Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Harlon Carter: the Man Who Militarized the Cops and the NRA

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Robert is joined again by Matt Lieb for the final part of our series on Harlon Carter and the NRA.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's Epstein my bar virus? 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? 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 does. Hard to tell. But you will know if you had it, if you ever take the Epstein bar exam. That's right. It is a test. You get the rest of the job. You can do it for free on this podcast.

If you sign up for a week of food, we love the Epstein bar virus. You just like to make our poor editor bleep things. I do. I do. It's fun. 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 a hundred percent sure, but I've decided it was our editor. It was not Chris.

You don't know that, Sophie. You don't know that he didn't come in. You can't prove it. You don't know that he didn't do it. Oh wait, unless you did it. Do you want to know who I know that? I've seen his dogs. His dogs are honest. He would never do that. Well, it was the, it was the, you know who it was. You're on blast, Chris.

You know who it was. And I don't know who it was. I don't know, but I'm just giving my life into a new set of pictures. I go in shorter direction, even when I didn't finish it. I thought it was a bang bang for theανnnll Do you read that, so what you write, check police power. Yeah, I may have lost the thread a little. No, I got you. You shall not pass legislation legislation.

All right, we figured it out. We got it. We got it back. Yeah, it got there. See, people, this is how the sausage gets made. So disgustingly. Now we're talking about the NRA, and particularly we have this over the gun control act, this this first big clash between Harlan Carter's people and the Old Guard and the Old Guard wins, right?

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 an awful lot of perhaps most NRA members are actually not on board with the direction they want to are really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards the Second Amendment. And while Harlan Carter was busy building the bones of a fundraising and lobbying machine that would dominate conservative and really in a lot of ways American politics for the next half century, the Old Guard were wistfully looking back to the organization's past as a sporting association and figured maybe we could go

back to that, right? And so they are the conservatives. Harlan Carter is the radical, right? Politics kind of leaves a bad taste in these people's mouths, because again, they're all aristocrats, right? They're all like they're kind of like Joe Biden. They want to have all of their friends, right? They like on both sides of things.

They don't want things to get too political because that gets nasty and it reduces the number of people who can give you money. Right, yeah. In 1973, the Old Guard had purchased land in Colorado and they wanted to turn it initially into a shooting range, pre-normal thing for the NRA to do. But in 1976, they decided to go with a grander plan, the National Rifle Association Outdoor Center. This was going to be a massive compound dedicated to classes on like woodcrafting

and wilderness, you know, stuff and conservation research. There's supposed to be like scientific research done there and also other sporting skills. And of course, there would be a shooting range there and people would be able to hunt on the land. But like guns were not the primary purpose, right? It was like a whole outdoor recreation center for the NRA. And this was in line with they wanted to expand the organization because that's obviously there's more money and whatnot.

But they didn't want to like hone in on guns entirely. They wanted to be like, well, we could be like the American go-to organization for like outdoor, you know, sporting and stuff. So in order to help them kind of make this shift, right? Because this is at this point, that is different from the NRA's initial vision, as is Harlan Carter's vision, right? So they're both trying to move it in different directions, right? It's become clear that like this thing the NRA had been isn't going to continue.

And the old guard has a vision and the new guard has another one. And so the old guard hires a PR firm, the 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 impressive vision. 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, and they want this PR firm to help them like take back like power from from Harlan Carter and like get people on their side.

Now, here's be 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? You can see what this is kind of like how you've got like those those like old political ghouls in the the the Democratic Party and like the parts of the Republican Party that turned into a Lincoln project to oppose Trump with like very slick political ads that did nothing, whereas Trump just got people angry and that works a lot better than like.

Anyway, this is a version of that same fight, right? And part of how you could tell the Orem Group was not going to succeed in their goals is that their founder, like the guy they're named after their founders, this wealthy New York philanthropists whose most prominent clients before the NRA were Planned Parenthood and the NAACP. So boy, this this 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. I 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 no, these guys are going to be politically and morally opposed with each other. It's going to it's not going to work out well. It's not going to work out well for them. It may have it may be such a bad idea that literally anyone could have called it.

But the NRA bigwigs, they bring this guy on the team. And his goal in his organization's goal is to chart like a safe new course for the NRA in which they kind of keep out of politics. And this is in part because like they want to build this new facility, you're not going to get 30 million dollars in 1970s money like by by hewing to a hard political line, right? So they succeed in roping in a bunch of big donors from all across, you know, major American business interests.

They get Bill Spencer, who's like the second guy at Citibank. They get Ezra Taft Benson, who's the highest apostle of the Mormon Church. They get a bunch of oil and gas industry bigwigs, all of whom agree to like start putting money into this project. So in order to like celebrate that they've found enough rich old dudes to fund this thing, the NRA sets up a big party on their land in Colorado for all of these these rich guys. And they basically host like a multi-millionaire summer camp.

People are like camping in their private jets on the land. Like they park their private jets there and like sleep on them. And then they hunt and fish in the daytime. I love it. Super relatable. Very exactly, right? You see, again, 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. No, yeah. 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. Right. Exactly. They're missing the entire cultural aspect of it at this point. Yeah. And so this is not going to work out well for them. Right. So there's there's some backlash.

And Alina Buckley describes kind of the old guards vision of the Association's future as quote, one in which shooting accompanied frontier abundance funded by corporations that had long bankrolled conservative causes, one in which guns were a reflection of American might cowboy like to be sure, but still with a military like formality rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal power as a threat. So again, the NRA, this is the attitude. The NRA works with the federal government in order to ensure

this sporting culture and in order to ensure a degree of military readiness, which is basically back to their old principles as opposed to the NRA as this is an association that enables individual Americans to be vigilantes, right? Right. Like, which is more what Carter is pushing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The fun, the fun type of the guy who was a vigilante. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Now, Knox had been educated at Christian College in Abilene, Texas. And the fact that he comes from Abilene is a red flag. Oh, yeah. Just in general. Don't go to Abilene. I won't. No, it's almost as bad as Brady. So anyway, sorry, Abilene.

