Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Charlie Kirk & Guns

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Charlie Kirk & Guns · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans. One of the most influential right wing organizers in America has been
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  assassinated in front of a crowd of university students who was speaking to, and if you feel
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  the slight nausea in your stomach and tightness in your chest that I do, let's begin with a
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  nice deep breath. And remember that you are a child of the earth and the stars and that flowers
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  still exist and there are butterflies fluttering around and let's just ground ourselves for a moment
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  because I find it difficult to know exactly what to make of this moment in history. I'm pretty good
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  at political predictions. I'm good at predicting elections. I wasn't great at the last US election.
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  I didn't think Trump was going to win that big, but I'm pretty good at smelling the mood of an
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  electorate when other people are can't. I'm much, much less good at understanding whether or not I'm
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  living through something that's important or not culturally. I thought that the Trump assassination
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  attempt was going to be a huge history-defining moment and maybe it had an impact on the election
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  a little bit, certainly his reaction to it. But the fact that it is now sort of maybe less thought
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  about than him saying that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville rally or
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  Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters deplorables, like I would never have predicted that those
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  things were going to stick in the public imagination or consciousness. And when I was recently talking
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  about my father's death, I mentioned at the line that he used to say, which is that the problem
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  with life is that you can only understand it backwards, but you have to live it forwards.
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  And when something like this happens, I feel very much like there are two possible futures. One in
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  which Charlie Kirk is the answer to an obscure trivia question and another of which
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  has today as its own chapter in the book that is someday written about the fall of America
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  into the troubles. Let's just talk about Charlie for a moment. I really, really in a way that
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  I haven't in a while feel terrible empathy for Charlie and his family and his loved ones and his
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  supporters, although I disagreed with him on almost everything. It's just a moment for extending
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  as much human empathy as we can muster. I mean, he was smart. He was charismatic. He was motivated.
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  He founded the America's preeminent right wing youth activist group. And he was 18 when he
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  founded this thing. It's incredible how much he had achieved by the age of, what was he 31?
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  And a lot of people felt that he was a terrible, terrible influence on the country. And at the same
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  time, as you can believe that, if you do, you can also say that is completely irrelevant at this point.
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  So when he was 18, he created Turning Point USA, which was this organization that was a conservative
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  youth group, attracted tens of millions of dollars in donations, sort of made the right hip,
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  to some extent, was influential with Candace Owens and other figures like that. It now has
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  chapters at more than 850 colleges and they register students to vote and they bring conservative
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  speakers to campus. And a lot of those conservative speakers on campus were the subject of boycotts
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  and rallies and being shouted down and often instances of violence, of minor violence and where
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  they would have to be hustled off campuses and so on. And he became a flashpoint during the
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  culture wars for trying to diversify the amount of the scope of ideas on university campuses in
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  ways that leftists found highly distasteful. You know, he was like a fan of Rush Limbo in high
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  school and Rush Limbo ended up headlining one of his events in 2019, actually, and donating money
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  to him. He was the Charlie was the, that is, was the youngest speaker at the Republican National
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  Convention in 2016. Trump's, you know, first convention. He was only 23 years old.
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  Trump loved him. Charlie was apparently influential in the peak of JD Vance. He spent a lot of time
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  at the White House and sort of became a liaison between Trump and the way that young,
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  non-woke Americans were thinking. And here he was giving a speech at a university campus in Utah and
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  20 minutes into the speech. He was shot and killed. And we don't want to be hasty about why.
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  You know, everyone thought initially that the Trump assassination attempt was politically
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  motivated and it just turned out to be a crazy person who wanted to shoot somebody famous.
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  So this could be that. But the only appropriate response at the moment
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  is genuine sympathy for Charlie and his family and his fans. At the same time, I am afraid
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  of the reaction. I'm afraid of the justification that this could give the Trump administration
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  to further militarize cities, to further demonize the left.
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  I feel preemptive anticipatory irritation at the American left, which will go around saying
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  there's no excuse for violence. There's no excuse for violence. Yeah, sure. We get it. We all agree
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  with that. That's a bromide. That's a platitude. But let's also own our own behavior
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  and not just fall back on cynical trite. I don't know. I mean, what else can you do? I don't
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  want to criticize people for saying, I mean, it's certainly better to say that there's no excuse
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  for violence than to say that there is an excuse for violence. But I also would have liked to see
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  somewhat greater empathy towards the scope of the American political opinion over the past 10
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  years so that we didn't arrive at a situation where we feel like we're on tender hooks and we're
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  living in a powder keg. We shouldn't have gotten here. There was a time, of course, when someone
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  being shot while giving a speech, pre-mass media, pre-social media, well, pre-social media, really,
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  not pre-mass media would have just potentially been a terrible event that we didn't have to all
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  have an opinion on and all psychoanalyze and all fit into the prism of our sort of own global
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  preconceptions. This is a point that I made after Trump's election where I exalted Americans
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  really not to read too much into it, to realize that inflation was high, dissatisfaction with
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  incumbent parties was high, and an attempt to do something different was widespread around the
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  world, and Kamala Harris was a pretty weak candidate. So all of the millions of words of
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  op-eds that were gushing out of people's computers to analyze the heart and soul of the appellation
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  was sort of less important than, you know, shit happens. And to some extent, shit happens.
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  And it'd sort of be nice to live in a world in which people like me weren't constantly
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  pontificating about the vast meaning of things. So I don't intend to do that today. Instead,
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  I want to focus on just one small angle on which I think I have some unique expertise,
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  and in which it might be constructive to focus your attention instead of our fears about
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  some impending collapse of American democracy. And that is the issue of guns.
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  So what we're going to do today is I'm just going to reintroduce you, or perhaps introduce you
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  for the first time, to a monologue that I did trying to bridge understanding between Americans
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  and the rest of the world about firearms. This is one of those issues which is ripe for a kind
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  of a zaps take because it is because opinions are very hot on both sides of it.
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  Points of view are very simplistic on both sides of it. And having lived in the United States
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  and in Australia, which has some of the world's strictest gun laws, I think I understand both
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  perspectives. What I'm going to play for you today after I have a few more things to say about
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  the current political moment was recorded originally in 2019 in August. It was after the El Paso
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  shooting. And I'm ashamed to say that I don't even remember whether or not El Paso,
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  like whether it was El Paso or the Pulse Night Club or Las Vegas. But two years after that,
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  I re-released this. It was originally an episode of We The People Live, which was my old show.
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  And then I re-released this after the Boulder, Colorado shooting in March of 2021 as an episode
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  of uncomfortable conversations with a new intro. And I've basically had an unofficial policy that
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  every time there's a mass shooting in America and everyone's talking about this, I want to sort of
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  bring this back to you. It's also the case that a lot of people listen to the show who weren't
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  listening to the show four years ago, let alone six. This monologue is mostly about mass shootings.
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  So when you hear me talk about schools and movie theaters and shopping malls,
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  just mentally insert the term political rallies. And when you hear me talk about mass shootings,
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  just insert the term political violence. I don't stand by everything that I say in this monologue.
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  It was recorded six years ago. It is not perfect. I was a younger person. There are some things
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  that I would no longer say, but it remains, I think, one of the best examples of my honest attempt
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  to grapple with something thorny in a way that can resonate with both sides. Now coming back to the
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  present day, I mean, I don't know where to start on the threats that America faces, but I do know
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  that we are not doing a good job about isolating and identifying what I regard as the two
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  central threats in a clear and clean way that can land with the American Heartland.
