(02:03:17):
and the NRA happily endorses the measure. The Black Panthers
assemble with their guns in the Capitol on one of
the last days it would remain legal to do so
it's described in local news as an invasion, even though
again it was people legally protesting in a way that
was not again.

Speaker 3 (02:03:35):
Whatever for the exact rights that the same you know,
like white wackadoos do now.

Speaker 2 (02:03:41):
But again, fucking Harlan Carter totally on board with criminalizing
this as is again Ronald Reagan is the governor at.

Speaker 3 (02:03:48):
The governor of California.

Speaker 2 (02:03:49):
Reagan's totally against. So yeah, some of these guys get
arrested during their protest, and Sacramento as they are handcuffed,
Bobby Seal read from their executive mandate, which protested quote
the racist California legislature which is now considering legislation aimed
at keeping black people disarmed and powerless. The measure passed,
and it laid the groundwork for the extensive gun control

(02:04:10):
that the state of California now enjoys to this day.
Those laws primarily impact poor black people. Rich white folks
can acquire concealed weapon permits very easily. You just have
to be able to have a second home in a
place like San Bernardino, and you can get the license
to carry a concealed gun in the state of California.
They can also purchase to so California. One of the

(02:04:30):
things that they have is a handgun roster, right, so,
the only handguns you can buy in the state of
California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state. However,
you can bring handguns into the state if you move there,
as long as they don't have an illegal you know,
as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than
a ten round capacity, you can bring those into the
state and then you can have them or you can

(02:04:52):
sell them to people through an FFL. And if you
are a police officer, you can buy any kind of
gun you want and you can sell it to whoever
you want. So is a massive industry in California of
police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in
the state of California to buy and less a police
officer sells them to you for twice the normal price. Anyway,
whole bunch of sketchy shit happens.

Speaker 3 (02:05:12):
Yeah, it's a nice side hustle for the cops, you know,
I mean because hey, there was a gig economy back
then too. A lot of us are uber drivers slash
gun salesman now, so I get it.

Speaker 2 (02:05:23):
And it's one of those things. There's a number of
things about, including like waiting periods and stuff in California
that there's a strong argument to be made in favor of.
But this is where a lot of it starts, and
it never entirely gets divorced from this thing of Like again,
you can look at the same thing in the nineteen
thirty four NFA of like, well, no, we want to
we don't want rich people to be affected, right.

Speaker 3 (02:05:46):
Yeah, yeah, anyway, you know they banned what is that,
the Saturday Night specials?

Speaker 2 (02:05:51):
Like any like, oh, we're getting to that. That's where
the handgun That's where the handgun roster starts though, yes,
with the Saturday Night special. Yeah, but we're we'll get
to that, don't worry. So Harlan Carter's support of an
individual right to bear arms was not out of principled
belief that all Americans deserve to defend themselves, or out
of a desire to even check governmental power again, he
militarized the border patrol. Instead, he believed that guns were

(02:06:14):
a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to
ensure that white people maintained the right to do this,
and backing California's open carry ban, he was engaging in
an intelligence strategy. You draw attention away from guns and
you focus on who is carrying them. This is the
origin of the quote guns don't kill people, People don't
kill people argument, But when Harlan made it, the people
were explicitly coded as black. I'm going to quote from

(02:06:36):
Epic magazine now. The same year, American Riflemen published an
editorial titled Who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like
Watts as mob violence. Who then supports the police? Who
then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery
and pillaging. It read with home front safeguards spotty and uncertain.
The armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer. Right.

Speaker 3 (02:06:59):
Nothing is more stable stabilizing for a community than a
bunch of armed white people.

Speaker 2 (02:07:05):
Well, and he's he's very much making the writtenhouse argument here, right,
armed citizen supports the police. The Black panthers are making
what I might argue is more of an originalist interpretation,
which is the armed citizen protects the community from government overreach.
That's the Black panthers. He's saying, the armed citizen aids
the police in enforcing white supremacy, right, right, that's the

(02:07:25):
argument being made by the NRA here.

Speaker 3 (02:07:27):
Yeah, Yeah, it's funny because like you know, obviously, you know,
you do have your you know, right wing insurrectionists, militias and.

Speaker 2 (02:07:37):
Shit like that.

Speaker 3 (02:07:37):
But for the most part, what is being supported is
like arming the suburbs, you know, and anyone who supports
the police should be armed in anyone who in any
ways against it shouldn't be. And that is uh, you know, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:07:53):
It is a problem.

Speaker 3 (02:07:54):
It's a issues.

Speaker 2 (02:07:56):
It's a problem that deserves a more complex series of
solutions then to get suggested in debates over this. But
that's a separate topic. So after RFK and Martin Luther
King Junior are murdered in nineteen sixty eight, Senator Thomas
Dodd reintroduces the Gun Control Act to Congress. This has
been put it through it for it a couple of times.

(02:08:19):
He puts it through again in nineteen sixty eight after
those assassinations, and the Gun Control Act is intended to
ban the interstate sale of guns, ban their sale to children,
to convicted felons, and because of some bigotry mental defectives. Right.
So again, like all of these laws, there's like, Okay,
you don't want people to just be able to like
ship guns through a mail order catalog across the country.

(02:08:42):
I can get on board there, right, Probably shouldn't be
selling them to children or you know, convicted, although I
have issues with like who becomes a felon right, Like
he's got a violent history. Sure that makes sense. You
don't want somebody who's like a convicted rapist buying guns.
And then like and mental defectives, well, how the hell
do you define that?

Speaker 1 (02:08:58):
Now?

Speaker 2 (02:08:59):
Right now, I've got some concerns. But this this law again,
there's a lot that's very reasonable in here, and the
nra rallies against it in huge numbers. Harlan Carter and
his partner in the air and they are not in
they don't have an issue with the mental defective's part, right,
that's not the thing that's a problem to them. This
is the first law that causes the NRA to get

(02:09:20):
like hugely political. And Harlan Carter again, there's this war
still within the NRA that hasn't resolved between the old
Guard and the new Guard. Carter, because he has a
lot of influence in American Rifleman magazine, he enlists like
the people that he's been seeding the NRA with these
New Guard folks to start like coming up with a
series of blistering editorials in American Rifleman magazine that are

(02:09:43):
urging people to write letters to Congress to like this
is the first real concerted lobbying campaign.

Speaker 3 (02:09:48):
And I'm trying to figure out what which part of
it it is? Is it the children part? Is it
the fact that they're like, no children is neutral racially neutral,
So they're like wait wait wait wait wait wait, you
can't do that, or what is it?

Speaker 2 (02:10:01):
A big part of it this is an attempting to
establish like if you're buying a gun, you have to
do it through there has to be like this this
legal process, Like it can't just be a dude has
a gun and I get it right. And that's that's
the big that's the center of the problem, right, is
the idea that the federal government is now going to
be involved inherent like in all legal gun purchases, which

(02:10:23):
is obviously not what the Gun Control Act does. There's
these things called face to face sales in a lot
of states where if you're not a gun dealer, you
can sell a gun to anybody without there being any
kind of a background check. That is still the law
in a lot of the country, but most gun purchases
you have to do you have to fill out what's
called a Form four four seven three, which is and
you have to have like a federal background check. Right,

(02:10:45):
and the government gets involved, right, That's that's the thing
that they're scared about. And again, you can't divorce this
from like the John Birch Society, from all of these
panics about communism, about like, you know, the government getting
increasingly centralized. And I guess you might argue that that's
also closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But anyway, so the NRA, you know, Harlan Carter urges

(02:11:11):
like helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against
the Gun Control Act, and it's not popular with many
of the folks running the NRA at the time, and
again the way they've done things before, Congress would suggest
a bill, the NRA would usually have some issues with it,
but they would like make those issues clear. Then they'd
sit down and like hash something out, as they did
in nineteen thirty four. So the vice president of the NRA,

(02:11:32):
a guy named Franklin Orth, figures, that's what we're going
to do. Right. He doesn't want the organization to take
like a really public political stance because that's kind of
permanently alienated from like one party, right, And that's not
his goal with the NRA. He doesn't want it to
be like a Republican or a democratic thing. Short sighted idiot. Yeah, So,

(02:11:52):
for what would be the last time, because again Orth
and his people are still in charge of the NRA broadly,
the NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach
a compromise on the bill and they you know, they
alter it and what not to be a little bit whatever.
Orth describes it as a law. The sportsmen of America
can live with the fact that anything had been passed

(02:12:13):
at all. Enrages the base that Carter has put together,
and they respond with a flood of hate mail so
voluminous it nearly makes Orth resign. It becomes increasingly clear
that the Old Guard did not speak for the increasingly
radicalized masses of the NRA. And these again, these people
are they're they're frightened of black mobs of the Watts Riots, right,

(02:12:34):
They're also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys
with like fears of Communist infiltration and invasion. This is
all kind of coming together as part of it. And
obviously a lot of the right in this time sees
the Watts Riots is like it must have been the
Soviet Union.

Speaker 3 (02:12:50):
There's is like a synonymous like you know, any kind
of black uprising synonymous with communism at this point.

Speaker 2 (02:12:56):
Yeah, So kind of what you're seeing here is the
radical chunk of the NRA doesn't want, like once to
oppose any like this law under all conditions. Right, there's
no way in which they'll be okay with this, and
they they lose the fight to the Old Guard, who
works with the government to pass this law. But the
New Guard, I guess you New Guard isn't really a turn.

(02:13:18):
But like the Harlan, Carter's faction becomes it starts to
become more dominant as a result of this, because it
pisses off so many people, and because it's so much
easier to electrify people with like threats of the communist
government is coming to like take your guns to stop.
You have to be able to protect your family against
these dangerous black like that. That's easier to rile people

(02:13:39):
up for than we should work with the government to
come to like sensible you know, accommodations, right, that's compromise,
that's not a selling point, right. So because of what
Carter builds here over this fight, membership in the NRA
soares to over a million people for the first time
in the association's history. So this is part of what

(02:13:59):
scares the old guard and makes them silo. Harlan Carter
off to the ISLA, which is the NRA's first registered
lobby and when they make this lobbying group for him
to run, they don't like fund it, so he's going
to have to raise his own money to do anything.
And their hope is that, like, this guy's dangerous, but
we can't kick him out. So if we give him
this lobbying organization but don't give him any money, he's

(02:14:19):
going to have to spend all of his time raising funds,
and he's not going to be able to like cause
any trouble. Sure, this proves to be a bad strategy
because Harlan Carter invins the concept of right wing fund raising.
Damn it. Yes, the first podcaster. Yeah, he's the first
guy to figure out how everything is going to work

(02:14:40):
for right wing fund raising in the future. And he
does it because he figures out he uses computers, right, Like,
that's the thing he figures out is going to be critical.
And I'm going to quote from Aleena Buckley again. Their
computer could print eleven hundred lines per minute, letting Carter's
team produce thousands of letters addressed to members over a
twenty four hour period. It was the latest iteration of
a powerful time direct mail. The medium had reached prominence

(02:15:02):
by the early nineteen seventies, when it was first pioneered
by Richard Vigeri, who, as a campaign worker had copied
down the names and addresses of people who had donated
to Burry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential bid. With that list of
Republicans in their addresses as good as the gold bricks
deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote Vigory had developed
away for conservatives to reach the people most likely to
become coveted single issue voters with the right messaging. Carter

(02:15:24):
hoped to use the tool to drum up support for
ila's legislative work. Vigory himself collaborated with Carter to build
their database. Iola did all of this under the noses
and the shoes of the NRA executives, gaining ground for
a hardened line against gun control. I'm building an organization
capable of public persuasion, not only in Washington, but in
the States, Carter said at the time. We don't know
the best way to reach all the people yet, but

(02:15:45):
of course we shall.

