 is presently teaching a course on firearms and violence at Stanford University and has filed in a brief with the appellate court dealing with the banning of assault weapons. I'd like to introduce to you Don Cates. So if I begin to make terrible noises through this thing or you can't hear or something, please wave a hand and I'll try to be, I could probably do better without it. In any event, as a liberal I always enjoy speaking to libertarians since they are, at least on the gun question, since they are the closest heirs traditional liberalism has. Traditional liberalism comes from a philosophy which historians label republicanism, not anything to do with the republican party other than that the republican party has adopted the name. The republicans are a set of philosophers principally associated with the school of Machiavelli and through Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke, and then the founding fathers of our own country. And the republicans were particularly concerned with the right of arms. They followed Aristotle in viewing arms not only as the key to the kind of government that a country would have, but also as a basic hallmark of being a citizen. In the great city states there were two types of people who were not armed and were not expected to come to the aid of the city in times of crisis. Those two types of people were slaves and resident aliens. They were not armed because they were not deemed trustworthy to have arms. But there was also a second element which we tend to ignore by we I should say most discourse about arms in the United States today tends to ignore. From a philosophical point of view the discussion of arms in the United States today takes place or at least when we're talking about a philosophy of government the discussion of arms takes place in conjunction with the idea of power. An armed citizenry will have enough power to overthrow a tyranny. But that ignores a vital element which the founding fathers saw which was that people who were unarmed were deemed not to have the virtue required of Republican citizens. Only citizens who were armed to defend themselves and their property had the moral fiber necessary to be good citizens in a republic. And to the founding fathers the idea that Republican government was in danger the idea was the Republican government was a very perilous enterprise and it depended first and foremost on the moral fiber of its citizenry. The militia concept which is part of that moral fiber and part as well as of a philosophy of power or a philosophy related to power the militia concept was that you had the basic military component of society was the entire armed citizenry composed of individuals who had the moral fiber based upon being armed which also gave them the power to defend themselves and their families and their property from criminals and from the state. And by the same token they had the moral fiber to join with other citizens like themselves in defending all citizens from tyranny whether it be external or internal and also from criminal misconduct which was viewed as a yet another form of lawlessness because to the founding fathers and indeed to everyone 200 years ago the most elemental and basic philosophical right was the right of self-defense and we find that right used again and again in the works of the various Republican philosophers principally or most notably John Locke whose basis for the idea of overthrowing kings the right of the public right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler a philosophical view he championed and of course was highly controversial in his time for doing so self-defense was the basis of that view the fact was said Locke that God has given man arms with which to defend his property and his life and his family and any tyrant who would take from him his liberty or his property or his life is no different from a robber robbers may be resisted to the death so therefore may rulers be resisted from to the death for they are but robbers when they attempt to tyrannize over the people and when they take that which God has given you you have the right from God whether or not we happen to believe in any God today not a subject I'm about to discourse on but in any event that was his view now at the same time the Republicans particularly Locke were very concerned with another notion we're very concerned with an accusation which they tended to receive and that accusation was that they were an accusation not unknown to us today in a rather different context but the accusation was that that by encouraging the people to have arms and to believe in revolution the Republicans were going to produce anarchy they were going to produce bloodshed there would be at all times a risk of revolution and revolt that would be that that was morally unacceptable and like many arguments from that period I think you can see the relationship to some arguments we have today and the response was the same response in a somewhat different form that we have today Locke's proposition was that if the people be armed there will be no need for revolution because government must always be terrified into recognizing the people's rights and if the people is armed the people are armed government will be terrified and government will not attempt to overthrow the rights of the people whereas if the people are not armed government which is inherently tyrannous will progress further and further and further or regress if you will toward destroying the rights of the people that eventually the unarmed people will rise and then you will have a war of extermination which