Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "America and Guns"

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"America and Guns" · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day, humans! Something a little interesting for you this week, a little unusual.
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One of the most popular and most commented on episodes of my old show, We The People Live,
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out of the hundreds of shows that we did, was an uncomfortable conversation that I had not
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with a guest, but with myself. It was an uncomfortable conversation to Australians and Americans,
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but it's interesting for Australians to listen in on about guns. I recorded in 2019 in August,
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and I had to look up which shooting it was in response to, because there were just so many.
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This one was the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings, which I'm sad to say I don't even remember.
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I thought it might have been the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Florida, or I thought I might have
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recorded it after the Las Vegas Massacre. But no, it was after those ones, El Paso and Dayton,
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and now we are coming to the end of a week, wherein there was another mass shooting in the United
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States, coming off the heels of a range of shootings at those beauty parlors, and I think it's
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time to revisit this conversation. I won't give it any preface, I wouldn't do it exactly the
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same way as I did it. It's an intellectual adventure into the thicket of my mind,
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so without any further ado, enjoy this unusual but definitely uncomfortable conversation with myself.
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Today, a special episode, or a not so special episode, not quite sure what this is,
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but something I've been wanting to do for a while, and every time there's a mass shooting in America,
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I think maybe I'll do it this time, and then I lose my nerve and I release whatever episode we
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had planned on releasing, but this time, I want to jump in. Because guns in America are something
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that I feel like I understand pretty well, having lived in the States for 12 years. The gun culture,
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in a way that foreigners don't. It's very easy for non-Americans to be completely bamboozled by
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why America puts up with its massive, stratospheric level of guns and now of mass shootings.
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And to foreigners, it seems like, well, why don't there's do something about it? Why do they
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walk this situation? There are several things going on both culturally and constitutionally and
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legally that I think it'll be worth explaining to non-Americans. And similarly, to Americans,
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they often have American friends ask me about Australia's experience because Australia's experience
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of completely overhauling its gun laws in the 1990s, after there was a mass shooting in Australia,
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is often held up by gun control advocates, or gun safety proponents, as they should more rightly
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be called, because I don't think it's, I don't think, control is the right word. Gun safety
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proponents in the United States as being something that they would want to emulate and is
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parodied by the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups in the United States,
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pro-gun groups as being a catastrophic failure that has left Australians dangerously unarmed.
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So I've been thinking for a while about speaking with someone who is a fairly across the Australian
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experience and also fairly across the American experience. And as I was driving along recently,
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I thought, what about me? What about more? Who better to speak with? Well, actually, there are
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lots of people who'd be better to speak with than me, but it won't have quite the punch as if I
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just try to articulate. My point of view, which I think is hopefully unbiased on this issue,
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I'm not a create, I'm not someone who believes that like Piers Morgan seems to, that all Americans
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would have to do would be to get up one morning and decide to emulate Australia's policy experience
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or ban all guns and that that would be feasible. On the other hand, I'm not somebody who thinks
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that the status quo is tenable or that America can survive like this or should want to survive like
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this. This repeated carnage that schools and movie theaters just being a wash with guns and a
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wash with the violence caused by guns and a wash with the fear and consternation that comes from
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knowing that you live in a society where this could happen to you at any time, even if it's
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an irrational fear and even if it is not as big a problem as people say, a lot of conservatives say,
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look, we focus on all of these mass shootings because it's telegenic to see images of school
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children running out of school and cowering in fear. But in reality, the problem, the scourge of
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guns is an inner city problem, it's largely an African-American problem and a Latino problem,
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it's a gang problem and it's a problem of poverty and violence. Those are the, if you actually
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care about the impact of guns on American society, the proportion of people who get
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assassinated by some crazed 19-year-old kid in a school is just vanishingly small. That is not
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the gun problem. The gun problem is a handgun problem among drug gangs and black youths.
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That's an argument that has some currency because if you're just looking at numbers, it's true.
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The vast proportion of Americans who are killed by guns are African-Americans and people who
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are involved in gangs. It's very, it's the rate of gun homicide between races is low in America.
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It's just not the case that people are being moaned down by walking along the street.
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So I have some sympathy for the claim that mass shootings aren't all we should be focusing on,
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if the only metric by which you're determining what's bad about guns is the body count.
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If you're just counting up piles of dead Americans, then it's true that mass shootings aren't
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the biggest problem. But if you care about what happens to a culture's head, about what it's
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like to grow up in a place, about the intangible aspects of human existence, then events like what
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has just happened and before that the Las Vegas shooting, people being plucked off moaned down
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by a madman with effectively a machine gun, a semi-automatic, a legal semi-automatic weapon
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that had been amended with a legal, what's called a bump stock to basically hold the trigger down
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and release it so fast that it turns into effectively a military style machine gun.
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That is happening on America's streets, does something to a country and certainly does something
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to my heart and my soul certainly made me more callous, has it made you more callous?
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Do you even really care anymore? When these events happen,
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I'm ashamed to say increasingly I don't. Increasingly I just feel weary and like you know what,
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you lie in the bed you make. A series of communal decisions have been made by the American people
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over the course of years and decades that have obviously and predictably led to a scenario
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in which this is a routine fact of life. It makes me sad to even think about what that has done
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to my own character that I can feel that way but I'd be surprised if a little corner of you
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doesn't sort of feel that way too. You just get compassion fatigue after a while
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and frustration towards a nation that refuses to do anything about this.
