The Ricochet Podcast - Guns N' Poetry

Episode Date: October 5, 2017

This week, Jon Gabriel captains the good ship Ricochet in place of James Lileks and podcast amigo Andrew Klavan is in the Long Chair® this week. Our guests are Charles C.W. Cooke, the foremost authority on firearms (also roller coasters, but that’s for another show). Then, TV’s and noted Trump supporter Rob Long stops by to plug his new book Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse. Also... Source

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In fairness to those listeners, we'll now take a few seconds before we begin side two. Thank you. We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. I do not have the skills of James Lilacs, but I will do my best. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Hello, welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. I'm John Gabriel, sitting in for James Lilacs. We also have author extraordinaire Andrew Klavan, who's sitting in the long chair today. We, of course, have Peter Robinson and our guests are Charles C.W. Cook to talk about gun control in the aftermath of Las Vegas. And also we have Rob Long, who apparently

has some sort of trunk in now. Hmm. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye. Welcome to Ricochet Podcast number 372. And the Ricochet Podcast is brought to you by the fine people at Texture. Why subscribe to just a couple of magazines when you have all of your favorites right on your smartphone or tablet all the time for way less? With Texture, you get access to dozens all for one low price. Right now, Texture is offering Ricochet listeners a 14-day free trial when you go to texture.com slash ricochet.

And by Bolland Branch, the right sheets can take your sleep and your style to the next level. With Bolland Branch, that upgrade has never been more affordable. Go to bollandbranch.com, spelled B-O-L-L and branch.com, and use promo code RICOCHET to get $50 off your first set of sheets plus free shipping in the U.S. And buy one more, Blinkist, introducing the Blinkist app. Over 2,000 of the best-selling nonfiction books transformed into powerful packs that you can read or listen to in just 15 minutes go to blinkist.com slash ricochet right now to search a free trial or get three months off your yearly plan when you join today and also of course by ricochet.com uh this is john gabriel by the way uh james lilacs is out gallivanting around minnesota somewhere so i do not have a segue ability, but we do our best.

And it's my job to kind of fill in for Rob here as well, since he usually promotes Ricochet. I'm going to be completely selfish and promote a new level that we introduced about a month ago called the X-John level. E-X-J-O-N, that's my handle on Twitter. And to reach out to a lot of people who share the articles we write at Ricochet and the podcast as well, there's a lot of people on social media who love sharing our articles, love reading them, but they don't join.

They don't really have any skin in the game. And so in addition to our membership levels named after luminaries of the right-of-center movement like Reagan, Thatcher, Coolidge, and Lincoln, we now offer one named after me. So I'm getting kind of a big head about it, but it's only a measly $2.50 a month. You can comment on all my posts. You can comment on all the podcasts and read our comment section, which is basically the Digital Algonquin Roundtable. So if you love chatting on that kind of content, and I know you'll love it, you can upgrade to a full membership anytime you want. So all you need to do is go to ricochet.com slash xjohn to sign up for this special offer. Now, we welcome, filling in for Rob today, is Andrew Klavan of the show.

He's this week's occupant of the long chair. Andrew's an author, screenwriter, and essayist, an excellent author, I might add, nominated for the Mystery Writer of America's Edgar Award five times, and he won twice. He's also the host of the wildly popular Andrew Clavin Show podcast. You can get that daily right here at Ricochet. And starting next week, a new podcast, something very different we're excited about. We'll be talking about that a little later in the show. And so we have Andrew here.

We have, of course, Peter Robinson here. How are you gentlemen doing? We're well. And by the way, I have decided the single word, Andrew does so many things, Andrew Drew to all of us, does so many things and just sort of layers charm over all of them i think the one word that sums him up is the same word that would have been used of maurice chevalier drew clavin is a boulevardier that's you know i always you go for that one will you take that that is exactly that is exactly how i describe myself every morning when i look in the mirror. I say, Drew, you boulevardier, I love you to death. We should go strolling down Wilshire Avenue.

It's a pleasure wherever we go. I have to say I'm so honored to be filling in for Rob Long because now that he actually has a job, it's impossible to get him anywhere. So I just think that – I told him that he has proven the truth of the old Chinese expression that if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, you can't get him on the phone. So I'm honored that I get to fill in for him. Well, excellent. Boulevardier is actually one of my favorite cocktails.

It's basically a Negroni, but you swap out the gin for rye whiskey, and it's very good. You're also a great cocktail, Drew. Why would you dilute rye whiskey with anything else? It's just a clever disguise, I think. Because you get to use the term Boulevardier a lot. Very sophisticated. I think we've probably used it in the last three minutes more than all of america has used it over the last week so right well of course the main topic that has dominated

the week um it's not something super important like the nfl uh players deciding to kneel but it's far more serious far more upsetting uh we had late sunday night uh the country music concert outside of the mandalay bay Hotel just across the street from it. You had the Vegas shooting, and we've all heard the details. We're still trying to figure out, okay, what weapons did he use? What on earth was this guy's motivation? It's like the more we learn about the guy, the more confusing it all gets. And lots of, of course, lots of talk about gun control, laws and regulation, a lot of vague pronouncements from celebrities and politicians saying, well, we need sensible gun control, which they never –

Before we even get to the gun control, I want to ask Drew Klavan, who is, after all, a mystery writer and a novelist. Isn't it – does it strike you that there are many pieces of this story that just don't seem to fit, that don't add up? Absolutely. This is a very, very strange story. I mean, first of all, if you do something like this, there's the assumption that in some sense you want a celebrity. You want to be famous. You know, people do these things thinking I'm going to go out in a blaze of glory. Right.

