 Hi, my name is Sandy Baird and we're here with what's happening or what's going on with Pete Garretano, my guest, and we're going to talk a little bit about the current situation in our country with what they, what some people call gun violence, or guns, and we're going to start with having some of the research that Pete has looked into about mass shootings elsewhere, and before we begin to discuss at least a little bit about what's going on in our culture that has caused things like ULD. Okay, Pete, how are you? You're just back from Costa Rica. Yes, I was, I am just back from, I didn't read of any, of course, there's no newspaper or local news where I am, so I don't know. Really, none zero? Well, there may be, but I don't know where it is. Oh. There's just nobody. Nobody cares? Oh, they care about soccer. Well, okay. If somebody got shot at a soccer match, then it would make the TV news. Okay, but what's going on? You have done, is this the only country, as they claim, that has such mass shootings? Well, no, apparently there's been a number of studies done, and the United States is not even in the top 10 per capita of... What does that mean per capita? Well, so a country like Norway, which may only have, let's just throw a number out, 10 million people, United States has 350 million, so if there's, you know, five mass shootings a year in Norway and 30 in the United States, Norway has a higher rate because of the number of people in the country. And so there are, on one study, United States was 11th, and another study, they were like 50th. Why doesn't this come out? Well, I mean there's... And we're told that it's peculiar to the United States, correct? Right, gun violence is peculiar, but not mass shootings. And we're number two in the world in gun violence. Which means what? Like things that happen in Chicago on? All homicides, all deaths by gun. What's the first? It's a, oh, you know, I can't remember now. Whoever was number one was way ahead of us, though, but I want to say it's a real small country. I would guess South Africa, but maybe not. Yeah, I can't recall right now who it is. But, I mean, so, yeah, it's a terrible thing. I mean, I don't think anybody would downplay how terrible it is to have somebody go into a school or a church or... Or your bedroom. Or a department store or whatever it is and kill a lot of people. But in the United States, for instance, 50% of all gun deaths are suicides. So let's say there's 25, 30,000 people a year die from firearms. Half of them are suicides. So a very, very small portion are these mass shootings. And so I think, I mean, the argument that's being put forth is if we get rid of assault rifles, and I think what Biden is proposing, anything with over 10 rounds or seven rounds in it, so a cartridge with more than so many rounds in it would be considered an assault weapon, even though apparently most pistols nowadays have more than seven rounds in a cartridge. I mean, we're all living the past thinking that a gun has like six bullets, but it's not true anymore. The cartridges all have apparently between them. So are they considered then assault weapons, pistols? Well, I mean, that's actually, that's the argument that's going to be put forth is that anything more than seven rounds is going to be considered an assault rifle. Rifle? What about a pistol? Assault weapon. Well, no pistol. So I mean, and so what people that are, I mean, the gun, the pro-gun people are saying that this is going to eliminate 80% of the guns in the United States, which is of course impossible, but you can't, that's not going to happen. So they're either going to have to ease up what they're considering an assault rifle. I mean, I think at one point the AR-17 or whatever was banned, right? But then it got overturned. Yeah, it was overturned because there was no significant difference. Right. It was only banned for about a year, and during that year there was no significant difference in the mass shootings. And so why ban them anymore? Well, and then the other... There was no significant increase. There was no significant increase, right? Or decrease. The other component is that many of these have been done with a pistol because you can get 15 rounds and the one guy, apparently they went in... I can't remember, shot 31 people somewhere. He just had two pistols with a whole bunch of rounds in his pocket. So you take it out, you put another one in, it takes you five seconds. It's not a really big deal, apparently, to pop a cartridge out, put another one in there. So getting rid of an assault rifle, like you said, may not solve the problem, but I think some news organizations that people have touched on, I mean, what is the real problem? Why do we have all this gun violence? Before we go there, though, I mean, the argument is being made throughout the world that the United States is different because of the Second Amendment, okay? So the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and this has been upheld in the court, and the most recent case that I know of is Heller versus Washington D.C., or Washington D.C. versus Heller, in which the court said that people have the right to bear arms, and that was part of the Second Amendment. Do you think that's correct? It's because of the Second Amendment that Americans having the right to bear arms is that why there are so many mass shootings and deaths by guns is because we are... That Second Amendment is very particular to the United States, in other words. You think if we amended the Second Amendment or got rid of it that we would end mass shootings? Well, at this point, no, because there's so many guns in the country. I mean, how