will produce far more bloodshed than any temporary and indeed Locke would have said quite unlikely revolutionary outburst that might be occasioned from the people being armed because again if the people are armed they need fear they need not fear government now obviously that kind of thinking is far from where we are today when we are told that assault rifles must be banned not because I think anyone has much confidence that that will take assault rifles away from criminals but for a more basic reason which is that people should not have weapons equal to those of government that is I believe the most basic the common sense basis I use the word common sense in quotes for the assault rifle controversy modern liberals I would say pseudo liberals have come to see government as the only proper repository of force Ramsey Clark for instance in arguing that all guns not just assault rifles but all guns should be banned says that it is abhorrent it is unpatriotic to believe that people should defend themselves that is the first duty of government is to defend people and I'm more or less paraphrasing him literally if you see a leap here that is mr. Clark's fault it's not mine and since it is the first duty of government to defend the people they must give up their arms because I guess they must presume that government will defend them even if it isn't doing an adequate job of doing so now in this connection well actually let me also talk about Gary wills whose view is that it is immoral for people to think of for them just to contemplate having arms to defend their families that is morally repugnant presumably what he means is that they should defend depend on government to defend them although he has not fully explained his theory nor why it is I mean his theories expressed basically in a series of epithets you will find it in his columns about gun nuts thinking of how how immoral it is for them to be gun nuts etc and he certainly hasn't explained what seems to me a difficult proposition which is that if it's immoral to contemplate having a gun to defend your family why isn't it immoral to contemplate calling on somebody else with a gun to defend your family one if one takes him seriously then one would have to assume that the American public was most irrationally agitated about the question of Lieutenant Kelly in my lay and the concern that General Westmoreland was not being punished for the atrocities that allegedly he had ordered for in fact it was perfectly all right for General Westmoreland to order Lieutenant Kelly to commit atrocities it would only have been wrong if General Westmoreland had committed the atrocities himself in any event that is the liberal philosophy it is of course not limited to liberals or pseudo liberals today a few years ago in the same month I picked up two articles from the New York Times both of which had amazingly similar well I don't know that they're amazingly similar maybe only the libertarians would they seem similar and the New York Times simply quoted them very approvingly without any suggestion of the what seems to me and I'm sure will seem to libertarians the difficulty in them the first was a comment by a deputy director of the FBI that citizens should not have handguns only the police should have handguns because the only purpose of a handgun is to kill now think about that only the police should have handguns because the only purpose is to kill the other comment was from a New York City police officer who said that citizens should not have handguns because they would always lose in a contra confrontation with a criminal because criminals were ruthless brutal sociopaths who would shoot first and ask questions later only the police should have guns don't issue laughing I assure you the New York Times printed those and I don't think that either of those statements they printed they printed them perfectly straight and the National Coalition to ban handguns has distributed those statements and I take it that neither the New York Times nor the National Coalition to ban handguns had any thought at all like he's going through your mind and that is a rather frightening thing right there now one of the other phenomena which I associate with the pseudo liberal or which which comes from this phenomenon of which I've been speaking is that because they are so fundamentally unsettled by the notion of citizens using force to defend themselves that view which is a philosophical view or I let's put this way to be to put it charitably it's a philosophical view but certainly not a pragmatic view that view however gives rise to a pragmatic errors the same people who say that it's wrong for citizens to defend themselves also say that it doesn't work now for we are fortunate that anti-gun organizations are so infused with this view because over the past 10 years they have sponsored a series of investigations to determine to show that people can't defend themselves with guns and that people don't those investigations consist of polls which they've taken to determine because I feel that there's no other information really elicited about the extent to which people defend themselves we have extensive information about how people use guns to commit crimes but how criminals do that but not any information of how we have citizens of how many citizens defend themselves against crime while these polls taken at the behest of various anti-gun groups have remedied that information deficit and professor cleck who is the single most important social scientist working in this area today published an article last year which dealt with the