Speaker 3 (02:15:47):
Ugh so, God damn it. He built a mailing list.

Speaker 2 (02:15:51):
He's one of the very first people to do this
and is arguably the most successful of anyone in this
period to do it. And uh, yeah, that's where we're
gonna leave things for today. But first, Matt, you got
a mailing list? You want to you want?

Speaker 3 (02:16:07):
I got a mailing list. Yeah, it's called Instagram. You
can find me there at Matt leap Jokes. Please follow me.
And also, hey, if you like the Sopranos, listen to
pod yourself a gun and is a rewatch podcast where
me and Vince Mancini talk about every episode. We just
wrapped it up and it is the greatest and only

(02:16:29):
sopranos podcast in the world. And I would love for
y'all to check it out and tell you, well.

Speaker 2 (02:16:35):
That's wonderful. I would like to use this time to
get everyone to get involved in my fundamentalist right wing
mailing list NAKA, the National Anti Quartering Association. We're Third
Amendment fundamentalists, Matt oh. Not only do I think that
soldiers shouldn't be quartered in houses, Yeah, I don't think
they should be quartered anywhere. I think soldiers should be

(02:16:58):
kept awake constantly with heavy doses of amphetamines for the
direction of the time that they're serving. No quartering of
soldiers anywhere, not even on military basis. Keep them in
the sea or in the sky on drugs at all times.
That's the KNAKA line. Yeah yeah, find fight us online,
give us your email, send us money and.

Speaker 3 (02:17:18):
Act blue dot com slash anti.

Speaker 2 (02:17:22):
No quartering nowhere, Good times, good times? Whats epstein my
bar virus?

Speaker 1 (02:17:41):
Why was that your intro?

Speaker 4 (02:17:43):
Why we?

Speaker 2 (02:17:45):
As as with all of our podcasts, this show is
sponsored by the epstein bar virus. Have you had mono? No? Well,
maybe try it. Maybe try mono. It's good. It might
cause multiple sclerosis late in life. There's all sorts of
things that money hard to tell, hard to tell.

Speaker 3 (02:18:03):
You will know if you had it, if you ever
take the Epstein bar exam.

Speaker 2 (02:18:07):
That's right, a test you get the rest of the job.
You can do it for free on this podcast if
you sign up for a week of food. We love
the epstein bar virus.

Speaker 1 (02:18:23):
You'd just like to make our poor editor bleep.

Speaker 2 (02:18:26):
Things I do I do.

Speaker 1 (02:18:29):
I'm so sorry for him. Chris.

Speaker 2 (02:18:31):
Well, once upon a time when we still went to
the office, somebody dinged my car. Maybe I'm not one
hundred percent sure, but I've decided it was our editor,
and this is Chris.

Speaker 1 (02:18:41):
It was.

Speaker 2 (02:18:41):
You don't know that, Sophie. You don't know what. He
didn't come in. You don't know that he didn't do it.
You did it?

Speaker 1 (02:18:47):
Do you want to know that?

Speaker 4 (02:18:49):
I've seen his dogs. His dogs are honest. He would
never do that.

Speaker 2 (02:18:53):
Well, it was the it was the Union, Chris. You
know who it was, and I don't know who it was.
It does wrench us back onto topic, which is Harlan
Carter and the birth of the National well not the
birth of but the rebirth of the like this is
it's it's like a racist you know how. Gandalf is
like Gandalf the Gray and then he gets reborn as

(02:19:15):
Gandalf the White after fighting a ball rog. The NRA
gets rebirthed is a white supremacist organization after fighting the
ball rog of the black Panthers assembling legally with guns
to check police power. Yeah, I may have lost the
threat a little. I shall not pass. All right, we

(02:19:37):
figured it out. We got it.

Speaker 3 (02:19:39):
There.

Speaker 2 (02:19:40):
See, people, this is how the sausage gets made so disgustingly.
Now we're talking about the NRA, and particularly we have
this over the Gun Control Act. This this first big
clash between Harlan Carter's people and the Old Guard, and
the Old Guard wins, right because they're still broadly speaking
in control. But but it becomes that like they kind

(02:20:01):
of sack like in the course of winning, it becomes
clear that an awful lot of perhaps most NRA members
are actually not on board with the direction they want.
They are really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards
the Second Amendment and while Harlan Carter was busy building
the bones of a fundraising and lobbying machine that would

(02:20:22):
dominate conservative and really in a lot of ways, American
politics for the next half century. The Old Guard we're
wistfully looking back to the organization's past as a sporting
association and figured maybe we could go back to that
right And so they are the Conservatives, Harlan Carter is
the radical right. Politics kind of leaves a bad taste

(02:20:42):
in these people's mouths, because again, they're all aristocrats, right,
They're all like they're they're kind of like Joe Biden.
They want to have all of their friends right. They
like on both sides of things. They don't want things
to get too political because that gets nasty and it
reduces the number of people who can give you money. So,
in nineteen seventy three, the Old Guard had purchased land

(02:21:03):
in Colorado and they wanted to turn it, initially into
a shooting range. It's pretty normal thing for the NRA
to do, But in nineteen seventy six they decided to
go with a grander plan, the National Rifle Association Outdoor Center.
This was going to be a massive compound dedicated to
classes on like woodcrafting and wilderness you know stuff, and
conservation research. They're supposed to be like scientific research done there,

(02:21:26):
and also other sporting skills, and of course there would
be a shooting range there and people would be able
to hunt on the land. But like guns were not
the primary purpose, right. It was like a whole outdoor
recreation center for the NRA. And this was in line
with they wanted to expand the organization because that's obviously
it's more money and whatnot. But they didn't want to
like hone it on guns entirely. They wanted to be like, well,

(02:21:47):
we could be like the we could be like the
American go to organization for like outdoor you know, sporting
and stuff. So in order to help them kind of
make this shift, right, because this is at this point,
but that is different from the NRA's initial vision, as
is Harlan Carter's vision, right, so they're both trying to
move it in different directions. Right, It's become clear that

(02:22:07):
like this thing the NRA had been isn't going to continue.
And the old Guard has a vision and the new
Guard has another one, and so the old Guard hires
a pr firm, the Orum group to help them drum
up funding to make this facility reality, because they need
tens of millions of dollars to build this thing. It's
a pretty impressive vision, and they hope that they see
Carters built this like massive fundraising arm. He's getting all

(02:22:29):
these people organized on behalf of his Second Amendment absolutism,
and they want this PR firm to help them like
take back like power from from Harlan Carter and like
get people on their side.

Speaker 3 (02:22:41):
Now here's me like, yeah, you know, Second Amendment absolutism
is fun, but what if we built a rec center?

Speaker 2 (02:22:47):
Yeah? What if we had a rec center for rich people?
You can see what this is kind of like how
you've got like those those like old political ghouls in
the Democratic at Party and like the parts of the
Republican Party that turned into Lincoln Project who opposed Trump
with like very slick political ads that did nothing, whereas
Trump just got people angry and that works a lot
better than like anyway, this is a version of that

(02:23:10):
same fight, right, And part of how you could tell
the ORM Group was not going to succeed in their
goals is that their founder, like the guy they're named after,
their founder is this wealthy New York philanthropists whose most
prominent clients before the NRA were Planned parenthood in the NAACP. So, boy,
this this guy maybe doesn't get the base of the NRA,

(02:23:30):
and it's gonna have trouble speaking to.

Speaker 3 (02:23:32):
Them, right, Yeah, that's gonna be a problem.

Speaker 2 (02:23:35):
I might might be a problem. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:23:37):
I mean it's one thing if it's just like a
we have two different branches of conservatism or whatever. But
uh no, these guys are going to be politically and
morally opposed with each other.

Speaker 2 (02:23:48):
It's gonna it's not gonna work out well. It's not
gonna work out well for them. It may have it
may be such a bad idea that literally anyone could
have called it. But the NRA big wigs they bring
this guy on the team and his goal in his
organization's goal is to chart like a safe new course
for the NRA in which they kind of keep out
of politics. And this is in part because like they

(02:24:10):
want to build this new facility. You're not gonna get
thirty million dollars in nineteen seventies money like by by
Hewing do a hard political line, right, so they succeed
in roping in a bunch of big donors from all
across you know, major American business interests. They get Bill Spencer,
who's like the second guy at City Bank. They get
Ezra Taft Benson, who's the highest apostle of the Mormon Church.

(02:24:31):
They get a bunch of oil and gas industry big wigs.
All of them agree to like start putting money into
this project. So in order to like celebrate that they've
found enough rich old dudes to fund this thing, the
NRA sets up a big party on their land in
Colorado for all of these these rich guys, and they
basically host like a multi millionaire summer camp. People are
like camping in their private jets on the land, Like

(02:24:52):
they park their private jets there and like sleep on them,
and then they hunt and fish in the daytime.

Speaker 3 (02:24:56):
I love.

Speaker 2 (02:24:59):
Exactly right. You see again, this just makes it really
easy for Carter to be like, well, these guys don't
have your interest at heart, because they don't. Right, Yeah,
it's not defending Carter to say that, like, these guys
don't give a shit about the average person who might
want to join the NRA, because most people who join
the NRA are not millionaires with private jets, right exactly.
They're missing the entire cultural aspect of it at this point. Yeah,

(02:25:23):
and so this is not going to work out well
for them, right, So there's there's some backlash, and Alina
Buckley describes kind of the Old Guard's vision of the
association's future as quote, one in which shooting accompanied frontier
abundance funded by corporations that had long bankrolled conservative causes.
One in which guns were a reflection of American might,
cowboy like to be sure, but still with a military

(02:25:45):
like formality rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal
power as a threat. So again, the NRA, this is
the attitude. The NRA works with the federal government in
order to ensure this sporting culture and in order to
ensure a degree of military readiness, which is basically back
to their old principles. As opposed to the n RA
is an association that it enables individual Americans to be vigilantes, right, like,

(02:26:08):
which is more what Carter's pushing.

Speaker 3 (02:26:10):
Yeah, yeah, the fun the fun type.

Speaker 2 (02:26:13):
Of the guy who was a vigilante, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:26:16):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:26:17):
So while the Old Guard or hobnobbing with the great
and good Harlan Carter is making a strategic alliance with
a gun industry journalist, a guy named Neil Knox. Now,
Knox had been educated a Christian college in Abilene, Texas,
and the fact that he comes from Abilene is a
red flag just in general. Don't go to Abilene. No,
it's almost as bad as Brady. So anyway, sorry, this

(02:26:45):
is this is just Texas lore. You have to come
from Dallas. You have to ship on every other city
in Texas so that people don't notice how terrible Dallas is.
So I I like to throw a lot of flag
Houston's way in order to ignore that They're food is better.
It's whatever. So he goes to Aplene college, and every

(02:27:05):
soci'll find on Neil Knox will note that he marries
his wife because she was the only girl on campus
who kept a rifle in her dorm room. Well, hey,
you know what, that's love, right, Like he finds his
he finds this person, good for him, he was interested
in safe sex. I mean it is this is like

(02:27:26):
getting into like how different some things are in the country.
But like at the elementary school where I went to,
it was not uncommon for like people, particularly like teachers
to have like guns in their cars in the parking
lot and at the high school, like kids would regularly
have their guns in their cars in the parking lot
during the hunting season and stuff. Well it's like they're
hunting rifles, right, because they're like, ok, this is in

(02:27:47):
like Idabell, Oklahoma, Like it's not uncommon during the season,
Like you go straight from there to like whatever blind
you've got. So again, this is like different, different time.
But also Neil Knox is a very modern kind of
gun guy who is going to help make the NRA
into like the gun culture war organization that it comes.

