Part Three: Harlon Carter: the Man Who Militarized the Cops and the NRA

Robert is joined again by Matt Lieb for the final part of our series on Harlon Carter and the NRA.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's Epstein my bar virus? Why was that your intro?
Because Sylvie, As as with all of our podcasts, this
show is sponsored by the Epstein bar virus. But have
you had mono? No? Well, maybe try it, Maybe try
motto hell yeah, it's good. It might cause multiple sclerosis

(00:26):
later in life. There's all sorts of things that you
will know if you had it. If you ever take
the Epstein bar exam. That's a test. You get the
rest of the joke. You can do it for free
on this podcast if you sign up for a week
of food. We love the Epstein bar virus. You'd just

(00:50):
like to make our poor editor bleep things I do
I do. It's fine. I'm so sorry for him. Chris. Well,
once upon a time when we still went to the office,
somebody dinged my car. Maybe I'm not sure, but I've
decided it was our editor and Chris it was. You
don't know that, Sophie. You don't know he didn't come in.

(01:11):
You don't know that he didn't do it unless you
did it. That. I've seen his dogs. His dogs are honest.
He would never do that. Well, it was the it
was the on blast, 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

(01:33):
the rebirth of the like this is it's it's like
a racist you know how Gandolf is like Gandolf the
Gray and then he gets reborn as Gandolf the White
after fighting a ball rock. The n r A gets
rebirthed as a white supremacist organization after fighting the ball
rog of the Black Panthers assembling legally with guns to
check police power. Yeah, it may have lost the threat

(01:56):
a little, you shall not. All right, we figured it out.
We got it, We got ye. There see, people, this
is how the sausage gets made. So now we're talking
about the n r A, and particularly we have this
over the Gun Control Act. This this first big clash

(02:18):
between Harlan Carter's people and the Old Guard Um and
the Old Guard wins right because they're still broadly speaking,
in control. But it becomes like they kind of sack
like in the course of winning. It becomes clear that
an awful lot of perhaps most r A members are
actually not on board with the direction they want, are
really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards the Second Amendment. UM.

(02:43):
And while Harlan Carter was busy building the bones of
a fundraising and lobbying machine that would dominate conservative and
really in a lot of ways, American politics for the
next half century, the Old Guard were wistfully looking back
to the organization's past as a sporting association and and
figured maybe we could go back to that right um.
And so they are the conservatives, Harlan Carter is the

(03:05):
radical right. Um. Politics kind of leaves a bad taste
in these people's mouths um, because again, they're all aristocrats,
right um. 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

(03:25):
you money. So in nineteen seventy three, the Old Guard
had purchased land in Colorado and they wanted to turn
it initially into a shooting range, pretty normal thing for
the n r A to do, um. 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

(03:46):
and wilderness you know stuff, and conservation research. They're supposed
to be the the scientific research done there, 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,
was like a whole outdoor recreation center for the n
r A. And this was in line with they wanted
to expand the organization because that's obviously there's more money

(04:08):
and whatnot. But they didn't want to like hone it
on guns, and they wanted to be like, well, we
could be like the we could be like the the
American go to organization for like outdoor you know, sporting
and stuff. Um. So, in order to help them kind
of make this shift, right because this is at this point,
but that is different from the n r a's initial vision,
as is Harlan Carter's vision, right, so they're both trying

(04:30):
to move it in different directions. Right, It's become clear
that like this thing the n r A 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 Aorum 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 um and they

(04:52):
hope that they they see Carter's built this like massive
fundraising arm. He's getting all 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 Harland Carter and like people on their side now, like, yeah,
you know, Second Amendment absolutism is fun, but what if
we built a center? Yeah, what if we had a

(05:14):
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 in
the 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,

(05:35):
this is a version of that same fight, right, And
part of how you could tell the Oram 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 who's most prominent clients before the
n r A were Planned parenthood in the Double A CP.
So this these this guy maybe doesn't get the base

(05:55):
of the n r A and it's gonna have trouble
speaking to them, right, Yeah, that's gonna be a problem.
It might be a problem. Yeah. I mean, it's one
thing if it's just like, hey, we have two different
branches of conservatism or whatever. But no, these guys are
going to be politically and morally opposed with each other.
It's not gonna gonna work out. Well, it's not gonna

(06:17):
work out well for them. It may have it may
be such a bad idea that literally anyone could have
called it um. But the n r A big wigs
they bring this guy on the team UM, and his
goal in his organization's goals to chart like a safe
new course for the n r A in which they
kind of keep out of politics. UM. And this is
in part because like they want to build this new facility,

(06:37):
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 Binson, who's the highest
apostle of the Mormon Church. They get a bunch of

(06:57):
oil and gas industry big wigs, all of whom have
agreed 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 n r A
sets up a big party on their land in Colorado
for all of these these rich guys. Um, and they
basically host like a multimillionaire summer camp. People are like
camping in their private jets on the land, Like they

(07:18):
park their private jets there and like sleep on them,
and then they hunt and fish in the daytime. Exactly right.
You see again, Car, this this just makes it really
easy for Carter to be like, well, these guys don't
know if you're interested, heart, because they don't write like, Um,
it's not defending Carter to say that, like these guys
don't give a shit about the average person who might

(07:39):
want to join the n r A, because most people
who join the n r A are not millionaires with
private jets exactly. They're missing the entire cultural aspect of
it at this point. Yeah, and and so this is
not going to work out well for them. Um right, Uh,
so there's there's some backlash. Um. And Elina Buckley describes
kind of the old guards vision of the association's future

(07:59):
is 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 like formality,
rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal power as
a threat. So again, the n r A, this is
the attitude the n RA works with the federal government

(08:21):
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
r A is an association that enables individual Americans to
be vigilantees right like, which is more what Carter's pushing Yeah,
the fun the fun type Carter, the guy who was
a vigilante, you know. Yeah. So while the old Guard

(08:45):
are hob nobbing with the great and good Harlan Carter
is making a strategic alliance with a gun industry journalist,
guy named Neil Knox. Now, Knox had been educated at
Christian College in Abilene, Texas. Um, and the fact that
he comes from Abilene is a red flag. Um in general,
don't go to Abilene. Um No, it's almost as bad
as Brady. So Um anyway, sorry, Abel, anything about this

(09:11):
is this is just Texas. Lare you have to come
from as I do. You have to shoot on every
other city in Texas so that people don't notice how
terrible Dallas is. Um. So I like to throw a
lot of flak Houston's way in order to or that
their food is better. Um, it's whatever. So he goes
to Abilene College, and every social find on Neil Knox

(09:32):
will note that he marries his wife because she was
the only girl on campus who kept a rifle in
her dorm room. Um, 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, right, I mean it
is this is like getting into like how different some

