CZM Rewind: Harlon Carter: the Man Who Militarized the Cops and the NRA

Originally aired June 2022 Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss Harlon Carter and NRA. SOURCES: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/04/27/meet-the-2-texans-who-took-over-the-nra-and-made-the-gun-rights-group-a-feared-and-powerful-force/%3foutputType=amp https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/22/us/harlon-b-carter-longtime-head-of-rifle-association-dies-at-78.html https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linktv.org%2Fthe-legacy-of-the-texas-rangers-a-look-at-the-long-history-of-violence-at-the-border&data=05%7C01%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cd1cfb387b7824336b4ea08da4da686f1%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C637907674876222099%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=0cm%2FdSRPoBf2Q6VoySea0EQHV3uo%2FR%2FHTkA7uGMsjv8%3D&reserved=0https://www.linktv.org/the-legacy-of-the-texas-rangers-a-look-at-the-long-history-of-violence-at-the-border https://timeline.com/harlon-carter-nra-murder-2f8227f2434f https://bostonreview.net/articles/america-as-a-tactical-gun-culture/ https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/04/us/hard-line-opponent-of-gun-laws-wins-new-term-at-helm-of-rifle.html https://nraontherecord.org/harlon-carter/ https://medium.com/epic-magazine/sons-of-guns-a250e6637593 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/battleground-america https://scholar.colorado.edu/downloads/s1784m73m https://addran.tcu.edu/history/files/Dissertation-Prospectus-2.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20190331211610/http://www.davekopel.com/NRO/2000/Misfiring-at-Harlon-Carter.htm https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2022/05/31/how-nra-evolved-from-backing-1934-ban-on-machine-guns-to-where-it-is-now-commentary/ https://www.thetrace.org/2020/01/gun-industry-legal-immunity-plcaa/ https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-28/how-defective-guns-became-the-only-product-that-can-t-be-recalled https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LW0MNW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LW0MNW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Robert Evans?

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• 1:07Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:10Robert Evans?

  Hey, everyone. Robert here, and we're on reruns this week, so we're deciding to rerun two episodes with you, cutting multiple parts into a single episode, reducing some ads, and getting some ears on some topics that have unfortunately only become more relevant as time has gone on. And this week, we're talking about one of the founders of Border Patrol as an organization and institution, and one of the men who was behind the start of the NRA and its growth into what it has become today. Like with the DHS, these episodes have only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, and it's very important that we get them in front of as many people as we can. So please, listen and, I don't know, enjoy seems like the wrong word, but enjoy.

• 1:56Robert Evans?

  Matt.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  So.

• 2:00Robert Evans?

  How are you doing today?

• 2:01Speaker 04

  I'm good, man. I just got married.

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  You did just get married.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  I got married to former guest Francesca Fiorentini, you know?

• 2:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, one of our favorite guests with our least favorite. Oh, shit.

• 2:11Speaker 04

  Oh, how dare you, motherfucker.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  I'm just being an asshole. We love you. That's why I've brought you on to read you a 12,000 word script about, um.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Ooh, a script?

• 2:21Robert Evans?

  Oh, a script. That's right, Matt. Um, because, because I do love you and we have such a good time talking. And I wanted to celebrate. I'm sorry. You, you have embarked on this new chapter of your life.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, love. I got love in my life. Yeah, I actually, this is the perfect palate cleanser to a weekend of joy.

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  Coming on this podcast and just being just torn to shreds emotionally.

• 2:45Robert Evans?

  Cause there's gonna be no joy here. Matt.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:49Robert Evans?

  How do you feel? How do you feel? First off, I guess, have you ever heard of a motherfucker named Harlan Carter?

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Harlan Carter? I don't think so.

• 2:57Robert Evans?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  Is that Jimmy Carter's brother?

• 3:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy, not at all. That would be Billy Carter and Billy Carter will be on our, our episode behind the heroes.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, cause he seems pretty chill. I thought you were gonna ruin, you know, that guy, cause uh, he seemed pretty dope.

• 3:13Robert Evans?

  Can you imagine back when like the biggest scandal a president had? Was that like his brother made bad beer?

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 3:20Robert Evans?