Speaker 3 (02:28:06):
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like the kind of origin story
of like the first guy horny for guns. That's going
to be normal, Like he's going to normalize being horny.

Speaker 2 (02:28:15):
He's gonna normally as being gun horny. But also with
conspiracy baked into it, right, that's one of the keys. Right,
it's not just like an appreciation for guns, it's an
appreciation for guns within this like conspiratorial milieu that Neil
Knox is like he's a guy on this.

Speaker 3 (02:28:30):
Yes, it's a it's a yeah, he's he's read the
Turner Diaries.

Speaker 2 (02:28:34):
And shit, yeah, I mean he would have been the
kind of guy to help write them. Not that he was,
because that's a different set of guys, although they are
kind of connected by the Goldwater campaign, but that's another story.
As the Dallas Morning News, rights Knox was, Yeah, I'm
just going to quote them walking through this guy's background.
In the mid nineteen sixties, Knox worked as a reporter
and editor with newspapers in Vernon and Wichita Falls, before

(02:28:56):
getting a job as founding editor of Gunweek, a newspaper
covering five arms issues of the day. From his base
in Arizona, the Bearded gun evangelists spent the next forty
years raising against gun control and pinning himself against NRA
leaders he saw as too compromising. In the nineteen sixties
and seventies, the gun industry and the NRA were inclined
towards pragmatism, said Jeff Knox, who's his kid from his
home in Buckeye, Arizona, and willing to make concessions. The

(02:29:18):
elder Knox believed strongly that the Second Amendent was absolute,
and he especially didn't like the idea of registering guns,
which to him, raised the specter of a dictator confiscating
all arms. And subduing the citizenry, Jeff Knox said at
one point in the mid nineteen nineties, Neil Knox even
suggested the assassinations of Kennedy and King might have been
staged to build support for gun control. So Knox is
the start of specifically the strain of the American right

(02:29:41):
and American gun culture that kind of culminates in Alex Jones. Right, yeah, right,
And he's not super big about pushing that, but he
is like the first kind of prominent voice to start
talking about like these these these.

Speaker 3 (02:29:52):
Shootings acts exactly made specifically right for gun control.

Speaker 2 (02:29:56):
That's one of the big things that Neil Knox introduces
into American culture, at least helps to introduce. I'm not
going to claim that he was entirely on his own there,
but he's like the vanguard of that kind of guy
who winds up doing the Sandy Hook conspiracy shit later on.
And it's worth noting though that, Wow, when Knox partners
with Harlan Carter. Again, this is seventy six, seventy seven,

(02:30:18):
so he has not yet started pushing conspiracies outright, but
you can see kind of where he goes is where
he and Carter helped to lead a lot of the
gun culture. And yeah, so these guys the old Guard
see Carter and Knox and see them as like kind

(02:30:39):
of unhinged. But even more than that, they're not primarily
objecting necessarily to their goals as much as the fact
that they're so extreme that it's going to take away funding. Right,
it's going to reduce the nays ability to attract a
lot of people to give them money for this.

Speaker 3 (02:30:54):
It was a Republican establishment during like Xamstern, they were
just like, listen, we agree all Mexicans are rapists, but
you're not gonna get the nomination by saying it. And
it's like wanna bet.

Speaker 2 (02:31:08):
Yeah, yeah, exactly like that. That's kind of like they're arguing,
like these people are too extreme. The NRA will like
die out if their kind takes over. And Harlan Cutter's like, oh, motherfucker,
you want to see how to make the NRA make
a lot of money, I will show you some things.
He's about to. Yeah. So one Friday, November of nineteen
seventy six, the head of the NRA purged eighty staff

(02:31:29):
members loyal to Carter. Right, they fire everybody with like
very little warning because again Carter spent years getting his
Border Patrol guys in there. So they try to get
rid of all these people and what becomes known later
as the Weekend massacre and Harlan it's the only massacre.
Harlan resigns from his position in protest, and Alina Buckley

(02:31:50):
continues Quote and Gunweek, Handloader, and Rifle, all publications Knox
At once edited. Writers began reporting rumors about a shake
up at headquarters. The ORUM Group's report on the Outdoor
Center had been leaked, and gun group leaders around the
country bristled at its language. And this is from the
Orum Group's report. In the public mind, the NRA's current
image is based almost totally on its supposed opposition to

(02:32:10):
any form of gun control. This public image constitutes a
weakness for fundraising. A new piece of again, very bad
at being at their job. By the way, a new
piece of information had gotten out too, via a brocher
sent in the mail to some members. The Executive Committee
was considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs, not far
from Raton, where the NRA could focus more squarely on

(02:32:31):
its sports shooting ties. Regional gun groups began receiving concerned
notes from their members. The Shooter's Committee of Political Education SCOPE,
based in New York, wrote a letter to Rich protesting
the nre's recent board appointees and to let him know
that they would advise their membership to write in Neil Knox,
among several others as board candidate. At the annual meeting
in Cincinnati. In the American Riflement, an unsigned editorial appeared.

(02:32:52):
There have been charges that the National Rifle Association is
being subverted. It read in abandoning its fight against gun control.
So this, uh, and you see here they've built in
their partnership, Knox and Carter have built a very effective
both fundraising and propaganda wing. That is, they're they're building
a moral panic over this right in a very modern way.

(02:33:16):
In a way that is, and it's modern because this
is like the the fucking this is part of like
the blueprint of really everything the right will do in
the future. So for the next couple of weeks, Knox
and Carter call every other NRA lifetime member they can
in brief, like you, when you have an organization like
the NRA, every year you have to have a meeting
and you have to do like voting at that meeting
and stuff, and like there's people who are the actual

(02:33:38):
like board and stuff, but also the lifetime members get
to vote, and so the board is in control unless
you can get like enough of those members to vote
on measures that would like replace the leadership, right, So,
and they didn't. They had never worked, No one had
ever really tried to do this before the fact that
the members get to vote had kind of been like
like stock options voting, where it's like, right, yeah, I

(02:34:00):
mean the random citizens who control twenty percent of the
company's stock get a vote, but like our CEO controls
forty five percent, in his best friend controls twenty, so
it doesn't matter what they say, right right. That was
the thinking. But obviously the NRA isn't like a publicly
traded company. You just each each of these people has
a vote, and if you can whip them all into shape,
you could actually rest control of the organization away from

(02:34:23):
the old guard, which is what knocks and Carters start
planning to do. Now, there's a lot of politicking that
goes on here. You can read about it in detail
in Alena Buckley's article. One thing I think that's worth
noting is that the whole event has something of an
early Trumpy vibe. The folks carter lines up to back
their plan to take over the NRA saw the Old
Guard as out of touch aristocrats, which they were. They

(02:34:44):
framed themselves as like Paul Revere types. Right, they're founding fathers, right,
they're fighting a revolution against an unjust like aristocracy. Yeah,
one person who was probable.

Speaker 3 (02:34:55):
But they're all doing the cosplay now. It's already begins
with the don't tread on me flags and the three
pointed you know, fucking hats and yes.

Speaker 2 (02:35:03):
And one person who was present later recalled some members
were angry enough to bring rope, tar and feathers to Cincinnati.

Speaker 3 (02:35:11):
Yeah's are obsession when it's like, oh, the tea party,
tarn feathering. It's just like they just have an obsession
with this like patriotic forms of like you know, like
old style LARPing.

Speaker 2 (02:35:24):
It's just just the same fucking God. I mean this
gets into a broader issue that actually is is present
in different forms everywhere, which is that like everyone has
their types of violence that are like good and traditional
and okay, and they're types of violence that are so

(02:35:46):
black people breaking a bunch of windows during a riot
or like you know, flipping a cop car and lighting
and on fire. That is not okay, that's horrifying. That's
that's evil violence. You know, end of some caring and
feathering a guy trying to like raise taxes, like literally
melting a man's skin off in order to stop him

(02:36:08):
from like getting the taxes that will pay for a road.
That's traditional, right, Yeah, that's and that's yeah, it's allowed.
You know.

Speaker 3 (02:36:14):
It's uh, I mean burning their skin off and then
the feathers.

Speaker 2 (02:36:19):
It's just so they look like a chicken.

Speaker 3 (02:36:21):
Just the most horrifying joke that you can possibly think of.

Speaker 2 (02:36:26):
Yeah, there was.

Speaker 3 (02:36:27):
Like that John Adams HBO series with Paul Giamatti. Oh yeah, yeah,
they had like a tarring and feathering in it, and
it was like the first time I was like, oh yeah,
that's incredibly violent.

Speaker 2 (02:36:38):
Really really violent.

Speaker 3 (02:36:39):
Actually tatar I thought it was just like, hey, we're
gonna make you look like a funny chicken, like a
pie in the face. I put it on the same
level as a pine a face.

Speaker 2 (02:36:47):
But it's no, it's not. It's pretty bad. No, And
it's like, I mean, everyone, there's a degree to which
this is very common across the political spectrum, because one
that you get like whenever people suggests like, well, the
cops should confiscate this or the cops should like do that,
it's like, well, okay, what happens when police confiscate things?
Like what does that look like? Violence wise? You know, yes,

(02:37:10):
And it's it's because like I don't know, everyone's got
it's it's a. It's a it's I mean, it's a
common political tactic. Right to frame the violence you want
to do or you want to have the government do
as not violence because it's being done by the government.
It's like, you know, when people do a panic about
like drug dealers sneaking fentanyl into things, and their solution

(02:37:31):
to that is have the DEA raid more people, It's like,
well the DEA kill people too. Yeah, yeah, completely, I
don't know, this is just what people do anyway. Uh So,
knox h takes point on the actual day of the convention.
He's the one who's actually whipping votes at the NRA
convention to propose a series of bylaw changes. Using the

(02:37:53):
support based Carter had built, he gets them to vote
in a defense of the second Amendment to the NRA's
Mission for the first time, right, So he's like, this
is the first time they actually add because the like
they have a mission statement whatever is an organization. The
first thing they do is they add like Second Amendment,
you know, like we are an advocating for like the
you know, this interpretation of the Second Amendment to that.

