 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is David Kopel, Associate Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute, Research Director at the Independence Institute, and Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, which is my alma mater and he was my professor. Welcome to Free Thoughts, David. David Kopel Thank you very much. You've done quite well post-law school. David Kopel Well, thank you. And you got me into firearms to begin with when I was your research assistant. I didn't really, wasn't terribly interested in firearms libertarian, but I don't own guns. I'm not big into guns myself, but it's a very interesting topic and of course it's much in the news over the last year with mass shootings. So are there more mass shootings than ever before? Trevor Burrus If you're talking about what the public commonly calls mass shootings, these horrific crimes like in Las Vegas or Sutherland Springs, Texas. There are several per year and so looking at trend is a little difficult, but the answer is probably yes compared to say 20 years ago. Trevor Burrus But these would be, there's mass shootings, which the FBI can call four or more in a single incident or single act versus spree killings, which is different. So sometimes those numbers are misleading if you hear them from like Mother Jones or something. Trevor Burrus Well, and the gun ban activists have sort of their own idiosyncratic definition of mass shootings for which there is no formal official definition. So they would call a lot of ordinary gun crime a mass shooting. Like let's say there's a liquor store robbery and the robber shoots two people who work at the store and two patrons and so four people are injured, nobody's killed. They would call that a mass shooting. That's I think in the fits in the broad category of overall general gun crime. That overall general gun crime is down massively compared to the early 1990s. The gun homicide rate has fallen by over half and the gun violence victimization rate is down by about 70% over the past 25 years. So there's been a tremendous amount of progress in reducing gun crime in the United States. Trevor Burrus You said something interesting there. You said gun ban advocates and I imagine people listening to this who are very totally friendly to gun rights might think that that was a little bit overstating your case. There are people who want gun control. Is it fair to call them gun ban advocates? Trevor Burrus Oh, it depends. I think it's fair to call Michael Bloomberg a gun ban advocate and he's the sugar daddy of what is the 900-pound gorilla of the anti-gun movement in this country. I mean it's taken over the issue from all of the traditional groups which had more of a, somewhat more of a base, but you know they've got their one fund turn and he's got lots of billionaire friends. Bloomberg filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the Heller case saying that second, individual Americans have no second amendment rights at all. He, as mayor of New York City, used registration lists to confiscate guns. He's said over and over that like people who own guns or like he said if you own a gun and you have children in your home you're stupid and he is at every opportunity endorsed all kinds of ban legislation. Trevor Burrus Now, in terms of the sort of makeup of the gun control side I think a lot of them you know think rifles are okay and shotguns are okay they might want to ban other things but some of them might be of the sort that they think that a good just society would have no guns in private hands. Do you, what do you think the makeup is on that in terms of the, when you interact with gun control advocates do you think a lot of them are actually just hiding the fact that they were with their ban guns entirely? John Lennon I mean one data point was I talked to a guy who had been very closely involved in what's now called the Brady campaign. Before that it was called Handgun Control Incorporated. Before that it was the National Coalition to Control Handguns and you know that organization when it started out in the 1970s was very expressly for a handgun ban and would also say long guns are not the problem. The book written by their then president said that point we know we got no interest in that issue obviously that changed and so much so that as this guy explained he wanted the group to run an ad showing some hunter guy you know out in the field carrying a shotgun you know about bird hunting or something like that looking very wholesome and the ad would say this guy is not the problem which I would agree with and the Brady campaign by that point was so anti-gun and its ethos that they couldn't bring themselves even to do that. John Lennon Interesting back to get to that to mass shootings. We describe how it wasn't a large portion of the homicide and the homicide rate is going down but if they have the spree killings have kind of increased and it's hard to say a trend but if they these are getting a little bit upsetting people are starting to look at their phone and say not again. John Lennon Right. John Lennon I certainly feel that way. John Lennon Absolutely but is it I mean no one's championing them but is it a little bit ridiculous the rest of the world looks at us and says you know we did something about this in Dunblane Scotland there was a mass killing and they went after guns in Port Arthur Australia they there was a mass shooting and they did something about it and just consistently we don't do anything about this. People are just saying oh another SSDD another mass shooting is that is that okay for us to react so sort of nonchalantly to these horrible acts of violence? John Lennon I don't think it's a nonchalant reaction at all. I think it's a very people are very concerned and they think seriously about what can be done but when you have advocates