I wish I knew anything about Texas, but this is just Texas, Laura. You have. Yeah, you're doing some. You come from Dallas as I do. You have to shit on every other city in Texas. Yeah. So that people don't notice how terrible Dallas is. Right. Right. So I like to throw a lot of flak Houston's way in order to ignore that their food is better.

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. 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?

Oh, we're having fun. I mean, it is this is like getting into like how different some things are in the country. But like at the elementary school where I went to, it was not uncommon for like people, particularly like teachers to have like guns in their cars in the parking lot. And at the high school, like kids would regularly have their guns in their cars in the parking lot

during like hunting season and stuff. Well, it's like they're hunting rifles, right? Because they're like, this is in like Ida Bell, Oklahoma. Like it's not uncommon during the season. Like you go straight from there to like whatever blind you've got. Yeah. So again, this is like different, different time. Um, but also Neil Knox is a very modern kind of gun guy who is going to help make the NRA

and to like the gun culture war organization that it comes. Yeah. Yeah. It 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. 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. It's an appreciation for guns within this like conspiratorial milieu that Neil Knox is like he's a guy on this. Yes, it's a it's a yeah, he's he's read The Turner Diaries and shit. Yeah, I mean, he would have been the kind of guy to help write them. Not that he was because that's a different set of guys, although they are kind of connected by the Goldwater Campaign, but that's another story.

Um, as the Dallas Morning News writes, Knox was, yeah, I'm just going to quote them walking through this guy's background. 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. From his base in Arizona, the bearded gun evangelists spent the next 40 years

railing against gun control and pinning himself against NRA leaders. He saw as too compromising 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. 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. 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. So Knox is the start of specifically the strain of the American right and American gun culture that kind of culminates in Alex Jones, right? Yeah, right.

And he's not super big about pushing that, but he is like the first kind of prominent voice to start talking about like these, these, these false flag attacks that were made 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. But he's like, he's like the vanguard of that kind of guy.

He winds up doing the Sandy Hook conspiracy shit later on. And it's worth noting, though, that while when Knox partners with Harlan Carter, again, this is 76, 77. So he has not yet started pushing conspiracies outright. But you can see kind of where he goes is where he, he and Carter helped to lead a lot of the gun culture. And yeah, so these guys, the old guard, see Carter and Knox and see them as like.

Unhinged, kind of unhinged, but even more than that, they're not primarily objecting necessarily to their goals as much as the fact that they're so extreme that it's going to take away funding, right? It's going to reduce the NRA's ability to attract a lot of people to give them money for their support. Right. It was a Republican establishment during like, I'm Surran. 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 a bet? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like that's kind of like, they're arguing like, these people are too extreme. The NRA will like die out if their kind takes over. 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.

Yeah. 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 because again, Carter spent years getting his Border Patrol guys in there. So they try to get rid of all these people. And what becomes known later is the weekend massacre. And Harlan, it's the only massacre.

Massacre. Harlan resigns from his position in protest. And Alina Buckley continues, quote, and gun week, hand loader and rifle, all publications Knox had once edited. Writers began reporting rumors about a shakeup at headquarters. The Orem Groups 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 Groups report. In the public mind, the NRA's current image is based almost totally on

its supposed opposition to any form of gun control. This public image constitutes a weakness for fundraising. A new piece of, again, very bad at being at their job, by the way. A new piece of information had gotten out to via a brochure sent in the mail to some members. The executive committee was considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs, not far from Raton, where the NRA could focus more squarely on its sports shooting ties.

Regional gun groups began receiving concerned notes from their members. The Shooters Committee of Political Education, SCOPE, based in New York, wrote a letter to Rich protesting the NRA's recent board appointees and to let him know that they would advise their membership to write in Neil Knox, among several others, as board candidate at the annual meeting in Cincinnati. In the American 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.

So this, and you see here, they've built, in their partnership, Knox and Carter have built a very effective, both fundraising and propaganda wing, that is, they're building a moral panic over this, right? In a very modern way, in a way that is, and it's modern, because this is like the the fucking, this is part of like the blueprint of like everything the right will do in the future. So for the next couple of weeks, Knox and Carter call every other NRA lifetime member they can, in brief, like you, when you have an organization like the NRA,

every year you have to have a meeting and you have to do like voting at that meeting and stuff. And like there's people who are the actual like board and stuff, but also the lifetime members get to vote. And so the board is in control, unless you can get like enough of those members to vote on measures that would like replace the leadership, right? So, and they didn't, they had never, no one had ever really tried to do this before. The fact that the members get to vote had kind of been like stock options voting,

where it's like, yeah, I mean, 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? Right, yeah. That was the thinking. But obviously the NRA isn't like a publicly traded company. You just, each of these people has a vote.

And if you can whip them all into shape, you could actually rest control of the organization away from the old guard, which is what Knox and Carter start planning to do. Now, there's a lot of politicking that goes on here. You can read about it in detail in Alina Buckley's article. One thing I think that's worth noting is that the whole event has something of an early Trumpy vibe. The folks Carter lines up to back their plan to take over the NRA, saw the old guard is out of touch aristocrats, which they were.

They frame themselves as like Paul Revere types, right? They're founding fathers, right? They're fighting a revolution against an unjust like aristocracy. Yeah, one person who was present. They're all doing the cosplay now. It's all begins with the don't tread on me flags and the three pointed, you know, fucking hats and yes. And one person who was present later recalled,

some members were angry enough to bring rope tar and feathers to Cincinnati. Yeah. What is their obsession with? He'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, larking. It's just just the same fucking. Oh, God.

I mean, this gets into a broader issue that actually is is present in different forms everywhere, which is that like everyone has their types of violence that are like good and traditional and OK and their types of violence that are. So black people breaking a bunch of windows during a riot or like, you know, flipping a cop car and lighting it on fire. That is not OK. That's horrifying. That's that's evil, violent, you know, end of civilization.

