Rev Left Radio - [UNLOCKED] American Carnage: Mass Shootings, Gun Policy, & Root Causes

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Breht and Alyson discuss the recent barrage of mass shootings, how Marxists should think about these issues, what the root causes of american mass shootings are, policies/reforms that the socialist left might be able to support, and much more.  Outro music: 'Pray for Newtown' by Sun Kil Moon Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. Today's episode is going to be a much more somber one. We're recording in the wake of the horrific shooting in Uvaldi, Texas, where multiple, I think 19, at this point children were murdered and two teachers. That, of course, was coming on the heels of a absolutely brutal shooting in Buffalo where a neo-Nazi specifically targeted black grocery shoppers. And actually, in that case, there was also an attempt, or at least a scheme that he was planning on going to a black elementary school at first, felt he could not get in adequately, easily enough, and then decided to turn to a grocery store instead. So one seems

very ideological, one seems just nihilistic and things could come out in the future, the most recent shooting as to what his motivations were, but much like the Sandy Hook shooting, it just seems like a very disturbed individual with no real political vision carrying out violence for its own sake, whereas in the Buffalo shooting, it was clearly ideologically motivated. And this is becoming just par for the course in American society, unfortunately. And what we wanted to do in this episode is kind of offer, if not answers, the beginnings of the search for answers of what a principled socialist position could be on these issues specifically around gun policy because I feel like there's two major extremes. There's the liberal extreme, which is like ban everything.

You know, we shouldn't have guns. What the fuck do you need a gun for, etc., which is par for the course on the liberal center left. And then we have on the far left basically a regurgitation of the far right wing position, which is a very lazy, sloppy, don't do anything at all kind of approach. And I was hoping that Allison and I might be able to find a path down the middle and that's what this is going to be. But neither of us have any clear answers. I actually got an email from a listener begging for this kind of discussion

because they were so frustrated with the socialist lefts, you know, lack of a real counter to the liberal and the far right position. And so we were hoping to make an intervention on that front. But first and foremost, before we get into this discussion, I just wanted to, you know, just take a moment to think of the victims of these two latest mass shootings, the heartbreak that I think anybody with a fucking pulse around the world, but certainly in the United States, has to be feeling. I know I went through an entire grieving process that the several days after the news, you know, I was just throughout my day, you know, breaking

down in random fits of just, you know, gut-wrenching, weeping over the loss, what the families are going through. I have an infant, what we're dealing with the formula crisis, and I have two older kids who the day after the mass shooting, you know, I had to drop off at school, public schools just like the ones that have been targeted in the past. And at least one of those schools, my younger child's school had a pretty heavy police presence. And it was absolutely fucking nauseating to have to just watch them bounce into school knowing what happened. And so my heart is fucking broken. It's absolutely brutal. As a parent, I'm directly facing the consequences and the implications of what this stuff means for my own family, from my own

children. And yeah, it's just absolutely fucking heartbreaking. And so I can't do anything other than offer my entire heart and soul to the families in both of these shootings as well as the victims. Allison, do you have anything you want to say up front before we kind of get into the details of this? Yeah, I mean, I would just echo the extent to which I think it's important to emphasize the loss of human life here, right? Not to abstract this away from what it is. And also just like to recognize how fucking just hard it is to deal with how back to back these shootings are as well, right? Having the Buffalo shooting, then the news of this. And even today, a shooting one was killed and seven people were shot in Oklahoma. And it just keeps going, right? And that's, you know,

I think just horrific. And in an instance like this where we see a shooter once again going to an elementary school, there's just such an added level of just fucking depravity, honestly. to the act that I think has to be pointed out, um, you know, I, my wife and I both as soon as we heard about it were just kind of like fucked up by this one, right? I don't even know how else to put it really. Um, but it's a horrific situation. And I think that how horrific it is and how much of a human toll there is, is part of the reason why having these conversations is important. Right. I think that the left echoes a line that gets seen as kind of callous a lot of the time. Uh, And if only just like for like public image, that's fucking bad, like in the wake of this.

It's not an appropriate way to respond to grief and having conversations, I think, where we can admit that we don't have all the answers, but clearly we need to try to come to something in the face of atrocities and horrors like this, you know, hopefully can help us move forward with that so that we're not just fucking being callous assholes when these kind of things happen because I don't think that's an acceptable response. So I don't know, just kind of some opening thoughts there. Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, the depravity and the callousness of just like a, you know, don't do anything approach is obviously grotesque in its own right.

Something has to be done. I mean, there's the problem of a completely broken government that can't solve any problem. So when you come up with policy solutions, you're playing more or less a fucking thought experiment because the government that we have that would initiate these policies just doesn't fucking exist. They're on a vacation right now. But let's go ahead and dive into some of these issues. And I think the big point that needs to be made up front when we're saying, like, what the fuck is the solution here? I think, Alison, you probably would agree that, you know, a real solution that gets to the roots of the problem would have to be either dramatic, widespread reformation of every institution and corner of our society or a full-on revolutionary rupture from this disease society because the roots of this pathological violence are very, very deep. And there's a certain sort of liberal obsession with the gun issue as the main pillar holding up these tragedies that I think is like an easy way out.

It's the liberal version of being a sloppy thinker. It's like if we could just, you know, straight up ban guns, then the problem solved. We don't have to dig deeper into elements of the liberal worldview that are underpinning this. Like, you know, we'll get into. But imperialism, you know, violence, settler colonialism, inequality. they all have a role to play here but at the same time we can't just say the problem is so multifaceted that we should

just throw our hands up and not try to stop children from being fucking murdered that's not the solution either so with that in mind I guess Allison what are some if we're looking at the deeper roots right we will talk about policy and reforms and guns in a second but the deeper roots of this

problem what would you say that those are yeah so I mean I think looking at the root kind of issues is important right and I think you're right. Liberals don't want to open that door, right? Because the moment that you start to open it, you have to ask a question, which is why in this supposed liberal paradise that liberals believe is the best country on the world are people motivated to take actions like these, right? And that's an action, or that's a question that if you really start to ask it, I think really poses

a problem for the liberal worldview and the liberal view of what the United States is. So there's like a couple things that I think are relevant. I mean, the big one that a lot of people have talked about already that I think is really worth talking about, especially in this case, is misogyny and how misogyny is at play here. What we're learning about the shooter in Texas as more information comes out is that he, over the last few years, has been known in online communities on these apps that are being used by high schoolers as a weird fucking misogynistic creep who was making rape threats and death threats and kidnapping threats against women who disagreed with him, who he had made contact with, who was finding ways to add other young women on various apps and DM them

invasive questions and then make similar threats when they didn't answer. And who just generally fits this profile that tends to connect all of these shooters was just an intense fucking hatred of women. He also shot his grandmother in the head before going to the school to engage in the attack. And we see this kind of repeated pattern of before the shootings, femicidal violence also being engaged in by these shooters against a family member. Sandy Hook saw a very similar thing. And I think that misogyny is a really big part of it that we have to wrestle with. And part of what's really horrific in my mind about this, and I think shows how deep this kind of misogynistic aspect goes, is that several news outlets were able to interview some of the

girls that he had been messaging online. And several of them basically said, like, we reported it, nothing happened. You know, this is just how boys are on the internet. And I think, that idea of this is how young men online are just expected to act with this like violent, brutal, threatening misogyny speaks to such like a background moral degradation at play that produces that to the point where it has to almost be shrugged off until it erupts into something on this level and manifests in this kind of intense violence. And I think that tells us that within the way that, you know, online communities have formed within the way that that the internet has developed this, oh, like, guys are just joking, you know, grow tougher, thicker skin, get over it, it's just trolling attitude, that it allows this festering and this manifesting of this hatred for women that I think is inseparable from this kind of violence to a certain extent. And I think it's really important that we wrestle with that as one of the roots that really like over and over again, when you look into who these killers are, they are profound misogynists. And I don't think that that is coincidental. And I think that that is something in our culture that is,

producing this violence in many ways. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And as a side note to that, I couldn't help but notice that in this instance, the three people who really tried to put their bodies in between this killer and these fucking children were all women. First, the grandma shot in the face, still called 911, which is how the cops actually engaged or encountered the shooter before he even walked in. And then the two teachers, both women, I can't even imagine what women.