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  The two clear threats, as I see them, are firstly a sort of soft authoritarianism, a kind of Hungarian
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  style, illiberal democracy sort of in name only, where the game is rigged. And there are
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  which hunts and the executive branch has way too much power. And you sort of have to tread gently
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  when you criticize the government for fear of being audited or having your business deal
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  fall through or are you seeing the attempt to do that? Whether it's the CBS merger being cleared
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  or a million ways from Sunday, I'm not going to recount them here and bore you with them.
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  And then secondly, I think the underappreciated risk is a risk of sort of civil strife.
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  I don't want to call it a civil war. I don't think it descends into the Balkans,
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  but it may be more analogous to the troubles in Ireland, where you have two sides who
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  are who cannot understand each other and who feel that their basic interests are inimical to the
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  others. And this is why I said earlier that I'm sort of irritated in advance by the,
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  there's no excuse for violence, thoughts and prayers, brigade. Because as I said when I spoke to
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  Joey Watson, the journalist about the Christchurch shooter and white supremacy a few weeks ago,
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  and that's a great conversation, by the way, if you haven't listened to that, we talk about
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  the Christchurch shooter, this Australian guy who slaughtered almost 60 innocent Muslims
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  while they were praying at mosques in New Zealand. Incidentally, the reason he went to New Zealand
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  was because New Zealand has lax gun laws. So it's relevant to this conversation as well.
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  If you needed to point to a specific example of where Australian lives were saved by our gun laws
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  in the context of mass shootings, specifically the Christchurch shooting is perfect because he was
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  an Australian radicalized white supremacist who traveled to Eastern Europe and all over the world
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  to sort of train with far right militias and migrant hunters. And he came back and intentionally
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  moved to New Zealand because in New Zealand you can get the kinds of military style weapons that you
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  can not quite as widely in America, but it's pretty easy and he was able to get
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  at 15s and so on and New Zealand would have been able to buy in Australia. So that's a little
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  aside, but one of the things that I was talking about with Joey was that there is a kind of
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  inexorable logic towards violence. Once you start seeing the world in mannequin divisive terms
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  of them and us and we are threatened by them, instead of seeing them the way that I try to
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  see the world, which is we're all in this together. There is no, there are no escape rafts
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  for us to go off in so we have to find a way to be more empathetic towards people who we think
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  are our enemies. If you really believe that your political opponents are destroying you
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  and if you've been preaching that message as your principal focus for years, then what other
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  option is there but to take up arms? I mean to some extent it would be irresponsible not to
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  and let me be clear, I'm not saying you should because I think the premise is wrong,
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  the premise that there's a group of people in the country like a not a tiny ramp of people,
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  yes, there are, you know, there are jihadists and there are neo-nazis and there are, I don't know,
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  yes, violent people. But the idea that there's a significant cohort of people,
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  like the people who were fans of Charlie Kirk, who want to destroy America is wrong. They don't.
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  And if you believe that they did and if you spent a long time speaking as if they do,
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  I think it's a bit rich to turn around and say no excuse for violence, no excuse for violence,
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  no excuse for violence. Violence is the logical conclusion of the hysteria that you've been pushing.
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  I'm not being partisan about this because if it had gone the other way in a different person
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  of a different political persuasion had been killed. And again, we're making all kinds of assumptions
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  about the reason why he was killed. I'm sort of talking more about the way that we're going to be
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  talking about this the way that I'm sure if I turn on CNN or Fox News right now, I will hear
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  them talking about this regardless of who the, you know, what the motives of the killer actually were.
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  To take it back to the Joey Watson Christchurch shooter analogy, if Islam is destroying Western
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  civilization, then Muslims need to be made to feel unsafe. Try clipping that and putting that on
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  social media as something that Josh Zep said, you know, you, you understand what I'm getting at?
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  I'm not saying that that's true. I'm saying that there is a logical connection between belief and
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  action. And it's a bit rich to pretend that there isn't. If Zionists are genocidal,
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  then maybe Jews ought to be attacked. If garsens are all potential terrorists, maybe they need
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  to be erased. If the left is trying to destroy the meritocratic system that built America,
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  then leftists need to go. And if right wing speakers on college campuses need to be silenced,
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  then they need to be silenced. This is a logical extension of the way we've been talking
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  for the past 10 years. So it's a bit bloody rich for the people who talk that way to then turn
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  around and distance themselves from it by saying, we saying we stand against political violence.
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  Yeah, you're standing against political violence and you ferment it on both sides, especially on
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  the right, definitely not giving a pass to Trump here, who is probably the most masterful instigator
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  of political violence whilst stepping aside from it just enough to maintain plausible
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  deniability. See, for example, January 6th. I actually happened to have been in an email
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  argument with a listener, which is very unusual for me, but this is a guy who sends very, very
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  intelligent and thoughtful, but a bit sort of like spectromy emails to me, being highly critical
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  of people like me and Sam Harris, who have ourselves criticized the excesses of the social justice
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  left and lamented the decline of universalism on the left and the rise of identitarianism. Because
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  this guy lives in the South, in the United States, around a long lineage of centuries of
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  white red necks, essentially. And he says that we just don't get it. We should never have been
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  platforming people who were anti-woke, because that just empowered the right. This is a very,
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  very mainstream idea on the left. I think it's a vast majority of people in the institutional left
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  believe this. And let me just quote you some of his email, because I think it gets to the
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  question of the extent to which we should have empathy for the other side and the extent to which
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  we should take up arms. He emailed me yesterday and said he was talking about the Supreme Court
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  approving Trump's attempt to implement essentially a national stop and frisk policy. And he wrote,
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  this is exactly what Trump was promising was coming to America. Should he be elected? While idiots
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  like Sam Harris were accusing the left of hysterics when it came to racism and Trump.
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  Maybe it's time not to say who could have known, as so many people are doing right now.
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  Maybe it's time to say the people who didn't know don't actually know all that much about
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  politics in America that maybe just maybe those who didn't know this was coming aren't super duper
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  smarty pants who we should celebrate for their dispassionate contrarianism. Maybe they are people
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  who shouldn't be talked to again and again, because they don't actually know anything.
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  So that's his criticism of me for talking to people like Sam Harris.
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  And I normally don't take the bait, but I did this time. And I wrote back,
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  or maybe it's time to say that if the left had listened to Sam Harris when voters felt the country
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  was being hijacked by a sensorious hysterical radical fringe of thought police who were firing
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  columnists for discussing the n-word, and mobbing professors for saying Halloween costumes
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  shouldn't be banned, and violently harassing restaurant goers for not bending the knee,
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  when the likes of you, presumably, were whistling past the time bomb saying,
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  but but but the real problem is white supremacy, then a strong democratic candidate might have
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  made it through the primaries. And suburban soccer moms in Ohio and young Latinos in Arizona
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  might not have been so activated about race that they were suddenly available to be picked off by
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  Marga. You don't need to keep reminding me why the left is blameless and why the real problem
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  is any progressive who tries to appeal to centrists by arguing for not being crazy.
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  That's what I devote my life to doing. Trust me, I get it, I don't need reminding Trump bad.
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  So not my most generous response to a listener, and you know, I could probably have been more tactful.
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  But I have to say when I woke up this morning and saw the news about Charlie Kirk,
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  I felt like there are a lot more people in America who agree with this guy than with me,
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  or at least they're the ones defining the conversation at the moment,
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  that there's no point in building bridges because the other side is beyond the pale,
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  and we should devote all of our efforts to fighting for our side.
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  This is where fighting for our side gets us.