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So let's talk about specifics enough, waffling. America's firearm homicide rate is 25 times
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the average of other rich countries. Its suicide rate is 8 times higher than other countries.
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Now some people, even friends of mine who are ostensibly sensible on guns will say look it's not
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just guns. That is a portion of this but Americans are violent. We are violent people
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or we are more racially divided than other countries or this is a mental health issue.
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This is about mental health. These people are crazy. Of course crazy people are going to do stupid things.
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Let's take each of those points individually. Is America actually more violent?
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Well what we know is that Americans make up about 4.5% of the global population
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and they own 42% of the world's guns. 4.4% of the population of the world and they own 42%
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of the world's guns. Between the mid 60s and the past few years over that half century,
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31% of the gunmen in mass shootings in the world were Americans. Almost a third.
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Do you think that Americans are responsible for almost a third of the world's crime?
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No. America is responsible for the same share of the world's crime as their population represents.
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They're not more criminal. Adjusted for population, the only country that has a higher rate of
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mass shootings and we're only looking here in this particular study. This was a study out of the
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University of Alabama in 2015. They're only looking at countries that have more than 10 million
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people because you can have tiny little outliers if you include countries like Monaco or
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little flyspeak nations. So of countries with more than 10 million people, the only country that
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has a higher rate of mass shootings is Yemen. Yemen has the world's second highest rate of gun
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ownership. The highest rate of gun ownership, surprise, surprise, is the United States. So good on
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the United States for having more guns per capita than Yemen but killing yourselves at a lower rate
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than Yemen used to. Globally, a country's rate of gun ownership is directly correlated to the odds
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that it'll experience a mass shooting. And that holds. That correlation holds even if you
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exclude the United States. So to people who think that there's something unique about the United States
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that might be unusually violent or it's because of racial divisions or it's because of the lack of
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of proper mental care under a health care system that is more inequitable and in other developed
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countries. Even if you exclude the United States, there is still a strong correlation between a
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country's rate of gun ownership and its number of mass shootings. And what about these background
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crime rates? There isn't a difference really between the amount of violent crime in the United
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States and the amount of violent crime in other developed countries. It's a little bit higher but
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not a lot. What is a lot higher is the number of times those criminal events lead to someone
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being killed. Here's a statistic for you. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner.
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But the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process. 54 times more likely to die
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in a robbery that they have the same likelihood of encountering as someone in London.
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And the discrepancy, this is according to a study at the University of California Berkeley in 1999
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a landmark study. The discrepancy can be entirely explained by the difference in the use of guns.
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More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every single axis.
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Among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities,
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and when you control the crime rates. And when you look at 10 countries, there's an analysis
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of 130 different studies from 10 different countries. Gun control legislation tends to reduce
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the number of gun murders. I mean, this sounds obvious doesn't it's amazing that we even need to
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say this. When there are fewer guns, fewer people die at the hands of guns. Ah, but gun proponents might
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say. Crazy people just find other ways to do bad things. If they're not going to use a gun, they'll
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use a knife. If they can't use a knife, they'll use a hammer. If you really, really want to kill
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somebody, you will find a way to kill somebody. Yes, what would the Las Vegas shooter have done
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to kill those scores of people? I guess you could say he might have been able to get some kind of a
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bomb. If you're that dedicated, maybe you would. But the statistics show that when you make it much,
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much easier to kill people, more people die. Look at that fact that a New Yorker is 55 times more
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likely to be killed in a robbery than a Londoner is. Here are some numbers. Japan has a third
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the population of the United States. In the 2013, there were 13 gun deaths in Japan. 13. In
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America, there were 11,208 homicides and more than 21,000 suicides and more than 500 deaths
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accidental gun deaths. So an American is about 300 times more likely to die by by at the hands of a
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gun by homicide or accident. This is excluding suicide. Then a Japanese person is now America's
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gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan's. So the gap between the 150 times higher gun
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ownership rate and the 300 times higher gun homicide or accident rate does show that there's
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something else going on. So bravo to you. If you're one of the people who say it's not just about
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guns, no, no, it's about all kinds of other things. Yeah, okay. The all kinds of other things
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increases twofold the relationship between the number of guns and the number of gun homicides
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and accidents, but the number of guns increases 150 fold the number. So if you're going to go for
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the low hanging fruit, if you're going to go for the simplest option, then instead of banging on
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about mental health and the uniquely violent nature of Americans and the uniquely fractious nature
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of American race relations, you would just go for the easiest possible thing, which is extremely
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powerful weapons in the hands of almost anyone who wants to get them. So let's talk about Australia.
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In 1996 in April, a 28 year old guy had lunch at a cafe in Tasmania at a tourist site,
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a historic kind of penal colony called Port Arthur. He finished his mail, he returned his tray,
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he took a semi-automatic rifle from his bag and killed 35 people and wounded 23 more.
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By far the worst mass shooting in Australian history. So the conservatives were actually
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in power in Australia at the time. Can you imagine a Republican government in the States doing
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what the conservative party in Australia did to its credit, which was to ban automatic and semi-automatic
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weapons? And that's what everyone focuses on, right? The ban. But it's actually the smallest
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component. Would you be surprised to note or to know that right now there are more guns in
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Australia than there were before the ban? It's true. It's not about the ban. It's about the way
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the ban was introduced and the regulations that were part of it. It established a national firearms
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registry. I can already hear the NRA quaking in its boots with the idea of the government having
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a registry for your firearms. It implemented a waiting period for gun purchases. So when you apply
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to get a gun, there's a 28-day wait. And then there was the gun buyback. A mandatory gun buyback,
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600,000 guns were bought back. They were the government paid for them. It cost half a billion
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dollars and they implemented a special temporary tax to fund the money that they were going to give
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to gun owners in the buyback. Now I hear a lot of Americans say buybacks don't work. New York City
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has had a buyback. They occasionally implement a voluntary buyback and you see the mayor get up
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and the governor and they say, we've got this number of guns. We've taken them off the streets.
