The Ricochet Podcast - Doing The Right Something

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

With a catastrophic tragedy in the news, the Ricochet mood is a bit more serious; but that doesn’t mean bad policy or sentimental grandstanding are appropriate courses of action. That’s why this week, we’ve invited a Second Amendment expert and parent on to the show. The one and only Charles C.W. Cooke. He fields questions on the horror in Uvalde, the reaction from politicians and the press... Source

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We'll be guided by you, James. Although I'd rather talk about Humphrey Bogart one more time, let you talk about Humphrey, than talk about the chief thing. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Every parent in America right now is lying to their kids. If you're telling your kid they're going to be safe at their school and everything's going to be okay, it's a lie. With

all due respect, that's emotional art. I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson, Rob Long's out, I'm James Lonex, and I'm here to talk to Charles C. W. Cook about the Second Amendment. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome to the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 595. How did we get this far? Well, thanks to members like you. What's that? You're not a member? Okay, well, no thanks to you. But why don't you become a member at Ricochet.com?

Why would you want to do that, you ask? Well, you know how the internet is? Yeah, that internet. Well, there's a place where the conversations are stimulating and civil because there's a code of conduct and there's a great community that forms as well, and that is called Ricochet.com. Join us. Take a look. You'll wish you'd found it years ago. Rob Long is somewhere out there. And one of the founders, of course, is Peter Robinson in California. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it's a beautiful day. And I

wonder, how's the flora and the fauna looking in the Golden State? I was just closing the curtains to adjust the lighting here, and I saw a hummingbird. And I thought to myself, you know, California still does deliver. A friend said to me the other day that in California, everything God made is beautiful, and everything man made is a horrible, misshapen mistake. And in Texas, it's just the other way around, said the friend who had just moved to Austin. In any event, you've reduced me to talking about hummingbirds, James. I figure that's a safe topic because I have never received abuse of the kind that, for anything I've said on this podcast in almost 600 episodes, of the kind that I received when I just questioned innocently, with an open mind,

questioned Humphrey Bogart's performance in The Big Sleep. Oh, my goodness. Abuse. I actually, I almost think it was you setting up fake accounts on Twitter to abuse me for that. Oh, I unleashed my whole spam bot army, yes. If you weren't with us, of course, Peter would have watched The Big Sleep with his wife

and was sort of questioning, what is the big deal about Humphrey Bogart? So at the end of this podcast, we're going to have another conversation like that where we're going to say, what exactly is the deal with Robert Mitch and why do girls go for him? He looks like he's fallen asleep.

So we'll get to that in just a little bit as we work Peter through these archetypes of the 40s and 50s culture. Stay tuned. It'll be fun. But in the meantime, of course, we have to get to the gruesome political events of the day. We're going to talk to Charlie Cook in just a little bit about firearms and the rest of it. But the Senate has voted unanimously, I believe, to beef up security for the Supreme Court. Somebody was in Davos this week and was angry because they couldn't get in and was pointing

out that here in Davos, they have private guards to keep them from the consequences of discussing taking guns away from everybody else. They come in on private helicopters and planes in order to discuss why you shouldn't be able to fly. And they have sumptuous meals after which they retire to their stages and talk about the need for everybody to eat bug protein. Right. A little bit over the top, but on the other hand, a little bit on the nose. I've been watching some of those guys and it is interesting. I mean, some of the super villainy things that they say in Davos, well, what we need here and what COVID was really good for was telling us the need for total, complete biometric surveillance of every individual, or things like that. And they're all saying these things on the stage. And it's all being

live-streamed. It's almost like Blofeld, instead of having a secret base inspector in a volcano somewhere, is actually having a meeting at Carnegie Hall, telling everybody exactly what he's going to do. Well, first, I'm going to nuke the Russians in orbit, and then the Americans, and play them off each other, and then after the fallout stops, then the Spectre will take over the world. So, back to the Supreme Court. Do you find this to be, well, what's your take on it, other than, yikes? I just don't know. What is there to say? We'll get into the whole subject of gun control with Charlie. The larger, the background question here is, you say to me, I'm now speaking in my voice as ordinary American, you say to me that the left gets to wage five or six decades of war on the American family, beginning with metaphorical divorce, beginning with welfare payments that undermine the role of

the male. And we produce two generations in which millions of kids are raised in single parent homes, that the left gets to eliminate even the most kind of common sense censorship. So garbage of every kind is available on demand on the web. And that we've seen in the last two of in the during the trump administration that we cannot trust even our intelligence operations even the storied fbi we cannot trust it we cannot trust our own government and then you tell ordinary americans who watch all of this happening and not all of whom live in palo Alto, California, or in a beautiful leafy

suburb of Minneapolis with big, gorgeous old homes like yours, and you tell ordinary Americans, nope, now we're going to take your guns. We're going to take any opportunity you have of self-defense. And it doesn't surprise me that there's a problem with that, that there's a political problem with that. So we have this big decades-old dissolving of the fabric of ordinary decency and family life. Which was not the intention. Which was not the intention, but in the short term, I can't see anything to do

except beef up security. You can talk about gun control until you're blue in the face, but we live in a nation in which there are more guns than citizens. 400 million guns in private hands in this country. So you're going to institute gun control and think that's going to prevent rogues, crazy kids, crazy upset sick kids from picking up weapons? No, you're going to end up with security guards at every elementary school in America. you're going to end up with security guards at every elementary school in america you're going to end up with more security at the supreme court i just don't see any way to avoid that in the short term and the short term here lasts years i hope i'm hoping you and charlie can talk me out of that conclusion but i don't see anything i don't see any oh i mean if somebody shut up the supreme court um and their statement they had a manifesto as we call these things these days was all about