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  But let me step back off the brink of being a pontificating obnoxious,
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  moralizing boob and come back to what I said I would give you, which is this piece about guns,
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  because this is really fundamental, and I think if you want to just take a deep breath and
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  smell the flowers and look at the butterflies and give America a bit of a break and give
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  yourselves a bit of a break and feel like, you know what, we're not broken. We have a series of
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  challenges that we need to figure out how to surmount from climate to artificial intelligence to
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  the attempted authoritarian excesses of the Trump administration to this other piece of the
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  jigsaw puzzle, which causes an untold amount of American strife, which is firearms.
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  So please enjoy this flawed, but nonetheless, I think, interesting and stimulating, and on this day,
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  timely way to take your brain away from all of the chatter in the rest of the media,
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  and back to something I think deeper and more fundamental, which is a discussion about firearms,
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  in the context of the United States, recorded six years ago, again, I don't condone all of it,
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  but I think it's bloody useful. My thoughts are with you. Take time for yourself. Be gentle with
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  yourself. I'll see you next time. Enjoy.
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  Today, a special episode, or a not-so-special episode, I'm 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 that I
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  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 they do something about it? Why do they walk this
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  situation? There are several things going on both culturally and constitutionally and legally
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  that I think it'll be worth explaining to non-Americans, and similarly to Americans, they often
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  have American friends ask me about Australia's experience because Australia's experience of
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  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 me? 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 just
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  try to articulate my point of view, which I think is hopefully unbiased on this issue. I'm not a
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  create, I'm not someone who believes that like Piers Morgan seems to, that all Americans would have
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  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 that
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  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 that, if you actually care
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  about the impact of guns on American society, the proportion of people who get assassinated by some
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  crazed 19-year-old kid in a school is just vanishingly small. That is not the gun problem. The gun
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  problem is a handgun problem among drug gangs and black youths. That's an argument that has
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  some currency, because if you're just looking at numbers, it's true. The vast proportion of Americans
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  who are killed by guns are African-Americans and people who are involved in gangs. It's very,
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  the rate of gun homicide between races is low in America. It's just not the case that people
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  are being moaned down by walking along the street. So I have some sympathy for the claim that mass
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  shootings aren't what we should be focusing on, if the only metric by which you're determining
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  what's bad about guns is the body count. If you're just counting up piles of dead Americans,
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  then it's true that mass shootings aren't the biggest problem. But if you care about what happens
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  to a culture's head, about what it's like to grow up in a place, about the intangible aspects
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  of human existence, then events like what has just happened, and before that the Las Vegas
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  shooting, people being plucked off moaned down by a madman with effectively a machine gun,
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  a semi-automatic, a legal semi-automatic weapon that had been amended with a legal, what's
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  called a bump-stock to basically hold the trigger down and release it so fast that it turns into
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  effectively a military-style machine gun. That is happening on America's streets, does something to
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  a country, and certainly does something to my heart and my soul. It's certainly made me more
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  callous, has it made you more callous? 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 and frustration
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  towards a nation that refuses to do anything about this. So let's talk about specifics
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  enough, waffling. America's firearm homicide rate is 25 times the average of other rich countries.
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  Its suicide rate is 8 times higher than other countries. Now some people, even friends of mine,
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  who are ostensibly sensible on guns will say, look, it's not just guns. That is a portion of
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  this, but Americans are violent. We are of violent people. Or we are more racially divided
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  than other countries. Or this is a mental health issue. This is about mental health. These people
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  are crazy. Of course, crazy people are going to do stupid things. Let's take each of those
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  points individually. Is America actually more violent? Well, what we know is that Americans make up
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  about 4.5% of the global population, and they own 42% of the world's guns. All right, 4.4%
• 31:15
  of the population of the world, and they own 42% of the world's guns. Between the mid 60s and
• 31:22
  the past few years, over that half century, 31% of the gunmen in mass shootings in the world
• 31:31
  were Americans. Almost a third. Do you think that Americans are responsible for almost a third
• 31:38
  of the world's crime? No. America is responsible for the same share of the world's crime,
• 31:44
  as their population represents. They're not more criminal. Adjusted for population,
• 31:51
  the only country that has a higher rate of mass shootings, and we're only looking here in this
• 31:55
  particular study, this was a study out of the University of Alabama in 2015. They're only looking
• 32:02
  at countries that have more than 10 million people, because you can have tiny little outliers,
• 32:05
  if you include countries like Monaco or, you know, little flyspec nations. So of countries with
• 32:10
  more than 10 million people, the only country that has a higher rate of mass shootings is Yemen.
• 32:15
  Yemen has the world's second highest rate of gun ownership. The highest rate of gun ownership,
• 32:24
  surprise, surprise, is the United States. So good on the United States for having more guns
• 32:29
  per capita than Yemen, but killing yourselves at a lower rate than Yemen used to.
• 32:36
  Globally, a country's rate of gun ownership is directly correlated to the odds that it'll
• 32:41
  experience a mass shooting. And that holds, that correlation holds, even if you exclude the
• 32:47
  United States. So to people who think that there's something unique about the United States, that
• 32:51
  it might be unusually violent, or it's because of racial divisions, or it's because of the lack of
• 32:55
  of proper mental care under a health care system that is more inequitable in other developed
• 33:01
  countries, even if you exclude the United States, there is still a strong correlation between
• 33:06
  a country's rate of gun ownership and its number of mass shootings. And what about these
• 33:13
  background crime rates? There isn't a difference really between the amount of violent crime in
• 33:20
  the United States and the amount of violent crime in other developed countries. It's a little
• 33:25
  bit higher, but not a lot. What is a lot higher is the number of times those criminal events lead
• 33:31
  to someone being killed. Here's a statistic for you. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as
• 33:37
  a Londoner, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process. 54 times more
• 33:46
  likely to die in a robbery that they have the same likelihood of encountering as someone in London.
• 33:52
  And the discrepancy, this is according to a study at the University of California Berkeley in
• 33:56
  1999, a landmark study, the discrepancy can be entirely explained by the difference in the use
• 34:02
  of guns. More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every single
• 34:07
  axis. Among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities,
• 34:13
  and when you control the crime rates. And when you look at 10 countries, there's an analysis
• 34:20
  of 130 different studies from 10 different countries. The gun control legislation tends to reduce
• 34:26
  the number of gun murders. I mean, this sounds obvious doesn't it's amazing that we even need to
• 34:29
  say this. When there are fewer guns, fewer people die at the hands of guns. Ah, but gun proponents
• 34:35
  might say crazy people just find other ways to do bad things. If they're not going to use a gun,
• 34:41
  they'll use a knife. If they can't use a knife, they'll use a hammer. If you really,
• 34:44
  really want to kill somebody, you will find a way to kill somebody. Yes, what would the Las Vegas
• 34:50
  shooter have done to kill those scores of people? I guess you could say he might have been able to
• 34:57
  get some kind of a bomb. If you're that dedicated, maybe you would. But the statistics show that when
• 35:05
  you make it much, much easier to kill people, more people die. Look at that fact that a New Yorker
• 35:11
  is 55 times more likely to be killed in a robbery than a Londoner is.
• 35:17
  Here are some numbers. Japan has a third the population of the United States. In the 2013,
• 35:23
  there were 13 gun deaths in Japan. 13. In America, there were 11,200, eight
• 35:32
  homicides and more than 21,000 suicides and more than 500 deaths accidental gun deaths.
• 35:38
  So an American is about 300 times more likely to die by the hands of a gun
• 35:47
  by homicide or accident. This is excluding suicide than a Japanese person is. Now America's gun
• 35:51
  ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan's. So the gap between the 150 times higher gun ownership
• 35:57
  rate and the 300 times higher gun homicide or accident rate does show that there's something else
• 36:03
  going on. So bravo to you if you're one of the people who say it's not just about guns. No, no,
• 36:09
  it's about all kinds of other things. Yeah, okay. The all kinds of other things increases twofold,
• 36:16
  the relationship between the number of guns and the number of gun homicides and accidents.
