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

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Robert is joined again by Matt Lieb for part two of three 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. Welcome to The Wire, the podcast that created the hit TV show The Wire. Our idea was stolen by that hack, David Simon. We went to HBO in 1998 and you said, have you ever considered making a show about wires? Yeah, and we said, you know who understands Baltimore? Me and Matt Leib.

That's right, exactly. We understand Baltimore more than anyone understands Baltimore. I stopped there once for gasoline on a road trip, so I get it. I played for the Baltimore Orioles. That's a lot of people are talking about that right now. Yeah, and you know, I feel like, I mean, it was in Los Angeles, and I was in fifth grade, but I was an Oriole. And you know, we famously, season two was based on the fact that I once bought a sandwich from a Polish man. That's right, that's right.

He said, what if this was a whole show? What if this was a whole season about Longshoremen? Yeah, yeah, just like Longshoremen, like stevedores, and like, you know. God, that's a word that doesn't get used enough. I love the word stevedore. What an incredible job title. It's the coolest job title. I don't know, like, what about moving like crates? It makes no sense to me based on what the job is, why they're called stevedores. I imagine there was just like the first guy to ever do that was named Steve.

Steve, and he was just so good at it that they were like, everybody's just fucking stevedore now. Yeah, with stevedores. You're like, look at how good he is at moving crates. Jesus. You're moving shipping crates like Steve did? Mm-hmm. Oh, man, I want that job. This was a meandering way of introducing the podcast behind the bastards. Matt Leib, guest, also host of a podcast.

Yeah, yeah. Pod yourself a gun, which is a Sopranos podcast. And then soon to be a wire podcast coming out shortly. So get excited for that. We were talking about the wire. Yeah, it's a good show. Also soon to be the host of a baby. I know. I'm having a baby, dude.

We'll subsequently launch a podcast called Goo Goo Ga. Yeah, dude. I can't wait to do a Barney rewatch podcast. Yeah. With my little baby. Yeah. Just like analyzing like, you know, the role of American imperialism in the happy purple dinosaur. Well, you know, there was that whole season of Barney that took place in a contra camp in Nicaragua. Yeah, that was great.

It was a bold choice. You have to give it to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barney was like teaching, you know, classes over at the school for the Americas. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that he worked hand in glove with Oliver North. Exactly. To sell those missiles to Iran. Exactly, dude. Because the only person the shot trusted, or the shot.

Yeah. The IA told it trusted. Exactly. The dinosaur. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Soulcrack. So he did sell a lot of crack, but that was completely unrelated. Yes.

We should probably talk about where, you know, when we left, left off, we were about to, we were talking about Operation Cloudburst, this attempt by Harlan Carter and the Border Patrol and this guy General Swing to cleanse the border area. So we should probably give a little bit more background about what's happening in the border in this period. So this is kind of, again, I think Harlan's primary motivation is racial, but there's other stuff happening. So in the early 1940s, the US government had created a, this thing called the Bracero Program,

which is like a guest worker visa program that would let Mexican farm workers enter the country legally temporarily to work for American farmers. This gets started during World War II, because like, we don't have any, we don't have any dudes left in the country. Right. It's all over there, you know, like we need, we need some more dudes. Yeah. The shortage of dudes at this point.

But it also, one of the reasons why it's popular, even with people who like are pretty racist, is that it, by providing kind of a legal regulated way for them to work here, it also provides a legally regulated way to get them out of here. Yeah. They can't become residents, right? The Bracero Program does not, these people are supposed to leave. But in fact, part of the deal is that like 10% of the migrants' wages are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an account that are given to them when they come back

to Mexico, right? So that's part of why this is popular, is that it allows them to do the work that the country can't function without, but it also ensures that they don't stay, right? Yeah. That's why this is such a big deal for a lot of folks. So it's actually very popular, and one of the things about it is it doesn't limit the number of workers, because why would you, right? Right.

Anyway, millions and millions of Mexican workers use the Bracero Program over the years. And from the perspective of the US government, it works pretty well for a while, and it certainly keeps workers in farms. But and so by like the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these workers, or there's like 5 million people have worked in through the Bracero Program, but also like unauthorized migrants continue to cross into the border. And by the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these people. And part of one of the things like that happens in this period is that there's suddenly like

a big surge of folks coming in unauthorized in the early 1950s. And this is part of what like inspires Operation Cloudburst, is that like Border Patrol has never had to deal with like these kind of numbers of people crossing postwar, and they're not really capable of handling it. So by the early 1950s, the number of like voluntary departures in had raised in 1946, like 101,000 undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United States in 1952, more than 700,000 do. And you can like these numbers are just kind of useful in seeing like how many folks are

coming in. Sure. So this, a lot of people are not wild about this because again, you know, racism and such. So Joseph Swing, part of his motivation here is that like he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers to cooperate so that they can like increase the number of folks who are working there under the Bracero Program and shrink the unauthorized workers. And so his justification for like participating in some of the stuff that Harlan Carter is building is that he wants to cut down the supply of unauthorized workers in order to

get more of these employers on board with the Bracero Program. So again, a lot of, there are a lot of like kind of wonky aspects to what's happening with migration here that you can, as always, justify as like not based in racism is based in like, well, there's a lot of these undocumented people coming over and it's like create a problem for the Border Patrol and the conditions they're working under are like really bad and we want to reform this program so that, you know, everyone is documented and legal and like we're not trying to stop them from coming over. But also one of the things you're trying to do by expanding this program is making sure

that they don't stay, right? And I guess, again, you can look at what's happening with the Bracero Program in a couple of different ways. But if you really want to know what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and Swing eventually enact, the main thing you need to know is what they call it. And this is Harlan Carter's name for this is Operation Wetback, that is the official name of this immigration purge that they're going to do. And again, did they invent the term or was it?

No, no, it existed for a while. Okay. So they did just explicitly name it after a slur. Yes. Yes. Okay. So like, again, for folks who maybe are not aware of this, I know we have a lot of like European listeners, Canadian listeners who may not have heard this.

Wetback is a racial slur for Mexican immigrants to the United States. It takes its name from when people would cross illegally, they would do so through the Rio Grande often. Right. And like, so, you know, you get wet when you do that, right? And so like that's the, that's the origin of the slur. Right. The backs part, I don't know why they specified it.

I don't know why they specified it, but this happens, there's like a history of this, like an old anti-Italian racial slur is WAP, which means without papers. I don't think it was entirely just for Italians, but like, you know, this is like the late 1800s, I think. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. And Carter, again, so Swing, Swing is the kind of guy who can sit down and explain to

you like, well, this is where the Bracero program was broken down. And like, these are the problems that we're having, and these are the different violations that we're seeing. And like, we need to get these, you know, employers on board with this program to reform the system, and the only way to do that is to cut down on the, like, so he can get very wonky with it in a way that doesn't sound racist, whereas Harlan Carter's like, yeah, Operation Wetback, let's get him out of here. And Carter is not great at like, he says, he just kind of says the loud part loud.