on in that classroom and that motherfucker walked in there but I know for a fact that you know I think the grandma might still be alive but two women maybe three gave their lives trying to stop this fucking asshole while cops with you know full body armor backup multiple weapons they were even on his

ass before he walked into the school sat around and fucking beat parents and handcuffed moms while their kids were being fucking sprayed with bullets inside the fucking classroom it is absolutely disgusting but yeah I totally agree misogyny underpins if you dig deep enough in almost every mass shooting,

there will be a layer of violent misogyny that you'll come across almost every time without exception. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, talking about another one, and this is one that people have brought up a fair amount. On the left eye, I do think we need to talk about

because it's, I actually think just as important, is the issue of imperialism as well, right? One thing that we have to confront as people living in the U.S. is that for the most part as a culture, we don't have a problem with women and children being slaughtered with guns. We have a problem with American women and children being slaughtered with guns. And that's very patently evident through the wars that we have engaged in, through over a million dead civilians in Iraq as a result of the Iraq war, which was cheered on by massive amounts of the American populace. You know, one tweet that

I think rightfully got a lot of hate in response to this was Pete Buttigieg saying, you know, I didn't go fight overseas and carry an assault rifle so this could happen. here. With the assumption being that, yeah, it's okay when this shit happens in Iraq or in Syria or Afghanistan, right? The problem isn't that this happens. It's that it happens in America. And I think that it's not surprising that a culture that can accept these kind of atrocities and that can accept this kind of violence as a core part of its foreign policy and its relation to the rest of the world sees that kind of violence exist back home, right? The, you know, these fucking, God, it's just infuriating because when you really think about it, the people, the people

who are engaging in these shootings are certainly exposed these cultural obsessions with warfare through video games, media, etc. And that's not to say that those things are responsible, but as part of a broader imperialist ideology that says that this kind of violence has this place, it's not surprising to see that sink itself into kind of the fucked up psyche of the people who engage in this. So I really do think imperialism is one of the other key things that we really need to wrestle with and recognize that America has been willing to accept this kind of of violence for a very long time. The question is where it happens. Yeah, absolutely. And just to,

I think you alluded to this a little bit, but just to maintain an empire, it comes with the maintenance of a certain sort of psychology amongst the population that must always be at war, that must always have an enemy, external or internal, whether that's communist or immigrants or terrorist or whatever. There's always a rotating cast of characters that are violent threats to American way of life that need to be put down and confronted, and in order to maintain that literal material hegemonic empire, the people inside the imperial core, inside that hegemonic empire's domestic population must be fed a certain diet of violence and glorification of that violence and of guns. And you can't go to a goddamn Super Bowl without seeing fighter jets fly

over. And it's not that the entertainment itself is the cause, but that the way that violence so easily manifests in every sort and every corner of our culture is a direct product of the violence that must be maintained, not only in the initiation of stealing this land, taking it over and building an empire, but then through the maintenance of that empire, through the act of brutal insane violence, to say nothing of the fact that the United States is the number one arms dealer in the world. So if we're not directly involved in slaughtering and murdering and destabilizing, we're giving people around the world the weapons to do it themselves. And that comes with a domestic fucking cost.

And anybody who says you can separate foreign policy and empire and hegemony from domestic psychology and domestic social pathologies is lying to your fucking face. And so as long as we have this apparatus built on murder and bloodshed and misery, it's going to come home in one way or another all the fucking time. And we've seen that our entire lives. These problems, these mass shootings have been going on forever. But even in the early 90s when you had the Oklahoma City bombing, it was a preschool at the bottom of the building that took the brunt of the attack. So this is nothing new. The slaughtering

not only of innocence, but the slaughtering of innocent, defenseless children is very fucking disgustingly American. And it just cannot be separated from these issues as well as many more. But we can continue because the list is quite long. Right. The other one that I wanted to mention, which you got at is the component of settler colonialism and also of like anti-black white supremacy in the United States where, you know, one of the interesting things about the United States is that the Second Amendment and the right to have an armed populace has not historically been interpreted as everyone in the U.S. has the right to be armed in that way, right? We know that at the founding of these countries, the implementation of the supposed constitutional

rights was for white men in particular. And the process of settler colonialism of westward expansion of congregant occupation required sort of the deputization of a civilian populace into the process of genocide against indigenous people, which is why you had pioneers and militias that formed in settler towns that were not the state itself that were armed and had this right to be armed who were engaging in these exterminatory practices. And so I think that's another history that has to be thought of there, also the history of using guns in the hands of slave-owning civilians in order to keep black populations under control in the United States. All of these things, which are easy to try to brush off as in the past, have ongoing ideological legacies and

implications and ramifications today that produce a culture where these things happen. So while imperialism is one aspect, settler colonialism and white supremacy at home, I think is the other aspect that really needs to be kind of taken seriously. And the role of guns in the hands of civilians as interpreted as in the hands of the white landowning class historically is an important consideration as well. Absolutely. And, you know, the NRA, we could talk a little bit more about it in general, but if you remember during that Philando Castile murder, the NRA really revealed itself in that moment, as in so many others, but it was a nice flashpoint to see who they really fucking are, because they pretend to be small government for the individual liberty, for the responsible gun owner, Philando Castile, a legal responsible gun owner telling an agent of the state, I'm reaching in to get the documents you're telling me to. I am a legal gun owner, shot dead in front of his, you know, his girl and her, and her child in the back seat watching this murder and they didn't say fucking shit they never came to his fucking uh defense because he was black and it was a cop who did the killing that shows you

what the fuck they're about and that shows you the nRA comes directly out of settler colonialism there is no nora as it exists without that legacy of settler colonialism propping it up and giving it's vitality and then there's this this it's almost crude to even talk about um and and it's not the main point, but it just is worth saying, like, the, the insanity of, of, of whiteness and anti-black hatred, the, the buffalo shooter was a neo-Nazi who was, had his brain rotted out from the great replacement theory. And he literally wanted to, you know, murder black people because, in part, this idea that white people are being systematically replaced with people of color when, because of slavery and the history of America, you know, a lot of fucking, you know,

