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

its growth into what it has become today. Like with the DHS, these episodes have only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, and it's very important that we get them in front of as many people as we can, So please listen. And I don't know, enjoy seems like the wrong word, but enjoy. Matt salieb, how are you doing today? I'm good man. I just got married. You did just get married? Married For former guests France Osco Fiorentini, you know, yeah, one of our favorite guests with our

least favorite. Oh shit, Oh, I'm just being an asshole. We love you. That's why I've brought you on to read you a twelve thousand words script about oh a script. Oh a script that's right, Matt, because because I do love you and we have such a good time. Yeah, and I wanted to celebrate that you you have embarked on this new chapter of your life. Yeah, making it very sad. Yeah.

police militarization, which is one hundred percent toxic. YEP. And the guy we're going to talk about today, Harlan Carter is the dude who started both of those things. He's the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the guy who made the NRA. So it is Sophie's got a picture of him. He looks like he looks like who you would cast if you were putting king in that villain. He looks like Kingpin. Like he literally looks exactly like Kingpin.

the United States. Well, it wasn't the United States then, but you know what I'm saying, right, the colonies against their will, and not that long after, in sixteen eighty, which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back then, the Virginia Assembly passed one of, if not the earliest gun control laws in the colonies. Now, this law did not restrict the ability of white people to be armed. It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't

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

object if it could be used to hit somebody. This started what wound up being like a more than a century long tradition of elderly black people being banned from having canes. Oh my god, because you can hit someone with the cane, right as Gandalf showed us. You know, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, they weren't being fooled by that. In Virginia sixteen eighty, Yes, we will pardon old man for this walking stick. I know a wizard staff when I see one, you think, I don't know, you gonna cast

a spell? Now, this being sixty years after the forced importation of African slaves to the continent. The sixteen eighty law was aimed at slaves, obviously, but it applied equally. There were some freed black people in the colony of this period, and it applied to them as well. The law was amended in seventeen twenty three to specify that Africans African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for

any purpose, be it hunting or self defense. And again seventeen twenty three, it's kind of important to be able to use a gun, you know, just if you're living in the Virginia frontier.

were to use to defend themselves would be illegal. So gun control in the early colonies, most of the time, these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the exceptions of the rule because as a rule, like there were, the laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things and more just kind of generally trying to make it possible for black people and slave to free to challenge white supremacy in any way. So it wasn't just guns.

And in fact that because guns were like not as good back then, those were less of a focus than some other objects that might surprise you. Possession of dogs by black people was heavily regulated in this period. They couldn't have dogs, well, it was not impossible, but it was very hard if you were a black person who wanted to own a dog. In Maryland in the early seventeen hundreds, for example, you were forced to get a license from the Justice of the peace who was going

to be a white man. So it was not easy to get a license from a justice of the peace for this, and if you managed to get one, you were still restricted to owning no more than one dog at a time, Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for black people under any circumstances, and even allowed slave patrols to kill dogs found in the house of a black person. So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is very old.

again it's also worth noting. Obviously, the prohibition against black people carrying guns or their weapons make sense if you're afraid of a slave or you know, just an uprising, right because a group of people with guns can do an uprising. You can't really effectively organize a bunch of dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together. It's hard to do.

We're going to be talking a lot about the changing ways this has been interpreted through time, and despite what people on tend to say on either side of the modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to interpret how the so called Founding Fathers intended it to function. And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in agreement about pretty much anything, but one thing is perfectly clear. They did not see the right to bear arms as

extending to black people. Now, black people were not categorically forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States, but in those states where it was legal for them to own arms, they were always required to register those weapons with the government. This was not the case for white people. While there was some hope during the Revolution among black Americans that independents would bring about an improvement in their circumstances,

and that was not unreasonable. Again, the British Empire allowed slavery too. So at this stage in time, it's not like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that like, well, maybe things will get better when they don't have a king anymore, right, Obviously that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, there's some uprisings in the New United States. In eighteen eleven, Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed, and in response to this, New Orleans made it a crime for black people to

carry weapons. And this was again primarily even more than guns. Banned them from stuff like canes, crutches, wheelchairs. Yeah, any yeah, definitely with an assault wheelchair. Yeah. So, as we've discussed in our Behind the Police series, many Southern police departments started as slave patrols, made up of armed white dudes searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a

boot on the neck of even free black people. In eighteen twenty five, Florida gave slave patrols the right to enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition, or any other weapons found. And obviously these kinds, as is the case with no knock raids today, these often were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes

right by saying you felt threatened. Yeah. Now, in the early eighteen sixties, obviously we have US a civil war over slavery, and broadly speaking, this goes pretty well if you think slavery is bad, US civil war broadly speaking goes all right. Yeah. Now, one of the most kind of revolutionary aspects of the Civil War is that, for the first time in US history, a shitload of black

men are legally carrying guns in an organized way. One hundred and seventy nine thousand black people serve in the Union Army, which is roughly ten percent of its total, and you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men with guns marching across the US South, which really freaks out people in the South.

them that way. So let's just write new Let's just we'll take the old laws that we had that restricted slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control, and will replace the word slave with servant or you know, something similar, so that we can try to hold them under the same laws. In Mississippi, black people were still banned from possessing weapons or ammunition, and if white people turned them in for this crime, they would be given

their firearms as a reward. And again this is after they've been freed, so they like should have the right to bear arms and whatnot. I want to quote now from a twenty twenty one Honors thesis by Alexandra Lenzetta from the University of Colorado. Quote. Other Southern states to enact their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana. Both states prohibited African Americans, not including veterans, from owning

guns without a license or special permit. Not surprisingly, these permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally obtain a gun. This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns, making the potential penalties of exposure even greater. Punishment for having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of the weapon. Old slave patrols re emerged to enforce the

Black Codes and to terrorize African Americans. This, along with a combination of great incentives to catch black with weapons and a hatred over their newfound freedom, created a white frenzy, making it extremely difficult to height a gun as an African American. White frenzy is the worst frenzy. It's it's it's it's the most common frenzy.

the war was over. So in eighteen sixty six, the US Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which this is like there's a big old fight over this, and this is the this is the law that basically says, hey, you actually have to these people have the same rights that white people have on the bill front, right, Like that's what that does, you know, And you know, things do get a lot better for a while, you know, we talked about.

five thousand black Americans. Obviously, there's no way of knowing the actual total good chance it was significantly more, but yeah, at least five thousand. So in response, black people do what you would expect. They form militias, you know, they start carrying guns for what. I don't think I need to explain the logic here, right, organized to stop lynchings.

This culminates in Louisiana in eighteen seventy six where a bunch of klansmen who are also government officials, these are like elected leaders in Louisiana who are also in the KKK, are charged with conspiring to disarm a meeting of Black Americans. Basically, like one of these groups of black folks had gotten together with guns to like figure out how to protect their community, and these state officials like try to take

their weapons away. A bunch of court shit happens. It goes to the Supreme Court who rules in favor of the ku Klux Klan, saying that the state had the legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common good God. And you know, in this period of time, there's also one of the things that's happening during the lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person who is attempted to be lynched has a gun and

they shoot the people trying to lynch them. And when that happens, a number of laws are passed in different towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms, and in fact, those are some of the first specific laws against the carrying of concealed handguns. Now, this is an area where like the kind of the anti gun

control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff. It's very much worth noting all gun control in the United States in this period is not based in white supremacy, in part because a lot of it is put in areas where like most of the population is white, and there was it's worth noting significantly more gun control in portions of the like the so called wild West, than there are in a lot of those same states today.

In places like the Dakotas and whatnot, it was common for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted in many towns. If a visitor came into town, they would be expected to leave their guns with the local police

before entering. They'd get like a little card or something you weren't supposed to like like there were it's it's and there's you know, a lot to be said about like why this is being done, but in general, it's being done because they see that it's it's perfectly reasonable to say that, like, well, there should be restrictions on what you can do in town with a firearm, right.

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

Like the gunfights that have kind of come down to history were like the ones that the media went nuts on in the day, like the gunfight at the Ok Corral. But broadly speaking, by the end of the eighteen hundreds, most places in the United States had banned the concealed carrying of handguns, although open carrying remained legal in a

lot of places. We'll talk about when that ended. In eighteen ninety three, the government of Texas said that quote the mission of the concealed deadly weapon as murder to check it as the duty of every self respecting law abiding man. And again, he was probably saying that primarily because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns. This is the governor of Texas in eighteen ninety three,

so do keep that in mind. But US gun control in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the specter of armed black people, and even where laws were perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy, even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law, Lanzetta writes. Quote. Another example of discrimination is found in legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era. Involved an eleven year old black boy with a toy gun in Saint

Louis in nineteen hundred. It was illegal to fire a gun within city limits, and the boy was charged for violating this law. However, when his case was being reviewed by a judge to determine his guilt. It was discovered that the gun was fake. Knowing this new information, the judge should have dropped all charges, given that it is not possible to fire a fake gun, but this was not the case. Instead, the boy was found guilty and the judge fined him ten dollars almost three hundred and

ten dollars to day, which is interesting. I did again, another thing that goes back very far is black kids being penalized for having toy guns, right exactly, quite quite far back.

us back to the glorious state of Texas. Like much of the South, after the Civil Rights Act, legislators had to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm black people were not motivated by racism. Brendan Rivus from Texas Christian University Rites quote the post eighteen sixty five laws, however, used race neutral language to accomplish a racially motivated goal. Most of these laws attempted to disarm Black Texans, but some from the eighteen seventies stopped to curb the racial

violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone. For instance, a part of the Texas Slave Code prohibited slaves from carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer, and a law passed in eighteen sixty six prohibited laborers from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent and race neutral language. The eighteen sixty six law achieved the same result as the Slave Code without specifically declaring

that African americ and should be disarmed. Their arming was conditional, subject to the authorization of an interested white party. Similarly, the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those local offices. And you can guess which of those happens

more often. And this is the state of affairs legally in the state of Texas. When Harlan Bronson Carter is born on August tenth, nineteen thirteen, in Granbury, Texas. Now, at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that it was the home of Davy Crockett for a little while. And every town in Texas was Davy Crockett's home for a little while. Not super impressive, and yeah.

the local gun culture of the time. Pretty much everywhere is semi rural, so he's you know, he does a lot of hunting, He does a lot of target shooting. He becomes an excellent shot from an early age, and he develops an intense affinity for firearms, shall we say so. When he's young, the family moves to Laredo, and Laredo is a border town, right, and his father they moved to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent and in fact is one of the very first Border

Patrol agents. So the year that they moved to Laredo is nineteen twenty seven, Harlan's fourteen, and it's the same year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes a trip to the town and expresses in an official document, has shocked to find that quote, Laredo was strictly a Mexican town. Probably ninety percent of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent. He adds with horror. The only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself.