(09:54):
things are in the country. But like at the elementary
school where I went to, it was not uncommon for like, um,
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
this is in like Idabelle, Oklahoma, Like it's not uncommon

(10:15):
during the season, like you go straight from there to
like whatever blind you've got. Um. So again, this is
like different, different time, um. But also Neil Knox is
a very modern kind of gun guy who is going
to help make the n r A into like the
gun culture war organization that it comes. Yea, it sounds
like the kind of origin story of like the first

(10:35):
guy horny for guns. That's gonna be normal, Like he's
gonna normalize being horny. He's gonna normally is 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 Nil Knox is like, he's a guy

(10:56):
on this. Yes, it's a it's a yeah, he's he's
read the Turner Diary. Ship. Yeah, I mean he he
would have been the kind of guy to help write them. Um,
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. Um. 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,

(11:18):
knock Knox worked as a reporter and editor with newspapers
in Vernon and Which Atall Falls, before getting a job
as founding editor of Gun Week, a newspaper covering firearms
issues of the day. From his base in Arizona. The
Bearded gun evangelists spent the next forty years railing against
gun control and pitting himself against n r A leaders
he saw as too compromising. In the nineteen sixties and seventies,
the gun industry in the n r A were inclined

(11:38):
towards pragmatism, said Jeff Knox, who's his kid from his
home in Buckeye Arizona and willing to make concessions. The
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 citizen rate. Jeff Knox said
at one point in the mid nineteen nineties, Neil Knox
even suggested the assassinations of Kennedy and King might have

(12:00):
been staged to build support for gun control. So Knox
is the start of, specifically the strain of the American
right in American gun culture that kind of culminates in
Alex Jones, 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 stings specifically

(12:21):
for control. That's one of the big things that Neil
Knox introduces into American culture, at least helps to introduce him.
Not going to claim that he was entirely on his
own there um, but he's like he's like the vanguard
of that kind of guy who winds up doing the
Sandy Hook conspiracy ship later on. And it's it's worth
noting though that, wow, when Knox partners with Harlan Carter. Again,

(12:43):
this is seventies seventy seven, so he has not yet
started pushing conspiracies outright. Um, but you can see kind
of where he goes is where he and Carter helped
to lead a lot of the gun culture. Um. And yeah,
So these guys the Old Guard see Carter and Knox
and see them as like un kind of unhinged. But

(13:06):
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 n ra's ability to attract a
lot of people to give them money for this. It's
a republican establishment. During run, they were just like, listen,
we agree all Mexicans are rapists, but you're not going

(13:29):
to get the nomination by saying it. And it's like
I wanna bet yeah, yeah, exactly, Like that's that's kind
of like they're arguing, like these people are too extreme.
The n r A will like die out if they're
kind takes over and Harland Carter's like, oh, motherfucker, you
want to see how to make the n r A
and a lot of money. I will show you some
things he's about to ye. So one Friday in November

(13:52):
of nineteen seventy six, the head of the n r
A purged eight staff members loyal to Carter. Right, they
fire everybody with like very little warm 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 is the Weekend massacre and Harlan
it's the only massacre UM. Harlan resigns from his position

(14:14):
in protest UH and Elena Buckley continues Quote and Gun Week, Handloader,
and Rifle, all publications Knox had once edited. Writers began
reporting rumors about a shake up at headquarters. The Orum
Groups 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 Groups report. In the
public mind, the n r a is current image is

(14:34):
based almost totally on its supposed opposition to 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, UM, a new piece
of information had gotten out to via a brochure sent
in the mail to some members. The executive committee was
considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs, not far from Raton,

(14:56):
where the n r A could focused more squarely on
its sports shooting ties. Regional gun groups began receiving concerned
notes from their members. The Shooters Committee of Political Education SCOPE,
based in New York, wrote a letter to Rich protesting
the n r a's reagent board appointees and to let
them know that they would advise their membership to write
in Neil Knox amongst several others as board candidate at
the annual meeting in Cincinnati. In the American Rifleman, an

(15:17):
unsigned editorial appeared, 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,

(15:38):
they're they're building a moral panic over this right um
in a very modern way, in a way that because
this is like the fucking this is part of like
the blueprint of everything the right will do in the future.
So for the next couple of weeks, Knox and Carter
call every other n r A lifetime member. They can
in brief, like you when you have an organization like
the n r A, every year you have to have

(15:59):
a meeting and you have to do like voting at
that meeting and stuff, and like there's people who are
the actual 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

(16:21):
the members get to vote had kind of been like
like stock options voting, where it's like, yeah, I mean
the random citizens who control of the company's stock get
a vote, but like our CEO controls and his best
friend controls twenty, so it doesn't matter what they say. Right,
That was the thinking. But obviously the n r A
isn't like a publicly traded company. You just each each

(16:43):
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 the old guard which is
what Knox and Carters start planning to do. Now, there's
a lot of politicking that goes on here. You can
read about it in in detail in Elena Buckley's article.
One thing I think that's noting is that the whole
event has something of an early Trumpy vibe. The folks

(17:04):
Carter lines up to back their plan to take over
the n r A saw the old Guard is out
of touch aristocrats, which they were. They framed themselves as
like Paul Revere types. Right, they're founding fathers, right, They're
they're fighting a revolution against an unjust like aristocracy. One
person who were all but they're all doing the couseplay. Now.
It's all begins with the don't tread on me flags

(17:25):
and the three pointed hats and yes um and one
person who was present later recalled some members were angry
enough to bring rope, tar and feathers to Cincinnati. Um. Yeah,
the obsession was it's like, oh, the tea party, a
tarn feathering. It's just like they just have an obsession
with this like patriotic forms of like you know, like

(17:48):
old style LARPing. 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, um,
everyone has their types of violence that are like good

(18:08):
and traditional and okay, and there are types of violence
that are so black people breaking a bunch of windows
during a riot um or like um, flipping a cop
car and lighting and on fire. That is not okay.
That's horrifying. That's that's evil violence. Ring and feathering a

(18:29):
guy trying to like raise taxes, like literally melting a
man's skin off in order to stop him from like
getting the taxes that will pay for a road. That's traditional, right, Yeah,
that's that's it's allowed, you know, it's I mean, burning
their skin off and then the feathers is just so
they look like a chicken. Just the most horrifying joke

(18:51):
that you can possibly think of. Yeah, there was like
that John Adams HBO series with PAULI. Oh yeah, yeah.
They had like a tar and feathering in it, and
it was like the first time I was like, oh yeah,
that's incredibly violent, really really violent actually and feather a person.
I thought it was just like, hey, we're gonna make
you look like a funny chicken, like a pine in

