Making Sense with Sam Harris - #19 — The Riddle Of The Gun (Revisited)

Episode Date: October 8, 2015

Sam Harris discusses his views about guns and gun control in light of a recent mass shooting. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. Okay, well a lot has been going on. There's been another mass shooting, which is really the proximate cause of this podcast. But the reaction to it ties in with my release of my book with Majid Nawaz this week and some of the pushback against that. For instance, the minor demagogue, Deem Obadala, who I collided with on CNN last week, got onto Twitter after this shooting, which took place in a community college in Oregon. And because of a rumor that the shooter had asked people their religion before killing them, he speculated that this was the result of new atheism and perhaps could be directly tied to me.

But he made a great show of withholding judgment by way of casting aspersion. So he got on Twitter and he said, hey friends, I know that many of you don't like Sam Harris, but seriously, don't unfairly link new atheism to this shooting. We don't know the facts yet. That is just a masterpiece of demagoguery. And this is a point that I then felt I had to spell out on social media. So I wrote a short piece on Facebook and also on Twitter. And I'll just read it to you. I think it's important. People are so confused or pretending to be confused about the nature of atheism that the argument is always that it's just like religion.

So Dawkins and I are often accused of being just as fundamentalist as our most fundamentalist adversaries on the religious side of the argument. But this is just a totally fatuous thing to say. There's no analogous doctrine on the side of atheism. So in any case, this is what I wrote. No rational atheist or new atheist holds religion accountable for every idiotic or unethical thing religious people do. We blame a religion only for what its adherents do as a direct result of its doctrines,

such as opposing gay marriage or killing apostates. Atheism has no doctrines. It does not demand that a person do anything or refrain from doing anything on the basis of his unbelief. Consequently, to know that someone is an atheist is to know almost nothing about him, apart from the fact that he does not accept the unwarranted claims of any religion. Atheism is simply the condition of not believing in Poseidon or Thor or any of the thousands of dead gods that lie in that graveyard we call mythology.

To that extent, everyone knows exactly what it is to be an atheist. The atheist has simply added the God of Abraham to the list of the dead. If a belief in astrology were causing people to go berserk, to deny medical care to their children or to murder unbelievers, many of us would speak and write about the dangerous stupidity of astrology. This would not be bigotry or intolerance on our part. It would be a plea for basic human sanity. And that is all that an atheist's criticism of religious tribalism and superstition ever is. If you understand this, you will recognize any attempt to blame atheism for

specific crimes, great or small, for what it is, a fresh act of religious demagoguery. So many people got back to me in response to that saying, no, no, no, atheists believe all kinds of things. Atheism is full of doctrines. You believe things about evolution. You believe things about cosmology. Okay, again, this is confusion. So my response was, yes, atheists harbor all sorts of beliefs,

ethical, political, scientific, but they don't get these beliefs from atheism. Rather, their atheism is itself the product of what they believe about science and about the merely human origin of all our books. No rational atheist is dogmatically opposed to believing in God. It's just that the evidence for his existence is terrible.

It would be trivially easy, in fact, for an omniscient being to write or inspire a book that would remove all doubt about him. Neither the Bible nor the Quran is that sort of book. For instance, if the Old Testament contained a single chapter that resolved the deepest questions of 21st century science, rather than merely telling us how to sacrifice goats and when to stone our daughters to death, I too would be a believer.

Now, many people pushed back against this. They thought that there could be no book that could testify to its author's omniscience. I think you're not thinking clearly enough about just how good a book could be written by an omniscient being just how good a book could be written by an omniscient being and what sort of signs could be in there that would demonstrate that it could not possibly have been of human origin.