And this is an interesting like Lareda at this point because it's it's so heavily Mexican. Is not a town controlled by white people and the police are not a white force. Right. You'll note that quote I read earlier states that like kind of the laws against gun control were usually mainly like put into force against like armed black people, but depending on politics, could be used to try to stop white vigilantes. Well, this is one of those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police

force is not white. So the border patrol, however, is not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican folks are running things, right that does not thrill them. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.

full scale house cleaning. Now in the Wonderful book Migra Kelly Hernandez writes, quote, he charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector, and border patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrants smuggling, and forced just under half of Laredo's twenty eight border patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector

to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select border patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo sector because all were experienced, well disciplined fighters who knew the country well. Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the Border Patrol station from

the local Mexican American political elite. Tension quickly mounted between the ex Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo Police Department, while the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with the local police in most borderland communities. In nineteen twenty seven, several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol got in their Model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling

and shooting up the police station. Holy fuck, so he Klean's house brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which is like the most racist police force in the United States of this period, and has them shoot up the police station. Fucking A.

not enforcing white supremacy. So we have to get rid of them with guns. Yeah, and they get rid of they do get rid of the Laredo police force with guns.

nineteen twenty seven as part of this process. It's entirely possible that Horace Carter was one of the guys shooting that police station, and in this period of time, Harlan's father would have seen his job as explicitly to use violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most

people were not white quote from Migra. Although most local stations developed their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican American leadership. The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge

for white violence within Mexican dominated Laredo. So they've turned the border patrol prior to this, and they're all like local guys, right, so they don't really care about like Mexican America, like Mexicans coming into America because like that's how they got there, right, That's like their family everybody, like. And again they also probably don't see the border as this solid thing because they believe the relatives have lived here for forever. It used to not be like a

thing to cross. But this is the period where the border is really is becoming a thing in a way it hadn't been before. And part of how they do that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of white people and have them shoot anybody who disagrees, right like that. That's how the border becomes real in Laredo.

seen pictures of the Uvaldi police. A lot of them are Mexican American it's and the border patrol guy like it's it's the whole thing. Like if you go down to border communities, you'll see, Yeah, it's not that simple.

Civil War. There's these two Union generals who are like, because again Civil War one of the things early on the South is doing pretty well. And part of why they're doing pretty well is that like all the boys who like wind up fighting in the Confederacy's military, Like, they're country boys, right, They've grown up shooting and hunting.

They're like and using guns to enforce white supremacy. They're good with firearms, whereas most of the northern boys who get drafted are like city kids, and many of them had never had any chance to use firearms, so they're like they suck with them, right, And these two Union generals are like, boy, our soldiers are really bad at shooting, and it takes a long time to train them up.

Maybe if we should get ready for the next war by having an organization where boys who grow up in urban areas can like go in and learn how to shoot, you know, Like that seems like a good thing to encourage. So that's in the NRA up until the early twentieth century, is like a sportsman's association. You're doing it for target shooting,

you're doing it for hunting. Now, it is worth noting that, like from the beginning, and this was not seen as problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect to it as well. It's not like a military organization, but part of the purpose of the NRA is to prepare people to be part of the military if necessary. And this is also the military is a really different thing in this period. You know, we have a big standing army during the Civil War, but we hadn't before

and we don't quickly afterwards. Right, Like this is again, when World War one happens, they have to like make an army. When World War II happens, they have to like make an army in a way that like it had not hugely existed prior to this. So there's this understanding that like, if there's an emergency, we're going to need to activate all of these civilians and they need

to be ready to like fight and whatnot. So, Yeah, the US Defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons and other equipment to the NRA, which would sell them to members quite cheaply. This used to be able to get like World War two guns like Garrens for really cheap from the NRA. It was a bunch of stuff they did like that. So in February nineteen thirty one, the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of their house. Right now, they have no idea who does this?

The origin story of so many races go on. Oh boy, Matt, so again. As far as I know, it was never figured out who had done this. But a couple of weeks after their car is stolen, on March third, nineteen thirty one, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harlan's mother sees three Hispanic boys quote unquote loitering out in front of the house. Now, she says, loitering. We have no idea. They may have just been like walking around or what like. Even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this.

But like racist white lady sees people who are not white vaguely close to her house, and she decides that, like, these boys must have been who stole my car?

and Casiano started swearing at each other. Casiano pulled out a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter lifted his shotgun to Ramone's chest. According to testimony from that time, Ramon told him not to do it and pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back and laughed. Annoyed by Ramone's lack of fear, Carter asked if he thought he wasn't going to shoot then he did. Casiano lay dying on the ground with a two inch

shotgun wound in his chest. Jesus, So that sounds familiar, right, There's shades of Rittenhouse, There's shades of Zimmerman, you know, like this is again not obviously, I'm sure like if we had been around at the time and paying attention to the news, we'd say, oh, there's shades of like this thing that happened like nineteen twenty and this thing

right which happened the most recent incidents. Yeah, you know, this is a very familiar incident, right, and you can imagine if this happened today, it would be a massive culture wars. Well, he had a knife, what was you kid supposed he was just defending his family, you know,

yeaha YadA YadA. So it's worth noting talking about why Harlan felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which there are some like obviously it's not entirely legal to carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff, but this is you're not supposed to like walk out to try and solve the robbery of your car with

a twelve gage shotgun, Like that's not explicitly legal. But there's a long history of vigilante violence by white people, and so whether or not this actually is legal is gonna come down heavily on the local courts, right and so the fact because this is happening in Laredo, if this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city of Hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue. But because it's happening in Laredo, this is going to be a problem for Harlan. Did you called Dallas the

City of hate? That's literally it's nickname. Yeah, that's the next name of Dallas, Texas is the city we killed JFK. Yeah, I mean good point bully shit.

like he should have been sentenced to more. I I'm mixed because he was a child, right, Like this is bad, but also like I think you have to if you believe children are not culpable in the way that adult. But anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years. His family appeals the judgment and they complain for about number of things. They say the judge is related to the prosecutor, that that self defense had not been adequately explained to the jury, that one of the witnesses was

like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy. A bunch of racist shit.

were convicted of infamous crimes. But you know, it's also worth noting that, like Harlan's dad helped run law enforcement in Laredo, it's impossible that some of the people who had witnessed the shooting were like targeted by the police to provide plausible deniability for his kid, and if not likely, So Harlan gets led out of prison, his conviction is overturned, and he proceeds with life now as a young adult. As a free man, he enrolls in the University of Texas,

but he changes his name. So his original name had been Harlan h A R L A N, and he swaps out the A for an O. And he does this basically under the understanding that like, well, this will make it hard. If people go looking for Harlan Carter is criminal record, they won't find anything.

maybe even worse. But like I think fundamentally you have to believe that, like, well, if a child does something, even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused on the possibility of rehabilitation because otherwise you don't actually believe that children are less responsible than adults.

commit murder, Harland definitely committed murder. It's not self defense, and anyone who says otherwise is probably racist. But it's worth noting that even modern sources, and this is something, this is where things get really income. Even modern sources that are like very pro gun control, very anti Harlan Carter, who will attack Harlan for his work with the NRA, tend to tell the story of what happened with him in and Raymond Cassiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce

Hardlan's claims of self defense. This is a very strange thing I've noticed in a couple of sources. I've read a lot of articles about this guy, and his actions can be framed in fascinating ways. I want to highlight, particularly a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler. And Gunfight, there's actually like five books titled Gunfight. I think one of them is like seemed to be slightly grifty.

It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who like does an anti gun book because I think maybe that's where the money was. I don't know. I'm not going to go in to date because I haven't read it't I haven't read it. But like there's a bunch of books with this title. The good one, the one that you

would actually be worth reading, is Winkler's Gunfight. He's a he's a UCLA professor, and Gunfight is a critical history of the battle over the Second Amendment in US politics that has a lot of really useful context, including some of what I went over about, like the early racism and gun control. It's a good and again very much NRA. But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter and Ramon Casiano, which I find very peculiar. Quote, Carter

loved guns from childhood. He was an excellent shot and would go on to win two national shooting titles and set forty four national shooting records during his lifetimes. His most infamous shot, however, came at the age of seventeen, when in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun into the chest of a knife wielding Mexican teenager. Nope, not how much weird way to describe that. That's not

what happened at all. That's such a weird way for and again, Winkler is like he's a professor of law at UCLA, Like he's all over the New York Times writing about this kind of stuff. It's like really weird that he describes it that way.

defending Harlan Carter's legacy. Now, in this article, he's critiquing a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that acts accurately noted quote. Fifty years ago, Carter shot and killed a fifteen year old boy and was convicted of murder. Arguing against this, Kopel writes, the letter admitted the fact that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang of intruders led by the boy, and that the boy was menacing Carter with a knife. Again, this is also

not true. He was not defending his mother's ranch. They were swimming.

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

focused on Carter. It's a whole history of like kind of the how the Second Amendment has been interpreted and ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries. So he does have a lot of ground to cover. It's just very and I guess that one of the things he did was just kind of brush over what happened there. It's right, Yeah, like the way I would do it, right, because it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history

to not go into detail. But I would have just said something like he confronted you know, another teenager over like you know, something his mother said and like or he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicious even that would be better, right, Yeah.

a lot newer. It's easier to become head of the Border Patrol.

out with his buddies. I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly, but it's not like a part of his public persona as a you know, once you're the head of the Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know, right.

the folks who had signed up earlier. This was not like the thing that they had signed up for. Specifically, Harlan, though, is hugely supportive of this change, and in fact, he wanted to expand the Border Patrol's perview even further and use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely. This was justified in his mind by the fact that a large number of undocumented migrants were living and working, or

this was justified publicly, right. So, Harlan, there's like a racial motivation, but you can't use that, as we talked about earlier, right, like you have to hide when you're long racially motivated. So the justification is that a large number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches and other businesses in the border lands, often under nightmarish

slave like conditions. Now, this is a real problem that's happened, right like as it is today, right, And yeah, there's this like suggestion of a new a thing called the Pressro program that will provide kind of like a legal way for these people to like work, but they'll have, you know, there will be more control over the conditions that they can work in, which obviously the people who would be hiring them don't like It's it's a whole thing.

three basic steps. First, an anti infiltration operation on or near the border would seal the border with the assistance of twenty one hundred and eighty military troops. In addition to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic.

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

or canal crossing by observers in radio equipped towers. So this is the first modern this is the wall, right, This is the start of This is the beginning of that. Not that there hadn't been like fences and stuff in different areas before, then, this is the first time someone's like, we need to build a wall, and like a concerted vision of that and specifically a vision of using the of the wall as a system of violence in order to keep the borderlands white. Right, That's that's what he's

doing here. And he invins that ship.

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

third phase began. The mopping up operations would be conducted in northern areas such as San Francisco, where the task forces would raid designated locations such as migrant camps or places of business. So San Francisco, I don't know if you've ever been, Matt, Yeah, not super close to the border.