(19:11):
the face. I put it on the same level as
a pine of face. But it's, um no, it's not.
It's pretty bad. No. And it's like, I'm I mean everyone,
there's a degree to which this is very common across
the political spectrum because I want you get like whenever
people suggests like, well, the cops should uh confiscate this
or the cops should like do that, it's like, well, okay,
what happens when police confiscate things? Like what does that

(19:34):
look like? Violence wise? You know? Um, 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

(19:55):
fentanyl into things, their solution to that is have the
d e A raid more people. It's like, well, the
d A kill people too. He I don't know, this
is just what people do. Um anyway, Uh So Knox
uh takes point on the actual day of the convention.
He's the one who's actually whipping votes at the n

(20:16):
r A convention to propose a series of by law changes.
Using the support based Carter had built, he gets them
to vote in a defense of the Second Amendment to
the n r a's mission for the first time, right. Um.
So he's like, this is the first time they actually
add because the like they have a mission statement or
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

(20:39):
the Second Amendment to that. The next thing they do
is they block the sale of the n r A
headquarters in d c uh and they block the development
of the outdoor center. So they put it into this plan. Um.
And then UH Carter or uh Knox brings up a
guy named Bob Kokla, who's one of Carter's people who's
still in the n r A when Carter resigns in protest,

(21:00):
Hukla takes over the lobbying arm and he's apparently, I
guess the 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 n r A and the other members of the
Old Guard criticizing Kukle for quote going to war every
time someone mentions gun control. UM. So he veritas again,

(21:24):
these guys are really building the playbook that's going to
be used everywhere, well outside of guns. So following this,
Knox and his voters stripped the board and managing Committee
of power. UM. And basically again this is that. You
can go into a lot more detail about how they
do this all legislatively, but by the end of things,
the Old Guard are no longer in charge of the
n r A and Harlan Carter is the new executive

(21:45):
vice president. UM. At three yeah, yeah, they do it.
They do it fucking street style. UM. And at three
thirty am, Carter takes to the stage to give his
first speech to his newly conquered in r A. You're
America's greatest people, my friends. Don't ever forget that you are.
You have afforded the n r A this wonderful, historically
important reaction of years to the way the association has

(22:07):
been going, to the way you want it to be,
to the way it ought to be. And if I
have anything to do with it. You are going to
win because you are the n r A buck. So
he did it. He did it Trump speech. Yeah, yeah,
I did his, his Trump speech, and he took over
the n r A. And I imagine now people are

(22:28):
gonna start falling in line. Yeah. Well the n r
A is gonna 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 are
our sponsors who backed a series of coups in Indonesia

(22:49):
in order to gain access to the island that you
can go to hunt kids on. Yeah, that's what they're
known for. And hey, if you're not, if you're not
into guns, understands you can use bows us an addleaddle
you know, Ninja stars, Ninja stars for sure, there's stop
you Yeah, a bow staff, literally any weapon, the ninja turtles. Yeah.

(23:11):
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 coup, Harlan Carter sets to work remaking
the n r A in his own image. One of
his first hires is a guy you may have heard of,

(23:32):
Matt Wayne Lapierre. Yeah, there we go, w big Wayne
Big Lapierre. Pepper pew pew p pew. Yeah. I think
it's not French, but you know, I probably somewhere along
the somewhere along the lines. The point is pep is
a very good nothing and everyone that was a good joke.

(23:54):
You should be proud. So by nine six, Lapierre is
running the n r a's entire lobbying arm. Right, so
we kind takes the job that Carter had had basically,
um 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 d C, right
in the entire country. Um. Again, Card draws kind of

(24:18):
the blueprints. Lapierre carries them out though, um, there's no
other sports someday, yeah, you know exists that you know,
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 lobby. And again there's
like critiques about well they're were primarily interested in like

(24:40):
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 again it's like broadly speaking,
like like what you would kind of want to see
in a democracy that's supposed to function the way ours
does as opposed to like we are going to become

(25:03):
so key to right wing fundraising that if somebody proposes
any kind of law at curbing gun crime, we will
destroy them, right um, which yeah, by any means necessary,
and to a to an extent that like it doesn't
matter how like reasonable the restriction might be, like getting
outside of stuff like an assault weapons ban, Like if

(25:25):
you're going to propose like universal background checks, which most
gun owners support, right, We're we're going to come for
your ass, you know, um, unless you're the Black Panthers,
but whatever. Like So, another nineteen seventy seven higher brought
onto the n r A at the same time as
Wayne Lapierre is a guy named Robert Doublet. Now Doublet
becomes the n r a's general counsel and it's his

(25:48):
job to begin wrangling together legal scholars to push hard
the idea of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
So between nineteen seventy, there's only three law review articles
endorsing an individualist interpretation. Right, there are some like state
level ruvings, you could argue kind of endorse one earlier,
but there's never been like a national like a Supreme

(26:09):
Court ruling on the matter one way or the other.
And it hadn't really people have not even talked about
it in that way until the sixties. So three our
law review articles written between nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy
endorsing that interpretation. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty nine,
the period in which Doublet is the n r AS
General Council, there are twenty seven law review articles, three
of which are authored by Doublet himself, and his work

(26:30):
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 one. Some people will say, like,
point to D. C. As Heller, that's not the first
time it happens. In two thousand one, and the case
in question has its origins in a nineteen nineties seven
criminal case in which a Texas woman divorced her husband

(26:51):
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 um, during a meeting
with his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he
pulls a gun during an argument and points it at them,
so he gets and again, if you're a rational, good own,

(27:14):
are 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 Second Amendment right.
And the ruling what it actually rules is kind of complicated.
The ruling is not entirely in favor of this guy Emerson.
It's Emerson versus the United States. But in the ruling,

(27:36):
the Supreme Court rules that the describes the Second Amendment
as an individual right right, so this is the first
time that happens at a federal level. UM. And then
this ruling in two thousand is reinforced by two thousands
dates d C versus Heller, which is like the big
ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban
like categories of weapons and whatever it's based on like
a d C I think handgun band um. And then

(27:58):
in two thousand ten the second min is finally incorporated
UM 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 as
he earned his salary, right, that that's a significant change
in US Jewish prudence that he kind of painstaking lye

(28:18):
uh is the architect of of pushing um. It's probably
worth worth noting here that he was a murderer. UM.
So I'm gonna quote from the Boston Review here. Robert J.
Dowlett was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yoacum, the mother
of his then girlfriend, in nineteen sixty three. Dowlett also
robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop, like
Carter dow Little seventeen years old when he pulled the trigger.