• 36:21
  But the number of guns increases 150 fold the number. So if you were going to go for the low hanging
• 36:28
  fruit, if you're going to go for the simplest option, then instead of banging on about mental health
• 36:35
  and the uniquely violent nature of Americans and the uniquely fractious nature of American race
• 36:40
  relations, you would just go for the easiest possible thing, which is extremely powerful weapons
• 36:46
  in the hands of almost anyone who wants to get them. So let's talk about Australia.
• 36:53
  In 1996 in April, a 28 year old guy had lunch at a cafe in Tasmania at a tourist site,
• 37:03
  a historic kind of penal colony called Port Arthur. He finished his mail, he returned his tray,
• 37:10
  he took a semi-automatic rifle from his bag and killed 35 people and wounded 23 more by
• 37:18
  father worst mass shooting in Australian history. So the conservatives were actually in power in
• 37:24
  Australia at the time. Can you imagine a Republican government in the States doing what the conservative
• 37:32
  party in Australia did to its credit, which was to ban automatic and semi-automatic weapons?
• 37:41
  And that's what everyone focuses on, right? The ban. But it's actually the smallest component.
• 37:45
  Would you be surprised to note or to know that right now there are more guns in Australia than
• 37:52
  they were before the ban? It's true. It's not about the ban. It's about the way the ban was introduced
• 37:59
  and the regulations that were part of it. It established a national firearms registry. I can
• 38:06
  already hear the NRA quaking in its boots with the idea of the government having a registry
• 38:11
  for your firearms. It implemented a waiting period for gun purchases. So when you apply to get a gun,
• 38:17
  there's a 28-day wait. And then there was the gun buyback. A mandatory gun buyback, 600,000
• 38:24
  guns were bought back. The government paid for them. It cost half a billion dollars and they
• 38:31
  implemented a special temporary tax to fund the money that they were going to give to gun owners
• 38:36
  in the buyback. Now I hear a lot of Americans say buybacks don't work. New York City has had a buyback.
• 38:41
  They occasionally implement a voluntary buyback and you see the mayor get up and the governor and
• 38:45
  they say, we've got this number of guns we've taken them off the streets. That's a voluntary buyback.
• 38:52
  What on earth is the point of a voluntary gun buyback? I'm sorry to sound totalitarian and dictatorial,
• 39:00
  but you've got to force the fuckers to give up their guns. Otherwise, they're not going to give them
• 39:03
  up. The only people who are going to give them up are the people who don't want them and have no
• 39:06
  use for them. No point in buying guns and paying people to give you guns that they're happy to
• 39:12
  part with. You want to get the guns that people aren't happy to part with. Let's talk about the
• 39:19
  registry. I recently bought a new car. The moment I paid the private, it wasn't a new car,
• 39:27
  so it was a second hand car. So it was already owned by somebody else. The moment, the moment I
• 39:31
  paid him the money for the car, he immediately had an incentive to take himself off the car
• 39:37
  insurance because he knows that if I have an accident, even just driving out on my way home from
• 39:43
  having bought the car, and his name is on the insurance, then even if he wasn't driving,
• 39:48
  he's going to lose his no claim bonus and his insurance is going to be more expensive thereafter.
• 39:52
  In other words, he's basically responsible for what that car does when he's on the insurance
• 39:57
  docker when he's on the registration. So there's a strong incentive for him to inform the authorities
• 40:04
  as soon as that car changes possession. That's basically the incentive that was implemented
• 40:10
  by the Australian government in 1996. What it said was, you are now responsible for your guns.
• 40:18
  Believe it or not, in the States, you're not. In the States, if someone finds a gun at the
• 40:23
  scene of a crime and they look up at who owns the gun and you were the one who bought the gun
• 40:28
  and you went through all of the proper processes, then you can just say, well, yeah, but it got stolen.
• 40:34
  When did it get stolen? I don't know. Why didn't you report it to the police? I didn't feel like it.
• 40:39
  And that's fine. That's totally fine in the States. So when conservatives say they're going to take
• 40:43
  out guns, they're coming for our guns, we're going to keep our guns. No, before we come for the guns,
• 40:49
  the first thing we might like to do is just know who's got guns and implement a rule that says
• 40:57
  that you are responsible for your gun. That doesn't mean that we're going to assume that you did the
• 41:01
  murder. What it means is we're going to give you a fine for having been reckless enough to let the
• 41:07
  gun out of your sight. And you know one other consequence of the Australian laws that were introduced
• 41:13
  in 1996, gun theft dropped by half because now that people knew, now the gun owners knew they had
• 41:20
  to be responsible for what happened to their gun and that the law enforcement was going to knock on
• 41:25
  the door if their gun was lost or stolen, they locked up their guns. Another reform was that you
• 41:33
  need to prove a reason. You need to prove that you wanted for hunting or shooting or that you were
• 41:37
  a gun collector. That's not very hard to prove. Pretty much everybody who owns a gun presumably
• 41:41
  should be able to prove that they they want it for hunting or shooting or for collecting.
• 41:46
  Self-defense was no longer a justification for having a gun. In civilized societies, we outsource
• 41:54
  that to the police. I'm sorry if you live in the middle of the woods and you don't have faith that
• 41:59
  the police are going to get to you in time if a mass murderer comes lurking around your property,
• 42:04
  your remote farm, but you know what? If you live on a remote farm, then you need a gun for hunting
• 42:10
  and shooting or collecting. You don't need a gun if you're in a large apartment block
• 42:16
  right around the corner from a police station in a downtown area. So that was one reform. Then
• 42:23
  secondly, you need to license the gun. You need to register the gun. I mean, for God's sake,
• 42:28
  we register cars. We register boats. We register dogs. You can't register guns. I mean the fear in
• 42:35
  the States is that if you we'll once you register them, then the government's going to come and take
• 42:39
  them. As the government hasn't come and taken your car, the government hasn't come and taken your dog
• 42:44
  or your boat. Can you not see that there is an upside to registering guns short of full
• 42:52
  government confiscation? How would they even do it under the Second Amendment and we'll get to
• 42:56
  the Second Amendment in just a moment? I just want to make the point that there are all kinds of
• 43:01
  things that Australia did, short of the gun buyback and short of the gun ban that were crucial
• 43:07
  in yielding the results that those reforms in the 1990s had and which America would be able to
• 43:13
  emulate. Here are two really important components. It became against the law to privately sell a gun.
• 43:23
  You had to go through a dealer and if you sold it privately, you needed to have the cops
• 43:28
  witness it. It's all very well if you want to sell me a gun, we're neighbours. That's fine,
• 43:34
  but you've got to go down a local police station and say, mate, can you just sign this thing
• 43:38
  that says that you've witnessed that this actually took place? That means that there's always a
• 43:43
  paper trail of exactly who's got what gun wear and it's not to confiscate the gun. It's so that
• 43:49
  people take responsibility for their own firearms because they're deadly weapons. It's so that the
• 43:53
  nation isn't just a wash mysteriously in a way that nobody understands with high-powered military
• 44:01
  style death machines. You can go to the police and you can have the private sale witnessed or you
• 44:09
  can sell it to a dealer and the dealer can sell it to your mate, but you can't do what currently
• 44:13
  happens in the States, which is get around the background checks, which are already incredibly
• 44:18
  loose. The background checks are it's voluntary for States to contribute the information about
• 44:23
  their background checks, so there's no reason for conservative Republican States to even bother
• 44:28
  participating in the background checks scheme and submitting the relevant information to the FBI
• 44:32
  because they don't frankly care. More than three-quarters of gun criminals didn't even get their
• 44:38
  guns via background checks. They were able to get them through what's called the gun show loophole,
• 44:42
  which basically means that you can give a gun to anybody and it doesn't have to be any real record
• 44:47
  in the States. Why not just change that? Why do we keep talking about banning guns? Why do we keep
• 44:52
  talking? Why does the right keep saying that they're coming for your guns? We're not coming for
• 44:55
  the guns. There are so many things that we could do that would change a little bit, just a little bit.