who say oh you know when they what the United Kingdom did or what Australia did they confiscated guns they used they had guns on registration lists and then they did massive confiscation in Australia they confiscated 20 or 25% of the total guns supply and then they did future rounds of confiscation for more guns so when you have Americans like Hillary Clinton or lots of others who say oh look at Australia they show the right way to go well yeah they're telling you they are gun banners they're not only they don't want to only ban future sales they want to confiscate guns from existing people now if you tried an Australia style gun confiscation in the United States you'd be confiscating about 60 million guns that is unrealistic it is in fact dangerous to law enforcement to force them to do something like that and it would make all the problems we've had in the past of things when you try to prohibit things against the popular will alcohol prohibition the war on marijuana users all those things those would be small scale compared to the social trouble we would get by trying to follow that UK or Australia gun ban system and by the way on a per capita basis lots of countries have more mass shootings than the end fatalities than the United States and of course there's also this thing where only only some things count as a mass shooting so if you know the narco traficantes in Mexico murder 12 people that doesn't count for I suppose for two reasons one is some people don't count killings by organized criminals as a mass shooting and secondly there's this kind of bigoted view that the only comparables for the United States or like the west or western Europe and Japan and you can't ever think about other countries like our neighbor to the south which has incredibly repressive gun laws and a much more serious firearms crime problem than the United States and that that's true broadly the United States has a lower homicide rate than the world average now if we look at the the tools of mass shooters though and we see for example in Las Vegas the amount of guns he had there the there he uses a thing called a bump stock which I'll ask you or about a second to make rapid fire faster but it's just a bunch of weapons of war that he you know a lot of stuff has come out about where he purchases and how but you know couldn't we at least say hey you know you shouldn't be able to buy five assault weapons at a time that probably indicates something about what you might be doing I mean it might make a marginal effect but isn't that something we should be doing well you can look at our we have a comparable on this which is since 1968 anytime somebody buys two or more handguns in a within a week local law enforcement and the federal bureau of alcohol tobacco farms and explosives get notified of that purchase and that's sure moved a lot of paperwork around but I think it'd be hard press to find anybody who'd say that has helped us prevent crimes or do anything you know yes if you're like a gun collector you know you go to the gun collector show that weekend and maybe you know you might buy seven guns handguns then that doesn't mean you're going to use them for nefarious purposes so if the system isn't really producing much of value on handguns it's hard to see why extending it to long guns would have benefits assault weapons are used in most of these mass shootings correct assault weapons is a bogus term invented by the gun ban lobbies and has no meaningful standard definition I can tell you what an assault rifle is as defined by the United States government's defense intelligence agency an assault rifle is something that is of the type that was invented by the the german military and started to be used in 1943 and similar to the of Kalashnikov Avtomat Kalashnikov rifles AK-47 Avtomat Kalashnikov 1947 rifle is that is one of those and that is a medium-sized rifle that can fire either one shot at a time semi-automatically or it can fire automatically like a machine gun that's what a genuine assault rifle is militaries all over the world use assault rifles the guns that are falsely labeled as so-called assault weapons in the united states are not that you won't find one of them that is used by any military anywhere in the world these are normal guns that fire one shot at a time and they get demonized because they can be as the as a strategy memo written by Josh Shugerman one of the leading thinkers of gun prohibition wrote in 1987 the public would be confused because they would when we talk about these assault weapons as he calls them the public will say oh it looks like a machine gun so it must be a machine gun and that confusion has persisted ever since the the disinformation against normal guns that because they have for example their stock has made a black polymer rather than brown walnut that it's supposedly a military gun well that seems i mean a little bit nitpicky if you look at the pictures of the arsenal in Las Vegas or the pictures of these guns used used in a lot of these crimes they're not squirrel rifles they're not hunting rifles they're not shotguns they're they look like what our military pick care i mean like why are people normal people allowed to even own that they certainly are hunting rifles they are the most common caliber is 223 which is not powerful enough for game larger than a deer but they are quite commonly used for hunting for target shooting for very high end target competitions and for home defense because in that caliber of 223 which is relatively small lightweight relatively less recoil easier to control especially people who maybe don't have that much upper body strength find them to be a good rifle for home defense they're very versatile so you mentioned machine guns and the machine gun fully automatic function of an assault rifle since you seem you know to sort of say these these aren't