(28:43):
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 two thousand fourteen. God damn,
no wonder it's like this is it's also he and
he and Carter in Kyle. Now it's all seventeen. When
they kill people in like these, I guess I wouldn't

(29:04):
maybe you wouldn't call what DOUBLET does vigilante violence. He's
really just murdering people. Know that just sounds like straight
up murder. Yeah, he just murders a woman and then
shoots a pawn shop owner in a robbery. So I
guess you would say he's not a vigilante. He's just
straight up an armed criminal. That is insane. And this
is the guy who's made it easier for fucking everyone

(29:25):
in the world. In the United States, he's he's the
n r a's general counselor 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, you know, good for them. I guess nice
to know when we live in the land of opportunity
like that. I believe firmly that people should be able

(29:47):
to get a second chance after making a mistake, especially
when they're you know, not a legal adult. Certain I
believe in certain second chances for certain kinds of mistakes.
I think perhaps if you murder your girl friend'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 Associations, Like, maybe that's not okay? Yeah,

(30:11):
I mean, you know, it's like, listen, that guy explicitly
does gun crimes, Yeah, for fun. Perhaps should not be
his job. I want to know what happened with the
with the the relationship, Um did that don't actually suffer
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. Um yea yeah. It's like

(30:35):
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
be a border patrol officer. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know,
there's like little things like not giving them, I don't know,

(30:56):
authority over other people or requiring them to you was
full force as a part of the job. And maybe
the guy who murders his girlfriend's mom shouldn't help to
be an architect of federal gun policy. But I mean,
it's just paps that guy. It sounds rational. But you
know what, I don't know if that's yeah, I think

(31:19):
I think it'll work out fine. 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 a case. If you've got
to make that case, maybe Ross Doublet shouldn't be the
man doing it. No. Um, So that's cool. Um. And

(31:42):
the Boston Review article I found is a good job
of pointing out that the n r a's embrace of
the specific legal interpretation does not occur in a vacuum.
While doubtlets are lawyers are making their case right. So
while there and again this is a very it's a pain.
It's forty years it's painstaking process of doing well not
I guess twenty ish, twenty three, something like that. Um.
But while they're making their case, the n r A

(32:04):
is carrying out mass mailing campaigns, some of the most
extensive and political history. And they're publishing magazines that reach
millions of people. Um. They're paying for ads and all
of these different gun press magazines. They're having paid spokesman
show up and talk radio stations, right. And part of
like what they're doing, they're obviously they're arguing for this
interpretation of the Second Amendment, but they're also pushing a

(32:26):
cultural change what some scholars have turned the term to
the tactical turn in U. S. Gun culture again, even
to the extent that, like, 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
civilian hands that the n r A before it's political turn,

(32:49):
sold to people was the M one Guarrant, which was
the U. S. Service rifle of World War Two. Right, Um,
But what is really new is that it's this is
this kind of how a military turn for gun owners
because people were not buying in one Garran's primarily to
like play act as soldiers. They were buying them because
the guarante is a perfectly good hunting rifle, right thirty

(33:09):
out six, which is a very effective hunting round. Um
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 Gerrans primarily, right, that kind
of stuff. The tactical turn in u S. Gun culture
occurs because it occurs alongside the militarization of the police

(33:31):
and these kind of Hollywood valorization of the militarization of police. Um.
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 Holly Hollywood partnership with
the Defense Department, right, and the increasing degree to which
like military tactical culture becomes like popularized. But the n

(33:51):
r A recognizes, like this is there's a lot of
promise in this number one. You can get more people involved.
You can you can sell more ship to people, which
means you can have more companies funding the n r
A who are not selling much as guns, but all
this tactical gear um, I'm gonna read a quote again
from that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but
it really ties all of this together. Quote. The story

(34:14):
of this tactical development in U s 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
into nearly every US town, and turned militarized border security

(34:35):
into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization. This is 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, of course the n r
A backs. Like the nationalization of border security, it turned
this nation's city streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement. Second,

(34:58):
individuals once areing 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 n r A has played
an outsize role in this vigilante reframing by promuligating the
myth that gun ownership has always been about an individual
constitutional right and oriented towards a nativist version of self defense.

(35:21):
This vigilantism operates in conjunction with extra legal violence of
law enforcement officers and is fueled by an individualish 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 equality as tyranny.
More importantly, this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual
the power to take life in defense not of law,

(35:43):
but of particular social and racial orders. There are now
twenty five federal agencies with special tactical units, and may
of June of 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 U. S.
Mar Shoals, the U. S. Coast Guard. In every one
of the FBI's fifty six field offices, and at the

(36:04):
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,
pioneering what was at the time and almost unprecedented domestic
use of military force. In Carter's victory speech, he declared,

(36:28):
beginning in this place, in this hour, this period in
n r A history is finished. The post nineteen seventy seven,
n r A was decidedly partisan, took an absolute position
against gun regulation, and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a
social identity and authoritarian political ideology among its members. God
damn yeah like that. Yeah, Yeah, all of that in

(36:51):
a row and concisely done. Yeah, fucked up. Yeah, and
it's again. I I am I there. Some of our
listenership will agree and some will disagree. I'm a believer
fundamentally that UM. 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

(37:13):
things that I cannot own. Um but and and that
there's there's an argument to be made, if you're again
care about being an originalist, that that is close to
the original interpretation of the Second Amendment? Right, Um, what
part of what by? And they're claiming to be originalist,
they're claiming to be that the that the initial original
interpretation was individualist. But what they're doing that for is

(37:36):
not any idea of 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

(37:56):
and to act as vigilantes in their stead. Right. That
is where the n r A turns, and that is
that is the tactical turn. Right. It's not that there's
nothing evil about owning body armor, which people can do
for defense perfectly reasonable defensive purposes. There's nothing like um
but but what what they're what they're doing is pushing

(38:17):
this idea of like not just the millet, not just
that like society ought to be militarized, which you get
in every kind of argument that like what we need
to do is harden the schools. We need to add
more cops. Um. 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. And this

(38:41):
is and this is the thing, this is what I
wish folks who are supportive of 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. And that that's I think Vivaldi made
that perfectly clear that like, these are two sides of
the problem, um and and the n r A is

(39:05):
a huge part of how we get there. Both how
we get these cops that look indistinguishable from like marines
in downtown VALLUSA. Not that I think the Marines necessarily
should have been in downtown valluja um, but you you
you have these guys. It's this There's this thing called
the weapons effect, right, which is a psychological phenomenon that's
noted that like the presence of weapons in an area,

(39:28):
visible weapons can increase the willingness of people to use violence. Right.
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, Um.
But another part of that is the fact that everywhere
you go you see fucking cops in a way that like,

(39:50):
you don't see cops dressed as armed as heavily as
our cops and fucking war zones a lot of the times. Right.
But it's, um, it's anyway whatever, that's that's what Irlyn
Carter builds. You know. Yeah, no, I I hear exactly
what you're saying, and I I I agree to an
extent with with what you mean. I feel like in general,

(40:15):
problem with liberals is that, um, they tend to kind
of like put guns in the same um category, Like
they moralize guns the way they moralize like the right
will moralize drugs, um, and kind of this idea that like,
you know, uh, if we were to just make all

(40:35):
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 of it like misses
the entire point of why exactly the uh, why the
people who want guns and have those guns have them?