people that are black in this society have been around in this country hundreds and hundreds and built this fucking country hundreds of years before a lot of these European immigrants came over that then develop into an 18 year old neo-Nazi who says get the fuck out of my country like the the the irrationality of it of the violence of the whiteness is is part and parcel of the entire phenomenon of course white supremacy itself was forged through the processes of settler colonialism of the slave trade and of just colonialism, European colonialism more broadly. So again, these processes are continuing. They did not end in the past and we have not moved beyond them. The institutions, the psychologies, the worldviews, the mindsets, the values, the structures

are still very, very much in place and generating this unique form of American pathological violence. Absolutely. Do we want to talk about economic and social inequality potentially? I think so. Yeah, we can get back to cops and guns. Awesome. Do you want to go ahead and take that one then? Sure, yeah. Just to state that, you know, the economic and social inequality that racks the society, it cannot be, you know, credited with every single one of these actions for sure. But when you have a generation of people coming up with all these other things in the background, imperialism, settler colonialism, misogyny, completely broken and corrupt government, you have the extra layer of no future, no opportunities, no consequences. community. No sense of community where maybe a troubled teen who's having a really hard time has an uncle or a neighbor who can step up and try to intervene in that child's life. That's completely

gone. Intensifying alienation and anger and hatred. It's just a cesspool. You know, like what if every single American, just to indulge me for a fucking second, if every American was guaranteed gainful employment, a home of their own, good wages, mental and physical health, care, a sense of community with actual community, you know, enriching rituals and, and rights of passage that have, you know, been part and parcel of the human experience for our entire existence as a species on this planet. You know, what if there were plentiful opportunities to access higher education, to get a good job in the trades, you know, would as many people be willing to just throw their lives away in an act of feverish violence,

random violence or be sucked into hyper, you know, radicalizing neo-Nazi ideologies if they had a fucking system and a society that invested in them, that cared for them, that tried to create a life for their citizens, instead of throwing them to the fucking wolves of capital and saying, figure it out yourself. You know, and none of these issues, settler colonialism, imperialism, economic and social inequality, rampant violent misogyny. these are not things that can be reformed away. So as we shift into this conversation about some reform, some reforms, some policies

that principled socialist and Marxists might be able to accept, we have to understand the problem is much, much, much deeper and without radical, radical change. At every level of society, the same sickness is going to manifest. You can take the gun out of the hand of the sickness, and that certainly might help reduce the body count, but the sickness will still be there. And with the rise of 3D printing, of ghost guns, of the ability, increasing ability just to make, like, bombs easier to make, you know, the gun is part of the problem, but it cannot be the only problem. And we have to keep that in mind going forward. Yeah, definitely.

We can transition to talking about some of the, you know, kind of proposed solutions to this and also where we might fall into that. I mean, one that I want to talk about in transition and talking about briefly is the response that we're largely seeing on. the right, which is that we need more cops in schools, right? Uh, is kind of the response, or we need to securitize schools more, make them have a single entrance point, have more armed police there, or, uh, the, the dystopian term that they use a school resource officer, uh, but that we need to have more cops there. And, you know, I think this, uh, shooting is the fucking example of why that doesn't make a difference, right? You know, Sandy Hook originally was an instance that a lot of people

wrote about how the school resource officers at Sandy Hook fucking hid and ran a when the shooting started, right? They just allowed it to take place. And in the case of this shooting, we saw almost something even more fucking horrific than that, which is that the cops didn't stop it for an hour. While they were not stopping it in that hour, they maced and pepper sprayed and attacked and tackled in handcuffed parents trying to get their kids. And some cops went in and rescued their own fucking kids, but nobody else during that time, which goes, you know, again, a level beyond what we saw at Sandy Hook in that instance. And in top of all that, they've just been lying about it the entire fucking time. The day of, I remember watching the

press release that the police were doing, where they were telling this story of like Border Patrol coming in and saving the day immediately, right? And immediately engaging in gunfire. And this whole thing went really quickly and was, you know, put down quickly. And as we've seen, that's not the case. The gunman was in the building for an hour. Border Patrol didn't even breach the classroom. a school employee had to be brought in to unlock the fucking door. Now there's some evidence that the police essentially barricaded the shooter in that classroom at one point. It is all just a little unclear precisely the details, but what we have seen is that the police didn't take any risks to their own safety in this instance to protect children.

They just let children get fucking killed. And so in terms of the reforms that people are proposing, in terms of the solutions, I do think it is worth tackling this idea of we need more securitized schools and we need more cops would know, this is the exact instance that proves why that doesn't work. This is a police force that had 40% of its town budget, that had its own SWAT team in a town of thousands of people, and this is how that played out. Police are not the solution, it cannot be the solution. And with even some liberals pushing this line, I think it's very important to just say that this absolutely is a non-starter as a solution, and that police reinforce all the systemic problems

that we talked about of white supremacy and misogyny within the spaces that they occupy. So we have to push back against that, I think, as we're trying to figure out what sort of reforms might be possible in this instance. Yeah, I mean, yes, you know, all the stuff we see from cops in this society, you know, murdering mentally ill people, murdering family pets, Philando Castile, you know, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, we go down the entire list of situations in which the police are in no fucking real danger, think they are, slaughter an innocent. The moment they can prove themselves And it's not even like they showed up late So if you come like The shootings are already happening And then somebody's calling

And then you have to get all your forces across The grandma called them So they were there on the scene Before the motherfucker even walked into the school And they lied about him being heavily body armored So their first thing I think the first lies that came out And I can't remember

I don't know exactly who these things come from It's very in the moment But that there was a shooter with full body armor They engaged him with bullets shooting at him But they couldn't get him You know, none of that was true He had a tactical vest with no plate in it One fucking, you know, dumbass

Undertrained teenager You see him walking into the school There's two or three cops on the scene Engaging with them knowing he just shot his grandma On the fucking face What do you do? If you're a fucking human being Not even a cop, but a human being

Especially if you look down at your side And you seem to have a fucking gun on your hip You follow that son of a bitch in there And you end him before he gets into that second classroom because when he walked in this back door there was the first class he came in through at least my understanding at the time

is that it was empty there was a sliding divider between that empty classroom and the next one and so he was able then to get in there with no pressure being put on him by police he can sit and think okay maybe I have to open this up oh there's the kids I hear him through the wall

now I'm going in now I'm going to shoot if he had to turn around and fight off two three cops upon entering the building almost certainly children fucking could have been saved And this is also not a lack of training Because these motherfuckers were in the school itself I think two times in the last year

Playing their little war games Where they're you know They're running down the hallways literally of these schools Knowing what how to respond to this shit And then the time comes and they're not there So you know they can slaughter innocence They can beat up fucking kids They can kill your family pet

Everything because they feared for their life Feared for the life fear for the life The moment it comes where they actually have to put their bodies and their lives in jeopardy to save innocence they cower. And as somebody who has a very fucking low opinion of

American cops, if those motherfuckers went in behind him and put him down and save those kids, I would join the chorus of people saying, hey, for once in this fucking country cops actually did a heroic thing. I would give him a fucking clap for saving children. You know, so like

this could have been a moment where all the pro cop propaganda that to shove down our fucking throats every day. Here's a proving ground. You're on the scene. You see the guy with the gun before he goes in. What do the cops do? They fuck it up.