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. Right. That's traditional, right? Yeah, that's it's allowed. You know, it's I mean, 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 HBO series with Paul Giamatti. Oh, yeah, yeah. They had like a tarring and feathering in it. And it was like the first time I was like, oh, yeah, that's incredibly violent. 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.

I put it on the same level as a pie in the face, but it's no, it's not. It's pretty bad. No, and it's like, 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 confiscate this or the cops should like do that. It's like, well, OK, what happens when police confiscate things? Like, what does that look like? Violence wise, you know?

Yes, yeah. And it's because like, I don't know, everyone's got it's a it's a it's a. I mean, it's a common political tactic, right, to frame the violence you want to do or you want to have the government do as not violence because it's being done by the government. It's like, you know, when people do a panic about like drug dealers sneaking fentanyl into things, your solution to that is have the DEA raid more people. It's like, well, the DEA kill people too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, completely.

I don't know. This is just what people do. Anyway, so Knox, you know, he's a very, very, very violent person. Uh, takes point on the actual day of the convention. He's the one who's actually whipping votes at the NRA convention to propose a series of bylaw changes using the support base Carter had built. He gets them to vote in the defense of the second amendment to the NRA's mission for the first time. Right.

Um, so he's like, this is the first time they actually add because the like they have a mission statement, whatever is an organization. The first thing they do is they add like second amendment, you know, like we are advocating for like the, you know, this interpretation of the second amendment to that. The next thing they do is they block the sale of the NRA headquarters in DC, and they block the development of the outdoor centers. So they put it into this plan.

And then Carter or Knox brings up a guy named Bob Kukla, who's one of Carter's people who's still in the NRA. When Carter resigns in protest, Kukla takes over the lobbying arm. And he's apparently, I guess the, the old guard had thought he was trustworthy, but he secretly records one of their managing committee meetings. And they play this in front of the crowd. And in the tape, you can hear the current head of the NRA and the other members of the old guard criticizing Kukla for quote, going to war every time someone mentions gun control.

So he pulled the project Veritas, he Veritas again, these guys are really building the playbook that's going to be used everywhere, well outside of guns. So following this, Knox and his voters stripped the board and managing committee of power. And basically again, this is that you can go into a lot more detail about how they do this all legislatively, 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. At 3 30, yeah, yeah, they do it, they do it fucking street style. 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, you have afforded the NRA this wonderful historically important reaction of yours to the way the association has been going to the way you want it to be, to the way it ought to be. And if I have anything to do with it, you are going to win because you are the NRA. Fuck. So you did it. He did it. Very Trumpy speech. Yeah, I did his Trump speech and he took over the NRA and I imagine now people are going to start falling in line.

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, you know who loves to carry out COOS? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, our sponsors who backed a series of COOS in Indonesia in order to gain access to the island that you can go to hunt kids on. Yeah, that's what they're known for. And hey, if you're not if you're not into guns, understand you can use bows and use an Adal-Adal, you know, ninja stars, ninja stars for sure. Look, they can't stop you.

Yeah, a bow staff, literally any weapon the Ninja Turtles use. Yeah, the government of Indonesia has no control over this island. So it's all on. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. 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. There we go. W. Big Wayne. Yeah. Big LaPierre. Pepe Le Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew. Yeah, exactly. It's not French, but you know. I mean, probably somewhere along the line. Somewhere along the line. Point is, Pepe Le Pew, Pew, Pew, Pew is a very good one. That was a good joke. You should be proud. 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. But by the by the 80s, he has turned it into, because again, it was, I mean, in Carter started this process, but it becomes the most the best funded and most effective

lobbying organization in DC, right, in the entire country. Again, Carter draws kind of the blueprints. LaPierre carries them out, though. There's no other sport that, you know, exists that, you know, 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. Yeah. And again, there's like critiques about, well, we were primarily interested in preserving rich people's right to ownership, 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. And these are some changes. And again, it's like,

broadly speaking, like what you would kind of want to see in a democracy that's supposed to function the way ours does, as opposed to like, we are going to become so key to right wing fundraising, that if somebody proposes any kind of law meant at curbing gun crime, we will destroy them. Yeah, right. Which is by any means necessary. Yeah. By any means necessary. And to an extent, like it doesn't matter how like reasonable the restriction might be, like outside of stuff, like an assault weapons ban, like if you're going to propose like universal background checks, which most gun owners support, right, we're going to come for your ass, you know. Yeah. Unless you're the Black Panthers, but whatever. So another 1977 hire brought onto the NRA at

the same time as Wayne LaPierre is a guy named Robert Dowlett. 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. So between 1960, 1970, there's only three law review articles endorsing an individualist interpretation, right? There are some like state level rulings, you could argue kind of endorse one earlier, but there's never been like a national like as a Supreme Court ruling on the matter one way or the other. And it hadn't really people have not even talked about it in that way until the 60s. So three law review articles written between 1960 and 1970 endorsing that interpretation 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. Yeah. And his work would start to bear fruit. Again, there's some like lower level rulings, but it makes the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment makes its way to the Supreme Court for the first time in 2001. Some people will say, like point to DC is heller, that's not the first time it happens in 2001. 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. The next year, while he's got this protective order, which he's not supposed to have guns,

because he has the protective order against him, right? During a meeting with his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he pulls a gun during an argument and points it at them. So he gets and 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. 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. 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. But in the ruling, the Supreme Court rules that describes the Second Amendment as an individual

right, right? So this is the first time that happens at a federal level. And then this ruling in 2000 is reinforced by 2008's DC versus Heller, which is like the big ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban like categories of weapons and whatever, it's based on like a DC, I think handgun ban. And then in 2010, the Second Amendment is finally incorporated in McDonald v Chicago. But this is all orchestrated by Robert Dowlett, right? Starting in the 70s. And one thing you have to say about the man as he earned his salary, right? That's a significant change in US Jewish prudence that he kind of painstakingly is the architect of pushing. It's probably worth noting here that he was a murderer. So I'm going to quote from the Boston

review here. Robert J. Dowlett was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yocum, the mother of his then girlfriend in 1963. Dowlett also robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop like Carter. Dowlett was 17 years old when he pulled the trigger. He confessed to the shootings and served six years at prison before his conviction was overturned on a technicality. The crimes were not made public until 2014. God damn, no wonder it's like this is. It's also he and the same origin story over and over. 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. 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. So I guess you would say he's not a vigilante. He just straight up an armed criminal. That is fucking insane. And this is the guy who's made it easier for fucking everyone in the world or in the United States. He's he's he's the NRA's general counsel. So at one point, I assume you went to law school. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because again, he gets off like like like Carter does, right? He gets off and then he goes to college and I mean, you know, 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.