In any case, nothing much turns on this. It's pedantic to fixate too much on the word omniscience. I'm just saying that every rational atheist could be convinced about the reality of God or about the truth of Christianity or any specific religion given sufficient evidence. If Jesus shows up on the White House lawn and starts wielding his magic powers, and David Copperfield and all the other magicians can't figure out how he's doing it, and he's healing the sick, and he's reading minds, and he's flying without the aid of technology, and he's just doing the whole superhero dance for us. Every scientist

would be convinced that something supernatural, or at the very least, totally unique in human history was going on. And we would just wait to be told by this being what the hell that something is, there's a sufficient demonstration that could make believers of all of us skeptics. And so the reality is that atheism is simply a position of not being convinced by the unjustified and in certain cases unjustifiable, claims of religious people. And that is not a situation of intellectual parody. As Carl Sagan famously said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The extraordinary claims are not on the side of atheism. They're on the side of those who believe that their books were written

by the creator of the universe. They're on the side of those who believe that their books were written by the creator of the universe. They're on the side of people who believe that their favorite first century rabbi rose from the dead and still exists and can read the minds of everyone alive and will be coming back to judge the living and the dead. These are positive claims about the way the world is and they are claims that trespass on science across the board. So there is no doctrine within atheism at all, really, but a failure to be convinced. Now, it's true that certain atheists can express this failure and express their views about

the stupidity of those who are convinced in a way that is hostile and offensive and that people find annoying. That's true. But there is no doctrine within atheism that can lead to behavior of any kind. Religious people have been waiting for this. In particular, Muslim apologists have been waiting for this. They've been waiting for an event that can be tied to atheism. We saw this with the Chapel Hill shootings earlier this year. Again, this joker, Dean Obadala, blamed me and Dawkins for those shootings. There was no evidence at all that this was even a hate crime,

in fact. This was just an ordinary triple murder, if that doesn't sound like a total oxymoron. But this guy grew unhinged over a neighbor dispute. And the fact that he was an atheist, there's no sign that that was the cause of his behavior. And again, this is a point that was in the piece I wrote. I have to emphasize it again, as critical as I am of religion and as much as I want to spell out the link between belief and dangerous behavior, the link between a belief in jihad and martyrdom and the kinds of violence we see in the Muslim world, for instance, I would never dream of holding religion responsible for every bad thing that religious people do. Now most people on

earth are religious and have always been. Virtually everything, good or bad, has been done by somebody who believes in God. So every liquor store that has ever been robbed has very likely been robbed by a person of faith. Statistically speaking, there has been nobody else to do the job. Now, if a Muslim robs a liquor store and steals a pound of bacon and kills the cashier, I would not even be slightly tempted to blame Islam for that behavior. It's absolutely clear that there are Muslims of whatever degree of religious conviction who can do heinous things that have absolutely nothing to do with their religious beliefs. That just should be obvious.

It is not obvious to the other side who are just waiting to find an atheist doing something heinous so that they can pin it on atheism, as though there's an analogous problem of specific doctrines within atheism producing bad behavior. If we had a text, if we had a text that we deemed sacred, that we deemed infallible, and it said things like, butcher them in their schools, then there'd be a case. And every time there was a mass shooting by an atheist in a school, we denied the link between this doctrine and the behavior, all the while reaffirming the infallibility of the text in which that line appeared. That would be an analogous situation to what you have in the Muslim

world. So find me that group of atheists who are talking about some infallible text that they will defend even when it obviously produces murder and mayhem. It doesn't exist. It will never exist. It's a totally false analogy. But there has been this mass shooting, and in response to it, many readers and listeners have asked me if it has caused me to reconsider my views about guns. And this alerts me to the fact that many of you don't necessarily understand

what my views about guns are. I certainly don't align with any predictable political poll on this issue. As I think most of you know, I wrote an article after the Newtown massacre entitled The Riddle of the Gun, and I'm just going to read it in this podcast and in perhaps a few places elaborate on its points. But it was, in fact, one of the most controversial articles I ever wrote because most of the people who like what I'm up to, most of the people who are skeptical of religion and interested in science and interested in the nature of human consciousness and in things like meditation and like to see this convergence of philosophy and science and issues that matter in the real world, most of you tend to not be people

who keep arsenals in your homes on the odd chance that you may have to defend yourself against a home invasion. You're not Second Amendment gun fanciers, for the most part. And so when I wrote this article, which seemed, at least on balance, to be pro-gun, many of you were just floored. And I heard a lot of despair from otherwise very devoted readers. But many of you,