They cowered. They let children die. And in one of the most horrific instances of incompetence, at the very end of this fucking thing, when they finally got a tactical group of some sort at the door, they yelled into the classroom. If you need help, yell for help. One little fourth grade, beautiful, innocent, precious little fucking girl.

screamed help and the shooter came over and ended her fucking life authorities figures that are there to help and protect little babies telling them do you need help okay here's our chance yes I need help

gets wiped off the face of the fucking earth and only then do the cops come in and put this motherfucker down so you know it's one thing you could say well it's easy to be Monday night quarterbacking but with everything all the training 40% of the fucking city's budget goes into your fucking pockets

you have a militarized police force a SWAT team in a town of 13,000 100 and you can't and you've specifically trained within the last several months for this exact situation and you spend the time in the parking lot beating fucking parents

it is a crime on top of a crime on top of a fucking crime and you know what else is there to say except just to rage at this shit parents were like we'll go in no training no weapons I will go in and stand

between the shooter and innocent children. And for that, they got arrested on site. I mean, yeah, words are not sufficient. Yeah, absolutely. There's nothing to you fucking say. It's just horrific. And one more thing, too. One more thing on Twitter, I saw a prosecutor, a DA,

used to be in Yuvaldi, now is in Midland, Texas or something. And she had this long tweet thread, I think, where she was basically saying, like, I worked in Yuvaldi as a DA for many, many years. And let me just tell you, these motherfucking police are lying to you. You will never, ever know the truth of what actually happened unless you do the investigation independently yourself.

Using the idea that you're going to ask the cops what happened and get anything but a set of fucking lies to cover their own asses is a delusion. So, I mean, this is coming from a prosecutor that used to work in there, work with the police telling you, don't listen to a fucking word they say. Insane. Yeah. well and what's so horrific too is one of the things that I think has been interesting at the wake of this is even seeing right wing media condemning the cops in this case right like the fucking New York Post which is like a right wing ass rag has been going out of their way to publish pieces on this I've been seeing it from a lot of different right wing sites and there does seem to be on kind of both sides of that divide condemnation of this police department and then a reporter asks Biden whether there will be an investigation into the police conduct in this and how they handled things. an investigation that would certainly have bipartisan support in this country.

And Biden's answer is, no, we support and stand behind our law enforcement officers, right? It's just the most fucking cowardly, meaningless thing at a time when both the right and left are pointing out that, you know, and in agreement that there was a clear failure in the police's actions in this instance. And that's what we get from the fucking Democratic lesser of two evil president. Right, exactly. It's unbelievable. And nobody, nobody will be held accountable for this. nobody

and that's that's just fucking disgusting but let's go ahead now that we've we've laid out some of the deeper rot at our fucking society some of the absolute failures of the people supposed to protect these little babies maybe we can move into the discussion about guns proper because certainly it's

part of this thing I mean America you know it is worth saying other countries have high gun ownership countries that are a lot less stable than the United States countries with a lot more poverty a lot more tyranny a lot more you know stifling and oppression and you don't see mass shootings in other societies even if you you know control for all the other things that we have there's other settler colonial societies

they tend to certainly be more violent but not by definition all every other society has violent entertainment you know or if you're fucking on ted cruz's dumbass wavelength every other society has buildings with doors in them um it is a specific american sickness and guns are a part of that the you know they're tools but there's this fetishization of them, this equalizing them with the very idea of freedom that comes from these deeper things that we've talked about. But yeah, so let's just tackle this tough situation. I'm somebody who owns many guns because not only because I grew up in Nebraska and Montana where there's just a different culture, but also because I've personally been targeted by multiple waves of right-wing

fascist neo-Nazi docs attempts. My family's been attacked. And then I've also been visited by the state, by police, et cetera, in lieu of that as well for, for, you know, whatever. And I want to be able to protect my family, not because I think I'm going to go to war at the police or because I'm going to go to war with the United States government, but because I want to be competently able to not only be able to use those weapons to hunt for food and build that skill set, but also to defend my family straight up, period. No apologizing for that. But at the same time, I'm not going to say that don't do fucking anything.

There's nothing we can do because I value my gun more than I value the lives of little children. I'm not going to do that either. So I guess let's go ahead and jump into it. Do you have any opening statements that you want to say, Alison, about this? Yeah. I mean, as an opening framing question, I think this is where, you know, again, as you alluded to in our introduction, we have to break away from the two kind of obvious things that people fall back on, which is either it's all the guns or the guns have fucking nothing to do with it, right? These are kind of the two answers that we get. And it's all the guns, I think, is, you know, obviously false. You know, there are all the other things we've talked about that are factors that are clearly at play here

that matter and need to be taken into account and removing guns isn't going to get rid of all those other things. But the reflexive move on the far left of, therefore, the guns have nothing to do with it is a mistake too, right? And I think we just have to push back against that. On just a practical level, right? The amount of deaths that can be caused by a gun is higher than with other weapons, right? That just is true. I don't think we have to pretend that that's not true. That's something we can wrestle with. And on top of that, and I think you hinted at this, right? Like, all these ideologies that we're talking about have an obsession with guns as objects into them, right? And the gun is this kind of ideological object in U.S. culture. It's this object of masculinity,

of conquering this object of kind of brutality within all of these various ideologies, especially in the context of misogyny. I think the gun is seen as a masculinizing thing that a young boy can have. There's all of these sort of ideological projections onto guns themselves that make them relevant and worth considering. So, you know, just as like a framing question, I think we really have to get beyond this reflexive response to the liberals where, you know, they say, oh, the gun is everything and we say it's nothing. No, I mean, the, these crimes are inseparable from the guns, right? We have to take that seriously.

So I think that's an important framing. How we deal with that is a tougher question, right? Because from my perspective, I don't want any solutions to that problem that are going to increase, you know, state surveillance or increase, you know, state control or populations, which is how a lot of gun control shit is proposed, right? Often very surveillance-heavy, often very much a way of expanding the state's ability to gather information about people, database it, and store it in the name of public safety. So we have to be really critical of that, right? When we have to push back against that. But that doesn't mean that

we get to just like throw our hands up about the issue, I think. And that is something that we need to push back against and deal with, because guns are a part of the problem. And there's no getting around that. And I think that one last kind of thing that I'll say in an opening aspect is that oftentimes I think that communists in the United States and leftists generally misread what like Marx and the communist position on guns are, which is that you need an armed proletariat. But an armed proletariat isn't synonymous with the individualized gun ownership culture in the United States. And I think that there's an attempt to kind of flatten those two things. And obviously individualized gun ownership is what we have. And I'm not saying that should be

thrown away. But just pretending like throwing Marx quotes at this as if the contexts aren't different is I think just an incredibly lazy way of engaging as well. And really a way of just phrase mongering in the place of offering actual analysis or just even fucking trying to struggle with this question honestly in the first place. So those are kind of just some opening thoughts on that at least. Yeah, well, well said. So let me phrase this in a very succinct way before we get into specific reforms. So based on what Allison and I are saying, the question is basically, are there reforms inside the system as it exists, right? Because we can't wait post-revolution to try to do something. So are there reforms that communist, socialists, anarchist, Marxists,

et cetera, could support while understanding and keeping at the top of mind that any new laws have to be understood in terms of who actually gets policed. So if you do something like retrospective, ban these guns. So either, you know, any gun, if you have a gun like this and a cop finds it in your car, you're going to have a felon, you know, stuff like that will disproportionately fall on poor people and on black and brown communities in particular. So if we do support some policy reforms and we'd want to avoid the opening up of room to crack down specifically on some communities while the very communities that probably need to be cracked down on white reactionary ones most likely to generate these insane shooters those are the ones

least likely to be policed okay so keep that in mind so then can we support laws that one actually prevent mass tragedy shootings like this even just some but that two won't fundamentally transgress the right for responsible adults to bear arms, which I think you and I and most people listening agree that as long as the military and the far right and the fucking police and everybody who thinks that we're subhuman has guns. Maybe it's nice that we have a few ourselves. And three, that won't create an opening for racial and class-based asymmetry in policing. So that's the sort of, you know, thread that we're trying to cross here. And can we do it? So here are just some ideas that I think I'm at least open to.