  What a time. What an administration.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was just like, hey, his brother's too cool.

• 3:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Dudes, dudes were not supposed to rock this much. That was, uh, you know, that was the biggest scandal he had.

• 3:33Robert Evans?

  We gotta get this guy out of the White House and put in a dude who's gonna do part of a genocide. Anyway, Matt, how do you feel about the proliferation of firearms in American society?

• 3:46Speaker 04

  Um, I'm pro.

• 3:49Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  I think, uh, you know, the more guns, the better, obviously. Uh, nothing, you know, uh, the only thing that uh, stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I think we all know that. Um, and I think it's

• 4:04Robert Evans?

  Or nineteen good guys with guns stacked outside of a classroom for seventy eight minutes.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Exactly, dude. Just kind of sitting around waiting to be like,

• 4:13Robert Evans?

  Waiting to be good guys.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Oh, I can't wait to be a hero. I'll just give it another forty five minutes.

• 4:18Robert Evans?

  You've got to clock in first.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:21Robert Evans?

  So it's interesting. It's fun that we got to the militarize, the incompetent militarization of police. Because this is a thing, one of the things that's frustrating, obviously, you and I may have some slightly different attitudes towards firearms. But I'm, I'm, I'm frustrated with American gun culture, which I think is primarily toxic. And also the culture of police militarization, which is a hundred percent toxic.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 4:46Robert Evans?

  Um, and the guy we're going to talk about today, Harland Carter, is the dude who started both of those things. He's the guy who started militarizing the police and he's the guy who made the NRA.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  This dude.

• 4:58Robert Evans?

  It is, Sophie's got a picture of him. He looks like, he looks like who you would cast if you were putting Kingpin, that like comic book villain. He looks like Kingpin. Like he literally looks exactly like Kingpin.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  He looks so mean.

• 5:12Robert Evans?

  And spoiler.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Sorry for body shaming the NRA guy.

• 5:16Robert Evans?

  I would prefer any gangster to, it's not even body shaming. He just looks like, like his, his neck is the width of his ears.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  No, he's like a literal dickhead. Like it is the most dickheadish head I've ever seen.

• 5:28Robert Evans?

  He is a chode someone poured into a suit.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that this is what Joe Rogan was like, I want this. And then that's where he based his style off of.

• 5:39Robert Evans?

  Like some, someone has been cutting Joe Rogan's HGH with lemon juice just to try to keep him from getting too huge. But if Joe got the amount of HGH that he intended to shoot into his testicles, this is how he would look.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, he would look like this guy.

• 5:53Robert Evans?

  His neck would be even thicker.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  He's exactly the way you are picturing him in your minds, listeners.

• 6:00Robert Evans?

  He does kind of look like, cause Alex Jones has that thick neck, but he's like not that, not, he's a little, he's smaller.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:07Robert Evans?

  And, and Joe Rogan's got that, that big muscle, muscle guy head. If like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, if you like in vitro fertilized, like cut their sperm in half and like merged them together with the egg from like a dead California condor, you would get Harland Carter.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  What's better is this painting of him where he literally looks like Dr. Evil.

• 6:28Robert Evans?

  He does. He does look like Dr. Evil.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Who painted him?

• 6:31Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 6:32Robert Evans?

  A lot of people. He's a very important person.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  That we would not get drinks with.

• 6:36Robert Evans?

  So we're gonna have to start by discussing the history of gun control in the United States. And because this is the United States, that also started with white supremacy.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  I can only, yes, like just from, uh, this is just a guess. But I bet you gun control laws, uh, that have been enacted were mostly racist.

• 6:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's one of those things when you get these, you get these arguments online where like people will be like, gun culture is white supremacist. And it's like, yeah, an awful lot of it is. And then folks who are pro-gun will be like, well, gun control is white supremacist. And you're both right, because it's the United States of America.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:14Robert Evans?

  It's like if you try, it's like people talking about like, oh, well, the Democratic Party used to be, like was a white supremacist party for a very long time. And it's like,

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:24Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:25Robert Evans?