in fact, did not understand my basic position. So I'm going to read this essay again, but I want to inoculate you against these misunderstandings by putting a few things in view at the outset. The first thing you need to understand is that my recommendations with respect to gun control are more aggressive, more stringent, more intrusive than any you have heard from any liberal who is bemoaning the status quo in the United States. So it is true to say that there is no politician who has articulated a position on gun control more anti-gun than mine. And my position is a non-starter. I think getting a gun should be genuinely difficult. I think it should be like getting a pilot's license. You should have to

be trained. Dozens of hours of training should be required to legally own a gun. And I think that background checks and all the rest should be as intrusive as possible at this point. There is no one articulating that position. And those of you who are sort of distant from this debate and think that, well, we should just ban guns, are not in contact with just how impossible that project is politically and practically in the United States. In the United States, we have 300 million guns on the ground.

And we have at least a million people, probably more, for whom gun ownership is the most important variable in their lives. People who are telling us they would fight a civil war to defend their right to own all the guns they want and all the guns they currently have. And needless to say, these people are quite well-armed. So if you can imagine trying to get guns back from these people, the people who are the rabid core of the NRA, no one is proposing that. There's no buyback program that's going to get guns out of these people's hands. So unless you have some magical method of getting hundreds of millions of guns off the street, whatever remedy you suggest has to be applied in a condition where there is already

a surfeit of guns. There are guns everywhere. And that is a different scenario than what you have in a country, let's say like the UK, where there are just not that many guns in circulation. Then there's a condition where banning gun ownership may in fact be viable. And I am on two sides of the ethics of that issue. There are a few things I think, and you'll hear me talk about them, that run counter to a notion of a ban, even in a condition where we could really start fresh

and there are no guns yet in existence. But that takes me to my second point, which is everything I say that's apparently in defense of a person's right to own a gun goes completely out the window once we have a truly equivalent but non-lethal alternative to a gun. So the moment that Taser or some other company devises a weapon that doesn't kill people but stops them in their tracks and it has the range and reusability and all of the defensive

characteristics of a gun, and hopefully better, then I think the argument for owning guns totally evaporates. I'm not a Second Amendment person. The Constitution is only important to me insofar as it secures sane policy in every present generation. And if things change, if technology changes, if the world changes, the Constitution has to change. So the moment we have a non-lethal alternative to guns, everything I say in defense of firearms is canceled. But there is no real alternative at the moment. And you just have to see video of cops using their tasers on people and see the vagaries of those effects to know that the current generation of tasers don't offer a substitute for a gun.

And finally, though I do in this essay express open-mindedness about the possibility of putting armed security guards in schools and on college campuses and in any place that we would be worried about a mass shooting. If we had truly well-trained security guards, I'd be happy to have them more in evidence in this world for reasons that will become obvious. But it's obvious that that is not a fundamental solution to the mass shooting problem. The mass shooting problem may be a problem that can't totally be solved, which is to say that if a person is intent upon killing a bunch of innocent people,

there will always be a place, a restaurant, a movie theater, a school, a shopping mall, that is sufficiently insecure so as to make that a very easy thing to do. And the only real remedy there, which I do in fact think would change the lethality of these episodes, would be if people internalized a new ethic and sense of responsibility around keeping society safe from this kind of violence. And the analogy I would draw, and I draw this at the end of this essay, although I don't make much of it, is to what you now know would happen in an airplane at 30,000 feet if someone pulled out a knife or a gun or

just started trying to open the cabin door. This sort of thing has happened since September 11, 2001, and we now know what happens, right? And we knew it a week after September 11, and no one had to talk about it. Something has changed worldwide, I think very likely in the minds of billions of people. And it is a sense of what you have to do as a bystander in the enclosed space of an airplane at 30,000 feet when someone starts misbehaving and trying to essentially bring the plane down. There is nowhere to run on a plane. And everyone understands that whether you're trained or not, whether you have a weapon or not, you have to attack the attacker. You have to go on offense and you have to go on offense hard and immediately. And there's nothing to talk

about. Imagine someone standing up on a plane now and saying, everyone just stay in your seats. You're all going to be fine. I'm just going to take control of this plane, right? That is a total non-starter now. But September 11th cured us of the illusion that safety could possibly reside in listening to this person's demands. It doesn't matter who you are. you jump on this guy and you start trying to claw his eyes out. Someone hits him low, someone hits him high, someone grabs the weapon hand. I mean, this has to happen, and it has to happen immediately. Now, I think this sense of just, and it is really like an animal sense. It was like a firmware upgrade of our limbic system. But it is local to an airplane in flight. I don't think it should be. I think if someone comes into your classroom and produces a weapon and says, everyone get against the wall, you are in an airplane at