(40:56):
You know, it's like 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, isn't it crazy
that you know, all these people have so many guns?
And it's like, yeah, well, while you're talking amongst yourselves,
all these guys have created an entire and it's like

(41:17):
looking at these right wing like militias that people are
rightly like concerned to see militia's 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 six And that's a huge
chunk of it. And like, you can't you can't divorce

(41:39):
your desire to reduce the number of guns in American
culture from the need to reduce the militarization of the police,
because they were both inextricably tied to the problem um
which is the constant gun violence in this country has
has has two points that need to be really like
hit on, It's not It's not just civilian gun ownership.
It's also the way in which the state uses in

(42:01):
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've broken the law
right like Harlon Carter. You know. Um, Anyway, under Harlan Carter,
the n r a's membership triples from one million to
more than three million UM. It would reach five million

(42:24):
members under Wayne Lapierre. Obviously, the n r A. We're
not 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. Um. There's a
pretty good podcast about like what the funk happened there?
But yeah, it's yourself an a Sopranos podcast. I'm sorry.
Um So, the n r A tops out at about

(42:45):
five million members UM, but as of seventeen, about fourteen
million Americans claimed some sort of affinity for the organization,
and ever get who did the poll? But whatever, Um,
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 block compared to the entirety of the United States
right And so looking at that, you have to kind

(43:06):
of marvel at the success of the ARRA in making
their ideas a cornerstone of right wing politics, because 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 on guns than you
would guess by how the party acts. And it's because

(43:26):
the party's ability to fund elections for decades was heavily
based on who could get the n r a's approval
right that A plus rating exactly. In two thousands sixteen,
they spent more than thirty million dollars on Donald Trump's campaign. Um.
And this again people often miss this, like, my parents
are were hardcore right wingers, right, So it was my
whole family. I had like two relatives who owned guns,

(43:49):
like my grandpa and one of my uncle's right. Um,
and I did go shooting as a kid, but my
parents didn't have any My aunt and uncle didn't have any.
They were not guns in the house of my family
in Texas. You know. Um, because like it's actually not
as integral to conservatism as a as a at least
I mean this is again changed because the culture wars
have accelerated, so like this is that there's less conservatives

(44:11):
like the ones I grew up with when they're in
there were today. But the n r A. 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. Um. That's why they
were able to read wield power so effectively. Um. One
of the most peculiar but also influential aspects of Harland's
time and power was his repeated and intense defense of cheap,

(44:33):
shitty handguns. And this gets us to the Saturday Night
Special Saturday Night specially in brief, Like, there's a type
of handgun that was very cheap in the seventies up
there in the eighties and stuff called a Saturday it
was nicknamed the Saturday Night Special. It's like a five
or a six shot usually thirty eight caliber handgun. Um,

(44:54):
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. Um. All THEO,
what what is a cheap shitty handgun? Is different now
because actually six shot revolvers are kind of pricey these days.
It's supposed to like um high point or something. Um.

(45:17):
But yeah, so this is a cheap shitty handgun. Um.
And these are particularly low quality handguns. They were not
like well made as a general rule. Um, they didn't
always work. They did not always. We are yet that's
that we're building to that. You have this massive crime
rate and starts in the seventies and really like peaks

(45:38):
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 soon amies that forms around the
crime surge is around this fear of the Saturday Night Special.
And one of the reasons why people are so scared

(45:59):
of the Saturday Night Special is that it is a
gun that black people can afford. Right, It is a
cheap handgun, and so it is affordable for those folks. Um.
Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban this Saturday night special. Um.
Although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor
people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly on the grounds that they

(46:20):
were shitty and broke easily. Um. And this is one
of the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from the
from n r A on the record 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 the nineteen seventy two speech before the inn
As Executive Committee, I can produce actual cases that the
cheap handgun that snaps in a police officer's face instead

(46:42):
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. I mean, it's like he has
a point, a really fucked up evil point. And it's
also he's getting straight too. I mean the crux of

(47:03):
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 their quality of handguns is uh, there's a lot.
There's a lot that's messy on this whole this whole thing,

(47:24):
but it is very funny and it's going to wind
up getting a lot of people killed, not in necessary
not not just from violence. A lot of people are
going to die um because of Carter's defensive terrible handguns
and where it leads. But before we get it in,
you know who else loves shitty handguns that break in
their owner's hands and they I'm sorry, so absolutely loves it.

(47:51):
The motto is, we want you to be armed, and
we want you to never know if that gun is
gonna fire or not completely inexplicable. We we want to
weapon that you cannot trust under any circumstances. That's guarantee.
Remove drop safeties from handguns, Let them free. You know,
I enjoy this because I am watching Sophie just shaking

(48:13):
her every time you do this bit. She hates it
makes you so angry, you know, I hate it. Why
is that, Sophie? Because there's like, if you read it
of people being like, wait, what is this. I've never
read about who who has a child hunting? And I
just it just feels like most of my heart, I

(48:39):
like fucking with him. Yeah. I feel the same way
towards him that I do with my cat when I like,
I like pick it up and I toss it in
the air and it hates it. But it can't. You can't.
It has to let me like squeeze it and wrap
it in a blanket. It's called rent. It's called paying rent. Yeah,
that's right, motherfucker. Yeah, you gotta be adorable for me.
Sometimes your fear makes me smile. I feel the same

(49:03):
way about our piggies, you know. Everyone, it's like you
feed the slot to the piggies and you let them wink.
But it's you're you're the farmer. Remember that, right, you're
the farmer. Well, I'm the farmer. You are, yes, exactly. Remember,
don't do that to the goats. I don't think it'll
work out. Work out. Well, it's really fun to fun
with the goats if you pick them up, like they

(49:23):
don't know what to do with their little legs and
they just like kick in the air, and then you
can hug them. I love it. They go wow, except
for my boy Goat. He's the ram. He loves it.
He fucking as soon as he sees you, he'll run
up because he wants to get cuddled. Damn his sister
hates it. But yeah, anyway, of course we're back. Before

(49:53):
we get onto the consequences of Harland Carter's embrace of terrible,
unsafe firearms, let's talk about the defense of the virtues
of arming small children with derringers. Now, Matt, you're not
a gun guy. The derringer is a tiny, ultraconcealable one
or two shot pistol. They were originally made for riverboat gamblers,
as documented in the documentary Maverick. Okay, and I know