I'm going to be – my face is going to be in the newspaper. I'll be remembered. Or they do it as a terrorist to prove a point or to support a political or religious point of view. You want people to know about that, right? I mean, if you're doing it as a terrorist, you want people you want people to know why. If you're doing it for fame, you want people to know why. It's very, very mysterious that they haven't pinned down any sense of a motive at all. I mean, they interviewed his girlfriend and she says she has no idea.

We don't know if that's true yet, but, you know, at least she didn't come. She didn't push forward with something. It looks like he was been storing guns for a year at least. So he's really had this well planned. The cameras that he put out show that it's really well planned. They say he might have had an escape route. They say he might have had an accomplice. It is a really, really strange story. I mean, I can't emphasize enough. I mean, unfortunately, we've seen too many of these things. And usually finding the motive is a pretty quick

job because it's on the Facebook page. It's on their – or they publicize it themselves. So why does a guy who apparently was very well-heeled, apparently made a lot of money, lived off the FBI agents for Vegas said we've been talking to people overseas as well. So we don't even know if there's still a political thing. Obviously ISIS tried to take credit but they would take credit for anything. So I just – I have to say it is really a mysterious and strange story as well as being an upsetting one, an upsetting, absurd evil. It's horrible beyond speaking. But the other thing that strikes me, here we are on day three.

I'm sure the police have talked to them. I'm sure they're deeply involved in all this. I'm sure the FBI has talked to them. But the reporting strikes me as thin. We have yet to hear from anybody at the Mandalay. And as you know, I don't mean to suggest this is the way you spend your weekends but you certainly both of you know this a large hotel casino operation a resort such as the mandalay has security everywhere there are security cameras all through those operations

and here he seems to have broken two windows, big, heavy windows constructed to withstand high winds. When did he break the windows? Where's the broken glass? Apart from anything else, how did he get all those guns and all that ammunition up to his room? There wasn't a security guard or a maid who said something suspicious is

going on here it none of this seems to add up to me it just doesn't it just doesn't the pieces don't fit of this puzzle to me they don't and and it's disturbing to watch people speculate i mean i know they've got to fill up all that cable news time but it's disturbing to watch people speculate about you know his motivations and where he was going and letting rumors spread that there may have been other shooters and stuff like this. And I think that one of the things that the police, law enforcement should be very careful about, I know they want to protect an ongoing investigation. I know it's important to make sure that things don't get out before their time. But you do want to make sure that rumors don't spread and people don't start to get panicked and start to look at each other askance or anything like that. We want to know what this guy was up to and where he came from.

A very, very strange life, not an ordinary life, not an ordinary mass shooting, just very, very weird. And so that gets us to the question of all the calls for gun control hillary clinton on jimmy kimmel last night chuck schumer stood in the well of the senate either yesterday i can't quite recall when and said if you spoke to all the dead in heaven they would say do something this is a paraphrase do something don't tell the National Rifle Association enough. And so the first and obvious point is that it is impossible to enact legislation to prevent an event from happening before you understand what happened. I mean, that just the way that the Democrats are piling. Now we've got them. Now we've gotiling – now we've got them.

Now we've got Trump. Now we've got the NRA. Well, first of all, nobody knows quite what happened. In the second place, if he was using automatic weapons, automatic weapons have been very heavily regulated for something like seven decades already. If he modified the weapons to make them automatic that also is already illegal uh we know well we don't know this but i've read again the reporting seems thin and tentative so you don't know whether even when something is in print to put your faith in it but that a couple of gun dealers who dealt with this guy said oh yeah yeah we ran all the checks on him he passed all the

checks so in go ahead drew well it's despicable first of. It's despicable. First of all, it's despicable the entire thing that they keep saying that no, we don't want to wait for your emotions to calm down. Everyone from Jimmy Kimmel to Chuck Todd to Chuck Schumer, they're all saying the same thing. We don't want to wait for your emotions to calm down. Don't let a good crisis

go to waste. They want to seize your guns. Charlie Cook, I believe we're having Charlie Cook on later in the show. He wrote the best piece about this of all so i'll let him i'll let him talk about that but last night on the brett bear show molly hemingway said something that i just thought was was so true that i almost couldn't take it in you know it was one of those things that went above and beyond news commentary she said you know we're not really talking about anything useful because none of the things they're suggesting are going to have any you know, we're not really talking about anything useful because none of the things they're suggesting are going to make any difference about mass shootings. Nothing they do

is going to have any effect on this at all. She said, what we're really talking about is the nature of evil and whether you can build a government big enough to stop it. And obviously, we on the right believe, no, you can't. Human evil is a force way force way way beyond government and the only way you could build a government big enough to stop it is would be big enough to crush the humanity and individuality out of all of us the left of course doesn't share our feelings about the power of evil and the power of this and i just feel that this is indeed a meaningless conversation they're having long conversations about these bump stocks i think think they're called, that help a semi-automatic weapon become an automatic weapon. You can do that with almost anything.

You can adjust these things almost any way. Guns are modular. You can always rig them. You can always fix them. It's just a weird kind of meaningless thing. And even you saw, I'm sure, that article by the data analysis that was actually in the Washington Post where she said, I went in to analyze the 30,000 gun deaths a year as a liberal and came out thinking, no, there's really nothing they can do to stop this. So it's this kind of useless comfort food that the Democrats feed us, everything they can do to get any kind of grip. And the thing that I liked about Charlie's article that he'll talk about is just that

he doesn't accept it at all. He doesn't even accept the conversation, which I think is the right attitude. But it is, look, these are such horrible situations. Maybe the answer is that we all go to the place that makes us feel better about the fact that words are not enough. Words are not enough. The only thing that answers evil are the people and the things that they did, the way they

threw their bodies over their loved ones, the guy who had the wonderful name of Jonathan Smith. I love the fact that he was named John Smith, which he could have just as well be named any man, you know? Right. And he ran back and saved 30 people, and then he himself was saved by an off-duty police officer. I mean, that's the answer to evil. It's the only answer there's ever been.