unique but so would machine guns should we make those legal well first of all what is the legal status of machine guns for listeners who don't know machine guns were invented in 1884 well i take the automatic automatics were invented in 1884 the machine gun if you want to be really technical has a different definition because that would go back to gatling guns and predecessors like that but what federal law is concerned about is is an automatic where you press by pressing the trigger once that's all you have to do and ammunition will fire continuously that was invented in again in 1884 by it's by federal law it's called a machine gun which is not exactly correct but that's what it is what is so in 1934 um and machine guns having been invented were extremely expensive and you know obviously they're they're not expensive for them in themselves that also the the amount of ammunition you use is real expensive so they never really caught on with the the general public obviously they they had military utility you know in a very horrific way for example and in the trench warfare of world war one and even when the the tomson submachine gun was invented and that was brought to the market in the 1920s the al Capone gun exactly well it it never really caught on with the general public i mean some some people got it but but it was much more popular with gangsters than with with regular folks and so in 1934 congress enacted a tax and registration system for automatics what it calls machine guns and that has been in place ever since in 1986 as part of as an amendment to the farm's owners protection act which was a comprehensive revision of federal gun laws uh the manufacture of new machine guns for non-government people was prohibited after may 19th 1986 so today in 37 states you can under state law in conjunction with federal law you can lawfully own a machine gun but it'll be one that was made before may 19th 1986 and it's just you'll not only pay the 200 federal tax on it you'll it'll take months to go through the paperwork to do it and obviously the gun itself is probably you know six thousand dollars or or more in price so if that so that so it's hard to get a machine gun you can go to gun ranges and shoot them if they because they pay a lot to shoot them and things like this it it would be bad though correct me if i'm wrong that if these mass shooters had machine guns and we don't have any machine guns in society and we were able to get rid of them over a long period of time or make them very difficult to attain i mean it and so if the Aurora shooter had a machine gun that would have been worse i think uh we're both from Colorado so yeah you know call them by so yeah so why why don't we do that with all guns why why don't we go i mean we it'll take a long time there are 300 million guns why don't we start with the national firearms apps with the tax with the transfer with the registry move into thing make them so they're very rare and then and then make a dent in this problem for guns in general you're talking about very particularly dangerous guns guns are dangerous you know they're they ain't toys um and you know even a single shot 22 caliber gun can can kill somebody um so it's as a NRA certified safety instructor it's important you'd rather have a single shot 22 if that was all a mass shooter had available to it yes so the trade-off is what congress decided with machine guns was well on the one hand you know we see them used in things like the st valentine's day massacre and by gangsters and on the other hand we don't really see a lot of law-abiding folks you know having fun with them at the target range or or you know using them for protection or whatever so that that trade-off was fairly you know they should point out there are tens of thousands or more machine gun hobbyists who enjoy their their hobby and comply with the national firearms act and you know have have fun at a target range with it and and don't cause anybody any problems and in fact none of the you know it's almost never are gun the machine guns that have been lawfully possessed pursuant to the national firearms act they they have essentially no involvement in crime you do sometimes have stolen machine guns like from a military armory or things like that that might be used by say a drug gang firearms save lives when they're in the right hands and firearms in the wrong hands are very dangerous to the general public so sensible gun laws recognize both sides and this this is what the the way the gun ban movement is really sort of a flat earth society in terms of the empirical facts about guns is they just insist that you know as Shannon Watts the head of Michael Bloomberg's mom's demand group says that a good guy with a gun never stops a crime which is crazy because you can read about it in the newspapers every day maybe not every newspaper every single newspaper every issue of every newspaper around the country but if you certainly follow national news that it happens frequently and of course Stephen Williford saved dozens of lives with his a r15 in the the southern springs crime but more generally firearms are used according to social science including recent reports by the report a few years ago by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which did summary the issue and it said you know we don't really know and there's there's a range of estimates but the the low end would put defensive gun uses in this country at tens of thousands per year the higher end of the estimate would we'd get into well over a million and you can some people like the national opinion research center when it looked into it said well really probably the the correct answer we think is probably somewhere in between so it said hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses annually in this country now most of them without a shot being fired