  Both major US parties are primarily rooted in white supremacy.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. And it's always, it's always super weird that, you know, whenever someone is just like, nah, and it's like, what? Why are you? You don't need to be so attached to being a Democrat that you're just gonna refuse to believe that it's.

• 7:43Robert Evans?

  And this doesn't make an argument one way or the other about gun control, because like you could say, like zoning laws have a lot of their rooting in white supremacy. It doesn't mean zoning shouldn't exist.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:54Robert Evans?

  Because fundamentally, yeah, factories maybe shouldn't be in the same places apartment complexes. But, um, that also, that like, yeah, anyway, whatever, we're gonna do our Robert.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah, we're doing gun control. We're doing CRT on this podcast. This is gonna be.

• 8:09Robert Evans?

  A little, a little bit. Yeah, we're getting into a lot of stuff, but we're gonna be talking a shitload about the Border Patrol. Uh, but first, let's talk a little bit about the history of gun control in the United States. Obviously, 1619, thereabouts, is when the first African enslaved people are brought to the United States. Uh, well, it wasn't the United States then, but you know what I'm saying, right?

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:28Robert Evans?

  Uh, the, the colonies against their will. Um, and not that long after, in 1680, which is pretty quick considering how slow things went back. Back then, the Virginia Assembly passed one of, if not the earliest gun control laws in the colonies. Now, this law did not restrict the ability of white people to be armed. It might even be more accurate to say it wasn't gun control, but weapons control. But this law passed in 1680 made it a crime for any African American to carry a weapon or weapon-like object. Now, that last term there is interesting, Matt, because you could, I mean, I, like, as a man, right? Anytime you're out in the world, you think about all the different things you could use as weapons.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  Everything is a weapon.

• 9:10Robert Evans?

  It's just a thing that happens.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  I enter every room going, what could I use for self-defense? And/or if I just felt like harming someone.

• 9:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if I had to defend myself against the 84-year-old man next to me in the post office, how hard could I hit him with one of these empty cardboard boxes?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Seriously, in the genes of, of every dude is just Mark Wahlberg going, "I would have stopped 9/11 if I had been on that plane."

• 9:34Robert Evans?

  God.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  And, you know, that's, that's all of us.

• 9:37Robert Evans?

  It would have been so funny. It would have been really funny if he'd like, if he'd stopped it, but then he'd had to try to land the plane and had accidentally crashed it into the White House, like, oh, God. Anyway, so, as you might guess, the vagueness around the term weapon-like object mean that, meant that this law, it didn't just like ban black people from, from carrying guns. It meant that they could be punished brutally for holding any object if it could be used to hit somebody. This started what wound up being like a more than a century-long tradition of elderly black people being banned from having canes.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 10:11Robert Evans?

  Because you can hit someone with the cane, right? As Gandalf showed us, you know?

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 10:16Robert Evans?

  They weren't being fooled by that in Virginia in 1680. Yes, we will pardon old man from his walking stick.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  I know a wizard staff when I see one. You think I don't know you're gonna cast a spell?

• 10:30Robert Evans?

  Now, this being 60 years after the forced importation of African slaves to the continent, the 1680 law was aimed at slaves, obviously, but it applied equally. There were some freed black people in the colony at this period, and it applied to them as well. The law was amended in 1723 to specify that Africans, African Americans were not allowed to use firearms for any purpose, be it hunting or self-defense. And again, 1723, it's kind of important to be able to use a gun, you know, just if you're living in the Virginia frontier.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of other people with guns, and it seems like the time to have one.

• 11:05Robert Evans?

  You need food and stuff, you know, and there's bears, like.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  How do you catch your food?

• 11:14Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  If you are not allowed to use a gun?

• 11:16Robert Evans?

  You can trap, but I think the purpose here, no one's thinking about like, they're not, they're doing whatever they can to make these people's lives harder because like, they're terrified of the existence of free black people.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Yes, of course.

• 11:28Robert Evans?

  And under this law, a freed black person who defended himself from a white person using a firearm was committing a crime, technically with any weapon, like, is any, like, any tool they were to use to defend themselves would be illegal. So, gun control in the early colonies, most of the time, these kind of laws in Virginia were sort of the exceptions of the rule. Because as a rule, like, there were, the laws were less kind of specifically banning certain things and more just kind of generally trying to make it possible for black people enslaved or free to challenge white supremacy in any way.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:02Robert Evans?