are you going to get rid of all the guns? Number one, okay, but, you know, there are threats from... The NRA is saying that Joe Biden and the Democrats are interested in confiscating our guns. Is that true? Who knows? But I mean, it's hard to imagine that could happen because I think the Second Amendment defenders and the pro-gun, I'm not even going to say lobby anymore because I don't think the NRA has much power since they went bankrupt. The people that own guns are not going to put up with that. They're not going to put up with that. I don't think there's a more powerful, a more, what's the right word? Militant. A militant, that's a good word, group of people than this group of people. And it may end up having some kind of divide just like our Roe vs. Wade issue. It may end up being that the Northeastern states or the big cities will ban it, and then the Southern states and other places like Montana won't because, I mean, there's so many arguments. There are countries that have pretty much eliminated guns like Japan who have no gun violence, but then there's countries like Canada who have just as many guns per person as we do that have no gun violence, literally compared to us. I mean, it's like a fraction. So what's going on here? My take on it. Although Trudeau just did. No, I know he wants to ban weapons even though they have, like, literally no problem. No, because he's a follower. Well, what is, okay, just before we get into what are the commonalities between all these shooters? I really believe, I guess I believe in self-defense. And so I am a supporter of the Second Amendment. And isn't that the reason that people want or that they do own guns is for self-defense and also a perception that if you ban guns with citizens, then the police and the government have all the guns, including the military. Nobody is going to stop the military from having assault weapons, especially if you're always in a war like the United States is persistently in wars. So you're always going to have assault weapons. It's just going to be that the state owns them all. Right. And that's basically the danger of leaning towards the totalitarian communist situation is that you look at the countries, some of the countries who have banned guns, they had the worst, strictest, most draconian lockdowns during COVID because people could not resist and say, you know, the heck with you, we're not going to do this. So, right, it really enables the government to be even more powerful and iron fisted. And that was one of the reasons for the American Revolution. I mean, there are a lot of reasons for the American Revolution, but one of the reasons that it was successful is that militias had the right to have guns, right? Yeah. I mean, they had guns for a lot of other reasons, I suppose, including to control slaves. However, one of the reasons was to resist empire. But a lot of the gun, anti-gun advocates would say the Second Amendment, part of the Second Amendment also talks about a militia and the real reason was to have guns for a militia before there was a really organized army. So they were saying it's different now because we don't have or need a militia, which some people think we do, because we have a military. But the other argument in that is that in that last important gun control case in Washington, the court said citizens have the right to bear arms. That's separate from militias. So there you go. And that's been upheld. I would say there's zero chance that there'll be any really strong... There's not going to be any reform of guns. No, there won't be any reform of guns. It's too deep in the American Constitution for one thing. But I think and many people think that the real problem, and I've had this discussion with people who seriously think that the guns are the real problem, is that we have a mental health problem in the United States and we have a lot of unhappy people. And they're distressed about many things. In the last two years, of course, mental health problems skyrocketed during COVID because we basically turned our country into a giant, like, concentration camp of sorts where people were isolated and we know isolation is bad. I mean, that's what we do to people in prison to break them. So we had people who may have already been on the edge that went over the edge because they needed to be with other people and talk to other people and they needed work and they needed friends and all these things that were deprived because of... And let's not say it was because of COVID, it was because of the lockdowns. Because the press constantly wants to say, COVID did this, COVID did that. No, COVID didn't do it. The lockdowns did it. And the government did it. And the government was the ones who enacted the lockdowns. Countries that didn't have lockdowns didn't have these problems. Their economy is doing much better than ours. And states that didn't adhere as long as states are also doing much better. But we're neglecting something else, okay? And you brought this to my attention, actually, although I kind of had also thought about it, was that there is a connection with gender, isn't there? Oh, yeah. And race in a way. I don't know of any... I don't know of many black people who have committed mass violence with guns against schools. I might be wrong. But what is the typical profile of a person who goes into a school and shoots up a school? Well, I hate to say at this point that it's a white male. Why? Because you're a white male? Well, because the white males are being stomped on right now. So that's the worst thing it can be. No, I consider myself not really a white male. But, yeah, it is a white male. But maybe that's