30,000 feet. If someone in particular has already shot someone, just imagine you've already heard shots ring out in the hallway, right? And now this person comes through the door of your classroom. There is nothing to talk about. And if you can run away, great, run away. But if you can't run away, everyone has to swarm this person. The reality is that no matter who you are, no matter what gun you're carrying, if five people dive on you and tackle you, your plan will be sufficiently disrupted. I mean, a gun is not magically destructive. A gun is a piece of metal, and if the barrel is pointed in some innocuous direction, it is not dangerous to anyone. So you grab the shooter's arm, you grab the gun. It's true, someone is very likely going

to get injured or killed doing this. And any individual hero who tries to do it is also very likely going to die. But if everyone does it simultaneously simultaneously as they would on a plane, you're in a very different situation. The shooter is in a very different situation. I don't care if he's Delta Force or a Navy SEAL. If 10 people just dive on him, he's going down and there's no way he's going to be able to continue to harm people. But what you have in these situations is some version of compliance where a person with a gun can herd people into some situation

where he continues to have distance from them and just can shoot away, and people are compliant, or people come up to him serially. One person tries to be a hero, gets shot. Another person tries to be a hero, gets shot, and then you run out of heroes. Or you have people hiding under desks and just getting shot. I mean, we need a new understanding of how to behave in these situations. And luckily, these are incredibly rare situations. This is not the preponderance of gun violence as you're going to hear in this essay has nothing to do with mass shootings. In terms of the actual casualties, they are a rounding error in the deluge of gun related homicides in the United States.

As horrible as they are, they are not the problem that we have to confront when we're talking about the problem of gun violence. That's a long-winded way of saying, I think there is a response that would make a difference. It's a response that we can all take some responsibility for. It's something that effortlessly got into our heads after September 11th for the local case of an airplane. And I think this is a totally trainable thing. There are people who run drills in schools for active shooter drills, and you can see video of this online. And far from being terrifying and oppressive to the students,

they look incredibly fun, right? I mean, they get to tackle this person who comes through the door, and it's probably the most fun they have in the entire year in school. In any case, training for this kind of thing is doable. It's wise. I'm sure it's fun. It's analogous to the sorts of training I've done in martial arts, and people should do it. But short of training, we should just understand that there are situations where you have to react en masse instantly and that that really would change things. And I have a little more of my thinking on violent conflict on my blog. And the first article to which the riddle of the gun was

a follow-up was the truth about violence. There's been a lot of response to that article, and I have not heard anything from law enforcement or people in the military or the people I train with, SWAT operators and martial artists. I haven't heard pushback on the details there in any important sense. Insofar as I do, I will correct the record. But in any case, I still believe that is a valid resource for how you should be thinking about potentially lethal encounters with people. And finally, I just want to say, as I say at the end of this podcast, that I acknowledge that this is not everyone's cup of tea. There are people who think that merely thinking about this stuff is perverse.

We are incredibly lucky to live, for the most part, in safe societies. In fact, we live in the safest societies that have ever existed in human history. Most of us. Many of us, I should say. Certainly most of the people have the leisure to listen to a podcast like this. And because we live in a condition where becoming a victim of potentially lethal violence is so unlikely, it seems morbid and in some way intellectually disreputable to even think about this stuff, to think about human violence and to train in anticipation of ever having to face it. That's crazy. Many of you think that. I hear from people who don't lock their doors at night, and they think that locking

their doors would impose upon them and their children a kind of concession to paranoia that would be psychologically and spiritually unhealthy. Well, if you're one of these people, I think it may be hard for you to get on board with this consideration. I can only say that the likelihood of encountering significant violence in your life is not as remote as you might believe, but it is still remote enough that you are likely to avoid it. You're, you're unlikely to be raped, you're unlikely to be assaulted, you're unlikely to be murdered. That's a very good thing. But you're also very likely to meet someone who has encountered violence of this sort. It's a little bit like a car crash. I've never been in a significant car crash, right? But I don't drive with a sense that car crashes don't happen to people like me.