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That's a voluntary buyback. What on earth is the point of a voluntary gun buyback? I'm sorry to
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sound totalitarian and dictatorial, but you've got to force the fuckers to give up their guns.
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Otherwise, they're not going to give them up. The only people who are going to give them up are
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the people who don't want them and have no use for them. No point in buying guns and paying
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people to give you guns that they're happy to part with. You want to get the guns that people
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aren't happy to part with. Let's talk about the registry. I recently bought a new car.
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The moment I paid the private, it wasn't a new car so it was a second hand car so it was
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already owned by somebody else. The moment I paid him the money for the car, he immediately
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had an incentive to take himself off the car insurance because he knows that if I have an accident
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even just driving out on my way home from having bought the car and his name is on the insurance,
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then even if he wasn't driving, he's going to lose his no claim bonus and his insurance is going
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to be more expensive thereafter. In other words, he's basically responsible for what that car does
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when he's on the insurance docker, when he's on the registration.
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So there's a strong incentive for him to inform the authorities as soon as that car changes
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possession. That's basically the incentive that was implemented by the Australian Government in
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1996. What it said was, you are now responsible for your guns. Believe it or not, in the States,
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you're not. In the States, if someone finds a gun at the scene of a crime and they look up
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who owns the gun and you were the one who bought the gun and you went through all of the proper
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processes, then you can just say, well, yeah, but it got stolen. When did it get stolen? I don't know.
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Why didn't you report it to the police? I didn't feel like it. And that's fine. That's totally
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fine in the States. So when conservatives say they're going to take out guns, they're coming for
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our guns. We're going to keep our guns. No. Before we come for the guns, the first thing we might
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like to do is just know who's got guns and implement a rule that says that you are responsible for your
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gun. That doesn't mean that we're going to assume that you did the murder. What it means is we're
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going to give you a fine for having been reckless enough to let the gun out of your sight.
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And you know, one other consequence of the Australian laws that were introduced in 1996,
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gun theft dropped by half because now that people knew, now the gun owners knew they had to be
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responsible for what happened to their gun and that the and that law enforcement was going to knock
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on the door if their gun was lost or stolen, they locked up their guns. Another reform was that you
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need to prove a reason. You need to prove that you wanted it for hunting or shooting or that you
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were a gun collector. That's not very hard to prove. Pretty much everybody who owns a gun
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presumably should be able to prove that they they want it for hunting or shooting or for collecting.
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Self-defense was no longer a justification for having a gun. In civilized societies, we outsource
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that to the police. I'm sorry if you live in the middle of the woods and you don't have faith that
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the police are going to get to you in time if a mass murderer comes lurking around your property,
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your remote farm, but you know what? If you live on a remote farm, then you need a gun for hunting
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and shooting or collecting. You don't need a gun if you're in a large apartment block
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right around the corner from a police station in a downtown area. So that was one reform. Then
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secondly, you need to license the gun. You need to register the gun. I mean, for God's sake,
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we register cars. We register boats. We register dogs. You can't register guns. I mean the fear in
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the States is that if you we'll once you register them, then the government's going to come and take
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them. As the government hasn't come and taken your car, the government hasn't come and taken your dog
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or your boat. Can you not see that there is an upside to registering guns short of full government
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confiscation? How would they even do it under the Second Amendment? We'll get to the Second Amendment
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in just a moment. I just want to make the point that there are all kinds of things that Australia did
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short of the gun buyback and short of the gun ban that were crucial in yielding the results
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that those reforms in the in the in the 1990s had and which America would be able to emulate.
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Here are two really important components. It became against the law to privately sell a gun. You
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had to go through a dealer and if you sold it privately, you needed to have the cops witness it.
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So it's all very well. If you want to sell me a gun, we're neighbours. That's fine, but you've
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got to go down a local police station and say, mate, can you just sign this thing that says that you've
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witnessed that this actually took place? That means that there's always a paper trail of exactly
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who's got what gun wear and it's not to confiscate the gun. It's so that people take responsibility
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for their own firearms because they're deadly weapons. It's so that the nation isn't just a wash
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mysteriously in a way that nobody understands with high-powered military style death machines.
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So you can go to the police and you can have the private sale witnessed or you can sell it to a
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dealer and the dealer can sell it to your mate, but you can't do what currently happens in the
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States, which is get around the background checks, which are already incredibly loose. I mean,
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the background checks are it's voluntary for states to contribute the information about their
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background checks. So there's no reason for conservative Republican states to even bother
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participating in the background checks scheme and submitting the relevant information to the FBI
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because they don't frankly care. And more than three quarters of gun criminals didn't even get their
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guns via background checks. They were able to get them through what's called the gun show loophole,
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which basically means that you can give a gun to anybody and there doesn't have to be any real
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record of it in the States. Why not just change that? Why do we keep talking about banning guns? Why
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do we keep talking? Why does the right keep saying that they're coming for your guns? We're not
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coming for the guns. There are so many things that we could do that would change a little bit,
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just a little bit. And the other second component that I thought was interesting when I was digging
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into this about the Australian reforms was that it made it a crime not to report the loss of theft
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of a gun. It's mandatory now in Australia to report the loss of theft of a gun. Doesn't mean that
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you're going to be punished for it. It's totally fine to lose something. It's totally fine to
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have your house broken into and your gun gets stolen. But that has to be on the register.