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That's the only answer there will ever be until the last day when the cavalry arrives and saves us. But I think that for now, these little acts of heroism, you know, it's amazing. But the guy who got it exactly right, the guy who had the restrained, proper attitude was our president, Donald Trump. Not the man you turn to for tact, usually not the man you turn to for balance. He is the only person whose statements have been right on the money you know recognize the evil support the police and the first responders and uh you know understand that that the heroism is what lifts us up in moments

like this exactly could not agree more and uh if you want to keep up on all these news issues, of course, please go to Ricochet. Visit Daily Wire as well, another excellent website. But there's all sorts of great things online, but I think all three of us really enjoyed leafing through a magazine. That was always a good way to learn what was going on in the world in a deeper way. And there's a company called Texture that's here to help out and bring magazines into the digital age. Magazines are more than just something to flip through in the checkout line at the grocery store.

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I've got to say, John, i i have this app and it's like you're selling heroin because i mean once you get on this thing you're gone your life is over you just cannot stop reading it's amazing excellent uh okay so the personal endorsement compares the product to heroin but in a good way you mean in a good way all right right well we have our uh first guest um his name is charles cw cook i know you enjoy the mad dogs and englishman podcast you see on ricochet he's also on the editor's podcast he's all over the place um on our podcasting a great voice loved his conservatory and manifesto book. He's also the editor of National Review Online, a graduate of the University of Oxford. I can relate to that

because I went to Arizona State, very similar, at which he studied modern history and politics. He's also the co-host of, of course, Bad Dogs in English, but as I mentioned, available on Ricochet. He knows a lot about guns, which is one reason we chose him, but he also knows a lot about roller coasters, and he also completely agrees with my belief that Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys is far superior to Sergeant Pepper. How are you doing, Charlie? I'm doing fine, and I absolutely do not agree with that, which is heresy. Oh, yeah, a bit of a Beatles fan as well, folks. I have to tease him on that. Basically, we're seeing all this reporting. Actually, I have to say, a lot of the left-leaning journalists are going deep dives on guns and what's an automatic versus semi-auto.

Usually, they conflate the two. Everybody's trying to figure out what the heck is a bump stock. Can you explain to us what it is? I spent about three hours studying it. Start there, Charlie. Yes. A bump stock is a device that allows the user of a semi-automatic weapon to pull the trigger extremely quickly. It doesn't convert the fundamental mechanism to automatic.

That is, it does not permit the user to keep the trigger depressed and fire until the magazine is empty it merely moves the gun back and forth so that the trigger is repeatedly depressed and it uses the recoil from the first shot to um trigger the second and the third and so forth and this is effectively a homemade device or something very easily available that someone who knows something about guns can easily add to a semi-automatic? A combination really. The devices first started to bubble up in the late 2000s and the ATF considered whether they violated the underlying law governing automatic weapons. Some of them were deemed to do so. Others were not.

In 2010, the Obama administration's ATF concluded that they were and should be legal. They cost about $99, maybe $150. You change the stock on your modular AR-15 or other weapon, and hey, presto, you have a weapon that can fire very quickly. Now, the problem, of course, with regulating them or banning them seems likely, given that the National Rifle Association has said today it would consider that acceptable, is that with 3D printing being what it is, and indeed with physics being what it is, it's not too hard to build your own.

But Charlie, you could use your belt to do that, couldn't you? Right, you can, yes. So why would... I'm going to ask ignorant questions, but I hope that it has the advantage that some non-gun savvy people will be listening and say, yeah, Robinson's asking what I want to know as well. Why would anybody want a bump stock?

It's a reasonable question. What's a legitimate use for that? Target practice? You don't use it. It depends what you mean by legitimate, of course. This gets us into a thorny area. People ask, why would you need this? Why would you need that?

I fired one myself. I didn't especially enjoy it. To me, it seemed like a good way to waste expensive ammunition and also to diminish my accuracy. I think when it comes to guns, an awful lot of people are hobbyists. AR-15s are modular. You can change them in a number of different ways. You can add accessories. And it's become a replacement hobby for people who in years past would maybe change out their car parts or would build their own computers. These days, we don't

do that. iPhones, you can't open. Cars, you really can't change. So it's more of a hobbyist's addition than anything else, and it permits the user to fire at a much faster rate than they would otherwise be able to do. I am sympathetic to the idea that they should be regulated in the way that other automatic weapons are, and I think that's probably what we'll see. So the question of questions. Hillary Clinton on Jimmy Kimmel last night, Chuck Schumer, Senator Schumer of New York and the well of the Senate, they both said essentially the same thing.

It's time enough of this. We need more gun control. Chuck Schumer said, if you talk to the people who've been killed in Las Vegas who are now in heaven, they'd say to the Republicans, enough. Stop listening to the National Rifle Association. We need gun control. And Charlie Cook answers how. I just don't see the evidence for that. I mean, I think it's interesting that both Jimmy Kimmel and Thomas Friedman made a similar argument. Friedman in the New York Times, Jimmy Kimmel on his show, they suggested that if the shooter had been a Muslim,

then we would have thrown the book at gun regulations. And, of course, that might be true, although it certainly wasn't true after polls. But all of the responses that Jimmy Kimmel and Thomas Friedman cited, they oppose. And they oppose Donald Trump's wall. They oppose Donald Trump's travel ban. And yet they want the same sort of reaction when it comes to guns. And I don't understand how that follows. If our reaction in the minds of Jimmy Kimmel and Thomas Friedman to atrocities committed by Muslims are overreactions, if they're knee-jerk reactions, if they don't actually do what they were supposed

