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

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Speaker 23 Calls our media.

Speaker 23 Hey, everyone, Robert here, and we're on reruns this week.

Speaker 23 So we're deciding to rerun two episodes with you, cutting multiple parts into a single episode, reducing some ads, and getting some ears on some topics that have unfortunately only become more relevant as time has gone on.

Speaker 23 And this week, we're talking about one of the founders of Border Patrol as an organization and institution, and one of the men who was behind the start of the NRA and its growth into what it has become today.

Speaker 23 Like with the DHS, these episodes have only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, and it's very important that we get them in front of as many people as we can.

Speaker 23 So please listen and, I don't know, enjoy seems like the wrong word, but enjoy.

Speaker 23 Matt,

Speaker 23 Calib,

Speaker 23 how are you doing today? I'm good, man. I just got married.
You did just get married. I did just get married.

Speaker 23 Former guest Francesca Fiorentini, you know? Yeah, one of our favorite guests with our least favorite. Oh, shit.
Oh, how dare you joking?

Speaker 23 I'm just being an asshole. We love you.
I love you. That's why I've brought you on to read you a 12,000-word script about.

Speaker 23 Ooh, a script? Oh, a script. That's right, Matt.

Speaker 23 Because I do love you, and we have such a good time talking. And I wanted to celebrate

Speaker 23 that

Speaker 23 you have embarked on this new chapter of your life. Yeah, lovely.
I'm making you very sad.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I actually, this is the perfect palate cleanser to a weekend of joy. That's right.
That's right. Coming on this podcast and just being just torn to shreds emotionally.

Speaker 23 Because there's going to be no joy here. Matt.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 How do you feel?

Speaker 23 How do you feel?

Speaker 23 First off, I guess, have you ever heard of a motherfucker named Harlan Carter? Harlan Carter? I don't think so. Okay.
Okay. Is that Jimmy Carter's brother? Oh, boy, not at all.

Speaker 23 That would be Billy Carter. And Billy Carter will be on our episode Behind the Heroes for his invention for Billy Show.

Speaker 23 I thought you were going to ruin that guy because

Speaker 23 he seems pretty dope. Can you imagine back when the biggest scandal a president had was that his brother made bad beer? Right.
My God, what a time.

Speaker 23 What an administration. Yeah, it was just like, hey, his brother's too cool.

Speaker 23 Dudes were not supposed to rock this much. That was, you know, that was the biggest thing.
We got to get this guy out of the White House and put in a dude who's going to do part of a genocide.

Speaker 23 Anyway, Matt, how do you feel about

Speaker 23 the proliferation of firearms in American society?

Speaker 23 I'm pro.

Speaker 23 I think, you know, the more guns, the better. Obviously,

Speaker 23 nothing, you know, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I think we all know that.

Speaker 23 And I think it's... Or 19 good guys with guns stacked outside of a classroom for 78 days.
Exactly, dude. Just kind of sitting around waiting to be like a vegan guy.

Speaker 23 Oh, I can't wait to be a hero. I'll just give it another 45 minutes.
You've got to clock in first. Yes.

Speaker 23 So it's interesting. It's fun that we got to

Speaker 23 the incompetent militarization of police because this is a thing,

Speaker 23 one of the things that's frustrating. Obviously, you and I may have some slightly different attitudes towards firearms, but

Speaker 23 I'm frustrated with

Speaker 23 American gun culture, which I think is primarily toxic, and also the culture of police militarization, which is 100% toxic. Yep.

Speaker 23 And the guy we're going to talk about today, Harlan Carter, is the dude who started both of those things. He's the guy who started militarizing the police, and he's the guy who made the NRA.

Speaker 23 Sophie's got a picture of him. He looks like...
He looks like who you would cast if you were putting Kingpin, that comic book villain. He looks like Kingpin.
He literally looks exactly like Kingpin.

Speaker 23 He looks so so good. Oh, my God.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 sorry for body shaving the NRA guy. I would prefer any gangster to.
It's not even body shaving. He just looks like

Speaker 23 his neck is the width of his ears. No, he's like a literal dickhead.

Speaker 23 It is the most dickheadish head I've ever seen. He is a chod someone poured into a suit.

Speaker 23 I'm pretty sure that this is what Joe Rogan was like. I want this.
And then that's where the Joe Rogan style off of.

Speaker 23 Someone has been cutting Joe Rogan's HGH with lemon juice just to try to keep him from getting too huge.

Speaker 23 But if Joe got the amount of HGH that he intended to shoot into his testicles, this is how he would look. Yeah, he would look like this guy.
His neck would be even thicker.

Speaker 23 He's exactly the way you are picturing him in your mind, listeners. He does kind of look like, because Alex Jones has that thick neck, but he's like not that, not

Speaker 23 smaller.

Speaker 23 And Joe Rogan's got that big muscle guy head.

Speaker 23 If like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, if you like in vitro fertilized, like cut their sperm in half and like merged them together with the egg from like a dead California condor, you would get Harlan Carter.

Speaker 23 What's better is this painting of him where he literally looks like Dr. Evil.

Speaker 23 He does. He does look like Dr.
Evil. Who painted him? I don't know.

Speaker 23 A lot of people. He's a very important people.
I think that's a lot of people that we would not get drinks with.

Speaker 23 So we're going to have to start by discussing the history of gun control in the United States. And because this is the United States, that also started with white supremacy.

Speaker 23 I can only, yes, like just from,

Speaker 23 this is just a guess, but I bet you gun control laws that have been enacted were mostly racist.

Speaker 23 Yeah, it's one of those things when you get these arguments online where like people will be like, gun culture is white supremacist. And it's like, yeah, an awful lot of it is.

Speaker 23 And then folks who are pro-gun will be like, well, gun control is white supremacist. And you're both right because it's the United States of America.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 It's like, if you try, it's like people talking about like, oh, well, the Democratic Party used to be,

Speaker 23 like, was a white supremacist party for a very long time. And it's like, yeah, yes.
Yes. Both major U.S.
parties are primarily rooted in white supremacy. 100%.
And

Speaker 23 it's always super weird that, you know, whenever someone is just like, no,

Speaker 23 and it's like, what? Why are you, you don't need to be so attached to being a Democrat that you're just going to refuse to believe that it's

Speaker 23 this doesn't make an argument one way or the other about gun control because like you could say that like zoning laws have a lot of their rooting in white supremacy.

Speaker 23 It doesn't mean zoning shouldn't exist. Right.
Because fundamentally, yeah, factories maybe shouldn't be in the same place as apartment complexes. But

Speaker 23 that also that like, yeah, anyway, whatever. We're going to do our rocket.
Oh, yeah. We're doing gun control.
We're doing CRT on this podcast. This is going to be a little, a little bit.

Speaker 23 Yeah, we're getting into a lot of stuff, but we're going to be talking a shitload about the Border Patrol. But first, let's talk a little bit about the history of gun control in the United States.

Speaker 23 Obviously, 1619 thereabouts is when the first African enslaved people are brought to the United States. Well, it wasn't the United States then, but you know what I'm saying, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 The colonies against their will.

Speaker 23 And not that long after, in 1680, which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back then, the Virginia Assembly passed one of, if not the earliest gun control laws in the colonies.

Speaker 23 Now, this law did not restrict the ability of white people to be armed. It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't gun control, but weapons control.

Speaker 23 But this law passed in 1680 made it a crime for any African American to carry a weapon or weapon-like object. Now,

Speaker 23 that last term there is interesting, Matt, because...

Speaker 23 You could, I mean, I, like, as a man, right? Anytime you're out in the world, you think about all the different things you could use as weapons. Everything is.

Speaker 23 It's just a a thing that happens. I enter every room going, what could I use for self-defense and or if I just felt like harming someone?

Speaker 23 Yeah, if I had to defend myself against the 84-year-old man next to me in the post office, how hard could I hit him with one of these empty cardboard boxes?

Speaker 23 Seriously, in the genes of every dude is just Mark Wahlberg going, I would have stopped 9-11 if I had been on that plane.

Speaker 23 And, you know, that's all of us. It would have been so funny.
It would have been really funny if

Speaker 23 if he'd stopped it, but then he'd had to try to land the plane and had accidentally crashed it into the White House. Like,

Speaker 23 oh, God. Anyway, so as you might guess, the vagueness around the term weapon-like object meant that this law, it didn't just like ban black people from carrying guns.

Speaker 23 It meant that they could be punished brutally for holding any object if it could be used to hit somebody.

Speaker 23 This started what wound up being like a more than a century-long tradition of elderly black people being banned from having canes. Oh, my God.
Because you can hit someone with the cane, right?

Speaker 23 As Gandalf showed us, you know? Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 They weren't being fooled by that in Virginia in 1680. Yes, we will pardon old man for his walking stick.
I'll know a wizard's staff when I see one.

Speaker 23 You think I don't know you're going to cast a spell?

Speaker 23 Now, this being 60 years after the first importation of African slaves to the continent, the 1680 law was aimed at slaves, obviously, but it applied equally.

Speaker 23 There were some freed black people in the colony at this period, and it applied to them as well. The law was amended in 1723 to specify that

Speaker 23 African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for any purpose, be it hunting or self-defense.

Speaker 23 And again, 1723, it's kind of important to be able to use a gun, you know, just if you're living in the Virginia frontier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 There's a lot of other people with guns, and it seems like a time to have one. You need food and stuff, you know, and there's bears.

Speaker 23 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 23 How do you catch your food

Speaker 23 if you are not allowed to use a gun? You can trap, but I think the purpose here, no one's thinking about like, they're not,

Speaker 23 they're doing whatever they can to make these people's lives harder because, like, they're terrified of the existence of free black people. Yes.

Speaker 23 And under this law, a free black person who defended himself from a white person using a firearm was committing a crime, technically with any weapon. Like,

Speaker 23 any tool they were to use to defend themselves would be illegal. So gun control in the early colonies,

Speaker 23 most of the time, these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the exceptions of the rule.

Speaker 23 Because as a rule, like there were

Speaker 23 the laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things and more just kind of generally trying to make it possible for black people enslaved or free to challenge white supremacy in any way.

Speaker 23 Right. So, it wasn't just guns.
And, in fact, because guns were like not as good back then, those were less of a focus than some other objects that might surprise you.

Speaker 23 Possession of dogs by black people was heavily regulated in this period.

Speaker 23 They couldn't have dogs?

Speaker 23 Well, it was not impossible, but it was very hard.

Speaker 23 If you were a black person who wanted to own a dog in Maryland in the early 1700s, for example, you were forced to get a license from the Justice of the Peace, who was going to be a white man.

Speaker 23 So it was not easy to get a license from a Justice of the Peace for this.

Speaker 23 And if you managed to get one, you were still restricted to owning no more than one dog at a time.

Speaker 23 Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for black people under any circumstances and even allowed slave patrols to kill dogs found in the house of a black person.

Speaker 23 So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is very old indeed. Of course.

Speaker 23 I should have known. Of course, dog control also, you know, ties directly to white supremacy.
Well, and it's one of those things you have to, again, weapons, firearms are a lot less deadly back then.

Speaker 23 So like a gun, you get one shot and it's not easy to reload.

Speaker 23 I think there are helicopters.

Speaker 23 Yeah, a dog, you don't need to reload, right? A doberman will keep fucking going until you go.

Speaker 23 So that's what white folks were particularly scared of. And again, it's also worth noting,

Speaker 23 obviously the prohibition against black people carrying guns or other weapons makes sense if you're afraid of a slave or just an uprising, right?

Speaker 23 Because a group of people with guns can do an uprising. You can't really effectively organize a bunch of dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together.
It's hard to do that.

Speaker 23 I'd like to see it, though. It would be cool.
That would be the greatest. What they're doing here, they don't want black people to be able to defend themselves from like mob violence, right?

Speaker 23 Like individual and families. They don't want them to have any kind of defense if like somebody wants to do a murder, you know? Jesus Christ.

Speaker 23 They're just like inventing inventing laws that are completely useless. The idea that somehow this is like, oh, well,

Speaker 23 we can't kill that guy. He lives in a kennel filled with ravenous dogs surrounding him.
Like he's fucking Ramsey Bolton.

Speaker 23 just like ready with hungry dogs to bite your dick off if I'm yeah

Speaker 23 so in the late 1700s spoilers the American Revolution broke out

Speaker 23 yeah and by 1787 we have us a constitution you know we we get we we fight them English we beat them And then we're like, oh boy, this first government, we tried as a giant shit show.

Speaker 23 We should probably like

Speaker 23 give another shot at this. And they do a constitution.
And eventually, this constitution comes to include a Bill of Rights and the now infamous Second Amendment.

Speaker 23 We're going to be talking a lot about the changing ways this has been interpreted through time. And despite what people

Speaker 23 tend to say on either side of the modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to interpret how the so-called founding fathers intended it to function.

Speaker 23 And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in agreement about pretty much anything.

Speaker 23 But one thing is perfectly clear. They did not see the right to bear arms as extending to black people.

Speaker 23 Now, black people were not categorically forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States, but in those states where it was legal for them to own arms, they were always required to register those weapons with the government.

Speaker 23 This was not the case for white people. While there was some hope during the Revolution among black Americans that independence would bring about an improvement in their circumstances,

Speaker 23 and that was not unreasonable, again, the British Empire allowed slavery too.

Speaker 23 So, at this stage in time, it's not like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that, like, well, maybe things will get better when they don't have a king anymore, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 Um, obviously, that doesn't happen. Um, and when that doesn't happen, there's some uprisings in the new United States.
In 1811, a Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed.

Speaker 23 Uh, and in response to this, New Orleans made it a crime for black people to carry weapons. And this was, again, primarily even more than guns, banned them from stuff like canes,

Speaker 23 um,

Speaker 23 crutches, wheelchairs. Yeah, any, yeah, definitely don't want them with an assault wheelchair.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 So as we've discussed in our Behind the Police series, many southern police departments started as slave patrols made up of armed white dudes searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a boot on the neck of even free black people.

Speaker 23 In 1825, Florida gave slave patrols the right to enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition, or any other weapons found. And obviously, these kind,

Speaker 23 as is the case with no-knock raids today, these often were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes by saying you felt threatened. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Now, in the early 1860s, obviously, we have us a civil war over slavery. And broadly speaking, this goes pretty well.

Speaker 23 If you think slavery is bad, U.S. Civil War, broadly speaking, goes all right.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 Now, one of the most kind of revolutionary aspects of the Civil War is that for the first time in U.S. history, a shitload of black men are legally carrying guns in an organized way.

Speaker 23 179,000 black people serve in the Union Army, which is roughly 10% of its total.

Speaker 23 And you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men with guns marching across the U.S. South, which really freaks out people in the South.
Yeah, that's got to be the scariest thing.

Speaker 23 They looked at that and they're like, see, this is what I'm talking about. This is the scary shit I did not want to happen.
Yeah, this is why we're losing, started this war that we're losing.

Speaker 23 So post-Civil War,

Speaker 23 black people are not immediately entitled to the same rights as white people.

Speaker 23 So starting in 1865, which is the year the war ends, states like former states that had lost basically start enacting black codes.

Speaker 23 And these are kind of, okay, these people aren't slaves anymore, but we want to treat them that way.

Speaker 23 So let's just write new, let's just take the old laws that we had that restricted slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control, and we'll replace the word slave with servant or something similar so that we can try to hold them under the same laws.

Speaker 23 in mississippi black people were still banned from possessing weapons or ammunition and if white people turned them in for this crime they would be given their firearms as a reward and again this is after they've been freed so they like should have the the right to bear arms and whatnot right i want to quote now from a 2021 honors thesis by alexandra lanzetta from the university of colorado quote

Speaker 23 Other southern states to enact their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana.

Speaker 23 Both states prohibited African Americans, not including veterans, from owning guns without a license or special permit.

Speaker 23 Not surprisingly, these permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally obtain a gun.

Speaker 23 This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns, making the potential penalties of exposure even greater. Punishment for having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of the weapon.

Speaker 23 Old slave patrols re-emerged to enforce the black codes and to terrorize African Americans.

Speaker 23 This, along with the combination of great incentives to catch blacks with weapons and a hatred over their newfound freedom, created a white frenzy, making it extremely difficult to hide a gun as an African American.

Speaker 23 White frenzy is the worst frenzy.

Speaker 23 It's the most common frenzy, too.

Speaker 23 Yeah, no,

Speaker 23 it's their most traditional American frenzy, but it

Speaker 23 is not a fun one. We do love us a frenzy.
We love a frenzy. We love a good frenzy.
We love a bad frenzy.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 1865, right?

Speaker 23 Bunch of black codes come into effect to basically try and keep black people in similar positions to how they'd been during slavery, even though the war was over. So in 1866, U.S.

Speaker 23 Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which this is like, there's a big old fight over this.

Speaker 23 And this is the law that basically says, hey, you actually have to, these people have the same rights that white people have under the Bill of Rights. Right.
Like, that's what that does, you know?

Speaker 23 And, you know, things do get a lot better for a while. You know,

Speaker 23 at this point, was like, look, do you ever just like read up on Reconstruction and go like, holy shit, for a hot second there. We seem to be on a good track for that.
We were on a good track.

Speaker 23 Like it seemed like shit was going to like work out. Yeah, which is things get a lot better for a while, and then there's a violent reaction from the reactionaries.

Speaker 23 And they do an insurgency, which is kind of centered around the KKK. We have talked about this in other episodes.

Speaker 23 It ends with a series of demeaning, bigoted laws aimed at maintaining white supremacy in the former Confederacy. These are, you know, Jim Crow laws, right?

Speaker 23 And come into place alongside a wave of lynchings, which kill at least like 5,000 black Americans. Obviously, there's no way of knowing the actual total.

Speaker 23 Good chance it was significantly more, but at least 5,000.

Speaker 23 So in response, black people do what you would expect. They form militias, you know, they start carrying guns for what I don't think I need to explain the logic here, right?

Speaker 23 And they organize to stop lynchings.

Speaker 23 This culminates in Louisiana in 1876, where a bunch of Klansmen who are also government officials, these are like elected leaders in Louisiana who are also in the KKK, are charged with conspiring to disarm a meeting of black Americans.

Speaker 23 Basically, like one of these groups of black folks had gotten together with guns to like figure out how to protect their community.

Speaker 23 These state officials like try to take their weapons away. Right.

Speaker 23 A bunch of court shit happens. It goes to the Supreme Court, who rules in favor of the Ku Klux Klan, saying that the state had the legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common good.

Speaker 23 God.

Speaker 23 And, you know, in this period of time, there's also one of the things that's happening during the lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person who is attempted to be lynched has a gun and they shoot the people trying to lynch them.

Speaker 23 And when that happens, a number of laws are passed in different towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms.

Speaker 23 And in fact, those are some of the first specific laws against the carrying of concealed handguns. Now,

Speaker 23 this is an area where like the kind of the anti-gun control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff.

Speaker 23 It's very much worth noting all gun control in the United States in this period is not based in white supremacy, in part because a lot of it is put in areas where like most of the population is white.

Speaker 23 And there was, it's worth noting, significantly more gun control in portions of the like the so-called Wild West than there are in a lot of those same states today.

Speaker 23 In places like the Dakotas and whatnot, it was common for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted.

Speaker 23 In many towns, if a visitor came into town, they would be expected to leave their guns with the local police before entering. They'd get like a little card or something.

Speaker 23 You weren't supposed to like, like, there were,

Speaker 23 and there's, you know, a lot to be said about like why this is being done.

Speaker 23 But in general, it's being done because they see that it's, it's perfectly reasonable to say that like, well, there should be restrictions on what you can do in town with a firearm, right? Right.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 Walking around with a gun seems, I don't know, threatening. Yeah, they certainly don't want you doing it openly.

Speaker 23 And then like, there's a bunch of there's laws about carrying concealed, and those kind of vary from place to place.

Speaker 23 But it's worth noting that the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral actually occurred because a guy, like it was over gun control, right? Like, a guy was openly carrying his guns in the city.

Speaker 23 Um, and, you know, there was, as far as I'm aware, like, everyone involved in that, I'm pretty sure, was like a white dude. So I don't think there's anything particularly racist in the gunfight.

Speaker 23 You could talk about it be it involving like police overreach, sure.

Speaker 23 Um, which people will make the case that, like, this was, this was a case of like a fucking early cop going bug fuck on some people. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Don't tread on me. And just people.
See, this whole time, I didn't know that that was a real gunfight at the OK Crow. Yeah.
Oh, no, no, no. It's a pretty cool story.

Speaker 23 As it perfectly accurately described in the documentary Tombstone.

Speaker 23 That's a great document. Starring Val Kilmer.
Yeah. See,

Speaker 23 I thought the reason was, you know, like a card game got lost or something, or someone had like extra aces up their sleeve, but it turns out gun control. No,

Speaker 23 that would be the documentary. Shit, was it Maverick? What's the documentary about the card guy who gets like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I need to rewatch that.

Speaker 23 That was a good fucking, that's a good movie. My other guest was going to be a giant metal spider who tries to take over.
My third favorite documentary. And this is what brought about the famous U.S.

Speaker 23 law against the carrying of gigantic metal spiders. Right, right, right.

Speaker 23 Which I consider to be the civil rights era of the day.

Speaker 23 I think access to giant metal spiders should be democratized.

Speaker 23 I mean, that's just a legitimate thing. Well, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a giant metal spider is a good guy with a giant meter.

Speaker 23 I would argue that you can't be a bad guy with a giant metal spider. Agreed.
Because, look, no matter what it's doing, if I get to see a giant metal spider tromping around town, my day's improved.

Speaker 23 I don't care what that spider's going on. Everyone feels safe and happy.
Everybody feels better with a giant metal spider.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 this podcast is brought to you by giantmetal spider.com. Promo code giant metal spider.
All right. Congratulations.
Pictures today. We're actually right on time because

Speaker 23 it is about that time. Wow.
Well, look,

Speaker 23 everybody's talking a lot about AR-15s. You know what's more powerful than an AR-15? A metal spider the size of the Chrysler building.

Speaker 23 That is scary. Yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 18 Okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up.

Speaker 6 Season three is here, and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

Speaker 8 They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

Speaker 11 This season, they're covering it all, from circuit culture to hookup horror stories to locker room shenanigans.

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Speaker 23 Oh, we're back.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 you have, you know,

Speaker 23 again, the Wild West, how common gunfights and stuff were, especially in like cities and towns, is exaggerated.

Speaker 23 But also there was a lot of like, there were a lot of robberies, there were a lot of crimes, like, and it's the same as it is today.

Speaker 23 Like the gunfights that have kind of come down to history were like the ones that the media went nuts on in the day, like the gunfight at the OK Corral. Right.

Speaker 23 But broadly speaking, by the end of the 1800s, Most places in the United States had banned the concealed carrying of handguns, although open carrying remained legal in a lot of places.

Speaker 23 We'll talk about when that ended.

Speaker 23 In 1893, the government of Texas said that, quote, the mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder, to check it as the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man. And again,

Speaker 23 he was probably saying that primarily because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns. He assisted the governor of Texas in 1893.

Speaker 23 So do keep that in mind. But U.S.
gun control in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the specter of armed black people.

Speaker 23 And even where laws were perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy, even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law.

Speaker 23 Lanzetto writes: quote, Another example of discrimination is found in legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era, involved an 11-year-old black boy with a toy gun. In St.

Speaker 23 Louis in 1900, it was illegal to fire a gun within city limits, and the boy was charged for violating this law.

Speaker 23 However, when his case was being reviewed by a judge to determine his guilt, it was discovered that the gun was fake.

Speaker 23 Knowing this new information, the judge should have dropped all charges, given that it is not possible to fire a fake gun. But this was not the case.

Speaker 23 Instead, the boy was found guilty, and the judge fined him $10, almost $310 today,

Speaker 23 which is interesting. I did, again, another thing that goes back very far is black kids being penalized for having toy guns.
Right, exactly.

Speaker 23 Quite far back. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's literally just these are like rulings.
It's like, well, you scared me. Yeah.
That's that's the entire thing.

Speaker 23 That has been the, I believe, the explanation for the deaths of countless, countless black people. Well, and it's also just like this.
I was scared.

Speaker 23 Perhaps we don't like, perhaps we're fundamentally frightened by the concept, even if it's a toy, of like black people having guns, because that's how we maintain our power over them, right? Right.

Speaker 23 Which is, again, even in these areas where concealed carrying or open carrying is illegal, it's generally not illegal for white people to do if they're being vigilantes, right?

Speaker 23 This is a key aspect of this period.

Speaker 23 And this brings us back to the glorious state of Texas.

Speaker 23 Like much of the South, after the Civil Rights Act, legislators had to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm black people were not motivated by racism.

Speaker 23 Brendan Rivas from Texas Christian University writes, quote, the post-1865 laws, however, used race-neutral language to accomplish a racially motivated goal.

Speaker 23 Most of these laws attempted to disarm black Texans, but some from the 1870s stopped to curb the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone.

Speaker 23 For instance, a part of the Texas slave code prohibited slaves from carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer, and a law passed in 1866 prohibited laborers from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent.