One, and I'll get your thoughts in real time, I'm not going to go through all of them, at every one we'll go back and forth a little bit. But one is age limits. So in most high school shootings, Columbine, Sandy Hook, this latest one, if not in all of them, the person that does these shootings is almost always 18, 19 something years old. The Buffalo shooter and the Yuvaldi shooter were both 18 years old. and I don't exactly know the Buffalo Shooters situation, but I know in the

Uvaldi Shooter's case, he turned 18 and just went to the store bought two AR-15s and like something like seven magazines. So, I mean, right there like, holy shit. Somebody selling this, I just turned 18 last week. Can I get seven magazines?

That should at least draw a question from the motherfucker selling this dude, this weaponry. But you know, I'm totally fine. At least unless there's an argument I'm not aware of, saying that, you know, 18 year olds, there's no place for an 18 year old to go be able to buy an automatic weapon. There's almost no legitimate need for it in our society. Responsible adults would not be impacted whatsoever by having

an age limit. I know for a fact, when I was 16, 17, 18, 19, I was a completely reckless dumbass. I would not have sold myself a gun at 18, not because I would hurt anybody, but because I was just a reckless, you know, youth that my brain wasn't done developing for, you know, something like driving a car. It's like, shit, we let 16 year olds get behind the wheels of these fucking things and fly down the interstate on their cell phone when I'm trying to get my, you know, kids across town to their grandparents or whatever. Like, it's a little disorienting, but you understand, well, to survive in this society,

you got to go to work, you got to go to school, you know, you can't just make kids not drive a car. But when I first got my car, and this is just talking from my own. insane immaturity. I would be so reckless with it that kids at my school would like sign up for when I could take them home from school every day because I would just do crazy shit like on trash day. I would see how many big trash cans I can hit with my car when I'm dropping my friends off or this most insane shit I ever did is like drive through front yards instead of driving down the street just to make my friends laugh. So that's the level of maturity that I had and I'm sure

plenty of others have. Okay, but cars are one thing. Certainly you don't put a semi-automatic rifle in my hand at 18 and say go have fun we know that the brain for example and this is an argument i use against student loans the brain is the prefrontal cortex is not done developing until around age 25 meaning you're literally incapable of weighing present consequences adequately against future consequences you cannot think long term in a responsible way because the part of the brain responsible for such maturity is still not developing or still not done developing so we know that most school shooters are this age. We know the brain is not developed that much. We know most, if not all really truly responsible gun owners would not be swept up in this. And we know it's a point

of cell situation, meaning that the policing would not take place after the fact where you could have these discrepancies and who gets policed. But it would be at the point of cell, you're 18 years old. I'm sorry. Wait till you're 25 to get an AR-15. Now, if you want to have a special license for I'm a pheasant hunter and I want a game, you know, shotgun or whatever, maybe there's special carveouts and laws and licensing that you can go through to get those things. And maybe even a handgun for protection, home protection carve out. AR-15s, AK-47s, I don't see a reason for it. So what are your thoughts on that first one?

Yeah, this is one of the ones that I think I can find myself in agreement with, right? I think that the brain development question is pretty concrete in terms of what we know about developmental psychology and neurology, right? That is fairly well established at this point in the literature, and it makes sense to me. I agree with you broadly that I think that in general, when we're thinking through things like this that do have the point of sale effect, thinking about these hunting concerns is actually reasonable because, you know, as someone who comes from California where no one fucking thinks about this, There are people in the U.S. who still subsistent hunts, right? And especially native and indigenous communities in Alaska that rely on subsistence hunting. So when we're creating point of sale sort of actions like this, I do think it's important to recognize that there are communities that are often colonized communities who need access to firearms for subsistence. And it's important to think about carve-outs there. But besides that big concern, I think that this is one of the things that makes sense to me. There is generally an age range that we see in these shootings. and I do think taking away access to a firearm, you know, or at least these types of firearms in that context is a step, right? Does it solve it?

No, obviously, right? That's what we're talking about. There's nothing short of the overthrow of this society in building something not fundamentally sick to its core that can stop it. But could it make a difference? Yeah, I think so. And this is definitely one of those ones that I think, you know, is a reasonable idea to get behind, assuming that those proper exceptions are built into it. Yeah. And it has the benefit of not fundamentally infringing on the right itself. And it literally just objectively would have at least stopped this last one. And I think if you really dug into the details, you would see that it would have stopped many more. So let's say with this inaction, you know, 10, 15, 20 percent of crimes that other mass shootings that otherwise would have been committed don't happen. That's a win. That's an easy reform that I can accept that does not fuck with my right as a responsible gun owner to protect my family. that's one. The next one is one that we often hear about, which is background checks and gun show

loopholes. Obviously, there's pretty high support among the general population, right, left, and center for universal background checks. It seems like it's an easy thing to do. It is still a point of sale thing, so you're not going into communities and policing these things. Is there some threat that if you're on a list for being a far leftist, right, your background check will come up and say no. I think there's some risk. We should be able to wrestle with that fact. when I went and I got a background check when I was buying actually a shotgun my background check was extended

and usually it's like yeah this will be done in store well actually something was flagged you'll have to come back tomorrow and I was like oh fuck like does the show or you know my my past run-ins or protesting and organizing shit is that getting me flagged eventually the flag was lifted it was a mistake somebody else with my name and I got the gun

but I didn't mind going through a basic background check I'm not a I'm not a fucking violent hurtful person that commits crimes or hurts innocent people. So I was like, sure, you know, whatever. And then the gun show loophole, we know gun shows in general are filled with people on the far right, right? Like, oh, I'm just a Nazi enthusiast. That's why I have all these guns and this medallions and these suits and shit like that. It gets a very creepy place.