Right. In interviews with the press, he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history. He tells the Los Angeles Times that he intends to deploy, quote, an army of border patrol officers complete with Jeep's trucks and seven aircraft in order to declare, quote, all-out war to hurl Mexican wetbacks into Mexico. Jesus Christ. So he's not a subtle man.

He added yee-haw after every sentence. Yeah. You have to imagine he's shooting his six guns into the air as he gives these speeches to the press. Oh, it was in the middle of burning across. Yes. As he lit a cross on fire on someone's lawn, Harlan Carter gave a statement to the LA Times.

So what followed was close to, again, Operation Wetback is kind of, it's a lot of what he had tried to do with Operation Cloudburst, only just toned down a little bit so that they could get the federal government on board. Obviously, this follows like a massive hiring campaign of border patrolmen and they take thousands of border patrol agents and they separate them into mobile task groups and they set up mobile immigration systems to block roads. So they're basically doing like this, they've already put this like started putting these fences up, but they do like a kind of a, you could call it a kind of like racist defense,

like defense of white supremacy in depth, where they're setting up blockades deeper into the country. And they're also carrying out raids on factories and restaurants and just through whatever mean they can arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican migrants. And I'm going to quit from Migra again. To hold the detainees, the officers turned public spaces into temporary detention facilities. For example, in Los Angeles, the border patrol transformed Elysian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals were processed

for deportation. In countless fields and along many country roads, border patrol officers set up mobile immigration stations to process unsanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation. They used trucks on loan from the armed services to transport the apprehended immigrants from California to Nogales, Arizona for deportation to Mexico. To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise Mexicano communities, leisure spots, and migrant camps, ranches, farms and parks.

They also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ undocumented Mexican immigrants. Between June 17th and June 26th, 1954, 2,827 of the 4,403 migrants apprehended by the task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry. After border patrol raids during the summer of 1954, three Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of workers and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, border patrol officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen help, waiters, etc.

Officers reported apprehending such workers at well-known establishments such as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times, border patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running through the servant area. Everywhere they went, the officers were chased and photographed by journalists who had come to witness what General Swing had promised would be a spectacular show of U.S. immigration law enforcement.

Swing pledged that the border patrol would deport or otherwise purge the 1 million undocumented Mexican nationals estimated to be living in the United States at the time. Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah. There's just going buck wild with journalists in the back like, this is great footage. Yeah, and it's interesting because a huge number of these guys are immediately let back into the country. Like a lot of times what they're doing is they're pushing them across the border and

then making them recross under like the Bracero program. So again, they can be, because they need the labor, right? They don't want the brickyard shut down. They don't want these places to go out of business. They just don't want these people to be able to actually build a life in the United States. They want to guarantee that they go back. So that's like a huge chunk of what's happening here. Like it's, it's basically taking, it's taking the natural movement of people across an area

where like their ancestors and relatives had been moving freely for centuries. And it's stopping that stopping like the ability of populations to move and build lives and turning them entirely into economic units, right? Yes. You're not a member of the community. You're labor. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You're an entirely different class of citizen, which is non-citizen, which means ... You have no rights. Yeah. You have no rights. You're, you're not entitled to any of the human rights that we give to our citizens. Yeah.

Super normal and definitely a natural state of things. Definitely not a... Definitely the way things are supposed to go. Exactly. Not an invention of humans at all. No. Just... So at the same time as they're doing this, and obviously the media is a big part of like

why this is such a hit because INS says, hey, we're going to raid the Biltmore. Like yeah, you're going to show up there and like that's like, who doesn't want to see that as like a journalist. So like part of like what increases sort of the... because the people hadn't really, the border patrol had not been probably most Americans had only been kind of vaguely aware of its existence up until this point. This is part of what turns them into like an institution within the United States is like all of the press around Operation Wetback.

Right. It's like they took a cue from the FBI. They're like, we need to be flashy, we need to look cool as shit doing a bunch of horrid shit to people. Yeah. I mean, like in you're talking about like what the FBI does against anarchists and socialists and like the late, the early 1900s, yeah, this is like the border patrol's equivalent of that.

Right. Like an entire propaganda arm that made like, you know, the G-man cool. Yes. Yes. And at the same time they're doing this, Carter and Swing are like meeting with these influential ranchers and farmers and industrialists, the people using the undocumented migrant labor and they're getting them in line between like a revamp of the Bracero program that is again like supposed to fix some of the issues the program had.

I'm not going to get terribly into the weeds on that kind of stuff. There's plenty of places to read about that. If you'd like. There's a pretty good article. Yeah. We'll have some sources in here, but the book Migra goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So in the end, it was a wild success.

More than one million people are deported, potentially as many as one and a half million people are deported. Beyond that, the precedent was established that the U.S. border patrol could and should conduct operations from deep within the United States. Border patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within a hundred miles of the border, right? Any border like that's the exactly of any border, right? Which includes the coast and Canada.

So basically all of the places where most Americans live are covered by the two, about two thirds of the U.S. population are in this area, which is why the border patrol has like the widest ranging purview of any law enforcement agency pretty much. Yeah. I guess, yeah, like the FBI technically has more, but like their mission is more limited anyway, it's whatever. This is like the border patrol. This is what turns them into what they are to this monster, this juggernaut they are

today, as opposed to like some dudes literally on the border, you know, like, again, and not that like they weren't getting up to problematic shit earlier in their history, but their ability to do harm was limited by geography, it's not after Operation Wetback and we can thank Harlan Carter for that. And it's it's it's worth kind of noting here, I'm not going to get too much into Trump, but he, Donald Trump, consciously looks back to Harlan Carter's period of time running the border patrol as as an inspiration. Yeah.

Clearly. During a 2015 presidential, Republican presidential debate, Donald Trump said, quote, let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. I liked him. I like Ike, right? The expression, I like Ike, moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of the country, moving them just beyond the border. They came back, moved them again beyond the border.

They came back, didn't like it, moved them way south. They never came back. Dwight Eisenhower, you don't get nicer. You don't get friendlier. They moved 1.5 million people out. We have no choice. We have no choice. Just.