Speaker 23 In race-neutral language, the 1866 law achieved the same result as the slave code, without specifically declaring that African Americans should be disarmed.

Speaker 23 Their arming was conditional, subject to the authorization of an interested white party.

Speaker 23 Similarly, the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those local offices.

Speaker 23 And you can guess which of those happens more often. And this is the state of affairs legally in the state of Texas when Harlan Bronson Carter is born on August 10th, 1913 in Granbury, Texas.

Speaker 23 Now,

Speaker 23 at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that it was the home of Davey Crockett for a little while.

Speaker 23 And every town in Texas was Davey Crockett's home for a little while.

Speaker 23 Not super impressive.

Speaker 23 And yeah,

Speaker 23 every town is just, he stayed at a motel here for two weeks. Yeah.

Speaker 23 He's fucking all our hookers.

Speaker 23 He's like a celebrated hunter and frontier guy. And

Speaker 23 Harlan certainly, like,

Speaker 23 I heard God knows how many fucking stories about Davy fucking Crockett when I was a kid in my mandatory Texas history class. I am going to guess in like 1920,

Speaker 23 young Harlan Carter is growing up and learning even more of these stories. Yeah.

Speaker 23 And obviously he's also enmeshed in the local gun culture of the time. Pretty much everywhere is semi-rural.
So he's, you know, he does a lot of hunting. He does a lot of target shooting.

Speaker 23 He becomes an excellent shot from an early age. And

Speaker 23 he develops an intense affinity for firearms, shall we say. So when he's young, the family moves to Laredo.
And Laredo is a border town, right?

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 they moved to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent.

Speaker 23 And in fact, is one of the very first Border Patrol agents. So the year that they moved to Laredo is 1927.
Harlan's 14.

Speaker 23 And it's the same year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes a trip to the town and expresses in an official document his shock to find that, quote, Laredo was strictly a Mexican town.

Speaker 23 Probably 90% of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent. He adds with horror, the only only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself.

Speaker 23 And this is an interesting, like, Laredia at this point, because it's so heavily Mexican, is not a town controlled by white people. And the police are not a white force, right?

Speaker 23 You'll note that quote I read earlier states that, like, kind of the laws against gun control were usually

Speaker 23 mainly like

Speaker 23 put into force against like armed black people, but depending on politics, could be used to try to stop white vigilantes.

Speaker 23 Well, this is one of those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police force is is not white.

Speaker 23 So the Border Patrol, however, is not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican folks are running things, right? That does not thrill them.

Speaker 23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, next, you know, they'll start inviting other Mexicans to live here and they won't stop the border.
I mean, I love the idea of these like.

Speaker 23 people going to a town right on the border of Mexico in Texas, which used to be Mexico, and being like, what the hell are all these Mexicans doing?

Speaker 23 Yeah, these communities that had been there for decades before a state of Texas was a thing that anyone had thought of, being like,

Speaker 23 these people are going to change the nature of Texas.

Speaker 23 Yeah, now this is not the Texas I know that we invented about 20 years ago. Yeah, that we invented when I was 15.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 23 So this inspector guy, Perkins, again, is exactly as racist as you might expect. And he decides that Laredo's immigration cops are not going to be able to enforce U.S.

Speaker 23 immigration restrictions, which are, are again geared towards enforcing white supremacy, if the state of affairs in Laredo remains the way that it is.

Speaker 23 So he carries out what he describes as a, quote, full-scale house cleaning.

Speaker 23 Now, in the wonderful book Migra, Kelly Hernandez writes, quote, he charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector, and border patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrant smuggling and forced just under half of Laredo's 28 Border Patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired.

Speaker 23 Perkins then transferred select border patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo sector because all were experienced, well-disciplined fighters who knew the country well.

Speaker 23 Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the Border Patrol station from the local Mexican-American political elite.

Speaker 23 Tension quickly mounted between the ex-Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo Police Department.

Speaker 23 While the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with the local police in most borderland communities, in 1927, several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol got in their Model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling and shooting up the police station.

Speaker 23 Holy fuck. So he cleans house, brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which is like the most racist police force in the United States in this period, and has them shoot up the police station.

Speaker 23 Fucking A.

Speaker 23 I mean, like on the one hand, a cab. Yeah.

Speaker 23 It's like on the one hand.

Speaker 23 But on the other hand, I don't think it's A. I think it's just these particular cabs.
You You know what I mean?

Speaker 23 They're going after specifically an armed group of Mexican-Americans. It's also probably worth noting that in this period, if you're being a fucking,

Speaker 23 being a Mexican-American police officer in Laredo in 1927 is a bit different from being a police officer pretty much anywhere in the United States at this point, which is part of why the Border Patrol is purging them.

Speaker 23 Because he's like, you guys,

Speaker 23 they're not stopping immigration. They're not like violently cracking down on people who aren't white.
They're not enforcing white supremacy. So we have to get rid of them with guns.

Speaker 23 And they get rid of, they do get rid of the Laredo police force with guns.

Speaker 23 It's the only time in American history that police have been able to be fired. Yes.
Yeah,

Speaker 23 this is the one time it happened. This is what it took.

Speaker 23 The one time.

Speaker 23 So it's safe to say that Laredo was a pretty wild place when Harlan Carter was an adolescent.

Speaker 23 His father, Horace, was among the first cohort of Border Patrol agents hired in 1927, and he was transferred to Laredo in 1927 as part of this process.

Speaker 23 It's entirely possible that Horace Carter was one of the guys shooting that police station.

Speaker 23 And in this period of time, Harlan's father would have seen his job as explicitly to use violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most people were not white. Quote from Migra.

Speaker 23 Although most local stations developed their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican-American leadership.

Speaker 23 The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge for white violence within Mexican-dominated Laredo.

Speaker 23 So they've turned the Border Patrol prior to this, and they're all like local guys, right? So they don't really care about like

Speaker 23 Mexican American, like Mexicans coming into America because that's how they got there, right? That's like their family, everybody.

Speaker 23 And again, they also probably don't see the border as this solid thing because

Speaker 23 their relatives have lived here for forever. It used to not be like a thing to cross.

Speaker 23 But this is the period where the border is really becoming a thing in a way it hadn't been before.

Speaker 23 And part of how they do that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of white people, and have them shoot anybody who disagrees, right? Like that's that's how the border becomes real in Laredo.

Speaker 23 The American way. And it's how borders are enforced everywhere.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 That's why borders are bad, folks. Yep, yep.
Although, today, I mean, there's a long conversation to be had about the fact that the Border Patrol today is extremely diverse.

Speaker 23 Like, one of the things people on the left, particularly, have gotten wrong about Evaldi is like the assertion that, like, well, they probably didn't go in because those kids were Hispanic.

Speaker 23 And it's like, have you seen a pictures of the Evaldi police? A lot of them are Mexican-American.

Speaker 23 And the Border Patrol guy, like, it's, it's, it's a whole thing. Like, if you go down to border communities, you'll see

Speaker 23 white supremacy isn't

Speaker 23 always as like superficial and simple as it seems. Yeah.

Speaker 23 So in 1930, Harlan, aged 16, joins the National Rifle Association. And again, the NRA is rightfully, again, I'm more pro-gun than most people on the left tend to be.

Speaker 23 But the NRA is like undoubtedly,

Speaker 23 we'll be spending hours talking about this, incredibly toxic. It's not at this point, right?

Speaker 23 It's not, there's nothing wrong with the NRA at this stage, really.

Speaker 23 And in fact, the NRA has its roots on the correct side of the Civil War.

Speaker 23 There are these two union generals who are like, because again, Civil War, one of the things early on, the South is doing pretty well.

Speaker 23 And part of why they're doing pretty well is that like all the boys who like wind up fighting in the Confederacy's military, like they're country boys, right? They've grown up shooting and hunting.

Speaker 23 They're like, and using guns to enforce white supremacy. They're good with firearms.

Speaker 23 Whereas most of the northern boys who get drafted are like city kids, and many of them had never had any chance to use firearms. So they're like, they suck with them, right?

Speaker 23 And these two union generals are like, boy, our soldiers are really bad at shooting, and it takes a long time to train them up.

Speaker 23 Maybe if we should get ready for the next war by having an organization where boys who grew up in urban areas can like go in and learn how to shoot, you know, like that seems like a good thing to encourage.

Speaker 23 So that's, and the NRA up until the early 20th century is like a sportsman's association. You're doing it for target shooting.
You're doing it for hunting.

Speaker 23 Now, it is worth noting that, like, from the beginning, and this was not seen as problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect to it as well.

Speaker 23 It's not like a military organization, but part of the purpose of the NRA is to prepare people to be part of the military, if necessary. And this is also...

Speaker 23 The military is a really different thing in this period. You know, we have a big standing army during the Civil War, but we hadn't before, and we don't quickly afterwards, right?

Speaker 23 Like this is, again, when World War I happens, they have to like make an army. When World War II happens, they have to like make an army in a way that like it had not hugely existed prior to this.

Speaker 23 So there's this understanding that like if there's an emergency, we're going to need to activate all of these civilians and they need to be ready to like fight and

Speaker 23 whatnot. Right.

Speaker 23 So yeah, the U.S. Defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons and other equipment to the NRA, which would sell them to members quite cheaply.
This

Speaker 23 used to be able to get like World War II guns like Guerins for really cheap from the NRA. It was a bunch of stuff they did like that.

Speaker 23 So in February 1931, the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of their house, right?

Speaker 23 Now they have no idea who does this. This is the origin story of so many racists.
Oh, but go on. Oh boy, Matt.

Speaker 23 So again, as far as I know, it was never figured out who had done this.

Speaker 23 But a couple of weeks after their car is stolen, on March 3rd, 1931, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harlan's mother sees three Hispanic boys, quote unquote, loitering out in front of the house.

Speaker 23 Now, she says says loitering, we have no idea.

Speaker 23 They may have just been like walking around or what, like, even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this, but like racist white lady sees people who are not white vaguely close to her house, and she decides that like these boys must have been who stole my car.

Speaker 23 Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 23 The earliest recorded incident of Karen. Yeah.
Yeah. So Karen Carter calls the cops.
Karen Carter. Well, you can't really call it.
It's 1931. Some people do have phones.
I don't know if they do.

Speaker 23 It's not easy to call. It's not as easy to call the cops.
Do they send a pigeon or whatever those guys did there? No.

Speaker 23 Her son winds up taking this into his own hands. Ah, yes, that's right.
I'm going to quote from a write-up in timeline here.

Speaker 23 The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn't be home for hours, so the son picked up his shotgun and walked out the door.

Speaker 23 It didn't take him long to find the boys, who were between the ages of 15 and 12, at a swimming hole nearby. He demanded they come home with him.

Speaker 23 When they asked why, he wouldn't say, 15-year-old Raymond Cassiano responded, hell no, we won't go to to your house and you can't make us. Carter and Cassiano started swearing at each other.

Speaker 23 Cassiano pulled out a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter lifted his shotgun to Ramon's chest.

Speaker 23 According to testimony from that time, Ramon told him not to do it and pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back and laughed.

Speaker 23 Annoyed by Ramon's lack of fear, Carter asked if he thought he wasn't going to shoot. Then he did.
Cassiano lay dying on the ground with a two-inch shotgun wound in his chest. Jesus.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 that sounds familiar, right?

Speaker 23 There's shades of Rittenhouse. There's shades of

Speaker 23 Zimmerman, you know? Like, this is, again, not...

Speaker 23 And obviously, I'm sure if we had been around at the time and paying attention to the news, we'd say, oh, there's shades of like this thing that happened in 1920 and this thing that happened.

Speaker 23 We just happen to know the most recent incidents. Yeah.

Speaker 23 This is a very familiar incident, right? And you can imagine if this happened today, it would be a massive culture war. Well, he had a knife.
What was

Speaker 23 supposed to be? He was just defending his family. Yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 23 So it's worth noting talking about why Harlan felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which there are some, like, obviously, it's not entirely legal to carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff.

Speaker 23 But this is, you're not supposed to, like, walk out to try and solve the robbery of your car with a 12-gauge shotgun. Like, that's not explicitly legal.

Speaker 23 But. There's a long history of vigilante violence by white people.
And so whether or not this actually is legal is going to come down heavily on the local courts, right?

Speaker 23 And so the fact, because this is happening in Laredo, if this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city of hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue.

Speaker 23 But because it's happening in Laredo, this is going to be a problem for Harlan. Did you call Dallas the city of hate? That's literally its nickname.
What? Yeah, that's the nickname of Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 23 It's the city. We killed JFK.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I mean, good point.

Speaker 23 Holy shit.

Speaker 23 The city of brotherly hate. That's wow.
I mean, not anymore, but like, that that is the nickname of Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 23 Yeah, so because this happens in Laredo, the law is not as on his side as you might expect if it had happened in some other parts of Texas. Harlan Carter is arrested.

Speaker 23 He is tried, and he is convicted of murder.

Speaker 23 He's sentenced to three years in prison. Again, you can say, like, he should have been sentenced to more.

Speaker 23 I'm mixed because he was a child, right? Like, this is bad, but also, like, I think you have to, if you believe, children are not culpable in the way that adults.

Speaker 23 But anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years.

Speaker 23 His family appeals

Speaker 23 the judgment, and they complain about a number of things. They say the judge is related to the prosecutor,

Speaker 23 that self-defense had not been adequately explained to the jury, that one of the witnesses was like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy, a bunch of racist shit. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 They were like, well, the judge failed to consider that the victim was no angel.

Speaker 23 That's based, yeah. Although they focus more on like the kid who watched him's friend get his brother or whatever get murdered was no angel.
It's more than answering. He was also no angel.

Speaker 23 So eventually. But you are legally allowed to kill no angels.
That's right. That's in the Bible.
That's right. That's why anytime I see a bunch of floating eyes, I just start shooting.

Speaker 23 That was a biblical angel joke. Sure was.

Speaker 23 So eventually, a judge with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agrees that the case was bad, and he overturns Harlan Carter's conviction on these grounds.

Speaker 23 And because, quote, several of the material witnesses for the state have been discredited, having been convicted of infamous crimes.

Speaker 23 It does not seem accurate that they were convicted of infamous crimes.

Speaker 23 But, you know, it's also worth noting that, like, Harlan's dad helped run law enforcement in Laredo.

Speaker 23 It's impossible that some of the people who had witnessed the shooting were like targeted by the police to provide plausible deniability for his kid.

Speaker 23 And if not likely. So Harlan gets let out of prison.
His conviction is overturned, and he proceeds with life now as a young adult, as a free man.

Speaker 23 He enrolls in the University of Texas, but he changes his name. So his original name had been Harlan, H-A-R-L-A-N, and he swaps out the A for an O.

Speaker 23 And he does this basically under the understanding that, like, well, this will make it a hard. If people go looking for Harlan Carter's criminal record, they won't find anything.

Speaker 23 Wait, so he changed it to Horlan or

Speaker 23 Harlan. Harlan.
Okay. H-A-R-L-O-N as opposed to H-A-L-A-N, right? Okay, okay, got it.
And again, it's a marker of like how different the time is that, like, this works perfectly for him for decades.

Speaker 23 Like, people are like, ah, well, they swapped an A with an O. No, nothing we can do.
Yeah, it's like, well, the search engine doesn't do other letters, so fuck it. I guess you can.

Speaker 23 It's so easy to get away with crimes back in the 30s. My God, was it easy? Speaking of getting away with crimes, Junior.

Speaker 23 If you walked fast, like if you could walk pretty fast, you could get away with a crime.

Speaker 23 Oh, man, those are the days. Those were the days.
Let's bring it back. Robert, do you know who else gets away with crimes?

Speaker 23 The

Speaker 23 corporation when they hired those mercenaries to gun down union organizers in Latin America? That was a lob, and you took it. I'm very proud of you.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 Drink.

Speaker 23 Ah, we're back. And I'm just going to have a nice refreshing sip of.

Speaker 23 Oh, it's the classic drink.

Speaker 23 You know? That tastes like locking a bunch of nuns and hug organizers in a church and lighting it on fire.

Speaker 23 God, that's good stuff. Yummy.
Love it.

Speaker 23 So,

Speaker 23 again, it's one of those things. If this had kind of been the end of Harlan Carter's story, I'd say like, well, that was a fucked up thing that happened.
But

Speaker 23 I guess I don't believe a 16-year-old should be locked in prison for their whole life. Um,

Speaker 23 so

Speaker 23 but that's not the end of the story.

Speaker 23 It sucks that, like, there are, yeah, like cases where I'm like, it would be sick if he had it's like with Kyle Rittenhouse. I don't think the right thing was to throw him in a hole for forever.

Speaker 23 Certainly, the right thing is not to turn him into a celebrity and give him millions of dollars.

Speaker 23 That's right, maybe even worse, but like, I think fundamentally you have to believe that, like, well, if a child does something, even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused on the possibility of rehabilitation because otherwise you don't actually believe that children are less responsible than adults.

Speaker 23 And anytime you like, uh, try to set up anytime you, you know, try to be more punitive, uh, it always affects, you know, uh, brown people and people of color way more.

Speaker 23 And obviously, yeah, like Raymond Casayano suffers even more for, you know, whatever, however questionable you want to think his call to pull a knife might have been.

Speaker 23 Although I think it's, again, you could argue, justified because the other kid had a fucking gun. Anyway, whatever.

Speaker 23 One of the problems with guns in America is how often angry teenage boys get a hold of them. And this is, again, quite an old story.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 Tail is old as a story. But regardless of what you think should be done when kids commit murder, Harlan definitely committed murder.
That's not self-defense.

Speaker 23 And anyone who says otherwise is probably racist.

Speaker 23 But it's worth noting that even modern sources, and this is something, this is where things get really uncomfortable, even modern sources that are like very pro-gun control, very anti-Harlan Carter, who will attack Harlan for his later work with the NRA, tend to tell the story of what happened with him and Raymond Cassiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce Harlan's claims of self-defense.

Speaker 23 This is a very strange thing I've noticed in a couple of sources. I've read a lot of articles about this guy, and his actions can be framed in fascinating ways.

Speaker 23 I want to highlight particularly a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler. And Gunfight, there's actually like five books titled Gunfight.

Speaker 23 I think one of them is like, seemed to be slightly grifty. It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who like

Speaker 23 does an anti-gun book because I think maybe that's where the money was. I don't know.
I'm not going to go into date because I haven't read it. I haven't, I haven't read it.

Speaker 23 But like, there's a bunch of books with this title. The good one, the one that you would actually be worth reading is Winkler's Gunfight.
He's a UCLA professor,

Speaker 23 and Gunfight is a critical history of the battle over the Second Amendment in U.S. politics.

Speaker 23 That has a lot of really useful context, including some of what I went over about like the early racism and gun control.

Speaker 23 It's a good, and again, very much anti-NRA. But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter and Raymond Cassiano, which I find very peculiar.

Speaker 23 Quote, Carter loved guns from childhood. He was an excellent shot and would go on to win two national shooting titles and set 44 national shooting records during his lifetimes.

Speaker 23 His most infamous shot, however, came at the age of 17 when, in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun into the chest of a knife-wielding Mexican teenager. Nope, not that.

Speaker 23 That's a weird way to describe that. That's not what happened at all.
That's not what happened at all. That's such a weird way for.
And again, Winkler is like, he's a professor of law at UCLA.

Speaker 23 Like, he's all over the New York Times writing about this kind of stuff. It's like really weird that he describes it that way.
Maybe it was just like, oh man, I've done all this other research.

Speaker 23 I'm just not going to, I'm just going to go with the autobiography that he wrote.

Speaker 23 It's like calling Ramon Cassiano a knife-wielding Mexican teenager. It's such an unsettling way to choose to phrase that.
It's just strange. It was just like people forget that Cassiano was guilty.

Speaker 23 He had a knife. Guilty of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Speaker 23 It is.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 Again, the book is not at all right-wing or reactionary. There's a lot of good stuff stuff in there.

Speaker 23 The fact that he describes Cassiano's murder in this way, though, makes me question some stuff that, like, maybe I missed in vetting this thing, because it's a really weird passage. It's so strange.

Speaker 23 Now, let's compare that to this write-up by a right-wing dude, Dave Coppel, from an article he wrote explicitly defending Harlan Carter's legacy.

Speaker 23 Now, in this article, he's critiquing a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that accurately noted, quote, 50 years ago, Carter shot and killed a 15-year-old boy and was convicted of murder.

Speaker 23 Arguing against this, Coppol writes, the letter admitted the fact that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang of intruders led by the boy and that the boy was menacing Carter with a knife.

Speaker 23 Again, this is also not true. He was not defending his mother's ranch.
They were swimming.

Speaker 23 They were swimming and having a good time and being accused of doing a crime. That they did, I mean, did they do the crime even? I don't think there's ever been any evidence that they did.

Speaker 23 Again, this is a little murky, but it kind of seems like what happened is their car was stolen.

Speaker 23 A couple of weeks later, she sees some Mexican kids walk past their house towards a swimming hole and six her son on them, right? That kind of seems like what happened. That seems

Speaker 23 and it's weird because Winkler and Coppel could not be more apart ideologically,

Speaker 23 but their description of this murder is very similar in a way. Like, I just, it's, I don't want to harp too much on this, but it's like really weird to me that that happened.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 Do you have any like inkling as to why that may be or is there just a

Speaker 23 most

Speaker 23 people

Speaker 23 don't dwell too much on it took me a while actually to find good specific details about what happened that day

Speaker 23 um

Speaker 23 and i think most people take the attitude that just like uh

Speaker 23 well he said he was defending his mom and like that that's the I don't know.

Speaker 23 I think in part, you know, Winkler's covering a lot of ground, right?

Speaker 23 Because his book is a whole, it's not focused on carter it's a whole history of like kind of the the how the second amendment has been interpreted and ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries so he does have a lot of ground to cover it's just very and i guess that one of the things he did was just kind of brush over what happened there it's right

Speaker 23 that he did it in that way

Speaker 23 yeah like the way i would do it right because it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history to not go into detail but i would have just said something like uh he confronted you know another teenager uh over like you know something his mother said and like or he could he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicion so even that would be better right yeah and and also this is you know you do a podcast this guy's a UCLA professor yeah it's like

Speaker 23 again I don't want to like shit on him too much because it's like there's a lot of good stuff in the book it's it's just that part I don't get it I don't get why you would write about it though.

Speaker 23 Anyway,

Speaker 23 so Harlan Carter commits murder, does two years in prison, goes to college,

Speaker 23 and then he decides to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Border Patrol. He becomes an agent in 1936, three years after leaving prison.
Carter's rise was rapid, if not meteoric.

Speaker 23 So he joins in 36, having been in prison two years earlier. In 1950, he's running the entire Border Patrol.
Wow.

Speaker 23 Now, again,

Speaker 23 Border Patrol was a lot smaller back then. It's a lot newer.
It's easier to become head of the Border Patrol. And also, his murder was definitely something on his resume.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 23 mean like i i probably on like the secret i don't think he put it on his paper resume but i'm sure

Speaker 23 because he's known in laredo as dead like i'm sure the guys giving him his first gigs all know about it and think it's bad right right yeah

Speaker 23 um but he also he does keep it a secret publicly right like he doesn't brag about it in public. Again, when he's hanging out with his buddies, I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly.

Speaker 23 But it's not like a part of his public persona as a,

Speaker 23 you know, once you're the head of the Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know? Right, right, right. Yeah.

Speaker 23 It's not like today, in which that would be something he would be celebrated for and talk about on, you know,

Speaker 23 the shotgun that he used to kill Raymond Cassiano would have been auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars. And he would have used it to buy an F-350 with

Speaker 23 the Daily Wire would give him his own column. Yeah,

Speaker 23 yeah, he'd be making documentaries with Matt Walsh.

Speaker 23 Times were a lot more chill back then, which is.

Speaker 23 It is when we're talking about the story of this guy who does like a racist murder as a teenage boy. And like, wow, he really was less proud of it than he would be today.
Right, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 23 That's where we're at, where we're like, oh, wow, he didn't make that like his whole brand. It's weird.
Wild.

Speaker 23 So the Border Patrol had shifted at this point from being geared mainly towards policing the border to being a force for policing Mexican Americans inside the United States on the pretext of them being potentially undocumented migrants.

Speaker 23 As a result, their work strayed further and further from the border and increasingly into American cities, factories, farms, and anywhere expected of harboring illegals.

Speaker 23 Some Border Patrol agents had difficulty with this, right? This was not. A lot of the folks who had signed up earlier, this was not like the thing that they had signed up for specifically.

Speaker 23 Harlan, though, is hugely supportive of this change. And in fact, he wanted to expand the Border Patrol's purview even further and use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely.

Speaker 23 This was justified in his mind by the fact that a large number of undocumented migrants were living and working, or this was justified publicly, right?

Speaker 23 So, Harlan, there's like a racial motivation, but you can't use that, like as we talked about earlier, right? Like, you have to hide when your laws are racially motivated.

Speaker 23 So, the justification is that a large number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches and other businesses in the borderlands, often under nightmarish, slave-like conditions.

Speaker 23 Now, this is a real problem that's happening, right? Like,

Speaker 23 as it is today, right? Yes.