(50:16):
exactly what's right. Yeah, they're like little, little bitty like yeah,
hot girl guns. This is the way I think. 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 ringers,
and four bushy guys ambled up in an arrogant manner.
He stopped them, and three of them were very nice

(50:37):
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 little
guns have a very noble and perfect important purpose that
we should make our position clear. God. That is the
first recorded incident of like someone being like, my five
year old just said, Daddy, why does Trump do the

(50:57):
bad thing? And I couldn't explain. It's like a totally
fake story that did not There's absolutely no way this happened.
But also that makes it like, what does it mean
by their bushy? What does that mean? He has to
be being racist here? Oh yeah, for sure, but I
don't know how which race, like the Hasidic Jews? Yeah,

(51:18):
what does this mean? What does bushy mean? It could
be Italians? It would be funny if like the real
story is that that the Jeb and George Bush who
were like it was it was all of the Bush
brothers like trying to mug children. Yeah, you know Bushy
like the former head of the CIA. Yeah, I think

(51:39):
he was current, probably would have been a current when
this was Yeah, so obviously that's probably a lie. Um,
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 routine carrying handguns on

(52:01):
their person. Yeah, because yeah, exactly, that is out of
its damn mind. Just oh, man, a bushy man could
strike at any point. 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 pocket.
It's the seventies. Maybe it is talking about like a Toms,

(52:23):
like a like a lot of chest hair type. You know.
It's like disco shows up. Yeah, a bunchet disco guys
come out and start threatening children. Um So, anyway back
to the point. Under Harlan and his successors, the n
r A acted repeatedly to defend the rights of gun
manufacturers to build dangerously shoddy firearms Like this is we

(52:45):
talk a lot about, rightly, so the things they do,
like legislatively to defend the gun industry, But this is
often left out because one of the things is its
primary victim is gun owners. Right. Um, I'm gonna quote
here from a rite up in Bloomberg and Night seventy two,
Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier,
Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the omnibus Crime Control and

(53:06):
Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearms sales,
and advocates of gun control hope to give this agency
oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingle, a Sorry, a
Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A plus
rating from the ascendant in r A, blocked them in
nineteen seventy five. He did it again when a colleague
introduced a bill making a second run at giving the

(53:27):
CPSC firearms authority. We put in there and express prohibition
against their getting them getting their nose into the business
of regulating firearms and ammunition. Dingle said in debate in
Congress that second bill was crushed three to eighty and
the issue has never been seriously considered again. And it's
one of those like this is again perfectly even if

(53:47):
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 seems
to make that there shouldn't be a political issue. It's
into that and the only explanation for you not being
into it is like, oh good, they can't get the

(54:11):
good guns. I mean, like, like poor poor people, black
people getting the defective guns seems to be the only
excuse here. I mean, well, I mean they're specific excuses
that like this will this will enable potentially the government
to like regulate what kind of AMMO is illegal and
banned types of like whatever, which they do. Anyway, there's

(54:33):
that ship happens and like whatever, it's dumb. It's dumb
that this happens this way. Um it is worth noting that, Yeah,
it's it's like a blue dog Democrat who is the
one who like blocks this ship. Um. 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.

(54:56):
Not even the b A t f E, which supposedly
regulates fire arms, can force a gunmaker to take broken
guns off the market. And I'm gonna 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

(55:17):
boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house
around seven fifteen am on the last day of bleeding out.
Brown is telling the story now about how he was
sitting in his chair in the living room when he
heard the shot. His son, Jared twenty eight, had just
picked up Bud's Taurus pti 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

(55:39):
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 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

(56:00):
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 and he can't se he
can't do nothing, absolutely nothing, but is one of we
have no idea how many Americans died due to defective
tourist guns. The company did eventually issue a recall on
something like a million weapons that were potentially defective, but

(56:23):
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 warn people that they'd
sold guns that could fire for no reason. Unknown number
of those weapons are still in people's gun saves, closets
and holsters today. That's um fucking crazy, just like I

(56:45):
don't even know that justificate it's just guns don't kill people. Yeah,
it's this face kills people. The the n r A
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

(57:05):
their products don't work. We'll do it if they can,
you know. 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. Yeah, it's and it's I

(57:26):
mean again for among other things, don't buy tortist guns
for any practical purpose. Um uh. In the nineteen nineties,
more than forty U S. Cities filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers,
spurred on by a surgeon violent crime. This was the
super Predator era. Um Now. I can't speak as to
the legal merits of the individual cases of these cities

(57:47):
against these gun manufacturers, but the response the n r
H shows was interesting. They used their lobbying arm to
launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho
and Representative Cliff Sterns 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

(58:07):
to actually get the law, which is the p l
c a A written, UH, and by the time it
was introduced, George W. Bush was on his second term.
In October two thousand five, he signed the p l
c A A and the 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, UM, but

(58:30):
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
um 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

(58:52):
used to justify like the suing against the bush Master
who made the gun that was used in Sandy Hook,
was this UM this ad campaign they'd just done where
it was like a consider your Man card reissued and
they would like send you a man card with an
a R fifteen and it's it's it's again, there's a again.
I this is like a complicated thing to get into entirely,

(59:12):
but there's a debate to be had, And into my mind,
the area in which it's kind of most relevant to
have this debate is on to what extent is does
the way the gun industry tries to sell weapons to
people UM complicit in when those weapons are used for violence. So,
for example, when Daniel Defense launches an ad where you
have like Bible verse and a small child holding an

(59:35):
air fifteen um, to what extent 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 Vivaldi 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

(59:58):
I mean, it's like, uh, I mean the way cigarettes
were marketed change. You know, yes, we're regulated like crazy
and has actually had an effect on the amount of smokers. 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 p l C I a

(01:00:20):
kind of ended that for a long time. I mean,
this is starting to be challenged, but for for fifteen
or seventeen years or whatever, made any kind of like
debate meaningless, right because it was just prohibited and it
was prohibited. Again, this is the n r A spent
a lot of money on George W. Bush's campaigns. You know,
I am wondering if the like initially the Patachi Magic

(01:00:43):
wand actually was a back massager, and if you could
sue sue a company because it gave your wife an orgasm,
well the 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 of out
of mass shooting? There are some unsettling implications to some
of that. Um, it's not as super cut, it's not

(01:01:05):
as cut and dry as certain other things are. I'm
not saying it's a slippery slope necessarily, but I am
saying that I thought it was a back massager, and
now it's better at making my wife calm than I am.
And that has been Yeah, and well, I mean, it
seems kind of unfair to me to have not known that.