So first off, obviously, it's probably not going to surprise people. That's again, as we've said, completely wrong for among other things, nearly all of them come back. Yeah. Oh, it under like the Bracera program. Like that's part of the point. Like they're not, but yeah, it's it's so Carter. And again, there's the kind of folks who like, again, Swing, I'm sure has his racism, Ike,

there's racism and like his motivations, but it's also there's a lot of economic and just like they're the kind of people who believe all of this stuff should be done based on a set of laws. So they're like kind of fundamentally, they're probably more offended by the fact that people are undocumented than they were necessarily about the racial element chunk of these people. Absolutely. And that's alone is just like Jesus, Carter's doing it for white supremacy. And that's the thing.

You'll notice the thing Trump takes out of Operation Wetback isn't the way they established this kind of like system in order to like document and like make these workers legal in order to provide labor, a labor for like, that's not the thing he takes out of this. The thing he takes out of this is they got one and a half million Mexicans to leave, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like that's the thing that has come down in history from Carter's period. That's the thing to the heart of really what's going on here behind all of the, you know, I don't know, respectability politics or whatever of it. Yes. That's what has lived on that. And of course, the militarization of the border patrol and the fact that it gets to work every we get all of that from Harlan Carter. And here's the thing.

Harlan's just getting started. This ain't even this ain't even his whole thing, right? This like this isn't even his main gig. You know, we haven't even gotten to the point of the beginning, which is like, we're going to talk about some NRAs and some gunship. We're not even into that shit yet. Like this is just his first gig, right? This is his like the equivalent of the time like the rest of us spent like working at

a Wendy's or something. This is that for Harlan Carter, right? This is Hitler at painting school. Yeah. This is yeah. This is Hitler at fucking like hanging out in Austria and opera houses, arguing with homeless people about the Jews, which was like a whole chunk of his life. But anyway, because he was homeless too.

It's whatever. He was living in a men's shelter anyway, Hitler. So I should note before we move on to the NRA that while Harlan Carter was massively expanding the reach and power of the border patrol, he was also robbing it blind for his own benefit. See, Harlan loves shooting, right? Like he's not one of these NRA like Wayne LaPierre, the current head of the NRA, Wayne particularly cares much about like a lot of these guys, like it's a political thing as

opposed to them like Harlan Carter is, you have to say loves to shoot guns. Yeah. But here's the thing about shooting guns, bullets cost money. So three years after Harlan Carter retires from government service in 1957, the Justice Department opens an investigation into what are termed, quote, various allegations against him, including the claim that he had stolen 40 to 50,000 rounds of ammunition from the border patrol, quote, with the sole intent of converting this property to his own use after he retired.

Wow. Wow. It's like a pallet of bullets to go shoot privately. I would love it if we found out that he's the one who stole his mom's car. Yeah. He went joyriding and crashed. Yeah, it was him. He was just like, oh, fuck, I got to find some Mexicans to murder.

That 15-year-old gets murdered, so yeah, it's not that funny, but like that's not impossible, right? Yeah. Yes. So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here about this theft of tens of thousands of bullets that Harlan Carter perpetrated, quote, asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations. Mr. Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand jury in San Diego for some

hours and they covered a lot of things, none of which I'm ashamed of and none of which I had any difficulty asking. He added that he did not, quote, know anything about the disappearance or misappropriation of government ammo. The missing ammunition, worth several thousand dollars, was never traced according to an agent who worked on the investigation and no charges were fired. Filed. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Very funny. Now, obviously Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's about to get a new job that is never going to let this him run out of ammunition. So as we stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when he joined the NRA, whether it was before or after he killed Raymond Casiano. Probably he was like 16 when he joins and in 1951, the year after he becomes head of

the Border Patrol, he joins the NRA's national board. And again, at this point in time, there's obviously there's people who are right-wing in the NRA. Sure. There's people who want it to be more of a conservative institution. It's not really a political organization. Right. Right.

Right. It's almost at this point from, just from what I remember, it's almost an apolitical just kind of gun lobbying group that kind of... They're not lobbying. There's no lobbying. They do not lobby in this period of time. Oh. So they're like the Sierra Club at this point.

Yeah. So it's kind of like, yeah, they're there to provide training courses for people. They're there so that one of the things they do is when the government demilitarizes weapons, right? They're like, okay, we're not using... Like the M1 Garand is no longer the gun that the army uses. So we have a couple of million of these things. We will sell them at a discount to the NRA who can sell them very cheap to their members

and it's part of this... So there's stuff that they're doing, but they're not getting in... And they have some involvement politically. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But they are not like lobbying on behalf of the Republican Party or something, right? Like that's not really a thing that the NRA is doing yet. Harlan Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing, but they're not in 1951 when he joins the board.

They're still not very political. But now that he's on the board, he starts to seed the organization with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol, right? Because he can help get people hired. He can put in a good word. So he starts all of his buddies from the Border Patrol who are like wanting a cushy job and the private sector after working for the... He starts filling the NRA with them.

So he finally leaves government service in the early 1960s. He stops running the Border Patrol in 57, but he does some other shit. Not really that important for our purposes. But he retires from working for the government in the early 60s. And he gets pretty much immediately elected president of the NRA from 1965 to 1967. But that doesn't mean he's actually running the NRA, right? It's just like a job within the organization. You've still got this board of directors.

So he's an influential figure in the NRA, but he's not actually directing it at this point. Right. He's collecting a check and he's probably getting a bunch of free bullets, which is all he wants at this point. Well, he also wants the NRA to get more political. And again, we're going to chat a little bit about why in a second. But one of the things that happens is the folks at the NRA who kind of don't necessarily

want that know they have to do something with Harlan Carter, right? Like you can't like ignore him. So they stick him, they create a lobbying arm for the first time of the NRA, the Institute for Legislative Action, and they put him in charge of it. And again, this is the first time the NRA had had a lobbying arm. In the early 1960s, it was like not they barely funded it. So there's this, you know, there's kind of this growing fight. And Harlan is one of these guys saying that like, hey, the NRA needs to get more political.

We need to be lobbying. We need to be focused on second amendment advocacy that was not had like the NRA's planks, like they're like stated purpose as an organization did not include like protecting or defending the second amendment at all. Like that was not on their even on their radar. He thinks it needs to be and the old guard who run the NRA don't see it that way. They see themselves as essentially in partnership with the government to ensure the development of a heavy of a healthy shooting sports culture in the United States, right?

And part of what that means is that when gun control laws get passed, they work with the government to formulate those laws. So again, they're certainly like, they're not anti-gun, right? But they're not anything we would recognize as like pro in like a modern political context. They just want to, so it sounds like they just want to make sure that gun control doesn't affect hunting and or like regulation of people owning actual rifles or. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's again, everything is different, right? Everything, the AR-15 exists in this period, but it's not what it's going to become, right? Right. Like because it's harder to make, they're much less common. Like today an AR like one of the things that has made the AR-15 what it is, is that it's a perfectly modular platform. So it's basically like gun Legos. So there's like a million, you can customize it infinitely.