(02:38:14):
The next thing they do is they block the sale
of the NRA headquarters in DC, and they block the
development of the outdoor center, so they put it into
this plan and then uh Carter or Knox brings up
a guy named Bob Kukla, who's one of Carter's people
who's still in the NRA. When Carter resigns in protest,
Cucla takes over the lobbying arm and he's apparently I

(02:38:37):
guess the Old Guard had thought he was trustworthy, but
he secretly records one of their managing committee meetings and
they play this in front of the crowd, and in
the tape you can hear the current head of the
NRA and the other members of the Old Guard criticizing
Cucla for quote going to war every time someone mentions
gun control. So it pulled up Project Veritas on he
does he Veritas again. These guys are really Bill being

(02:39:00):
the playbook that's going to be used everywhere, well outside
of guns. Goddamn. So following this, Knox and his voters
stripped the board and Managing Committee of power and basically,
again this is there. You can go into a lot
more detail about how they do this, all legislative lea.
By the end of things, the old guard are no
longer in charge of the NRA and Harlan Carter is
the new executive vice president. Damn. At three yeah, yeah,

(02:39:23):
they do it. They do it fucking street style. And
at three point thirty am, Carter takes to the stage
to give his first speech to his newly conquered NRA.
You're America's greatest people, my friends. Don't ever forget that
you are. You have afforded the NRA this wonderful, historically
important reaction of yours to the way the association has
been going, to the way you want it to be,
to the way it ought to be. And if I

(02:39:45):
have anything to do with it, you are going to
win because you are the NRA. Fuck. So he did it.
He did it, very trumpy speech.

Speaker 3 (02:39:55):
Yeah yeah, I did is Trump's speech, and he took
over the NRA, and I imagine now, uh, people are
going to start falling in line.

Speaker 2 (02:40:04):
That's uh yeah, well the NRA is going to make
a lot of people fall in line, and we're going
to talk about what they do. But first, you know
who loves to carry out coups. Who our sponsors, who
backed a series of coups in Indonesia in order to
gain access to the island that you can go to

(02:40:26):
hunt kids on.

Speaker 3 (02:40:27):
Yeah, that's what they're known for.

Speaker 2 (02:40:29):
And hey, if you're not if you're not into guns,
understands you can use bows. You can use an addle addle. Yeah.
Ninja stars. Ninja stars for sure, looks they can't stop you.

Speaker 3 (02:40:40):
Yeah, a bow staff, literally any weapon that ninja turtles us.

Speaker 2 (02:40:44):
Yeah. The government of Indonesia has no control over this island,
so it's all on. Oh we're back. So immediately after
carrying out his harlan, Carter sets to work remaking the
NRA in his own image. One of his first hires

(02:41:04):
is a guy you may have heard of, Matt Wayne LaPier.
Ah yeah, yeah, good old Yeah, there we go, w
Big Wayne.

Speaker 3 (02:41:12):
Yeah, big le Pierre Pee Peppi la pew pew PuO pew.

Speaker 2 (02:41:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:41:18):
I don't exists, not French, but you know.

Speaker 2 (02:41:20):
It's I mean, probably somewhere along them.

Speaker 3 (02:41:22):
Somewhere along the line. The point is, Pew is a
very good.

Speaker 2 (02:41:26):
And everyone that was a good joke, you should be proud.
So by nineteen eighty six, Lapierre is running the NRA's
entire lobbying arm. Right, so he kind of takes the
job that Carter had had basically, but by the by
the eighties, he has turned it into because again it
was I mean, and Carter started this process, but it
becomes the most the best funded and most effective lobbying
organization in DC, right in the entire country. Again insane.

(02:41:50):
Carter draws kind of the blueprints, LaPier carries them out
though there's no other editorial.

Speaker 3 (02:41:56):
Someday you know exists that you know, it has a
lobbying arm that changed into just like a you know
what I mean, it was like this was a sportsman
lobby that it wasn't even a lobby, and now it
is the most powerful lobbying.

Speaker 2 (02:42:11):
And again there's like critiques about well were primarily interested
in like preserving rich people's right to ownership, but they
were broadly speaking saw that like, okay, when a law
affecting guns is proposed, we'll sit down and we'll let
them know this is how we think this will affect
our members. And these are some changes. And you know,
again it's like broadly speaking, like like what you would
kind of want to see in a democracy that's supposed

(02:42:31):
to function the way ours does as opposed to like
we are going to become so key to right wing
fundraising that if somebody proposes any kind of law meant
at curbing gun crime, we will destroy them forever, right, Yeah,
which is necessary, Yeah, by any means necessary, and to

(02:42:51):
an extent that, like it doesn't matter how like reasonable
the restriction might be. Like even outside of stuff like
an assault weapons band, Like if you're going to propose
like universal background checks, which most gun owners support, right,
we're gonna come for your ass, you know, unless you're
the Black Panthers, but whatever you're like. So, another nineteen

(02:43:13):
seventy seven higher brought onto the NRA at the same
time as Wayne Lapierre, is a guy named Robert Dowlett.
Now Dowblet becomes the NRA's general counsel, and it's his
job to begin wrangling together legal scholars to push hard
the idea of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
So between nineteen sixty nineteen seventy, there's only three law
review articles endorsing an individualist interpretation. Right, there are some

(02:43:36):
like state level rovings, you could argue kind of endorse
one earlier, but there's never been like a national, like
a Supreme Court ruling on the matter one way or
the other. And it hadn't really people had not even
talked about it in that way until the sixties. So
three law review articles written between nineteen sixty and nineteen
seventy endorsing that interpretation. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty nine,
the period in which Dowlett is the NRA's General Council,

(02:43:58):
there are twenty seven law review articles, three of which
are authored by Dowblit himself, and his work would start
to bear fruit. Again. There's some like lower level rulings,
but it makes the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment
makes its way to the Supreme Court for the first
time in two thousand and one. Some people will say, like,
point to DC as Heller, that's not the first time
it happens in two thousand and one, and the case

(02:44:19):
in question has its origins in a nineteen ninety seven
criminal case in which a Texas woman divorced her husband
and filed for a protective order against him because he
had threatened to murder the man she cheated on him
with the next year, while he's got this protective order,
which he's not supposed to have guns because he has
the protective order against him. Right during a meeting with
his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he pulls

(02:44:41):
a gun during an argument and points it at them,
so he gets in again. If you're a rational gun owner,
you a thing like, well, this is exactly the kind
of person who shouldn't have access to a fucking gun.
He gets indicted for possession of a firearm, will subject
to a court order, and he files for dismissal, arguing
that this had unfairly infringed on his sex an Amendment right.
And the ruling what it actually rules is kind of complicated.

(02:45:04):
The ruling is not entirely in favor of this guy, Emmerson.
It's Emerson versus the United States. But in the ruling,
the Supreme Court rules that the Second describes the Second
Amendment as an individual right right. So this is the
first time that happens at a federal level. And then
this ruling in two thousand is reinforced by two thousand
and eight DC versus Heller, which is like the big
ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban

(02:45:26):
like categories of weapons and whatever it's based on like
a DC I think handgun ban. And then in twenty
ten the Second Amendment is finally incorporated in McDonald v. Chicago.
But this is all you know, orchestrated by Robert Dowlett,
right starting in the seventies. And one thing you have
to say about the man is he earned his salary. Right,
that's a significant change in US Jewish prudence that he

(02:45:50):
kind of painstakingly is the architect of pushing. It's probably
worth noting here that he was a murderer, So I'm
I'm going a quote from the Boston Review here. Robert J.
Dowlitt was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yoakum, the mother
of his then girlfriend, in nineteen sixty three. Dalitt also
robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop. Like

(02:46:12):
Carter dal Liitt was seventeen years old when he pulled
the trigger. He confessed to the shootings and served six
years in prison before his conviction was overturned on a technicality.
The crimes were not made public until twenty fourteen. God damn, no,
wonder it's like this is it's also he and s
origin story over, He and Carter and Kyle Rittenhouse all

(02:46:33):
seventeen when they fucking kill people in like these, I
guess I would maybe you wouldn't call what dowlit does
vigilante violence. He's really just murdering people. No, that just
sounds like straight up murderer. Yeah, he just murders a
woman and then shoots a pawn shop owner and a robbery,
So I guess you would say he's not a vigil
ande he's just straight up an armed criminal. That is
fucking insane.

Speaker 3 (02:46:54):
And this is the guy who's made it easier for
fucking everyone in the world in the United States.

Speaker 2 (02:47:00):
Sick. He's he's the NRA's general counsel. So at one
point I assume he went to law school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
because again he gets off like like a like Carter does. Right,
he gets off and then he goes to college, and
I mean, yea, his career.

Speaker 3 (02:47:14):
Good for them.

Speaker 2 (02:47:15):
I guess nice.

Speaker 3 (02:47:16):
You know, we live in the land of opportunity like that,
I believe firmly that people should be able to get
a second chance after making a mistake, especially when they're
you know, uh not a legal adult.

Speaker 2 (02:47:26):
Certain I believe in certain second chances for certain kinds
of mistakes. I think perhaps if you murder your girlfriend's
mom and then shoot a pawn shop owner during a
robbery an avenue that we ought to close to you
is representing the National Rifle Association, that's right. Maybe that's
not okay?

Speaker 3 (02:47:44):
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like, listen, that guy
explicitly does gun crimes.

Speaker 2 (02:47:49):
Yeah, for fun. This should not be his job.

Speaker 3 (02:47:53):
I want to know what happens with the with the
the relationship.

Speaker 2 (02:47:59):
Actually after the murder of the mother. It must have
been hard while she was his girlfriend, So I don't
think they wind up staying together. Well damn yeah. It's like,
you know, with Harlan Carter. I think a seventeen year
old who, in a crime of racism, commits a murder,
there should be some way for like that person to
be rehabilitated. But perhaps they should never be allowed to

(02:48:21):
be a border patrol officer.

Speaker 3 (02:48:22):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, there's like little things
like not giving them I don't know, authority over other
people or requiring them to use lethful force as of
the job.

Speaker 2 (02:48:36):
And maybe the guy who murders his girlfriend's mom shouldn't
help to be an architect of federal gun policy. I
mean it just perhaps i'm that guy.

Speaker 3 (02:48:47):
It sounds rational, but you know what, I don't know.
If that's yeah, I think it'll work out fine.

Speaker 2 (02:48:54):
I'm not even arguing against an individualist interpretation of the
Second Amendment because again, I don't really believe that the
Constitution is something that we should treat as a religious document.
But not this guy, not this guy making that case.
If you're got to make that case, maybe Ross Doublets
shouldn't be the man doing it. Seems like not no,

(02:49:14):
So that's cool. And the Boston Review article I found
does a good job of pointing out that the NRAs
embrace of this specific legal interpretation does not occur in
a vacuum. While doubtlets A lawyers are making their case right,
so while they're and again, this is a very it's
a pain. It's forty years, it's a painstaking process of
well not I guess twenty ish twenty three something like that.

(02:49:36):
But while they're making their case, the NRA is carrying
out mass mailing campaign, some of the most extensive and
political history, and they're publishing magazines that reach millions of people.
They're paying for ads and all of these different gun
press magazines. They're having paid spokesmen show up and talk
radio stations, right. And part of what they're doing they're
obviously they're arguing for this interpretation of the Second Amendment,

(02:49:58):
but they're also pushing cultural change what some scholars have
termed the tactical turn in US gun culture again, even
to the extent that like, oh, I mean, one thing
that liberals get wrong is like it is not new
for civilians to own on a widespread scale military grade weapons,
among other things. One of the most popular guns in

(02:50:19):
civilian hands that the NRA before its political turn sold
to people was the M one Garrant, which was the
US service rifle of World War Two. Right, But what
is really new is that it's is this kind of
paramilitary turn for gun owners because people were not buying
in one gharans primarily to like play act as soldiers.