wade rovers wade right we'd be asked we would be asked to understand yes yes yes brought them to this exactly righteous anger and so forth um so you know political violence was generally regarded as a not good thing to do but in, political violence all of a sudden became necessary. We had a case here. My wife was on, and I'm going far afield here, but I am coming back. My wife was doing a CLE, a continuing legal education, and one of the things that they offered was a discussion with the lawyers who had arranged a happy outcome for a local activist who had toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus during the enthusiastic days of iconoclasm that we had here in the cities. And the person had to do some community service, which they wanted to do anyway,

community activist. And they were describing with happiness, because we're not just talking a couple of lawyers to defend the accused. We're talking about people who bow into this in order to achieve certain social outcomes. And they were really, really happy because they had incorporated social elements into the trust. Social determinants, I think was the term that they used, into the whole calculation of how this guy should be treated with. Now, he shouldn't go to jail, obviously not. He should come to understand that this was injurious to the feelings of some people,

perhaps the Italian-Americans, perhaps others. But the whole point was that nothing served by punishing him for this. Social determinants, meaning how he felt about this, how his community felt about this, must be taken into account in order to figure out what to do with Guy. And so, you know, if I'd been there, what I would have liked to have asked, as coolly and calmly as possible, is that going forward, what are the acceptable justifications for destroying public property? I'm not even going to give you an example of anything that is politically loaded. What are the justifications in place now that justify and absolve one from destroying public property?

They won't answer that because you can't say it's unquantifiable. It's very nebulous. It's social justice as opposed to, I mean, justice is not always the right thing has been done. Justice is the process. If justice has been done, it means that we follow the process correctly and there was an outcome. We may not like it, but that's justice. Social justice is a whole different thing. And I always say over and over, it's boring. You are on trial for your life. There are two doors that you can go through. One of them is marked justice and the other is marked social justice. Which one do you want to go through? You take justice every single time. Right. So, but the people doing this don't believe we are tearing down the idea of accountability and all the

rest of it no what they're doing is they're adding they believe elements to it that humanize a a broken and dysfunctional system just as all of those things that you discussed before that have had the effect of destroying of fraying in some places and destroying others the social fabric not intended to destroy the family or to destroy civil society. No, I mean, these were well-intentioned people, never thought past first consequences of their actions, who believed that they were embellishing, improving, embroidering, and helping the marginalized people who did not have access to money, jobs, etc. But the consequence of this, as anybody could see, was to replace the institutions that were there. But if you take all of the corn that you raise and you microwave it and you have none left for seeding, this is what happens.

And so now we are out of seed corn because they've happily microwaved the stock that we have. Expecting that there would be enough people to behave properly when these chalks were taken off and these limitations were removed, that everything would just go along as it had been before. Well, it didn't, especially when all of these things came to bear on society at the same time. And I probably just said the most obvious thing in the world that Tom Sowell said in probably seven words. Yeah, here's where I might disagree with you, but I'm disagreeing only to agree in a more forceful way. Maybe at the beginnings, maybe in the 60s, excuse me, not maybe in the 60s, certainly in the 60s, the good liberals who were enacting the socials, starting this whole thing rolling, were well-intentioned.

We're half a century into this now. We know what this leads to. We know that our schools are not educating kids. We know... Well, let's just... By the way, here's a question. Now I'm addressing a question to you in your capacity as a member of the staff of the Minneapolis Tribune. Who has been punished? Who has even been charged for the destruction of a police station during the riots of two years ago? There have been charges. There have. I mean, I can go and get all the numbers. I don't have them offhand, but there have been people who have been jailed. They've done a proper investigation and they brought proper charges yeah trials yeah they found

they found some they found jerk faces who were terrorism tourists who came here from other parts of the state oh is that so yeah all over the place yeah i mean hey look great fun summer hot time summer in the city all the rules are off you can burn you can you can you can drift in the middle of the street the police have nothing to say. For some people, this is catnip, and it always will be. But you're right. It's been a long time, and we see the consequences. But it's like the Russian Revolution. Did Lenin believe what he was talking about?

He did. Did he create an institution in which everybody had to mouth the platitudes, or otherwise the whole system would collapse because you couldn't question the predicates? You did. That's what happens. So now 50 years on, who are these people to say, I question the fundamental assumptions of the great society and the rest of these things because it turns out

they created dystopian nightmares. No. It just means insufficient application of the wonderful ideas we have to double down. That's my point. That American liberalism, which has undergone this transformation, transmutation into wokeness. We are deep in the Brezhnev phase here. They know better.

They know better. This is just corrupt politics rolling along because nobody has the courage or the wits to stop it. Well, then it'll be followed by the short-term Chernenko phase, followed by the Andropov phase, where we will learn probably that the new leader of the Democratic National Committee loves jazz and whiskey and the rest of it, as we were also told about good old Uri.

Hey, that was a myth, of course. I think it was spread about Andropov that he was a jazz lover. We can deal with him. He's like the West. Oh, the myths. There's so many. Did you know, for example, thread count? Thread count is a myth. See, Rob would not have seen that one coming. Thread count is a myth because it doesn't matter how many threads your sheets have if they're not the best threads possible, does it? Right. Well, Bowling Branch uses the best 100% organic cotton threads on earth for a superior softness and a better night's sleep.

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but it always has to be one of these things where it's an issue with guns. Somebody was my wife, my daughter the other day, they were angry about what happened, as all we should be, and they were saying why can somebody walk into a

store at 18 and buy a rifle and i said i could everybody in fargo north dakota could go to the kmart and buy a rifle none of us did and none of us shot anything up the question is what's changed so i'll just sit back here and let you just talk for 20 minutes and tell us what's changed. Or perhaps you could tell us what you think the political fallout is going to be and whether or not it's going to work. I think what's changed is a good question. And I don't know the answer to it, but something has changed because while it is true that the United States is awash in guns, there's more guns than people, 20 million guns are sold every year. So we may be at about 450 million guns now.