information from those polls and based on those polls he has determined number one that good citizens with guns use them more frequently to defeat crime than criminals use guns to commit crime handguns are used approximately 645,000 times a year by good citizens to defeat crime while they are only used by criminals committing crime approximately 580,000 times a year now the second question that he inquired into was the issue of injury here he used a different sample instantly on the verifying the fact of the use of handguns to prevent crime a recent federal survey of 2000 prisoners in state prisons across the united states found that they were more afraid of good citizens with handguns than they were afraid of the police that they had been substantially deterred from committing crimes because of the fear that victims might be armed and that they that that approximately 30 percent of them had been captured or scared off by citizens with guns in one or another crime and that 65 percent of them knew other criminals who had had the same concern and that the thing they were most worried about more worried about than meeting the police was meeting a citizen armed with a gun but let's talk about the danger of injury uh pete shields the head of handgun control ink advises you to submit to rapists or robbers rather than resisting because of the danger of injury give them what they want he says or run away if you can now professor cleck finds that pete shields is correct as long as you're going to resist without a gun if you're going to resist without a gun your chance of being injured is approximately 48 percent uh that's using a knife or a club or or your bare hands if you're going to if you're not going to resist if you take mr. shields advice your chance of being injured is 25 percent because criminals often injure their victims regardless of whether they resist if you resist with a gun your chance of being injured is 11 percent now that's a rather impressive uh statistic and well worth thinking about but as i say to liberals and not only liberals such resistance is immoral or wrong at least because they value orderliness above all and it's disorderly to having have citizens resist the police you can rely on interesting since they don't have much respect for the police in any other context but you know the only people who should have guns are the police and you can rely on the police but everything else is disorderly my girlfriend recently saw a tv program in which uh they were showing school children now being trained to deal with the assault rifle uh problem at a signal from the principal's office the teacher will signal the children and the children will all get under their desks and my girlfriend's question was this if somebody walks into a classroom with an assault rifle it'll be real orderly all he has to do is shoot all the children who will be sitting under their desks unable to escape rather than the disorderly thing of having children run in all directions which makes it much harder to shoot them but it is so much more disorderly i mean after all what are we concerned with in this society merely saving lives or having an orderly society in which the best and the brightest provide moral instruction and welfare to a passive population of what we might reasonably call the masses uh who are able to benefit from this moral instruction by these higher sets of people such as pete shields and ramsey clark and gary wilson it is because they have this profound conviction that the individual force use of force is wrong that pseudo liberals have come up with such preposterously non empirical pragmatic arguments for instance we all know that it's absurd to talk about an armed populace defeating a military force i mean after all think of all these stupid people with their stupid handgun shooting running out and shooting at tanks and then throwing themselves with their handguns right under a tank rolling over yes if you assume that everybody is stupid that certainly is a really stupid proposition but if instead you assume that ordinary americans have as much intelligence as jews in israel and the irish in ireland and the angolans in angola and the iranians in iran and the cubans in cuba and i can keep on listing for about 15 minutes all the peoples in the 20th century who have had revolutions and not just fought modern military powers to a standstill but totally destroyed and overthrown them it is virtually impossible to name a guerrilla war in the 20th century that a modern military power won and the only thing which we have when liberals talk about how useless and absurd the right to keep and bear arms is compared to the power of a modern military well they'll talk about world war two and tanks well what the that's got to do with anything the american people are not about to declare war on government what we're dealing with here is a question of guerrilla warfare and guerrilla warfare virtually always wins among other reasons it virtually always wins is because the army is part of the people too and sooner or later the army decides it's sick of having this kind of a fight and goes over to the people or substantial portions of the army does that but of course to the to the pseudo liberals the idea of the army doing something so disorderly uh is something else it's anathema all right i i i'm tossed out a bunch of ideas and i may well have some questions and i've talked for a good deal of time and since i don't since i was too disorderly to bring a watch this morning i don't know how long i've talked so those of you interested will be taking a 30 minute break