• 45:04
  And the other second component that I thought was interesting when I was digging into this about
• 45:09
  the Australian reforms was that it made it a crime not to report the loss or theft of a gun.
• 45:16
  It's mandatory now in Australia to report the loss or theft of a gun. Doesn't mean that you're
• 45:21
  going to be punished for it? It's totally fine to lose something. It's totally fine to have your
• 45:26
  house broken into and your gun gets stolen, but that has to be on the register. We have to know
• 45:32
  and simply in knowing, simply in understanding the pattern of gun ownership in Australia,
• 45:38
  law enforcement is so much better able to know who's got guns and to then keep them out of the
• 45:44
  hands of people who shouldn't have them. So background checks. Half of gun criminals, this is
• 45:52
  according to a study in the United States, half of gun criminals would have passed their background
• 45:56
  check if they'd had them. They weren't bad guys before they did something bad with a gun.
• 46:03
  They weren't on mental health registries. They didn't have criminal records.
• 46:09
  The lost Vegas mass shooter would have passed a psychology exam. There was nothing obviously wrong
• 46:14
  with them. Not to mention the fact that two thirds of gun deaths are suicides. You're not going to
• 46:21
  prevent suicides by better background checks. So what are we concluding here? Small voluntary gun
• 46:28
  buybacks like the ones that the ones that American cities sometimes implement don't work. It has
• 46:34
  to be a widespread mandatory gun buyback. Australia's was the biggest gun buyback ever
• 46:41
  anywhere in the world. 640,000 weapons in 12 months. What ended up happening? Okay, let's get to
• 46:50
  the facts about this. Well, the risk of dying by gunshot dropped by more than a half. That's
• 46:57
  including suicide and accidents. Australia's gun death rate is 1-10th, the United States.
• 47:05
  In the 18 years prior to the changes in the law, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia.
• 47:12
  That's defined in Australia as an incident in which a gunman killed five or more people
• 47:16
  other than himself. That's actually a higher casualty count than is usually applied in the United
• 47:20
  States for telling mass shootings. So even using the higher bar, it was 13 mass shootings
• 47:26
  in the 18 years prior. And you know since the poor Arthur massacre,
• 47:30
  touching lots of wood, zero, not a single one. In the 20 years after the laws came into effect in
• 47:40
  1996, gun-related homicides dropped by 59%. Gun-related suicides by 65%. Just stop thinking about
• 47:51
  these numbers and think about what this means in terms of lives. That's two-thirds of the people
• 47:58
  who are otherwise have shot themselves in the head to end their lives who didn't. And even if
• 48:05
  you're crazy enough to think that the ease with which guns enable people to kill other people
• 48:12
  doesn't make them more likely to do so. And then a person who wants to call someone will always
• 48:17
  find a way. They're gonna find it. Use a gun and they're gonna use a knife. If they don't use
• 48:21
  a knife, then they're gonna use a baseball bat. Even if you're stupid enough to think that the
• 48:26
  simplicity of pulling a trigger doesn't make it more likely that someone's going to be able to
• 48:31
  inflict serious injury than them having to hunt the person down with a baseball bat and smash their
• 48:36
  skull in. Think about suicide because there it really is obvious that a person who's drunk or
• 48:45
  high or who's incredibly depressed, who's boiling their eyes out in the darkest moment of their
• 48:50
  entire lives, could make a decision with a gun that they simply wouldn't do if they were trying
• 48:57
  to kill themselves with a stapler. It's too grizzly. And speaking of mental health, this is the
• 49:07
  talking point that you hear more often than anything else on Fox News and from the NRA and from
• 49:11
  Republicans who don't want to see any changes whatsoever to gun safety laws. That we need to
• 49:19
  worry about mental health. These are the same people who cut investments in public health,
• 49:24
  who cut investments in mental health. Here's an article from NBC 15th of February 2018. The headline
• 49:32
  Trump Signs Bill revoking Obama era gun checks for people with mental illnesses. President
• 49:39
  Trump quietly signed a bill into law on Tuesday. That's this Tuesday, rolling back an
• 49:42
  Obama era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illnesses to purchase a gun.
• 49:46
  The rule which was finalized in December added people receiving social security checks for mental
• 49:52
  illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background
• 49:57
  check database. Had the rule fully taken effect, it would have added about 75,000 names to that
• 50:03
  database. So at the moment, if you're getting a social security check for mental illness,
• 50:11
  you can buy a gun. If you've been deemed unfit to handle your own financial affairs,
• 50:17
  you can buy a gun. This tiny tweak which would have added people who obviously have a mental
• 50:25
  illness because they're receiving a social security check for it. And if they don't have a
• 50:29
  mental illness, then that's social security fraud. So fuck them. They don't get their gun. They
• 50:33
  can choose one or the other. Either you get to defraud social security or you get to have a gun.
• 50:37
  But no, the Republicans want you to be able to do both. You can get your social security check for
• 50:43
  mental illness and you can also buy a gun. So that regulation which was implemented after the
• 50:51
  mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School has been revoked by President Trump.
• 50:56
  Let's also just note that if this really was a problem of mental health, then you're basically
• 51:03
  claiming that Americans are uniquely insane. I mean, if you have 25 times the number of gun
• 51:08
  homicides as the average and developed world, are you saying that you're 25 times crazier?
• 51:12
  Because that's a pretty fucking damning indictment of your own country. In my experience,
• 51:16
  Americans aren't more crazy. They're a little more odd in some ways, but hey, so are Aussies.
• 51:22
  And the other final point that I'd make about mental health is it stigmatizes people with
• 51:28
  mental illnesses to claim that the reason why America has this problem, this recurring catastrophe
• 51:36
  of gun massacres is because of the mentally ill. And quite apart from anything else, when we talk
• 51:43
  about making sure that mentally ill people don't have access to guns, I'm not sure if you're
• 51:51
  claiming that there is a second amendment constitutional right to bear arms. Why, for example,
• 51:57
  schizophrenic people don't have constitutional rights. Imagine arguing that schizophrenic people
• 52:04
  shouldn't have the first amendment shouldn't apply to them, so they shouldn't be allowed to
• 52:08
  freely speak their mind because they're mentally ill. That wouldn't pass master.
• 52:12
  How come you can say that the second amendment doesn't apply to them and they don't have the
• 52:15
  right to bear arms? If, as you claim, the second amendment is absolute, and this is where we
• 52:21
  really start getting into the juicy stuff. Let's talk about the second amendment.
• 52:28
  The second amendment says this, a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free
• 52:36
  state, the right of the people to keep in bear arms shall not be infringed.
• 52:40
  What's the first thing you notice about that statement? No, it's not the well-regulated militia.