And while it is true that that isn't the case in, say, Britain, and that having a large cache of guns therefore makes a difference, the large cache of guns were therefore, makes a difference. The large cache of guns were also a feature of American life in 1960 and 1950 and 1940 and 1850, for that matter. And yet we didn't see this happen, at least not with the horrifying regularity that it does here. So something has changed. And a lot of the academic research suggests that this is as much as anything a copycat problem and funnily enough that media attention makes it worse over time so that is a good question but um on a more immediate basis uh i think there are a couple of things to start the conversation by noting.

The first one is that while it is important to work out what we can do about this, we should not do what Eric Swalwell did two days ago and go on television and say that it is a lie that schools are safe and scare parents across the country. I understand why he felt like that, because I did, too. and say that it is a lie that schools are safe and scare parents across the country. I understand why he felt like that, because I did too. Irrationally, the first thing I thought on Tuesday was, I'll go pick my kids up. Maybe they shouldn't go to school tomorrow. Are they safe? But we're talking here about a problem that on average kills seven people, including teachers, in schools a year and has done since 1999. And that's seven

too many. And it's no consolation to the people who are killed or their families. And if it happened to my children, I would be inconsolable and I wouldn't care about that number. But it does matter when trying to determine whether or not schools are safe, that one has a one in 1.3 million chance of this happening. Schools are safe, and we should not be scaring people into believing otherwise. And the second thing to say is that we should not do what Joe Biden did on Tuesday, which is pretend that we all know the answers secretly, but only some of us want to offer them up, and that this is really a debate between people who care and people who don't. I thought that was a disgraceful implication, that half the country knows how to fix this,

but just doesn't want to. That is not true. This is an extremely difficult problem to fix, and as a result, it should be treated as an extremely difficult problem to fix. Charlie, Peter here, Peter Robinson here. Can you briefly, I'd like to take you through a couple of the arguments that are, it turns out that although everybody's taken to Twitter, and there have been thousands of tweets about this, there were really only two or three arguments. And here's one of them. In the Heller decision, we don't even have to be specific as to decisions, but in the last decade and a half, the Supreme Court, falling under the sway of conservatives, in one way or another misread the Constitution. I say one way or another because many of the tweets accused Justice Scalia in the Heller decision of disingenuousness. He ought to know

better. The history on this matter is clear. If you read the constitutional debates and read up on the history of the times, you recognize that the Second Amendment is only intended to protect the ability of states to raise militias, not to grant individuals the right to bear arms. This argument, notwithstanding that if you read Heller, as I did at one point, you discover that Justice Scalia devotes 60 pages to textual and historical analysis. He's not making things up, he's engaging in a transparent, serious intellectual effort. Anyway, we set that aside. So, that's the argument that the Second Amendment, conservatives like you who say, ah, but the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms are simply mistaken. And Charlie responds,

how? Every single thing about this argument, including what follows from it, is wrong. First off, there really was no dispute at the time of the founding over what the right to keep and bear arms meant, or had meant in the colonies, or had meant before that in England, or frankly, had meant at the time of the Emperor Justinian in the colonies or had meant before that in England or frankly had meant at the time of the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century. There is no gun control debate in the United States either. If you read contemporary accounts, contemporary responses to the Bill of Rights in particular, you will see this discussed in the way that Justice Scalia discusses it in the Heller decision. I could run through 200 years worth of constitutional history here if you want,

but what I will do instead is point out that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Supreme Court did not invent this concept or misread this concept in 2008 by the existence of 45 state constitutional equivalents, almost all of which were put into place before 2008. The first right to keep and bear arms in American history was Pennsylvania's. It was inserted into Pennsylvania's first constitution in 1776, and it reads, and there's no ambiguity here unlike in the Second Amendment, it reads that the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state.

This is a common construction. This is a construction that tallies perfectly with heller and also that tallies with a lot of the left-leaning law professors who made heller possible i know that it's fashionable to say the nra the nra but actually it was the work of among many conservatives uh people such as sanford levinson and lawrence tribe and akhilid Amar and Adam Winkle, who don't like guns, who aided in the restoration. Forty-five of the 50 states, 90% of the states, have this provision. When Alaska becomes a state in 1959, it copies the Second Amendment verbatim into its constitution,

which, of course, if you believe the Second Amendment to protect the federal right to operate a militia would be nonsensical why on earth would you would you do that so that that is wrong but also what is wrong is that heller has mattered very much it matters a great deal in that we should be honest about history but the implication here is that we had all this gun control and then justice scalia wrote his Heller majority opinion, and then it all disappeared. And now we have school shooting. But it's just not true. Heller struck down a law in Washington, D.C. It was then applied to the states in McDonald, and it struck down a law in Chicago. And other than that, it's done nothing. It hasn't really been picked up by the court since. None of the loosening of gun laws that we've seen around the country subsequently has been done by courts of any type,

nor has it been done at the behest of the Supreme Court in Heller. State legislatures have expanded gun rights almost everywhere because the American people have asked them to. That's the problem if you see it as a problem with America's gun regime, not Justice Scalia. Okay, can I just add, Charlie, you have declined to go into 200 years of constitutional history, although you did a nice summary just then, but we will post the National Review article, we will post a link, listeners, if you want to read it all, we will post a link to the National Review article of, I think, about two or three years ago, in which you did review all 200 years of constitutional

history. So, Blue Yeti, please make a note of that. We need to post a link. James? I was simply going to say, you realize, Charlie, I say Charlie Charles, how frustrating this is to people who don't care that the Constitution says this, that, or the other. They don't care whether or not the Constitution is silent on abortion. What matters is that abortion is necessary, and what matters is that guns be stopped. And we can define stopped some way between more laws that will fix the thing that didn't fix prevent the other one or just total complete confiscation so you have a you have a an opposition that seems grounded in a complete disregard for the constitution because they want a better outcome for society i don't know how