You can make the basic gun itself for a couple of hundred bucks if you have some stuff. It's not like that at this point, right? It's now it's like the Honda Civic of guns. Yeah. So they just haven't like for part of why it's not political in the way it will become is that there's not really a need to, you know, like no one's, there's not like, there's not the culture that the NRA helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that. So yeah, their primary focus is like hunting and target shooting, right?

Right. And again, Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment and in the 1970s, he's going to go to war with the NRA's old guard in order to change it. But before we get into that, we should probably have some ads. I love ads. Oh, I do too. Including this ad for guns, the concept of, uh, yeah, guns. How about the life card?

The life card. It's a gun that's built into a little credit card. Can it shoot well? No. Is it accurate? Of course not. Is it? Is it a stupid thing to carry in your pocket?

Yes. 100%. Enjoy. Um, that's a real thing. Look, look it up. Very silly gun of the, of the, of the, of the meme guns, easily the memeist. Wow. That's the whole thing we have these days.

There's no meme guns in the 1960s. We haven't invented memes, you know, but we had one, but it, yeah. Which was the meme from the 1960s? Well, it's, it's earlier than that. You know that this is getting way off topic, but you've just heard of Kilroy was here. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There's memes, but yeah. I was thinking I was like, was this the Zapruder film? Was that a meme? I guess that came out in the 70s or something. Yeah. No. It comes out a little late.

Oh, that's like the 60s or mid 60s, right? Well, the, the, but when did the, did people see the Zapruder film? I thought that was like, I don't know. I mean, I will tell you my entire life, I have specifically picked houses with a floor plan where the bathroom is kind of like back into the left of the living room. So that when people ask where the bathroom is, I can say, oh, just take a Kennedy. Yeah. I love it.

You know, go back into the left. It's worth it. That's a JFK getting murdered joke. Anyway, here's ads. 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.

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podcasts. Oh, we're back. Everybody's having a good time. You know, Robert Kennedy was killed with the.22, which is the same caliber as the life card. The gun that's built into a credit card. I love that there's a credit card gun. Yeah, yeah, I mean, honestly, if Sir Han and Sir Han had had one of those, RFK would probably

be alive. Yeah, it'd be fine. Life card is a really stupid gun. Anyway, the second amendment, well, actually, weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument Harlan Carter will later make, but I don't want to get ahead of things. So the second amendment is, I think it's fair to say the most politicized part of the Bill of Rights today, right? That's probably not, maybe the first amendment gives it a run for its money, but even then

it's usually people differing over interpretations of the first amendment as opposed to the argument over the second is really should it exist or does it exist in the way that it's like currently being interpreted, right? Because an awful lot of Americans think it shouldn't be the law of the land at all, which is difficult to square with actually doing something legislatively because it does exist. But anyway, in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in DC versus Heller that the second amendment establishes an individual right to bear arms. Now, obviously, a lot of liberals see this as terrible jurisprudence and claim that an

individual right to bear arms was basically invented by the NRA. Conservatives will say the opposite, that this was clearly what the founders had intended. And the reality of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the second amendment at a federal level is only like 20 years old, different courts have ruled very differently on the second amendment for quite a long time. And also the Supreme Court is stupid. So yes, like, I don't personally give a good goddamn about what the founders intended. Yeah, that seems like the weirdest standard to uphold to this day where we're like, the

founders intended and it's like the founders, first of all, none of them had teeth. None of them had. And it's one of those. This is it's comprehensively wrong because again, the rules will often be like, well, the founders would never have wanted people to have AR 15s and it's like, did you know some of those guys? Yeah. A lot of those dudes would have been like, this will kill so many more like indigenous

people. Of course we should have these. They all wore powder, powdered wigs because they all had like the herpes on their heads and they, you know, they were all syphilitics. So yeah, they were insane being like the founders wouldn't like that. It's like, no, no, no, don't defend the founders. Well, and they would have, they would have liked it for a variety of different reasons. Thomas Payne would have liked it because it would allow you to shoot government agents

much better. Right. Like Thomas Jefferson would have liked it because he was scared of how many slaves he had, you know, like different different people would have liked it for different reasons. They all would have loved to have that gun. Yes. So obviously, again, as regards my personal standing towards gun control, I don't care

about what the founders thought about anything, including free speech because they didn't actually believe in free speech either. Yes. Yes. Because a lot of them owns, well, Thomas Payne did again. I, he's, he's, he's our one good one. He was, you know, although kind of in a reactionary during the French Revolution, you know, they locked his ass up.

They did lock his ass up during the French Revolution, but they locked a lot of people up. They really just kind of went overboard as is the left. So I think it's probably valuable to discuss how interpretations of the right to bear arms have varied over time in the United States. Because again, if you're ever saying it's always meant this thing or that thing, that's not, you're not going to be correct because a bunch of different courts have found a bunch of different things.

So the Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison and in portraits, he's the founding father with just massive bags under his eyes. Like you look up a drawing of this dude, he looks fucking exhausted in every, every sketch of it. He was literally dying at all times in his famed career. He was dying all the time. If only every American political leader had followed in his footsteps of dying. I know.

I know. You know, he's, he was supposed to write way more of the Federalist papers, but he was so sickly. You couldn't. We are getting to that. So obviously he's a, he's, you know, on that side of the Federalist, Anti-Federalist divide, but he drafts the Bill of Rights because the Anti-Federalists are worried and they have a very good point that like, okay, well, we're establishing the supposedly Democratic

government, but if we don't place limits on the powers of the federal government, they could get the power to do anything one day, which is a very reasonable thing to be concerned about. Right. And speaking, one of the better ideas the founders had was having a Bill of Rights. So most of them are terrified of the idea of a permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to be frightened of. And if we had stuck with that idea, maybe things would be a little bit better.

One of the things is that like these guys are all ancient Roman history nerds, right? And they are well aware that like the history of the Roman Republic includes so many times where just like a guy gets an army and takes over, right? And tries to take over and there's a big fucking fight over it. So they don't like the idea of like a big centralized standing army because it's very dangerous. Yeah. So the second amendment was initially drafted to guarantee people's right to form a militia.

The original text, and this is not what's in the Bill of Rights now, but this is the original text Madison writes is, quote, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, semi-colon, a well-armed and well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country, colon, but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person. Now this is interesting because if that had been in the Bill of Rights today, right? This would have done a couple of things. Among other things, it would probably have made a draft impossible, right?