to do, that should teach them a lesson. That lesson being that it is not smart to respond to horror and atrocity by immediately calling for new laws. I think when you get down into what those laws would be, it becomes even more difficult. There was an excellent piece in the Washington Post by Leah Labresco, who worked for FiveThirtyEight. She's a statistician. She's an analyst, and she said that she was in favor of all of the usual gun proposals that one hears from the Democrats until she looked into every single murder, every single death with a gun that she could find, and she changed her mind. She decided that rules of the sort that Chuck Schumer and Jimmy Kimmel want wouldn't have made a difference. I think that Marco Rubio was given a Geppetto checkmark in the Washington Post's fact-checking section two years ago when he pointed out that none of the proposals that we've heard from Congress

or from the then-Obama administration would have stopped any of the mass shootings in recent years. Chris Murphy came out after this and suggested we pass background checks. Hillary Clinton came out and suggested that silences, better known as suppressors, should be more heavily regulated. None of those proposals intersected with what we saw, and that's often the case. Charlie, this is Andrew Klavan. I thought the best article that I read this week about this was written by you, actually. I did an entire episode of my podcast about it. It was called something like the Second Amendment is not up for negotiation, which I thought lifted the

conversation above these practical considerations. I mean, there are practical considerations. Would this help? Would that help? And usually the answer turns out to be no, it's not going to help. But you made the point that they're not even talking about the real issue, which is the reason we have the Second Amendment. That's right. And I'm, of course, happy even talking about the real issue, which is the reason we have the Second Amendment. That's right. And I'm, of course, happy to talk about the practical arguments because they do need to be addressed. But I think ultimately the Second Amendment is a statement of philosophy and it's a statement

of government. It's not a question of statistics. The fact is that at the time of the Constitutional Convention, and indeed the subsequent addition of the Bill of Rights, the founders were trying to build a structure that could both accommodate and serve as a prophylactic against human nature. And human nature has not changed in the last 230 years. It never changes. When James Madison looked throughout history, he saw an ebb and flow of liberty and tyranny. And as such, both through the Enumerated Powers Doctrine and then through the Bill of Rights, put in place provisions that should,

he hoped, keep America free. Now, you often hear people say that if James Madison were around today, he would change his mind. Brett Stevens did so today in the New York Times. I think quite the opposite is true. I think if James Madison came back today, he would be absolutely horrified at the scale of the tyrannies that we saw in the 20th century, tyrannies that he could never have imagined. And I am, as you know, a great advocate of the American Revolution. But if you compare the list of complaints in the Declaration of Independence to, say, those that would have come out of Nazi Germany or of communist China or communist Russia, of Cuba, or it has to be said of the

Jim Crow South, they pale in comparison. So rather than sitting in the New York Times editorial office and saying, my goodness me, I was so wrong about the Second Amendment, I think James Madison would be astonished at how right he was. I do not see the 20th century as an argument against individual rights, and I think it's always worth setting the Second Amendment, and indeed the First Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment, and so forth, into that context. Why is it that we never hear, why do we have to listen to you and your damned plummy accent when we should be listening to Americans saying these things? I never hear this from the politicians. I never even hear it from the NRA that this is, you know, how can you have the right to

life and the right to liberty if you personally can't defend your life and can't defend your liberty? Why isn't it we don't hear this from them? I'm doing those jobs Americans won't do. I think I'm a convert. I used to be very anti-gun. I used to believe lies about the real meaning of the Second Amendment. I also come from a country that has largely abandoned the right to keep and bear arms.

I think really what unlocked it for me, and perhaps more gun rights advocates ought to focus on this, is that in practice, the second amendment is an auxiliary right um it is a right that is inextricably linked to the right to self-defense because if you don't have the means by which to defend yourself you don't have a practical right to self-defense you go back to justinian um that the law at that point um in the empire was that anything you did in defense of yourself was presumed to be legal. Now, if you extrapolate that out, what you see is that in order to permit a small woman to have the same presumed right to self-defense as a Marine, tools are going to be needed to be presumed legal as well. Otherwise, it's a survival of the fittest situation.

And that's really what the Second Amendment does. It allows the put-upon black in the post-failure of Reconstruction South to have a chance to defend himself against the lynch mob. It gives the woman in... Don't let foot pain or discomfort hold you back. At Foot Solutions, we specialise in high-quality, supportive footwear. And use the latest scanning technology to custom-make orthotics designed for your unique feet.

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peter here all right so we have the second amendment self-defense even justice scalia in uh into the heller decision which which reaffirmed the way i take it it reaffirmed the plain meaning you get to bear arms but even justice scalia would never have argued that the second amendment gives everyone the right to his own tank or his own Stinger missiles. So we have a question here of where the line gets drawn and how the line gets drawn. And it strikes me that one could make a perfectly good – at least a perfectly plausible argument that I grant every word you just said, that the Second Amendment gives us the right to self-defense, it's vital in preventing this country from becoming an outright tyranny.

I mean, that is just one option that won't happen here because people can defend their homes and their own purse. Got it. Grant all of that. But the line's been drawn in the wrong place. All those weapons that that lunatic had up in his room in the Mandalay Hotel should have been illegal. They should he shouldn't have been able to get his hands on them. Nobody needs even as nobody needs his own stinger missile, even as the second. But let me put it this way. Even as the Second Amendment does not grant anyone the right to his own Stinger missile. That's just too much firepower to be prudent and to be consistent with the right to self-defense.

Nobody needs the weapons that that man had in his room. Now we're getting into we've permitted ourselves to be pushed around too much by hobbyists. The laws have been crafted for people who like guns overwhelmingly with innocent motives, but it's just creating too much. The line's been drawn in the wrong place. How do you handle that argument? Well, I think we need to be extremely precise about this. There is, of course, an argument that automatic weapons, for example, are across the line, and that's largely been implemented by law under the National Firearms Act and the 1986 Hughes Amendment. We have to separate out, though, that case on the bleeding edge from the examples that you gave, Stinger missiles and so forth.