  So it wasn't just guns, and in fact, that, because guns were like, not as good back then, those were less of a focus than some other objects that might surprise you. Possession of dogs by black people was heavily regulated in this period.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Just having, they couldn't have dogs?

• 12:18Robert Evans?

  Well, it was not impossible, but it was very hard. If you were a black person who wanted to own a dog in Maryland in the early 1700s, for example, you were forced to get a license from the justice of the peace who was going to be a white man. So it was not easy to get a license from a justice of the peace for this. And if you managed to get one, you were still restricted to owning no more than one dog at a Time Mississippi banned the ownership of dogs for black people under any circumstances and even allowed slave patrols to kill dogs found in the house of a black person. So the police tradition of shooting people's dogs is is very old indeed.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Of course, I should have. I should have known. Of course, dog control also, you know, ties directly to white supremacy.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  Well, and it's one of those that you have to, again, weapons firearms are a lot less deadly back then. So like a gun, you get one shot and it's not easy to reload. I think there are some revolvers, but yeah, a dog, a dog, you don't need to reload, right? A Doberman will keep fucking going until, you know, yeah. So that's what, you know, white folks were particularly scared of. And again, it's also worth noting, obviously, the prohibition against black people carrying guns or other weapons makes sense if you're afraid of a slave or, you know, just an uprising, right? Because a group of people with guns can do an uprising. You can't really effectively organize a bunch of dudes and their dogs to do an uprising together. It's hard to do that with.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  I'd like to see it, though.

• 13:39Robert Evans?

  It would be cool, but clearly what they're doing here, they don't want black people to be able to defend themselves from like mob violence, right? Like individual and families, they don't want them to have any kind of defense. If like, somebody wants to to do a murder, you know?

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ, they're just like inventing, inventing laws that are completely useless. The idea that somehow this is like, oh, well, we can't, we can't kill that guy. He lives in a kennel filled with ravenous dogs surrounding him like he's fucking Ramsey Bolton.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Just like ready with hungry dogs to bite your dick off.

• 14:16Robert Evans?

  If I'm, yeah. So in the late 1700s, spoilers, the American Revolution broke out.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And by 1787, we have us a constitution, you know? We get, we fight them, English, we beat them. And then we're like, oh, boy, this first government, we tried as a giant shit show. We should probably like, give another shot at this. And they do a constitution. And eventually this constitution comes to include a bill of rights and the now infamous second amendment. We're going to be talking a lot about the changing ways. Has been interpreted through time and despite what people tend to say on either side of the modern issue, there are a couple of different ways to interpret how the so-called founding fathers intended it to function. And again, as a general rule, they weren't all in agreement about pretty much anything. But one thing is perfectly clear. They did not see the right

• 15:08Robert Evans?

  to bear arms as extending to black people. Now, black people were not categorically forbidden from owning weapons in the new United States, but in those states where it was legal for them to own arms, they were always required to register those weapons with the government. This was not the case for white people. While there was some hope during the revolution among black Americans that independence would bring about an improvement in their circumstances, and that was not unreasonable. Again, the British Empire allowed slavery too. So at this stage in time, it's not like it's perfectly reasonable to hope that like, well, maybe things will get better when they don't have a king anymore. Right? Yeah. Obviously, that doesn't happen. And when that doesn't happen, there's some uprisings in the new United States. In

• 15:51Robert Evans?

  1811, Louisiana uprising of enslaved persons failed. And in response to this, New Orleans made it a crime for black people to carry weapons. And this was again, primarily even more than guns, ban them from stuff like canes.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Crutches, wheelchairs.

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, any, yeah, definitely.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Wearing glasses.

• 16:09Robert Evans?

  Assault wheelchair.

• 16:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So as we've discussed in our Behind the Police series, many southern police departments started as slave patrols made up of armed white dudes searching for escaped slaves and using weapons to keep a boot on the neck of even free black people. In 1825, Florida gave slave patrols the right to enter any black person's home and take away firearms, ammunition, or any other weapons found. And obviously, these kind, as is the case with no-knock raids today, these often were basically just pretexts to kill people in their homes.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:41Robert Evans?