usually the display of the gun is a sufficient to turn for the criminal to decide it's time to leave work early that day and that ends the situation so you have you have really huge contributions to public safety by guns in the right hands and I've talked to plenty of people who tell me how their lives were saved because they had a gun at the right time and others who's you know they would have been raped or assaulted or or otherwise really horribly victimized but they would save themselves because they had because they had a gun in fact you know Cato's former former Cato guy Tom Palmer who was one of the plaintiffs in the case that eventually became district of Columbia versus Heller was with a friend who would in California the friend was gay and a bunch of thugs came up to them intending to do some gay bashing and Palmer had his handgun showed it and that was the end of the gay bashing and all the gay bashers decided it was time to go you know walk watch clockwork orange again or something else now when it comes to the this level of defensive gun uses was we call it it isn't it the case that these crimes are being committed because people have guns and the criminals have guns and so saying that the solution to this is to pour more guns into the situation and to let people defend themselves with guns as opposed to go back and try to take the guns away from the criminals that that seems to be more sensible than just pouring thing on pouring more gasoline on the fire well you can do both and putting a guns in law abiding hands aren't gasoline on the fire they're how you they're fired extinguishers in that regard you know I mean I agree there there are people who think that guns cause crime that you know this is a common trope of the gun ban movement that if you have a gun in the house and you're a normal person that you are at risk of flying into some rage you know you're you were happily married for 30 years and then you know then you got a gun and then one day your wife burned the chicken dinner and then you shoot her because guns cause people I mean they literally say things like this that the guns cause people to go crazy were to lose self-control again that's the opposite of what the social science says people who use guns for crimes are not people who were law abiding and then turned into a criminal they were criminals beforehand now guns can certainly facilitate a crime it it depends on the situation you know OJ Simpson didn't need a gun to murder his ex-wife because he's a it's a big strong guy on the other hand say a scrawny 14-year-old probably couldn't hold up a liquor store or a convenience store if he only had a knife or at least it would be it would be harder for that criminal to do so so certainly there are times when a gun like that more than facilitate that can actually cause it I mean there might be someone who who says I wouldn't rob except for a gun I mean right that I mean like if you gave me a knife I wouldn't rob but if you gave me a gun I would rob that that's right that might that might he's criminal in his mind already but he doesn't see an opportunity unless he unless he has the the firearm because you know this this is the thing about guns is everything that makes them usable for and and superior to other arms for self-defense also makes them usable for offense particularly the ability to project force at a distance and as something that that equalizes the disparity between people of different strengths or numbers so you know a woman in a parking garage who's say 50 years old and surrounded by four thugs a handgun's the only thing as a practical matter that's going to equalize that disparity and force between them so by the way if you get rid of all guns then the the that's a great deal for the four thugs because they you can go back to the rule of the strong like we had in the middle ages and whoever's the biggest and toughest and meanest will be able to dominate everybody else so that would women and elderly and other people who aren't big and tough will be the ones victimized probably more in that scenario but ultimately it would be better even if there was the same level of crime with let's push a button and make guns disappear from everyone victims criminals even the government and then and then say let's say the this the level of crime would be the same which i'm not sure would be let's say it would be but we've converted every gun attack into a knife attack that would be better correct i mean that would be a better it would be less lethal your hypothesis is that we keep the the gun the level of crime constant i think it would increase the level of home invasion burglaries one of the studies we another thing that's pretty clear from the social science and this is presented in my uh supreme court amicus brief for a large coalition of law enforcement organizations in the the heller case was study after study after study of both burglars who were in prison and even one study that managed to interview burglars in st louis who were out of prison and were active successful professional burglars is the biggest part of their working day is observing the place they're targeting and trying really hard to make sure that there's nobody home when they go in because if they do there is a high risk of getting shot that is a the burglars risk of getting shot is about equal to burglars risk of going to jail so we're going to prison if you figure one is a deterrent then probably the other equally sized risk is is also a deterrent the centers for disease control in the mid 1950s and they're they're not known as one of the top pro-gun organizations out there did a national study that estimated guns are used defensively against burglars in the united states about 600 000 times a year and again that's usual the large majority of scenarios are not a shot being fired it's just the