One of the questions that I get frequently is, well, should I be able to own a nuclear weapon? And the reason that's not a very good question is twofold. Firstly, there's always been a distinction in American law between arms and ordinance. Ordinance at the time of the founding was in many cases legal, but it was not protected by the Second Amendment. It had never been protected under British law or under common law. Ordinance was a separate category. Arms, and this is the second point, have been defined quite clearly in the dictionaries

um of the era both black's dictionary for example and johnson's dictionary and subsequently by blackstone and tucker and and so forth and arms have always been um weapons that an individual can carry and hold himself so you know a st, a Stinger missile is out, so is a crew-fed machine gun. A weapon with which an infantryman could discriminate. In other words, you know, a nuclear weapon doesn't count. And a weapon that could plausibly be used in self-defense, which an F-15 or a submarine is not. Now, if you go back to these definitions, you will find words in there, handgun or pistol, for example. You also find the

word carbine, and an AR-15 is a carbine. So we can debate what regulation of carbines is legitimate, whether automatic weapons should be regulated, whether semi-automatic weapons should be regulated, although it's worth saying that the Heller decision means they can't be because it protects weapons in common use and half of all the weapons in the United States are semi-automatic. They have been for 100 years. But the usual left-wing talking point of, well, we already restrict a tank, therefore, does not apply here.

So I take your point, but I think that is the conversation that we are having, right? When Justice Scalia was asked how the court would address this question, and he presumed it would have to at some point, the example he gave, and I think it was a good one, was of a bazooka. And it does a bazooka fall under arms it can be carried by a person but does it discriminate does it not uh that is i think a good question um but we're already there that's already the debate that we've been we've been having when it comes to automatic weapons and the like go ahead okay um i know uh charlie one thing that seems to shock people and i guess it's just the nature of the news, if it bleeds, it leads.

But if you look at the statistics for gun deaths, they seem to – when the assault weapons ban was passed in the 90s, gun crimes went down. And then after it was repealed, gun crimes kept going down. And you have a situation. It's almost like the problem seems to be less about guns and more about social pathologies. The vast majority of gun-related deaths are usually elderly white men committing suicide. Below that, domestic violence victims. And below that, you'll have kind of gang warfares, young males out in the streets. So I think there is no easy fix is there i think we'd love to say

hey if we ban suppressors there'll be no more crimes but i i just don't see any kind of an easy solution here no that's absolutely right i mean it is a fact that since about 1990 the number of guns in private hands in the united States has doubled and the laws have been broadly loosened including now concealed carry in every single state, open carry in 45 states, permitless concealed carry in about 12 and the number of crimes committed with guns and murders committed with guns have been reduced dramatically, cut in half in the case of murders, more in the case of other crimes. One of the problems that we have here is we often focus on the wrong laws too.

The assault weapons ban, so-called, that you mentioned, dealt with rifles. But rifles really aren't the vast majority of deaths. They don't cause the vast majority of deaths. They don't cause the vast majority of deaths. Suicide is by far and away the leading group, about two-thirds of all gun deaths. And then after that, it's handguns. Criminals use handguns. They're portable, they're cheap, they're concealable. They just don't use rifles. In fact, not just rifles, but so-called assault weapons are used so infrequently in crimes that the fbi doesn't keep statistics you know you are you are three times two and a half times more likely to be killed by hands and feet than by a rifle of all sorts let alone an assault weapon if you wanted to wave a magic wand and get rid of a certain type of gun

in this country which of course you can't do it would be impossible to try to do but if you if you suddenly had magic powers and you could do that um the gun you would get rid of is the handgun because it is it is that that is used in suicides and it's that uh that is used in crime um and yet for some reason we focus on rifles obsessively i think it's perhaps the way they look is it you know if you take out the criminality you're left with uh suicide and these kinds of mad acts like we had in las vegas which leads me to believe that the real question we're looking at is a question of mental illness and how we deal with it. Is there anything to be said for background checks that are clever about catching mental illness? When I bought a gun, the background checks seemed to me to be pretty perfunctory, and I'm in California where things are very tight, the gun laws are very tight.

But at one point I was answering a questionnaire, and one of the questions was, are you a fugitive? And I turned to the guy selling me a gun, i said what's the right answer for that you know i mean it just seemed like a silly question is there something to be said for for better background round checks i don't think that there is for a couple of reasons the first is that although it may have seemed perfunctory what that background check did in practice uh was um check your name against a federal database to which both um state criminal records are submitted and state mental health records are submitted so if you have been um committed uh or if you have any form of uh of

mental illness that rises up to the threshold, then your name would have been in there and the check would have been denied. The problem, of course, with introducing more veto points on a right is that that gives the government a great deal of power. And I think there's an enormous amount of suspicion, as there should be, especially given the racial history in the United States, for tests of any sort, for tests before voting, for tests before speaking, for tests before buying a firearm. It also seems to be the case that the vast majority of mass shooters, which is a discrete problem, a problem that has to be separated from your

suicides and your everyday crime. The vast majority of these people don't show any signs of mental illness. They would pass a psychiatric test. They would pass a perfunctory mental evaluation. The question of mental illness, acid is traditionally defined anyway, and gun controls, they don't really intersect. So although it is important that we do better when it comes to mental health per se, I don't think this is the panacea that it's often presented as being. Interesting. Exactly. Couldn't agree more. Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights on the Second Amendment and some of these terrible gun control proposals, Charlie. We will continue to read you on National Review Online and listen to you right here on Ricochet.

Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Charlie. All right. Well, I had mentioned earlier that bump stocks, I had never heard of them. I live in Arizona, one of the most pro-gun states in the country. And after about three hours, I think I was up till after midnight reading about GATT cranks and bump stocks and how they work. And I was exhausted. So I just wanted to lay down in my beautiful bowl and branch sheets. And let me give you the three most important words for getting a good night's sleep. Comfortable, comfortable, and comfortable. If you want the best sleep of your life, you need to be comfortable.

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Thanks again also to Bull and Branch for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. So, Drew, something I want to bring up, something that I see with this gun control debate. Basically, if Trump is for something, everybody's against it. You saw some early calls before we had any facts trying to blame this on Trump for some reason, because he got the NRA endorsement. You see, Jimmy Kimmel, who used to be a perfectly friendly guy, he hosted the Man Show, the most politically incorrect show that's probably ever been on television. And now he's ranting about Trump and gun control and saving Obamacare. Talk about Trump derangement syndrome and how the heck do Democrats think they can get back into power using this? Well, you know, I started out very, very much opposed

to Trump and there's still things about the guy that drive me insane. I mean, the rudeness and the bullying and the, you know, one day he says one thing and the next day he says another and the attacks on his people and all this. But I have come to realize that the people, as so often, the wisdom of crowds, actually was higher than my own insights here. Because, you know, it's got to be now 30 or 40 years. The people of this country, the people in that small swath of America that exists between New York and L.A., have been essentially relentlessly abused by the people who consider them their betters.

If you look at not just Jimmy Kimmel, look at all the late night comedians, every single one of them, just about a white male, except for Trevor Noah, who's a little tan, every single one of them is a left wing anti-Trump Democrat. And all you hear, if you're one of the 60 million people who voted for Donald Trump for whatever reason, all you hear when you turn on the late-night comedy, you don't hear comedy. You hear, you're an idiot, you're an idiot, you're an idiot. If you watch an Emmy show or an Oscar show, these millionaires, these genetic jackpots

giving each other awards for being themselves, they stand up and they stand behind the podium and they look at you if you're one of those people and they say, you're an idiot, you're an idiot. If you go on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, all the same thing. I don't want to interrupt you mid-flow, but I have to ask a question. Everything you say is, of course, correct. And for those of us who can remember, here I'm going to date those of us who can remember, Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson was always exquisitely careful to position himself as an ordinary American. The number of times he reminded people he grew up in small town Nebraska when he made political jokes.

He was extremely careful to attack Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal measure. But the sensibility was that of a kind of a clever, smart-ass guy from the middle of the country who somehow or other got lucky enough to live in L.A., right, to live in New York first and then L.A. But the kind of utter – the monolithic quality of the entertainers siding with the coasts against the country was inconceivable just a couple of decades ago what happened well it's just it's the it's this bubble thing it is the fact that so many people now live in cities more people live in cities we're no longer an agricultural society and this bubble effect with this incredible incredible ubiquitous media so that people are only talking to themselves. I mean, in the 60s, basically, the left seized the culture and the organs of the culture. And as they got more and more control of it, more and that for once, for once, they can hear what it feels like to be insulted like this day after day after day.

And though I don't like the fact that now our side is stooping to their level, I don't like it. It works. It works. CNN is now playing defense. New York Times, ABC, CBS, they're all playing defense because they know that Trump will call them out and a large swath of America will say, that's right, that is fake news. And I just think, you know, the more Trump derangement syndrome they get, the more Trump they're going to get. And I think that it is ultimately could be a good thing, even though I see some moral hazards there. All right, definitely. And by the way, gentlemen, we are joined by a very special guest. I don't think he's ever been on the Ricochet podcast. I won't give him a long introduction, but hey, that's his name, Rob Long. Well, Mr. Long, you've written a book, I understand, with a little help from our POTUS. Please tell us about it.

Well, first of all, fellas, I'm really pleased to be on your program. This is live. How did this go? I'm not familiar with the system. We'll edit out all the stuff when I have to worry about it. Yeah. I used to watch back when I had real people on instead of Drew Clavin and

John Gabriel. Good lord. Yeah, I didn't write a book. I just sort of put together a little book. It's probably the lowest rent, easiest writing I ever did. It was really more arranging on a page. And, God, even when I'm trying to be the rhino squish that lurks deep within me, I still get nailed by the liberals. They just won't cut me any – they won't let me in their club.

So, what am I going to do? This is is what's happening rob's book is called bigly he's too modest even to name the book the book is called bigly and it is donald trump in his own words arranged as free verse and i have i i don't know that anybody actually reads the book it's intended to flip around in and have fun with it is a straightforward satire of the president of the United States. It is killingly funny. It's really funny. And Rob just got a review in the New Yorker magazine, the New Yorker magazine,

which takes it all extremely serious and refers to our own Rob Long. Rob Long as a Trump enabler. Isn't that amazing? They've been so mad at me. And I think deep down, here's the problem. I think about that this morning. First of all, I mean, I'm in show business, so all publicity is good publicity. Secondly, before you let me go, I have a special offer for Ricochet members.

That's important, Ricochet members. But the third thing here is that, like she said, her big problem is, and I think it's a big problem the left has. She is Rebecca Mead, one of the staff members. Go ahead. Right. And their big problem is that all stuff like this normalizes Trump. Yes. And I don't know what that word means.