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We have to know. And simply in knowing, simply in understanding the pattern of gun ownership
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in Australia, law enforcement is so much better able to know who's got guns and to then keep
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them out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them. So background checks. Half of gun criminals,
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this is according to a study in the United States, half of gun criminals would have passed their
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background check if they'd had them. They weren't bad guys before they did something bad with a gun.
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They weren't on mental health registries. They didn't have criminal records.
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The lost Vegas mass shooter would have passed a psychology exam. There was nothing obviously wrong
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with them. Not to mention the fact that two thirds of gun deaths are suicides. You're not going to
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prevent suicides by better background checks. So what are we concluding here? Small voluntary gun
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buybacks like the ones that the ones that American cities sometimes implement don't work. It has
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to be a widespread mandatory gun buyback. Australia's was the biggest gun buyback ever anywhere in
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the world. 640,000 weapons in 12 months. What ended up happening? Okay, let's get to the facts about
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this. Well, the risk of dying by gunshot drops by more than a half. That's including suicide and
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accidents. Australia's gun death rate is one-tenth in the United States. In the 18 years prior to
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the changes in the law, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia. That's defined in Australia as
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an incident in which a gunman killed five or more people other than himself. That's actually
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a higher casualty count than is usually applied in the United States for telling mass shootings.
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So even using the higher bar, it was 13 mass shootings in the 18 years prior. And you know since
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the poor Arthur massacre, touching lots of wood, zero, not a single one. In the 20 years after
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the laws came into effect in 1996, gun-related homicides dropped by 59 percent.
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Gun-related suicides by 65 percent. Just stop thinking about these numbers and think about what
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this means in terms of lives. That's two-thirds of the people who were otherwise have shot themselves in
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the head to end their lives who didn't. And even if you're crazy enough to think that the ease with
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which guns enable people to kill other people doesn't make them more likely to do so. And that a
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person who wants to call someone will always find a way. They're going to say, use a gun and they're
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going to use a knife. If they don't use a knife, they're going to use a baseball bat. Even if you
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stupid enough to think that the simplicity of pulling a trigger doesn't make it more likely
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that someone's going to be able to inflict serious injury than them having to hunt the person
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down with a baseball bat and smash their skull in. Think about suicide because there it really is
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obvious that a person who's drunk or high or who's incredibly depressed, who's boiling their
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eyes out in the darkest moment of their entire lives, could make a decision with a gun that they
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simply wouldn't do if they were trying to kill themselves with a stapler. It's too grizzly.
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And speaking of mental health, this is the talking point that you hear more often than anything
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else on Fox News and from the NRA and from Republicans who don't want to see any changes whatsoever
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to gun safety laws that we need to worry about mental health. These are the same people who
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cut investments in public health, who cut investments in mental health. Here's an article from NBC
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15th of February 2018. The headline, Trump Signs Bill revoking Obama era gun checks for people
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with mental illnesses. President Trump quietly signed a bill into law on Tuesday that's this Tuesday
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rolling back an Obama era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illnesses to
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purchase a gun. The rule which was finalized in December added people receiving social security
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checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs
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to the national background check database. Had the rule fully taken effect, it would have added
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about 75,000 names to that database. So at the moment, if you're getting a social security
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check for mental illness, you can buy a gun. If you've been deemed unfit to handle your own
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financial affairs, you can buy a gun. This tiny tweak which would have added people who obviously
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have a mental illness because they're receiving a social security check for it. And if they don't
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have a mental illness, then that's social security fraud. So fuck them. They don't get their gun.
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They can choose one or the other either you get to defraud social security or you get to have a gun.
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But no, the Republicans want you to be able to do both. You can get your social security check
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for mental illness and you can also buy a gun. So that regulation which was implemented after
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the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School has been revoked by President Trump.
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Let's also just note that if this really was a problem of mental health, then you're basically
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claiming that Americans are uniquely insane. I mean, if you have 25 times the number of gun
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homicides as the average and developed world, are you saying that you're 25 times crazier?
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Because that's a pretty fucking damning indictment of your own country. In my experience,
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Americans aren't more crazy. They're a little more odd in some ways, but hey, so are Aussies.
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And the other final point that I'd make about mental health is it stigmatizes people with mental
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illnesses to claim that the reason why America has this problem, this recurring catastrophe of gun
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massacres is because of the mentally ill. And quite apart from anything else, when we talk about
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making sure that mentally ill people don't have access to guns, I'm not sure if your claim is
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that there is a second amendment constitutional right to bear arms. Why, for example,
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schizophrenic people don't have constitutional rights. Imagine arguing that schizophrenic people
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shouldn't have the first amendment shouldn't apply to them, so they shouldn't be allowed to
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freely speak their mind because they're mentally ill. That wouldn't pass master. How come you can
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say that the second amendment doesn't apply to them and they don't have the right to bear arms,
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if as you claim, the second amendment is absolute. And this is where we really start getting into
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the juicy stuff. Let's talk about the second amendment. The second amendment says this,
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a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people
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to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. What's the first thing you notice about that statement?
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No, it's not the well regulated militia. I'm getting to that. It's not even grammatical.