display of the gun the distinctive sound of a pump action shotgun being racked to load the round makes the burglar burglar decide to leave the scene you can contrast that with what goes on in australia after they did their ban on defensive gun ownership and england and the netherlands and ireland and lots and lots of other places where burglars come in to deliberately come into occupied homes and do so with impunity and they do so because the occupied home is better for the burglar because you've got purses and wallets at home where you can take cash which has you don't have to sell at a discount the way you do with with other goods that you're fencing on the black market and we know that a not the majority but a significant minority of home invasion burglaries when the occupants are present leads to assault against the occupants so when you increase home invasion burglaries when if you keep the number of burglaries constant but you move move more of them to becoming home invasions you will be significantly raising the assault rate in the united states but you can defend yourself with other things too i mean then my hypothetical taking guns away you can defend yourself with you can have home security you can have a machete you can have a big dog i mean so yeah actually we should we be comparing guns to like big dogs i mean i mean other forms of security if we made all guns disappear so now the criminals just have knives but we have big i mean other ways of protecting you know i've had a big dog and she was certainly leap up to joyfully greet the burglar but in her window well i didn't try i didn't train my big dog my big dog to be a man killing machine you know you can train dogs to do that that they will yes when you say attack they will go at it and they'll they'll do something they have have very good genetic skills to do which is is rip somebody's throat out and and try to kill them now you tell me that we're going to be safer when instead of the gun which sits in it's safe or the bedside drawer completely inert and has no will of its own and will never get up and walk around and attack somebody on its own we want to have people say well instead of a gun for defense you should have dogs that are trained to attack and kill strangers uh i don't i think you know i mean there's a variety of home security options available i take your point on dogs but you you can get a security system right you can you can oh yeah you can get a security system and the security system will when the burglar comes in uh automatically notify somebody in northfield minnesota or someplace and then the people in northfield minnesota will call the police and then the police will send somebody with a gun to train but a trained person people who you can you can do training on your own but isn't it really hard for an individual person to actually like use a gun defense i mean they're gonna freak out the guns that be taken from them by the criminal and use again i mean cops go through a police academy basically almost military style training and an or normal more personally gun does not go through that so i mean i've heard that criminals are more likely to take a gun from someone and use it against them if you use it defensive well if you're still hearing that you should distrust whoever you're hearing it from because gary cleck a professor at florida state university school of criminology his his book on gun data point blank won the american society of criminology's award for the the best work of best criminology book in a three-year period and cleck studied the the data on that which comes mainly from the national crime victimization survey conducted by the census bureau and then the department of justice and they found uh the data showed the takeaways are extremely rare well well under one percent of defensive gun uses and in fact uh takeaways from the criminal actually happened more often than than takeaways from from the defender um no but they meant you of course you're right like yeah i represent law enforcement all the time in the courts and of course law enforcement on the whole is better trained in firearms than the average citizen so you know you can look at that when the uh guy from wisconsin tried to murder uh the republicans at baseball practice uh this summer the heroic dc capital police officer i mean she she got she shot the criminal at a pretty long range with a handgun that was a very impressive shot she was she was really good and and presumably well trained and i would bet it wouldn't surprise me if she was one of those officers who besides doing the mandatory training spends a lot of optional time um in in skills practice for a home invasion you're not in that kind of complicated or difficult shot scenario you know the vast majority of defensive gun uses uh are at a distance of 10 feet or less so and you're also not in a situation where well okay police officer going into say a home he's never been into before where there's a domestic violence called 911 he goes in he doesn't know who's there who are the who's the good guy who's the bad guy you know how how those alliances might shift that's a very complicated situation for which it's really important to have a lot of good training and not just with the firearms side of that but in contrast when you're defending yourself against two guys who just kicked down your front door it's fairly clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and of the necessity for the immediate use of defensive force but if you have a gun in your house we were talking about the dog analogy but if you have a gun in your house and most guns are not going to be used defensively i would i would imagine i've never used my fire extinguisher defensively either i have fire extinguishers all over the house and the house has never caught on fire but isn't the isn't having a gun