exactly you find any middle ground with these people except opposing on every possible field their attempts to diminish the legitimacy of the Constitution as our founding document. So what do you think they're going to do, though? Because it's always some little incremental closing the door after the horses are bones in the desert at this point. What do you think they're going to try to do next? Well, I think for a few years, at least I hope for a few years, they're going to have their work cut out in the Supreme Court. To overturn Heller would be to lie about law and history in a way that

would be deeply troubling, irrespective of one's view on guns. Well, and you say that like they're worried about such a thing. I don't think they're worried about it, but I do think that six of the nine justices are worried about it. And I include John Roberts in that because he joined the majority opinion in Heller and in Macdonald. It seems unlikely to me, although we haven't seen any major cases, we're about to get one, that Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are going to go along with that ruse. In fact, we know that Kavanaugh isn't because of his dissent in Heller, too. So I think at the court level, they're going to have a problem. When you say dissent into Heller, for a for a minute it sounded like some biblical passage

anyway go on sorry so i think that their aim is broader here and that is to peddle this lie whenever they can and that's why you see it uh you see it even referred to obliquely in new york times pieces and slate pieces well of course sc Scalia lied in 2008, and now we are here. And that's why I write about this a great deal, because I think it's important to have people, and I'm by no means the only one, who stand up every time they do it and say, actually, that's a conspiracy theory.

Actually, that is not true. Because although at the moment 80% of Americans, according to recent polls, believe that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Amazingly, they're persuaded by the fact that right of the people means right of the people. There's no nuance Americans can't grasp. They could be, over time, kicked out of that by repeated attempts, and I don't think we should let them. Charlie, so we grant the Second Amendment. Isn't that big of me?

I'll stipulate that you're correct and Justice Scalia were correct. Here's the second argument that I want to put to you that's floating through Twitter. Thousands of tweets saying roughly this, okay, okay, okay, Second Amendment. But nobody supposes that the Second Amendment gives anyone the right to keep a tank in his garage or a bazooka in his rec room. It's a question of drawing lines in sensible places. And AK, what was the AK dash number that the kid used in Uvalde the other day? That was an AK what? An AR-15. AR, excuse me. All right, I'm sorry. And the AR stands for assault rifle, don't you know?

Okay, so anyway, you get the argument that no 18-year-old needs to be equipped, should have access to assault rifles. We're drawing the line in a completely unreasonable place. Grant the Second Amendment. Let's just permit states and localities to redefine what arms are in harmony with the Constitution. Let's talk it over and draw the line in a more sensible place. Charlie? Well, there's a legal problem with that argument, and then there's a practical problem with that argument. The legal historical problem with that argument, and then there's a practical problem with that argument. The legal historical problem with that argument is that the Second Amendment protects... Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center.

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Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. Arms, not say muskets. And at the time of the founding, while there was a distinction drawn between arms and ordnance, there was no distinction drawn between types of arms that were defined as arms under common law. And those included, for example, in Black's Law Dictionary's definition from the period, carbines. And the AR-15 is a carbine. So historically, there's really no means by which

to distinguish between a musket, which is the usual gun they go to, and then there's the more practical legal problem, which is that the Heller decision defines the standard as in common use. The government, both at the federal level and then thanks to the incorporation of McDonald, cannot ban a weapon that is in common use. And the AR-15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the United States. There's 20 million of them. And so under current jurisprudence and historical... By the way, can I ask?

I'm not a gun nut, although, you know, at this point, just as an act of defiance, I might be tempted to become one. So 20 million people. What do those 20 million people, what pleasure, what sense of, why do they own AR whatever? AR-15, whatever? How come? Well, because it is a lightweight, reliable weapon that is easier to use for many people than a handgun. I mentioned the practical problem here earlier. Although, of course, they are different, the firing mechanism on a semi-automatic handgun, say a Glock 17, is identical, really, to the firing mechanism on an AR-15. And when you try and get into distinguishing between them in law,

you run into an awful lot of problems because you end up saying, well, the Glock 17 is fine for reasons, but the AR-15 is not because it has a pistol grip or a barrel shroud or all of these cosmetic features that distinguish it rather than anything in the guts of the weapon. And so although the effect of a Glock and the effect of an AR-15 are broadly the same, the difference that people enjoy is aesthetic or ergonomic. And, you know, there's just very little reason to regulate that, especially on the grounds of lethality.

I mean, for example, my wife doesn't have an AR-15, but my wife finds it easier to fire an AR-15 than she does a handgun. A handgun, especially for a smaller person, is more difficult to control. There's a great deal of recoil, and obviously you're holding it in your hands, the name. An AR-15, you can press up against your shoulder. It can be held in uh various points um and if you are uh you know weaker than a navy seal uh you're going to benefit from the way that it can deal based upon its size and the way it's designed with the recoil now i'm not going to pretend for for the record that the lethality of a handgun and a rifle are identical they're not by their nature rifle rounds move a handgun and a rifle are identical. They're not. By their nature, rifle rounds move a lot faster and they can do a lot more damage. But, you know, without descending

into the sort of imagination that would make us all crazy, Kevin Williamson on our podcast earlier this week made a point that has haunted me ever since and made me want to cry but that i think is true which is once the guy in uvalde had barricaded himself in a room full of seven to ten year olds the distinctions that we're now talking about evaporate right um i mean frankly that guy could have could have been affected with a knife in that room um so without trying to downplay it too much, I think a lot of the focus here is misplaced. And it's also worth saying it's misplaced statistically, because while it is true that a lot of very infamous and spectacular mass shooters in recent years have decided to use the AR-15, it's not even true that the majority of mass shooters use rifles,

and it's certainly not true that the majority of murders are committed with rifles. In fact, rifles of all types, not just so-called assault weapons, rifles of all types are used in fewer murders in the United States each year than hands and feet. Assault rifles, so-called, are used in so few killings in the United States every year that the FBI doesn't have a category for them in its database. If you wanted to go after guns in America, you should go after handguns. 90% of murders are committed with handguns, and the much bigger problem than murders is suicide than almost every single one of those is committed with a handgun, and yet we're fixated on this rifle, and it's strange.