Speaker 23 Completely.

Speaker 23 And yeah, there's this like suggestion of a new thing called the Bracero program that will provide kind of like a legal way for these people to like work, but they'll have, you know, there will be more control over the conditions that they can work in,

Speaker 23 which obviously the people who would be hiring them don't like. Right.

Speaker 23 It's, it's a whole thing.

Speaker 23 Just fucked, fucked every which way.

Speaker 23 From the perspective of Harlan Carter, though, this is primarily a humanitarian pretext for carrying

Speaker 23 And I'm going to quote from Migra again. Carter had convened a meeting to request the assistance of the U.S.

Speaker 23 military and the National Guard to purge the nation of undocumented Mexican nationals and seal the U.S.-Mexico border.

Speaker 23 The Border Patrol's proposal was titled Operation Cloudburst and consisted of three basic steps.

Speaker 23 First, an anti-infiltration operation on or near the border would seal the border with the assistance of 2,180 military troops.

Speaker 23 In addition to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic.

Speaker 23 Two metal picket barbed wire fences, eight feet high and eight feet apart, with rolls of concertina wire in between and one roll of concertina wire on top of the fence nearest Mexico, built several miles along the border, would form the fence.

Speaker 23 But previous experience had taught the Border Patrol that fenced areas still needed additional security.

Speaker 23 Therefore, the concertina fence would be reinforced by officers and jeeps who will be directed to the scene of any attempted fence or canal crossing by observers in radio-equipped towers.

Speaker 23 So this is the first modern, this is the wall, right? This is the start of that. This is the beginning of that.
Not that there hadn't been like fences and stuff in different areas before then.

Speaker 23 This is the first time someone's like, we need to build a wall and has like a concerted vision of that. And specifically a vision.

Speaker 23 of using the of the wall as a system of violence in order to keep the borderlands white, right?

Speaker 23 That's that's what he's doing here. And he invents that shit, you know? Wow.
Wow. He's like the Thomas Edison of making racist borders.
That's right. Yeah, wow.

Speaker 23 He's the Elon Musk of

Speaker 23 border racism. Sure.

Speaker 23 Yes. So

Speaker 23 to continue that quote. Race X.
Sorry.

Speaker 23 I wanted to do a pawn. Yeah.
Sorry.

Speaker 23 Good work. Thank you.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 So I'm going to continue that quote. Second, a containment operation would maintain roadblocks on all major roads leading from the southwest to the interior of the United States.

Speaker 23 These roadblocks would be used to inspect traffic, including railroad traffic, for the purpose of detecting illegal entrants and to maintain safety patrols around the checkpoints.

Speaker 23 The roadblocks were planned for strategic locations that would prevent aliens from fleeing to the interior of the nation when the mopping-up operations, the third phase, began.

Speaker 23 The mopping-up operations would be conducted in northern areas, such as San Francisco, where the task forces would raid designated locations, such as migrant camps or places of business. So

Speaker 23 San Francisco, I don't know if you've ever been, Matt. Yeah.
Not super close to the border. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess close to like a sea border, right?

Speaker 23 Yeah, no, that's what we're building towards. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, those are the other aliens that they also want to put a fence around. Yeah.
Watch out for all those turtles and fucking, you know.

Speaker 23 Don't worry. We'll get rid of those in a couple of decades.
Right, exactly. Just put a few more of those soda, you know, fucking soda rings in the water.
But yeah, no, not close to the border.

Speaker 23 I lived in San Francisco, and I'll tell you, it was a trek to get to

Speaker 23 San Francisco. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 23 So the primary downside to his plan, right, this is a pretty good idea if you're a white supremacist, right?

Speaker 23 Solid plan. The only problem with it is that it is wildly unconstitutional.
So

Speaker 23 there's this thing, right?

Speaker 23 This law. um that that kind of gets in the way of this so right at this point in time nowadays the border patrol like you see those guys fucking walking around, and they look like soldiers, right?

Speaker 23 They've got their plate carriers and their AR-15s and all their fucking cool tactical gear.

Speaker 23 At this point, the Border Patrol is like slightly better armed than a modern Boy Scout troop, you know?

Speaker 23 Like they're not, they're not, they're not packing that much heat compared to what they're going to be packing. Yeah, but they have a lot of merit badges.

Speaker 23 They have a lot of merit badges in racism, but there's not a ton of them, right? So

Speaker 23 they can't do this without the US military. And in fact, the military is going to wind up being a significant portion of the effort if they try to do this.
But here's the problem.

Speaker 23 There's this stupid fucking bullshit-ass 1878 law called posse comatatus, right? And that means you can't use the military to enforce domestic laws without Congress's approval. Oh, damn.
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 23 I know.

Speaker 23 We all hate posse comatatus. Yeah, dude.

Speaker 23 I, for one, think the military should enforce all of the laws.

Speaker 23 Yes, dude. Particularly jaywalking.
Exactly. They're the best at it.

Speaker 23 You don't want a bunch of Boy Scout border patrols getting a fucking merit badge for walking a Mexican old lady across the border. We should have

Speaker 23 making sure, watching for people to cross the street illegally. And we should have MLRS rocket systems to just bombard the area if they cross the street, not at a crosswalk.
Exactly, dude.

Speaker 23 We want more Robocops than we want them to be. Absolutely.
Yeah. Federal.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Reinstate the draft and use it to stop jaywalking and littering. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Someone cuts, you know, absolutely. Someone like cuts you off, someone's speeding Agent Orange immediately.

Speaker 23 Absolutely. Absolutely.
So this, this fucking law, posse comatatis, really, really grinds Harlan's gears.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 So obviously, I should also note here that like the fact that it's the military is not supposed to be used to enforce the law doesn't mean it isn't, right?

Speaker 23 If you've casually googled the Watts riots, you know the government has a way of finding out, figure, making it it, being able to use soldiers to do cop shit when it needs to.

Speaker 23 But in this case, the government wasn't willing to like push things that far, right?

Speaker 23 And the general whose like job it is to like, basically the general who's liaising with Carter, this guy named Swing, who really wants to do this, like he's a racist too.

Speaker 23 But he's like, hey, we can't make this work legally right now, but we could do it if the president issued a proclamation.

Speaker 23 Like it's not impossible to do, but like it's, you'd have to get Eisenhower on board.

Speaker 23 So Harlan Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's people, and he tries desperately to get approval, but Eisenhower isn't quite willing to deploy troops.

Speaker 23 Now, he, again, not to give Ike any credit, he agrees with Harlan's basic goals.

Speaker 23 He just, this, like, using the army in this way is a little too far for him. Yeah.
But

Speaker 23 again, he's not against this. So in May of 1954, Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, right? INS.
We don't have INS anymore now.

Speaker 23 We've got

Speaker 23 whatever. But these guys are in.
So he's basically, now he's Carter's boss, essentially, this general.

Speaker 23 And Swing had a long history of commanding troops in battle from Mexico to Korea.

Speaker 23 Obviously, you could see the fact that now a general is in charge of INS as like the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol.

Speaker 23 And Swing is a bastard in his own right, but this is really happening in part because of

Speaker 23 what Carter is pushing to turn the Border Patrol into, right?

Speaker 23 This is not just the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is going to become the first large police agency to militarize, right?

Speaker 23 This happens decades before, you know, we talked about the Watts riots, which happened like a decade or so from now, and then the L.A.

Speaker 23 riots, which were a big, you know, decades later, which were a big pusher. This happens way before all of that.
This is 1954.

Speaker 23 So this is like, in a lot of ways, the beginning of police militarization happens because Harlan Carter and General Joseph Swing want to cleanse the borderlands of Mexican Americans. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Quote: As promised, one month after joining INS, Swing announced that he would lead the U.S.

Speaker 23 Border Patrol in an intensive, innovative, and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Speaker 23 No one questioned how, in four short weeks, he had prepared the officers of the Border Patrol for such a massive campaign.

Speaker 23 I mean, at this point, too, what was even the

Speaker 23 like, what were the migration numbers? Like, was it even that,

Speaker 23 I mean, certainly it's not as much as it was now, but I'm thinking about like what 1950s, 1950s, Mexico was what? They had, you know,

Speaker 23 the civil wars not that long ended. Yeah, the PRI is in power.
It's, isn't it fairly stable at this point? I feel like.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 So it's like, it's like what they were doing this pretense of like oh we got to stop the illegals i mean we're not even talking about like you know uh we're not talking about modern uh latin american immigration that we have today which is used as a pretext for all sorts of racist laws against um latin americans here legally we're talking about there's a lot like yeah labor stuff that's taught and again they have to like do moral panic and stuff about right the treatment of migrants but like

Speaker 23 this is all very messy because like some of the the biggest people opposing the government doing this crackdown are these different ranchers and other employers who are like who want to exploit

Speaker 23 people's labor.

Speaker 23 It's not, there's a lot that's that's going on

Speaker 23 overall in this issue, but when it comes to Harlan Carter, it's pretty simple, right? He's he's a racist, you know?

Speaker 23 Yeah, he's trying to do a racial purge under the pretext of like, oh man, you know, they're not paying fair wages.

Speaker 23 Like he gives a shit.

Speaker 23 And it's, you know,

Speaker 23 he's also like starting the process of

Speaker 23 justifying, figuring out ways to justify

Speaker 23 this that are like palatable to large chunks of Americans.

Speaker 23 And yeah, that's

Speaker 23 what's happening in this period of time.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 you know what else is happening right now, Matt? What?

Speaker 23 I'm going to ask you for your pluggables. Oh, hell yeah.

Speaker 23 So my pluggables are I just finished the entire series, The Sopranos. Pod Yourself a Gun is a podcast that I do with Vince Mancini, and we just did our very last episode.
We watched all of it.

Speaker 23 We watched all the Sopranos.

Speaker 23 And you can listen to the series finale

Speaker 23 wherever you get your podcast. So check that out.
And also follow me on Instagram because,

Speaker 23 you know, I feel like that's where all the cool kids hang out. So,

Speaker 23 you know,

Speaker 23 hit me up there. And also be excited because me and Vince our next show We're gonna be talking about the wire.
That's right

Speaker 23 20 years after the wires come out finally two white men will break down the wire because finally

Speaker 23 someone's got to do it. I mean that is the right group to break down the wire season two.

Speaker 23 Oh for sure for sure very exciting. You got to make sure at least one of you's a poll.
Oh, yeah, we're going to get some we got some polls who are going to come on.

Speaker 23 We got a bunch of Greek Baltimore friends who are going to come on. It's going to be great.
But yeah,

Speaker 23 look for that.

Speaker 23 What are you calling it?

Speaker 23 Probably when you pod through the garden,

Speaker 23 you know, which

Speaker 23 kind of continues our tradition of having a really bad title for a TV rewatch podcast.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 So check it out whenever that comes out. But for now, listen to Pod Yourself a Gun.

Speaker 23 You can go back, listen to the whole thing.

Speaker 23 You have to know who your favorite character on the Wire was.

Speaker 23 I mean, I relate the most to Bubbles because I used to love heroin.

Speaker 23 But other than that, shit.

Speaker 23 Probably Clay Davis.

Speaker 23 Clay Davis is cool.

Speaker 23 He's the state senator

Speaker 23 who says shit a lot. She.

Speaker 23 She. You know, for a show that is

Speaker 23 lifted up as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, there sure certainly are a lot of catchphrases. It's a weirdly catchphrase-heavy show for something that is

Speaker 23 incredibly serious. Oh, I was so excited.

Speaker 23 What the fuck did I do? You got, you know, you got a proposition, Joe. He's like, I got a proposition for, it's like, this is a serious show, but they love catchphrases.
Anyways, I'm excited.

Speaker 23 That sounds awesome. Me too.
Boom.

Speaker 23 Podcast.

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Speaker 23 Welcome to The Wire, the podcast that created the hit TV show The Wire.

Speaker 23 Before we were first, our idea was stolen by that hack, David Simon.

Speaker 23 We went to HBO in 1998 and you said, have you ever considered making a show about wires? Yeah. And we said, you know, who understands Baltimore?

Speaker 23 Me and Matt Lee. That's right.
Exactly. That's right.
Baby.

Speaker 23 We understand Baltimore more than anyone understands Baltimore. I stopped there once for gasoline on a road trip.
So

Speaker 23 I get it.

Speaker 23 I played for the Baltimore Orioles. That's a lot of people are talking about that right now.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And, you know,

Speaker 23 I feel like, I mean, it was in Los Angeles.

Speaker 23 That's right.

Speaker 23 And I was in fifth grade, but I was an Oriole. Yeah, and we famously, season two was based on the fact that I once bought a sandwich from a Polish man.
That's right. That's right.

Speaker 23 And I said, what if this was a whole show? What if this was a whole season about longshoremen? Yeah, yeah. Just like longshoremen, like Steve-Adors and like, you know.

Speaker 23 That's a word that doesn't get used enough. I love the word Steve Adore.
It is. What an incredible job title.
It's the coolest job title.

Speaker 23 I don't know, like, what about moving like it makes no sense to me based on what the job is, why they're coming up. I imagine there was just like the first guy to ever do that was named Steve.
Steve.

Speaker 23 And he was just so good at it that they were like, everybody's

Speaker 23 Steve Ador now. Yeah.
Steve Adores. You're like, look at how good he is at moving crates.
You're just moving shipping crates like Steve did?

Speaker 23 Oh, man. I want that job.
Well, this was a meandering way of introducing the podcast behind the bastards. Matt Lieb, guest, also host of a podcast.

Speaker 23 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Pod Yourself a Gun, which is a Sopranos podcast. And then soon to be a wire podcast coming out shortly.
So

Speaker 23 I'm excited for that. We were talking about the wire.
Yeah, it's a good show. Also, soon to be the host of A Baby.
I know. I'm having a baby, dude.

Speaker 23 We'll subsequently launch a podcast called The Goo Goo Ga.

Speaker 23 Yeah, dude. I can't wait to do a Barney rewatch podcast with my little baby.
Just like analyzing

Speaker 23 the role of American imperialism in the happy purple dinosaur. Well, you know, there was that whole season of Barney that took place in a Contra camp in Nicaragua.
Yeah, that was great.

Speaker 23 Choice. You have to give it to them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barney was like teaching, you know, classes over at the school for the Americas.

Speaker 23 Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that he worked hand in glove with Oliver North to sell those missiles to Iran. Exactly.

Speaker 23 Because the only person the Shah trusted, or the Shah, the Ayatollah trusted, was Bronx Dinosaur. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sol crack.

Speaker 23 He did sell a lot of crack, but that was that was completely unrelated.

Speaker 23 We should probably talk about where when we last left off,

Speaker 23 we were talking about operation cloudburst, this attempt

Speaker 23 by Harlan Carter and the Border Patrol and this guy, General Swing, to cleanse the border area.

Speaker 23 We should probably give a little bit more background about what's happening on the border in this period.

Speaker 23 So, this is kind of, again, I think Harlan's primary motivation is racial, but there's other stuff happening.

Speaker 23 So, in the early 1940s, the U.S.

Speaker 23 government had created this thing called the Bracero program, which is like a guest worker visa program that would let Mexican farm workers enter the country legally temporarily to work for American farmers.

Speaker 23 This gets started during World War II because like we don't have any, we don't have any dudes left in the country.

Speaker 23 We send them all over there, you know, like

Speaker 23 we need some more dudes. Yeah, yeah, that's a shortage of dudes at this point.
But it also, one of the reasons why it's popular, even with people who like are pretty racist, is that

Speaker 23 by providing kind of a legal regulated way for them to work here, it also provides a legally regulated way to get them out of here.

Speaker 23 They can't become residents, right? The Bracero program does not, these people are supposed to leave.

Speaker 23 And in fact, part of the deal is that like 10% of the migrants' wages are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an account that are given to them when they come back to Mexico, right?

Speaker 23 So that's part of why this is popular is that it allows them to do the work that the country can't function without, but it also ensures that they don't stay, right? That's why this is such a big deal

Speaker 23 for a lot of folks.

Speaker 23 So it's actually very popular.

Speaker 23 And one of the things about it is it doesn't limit the number of workers. Cause why would you, right? Because they're not.

Speaker 23 Anyway,

Speaker 23 millions and millions of Mexican workers use the Bracero program over the years. And from the perspective of the U.S.
government, it works pretty well for a while.

Speaker 23 And it certainly keeps workers in farms.

Speaker 23 But and so by like the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these workers.

Speaker 23 Or there's like 5 million people have worked in through the Bracero program, but also

Speaker 23 like unauthorized migrants continue to cross into the border. And by the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these people.

Speaker 23 And part of one of the things that happens in this period is that there's suddenly like a big surge of folks coming in unauthorized in the early 1950s.

Speaker 23 And this is part of what inspires Operation Cloudburst is that Border Patrol has never had to deal with these kind of numbers of people crossing post-war.

Speaker 23 And they're not really capable of handling it.

Speaker 23 So by the early 1950s, the number of like voluntary departures had raised in 1946, like 101,000 undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United States. In 1952, more than 700,000 do.

Speaker 23 And you can like these numbers are just kind of useful in seeing like how many folks are coming in. Sure.

Speaker 23 So this, a lot of people are

Speaker 23 not wild about this because, again, you know,

Speaker 23 racism and such. Yeah.

Speaker 23 So Joseph Swing, part of his motivation here is that, like, he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers to cooperate

Speaker 23 so that they can

Speaker 23 increase the number of folks who are working there under the Bracero program and shrink the unauthorized workers.

Speaker 23 And so his justification for like participating in some of the stuff that Harlan Carter is building is that he wants to cut down the supply of unauthorized workers in order to to get more of these employers on board with the Bracero program.

Speaker 23 So, again, a lot of, there are a lot of like kind of wonky aspects to what's happening with migration here that you can,

Speaker 23 as always, justify as like not based in racism, is based in like, well, there's a lot of these undocumented people coming over and it's like created a problem for the Border Patrol and the conditions they're working under are like really bad.

Speaker 23 And we want to reform this program so that, you know, everyone is documented and legal.

Speaker 23 And like, we're not trying to stop them from coming over, but also one of the things you're trying to do by expanding this program is making sure that they don't stay. Right.

Speaker 23 And I guess, again, you can look at what's happening with the Bracero program in a couple of different ways.

Speaker 23 But if you really want to know what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and Swing

Speaker 23 eventually

Speaker 23 enact, the main thing you need to know is what they call it.

Speaker 23 And this is Harlan Carter's name for this is Operation Wetback.

Speaker 23 That is the official name of this immigration purge that they're going to do. And again,

Speaker 23 did they invent the term or was it... No, no, it had existed for a while.
Okay, so they did just explicitly name it after a slur. Yes, yes.
Okay. Yeah, that's exactly it.

Speaker 23 And obviously, like, again, for folks who maybe are not aware of this, I know we have a lot of like European listeners, Canadian listeners who may not have heard this.

Speaker 23 Like, wetback is a racial slur for Mexican immigrants to the United States. It takes its name from when people would cross illegally, they would do so through the Rio Grande often.

Speaker 23 And like, so you're, you know, you get wet when you do that, right? And so, like, that's the origin of the slur. Right.
The backs part, I don't, I don't know why they specify it.

Speaker 23 I don't know why they specify, but this happens. There's like a history of this.
Like, an old anti-Italian racial slur is WAP, which means without papers.

Speaker 23 I don't think it was entirely just for Italians, but like, you know, this is like the late 1800s, I think. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 So,

Speaker 23 yeah.

Speaker 23 And, and Carter, again, so so

Speaker 23 Swing is the kind of guy who can sit down and explain to you, like, well, this is where the Bracero program was broken down. And, like, these are the problems that we're having.

Speaker 23 And these are the different violations that we're seeing. And, like, we need to get these, you know, employers on board with this program to reform the system.

Speaker 23 And the only way to do that is to cut down on the like, so he can get very wonky with it in a way that doesn't sound racist.

Speaker 23 Whereas Harlan Carter's like, yeah, Operation Wetback, let's get it out of here.

Speaker 23 And Carter is not great at, like, he says, he just kind of says the loud part loud. Right.

Speaker 23 In in interviews with the press he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history he tells the los angeles times that he intends to deploy quote an army of border patrol officers complete with jeeps trucks and seven aircraft in order to declare quote all-out war to hurl mexican wetbacks into mexico jesus christ so he's not

Speaker 23 a subtle man he added yee-haw after every sentence yeah you have to imagine he's shooting his six guns into the air as he gives these speeches to the press.

Speaker 23 He was in the middle of burning a cross.

Speaker 23 As he lit a cross on fire on someone's lawn. Harlan Carter gave a statement to the L.A.
Times.

Speaker 23 So what followed was close to, again, Operation Wetback is kind of,

Speaker 23 a lot of what he had tried to do with Operation Cloudburst only just toned down a little bit so that they could get the federal government on board.

Speaker 23 Obviously, this follows like a massive hiring campaign of Border Patrol men, and they take thousands of Border Patrol agents and they separate them into mobile task groups, and they set up mobile immigration systems to block roads.

Speaker 23 So they're basically doing like this.

Speaker 23 They've already put this, like started putting these fences up, but they do like a kind of a,

Speaker 23 you could call it a kind of like racist defense, like defense of white supremacy in depth, where they're setting up blockades deeper into the country.

Speaker 23 And they're also carrying out raids on factories and restaurants and just through whatever mean they can, arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican migrants.

Speaker 23 And I'm going to quote from Migra again. To hold the detainees, the officers turned public spaces into temporary detention facilities.

Speaker 23 For example, in Los Angeles, the Border Patrol transformed Elysian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals were processed for deportation.

Speaker 23 In countless fields and along many country roads, Border Patrol officers set up mobile immigration stations to process unsanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation.

Speaker 23 They used trucks on loan from the armed services to transport the apprehended immigrants from California to New Gales, Arizona, for deportation to Mexico.

Speaker 23 To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise Mexicano communities, leisure spots, and migrant camps, ranches, farms, and parks.

Speaker 23 They also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Speaker 23 Between June 17th and June 26, 1954, 2,827 of the 4,403 migrants apprehended by the task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry.

Speaker 23 After Border Patrol raids during the summer of 1954, three Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of workers and temporarily closed down their operations.

Speaker 23 Similarly, Border Patrol officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen help, waiters, etc.

Speaker 23 Officers reported apprehending such workers at well-known establishments such as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby.

Speaker 23 At times, Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running through the servant area.

Speaker 23 Everywhere they went, the officers were chased and photographed by journalists who had come to witness what General Swing had promised would be a spectacular show of U.S. immigration law enforcement.

Speaker 23 Swing pledged that the Border Patrol would deport or otherwise purge the 1 million undocumented Mexican nationals estimated to be living in the United States at the time.

Speaker 23 Oh, well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Just, uh, yeah, there's just going buck wild with journalists in the back, like, this is great footage.

Speaker 23 Yeah, and it's interesting because a huge number of these guys are immediately let back into the country.

Speaker 23 Like, a lot of times, what they're doing is they're pushing them across the border and then making them recross under like the Bracero program.

Speaker 23 So, again, they can be because they need the labor, right? They don't want the brickyard shut down. They don't want these places to go out of business.

Speaker 23 They just don't want these people to be able to actually build a life in the United States, right? They want to guarantee that they go back.

Speaker 23 So, that's like a huge chunk of what's happening here. Like, it's basically

Speaker 23 taking the natural movement of people across an area where their ancestors and relatives had been moving freely for centuries, and it's stopping that, stopping the ability of populations to move and build lives and turning them entirely into economic units, right?

Speaker 23 Yes. You're not a member of the community.

Speaker 23 You're labor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're an entirely different class of citizen, which is non-citizen, which means

Speaker 23 you have no rights.

Speaker 23 You're not entitled to uh any of the human rights that uh we give to our citizens super super normal and definitely uh a natural state of things certainly not a definitely the way things are supposed to go exactly not an invention of humans at all no

Speaker 23 um so at the same time as they're doing this and obviously the media is a big part of like why this is such a hit because you know in s says hey we're going to raid the built more like yeah you're going to show up there and like that's like who doesn't want to see that?

Speaker 23 Um, as like a journalist.

Speaker 23 So, like, part of like what part of like what increases sort of the because the people hadn't really, the Border Patrol had not been, probably, most Americans had only been kind of vaguely aware of its existence up until this point.

Speaker 23 This is part of what turns them into like an institution within the United States is like all of the press around Operation Wetback. Right.

Speaker 23 It's like the, you know, they took a cue from the FBI. They're like,

Speaker 23 we need, we need to be flashy. We need to, uh, We need to look cool as shit doing a bunch of horrid shit to people.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 I mean, like, and you're talking about like what the FBI does against anarchists and socialists in like the late, you know, the early 1900s.

Speaker 23 Yeah, this is, this is like the Border Patrol's equivalent of that. Yes.
And creating like, you know, an entire propaganda arm that made like, you know, the G-Man cool. Yes.
You know? Yes.

Speaker 23 And at the same time they're doing this, Carter and Swing are like meeting with these influential ranchers and farmers and industrialists, the people using using the undocumented migrant labor, and they're getting them in line between like a revamp of the Bracero program that is, again, like supposed to fix some of the issues the program had had.