And I just don't think you should be able to go into a conference center and just buy whatever you want, you know, no matter what. So those two things, I've never bought a gun in a gun show, loop gun show personally maybe there's something i'm not fully seeing here but i don't see any reason why responsible uh people that want to own guns would be against background checks and in just some sort of of closing the loophole where you don't have to do anything to go into a gun show in particular and buy whatever you want so what are your thoughts on that am i missing anything there what do you think yeah i mean so background checks i think are at the point where there is pretty universal support right and they're implemented in most states already in some degree there's a high amount of

variance about what that means. But there's general support for them. One thing I will say critically about background checks, and I don't think this is a reason that they shouldn't exist, but I do think it's worth thinking into in terms of their efficacy and how background checks overlap with some of these issues of white supremacy and settler colonialism that we've talked about is that the people most likely to get flagged by background checks are going to be people from colonized communities, right? Because of over-policing within those communities. And so that is one thing that we need to think about is that police presence in communities, black communities in particular, and indigenous communities in the United States is much, much higher than in white communities, and people are much more likely

to have a criminal background on the basis of that over-policing. So that's where, I think, it starts to get complicated there. And the issue with background checks, too, is I don't know how much they would catch some of these people. You know, I think about some of these just fucking privileged white boy shooters, like Elliot Rogers, as an example from the Ila Vista shooting, who was just this fucking rich white kid, right, who never had to run in with the cops that would have been able to get flagged from that because of his own insulation from his wealth and his social position. So that is my concern about background checks as kind of this bipartisan supported solution here is that I don't know how much they would catch in these cases actually. And also there is kind of the discrepancy

in policing that is a bit concerning. But again, background checks in many places are essentially the status quo situation, whether or not they're strengthened or not, you know, is a broader question. Well, the gun show loophole, this is one I've, you know, spent some time thinking about it is a popular talking point. I can't think of a solid reason not to close it, right? If we are going to have background checks and some level of kind of regulation as the de facto in every other situation, I don't see why this loophole should exist in the first place, right? And again, we could maybe question that background assumption, but it does obviously just seem like a strange failure to enforce existing law sufficiently. So if we think that those are a solution,

then I do think there's no reason not to close that loophole. That's definitely where I come down on that. Yeah, really good points about the background checks. But as you said, in a lot of places it already is the status quo, but you're right, the people in poor or racialized communities more likely to have a background that won't pass the check. And there's the question of efficacy. I'm just really not sure. Like, with this Buffalo shooter and with this Yuvaldi shooter, I don't think either of them had any criminal background that would have, the background check would have been the thing that stopped them, whereas the age limits in both cases, I think, would have

been. So food for thought for sure. The next one is an issue of regulation, and it gets difficult because if you're on the left, like we are, you fundamentally disagree with the existence of the bourgeois dictatorship that is the American government.

And so it is sort of contradictory on some level to want to give it powers of regulation. But at the same time, like we do live in that society and there are ways to make it safer for regular people and I don't think we should sacrifice the lives of innocent children or grocery shoppers just, you know, to, to, because we have a paranoia or a dislike of the government as it properly exists. For example, none of us on the,

on the Marxist left, are railing against the fact that we have, that our government forces us to go get basic training, pass a test, et cetera, to get a car license. Now, we need a license to drive to work, to drive to school to do to run our errands especially in the way that american society is structured such that you have these the sprawl everywhere um and and you know nobody is like the government should not have i mean libertarian right wing white people are but for the most part we understand like yeah that you have to you have to display some competency before you get behind a two ton a pile of metal and go down the interstate at 75 miles per hour um and so this next one is basically uh licensing and testing for competence and safety before you get

your gun. Now, when you want to get a concealed carry permit, at least in the state where I live, you do have this sort of special advanced testing under the licensed trainer in order to be able to get this concealed carry permit. And nobody really complains about that. I mean, yeah, it makes sense. You're not only wanting a gun, but you're wanting to carry it on you everywhere and hide it from view. Yes, you have to go through a few extra fucking jumps so that we know that you're the sort of person that can do that competently. And I don't see a reason why that same logic couldn't apply when it comes to automatic weaponry in particular.

These training programs, for example, if we had them, they could be run by people trained in spotting possible problematic trainees, but that opens up another layer of problem, which is like, what's the mechanism to follow up? You know, if this trainer is racially biased, does he see the black guy coming in for his training as more suspicious than like the dead-eyed white 18 year old or whatever so that does open up more problems but you know anytime i think you're going to try to solve a problem you're going to generate contradictions by trying to do that but those are certainly some of them but i'm not fundamentally at least in the abstract against the idea that some more testing and licensing

should you have you have to meet certain requirements uh to have weapons that are literally made to slaughter human beings and as many as possible possible in a short amount of time as possible. Again, need not apply to everything if you want a basic handgun for home protection or a shotgun because, you know, you like to hunt pheasants or whatever. That's one thing. But when you have automatic weaponry designed to kill at high rates of speed, I don't see necessarily why we would be against some basic licensing and testing. What are your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, in general, I think the concept of having to do licensing and testing is fine. The devil's in the details with it, I think, is largely what you get into.

I mean, I think the question that you get out of what happens, if you do have kind of people who are doing the testing, who are supposed to be looking for concerning signs, what is the follow-up there, right? That is an important question, because if it's an expansion of law enforcement contact, that isn't necessarily a great solution, right? And the other thing that I would say is that the way that some states have implemented their concealed carry sort of requirements show how much this kind of licensing and testing can become, like, a problem and an issue of corruption. So here, thinking about California specifically, if you want to get a concealed carry permit in California, you do have to pass a test. You have to get a training certificate and go through

an approved state training course. You have to do proof of residency, all of those things, fingerprinted, all of that. But you also have to do an interview with the county sheriff's office, and ultimately the sheriff gets the final decision, which has led to some really weird kinds of corruption, where you have sheriffs in California who have been accused of taking bribes in exchange for giving concealed carry permits to specific people, or who have been accused of allowing concealed carry permits for their political allies and not opponents, a whole bunch of things. So when you bring in the law enforcement side of things into that licensing and training aspect of things, there's room for a lot of problems, I think. So in the abstract,

I'm not opposed to that concept. But again, it really just kind of depends on how it's put into practice which all of this is somewhat hypothetical because on a federal level will never fucking see anything like that right like you know that's just not one of the possible reforms that i think is even close to on the table yeah absolutely i'm going to go to the next one but it's something you just i just thought of this i was talking earlier about you know being sort of immature and growing up in montana nebraska being around guns and two memories just came to my mind i realized i've had guns pointed at me several fucking times in my life um in montana one display of our immaturity is I remember at one moment we were just you know this is like country

Montana we're hanging out we're getting drunk my friend guns everywhere my friend has an AR 15 we're driving down the interstate at like two in the morning he's sitting on out the window firing the air 15 into the fucking sky as we're driving 65 miles per hour we should not have had that fucking gun right in another instance I was at a party some guy thought I was I don't know thought I was involved with his girl or something, I waited in my truck till the end of the party when I came back, he popped out of my truck with a shotgun and put it right in my face. And he was on Coke as well. So his eyes are all fucking weird. His lips quivering. And my friend sat there. As he literally, I could feel like the shotgun is an inch away from my nose for like 10 minutes. As

this guy's shaking, convinced I slept with his girlfriend. I didn't. And my friend is sitting there talking in his ear, like, a mutual friend, you know. I know him. He's not like that. He didn't do that he has his own, you know, blah, blah, blah, and eventually he lowered the thung. And then another time I got tackled by a cop and a gun put to my head by a police officer. So, you know, the, the, the head-on encounter with firearms and how quickly things can fucking spiral out of control is just, you know, something worth mentioning. But here's the next policy, which is, and you hear this a lot as well, mandatory weight periods. I don't have a lot of thoughts on this. I mean, it makes sense, right like in this case i don't know what it would do if he had to come back three weeks later

uh as opposed to now i mean it would be summer but i don't really know how long he was planning this um some people are saying you know up to 28 days some i think some states actually have already mandatory weight periods i don't really know their efficacy but kind of what are your thoughts on on the mandatory weight period as one of the solutions yeah so they're one of the ones that i feel like has the least downsides right i don't really see like a huge problem from a discrimination perspective or anything like that with having a universal mandatory weight period, I want to see more long-term studies on their efficacy where they have been implemented because there are states that do have weight periods. But yeah, the efficacy here is more the question that I have, right?