in the house knowing that even just more dangerous because of accidents because of its ability to be taken by your children i mean we hear all the time that it is more likely to hurt someone you love or you or be using a suicider so i didn't do stop a crime well it depends on how the gun is stored you know if you uh happen to live in a home with a violent alcoholic who's got a criminal record then probably bringing a gun into the house and leaving it accessible to that guy may well be raising the the risks you know on the other hand if you leave that guy and move out on your own and get a gun in your own home in case he comes over and decides he wants to kill you now that you've left you're much safer having that that firearm for defense the issue of children and accidents is something that has been very successfully addressed by education and safe storage practices which definitely vary from family to family based on the circumstances you know the number of fatal gun accidents in this country per capita since the early 1970s it's fallen by 88 percent overall and for children that is ages 0 to 14 it's fallen by 92 percent and that's come at a time when we've just about doubled the number of guns in this country so rising gun ownership more exposure to guns as they say in the literature has been consistent with dramatically falling accident rates but we've also we also pretty concentrated gun ownership if we doubled the gun ownership and also because it would be most people on multiple guns correctly it's less than half the households in America own guns or about yeah it depends on the surveys and also depends on you know it as you said on households if if dad owns four guns then is is mom a gun owner too you know she has access to them and uses them sometimes you know maybe so when you're trying to count gun owners that's that's a complexity but the depending on the surveys you get about a third to a half of american households owning guns and of course there are probably that that may be an underestimate so that since there are plenty of gun owners who are not really interested in in self-disclosing to a stranger on the telephone so we have so we have a gun gun deaths we have violence in america it doesn't look like it does in western europe uh there are a lot of guns here uh there are fewer guns in other countries and everyone keeps saying the gun you know people people on the gun rights they keep saying gun are not the problem when that seems to be the obvious obvious difference here between yeah you're right it's not like western europe and thank god and that's one of the reasons it's not is because we have guns in this country so why is it why are we are we more violent here no we're over the law over the historical term we're considerably less violent try being a jewish guy walking around paris berlin with a yamaka try being a woman wearing a short skirt uh in gotenberg scotland i was gonna start gotenberg sweden there are a rising amount of gang impunity groups of thugs uh who go around freely attacking jews women and others in western europe and the governments of western europe tell you oh well you can't have a gun to protect yourself in that kind of situation and by the way if you criticize the people who are doing this uh then we'll persecute you for hate speech or you know uh because you're supposedly prejudiced because you don't like uh gangs of immigrant criminals beating people up or sometimes not immigrants sometimes children of previous immigrants and the let's look at the last 70 years of homicide in western europe because they had gun control stemming from their historic distrust of the people which is why this country was founded on different principles because they had gun control for example when the nazis came into france and belgium and took it over uh they were able to confiscate all the weapons because they had registered there were registration lists of guns and so the nazis vacuumed up everything they could in eastern europe after uh operation barbarosis started on june 22nd 1941 and germany invaded uh eastern poland the baltik states ukraine uh Belarus all of which were at the time puppet colonies of stalin and then of course they went into russia itself in that first year a million people died in mass shootings the germans sent around the insats group and just a few thousand specially trained killers to go from small town to small town and one town at a time marched the jews and the gypsies also known as the roma marched the jews and then the roma out of town line them up shoot them all move on to the next town so we had a million people killed at mass shootings in europe in this seems like a really strange definition of mass shooting well when you kill it when you're shooting a bunch of people all at once i'd call that a mass shooting this wasn't worth this wasn't warfare this this was not uh you know the soviet tanks against the russian tanks against the german tanks when you have uh 12 people who use guns to murder 300 people i'll call that a mass shooting but it's the government i mean it's the nazi i mean it seems like it's to use a black swan event in world history like the nazi germany which is argued with the craziest thing that has ever happened in the history of the world uh that seems kind of a strange justification well okay first of all genocide isn't a black swan event in this world uh you uh had happened in rwanda with machetes uh under the bill clinton administration it uh sort of the uh foundational genocide for the 20th century was what the turks uh did to the armenians during world war one and by the way that there's uh i've written for national review online among others to the extent that our armenians in that situation were able to get guns for defense they significantly saved lives and so do the jews uh under in polin eastern poland where it's