(02:50:39):
They were buying them because the garrant is a perfectly
good hunting rifle. Right, it is thirty out to six,
which is a very effective hunting round. And those were cheap, right,
so it was a good weapon to buy. So people
are not dressing up as soldiers with their in one
gharans primarily, right, that kind of stuff, the tactical turn
in US gun culture occurs. But because it occurs alongside

(02:51:02):
the militarization of the police and these kind of Hollywood
valorization of the militarization of police. So there's a lot
that's going on here, right, and including like broadly speaking,
the kind of like you could you also should tie
in what Hollywood's partnership with the Defense Department, right, and
the increasing degree to which like military tactical culture becomes

(02:51:23):
like popularized. But the NRA recognizes, like this is there's
a lot of promise in this number one. You can
get more people involved, you can sell more shit to people,
which means you can have more companies funding the NRA
who are not selling much as guns, but all this
tactical gear. I'm going to read a quote again from
that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but it

(02:51:43):
really ties all of this together. Quote, the story of
this tactical development in US gun culture is complex. I
focus in this essay on a few particularly crucial components.
The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized
since the nineteen seventies and diffused deeper into the interior
of the country. This has blurred the boundary between domestic
and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers

(02:52:04):
into nearly every US town, and turned militarized border security
into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization. This has also corresponded
with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly
worsened by the War on Terror, but which historian Elizabeth
Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson
administration's War on crime, which ports the NRA backs, like

(02:52:25):
the nationalization of border security, it turned the nation's city
streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement. Second, individuals once
arming themselves for self defense, often out of racial fears
or a perceived threat to their masculinity, are now frequently
claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and
freedom itself. The NRA has played an outsized role in
this vigilante reframing by promuligating the myth that gun ownership

(02:52:48):
has always been about an individual constitutional right and oriented
towards a nativist version of self defense. This vigilantism operates
in conjunction with extra legal violence of law enforcement officers,
and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty. More
dangerous than any military grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom
of others is equal to one's own, and views any
attempt to support such a quality as tyranny. More importantly,

(02:53:11):
this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power
to take life in defense not of law, but of
particular social and racial orders. There are now twenty five
federal agencies with special tactical units. In May of June
of twenty twenty alone, sixteen deployed their tactical teams to
Black Lives Matter protests, including the Border Patrol, the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, the

(02:53:32):
US Marshals, the US Coast Guard. In every one of
the FBI's fifty six field offices, and at the local
law enforcement level, special weapons and Tactics SWAT units are
now a staple of daily policing. Their very ordinariness is
to a testament to how dramatically local policing has changed
since nineteen sixty nine, when a swat unit was first
used to raise the Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles,

(02:53:53):
pioneering what was at the time an almost unprecedented domestic
use of military force. In Carter's victory speech, he declared,
beginning in this place, in this hour, this period in
NRA history is finished. The post nineteen seventy seven, NRA
was decidedly partisan, took an absolute position against gun regulation,
and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a social identity and

(02:54:14):
authoritarian political ideology among its members. God damn, yeah, God,
it all out like that.

Speaker 3 (02:54:22):
Yeah, yeah, all of that in a row and concisely done.

Speaker 2 (02:54:27):
Yeah, fucked up. Yeah, And it's again. I I there.
Some of our listenership will agree and some will disagree.
I'm a believer fundamentally that I don't like the idea
of the state having a monopoly on violence, and I
certainly don't like the idea of the police being able
to own things that I cannot own. Sure, and there's

(02:54:51):
there's an argument to be made, if you're again care
about being an originalist, that is close to the original
interpretation of the Second Amendment, right, what part of what by?
And they're claiming to be originalists, they're claiming to be
that the that the initial original interpretation was individualists. But
what they're doing that for is not any idea of

(02:55:12):
community self defense or a fear that the federal government
will accumulate too much power, although it's often framed that way.
Fundamentally it is about allowing regular white citizens to emulate
the military and the police and to act as vigilantes
in their stead right. That is where the NRA turns,

(02:55:35):
and that is that is the tactical turn. Right. It's
not that there's nothing evil about owning body armour, which
people can do for defense, perfectly reasonable defensive purposes. There's
nothing like but but what what they're what they're doing
is pushing this idea of like, not just the miliity,
not just that like society ought to be militarized, which

(02:55:56):
you get in every kind of argument that like what
we need to do is harden the schools, we need
to add more cops. But it's this idea that the
individual white person should militarize themselves in order to in
order to protect this kind of racial hierarchy, right, supremacy,
And this is and this is the thing. This is

(02:56:17):
what I wish folks who are supportive of more gun
control would more often do, is tie in all of
this to what has happened to the police, because they
cannot be extricated, right, Yeah, And that's I think Avaldi
made that perfectly clear, that like, these are two sides
of the problem, and and the NRA is a huge

(02:56:39):
part of how we get there both how we get
these cops that look indistinguishable from like marines in downtown Fallusia.
Not that I think the Marines necessarily should have been
in downtown Fallusiah, but you you have these guys. It's
this There's this thing called the weapons effect, right, and
which is a psychological phenomenon that's noted that like the

(02:56:59):
presence of weapons in an area, visible weapons can increase
the willingness of people to use violence, right that there's
like something about that that heightens it. And that's happening here.
And part of why that happens is just the fact
that America has so many goddamn guns, right, right. But
another part of that is the fact that everywhere you

(02:57:21):
go you see fucking cops in a way that like,
you don't see cops dressed as armed as heavily as
our cops in fucking war zones a lot of the time, right,
Like it's it's anyway whatever, No, that's what Ireland Carter builds,
you know.

Speaker 3 (02:57:36):
Yeah, no, I I hear exactly what you're saying, and
I I agree to an extent with with what you mean.
I feel like, in general, my problem with liberals is
that they tend to kind of like put guns in
the same category, Like they moralize guns the way they

(02:57:58):
moralize like the right it will moralize drugs, yes, and
kind of this idea that like, you know, if we
were to just make all the guns illegal, then you know,
this would solve the problem and whatnot. And that's not
to say that it there isn't it wouldn't be helped
if you had some serious regulation. But this like moralization

(02:58:21):
of it like misses the entire point of why exactly
the uh why the people who want guns and have
those guns have them? You know, it's like, yeah, you're
the people you're speaking to, are not it's people speaking
to the choir. Liberals often just speak to themselves and
go like, uh, isn't it crazy that you know, all
these people have so many guns, and it's like, yeah, well,

(02:58:44):
while you're talking amongst yourselves, all these guys have created
an entire family filled with guns.

Speaker 2 (02:58:50):
And it's like looking at these right wing like militias
that people are rightly like concerned to see militias marching
around US streets like threatening people, and but also failing
to see the thing that is, like, well, every one
of those guys has friends who are cops, and like
a significant percentage of them are cops, which is why
a whole bunch of cops were president January sixth, And
that's a huge chunk of it. And like, you can't

(02:59:11):
you can't divorce your desire to reduce the number of
guns in American culture from the need to reduce the
militarization of the police, because they are both inextricably tied
to the problem, which is the constant gun violence in
this country. Has has two points that need to be
really like hit on. It's not just civilian gun ownership,

(02:59:31):
it's also the way in which the state uses and
legitimates armed force, going back to even the earliest days
where it's like yeah, in Texas, your right to carry
guns was heavily restricted, but if you were a white
vigilante who carried guns to do racist violence, you would
often get off right and though you'd broken the law,
right like Harlan Carter, you know. Anyway, under Harlan Carter,

(02:59:52):
the NRA's membership triples from one million to more than
three million. It would reach five million members underwayn Lapierre. Obviously,
the NRA going to get into this a lot, but
it's like well past its prime at this point for
a variety of reasons, of primarily rampant corruption. There's a
pretty good podcast about like what the fuck happened there?

Speaker 3 (03:00:10):
But yeah, it's to Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos
podcast sect.

Speaker 2 (03:00:14):
I'm sorry. So the NRA tops out at about five
million members, but as of twenty seventeen, about fourteen million
Americans claimed some sort of affinity for the organization, And
I forget who did the poll, but whatever. And one
of the things that's interesting here is that like that's
like a lot of people to get around anything, but
that's also not a lot of people. Is a voting

(03:00:34):
block compared to the entirety of the United States, right, yeah, yeah,
And so looking at that, you have to kind of
marvel at the success of the LDRA in making their
ideas a cornerstone of right wing politics, because I was
just thinking myself, that seems like a low number. It's right,
because again, if you look at actually polling of Republicans
on gun control issues, they are a lot less hardliners

(03:00:56):
on guns. Then you would guess by how the party acts.
And it's because the party's ability to fund elections for
decades was heavily based on who could get the NRA's approval, right, yeah,
god exactly. In twenty sixteen, they spent more than thirty
million dollars on Donald Trump's campaign. And this again people
often miss this, Like my parents are were hardcore right wingers, right,

(03:01:18):
So it was my whole family. I had like two
relatives who owned guns, like my grandpa and one of
my uncles, right, And I did go shooting as a kid,
but my parents didn't have any. My aunt and uncle
didn't have any. There were not guns in the house
of my family in Texas, you know, because like it's
actually not as integral to conservatism as a as a

(03:01:38):
at least I mean, this is again changed because the
culture wars have accelerated so like, yes, is that there's
less conservatives like the ones I grew up with when
they were right there were today, but the NRA. It
wasn't that everyone on the right was in lockstep. It's
that the elected leaders were scared to cross them because
that's where the fucking money came from. Right now, of course,
that's why they were able to read will power so effectively.

(03:01:59):
One of them most peculiar but also influential aspects of
Harlan's time and power was his repeated and intense defense
of cheap shitty handguns. And this gets us to the
Saturday Night Special. Here we go, Saturday Night Special. In brief, like,
there's a type of handgun that was very cheap in
the seventies up through in the eighties and stuff called

(03:02:20):
a Saturday It was nicknamed the Saturday Night Special. It's
like a five or six shot usually thirty eight caliber handgun.
These are still guns like this are still used in
violent crime way more often than like the guns that
are politicized, like, cheap handguns in general are the primary
guns that are used in violent gun crime. Although what

(03:02:42):
is a cheap shitty handgun is different now because actually
six shot revolvers are kind of pricey these days. It's
supposed to like a high point or something. But yeah,
so this is a cheap, shitty handgun, and these are
particularly low quality handguns. They were not like well made.
As a general rule, they always work. They did not
always we are yet that's that we're building to that, Okay,

(03:03:05):
umping the gun. So you have this massive crime rate
raised and starts in the seventies and really like peaks
in the early nineties. And again a lot of Joe
Biden's career is based off of this like violent crime
panic that starts in this period. And one of the
first like legislative like tsunamis that forms around the crime

(03:03:25):
surge is around this fear of the Saturday Night Special.
And one of the reasons why people are so scared
of the Saturday Night Special is that it is a
gun that black people can afford, right, right, It is
a cheap handgun, and so it is affordable for those folks.
Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban this Saturday Night Special,

(03:03:48):
although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor
people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly on the grounds that they
were shitty and broke easily. And this is one of
the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from the from
NRA on therecord dot org quote. Speaking in opposition to
opposition to legislation that aimed to ban Saturday Night Specials
and other inexpensively produced handguns, Carter stated in a nineteen

(03:04:09):
seventy two speech before the inter Raised Executive Committee, I
can produce actual cases that the cheap handgun that snaps
in a police officer's face instead of firing has saved many,
many lives. And the question arises, what are we trying
to do upgrade the quality of handguns in the hands
of our criminals. God, that's an amazing logical argument. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:04:28):
I mean, it's like he has a point, a really
fucked up evil point. And it's also he's getting straight
to i mean, the crux of it here, which is
like he's lucky to be in a situation in which
he can claim like, oh, actually, I don't want to
ban this because this makes me feel safer to know
that they have, you know, the poor their quality of

(03:04:51):
handguns is.