I don't think she knows what it means either, because the truth is that, I mean, I got some bad news for her. He's president of the United States. I remember I saw it happen on TV. I remember she took the oath of office and it happened. And her point is that if we bang our spoon on our high chair, by the way, I apologize for background noise, but I am standing outside the soundstage here at a very busy Long Island video. But the idea is that somehow we're not supposed to just get over it. I'm not saying get over it. Good Lord, everyone listening to this podcast knows exactly how I feel about Donald Trump. But on the other hand, he's kind of funny, too. And it seemed to me that looking at his speeches and hearing them, that if you kind of took him and the rule of his poems for me, when I was putting together was I couldn't add a word, I could not subtract a word,

I could not rearrange the order. It is exactly as he spoke it. And the one poem where I tried to add a little refrain that was his own refrain, the lawyers maybe take it out because they said that's you know, that is not actually precisely 100 percent what he said. So there was a little that. But there I think I think there's only one official position that you can have now about President Donald Trump, if you're in the left wing or the progressive media or whatever it is, and that's constant state of freak out. You just have to keep changing your pants every 20 minutes because you just can't handle it. He is the president, so it is normal. That's the way it is.

Yeah, it's the way it is. I mean, I remember seeing it. Listen, I'm not pretending to be somebody I'm not. I was not thrilled. I don't know. I mean, people, the Ricochet podcast listeners and Ricochet members, especially the ones who support Trump, you know, our own Max LeDoux must be looking at himself saying, how did Long manage to get this kind of reputation. But the truth is, look, whether you love the guy or hate the guy, whether you're a never-Trumper or a bag-of-hat-wearer, you've got to admit he's got a very specific, singular, unique way of expressing himself and being understood, and that

a lot of that's kind of funny. I mean, listen, I don't want to live in a world where there are humorless Trump supporters not willing to say, you the guy you know he's funny sometimes in his tweets and in the things he says and i would never want to live in the opposite world where just because you don't like him or disagree with him that you uh you want to bury your head in the sand and pretend that he isn't who he is i think in fact you've brought

out you've brought out his bardic nature. You've brought out his secret poetry of his soul. I have a question for Drew, but I'm going to read two sentences from Rebecca Mead's review first. Quote, Bigley, that's the name of the book. Let's sell books here, for goodness sake. Bigley, the name of the book. Bigley is an example of expedient political normalization

dressed up in honorable clothes of political satire final sentence it is the jocular sanctioning on the part of the right that would be rob long in case you were confused by this it is the jocular sanctioning on the part of the right of the right kind of tyrant close quote i have to say that is always what i say to rob stop your jocular sanctioning actually to be honest honest your jocular sanctioning. Actually, to be honest, jocular sanctioning was my stage name for about 11 years. So, Drew, I mean,

how can the left live without a laugh? This is like the old joke, how many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? I don't know, but it's not funny. That's right. Well, you know, at least least I think the experiment is being tried because they haven't laughed in 20 years, and they used to own the government. They still weren't laughing, so I don't know.

Well, to be fair, her point isn't that it's not funny. It's that it's funny, but it's the wrong kind of funny. That's right. They got really subtle, and they decided, oh, yeah, you can – I don't understand how someone who writes for The New Yorker, which publishes little funny little cartoons and really unfunny Andy Borowitz, could complain. I mean, I think it's, you know, satirist satire. You satirize yourself before you come after me. But, look, this is the problem.

And also, I think it's also a problem – I mean, this is going to be a wild analogy, and you can attack me later for it, but one of the problems we had after the reporting on the tragedy in Las Vegas, look, the liberal media, the progressives said, we all have to talk about guns. It's all about guns and gun control. Why don't we have, why aren't we having a national conversation about guns? Trevor Noah said, you know, the fact that we have all these shootings, we never talk about guns, but there's nobody on the staff of any of those newspapers or TV shows who knows anything about guns. And it'd be actually pretty easy to hire a reporter just to cover the gun problem. If there's a gun problem and you're exercised about it, get a reporter to cover it,

but you have to know he or she would have to know something about it. And it's sort of the same thing here with the liberal progressives as conservative thought or conservative. So as far as they're concerned, they got to twist themselves, the weird pretzels. All this lady had to do was listen to this podcast, go on Ricochet divide between the Trump supporters and the anti-never-Trumpers, and then people who are just kind of confused and halfway between each. I mean, it's a very interesting schism, political schism, in American political history that the left and the media and the left-wing media have zero interest in actually covering, which is too bad, because it would be interesting instead they're just going to write nonsense and tar everybody with some wild brush i mean good lord the irony of this one is what i love because the minute i read this review i thought you know peter robinson must be and i think i was right i could hardly breathe i was laughing

if you think they think rob is a trump courtier good lord all right well thanks so much for joining us rob um. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What is this? I'm getting the brush? I'm getting the push off here? I'm the Sandman at the Apollo right now. Just push, push, push. Well, before you do, can I just say, we're going to post it. We're going to post it on the pages. For all members, Ricochet members, if you buy a copy and send it to us, i'll sign it to you just let me know who to sign

it to just put a little card in there what you want and i'll sign it and i'll send it back uh we don't have an address yet um that's a that's a um that's a logistic concern that's just far beneath me i'm much more important but but we'll figure it out, and then you can proudly hold up this book and my signature and say, this guy's a total fraud. He's a Trump courtier. If you're on any one side of it, you're on. The important thing is you buy the book.

Buy it and rush out now in a buying frenzy. All your jocular sanctioning needs are included within the big covers of Donald Trump Inverse, and we'll of course include a link in the podcast notes. So rush out and get that thing. Thanks so much, Rob.

Thanks, Mel. Good talking to you, Rob. Congratulations. Back in New Haven, they're saying, yes, yes, yes, well, you heard about Rob Long. He's been reviewed in the New Yorker. It finally happened. He was the reviewed in The New Yorker. It finally happened. He was the jocular sanctioning man. Harold Bloom.

My Halloween costume this year will be jocular sanctioning. Jocular sanctioning. All right. Thanks. Well, speaking of books, we actually have a new sponsor, and it's called Blinkist. There's a Blinkist app. It has over 2,000 of the best-selling nonfiction books. Bigly is not on there yet, but I'm sure it's headed there soon.