Yeah. That second cause is like you cannot force someone to render military service, which like you would think would make a draft impossible. That said, it also might have made it impossible to do things that a lot of liberal support, like banning weapons like the AR-15, because when you have well-armed in there, it does kind of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the current text of the second amendment does. That interpretation could at least be argued.

Now this is all academic because the wording winds up being changed to the present text, which puts well-regulated upfront and fun times also makes it legal to draft people. Obviously people have argued for years and will be arguing for years what the second amendment should mean about gun control and how it should function. I'm not an originalist. I think the Constitution is too old for anyone to care about, but obviously it does matter because it is the law of the land and how it's written and how it's interpreted has a huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation.

And so I think the context of how the second amendment was seen at the time is helpful to have even though, again, I'm not an originalist. Please don't take this as me arguing because the Founding Fathers felt this way. This is how people should act. But I don't think we can stress enough. We do not care what the Founding Fathers thought about literally anything. My stance broadly in support of civilian arms ownership has nothing to do with the Constitution because it's a stupid document written a long time.

Well, again, given the time, not a stupid document, better than anyway, whatever. I don't need to have this conversation. I am going to quote from the New Yorker here because I think it gives some helpful context. None of this, this being the second amendment, had anything to do with hunting. People who owned and used long arms to hunt continued to own and use them. The second amendment was not commonly understood as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. The Middle East once wrote, one does not bear arms against a rabbit.

Meanwhile, militias continued to muster. The Continental Army was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, but the National Defense was increasingly assumed by the U.S. Army. By the middle of the 19th century, the U.S. had a standing army after all. And this is one of the things I think is interesting because, again, the kind of especially on Twitter common takes on one side or the other, this is that like, well, you don't need these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of the second amendment, which no, it's absolutely not.

But at the same time, the idea of the second amendment is referring to an individual's ability to stockpile an arsenal is not really accurate because it was within the context of a militia. However, if you're bringing that up, it's one of the things that they meant by like, one of the things that the founding fathers wanted with this militia was for it to be the primary method of defending the country as opposed to a massive standing army. So, again, if you are, if you are one for one reason or the other, if you're arguing that we should do things the way the founding fathers argued, probably the most accurate

thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of the context of a militia and also ensure that the militia is the only armed force in the country, including police. So that like a massive civilian militia is the only armed force. There's no federal power to deploy a massive military and there's not really federal policing in any meaningful way because that's how things were in the 1800s, right? Yeah. Yeah. If you're arguing that, that's probably closer to an originalist interpretation than anything

being argued right now, which is not to say that that makes much sense in the current day at all. Although I would argue there's a number of, you could look at like what Switzerland does, right? Which is often brought up by second amendment advocates. What do they do? I don't even know what. Switzerland has like, basically, if you want to own a weapon in Switzerland, the government

will give you one, but like there's training and you're part of a militia to get it. It is a military assault rifle, right? And a lot of Switzerland's, the percentage of Swiss people who own guns is not significant compared to the United States, but it's one of the highest in the world, right? But it does come as you don't, it's not, well, you can buy some arms in Switzerland. It's not like, you're not like just stockpiling guns for your own personal thing. You are being armed by the state as part of the state's defense apparatus, right? Right.

But also not in a way like the Swiss, like the civilians who own guns in Switzerland are not like deployed for, obviously, Switzerland, right? They don't do that kind of shit. Famously. But anyway, I mean, this is again, when I talk about like Rojava and like what I think about in terms of the value of the state not having a monopoly on the use of force, these are some of the things that I think about. Broadly speaking, you know, stuff has been different about the second amendment.

Just changed like a little bit. And kind of as a result, the second amendment as heavily politicized as it is now was kind of like nobody, it was like the third amendment, right? Nobody talks about that anymore. Nobody fucking talked about the second amendment on a national level for like a century or so, right? Yeah. We talked about like gun control earlier, but it was basically all state level, right?

Different states, different cities would have like different rules based on shit that was happening there. The federal government left them alone. Like there was not really any kind of federal interest in regulating the second amendment until the early 1930s. And that is when we get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now the NFA or National Firearms Act was a response to the era of the gangster, right? In particular, you get this weapon starting in like, I don't know exactly when it was

invented, I could have looked it up, but like it becomes popular in the thirties, the Tommy Gun, right, which is the Thompson submachine gun, and it is broadly speaking kind of like, at least in terms of the way it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used in crime, kind of like the AR-15 of its day, because it is Thompson, it's an automatic 45 caliber weapon. It's a submachine gun, right? So it's not like a full-sized rifle. This will be one of the most popular squad weapons that the United States uses in World

War Two, right? A very effective weapon for what it does, which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets very quickly at people at close range. So super good if you're, for example, a gangster who wants to murder a bunch of people in an enclosed room, right? If you're like, lining a bunch of other gangsters up against the wall, you can kill a shitload of people with a Tommy Gun, you know? Very fun for, you know, pulling off some sort of St. Valentine's Day massacre.

Incredible bank robbing weapon. Great for all sorts of stuff. Going to the local Gabagoolery and shooting up the Gabagool. Exactly. You could gab a hell of a lot of ghoul with this gun. Lots of ghouls. It's nowadays, honestly, not that impressive of a weapon. But at the time, right, like prior to this, most Americans, like, they're experienced

with this like single-shot rifles and lever-action guns and like revolvers and shit, right? Even semi-automatic handguns are pretty new and fancy in the 30s. The Thompson is just so much deadlier than anything else. Yeah, it's scary as fuck. And the crimes that get committed with it, again, as with the AR-15, on like a national scale, very little gun crime involves a Thompson submachine gun. And again, the AR-15, not the most common gun used in crime by any, like, it's not super common compared to a lot of other kinds of firearm.

But the crimes that it's used in are so spectacular and kind of like horrifying that they shock the nation. And law enforcement gets nuts about this, because one of the things that gangsters do with Tommy Gunn's is shoot lots of police officers with them. So there's a whole kind of America's first panic over a gun, right, is what happens with the Tommy Gunn in the 30s. And it's not just the Tommy Gunn. They're also freaking out about sawed-off shotguns, which is actually pretty dumb.

They're only scared about them because you can like hide them, like hide them, but they're not even like anyway, it's dumb for sawed-off shotguns to be regulated more than regular shotguns. They're actually less deadly. Right. Yeah. They're not as cool as fuck. They look and you see them a lot in the hands of gangsters, right?

So it's again, there's this part of this is that like, yeah, the Thompson is a lot deadlier than guns that had been available before. But part of it's also just like there's this media sort of panic around the Thompson. And by the way, I should note at this period of time, if you want a Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail one to your house. Like this is not, there are not like, you don't have to go to a gun store. You don't have to do it. They're like background shacks.