Speaker 2 (03:04:52):
Yeah, it's way worse. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a
lot that's messy on this whole thing. But it is
very funny, and it's going to d up getting a
lot of people killed, not necessarily, not just from violence.
A lot of people are going to die because of
Carter's defensive terrible handguns and where it leads. But before
we get into that, you know who else loves shitty
handguns that break in their owner's hands and they, I'm sorry,

(03:05:21):
Sophie absolutely loves it. Motto is we want you to
be armed, and we want you to never know if
that gun's going to fire or not. Yeah, completely inexplicable.
We want a weapon that you cannot trust under any circumstances,
that's guarantee. Remove drop safeties from handguns, let them free.

Speaker 3 (03:05:42):
You know I enjoy this because I am watching Sophie
just shaking her head every time you do this bit.

Speaker 2 (03:05:50):
She hates it. She You're so angry.

Speaker 1 (03:05:53):
Do you know why I hate it?

Speaker 2 (03:05:55):
Why is that, Sophie?

Speaker 1 (03:05:56):
Because there's like fifty Reddit threads of people being wait,
what is this?

Speaker 2 (03:06:01):
I've never read about who has a child hunting?

Speaker 4 (03:06:05):
And I just it just feels like betrayal to our listeners.

Speaker 1 (03:06:09):
I love most of my heart.

Speaker 2 (03:06:12):
I like fucking with them. Yeah, I feel the same
way towards them that I do with my cat when
I like, I like pick it up and I like
toss it in the air, and it hates it. But
it can't. It can't. It has to let me like
squeeze it and wrap it in a blanket. And it's
called rent. It's called paying rent. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker.

Speaker 3 (03:06:30):
Yeah, you got to be adorable for me. Sometimes your
fear makes me smile. I feel the same way about
our piggies.

Speaker 2 (03:06:37):
You know.

Speaker 3 (03:06:38):
Everyone, it's like you feed the slot to the piggies
and you let them wink.

Speaker 2 (03:06:42):
But it's you're the farmer. Remember that's right, you're the farmer. Well,
I'm the farmer.

Speaker 3 (03:06:47):
You are, yes, exactly.

Speaker 4 (03:06:49):
Remember, don't do that to the goats. I don't think
it'll work out. Work out.

Speaker 2 (03:06:52):
Well, it's really fun to fuck with the goats if
you pick them up, like they don't know what to
do with their little legs and they just like kick
in the air and you can hug them all.

Speaker 3 (03:07:02):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (03:07:03):
They go except for my boy goat. He's the ram.
He loves it. He fucking as soon as he sees
you will run up because he wants to get cuddled. Damned.
His sister hates it. But yeah, anyway, we're back. So

(03:07:24):
before we get onto the consequences of Harlan Carter's embrace
of terrible, unsafe firearms, let's talk about his defense of
the virtues of arming small children with derringers. Now, Matt,
he's not a gun guy. The derringer is a tiny,
ultraconcealable one or two shot pistol. They were originally made
for Riverbroat gamblers, as documented in the documentary Maffick.

Speaker 3 (03:07:46):
I'm pretty sure I know exactly right.

Speaker 2 (03:07:48):
Yeah, they're like little little bitty like yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:07:52):
Well, hot girl guns. This is the way I think
of it.

Speaker 2 (03:07:55):
Here's something he said to Congress. There was a little
boy and it was real cold, and he had his
hands in his overcoat. He had one of these little
old arangers, and four bushy guys ambled up in an
arrogant manner. He stopped them, and three of them were
very nice and decent, and one of them said, what
would you do if I told you I had a
pistol and I was going to kill you? And he says,
I would kill you, you son of a bunch. These

(03:08:15):
little guns have a very noble and important purpose and
we should make our position clear.

Speaker 3 (03:08:19):
God, that is the first recorded incident of like someone
being like my five year old just said, Daddy, why
does Trump do the bad thing? And I couldn't explain.
It's like a totally fake story that did nothing.

Speaker 2 (03:08:33):
There's absolutely no way this happened. But also none of
it makes it Like, what does it mean by their bushy?
What does that mean? He has to be being racist here?

Speaker 4 (03:08:42):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (03:08:43):
Yeah, for sure. And I don't know how which race going?
Like were they hacidic Jews?

Speaker 2 (03:08:49):
Yeah? What does this mean? What does bushy mean? I
don't know what. It could be Italians. It would be
funny if, like the real story is that that the
Jeb and George Bush who were at this point like
it was it was all of the Bush brothers, like, yeah,
trying to mug children. Yeah, you know Bushy like the
former head of the CIA. Yeah, I think he was current,

(03:09:11):
probably would have been a current when this was. I
guess it's like the late seventies. Yeah, so obviously that's
probably a lie, but it's very Again, Harlan Carter is
he is the kind of guy who is not just
like I think, UH, children should be able to engage
in shooting sports. But like I think children should be
routinely carrying handguns on their person. Yeah, because why guys, Yeah, exactly,

(03:09:36):
that is out of its damn mind.

Speaker 3 (03:09:39):
Just just oh, man, a bushy man could strike at
any point.

Speaker 2 (03:09:44):
Yeah, you never know when a bushy dude's gonna come in.
You gotta be you have to always have a derringer
in your five year old's pocket. It's the seventies.

Speaker 3 (03:09:52):
Maybe he's talking about like a tom like a like
a lot of chest hair type. Yeah, you know, like
he disco ste shows up.

Speaker 2 (03:10:00):
Yeah, a bunch of disco guys come out and start
threatening children. So anyway, back to the point. Under Harlan
and his successors, the NRA acted repeatedly to defend the
rights of gun manufacturers to build dangerously shoddy firearms like
this we talk a lot about, rightly, so the things
they do, like legislatively to defend the gun industry, But

(03:10:21):
this is often left out because one of the things
is its primary victim is gun owners.

Speaker 3 (03:10:26):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:10:27):
I'm going to quote here from a write up in Bloomberg.
In nineteen seventy two, Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Four years earlier, Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus
Crime Control in Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects
of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to
give this agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingle,

(03:10:47):
sorry a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an
A plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In
nineteen seventy five. He did it again when a colleague
introduced a bill making a second run at giving the
CPSC firearms authority. We put in there an express prohibition
against them getting their nose into the business of regulating
firearms and ammunition, Dnkle said in debate in Congress. That
second bill was crushed three hundred and thirty nine to

(03:11:09):
eighty and the issue has never been seriously considered again.
And it's one of those like this is again perfectly
even if you're like a gun fundamentalist, you should want
there to be oversight of guns that don't work or explode,
and like ammunition that doesn't work, like right right. That

(03:11:29):
seems to make that shouldn't be a political issue.

Speaker 3 (03:11:32):
It's they'd be into that, yeah, And the only explanation
for you not being into it is like, oh good,
they can't get the good guns. I mean, like, like
poor poor people, black people getting the defective guns seems
to be the only excuse here.

Speaker 2 (03:11:51):
I mean, well, I mean their specific excuse is that
like this will this will enable potentially the government to
regulate what kind of ammo's illegal and ban types of
like whatever, right, which they do anyway, like that shit
happens like whatever, it's dumb. It's dumb that this happens
this way. M it is worth noting that, Yeah, it's
like a blue dog Democrat who is the one who

(03:12:13):
like blocks this shit. So the end result is that
when gun manufacturers produce firearms that, for example, fire for
no reason and kill their owners, it is impossible for
the government to order them to recall those weapons. Not
even the BATFE, which supposedly regulates firearms, can force a
gun maker to take broken guns off the market. And

(03:12:34):
I'm going to quote again from that Bloomberg article, and
this is actually how the article opens. Thomas bud Brown
makes his way out the back door and stops a
few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm pointing
at something. It's where he found his boys slumped against
the cold back wall of the house around seven to
fifteen am on the last day of twenty sixteen. Bleeding
Out Brown is telling the story now about how he

(03:12:56):
was sitting in his chair in the living room when
he heard the shot. His son, Jared twenty eight it
had just picked up Bud's Taurus PT one forty five
millennium pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting
near their house in Griffin, Georgia with his best friend
Tyler Haney. Bud figure Jared had fired at something for
the fun of it, like he did sometimes. I was
thinking I'd better go out there and tell him to
be careful or something, Bud fifty four says, his voice

(03:13:17):
trailing off. But what he'd heard was the pistol going
off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a forty five
caliber slug through Jared's femoral artery. Oh shit, my leg,
my leg, Jared yelled loud enough for his father to hear.
Haney twenty six rushed to the house in a panic,
pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol
was still in its holster, tucked into Jared's waistband. So

(03:13:41):
any Bud, so he can't do nothing, absolutely nothing. Bud
is one of We have no idea how many Americans
died due to defective Turis guns. The company did eventually
issue a recall on something like a million weapons that
were potentially defective, but they didn't have to run ads
anywhere to inform people of the recall. They were not
required to reach out to their customers, to reach out
to gun stores, to take any action at all to

(03:14:02):
warn people that they'd sold guns that could fire for
no reason. An unknown number of those weapons are still
in people's gun saves, closets and holsters today. That's fucking crazy.

Speaker 3 (03:14:14):
Just like I don't even know that justificate it's just
guns don't kill people.

Speaker 2 (03:14:20):
Yeah, it's this face kills people. The the NRA they are,
there's this like social like uh culture war component of
how they do what they're doing. But they fundamentally represent
the gun industry in any industry that can stop there
from being a way to sue them if their products
don't work. Course will do it if they can, you know.

Speaker 3 (03:14:40):
Yeah, it's just it's just it's yeah, it's so insane
to get to a point where it's so clearly a
manufacturing lobby mixed in with a culture war issue that
just creates death everywhere.

Speaker 2 (03:14:55):
Yeah, it's and it's I mean again for among other things,
don't buy tortoise guns for a practical purpose. But in
the nineteen nineties, more than forty US cities filed lawsuits
against gun manufacturers, spurred on by a surge and violent crime.
This was the super Predator era. Now, I can't speak

(03:15:15):
as to the legal merits of the individual cases of
these cities against these gun manufacturers, but the response the
NRA shows was interesting. They used their lobbying arm to
launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho
and Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida to propose a piece
of legislation that would end all pending litigation against gun
companies and prevent any future litigation. It took a while

(03:15:38):
to actually get the law, which is the PLCIA, written,
and by the time it was introduced, George W. Bush
was on his second term. In October two thousand and five,
he signed the PLCAA and a law which blocked lawsuits
from seeking damages on gun industry companies for unlawful use
of a firearm right. So if the company could be
sued for like breaking the law in some way, but

(03:16:01):
they cannot be sued for what people do with their weapons.
And I have some conflicting feelings on some of these lawsuits.
But one of the things that people will point out
is that the advertising of a lot of these companies
like leads to the like and this is a big thing,
like the Sandy Hook lawsuit, right, One of the big issues.
One of the big like points that used to justify

(03:16:23):
like the suing against the Bushmaster who made the gun
that was used in Sandy Hook, was this ad campaign
they'd just done where it was like, consider your Man
card reissued, and they would like send you a man
card with an AR fifteen and it's it's again, there's
a again. I this is like a complicated thing to
get into entirely, but there's a debate to be had.