• 52:46
  I'm getting to that. It's not even grammatical. I mean, quite apart from anything else, people who
• 52:51
  think that the US Constitution is flawless and the most brilliantly devised document ever handed
• 52:58
  down to man by Moses from the burning bush, it's not a grammatical sentence. A well-regulated
• 53:04
  militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep in bear
• 53:09
  arms shall not be infringed. That's missing a verb. Anyway, we take their point. Their point
• 53:16
  would seem to be, unless you're an ideologue, unless you're intentionally misunderstanding it,
• 53:21
  would seem to be that you want to have militias, you want to make sure they're well-regulated,
• 53:26
  but those militias are going to be fundamental to maintaining freedom in this state, both from
• 53:33
  aggressors abroad and within. Therefore, people need to keep in bear arms.
• 53:41
  This has become the sentence on which all of this carnage and mayhem is predicated is justified.
• 53:48
  All the lives ruined, the bullets tearing through flesh, the little children lying in pools of blood
• 53:56
  is all because of this sentence, or rather because of the Supreme Court's interpretation of this
• 54:01
  sentence. To Americans who say, well, it's in the Constitution, there's not a lot you can do about it,
• 54:08
  fuck that. What are you talking about? You can interpret the Constitution a million ways. If the
• 54:14
  Supreme Court can find a right for me and my gay husband to get married in the Constitution,
• 54:20
  which was the furthest thing from the founding fathers' minds, if they can find a right to privacy,
• 54:26
  which allows a woman to get an abortion in the Constitution, even though there's nothing
• 54:30
  about abortions in the Constitution and nothing about privacy in the Constitution, then they can find
• 54:34
  a fucking way to interpret the Second Amendment in such a way that you can't buy, that a mentally
• 54:40
  handicapped person can't buy a semi-automatic weapon. The Supreme Court's already said time and
• 54:46
  time again, including in the Heller decision, which is the one that fundamentally changed the
• 54:51
  game for gun ownership in the United States. And by the way, it was only in 2008. If you think this
• 54:55
  goes back a long way, well, guns are a long, honored part of American, the American tradition.
• 55:00
  Yes, they are culturally, but the constitutional right was only invented by the Supreme Court
• 55:07
  in 2008. That was when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to a decades-old ban in Washington
• 55:14
  DC on handgun position. Washington DC had, for decades, not allowed your own handguns. And
• 55:22
  any firearm that you had in the home had to be stored unloaded and it either had to be disassembled
• 55:27
  or bound by a locking device. That was the law of the land in Washington DC.
• 55:32
  And it was only when gun proponents became particularly cocky and the NRA was essentially
• 55:40
  co-opted in the 1970s by radical reactionary libertarians who became very bullish and started
• 55:47
  pushing this stuff up through the courts that the Supreme Court found that for the first time
• 55:53
  in 70 years, there was an individual right to possess firearms. In other words, that that whole
• 55:59
  bit about the well-regulated militia didn't exist. They didn't just did not think that that was
• 56:05
  relevant to the Second Amendment. And that was a radical departure from what the Supreme Court had
• 56:11
  previously held. So don't give me this like it's a long, long, long, long history of American
• 56:15
  jurisprudence. It's not. It's a decade old. Less than a decade old.
• 56:22
  But one thing that even the conservatives, even Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court said
• 56:28
  was that the Second Amendment should not be understood as conferring, quote, a right to keep and
• 56:34
  carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. The court gave
• 56:40
  examples of laws that it would consider presumptively lawful, such as a prohibiting firearm
• 56:46
  possession by felons and by the mentally ill. B, forbidding firearm possession in sensitive
• 56:52
  places like schools and government buildings. And C, putting conditions on the commercial
• 56:58
  sale of firearms. So the Supreme Court itself has said, listen guys, don't take the Second Amendment
• 57:04
  absolute. Of course, it has to be interpreted sensibly. If it has to be interpreted sensibly,
• 57:10
  then just interpret the fucking line sensibly. This is not about the Second Amendment being a great
• 57:16
  impediment to common sense gun safety laws in America. I mean, Bill Clinton banned semi-automatic
• 57:25
  weapons. It has already been done in America. And then George W. Bush revoked the ban.
• 57:31
  You know, what is an arm? Let's look at this. What are arms? A well-regulated militia being
• 57:36
  necessary to the security of a free state. The right of the people to keep and bear arms
• 57:40
  shall not be infringed. What's what are arms? Do you think nuclear weapons are arms?
• 57:44
  If they're not arms, what are they? A rocket propelled grenades arms? Are bazookas arms?
• 57:52
  This makes no sense. If the Supreme, if the Second Amendment is absolute,
• 57:56
  if the Second Amendment is the reason why, and I, gee, I hate it when people say, well,
• 58:01
  I'm a Second Amendment, I'm a believer in the Second Amendment. Yeah, we're all believe that,
• 58:05
  what do you mean you believe in the Second Amendment? I believe the Second Amendment exists,
• 58:08
  so I can see it right in front of me. It's in the Constitution. And I'm not saying you should
• 58:14
  deny the existence of the Second Amendment or past laws that breach the spirit of the Second
• 58:20
  Amendment as it was conceived off by the people who wrote it and who specifically wrote the
• 58:24
  words a well-regulated militia when they were writing their crazily ungrammatical sentence.
• 58:32
  So, yeah, nukes, bazookas, rocket propelled grenades. What about a backpack nuke? Why can't I have those?
• 58:39
  It says, in the Second Amendment, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
• 58:45
  If you're going to say that I can have a semi-automatic weapon, but I can't have an automatic
• 58:49
  weapon. In other words, I can have a machine gun looking the thing that I can pull the trigger as
• 58:56
  many times as I want as fast as I can and even put a bumpstock on it which artificially pulls the
• 59:02
  trigger as faster than it's humanly possible, and that's okay, but that a machine gun where I
• 59:09
  just hold the trigger down and it releases rounds at about the same rate as my semi-automatic can,
• 59:17
  little bit faster. Then where is that in the Second Amendment? I don't see that distinction in
• 59:22
  the Second Amendment. You're already agreeing with me that the Second Amendment has to be interpreted
• 59:28
  through the light of current arms. So either say that individuals, in fact mentally handicapped
• 59:37
  individuals, in fact mentally handicapped juvenile individuals, should be able to buy nuclear
• 59:42
  rocket propelled grenade launches that can bring down a plane and so on, or shut up and agree with me
• 59:51
  that the Second Amendment is a matter of interpretation and you could just as easily interpret it
• 59:56
  to say that all it allows you to do is it allows sane adults to own the kinds of firearms that
• 1:00:04
  existed when the Second Amendment was written. That would be an equally valid interpretation. There
• 1:00:10
  is absolutely nothing in the current debate about guns that has anything to do with the Second
• 1:00:14
  Amendment because everybody agrees, apart from those who genuinely do believe that children living
• 1:00:19
  with psychotic mental illnesses should be able to buy nuclear bombs, everyone agrees that it
• 1:00:24
  requires interpretation. So just interpret it differently. However, all of this is not to say that I
• 1:00:31
  have no sympathy for gun advocates in all of this. The main argument that the most reasonable
• 1:00:40
  sounding Republicans make when tragedies like this take place is one that I actually agree with,
• 1:00:47
  which is what possible amendment that you could actually get through Congress would remotely make
• 1:00:55
  a difference. It is such a daunting problem in America where there are as many guns as there are
• 1:01:01
  people more, I believe by now, that what can you do that would help? I saw Tucker Carlson saying
• 1:01:09
  this on Fox News, you named me one thing, he was talking to a Democratic Senator or Congressperson,
• 1:01:14
  you named me one thing that you could get through that you had to have any hope of getting through
• 1:01:17
  that would have made any difference, this was after the Las Vegas shooting, that would have made any
• 1:01:22
  difference at all. And he's right. Here's the problem. The tactic has been for the past 40 years