I believe in certain second chances for certain kinds of mistakes. 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 a lawyer. I feel like that's right. Like maybe that's not okay. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, listen, that guy explicitly does gun crimes for fun. This perhaps should not be his job. I want to know what happened with the relationship. Did it suffer after the murder of the mother? It must have been hard while she was his girlfriend. So I don't think they wind up staying together. Oh, damn. Yeah. It's like, you know, with Harlan Carter, I think a 17-year-old

who in a crime of 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. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's like little things like not giving them, I don't know, authority over other people or requiring them to use lethal force as a part of the job. And maybe the guy who murders his girlfriend's mom shouldn't help to be an architect of federal gun policy. Perhaps not that guy. It sounds rational. Yeah. But you know what? I don't know if that's... Yeah. I think it'll work out fine. 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. If you're going to make that case, maybe Ross Dowlett shouldn't be the man doing it. Seems like not. No. So that's cool. And the Boston Review article I found is a good job of pointing out that the NRA's embrace of the specific legal interpretation does not occur in a vacuum. Well, Dowlett's lawyers are making their case, right? So while they're... And again, this is a very... It's a... It's 40 years. It's a painstaking process of bill... Well, not... I guess 20-ish, 23, something like that. A lot of time. 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. They're paying for ads and all of these different gun press magazines. They're having paid spokesmen show up and talk radio stations, right? And part of what they're doing, they're obviously... They're arguing for this interpretation of the Second Amendment, but they're also pushing a cultural change. What some scholars have turned the... Turned the tactical turn in US gun culture. Again, even to the extent that like... I mean, one thing that liberals get wrong is like, it is not new for civilians to own on a widespread scale military-grade weapons. Among other things, one of the most popular guns in civilian hands that the NRA, before its political turn, sold to people was the M1 Garant, which was the US

service rifle of World War II, right? Right. But what is really new is that it's... Is this kind of paramilitary turn for gun owners? Because people were not buying M1 Garans primarily to like play active soldiers. They were buying them because the Garant is a perfectly good hunting rifle, right? It says 30 out of 6, which is a very effective hunting round. And those were cheap, right? So it was a good weapon to buy. So people are not dressing up as soldiers with their M1 Garans primarily, right? That kind of stuff, the tactical turn in US gun culture, occurs because... It occurs alongside the militarization of the police and these kind of Hollywood valorization of the militarization of police. So there's a lot that's going on here,

right? And including, broadly speaking, the kind of... You also should tie in what Hollywood's partnership with the Defense Department, right? And the increasing degree to which military tactical culture becomes popularized. But the NRA recognizes... There's a lot of promise in this. Number one, you can get more people involved. You can sell more shit to people, which means you can have more companies funding the NRA who are not selling not just guns, but all this tactical gear. I'm going to read a quote again from that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but it really ties all of this together. Though the story of this tactical development in US gun culture is complex, I focus in this

essay on a few particularly crucial components. The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized since the 1970s and diffused deeper into the interior of the country. This has blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers into nearly every US town, and turned militarized border security into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization. This has also corresponded with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly worsened by the war on terror, but which historian Elizabeth Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson administration's war on crime, which of course the NRA backs. Like the nationalization of border security,

it turned the nation's city streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement. Second, individuals once arming themselves for self-defense, often out of racial fears or a perceived threat to their masculinity, are now frequently claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and freedom itself. The NRA has played an outsized role in this vigilante reframing by promulgating the myth that gun ownership has always been about an individual, constitutional right, and oriented towards a nativist version of self-defense. This vigilantism operates in conjunction with extra-legal violence of law enforcement officers and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty more dangerous than any military-grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom

of others as equal to one's own and views any attempt to support such a quality as tyranny. More importantly, this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power to take life in defense not of law, but of particular social and racial orders. There are now 25 federal agencies with special tactical units. 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, Tobacco, and Fire Arms, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. 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. 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. In Carter's victory speech, he declared, beginning in this place in this hour, this period in NRA history is finished. 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. Goddamn. Yeah, pretty bleak when you lay it all out like that. Yeah, yeah. All of that in a row and concisely done. Yeah. Bucked up. Yeah. And it's, again, I, I, there are some in our listenership will agree and some will disagree.

I'm a believer fundamentally that 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. 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. What part of what by, and they're claiming to be originalists, they're claiming to be that the, that the initial original interpretation was 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. Fundamentally, it is about allowing regular white citizens to emulate the military and the police and to act as vigilantes in their stead, right? That is where the NRA turns. And that is, that is the tactical turn, right? It's not that there's nothing evil about owning body armor, which people can do for, perfectly reasonable defensive purposes. There's nothing like, but, but what, what they're, what they're doing is pushing this idea of like, not just the millet, not just that like society ought to be militarized, which you get in every kind of argument that like, what we need to do is harden the schools, we need to add more cops. But it's this idea that the individual white person should militarize themselves in order to,

in order to protect this kind of racial hierarchy, right? Yeah, uphold white supremacy. And this is, and this is the thing, this is what, what I wish folks who are supportive of, 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? And that's, I think Evaldi made that perfectly clear that like, these are two sides of the problem. And, and the NRA is a huge part of how we get there, both how we get these cops that look indistinguishable from like Marines and downtown Fallujah, not that I think the Marines necessarily should have been in downtown Fallujah, but you,