(03:16:44):
Into my mind, the area in which it's kind of
most relevant to have this debate is on to what
extent does the way the gun industry tries to sell
weapons to people complicit in when those weapons are used
for violence. So, for example, when Daniel Defense launches an
ad where you have like a Bible verse and a
small child holding an air of fifteen. To what extent

(03:17:08):
does that help to lead to what extent does that
help make gun culture in the United States more violent? Right?
And this is not really what the lawsuits are, Like
the Uvaldi families aren't suing Daniel Defense or that they're
attempting to right now. This is all happening at the
moment on those lines. But to my mind, that's kind
of the most That's the thing that like, I think
there's a point on sure.

Speaker 3 (03:17:28):
I mean it's like, I mean, the way cigarettes were
marketed changed, you know, yes, were regulated like crazy and
has actually had an effect on the amount of smokers.

Speaker 2 (03:17:41):
Yeah, and so anyway, again I have some complicated thoughts
on like suing companies for the unlawful use of their products,
but there's like, anyway, the PLCIA kind of ended that
for a long time. I think this is starting to
be challenged, But for fifteens or seventeen years or whatever,
made any kind of like debate meaningless because it was
just prohibited. And it was prohibited. Again. This is the

(03:18:04):
NRA spent a lot of money on George W. Bush's campaigns.

Speaker 3 (03:18:08):
You know, I am wondering if the like initially the
Hatachi Magic wand actually was a back massager. And if
you could sue sue a company because it gave your
wife an orgasm.

Speaker 2 (03:18:23):
Well, like again there, I think people do need to
consider when we talk about, like to what extent should
a gun manufacturer be liable for something about a mass shooting?
There are some unsettling implications to some of that. It's
not a super cut, it's not as cut and dry
as certain other things are.

Speaker 3 (03:18:39):
And I'm not saying it's a slippery slope necessarily, but
I am saying that I thought it was a back massager. Yeah,
and now it's better at making my wife calm than
I am.

Speaker 2 (03:18:50):
And that's always has been.

Speaker 3 (03:18:52):
Yeah, And well, I mean it seems kind of unfair
to me to have not known that.

Speaker 2 (03:18:57):
What's really I mean, people are bringing up people into
or have brought up the fact that, like you're limited
to six dildos I think in the state of Texas,
is that right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, there's like literal laws
on how many. I mean, I don't think they've ever
been in. What has been enforced though, is that like
anyone you know who works at a sex shop in
Texas it has to be like is like prepared This
is a little little bit less the case now. But

(03:19:19):
when I had friends in the early two thousands, like
you get training on like what to do if you
get raided because you're not allowed to sell sex toys
they had. They were always called cake toppers, right, like
the dildos and shit were like cake toppers or personal
massagers or whatever. Yeah, but you couldn't, like you couldn't say, like,
these are for fucking, in the same way that like
you could sell a bong, but you had to call
it a water pipe for tobacco, like if you use

(03:19:41):
the ball word bong and a Texas. Again, head shops
were always kind of inconsistent about how much they were
paranoid about this. But like you, you could get asked
to leave for calling something a bong in a in
a head right.

Speaker 3 (03:19:53):
But I mean, what do you what do you call
the you know that you know that silicon butt that
has both the pussy and the giant. That's a sex ass.
That's a sex ass. Yeah, so but you I mean,
I'm just saying, how do you market that around?

Speaker 2 (03:20:08):
I don't I don't think they really had sex ass,
although I know people bought fucking what do you call them?
The flesh lights. So there must have been some, like
I'm guessing they probably they must have been advertised as
like a novelty, right, It's like this is a for
joking around at a bachelorette partner you put it. They're like,
it's dumb. All Texas's whole legal system is stupid.

Speaker 3 (03:20:29):
Sh that's insane. That's a lot of fun though. I mean,
you know, but people get around it like I didn't
have access to a big silicon, you know, uh but
vagina and so I fucked a big mouth billy bass.

Speaker 2 (03:20:43):
Yeah, who didn't fuck a big mouth billy bass? Yeah,
I'm universal experience of people in the early two thousands.

Speaker 3 (03:20:50):
Yeah, I'm sorry. I just like eventually I just was like,
we're going to start talking about com We're gonna start.

Speaker 2 (03:20:56):
Talking about Look, you know, the same year that George W.
Bush signs the PLCAA and the law, that's the year
that many millions of young American boys encountered a billy
Largemouth bass. For the fact's right. Yeah, and thanks to
the NRA's lobbying, the Billy Bass Company couldn't be suited
for taking the rigidity of all those boys.

Speaker 3 (03:21:18):
Take me to your virginity. All right, I'm done.

Speaker 2 (03:21:22):
All right. The last thing I want to talk about here,
and this is maybe the most unsettling thing the NRA
has done, is that they have made it impossible not
just to like, not only do they fight like any
regulation that might potentially impact positively America's gun violence problem
or America's gun death problem, they've made it impossible to

(03:21:43):
research how gun violence works and like the extent to
which different policies affect it. In nineteen ninety three, the
New England Journal of Medicine published an article that show
showing that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide
in the home. Now, this is a study you'll see
cited a great deal, and it's often used to argue
that firearms in the home make people less safe. This

(03:22:04):
study was widely reported on it at the time, and
it scared the shit out of the NRA. So the
NRA campaigned to eliminate the organization that had funded the study,
the CDC's National Center for Energy Injury Prevention. Congress included
language in the nineteen ninety six Omnibus Appropriations Bill to
insist that quote none of the funds made available for
injury prevention and control with the Centers for Disease Control

(03:22:25):
and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.
Now you may note they weren't doing that with that study.
It was a study that you could use to argue
gun control, supported gun control, but it was just a
study on like the homicide risk and how that changes
when you have a gun in the home, right, right, Like,
the CDC was not like lobbying specifically, they were carrying
out a study. But the NRAMA studied, yeah, how people

(03:22:49):
get hurt in the home, And the NRA argued that
was inherently like that's political and should be illegal. Yeah,
and then they make that happen, right Yeah, Like, Congress
goes through with this shit. This is later referred to
as the Dickie Amendment because of some dude named Dickie.
Now under extensive lobbying pressure, Congress also removed two point
six million dollars from the CDC's budget, as that was

(03:23:10):
the amount they had invested in firearm injury research the
year before. So they cut all of the money out
of the CDC's budget that had been used to research
firearm industry. And again, whatever you think about gun control,
there are four hundred million of these things in the
fucking country. There should be research into how they affect people. Right,
It just seems prudent. It seems prudent, Just seems prudent. Yeah,
if fucking if auto companies were blocking research into how

(03:23:34):
car accidents work, right, like, you would say that's nuts,
you know, because it would be And it's not even
It's like, it's not even our companies tried to do that. Yeah, right,
it's I don't fault them for trying. It's the same
way with their you know, that's what they're going to do.
That's what they're going to do.

Speaker 3 (03:23:50):
They're going to try to do that, and you know,
it's a fucked up capitalist system we're in.

Speaker 2 (03:23:56):
If you have the money, you can try.

Speaker 3 (03:23:57):
The crazy thing is a success rate of the NRA
in these in these things that are completely like common
sense ideas.

Speaker 2 (03:24:09):
There's there's a wide variety of arguments about how should
you interpret this, this the you know, the findings to
studies like this, to what extent should they inform policy?
All that kind of stuff. But at the end of
the day, I think if you're saying you shouldn't be
studying this kind of stuff at all, you were the
bad guy here. You're definitely bad, but defin you're a
bad guy.

Speaker 3 (03:24:28):
The very least coming in bad faith. But yeah, you
are one doing bad guys stuff.

Speaker 2 (03:24:35):
Yeah, and should be stopped. And federal funding for research
into gun violence and gun related injuries dried up after that.
Since nineteen ninety six, the CDC's funding for firearm injury
prevention has fallen ninety six percent, and similar attempts to
fund research have met with further attacks and the ability
to study any of these stuff, most recently in twenty twelve.

(03:24:55):
And yeah, so anyway, that's broadly speaking the story our
buddy Neil Knox. I should give you a little bit
of context on how our heroes turned out. Yeah, they doing.
Neil Knox wound up being way too radical for even
Harlan Carter's NRA. He was forced out of the organization
in nineteen eighty two after being overshadowed by the rise
of Wayne Lapierre. I think LaPier kind of helps maneuver

(03:25:15):
him out. He dies of colon cancer in two thousand
and five. He outlived Carter by a fair amount. Harlan
died not surprisingly of lung cancer in nineteen ninety one,
so the tobacco industry did us all a solid on
this one. Yay.

Speaker 3 (03:25:28):
Occasionally it works out.

Speaker 2 (03:25:30):
One of his final acts in this world was to
hand over control of the NRA to Wayne LaPier. Oh shit,
that's the that's the Harlan Carter in the NRA. Everybody,
God damn. There's a pretty good song about him called
Raymond Cassiano by the Drive By Truckers, which is good. Well,
that guy fucking he sucks. It sucks that he he

(03:25:53):
sucks that he's dead too.

Speaker 3 (03:25:55):
I feel like one of the big reasons why I'm
just like, I don't, you know, I'm not for like, hey,
look to make guns illegal or whatnot, is because I
feel like guns might end up being very useful in
stopping all these ridiculous, you know, fucking NRA lobbies.

Speaker 2 (03:26:12):
You know. Yeah, And this is I have tried. I
think I've done a very good job of like not
inserting a bunch of my own specific opinions on gun control,
because at the end of the day, there is a
history of here and it deserves to be like talked about, sure,
without a tremendous amount of editorializing. But yeah, I feel
similarly like my attitudes on what gun control should be

(03:26:36):
around are impacted by like Number one, I don't think
only rich people should have guns. I don't like the
idea of a thousand percent XIZ tax on AR fifteen
so that only wealthy people can afford them.

Speaker 3 (03:26:47):
Right, And I don't like the idea that like, at
this point, at least culturally, the only people who are
interested in having guns are people who are interested in
upholding white supremacy.