Speaker 23 I'm not going to get terribly into the weeds on that kind of stuff. There's plenty of places to read about that, if you'd like.
There's a pretty good article.

Speaker 23 Yeah,

Speaker 23 we'll have some sources in here, but the book Migra goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So in the end, it was a wild success.

Speaker 23 More than 1 million people are deported, potentially as many as 1.5 million people are deported.

Speaker 23 Beyond that, the precedent was established that the U.S. Border Patrol could and should conduct operations from deep within the United States.

Speaker 23 Border Patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within 100 miles of the border, right? Of any border.

Speaker 23 That's the exactly. Of any border, right? Which includes the coast and Canada.
So basically, all of the places where most Americans live are covered by the two, about two-thirds of the U.S.

Speaker 23 population are in this area, which is why the Border Patrol has like the widest ranging purview of any law enforcement agency, pretty much. Yeah.

Speaker 23 I guess, yeah, like the FBI technically has more, but like their mission is more limited. You know, it's whatever.

Speaker 23 Like, this is like the Border Patrol, this is what turns them into what they are, this monster, this juggernaut they are today, as opposed to like some dudes literally on the border, you know?

Speaker 23 Like, say, which, like, again, and not that like they weren't getting up to problematic shit earlier in their history, but their ability to do harm was limited by geography.

Speaker 23 It's not after Operation Wetback. And we can thank Harlan Carter for that.

Speaker 23 And it's worth kind of noting here. I'm not going to get too much into Trump, but he, Donald Trump consciously looks back to Harlan Carter's period of time running the Border Patrol as an inspiration.

Speaker 23 Yeah, clearly.

Speaker 23 During a 2015

Speaker 23 Republican presidential debate, Donald Trump said, quote, let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. I liked him.
I like Ike, right?

Speaker 23 The expression, I like Ike, moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of the country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back, moved them again beyond the border.

Speaker 23 They came back, didn't like it, moved them way south. They never came back.
Dwight Eisenhower, you don't get nicer. You don't get friendlier.
They moved one and a half million people out.

Speaker 23 We have no choice. We have no choice.

Speaker 23 So, first off, obviously, it's probably not going to surprise people. That's, again, as we've said, completely wrong.
For, among other things, nearly all of them come back

Speaker 23 under the Bracera program. Like, that's part of the point.
Like, they're not.

Speaker 23 But yeah, it's, it's,

Speaker 23 so Carter, and again,

Speaker 23 there's the kind of folks who, like, again, Swing, I'm sure, has his racism.

Speaker 23 Ike, there's racism in like his motivations, but it's also, there's a lot of economic, and just like, they're the kind of people who believe all of this stuff should be done based on a set of laws.

Speaker 23 So they're like kind of fundamentally, they're probably more offended by the fact that people are undocumented than they are necessarily about the racial element that's a chunk of these people absolutely lack of documents alone is just like jesus christ carter's doing it for white supremacy and that's the thing you'll notice the thing trump takes out of operation wetback isn't the way they established this kind of like system in order to like document and like make these workers legal in order to provide labor a labor force like that's not the thing he takes out of this the thing he takes out of this is they got one and a half million mexicans to leave right yeah yeah yeah like that's the thing that has come down in history from carter's period is right cutting to the heart of really what's going on here behind all of the uh you know i don't know respectability politics or whatever of it yes that's what has lived on uh that and of course the militarization of the border patrol and the fact that it gets to work every we get all of that from harlan carter

Speaker 23 and here's the thing harlan's just getting started oh god this ain't even this ain't even his whole thing right this like this isn't even his main gig i know we haven't even gotten to the

Speaker 23 the beginning where it's just like, we're going to talk about some NRAs and some gun shit. We're not even into that shit yet.
Like, this is just his first gig, right? God damn it.

Speaker 23 This is his, like, the equivalent of the time the rest of us spent like working at a Wendy's or something. This is that Reharlan Carter, right?

Speaker 23 This is, this is Hitler at painting school. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is Hitler at fucking, like, hanging out in Austrian opera houses.
Exactly.

Speaker 23 Arguing with homeless people about the Jews, which was like a whole chunk of his life. But anyway, because he was homeless too.
It's whatever. They were living in a men's shelter.
Anyway, Hitler.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 I should note before we move on to the NRA that while Harlan Carter was massively expanding the reach and power of the Border Patrol, he was also robbing it blind for his own benefit.

Speaker 23 See, Harlan loves shooting, right? Like, he's not one of these NRA, like Wayne Lapierre, the current head of the NRA.

Speaker 23 I don't think Wayne particularly cares much about, like, a lot of these guys, like, it's a political thing as opposed to them. Like, Harlan Carter is, you have to say, loves to shoot guns.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 But here's the thing about shooting guns: bullets cost money.

Speaker 23 So three years after Harlan Carter retires from government service in 1957, the Justice Department opens an investigation into what are termed, quote, various allegations against him, including the claim that he had stolen 40,000 to 50,000 rounds of ammunition from the Border Patrol, quote, with the sole intent of converting this property to his own use after he retired.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 23 So he steals like a pallet of bullets to go shoot privately.

Speaker 23 I would love it if we found out that he's the one who stole his mom's car. Yeah.

Speaker 23 He would joyriding and crashing. It was him.

Speaker 23 I mean, oh, fuck, I got to find some Mexicans.

Speaker 23 15-year-old gets murdered. So yeah, it's not that funny.
But like,

Speaker 23 that's not impossible, right? Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 23 So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here about this theft of tens of thousands of bullets that Harlan Carter perpetrated. Quote, asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations, Mr.

Speaker 23 Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand jury in San Diego for some hours, and they covered a lot of things, none of which I'm ashamed of and none of which I had any difficulty asking.

Speaker 23 He added that he did not, quote, know anything about the disappearance or misappropriation of government ammo.

Speaker 23 The missing ammunition, worth several thousand dollars, was never traced, according to an agent who worked on the investigation, and no charges were fired.

Speaker 23 Filed. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
It's a funny slip.

Speaker 23 Now, obviously, Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's about to get a new job that is never going to let him run out of ammunition.

Speaker 23 So, as we stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when he joined the NRA, whether it was before or after he killed Raymond Cassiano. Probably he was like 16 when he joins.

Speaker 23 And in 1951, the year after he becomes head of the Border Patrol, he joins the NRA's national board.

Speaker 23 And again, at this point in time, there's obviously there's people who are right-wing in the NRA. There's people who want it to be more of a conservative institution.

Speaker 23 It's not really a political organization at this point. Right?

Speaker 23 It's almost at this point from just from what I remember, it's almost an apolitical, just kind of gun lobbying group that kind of they're not lobbying. There's no lobbying.

Speaker 23 They do not lobby in this period of time. They don't have to do it.
So they're like the Sierra Club at this point.

Speaker 23 Yeah, they're just kind of like, yeah, they're there to provide training courses for people.

Speaker 23 They're there so that one of the things they do is when the government demilitarizes weapons, right? They're like, okay, we're not using, like, the M1 Garand is no longer the gun that the Army uses.

Speaker 23 So we have a couple of million of these things. We will sell them at a discount to the NRA, who can sell them very cheap to their members.
And like, it's part of this.

Speaker 23 So there's like stuff that they're doing, but they're not, they're not getting in,

Speaker 23 and they have some involvement politically. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but they are not like lobbying on behalf of the Republican Party or something, right?

Speaker 23 Like that's not really a thing that the NRA is doing yet. Harlan Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing, but they're not in 1951 when he joins the board, they're still not very political.

Speaker 23 But now that he's on the board, he starts to seed the organization with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol, right? Because he can help get people hired. He can put in a good word.

Speaker 23 So he starts all his buddies from the Border Patrol who are like wanting a cushy job in the private sector after, you know, working for the government. Like he starts

Speaker 23 filling the NRA with them.

Speaker 23 So he finally leaves government service in the early 1960s.

Speaker 23 He stops running the Border Patrol in 57, but he does some other shit,

Speaker 23 not really that important for our purposes. But he retires from working for the government in the early 60s, and he gets pretty much immediately elected president of the NRA from 1965 to 1967.

Speaker 23 But that doesn't mean he's actually running the NRA, right? It's just like a job within the organization. You've still got this board of directors.

Speaker 23 So he's an influential figure in the NRA, but he's not actually directing it at this point. Right.
He's collecting a check and he's probably getting like,

Speaker 23 you know, a bunch of free bullets, which is all he also gets. Even more free bullets.
Well, he also wants it, he wants the NRA to get more political.

Speaker 23 And again, we're going to chat a little bit about why in a second.

Speaker 23 But one of the things that happens is like the folks at the NRA who kind of don't necessarily want that know they have to do something with Harlan Carter, right? Like you can't like ignore him.

Speaker 23 So they stick him, they create a lobbying arm for the first time of the NRA, the Institute for Legislative Action, and they put him in charge of it.

Speaker 23 And again, this is the first time the NRA had had a lobbying arm.

Speaker 23 In the early 1960s, it was like not, they barely funded it.

Speaker 23 So there's this, you know, there's kind of this growing fight. And Harlan is one of these guys saying that, like, hey, the NRA needs to get more political.
We need to be lobbying.

Speaker 23 We need to be focused on Second Amendment advocacy.

Speaker 23 That was not, had not, like the NRA's planks, like their like stated purpose as an organization did not include like protecting or defending the Second Amendment at all.

Speaker 23 Like that was not on their, even on their radar. Wow.

Speaker 23 He thinks it needs to be. And the old guard who run the NRA don't see it that way.
They see themselves as essentially in partnership with the government to ensure the development of

Speaker 23 a healthy shooting sports culture in the United States. Right.
And part of what that means is that when gun control laws get passed, they work with the government to formulate those laws.

Speaker 23 So again, they're certainly like, they're not anti-gun, right? But they're not anything we would recognize as like in like a modern political context.

Speaker 23 They just want to, so it sounds like they just want to make sure that gun control doesn't affect hunting and/or like regulation of people owning actual rifles, or yeah, yeah, and it's again, everything is different, right?

Speaker 23 Like, nothing the AR-15 exists in this period, but it's not what it's going to become, right? Like, because it's harder to make, they're much less common.

Speaker 23 Like, today, an AR, like one of the things that has made the AR-15 what it is, is that it's a perfectly modular platform.

Speaker 23 Um, so it's basically like gun Legos, so there's like a million, you can customize it infinitely, you can make the basic gun itself for a couple of hundred bucks if you have some stuff It's not like that at this point, right?

Speaker 23 Yeah, it's it's now it's the it's like the Honda Civic of guns. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 23 so they they just haven't like for part of why it's not political in the way it will become is that there's not really a need to you know like no one's there's not like uh there's not the culture that that the NRA helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that.

Speaker 23 So yeah, their primary focus is like hunting and target shooting, right? Right.

Speaker 23 And again, Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment. And in the 1970s, he's going to go to war with the NRA's old guard in order to change it.

Speaker 23 But before we get into that, we should probably have some ads.

Speaker 23 I love ads. Oh, I do too.
Including this ad for

Speaker 23 guns.

Speaker 23 The concept of,

Speaker 23 yeah, guns. Sure.
How about the life card? The life card. It's a gun that's built into a little credit card.

Speaker 23 Can it shoot well no is it accurate of course not is it is it a stupid thing to carry in your pocket yes a hundred percent enjoy

Speaker 23 um

Speaker 23 it's a real thing look look it up very silly gun of the of the of the of the meme guns easily the memeest wow that's a whole thing we have these days there's no meme guns in the 1960s we haven't invented memes you know but we had one

Speaker 23 but it yeah which was the meme from the 1960s Well, it's it's earlier than that. You know, this is getting way off topic, but you've ever heard of Kilroy was here? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 There's memes, but yeah, I was thinking, I was like, was uh, is this the Zapruder film? Was that a meme? But I guess that came out in the 70s or something. Yeah, no, it comes out a little late.

Speaker 23 Oh, that's like the 60 or mid-60s, right?

Speaker 23 But when did the did people see the Zapruder film? I thought that was like,

Speaker 23 I don't know.

Speaker 23 I mean, I will tell you, my entire life, I have specifically picked houses with a floor plan where the bathroom is kind of like back into the left of the living room so that when people ask where the bathroom is, I can say, oh, just take a Kennedy.

Speaker 23 Yeah. Yeah, just, you know, go back into the left.
That's what I'm doing. That's a JFK getting murdered joke.
Anyway, here's ads.

Speaker 23 Oh, we're back.

Speaker 23 Everybody's having a good time.

Speaker 23 You know, Robert Kennedy. was killed with the 22, which is the same caliber as the life card.
Oh. The gun that's built into a credit card.

Speaker 23 I love that there's a credit card gun. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, honestly, if Sirhat and Sirhan had had one of those, RFK would probably be alive. Yeah.
Because the lifeguard is a really stupid gun.

Speaker 23 Anyway, the Second Amendment, well, actually, weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument Harlan Carter will later make, but

Speaker 23 I don't want to get ahead of things.

Speaker 23 So the Second Amendment is, I think it's fair to say the most politicized part of the Bill of Rights today, right? That's probably not. Maybe the First Amendment gives it a run for for its money.

Speaker 23 But even then, it's usually people differing over interpretations of the First Amendment as opposed to the argument over the second is really,

Speaker 23 should it exist or does it exist in the way that it's like currently being interpreted, right? Because an awful lot of Americans think it shouldn't be the law of the land at all,

Speaker 23 which is difficult to square with actually doing something legislatively because it does exist. But anyway, in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in D.C.

Speaker 23 versus Heller that the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to bear arms.

Speaker 23 Now, obviously, a lot of liberals see this as terrible jurisprudence and claim that an individual right to bear arms was basically invented by the NRA.

Speaker 23 Conservatives will say the opposite, that this was clearly what the founders had intended.

Speaker 23 And the reality of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment at a federal level is only like 20 years old, different courts have ruled very differently on the Second Amendment for quite a long time.

Speaker 23 And also, the Supreme Court is stupid. So,

Speaker 23 like, I don't personally give a good goddamn about what the founders intended. Yeah, that seems like the weirdest standard to uphold to this day where we're like, well, the founders intended.

Speaker 23 And it's like, the founders, first of all, none of them had teeth. None of them had, and it's one of those.

Speaker 23 This is, it's comprehensively wrong because, again, liberals will often be like, well, the founders would never have wanted people to have AR-15s. And it's like, did you know some of those guys?

Speaker 23 Yeah, no. A lot of those dudes would have been like, this will kill so many more like indigenous people.
Of course, we should have these. They all wore

Speaker 23 powdered wigs because they all had like herpes on their heads. And they,

Speaker 23 you know, they were all syphilitic. So yeah, they were insane.
Being like, the founders wouldn't like that. It's like, no, no, no.
Don't defend the founders.

Speaker 23 Well, and they would have liked it for a variety of different reasons. Thomas Paine would have liked it because it would allow you to shoot government agents much better, right?

Speaker 23 Like Thomas Jefferson would have liked it because he was scared of how many slaves he had, you know? Yeah. Like

Speaker 23 different people would have liked it for different reasons. They all would have loved to have that gun.
Yes.

Speaker 23 So, obviously, again,

Speaker 23 as regards my personal standing towards gun control, I don't care about what the founders thought about anything, including free speech, because they didn't actually believe in free speech either.

Speaker 23 Yes, yes.

Speaker 23 Because a lot of the most, well, Thomas Paine did. Again,

Speaker 23 he's our one good one.

Speaker 23 He was, yeah, you know, although kind of a reactionary during the French Revolution, you know, they locked his ass up. They did lock his ass up during the French Revolution.

Speaker 23 They locked a lot of people up. They really just kind of went overboard.

Speaker 23 As is the left.

Speaker 23 So I think it's probably valuable to discuss how interpretations of the right to bear arms have varied over time in the United States.

Speaker 23 Because again, if you're ever saying it's always meant this thing or that thing, that's not...

Speaker 23 You're not going to be correct because a bunch of different courts have found a bunch of different things. So the Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison.

Speaker 23 And in portraits, he's the founding father with just massive bags under his eyes. Like you look up a drawing of this dude.
He looks fucking exhausted in every

Speaker 23 sketch of it. He probably was.
Literally dying at all times in his famed career. He was dying all the time.

Speaker 23 If only every American political leader had followed in his footsteps of dying. I know, I know.
You know, he's a... Yeah,

Speaker 23 he was supposed to write way more of the Federalist papers, but he was so sickly he couldn't.

Speaker 23 We are getting to that. So

Speaker 23 obviously

Speaker 23 he's

Speaker 23 on that side of the Federalist, anti-federalist divide, but he drafts the Bill of Rights because the anti-federalists are worried, and they have a very good point that, like, okay, well, we're establishing this supposedly democratic government, but if we don't place limits on the powers of the federal government, they could get the power to do anything one day, which is a very reasonable thing to be concerned about, right?

Speaker 23 Broadly speaking, one of the better ideas the founders had was having a Bill of Rights. Yes.

Speaker 23 So most of them are terrified of the idea of a permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to be frightened of. And if we had stuck with that idea, maybe things would be a little bit better.

Speaker 23 One of the things that, like, these guys are all ancient Roman history nerds, right?

Speaker 23 And they are well aware that, like, the history of the Roman Republic includes so many times where just like a guy gets an army and takes over, right?

Speaker 23 Or tries to take over, and there's a big fucking fight over it.

Speaker 23 So they don't like the idea of like a big centralized standing army because it's very dangerous. Yeah.
So the Second Amendment was initially drafted to guarantee people's right to form a militia.

Speaker 23 The original text, and this is not what's in the Bill of Rights now, but this is the original text Madison writes, is, quote, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Speaker 23 Semicolon, a well-armed and well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country, colon, but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

Speaker 23 Now, this is interesting because if that had been in the Bill of Rights today, right, this would have done a couple of things.

Speaker 23 Among other things, it would probably have made a a draft impossible, right?

Speaker 23 Because that second clause is like, you cannot force someone to render military service, which like you would think would make a draft impossible.

Speaker 23 That said, it also might have made it impossible to do things that a lot of liberals support, like banning weapons like the ARF-15.

Speaker 23 Because when you have well-armed in there, it does kind of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the current text of the Second Amendment does.

Speaker 23 That interpretation could at least be argued.

Speaker 23 Now, this is all academic because the wording winds up being changed to the present text, which puts well-regulated up front and fun times also makes it legal to draft people.

Speaker 23 Obviously,

Speaker 23 people

Speaker 23 have argued for years and will be arguing for years what the Second Amendment should mean about gun control and how it should function. I'm not an originalist.

Speaker 23 I think the Constitution...

Speaker 23 is too old for anyone to care about, but obviously it does matter because it is the law of the land and how it's written and how it's interpreted has a huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation.

Speaker 23 And so I think the context of how the Second Amendment was seen at the time is helpful to have.

Speaker 23 Even though, again, I'm not an originalist. Please don't take this as me arguing because the Founding Fathers felt this way, this is how people should act.
But

Speaker 23 I don't think

Speaker 23 we can stress enough. We do not care what the Founding Fathers thought about literally anything.

Speaker 23 My stance broadly in support of civilian arms ownership has nothing to do with the Constitution. Yeah.
Because it's a stupid document written a long time.

Speaker 23 Well, again, given the time, not a stupid document, broadly speaking. Better than, anyway, whatever.
I don't need to have this conversation.

Speaker 23 I am going to quote from the New Yorker here because I think it gives some helpful context.

Speaker 23 None of this, this being the Second Amendment, had anything to do with hunting. People who owned and used long arms to hunt continued to own and use them.

Speaker 23 The Second Amendment was not commonly understood as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As Gary Willis once wrote, one does not bear arms against a rabbit.

Speaker 23 Meanwhile, militias continued to muster. The Continental Army was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, but the national defense was increasingly assumed by the U.S.
Army.

Speaker 23 By the middle of the 19th century, the U.S. had a standing army after all.
And this is one of the things I think is interesting, because, again,

Speaker 23 the kind of, especially on Twitter, common takes on one side or the other of this is that like,

Speaker 23 well, you don't need these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of the Second Amendment, which no, it's absolutely not.

Speaker 23 But at the same time, the idea of the Second Amendment as referring to an individual's ability to stockpile an arsenal is not really accurate because it was within the context of a militia.

Speaker 23 However, if you're bringing that up, it's one of the things that they meant by like one of the things that the Founding Fathers wanted with this militia was for it to be the primary method of defending the country as opposed to a massive standing army.

Speaker 23 So again, if you are, if you are, for one reason or the other, if you're arguing that we should do things the way the founding fathers argued, probably the most accurate thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of the context of a militia and also ensure that the militia is the only armed force in the country, including police.

Speaker 23 So that like a massive civilian militia is the only armed force. There's no federal power to deploy a massive military and there's not really federal policing in any meaningful way.

Speaker 23 Because that's how things were in the 1800s, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 Or 1700. If you're arguing that, that's probably closer to an originalist interpretation than anything being argued right now.
Right.

Speaker 23 Which is not to say that that makes much sense in the current day at all. Although I would argue

Speaker 23 there's a number of you could look at like what Switzerland does, right? Which is often brought up by Second Amendment advocates. What do they do?

Speaker 23 I don't even know what Switzerland has, like, basically.

Speaker 23 If you want to own a weapon in Switzerland, the government will give you one, but like there's training and you're part of a militia to get it. It is a military assault rifle, right?

Speaker 23 And a lot of Switzerland's, the percentage of Swiss people who own guns is not significant compared to the United States, but it's one of the highest in the world, right?

Speaker 23 But it does come as you don't, it's not, well, you can buy some arms in Switzerland. It's not like, you're not like just stockpiling guns for your own personal thing.

Speaker 23 You are being armed by the state as part of the state's defense apparatus, right? Right, right, right, right.

Speaker 23 But also not in a way like the Swiss, like the civilians who own guns in Switzerland are not like deployed for, obviously, Switzerland, right?

Speaker 23 They don't do that kind of shit. Famously.

Speaker 23 But anyway, I mean,

Speaker 23 this is again, when I talk about like Rojava and like what I think about in terms of the value of the state not having a monopoly on the use of force, these are some of the things that I think about.

Speaker 23 Broadly speaking, you know,

Speaker 23 stuff has been different about the Second Amendment throughout history. Like a little bit.

Speaker 23 And kind of as a result,

Speaker 23 the Second Amendment, as heavily politicized as it is now, was kind of like nobody, it was like the Third Amendment, right? Nobody talks about that anymore.

Speaker 23 Nobody fucking talked about the second amendment on a national level for like a century or so right yeah we talked about like gun control earlier but it was basically all state level right different states different cities would have like different rules based on shit that was happening there um the federal government left them alone Like there was not really any kind of federal interest in regulating the Second Amendment until the early 1930s.

Speaker 23 And that is when we get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now, the NFA, or National Firearms Act, was a response to the era of the gangster, right?

Speaker 23 In particular, you get this weapon starting in like, I don't know exactly when it was invented, I could have looked it up, but like it becomes popular in the 30s, the Tommy gun, right?

Speaker 23 Which is the Thompson submachine gun. And it is

Speaker 23 broadly speaking, kind of like, at least in terms of the way it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used in crime, kind of like the AR-15 of its day, because it is the Thompson.

Speaker 23 It's an automatic.45 caliber weapon. It's a submachine gun, right? So it's not like a full-sized rifle.

Speaker 23 This will be one of the most popular squad weapons that the United States uses in World War II, right?

Speaker 23 A very effective weapon for what it does, which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets very quickly at people at close range. So

Speaker 23 super good if you're, for example, a gangster who wants to murder a bunch of people

Speaker 23 in an enclosed room, right? And if you're like lining a bunch of other gangsters up against the wall, you can kill a shitload of people with a Tommy gun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 Very fun for, you know, pulling off some sort of St. Valentine's Day massacre.
Incredible bank robbing weapon, great for all sorts of stuff.

Speaker 23 Going to the local gaba ghoulery and shooting up the gaba ghoul. Exactly.
You could gaba a hell of a lot of ghoul with this. Lots of ghouls.

Speaker 23 It's nowadays, honestly, not that impressive of a weapon.

Speaker 23 But at the time, right, like prior to this, most Americans, like their experience with this, like single-shot rifles and lever action guns and like revolvers and shit, right?

Speaker 23 Even semi-automatic handguns are pretty new and fancy in the 30s.

Speaker 23 The Thompson is just so much deadlier than anything else. That's scary as fuck.

Speaker 23 And the crimes that get committed with it, again, as with the AR-15, on like a national scale, very little gun crime involves a Thompson submachine gun.

Speaker 23 And again, the AR-15, not the most common gun used in crime by any, like it's not super common compared to a lot of other kinds of firearm, but the crimes that it's used in are so spectacular and kind of like horrifying that they shock the nation.

Speaker 23 And law enforcement gets nuts about this because one of the things that gangsters do with Tommy guns is shoot lots of police officers with them.

Speaker 23 So there's a whole kind of America's first panic over a gun, right, is what happens with the Tommy gun in the 30s. And it's not just the Tommy gun.