And here we are in car crash territory. We're not in plane crash territory. When talking about the statistics of violence, even in the safest neighborhoods in our societies. But I will concede that many of you think I've just gone off my rocker every time I write or speak about martial arts or guns or the lethal use of force or studying how violence unfolds between people. And, you know, you can just wait for the next podcast. It will not be on this topic. But for those of you who are interested in what I think about guns and why yet another mass shooting doesn't get me to say, oh yes, we have to ban guns in the U.S. as if that were possible. Listen to this essay with an open mind and realize

that it might blow you around a little bit in how you feel about what I'm saying, because I do argue both sides of this. If you're a Second Amendment person, you're going to hate half of what I say. And if you're morbidly afraid of guns, you're also going to hate what I say. My position is slightly hard to characterize here. But in any case, my views have not changed since I wrote this, but there may be some points to clarify along the way. And now I give you the riddle of the gun. The Riddle of the Gun. The Riddle of the Gun.

Fantasists and zealots can be found on both sides of the debate over guns in America. On the one hand, many gun rights activists reject even the most sensible restrictions on the sale of weapons to the public. On the other, proponents of stricter gun laws often seem unable to understand why a good person would ever want ready access to a loaded firearm. Between these two extremes, we must find grounds for a rational discussion about the problem of gun violence. Unlike most Americans, I stand on both sides of this debate. I understand the apprehension that many people feel toward gun culture, and I share their outrage over the political influence of the National Rifle Association. How is it that we live in a society in which one of the most compelling interests is gun ownership?

Where is the science lobby? The safe food lobby? Where is the get-the-Chinese-lead-paint-out-of-our-kids-toys lobby? When viewed from any other civilized society on Earth, the primacy of guns in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis. Most of my friends do not own guns and never will. When asked to consider the possibility of keeping firearms for protection, they worry that the mere presence of them in their homes would put them and their families in danger. Can't a gun go off by accident? Wouldn't it be

more likely to be used against them in an altercation with a criminal? I'm surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs. But unlike my friends, I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor. This is an expensive and time-consuming habit, but I view it as part of my responsibility as a gun owner. It was true that my work as a writer has added to my security concerns somewhat, but my involvement with guns goes back decades. I've always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I've never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called. I've expressed my views on self-defense elsewhere.

That's in a blog post entitled The Truth About Violence. Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not a fault of the police. It's a problem of physics. Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn't any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn't understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene.

There have been cases of prison guards, who generally do not carry guns, helplessly standing by as one of their own was stabbed to death by a lone prisoner armed with an improvised blade. The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense, and diffusion of responsibility has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one's training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man,

not even a member of SEAL Team 6, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world? Of course, owning a gun is not a responsibility that everyone should assume. Most guns kept in the home will never be used for self-defense. They are, in fact, more likely to be used by an unstable person to threaten family members or to commit suicide. However, it seems to me that there is nothing irrational about judging oneself to be psychologically stable and fully committed to the safe handling and ethical use of firearms,

if indeed one is. Carrying a gun in public, however, entails even greater responsibility than keeping one at home, and in most states the laws reflect this. Like many gun control advocates, I have serious concerns about letting ordinary citizens walk around armed. Ordinary altercations can become needlessly deadly in the presence of a weapon. A scuffle that exposes a gun in a person's waistband, for instance, can quickly become a fight to the death, where the first person to get his hands on the weapon may feel justified in using it in, quote, self-defense. Most people seem unaware that knives present a similar liability.