Like they just will send it to you. It's like if you order like a book on Amazon, it was that easy to get a Thompson submachine gun. So the NFA puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the ownership of machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers. Now the NRA is again, not a political organization at this point. It does initially oppose the NFA. And this is kind of the first time it gets political.

The organization writes a dissent in their magazine, American Rifleman. And this is a pretty like, tamely phrased dissent and it prompts congressional leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to limit their bill. The main thing that it does is that like it stops the ban from being total. So rich people can still get machine guns and silencers. Well, and we get to, I could rant about silencers, which are not what people tend to think. They're not silent. They're not silent.

All of these things are still legal if you have the money, right? In the case of like a silencer or what's called a short-billed shotgun, it takes like a $200 tax stamp in a couple of months. It's technically like a similar legal process to get a machine gun, but machine guns cost the cheapest machine guns today are like $10,000. So it's, that's why you don't see them like used in crimes. Yeah. I guess I don't know what a machine gun is.

What's an AR-15? An AR-15 is a semi-automatic gun. The legal definition of a machine gun is a weapon that will fire more than one bullet per trigger pull, right? This is all very wonky because like we had bump stocks a while ago, which function more or less as a machine gun, but legally weren't technically a machine gun. There's a couple of weird kinds of triggers. As with anything with guns, because when you make a law to ban a thing, you have to specify

what that thing is in mechanical terms. And so you find a way to, people do this with drugs too, where it's like, okay, they banned MDMA. Let's make a drug that affects the same parts of the brain, but doesn't like, isn't explicitly banned, right? Different compound. Yeah. And the same thing happens.

Now there are sawed-off shotguns that aren't legally shotguns because of very, anyway, whatever. This is getting off of the point a bit, but the NRA works with Congress, right? They don't do like a big political brouhaha. They're like, hey, we want to make sure that rich people can still own these weapons. Let's sit down and work some things out. And Congress is happy to work with them. Now, some people in Congress are. The attorney general claims that they emasculate the bill, but broadly speaking, the NFA seriously

limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have. And this is the first time anyone had done that at the federal level. And the NRA is pretty happy with the resulting bill, and they endorse the 1934 NFA. Now there was still no real like massive national discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this period. Not that it was like particularly discussed much at all. This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period of time. It's not yet part of the culture war.

Yeah, it has. Yeah, that hasn't really evolved yet. The context, the discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms doesn't really start to take off until the early 1960s. And this is when the very first law review articles arguing an individualist interpretation are published. Now, this period coincides with the civil rights movement and the second big push for gun control in federal history.

This time, rather than, well, racism and crime have a role to play as we'll discuss. But one of the first things that sets it off is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Famously, John F. Kennedy is assassinated by Bernard Sanders using the Mannlicher Karkana rifle that he'd ordered from a classified add in the American Rifleman magazine, which is the NRA's magazine. So the gun that kills JFK is ordered from the back of a magazine, right? And this is it's not again, he's not killed with like anything you would consider an assault

weapon. It's like an old bolt action rifle. But the fact that he was able to get it from like a magazine ad becomes like and like, you know, again, background checks are not really a thing yet. And that's that that makes a lot of people very angry. And I'm going to quote now from an article by Alina Savadra Buckley, quote, for years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had been watching television and learning how to shoot in the 1950s when Hollywood studios were churning out Western's popular science

estimated that half a million Americans had started quick draw shooting for fun. And by the end of the decade, 3000 Western style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smythe in his book, The NRA, The Unauthorized History. At the same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures as a result. The NRA braced itself for new legislation in the early 1960s, sprinkling the first references to the Second Amendment in American Rifleman. Eight months after Kennedy died, the magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead,

the strength of the NRA and therefore the ability to accomplish its objects and purposes depends entirely upon the support of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep and bear arms. And a lot of this push is coming at the direction of Harlan Carter, who writes stuff for American riflemen and who is a big believer that the the NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's, again, that's different from what they had always been pro-gun, because obviously it's the NRA, right? But when you look at what they're doing in 34, they're not advocating for the Second Amendment. They're advocating for what they see as sportsmen, right? And obviously there's problems with that. It's based heavily on like the desire of rich people to be heavily armed. But they're arguing for sportsmen as opposed to Carter wants to turn it into an advocacy

organization for this thing, this idea of the Second Amendment. And when you do something like that, number one, if you kind of are an essentialist and you claim that this is like, there's this kind of inherent timeless essential interpretation of this rule, and that's your guiding light, there's not any ability to compromise there, right? Like you have to be kind of a fundamentalist about it. Right. It doesn't matter if a president was just merked in front of everyone in Dallas.

Yes. Yes. You have to be like, sorry, the law's the law and this is, you know, this is my interpretation of it. And Carter understands, again, he's a very smart guy. What he'd done with the Border Patrol shows, he understands how the media works. He understands how to advocate for white supremacy without advocating for white supremacy, right? And so he knows that it's not just enough to like say that you support gun ownership.

And I'm going to continue with a quote from Buckley here, in order for there to be good guys with guns, there had to be an opposing force to the NRA and many lawmakers that opposing force was usually black. Now this gets into the aspect of the gun control push. Again, there's an aspect that's just based in these assassinations that's not at all based in racism. And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots. So in 1965, the LAPD beats a black man named Marquette Frye with a baton during a traffic

stop and protests erupt. It becomes an insurrection and spreads throughout the country. The militaries eventually called in to augment an overwhelmed LAPD. This is part of what jump starts the war on crime, a period of largely racist gun or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator panic that Biden is famous for. And the NRA, huge supporters of crime bills, anti gun control support crime bills, right? So you see what they're doing here is you have some folks because people are during the Watts riots using guns to fight the LAPD.