Speaker 2 (03:26:58):
And that is deliberately designed. And I mean one of
the things that has happened in the last couple of years,
this is really accelerated since twenty twenty is the demographics
of people buying firearms have changed wildly, particularly first time
gun buyers, and it's gotten a lot more left laning
and a lot less white. And you know, there's a
variety of personally, okay, because people do ask about this

(03:27:19):
because I talk about guns sometimes in terms of what
I think are the number one the laws that you
could most easily pass without the Supreme Court guaranteed shutting
them down. And I think a federal assault weapons ban
the Supreme Court will rule against, right like, it will
go to the Supreme Court and they will rule against it.
In their current construction outside of like talking about should
we stack the Supreme Court whatever, like, by it's not

(03:27:41):
doing that. So stuff that I think would not number
one would not necessary. Like obviously anything as a crapshoot
with the Supreme Court, So literally anything could get turned
down by the Yeah, because they're about to rule on
a concealed handgun carry bill anyway. But the I think,
I think it's perfectly reasonable and is also there is

(03:28:02):
legal precedent for raising the age at which someone has
to be in order to buy a semi automatic firearm. Certainly,
eighteen year olds are not full adults, and our current
gun legislation recognizes that by banning them from buying handguns.
Although that's also not entirely accurate because you can still
buy handguns through like face to face sales or have
them given to you by a parent or whatever. There's

(03:28:22):
always every there's always like ways around this kind of stuff,
but it is it's been established since I think nineteen
eighty six that the federal government regulates STOP does not
want people under twenty one buying handguns. So it's the
kind of thing where if you were to pass a
law extending that to semi automatic rifles. You'd have a

(03:28:43):
stronger argument in front of the Supreme Court if it
came to the Supreme Court in order to defend that
cut piece of gun control legislation. And both of our
most recent mass shootings as of this recording, there may
have been another one drive there. We're eighteen year olds
who bought a gun and immediately carried. So I do
think just on a moral level, there's a case to
be made that, yeah, this might fuck save some lives,
and I think the best thing you could do you
would probably not have to call it a red flag

(03:29:05):
law because that term has been politicized, but a law
that would allow you to take guns and stop people
from buying guns if they have a history of domestic
violence and violence towards women and making violent threats of
mass shootings, which seems like a no brainer. Yeah, again,
like everything's been politicized to a stupid degree. But the
Buffalo shooter was had been doing like threatening shootings and

(03:29:25):
threatening women, and like had was on law enforcements, radar
should have been it should be possible to do something there, right.

Speaker 3 (03:29:31):
You'd figure and yeah, I feel like that there's so
many like common sense, like law is that you're yeah,
that don't exist, that you're surprised every time you find
out they don't exist.

Speaker 2 (03:29:44):
I do think. I think one of the things where
gun control advocates make a mistake is focusing on universal
background checks. Not because I don't think it's a good
idea to have background checks for buying a gun, but
because nearly all of the guns bought and even used
in massacres were by people who passed a background check,
including the buffalo of all theyse shooters. They both like

(03:30:04):
universal background checks, they passed those, So like that that's
not as much of the solution as I think something
like an effective kind of Again, I think you would
need a better term than red flag law. But also
maybe I don't know the right's going to culture or
whatever you try to do.

Speaker 3 (03:30:20):
Right, but everything's poison pilled no matter what. You can
use any fucking euphemistic.

Speaker 2 (03:30:26):
Nice If you hit your wife and kids, you shouldn't
have a gun bill. But of course one of the
issues with that is that you're going to disarm like
forty percent of the police.

Speaker 3 (03:30:34):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:30:37):
I could talk about like what I think would be
a good idea at the end of the day, Like
I don't know, like what I what actually is going
to pass. That's a totally different fucking conversation.

Speaker 3 (03:30:45):
And yeah, no, I don't. I don't know what the
answer is. I know that one thing that I don't
think the answer is is is this like mutually assured
destruction thing where we're all armed at all times and
that's the society. I also know the answer isn't every
like liberal and leftists being like, oh, well, I'm you know,

(03:31:11):
I'm going to trust that the government and the police
will keep me safe from this the bad men, and
so I'm like, it's it's hard to know.

Speaker 2 (03:31:20):
It's hard to know what to do. I mean, this
is a very difficult issue because again people a lot
of people say, no, it's simple, just like ban the guns,
but it's like, well, how are you going to do that?
There is legal precedent, there is a Supreme Court, and
also there's a police force that's not going to disarm
certain people. Like, this is not as simple as you're
making it out to be. Right, you can say it
is the guns, and yeah, of course access to guns

(03:31:42):
is like why a lot of this is happening, But
also like that doesn't that's not the end of like
the complexity of the issue because there are four hundred
million of these fucking things in the country right now
and a whole culture built up around being ready to
immediately use them against right now gay and trans people,
particularly in the fucking crosshairs. And again this is like,

(03:32:05):
so I don't know. I think fundamentally, like I I
argue a lot about gun control with people. I think
the folks who want to see more of it are
coming from a fundamentally natural and noble position, which is
looking at repeating massacres and going like, we've got to
be able to do something about this, Like there's gotta
be some way we can do about this shit.

Speaker 3 (03:32:23):
No, I completely understand it, I mean, and yeah, and
I feel I feel the same way. It's like, there's
certainly got to be a fucking solution to this, that is,
this is a systemic solution, that this is.

Speaker 2 (03:32:34):
Like an an acceptable state of affairs. But like so
many of the problems we have, like how to fix it,
and like how to fix it without having a shooting
war over it, and like who does the fixing? And
like I think, like one of the things that is
frustrating to me is that like it is it is
just a big fundraising issue in a lot of ways,

(03:32:57):
and in ways that I think are kind of like
unhelpful and actually solving the problem. And I again, nobody
knows what to do with this because it's it's so
much like no one has ever had anything like this happen, right.
People bring up the Dunblane massacre, the Port Arthur massacre.

(03:33:19):
They bring out like you know, when Australia confiscated all
those guns, like that was two hundred thousand guns, Like
there are twenty million ar fifteens in the United States.
There has never been a society this heavily armed, or
a society that has turned the random mass killing of
civilians into a meme. Yeah, both of those things have
happened here, and they've happened alongside like the militarization of

(03:33:41):
an increasingly unaccountable, violent police force that wants dictatorial control
of American cities, and all of this stuff is pretty
pretty unique historically, So yeah, I don't know how we
fix it.

Speaker 3 (03:33:54):
It feels so American and unique that it feels like, yeah,
if I knew the answer to it, I would I
would say it, But yeah, I really do not.

Speaker 2 (03:34:07):
I mean, and again it's like one of those I
don't vote. I'm not a gun issue voter. I barely
a voter, right like, I do vote, but I don't
believe in it. I don't believe it's going to do
any vote as I vote as like a well, what
if I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, and it's best to
vote and vote in the people who say you got
to vote. If I'm wrong and they're right, then at

(03:34:29):
least I put in the vote, and I tried that thing.
I don't think it's going to work. I don't think
they're going to solve any of these problems. I think
other things are going to be happening in the future
that are not what we recognize as part of American politics,
but are going to become the way things get decided
in this country. And I think they're going to be
uglier and weirder than our parents were used to. But

(03:34:51):
I do like voting is like a well, okay, but
maybe I'm wrong about that. It's the same reason I
have a four oh one k right right right, right,
right right. Maybe there will be an economy in thirty
years so I'll get to retire. For the same reason
I own half of a bitcoin.

Speaker 4 (03:35:03):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:35:05):
I'm wrong, Yeah, you know, I get it. Yeah you
got just in case what if? Yeah, I just half
a one. That's all I could afford.

Speaker 3 (03:35:16):
But the point is is, yeah, I I I just
want to say I vote, and I also am cynical,
and I have the exact same I have the exact
same pessimism that you do. But you know, the real
the only optimism that I have is there's going to

(03:35:36):
be some someone smart who does something good. I don't
want to miss the bus.

Speaker 2 (03:35:43):
I don't want to miss you know, I mean, and
I tend to think we should all maybe if if
people are more committed to like getting out there and
taking personal responsibility, not necessarily not as a militia, but
in a in a in a in a responsibility for believing.
I think sometimes because we just had a mass shooting

(03:36:04):
in Portland that was stopped by an armed member of
the community, shooting at a protest for a police violence
victim that was stopped by an armed member of the community.
But I think community defense is everyone should have an eyefact.
Right downside's to owning a gun, No downside to having
a tourniquet and some gauze on you and some chess

(03:36:24):
seals and knowing how to use them. Zero downside could
be useful in a car accident. You can have a
fucking piece of rebar fall off of a building construction
and pail somebody and maybe you'd get to save their
life with an IFAC. Million times that could be useful.
Have an ifact right organized in your community, to provide
houseless people with you know, defense against sweeps, to provide
people who are low income with eviction defense, to stock

(03:36:46):
food pantries, like all of that stuff is uh. You
can wear you can wear cool uniforms if you want.
While you do, you can get a plate carrier. You
can put patches on it, you know.

Speaker 3 (03:36:56):
Can I wear tactical sunglasses?

Speaker 2 (03:36:58):
Yeah? Why the hell not? Yeah, be the be the
be the be the tactile sunglass guy. Yeah whatever, make
it make it cool, just help your help. Your black
panthers look cool as ship when they were like serving
food to kids, you know, yeah, they had they had swag.
You know. Yeah, they wore berets and they made berets
look bad ass.

Speaker 3 (03:37:17):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:37:17):
Yeah, look as how and protect your community. And yeah,
yeah it.

Speaker 3 (03:37:23):
Doesn't mean you need to own a gun. But maybe
a little more community involvement might be helpful and.

Speaker 2 (03:37:28):
All variety of things that you can you can do.

Speaker 3 (03:37:31):
Yeah, abolishing the police.

Speaker 2 (03:37:35):
That is a good idea. Anyway, Matt got.

Speaker 3 (03:37:41):
Oh man, I've had a great time. And if you
love uh, the bastards and getting behind them, you'll love u.
The podcast pot yourself a gun a sobranos Rewatch podcast
that me and my friend Vince Mancini do. We just
finish the entire series so you can re listen and

(03:38:02):
rewatch the whole thing and it's great. You'll love it.
And uh yeah, you look forward to us doing our
the Wire podcast very soon. It's going to be great
and uh, you know, speaking about cops being bastards. It's
a whole show about it.

Speaker 2 (03:38:19):
So you'll you'll love it.

Speaker 3 (03:38:22):
And I promise you that, you know, well, we're not gonna,
you know, be it's two white guys talking about the Wire.

Speaker 2 (03:38:30):
We're not gonna it's you know, so just don't worry.
It's good.

Speaker 3 (03:38:34):
It'll be good, you'll, I promise. I don't know how
to say that.

Speaker 2 (03:38:37):
Well, I'm excited to listen to it.

Speaker 3 (03:38:39):
We don't you know, we're leftists. Anyways, I'm excited follow
me at matt leab jokes on Instagram.

Speaker 2 (03:38:47):
Follow Matt Lib home. You have a Twitter track, I
do it's.

Speaker 3 (03:38:53):
It's it's at matt lib and you can follow me
there too. That's fine, but no jokes, no jokes on
that one. That's definitely serious, that one. You know, I
just post whatever today. In fact, I posted something from
a doomsday dried food ad that I saw good and
it was really weird. It was like a Mac versus
PC commercial, but they made the doomsday the like you know,

(03:39:18):
dried food guy. You know, he was talking about his product,
and then the other guy who was selling the fake
Patriot food was very much an anti Semitic meme.

Speaker 2 (03:39:29):
Oh god, oh yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:39:31):
They made him very clearly a Jew and he's it
opened hello fellow Patriots.

Speaker 2 (03:39:38):
And I was like, holy fun.

Speaker 3 (03:39:40):
They went for it, and uh yeah. So I posted
a little bit of that and you love.

Speaker 2 (03:39:47):
To see it.

Speaker 3 (03:39:48):
You love to see just straight up anti semitism on
the This was an Instagram ad, by the way, but hey,
it was on.

Speaker 2 (03:40:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:40:00):
Anyways, follow me on all the things and.

Speaker 2 (03:40:04):
Learned to can. Look it's cheaper than food buckets, yes,
learn to can and it works way better. It does
work very well. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:40:16):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

Speaker 1 (03:40:27):
Get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 (03:40:28):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every.

Speaker 1 (03:40:32):
Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 4 (03:40:34):
Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
the Bastards

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