Speaker 23 They're also freaking out about saw-off shotguns, which is actually pretty dumb. They're only scared about them because you can like.

Speaker 23 Hide them, hide them, but they're they're not even like anyway, it's dumb for saw-off shotguns to be regulated more more than regular shotguns. They're actually less deadly.
Right.

Speaker 23 Um, yeah, but whatever. They look cool as fuck.
They look, and they, you see them a lot in the hands of gangsters, right?

Speaker 23 So it's, again, there's this part of this is that, like, yeah, the Thompson is a lot deadlier than guns that had been available before, but part of it's also just like there's this media sort of panic around the Thompson.

Speaker 23 Right. Um, and by the way, I should note at this period of time, if you want a Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail one to your house.

Speaker 23 Like, this is not, there are not like, you don't have to go to a gun store. You don't have to do background checks.
Like, they just will send it to you.

Speaker 23 It's like if you order like a book on Amazon, it was that easy to get a Thompson sub-machine gun.

Speaker 23 So the NFA puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the ownership of machine guns, sought-off shotguns, and silencers.

Speaker 23 Now, the NRA is, again, not a political organization at this point. It does initially oppose the NFA, and this is kind of the first time it gets political.

Speaker 23 The organization writes a dissent in their magazine, American Rifleman.

Speaker 23 And this is a pretty like tamely phrased dissent, and it prompts congressional leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to limit their bill.

Speaker 23 The main thing that it does is that like it stops the ban from being total.

Speaker 23 So rich people can still get machine guns and

Speaker 23 shotguns and silencers. Well, and we could talk, I could rant about silencers, which are not what people tend to think.
They're not silent. They're not silent.

Speaker 23 All of these things are still legal if you have the money, right? In the case of like a silencer or a, what's called a short-barreled shotgun, it takes like a $200 tax stamp in a couple of months.

Speaker 23 It's technically like a similar legal process to get a machine gun, but machine guns cost the cheapest machine guns today are like $10,000. So it's that's why you don't see them like used in crimes.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 I guess I don't know what a machine gun is. What's an AR-15?

Speaker 23 An AR-15 is a semi-automatic gun. The legal definition of a machine gun is a weapon that will fire more than one bullet per trigger pull, right?

Speaker 23 This is all very wonky because like we had bump stocks a while ago, which function more or less as a machine gun, but legally weren't technically a machine gun.

Speaker 23 There's a couple of weird kinds of triggers you can, as with anything with guns, because when you, you, like, when you make a law to ban a thing, you have to specify what that thing is in mechanical terms.

Speaker 23 Right. And so you find a way to, people do this with drugs too, where it's like, okay, they banned MDMA.

Speaker 23 Let's make a drug that affects the same parts of the brain, but doesn't, like, isn't explicitly banned, right? Right. Different compound.
Yeah. Um, and the same thing happens.

Speaker 23 Now there are sought-off shotguns that aren't legally shotguns because of very, anyway, whatever. Yeah.
This is getting off of the point a bit. But the NRA works with, it works with Congress, right?

Speaker 23 They don't do like a big political brouhaha. They're like, hey, we want to make sure that rich people can still own these weapons.
Let's let's sit down and work some things out.

Speaker 23 And Congress is happy to work with them. Now, some people in Congress are.
The Attorney General claims that they emasculate the bill. But broadly speaking, the NFA

Speaker 23 seriously limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have. And this is the first time anyone had done that at the federal level.

Speaker 23 And the NRA is pretty happy with the resulting bill, and they endorse the 1934 NFA.

Speaker 23 Now, there was still no real like massive national discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this period.

Speaker 23 Not that it was like particularly discussed. much at all.

Speaker 23 This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period of time. It's not yet part of the culture war.
Yeah, it has. Yeah, that hasn't really evolved yet.

Speaker 23 The context, the discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms doesn't really start to take off until the early 1960s.

Speaker 23 And this is when the very first law review articles arguing an individualist interpretation are published.

Speaker 23 Now, this period coincides with the civil rights movement and the second big push for gun control in federal history.

Speaker 23 This time, rather than, well, racism and crime have a role to play, as we'll discuss, but one of the first things that sets it off is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Speaker 23 Famously, John F. Kennedy is assassinated by Bernard Sanders using a Manliker Carkano rifle that he'd ordered from a classified ad in the American Rifleman Magazine, which is the NRA's magazine.

Speaker 23 So the gun that kills JFK is ordered from the back of a magazine, right? Yeah.

Speaker 23 And this is, it's not, again, he's not killed with like anything you would consider an assault weapon. It's like an old bolt-action rifle.

Speaker 23 But the fact that he was able to get it from like a magazine ad becomes like, and like, you know, again, background checks are not really a thing yet.

Speaker 23 And that's, uh, that, that makes a lot of people very angry.

Speaker 23 And I'm going to quote now from an article by Alina Savadra Buckley: quote, for years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had been watching television and learning how to shoot.

Speaker 23 In the 1950s, when Hollywood studios were churning out Westerns, Popular Science estimated that half a million Americans had started quick draw shooting for fun.

Speaker 23 And by the end of the decade, 3,000 Western-style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smythe in his book, The NRA, The Unauthorized History.

Speaker 23 At the same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise, and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures as a result.

Speaker 23 The NRA braced itself for new legislation in the early 1960s, sprinkling the first references to the Second Amendment in American Riflemen.

Speaker 23 Eight months after Kennedy died, the magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead.

Speaker 23 The strength of the NRA, and therefore the ability to accomplish its objects and purposes, depends entirely upon the support of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep and bear arms.

Speaker 23 And a lot of this push is coming at the direction of Harlan Carter, who writes stuff for American riflemen and who is a big believer that the NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And that's, again, that's different from what they had always been pro-gun, because obviously it's the NRA, right?

Speaker 23 But when you look at what they're doing in 34,

Speaker 23 they're not advocating for the Second Amendment. They're advocating for what they see as sportsmen, right? And obviously there's problems with that.

Speaker 23 It's based heavily on like the desire of rich people to be heavily armed, but they're arguing for sportsmen as opposed to Carter wants to turn it into an advocacy organization for this thing,

Speaker 23 this idea of the Second Amendment. And when you do something like that, number one,

Speaker 23 if you kind of are an essentialist and you claim that this is like, there's this kind of inherent, timeless, essential interpretation of this rule, and that's your guiding light.

Speaker 23 There's not any ability to compromise there, right? Like you have to be kind of a fundamentalist about it. Right.
It doesn't matter if a president was just murked in front front of everyone in Dallas.

Speaker 23 Yes. Yes.
You have to be like, sorry, the law is the law. And this is,

Speaker 23 you know, this is my interpretation of it. And Carter understands,

Speaker 23 again, he's a very smart guy. What he'd done with the Border Patrol shows, he understands how the media works.

Speaker 23 He understands how to advocate for white supremacy without advocating for white supremacy.

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 23 And so he knows that it's not just enough to like say that you support gun ownership. And I'm going to continue with a quote from Buckley here.

Speaker 23 In order for there to be good guys with guns, there had to be an opposing force. For the NRA and many lawmakers, that opposing force was usually black.

Speaker 23 Now, this gets into the aspect of the gun control push. Again, there's an aspect that's just based in these assassinations that's not at all based in racism.

Speaker 23 And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots. So in 1965, the LAPD beats a black man named Marquette Fry with a baton during a traffic stop, and protests erupt.

Speaker 23 It It becomes an insurrection and spreads throughout the country. The military is eventually called in to augment an overwhelmed LAPD.

Speaker 23 This is part of what jump-starts the war on crime, a period of largely racist gun or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator panic that Biden is famous for.

Speaker 23 And the NRA, huge supporters of crime bills. Anti-gun control support crime bills, right?

Speaker 23 So you see what they're doing here is you have some folks because people are during the Watts riots using guns to fight the LAPD. And so there are like,

Speaker 23 and this, this is kind of, there's a, there's pushes, this is what starts some of the momentum for gun control in California comes from this. Right.

Speaker 23 But more than that, what the NRA looks at is they see these armed black people carrying out an uprising. And they're like, well,

Speaker 23 we can take away focus on guns and on legislating guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people, right?

Speaker 23 And that's what Harlan Carter realizes is like, well,

Speaker 23 this is the business the NRA needs to be in. And also, like,

Speaker 23 this is the business of like arming the police, arguing that, like, because that's where, you know, that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts, right?

Speaker 23 It's the idea that like you need to, the police need to have more and more weapons to deal with today's like dangerous, heavily armed criminals, right? Yeah.

Speaker 23 And also the, you know, guns don't kill people.

Speaker 23 This racial group that I do not like kills people. Yes, yes, which is an argument you still see made today.

Speaker 23 There's just a fucking Republican congressional candidate who was arguing that, like, America doesn't have a gun violence problem, black people have a gun violence, or something like that, right?

Speaker 23 Like, this is an old argument, and Harlan Carter is the one who first figures out how to make it, right?

Speaker 23 So, two years after the Watts riots, the members of the Black Panther Party start assembling and openly carrying firearms, which is lawful at the time.

Speaker 23 They would assemble with guns and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure that cops did not abuse members of the public.

Speaker 23 One could argue this is in some ways closer to an originalist interpretation of the second amendment

Speaker 23 than anything today.

Speaker 23 Now, their activism scares the fuck out of white people. And again,

Speaker 23 white people who are

Speaker 23 not pro-gun, right? Right.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 we're going to chat about all of that.

Speaker 23 And we're going to chat about my favorite president, Matt. I know your favorite president, Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 23 Star of bedtime for Bonzo. Love him.

Speaker 23 Star of. The monkey movie.

Speaker 23 Those McCarthy hearings.

Speaker 23 We owe Ronald Reagan a lot, including the beginning of the career of my favorite musician, John Hinkley Jr. Oh, he's so good, dude.

Speaker 23 You got to get his mixtapes.

Speaker 23 I like his early stuff better, but he's still really

Speaker 23 cranking out some solid things, you know? Yeah, his early stuff is

Speaker 23 unbelievable. Unbelievable.
Right.

Speaker 23 Number one with a bullet.

Speaker 23 Here's our ads.

Speaker 23 Oh, we're back.

Speaker 23 And, you know, I just wanted to give a special statement from our sponsors that they completely support the career of John Hinkley Jr. Yep.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 I don't know. Sophie, how do we?

Speaker 23 You're shaking your head. Probably shouldn't.
Probably not good. No, it's just a boring bit.
It's a boring bit. You think it's boring that John Hinkley Jr.
is making a comeback tour now.

Speaker 23 Yeah, he's touring and he's doing it.

Speaker 23 He's got a guitar and it says, this machine almost kills fascists.

Speaker 23 Pretty close to killing a fascist.

Speaker 23 This machine shot the sight of an armored limousine with, and it bounced and managed to penetrate a fascist chest cavity.

Speaker 23 This machine loves Jodi Foster and almost killed her fascist. Yeah, this machine was very

Speaker 23 creepy. She did say she was impressed.
She should be. I mean, it is impressive, right? Yeah.
Good for him, man.

Speaker 23 I don't know. Mixed bag, whatever.

Speaker 23 Probably enough John Hinkins Jr. jokes.
Mixed bag.

Speaker 23 Look, he did shoot Ronald Reagan. He did.
Unarguably. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. All right, Evans.

Speaker 23 So.

Speaker 23 Two years.

Speaker 23 So you get the Black Panthers start assembling with guns in public, and this scares the shit out of both kind of the progressive liberal crowd in California and conservatives in California.

Speaker 23 And so all of California gets on board the idea of banning the open carry of firearms.

Speaker 23 And the NRA happily endorses the measure.

Speaker 23 The Black Panthers assemble with their guns in the Capitol. On one of the last days, it would remain legal to do so.

Speaker 23 It's described in local news as an invasion, even though, again, it was people legally protesting in a way that was not,

Speaker 23 again, whatever.

Speaker 23 Fighting for the exact rights that the same, you know, like white wackadoos do now. But again, fucking Harlan Carter, totally on board with criminalizing this.

Speaker 23 As is, again, Ronald Reagan is the governor at the moment. Governor of California.
Reagan's totally against.

Speaker 23 So, yeah, some of these guys get arrested during their protest in Sacramento as they are handcuffed.

Speaker 23 Bobby Seal read from their executive mandate, which protested, quote, the racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless.

Speaker 23 The measure passed, and it laid the groundwork for the extensive gun control that the state of California now enjoys. To this day, those laws primarily impact poor black people.

Speaker 23 Rich white folks can acquire concealed weapon permits

Speaker 23 very easily.

Speaker 23 You just have to be able to have a second home in a place like San Bernardino, and you can get the license to carry a concealed gun in the state of California.

Speaker 23 They can also purchase to so California, one of the things that they have is a handgun roster, right?

Speaker 23 So the only handguns you can buy in the state of California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state.

Speaker 23 However, you can bring handguns into the state if you move there, as long as they don't have an illegal, you know, as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than a 10-round capacity, you can bring those into the state and then you can have them or you can sell them to people through an FFL.

Speaker 23 And if you're a police officer, you can buy any kind of gun you want and you can sell it to whoever you want.

Speaker 23 So there is a massive industry in California of police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in the state of California to buy unless a police officer sells them to you for twice the normal price.

Speaker 23 Anyway, a whole bunch of sketchy shit happens. Yeah, it's a nice side hustle for the cops, you know? I mean, because, hey, there was a gig economy back then, too.

Speaker 23 A lot of us are Uber drivers slash gun salesmen now. So I get it.
And it's one of those things.

Speaker 23 There's a number of things about, including like waiting periods and stuff in California that there's a strong argument to be made in favor of.

Speaker 23 But this is where a lot of it starts. And it never entirely gets divorced

Speaker 23 from this thing of like, again, you can look at the same thing in the 1934 NFA of like, well, no, we want to, we don't want rich people to be affected, right?

Speaker 23 Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway.

Speaker 23 You know, they banned, what is that, the Saturday night specials, like any like. Oh, we're getting to that.
That's where the handgun. That's where the handgun roster starts, though.

Speaker 23 Yes, with the Saturday Night Special. Yeah.
But

Speaker 23 we'll get to that. Don't worry.

Speaker 23 So Harlan Carter's support of an individual right to bear arms was not out of principled belief that all Americans deserve to defend themselves or out of a desire to even check governmental power.

Speaker 23 Again, he militarized the Border Patrol.

Speaker 23 Instead, he believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this.

Speaker 23 In backing California's open carry ban, he was engaging in an intelligent strategy. You draw attention away from guns, and you focus on who is carrying them.

Speaker 23 This is the origin of the quote, guns don't kill people, people don't kill people argument. But when Harlan made it, the people were explicitly

Speaker 23 coded as black. And I'm going to quote from Epic Magazine now.

Speaker 23 The same year, American Riflemen published an editorial titled, Who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like Watts as mob violence. Who then supports the police?

Speaker 23 Who then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery and pillaging?

Speaker 23 It read, with home front safeguards spotty and uncertain, the armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer. Right?

Speaker 23 Nothing is more

Speaker 23 stabilizing for a community than a bunch of armed white people. Well, and he's very much making the Rittenhouse argument here, right?

Speaker 23 The armed citizen supports the police.

Speaker 23 The Black Panthers are making what I might argue is more of an originalist interpretation, which is the armed citizen protects the community from government overreach. That's the Black Panthers.

Speaker 23 He's saying the armed citizen aids the police in enforcing white supremacy, right? That's the argument being made by the NRA here. Yeah, yeah.
It's funny because, like, you know,

Speaker 23 obviously, you know, you do have your, you know, right-wing insurrectionist militias and shit like that. But for the most part, what is being supported is like arming the suburbs.

Speaker 23 You know, and anyone who supports the police should be armed, and anyone who in any way is against it shouldn't be. And

Speaker 23 that is,

Speaker 23 you know, yeah. It is a problem.

Speaker 23 Yeah, it's a cause of issues. It's a problem that deserves a more complex series of solutions than tend to get suggested

Speaker 23 in debates over this. But that's a separate topic.

Speaker 23 So after RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. are murdered in 1968, Senator Thomas Dodd reintroduces the Gun Control Act to Congress.
This had been put up through it for it a couple of times.

Speaker 23 He puts it through again in 1968 after those assassinations. And the Gun Control Act is intended to ban the interstate sale of guns,

Speaker 23 ban their sale to children, to convicted felons, and because of some bigotry, mental defectives, right?

Speaker 23 So again, like all of these laws, there's like, okay, you don't want people to just be able to like ship guns through a mail order catalog across the country. I can get on board with that.

Speaker 23 Right. Probably shouldn't be selling them to children or, you know, convicted.
Although I have issues with like who becomes a felon, right?

Speaker 23 Like if somebody's got a violent history, sure, that makes sense. You don't want somebody who's like a convicted rapist buying guns.
And then like, and mental defectives.

Speaker 23 Well, how the hell do you define that? Now, now

Speaker 23 I've got some concerns.

Speaker 23 But.

Speaker 23 This law, again, there's a lot that's very reasonable in here, and the NRA rallies against it in huge numbers.

Speaker 23 Harlan Carter and his partner in the, and they are not in, they don't have an issue with the mental defectives part, right? That's not the thing that's a problem to them.

Speaker 23 This is the first law that causes the NRA to get like hugely political.

Speaker 23 And Harlan Carter, again, there's this war still within the NRA that hasn't been resolved between the old guard and the new guard.

Speaker 23 Carter, because he has a lot of influence in American Rifleman magazine,

Speaker 23 he enlists like the people that he's been seating the NRA with, these New Guard folks, to start like coming up with a series of blistering blistering editorials in American Rifleman magazine that are urging people to write letters to Congress.

Speaker 23 This is the first real concerted lobbying campaign, but he's and I'm trying to figure out what which part of it it is. Is it the children part? Is it the fact that they're like, no, children is

Speaker 23 neutral, racially neutral? So they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We can't do that or what is it?

Speaker 23 A big part of it, this is an attempting to establish, like, if you're buying a gun, you have to do it through, there has to be like this, this legal process.

Speaker 23 Like, it can't just be a dude has a gun and I get it, right?

Speaker 23 And that's, that's the big, that's the center of the problem, right? Is the idea that the federal government is now going to be involved in hair, like

Speaker 23 in all legal gun purchases, which is obviously not what the Gun Control Act does.

Speaker 23 There's these things called face-to-face sales in a lot of states where if you're not a gun dealer, you can sell a gun to anybody. without there being any kind of a background check.

Speaker 23 That is still the law in a lot of the country.

Speaker 23 But most gun purchases you have to do, you have to fill out what's called a Form 4473, which is, and you have to have like a federal background check, right?

Speaker 23 And the government gets involved, right? That's that's the thing that they're scared about.

Speaker 23 And again, you can't divorce this from like the John Birch Society, from all of these panics about communism,

Speaker 23 about like, you know, the government getting increasingly centralized.

Speaker 23 And I guess you might argue that that's also closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 23 But anyway,

Speaker 23 so

Speaker 23 the NRA,

Speaker 23 you know, Harlan Carter urges, like, helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against the Gun Control Act. And it's not popular with many of the folks running the NRA at the time.

Speaker 23 And again, the way they've done things before, Congress would suggest a bill.

Speaker 23 The NRA would usually have some issues with it, but they would like make those issues clear, then they'd sit down and like hash something out, as they did in 1934.

Speaker 23 So the vice president of the NRA, a guy named Franklin Orth, figures that's what we're going to do, right?

Speaker 23 He doesn't want the organization to take like a really public political stance stance because that's going to permanently alienate it from like one party, right?

Speaker 23 And he doesn't, that's not his goal with the NRA. He doesn't want it to be like a Republican or a Democratic thing.
Short-sighted idiot. Yeah.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 for what would be the last time, because again, Orth and his people are still in charge of the NRA broadly. The NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach a compromise on the bill.

Speaker 23 And they, you know, they alter it and whatnot to be a little bit,

Speaker 23 whatever. Orth describes it as a law the sportsmen of America can live live with.

Speaker 23 The fact that anything had been passed at all enrages the base that Carter has put together, and they respond with a flood of hate mail so voluminous it nearly makes Orth resign.

Speaker 23 It becomes increasingly clear that the old guard did not speak for the increasingly radicalized masses of the NRA.

Speaker 23 And these, again, these people are, they're frightened of black mobs, of the Watts riots, right?

Speaker 23 They also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys with like fears of communist infiltration and invasion. This is all kind of coming together as part of it.

Speaker 23 And obviously, a lot of the right in this time sees the Watts riots as like it must have been the Soviet Union, you know, right? 100%.

Speaker 23 There's

Speaker 23 like a synonymous, like, you know, any kind of black uprising synonymous with communism at this point. Yeah.

Speaker 23 So, kind of, what you're seeing here is the radical chunk of the NRA doesn't want, like, wants to oppose any, like, this law under all conditions, right?

Speaker 23 There's no way in which they'll be okay with this.

Speaker 23 And they, they lose the fight to the old guard, who works with the government to pass this law. But

Speaker 23 the new guard, I guess new guard isn't really a term, but like the Harlan Carter's faction

Speaker 23 starts to become more dominant as a result of this because it pisses off so many people and because

Speaker 23 it's so much easier to electrify people with like threats of the communist government is coming to like take your guns to stop you have to be able to protect your family against these dangerous black that that's easier to rile people up for than we should work with the government to come to like sensible

Speaker 23 accommodations, right? Let's compromise. That's not a selling point, right?

Speaker 23 So because of what Carter builds here over this fight, membership in the NRA soars to over a million people for the first time in the association's history.

Speaker 23 So this is part of what scares the old guard and makes them silo Harlan Carter off to the ILA, which is the NRA's first registered lobby.

Speaker 23 And when they make this lobbying group for him to run, they don't like fund it. So he's going to have to raise his own money to do anything.

Speaker 23 And their hope is that, like, this guy is dangerous, but we can't kick him out.

Speaker 23 So, if we give him this lobbying organization, but don't give him any money, he's going to have to spend all of his time raising funds and he's not going to be able to like cause any trouble. Sure.

Speaker 23 This proves to be a bad strategy because Harlan Carter invents the concept of right-wing fundraising.

Speaker 23 Damn it. Yes.

Speaker 23 The first podcaster.

Speaker 23 Yeah, he's the first guy to figure out how everything everything is going to work for right-wing fundraising in the future. And he does it because he figures out

Speaker 23 uses computers, right? Like, that's the thing he figures out is going to be critical. And I'm going to quote from Alina Buckley again.

Speaker 23 Their computer could print 1,100 lines per minute, letting Carter's team produce thousands of letters addressed to members over a 24-hour period.

Speaker 23 It was the latest iteration of a powerful tool, direct mail.

Speaker 23 The medium had reached prominence by the early 1970s, when it was first pioneered by Richard Vigueri, who, as a campaign worker, had copied down the names and addresses of people who had donated to Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential bid.

Speaker 23 With that list of Republicans and their addresses, as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote, Vigari had developed a way for conservatives to reach the people most likely to become coveted single-issue voters.

Speaker 23 With the right messaging, Carter hoped to use the tool to drum up support for ILA's legislative work. Vigari himself collaborated with Carter to build their database.

Speaker 23 ILA did all of this under the noses and the shoes of the NRA executives, gaining ground for a hardened line against gun control.

Speaker 23 I'm building an organization capable of public persuasion, not only in Washington, but in the states, Carter said at the time.

Speaker 23 We don't know the best way to reach all the people yet, but of course, we shall.

Speaker 23 So, goddammit. He built a mailing list, and

Speaker 23 he's one of the very first people to do this

Speaker 23 and is arguably the most successful of anyone in this period at doing it.

Speaker 23 And yeah, that's where we're going to leave things for today. But first, Matt, you got a mailing list you want to

Speaker 23 call Instagram.

Speaker 23 You can find me there

Speaker 23 at MattLeap Jokes. Please follow me.
And also,

Speaker 23 hey, if you like the Sopranos, listen to Pod Yourself a Gun. It is a rewatch podcast where me and Vince Miancini talk about every episode.

Speaker 23 We just wrapped it up, and it is the greatest and only Sopranos podcast in the world. And I would love for y'all.
to check it out and tell yourself. Well, that's wonderful.

Speaker 23 I would like to use this time to get everyone to get involved in my fundamentalist right-wing mailing list, NACA, the National Anti-Quartering Association. We're Third Amendment fundamentalists, Matt.

Speaker 23 Not only do I think that soldiers shouldn't be quartered in houses, I don't think they should be quartered anywhere.

Speaker 23 I think soldiers should be kept awake constantly with heavy doses of amphetamines for the duration of the time that they're serving. No quartering of soldiers anywhere, not even on military bases.

Speaker 23 Keep them in the sea or in the sky on drugs at all times. that's the naca line yeah so i love that dude yeah find find us online give us your email send us money and uh

Speaker 23 actblue.com slash anti-cornering sis no quartering nowhere

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Speaker 23 What's Epstein, my bar virus?

Speaker 23 Why was that your intro? Why was that your intro? Sophie, as with all of our podcasts, this show is sponsored by the Epstein bar virus. It is not, but okay.
Have you had mono?