30:35
I mean, quite apart from anything else, people who think that the US Constitution is flawless
30:40
and the most brilliantly devised document ever handed down to man by Moses from burning bush,
30:46
it's not a grammatical sentence, a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free
30:51
state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Yeah, that's missing a
30:57
verb. Anyway, we take their point. Their point would seem to be, unless you're an ideologue,
31:04
unless you're intentionally misunderstanding it, would seem to be that you want to have militias,
31:09
you want to make sure they're well regulated, but those militias are going to be fundamental to
31:15
maintaining freedom in this state, both from aggressors abroad and within. Therefore, people need
31:22
to keep and bear arms. This has become the sentence on which all of this carnage and mayhem is
31:32
predicated is justified. All the lives ruined, the bullets tearing through flesh, the little children
31:38
lying in pools of blood is all because of this sentence or rather because of the Supreme Court's
31:45
interpretation of this sentence. To Americans who say, well, it's in the Constitution, there's not
31:51
a lot you can do about it. Fuck that. What are you talking about? You can interpret the Constitution
31:57
a million ways. If the Supreme Court can find a right for me and my gay husband to get married
32:04
in the Constitution, which was the furthest thing from the founding fathers minds, if they can find a
32:09
right to privacy, which allows a woman to get an abortion in the Constitution, even though there's
32:15
nothing about abortions in the Constitution and nothing about privacy in the Constitution,
32:19
then they can find a fucking way to interpret the Second Amendment in such a way that you can't
32:23
buy, that a mentally handicapped person can't buy a semi-automatic weapon. The Supreme Court's already
32:30
said time and time again, including in the Heller decision, which is the one that fundamentally
32:35
changed the game for gun ownership in the United States. And by the way, it was only in 2008.
32:39
If you think this goes back a long way, well, guns are along on a part of American, the American
32:44
tradition. Yes, they are culturally, but the constitutional right was only invented by the
32:51
Supreme Court in 2008. That was when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to a decades-old ban in
32:58
Washington, D.C. on handgun possession. Washington, D.C. had for decades not allowed you to own
33:05
handguns. And any firearm that you had in the home had to be stored unloaded, and it either had
33:11
to be disassembled or bound by a locking device. That was the law of the land in Washington, D.C.
33:17
And it was only when gun, I mean, gun proponents became particularly cocky. And the NRA was
33:24
essentially co-opted in the 1970s by radical reactionary libertarians who became very bullish
33:31
and started pushing this stuff up through the courts that the Supreme Court found that for the
33:37
first time in 70 years, there was an individual right to possess firearms. In other words,
33:44
that that whole bit about the well-regulated militia didn't exist. They just did not think
33:49
that that was relevant to the Second Amendment. And that was a radical departure from what the
33:55
Supreme Court had previously held. So don't give me this like it's a long, long, long, long history
34:00
of American jurisprudence. It's not. It's a decade-old, less than a decade-old.
34:07
But one thing that even the conservatives, even Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court said
34:13
was that the Second Amendment should not be understood as conferring, quote, a right to keep and
34:19
carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. The court gave
34:25
examples of laws that it would consider presumptively lawful, such as A, prohibiting firearm
34:31
possession by felons and by the mentally ill. B, forbidding firearm possession in sensitive
34:37
places like schools and government buildings and C, putting conditions on the commercial sale
34:43
of firearms. So the Supreme Court itself has said, listen guys, don't take the Second Amendment to
34:49
be absolute. Of course, it has to be interpreted sensibly. If it has to be interpreted sensibly,
34:55
then just interpret the fucking line sensibly. This is not about the Second Amendment being a great
35:01
impediment to common sense gun safety laws in America. I mean, Bill Clinton banned semi-automatic
35:10
weapons. It has already been done in America and then George W. Bush revoked the ban.
35:17
You know, what is an arm? Let's look at the- what are arms? A well-regulated militia being
35:21
necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms
35:25
shall not be infringed. What are arms? Do you think nuclear weapons are arms? If they're not arms,
35:30
what are they? A rocket propelled grenades, arms? Are bazookas, arms? This makes no sense.
35:39
If the Supreme- if the- if the Second Amendment is absolute, if the Second Amendment is the reason
35:43
why- and I- I- gee, I hate it when people say, well, I'm a Second Amendment, I'm a believer in
35:47
the Second Amendment. Yeah, we're all believe that- what do you mean you believe in the Second Amendment?
35:52
I believe the Second Amendment exists, so I can see it right in front of me. It's in the Constitution.
35:56
And I'm not saying you should deny the existence of the Second Amendment or past laws that
36:03
breach the spirit of the Second Amendment as it was conceived of by the people who wrote it and
36:08
who specifically wrote the words a well-regulated militia when they were writing their
36:12
crazily ungrammatical sentence. So, yeah, nukes, bazookas, rocket propelled grenades,
36:20
what about a backpack nuke? Why can't I have those? It says, in the Second Amendment, the right
36:26
of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. If you're going to say that I can have
36:31
a semi-automatic weapon, but I can't have an automatic weapon. In other words, I can have a
36:37
machine gun looking thing that I can pull the trigger as many times as I want as fast as I can
36:43
and even put a bumpstock on it which artificially pulls the trigger as faster than is humanly possible
36:49
and that's okay. But then a machine gun where I just hold the trigger down and it releases rounds
36:57
at about the same rate as my semi-automatic can a little bit faster. Then where is that in the
37:05
Second Amendment? I don't see that distinction in the Second Amendment. You're already agreeing
37:09
with me that the Second Amendment has to be interpreted through the light of current arms.