I mean, if we think about like the Buffalo shooter, for example, this guy was fucking ideologically committed, right? Like, I don't know that you're going to see a difference if there's a weight period in place with some of these younger, more kind of nihilistic attacks, maybe. I, I, I, I, I just don't know how effective they would be, but I don't see harm in that one, especially compared to a lot of the other more thorny possibilities. That seems one that is less likely to have directly negative impacts, but it's efficacy I'm not so sure on. Yeah, I agree with that.

It involves, you know, virtually no policing, so that's a benefit. But the efficacy is very much in question. And if you're committed enough, waiting 28 days or even longer won't stop you. There are probably some instances in which somebody is being very impulsive or maybe spiraling, mentally and having another month or two of time to calm down or think or whatever might be helpful. But again, I think if anything is really going to happen on this front, it's going to be a combination of particularly smart policies working in unison, bolstering one another while not infringing on the right or not, as we are constantly worried about putting it

in the hands of police, which we know are not the people to put this fucking shit in the hands of. And so the last one I have here, and maybe you have more in your mind, I'm sure there are plenty of ideas out there. These are just some that came to my mind when thinking about things I could, at least in theory, support, is these voluntary buyback programs. Now, for those that don't know, many places have done this, which is basically you can do it in many different ways. Some people do, like, in times of high gas prices, right? Like, we'll fill up your gas tank if you just bring any gun and give it to us to be, I mean, ideally, I think, melted into metal and refact. fashioned into something else or whatever, just taking out of circulation. But my big concern there is, of course, the class implications because if you're somebody

on the lower economic strata, you're much more likely to respond to the incentive of cash or a free gas tank or whatever financial or monetary benefit you might get, as opposed to somebody who is more well off, more privileged economically, and that incentive doesn't speak to them. I don't I mean again it's voluntary so like people are you know if you want to go give one of your shitty guns away you can get some money back it's not a bad thing but maybe we maybe the real the real thrust of this comes in thinking about incentives that would not be class based as hard as that might be you know what could a buyback program offer that doesn't disproportionately attract people who are economically desperate but could just as easily bring in middle and upper middle class people to be like you know this incentive is worth it Here's at least one of my guns. Again, criminals aren't going to be the ones that are bringing their guns back. People planning on using it to slaughter people aren't going to be the ones that bring it back. But it might be one way to get, especially some of these loose guns out of circulation such that in like inner cities,

they might not fall into the wrong hands, et cetera. So you can see in some situations, these bybacks might be more efficacious than in others. And in perhaps the mass shooting situation, it wouldn't be very effective at all. But it doesn't seem like it could hurt if it's done quite right. and especially if it's voluntary, but what are your thoughts? Yeah, so these are fairly common in Los Angeles, actually. Like, I've seen a lot of these programs that have been instituted over, like, the last decade or so.

Yeah, I don't think there's as much room for harm with them, right? I think there is the class implication. And mostly for me, that's a concern on the efficacy level, right? Because a lot of these shooters are not actually always, you know, from lower working class contacts. Many of them are, in fact, from kind of alienated middle class petty bourgeois. context. So there's an efficacy question in relation to that that stems from the class question. But overall, I don't think these programs are like necessarily harmful in and of themselves.

A lot of the times also these programs have kind of this like no questions asked about where the gun comes from kind of amnesty aspect to them, which I think is not, you know, not a bad thing. It's good for people who have found themselves in a situation like that to be able to get rid of a gun, even if that means trying to get their life back on track and they don't know what to do with that fucking thing, right? Like it creates an option. to be able to get out of a situation. So I think that that's good, but I don't know how much it accomplishes, right? It definitely decreases just like the background amount of guns that exist in a given situation.

But I don't know that it would really make a difference in the context of these kind of terroristic shootings, right? I'm not sure how much it would overlap with them. Yeah, I agree with that. So that's kind of my list of things that jumped in mind. There is obviously the big elephant in the room, which is the liberal call to ban assault rifles outright, meaning AK-47s, AR-15s, and anything of the like, would be outright banned. Are you an agreement that people on the far left should resist that?

And if so, what's the argument for resisting that outright liberal call to ban assault rifles? Yeah, so I think I'm opposed to that. One, any implementation of it would increase policing, right? We saw that with the Assault Rifles Act. The other thing is, too, like I do think, and this is like where it's a little tricky, I think it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding by liberals of what guns are, right? Because I do think that, like, an assault rifle isn't actually a discrete class of guns, right? And maybe we could have conversations about different calibers of ammunition, right?

That might be an interesting conversation, but an assault rifle is not a particularly discrete thing, right? And what would get banned under that could very easily be things that are not, by most people's definitions, an assault weapon. And even thinking, and again, in the context of California, some of the laws that have been passed around assault weapons means that you can't have low caliber carbines with pistol grips. And it's just like, I don't think the pistol grips the problem. Like, I don't know. These are superficial and often just kind of image-based things that I don't think get to the actual problem or even focus on what types of guns are most deadly in these contexts. So there's that on just an efficacy level. And then also on a policing level, I think there's a deep concern with passing that kind of law, which would definitely.

definitely increase the police interaction through enforcement. So those are the grounds on which that I would oppose it. One of those grounds, I think, is an argument that you hear from the right as well, right, which is that there isn't a discrete category of guns that's called an assault rifle. But I do think there's a level of truth to that and focusing on does it look like an AR and what we think an assault rifle looks like misses some of the point that needs to actually be engaged with. Yeah. And there's also a problem of the ones that already exist. Right. So if you were to ban them the sales of them right there's the option to police and go go grab back the ones that already exist or to let those be grandfathered in um but we all know that that if if we did that

that would that would set in stone the disparity between who has them and who doesn't and it's the people on the far right uh the people with money to be able to collect 10,000 fucking guns uh those people will already have their stockpiles and then it's like you know people coming up people on the left trying to, you know, get some safety in an increasingly chaotic society, etc., they would be the ones prevented from it. So it's one of those things where it's like the genies already out of the bottle. Pandora's box has already been opened and these super heavy-handed things will almost certainly not actually solve the problem, create many more problems in the process, disproportionately impact the people who are the least likely to be doing these mass shootings

and to be a violent fascist and more or less grandfather in people on the far right that have had a gun fetish for a very, very, very long time even in relatively stable periods of American life. So, yeah, is there any other

little things around the edges that you think we could get behind? I mean, there's some discussion of like, you know, these egregious add-ons, like, I don't know, bump stocks makes it just easier to fire more bullets,

you know, in a quicker amount of time. Some of those things seem like grotesquely and singularly dedicated to just slaughtering as many people as possible. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. But, I mean, ultimately, another thing you hear a lot from liberals is like, oh, you think your AR-15 is going to fight the government. Like, you think you're going to be able to beat the government.