Speaker 23 No? Well, maybe try it. Maybe try mono.
Hell yeah. It's good.
It might cause multiple sclerosis later in life. There's all sorts of things that mono.
Hard to tell. Hard to tell.

Speaker 23 You will know if you had it if you ever take the Epstein Bar exam. That's right.
Which is a test.

Speaker 23 You get the rest of the joke. You can do it for free on this podcast if you sign up for a week of food.

Speaker 23 We love the Epstein bar virus.

Speaker 23 You just like to make our poor editor bleep things. I do.
I do. It's fun.

Speaker 23 I'm so sorry for him, Chris. Well, once upon a time when we still went to the office, somebody dinged my car.
Maybe. I'm not 100% sure, but I've decided it was our editor.

Speaker 23 It was not Chris. It was.
You don't know that, Sophie. You don't know that he didn't come in.
I can't prove it. You don't know that he didn't do it.

Speaker 23 I do. Do you want to know how I know that? I've seen his dogs.
His dogs are honest. He would never do that.
Well,

Speaker 23 it was the, it was the, you know who it was. You're on blast, Chris.
You know who it was.

Speaker 23 And I don't know who it was. It does wrench us back onto topic, which is Harlan Carter and the birth of the national.

Speaker 23 Well, not the birth of, but the rebirth of the like this is it's it's like a racist, you know, how Gandalf is like Gandalf the Gray, and then he gets reborn as Gandalf the White after fighting a ballrog.

Speaker 23 The NRA gets rebirthed as a white supremacist organization after fighting the ballrog of the Black Panthers assembling legally with guns to check police power. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 It may have lost the threat a little bit. No, I got you.
You shall not pass legislation. Legislation.

Speaker 23 All right, we figured it out. We got it.
We got it back there. It got there.
It got there.

Speaker 23 See, people, this is how the sausage gets made.

Speaker 23 So disgustingly. Now, we're talking about the NRA.
And particularly, we have this over the Gun Control Act, this first big clash between Harlan Carter's people and the old guard.

Speaker 23 And the old guard wins, right?

Speaker 23 Because they're still, broadly speaking, in control, but it becomes that like they kind of sack, like in the course of winning, it becomes clear that that an awful lot of, perhaps most NRA members are actually not on board with the direction they want.

Speaker 23 They are really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards the Second Amendment.

Speaker 23 And while Harlan Carter was busy building the bones of a fundraising and lobbying machine that would dominate conservative and really, in a lot of ways, American politics for the next half century, the old guard were wistfully looking back to the organization's past as a sporting association and figured maybe we could go back to that, right?

Speaker 23 And so they are the conservatives. Harlan Carter is the radical, right?

Speaker 23 Politics kind of leaves a bad taste in these people's mouths because, again, they're all aristocrats, right?

Speaker 23 They're all like

Speaker 23 they're kind of like Joe Biden. They want to have all of their friends, right?

Speaker 23 Like on both sides of things. They don't want things to get too political because that gets nasty and it reduces the number of people who can give you money.

Speaker 23 So in 1973, the old guard had purchased land in Colorado, and they wanted to turn it initially into a shooting range, which is a pretty normal thing for the NRA to do.

Speaker 23 But in 1976, they decided to go with a grander plan, the National Rifle Association Outdoor Center.

Speaker 23 This was going to be a massive compound dedicated to classes on like woodcrafting and wilderness, you know, stuff and conservation research.

Speaker 23 There's supposed to be like scientific research done there and also other sporting skills.

Speaker 23 And of course, there would be a shooting range there and people would be able to hunt on the land, but like guns were not the primary purpose, right?

Speaker 23 It was like a whole outdoor recreation center for the NRA.

Speaker 23 And this was in line with they wanted to expand the organization because that's obviously there's more money and whatnot, but they didn't want to like

Speaker 23 hone in on guns entirely. They wanted to be like, well, we could be like the, we could be like the American go-to organization for like outdoor, you know, sporting and stuff.

Speaker 23 So in order to help them kind of make this shift, right? Because this is at this point, that is different from the NRA's initial vision, as is Harlan Carter's vision, right?

Speaker 23 So they're both trying to move it it in different directions, right? It's become clear that like this thing the NRA had been isn't going to continue.

Speaker 23 And the old guard has a vision and the new guard has another one.

Speaker 23 And so the old guard hires a PR firm, the Orem Group, to help them drum up funding to make this facility a reality because they need tens of millions of dollars to build this thing. It's a pretty

Speaker 23 impressive vision.

Speaker 23 And they hope that they see Carter's built this like massive fundraising arm. He's getting all these people organized on behalf of his Second Amendment absolutism.

Speaker 23 And they want this PR firm to help them like take back like power from Harlan Carter and like get people on their side.

Speaker 23 Now, here's like, yeah, you know, Second Amendment absolutism is fun, but what if we built a rec center? Yeah, what if we had a rec center for rich people?

Speaker 23 You can see what this is kind of like how you've got like those. Those like old political ghouls in

Speaker 23 the Democratic Party and like the parts of the Republican Party that turned into the Lincoln Project who opposed Trump with like very slick political ads that did nothing, whereas Trump just got people angry and that works a lot better than like

Speaker 23 anyway. This is a version of that same fight, right?

Speaker 23 And part of how you could tell the Auram group was not going to succeed in their goals is that their founder, like the guy they're named after, their founder, is this wealthy New York philanthropist whose most prominent clients before the NRA were Planned Parenthood and the NAACP.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 this guy maybe doesn't get the base of the NRA and it's going to have trouble speaking to them, right? Yeah, that's going to be a problem.

Speaker 23 That might be a problem. Yeah, I mean, it's one thing if it's just like, hey, we have two different branches of conservatism or whatever, but

Speaker 23 no, these guys are going to be politically and morally opposed with each other.

Speaker 23 It's not going to work out well. It's not going to work out well for them.

Speaker 23 It may be such a bad idea that literally anyone could have called it.

Speaker 23 But the NRA bigwigs, they bring this guy on the team, and his goal and his organization's goal is to chart like a safe new course for the NRA in which they kind of keep out of politics.

Speaker 23 And this is in part because like they want to build this new facility. You're not going to get $30 million in 1970s money

Speaker 23 by hewing to a hard political line, right? So they succeed in roping in a bunch of big donors from all across major American business interests.

Speaker 23 They get Bill Spencer, who's like the second guy at Citibank. They get Ezra Taft Binson, who's the highest apostle of the Mormon church.

Speaker 23 They get a bunch of oil and gas industry bigwigs, all of whom agree to like start putting money into this project.

Speaker 23 So, in order to like celebrate that they've found enough rich old dudes to fund this thing, the NRA sets up a big party on their land in Colorado for all of these rich guys.

Speaker 23 And they basically host like a multi-millionaire summer camp. People are like camping in their private jets on the land.

Speaker 23 Like, they park their private jets there and like sleep on them and then they hunt and fish in the daytime. I love it.
Super relatable.

Speaker 23 Exactly, right? You see, again, Carter, this just makes it really easy for Carter to be like, well, these guys don't have your interests at heart because they don't, right?

Speaker 23 It's not defending Carter to say that, like, these guys don't give a shit about the average person who might want to join the NRA because most people who join the NRA are not millionaires with private jets.

Speaker 23 Right, exactly.

Speaker 23 They're missing the entire cultural aspect of it at this point. Yeah, and so this is not going to work out well for them.

Speaker 23 Right. So there's some backlash.

Speaker 23 And Alina Buckley describes kind of the old guard's vision of the association's future as, quote, one in which shooting accompanied frontier abundance, funded by corporations that had long bankrolled conservative causes, one in which guns were a reflection of American might, cowboy-like to be sure, but still with a military-like formality, rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal power as a threat.

Speaker 23 So again, the NRA, this is the attitude the NRA works with the federal government in order to ensure this sporting culture and in order to ensure a degree of military readiness, which is basically back to their old principles, as opposed to the NRA is an association that enables individual Americans to be vigilantes, right?

Speaker 23 Right. Which is more what Carter's pushing.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
The fun, the fun type of guy. Carter, the guy who was a vigilante, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 So while the old guard are hobnobbing with the great and good, Harlan Carter is making a strategic alliance with a gun industry journalist, a guy named Neil Knox.

Speaker 23 Now, Knox had been educated at a Christian college in Abilene, Texas. And the fact that he comes from Abilene is a red flag.

Speaker 23 Oh, yeah. Just in general, don't go to Abilene.
I will.

Speaker 23 No, it's almost as bad as Brady. So

Speaker 23 anyway, sorry, Abilene. I wish I knew anything about Texas.

Speaker 23 This is just Texas lore. You have to do some of the things that you come from Dallas

Speaker 23 as I do.

Speaker 23 You have to shit on every other city in Texas

Speaker 23 so that people don't notice how terrible Dallas is. Right, right.

Speaker 23 So I like to throw a lot of flack Houston's way in order to ignore that their food is better.

Speaker 23 It's whatever. So he goes to Abilene College, and every social find on Neil Knox will note that he marries his wife because she was the only girl on campus who kept a rifle in her dorm room.

Speaker 23 Well, hey, you know what? That's love, right? Like he finds his, he finds this person. Good for him.
Yeah, he was interested in safe sex. Am I right?

Speaker 23 Oh, boy. We're having fun.

Speaker 23 I mean, it is, this is like. Getting into like how different some things are in the country, but like at the elementary school where I went to, it was not uncommon for like

Speaker 23 people, particularly like teachers, to have like guns in their cars in the parking lot.

Speaker 23 And at the high school, like kids would regularly have their guns in their cars in the parking lot during like hunting season and stuff. Well, it's like they're hunting rifles, right?

Speaker 23 Cause they're like,

Speaker 23 this is in like Idabel, Oklahoma. Like it's not uncommon during the season, like you go straight from there to like whatever blind you've got.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 So again, this is like different, different time.

Speaker 23 But also Neil Knox is a very modern kind of gun guy who is going to help make the NRA into like the gun culture war organization organization that it becomes. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 Sounds like the kind of origin story of like the first guy horny for guns that's going to be normal. Like he's going to normalize being horny.

Speaker 23 He's going to normalize being gun horny, but also with conspiracy baked into it, right? That's one of the keys, right? It's not just like an appreciation for guns.

Speaker 23 It's an appreciation for guns within this like conspiratorial milieu that Neil Knox is like, he's the A guy on this. Yes, it's a, it's a, yeah, he's, uh, he's read the Turner diaries and shit.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I mean, he he would have been the kind of guy to help write them. Um not that he was, because that's a different set of guys.

Speaker 23 Although they are kind of connected by the Goldwater campaign, but that's another story. Um,

Speaker 23 as the Dallas Morning News writes, Knox was, yeah, I'm just going to quote them walking through this guy's background.

Speaker 23 In the mid-1960s, Knox worked as a reporter and editor with newspapers in Vernon and Wichita Falls before getting a job as founding editor of Gun Week, a newspaper covering firearms issues of the day.

Speaker 23 From his base in Arizona, the bearded gun evangelist spent the next 40 years railing against gun control and pitting himself against NRA leaders he saw as too compromising.

Speaker 23 In the 1960s and 70s, the gun industry and the NRA were inclined towards pragmatism, said Jeff Knox, who's his kid from his home in Buckeye, Arizona, and willing to make concessions.

Speaker 23 The elder Knox believed strongly that the Second Amendment was absolute, and he especially didn't like the idea of registering guns, which to him raised the specter of a dictator confiscating all arms and subduing the citizenry, Jeff Knox said.

Speaker 23 At one point in the mid-1990s, Neil Knox even suggested the assassinations of Kennedy and King might have been staged to build support for gun control.

Speaker 23 So, Knox is the start of specifically the strain of the American right and American gun culture that kind of culminates in Alex Jones, right? Yeah, right.

Speaker 23 And he's not super big about pushing that, but he is like the first kind of prominent voice to start talking about like these, these, these shooting attacks

Speaker 23 specifically for gun control. That's one of the big things that Neil Knox introduces into American culture, at least helps to introduce.
I'm not going to claim that he was entirely on his own there.

Speaker 23 But he's like the vanguard of that kind of guy who winds up doing the Sandy Hook conspiracy shit later on.

Speaker 23 And it's worth noting, though, that wow, when Knox partners with Harlan Carter, again, this is 76, 77. So he has not yet started pushing conspiracies outright.

Speaker 23 But you can see kind of where he goes is where he and Carter help to lead a lot of the gun culture.

Speaker 23 And yeah,

Speaker 23 so these guys, the old guard, see Carter and Knox and see them as like

Speaker 23 kind of unhinged, but even more than that, they're not primarily objecting necessarily to their goals as much as the fact that they're so extreme that it's going to take away funding, right?

Speaker 23 It's going to reduce the NRA's ability to attract a lot of like people to give them money for this. Right.
It was a Republican establishment during like Trump's run.

Speaker 23 They were just like, listen, we agree all Mexicans are rapists, but you're not going to get the nomination by saying it. And it's like, want to bet? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 23 Like, that's kind of like you, they're arguing, like, these people are too extreme. The NRA will, like, die out if their kind takes over.

Speaker 23 And Harlan Carter's like, oh, motherfucker, you want to see how to make the NRA make a lot of money. I will show you some things.
He's about to.

Speaker 23 So one Friday, November of 1976, the head of the NRA purged 80 staff members loyal to Carter, right? They fire everybody with like very little warning.

Speaker 23 Because again, Carter spent years years getting his Border Patrol guys in there. So they try to get rid of all these people.
And what becomes known later is the Weekend Massacre.

Speaker 23 And Harlan, it's the only massacre that

Speaker 23 Harlan resigns from his position in protest.

Speaker 23 And Alina Buckley continues, quote, and Gun Week, Hand Loader, and Rifle, all publications Knox had once edited, writers began reporting rumors about a shake-up at headquarters.

Speaker 23 The Orem Group's report on the outdoor center had been leaked, and gun group leaders around the country bristled at its language. And this is from the Orem Group's report.

Speaker 23 In the public mind, the NRA's current image is based almost totally on its supposed opposition to any form of gun control. This public image constitutes a weakness for fundraising.

Speaker 23 A new piece of, again, very bad at being at their job, by the way.

Speaker 23 A new piece of information had gotten out, too, via a brochure sent in the mail to some members.

Speaker 23 The executive committee was considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs, not far from Rattan, where the NRA could focus more squarely on its sports shooting ties.

Speaker 23 Regional gun groups began receiving concerned notes from their members.

Speaker 23 The Shooters Committee of Political Education, SCOPE, based in New York, wrote a letter to Rich protesting the NRA's Regent Board appointees and to let him know that they would advise their membership to write in Neil Knox, among several others, as board candidate at the annual meeting in Cincinnati.

Speaker 23 In the American Rifleman, an unsigned editorial appeared. There have been charges that the National Rifle Association is being subverted, it read, in abandoning its fight against gun control.

Speaker 23 So,

Speaker 23 this, uh, and you see here, they've built, in their partnership, Knox and Carter have built a very effective

Speaker 23 both fundraising and propaganda wing that is, they're building a moral panic over this, right?

Speaker 23 In a very modern way, in a way that is

Speaker 23 modern because this is like the fucking, this is part of like the blueprint of like everything the right will do in the future.

Speaker 23 So for the next couple of weeks, Knox and Carter call every other NRA lifetime member they can.

Speaker 23 In brief, like, you when you have an organization like the NRA, every year you have to have a meeting and you have to do like voting at that meeting and stuff.

Speaker 23 And like, there's people who are the actual like board and stuff, but also the lifetime members get to vote.

Speaker 23 And so the board is in control unless you can get like enough of those members to vote on measures that would like replace the leadership. Right.

Speaker 23 So, and they didn't, they had never worked. No one had ever really tried to do this before.
The fact that the members get to vote had kind of been like.

Speaker 23 like stock options voting where it's like yeah i mean the the random citizens who control 20 of the company's stock get a vote but like our CEO controls 45% and his best friend controls 20%, so it doesn't matter what they say, right?

Speaker 23 Right. That was the thinking, but obviously the NRA isn't like a publicly traded company.
You just, each of these people has a vote.

Speaker 23 And if you can whip them all into shape, you could actually wrest control of the organization away from the old guard, which is what Knox and Carter start planning to do.

Speaker 23 Now, there's a lot of politicking that goes on here. You can read about it in detail in Alina Buckley's article.

Speaker 23 One thing I think that's worth noting is that the whole event has something of an early Trumpy vibe.

Speaker 23 The folks Carter lines up to back their plan to take over the NRA saw the old guard as out-of-touch aristocrats, which they were. They framed themselves as like Paul Revere types, right?

Speaker 23 They're founding fathers, right? They're fighting a revolution against an unjust aristocracy. Yeah.
One person who was present.

Speaker 23 They're all doing the cosplay now. It all begins with the don't tread on me flags and the three-pointed fucking hats.
Yes.

Speaker 23 And one person who was present later recalled some members were angry enough to bring rope tar and feathers to cincinnati um

Speaker 23 yeah uh that's their obsession with it's like oh the tea party a tar and feathering it's just like they just have an obsession with this like patriotic forms of like you know like old style larping it's just just the same fucking

Speaker 23 I mean, this gets into a broader issue that actually is, is present in different forms everywhere, which is that like

Speaker 23 everyone has their types of violence that are like good and traditional and okay, and their types of violence that are so black people breaking a bunch of windows during a riot or like

Speaker 23 flipping a cop car and lighting it on fire. That is not okay.
That's horrifying. That's

Speaker 23 evil, violence, you know, end of civilization.

Speaker 23 Tarring and feathering a guy trying to like raise taxes, like literally melting a man's skin off in order to stop him from like getting the taxes that will pay for a road that's traditional right yeah that's that's yeah it's allowed you know it's uh i mean it burning their skin off and then the feathers is just so they look like a chicken just the most horrifying joke that you can possibly think of yeah there was like that john adams uh hbo series with paul giamatti oh yeah yeah they had like a tarring and feathering in it and it it was like the first time I was like, oh, yeah, that's incredibly violent.

Speaker 23 Really, really violent, actually, to tar and feather a person. I thought it was just like, hey, we're going to make you look like a funny chicken, like a pie in the face.

Speaker 23 I put it on the same level as a pie in the face, but it's, um, no, it's not. It's pretty bad.

Speaker 23 No, and it's like, um, I mean, everyone, there's a degree to which this is very common across the political spectrum because on one, you get like whenever people suggest like, well, the cops should

Speaker 23 confiscate this or the cops should like do that, it's like, well, okay,

Speaker 23 what happens when police confiscate things? Like, what does that look like violence-wise? You know,

Speaker 23 and it's, it's because, like, I don't know, everyone's got, it's, it's a, it's a,

Speaker 23 it's, I mean, it's a common political tactic, right? To frame the violence you want to do or you want to have the government do as not violence because it's being done by the government.

Speaker 23 It's like, you know, when people do a panic about like drug dealers sneaking fentanyl into things and their solution to that is have the DEA raid more people.

Speaker 23 It's like, well, the DEA kill people too, too, you know?

Speaker 23 Yeah, yeah, completely.

Speaker 23 I don't know. This is just what people do.

Speaker 23 Anyway,

Speaker 23 so

Speaker 23 Knox

Speaker 23 takes point on the actual day of the convention. He's the one who's actually whipping votes at the NRA convention to propose a series of bylaw changes.

Speaker 23 Using the support base Carter had built, he gets them to vote in a defense of the Second Amendment to the NRA's mission for the first time, right?

Speaker 23 So he's like, this is the first time they actually add, because the NRA, like they have a mission statement or or whatever as an organization, the first thing they do is they add like Second Amendment, you know, like we are advocating for like the, you know, this interpretation of the Second Amendment to that.

Speaker 23 The next thing they do is they block the sale of the NRA headquarters in D.C.

Speaker 23 And they block the development of the outdoor center. So they put it into this plan.

Speaker 23 And then

Speaker 23 Carter or

Speaker 23 Knox brings up a guy named Bob Kukla, who's one of Carter's people who's still in the NRA. When Carter resigns in protest, Kukla takes over the lobbying lobbying arm.

Speaker 23 And he's apparently, I guess, the old guard had thought he was trustworthy, but he secretly records one of their managing committee meetings. And they play this in front of the crowd.

Speaker 23 And in the tape, you can hear the current head of the NRA and the other members of the old guard criticizing Kukla for, quote, going to war every time someone mentions gun control.

Speaker 23 He pulled a Project Veritas out there. He does.
He Veritas. Again, these guys are really building the playbook that's going to be used everywhere, well outside of guns.
God damn.

Speaker 23 So following this, this, Knox and his voters strip the board and managing committee of power.

Speaker 23 And basically, again, this is there, you can go into a lot more detail about how they do this all legislatively.

Speaker 23 But by the end of things, the old guard are no longer in charge of the NRA, and Harlan Carter is the new executive vice president. Damn.

Speaker 23 At 3.30. Yeah.
Yeah. They do it.
They do it fucking street style.

Speaker 23 And at 3.30 a.m., Carter takes to the stage to give his first speech to his newly conquered NRA. You're America's greatest people, my friends.
Don't ever forget that you are.

Speaker 23 You have afforded the NRA this wonderful, historically important reaction of yours to the way the association has been going, to the way you want it to be, to the way it ought to be.

Speaker 23 And if I have anything to do with it, you are going to win because you are the NRA.

Speaker 23 Fuck. So

Speaker 23 you did it. He did it.
Very Trumpy speech. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Yeah. He did his Trump speech and he took over the NRA.
And

Speaker 23 I imagine now

Speaker 23 people are going to start falling in line.

Speaker 23 Yeah, well, the NRA is going to make a lot of people fall in line, and we're going to talk about what they do. But first,

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You can use an adelattle. Yeah, ninja stars.
Ninja stars for sure. Look, they can't stop you.
Yeah. Yeah.
A bow staff. Literally any weapon the ninja turtles use.

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Speaker 23 Oh, we're back.

Speaker 23 So immediately after carrying out his coup, Harlan Carter sets to work remaking the NRA in his own image. One of his first hires is a guy you may have heard of, Matt, Wayne Lapierre.
Ah, yes. Ah, yes.

Speaker 23 Good old Wayne. There we go.
W. Big Wayne.
Yeah, Big Lapierre.

Speaker 23 Pepe Le Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew.

Speaker 23 Yeah,

Speaker 23 it's not French, but, you know, it's

Speaker 23 probably somewhere along the lines. Somewhere along the lines.
The point is, Pepe Le Pew, Pew Pew Pew is a very good name.

Speaker 23 That was a good joke. You should be proud of it.
So by 1986, Lapierre is running the NRA's entire lobbying arm, right? So he kind of takes the job that Carter had had, basically.

Speaker 23 But by the 80s, he has turned it into, because again, it was, I mean, and Carter started this process, but it becomes the best funded and most effective lobbying organization in D.C., right?

Speaker 23 In the entire country.

Speaker 23 Again,

Speaker 23 Carter draws kind of the blueprints. Lapierre carries them out, though.

Speaker 23 There's no other

Speaker 23 that, you know, exists, that,

Speaker 23 has a lobbying arm that changed into just like a, you know what I mean? It was like, this was a sportsman lobby that wasn't even a lobby, and now it is the most powerful lobbying group.

Speaker 23 And again, there's like critiques about, well, they're primarily interested in like preserving rich people's right to ownership.

Speaker 23 But they were, broadly speaking, saw that like, okay, when a law affecting guns is proposed, we'll sit down and we'll let them know this is how we think this will affect our members.

Speaker 23 And these are some changes we'd like. And in age, it's like, broadly speaking, like

Speaker 23 what you would kind of want to see in a democracy that's supposed to function the way ours does. Yeah.

Speaker 23 As opposed to like, we are going to become so key to right-wing fundraising that if somebody proposes any kind of law meant at curbing gun crime, we will destroy them forever. Right.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 Which is

Speaker 23 necessary.

Speaker 23 Yeah. By any means necessary.

Speaker 23 And to an extent that it doesn't matter how reasonable the restriction might be, like even outside of stuff like an assault weapons ban, like if you're going to propose like universal background checks, which most gun owners support,

Speaker 23 we're going to come for your ass, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Unless you're the Black Panthers, but whatever.

Speaker 23 So another 1977 hire brought onto the NRA at the same time as Wayne Lapierre is a guy named Robert Dowlett.

Speaker 23 Now, Dowlett becomes the NRA's general counsel, and it's his job to begin wrangling together legal scholars to push hard the idea of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 23 So between 1960 and 1970, there's only three law review articles endorsing an individualist interpretation, right?

Speaker 23 There are some like state-level rubrings you could argue kind of endorse one earlier, but there's never been like a national, like a Supreme Court ruling on the matter one way or the other.

Speaker 23 And it hadn't really, people had not even talked about it in that way until the 60s. So three law review articles written between 1960 and 1970 endorsing that interpretation.

Speaker 23 Between 1970 and 1989, the period in which Dowlett is the NRA's general counsel, there are 27 law review articles, three of which are authored by Dowlett himself.

Speaker 23 And his work would start to bear fruit.

Speaker 23 Again, there's some like lower-level rulings, but it makes the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment makes its way to the Supreme Court for the first time in 2001.