more marshy and forested in france and the resistance to the extent that jews were able to get the get ahold of guns they were able to save a significant amount of lives and genocide it certainly didn't end when hitler died uh it's continued under communist regimes globally i'm not sure what robert mcgabi did in uh zimbabwe counts as genocide but it certainly counts as mass murder professor rj rummel of the university of hawaii did a book in the early 1990s um estimating the numbers of deaths by government in this past century and this was just up just up to the early 90s and he wasn't counting warfare and nor was he counting warfare in which instead of soldiers being killed you know maybe you're bombing a town because there's a military base there but you know you killed a lot of civilians too he wasn't counting those he was only counting the intentional murders uh by governments and it's about a hundred million perhaps more over the course of the century so mass murder by government has never been more common than it has been in the last century well it seems to make sense to have a different theory of like gun different theory of gun ownership that varies based on the quality of your government i mean that would that would i think even gun control advocates would say yes if you live in a very dangerous place and you have a very dangerous government i am all for gun ownership but if you have a stable western democracy where you can call the police and you don't have to resort to your own sort of self-help methods it's a very different question well but it's an it's an arrogant historically thing to assume that because your government's pretty nice at one time that is going to be so great in the future germany in 1900 was one of the most tolerant countries in the world for jews it had a well functioning democracy and a free press and so did you need guns to resist the government in germany 1930 absolutely not well but by the time you did when hitler took over in 1933 it was a little late to say oh well mr hitler now that you're you know uh jew hating fanatic and setting up a totalitarian dictatorship at this point we think we'd like to apply for some permits to own guns it's too late at that point and if the guns are registered you can bet that the germ the government will vacuum them up from anybody who's with the slightest suspicion of being a free thinker we're not subservient to the totalitarian boot and it was the the german the nazi government actually didn't even need to change its gun laws until 1938 they found the the weimar republic's gun registration and licensing laws were quite sufficient to take guns away from the jews the socialists people who believed in democracy and limit gun ownership solely to people who were trusted to be subservient tools of the the party so we have a gun violence problem in america we have mass shootings which might be going up and one could happen between when this episode comes out and and like i said a lot of people just be like well it's another one are we just saying throw your hands up in the air and there's nothing we can do about this we can't make people wait or even try something out you know a waiting period or or or extended background checks or better background better sharing of information i mean mental health i mean you know are we just saying that there's nothing we can do to like stop these people from getting guns and we just have to say well that's how america works no there are lots of things we can do and we should be doing them and we should when we might have started doing them sooner if so much of the political air supply wasn't being sucked up by the gun ban lobby which is something that gets a lot of a political attention and a lot of media attention and distracts from things that are a lot more boring for example of just talking in dc or probably anywhere in this country about the level of funding for probation and parole services and what a how many cases an average probation or parole officer has to work and then if they do want to revoke parole for somebody for bad behavior is there the jail capacity to take them or do they have to keep saying well it's too bad you did that and you really should get revoked but there's no room at the jail which is at 137 percent of capacity already so we're not going to do anything about that secondly in terms of mass shootings not all but a very large number of mass shooters have severe mental health problems in in fact the mass shootings issue is sort of detracts from the much larger issue of homicide in general about a fifth of people in state prisons for homicide convictions have serious mental health problems and people who have mental health problems in this country often don't get the help they need now one one thing is important to say there are studies that go back and forth about whether people with mental illness broadly defined are more likely to commit crimes or not and there there's a lot of good evidence that comes down somewhat on the the not side but even the people who would advocate for that would say yes that is true in general but at an extreme end when you've got serious schizophrenia there really is a much increased risk for homicide now most people with serious schizophrenia don't don't commit homicide not even close in fact the the biggest crime problem related mental health is people with mental illness are much more likely to be victimized by crimes so when you're helping people with with mental illnesses you're really preventing crime in a lot of ways not just not necessarily the person's dangerous but they might be able to be more situationally aware and so so not to get victimized but at the at the mass shooting level you've got a lot of mental illness this country now has the same number of mental health treatment beds per capita as we did in 1850 this is a