37:15
So either say that individuals, in fact mentally handicapped individuals, in fact mentally handicapped
37:24
juvenile individuals should be able to buy nuclear weapons, rocket propelled grenade launches
37:30
that can bring down a plane and so on or shut up and agree with me that the Second Amendment
37:38
is a matter of interpretation and you could just as easily interpret it to say that all it allows
37:43
you to do is it allows sane adults to own the kinds of firearms that existed when the Second Amendment
37:50
was written. That would be an equally valid interpretation. There is absolutely nothing in the
37:56
current debate about guns that has anything to do with the Second Amendment because everybody
38:00
agrees, apart from those who genuinely do believe that children living with psychotic mental illnesses
38:05
should be able to buy nuclear bombs, everyone agrees that it requires interpretation.
38:11
So just interpret it differently. However, all of this is not to say that I have no sympathy for
38:18
gun advocates in all of this. The main argument that the most reasonable sounding Republicans
38:26
make when tragedies like this take place is one that I actually agree with, which is what
38:34
possible amendment that you could actually get through Congress would remotely make a difference.
38:42
It is such a daunting problem in America where there are as many guns as there are people
38:47
more, I believe by now, that what can you do that would help? I saw Tucker Carlson saying this on
38:54
Fox News, you name me one thing, he was talking to a Democratic Senator or Congressperson,
38:59
you name me one thing that you could get through that you had to have any hope of getting through
39:02
that would have made any difference, this was after the Las Vegas shooting, that would have made any
39:07
difference at all. And he's right. Here's the problem. The tactic has been for the past 40 years
39:18
by the NRA, oppose all change to gun laws unless it's making guns more available, oppose any
39:26
restrictions whatsoever so that you make it impossible for people who want to improve the status quo
39:32
to see any possibility of large scale change. So you force them into a corner and then
39:36
and then force them to propose essentially only tiny tweaks at the edges because they only
39:42
want to propose things that they could have conceivably imagined might pass. And they also proposed
39:47
tiny little tweaks like banning semi-automatic weapons or banning bump stocks or tweaking the
39:55
mental health conditions of who can buy a gun or closing the gun show loophole. These are little
40:00
things that people who are in favor of gun safety put forward partly because they're the only
40:05
things that they can imagine getting through and partly because they want to show how unreasonable
40:10
the gun nuts are by not even agreeing to the tiniest form of progress. But the double-edged
40:17
sword there, the flip side of that coin to mix my metaphors, is that then the gun nuts,
40:24
I won't call you nuts, the gun advocates, the opponents of any gun safety law will say,
40:31
look, you're proposing such small-bore things that they wouldn't make a difference and they're
40:35
right, they wouldn't make much of a difference. It reminds me a little bit of the debate around
40:40
climate change. You know, people have gone, I remember 10 years ago when people who opposed any
40:46
action on climate change would say, look, we don't know about the science, we can't be certain
40:53
what's going on. Now they don't say that anymore. They usually say, I believe in climate change,
40:58
I believe that man is probably has something to do with it, but if the prognostications
41:04
of the intergovernmental panel on climate change and the climate scientists are correct,
41:07
then this is such a big deal that what you're proposing at the Paris Climate Accords is going to
41:12
do barely anything. You're saying that we should reduce the world's temperature by 1.5%,
41:16
and yet you're saying that it's already gone up by 3%, and there are 400 parts per million of
41:21
carbon and this and that and the ice sheets and melting and all you're saying is that we should
41:25
make these tiny tweaks around the edges. Come on, get serious. But of course, the people who wanted
41:30
action on climate change wanted to get serious 30 years ago, and every step of the way the people
41:35
who've opposed such action say, I mean, they throw sand in the gears and make sure that it can't
41:42
work until you get to such a scenario at which now we do face a crisis or rapidly will,
41:46
and the tiny tweaks that we want to try to get through in order to begin addressing it seem so
41:53
small-bore that our opponents are actually correct when they say it's not going to fucking matter.
41:57
If, as you say, it's as dire as you claim, then what you're doing is just fiddling while
42:04
Rome burns. It's deck chairs on the Titanic, and they're right. They've successfully
42:11
stalled reform on guns for 40 years, and each time people who want to change the status quo of guns
42:21
in America proposed something, the problem has gotten a little bit worse. There are a few million
42:29
more guns than there were last time. We had a massacre. And then people who seem to be cool
42:40
with this litany of destruction. And yes, if you oppose all gun safety laws, then you are
42:45
cool with the litany of destruction. You can't say on the one hand, I oppose these laws because
42:50
of freedom in the Second Amendment, but I also hate school shootings. You fucking love school
42:55
shootings. You love it on some crazy insane level that I don't understand. It is a pact that
43:02
you're willing to make. It's just something you're willing to tolerate.
43:07
Maybe you can find a way to be emotionally inert about it so you don't actually love it,
43:11
but on some secret emotional level in the darkest corner of your soul, you do. You must,
43:17
because something as abstract as the Second Amendment can't motivate you to turn a blind eye.
43:24
To this horror of living in a country where this constantly, constantly happens,
43:31
unless the tiny little part of you is cool with it.
43:37
And so when those people say, well, it's too late to fix a problem this big,
43:40
there are too many, you know, you're closing the barn door after the horses are already bolted.