you, you have these guys, it's this, there's this thing called the weapons effect, right? Which is a psychological phenomenon that's noted that like the presence of weapons in an area, visible weapons can increase the willingness of people to use violence, right? And there's like something about that that heightens it. And that's happening here. And part of why that happens is just the fact that America has so many goddamn guns, right? Right. But another part of that is the fact that everywhere you go, you see fucking cops in a way that like, you don't see cops dressed as armed as heavily as our cops in fucking war zones a lot of the time, right? Like it's, it's anyway, whatever. That's what Arlen Carter builds, you know? Yeah, no, I hear exactly what you're

saying. And I, I, I agree to an extent with, with what you mean. I feel like in general, my problem with liberals is that they tend to kind of like put guns in the same category, like they moralize guns the way they moralize, like the right will moralize drugs. And kind of this idea that like, you know, 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 this like moralization of it, like misses the entire point of why exactly the, why the people who want guns and have those guns have them, you know, it's like,

the people you're speaking to are not, it's people speaking to the choir. Liberals often just speak to themselves and go like, isn't it crazy that, you know, all these people have so many guns? And it's like, yeah, well, while you're talking amongst yourselves, all these guys have created an entire family filled with guns. It's like looking at these right wing like militias that people are rightly like concerned to see militias marching around US streets, like threatening people. 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. And that's a huge chunk of it. And like, you can't,

you can't divorce your desire to reduce the number of guns in American culture from the need to reduce the militarization of the police because they are both in inextricably tied to the problem, which is the constant gun violence in this country has has has two points that need to be really like hit on. It's not it's not just civilian gun ownership. It's also the way in which the state uses and legitimates armed force going back to even the earliest days where it's like, yeah, in Texas, your right to carry guns was heavily restricted. But if you were a white vigilante who carried guns to do racist violence, you would often get off, right? You broke in the law, right? Right, like Harlan Carter, you know. 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. Obviously, the NRA, we're not going to get into this a lot, but it's like well past its prime at this point for a variety of reasons of primarily rampant corruption. There's a pretty good podcast about like what the fuck happened there. But yeah, it's called Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos podcast. I'm sorry. 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. 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? Yeah. 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%. I was just thinking to myself that seems like a low number. It's right. Because again, if you look at actually polling of Republicans on gun control issues, they are a lot less hardliners on guns than you would guess by how the party acts. And it's because the party's ability to fund elections for decades was heavily based on who could get the NRA's approval, right? Yeah. Got to get that A plus rating. Exactly. 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

as my whole family, I had like two relatives who owned guns, like my grandpa and one of my uncles, right? And I did go shooting as a kid, but my parents didn't have any. My aunt and uncle didn't have any. They were not guns in the house of my family in Texas, you know? Because like, it's actually not as integral to conservatism as a, at least, I mean, this has again changed because the culture wars have accelerated. So like this is that there's less conservatives like the ones I grew up with when there were today. But the NRA, it wasn't that everyone on the right was in lock step. 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.

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. Here we go. So Saturday Night Special in brief, like there's a type of handgun 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. Yeah. These are still guns like this are still used in violent crime way more often than like the guns that are politicized like cheap handguns in general are the primary guns that are used in violent gun crime. Yeah. Although what 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. Yeah. But yeah. So this is a cheap shitty handgun. And these are particularly low quality handguns. They were not like well made as a general rule. Right. They didn't always work. They did not always. We are yet that's that we're building to that. Okay. So jumping the gun. So you have this massive crime rate that starts in the 70s and really like peaks in the early 90s. And again, a lot of Joe Biden's career is based off of this like violent crime panic that starts in this period. And one of the first like legislative like tsunamis that forms around the crime surge is around this fear of the Saturday night special. And one of the

reasons why people are so scared of the Saturday night special is that it is a gun that black people can afford. Right. Right. It is a cheap handgun and so it is affordable for those folks. Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban the Saturday night special. Although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly on the grounds that they were shitty and broke easily. And this is one of the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from the from NRA on the record dot org quote speaking in opposition to opposition to legislation that aimed to ban Saturday night specials and other inexpensively produced handguns. Carter stated in a 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. And the question arises, what are we trying to do? Upgrade the quality of handguns and the hands of our criminals? God, that's an amazing logical argument. Yeah. I mean, it's like he has a point, a really fucked up evil point. And it's also he's getting straight to, I mean, the crux of it here, which is like 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 the poor, their quality of handguns is way worse. There's a lot.

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, not in necessary, not just from violence. A lot of people are going to die because of Carter's defense of terrible handguns and where it leads. But before we get into that, you know, who else loves shitty handguns that break in their owner's hands and they can. I'm sorry, Sophie. 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. 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,

I enjoy this because I am watching Sophie just shaking her head every time you do this bit. She's she hates it. She hates it. She's 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? I've never read about this before. Who has a child hunting island? Is he? And I just it just feels like betrayal to our listeners. I love most of my heart. I like fucking with them. I feel the same way towards them that I do with my cat when I like pick it up and I like toss it in the air and it hates it, but it can't it can't it has to let me like squeeze it and wrap it in a blanket. It's 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. 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, but it's you're the farmer. Remember that. You're the farmer while I'm the farmer. You are. Yes, exactly. Rather remember. Don't do that to the goats. I don't think it'll work out well for you. 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. Oh, I love it. They go, except for my boy goat. He's the ram. He loves it. He fucking he'll as soon as he sees you he'll run up because he wants to get cuddled. Damn, dude. His sister hates it, but yeah, whatever.