They have nuclear bombs and jets and everything. But for most people that own these guns, responsible, regular, normal fucking people that own these guns, the idea that you're going to go to war with your government isn't really the impetus there. There's one of home defense. idea that I want to be competent to be able to defend myself from my community should it happen. And then the fact that we live in fucking America where, you know, collapse or balkanization or civil war or some version thereof is not off the table. And so it's not like,

you know, I have these guns because I think I'm going to go to fucking war with the U.S. military or even then I'm going to go to war with my local police department. But it's like there are things that could fucking happen where I would feel much better being able to, one, go out and harvest food from nature, but also protect my family in a situation where the state or the police or whoever the fuck is supposed to have the monopoly on violence is pulled out or is made, you know, irrelevant to the situation.

So I really look down my nose at the argument of like, oh, you just want it to fight the government. That has never been, at least for me, a motivating factor whatsoever. But yeah, do you have any other policies that jump to mind or? In terms of policies, the only one that I had, like, that I'd written down was bump stop. right, which you already mentioned. That just seems like something that we absolutely should probably ban, and I'm not super concerned about that one. But I do want to echo kind of that last point

that you made, which is, yeah, like, the question of gun ownership, I think, for a lot of people on the left isn't like, oh, are we going to go to war or so shit like that? We don't have a lot of faith that the present liberal order is going to last forever, right? Like, I think that's really or that police will protect us. Right, exactly. That's what a lot of it comes down to you. And I think that that is a reasonable fucking fear, right? And I think it's a reasonable thing to take seriously and to respond to. And, you know, it's in that sense that, you know, we have to reject kind of that whole liberal logic and that kind of condescending fucking objection that goes there. Because it's not unreasonable to think that social breakdown has happened and can happen.

There are so many historical instances of it. And in those situations, knowing how to hunt for subsistence and be able to defend yourself, I just think is an unobjectionably good thing. right? And I think that that is just worth defending. Yeah, absolutely. There's also the question if we're talking about deeper problems is the hyper-militarization of police. So if we're really going to, even on a reform level where we maintain the basic structure, but, you know, do these reforms, there has to be some movement on the front of this de-escalation of the militarizing of the police. And it really shows that the psychology of police officers have been so warlike that as we've pointed out many times people

on the left in general they begin to view the domestic population as a hostile enemy and especially when you're disproportionately hiring people who were trained in the military to have that psychology then they come in the police departments and then they view everybody as a as a domestic threat and so you have situations where police have no problem killing a 13 year old boy playing with a toy gun in a park but won't rush in to stop a mass shooter. And I think those things are all deeply connected because, oh yeah, we're fighting an enemy force out here, even if that's a sort of subconscious or semi-conscious thought in your head. So it's like, yeah, we're here to like put down people who are threats and we're not here

to protect them. Like, you know, when you're at war with a hostile enemy, you're not thinking about how you can protect their children and make their community safer. you're thinking about how the whole world's against you and I got my fucking Punisher logo on the back of my police car and I'm at war, you know, and they're trying to defund me and that's the mentality of a lot of fucking cops in this country. And that is part of the problem. And when you look at those fucking cops and you say, hey, here's a bunch of surplus military equipment. Okay, then you're just doubling down on that mentality. If we are at war and we are being attacked from all sides and

we are, you know, basically a gang, a band of brothers that have to defend themselves against women and children and fathers in your own society. So that has to be on the table as well. And I don't think we got a chance to mention that. But that kind of sums up my thoughts. We're over an hour here. Again, this was meant for thinking through so we don't fall into these lazy, either liberal grooves of thought or these lazy, let's just mirror everything the far right says grooves of thought. And can kind of think critically on a step by step basis about what the real problems are, how deep some are in relation to others.

what we could address within the structures of the system and what will take a revolution or radical change to build a new system that wouldn't have those specific pathologies at its core. But do you have any last thoughts? Anything you forgot to mention anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap this up? No, I mean, I think that covers moothos to my thoughts. And I think it is good ending on that. Like, we're not saying we have the answer here, right? I think one thing that I appreciate about our show and what we're able to do is I feel like we're able to kind of be honest like that with our listeners and the fact that sometimes we're just fucking wrestling with this shit while we're talking to each other, right? And I think that's important. And it's important that

people do that and that organizations be having these conversations internally, not just podcast hosts that you listen to. And, you know, we have some just open, honest discussions about these things because, again, sloganeering and out of context, Mark's quotes aren't fucking enough, right? Like, we have to actually wrestle with the details of these things. And so we're trying to do that here. And it might give you a starting point to jump off from, you might end up at different conclusions than us, but the process of struggling around these things is what matters and what hopefully we can kind of model and point to the need for here.

So that's just kind of the takeaway more than any of the specific details. That's what I hope people will take away from this episode. Absolutely. And as the final thing to wrap this show up, again, we just both want to extend our broken hearts to the families of these tragedies, the communities affected, the victims themselves. And we realize that the world that we want to build is a world where people like that, We'll be safe.

We'll be taken care of. We'll not have to worry about being gunned down in your movie theaters and your restaurants and at your fucking places of worship and in your elementary schools. This is a sick, sick society and it is falling apart all around us. Every institution is delegitimizing itself. And in the process of this collapse, it's the most vulnerable, the least defensible that are the ones that have to face the brunt of the chaos while the rich and the powerful, sit up at the top of society, twiddle their thumbs, and do fucking nothing for nobody.

So love and solidarity from the bottom of our hearts to everybody affected and to everybody listening. We'll be back soon. I was a junior in high school when I turned the TV. Jean-Tuberty went to a restaurant and shot everyone up with the machine gun. It was from my hometown. We talked about it till the sun went. down and everybody got up and stretched from yore and little eyes went on and I just left safe way when I walked in my doorway when I got took a boat to an island shot a bunch of little kids

up in Norway caught a few of my friends around here but no much really care but I did I just arrived in soul By way of vision I had an hour to myself at my hotel When I turned on the TV It was quite a thriller CNN was promoting the Batman killer His eyes were blazed like he was from Mars

Yesterday was no one Today was a star I was down to New Orleans At the Maileum enjoying some time to myself when I turned the TV There were shootings in a Portland mall

And it was everyday America And that's all It was just another one A walk down Royal Street The rest of the world was out having fun December 14 Another killing went down I got a letter from a fan

And he said Mark Say a prayer for me town I ain't want to pray but I'm wanting to sing and play from women and children and moms and dads and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts December 20 fell and I was just laying down I picked up a pen I wrote a letter to the guy in Newtown I said I'm sorry about the kids and the teachers who love their lives I felt it coming on I felt it in my bones

I don't know why So a Christmas comes And you're out Running around Take a moment to pause And think of the kids Who died a new time When so young

Oh Babe my to make us stop thinking and try to get around I went so young who knew a cloud so dark over them when they loved

gave the mom and dad kissing her so when your birthday comes and you're feeling pretty bake your cakes and open and guessing stuff in your mouth with food take them all for the children who lost their lives think of their families and all their morning when you're going to get married in your eyes

shopping around Take a moment to think about the families We've lost so much in Newtown