• 1:01:33
  by the NRA, oppose all change to gun laws unless it's making guns more available, oppose any
• 1:01:41
  restrictions whatsoever so that you make it impossible for people who want to improve the status
• 1:01:46
  quo to see any possibility of large scale change so you force them into a corner and then force
• 1:01:53
  them to propose essentially only tiny tweaks at the edges because they only want to propose things
• 1:01:58
  that they could have conceivably imagined might pass. And they also propose tiny little tweaks
• 1:02:04
  like banning semi-automatic weapons or banning bump stocks or tweaking the mental health conditions
• 1:02:12
  of who can buy a gun or closing the gun show loophole. These are little things that people who
• 1:02:17
  who are in favor of gun safety put forward partly because they're the only things that they can
• 1:02:21
  imagine getting through and partly because they want to show how unreasonable the gun nuts are
• 1:02:28
  by not even agreeing to the tiniest form of progress but the the double edged sword there,
• 1:02:33
  the flip side of that coin to mix my metaphors is that then the gun nuts, I want to call your nuts,
• 1:02:40
  the gun advocates, the opponents of any gun safety law will say look you're proposing such small
• 1:02:47
  more things that they wouldn't make a difference and they're right they wouldn't make much of a
• 1:02:51
  difference. It reminds me a little bit of the debate around climate change you know people have
• 1:02:58
  gone I remember 10 years ago when people who were who opposed any action on climate change would
• 1:03:02
  say look we don't know about the science we can't be certain what's going on now they don't say
• 1:03:09
  that anymore they usually say I believe in climate change I believe that man is probably having
• 1:03:15
  probably has something to do with it but if the prognostications of the intergovernmental panel
• 1:03:20
  on climate change and the climate scientists are correct then this is such a big deal that what
• 1:03:24
  you're proposing at the Paris Climate Accords is going to do barely anything you're saying that we
• 1:03:28
  should reduce the world's temperature by one and a half percent and yet you're saying that
• 1:03:33
  it's already gone up by three percent and there are 400 parts per million of carbon and this
• 1:03:37
  and that and the ice sheets are melting and all you're saying is that we should make these tiny
• 1:03:41
  tweaks around the edges come on get serious but of course the people who wanted action on climate
• 1:03:46
  change wanted to get serious 30 years ago and every step of the way the people who've opposed
• 1:03:51
  such action say I mean they throw sand in the gears and make sure that it can't work until you
• 1:03:58
  get to such a scenario at which now we do face a crisis or rapidly will and the tiny tweaks that
• 1:04:04
  we want to try to get through in order to begin addressing it seem so small bore that our opponents
• 1:04:10
  are actually correct when they say it's not going to fucking matter if as you say it's as dire as
• 1:04:15
  you claim then what you're doing is just fiddling while Rome burns it's deck chairs on the Titanic
• 1:04:23
  and they're right they've successfully stalled reform on guns for 40 years
• 1:04:32
  and each time people who want to change the status quo of guns in America
• 1:04:38
  propose something the problem has gotten a little bit worse there are a few million more guns
• 1:04:45
  than there were last time we had a massacre and then people who seem to be cool with this
• 1:04:55
  litany of destruction and yes if you oppose all gun safety laws then you are cool with the
• 1:05:01
  litany of destruction you can't say on the one hand I oppose these laws because of freedom
• 1:05:06
  in the second amendment but I also hate school shootings you fucking love school shootings
• 1:05:10
  you love it on some crazy insane level that I don't understand you it is a pact that you're
• 1:05:17
  willing to make it's just something you're willing to tolerate maybe you can find a way to be
• 1:05:23
  emotionally inert about it so you don't actually love it but on some secret emotional level in
• 1:05:28
  the darkest corner of your soul you do you must because something as abstract as the second amendment
• 1:05:35
  can't motivate you to turn a blind eye to this horror of living in a country where this constantly
• 1:05:44
  constantly happens unless the time a little part of you is cool with it and so when those people
• 1:05:53
  say well it's too late to fix problem this big there are too many you know you're closing the
• 1:05:57
  barn door after the horse is already bolted yeah they're right they're right because they've
• 1:06:00
  successfully kicked the can down the road for so long that there's very little we can do
• 1:06:07
  but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything because we're going to find ourselves next year
• 1:06:12
  facing exactly the same problem but a little bit worse and the year after that a little bit worse
• 1:06:16
  and the year after that a little bit worse the claim that none of the none of the the laws that are
• 1:06:22
  being proposed by Democrats would do much to impact gun violence in America maybe true
• 1:06:31
  but like the climate change trick it's a sort of logical fallacy of saying because we can't do
• 1:06:37
  everything we shouldn't do anything reminds me a bit of saying well we're never going to we're
• 1:06:42
  never going to get rid of fires and apartment buildings therefore we shouldn't do anything we
• 1:06:46
  shouldn't have fire escapes on the outside because that's just that's just fiddling while
• 1:06:50
  on burns that's deck chairs on the Titanic there are still going to be fires yeah but you do what you
• 1:06:55
  can you do what you can when you can so do I think that something can change in the United States of
• 1:07:02
  America this is something that people ask me quite a lot in the States because I come from the country
• 1:07:07
  where things actually did change no I don't really I am as jaded about this as I am about anything
• 1:07:15
  and there are a few reasons why firstly something that not Americans need to understand about
• 1:07:22
  American gun culture is that there are large swathes of America where guns just aren't seen as
• 1:07:27
  being violent things at all there are part of life they're a part of everyday life my in laws
• 1:07:33
  have guns in the home they live in New Hampshire they live by a lake they live a long way away from
• 1:07:37
  anywhere a gun is a tool it's not a it's not a violent thing it's not it has nothing their gun has
• 1:07:42
  as much to do with the school shooting or the Las Vegas shooting as I don't know they're hobby
• 1:07:49
  drone that they can fly over and take pretty pictures has to do with the SpaceX rocket going to
• 1:07:55
  Mars it's just not this it's it's only superficially even the same category of thing there's a tool
• 1:08:01
  it's like a can opener it comes in handy sometimes and in parts of America it's so embedded in the
• 1:08:08
  national culture and the psyche it's something that you know when you have a son you take him
• 1:08:13
  out in his first day you you teach him how to shoot and it's it's part of like fishing it's it's
• 1:08:17
  almost like I try to explain it to Australians and this is a very imperfect analogy but imagine
• 1:08:22
  if the government tried to control surfing imagine the communities in Australia for whom surfing
• 1:08:28
  is so fundamental and so ingrained it's just such a part of the way of life it's a backdrop to
• 1:08:34
  everyday life that you are afraid of the government meddling in it why should a bureaucrat have a
• 1:08:40
  ledger in which he was going to record the number of days you go surfing and how many waves you
• 1:08:44
  caught that's almost what it feels like to some Americans who go hunting every week
• 1:08:51
  and hear that the government wants to have a record of exactly what gun they've gotten how
• 1:08:56
  they're using it now of course you could say well surfing doesn't hurt anybody and surfing
• 1:09:01
  isn't causing carnage yeah I know all that all of those caveats aside I'm trying to get you
• 1:09:06
  understand that how interwoven into the very fabric of existence guns are in some parts of the
• 1:09:10
  states so if you did pass a mandatory gun by back by outlawing large numbers of guns and saying
• 1:09:16
  you can only have these categories of guns the way that we did here in Australia there would be
• 1:09:22
  bloodshed implementing that it would not be like in Australia where everyone said oh sounds
• 1:09:27
  like a bit of a good idea doesn't it probably shouldn't be killing each other and as an aside
• 1:09:32
  one of the things that United States has to endure that other countries don't have to endure is
• 1:09:36