Anyway, of course he does. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good bad ass way. It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313

days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Now, Matt, if you're not a gun guy, the Derringer is a tiny ultra concealable one or two shot pistol that were originally made for riverboat gamblers as documented in the documentary Maverick. Okay, I know exactly what's going on. Yeah, they're like little, little bitty, like, yeah. Yeah, little hot girl guns is the way I

think of it. 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. He had one of these little old derringers and four bushy guys sampled up in an arrogant manner. He stopped them and three of them were very nice and decent. 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. 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, Daddy, why does Trump do the bad thing? And I couldn't explain is like a totally fake story that did not. There's absolutely no way

this happened. But also none of it makes it like, what does it mean by their bushy? What does that mean? It has to be racist, right? He has to be being racist here. Oh, yeah, for sure. But I don't know how. Which race? I'm going like, were they acidic Jews? Yeah, what does this mean? What does bushy mean? I don't know, but it could be Italians. It would be funny if like the real story is that that the Jeb and George Bush who were young at this point, like it was, it was all of the Bush brothers like trying to mug children. Yeah, you know, bushy, like the former head of the CIA. Yeah, I think he was current probably would have been current when this was I guess at that point. 70s. Yeah. So obviously, that's probably a lie. But it's very again, Harlan Carter is he is the kind

of guy who is not just like, I think 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? Yeah, exactly. That is out of its damn mind. 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. It's the 70s. Maybe he's talking about like a Tom set like a like a lot of chest hair type like a disco stew shows up. Yeah, a bunch of disco guys come out and start threatening children. 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. 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? 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 Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales and advocates of gun control hope to give this agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingle, a sorry, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A plus rating from the Ascendant NRA

blocked them in 1975. He did it again when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. We put in there an express prohibition against they're getting them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition. Dingle said in debate in Congress, that second bill was crushed 339 to 80. And the issue has never been seriously considered again. And it's one of those like this is again, a perfectly, even if you're like a gun fundamentalist, you should want there to be oversight of guns that don't work or explode and like ammunition that doesn't work like right, right? That seems to make that shouldn't be a political issue. 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 people, black people getting the defective guns seems to be the only excuse here. I mean, well, I mean, there are specific excuses 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 right, which they do anyway, like there's that shit happens and like whatever, it's dumb. It's dumb that this happens this way. It is worth noting that yeah, it's like a blue dog Democrat who is the one who like blocks this shit. So the end result is that when gun manufacturers produce firearms that for example, fire for no reason and kill their owners, it is impossible

for the government to order them to recall those weapons, not even the BATFE, which supposedly regulates firearms can force a gun maker to take broken guns off the market. And I'm going to quote again from that Bloomberg article. And this is actually how the article opens. Thomas Bud Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm, pointing at something. It's where he found his boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house around 715 a.m. on the last day of 2016, bleeding out. Brown is telling the story now about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot. His son, Jared, 28 had just picked up Bud's Taurus PT 145 Millennium Pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting near

their house in Griffin, Georgia with his best friend, Tyler Haney. Bud figured Jared had fired at something for the fun of it like he did sometimes. I was thinking I'd better go out there and tell him be careful or something. Bud 54 says his voice trailing off. But what he'd heard was the pistol going off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a 45 caliber slug through Jared's femoral artery. 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. When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in its holster, tucked into Jared's waistband. So. And he can't do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Bud is one of, we have no idea how many Americans

died due to defective Taurus guns. Jesus. The company did eventually issue a recall on something like a million weapons that were potentially defective, but they didn't have to run ads anywhere to inform people of the recall. They were not required to reach out to their customers, to reach out to gun stores, to take any action at all to warn people that they'd sold guns that could fire for no reason. An unknown number of those weapons are still in people's gun saves closets and holsters today. That's fucking crazy. Just like, I don't even know the justification. It's just guns don't kill people. Yeah, it's this. Fate kills people. The NRA, they are, there's this like social, like 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. Of course. We'll do it if they can, you know. 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. Yeah. It's, and it's, I mean, again, for, among other things, don't buy tortoise guns for any practical purpose. Absolutely. In the 1990s, more than 40 US cities filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers spurred on by a surge in violent crime. This was the super predator era. 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. They used their lobbying arm to launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida to propose a piece of legislation that would end all pending litigation against gun companies and prevent any future litigation. It took a while to actually get the law, which is the PLCAA written. And by the time it was introduced, George W. Bush was on his second term. In October 2005, he signed the PLCAA and a law which blocked lawsuits from seeking damages on gun industry companies for unlawful use of a firearm, right? So if the company could be sued for like breaking

the law in some way, but they cannot be sued for what people do with their weapons. And I have some conflicting feelings on some of these lawsuits. But one of the things that people will point out is that the advertising of a lot of these companies like leads to the like, and this is a big thing like the Sandy Hook lawsuit, right? One of the big issues, one of the big like points used to justify like the suing against the Bushmaster who made the gun that was used in Sandy Hook was this ad campaign they'd just done where it was like consider your man card reissued. They would like send you a man card with an AR-15. And it's again, this is like a complicated thing to get into entirely. But there's a debate to be had

and to my mind, the area in which it's kind of most relevant to have this debate is on to what extent is does the way the gun industry tries to sell weapons to people complicit in when those weapons are used for violence. So for example, when Daniel Defense launches an ad where you have like a Bible verse and a small child holding an AR-15, to what extent does that help to lead to what extent does that help make gun culture in the United States more violent, right? And this is not really what the lawsuits are like the Evaldi families aren't suing Daniel Defense or they're attempting to right now. This is all happening at the moment on those lines. But to my mind, that's kind of the most that's the thing that like, I think there's a point on.

Sure. I mean, it's like, I mean, the way cigarettes were marketed changed, you know, were regulated like crazy and has actually had an effect on the amount of smokers. Yeah. 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 PLCAA kind of ended there for a long time. This is starting to be challenged. But for 15s or 17 years, whatever, made any kind of like debate meaningless, right? Because it was just prohibited. And it was prohibited. Again, this is the NRA spent a lot of money on George W. Bush's campaigns. You know, I am wondering if the like initially the Patachi magic wand actually was a back massager. And if you could sue a company,

because it gave your wife an orgasm. Well, like again, there 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? There are some unsettling implications to some of that. Right. It's not a super cut. It's not as cut and dry as certain other things are. Yeah. 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 always has been. Yeah. And well, I mean, it seems kind of unfair to me to have not known that. 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. There's like literal laws on how many. I mean, I don't think they've ever been in 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. 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 rated because you're not allowed to sell sex toys. They had they were always called cake toppers, right? Like the dildos and shit were like cake toppers or personal massagers or whatever. Yeah. But you couldn't, like you couldn't say like, these are for fucking in the same way that like you could sell a bong,