(01:01:27):
What's really I mean, people are bringing up people on
Twitter 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 has to be like has is like prepared. This
is a little little bit less the case now. But

(01:01:48):
when I had for instantly two thousand's like you get
training on like what to do if you get rated
because you're not allowed to sell sex toys. Um, they had.
They were always called cake toppers, right, like the dildos
and ship were like cake toppers or per sal massages
or whatever. 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

(01:02:10):
the ball word bong in 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 right, But I mean, what do you what do
you call that? You know that you know that silicon,
but that has both the pussy and the vagiant. That's
a sex ass. That's the sex ass, ye, But you

(01:02:35):
I mean, I'm just saying, how do you market that?
So I don't I don't think they really had sex ass,
although I know people bought um 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 for
joking around at a bachelorette parts and you put it
like they're they're like, it's dumb all Texas. His whole

(01:02:57):
legal system is stupid issues, 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, but vagina and so I suck the big
mouth billy bass. Yeah, who didn't suck a big mouth
billy bass. Yeah, I'm just saying universal experience of people

(01:03:18):
in the early two thousands. Yeah, I'm sorry. I just
like eventually I just was like, we're gonna start talking
about com talking about Look, you know the same year
that George W. Bush signs the p l c. A
A and the law, that's the year that many millions
of young American boys encountered a billy large mouth bass
for the yeah, and and thanks to the n r

(01:03:39):
a's lobbying, the Billy Bass Company couldn't be suited for
taking the rigidity of all those boys. Take me to
your virginity, all right, all right. The last thing I
want to talk about here, and this is maybe the
most unsettling thing the n r A has done, UM,
is that they have aid it impossible not just two

(01:04:03):
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 research how
gun violence works and like the extent to which different
policies affected UM. In the New England Journal of Medicine
published an article that shows showing that gun ownership was

(01:04:24):
a risk factor for homicide in the home. Now, this
is a study will see cited a great deal, and
it's often used to argue that hot firearms in the
home make people less safe. This study was widely reported
on it at the time, and it scared the ship
out of the n r A. So the n r
A campaign to eliminate the organization that had funded the study,
The c d c S National Center for Energy Injury Prevention.

(01:04:46):
Congress included language in the Omnibus Appropriations Bill to insist
that quote, none of the funds made available for injury
prevention and control with the Centers for Disease Control 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

(01:05:09):
what do you have a gun in the home? Right, Like,
the CDC was not like lobbying specifically. They were carrying
out a study, but they are basically studied, Yeah, how
people get hurt in the home. And the n r
A argued that was inherently like that's political and should
be illegal. Um. And then they make that happen, right Like,
Congress goes through with this ship Um. This is later

(01:05:29):
referred to as the Dickey Amendment because of some dude
named Dickie. Um. Now, under extensive lobbying pressure, Congress also
removed two point six million dollars from the CDC's budget,
as that was 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 ministry. And again, whatever you think
about gun control, there are four dred million of these

(01:05:51):
things in the fucking country. There should be research into
how they affect people. Right, just seems prudent. It seems prudent.
Just seems prudent. Yeah, fucking if auto companies were blocking
research into how car accidents work, right, like, you would
say that's nuts, you know, because it would be um,
and it's not even it's like, it's not even tried

(01:06:13):
to do that, but right, it's I don't fault them
for trying. It's the same way with there. You know,
that's what they're going to do. That's what they're gonna do.
They're gonna try to do that, and you know, it's
a fucked up capitalist system we're in. If you have
the money, you can try. The crazy thing is the
success rate of the n r A in these then

(01:06:33):
these things that are completely like sense. 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? Um, 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.

(01:06:55):
You're definitely bad at the very least coming in bad faith.
But yeah, you are bad guys stuff. Yeah, and should
be stopped. And federal funding for research into gun violence
and gun related injuries dried up after that. Since nineteen
the cdc IS funding for firearm injury prevention has fallen

(01:07:16):
nine and similar attempts to fund research have met with
further attacks on the ability to study any of these stuff,
most recently in two thousand twelve. Um and yeah, um
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. Neil Knox wound up being
way too radical for even Harland Carter's in r A.

(01:07:38):
He was forced out of the organization in nineteen eighty
two after being overshadowed by the rise of Wayne Lapierre.
I think Lapierre kind of helps maneuver him out. He
dies of colon cancer in two thousand five. He outlived
Carter by a fair amount. Harlan died not surprisingly of
lung cancer in nineteen nine one. So the tobacco industry
did us all a solid on this one. Occasionally, it

(01:07:58):
works out. One of his final acts in this world
was to hand over control of the n r A
to Wayne Lapierre. Shit, that's the that's the Hardland Carter
in the n r A. Everybody, God damn. There's a
pretty good song about him called Raymond Casciano by the
Drive By Truckers, which is good. Well, that guy fucking uh,

(01:08:21):
he sucks. It sucks that he sucks. That he's dead too.
I feel like the one of the big reasons where
I'm just like, I don't you know, I'm not for like, hey,
let's make guns illegal or whatnot, is because like I
feel like guns might end up being very useful in
uh stopping all these ridiculous you know, fucking n r

(01:08:41):
A lobbies. You know. Yeah, And this is um I
have 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 um without a
tremendous amount of editorializing. But yeah, I I feel similarly

(01:09:02):
like my attitudes on what gun control should be around
UM are impacted by like number one, I don't think
only rich people should have guns. I don't don't like
the idea of a thousand percent excise tax on air
fifteen so that only wealthy people can afford them, um.
And I don't like the idea that like, at this point,
at least culturally, the only people who are interested in

(01:09:23):
and having guns are people who are interested in upholding
white supremacy. And that is deliberately designed that way. And
one of I mean one of the things that has
happened in the last couple of years. This is really
accelerated since is the demographics of people buying firearms have
changed wildly, particularly first time gun buyers, and it's gotten
a lot more left blaning and a lot less white um.