43:43
Yeah, they're right. They're right because they've successfully kicked the can down the road
43:48
for so long that there's very little we can do, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything,
43:55
because we're going to find ourselves next year facing exactly the same problem,
43:58
but a little bit worse and the year after that a little bit worse and the year after that a little
44:01
bit worse. The claim that none of the laws that are being proposed by Democrats would do much to
44:10
impact gun violence in America. Maybe true, but like the climate change trick,
44:19
it's a sort of logical fallacy of saying, because we can't do everything, we shouldn't do anything.
44:25
Reminds me a bit of saying, well, we're never going to, we're never going to get rid of fires in
44:28
apartment buildings. Therefore, we shouldn't do anything. We shouldn't have fire escapes on the outside,
44:33
because that's just, that's just fiddling while Rome burns. That's deck chairs on the Titanic.
44:37
There are still going to be fires. Yeah, but you do what you can. You do what you can when you can.
44:45
So do I think that something can change in the United States of America? This is something
44:48
that people ask me quite a lot in the States, because I come from the country where things actually
44:53
did change. No, I don't really, I am as jaded about this as I am about anything. And there are
45:02
a few reasons why. Firstly, something that not Americans need to understand about American gun
45:07
culture is that there are large swathes of America where guns just aren't seen as being violent
45:13
things at all. They're a part of life. They're a part of everyday life. My in-laws have guns in
45:18
the home. They live in New Hampshire. They live by a lake. They live a long way away from anywhere.
45:23
A gun is a tool. It's not a, it's not a violent thing. It's not, it has not, their gun has as much
45:27
to do with the school shooting or the Las Vegas shooting. As I don't know, they're,
45:33
they're hobby drone that they can fly over and take pretty pictures has to do with the space
45:39
X rocket going to Mars. It's just not this, it's, it's only superficially even the same category of
45:43
thing. There's is a tool. It's like a can opener. It comes in handy sometimes. And in parts of America,
45:52
it's so embedded in the national culture and the psyche. It's something that, you know,
45:57
when you have a son, you take him out in his first day, you teach him how to shoot and it's,
46:00
it's part of like fishing. It's, it's almost like I try to explain it to Australians and this is
46:05
a very imperfect analogy. But imagine if the government tried to control surfing. Imagine the
46:10
communities in Australia for whom surfing is so fundamental and so ingrained. It's just such a
46:17
part of the way of life. It's a backdrop to everyday life that you are afraid of the government
46:23
meddling in it. Why should a bureaucrat have a ledger in which he was going to record the number
46:28
of days you go surfing and how many waves you caught? That's almost what it feels like to some
46:32
Americans who go hunting every week. And here that the government wants to have a record of exactly
46:40
what gun they've gotten, how they're using it. Now, of course, you could say, well, surfing doesn't
46:45
hurt anybody and surfing isn't causing carnage. Yeah, I know all that. All of those caveats
46:49
aside, I'm trying to get you to understand that how interwoven into the very fabric of existence
46:54
guns are in some parts of the states. So if you did pass a mandatory gun buyback by outlawing
47:00
large numbers of guns and saying you can only have these categories of guns the way that we did
47:05
here in Australia, there would be bloodshed implementing that. It would not be like in Australia
47:11
where everyone said, oh, it sounds like a bit of a good idea, doesn't it? Probably shouldn't be
47:15
killing each other. And as an aside, one of the things that United States has to endure that other
47:19
countries don't have to endure is being the biggest and therefore sort of most far down the
47:26
cultural into the into the cultural thicket of any other country. By which I mean one of the
47:33
reasons why the laws were able to be changed in Australia in 1996 is I believe because Aussies
47:38
were able to see the American experience and say, we don't want that we don't want to go down that
47:42
path. America has to plow forward and boisterously blunder into a briar patch of its own calamitous
47:53
making in order for other countries in the world to look at it and go, yeah, let's not do that bit.
47:58
Let's pick this other path. And America finds it harder to do that
48:04
partly because it's old as far as new countries go. I mean, we think of Europe as being old,
48:10
but a lot of Europe has been raised and rebuilt since the Second World War. America is actually
48:14
pretty old culturally. And secondly, it's bloody insular. Americans don't have the luxury of looking
48:20
around the world. They are so big they're trapped inside of their their own gravitational pull.
48:25
So the experience of other countries seems somewhat esoteric. It doesn't really land. Whereas for
48:29
an Australian, the experience of America is present. We get a lot of American films. We get a lot of
48:33
American news. We get a lot of American TV shows. It's right in our face and we see it as a warning.
48:41
So in some ways, America's sort of size and self-regard makes it difficult for it to step back
48:50
and make the changes that other countries are able to make. So there's that cultural
48:54
factor of Americans being attached to their guns. And then there's campaign finance,
49:01
just the political system and the corruption therein. Corruption is a big word for it,
49:06
but I think it's appropriate. If you run against guns,
49:13
and I'm just talking about a simple law change to introduce safety around guns, for example,
49:19
mandatory background checks, closing the gun show loophole, the NRA will pour money towards
49:25
your opponent and have you probably primary. You won't even make it to the general election
49:29
because someone will outflank you within your own party. So it's not that the NRA spends a lot of
49:35
money. Actually, if you look into it, they don't. They don't have to. The threat is there. Everybody
49:40
knows they have to tow the line because they don't want to spend all day, every day on the phone
49:44
to donors trying to drum up enough money to counteract the negative campaigns that the NRA is going
49:50
to put out at them if they don't tow the line. Another component that goes into my pessimism
49:55
about change in the United States is the suspicion of government that Americans have.