  By saying you felt threatened. Yeah. Now, in the early 1860s, obviously, we have us a civil war over slavery. And broadly speaking, this goes pretty well. If you think slavery is bad, US Civil War, broadly speaking, goes alright.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:56Robert Evans?

  Now, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the Civil War is that for the first time in US history, a shitload of black men are legally carrying guns in an organized way. 179,000 black people serve in the Union Army, which is roughly 10% of its total. And you suddenly have tens of thousands of black men with guns marching across the US South, which really freaks out people in the South.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's gotta be the scariest thing. They looked at that and they're like, "See, this is what I'm talking about." "This is the scary shit I did not want to happen."

• 17:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is why we're losing, started this war that we're losing.

• 17:33Robert Evans?

  So, post-Civil War, black people are not immediately entitled to the same rights as white people.

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  So, starting in 1865, which is the year the war ends, states like former, you know, states that had lost, basically, start enacting black codes. And these are kind of, okay, these people aren't slaves anymore, but we want to treat them that way, so let's just write new, let's just, we'll take the old laws that we had that restricted slaves from doing things in order to keep them under control, and we'll replace the word slave with servant, or you know, something similar, so that we can try to hold them under the same laws.

• 18:12Robert Evans?

  In Mississippi, black people were still banned from possessing weapons or ammunition. And if white people turned them in for this crime, they would be given their firearms as a reward. And again, this is after they've been freed, so they like, should have the right to bear arms and whatnot.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  I want to quote now from a 2021 honors thesis by Alexandra Lanzetta from the University of Colorado. Quote: Other southern states to enact their own set of black codes were Alabama and Louisiana. Both states prohibited African Americans, not including veterans, from owning guns without a license or special permit. Not surprisingly, these permits and licenses were controlled by white men, making it virtually impossible for a black man or woman to legally obtain a gun. This resulted in many blacks illegally purchasing guns, making the potential penalties of exposure even greater. Punishment for having an unlicensed firearm was a fine and confiscation of the weapon. Old slave patrols reemerged to enforce the black codes and to terrorize African Americans. This, along with a combination of great incentives to catch blacks with weapons and a hatred over their newfound freedom, created a white frenzy, making it extremely difficult to hide

• 19:10Robert Evans?

  a gun as an African American.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  White frenzy is the worst frenzy.

• 19:16Robert Evans?

  It's the most common frenzy, too, in this country.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's their most traditional American frenzy, but it is not a fun one.

• 19:26Robert Evans?

  We do love us a frenzy.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  We love a frenzy.

• 19:28Robert Evans?

  We love a good frenzy. We love a bad frenzy. So 1865, right? Bunch of black codes come into effect to basically try and keep black people in similar positions to how they'd been during slavery, even though the war was over. So in 1866, US Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which this is like, there's a big ol' fight over this. And this is the law that basically says, hey, you actually have to, these people have the same rights that white people have under the Bill of Rights, right? Like, that's what that does, you know? And, you know, things do get a lot better for a while, you know?

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, Reconstruction at this point was like, do you ever just like, read up on Reconstruction and go like, holy shit, for a hot second there?

• 20:12Robert Evans?

  We seemed to be on a good track for a minute.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  We were on a good track. Like, it seemed like shit was gonna, like, work out.

• 20:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, things get a lot better for a while, and then there's a violent reaction from the reactionaries. And they do an insurgency, which is kind of centered around the KKK. We have talked about this in other episodes. It ends with a series of demeaning, bigoted laws aimed at maintaining white supremacy in the former Confederacy. These are, you know, Jim Crow laws, right? And these come into place alongside a wave of lynchings which killed at least like 5,000 black Americans. Obviously, there's no way of knowing the actual total. Good chance it was significantly more, but at least 5,000. Um, so in response, black people do what you would expect. They form militias, you know? They start carrying guns for what? I don't think I need to explain the logic here, right?

• 21:05Robert Evans?