terrible shortage and it's one of the things the government should be spending more on and be more active in in providing this kind of social safety net one of my friends from grade school later developed carol endop it's your own book what a life can be she got severe schizoaffective disorder and she's you know she's doing fine and she's actually a she's got a degree in psychology and is a practicing psychologist but she's had things in her life where she said you know i know i'm going downhill i'm decompressing uh in the as the official term i'm not psychotic yet but i've been there before and i know i'm on the way and she walks into a mental health facility and they say sorry you know you're not crazy enough yet come back in a few days well carol is a very nonviolent person who would never hurt anyone so it was getting turned away like that was was bad for her but it didn't create any risk of crime to society but in there's there's other cases where it can and if we were more proactive in helping people who want treatment that would be a tremendous change we could make in this country uh to increase safety both for the people who need the treatment and for everyone else but in terms of banning something like we're gonna talk about some of the the tools of mass shooters bump stocks is that is that okay to ban a bump stock well i just testified before the senate judiciary committee this morning and said that something that makes a normal gun fire as fast as a machine gun should be regulated like a machine gun and i don't think that would violate the the second amendment at least is considered by the supreme court in the heller case which more or less said machine guns aren't part of the second amendment right you know bump stocks are sort of novelty gimmicks that have been used by guys who just want to go to the shooting range and have fun shooting off a bunch of rounds fast and you know it's kind of an expensive waste of ammo and in my uh thrifty view of things but it's a harmless activity and the las vegas crime was the first time that a bump stock was ever used in a crime as far as i know but the potential is now there and we know that that mass killers tend to study each other's techniques carefully and copy them so i think it would be legitimate to regulate uh bump stocks at the at the same level as machine guns which means it's something you can you can possess but there's a you know this month's long federal registration and tax process uh to go through you and you've got to submit fingerprints it it's a it's a big thing and so yeah that and on the other hand bump stocks don't have defensive utility they degrade the accuracy of a firearm which would make it less suitable for self defense certainly i don't think there's any state in the country that would allow hunting with that and you can't hunt with machine guns in general so presumably you can't hunt with things that fire at the same rate as machine guns what frustrates you most about the gun debate well uh it's sort of like the weather it's uh it's not the hate it's the stupidity at least that's part of it is some in the media and and some elected officials are just so willfully ignorant of things i mean you can obviously have policy differences but when people think that things like the Colt semi-automatic rifle that was brought to market in 1964 is a machine gun that is just factually not true and you know when people say oh you're more likely to have your gun taken away uh than to be able to use it for successful self-defense i suppose that was kind of a a bigoted thing to say in 1962 um but it you know it might have matched somebody's intuition and there wasn't any research on that really but but now that there is when a lot of things have been settled it's disappointing to see uh how many things that have been factually disproven keep coming back um i i'd say i'd say it's also disappointing to see how politically polarized uh things have gotten i mean one of one of the things that the uh michael bloomberg and cohorts have been very successful at doing is radicalizing the democratic party on this issue um sort of like the state that it got into around 1994 when i was voting for the clinton gun ban and then since then after losing a bunch of elections on the gun issue they decided well maybe it's it's okay for people to be moderate on this um and and still be members of the party and and now now it's gotten to be more extremist i mean that we have a problem political polarization obviously on on lots of other issues but this is certainly one of them in in congress you know there's lots of ways where you can do reasonable things but the problem is so often the the overreaching uh that goes on some in senator feinstein's bill doesn't just ban bump stocks it has a very everything a provision that says anything that functions to accelerate the rate of fire of a semi-automatic firearm which is just about all the gunsmithing work uh you can do like in replacing one trigger with a better trigger that operates more smoothly and therefore you know it takes uh one point one second to move the trigger instead of one point two seconds about firing a revolver like a like a western would that be with that qualifier is that to be some sort of technical apparatus well it's got to be some physical thing it at least in this country after it can't be just actually knowing how to shoot a gun guns in the right hands make the user and the public as a whole safer guns in the wrong hands make things more dangerous for innocent people sensible gun policy recognizes both of these truths and the laws that are constitutional and appropriate are the ones that attempt to disarm dangerous people while respecting and ideally even enhancing the possession and carrying of arms by law-abiding good persons thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org