but you had to call it a water pipe for tobacco. Like if you use the word bong in a Texas, again, head shops were always kind of inconsistent about how much they were paranoid about this, but like you you could get asked to leave for calling something a bong in a right. But I mean, what do you what do you call that, you know, that, you know, that silicon butt that has both the pussy and the vagina. That's a sex ass. That's a sex ass. Yeah. So but you I mean, I'm just saying, how do you market that? So I get around. I don't I don't think they really had sex ass, although I know people bought fucking, what do you call them, the 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? As like this is for joking around at a bachelorette party. I don't know. They're like, it's dumb. All Texas's whole legal system is stupid. That's insane. That's a lot of fun, though. I mean, you know, but people get around it. Like I didn't have access to a big silicon, you know, but vagina. And so I fuck the Big Mouth Billy Bass. Yeah, who didn't fuck a Big Mouth Billy Bass? Yeah, I'm just saying 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 come. We're going to start talking about come look, you know, the same year that George W. Bush

signs the PLCA and a 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. And thanks to the NRA's lobbying, the Billy Bass company couldn't be sued for taking the virginity of all those boys. 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 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 affected. In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article that show showing that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide in the home. Now, this is a study you'll see cited a great deal. And it's often used to argue that firearms in the home make people less safe. This study was widely reported on at the time, and it scared the shit out of the NRA. So the NRA campaigned to eliminate the organization that had funded the study, the CDC's National Center for Energy Injury Prevention. Congress included language in the 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. Now, you may note, they weren't doing that with that study, it was a study that you could use to argue gun control, supported gun control. It was just a study on like the homicide risk and how that changes when you have a gun in the home, right? Right. Like the CDC was not like lobbying specifically, they were carrying out a study, but the NRA basically argued, yeah. How people get hurt in the home. And the NRA argued that was inherently like that's political and should be illegal. Yeah. And then they make that happen, right? Yeah. Like Congress goes through with this shit. This is later referred to as the Dickey Amendment

because of some dude named Dickey. 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. So they cut all of the money out of the CDC's budget that had been used to research firearm industry. And again, whatever you think about gun control, there are 400 million of these things in the fucking country, there should be research into how they affect people, right? It just seems prudent. It seems prudent. It just seems prudent. Yeah. If fucking, if auto companies were blocking research into how car accidents work, right? Like you would say that's nuts, you know, because it would be. And it's not even, it's like, it's not even that I

kind of just tried to do that. But yeah. Right. It's, I don't fault them for trying. It's the same way with the, you know, 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 we're in. If you have the money, you can try. The crazy thing is the success rate of the NRA in these, in these things that are completely like common sense ideas. There's, there's a wide variety of arguments about how should you interpret this, this, the, you know, the findings to studies like this, to what extent should they inform policy, all that kind of stuff. 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, right? You're definitely bad. Like for sure, you're the very least coming in bad faith. But yeah, you are 100% 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. Since 1996, the CDC's funding for firearm injury prevention has fallen 96%. And similar attempts to fund research have met with further attacks on the ability to study any of these stuff. Most recently in 2012. And yeah. 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, they're doing 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. 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. 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. Oh, shit. That's the that's the Harlan Carter in the NRA, everybody. God damn. There's a pretty good song about him called Ramon Casiano by the drive by truckers, which is good. Well, that guy fucking, he sucks. It sucks that he's sucks that he's dead, too. I feel like the 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 stopping all these ridiculous, you know, fucking NRA lobbies. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, 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. Sure. Without a tremendous amount of editorializing. But yeah, I feel similarly like my attitudes on what gun control should be 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. Right. 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. And that is deliberately designed that way. 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. And it's gotten a lot more left-leaning and a lot less white. And, you know, there's a variety of personally, okay, because people do ask about this, because I talk about guns sometimes, in terms of what I think are the number one, the laws that you could most easily pass without the Supreme Court guaranteed

shutting them down. And I think a federal assault weapons ban, the Supreme Court will rule against, right? Like it will go to the Supreme Court and they will rule against it in their current construction outside of like talking about should we stack the Supreme Court, whatever, like buying. It's not doing that. So stuff that I think would not, number one, would not necessarily, like obviously, anything is a crapshoot with the Supreme Court. So literally anything could get turned down. Because they're about to rule on a concealed handgun carry bill anyway. But I think it's perfectly reasonable and is also there is legal precedent for raising the age at which someone has to be in order to buy a semi-automatic firearm. Certainly 18 year olds are not full adults and

our current gun legislation recognizes that by banning them from buying handguns. Although that's also not entirely accurate because you can still buy handguns through like face-to-face sales or have them given to you by a parent or whatever. There's always like ways around this kind of stuff. But it's been established since I think 1986 that the federal government regulates does not want people under 21 buying handgun. So it's the kind of thing where if you were to pass a law extending that to semi-automatic rifles, you'd have a stronger argument in front of the Supreme Court if it came to the Supreme Court in order to like defend that piece of gun control legislation. And both of our most recent mass shootings, as of this recording, there may have

been another one at a time this drops. We're 18 year olds who bought a gun and immediately carry 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. And I think the best thing you could do, you would probably not have to call it a red flag law because that term has been politicized, but a law that would allow you to take guns and stop people from buying guns if they have a history of domestic violence and violence towards women and making violent threats of mass shootings, which seems like a no-brainer. Yeah. Like everything has been politicized to a stupid degree, but the Buffalo shooter was ought had been doing like threatening shootings and threatening women and like had was on law

enforcement's radar should have been it should be possible to do something there, right? You'd figure. And yeah, I feel like that there's so many like common sense like laws that you're that don't exist that you're surprised every time you find out they don't exist. I do think 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 of all these shooters, they both like universal background checks, they they passed those. So like that that's not as much of the

solution as I think something like an effective kind of again, I think you would need a better term than red flag law because but also maybe, I don't know, the right's going to culture war whatever you try to do, right? But everything's poison pilled no matter what you can get any fucking euphemistic nice sounding thing. If you hit your wife and kids, you shouldn't have a gun bill. But of course, one of the issues with that is that you're going to disarm like 40% of the police. Right. I can talk about like what I think would be a good idea at the end of the day, like I don't know like what I what actually is going to pass that's a totally different fucking conversation. And yeah, no, I don't I don't know what the answer is. I know that the one thing that