  And they organize to stop lynchings. This culminates in Louisiana in 1876, where a bunch of Klansmen who are also government officials, these are like elected leaders in Louisiana, who are also in the KKK, are charged with conspiring to disarm a meeting of black Americans. Basically, like, one of these groups of black folks had gotten together with guns to like, figure out how to protect their community. And these state officials like, try to take their weapons away.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:32Robert Evans?

  A bunch of court shit happens. It goes to the Supreme Court, who rules in favor of the Ku Klux Klan, saying that the state had the legal right to disarm this meeting to protect the common good.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  God.

• 21:44Robert Evans?

  And you know, in this period of time, there's also, one of the things that's happening during the lynching period is sometimes lynchings get stopped because the person who was attempted to be lynched has a gun, and they shoot the people trying to lynch them. And when that happens, a number of laws are passed in different towns and states to ban the carrying of concealed firearms. And in fact, those are some of the first specific laws against the carrying of concealed handguns. Now, this is an area where like, the kind of the anti-gun control people tend to focus entirely on this stuff. It's very much worth noting, all gun control in the United States in this period is not based in white supremacy, in part because a lot of it is put in areas where like, most of the population is white. And there was, it's worth noting, significantly more gun control

• 22:26Robert Evans?

  in portions of the like, the so-called Wild West, than there are in a lot of those same states today. In places like the Dakotas and whatnot, it was common for the open carrying of firearms to be restricted. In many towns, if a visitor came into town, they would be expected to leave their guns with the local police before entering. They'd get like, a little card or something. You weren't supposed to like, like, there were, it's, it's- And there's, you know, a lot to be said about like, why this is being done, but in general, it's being done because they see that it's, it's perfectly reasonable to say that like, well, there should be restrictions on what you can do in town with a firearm, right?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Walking around with a gun seems, I don't know, threatening.

• 23:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they certainly don't want you doing it openly. And then like, there's a bunch of, there's laws about carrying concealed and those kind of vary from place to place. But it's worth noting that the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral actually occurred because a guy, like, it was over gun control, right? Like, a guy was openly carrying his guns in the city. And, you know, there was, as far as I'm aware, like, everyone involved in that, I'm pretty sure was like, a white dude. So I don't think there's anything particularly racist in the gunfight. You could talk about it involving, like, police overreach.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 23:38Robert Evans?

  Which people will make the case that, like, this was, this was a case of, like, a fucking early cop going bugfuck on some people.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Don't tread on me!

• 23:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  And just people, did you see this whole time? I didn't know that that was a real gunfight at the OK Corral.

• 23:52Robert Evans?

  Oh, no, no, no. It's a pretty cool story, as, as it perfectly accurately described in the documentary Tombstone.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Hmm, that's a great doc.

• 24:02Robert Evans?

  Starring Val Kilmer, yes.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  See, I, yeah, I, I thought the reason was, you know, like, a card game got lost or something, or someone had, like, extra aces up their sleeve, but it turns out gun control.

• 24:13Robert Evans?

  No, that would be the, that would be the documentary, shit, was it Maverick? What's the documentary about the card guy who gets like, yeah, yeah, yeah?

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that's Maverick.

• 24:21Robert Evans?

  I need to re-watch that. That was a good fucking, that's a good movie.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  My other guess was gonna be a giant metal spider who tries to take over the cell.

• 24:29Robert Evans?

  My third favorite documentary. And this is what brought about the, the famous US law against the carrying of gigantic metal spiders.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Right, right, right, right.

• 24:36Robert Evans?

  Which I consider to be the civil rights era of the day.

• 24:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 24:39Robert Evans?

  I think access to giant metal spiders should be democratized. I mean, I'm, that's just a legitimate point.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Well, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a giant metal spider is a good guy with a giant metal spider.

• 24:49Robert Evans?

  I would argue that you can't be a bad guy with a giant metal spider.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 24:52Robert Evans?

  Because, look, no matter what it's doing, if I get to see a giant metal spider tromping around town, my day's improved. Like, I don't care what that spider's going about doing.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  Everyone feels safe and happy.

• 25:00Robert Evans?

  Everybody feels better with a giant metal spider. So...