  being the biggest and therefore sort of most far down the cultural into the into the cultural
• 1:09:43
  thicket of any other country by which I mean one of the reasons why the laws were able to be
• 1:09:50
  changed in Australia in 1996 is I believe because Aussies were able to see the American experience
• 1:09:55
  and say we don't want that we don't want to go down that path America has to plow forward and
• 1:10:02
  boisterously blunder into a briar patch of its own calamitous making in order for other countries
• 1:10:10
  in the world to look at it and go yeah let's not do that bit let's pick this other path
• 1:10:16
  and America finds it harder to do that partly because it's old as far as new countries go
• 1:10:24
  I mean we think of Europe as being old but a lot of Europe has been raised and rebuilt since
• 1:10:28
  the Second World War America's actually pretty old culturally and secondly it's bloody insular
• 1:10:33
  Americans don't have the luxury of looking around the world they are so big they're trapped inside
• 1:10:37
  of their their own gravitational pull so the experience of other countries seems somewhat
• 1:10:42
  esoteric it doesn't so doesn't really land whereas for an Australian the experience of America is
• 1:10:46
  present we get a lot of American films we a lot of American news we a lot of American TV shows
• 1:10:51
  it's right now face and we see it as a warning so in some ways America's sort of size
• 1:11:00
  and self-regard makes it difficult for it to step back and make the changes that other countries
• 1:11:06
  are able to make so there's that cultural factor of Americans being attached to their guns
• 1:11:13
  and then there's campaign finance just the political system and the corruption they're in
• 1:11:20
  corruption's a big word for it but I think it's appropriate if you run against guns and I'm just
• 1:11:28
  talking about a simple law change to introduce safety around guns for example mandatory background
• 1:11:36
  checks closing the gun show loophole the NRA will pour money towards your opponent and have you
• 1:11:42
  probably primary you won't even make it to the general election because someone will outflank you
• 1:11:45
  within your own party so it's not that the NRA spends a lot of money actually if you look into it
• 1:11:51
  they don't they don't have to the threat is there everybody knows they have to tow the line
• 1:11:57
  because they don't want to spend all day every day on the phone to donors trying to drum up
• 1:12:01
  enough money to counteract the negative campaigns that the NRA is going to put out at them if they
• 1:12:06
  don't tow the line another component that goes into my pessimism about change in the United States
• 1:12:12
  is the suspicion of government that Americans have both ideologically and practically Americans
• 1:12:19
  fear tyranny so that's the ideological component right Americans have a much deeper ingrained
• 1:12:25
  sense that at some point in the future the government's going to turn on us and we're going to have
• 1:12:29
  to have our guns to fight back now I don't understand how an old dude on his porch with a semi-automatic
• 1:12:34
  weapon is going to fight against the 101st airborne I mean the US military is the most formidable
• 1:12:41
  power that military power that has ever existed anywhere you're going to make it you're going to
• 1:12:48
  defeat them with your pea shooter on your on your ranch in Alabama I don't really don't understand
• 1:12:53
  this but I suppose the argument might be that if it's too difficult for the secret service to come
• 1:12:59
  door to door because everyone is rising up constantly then then the population is harder to cow
• 1:13:06
  and I can imagine that I just think the likelihood that that is going to happen and that there would
• 1:13:10
  be no means for to to re seize democratic control is so small that it's not worth enduring having
• 1:13:18
  your kids constantly machine gun down at school that is a trade off that is a risk I will take the
• 1:13:23
  risk of tyranny rather than the certainty of living in a bloodbath and then the second component
• 1:13:30
  of American suspicion of government I think is just a very practical one that they don't think
• 1:13:33
  these rules would be implemented very well they've seen the post office it sucks they've seen the
• 1:13:40
  DMV where you're going to get your drivers license it's interminable the American government doesn't
• 1:13:44
  work well our franken had a line that republicans run on the platform that government doesn't work
• 1:13:49
  and then they get elected and prove it and there's some truth to that you know the government
• 1:13:56
  doesn't work government doesn't work let's get government out of your life then they get into
• 1:13:59
  power and they slash government services so the government is annoying paying taxes is frustrating
• 1:14:05
  the IRS is aggravating the DMV is pointless the post office is slow
• 1:14:11
  and you feel like why would I want to be handing over information about the the things that I own
• 1:14:17
  and whether or not I gave a gun to my son to these bureaucrats they're going to screw it up
• 1:14:25
  and this touches on a bigger suspicion in the American psyche that I think is hard for foreigners
• 1:14:31
  to understand but that I have definitely smelt and come into contact with a lot since being in
• 1:14:36
  the States which I haven't felt elsewhere which is not a mistrust of government but a mistrust
• 1:14:44
  of civilization and its ability to prevail there is a sense in America that this is a huge gamble
• 1:14:54
  that this is a huge role of the dice the American revolution was and that it's tenuous and fragile
• 1:15:00
  and the whole thing could come crashing down at any moment and I find that in Australia and in
• 1:15:05
  Western Europe and in New Zealand and Canada there's a sense that maybe you could even say a
• 1:15:11
  complacent sense that we have basically figured this out that we understand how to do Western
• 1:15:16
  liberal democracy now and we understand how to keep these things together and that may be a
• 1:15:22
  misguidedly optimistic point of view one of the reasons why Trump came as a shock one of the
• 1:15:27
  reasons why Brexit came as a shock one of the reasons why the fear of Le Pen in France is so stark
• 1:15:34
  is precisely because there had been certain things that were taken for granted in the West at
• 1:15:39
  least by liberal elites that suddenly couldn't be taken for granted anymore could the whole society fall
• 1:15:45
  apart could cultures crumble could bits of our countries fall off start fighting each other could
• 1:15:52
  even civil war be conceivable these concerns have been much more present at the front of American's
• 1:16:00
  minds than they have at the front of other people's minds I believe in my experience certainly
• 1:16:04
  of traveling throughout the Midwest in the States and the West and the South the idea that there's
• 1:16:10
  something tenuous in civilization that were on the brink Donald Trump was alluding to this when
• 1:16:16
  he was talking about this American carnage in his inaugural address the sense that things are
• 1:16:21
  just fraying and falling apart and could all all hell could break loose and to me that is such a part
• 1:16:30
  of the conversation around guns that nobody ever talks about and that non-Americans really appreciate
• 1:16:36
  that it's worth noting if you believe that there is a more than trivial probability
• 1:16:45
  that you might end up in some dystopian future you would want to be armed
• 1:16:54
  and that sense just doesn't seem to exist outside of the United States in Western liberal democracies
• 1:17:00
  you know what probably does exist Yemen it probably exists in Yemen
• 1:17:06
  there are lots of other things that we could talk about here but I don't want to bore you I hope
• 1:17:10
  this has been somewhat enlightening I mean one of the other things is just that people who really
• 1:17:14
  really care about a about a policy issue are willing to change their votes about it more than
• 1:17:21
  people who aren't and so people who really really care about the state of maintaining the status quo
• 1:17:26
  on gun safety or the lack of gun safety will actually swing their votes but you know it's their
• 1:17:33
  number one issue for the for gun advocates this is their number one issue but for you is it really
• 1:17:41
  even in the wake of this tragedy is it really a number one issue it's probably number seven in
• 1:17:46
  terms of things that would actually swing your vote so there's just a there's a kind of 80-20
• 1:17:51
  principle at work a political paradox where 90% of the population where you keep seeing these
• 1:17:56
  opinion polls 90% of the population wants gun safety laws yeah but that 90% of the population isn't
• 1:18:01
  going to change their vote the 10% who opposes gun safety laws will so they'll always have more power