Speaker 23 Some people will say, like, point to D.C. as heller.
That's not the first time. It happens in 2001.

Speaker 23 And the case in question has its origins in a 1997 criminal case in which a Texas woman divorced her husband and filed for a protective order against him because he had threatened to murder the man she cheated on him with.

Speaker 23 The next year, while he's got this protective order, which he's not supposed to have guns because he has the protective order against him, right?

Speaker 23 During a meeting with his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he pulls a gun during an argument and points it at them. So he gets indicted.

Speaker 23 Again, if you're a rational gun owner, you would think like, well, this is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't have access to a fucking gun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 He gets indicted for possession of a firearm while subject to a court order, and he files for dismissal, arguing that this had unfairly infringed on his Second Amendment right.

Speaker 23 And the ruling, what it actually rules is kind of complicated. The ruling is not entirely in favor of this guy, Emerson.
It's Emerson versus the United States.

Speaker 23 But in the ruling, the Supreme Court rules that the Sec describes the Second Amendment as an individual right, right? So this is the first time that happens at a federal level.

Speaker 23 And then this ruling in 2000 is reinforced by 2008's D.C. versus Heller, which is like the big ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban like categories of weapons and whatever.

Speaker 23 It's based on like a DC, I think, handgun ban.

Speaker 23 And then in 2010, the Second Amendment is finally incorporated in McDonald v. Chicago.
But this is all orchestrated by Robert Dowlett, starting in the 70s.

Speaker 23 And one thing you have to say about the man is he earned his salary, right? That's a significant change in U.S. jurisprudence that he kind of painstakingly

Speaker 23 is the architect of pushing.

Speaker 23 It's probably worth noting here that he was a murderer. So

Speaker 23 I'm going to to quote from the Boston Review here.

Speaker 23 Robert J. Dowlett was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yoakum, the mother of his then-girlfriend, in 1963.
Dowlett also robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop.

Speaker 23 Like Carter, Dowlett was 17 years old when he pulled the trigger. He confessed to the shootings and served six years in prison before his conviction was overturned on a technicality.

Speaker 23 The crimes were not made public until 2014. God damn.
No wonder it's like this is.

Speaker 23 It's also he and

Speaker 23 he and Carter and Kyle Rittenhouse, all 17 when they fucking kill people in like these. I guess I would, maybe you wouldn't call what Dowlett does vigilante violence.

Speaker 23 He's really just murdering people. No, that just sounds like straight up murder.
Yeah, he just murders a woman and then shoots a pawn shop owner in a robbery.

Speaker 23 So I guess you would say he's not a vigilante. He's just straight up an armed criminal.
That is fucking insane.

Speaker 23 And this is the guy who's made it easier for fucking everyone in the world or in the United States to he's the he's he's the NRA's general counsel

Speaker 23 so at one point I assume he went to law school yeah yeah yeah yeah because again he gets off like like uh like Carter does right he gets off and then he goes to college and then I mean you know

Speaker 23 good for them I guess nice to know we live in the land of opportunity like that I believe firmly that people should be able to get a second chance after making a mistake especially when they're you know, not a legal adult.

Speaker 23 I believe in certain second chances for certain kinds of mistakes.

Speaker 23 I think perhaps if you murder your girlfriend's mom and then shoot a pawn shop owner during a robbery, an avenue that we ought to close to you is representing the National Rifle Association as well.

Speaker 23 That's right. Like, maybe that's not okay.
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, listen, that guy explicitly does gun crimes

Speaker 23 for fun. This perhaps should not be his job.
I want to know what happened with

Speaker 23 the relationship.

Speaker 23 I don't actually suffer suffer after the murder of the mother? It must have been hard. Well, she was his girlfriend, so I don't think they wind up staying together.

Speaker 23 Oh, um, damn, yeah, it's like you know, with Harlan Carter, I think a 17-year-old who in a crime of uh racism commits a murder, there should be some way for like that person to be rehabilitated, but perhaps they should never be allowed to be a border patrol officer.

Speaker 23 Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, there's like little things like not giving them,

Speaker 23 I don't know, uh, authority over other people or requiring them to use lethal force as a part of the job.

Speaker 23 And maybe the guy who murders his girlfriend's mom shouldn't help to be an architect of federal gun policy. I mean, it just

Speaker 23 sounds rational, but you know what?

Speaker 23 I don't know if that's

Speaker 23 I think it'll work out fine.

Speaker 23 I'm not even arguing against an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment because, again, I don't really believe that the Constitution is something that we should treat as a religious document, but not this guy, not this guy making that case.

Speaker 23 If you're going to make that case, maybe Ross Dowlett shouldn't be the man doing it. Seems

Speaker 23 seems like not. No.

Speaker 23 So that's cool.

Speaker 23 And the Boston Review article I found does a good job of pointing out that the NRA's embrace of this specific legal interpretation does not occur in a vacuum.

Speaker 23 While Dowlett's lawyers are making their case, right? So while they're, and again, this is a very, it's a pain, it's 40 years, it's a painstaking process of building, well, not, it's, I guess,

Speaker 23 20-ish, 23, something like that.

Speaker 23 But while they're making their case, the NRA is carrying out mass mailing campaigns, some of the most extensive in political history, and they're publishing magazines that reach millions of people.

Speaker 23 They're paying for ads in all of these different gun press magazines. They're having paid spokesmen show up and talk radio stations, right?

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 part of like what they're doing, they're obviously they're arguing for this interpretation of the Second Amendment, but they're also pushing a cultural change what some scholars have turned the termed the tactical turn in u.s gun culture again

Speaker 23 even to the extent that like i mean

Speaker 23 one thing that liberals get wrong is like it is not new for civilians to own on a widespread scale military grade weapons among other things one of the most popular guns in civilian hands that the nra

Speaker 23 before its political turn sold to people was the m1 garant which was the u.s service rifle of world war ii right right um but what is really new is that

Speaker 23 is this kind of paramilitary turn for gun owners because people were not buying M1 Guerans primarily to like play act as soldiers.

Speaker 23 They were buying them because the Guerin is a perfectly good hunting rifle, right? It's a 30 out 6, which is a very effective hunting round. And those were cheap, right?

Speaker 23 So it was a good weapon to buy. So people are not dressing up as soldiers with their M1 Guerans primarily, right?

Speaker 23 That kind of stuff, the tactical turn in U.S. gun culture, occurs because it occurs alongside the militarization of the police and these kind of Hollywood valorization of the militarization of police.

Speaker 23 So there's a lot that's going on here, right?

Speaker 23 And including like, broadly speaking, the kind of like you could, you also should tie in what Holly, Hollywood's partnership with the Defense Department, right?

Speaker 23 And the increasing degree to which like military tactical culture becomes like popularized. But the NRA recognizes like this is

Speaker 23 there's a lot of promise in this.

Speaker 23 Number one, you can get more people involved, you can sell more shit to people, which means you can have more companies funding the NRA who are not selling not just guns, but all this tactical gear.

Speaker 23 I'm going to read a quote again from that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but it really ties all of this together. Quote, though the story of this tactical development in U.S.

Speaker 23 gun culture is complex, I focus in this essay on a few particularly crucial components.

Speaker 23 The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized since the 1970s and diffused deeper into the interior of the country.

Speaker 23 This has blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers into nearly every U.S.

Speaker 23 town, and turned militarized border security into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization.

Speaker 23 This has also corresponded with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly worsened by the war on terror, but which historian Elizabeth Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson administration's war on crime, which of course the NRA backs.

Speaker 23 Like the nationalization of border security, it turned the nation's city streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement.

Speaker 23 Second, individuals once arming themselves for self-defense, often out of racial fears or a perceived threat to their masculinity, are now frequently claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and freedom itself.

Speaker 23 The NRA has played an outsized role in this vigilante reframing by promulgating the myth that gun ownership has always been about an individual constitutional right and oriented towards a nativist version of self-defense.

Speaker 23 This vigilantism operates in conjunction with extra-legal violence of law enforcement officers and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty more dangerous than any military-grade weaponry.

Speaker 23 It rejects the freedom of others as equal to one's own and views any attempt to support such equality as tyranny.

Speaker 23 More importantly, this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power to take life in defense not of law, but of particular social and racial orders.

Speaker 23 There are now 25 federal agencies with special tactical units.

Speaker 23 In May of June of 2020 alone, 16 deployed their tactical teams to Black Lives Matter protests, including the Border Patrol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S.

Speaker 23 Marshals, the U.S. Coast Guard, and every one of the FBI's 56 field offices.
And at the local law enforcement level, special weapons and tactics SWAT units are now a staple of daily policing.

Speaker 23 Their very ordinariness is a testament to how dramatically local policing has changed since 1969, when a SWAT unit was first used to raise the Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles, pioneering what was at the time an almost unprecedented domestic use of military force.

Speaker 23 In Carter's victory speech, he declared: beginning in this place and this hour, this period in NRA history is finished.

Speaker 23 The post-1977 NRA was decidedly partisan, took an absolute position against gun regulation, and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a social identity and authoritarian political ideology among its members.

Speaker 23 God damn. Yeah.

Speaker 23 Yeah, yeah. All of that in a row and concisely done.
Yeah. Fucked up.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 And it's

Speaker 23 again,

Speaker 23 some in our listenership will agree and some will disagree. I'm a believer fundamentally that

Speaker 23 I don't like the idea of the state having a monopoly on violence, and I certainly don't like the idea of the police being able to own things that I cannot own. Sure.

Speaker 23 But, and, and there's, there's an argument to be made, if you're, again, care about being an originalist, that that is close to the original interpretation of the Second Amendment, right? Right. Um,

Speaker 23 what What part of what

Speaker 23 by, and they're claiming to be originalist, they're claiming to be that the

Speaker 23 original interpretation was individualist, but what they're doing that for is not any idea of community self-defense or a fear that the federal government will accumulate too much power, although it's often framed that way.

Speaker 23 Fundamentally, it is about allowing

Speaker 23 regular white citizens to emulate the military and the police and and to act as vigilantes in their stead, right? That is where the NRA turns. And

Speaker 23 that is the tactical turn, right? It's not that there's nothing evil about owning body armor, which people can do for perfectly reasonable defensive purposes. There's nothing like,

Speaker 23 but

Speaker 23 what they're doing is

Speaker 23 pushing this idea of like...

Speaker 23 not just that like society ought to be militarized, which you get in every kind of argument that like, what we need to do is harden the schools. We need to add more cops.

Speaker 23 But it's this idea that the individual, white person, should militarize themselves

Speaker 23 in order to protect this kind of racial hierarchy,

Speaker 23 uphold white supremacy.

Speaker 23 And this is the thing, this is what I wish folks who are supportive of more gun control would more often do is tie in all of this to what has happened to the police because they cannot be extricated, right?

Speaker 23 And that's, I think Ovaldi made that perfectly clear, that like these are two sides of the problem.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 the NRA is a huge part of how we get there, both how we get these cops that look indistinguishable from like Marines in downtown Fallujah.

Speaker 23 Not that I think the Marines necessarily should have been in downtown Fallujah,

Speaker 23 but

Speaker 23 you have these guys. It's this.
There's this thing called the weapons effect, right?

Speaker 23 And which is a psychological phenomenon that's noted that like the presence of weapons in an area, um, visible weapons, can increase the willingness of people to use violence, right?

Speaker 23 That there's like something about that that heightens it, and

Speaker 23 that's happening here. And part of why that happens is just the fact that America has so many goddamn guns, right? Right.

Speaker 23 Um, but another part of that is the fact that everywhere you go, you see fucking cops in a way that, like, you don't see cops dressed as armed as heavily as our cops in fucking war zones a lot of the time, right?

Speaker 23 Like, it's um,

Speaker 23 it's

Speaker 23 anyway, whatever.

Speaker 23 No, that's what Arlen Carter builds, you know? Yeah, no, I, I, I, I hear exactly what you're saying, and I, I, I,

Speaker 23 I agree to an extent with, with

Speaker 23 what you mean. I feel like, in general, my problem with liberals is that, um,

Speaker 23 they tend to kind of like

Speaker 23 put guns in the same category. Like, they moralize guns the way they moralize like the right will moralize drugs yes um and kind of this idea that like you know uh

Speaker 23 if we were to just make all the guns illegal then you know this would solve the problem and whatnot and that's not to say that it there isn't it wouldn't be helped if you had some serious regulation but um this like moralization of it like misses the entire point of why exactly the uh why the people who want guns and have those guns have them you know, it's like

Speaker 23 the people you're speaking to are not, it's people speaking to the choir. Liberals often just speak to themselves and go, like, uh, isn't it crazy that, you know, all these people have so many guns?

Speaker 23 And it's like, yeah, well, while you're talking amongst yourselves, all these guys have created an entire family filled with guns.

Speaker 23 And it's like looking at these right-wing like militias that people are rightly like concerned to see militias marching around U.S. streets, like threatening people.

Speaker 23 And, but also failing to see the thing that is like, well, every one of those guys has friends who are cops and like a significant percentage of them are cops, which is why a whole bunch of cops were present at January 6th.

Speaker 23 And that's a huge chunk of it.

Speaker 23 And like, you can't, you can't divorce your desire to reduce the number of guns in American culture from the need to reduce the militarization of the police because they are both inextricably tied to the problem,

Speaker 23 which is the constant gun violence in this country.

Speaker 23 Has two points that need to be really like hit on.

Speaker 23 It's not just civilian gun ownership, it's also the way in which the state uses and legitimates armed force.

Speaker 23 Going back to even the earliest days where it's like, yeah, in Texas, your right to carry guns was heavily restricted, but if you were a white vigilante who carried guns to do racist violence, you would often get off, right?

Speaker 23 Even though you'd broken the law, right? Right. Like Harlan Carter, you know?

Speaker 23 Anyway, under Harlan Carter, the NRA's membership triples from 1 million to more than 3 million. It would reach 5 million members under Wayne Lapierre.

Speaker 23 Obviously, the NRA, we're not going to to get into this a lot, but it's like well past its prime at this point for a variety of reasons, primarily rampant corruption.

Speaker 23 There's a pretty good podcast about like what the fuck happened there. Yeah, it's called Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos podcast.

Speaker 23 I'm sorry.

Speaker 23 So the NRA tops out at about 5 million members. But as of 2017, about 14 million Americans claimed some sort of affinity for the organization.
And I forget who did the poll, but whatever.

Speaker 23 And one of the things that's interesting here is that like, that's like a lot of people to get around anything, but that's also not a lot of people as a voting block compared to the entirety of the United States, right?

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And so looking at that, you have to kind of marvel at the success of the NRA in making their ideas a cornerstone of right-wing politics. 100%.

Speaker 23 I was just thinking to myself, that seems like a low number. It's right.

Speaker 23 Because again, if you look at actually polling of Republicans on gun control issues, They are a lot less hardliners on guns than you would guess by how the party acts.

Speaker 23 And it's because the party's ability to fund elections for decades was heavily based on who could get the NRA's approval, right? Yeah. Got to get that A-plus rating.
Exactly.

Speaker 23 In 2016, they spent more than $30 million on Donald Trump's campaign. And this, again, people often miss this.
Like my parents were hardcore right-wingers, right? So was my whole family.

Speaker 23 I had like two relatives who owned guns, like my grandpa and one of my uncles, right?

Speaker 23 And I did go shooting as a kid, but my parents didn't have any. My aunt and uncle didn't have any.
There were not guns in the house of my family in Texas, you know?

Speaker 23 Because like, it's actually not as integral to conservatism as a, as a, at least, I mean, this has, again, changed because the culture wars have accelerated. So like, this is that

Speaker 23 there's less conservatives like the ones I grew up with when they're than there were today. But the NRA, it wasn't that everyone on the right was in lockstep.

Speaker 23 It's that the elected leaders were scared to cross them because that's where the fucking money came from. Right, of course.
That's why they were able to wield power so effectively.

Speaker 23 One of the most peculiar, but also influential aspects of Harlan's time and power was his repeated and intense defense of cheap, shitty handguns. And this gets us to the Saturday Night Special.

Speaker 23 Here we go. So

Speaker 23 Saturday Night Special, in brief, like there's a type of handgun

Speaker 23 that was very cheap in the 70s, up through in the 80s and stuff called a Saturday. It was nicknamed the Saturday Night Special.
It's like a five or a six shot, usually.38 caliber handgun.

Speaker 23 These are still, guns like this are still used in in violent crime way more often than like the guns that are politicized.

Speaker 23 Like cheap handguns in general are the primary guns that are used in violent gun crime.

Speaker 23 Although what is a cheap, shitty handgun is different now because actually six-shot revolvers are kind of pricey these days as opposed to like a high point or something.

Speaker 23 But yeah, so this is a cheap, shitty handgun.

Speaker 23 And these are particularly low-quality handguns. They were not like well-made as a general rule.
Right.

Speaker 23 They didn't always work. They did not always work.
We are, yeah, that's that. We're building to that.
Okay.

Speaker 23 Jumping the gun. So you have this massive crime rate raise that starts in the 70s and really like peaks in the early 90s.

Speaker 23 And again, a lot of Joe Biden's career is based off of this like violent crime panic that starts in this period.

Speaker 23 And one of the first like legislative like tsunamis that forms around the crime surge is around this fear of the Saturday Night Special. And

Speaker 23 one one of the reasons why people are so scared of the Saturday Night Special is that it is a gun that black people can afford. Right.
Right.

Speaker 23 It is a cheap handgun, and so it is affordable for those folks.

Speaker 23 Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban the Saturday Night Special,

Speaker 23 although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly on the grounds that they were shitty and broke easily.

Speaker 23 And this is one of the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from NRAontherecord.org. Quote, speaking in

Speaker 23 opposition to legislation that aimed to ban Saturday night specials and other inexpensively produced handguns, Carter stated in a 1972 speech before the NRA's executive committee, I can produce actual cases that the cheap handgun that snaps in a police officer's face instead of firing has saved many, many lives.

Speaker 23 And the question arises, what are we trying to do? Upgrade the quality of handguns in the hands of our criminals?

Speaker 23 God. That's an amazing logical argument.
Yeah, I mean, it's like he has a point, a really fucked up evil point.

Speaker 23 And it's also he's getting straight to, I mean, the crux of it here, which is like he, he's lucky to be in a situation in which he can claim like, oh, actually, I don't want to ban this because this makes me feel safer to know that they have, you know, the

Speaker 23 poor,

Speaker 23 their quality of handguns is

Speaker 23 way worse. There's a lot.

Speaker 23 There's a lot that's messy on this whole, this whole thing, but it is very funny. And it's going to wind up getting a lot of people killed.

Speaker 23 Not just from violence. A lot of people are going to die because of Carter's defense of terrible handguns and where it leads.

Speaker 23 But before we get into that, you know who else loves shitty handguns that break in their owners' hands? And

Speaker 23 they're sorry, Sophie.

Speaker 23 Absolutely loves it. The motto is, we want you to be armed and we want you to never know if that gun's going to fire or not.
Yeah. Completely inexplicable.

Speaker 23 We want a weapon that you cannot trust under any circumstances. That's guaranteed.
Absolutely. Remove drop safeties from handguns.
Let them free. You know?

Speaker 23 I enjoy this because I am watching Sophie just shaking her head every time you do this bit.

Speaker 23 She's

Speaker 23 stopped. She hates it.
She makes you so angry. Do you know why I hate it? Why is that, Sophie? Because there's like 50 Reddit threads of people being like, wait, what is this?

Speaker 23 I've never read about this.

Speaker 23 Who has a child hunting island?

Speaker 23 And I just, it just feels like betrayal to our listeners.

Speaker 23 I love with most of my heart. I like fucking with him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 I feel the same way towards him that I do with my cat when I like, when I pick it up and I like toss it in the air and it hates it, but it can't.

Speaker 23 It has to let me like squeeze it and wrap it in a blanket.

Speaker 23 Yeah, it's called rent. It's called paying rent.
Yeah, that's right, motherfucker. Yeah, you got to be adorable for me.
Sometimes your fear makes me smile.

Speaker 23 I feel the same way about our piggies. You know, everyone, it's like you feed the slot to the piggies and you let them oink.

Speaker 23 But

Speaker 23 you're the farmer. Remember that.
That's right. You're the farmer.
Well, I'm the farmer. You are.
Yes, exactly. Robert, remember? Don't do that to the goats.
I don't think it'll work out well.

Speaker 23 Oh, it's really fun to fuck with the goats. If you pick them up, like they don't know what to do with their little legs and they just like kick in the air and then you can hug them.
It's very cute.

Speaker 23 Yeah. I love it.
They go,

Speaker 23 except for my boy goat. He's the ram.
He loves it. He fucking, as soon as he sees you, he'll run up because he wants to get cuddled.
Damn. His sister hates it.
But

Speaker 23 whatever.

Speaker 23 Anyway. Of course she does.
Of course she does.

Speaker 23 We're back. So before we get on to the consequences of Harlan Carter's embrace of terrible, unsafe firearms, let's talk about his defense of the virtues of arming small children with Derringers.

Speaker 23 Now, Matt, you're not a gun guy. The Derringer is a tiny, ultra-concealable one- or two-shot pistol.
They were originally made for Riverboat gamblers, as documented in the documentary Maverick.

Speaker 23 I'm pretty sure I know exactly what's going on.

Speaker 23 Yeah, they're like little, little bitty, like, yeah,

Speaker 23 little hot girl guns is the way I think of them. Here's something he said to Congress.
There was a little boy, and it was real cold, and he had his hands in his overcoat.

Speaker 23 He had one of these little old Derringers, and four bushy guys ambled up in an arrogant manner. He stopped them, and three of them were very nice and decent.

Speaker 23 And one of them said, what would you do if I told you I had a pistol and I was going to kill you? And he says, I would kill you, you son of a bunch.

Speaker 23 These little guns have a very noble and important purpose, and we should make our position clear. God, that is the first recorded incident of like someone being like, my five-year-old just said,

Speaker 23 Daddy, why does Trump do the bad thing? And I couldn't explain. It's like a totally fake story that did not exist.
There's absolutely no way this happened. But also, none of it makes sense.

Speaker 23 Like, what does it mean by their bushy? What does that mean? He has to be racist, right? He has to be being racist here. Oh, yeah, for sure.
But I don't know how. Which race?

Speaker 23 I'm going like, were they Hasidic Jews? Yeah, what does this mean? What does bushy mean? I don't know what it could be Italians.

Speaker 23 It would be funny if like the real story is that the Jeb and George Bush, who were younger at this point, like it was, it was all of the Bush brothers like trying to mug children.

Speaker 23 Yeah, you know, Bushy, like

Speaker 23 the former head of the CIA. Yeah, I think he was current.
Probably would have been current when this was

Speaker 23 like the late 70s. Yeah.

Speaker 23 So obviously, that's probably a lie. But it's very, again, Harlan Carter is, he is the kind of guy who is not just like,

Speaker 23 I think

Speaker 23 children should be able to engage in shooting sports, but like, I think children should be routinely carrying handguns on their person. Yeah.
Because what if a bushy guy shows up?

Speaker 23 Yeah, exactly. That is out of its damn mind.
Just like,

Speaker 23 just, oh man, a bushy man could strike at any point. Yeah, you never know when a bushy dude's going to come in.
You got to be, you have to always have a Derringer in your five-year-old's pocket.

Speaker 23 It's the 70s. Maybe it's talking about like a Tom,

Speaker 23 like a, like a lot of chest hair type guy. You know, like a disco stew shows up.
Yeah, a bunch of disco guys come out and start threatening children.

Speaker 23 So, anyway, back to the point. Under Harlan and his successors, the NRA acted repeatedly to defend the rights of gun manufacturers to build dangerously shoddy firearms.

Speaker 23 Like, this is, we talk a lot about, rightly so, the things they do, like, legislatively to defend the gun industry, but this is often left out because one of the things is its primary victim is gun owners, right?

Speaker 23 Um, I'm going to quote here from a write-up in Bloomberg. In 1972, Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Four years earlier, Lyndon B.

Speaker 23 Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this agency oversight of defective weapons.

Speaker 23 Representative John Dingell,

Speaker 23 a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the Ascendant NRA, blocked them.

Speaker 23 In 1975, he did it again when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority.

Speaker 23 We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition, Dinkle said in debate in Congress.

Speaker 23 That second bill was crushed, 339 to 80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again.

Speaker 23 And it's one of those like, this is again,

Speaker 23 a perfectly, even if you're like

Speaker 23 a gun fundamentalist, you should want there to be oversight of guns that don't work or explode and like ammunition that doesn't work. Like, right? Right?

Speaker 23 That seems to make that shouldn't be a political issue it seems like you'd be into that yeah and the only explanation for you not being into it is like oh good they can't get the good guns i mean like like poor poor people black people getting the defective guns seems to be the only excuse here i mean well i mean their specific excuse is that like this will this will enable potentially the government to like regulate what kind of ammo is illegal and ban types of like whatever,

Speaker 23 which they do anyway. Like there's that shit happens like whatever.
It's dumb. It's dumb that this happens this way.

Speaker 23 It is worth noting that, yeah, it's like a blue dog Democrat who is the one who like blocks this shit.