• 25:02Speaker 04

  This podcast is brought to you by GiantMetalSpider.com. Promo code GiantMetalSpider.

• 25:10Robert Evans?

  Get yours today.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  You're actually right on time, because it is, it is about that time.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 25:16Robert Evans?

  Well, look... Everybody's talking a lot about AR-15s. You know what's more powerful than an AR-15? A metal spider, spider the size of the Chrysler Building.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  That is scary.

• 25:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:34Robert Evans?

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• 27:14Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back. So you have, you know, again, the Wild West, how common gunfights and stuff were, especially in like cities and towns, is exaggerated. But also, there was a lot of like, there were a lot of robberies, there were a lot of crimes, like, and it's the same as it is today. Like, the gunfights that have kind of come down to history were like the ones that the media went nuts on in the day, like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Right. Um, but broadly speaking, by the, the end of the 1800s, most places in the United States had banned the concealed carrying of handguns, although open carrying remained legal in a lot of places. We'll talk about when that ended.

• 27:58Robert Evans?

  In 1893, the government of Texas said that, quote, "The mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder, to check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man." And again, he was probably saying that primarily because he didn't want black people to have concealed guns. This is the governor of Texas in 1893. So, do keep that in mind. But, um, US gun control in this period was at least deeply preoccupied with the specter of armed black people. And even where laws were perfectly reasonable, they were often used specifically to enforce white supremacy, even if that hadn't been the initial intent of the law. Lanzetta writes, quote, "Another example of discrimination is found in legal proceedings during the Jim Crow era involved an 11-year-old black boy with a toy gun.

• 28:40Robert Evans?

  In St. Louis in 1900, it was illegal to fire a gun within city limits, and the boy was charged for violating this law. However, when his case was being reviewed by a judge to determine his guilt, it was discovered that the gun was fake. Knowing this new information, the judge should have dropped all charges, given that it is not possible to fire a fake gun. But this was not the case. Instead, the boy was found guilty and the judge fined him $10, almost $310 today."

• 29:04Robert Evans?

  Which is interesting. I did. Again, another thing that goes back very far is black kids being penalized for having toy guns.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Right, exactly.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  Quite, quite far back. Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  I mean, it's literally just, these are like rulings. It's like, well, you scared me.

• 29:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  That's, that's the entire thing. That has been the, I believe, the explanation for the deaths of countless, countless black people.

• 29:29Robert Evans?

  Well, and it's also just like this.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  I was scared.

• 29:32Robert Evans?

  Perhaps we don't like, perhaps we're fundamentally frightened by the concept, even if it's a toy of like, black people having guns, because that's how we maintain our power over them, right?

• 29:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:42Robert Evans?

  Which is, again, even in these areas where concealed carrying or open carrying is illegal, it's generally not illegal for white people to do if they're being vigilantes, right? This is a key aspect of this period. And this brings us back to the glorious state of Texas. Like much of the South, after the Civil Rights Act, legislators had to at least pretend that their laws meant to disarm black people were not motivated by racism. Brendan Rivas from Texas Christian University writes, quote, "The post-1865 laws, however, used race-neutral language to accomplish a racially motivated goal. Most of these laws attempted to disarm black Texans, but some from the 1870s stopped to curb the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan by disarming everyone. For instance, a part of the Texas

• 30:24Robert Evans?

  Slave Code prohibited slaves from carrying a gun without written permission from a master or overseer, and a law passed in 1866 prohibited laborers from carrying firearms onto a plantation without the owner's consent. In race-neutral, in race-neutral language, the 1866 law achieved the same result as the Slave Code without specifically declaring that African-Americans should be disarmed. Their arming was conditional, subject to the authorization of an interested white party. Similarly, the state's first comprehensive weapons control law did not use racially charged language, but left enforcement in the hands of local officials who could apply it selectively against uppity blacks or white vigilantes, depending on which political party controlled those local offices." And you can guess which of those happens more often.

• 31:06Robert Evans?