part of... Poor too, right? Poor, yeah. And in most cases, someone who hasn't grown up with a father. Can you go into that a little bit? And how did you come to this conclusion? Well, there's been studies done on this. And, I mean, I think I want to say that right now maybe 10 or 20% of kids anyway don't grow up with a nuclear family that they used to, probably at least 20%. So the fact that these kids that act out many times have not had a father, 75%, it's still a big increase. I mean, the other thing that's been pointed out but I think this is all just part of a mental health issue is that a lot of these kids are on very powerful anti-depressants, anti-psychotic drugs. They're prescribed. Right, they're prescribed. They've been diagnosed. They go to a medical doctor, a psychiatrist and they get these drugs prescribed to them and the medical community has changed in that a lot of people would argue they're very quick to prescribe things and we did this, that's the solution where I think counseling is probably what is lacking in a lot of these cases. Kids that are troubled, people that are troubled need to talk to somebody. I mean, if anybody's ever had a marriage issue or any kind of issue and gone to a counselor you sometimes need to talk to somebody that is kind of neutral and this isn't available. The medical, mental health community is completely overwhelmed and understaffed right now. So you read a lot of these things that the kids, they went in but then that was it. They got prescription and then they were off and so there's so many factors I think but the last two years didn't help. It's one of these things where you say, okay, the symptom is the mass shootings but what is the disease? But nobody does that. Because we can't point our fingers at the pharmaceutical community or the medical community or say that the nuclear family that we need to get back to... You can't do that. Oh, you can't say, jeez, you know, dads have to hang around and people should have a mother and a father because that's not a, I would say in vogue right now but it's kind of not, it's not. Currently it's like, you know, it's a whole different climate out there. Things are being pushed that are really antithetical to anything that's happened in the last thousand years as far as family structure. No, civilization. Civilization, right. And I think that a lot of, and many people think, including me, that it's just wrong, that that's what's causing this, you know, a lot of this stress, too much strife, too many choices. That's another thing people have pointed out. Like you used to have, you know, this, this and this and now for everything there's a million choices and you have the... Oh, but I don't agree with that. Yeah. Well, think about it. If you're a young white male. Yeah. Poor. What, what choices do they have? I mean, they could be, they could be trying to get decent jobs. They could be trying to go to school and college like we did. However, at least, you know, many of those men are really without choices. They don't have money. They haven't been particularly ambitious in a lot of ways because they don't see that there are a lot of choices or a lot of ways up right now. And that was not the case when we were younger. And they don't, they don't think they're ever going to have any money to get out of the cellar of their mother's house and to have a family of their own. Well, I don't mean employment choices. I think I mean, we're, I hate to go into the woke thing. Go ahead. But you didn't used to have to decide if you were a man or a woman when you were six, eight, nine, ten years old. You don't have to know, but that is welcome. Well, it's something that's introduced to say, well, maybe you're not this. Maybe you're not that. And so, and that's a very confusing thing and could be a very disturbing thing, you know. Okay, okay, okay. So, but I want to get back to the idea of males and male role in society. It's always been screwed up for men and women because of that in traditional society. In any case, I'm a divorce lawyer, right? So I know, and I've known for years, that the biggest problem I think in the fundamentals of our society pretty much are broken families, you know. And they're not broken for no reason, you know. I think that there's tons of violence in families. I think that men are usually the perpetrator of violence. I think that many men leave families or women ask them to leave and they don't support their families financially. They're not good fathers once that's over and they leave and often they leave the mother alone. In fact, I see that every day, that mothers are left alone to raise children, which is impossible for a mother to do. It's just impossible to raise, especially if you have a lot of kids by yourself with no financial support. I mean, Bill Clinton ended even welfare payments to those mothers, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean... So you have these broken families. Men are not assuming what a male should do, which is the support of women and children, the protector of women and children. Instead, they leave leaving the mother pretty much in charge of the whole family and they're not able to do it. You know that, Pete, as well as I do. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, not having two parents is a bad thing because... Or an extended family. I mean, right now somebody has to work. So then what is that called? You end up being a helicopter kid when you come home and there's nobody there and you just open the door and you go in, something like that. But you brought up another thing, which is very important to this whole debate. We are... This discussion is that we are a culture of violence. We glorify violence in this country. How? The military. Yes, the military. I mean, there's no more glorification of... There can be any more disturbing to me than the way we treat people who mass murder people that we don't know. Of God. Yeah, that we don't know. So how is that not worse than anything that any of these people are doing? We give them permission and then when they come back, in many cases they get medals. True. So it's a sad thing and we are the most militant... Let's put it this way. In the last... Since World War II, we've easily caused the death of more people worldwide with violence than any other country. There's not even a close second to the U.S. military. The historians estimates 30 to 50 million people either by starvation or just direct bombing. So no matter what, no matter how wrong we are, we're never... Nobody's ever taken the task for it. No, it's considered okay. It's okay. So there's this... We haven't an argument about this yet. There's this too... That's not a two-face. There's this duplicity kind of thing where it's okay, if you work for the government, it's okay to do all these things and then go over and kill people because that's what your job is. As a man. As a man, but then if you come back and I think some of these people are ex-military that have committed these mass slaying. They have PSTD, sure. I mean, it's not a healthy thing to be part of this either. Some people can probably deal with it, but a lot of people struggle greatly with their task that they've taken on as far as being in the military and doing that. Well, I had this discussion with a woman over the weekend about this because I don't think... First of all, the production of assault weapons. I mean, you could outlaw, I suppose, the production of assault weapons, but not when your country's at war. The production of assault weapons is going to continue whether or not citizens are disarmed. The production of those weapons is going to continue as long as you're training young men to go to war. Isn't that correct? So to be really... We know there's weapons getting in the hands of other people. I mean, look what happened. All of our weapons in Iraq probably at this point the Taliban have. With Afghanistan, too. Yeah, in Afghanistan. And there's a good chance all the ones we send to Ukraine, half of those will end up in the hands of the Russians. I've heard that they already are. But the arms dealers don't care as long as they get paid. But it's not just the arms dealers. They're heinous enough, but it's also the question of what the government wants and what the government doesn't want. The governments through both Republican and Democrat have always been pro-war, haven't they? Oh, yeah. Has there ever been an exception to that? Well, they don't actually get to vote on it anymore. Right. There used to be a... There's a law, but nobody pays attention to it anymore, right? There's a... That Congress has to approve. Yes, right. No, in the Constitution, the only body that was supposed to declare war was Congress. The last time... It was a long time ago. It was 1941. No, I would say World War II, because I know Korea, Vietnam... 1941. So... And that's all... Okay, so that's my contention. And people argue with me about that. They say, what are you talking about? Well, let's ban assault weapons. Never on earth will assault weapons be banned until you stop war. Right? Well, somebody had the suggestion you just charge $1,000 per bullet. But that won't happen either. I mean, the connection would... Okay, but you're on to something, because every day a young man is taught one of his roles is to go abroad and kill other people. Sure. We train killers every day. For the military. Sure. But they're still trained killers. The people that are in the National Guard here are trained killers. They don't want to do it necessarily, but they do it. But they're still trained to kill people. Exactly. And I think that young men are trained in that way. You'll notice that in these mass shootings, how many females have been involved? I don't remember a single one. No. No, I'm not. And women, do they not... young girls, do they not receive the same training as men? I don't really know. But for some reason, this is a gender-specific crime, isn't it? Yeah, it is a gender-specific crime. But there are also very small... You still believe in gender. Well, there's also a very, very small portion of women. There's more than ever in the military, but there's still a very small portion in the military. Certainly fighting force. And do they go... One percent, five percent, I think... Yeah, because they can't stand the military very much because of what they're ordered to do, I suppose, and also because they get... I mean, a huge case is in the military of sexual harassment, right? So if you go back to the no-father thing, then are women way less likely to grow up without a mother than men are likely to grow up without a father? In other words... Oh, wait, mothers stay around. Right. So, I mean... I mean, they can't do it. Maybe we've solved the problem. How do we get men to stay around? In peace. Well, yeah. Okay, look at... I have seen too many men... Well, yeah, you don't want to have an abusive husband. Abusive husband, right, exactly. Right. But I think something else is also going on with men. I think that men have to be reminded, no matter who they're sleeping with, no matter what they're doing, that males, I think, and this is a value judgment, should be on earth to protect women and kids. And that's the male role. Are they being trained to do that? No. No. I don't think so. They're