Oh yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, well I guess close to like a sea border, right, No, no, we're building towards but yeah, exactly, I mean those are the other aliens that they also want to put a fence around, and I'll watch out for all those turtles and fucking you know, don't worry, we'll get rid of those in a couple of decades.

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

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

cop shit when it needs to. But in this case, the government wasn't willing to like push things that far right. And the general who's like, job it is to like basically the general who's liaising with Carter is this guy named Swing who really wants to do this, like he's a racist too, but he's like, hey, we can't make this work legally right now, but we could do it if the President issued a proclamation like it's not impossible to do, but like it's you'd have to get Eisenhower

on board. So Harlan Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's people and he tries desperately to get approval, but Eisenhower isn't quite willing to deploy troops. Now. He again not to give Ike any credit. He agrees with Harlan's basic goals. He just this, like using the army in this way is a little too far for him. But again he's not against this. So in May of nineteen fifty four, Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be Commissioner of the

Immigration and Naturalization Service. Rights we don't have IS anymore now we've got whatever, But these guys are in So he's basically now he's Carter's boss. Essentially. This like general and Swing had a long history of commanding troops in battle from Mexico to Korea. Obviously you could see the fact that now a general is in charge of IS is like the start of the militarization of the border patrol. And Swing is a bastard in his own own right.

But this is really happening in part because of like what Carter is pushing to turn the border patrol into right, this is this is not just the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is going to become the first large police agency to militarize.

Quote as promised. One month after joining i INS, Swing announced that he would lead the US Border Patrol in an intensive, innovative, and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the US Mexico border. No one questioned how in four short weeks he had prepared the officers of the Border Patrol for such a massive campaign.

that's going on overall in this issue. But when it comes to Harlan Carter, it's pretty simple, right, He's he's a racist. You know.

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

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

become residents, right. The Bressio program does not these people are supposed to leave, but in fact, part of the deal is that like ten percent of the migrants wages are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an account that are given to them when they come back to Mexico. Right. So that's part of why this is popular, is that it allows them to do the work that the country can't function without, but it also ensures that they don't stay right. That's why this's just such a

big deal for a lot of folks. So it's actually very popular. And one of the things about it is it doesn't limit the number of workers, because why would

you write because they're not anyway. Millions and millions of Mexican workers use the Bresso program over the years, and from the perspective of the US government, it works pretty well for a while, and it certainly keeps workers in farms, and so by like the early nineteen fifties, there's like two million of these workers, or there's like five million

people have worked in through the Bressero program. But also like unauthorized migrants continue to cross into the border, and by the early nineteen fifties, there's like two million of these people, and part of one of the things like that happens in this period is that there's suddenly like a big surge of folks coming and unauthorized in the

early nineteen fifties. And this is part of what inspires Operation Cloudburst, is that like border patrol has never had to deal with like these kind of numbers of people crossing post war, and they're not really capable of handling it. So by the early nineteen fifties, the number of like voluntary departures had raised in nineteen forty six, like one hundred and one thousand undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United States in nineteen fifty two, more than seven hundred thousand do.

And you can, like these numbers are just kind of useful in seeing like how many folks are coming in sure, so this a lot of people are not wild about this because again, you know, racism and such. Yeah, So Joseph Swing part of his motivation here is that, like he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers to cooperate so that they can like increase the number of folks who are working there under the Brasero program

and shrink the unauthorized workers. And so his justification for like participating in some of the stuff that that Harlan Carter is building is that he wants to cut down the supply of unauthorized workers in order to get more

of these employers on board with the Brassero program. So again, a lot of there are a lot of like kind of wonky aspects to what's happening with migration here that you can as always justify as like not based in racism, is based in like, well, there's a lot of these undocumented people coming over and it's like, great, the problem for the border control and the conditions they're working under are like really bad, and we want to reform this

program so that you know, everyone is documented and legal and like we're not trying to stop them from coming over. But also one of the things you're trying to do by expanding this program is making sure that they don't stay right. Yeah, And I guess again, you can look at what's happening with the Bracero program in a couple

of different ways. But if you really want to know what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and Swing eventually in act, the main thing you need to know is what they call it, and this is Harlan Carter's name for this is Operation wet Back. That is the official name of this immigration purge that they're going to do. And again, did they invent the term or was no? It existed for a while? Okay, so they did just explicitly name it after a slur, yes, yes, okay, yeah,

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

racial slur is WOP, which means without papers. I don't think it was entirely just for Italians, but like, you know, this is like the late eighteen hundreds, I think, right, yeah, so yeah, and Carter again, so Swing Swing is the kind of guy who can sit down and explain to you, like, well, this is where the presserra program is broken down, and like these are the problems that we're having, and these are the different violations that we're seeing, and like we

need to get these, you know, employers on board with this program to reform the system, and the only way to do that is to cut down on the like so he can get very wonky with it in a way that doesn't sound racist, whereas Harlans like, yeah, operation wet Back, Let's get out of here. And Carter is not great. It's like he says, he just kind of says the loud part loud. In interviews with the press, he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens

in history. He tells the Los Angeles Times that he intends to deploy quote an army of border patrol officers complete with jeeps, trucks and seven aircraft in order to declare quote all out war to hurl Mexican wetbacks into Mexico. Jesus Christ.

up mobile immigration systems to block roads. So they basically doing like this. They've already put this, like started putting these fences up, but they do like kind of a you could call it a kind of like racist defense, like defensive white supremacy in depth, where they're setting up blockades deeper into the country and they're also carrying out raids on factories and restaurants and just through whatever mean they can, arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican migrants

and I'm going to quot from Migre again. To hold the detainees, the officers turned to public spaces into temporary detention facilities. For example, in Los Angeles, the Border Patrol transformed Alesian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals were processed for deportation. And countless fields and along many country roads, border Patrol officers set up mobile immigration stations to process us UNS

sanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation. They used trucks on loan from the Armed Services to transport the apprehended immigrants from California to No Gals, Arizona for deportation to Mexico. To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise Mexicano communities, leisure spots and migrant camps, ranches, farms, and parks. They also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ

undocumented Mexican immigrants. Between June seventeenth and June twenty sixth, nineteen fifty four, twenty eight hundred and twenty seven of the four thousand four hundred and three migrants apprehended by the task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry. After border patrol raids during the summer of nineteen fifty four, three Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of

workers and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, border patrol officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen help waiters, etc. Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known establishments such as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills, Hood Hoel, Hollywood, Roosevelt Hotel,

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

Swing pledged that the Border Patrol would deport or otherwise purge the one million undocumented Mexican nationals estimated to be living in the United States at the time. Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun.

They don't want these places to go to business. They just don't want these people to be able to actually build a life in the United States, right, they want

to guarantee that they go back. So that's like a huge chunk of what's of what's happening here, Like it's it's basically taking it's taking the natural movement of people across an area where like their ancestors and relatives had been moving freely for centuries, and it's stopping that, stopping like the ability of populations to move and build lives and turning them entirely into economic units. Right. Yes, you're not a member of the community, you're your labor.

been kind of vaguely aware of its existence up until this point. This is part of what turns them into like an institution within the United States. Is like all of the press around Operation Wetback.

about that if you'd like, there's a pretty good article. Yeah, we'll have some sources in here, but the book Migra goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So in the end, it was a wild success more than one million people are deported, potentially as many as one and a half million people are deported beyond that, the precedent was established that the US Border Patrol could and

should conduct operations from deep within the United States. Border Patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within one hundred miles of the border right, any border, Like that's the exactly of any border right, which includes the coasts in Canada. So basically all of the places where most Americans live are covered by the two. About two thirds of the US population are in this area, which is why the Border Patrol has like the whitest ranging

purview of any law enforcement agency pretty much. I guess yeah, Like the FBI technically has more, but like their mission is more limited anyway. It's whatever, Like this is like

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

kind of noting here. I'm not going to get too much into Trump, but he Donald Trump consciously looks back to Harlan Carter's period of time running the border patrol as an inspiration. Yeah. During a twenty fifteen presidential Republican presidential debate, Donald Trump said, quote, let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president. People liked him. I liked him. I like ike, right the expression I like ike. Moved one point five million illegal immigrants out

of the country. Moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again beyond the border, they came back, didn't like it, moved them way south. They never came back. Dwight Eisenhower, you don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier. They moved one and a half million people out. We have no choice. We have no choice. Just so, first off, obviously it's probably not gonna surprise people. That's again, as we've said, completely wrong, for among other things, nearly all of them come back.

a set of laws. So they're like kind of fundamentally if they're probably more offended by the fact that people are undocumented than they are necessarily about the racial element that's chunk of these people.

that's not the thing he takes out of this. The thing he takes out of this is they got one and a half million Mexicans to leave, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like that's the thing that has come down in history from Carter's period, is the.

They were living in a men's shelter anyway, Hitler. So I should note before we move on to the NRA that while Harlan Carter was massively expanding the reaching power of the Border Patrol, he was also robbing it blind for his own benefit. See Harland loves shooting right, Like, he's not one of these NR like like Wayne Lapierre, the current head of the NRA. I don't think Wayne particularly cares much about like a lot of these guys like it's a political thing as opposed to them, like

Harlan Carter is you have to say, loves to shoot guns. Yeah, but here's the thing about shooting guns. Bullets cost money. So three years after Harlan Carter retires from government service in nineteen fifty seven, the Justice Department opens an investigation into what are termed quote various allegations against him, including the claim that he had stolen forty to fifty thousand rounds of ammunition from the Border Patrol quote, with the sole intent of converting this property to his own use

after he retired. Wowow, so he steals like a pallett of bullets to go shoot privately.

Asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations, mister Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand jury in San Diego for some hours, and they covered a lot of things, none of which I'm ashaved of and none of which I had any difficulty asking. He added that he did not quote know anything about the

disappearance or a misappropriation of government ammo. The missing ammunition, worth several thousand dollars, was never traced, according to an agent who worked on the investigation, and no charges were fired filed. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very fun. Now, obviously Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's about to get a new job that is never going

to let him run out of ammunition. So, as we stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when he joined the NRA, whether it was before or after he killed Raymond Cassiano. Probably he was like sixteen when he joins. And in nineteen fifty one, the year after he becomes head of the Border Patrol, he joins the NRA's national board. And again at this point in time, there's obviously there's people who are right wing in the NRA. There's who want it to be more of a conservative institution.

It's not really a political organization point right, right.