I don't think the answer is is is 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 um, every like liberal and leftist being like, oh, well, I'm, you know, I'm going to trust that the government and the police will keep me safe from the bad men. And so I'm like, it's it's hard to know. It's hard to know what to do. I mean, this is a very difficult issue because again, people a lot of people say, no, it's simple, just like ban the guns. 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. Like this is not as simple as

you're making it out to be. Right. You can say it is the guns. And yeah, of course, access to guns is like why a lot of this is happening. But also like that doesn't that's not the end of of like the complexity of the issue, because there are 400 million of these fucking things in the country right now. And a whole culture built up around being ready to immediately use them against right now. Gay and trans people are particularly in the fucking crosshairs. And again, this is like, so I don't know. I think fundamentally, like I argue a lot about gun control with people. I think the folks who want to see more of it are coming from a fundamentally natural and noble position, which is looking at repeating massacres and going like,

we got to be able to do something about. Yeah, there's got to be something we can do about this shit. No, I completely understand it. I mean, and yeah, I feel I feel the same way. It's like there's certainly got to be a fucking solution to this that is a systemic solution, a governmental solution. This is like an an acceptable state of affairs. Yeah. But like so many of the problems we have, like how to fix it and like how to fix it without having a shooting war over it and like the fixing and like, 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 and actually solving the problem. And I again, nobody knows what to

do with this because it's it's so much like no one has ever had anything like this happen, right? People bring up the the Dunblane massacre, the Port Arthur massacre, they bring out 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. There has never been a society this heavily armed or a society that has turned the random mass killing of civilians into a meme. Yeah. Both of those things have happened here and they've happened alongside like the militarization of an increasingly unaccountable violent police force that wants dictatorial control of American cities. And all of this stuff is pretty pretty unique historically. So yeah, I don't know how we fix

it. It feels so American and unique that it feels like, yeah, if I knew the answer to it, I would I would say it, but I really do not. I mean, and again, it's like one of those, I don't vote. I'm not a gun issue voter. I 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 vote in the people who say you got to vote, if I'm wrong and they're right, then at least I put in the vote and I tried that thing. I don't think it's going to work. I don't think they're going to solve any of these problems. I think other things are going to be happening in the future that are not what we recognize as part

of American politics, but are going to become the way things get decided in this country. And I think it's going to be uglier and weirder than our parents were used to. But I do like voting is like a, well, okay, but maybe I'm wrong about that. It's the same reason they have a 401k, right? Right, right, right, right, right. Exactly. Maybe there will be an economy in 30 years, so I'll get to retire, you know. It's the same reason I own half of a Bitcoin. Yeah, exactly. Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, you know, I get it. Yeah, you got just in case. What if I'm not missing out? Yeah, I just have a one. It's all I could afford. But the point is, is yeah, I, I just want to say I vote and I also am cynical and I have the exact same,

I have the exact same pessimism that you do. But you know, the only optimism that I have is there's going to be some, someone smart who does something good. And I don't want to miss the bus. I don't want to miss, you know. I mean, my, and I tend to think we should all, maybe if, if people are more committed to like getting out there and taking personal responsibility, not as a militia, but in a, in a, in a, in a response belief, 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 that was stopped by an armed member of the community. But I think community defense is everyone should have an eye fact,

right. Downside stoning 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. You could have a fucking piece of rebar fall off of a building construction and impale somebody, and maybe you'd get to save their life with an eye fact million times. That could be useful. Have an eye fact, right? Organize in your community to provide a 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 a, 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? Fuck yeah. Why the hell not? Be the, be the, be the, 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 did. They had, they had swag, you know? Yeah, they wore berets and they made berets look badass, you know? Yeah. Look who is hell and protect your community. And, uh, yeah. It 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, you can do. Yeah. Yeah. Abolishing, um, the police. That is a good idea. Anyway, Matt, got any portables? Oh man, I've had a great time.

Um, and if you love, uh, the bastards and getting behind them, you'll love, uh, the podcast, Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos rewatch podcast, uh, that me and my friend Vince Mancini do. Uh, we just finished the entire series, so you can re listen and rewatch the whole thing. And, uh, it's great. You'll love it. And, uh, yeah, you look forward to, uh, us doing our, the wire podcast very soon. It's going to be great. And, uh, you know, speaking about cops being bastards, it's a whole show about it. So you'll, you'll love it. And I promise you that, uh, you know, we're not going to, you know, be, it's too 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. I promise.

I don't know how to say that. I'm excited to listen to it. We don't, uh, you know, we're left this anyways. I'm excited. Follow me at Matt Leib jokes on Instagram. Follow Matt Leib home. You have a Twitter? I do. It's, it's, it's at Matt Leib and you can follow me there too. That's fine, but I feel no jokes on that one. That's definitely serious. That one, um, you know, I just post whatever today. In fact, I posted something from a doomsday dried food ad that I saw. And it was really weird. It was like a Mac versus PC commercial, but they made, uh, the doomsday, the like, you know, uh, dried food guy, you know, he was talking about his product. And then the other guy who was selling the fake Patriot food was very much an anti-Semitic meme. Oh God. Oh

no. Yeah. They made, they made him very clearly a Jew. And he's sweet. It opened with like, Hello, fellow Patriots. And I was like, Holy fuck. They went for it. And, uh, yeah. So I posted a little bit of that and, uh, you love to see it. You love to see just straight up anti-Semitism. Uh, on the, this was an Instagram ad, by the way, but, uh, hey, it was on. It usually is. Yep. 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. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool zone media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through

training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without

parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.