Charlie, here's my third and final question, because it's the third and final argument that I'm finding on Twitter. And I'm going to quote a tweet here by Bishop Flores, who's the Roman Catholic bishop of Brownsville, Texas. And whom I know from reading him, I've never met him, but whom I know from reading his... I would put him politically, bishops do take political stances and he does, I put him center left, but he strikes me as a reasonable man of perfectly goodwill and high intelligence. Here's his tweet of two days ago. This is right after the shooting. I say that in his defense rather. Don't tell me that guns aren't the problem. People are. I'm sick of hearing it. The darkness first takes our children who then kill our children using the guns that are easier to obtain than aspirin. We sacralize death's instruments and then we are

surprised that death uses them. Close quote. I take that as an example of a political exigency that Republicans now face. They have to do something. They have to do something. There comes a moment when politics takes the form of a tidal wave and sweet reason isn't good enough. You've got to do something. So how do you address that? Are there, even if you view them as political maneuvers to get past the emotion of the moment, are there concessions that you, Charlie, would be willing to make? Is there something to be done? So two questions. How do you handle the political exigency of this white-hot emotion that will not be satisfied until something is done, A, and B, are there actually good and useful ways

of responding to it, or simply ways of waiting till everybody calms down? On the first point, is your assumption that there is a necessity to do something, whatever that something is, just to make the emotion go away? Well, that's the question. Put yourself in the position of Ted Cruz or John Cornyn, Republicans or Greg Abbott. Put yourself in the position of someone I think of whom we would all approve on their positions, their stances on every issue we could think of, who are Republican office holders in Texas, and they are feeling white, hot emotion at the moment.

And as working politicians, they have to respond. Do you see what I mean? That's what I mean. How do you respond? Well, I do actually have a handful of suggestions, but I would reject the idea that a free good example of this yesterday when somebody emailed me and said, you know, Congress never does anything about guns. Look at what it did after 3000 people died on 9-11. And I emailed the guy back and I said, just so I'm aware, I mean, do you think what Congress did after 9-11 was good? And he said, no, I think it was a disaster. We went into Iraq, we passed the Patriot Act, and we set up the TSA.

And I thought, well, that more makes my point than his. That was, in a sense, the product of a need to assuage emotion. But he doesn't think what it did was good. So it would be a strange political platform. You're leaving out one disaster, which was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Well, true. Right, right. There's another one.

And my point there is that he seemed to think that, well, if we'd made all of these catastrophic mistakes in one case, then it's only fair that we make them in another. And I would rather that we make them in neither. But I don't think everything that we might do to address this would be a catastrophic mistake. I think those things that we believe would be useless should not be done. So I have three views on this. I don't think that the federal government should do anything at all. I think that beyond sending money, perhaps in some cases, the federal government has no role to play here,

at least no role that it doesn't already perform in the regulation of firearms i do think that we should do well at least look at three things the first is whether we can harden schools i know people hate this i know they think it's an excuse not to talk about gun control i don't think that's true there are 450 million guns in the united states the guns are here. A lot of our institutions are set up to acknowledge that. Courtrooms are set up to acknowledge that. Movie theatres are set up to acknowledge that. Disney World is set up to acknowledge that. Private schools are often set up to acknowledge that.

They have one entrance. They have a sort of airlock system after that entrance, which leads to a second door. And they have 20 or 30 emergency exits. And they are built to prevent what happened in Uvalde, which is a teacher left open a side door, it seems, and the shooter walked straight in. At the moment, the Wall Street Journal tells me we have $113 billion unspent from COVID pandemic funds in the nation's 90,000 public schools. And teachers in those

schools are saying, we don't know what to do with this money. Okay, maybe take 10% of it, $10 billion, give it to those 90,000 public schools, about 120 grand each, give or take, and say, harden your schools. Is that going to stop this? Not in every case. But that would at least be a policy that acknowledges where we are, rather than pretending we're going to send agents to everyone's door to take away their guns, which we're not. And then I have two that are more controversial that I am open to. The first one is, I've heard some proposals to raise the age at which one could buy a rifle to 21.

I'm not as opposed to that as some people are, partly because I would actually like to raise the age of majority to 21 in every case. I'd like to raise it to 21 for voting as well. That ship has sailed, but we already have 21 in a number of cases. It's 21 for handguns. That's the federal law. It has been since the 60s. It's 21 for handguns, that's the federal law, it has been since the 60s. It's 21 for rifles in Florida, those are in line. I think this has the benefit, at least as an

experiment, of directly relating to the problem as it exists. Again, one of the things I always push back hard against is the introduction of unrelated bills on the emotional wave of a mass shooting. We saw this after Sandy Hook. The shooting at Sandy Hook happened. Everyone was rightly devastated. And then we debated for three months the Toomey Mansion bill that had absolutely nothing to do with what had happened at Sandy Hook. We're apparently going to do the same thing here. Chuck Schumer introduced two bills into the Senate two days ago that have nothing to do with what happened in Uvalde. Well, this proposal actually does, and it should be considered seriously as a result. We have had in the last few years an awful lot of 18-year-old men who have bought rifles in states that don't

raise their age to 21 and then committed a mass shooting. And in fact, in this case, in Uvalde, the kid actually waited until he was 18 to buy the gun. He then did so legally and passed a background check. So I'm not wild about this plan, but I don't think it's unconstitutional. And I do think it at least has the benefit of directly intersecting with what happened. And I would be willing to look at it. And then the last one, and you'll be surprised at this given my civil libertarianism, is I think some tightly cabined and circumscribed red flag provisions could be You better explain that. A red flag provision is what?