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

Harlan Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing, but they're not. In nineteen fifty one when he joins the board, they're still not very political. But now that he's on the board, he starts to see the organization with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol right because he can help get people hired, he can put in

a good word. So he starts all of his buddies from the Border Patrol who are like wanning a cushy job and the private sector after, you know, working for the gut like, he starts filling them, filling the NRA with them. So he finally leaves government service in the

early nineteen sixties. He stops running the Border Patrol in fifty seven, but he does some other shit not really that important for our purposes, but he's he retires from working for the government in the early sixties and he gets pretty much immediately elected presidents of the NRA from nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty seven. But that doesn't mean he's actually running the NRA, like, right, it's just like a job within the organization. You've still got this

board of directors. So he's an influential figure in the NRA, but he's not actually like directing it at this point point.

and they put him in charge of it. And again, this is the first time the NRA had had a lobbying arm. In the early nineteen sixties, it was like not they barely funded it. So there's this, you know, there's kind of this growing fight, and Harlan is one of these guys saying that, like, hey, the NRA needs to get more political. We need to be lobbying, we

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

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

you have some stuff. It's not like that at this point, right that's it's now it's like the Honda Civic of guns. Yeah, yeah, so they just haven't Like part of why it's not political in the way it will become is that there's not really a need to you know, like no one's there's not like there's not the culture that the NRA helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that. So, yeah, their primary focus is like hunting and target shooting right, right,

and again. Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment, and in the nineteen seventies he's going to go to war with the NRA's old Guard in order to change it. But before we get into that, we should probably have some ads. I love ads, Oh I do too, including this ad for guns, the concept of uh yeah guns. Sure. How about the life card? The life card. It's a gun that's built into a little credit card. Can it shoot? Well? No? Is it accurate? Of course?

you've just heard of Kilroy was here. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's memes. But yeah, I was thinking, I was like, was this is the Suppruder film. Was that a meme?

the life card. Ah, the gun that's built into a credit card. Look, there's a credit card gun. Yeah yeah, I mean, honestly, if Sir Hunt and Sir Hanna had one of those, RFK would probably be alive. Life card is a really stupid gun. Anyway. The Second Amendment, well, actually, weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument. Harlan Carter will later make but I don't want to. I don't want to get ahead of things. So the Second Amendment is, I think it's fair to say, the most politicized part

of the Bill of Rights today. Right, That's probably not.

Maybe the First Amendment gives it a run for its money, but even then it's usually people differing over interpretations of the First Amendment as opposed to the argument over the second is really should it exist or does it exist in the way that it's like currently being interpreted, right, because the awful lot of Americans think it shouldn't be the law of the land at all, which is difficult to square with actually doing something legislatively because it does exist.

But anyway, in two thousand and eight, the Supreme Court ruled in DC versus Heller that the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to bear arms. Now, obviously, a lot of liberals see this as terrible Jewish prudence and claim that an individual right to bear arms was basically invented

by the NRA. Conservatives will say the opposite, that this was clearly what the founders had intended, and the reality of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment at federal level is only like twenty years old. Different courts have ruled very differently on the Second Amendment for quite a long time. And also the Supreme Court is stupid, So yes, like I don't personally give a good goddamn about what the Founders intended.

for different reasons. They all would love to have that gun. Yes, So obviously, again, as regards my personal standing towards gun control, I don't care about what the Founders thought about anything, including free speech, because they didn't actually believe in free speech. Yes, yes, because a lot of the moans, well, Thomas pain did. Again he's he's our one, good one.

courts have found a bunch of different things. So the Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison, And in portraits he's the founding father with just massive bags under his eyes, Like you look up a drawing of this dude. He looks fucking exhausted in every and he was every sketch of it.

pcerned about right. Broadly speaking, one of the ideas the founders had was having a Bill of rights. Yes, so most of them are terrified of the idea of a permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to be frightened of. And if we had stuck with that idea,

maybe things would be a little bit better. One of the things that like, these guys are all ancient Roman history nerds, right, and they are well aware that, like the history of the Roman Republic includes so many times where just like a guy gets an army and takes over, right, or tries to take over, and there's a big fucking fight over it. So they don't like the idea of like this big centralized standing army because it's very dangerous.

So the Second Amendment was initially drafted to guarantee people's right to form a militia. The original text and this is not what's in the Bill of Rights now, but this is the original text. Madison rights is quote the right of the people to keep in bear arms shall not be infringed simi colan, A well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country colon. But no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be

compelled to render military service person. Now this is interesting because if that had been in the Bill of Rights today, right, this would have done a couple of things. Among other things, it would probably have made a draft impossible, right because that second clause is like you cannot force someone to render military service, which is like you would think would

make a draft impossible. That said, it also might have made it impossible to do things that a lot of liberal support, like banning weapons like the Era fifteen, because when you have well armed in there, it does kind of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the current text of the Second Amendment does. That interpretation could

at least be argued. Now this is all academic because the wording winds up being changed to the present text, which puts well regulated upfront and fun times, also makes it legal to draft people. Obviously, people will have argued for years and will be arguing for years what the Second Amendment should mean about gun control and how it should function. I'm not an originalist. I think the Constitution

is too old for anyone to care about. But obviously it does matter because it is the law of the land, and how it's written and how it's interpreted has a huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation. And so I think the context of how the Second Amendment was seen at the time is helpful to have, even though again I'm not an originalist. Please don't take this as me arguing because the Founding Fathers felt this way, this is how people should act.

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

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the US had a standing army after all. And this is one of the things I think is interesting because again, the kind of especially on Twitter, common takes on one side or the other. This is that like, well, you don't need these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of

the Second Amendment, which no, it's absolutely not. But at the same time, the idea of the Second Amendment as referring to an individual's ability to stockpile in arsenal is not really accurate because it was within the context of a militia. However, if you're bringing that up, it's one of the things that they meant by like, one of the things that the founding fathers wanted with this militia was for it to be the primary method of defending

the country, as opposed to a massive standing army. So again, if you are if you are for one reason or the other, if you're arguing that we should do things the way the Founding Fathers argued, probably the most accurate thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of the context of a militia, and also ensure that the militia is the only armed force in the country, including police, so that like a massive civilian militia is the only

armed force. There's no federal power to deploy a massive military and there's not really federal policing in any meaningful way, because that's how things were in the eighteen hundreds, right, Yeah, yeah, if you're or seventeen, if you're arguing that, that's probably closer to an originalist interpretation than anything being argued right now, right, Which is not to say that that makes much sense in the current day at all, although I would argue there's a number of you could look at, like what

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

but it's one of the highest in the world. Right, But it does come as you don't it's not, well, you can buy some arms in Switzerland. It's not like you're not like just stockpiling guns for your own personal thing. You are being armed by the state as part of the state's defense apparatus. Right, But also not in a way like the Swiss, Like the civilians who own guns in Switzerland are not like deployed for obviously Switzerland, right,

they don't do that shit famously. But anyway, I mean, this is again when I talk about like Rojava and like what I think about in terms of the value of the state not having a monopoly on the use of force. These are some of the things that I

think about broadly speaking. You know, stuff has been different about the Second Amendment a little bit, and kind of as a result, the Second Amendment, as heavily politicized as it is now, was kind of like nobody it was like the Third Amendment, Right, nobody talks about that anymore.

Nobody fucking talked about the Second Amendment on a national level for like a century or so, Right, we talked about like gun control earlier, but it was basically all state level, right, different states, different cities would have like different rules based on shit that was happening there. The federal government left them alone. Like, there was not really any kind of federal interest in regulating the Second Amendment until the early nineteen thirties, and that is when we

get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now, the NFA or National Firearms Act, was a response to the era of the gangster right. In particular, you get this weapon starting in like I don't know exactly when it was invented, I could have looked it up, but like it becomes popular in the thirties, the Tommy gun, right,

which is the Thompson submachine gun. And it is broadly speaking, kind of like at least in terms of the way it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used in crime, kind of like the AR fifteen of its day, because it is Thompson. It's an automatic forty five caliber weapon. It's a submachine gun, right, so it's not like a full sized rifle. This will be one of the most popular squad weapons that the United States uses in World

War two. Right, a very effective weapon for what it does, which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets very quickly at people at close range. So super good if you're, for example, a gangster who wants to murder a bunch of people in an enclosed room. Right, if you're like fighting a bunch of other gangsters up against the wall, you can kill a shitload of people with a Tommy.

pretty new and fancy in the thirties. The Thompson is just so much deadlier than anything else that's as fu and the crimes that get committed with it again, as with the Air fifteen, on like a national scale, very little gun crime involves a Thompson sub machine guns. And again, the Air fifteen not the most common gun used in crime by any like, It's not super common compared to a lot of other kinds of firearm, but the crimes that it's used in are so spectacular and kind of

like horrifying that they shock the nation. And law enforcement gets nuts about this because one of the things that gangsters do with Tommy guns is shoot lots of police officers with them. So there's a whole kind of America's first panic over a gun, right is what happens with the Tommy gun in the thirties. And it's not just the Tommy gun. They're also freaking out about sawt off shotguns,

which is actually pretty dumb. They're only scared about them because you can like hide them, hide them, but they're they're not even like anyway, it's dumb for saw off shotguns to be regulated more than regular shotguns. They're actually less deadly, Yeah, but whatever, they look cool as funny they look, and you see them a lot in the hands of gangsters. Right, So it's again there's this part of this is that like, yeah, the Thompson is a

lot deadlier than guns that had been available before. But part of it's also just like there's this media sort of panic around the Thompson. Right. And by the way, I should note at this period of time, if you want a Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail one to your house. Like, this is not They're not like you don't have to go to a gun store. You don't do it. They're like background checks, like they just will send it to you. It's like if you order like a book on Amazon. It was that easy

to get a Thompson sub machine gun. So the NFA puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the ownership of machine guns, sawt off shotguns, and silencers. Now, the NRA is again not a political organization at this point. It does initially oppose the NFA, and this is kind

of the first time it gets political. The organization writes a descent in their magazine, American Riflemen, and this is a pretty like tamely phrased descent, and it prompts congressional leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to limit their bill. The main thing that it does is that like it stops the ban from being total, so rich people can still get machine guns, shotguns, and silencers right. Well, and we could tell you, I could rant about silencers, which are not what people tend to think.

machine gun is. An AR fifteen is a my automatic gun. The legal definition of a machine gun is a weapon that will fire more than one bullet per trigger. Poll Right, this is all very wonky because like we had bump stocks a while ago function more or less as a

machine gun, but legally weren't technically a machine gun. There's a couple of weird kinds of triggers you can as with anything with guns, because when you like, when you make a law to ban a thing, you have to specify what that thing is in mechanical terms, right, And so you find a way to people do this with drugs too, where it's like, Okay, they banned MDMA, let's make a drug that affects the same parts of the

brain but doesn't like isn't explicitly banned, right, right, different compound, Yeah, and the same thing happens. Now there are sawt off shotguns that aren't legally shotguns because of very anyway, whatever. This is getting off of the point a bit, But the NRA works with It works with Congress, right. They don't do like a big political brujaha. They're like, hey, we want to make sure that rich people can still own these weapons. Let's let's sit down and work some

things out. And Congress is happy to work with them. Now, some people in Congress are The Attorney General claims that they emasculate the bill. But broadly speaking, the NFA seriously limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have, and this is the first time anyone had done that at the federal level. And the NRA is pretty happy with the resulting bill, and they endorse the nineteen thirty

four NFA. Now, there was still no massive national discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this period, not that it was like particularly discussed much at all. This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period of time. It's not yet part of the culture war.