(01:09:44):
And you know, there's a variety of personally, okay, because
people do ask about this 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 and spanned 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

(01:10:07):
outside of like talking about should we stack the Supreme
Court whatever, like by not doing that. So, um, stuff
that I think would not number one, would not necessary.
Like obviously anything is a crapshoot with the Supreme Court,
So literally anything could get turned down because they're about
to rule on a concealed handgun carry bill anyway. But um,

(01:10:27):
the I think, I think it's perfectly reasonable and is
also there is legal precedent for raising the age at
which someone has to be in order to buy a
semi automatic firearm. Um, 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,

(01:10:48):
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 always every there's always like ways
around this kind of stuff. Um, but it is it's
been established since I think 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,

(01:11:12):
you'd have a stronger argument in front of the Supreme
Court if it came to the Supreme Court in order
to like defit that piece of gun control legislation. And
both of our most recent mass shootings as of this recording,
there may have been another one. 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 save some lives, and
I think the best thing you could do you would

(01:11:32):
probably not have to call it a red flag 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 and like everything politicized
to a stupid degree. But the Buffalo shooter was aunt
had been doing like threatening shootings and threatening women, and

(01:11:55):
like had was on law enforcement's radar, should have been
it should be possible to do something there, right, good figure,
And uh yeah, I feel like that there's so many
like common sense like laws that uh you're that don't
exist that you're surprised every time you find out they
don't exist. I do think, um. I think one of
the things where gun control advocates make a mistake is

(01:12:19):
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 Aldi shooters. They
both like universal background checks, they passed those, so like
that that's not as much of the solution as I

(01:12:40):
think something like an effective kind of Again, I think
you would need a better term than red flag law
because but also maybe I don't know the right's gonna
culture or whatever you try to do, right, but everything
is poison pilled no matter what you can any If
you hit your wife and kids, you shouldn't have a
gun bill. But of course one of the issues with

(01:13:01):
that is that you're going to disarm the police. Right.
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 conversation. 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

(01:13:21):
is is um is this like mutually assured destruction thing
where we're all armed at all times and that's the
society we live in. I also know the answer isn't
um every like liberal and leftist being like, oh, well,
I'm you know, I'm going to trust that the government

(01:13:43):
and the police will keep me safe from the bad men,
and so I'm like, it's it's hard to know. 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 banned 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

(01:14:05):
certain people. Like, this is not as simple as you're
making it out to be. You can say it is
the guns, and yeah, of course access to guns is
like why a lot of this is happening, But also
like that doesn't that's not the end of of like
the complexity of the issue because there are four million
of these fucking things in the country right now, um,
and a whole culture built up around being ready to

(01:14:26):
immediately use them against right now gay and trans people
are particularly in the fucking um crosshairs. And again this
is like, 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

(01:14:48):
gotta be able to do something about like there's gonna
be something we can do about this. Ship. No, I
completely understand it. I mean, and yeah, I feel I
feel the same way. It's like, there's certainly got to
be a fucking solution to this set is um, it's
just like an acceptable state of affairs. Um. But like
so many of the problems we have, like how to

(01:15:11):
fix it, and like how to fix it without having
a shooting war over it, and like does the fixing
and like, um, 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 days and in ways that I think are kind
of like unhelpful and actually solving the problem. And I, uh, again,

(01:15:35):
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. They bring out like, you know, when
Australia confiscated all those guns and that was two guns,
Like there are twenty million are fifteens in the United States.

(01:15:56):
There has never been a society that's 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 happened alongside like the militarization of
an increasingly unaccountable, violent police force that wants dictatorial control
of American cities, And all of this stuff is pretty

(01:16:19):
pretty unique historically, so I don't know how we fix it.
It feels so American and unique that it feels like, uh, yeah,
if I knew the answer to it, I would I
would say it, but I really do not. I mean,
and again it's like one of those I don't vote,

(01:16:40):
I'm not a gun issue voter. I'm barely a voter,
right like, I do vote, but I don't believe in it.
I don't believe it's an I vote as I vote
as like a well what if I'm wrong, If I'm wrong,
and it's best to vote and and vote, and the
people who say you've gotta vote if I'm wrong and
they're right, then, um, at least I I put in

(01:17:00):
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, um, 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 it's going to be uglier
and weirder than our parents were used to. But I
do like voting is like, well, okay, but maybe I'm

(01:17:23):
wrong about that. It's the same reason they have a
four oh one k right right, right, right right, Maybe
there will be an economy in thirty years so I'll
get to retire, you know. It's the same reason I
own half of a bitcoin exactly. Maybe I'm wrong yeah,
you know get it. Yeah you got just in case
I'm not missing that. Yeah, I just half a one.

(01:17:44):
That's all I could have for. But the point is is, yeah,
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 the
you know, the really the only optimism that I have

(01:18:04):
is there's gonna be some someone smart who does something good.
And I don't want to miss the bust, you know,
I mean my 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 not as

(01:18:25):
a militia um, but in in a in a in
a in a responsibilify believing. I think sometimes because we
just had a mass shooting in Portland that was stopped
by an armed member of the community, of shooting at
at at a protest for a a police violence victim
um that was stopped by an armed member of the community.
But I think community defense is everyone should have an

(01:18:47):
I fact, right downsidest owning a gun, no downside to
having a tourniquet and some gauze on you and some
chess 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 building construction
and impale somebody and maybe you'd get to save their
life with an ifact. Million times that could be useful.
Have an i FAC right organizing your community to provide

(01:19:09):
houseless people with um, you know, defense against sweeps, to
provide people who are low income with eviction defense, to
to stock 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, we tactical sunglasses. Yeah,
why the hell not? The be the be the be

(01:19:32):
the tactical 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 look badass, you know, yeah, look as hell.
And protect your community and yeah, yeah it doesn't mean

(01:19:53):
you need to own a gun, but maybe a little
more community involvement might be helpful. And a society of
things that you can you can do. Yeah, abolishing um
the police, that is a good idea. Anyway, Matt oh Man,
I've had a great time. And if you love uh

(01:20:17):
the bastards and getting behind them, you'll love uh the
podcast pot yourself a gun a Sopranos Rewatch podcast, Uh
that me and my friend Vince Mancini do. We just
finished the entire series, so you can really listen and
rewatch the whole thing, and it's great. You'll love it.
And yeah, you look forward to uh us doing our

(01:20:39):
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. So you'll you'll love it.
And I promise you that, you know, well, we're not gonna,
you know, be it's too white guys talking about the Wire.

(01:21:00):
We're not gonna it's you know, so just don't worry.
It's good. It'll be good, I promise. I don't know
how to say that. I'm excited to listen to it.
We don't, you know, we're leftist anyways, I'm excited. Follow
me at Matt leap Jokes on Instagram. Follow matt Leeb home.

(01:21:20):
You have a Twitter, I do. It's it's it's at
matt leeb and you can follow me there too. That's fine,
But I feel no jokes on that one. That's definitely serious.
That one. Um, you know, I just post whatever today.
In fact, I posted something from a doomsday dried food
ad that I saw god and it was really weird.

(01:21:41):
It was like a Mac versus PC commercial, but they
made the doomsday the like you know, 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. O. God, Yeah,
they made they made him very clearly a Jew, and

(01:22:03):
he it opened with hello fellow Patriots, and I was like,
holy fuck, they went for it. And uh yeah, So
I posted a little bit of that and you love
to see it. You love to see just straight up
anti semitism on the on. This was an Instagram ad

(01:22:25):
by the way, but hey, it was on ye anyways,
follow me on all the things and learned a can.
Look it's cheaper than food buckets. Yes, learned a can
and it works way better. It does work very well. Yeah,
behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

(01:22:48):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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