trained to go to war. Well, that's the other thing that has been right. What? The male's role versus the female's role has always been completely different. And males are also glorified for spreading their seed. And women, no. Are they? They shouldn't be, if that's the case. Well, no, of course, if a guy is promiscuous, nobody calls them... Other guys don't say bad things about them. They think that's great. Yeah. Right. And the opposite with a woman. No, a woman is considered a slut. Well, that's what I said. The opposite. It's not considered a good thing. Right. So that's... There's another thing where it's creating men who think it's okay to have a baby leave, have a baby leave. Right. And then there's also... And you have to chase them around for child support. Sports stars or famously have done this and there was somebody in the NBA like seven kids by seven women and what wasn't paying child support. I remember the guy's name, but I won't mention it. Yes, so else I got, I think I could take into court for child support. I believe it was Hunter Biden, but I'd have to check that out. But I think so. But he paid, I suppose, in the end. Yeah. Look, we don't have a whole lot of time, but this is something that I would really like to explore a lot because right now, as I said, I'm a divorce lawyer. And I am shocked at the number of women with a lot of kids who are simply ignored and neglected by our society. And that number is really up in our community because I think many women who are abandoned are new Americans. They don't have real access to the court because the courts... I mean, nobody can understand what's happening in the courts, even white Americans or black Americans and certainly new Americans with their difficulties in language cannot and they cannot access the courts. So we have all these mothers. We're talking about raising the future generation, all these single mothers with all these kids that have been totally neglected by our lovely progressive state. It's very upset. So how do you get fathers to stay, though? You tell me you're a father. How did you stay? Why did you stay? Tell me. I thought it was the right thing to do. Yeah, my husband did too. Times were tough in every marriage but you say, you know, I've got to take care of my kids and then after that... And wife. And wife, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I thought it was the right thing to do because I was raised a Catholic, I don't know. Could be. I don't know. Religion may have some role in it, but, you know, I don't know. It would be interesting to see if it's more prevalent in certain communities and other communities. You know, like once again, the South is typically more church-going than the North right now, I would say. So is there more of a problem with fathers leaving there or more of a problem in the North? It would be an interesting thing to see. That would be, but that's not the kind of study that's being done. That's what I'm saying. And the mothers that are left behind are really suffering. Yeah. And I guess that has been the situation for a very long time, I would think. But I think it's much worse at this point because white men are being... I don't know what's happening. Well, I go to Costa Rica in six months a year and the problem is just as bad if not worse down there. And traditionally, Hispanic cultures are not good with this either because it's a macho kind of male. And I know numerous guys who have kids that I don't think they ever see their kids. The only difference is there, the country takes care of the kids. Yeah, yeah. Right, which is not true here. Which was the argument is that you have babies to have an income. Yeah. And that's what people say down there because let's say the country of Costa Rica gives you $100 a month per child. So you have a couple of kids. That's kind of your job taking care of the kids, but at least they have a mom taking care of the kids. So the dad's gone, but... Okay, well, end this on... because this is a really important topic. We used to have the minimum welfare payments that would go to single-poor parents with children. Bill Clinton cut all that out. In other words, he said all that work that's done by that single parent, usually the mother with kids, we're not going to pay for it anymore. Right. And they're on their own. That is, to me, really, really disgusting. I mean, the problem with a lot of these, which I think you would call nanny state programs, is the fraud. And so... Yeah. So it costs probably twice as much as it should because there's so much fraud, you know? But there's not very much fraud on behalf of those mothers and trying to remember that. Well, yeah, I don't know. It was a while ago. Well, I do. You know? And all that's been cut out of some... I don't know. They go to work at some crappy job, so they have to leave their kids in some... Anyway, it's a very bad situation. And I would say that those mothers have to be supported financially when the men... When the husbands won't, or the fathers won't. Yeah. Okay, so I guess that's it for this week, right? Sure, we can wrap it up and we'll reconfine... And I just wanted to say one more thing about... It was D-Day yesterday. Yes. Correct? When the United States, Canada, and Britain, I guess, rolled into Germany and pushed the Nazis out of France, right? I want to remind people that at the same time they met in Berlin with the Soviet armies, and they congratulated each other, and they made peace. So that's fine. And we should do the same with Russia now, okay? Yeah. That's what I... All right, so we'll see you next month. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Sounds good.