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

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

assault weapon. It's like an old bolt action rifle. But the fact that he was able to get it from like a magazine ad becomes like and like, you know, again, background checks are not really a thing yet, and that's that makes a lot of people very angry. And I'm going to quote now from an article by Alina Savadra Buckley. Quote. For years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had been watching

television and learning how to shoot. In the nineteen fifties, when Hollywood studios were churning out Westerns, Popular Science estimated that famillion Americans had started quick draws shooting for fun, and by the end of the decade, three thousand Western style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smyth

in his book The NRA The Unauthorized History. At the same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise, and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures. As a result, the NRA braced itself for new legislation in the early nineteen sixties, sprinkling the first references to

the Second Amendment in American Riflemen. Eight months after Kennedy died, the magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead, the strength of the NRA, and therefore the ability to accomplish its objects and purposes, depends entirely upon the support of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep and bear arms. And a lot of this push is coming at the direction of Harlan Carter, who writes stuff for American Riflemen and who is a big believer that

the NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization. Yeah, yeah, And that's again, that's different from what they had always been pro gun because obviously it's the NRA, right, But when you look at what they're doing in thirty four, they're not advocating for the Second Amendment. They're advocating for what they see as sportsmen, right, and obviously there's problems with that. It's based heavily on like the desire of

rich people to be heavily armed. But they're they're arguing for sportsmen as opposed to Carter wants to turn it into an advocacy organization for this thing. This this this idea of the Second Amendment. And when you do something like that, number one, if you if you kind of are an essentialist and you claim that this is like there's this kind of inherent, timeless, essential interpretation of this rule,

and that's your your guiding light. There's not any ability to compromise there, right, Like you have to be kind of a fundamentalist about.

opposing force. The NRA and many lawmakers that opposing force was usually black Now this gets into the aspect of the gun control push. Again. There's an aspect that's just based in these assassinations that's not at all based in racism. And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots. So in nineteen sixty five, the LAPD beats a black man named Marquette Fry with a baton during a traffic stop and protests erupt. It becomes an insurrection and spreads

throughout the country. The militaries eventually called in to augment and overwhelmed LAPD. This is part of what jump starts the War on Crime, a period of largely racist gun or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator panic that Biden is famous for. And the NRA huge

supporters of crime bills. Anti gun control support crime bills. Right, So you see what what they're doing here is you have some folks, because people are during the Wats riots using guns to fight the LAPD, and so there are like and this this is kind of there. There's pushes.

This is what starts Some of the momentum for gun control in California comes from this, right, But more than that, what the NRA looks at is they see these armed black people carrying out an uprising, and they're like, well, we can take away focus on guns and on legislating guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people, right right, And that's what Harlan Carter realizes, like, well, this is something, this is the business the NRA needs to be in.

And also like, this is the business of like arming the police, arguing that, like because that's where you know, that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts, right, is the idea that like you need to the police need to have more and more weapons to deal with today's like dangerous heavily armed criminals, right yeah.

is lawful at the time. They would assemble with guns and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure that cops did not abuse members of the public. One could argue this is in some ways closer to an

originalist interpretation of the Second than anything today. Now, their activism scares the fuck out of white people, and again white people who are not pro gun right right, And we're gonna we're gonna chat about all of that, and we're gonna chat about my favorite press and Matt, I know, your favorite president, Ronald Reagan, star of Bedtime for Bonzo, Love Him, Star.

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

Those laws primarily impact poor black people. Rich white folks can acquire concealed weapon permits very easily. You just have to be able to have a second home in a place like San Bernardino, and you can get the license to carry a concealed gun in the state of California. They can also purchase to so California. One of the things that they have is a handgun roster, right, so, the only handguns you can buy in the state of

California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state. However, you can bring handguns into the state if you move there, as long as they don't have an illegal you know, as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than a ten round capacity, you can bring those into the state and then you can have them or you can sell them to people through an FFL. And if you are a police officer, you can buy any kind of gun you want and you can sell it to whoever

you want. So is a massive industry in California of police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in the state of California to buy and less a police officer sells them to you for twice the normal price. Anyway, whole bunch of sketchy shit happens.

militarized the border patrol. Instead, he believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this, and backing California's open carry ban, he was engaging in an intelligence strategy. You draw attention away from guns and you focus on who is carrying them. This is the origin of the quote guns don't kill people, People don't kill people argument, But when Harlan made it, the people

were explicitly coded as black. I'm going to quote from Epic magazine now. The same year, American Riflemen published an editorial titled Who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like Watts as mob violence. Who then supports the police? Who then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery and pillaging. It read with home front safeguards spotty and uncertain. The armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer. Right.

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

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

Guard and the new Guard. Carter, because he has a lot of influence in American Rifleman magazine, he enlists like the people that he's been seeding the NRA with these New Guard folks to start like coming up with a series of blistering editorials in American Rifleman magazine that are urging people to write letters to Congress to like this is the first real concerted lobbying campaign.

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

you have to have like a federal background check. Right, and the government gets involved, right, That's that's the thing that they're scared about. And again, you can't divorce this from like the John Birch Society, from all of these panics about communism, about like, you know, the government getting increasingly centralized. And I guess you might argue that that's also closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment.

But anyway, so the NRA, you know, Harlan Carter urges like helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against the Gun Control Act, and it's not popular with many of the folks running the NRA at the time, and again the way they've done things before, Congress would suggest a bill, the NRA would usually have some issues with it, but they would like make those issues clear. Then they'd sit down and like hash something out, as they did

in nineteen thirty four. So the vice president of the NRA, a guy named Franklin Orth, figures, that's what we're going to do. Right. He doesn't want the organization to take like a really public political stance because that's kind of permanently alienated from like one party, right, And that's not his goal with the NRA. He doesn't want it to

be like a Republican or a democratic thing. Short sighted idiot. Yeah, So, for what would be the last time, because again Orth and his people are still in charge of the NRA broadly, the NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach a compromise on the bill and they you know, they alter it and what not to be a little bit whatever. Orth describes it as a law. The sportsmen of America can live with the fact that anything had been passed

at all. Enrages the base that Carter has put together, and they respond with a flood of hate mail so voluminous it nearly makes Orth resign. It becomes increasingly clear that the Old Guard did not speak for the increasingly radicalized masses of the NRA. And these again, these people are they're they're frightened of black mobs of the Watts Riots, right, They're also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys with like fears of Communist infiltration and invasion. This is

all kind of coming together as part of it. And obviously a lot of the right in this time sees the Watts Riots is like it must have been the Soviet Union.

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

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

scares the old guard and makes them silo. Harlan Carter off to the ISLA, which is the NRA's first registered lobby and when they make this lobbying group for him to run, they don't like fund it, so he's going to have to raise his own money to do anything. And their hope is that, like, this guy's dangerous, but

we can't kick him out. So if we give him this lobbying organization but don't give him any money, he's going to have to spend all of his time raising funds, and he's not going to be able to like cause any trouble. Sure, this proves to be a bad strategy because Harlan Carter invins the concept of right wing fund raising. Damn it. Yes, the first podcaster. Yeah, he's the first guy to figure out how everything is going to work

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

a powerful time direct mail. The medium had reached prominence by the early nineteen seventies, when it was first pioneered by Richard Vigeri, who, as a campaign worker had copied down the names and addresses of people who had donated to Burry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential bid. With that list of Republicans in their addresses as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote Vigory had developed away for conservatives to reach the people most likely to

become coveted single issue voters with the right messaging. Carter hoped to use the tool to drum up support for ila's legislative work. Vigory himself collaborated with Carter to build their database. Iola did all of this under the noses and the shoes of the NRA executives, gaining ground for a hardened line against gun control. I'm building an organization capable of public persuasion, not only in Washington, but in

the States, Carter said at the time. We don't know the best way to reach all the people yet, but of course we shall.

soldiers anywhere, not even on military basis. Keep them in the sea or in the sky on drugs at all times. That's the KNAKA line. Yeah yeah, find fight us online, give us your email, send us money and.

Gandalf the White after fighting a ball rog. The NRA gets rebirthed is a white supremacist organization after fighting the ball rog of the black Panthers assembling legally with guns to check police power. Yeah, I may have lost the threat a little. I shall not pass. All right, we figured it out. We got it.

in control. But but it becomes that like they kind of sack like in the course of winning, it becomes clear that an awful lot of perhaps most NRA members are actually not on board with the direction they want. They are really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards the Second Amendment and while Harlan Carter was busy building the bones of a fundraising and lobbying machine that would dominate conservative and really in a lot of ways, American

politics for the next half century. The Old Guard we're wistfully looking back to the organization's past as a sporting association and figured maybe we could go back to that right And so they are the Conservatives, Harlan Carter is the radical right. Politics kind of leaves a bad taste in these people's mouths, because again, they're all aristocrats, right, They're all like they're they're kind of like Joe Biden. They want to have all of their friends right. They

like on both sides of things. They don't want things to get too political because that gets nasty and it reduces the number of people who can give you money. So, in nineteen seventy three, the Old Guard had purchased land in Colorado and they wanted to turn it, initially into a shooting range. It's pretty normal thing for the NRA to do, But in nineteen seventy six they decided to go with a grander plan, the National Rifle Association Outdoor Center.

This was going to be a massive compound dedicated to classes on like woodcrafting and wilderness you know stuff, and conservation research. They're supposed to be like scientific research done there, and also other sporting skills, and of course there would be a shooting range there and people would be able to hunt on the land. But like guns were not the primary purpose, right. It was like a whole outdoor

recreation center for the NRA. And this was in line with they wanted to expand the organization because that's obviously it's more money and whatnot. But they didn't want to like hone it on guns entirely. They wanted to be like, well, we could be like the we could be like the American go to organization for like outdoor you know, sporting

and stuff. So in order to help them kind of make this shift, right, because this is at this point, but that is different from the NRA's initial vision, as is Harlan Carter's vision, right, so they're both trying to move it in different directions. Right, It's become clear that like this thing the NRA had been isn't going to continue.

And the old Guard has a vision and the new Guard has another one, and so the old Guard hires a pr firm, the Orum group to help them drum up funding to make this facility reality, because they need tens of millions of dollars to build this thing. It's a pretty impressive vision, and they hope that they see

Carters built this like massive fundraising arm. He's getting all these people organized on behalf of his Second Amendment absolutism, and they want this PR firm to help them like take back like power from from Harlan Carter and like get people on their side.