And so there are like, and this, this is kind of there's, there's pushes, this is what starts some of the momentum for gun control in California comes from this. But more than that, what the NRA looks at is they see these armed black people carrying at an uprising and they're like, well, we can take away focus on, on guns and on legislating guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people, right? And that's what Harlan Carter realizes, like, well, this is some, this is the business the NRA needs to be in. And also like, this is the business of like arming the police, arguing that like, because

that's where, you know, that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts, right? It's the idea that like, you need to, the police need to have more and more weapons to deal with today's like dangerous, heavily armed criminals, right? Yeah. And, and also the, you know, guns don't kill people. This racial group that I do not like, yes, yes, yes. Which is an argument you still see made today, there's just a fucking Republican congressional candidate who was arguing that like, America doesn't have a gun violence problem, black

people have a gun or something like that, right? Like this is an old argument. And Harlan Carter is the one who first figures out how to make it, right? So two years after the Watts riots, the members of the Black Panther Party start assembling and openly carrying firearms, which is lawful at the time. They would assemble with guns and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure that cops did not abuse members of the public. One could argue this is in some ways closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second

Amendment than anything today. Now their activism scares the fuck out of white people. And again, white people who are not pro gun, right? Right. And we're going to, we're going to chat about all of that. And we're going to chat about my favorite president, Matt, I know your favorite president, Ronald Reagan, star of Bedtime for Bonzo, love him, star of the monkey movie, those McCarthy hearings, we owe Ronald Reagan a lot, including the beginning of the career of my favorite

musician, John Hinckley, Jr. Oh, so good, dude, I just like, you got to get his mixtapes. I like his early stuff better, but he's still really cranking, cranking out some solid things. You know, yeah, his early stuff is, yeah, his early stuff, unbelievable, unbelievable. Just, right, number one with a bullet, here's, here's, here's our ads. 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, bad ass 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 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? 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 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back.

And you know, I just wanted to give a special statement from our sponsors that they completely support the career of John Hinckley Jr. And I don't know, Sophie, how do we, you're shaking your head, probably shouldn't, probably not good. It's a boring bit. I think it's boring that John Hinckley Jr. is making a comeback to her now. Yeah, he's, he's touring and he's nailing it. He's got a guitar and it says, this machine almost kills fascists.

See, I get pretty close to killing a fascist. This machine's shot the side of an armored limousine with, and it bounced and managed to penetrate a fascist's chest cavity. This machine loves Jodie Foster and almost killed a fascist. Yeah, this machine heads, it was very creepy. She did say she was impressed. She should be. I mean, it is impressive, right?

Yeah. Mixed bag. I don't know. Mixed bag. Whatever. It was probably enough John Hinckley Jr. jokes. Look, he did, he did shoot Ronald Reagan. He did.

Unarguably. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, two years ago, so you get the Black Panthers start assembling with guns in public and this scares the shit out of both kind of the progressive liberal crowd in California and conservatives in California. And so all of California gets on board the idea of banning the open carry of firearms and the NRA happily endorses the measure.

The Black Panthers assemble with their guns in the Capitol on one of the last days it would remain legal to do so. It's described in local news as an invasion, even though, again, it was people legally protesting in a way that was not, again, whatever. Fighting for the exact rights that the same, you know, like white wackadoos do now. But again, fuckin' Harlan Carter totally on board with criminalizing this. As is, again, Ronald Reagan is the governor at the time. Governor of California.

Yeah, totally against. So yeah, some of these guys get arrested during their protest in Sacramento. As they are handcuffed, Bobby Seal read from their executive mandate, which protested, quote, the racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping Black people disarmed and powerless. The measure passed and it laid the groundwork for the extensive gun control that the state of California now enjoys. To this day, those laws primarily impact poor Black people.

Which white folks can acquire concealed weapon permits very easily. You just have to be able to have a second home in a place like San Bernardino and you can get the license to carry a concealed gun in the state of California. They can also purchase to, so California, one of the things that they have is a handgun roster, right? So the only handguns you can buy in the state of California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state. However, you can bring handguns into the state if you move there as long as they don't have

an illegal, you know, as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than a 10 round capacity. You can bring those into the state and then you can have them or you can sell them to people through an FFL and if you were a police officer, you can buy any kind of gun you want and you can sell it to whoever you want. So there is a massive industry in California of police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in the state of California to buy unless a police officer sells them to you for twice the normal price.

Anyway, whole bunch of sketchy shit happens. Yeah, it's a nice side hustle for the cops, you know, I mean, because, hey, there was a gig economy back then too. A lot of us are Uber drivers slash gun salesmen now, so I get it. And it's one of those things. There's a number of things about including like waiting periods and stuff in California that there's a strong argument to be made in favor of. But this is where a lot of it starts and it never entirely gets divorced from this thing

of like, again, you can look at the same thing in the 1934 NFA of like, well, though, we want to we don't want rich people to be affected, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you know, they banned what is that the Saturday night specials like any like. Oh, we're getting to that. That's where the handgun. That's where the handgun roster starts, though.

Yes. The Saturday night special. Yeah. But we're we're we'll get to that. Don't worry. So Harlan Carter's support of an individual right to bear arms was not out of principled belief that all Americans deserve to defend themselves or out of a desire to even check governmental power.

Again, he militarized the border patrol. Instead, he believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this. And back in California's open carry ban, he was engaging in an intelligent strategy. You draw attention away from guns and you focus on who is carrying them. This is the origin of the quote, guns don't kill people, people don't kill people argument. But when Harlan made it, the people were explicitly quoted as black. I'm going to quit from Epic magazine now.

The same year, American Rifleman published an editorial titled Who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like Watts as mob violence, who then supports the police, who then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery and pillaging. It read, with homefront safeguards, spotty and uncertain, the armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer, right? That thing is more stable, stabilizing for a community than a bunch of armed white people. Well, and he's very much making the written house argument here, right?

Oh, 100%. The armed citizen supports the police. The black panthers are making, what I might argue is more of an originalist interpretation, which is the armed citizen protects the community from government overreach. That's the black panthers. He's saying the armed citizen aides the police in enforcing white supremacy, right? That's the argument being made by the NRA here. Yeah.

Because obviously, you do have your right-wing insurrectionist militias and shit like that, but for the most part, what is being supported is like arming the suburbs, you know? And anyone who supports the police should be armed, and anyone who in any ways against it shouldn't be. And that is, you know, yeah. It is a problem. Yeah. It's a cousin issues.

It's a problem that deserves a more complex series of solutions than to be suggested in debates over this, but that's a separate topic. So after RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. are murdered in 1968, Senator Thomas Dodd reintroduces the Gun Control Act to Congress. This has been put forward a couple of times. He pushed it through again in 1968 after those assassinations, and the Gun Control Act is intended to ban the interstate sale of guns, ban their sale to children, to convicted felons, and because of some bigotry, mental defectives, right?

Right. So again, like all of these laws, there's like, okay, you don't want people to just be able to like ship guns through a mail order catalog across the country. I can get on board with that. Bear. Yeah. Right. Probably shouldn't be selling them to children or, you know, convicted.

100%. Although I have issues with like who becomes a felon, right? Like if somebody's got a violent history, sure, that makes sense. You don't want somebody who's like a convicted rapist buying guns and then like, and mental defectives. Well, how the hell do you define that? Now, now I've got some concerns. But this, this law, again, there's a lot that's very reasonable in here and the NRA rallies

against it in huge numbers. Harlan Carter and his partner in the, and they are not in, they don't have an issue with the mental defectives part, right? That's not the thing. That's a problem to them. This is the first law that causes the NRA to get like hugely political. And Harlan Carter, again, there's this war still within the NRA that hasn't been resolved between the old guard and the new guard.