Sure. So, a red flag provision would allow authorities in such a case as they suspected that somebody was planning mass violence or violence, because remember, mass violence is really rare, to temporarily remove someone's firearms. Now, this sets off every single bell in my body. But we already have a lot of laws that are a little bit like this on the books. For example, we have a system of restraining orders, and the challenge with that is making sure that there are adequate due process protections and that the circumstances in which one can be referred for a restraining order are really narrow,

so that we don't have people being referred because they vote Republican or they think the 2020 election was stolen or they're a little bit too Muslim for their neighbor's taste. And we also have a system of arrests where we allow the police to arrest people. And then if they don't have a good reason if somebody says, you know, in non-Brandenburg protected speech, hey, I'm thinking of going and shooting up my school tomorrow, that the authorities can go in and investigate them. Not for very long, not indefinitely, not without probable cause, not without due process protections, and not without judicial review. But I do think it can work if it's put in the same setup as many of our other government and prosecutorial roles. And I'm, as a result, interested in looking at that,

providing it's done at the state level. I think it would be a disaster federally. Well, many questions, but not enough time. Let's just end with this. A lot of people are criticizing the police response. I mean, there's always something about this. In every detail, you can go back and quarterback and say they should have done this, but that, but some people are saying they see reflections of parking. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here

because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia where the people who are entrusted with these things perhaps did not show the necessary enthusiasm for resolving the situation

have you been looking at the timeline and who did what and where, and have you drawn any conclusions from that? It seems to be chaos. And it seems to me there are two options here, and neither of them are flattering. One is that the response was chaotic and insufficient, and the other is that the DPS in Texas is lying about it. Because we have to work out somehow how they got to telling five or six different stories in the space of three days. So, you know, neither of those is ideal. It doesn't seem to me that the reputation

of that police department is improving as more information comes out. And, you know, something I've said on other shows is that I have been told over and over again since I started writing about this, that America's police departments had learned the lessons of Columbine and that as every mass shooting comes into the news and goes, that we improve in our ability to deal with them and i had broadly accepted that because i'm not an expert on police tactics but i now don't uh the details here seem catastrophic as they were in parkland in florida in 2018 so clearly again living in the

real world our police departments need to go back to basics on this one because they just don't seem to be getting it right is it is it i'm just is it an adequate explanation that the cops just didn't know what they were doing it's a relatively small town in texas nobody's trained for this kind of thing they were as shocked and horrified and immobilized as anybody. In other words, it seems to me, I don't know this. I haven't studied the details. But it seems to me the cops responded like local cops, not particularly, in no way trained for. At no point in their entire lives did they expect to witness such a horrific event. And it almost seems to me that the underlying premise of much

of the criticism directed at these cops is that they should not have been normal, confused human beings, but heroes. Some cop should have broken in and risked his life to go save the... And it would have been wonderful if somebody behaved heroically, but that's just not the way most human beings behave in most circumstances. And we ought to accept that. No, I don't. None of that makes sense at all.

Well, I don't agree with it. I mean, first off, Texas does have systems in place to train police departments with how to deal with this. And it's difficult in the fog of war, but I've read that the school district had undergone that training. So they should have known better if that's true. But second, I think that criticism about human behavior is entirely reasonable if one's discussing an armed bystander or a parent or a teacher.

I don't think that we can, as a society, expect that from our first responders. I think that if you are in a situation as a police officer who is sworn to uphold the law and to serve and protect, and you believe or know, as they did, that there are children being massacred then you have a responsibility to go in and i think back to the photographs and there's one video of the cops entering the world trade center on 9 11 who from my perspective looked to me as if they knew they were going to die and kept going up those stairs because that was their job. And I don't expect some random guy in lower Manhattan to have done that.

But I think when you're a cop, you have or a firefighter, you have a different set of responsibilities. And those those people behaved so admirably that they became, you know became famous the world over. And I would expect more from police departments in that situation than we saw. I'm persuaded, as I am an alarming amount of time when I speak with you, Charlie. Thank you. I'm done, James. I'm done. Well, we'll leave it at that, Charlie, unless there's anything you want to push

on the way out. Any books coming up? Any large web projects? Any Florida man escapades you want to push? Any customizations to your golf cart that you'd like to tout? No, it's been fairly quiet, actually, although the golf cart that I did and discussed with you last time, it's running beautifully. I don't want to change a single thing.

I think we've nailed it down. Have you added the sidewinder to the undercarriage yet? No, we just have a stereo now, which I thought would be great because when I put the stereo in, I imagined myself bombing around North Florida listening to Tom Petty or something with a beer, but my kids have discovered the stereo, unfortunately. And so what we now listen to is the theme from pirates of the caribbean or sonic the hedgehog not the same yes well you're a lucky man because kids of that age are regarded as the coolest dad in the world you know with a tricked out car like that driving around the the

window in which they will think it was uncool will be very small i think for you which will be great i mean there'll be this brief teen period where there'll be a little rolling of the eyes but then they'll realize exactly how cool dad was and uh you know it'll be a rep few men get to have so you're lucky that's all i hope so i hope so we'll let you go thank you hey charlie won't oh yes okay we do we need to let him go but i i no no i i i can't resist charlie what what do your family back in england make of you i mean to say i just thought to myself, wait a minute, this man started not that many years ago, this man was a chorister in Cambridge. Proper Anglican upbringing, and here you are uttering sentences such as, well, my wife, for example, finds an AR-15 much easier to handle than a Glock.