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And thanks so much to Blinkist for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. I misspelled it just so nobody else would make that mistake. B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T. And by the way, a little personal testimonial here. There is a category of books, and there are a lot of books in this category and none of them is by rob long or by drew clavin that i'd sort of like to squeeze as one squeezes an orange but not really linger over because the prose is some books you want to read because they're written they're beautiful that's drew clavin and some you just want to say what

is everybody talking about about this book? Just give me the sub. And you know what? Blinkist really scratches that itch. If there's a book you've heard people talking about, you're already a quarter of the way through War and Peace, and you don't want to take yourself out. Very briefly, and I won't name books

because I've just sort of suggested that they're not always the best written book. Business books is one category. There are certain kinds of history books, and I won't name the author. But just within the last 48 hours, there was a book I'd heard people talking about, and I went on Blinkist, and I got the substance, and it really gave me all I care to know about that book. You know, it's useful. It's really useful. And one thing that's great about it as well is there's a link

in there. If you like the book, you go through your 15 minutes and it's like, wow, I want to learn more about this. Buy it right then. It's fantastic. So it's a great way to distill the important points. Speaking of great American authors, Drew Clavin, there's something called Another Kingdom

that seems to be, that will be appearing soon on Ricochet.com. What is it? When can we hear it? What's it about? I have to thank you for asking. I'm so excited about this. I really am. I got, a while back, this idea came to me. It came to me almost fully formed. It's a thriller, but it's a fantasy thriller. It's something I've never done before. And as I was looking at it, I thought, you know, I don't want to bring this out as a novel because I don't feel it's like in line with the other things I've written. And it's really exciting and really different. So I thought, why don't I try and put this together as a podcast, a fictional podcast to tell this story, Another Kingdom. And I got my friend Michael Knowles,

who is a really fine actor. He is doing the reading and we're putting it together and we're going to bring it out on Ricochet Friday the 13th. So that's next Friday, not tomorrow. It's Friday a week. And I got to say, it's a story about a Hollywood nobody who one day opens a door and walks into another kingdom. And what makes it really different than anything I've ever quite seen like this, because there are a lot of stories about two worlds, is that this world, the L.A. world in which he lives, and this kingdom in which he keeps flashing in and out of, are intimately linked, and the story just weaves in between them kind of seamlessly,

if I say so myself, and it's a very exciting thriller with a big fantasy element, and we're going to release it as a number of episodes. I think it'll probably end up having maybe 13, 14 episodes beginning Friday the 13th on Ricochet. So I hope people will tune in, and I really would like to hear feedback about it because we will be listening to your reaction. Hold on. Have you written the whole thing, or is this a Charles Dickens where you're writing it chapter by chapter or episode by episode? It's a little bit of both. I know where I'm going with it, but we're still bringing it out as we go along, and so I'm listening to it.

You are a brave man. Nothing if not a brave man. That's right. But anyway, I'm really excited about it. I hope people will tune in, and I really would like to hear their feedback. Yeah, it's going to be a fantastic product. Hopefully, as soon as you're done with this, you can get published the sequel to Werewolf Cop because that's one that you wrote – what was it, a year, two years ago? Yeah, it's about two years ago.

Yeah, I devoured that in an afternoon, and I'm like, okay, where's part two? Yeah, I do need to do a sequel. But this one just came to me. It was so powerful. I started working on it immediately. So I had to do it. All right. One thing I wanted to mention before going to, we had another passing this week. And I really don't like this. Before it was like Frank Sinatra passed away.

And it was like, oh, yeah, I think my parents knew who he was. It didn't have that personal effect. This week we had Tom Petty suddenly died. He just finished this huge reunion tour, basically. Critics were raving about it. And he passed away this week. Just wanted to say a couple words on him. I'm on my own podcast with Stephen Miller, The Conservatarians.

We always give our music recommendations at the end of the show and play some brand new song that just came out. I usually go to more indie stuff. But Tom Petty was just one of those, he was basically a workman. He was like the utility player in an acting team. Great songs, great hits, great guy. And I've been going through a lot of videos of his. There was a performance he did

at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to honor George Harrison. They played When My Guitar Gently Weeps. He had Prince on the stage, Steve Winwood. All these stars were up there playing. But yeah, just a great guy, influenced a lot of musicians, and he never got a ton of credit. He wasn't one of these larger-than-life rock stars trashing hotel rooms. Just a good guy. uh i loved his work for the traveling willberries and uh we'll miss you tom i think we're going to play out with a song by him so i wanted to get that in and once again this podcast was brought to you by texture bull and branch and blinkist and please support them for supporting us visit our ricochet store as well lots of great ricochet

swag in there and if you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to leave a review on iTunes. Your reviews allow new listeners to discover us. We move up in the rankings on iTunes, and it helps keep the show going, helps the conversation get going. And please, podcast listener, join today on our brand new ex-John tier,

named after the famous John Gabriel. Only $2.50 a month, dirt cheap. That's less than I spend on a macchiato when I go to my pretentious little hipster coffee house. I spend about twice that. Please do all these things. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you, Drew. Thank you,

Peter. Thanks to Charlie and Rob. We'll see you in the comments, everyone. Take care, fellas. So long. See ya. 1, 2, 3, fellas. So long. See ya. One, two, three, four. Good night, baby. Sleep tight, my love May God watch over you from above

Tomorrow I'm working, what would I do? I'd be lost and lonely If not for you So close your eyes We're all right For now I've spent my life traveling Spent my life free I could not repay all you've done for me

So sleep tight, baby Unfurl your brow And know I love you. We're all right for now. We're all right for now. Ricochet. Join the conversation.