You can see what this is kind of like how you've got like those those like old political ghouls in the Democratic at Party and like the parts of the Republican Party that turned into Lincoln Project who opposed Trump with like very slick political ads that did nothing, whereas Trump just got people angry and that works a lot better than like anyway, this is a version of that same fight, right, And part of how you could tell the ORM Group was not going to succeed in their

goals is that their founder, like the guy they're named after, their founder is this wealthy New York philanthropists whose most prominent clients before the NRA were Planned parenthood in the NAACP. So, boy, this this guy maybe doesn't get the base of the NRA, and it's gonna have trouble speaking to.

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

All of them agree to like start putting money into this project. So in order to like celebrate that they've found enough rich old dudes to fund this thing, the NRA sets up a big party on their land in Colorado for all of these these rich guys, and they basically host like a multi millionaire summer camp. People are like camping in their private jets on the land, Like they park their private jets there and like sleep on them, and then they hunt and fish in the daytime.

They're missing the entire cultural aspect of it at this point. Yeah, and so this is not going to work out well for them, right, So there's there's some backlash, and Alina Buckley describes kind of the Old Guard's vision of the association's future as quote, one in which shooting accompanied frontier abundance funded by corporations that had long bankrolled conservative causes.

One in which guns were a reflection of American might, cowboy like to be sure, but still with a military like formality rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal power as a threat. So again, the NRA, this is the attitude. The NRA works with the federal government in order to ensure this sporting culture and in order to ensure a degree of military readiness, which is basically back

to their old principles. As opposed to the n RA is an association that it enables individual Americans to be vigilantes, right, like, which is more what Carter's pushing.

from Dallas. You have to ship on every other city in Texas so that people don't notice how terrible Dallas is. So I I like to throw a lot of flag Houston's way in order to ignore that They're food is better. It's whatever. So he goes to Aplene college, and every soci'll find on Neil Knox will note that he marries his wife because she was the only girl on campus

who kept a rifle in her dorm room. Well, hey, you know what, that's love, right, Like he finds his he finds this person, good for him, he was interested in safe sex. I mean it is this is like getting into like how different some things are in the country.

But like at the elementary school where I went to, it was not uncommon for like people, particularly like teachers to have like guns in their cars in the parking lot and at the high school, like kids would regularly have their guns in their cars in the parking lot

during the hunting season and stuff. Well it's like they're hunting rifles, right, because they're like, ok, this is in like Idabell, Oklahoma, Like it's not uncommon during the season, Like you go straight from there to like whatever blind you've got. So again, this is like different, different time. But also Neil Knox is a very modern kind of gun guy who is going to help make the NRA into like the gun culture war organization that it comes.

In the mid nineteen sixties, Knox worked as a reporter and editor with newspapers in Vernon and Wichita Falls, before getting a job as founding editor of Gunweek, a newspaper covering five arms issues of the day. From his base in Arizona, the Bearded gun evangelists spent the next forty years raising against gun control and pinning himself against NRA

leaders he saw as too compromising. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, the gun industry and the NRA were inclined towards pragmatism, said Jeff Knox, who's his kid from his home in Buckeye, Arizona, and willing to make concessions. The elder Knox believed strongly that the Second Amendent was absolute, and he especially didn't like the idea of registering guns, which to him, raised the specter of a dictator confiscating

all arms. And subduing the citizenry, Jeff Knox said at one point in the mid nineteen nineties, Neil Knox even suggested the assassinations of Kennedy and King might have been staged to build support for gun control. So Knox is the start of specifically the strain of the American right

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

with Harlan Carter. Again, this is seventy six, seventy seven, so he has not yet started pushing conspiracies outright, but you can see kind of where he goes is where he and Carter helped to lead a lot of the gun culture. And yeah, so these guys the old Guard see Carter and Knox and see them as like kind of unhinged. But even more than that, they're not primarily objecting necessarily to their goals as much as the fact

that they're so extreme that it's going to take away funding. Right, it's going to reduce the nays ability to attract a lot of people to give them money for this.

members loyal to Carter. Right, they fire everybody with like very little warning because again Carter spent years getting his Border Patrol guys in there. So they try to get rid of all these people and what becomes known later as the Weekend massacre and Harlan it's the only massacre. Harlan resigns from his position in protest, and Alina Buckley continues Quote and Gunweek, Handloader, and Rifle, all publications Knox At once edited. Writers began reporting rumors about a shake

up at headquarters. The ORUM Group's report on the Outdoor Center had been leaked, and gun group leaders around the country bristled at its language. And this is from the Orum Group's report. In the public mind, the NRA's current image is based almost totally on its supposed opposition to any form of gun control. This public image constitutes a weakness for fundraising. A new piece of again, very bad at being at their job. By the way, a new piece of information had gotten out too, via a brocher

sent in the mail to some members. The Executive Committee was considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs, not far from Raton, where the NRA could focus more squarely on its sports shooting ties. Regional gun groups began receiving concerned

notes from their members. The Shooter's Committee of Political Education SCOPE, based in New York, wrote a letter to Rich protesting the nre's recent board appointees and to let him know that they would advise their membership to write in Neil Knox, among several others as board candidate. At the annual meeting in Cincinnati. In the American Riflement, an unsigned editorial appeared. There have been charges that the National Rifle Association is

being subverted. It read in abandoning its fight against gun control. So this, uh, and you see here they've built in their partnership, Knox and Carter have built a very effective both fundraising and propaganda wing. That is, they're they're building a moral panic over this right in a very modern way. In a way that is, and it's modern because this is like the the fucking this is part of like the blueprint of really everything the right will do in

the future. So for the next couple of weeks, Knox and Carter call every other NRA lifetime member they can in brief, like you, when you have an organization like the NRA, every year you have to have a meeting and you have to do like voting at that meeting and stuff, and like there's people who are the actual like board and stuff, but also the lifetime members get to vote, and so the board is in control unless you can get like enough of those members to vote

on measures that would like replace the leadership, right, So, and they didn't. They had never worked, No one had ever really tried to do this before the fact that the members get to vote had kind of been like like stock options voting, where it's like, right, yeah, I mean the random citizens who control twenty percent of the company's stock get a vote, but like our CEO controls forty five percent, in his best friend controls twenty, so it doesn't matter what they say, right right. That was

the thinking. But obviously the NRA isn't like a publicly traded company. You just each each of these people has a vote, and if you can whip them all into shape, you could actually rest control of the organization away from the old guard, which is what knocks and Carters start planning to do. Now, there's a lot of politicking that goes on here. You can read about it in detail in Alena Buckley's article. One thing I think that's worth noting is that the whole event has something of an

early Trumpy vibe. The folks carter lines up to back their plan to take over the NRA saw the Old Guard as out of touch aristocrats, which they were. They framed themselves as like Paul Revere types. Right, they're founding fathers, right, they're fighting a revolution against an unjust like aristocracy. Yeah, one person who was probable.

that's evil violence. You know, end of some caring and feathering a guy trying to like raise taxes, like literally melting a man's skin off in order to stop him from like getting the taxes that will pay for a road. That's traditional, right, Yeah, that's and that's yeah, it's allowed. You know.

Like what does that look like? Violence wise? You know, yes, And it's it's because like I don't know, everyone's got it's it's a. It's a it's I mean, it's a common political tactic. Right to frame the violence you want to do or you want to have the government do as not violence because it's being done by the government. It's like, you know, when people do a panic about like drug dealers sneaking fentanyl into things, and their solution to that is have the DEA raid more people, It's like,

well the DEA kill people too. Yeah, yeah, completely, I don't know, this is just what people do anyway. Uh So, knox h takes point on the actual day of the convention. He's the one who's actually whipping votes at the NRA convention to propose a series of bylaw changes. Using the support based Carter had built, he gets them to vote in a defense of the second Amendment to the NRA's Mission for the first time, right, So he's like, this is the first time they actually add because the like

they have a mission statement whatever is an organization. The first thing they do is they add like Second Amendment, you know, like we are an advocating for like the you know, this interpretation of the Second Amendment to that. The next thing they do is they block the sale of the NRA headquarters in DC, and they block the development of the outdoor center, so they put it into this plan and then uh Carter or Knox brings up a guy named Bob Kukla, who's one of Carter's people

who's still in the NRA. When Carter resigns in protest, Cucla takes over the lobbying arm and he's apparently I guess the Old Guard had thought he was trustworthy, but he secretly records one of their managing committee meetings and they play this in front of the crowd, and in the tape you can hear the current head of the NRA and the other members of the Old Guard criticizing Cucla for quote going to war every time someone mentions gun control. So it pulled up Project Veritas on he

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

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

win because you are the NRA. Fuck. So he did it. He did it, very trumpy speech.

Carter draws kind of the blueprints, LaPier carries them out though there's no other editorial.

our members. And these are some changes. And you know, again it's like broadly speaking, like like what you would kind of want to see in a democracy that's supposed to function the way ours does as opposed to like we are going to become so key to right wing fundraising that if somebody proposes any kind of law meant at curbing gun crime, we will destroy them forever, right, Yeah, which is necessary, Yeah, by any means necessary, and to an extent that, like it doesn't matter how like reasonable

the restriction might be. Like even outside of stuff like an assault weapons band, Like if you're going to propose like universal background checks, which most gun owners support, right, we're gonna come for your ass, you know, unless you're the Black Panthers, but whatever you're like. So, another nineteen seventy seven higher brought onto the NRA at the same time as Wayne Lapierre, is a guy named Robert Dowlett.

Now Dowblet becomes the NRA's general counsel, and it's his job to begin wrangling together legal scholars to push hard the idea of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment. So between nineteen sixty nineteen seventy, there's only three law review articles endorsing an individualist interpretation. Right, there are some like state level rovings, you could argue kind of endorse one earlier, but there's never been like a national, like a Supreme Court ruling on the matter one way or

the other. And it hadn't really people had not even talked about it in that way until the sixties. So three law review articles written between nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy endorsing that interpretation. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty nine, the period in which Dowlett is the NRA's General Council, there are twenty seven law review articles, three of which are authored by Dowblit himself, and his work would start

to bear fruit. Again. There's some like lower level rulings, but it makes the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment makes its way to the Supreme Court for the first

time in two thousand and one. Some people will say, like, point to DC as Heller, that's not the first time it happens in two thousand and one, and the case in question has its origins in a nineteen ninety seven criminal case in which a Texas woman divorced her husband and filed for a protective order against him because he had threatened to murder the man she cheated on him with the next year, while he's got this protective order, which he's not supposed to have guns because he has

the protective order against him. Right during a meeting with his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he pulls a gun during an argument and points it at them, so he gets in again. If you're a rational gun owner, you a thing like, well, this is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't have access to a fucking gun. He gets indicted for possession of a firearm, will subject to a court order, and he files for dismissal, arguing that this had unfairly infringed on his sex an Amendment right.