50:00
Both ideologically and practically, Americans fear tyranny. So that's the ideological component.
50:08
Right? Americans have a much deeper ingrained sense that at some point in the future,
50:12
the government's going to turn on us and we're going to have to have our guns to fight back.
50:15
Now, I don't understand how an old dude on his porch with a semi-automatic weapon is going to fight
50:21
against the 101st Airborne. I mean, the US military is the most formidable power that military
50:28
power that has ever existed anywhere. You're going to defeat them with your pea shooter on your
50:36
ranch in Alabama. I don't really don't understand this, but I suppose the argument might be that
50:40
if it's too difficult for the Secret Service to come door to door because everyone is rising up
50:47
constantly, then the population is harder to cow. I can imagine that. I just think the likelihood
50:53
that that is going to happen and that there would be no means for to to re-seize democratic control
51:00
is so small that it's not worth enduring having your kids constantly machine gun down at school.
51:06
That is a trade off. That is a risk. I will take the risk of tyranny rather than the certainty
51:11
of living in a bloodbath. And then the second component of American suspicion of government,
51:16
I think it's just a very practical one that they don't think these rules would be implemented
51:20
very well. They've seen the post office. It sucks. They've seen the DMV where you're going to
51:26
get your driver's license. It's interminable. The American government doesn't work well.
51:30
Al Franken had a line that Republicans run on the platform that government doesn't work and then
51:34
they get elected and prove it. And there's some truth to that. Government doesn't work. Government
51:41
doesn't work. Let's get government out of your life. Then they get into power and they slash
51:45
government services so that government is annoying. Paying taxes is frustrating. The IRS is aggravating.
51:51
The DMV is pointless. The post office is slow. And you feel like why would I want to be handing
51:59
over information about the things that I own and whether or not I gave a gun to my son
52:05
to these bureaucrats? They're going to screw it up. And this touches on a bigger suspicion
52:13
in the American psyche that I think is hard for foreigners to understand,
52:17
but that I have definitely smelt and come into contact with a lot since being in the States,
52:22
which I haven't felt elsewhere, which is not a mistrust of government, but a mistrust
52:29
of civilization and its ability to prevail. There is a sense in America that this is a huge gamble
52:39
that this is a huge role of the dice the American Revolution was and that it's tenuous and fragile
52:45
and the whole thing could come crashing down at any moment. And I find that in Australia and in
52:50
Western Europe and in New Zealand and Canada, there's a sense that maybe you could even say a
52:56
complacent sense that we have basically figured this out, that we understand how to do Western
53:01
liberal democracy now and we understand how to keep these things together. And that may be a
53:06
misguidedly optimistic point of view. One of the reasons why Trump came as a shock, one of the
53:12
reasons why Brexit came as a shock, one of the reasons why the fear of Le Pen in France is so stark
53:19
is precisely because there had been certain things that were taken for granted in the West,
53:24
at least by liberal elites, that suddenly couldn't be taken for granted anymore.
53:28
Could the whole society fall apart? Could cultures crumble? Could bits of our countries
53:33
fall off? Start fighting each other? Could even civil war be conceivable?
53:40
These concerns have been much more present at the front of American's minds than they have
53:46
at the front of other people's minds, I believe, in my experience certainly of traveling
53:50
throughout the Midwest in the States and the West and the South.
53:54
The idea that there's something tenuous in civilization that were on the brink.
53:59
Donald Trump was alluding to this when he was talking about this American carnage in his
54:03
inaugural address. And it says that things are just fraying and falling apart and could all
54:09
all hell could break loose. And to me that is such a part of the conversation around guns that
54:16
nobody ever talks about and that non-Americans rarely appreciate that it's worth noting.
54:23
If you believe that there is a more than trivial probability that you might end up in some
54:33
dystopian future, you would want to be armed. And that sense just doesn't seem to exist outside
54:42
of the United States in Western liberal democracies. You know what probably does exist?
54:47
Yemen. It probably exists in Yemen.
54:51
There are lots of other things that we could talk about here but I don't want to bore you.
54:55
I hope this has been somewhat enlightening. I mean one of the other things is just that
54:58
people who really really care about a policy issue are willing to change their votes about it
55:05
more than people who aren't. And so people who really really care about the
55:10
maintaining the status quo on gun safety or the lack of gun safety will actually swing their votes.
55:17
But you know it's their number one issue. For gun advocates this is their number one issue.
55:24
But for you is it really? Even in the wake of this tragedy is it really a number one issue?
55:29
It's probably number seven in terms of things that would actually swing your vote.
55:33
So there's just a there's a kind of 80-20 principle at work, a political paradox where 90%
55:40
of the population where you keep seeing these opinion polls 90% of the population wants gun safety
55:44
laws. Yeah but that 90% of the population isn't going to change their vote. The 10% who
55:49
opposes gun safety laws will. So they'll always have more power.
55:58
It's me again, modern day Josh, in March of 2021. I hope that was useful. It's sad that it is still
56:06
so relevant and it's amazing how little this subject has occupied our minds in the intervening
56:13
year and a half to two years since I recorded it because of all the other schemozzles that we've
56:17
been dealing with. Maybe the next four years of a Biden administration will give Americans an
56:23
opportunity to revisit this but I somehow doubt it. We'll be back next week with a comfy couch
56:29
convo and then a real corka of another Uncomfortable Conversation Seed.