Speaker 23 So the end result is that when gun manufacturers produce firearms that, for example, fire for no reason and kill their owners, it is impossible for the government to order them to recall those weapons.

Speaker 23 Not even the BATFE, which supposedly regulates firearms, can force a gun maker to take broken guns off the market. And I'm going to quote again from that Bloomberg article.

Speaker 23 And this is actually how the article opens. Thomas Bud Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm, pointing at something.

Speaker 23 It's where he found his boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house around 7.15 a.m. on the last day of 2016, bleeding out.

Speaker 23 Brown is telling the story now about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot. His son Jared, 28, had

Speaker 23 Oh shit, my leg, my leg, Jared yelled, loud enough for his father to hear. Haney, 26, rushed to the house in a panic, pleading for help.

Speaker 23 When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in its holster, tucked into Jared's waistband.

Speaker 23 So.

Speaker 23 And he can't sue. He can't do nothing.
Absolutely nothing. Bud is one of...
We have no idea how many Americans died due to defective Taurus guns.

Speaker 23 The company did eventually issue a recall on something like a million weapons that were potentially defective, but they didn't have to run ads anywhere to inform people of the recall.

Speaker 23 They were not required to reach out to their customers, to reach out to gun stores, to take any action at all to warn people that they'd sold guns that could fire for no reason.

Speaker 23 An unknown number of those weapons are still in people's gun saves closets and holsters today. That's fucking crazy.

Speaker 23 I don't even know the justificate. It's just guns don't kill people.
Yeah, it's this faith kills people.

Speaker 23 The NRA, they are. There's this like social, like,

Speaker 23 a culture war component of how they do what they're doing, but they fundamentally represent the gun industry in any industry that can stop there from being a way to sue them if their products don't work.

Speaker 23 Like, of course,

Speaker 23 we'll do it if they can, you know?

Speaker 23 Yeah, yeah, it's just, it's just, it's, yeah, it's so insane to get to a point where it's so clearly a manufacturing lobby mixed in with a culture war issue that just creates death everywhere.

Speaker 23 Yeah, it's, and it's, I mean, again, for among other things, don't buy Taurus guns for any practical purpose.

Speaker 23 Absolutely.

Speaker 23 In the 1990s, more than 40 U.S. cities filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers, spurred on by a surge in violent crime.
This was the super predator era.

Speaker 23 Now, I can't speak as to the legal merits of the individual cases of these cities against these gun manufacturers, but the response the NRA chose was interesting.

Speaker 23 They used their lobbying arm to launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida to propose a piece of legislation that would end all pending litigation against gun companies and prevent any future litigation.

Speaker 23 It took a while to actually get the law, which is the PLCAA, written. And by the time it was introduced, George W.
Bush was on his second term.

Speaker 23 In October 2005, he signed the PLCAA into law, which blocked lawsuits from seeking damages on gun industry companies for unlawful use of a firearm, right?

Speaker 23 So if the company could be sued for like breaking the law in some way,

Speaker 23 but they cannot be sued for what people do with their weapons.

Speaker 23 And I have some conflicting feelings on some of these lawsuits, but one of the things that people will point out is that the advertising of a lot of these companies

Speaker 23 like leads to the like, and this is a big thing, like the Sandy Hook lawsuit, right?

Speaker 23 One of the big issues, one of the big like points used to justify like the suing against the bushmaster who made the gun that was used in Sandy Hook was this ad campaign they'd done where it was like

Speaker 23 consider your man card reissued. And they would like send you a man card with an AR-15.
And

Speaker 23 it's again, there's a, again, this is like a complicated thing to get into entirely, but there's a debate to be had.

Speaker 23 And to my mind, the area in which it's kind of most relevant to have this debate is on to what extent does the way the gun industry tries to sell weapons to people

Speaker 23 complicit in when those weapons are used for violence. So, for example, when Daniel Defense launches an ad where you have like a Bible verse and a small child holding an air of 15,

Speaker 23 to what extent does that help to lead to, to what extent does that help make gun culture in the United States more violent, right?

Speaker 23 And this is not really what the lawsuits are, like the Uvalde families aren't suing Daniel Defense, or they're attempting to right now. This is all happening at the moment on those lines.

Speaker 23 But to my mind, that's kind of the most, that's the thing that like I think there's a point on.

Speaker 23 Sure. I mean, it's like, I mean, the way cigarettes were marketed changed, you know,

Speaker 23 were regulated like crazy and

Speaker 23 has actually had an effect on

Speaker 23 the amount of smokers. Yeah.

Speaker 23 And so, anyway, again, I have some complicated thoughts on like suing companies for the unlawful use of their products, but there's like anyway, the PLCIA kind of ended that for a long time.

Speaker 23 This is starting to be challenged, but for 15 or 17 years or whatever, made any kind of like debate meaningless, right? Because it was just prohibited. And it was prohibited.

Speaker 23 Again, this is the NRA spent a lot of money on George W. Bush's campaigns, you know?

Speaker 23 I am wondering if the, like initially, the

Speaker 23 Hitachi magic wand actually was a back massager and if you could

Speaker 23 sue a company because it gave your wife an orgasm. Well, like, again,

Speaker 23 I think people do need to consider when we talk about like, to what extent should a gun manufacturer be liable for something about a mass shooting.

Speaker 23 There are some unsettling implications to some of that.

Speaker 23 It's not a super cut, it's not as cut and dry as certain other things are.

Speaker 23 And I'm not saying it's a slippery slope necessarily, but I am saying that I thought it was a back massager. Yeah.
And now it's better at making my wife calm than I am. And that's always has been.

Speaker 23 Yeah. And well, I mean, it seems kind of unfair to me to have not known that.

Speaker 23 What's really, I mean, people are bringing up, people on Twitter have brought up the fact that, like, you're limited to six dildos, I think, in the state of Texas. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 There's like literal laws on how many. I mean, I don't think they've ever been in.

Speaker 23 What has been enforced, though, is that like anyone you know who works at a sex shop in Texas has to be like, has, is like prepared.

Speaker 23 This is a little bit less the case now, but when I had friends in the early 2000s, like you get training on like what to do if you get raided because you're not allowed to sell sex toys.

Speaker 23 They had, they were always called cake toppers, right? Like the dildos and shit were like cake toppers or personal massagers or whatever. Yeah.
But

Speaker 23 you couldn't say like, these are for fucking in the same way that like you could sell a bong, but you had to call it a water pipe for tobacco.

Speaker 23 Like if you use the word bong in a Texas head, again, head shops were always kind of inconsistent about how much they were paranoid about this, but like you, you could get asked to leave for calling something a bong in a head shop.

Speaker 23 Right, but I mean, what do you, what do you call the, you know, that, you know, that silicon butt that has both the pussy and the vagina.

Speaker 23 That's a sex ass. That's a sex ass.
Yeah. So,

Speaker 23 but you,

Speaker 23 I mean, I'm just saying, how do you market that? So you get around it.

Speaker 23 I don't think they really had sex ass. Although, I know people bought

Speaker 23 fucking, what do you call them? The flesh lights. So there must have been some, like, I'm guessing they probably, they must have been advertised as like a novelty, right?

Speaker 23 As like a, this is for joking around at a bachelorette party. Put it on a, like,

Speaker 23 I don't, they're, they're, like, it's dumb. All Texas's whole legal system is stupid as shit.
That's insane. That's a lot of fun, though.
I mean, you know, but people get around it.

Speaker 23 Like, I didn't have access to a big silicon, you know, butt vagina. And so I fucked a big mouth billy bass.
Yeah. Who didn't fuck a big-mouthed billy bass? Yeah.

Speaker 23 So I'm just saying. That's the universal experience of people in the early 2000s.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I just like, eventually I just was like, we're going to start talking about cum.

Speaker 23 We're going to start talking about cum. Look, you know, the same year that George W.

Speaker 23 Bush signs the PLCAA into law, that's the year that many millions of young American boys encountered a Billy largemouth bass for the first time. That's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 23 And thanks to the NRA's lobbying, the Billy Bass Company couldn't be sued for taking the virginity of all those boys.

Speaker 23 Take me to your virginity. All right, I'm done.
All right. The last thing I want to talk about here, and this is maybe the most unsettling thing the NRA has done,

Speaker 23 is that they have made it impossible not just to like not only do they fight like any regulation that might potentially impact positively America's gun violence problem or America's gun death problem, they've made it impossible to research how gun violence works and like the extent to which different policies affect it.

Speaker 23 In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article showing that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide in the home.

Speaker 23 Now, this is a study you'll see cited a great deal, and it's often used to argue that firearms in the home make people less safe.

Speaker 23 This study was widely reported on at the time, and it scared the shit out of the NRA.

Speaker 23 So the NRA campaigned to eliminate the organization that had funded the study, the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention.

Speaker 23 Congress included language in the 1996 Omnibus Appropriations Bill to insist that, quote, none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.

Speaker 23 Now, you may note, they weren't weren't doing that with that study.

Speaker 23 It was a study that you could use to argue gun control supported gun control, but it was just a study on like the homicide risk and how that changes when you have a gun in the home, right? Right.

Speaker 23 Like the CDC was not like lobbying specifically. They were carrying out a study.
But the NRA basically argued

Speaker 23 how people get hurt in the home.

Speaker 23 And the NRA argued that was inherently like, that's political and should be illegal. Yeah.

Speaker 23 And then they make that happen, right? Like Congress goes through with this shit.

Speaker 23 This is later referred to as the Dickey Amendment because of some dude named Dickey.

Speaker 23 Now, under extensive lobbying pressure, Congress also removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget, as that was the amount they had invested in firearm injury research the year before.

Speaker 23 So they cut all of the money out of the CDC's budget that had been used to research the firearm industry.

Speaker 23 And again, whenever you think about gun control, there are 400 million of these things in the fucking country. There should be research into how they affect people, right? It just seems prudent.

Speaker 23 It seems prudent. It just seems prudent.
Yeah, Yeah, if fucking, if auto companies were blocking research into how car accidents work, right? Like, you would say that's nuts, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 23 Because it would be.

Speaker 23 And it's not even, it's like, it's not even. I've got car companies have tried to do that.
But yeah. Right.
I don't fault them for trying. It's the same way with the, you know.

Speaker 23 That's what they're going to do. That's what they're going to do.
They're going to try to do that. And, you know, it's a fucked up capitalist system wherein, if you have the money, you can try.

Speaker 23 The crazy thing is the success rate of the NRA in these in these things that are completely like

Speaker 23 common sense ideas.

Speaker 23 There's a wide variety of arguments about how should you interpret this,

Speaker 23 you know, the findings to studies like this, to what extent should they inform policy, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 23 But at the end of the day, I think if you're saying you shouldn't be studying this kind of stuff at all, you're the bad guy here. You're definitely bad.

Speaker 23 Like, definitely the bad guy. At the very least, coming in bad faith but yeah you are 100

Speaker 23 doing bad guy stuff yeah and should be stopped and federal funding for research into gun violence and gun-related injuries dried up after that uh since 1996 the cdc's funding for firearm injury prevention has fallen 96 percent and similar attempts to fund research have met with further attacks on the ability to study any of this stuff most recently in 2012.

Speaker 23 And yeah,

Speaker 23 so anyway, that's broadly speaking the story. Our buddy Neil Knox, I should give you a little bit of context on how our heroes turned out.
Yeah, how are they doing?

Speaker 23 Neil Knox wound up being way too radical for even Harlan Carter's NRA. He was forced out of the organization in 1982 after being overshadowed by the rise of Wayne Lapierre.

Speaker 23 I think Lapierre kind of helps maneuver him out. He dies of colon cancer in 2005.
He outlived Carter by a fair amount. Harlan died, not surprisingly, of lung cancer in 1991.

Speaker 23 So the tobacco industry did us all a solid on this one. Yay, occasionally it works out.
One of his final acts in this world was to hand over control of the NRA to Wayne Lapierre.

Speaker 23 Oh, shit.

Speaker 23 That's the Harlan Carter in the NRA, everybody. God damn.
There's a pretty good song about him called Raymond Cassiano by the Drive-By Truckers, which is good.

Speaker 23 That guy fucking,

Speaker 23 he sucks. It sucks that he's sucks.
That he's dead, too.

Speaker 23 I feel like one of the big reasons why I'm just like, I don't, you know, I'm not for like, hey, let's make guns illegal or whatnot is because like, I feel like guns might end up being very useful in

Speaker 23 stopping all these ridiculous, you know, fucking NRA lobbies. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
And this is,

Speaker 23 I have, I have tried, I think I've done a very good job of like not inserting a bunch of my own specific opinions on gun control because at the end of the day, there is a history of here and it deserves to be like talked about

Speaker 23 without a tremendous amount of editorializing. But yeah, I feel similarly.
Like my attitudes on what gun control should be

Speaker 23 around are impacted by like, number one, I don't think only rich people should have guns. I don't like the idea of a thousand percent excise tax on AR-15 so that only wealthy people can afford them.

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 23 And I don't like the idea that like at this point, at least culturally, the only people who are interested in having guns are people who are interested in upholding white supremacy.

Speaker 23 And that is deliberately designed that way.

Speaker 23 And one of, I mean, one of the things that has happened in the last couple of years, this has really accelerated since 2020, is the demographics of people buying firearms have changed wildly, particularly first-time gun buyers.

Speaker 23 And it's gotten a lot more left-leaning and a lot less white.

Speaker 23 And, you know, there's a variety of personally, okay, because people do ask about this, because I talk about guns sometimes, in terms of what I think are the, number one, the laws that you could most easily pass without the Supreme Court guaranteed shutting them down.

Speaker 23 And I think a federal assault weapons ban, the Supreme Court will rule against, right?

Speaker 23 Like it will go to the Supreme Court and they will rule against it in their current construction, outside of like talking about should we stack the Supreme Court, whatever, like Biden's not doing that.

Speaker 23 So

Speaker 23 stuff that I think would not, number one, would not necessarily, like, obviously anything is a crapshoot with the Supreme Court.

Speaker 23 So literally anything could get turned down, by the way, because they're about to rule on a concealed handgun carry bill anyway. But

Speaker 23 I think it's perfectly reasonable and is also there is legal precedent for raising the age at which someone has to be in order to buy a semi-automatic firearm.

Speaker 23 Certainly, 18-year-olds are not full adults, and our current gun legislation recognizes that by banning them from buying handguns.

Speaker 23 Although that's also not entirely accurate, because you can still buy handguns through like face-to-face sales or have them given to you by a parent or whatever.

Speaker 23 There's always every, there's always like ways around this kind of stuff.

Speaker 23 But

Speaker 23 it's been established since I think 1986 that the federal government regulates,

Speaker 23 does not want people under 21 buying handguns. So it's the kind of thing where if you were to pass a law extending that to semi-automatic rifles,

Speaker 23 you'd have a stronger argument in front of the Supreme Court if it came to the Supreme Court in order to like defend that piece of gun control legislation.

Speaker 23 And both of our most recent mass shootings, as of this recording, there may have been another one by the time this drops. Let's not jump.

Speaker 23 We're 18-year-olds who bought a gun and immediately carried it. So I do think just on a moral level, there's a case to be made that, yeah, this might fucking save some lives.

Speaker 23 And I think the best thing you could do, you would probably not have to call it a red flag law because that term has been politicized, but a law that would allow you to take guns and stop people from buying guns if they have a history of domestic violence and violence towards women and making violent threats of mass shootings, which seems like a no-brainer.

Speaker 23 Again, like everything has been politicized to a stupid degree, but the buffalo shooter was on, had been doing like threatening shootings and threatening women and like had was on law enforcement's radar.

Speaker 23 Should have been, it should be possible to do something there right you'd figure and uh yeah i feel like that there's so many like common sense like laws that uh you're yeah that don't exist that you're surprised every time you find out they don't exist i i i do think um i think one of the things where gun control advocates make a mistake is focusing on universal background checks not because i don't think it's a good idea to have background checks for buying a gun, but because nearly all of the guns bought and even used in massacres were by people who passed a background check, including the Buffalo and Navalde shooters, they both like universal background checks, they passed those.

Speaker 23 So like that, that's not as much of the solution as I think something like an effective kind of, again, I think you would need a better term than red flag law, but also maybe, I don't know, the right's going to culture war whatever you try to do.

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 23 Everything's poison-pilled no matter what. You can

Speaker 23 any fucking

Speaker 23 euphemistic, nice.

Speaker 23 If you hit your wife and kids, you shouldn't have a gun gun bill. But of course, one of the issues with that is that you're going to disarm like 40% of the police.
Right.

Speaker 23 Like,

Speaker 23 I could talk about what I think would be a good idea. At the end of the day,

Speaker 23 I don't know

Speaker 23 what actually is going to pass. That's a totally different fucking conversation.

Speaker 23 Yeah. No, I don't know what the answer is.
I know that

Speaker 23 one thing that I don't think the answer is is

Speaker 23 this like mutually assured destruction thing where we're all armed at all times and that's the society we live in. I also know the answer isn't

Speaker 23 every

Speaker 23 like liberal and leftist being like,

Speaker 23 oh, well, I'm, you know, I'm going to trust that the government and the police will keep me safe from

Speaker 23 the bad men. And so I'm like,

Speaker 23 it's hard to know. It's hard to know what to do.
I mean, this is a very difficult issue because, again, a lot of people say, no, it's simple, just like ban the guns.

Speaker 23 But it's like, well, how are you going to do that? There is legal precedent. There is a Supreme Court.
And also, there's a police force that's not going to disarm certain people.

Speaker 23 Like, this is not as simple as you're making it out to be.

Speaker 23 You can say it is the guns. And yeah, of course, access to guns is like why a lot of this is happening.
But also, like, that doesn't, that's not the end of

Speaker 23 like the complexity of the issue because there are 400 million of these fucking things in the country right now.

Speaker 23 And a whole culture built up around being ready to immediately use them against right now, gay and trans people are particularly in the fucking

Speaker 23 crosshairs. And again, this is like,

Speaker 23 so I don't know. I think fundamentally, like

Speaker 23 I argue a lot about gun control with people.

Speaker 23 I think the folks who want to see more of it are coming from a fundamentally natural and noble position, which is looking at repeating massacres and going like, we got to be able to do something about this.

Speaker 23 There's got to be something we can do about this shit. No, I completely understand it.
I mean, and yeah, and I feel the same way.

Speaker 23 It's like, there's certainly got to be a fucking solution to this that that is

Speaker 23 a systemic solution, a governmental solution. I thought this is like

Speaker 23 an acceptable state of affairs. Yeah.

Speaker 23 But like so many of the problems we have, like

Speaker 23 how to fix it and like how to fix it without having a shooting war over it and like who does the fixing? And like,

Speaker 23 I think like one of the things that is frustrating to me is that like it is. It is just a big fundraising issue in a lot of ways and in ways that I think are kind of like unhelpful in actually

Speaker 23 solving the problem. And I,

Speaker 23 again,

Speaker 23 nobody knows what to do with this because it's

Speaker 23 so much

Speaker 23 like no one has ever had anything like this happen, right? People bring up the Dunblane massacre, the Port Arthur massacre.

Speaker 23 They bring up like, you know, when Australia confiscated all those guns and like, that was 200,000 guns. Like, there are 20 million AR-15s in the United States.

Speaker 23 There has never been a society this heavily armed or a society that has turned the random mass killing of civilians into a meme. Yeah.
Both of those things have happened here.

Speaker 23 They've happened alongside the militarization of an increasingly unaccountable, violent police force that wants dictatorial control of American cities.

Speaker 23 And all of this stuff is pretty unique historically. So

Speaker 23 I don't know how we fix it. It feels so American and unique that it feels like,

Speaker 23 yeah if i knew the answer to it i would i would say it but i really do not

Speaker 23 i mean and again it's like one of those i don't vote

Speaker 23 i'm not a gun issue voter i'm barely a voter right like i do vote but i don't believe in it i don't believe it's going to do any i vote as i vote as like a well what if i'm wrong if i'm wrong and it's best to vote and and vote and the people who say you got to vote if i'm wrong and they're right then um at least i I put in the vote and I tried that thing.

Speaker 23 I don't think it's going to work. I don't think they're going to solve any of these problems.
I think

Speaker 23 other things are going to be happening in the future that are not what we recognize as part of American politics, but are going to become the way things get decided in this country.

Speaker 23 And I think they're going to be uglier and weirder than our parents were used to. But I do like voting is like a, well, okay, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

Speaker 23 It's the same reason they have a 401k, right? Right, right, right, right, right. Maybe there will be an economy in 30 years.
They'll get to retire. It's the same reason I own half of a Bitcoin.

Speaker 23 Exactly.

Speaker 23 Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah.
You know, I get it. Yeah.
You got just in case. What if I'm not missing enough?

Speaker 23 I just have a one. It's all I could afford.
But the point is, is, yeah,

Speaker 23 I just want to say I vote, and I also am cynical.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 I have the exact same

Speaker 23 pessimism that you do.

Speaker 23 But,

Speaker 23 you know,

Speaker 23 the only optimism that I have is there's going to be some, someone smart who does something good.

Speaker 23 And I don't want to miss the bus. I don't want to miss, you know.

Speaker 23 I mean, my, and I tend to think we should all

Speaker 23 maybe if people are more committed to like

Speaker 23 getting out there and taking personal responsibility, not necessarily, not as a militia,

Speaker 23 but in a, in a, in a, in a responsibility for believing, I think sometimes, because we just had a mass shooting in Portland that was stopped by an armed member of the community, a shooting at a protest for a police violence victim

Speaker 23 that was stopped by an armed member of the community. But I think community defense is everyone should have an IFAC, right?

Speaker 23 Downsides to owning a gun, no downside to having a tourniquet and some gauze on you and some chest seals and knowing how to use them. Zero downside.
Could be useful in a car accident.

Speaker 23 You could have a fucking piece of rebar fall fall off of a building construction and impale somebody and maybe you'd get to save their life with an ifac million times that could be useful have an ifac right um organize in your community to provide houseless people with um you know defense against sweeps to provide people who are low income with eviction defense to to stock food pantries like all of that stuff is uh uh uh you can wear uh you can wear cool uniforms if you want while you do you can get a plate carrier you can put patches on it you know can i wear tactical sunglasses yeah why the hell not yeah be the be the be the

Speaker 23 be the tactical sunglass guy yeah whatever make it make it cool just help your help your community black panthers look cool as shit when they were like serving food to kids you know yeah they had they had swag you know yeah they wore berets and they made berets look badass you know yeah look cool as hell and protect your community and yeah uh yeah

Speaker 23 doesn't mean you need to own a gun but maybe uh a little more community involvement might be helpful and also a variety of things that you can do. Yeah, abolishing the police.

Speaker 23 That is a good idea. Anyway,

Speaker 23 Matt, got any portables?

Speaker 23 Oh, man. I've had a great time.

Speaker 23 And if you love

Speaker 23 the bastards and getting behind them, you'll love the podcast, Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos rewatch podcast that me and my friend Vince Mancini do.

Speaker 23 We just finished the entire series, so you can re-listen and re-watch the whole thing. And it's great.
You'll love it. And yeah, you look forward to us doing our The Wire podcast very soon.

Speaker 23 It's going to be great.

Speaker 23 And,

Speaker 23 you know, speaking about cops being bastards, it's a whole show about it. So

Speaker 23 you'll love it. And I promise you.
that,

Speaker 23 you know, well, we're not going to, you know, be, it's two white guys talking about the wire. We're not going to, it's, you know, so just don't worry.
It's a good, it'll be good. You'll, I promise.

Speaker 23 I don't know how to say that. I'm excited to listen to it.
We don't, you know, we're leftists. Anyways, I'm excited.
Follow me at Matt Lieb Jokes on Instagram. Follow Matt Lieb home.

Speaker 23 You have a Twitter? Tracking. I do.

Speaker 23 It's at Matt Lieb. And you can follow me there too.
That's fine.

Speaker 23 No jokes.

Speaker 23 No jokes on that one. I got it.
Got it. Deathly serious.
That one,

Speaker 23 you know, I just post whatever. Today, in fact, I posted something from a doomsday dried food ad that I saw.

Speaker 23 I love this. And it was really weird.
It was like a Mac versus PC commercial, but they made the doomsday, the like, you know, dried food guy, you know, he was talking about his product.

Speaker 23 And then the other guy who was selling the fake Patriot food was very much an anti-Semitic meme. Oh, great.
Oh, God. Oh, Oh, yeah.

Speaker 23 Yeah,

Speaker 23 they made him very clearly a Jew and he's sweet.

Speaker 23 It opened wide.

Speaker 23 Hello, fellow patriots. And I was like, holy fuck.
Oh, dude. They went for it.
And yeah, so I posted a little bit of that.

Speaker 23 You love to see it. You love to see just straight up anti-Semitism on

Speaker 23 the on. This was an Instagram ad, by the way.
But hey, it was on. It usually is.

Speaker 23 yeah anyways follow me on all the things and learn to can look it's cheaper than food buckets yes learn to can and it works way better it does work very well yeah

Speaker 40 behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from coolzone media visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 38 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

Speaker 2 New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 38 Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.

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