These are words that up to the age of what, 18 or so, nobody who knew you would have predicted would ever come out of your mouth. Champion of the Second Amendment, the champion of the Second Amendment in some ways, married to a woman who prefers an AR-15 to a Glock. What do your family and friends back in England make of you? Well, they don't agree with me. I think I had some preparation for arguing with Americans who don't agree with me by discussing this with my own family before I started writing about it. But I think in some respects, they've changed the way they talk to me about it, because they know a little bit more about it now, because they ask. And so, although they don't agree with me, for example, they've internalized the fact that there are 400, 450 million guns in

America, and that therefore you can't talk as if there aren't. Whereas when I speak to friends of mine in England, they always start the conversation as if that isn't true. Right, right. Or that there isn't a very broad-based desire to keep the Second Amendment intact, and that you could, as happened in Britain, just put out an edict that said, hand in your guns, then everyone will do it. So I think my family has a different view on this, but we have really good conversations about it because they've come to they've come to accept the parameters of of American gun debates in a way. Maybe my friends from King's haven't. All right. All right. Thanks, Charlie. Let you go. Give my regards. Give my regards to Florida.

Walt Disney World. Never, never shall I go back there. Alas, but nevertheless, you're angry. You're angry with Disney World? No, I've been cast out of paradise. My daughter doesn't want to go. My wife doesn't want to go. So I'm not going to be one of those grown-up guys who walks around by himself with a camera and a Mickey hat going on. I would like to go back. I really

would like to go back, but it just isn't in the cards. Wow, that's so sad. Yes, it is. uh you know maybe maybe that'll change who knows who knows who knows anyway charles thanks a lot we'll talk to you charlie when when you get a golf cart with a sidecar i'd like a tour okay well you could you know you can come down i'll give you a tour you can sit in the passenger seat i could do that but your kids will be there listening to sonic the hedgehog no but i put but i also one of the things i did was i i built some

seats onto the back too oh all right then we have a deal so now we have a deal it now has four so yeah it's a rumble seat design in the classic american way where it'll fold down if need be or pop back over something yeah it folds it folds up exactly and so you can put you have a siren on it yet because i know your boys would probably okay you up, exactly. Do you have a siren on it yet? Because I know your boys would probably... I have a horn, but they're not allowed to touch that because it really is loud. It's a klaxon, I believe. Just tell them it's a klaxon.

Klaxon. That's right. It is a klaxon. You're correct. All right, Charlie. Talk to you later. Thanks. All right. Thanks. Charlie, thank you. Thanks. I just say that because we can go on forever and ever and ever. There's so much to talk about.

And Charles, of course, is in Florida where it's just green verdant all year long. The kudzu grows. Do they have kudzu in Florida? I'm not exactly sure. But you don't have to worry about growing seasons. I'm sure there are things that grow at certain times and certain things that don't. But here up, for example, in the Midwest, we're right now coming to the end of growing season. But there's still time to get stuff in. And I know because I'm going to be spending my weekend putting a lot of stuff in, including a tree. And where might that tree come from? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Yes, spring is here. Spring's been here for a while. Spring's

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Fast Growing Trees for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, Peter, there's a couple of things we can do to wrap up. We can either go back to last week's disastrous admission that you don't understand Humphrey Bogart, or we can talk about another linguistic little kerfluffle that is besetting the people of San Francisco. I i kind of like both those topics uh we'll we'll end with a personal one first and just note as we should that san francisco school district has dropped has dropped chief from the job titles because they believe it is injurious to the reputation and feelings of the native american community of course it's not an not American word. It comes from, you know, chef, from caput, from a whole bunch of French and Latin things, meaning head and the rest of it. But it's regarded as bad because it's what the whites who came in would then call the American Indian leaders as such.

I just use it as a generic term for guys whose name I can't remember. I mean, because every guy likes to be called chief. Hey, Hey chief. Hey boss, Hey sport. Men have lost the ability to just casually toss out like, like coins, words like that, that, uh, bring guys into the sort of community of run your mask characters, but it's not unexpected. Of course. runyon-esque characters but it's not unexpected of course um i could ask you which word you predict san francisco will ban next but you would come up with something ridiculous that would prompt that would promptly come true chef chef it will occur to them the chef is simply chief in french

so they're going to have to ban chef is doesn't that seem logical of course logic well the fact if it's french though it's if it's french it's good if it's french it's okay because the french are part of the class of european betters to whom we should emulate uh i was just on an online discussion such as it was on reddit about um i was going on about european cities versus american cities and i love european cities because i walk in them i mean it was just in new york and it's a city i love to walk in it's very walkable but i do not live in a walkable city in New York and it's a city I love to walk in. It's very walkable. But I do not live in a walkable city in the extent that it's very spread out

and you get from one part to the other, you need a car. And in this discussion constantly, they hate cars. Everybody, everybody, 70-year-old men with bad knees should be in a bus or the bike and the rest of it.

And so the preference for the European style or the American, I understand, but it's impossible as we're having this conversation with charlie about guns we have cities built around cars we have 450 million guns if you don't deal with those start with reality what you start with reality so you have to change what i mean at the beginning of it when charles said i you know i don't know what's changed i think we all know exactly what's changed as a matter of fact and peter you talked about at the beginning we were discussing the things that have unraveled the social fabric what has changed we have more fatherless sons my dad took me out to the field to handle a gun and to understand what it was to

shoot it and what power it was and i didn't like it and i've never i've never confused that own personal dislike for guns with wanting to do anything about them or demonizing the people who have them. I grew up with rifles on the wall. Everybody did. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia.

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So what changes? What changes are families? You must have had friends who were farm kids, and those rifles were used for shooting dogs, right? I mean, they were necessary on the farm. They were part of the culture. You yourself didn't like and didn't need it because of the business your family was in. But that's right, that they were part of the culture when you grew up. Is that right?