And the ruling what it actually rules is kind of complicated. The ruling is not entirely in favor of this guy, Emmerson. It's Emerson versus the United States. But in the ruling, the Supreme Court rules that the Second describes the Second Amendment as an individual right right. So this is the

first time that happens at a federal level. And then this ruling in two thousand is reinforced by two thousand and eight DC versus Heller, which is like the big ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban like categories of weapons and whatever it's based on like a DC I think handgun ban. And then in twenty ten the Second Amendment is finally incorporated in McDonald v. Chicago. But this is all you know, orchestrated by Robert Dowlett,

right starting in the seventies. And one thing you have to say about the man is he earned his salary. Right, that's a significant change in US Jewish prudence that he kind of painstakingly is the architect of pushing. It's probably worth noting here that he was a murderer, So I'm I'm going a quote from the Boston Review here. Robert J. Dowlitt was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yoakum, the mother of his then girlfriend, in nineteen sixty three. Dalitt also

robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop. Like Carter dal Liitt was seventeen years old when he pulled the trigger. He confessed to the shootings and served six years in prison before his conviction was overturned on a technicality.

The crimes were not made public until twenty fourteen. God damn, no, wonder it's like this is it's also he and s origin story over, He and Carter and Kyle Rittenhouse all seventeen when they fucking kill people in like these, I guess I would maybe you wouldn't call what dowlit does vigilante violence. He's really just murdering people. No, that just

sounds like straight up murderer. Yeah, he just murders a woman and then shoots a pawn shop owner and a robbery, So I guess you would say he's not a vigil ande he's just straight up an armed criminal. That is fucking insane.

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

But while they're making their case, the NRA is carrying out mass mailing campaign, some of the most extensive and political history, and they're publishing magazines that reach millions of people. They're paying for ads and all of these different gun press magazines. They're having paid spokesmen show up and talk

radio stations, right. And part of what they're doing they're obviously they're arguing for this interpretation of the Second Amendment, but they're also pushing cultural change what some scholars have termed the tactical turn in US gun culture again, even to the extent that like, oh, I mean, one thing that liberals get wrong is like it is not new for civilians to own on a widespread scale military grade weapons,

among other things. One of the most popular guns in civilian hands that the NRA before its political turn sold to people was the M one Garrant, which was the US service rifle of World War Two. Right, But what is really new is that it's is this kind of paramilitary turn for gun owners because people were not buying in one gharans primarily to like play act as soldiers. They were buying them because the garrant is a perfectly good hunting rifle. Right, it is thirty out to six,

which is a very effective hunting round. And those were cheap, right, so it was a good weapon to buy. So people are not dressing up as soldiers with their in one gharans primarily, right, that kind of stuff, the tactical turn in US gun culture occurs. But because it occurs alongside the militarization of the police and these kind of Hollywood

valorization of the militarization of police. So there's a lot that's going on here, right, and including like broadly speaking, the kind of like you could you also should tie in what Hollywood's partnership with the Defense Department, right, and the increasing degree to which like military tactical culture becomes like popularized. But the NRA recognizes, like this is there's

a lot of promise in this number one. You can get more people involved, you can sell more shit to people, which means you can have more companies funding the NRA who are not selling much as guns, but all this tactical gear. I'm going to read a quote again from that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but it really ties all of this together. Quote, the story of this tactical development in US gun culture is complex. I focus in this essay on a few particularly crucial components.

The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized since the nineteen seventies and diffused deeper into the interior of the country. This has blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers into nearly every US town, and turned militarized border security

into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization. This has also corresponded with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly worsened by the War on Terror, but which historian Elizabeth Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson administration's War on crime, which ports the NRA backs, like the nationalization of border security, it turned the nation's city

streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement. Second, individuals once arming themselves for self defense, often out of racial fears or a perceived threat to their masculinity, are now frequently claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and freedom itself. The NRA has played an outsized role in this vigilante reframing by promuligating the myth that gun ownership has always been about an individual constitutional right and oriented

towards a nativist version of self defense. This vigilantism operates in conjunction with extra legal violence of law enforcement officers, and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty. More dangerous than any military grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom of others is equal to one's own, and views any attempt to support such a quality as tyranny. More importantly, this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power to take life in defense not of law, but of

particular social and racial orders. There are now twenty five federal agencies with special tactical units. In May of June of twenty twenty alone, sixteen deployed their tactical teams to Black Lives Matter protests, including the Border Patrol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, the US Marshals, the US Coast Guard. In every one of the FBI's fifty six field offices, and at the local law enforcement level, special weapons and Tactics SWAT units are

now a staple of daily policing. Their very ordinariness is to a testament to how dramatically local policing has changed since nineteen sixty nine, when a swat unit was first used to raise the Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles, pioneering what was at the time an almost unprecedented domestic use of military force. In Carter's victory speech, he declared, beginning in this place, in this hour, this period in

NRA history is finished. The post nineteen seventy seven, NRA was decidedly partisan, took an absolute position against gun regulation, and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a social identity and authoritarian political ideology among its members. God damn, yeah, God, it all out like that.

to own things that I cannot own. Sure, and there's there's an argument to be made, if you're again care about being an originalist, that is close to the original interpretation of the Second Amendment, right, what part of what by? And they're claiming to be originalists, they're claiming to be

that the that the initial original interpretation was individualists. But what they're doing that for is not any idea of community self defense or a fear that the federal government will accumulate too much power, although it's often framed that way. Fundamentally it is about allowing regular white citizens to emulate the military and the police and to act as vigilantes in their stead right. That is where the NRA turns,

and that is that is the tactical turn. Right. It's not that there's nothing evil about owning body armour, which people can do for defense, perfectly reasonable defensive purposes. There's nothing like but but what what they're what they're doing is pushing this idea of like, not just the miliity, not just that like society ought to be militarized, which you get in every kind of argument that like what we need to do is harden the schools, we need

to add more cops. But it's this idea that the individual white person should militarize themselves in order to in order to protect this kind of racial hierarchy, right, supremacy,

And this is and this is the thing. This is what I wish folks who are supportive of more gun control would more often do, is tie in all of this to what has happened to the police, because they cannot be extricated, right, Yeah, And that's I think Avaldi made that perfectly clear, that like, these are two sides of the problem, and and the NRA is a huge part of how we get there both how we get these cops that look indistinguishable from like marines in downtown Fallusia.

Not that I think the Marines necessarily should have been in downtown Fallusiah, but you you have these guys. It's this There's this thing called the weapons effect, right, and which is a psychological phenomenon that's noted that like the presence of weapons in an area, visible weapons can increase the willingness of people to use violence, right that there's like something about that that heightens it. And that's happening here. And part of why that happens is just the fact

that America has so many goddamn guns, right, right. But another part of that is the fact that everywhere you go you see fucking cops in a way that like, you don't see cops dressed as armed as heavily as our cops in fucking war zones a lot of the time, right, Like it's it's anyway whatever, No, that's what Ireland Carter builds, you know.

this would solve the problem and whatnot. And that's not to say that it there isn't it wouldn't be helped if you had some serious regulation. But this like moralization of it like misses the entire point of why exactly the uh why the people who want guns and have those guns have them? You know, it's like, yeah, you're the people you're speaking to, are not it's people speaking

to the choir. Liberals often just speak to themselves and go like, uh, isn't it crazy that you know, all these people have so many guns, and it's like, yeah, well, while you're talking amongst yourselves, all these guys have created an entire family filled with guns.

that's a huge chunk of it. And like, you can't you can't divorce your desire to reduce the number of guns in American culture from the need to reduce the militarization of the police, because they are both inextricably tied to the problem, which is the constant gun violence in this country. Has has two points that need to be

really like hit on. It's not just civilian gun ownership, it's also the way in which the state uses and legitimates armed force, going back to even the earliest days where it's like yeah, in Texas, your right to carry guns was heavily restricted, but if you were a white vigilante who carried guns to do racist violence, you would often get off right and though you'd broken the law,

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

that's also not a lot of people. Is a voting block compared to the entirety of the United States, right, yeah, yeah, And so looking at that, you have to kind of marvel at the success of the LDRA in making their ideas a cornerstone of right wing politics, because I was just thinking myself, that seems like a low number. It's right, because again, if you look at actually polling of Republicans on gun control issues, they are a lot less hardliners

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

So it was my whole family. I had like two relatives who owned guns, like my grandpa and one of my uncles, right, And I did go shooting as a kid, but my parents didn't have any. My aunt and uncle

didn't have any. There were not guns in the house of my family in Texas, you know, because like it's actually not as integral to conservatism as a as a at least I mean, this is again changed because the culture wars have accelerated so like, yes, is that there's less conservatives like the ones I grew up with when they were right there were today, but the NRA. It wasn't that everyone on the right was in lockstep. It's that the elected leaders were scared to cross them because

that's where the fucking money came from. Right now, of course, that's why they were able to read will power so effectively. One of them most peculiar but also influential aspects of Harlan's time and power was his repeated and intense defense of cheap shitty handguns. And this gets us to the Saturday Night Special. Here we go, Saturday Night Special. In brief, like, there's a type of handgun that was very cheap in the seventies up through in the eighties and stuff called

a Saturday It was nicknamed the Saturday Night Special. It's like a five or six shot usually thirty eight caliber handgun. These are still guns like this are still used in violent crime way more often than like the guns that are politicized, like, cheap handguns in general are the primary guns that are used in violent gun crime. Although what is a cheap shitty handgun is different now because actually six shot revolvers are kind of pricey these days. It's

supposed to like a high point or something. But yeah, so this is a cheap, shitty handgun, and these are particularly low quality handguns. They were not like well made. As a general rule, they always work. They did not always we are yet that's that we're building to that, Okay, umping the gun. So you have this massive crime rate raised and starts in the seventies and really like peaks in the early nineties. And again a lot of Joe Biden's career is based off of this like violent crime

panic that starts in this period. And one of the first like legislative like tsunamis that forms around the crime surge is around this fear of the Saturday Night Special. And one of the reasons why people are so scared of the Saturday Night Special is that it is a gun that black people can afford, right, right, It is a cheap handgun, and so it is affordable for those folks.

Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban this Saturday Night Special, although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly on the grounds that they were shitty and broke easily. And this is one of the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from the from

NRA on therecord dot org quote. Speaking in opposition to opposition to legislation that aimed to ban Saturday Night Specials and other inexpensively produced handguns, Carter stated in a nineteen seventy two speech before the inter Raised Executive Committee, I can produce actual cases that the cheap handgun that snaps in a police officer's face instead of firing has saved many, many lives. And the question arises, what are we trying to do upgrade the quality of handguns in the hands

of our criminals. God, that's an amazing logical argument. Yeah.

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

ultraconcealable one or two shot pistol. They were originally made for Riverbroat gamblers, as documented in the documentary Maffick.

I would kill you, you son of a bunch. These little guns have a very noble and important purpose and we should make our position clear.

guess it's like the late seventies. Yeah, so obviously that's probably a lie, but it's very Again, Harlan Carter is he is the kind of guy who is not just like I think, UH, children should be able to engage in shooting sports. But like I think children should be routinely carrying handguns on their person. Yeah, because why guys, Yeah, exactly, that is out of its damn mind.

A plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In nineteen seventy five. He did it again when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition, Dnkle said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed three hundred and thirty nine to eighty and the issue has never been seriously considered again.

And it's one of those like this is again perfectly even if you're like a gun fundamentalist, you should want there to be oversight of guns that don't work or explode, and like ammunition that doesn't work, like right right. That seems to make that shouldn't be a political issue.

like blocks this shit. So the end result is that when gun manufacturers produce firearms that, for example, fire for no reason and kill their owners, it is impossible for the government to order them to recall those weapons. Not even the BATFE, which supposedly regulates firearms, can force a gun maker to take broken guns off the market. And I'm going to quote again from that Bloomberg article, and

this is actually how the article opens. Thomas bud Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm pointing at something. It's where he found his boys slumped against the cold back wall of the house around seven to fifteen am on the last day of twenty sixteen. Bleeding Out Brown is telling the story now about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when

he heard the shot. His son, Jared twenty eight it had just picked up Bud's Taurus PT one forty five millennium pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting near their house in Griffin, Georgia with his best friend Tyler Haney. Bud figure Jared had fired at something for the fun of it, like he did sometimes. I was thinking I'd better go out there and tell him to be careful or something, Bud fifty four says, his voice

trailing off. But what he'd heard was the pistol going off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a forty five caliber slug through Jared's femoral artery. Oh shit, my leg, my leg, Jared yelled loud enough for his father to hear. Haney twenty six rushed to the house in a panic, pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in its holster, tucked into Jared's waistband. So any Bud, so he can't do nothing, absolutely nothing. Bud is one of We have no idea how many Americans

died due to defective Turis guns. The company did eventually issue a recall on something like a million weapons that were potentially defective, but they didn't have to run ads anywhere to inform people of the recall. They were not required to reach out to their customers, to reach out to gun stores, to take any action at all to warn people that they'd sold guns that could fire for no reason. An unknown number of those weapons are still

in people's gun saves, closets and holsters today. That's fucking crazy.

NRA shows was interesting. They used their lobbying arm to launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida to propose a piece of legislation that would end all pending litigation against gun companies and prevent any future litigation. It took a while to actually get the law, which is the PLCIA, written, and by the time it was introduced, George W. Bush

was on his second term. In October two thousand and five, he signed the PLCAA and a law which blocked lawsuits from seeking damages on gun industry companies for unlawful use of a firearm right. So if the company could be sued for like breaking the law in some way, but they cannot be sued for what people do with their weapons. And I have some conflicting feelings on some of these lawsuits.

But one of the things that people will point out is that the advertising of a lot of these companies like leads to the like and this is a big thing, like the Sandy Hook lawsuit, right, One of the big issues.

One of the big like points that used to justify like the suing against the Bushmaster who made the gun that was used in Sandy Hook, was this ad campaign they'd just done where it was like, consider your Man card reissued, and they would like send you a man card with an AR fifteen and it's it's again, there's a again. I this is like a complicated thing to get into entirely, but there's a debate to be had.

Into my mind, the area in which it's kind of most relevant to have this debate is on to what extent does the way the gun industry tries to sell weapons to people complicit in when those weapons are used for violence. So, for example, when Daniel Defense launches an ad where you have like a Bible verse and a small child holding an air of fifteen. To what extent does that help to lead to what extent does that help make gun culture in the United States more violent? Right?

And this is not really what the lawsuits are, Like the Uvaldi families aren't suing Daniel Defense or that they're attempting to right now. This is all happening at the moment on those lines. But to my mind, that's kind of the most That's the thing that like, I think there's a point on sure.

is a little little bit less the case now. But when I had friends in the early two thousands, like you get training on like what to do if you get raided because you're not allowed to sell sex toys they had. They were always called cake toppers, right, like the dildos and shit were like cake toppers or personal

massagers or whatever. Yeah, but you couldn't, like you couldn't say, like, these are for fucking, in the same way that like you could sell a bong, but you had to call it a water pipe for tobacco, like if you use the ball word bong and a Texas. Again, head shops were always kind of inconsistent about how much they were paranoid about this. But like you, you could get asked to leave for calling something a bong in a in a head right.

which different policies affect it. In nineteen ninety three, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article that show showing that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide in the home. Now, this is a study you'll see cited a great deal, and it's often used to argue that firearms in the home make people less safe. This study was widely reported on it at the time, and it scared the shit out of the NRA. So the NRA campaigned to eliminate the organization that had funded the study,

the CDC's National Center for Energy Injury Prevention. Congress included language in the nineteen ninety six Omnibus Appropriations Bill to insist that quote none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control. Now you may note they weren't doing that with that study.

It was a study that you could use to argue gun control, supported gun control, but it was just a study on like the homicide risk and how that changes when you have a gun in the home, right, right, Like, the CDC was not like lobbying specifically, they were carrying out a study. But the NRAMA studied, yeah, how people get hurt in the home, And the NRA argued that was inherently like that's political and should be illegal. Yeah, and then they make that happen, right Yeah, Like, Congress

goes through with this shit. This is later referred to as the Dickie Amendment because of some dude named Dickie. Now under extensive lobbying pressure, Congress also removed two point six million dollars from the CDC's budget, as that was the amount they had invested in firearm injury research the year before. So they cut all of the money out of the CDC's budget that had been used to research

firearm industry. And again, whatever you think about gun control, there are four hundred million of these things in the fucking country. There should be research into how they affect people. Right, It just seems prudent. It seems prudent, Just seems prudent. Yeah, if fucking if auto companies were blocking research into how car accidents work, right, like, you would say that's nuts, you know, because it would be And it's not even

It's like, it's not even our companies tried to do that. Yeah, right, it's I don't fault them for trying. It's the same way with their you know, that's what they're going to do. That's what they're going to do.

of context on how our heroes turned out. Yeah, they doing. Neil Knox wound up being way too radical for even Harlan Carter's NRA. He was forced out of the organization in nineteen eighty two after being overshadowed by the rise of Wayne Lapierre. I think LaPier kind of helps maneuver him out. He dies of colon cancer in two thousand and five. He outlived Carter by a fair amount. Harlan died not surprisingly of lung cancer in nineteen ninety one, so the tobacco industry did us all a solid on

this one. Yay.

only rich people should have guns. I don't like the idea of a thousand percent XIZ tax on AR fifteen so that only wealthy people can afford them.

and a lot less white. And you know, there's a variety of personally, okay, because people do ask about this because I talk about guns sometimes in terms of what I think are the number one the laws that you could most easily pass without the Supreme Court guaranteed shutting them down. And I think a federal assault weapons ban the Supreme Court will rule against, right like, it will go to the Supreme Court and they will rule against it.

In their current construction outside of like talking about should we stack the Supreme Court whatever, like, by it's not doing that. So stuff that I think would not number one would not necessary. Like obviously anything as a crapshoot with the Supreme Court, So literally anything could get turned down by the Yeah, because they're about to rule on

a concealed handgun carry bill anyway. But the I think, I think it's perfectly reasonable and is also there is legal precedent for raising the age at which someone has to be in order to buy a semi automatic firearm. Certainly, eighteen year olds are not full adults, and our current gun legislation recognizes that by banning them from buying handguns. Although that's also not entirely accurate because you can still buy handguns through like face to face sales or have

them given to you by a parent or whatever. There's always every there's always like ways around this kind of stuff, but it is it's been established since I think nineteen eighty six that the federal government regulates STOP does not want people under twenty one buying handguns. So it's the kind of thing where if you were to pass a law extending that to semi automatic rifles. You'd have a stronger argument in front of the Supreme Court if it came to the Supreme Court in order to defend that

cut piece of gun control legislation. And both of our most recent mass shootings as of this recording, there may have been another one drive there. We're eighteen year olds

who bought a gun and immediately carried. So I do think just on a moral level, there's a case to be made that, yeah, this might fuck save some lives, and I think the best thing you could do you would probably not have to call it a red flag law because that term has been politicized, but a law that would allow you to take guns and stop people from buying guns if they have a history of domestic violence and violence towards women and making violent threats of

mass shootings, which seems like a no brainer. Yeah, again, like everything's been politicized to a stupid degree. But the Buffalo shooter was had been doing like threatening shootings and threatening women, and like had was on law enforcements, radar should have been it should be possible to do something there, right.

including the buffalo of all theyse shooters. They both like universal background checks, they passed those, So like that that's not as much of the solution as I think something like an effective kind of Again, I think you would need a better term than red flag law. But also maybe I don't know the right's going to culture or whatever you try to do.

making it out to be. Right, you can say it is the guns, and yeah, of course access to guns is like why a lot of this is happening, But also like that doesn't that's not the end of like the complexity of the issue because there are four hundred million of these fucking things in the country right now and a whole culture built up around being ready to immediately use them against right now gay and trans people, particularly in the fucking crosshairs. And again this is like,

so I don't know. I think fundamentally, like I I argue a lot about gun control with people. I think the folks who want to see more of it are coming from a fundamentally natural and noble position, which is looking at repeating massacres and going like, we've got to be able to do something about this, Like there's gotta be some way we can do about this shit.

unhelpful and actually solving the problem. And I again, nobody knows what to do with this because it's it's so much like no one has ever had anything like this happen, right. People bring up the Dunblane massacre, the Port Arthur massacre. They bring out like you know, when Australia confiscated all those guns, like that was two hundred thousand guns, Like there are twenty million ar fifteens in the United States.

There has never been a society this heavily armed, or a society that has turned the random mass killing of civilians into a meme. Yeah, both of those things have happened here, and they've happened alongside like the militarization of an increasingly unaccountable, violent police force that wants dictatorial control of American cities, and all of this stuff is pretty pretty unique historically, So yeah, I don't know how we fix it.

they're going to solve any of these problems. I think other things are going to be happening in the future that are not what we recognize as part of American politics, but are going to become the way things get decided in this country. And I think they're going to be uglier and weirder than our parents were used to. But I do like voting is like a well, okay, but maybe I'm wrong about that. It's the same reason I have a four oh one k right right right, right,

right right. Maybe there will be an economy in thirty years so I'll get to retire. For the same reason I own half of a bitcoin.

But I think community defense is everyone should have an eyefact. Right downside's to owning a gun, No downside to having a tourniquet and some gauze on you and some chess seals and knowing how to use them. Zero downside could be useful in a car accident. You can have a fucking piece of rebar fall off of a building construction and pail somebody and maybe you'd get to save their life with an IFAC. Million times that could be useful.

Have an ifact right organized in your community, to provide houseless people with you know, defense against sweeps, to provide people who are low income with eviction defense, to stock food pantries, like all of that stuff is uh. You can wear you can wear cool uniforms if you want. While you do, you can get a plate carrier. You can put patches on it, you know.

dried food guy. You know, he was talking about his product, and then the other guy who was selling the fake Patriot food was very much an anti Semitic meme.