According to Gallup, 16% of American men carry knives for personal protection. I'm quite sure that most of those men have not thought through the legal, ethical, and game theoretical implications of drawing a blade in a moment of conflict. It is true that brandishing a weapon, whether a gun or a knife, sometimes preempts further violence, but emotions being what they are, it often doesn't, and the owner of the weapon can find himself resorting to deadly force in a circumstance that would not otherwise have called for it. Some facts about guns. 55 million kids went to school on the day that 20 were massacred

at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Even in the United States, therefore, the chances of a child's dying in a school shooting are remote. As my friend Stephen Pinker demonstrates in his monumental study of human violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, our perception of danger is easily distorted by rare events. Is gun violence increasing in the United States? No. But it certainly seems to be when one recalls recent atrocities in Newtown and Aurora. In fact, the overall rate of violent crime has fallen by 22% in the past decade

and 18% in the past five years. As a side note, I think there's been an uptick in the last 12 months or so, but the general trend has been of a massive reduction in all violent crime in the last 20 years. We still have more guns and more gun violence than any other developed country. But the correlation between guns and violence in the United States is far from straightforward.

30% of urban households have at least one firearm. This figure increases to 42% in the suburbs and 60% in the countryside. As one moves away from cities, therefore, the rate of gun ownership doubles. And yet gun violence is primarily a problem in cities. It is the people of Detroit, Oakland, Memphis, Little Rock, and Stockton who are at the greatest risk of being killed by guns. In the weeks since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, advocates of stricter gun control

have called for a new federal ban on, quote, assault weapons and for reductions in the number of concealed carry permits issued to private citizens. But the murder rate has fallen precipitously since the federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. And this was also a period in which millions of Americans began to carry their guns in public. Many proponents of gun control have observed that the AR-15, the gun that Adam Lanza used to murder 20 children in Newtown, is now the most popular rifle in America. But only 3% of murders in the U.S. are committed with rifles of any type. 70 mass shootings have occurred in the U.S. since 1982, leaving 543 dead. I don't have the most recent number here but obviously that has increased a little bit.

These crimes were horrific but 564,452 other homicides took place in the U.S. during that same period. Mass shootings scarcely represent 0.1% of all murders. When talking about the problem of guns in our society, it is easy to lose sight of the worst violence and to become fixated on symbols of violence. Of course, it is important to think about the problem of gun violence in the context of other risks. For instance, it is estimated that 100,000 Americans die each year because doctors and nurses fail to

wash their hands properly. Measured in bodies, therefore, the problem of hand-washing in hospitals is worse than the problem of guns, even if we include accidents and suicides. But not all deaths are equivalent. A narrow focus on mortality rates does not always do justice to the reality of human suffering. Mass shootings are a marginal concern,

even relative to other forms of gun violence, but they cause an unusual degree of terror and grief, particularly when children are targeted. Given the psychological and social costs of certain low-frequency events, it does not seem irrational to allocate disproportionate resources to prevent them. We should also remember that mass killings

do not depend on guns. Much has been made in the press about the fact that, on the very day 20 children were murdered in Newtown, a man with a knife attempted a similar crime at an elementary school in China. At The Atlantic, James Fallows wrote, 22 children injured versus a current count of 20 little children and eight other people shot dead. That's the difference between a knife and a gun.

Guns don't attack children. Psychopaths and sadists do. But guns uniquely allow a psychopath to wreak death and devastation on such a large scale so quickly and easily. America is the only country in which this happens again and again and again. You can look it up. This is more tendentious than it might sound. There has been an epidemic of

knife attacks on school children in China in the past two years. As Fallows certainly knows, he is after all an expert on China. In some instances, several children were murdered. In March 2010, eight were killed and five injured in a single incident. This is as bad as many mass shootings in the U.S. I'm not denying that guns are more efficient for killing people than knives are, but the truth is that knives are often deadly enough, and the only reliable way for one person to stop a man with a knife is to shoot him. As a side note there, I should emphasize the words reliable and one. The only reliable way for one person to stop a man with a knife is to shoot him.

Now, of course, if you have a weapon that gives you a certain range, a long stick or a chair, that is helpful against a person with a knife. And multiple people attacking a person with a knife, armed or not, can certainly stop him. But if you're talking about one person in the presence of a knife-wielding attacker, a gun is certainly your best option, provided you're not already being stabbed. Back to the text. It is reasonable to wish that only virtuous men... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the

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