Absolutely. Yeah, they were part of the culture when you grew up. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah, they were. Completely. At the farm. And we lived in a 1962 Rambler in Fargo, North Dakota. And when we bought the house, my dad bought the house, there was a gun rack built into the rumpus room. Got it. Because you just assumed you were probably going to have rifles.

Right. And you did, you know, and there was, there was a time where, um, I think I've told the story before somebody was stealing gas from my dad's a bulk plant night after night. And so he went there with one of his employees and sat in the office in the dark until the guys came back. And then he flipped on the floodlights on the room and walked out and fired a shot. It was a rifle. One guy ran and the other guy stayed and liquefied himself um until the police came and my dad told the had called up the sheriff before and said what he's going to do and the sheriff was like well i wish you wouldn't but i understand my dad caught the guy with a gun and it didn't

happen anymore got it so that was sort of normal fargo culture at the time so what's changed you have uh you don't have intact families as much as you used to have a higher illegitimacy rate, so you don't have men providing an object like my father did. And it wasn't like my father had any particular great training. And it wasn't like my father grew up with a father like he became. He didn't. His dad was something of a dissolute storytelling con artist. So somehow my dad absorbed from the culture at the time the standards of what a man should be and what he should be to his son and the rest of it if that's lost then you have the atomized kid then you have kids who themselves have been

medicated and we're having a discussion about this on ricochet which by the way you should all join and i have no doubt that these drugs help an awful lot of kids but there are some i think i believe their brains are are made askew by having had themselves rewired by chemicals since they were 10 12 13 14 years old so that their their real personality doesn't even exist anymore it's just simply their dosage and then simply changes in that and something happens is that part of it i think that's part of it also the lockdown james James, don't you think the shooter in Texas was 18 years old. Did he lose the last two years of his own high school education to being locked down at home because of COVID? I haven't seen any reporting on that, but it wouldn't, let's put it this way. It wouldn't surprise me if we discovered that this kid's mental instability was made much,

much worse, that his depression was made much, much worse by lockdowns that we now know were largely useless. It didn't help. It didn't help. And some reports say that he was also torturing animals, and there's a big predictor there. And again, something like that may come from some people just born bad. I mean, some people are just born with no conscience, with no empathy, with that thing lacking. And you can't do anything about that except keep an eye on them and be careful.

But when we talk about these things, you know, the lockdown, the broken family, the chemicals, and the rest of a culture that doesn't seem to offer anything transcendent. Is it a religious culture anymore? No, it's not. Is it a patriotic culture anymore?

Well, there are a lot of elements that are, but is the overall cultural message people add be you're in America. Cause it's a great place with a fine storied history and a proud future to come. No. What is there, but atomization and all against all in an intersectional war.

I mean, there's not a lot of cultural messages, a young person vulnerable to these sorts of things can pick up. So what do you do? You sit online all day experiencing a flood of statements and emotions and games and the rest of these meaningless things all contained within a glowing box that is not connected to the real world. I mean, we tell people who get a little crazy online, dude, go out and touch grass. It's a line. But really, go out and touch grass. It's a line, but really go out and touch grass, get in touch with something that is not this cybernetic playground. And if you spend all of your time in a murder simulator, and I know we can't blame video games, except that I will. I played video games all my life and I've played more first person shooter games than a lot

of people out there. I love those games, but you know about the thing, all the people that I shot in those first person games, to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger and True Lies, they were all bad. If you have a game like some of these Grand Theft Auto, where frankly, you're just wandering around into a lawless atmosphere doing what you want, there are certain personalities that are going to enjoy the nihilism and the sociopathy of it. If you spend all of your time in that, and there is no other positive culture message to absorb, what happens? All of these things turn a vanishingly small number of people into the people that they are. We have more of them now because we've got more people, and we have more factors that come to bear. None of these things generally were going on in Fargo in the 60s when I was growing up.

I'm sorry. And it would be not bad if we looked at what culture was when this didn't happen and say, hmm, maybe there was something there that backstopped the youth of women. You said something that just about broke my heart a moment ago, just about broke my heart

and struck me as just a vital, what, fact, artifact of history, that your dad's dad was, I didn't know this, James, and forgive me if I misstated, but that your dad's dad was not somebody on whom you'd want to model yourself. Oh, no. But your own dad, your own dad was able to figure out from the wider culture what it meant to be a man. Yes. And that wider culture is not sending it meant to be a man.

And that wider culture is not sending that message to young men today. And you know how my father figured it out? He watched Humphrey Bogart movies, Peter. That'll bring us to the end here, I believe. Unless you have something more to add to my predictable expostulation. No, no, no. All I do is bow in sheer admiration, James. You not only brought this podcast to a rounded close, you tied it back to last week's pod. This is just amazing.

It's just simple professional muscle memory. That's all. Radio at the top of the show, you got to bring it all together. Hit the post, go to the news, but you never say next hour. I had a program director who got mad when we said next hour because it implied somehow that people were going to be there or that there was a difference between this hour and the next hour. There isn't. There's just a whole great, wonderful smear of listening to the station that we were listening to. But frankly, here, it fits.

Next podcast, not next hour, is when we will see you. In the meantime, Fast Growing Trees brought you this one. And get your trees. Get your trees now. Get them fast so they can fastly grow. Support them for supporting us. And of course, if Rob were here, he'd spend seven minutes telling you about Ricochet and why you should join it. I'm just going to say, Rob's right.

Listen to Rob and join Ricochet, ricochet.com. And also, take a minute, or I don't care, take an hour to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We'd really appreciate that. In any case, we'll thank you for listening. And I hope Rob's back. If not, it's just going to be Peter and me. Or maybe we'll all dash off or something. And maybe we'll all come together finally again, again, the three at episode 600 or maybe before.

In any case, we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 next week. James, next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. conversation. fully automated, the whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready.

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