Carter, because he has a lot of influence in American Rifleman magazine, he enlists like the people that he's been seating the NRA with, these new guard folks to start like coming up with a series of blistering editorials in American Rifleman magazine that are urging people to write letters to Congress to like, this is the first real concerted lobbying campaign by the NRA. And I'm trying to figure out what, which part of it it is. Is it the children part? Is it the fact that they're like, no, children is, I mean, neutral, racially neutral.

So they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we can't do that. Or what is it? A big part of it, this is an attempting to establish like, if you're buying a gun, you have to do it through, there has to be like this, this legal process. Like you can't just be a dude has a gun and I get it, right? And that's, that's the big, that's the center of the problem, right? It is the idea that the federal government is now going to be involved in hair, like in all legal gun purchases, which is obviously not what the gun control act does.

There's these things called face to face sales in a lot of states where if you're not a gun dealer, you can sell a gun to anybody without there being any kind of a background check. That is still the law in a lot of the country. But most gun purchases you have to do, you have to fill out what's called a form 4473, which is, and you have to have like a federal background check, right? And the government gets involved, right? That's the thing that they're scared about. And again, you can't divorce this from like the John Birch Society from all these panics

about communism, about like, you know, the government getting increasingly centralized. And I guess you might argue that that's also closer to an originalist interpretation of the second amendment. But anyway, so the NRA, you know, Harlan Carter urges like helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against the gun control act. And it's not popular with many of the folks running the NRA at the time. And again, the way they've done things before Congress would suggest a bill, the NRA would usually have some issues with it, but they would like make those issues clear than they'd

sit down and like hash something out as they did in 1934. So the vice president of the NRA guy named Franklin Orth figures that's what we're going to do, right? He doesn't want the organization to take like a really public political stance because that's kind of permanently alienated from like one party, right? And he doesn't that's not his goal with the NRA. He doesn't want it to be like a Republican or a Democratic thing. Short-sighted idiot.

Yeah. So for what would be the last time? Because again, Orth and his people are still in charge of the NRA broadly. The NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach a compromise on the bill. And they, you know, they, they alter it and whatnot to be a little bit, whatever. Orth describes it as a law the sportsmen of America can live with. The fact that anything had been passed at all enrages the base that Carter has put together and they respond with a flood of hate mail so voluminous it nearly makes Orth resign.

It becomes increasingly clear that the old guard did not speak for the increasingly radicalized masses of the NRA. And these, again, these people are, they're, they're frightened of black mobs of the Watts riots, right? They also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys with like fears of communist infiltration and invasion. This is all kind of coming together as part of it. And obviously a lot of the right in this time sees the Watts riots as like, it must

have been the Soviet Union, you know, 100%. There's is, is like a synonymous like, you know, any kind of black uprising synonymous with communism at this point. Yeah. So kind of what you're seeing here is the radical chunk of the NRA doesn't want like wants to oppose any like this law under all conditions, right? There's no, no way in which they'll be okay with this. And they, they lose the fight to the old guard who works with the government to pass this

law. But the new guard, I guess you knew guard isn't really a term, but like the Harlan Carter's faction becomes, it starts to become more dominant as a result of this because it pisses off so many people. And because it's so much easier to electrify people with like threats of the, the communist government is coming to like take your guns to start, you have to be able to protect your family against these dangerous black, that's easier to rile people up for than we should work with the government to come to like sensible, you know, accommodations, right?

Let's compromise. That's not a selling point, right? No, no. Because of what Carter builds here over this fight, membership in the NRA soars to over a million people for the first time in the association's history. So this is part of what scares the old guard and makes them silo Harlan Carter off to the ILA, which is the NRA's first registered lobby. And when they make this lobbying group for him to run, they don't like fund it.

So he's going to have to raise his own money to do anything. And their hope is that like, this guy is dangerous, but we can't kick him out. So if we give him this lobbying organization, but don't give him any money, he's going to have to spend all of his time raising funds and he's not going to be able to like cause any trouble. This proves to be a bad strategy because Harlan Carter invents the concept of right wing fundraising. Damn it.

Yes. The first podcaster. Yeah. He's the first guy to figure out how everything is going to work for right wing fundraising in the future. And he does it because he figures out he start, he's his computers, right? Like that's the thing he figures out is going to be critical. And I'm going to quote from Alina Buckley again.

Their computer could print 1100 lines per minute, letting Carter's team produce thousands of letters addressed to members over a 24 hour period. It was the latest iteration of a powerful tool, direct mail. The medium had reached prominence by the early 1970s, when it was first pioneered by Richard Vigari, who as a campaign worker had copied down the names and addresses of people who had donated to bury Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential bid. With that list of Republicans and their addresses, as good as the Gold Bricks deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote,

Vigari had developed a way for conservatives to reach the people most likely to become coveted single issue voters with the right messaging. Carter hoped to use the tool to drum up support for ILA's legislative work. Vigari himself collaborated with Carter to build their database. ILA did all of this under the noses and the shoes of the NRA executives gaining ground for a hardened line against gun control. I'm building an organization capable of public persuasion, not only in Washington, but in the States, Carter said at the time, we don't know the best way to reach all the people

yet. We shall. God damn it. He built a mailing list. Yeah. He's one of the very first people to do this and is arguably the most successful of anyone in this period of doing this. And yeah, that's what we're going to leave things for today.

But first, Matt, you got a mailing list. Do you want to? Oh, I got a mailing list. It's called Instagram. You can find me there at Matt Leib Jokes. Please follow me. And also, hey, if you like the Sopranos, listen to Pod Yourself a Gun and is a rewatch podcast where me and Vince Mancini talk about every episode.

We just wrapped it up and it is the greatest and only Sopranos podcast in the world. And I would love for y'all to check it out and tell your friends. That's wonderful. I would like to use this time to get everyone to get involved in my fundamentalist right wing mailing list, NACA, the National Anti-Quartering Association. We're third amendment fundamentalists, Matt. Not only do I think that soldiers shouldn't be quartered in houses, I don't think they should be quartered anywhere.

I think soldiers should be kept awake constantly with heavy doses of amphetamines for the duration of the time that they're serving. No quartering of soldiers anywhere, not even on military bases. Keep them in the sea or in the sky on drugs at all times. That's the NACA line. I love it, dude. Find us online, give us your email, send us money and actblue.com slash anti-quartering. No quartering, nowhere.

Good times. 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.