  And this is the state of affairs legally in the state of Texas. When Harland Bronson Carter is born on August 10th, 1913 in Granbury, Texas. Now, at the time, Granbury's primary claim to fame was that it was the home of Davy Crockett for a little while. And every town in Texas was Davy Crockett's home for a little while. So not super impressive. And yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Every town is just, he stayed at a motel here for two weeks.

• 31:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Just fucking all our hookers.

• 31:40Robert Evans?

  He's like a celebrated hunter and frontier guy. And Harland certainly, like I heard God knows how many fucking stories about Davy fucking Crockett when I was a kid in my mandatory Texas history class. I am going to guess in like 1920, young Harland Carter is growing up and learning even more of these stories.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:03Robert Evans?

  And obviously, he's also enmeshed in the local gun culture of the time. Pretty much everywhere is semi-rural. So he's, you know, he does a lot of hunting. He does a lot of target shooting. He becomes an excellent shot from an early age. And he develops an intense affinity for firearms, shall we say. So when he's young, the family moves to Laredo. And Laredo is a border town, right?

• 32:28Robert Evans?

  And they moved to Laredo because his father is a Border Patrol agent. And in fact, is one of the very first Border Patrol agents. So the year that they moved to Laredo is 1927. Harland's 14. And it's the same year that a Border Patrol inspector named Clifford Perkins makes a trip to the town and expresses in an official document his shock to find that, quote, "Laredo was strictly a Mexican town. Probably 90% of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent." He adds with horror, "The only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself." And this is an interesting, like Laredo at this point, because it's, it's so heavily Mexican is, is not a town controlled by white people and the police are not a white force, right? You'll note that quote I read earlier states that like, kind of the laws

• 33:13Robert Evans?

  against gun control were usually mainly like, uh, put into force against like armed black people, but depending on politics could be used to try to stop white vigilantes. Well, this is one of those towns where maybe that's more likely because the police force is not white. Um, so the border patrol, however, is not happy with the idea of a town where Mexican folks are running things, right? That does not thrill them.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, next, you know, they'll start inviting other Mexicans to live here and they won't stop the border. I mean, I, I love the idea of these like, people going to a town right on the border of Mexico in Texas, which used to be Mexico and being like, what the hell are all these Mexicans doing?

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. These communities that had been there for decades before a state of Texas was a thing that anyone had thought of being like, these people are going to change the nature of Texas.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now, this is not the Texas I know that we invented about 20 years ago.

• 34:12Robert Evans?

  That we invented when I was 15.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  So this inspector guy Perkins, again, is exactly as racist as you might expect. And he, he decides that Laredo's immigration cops are not going to be able to enforce US immigration restrictions, which are again geared towards enforcing white supremacy. If the, the state of affairs in Laredo remains the way that it is. So he carries out what he describes as a quote, "full-scale house cleaning." Now, in the wonderful book, MIGRA, Kelly Hernandez writes, quote, "He charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector and border patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrant smuggling and forced just under half of Laredo's 28 border patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select border patrolmen, who had all been

• 34:57Robert Evans?

  Texas Rangers, into the Laredo sector because all were experienced, well-disciplined fighters who knew the country well. Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the border patrol station from the local Mexican-American political elite." Tension quickly mounted between the ex Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo Police Department. While the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with the local police in most borderland communities, in 1927, several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol got in their Model T automobiles and spent about half an hour circling and shooting up the police station.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Holy fuck.

• 35:32Robert Evans?

  So he cleans house, brings in a bunch of Texas Rangers, which is like the most racist police force in the United States in this period. And has them shoot up the police station.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Fucking A. I mean, like, on the one hand, A cab.

• 35:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, on the one hand.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  But on the other hand, I don't think it's A. I think it's just these particular cabs, you know what I mean? Like, they're going after specifically an armed group of Mexican Americans.

• 36:03Robert Evans?

  It's also probably worth noting that in this period, if you're being a fucking, being a, being a Mexican-American police officer in Laredo in 1927 is a bit different from being a police officer pretty much anywhere in the United States at this point. Which is part of like, why the Border Patrol is purging them. Because he's like, you guys, they're not stopping, they're not stopping immigration. They're not like violently cracking down on people who aren't white. They're not enforcing white supremacy, so we have to get rid of them with guns.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:34Robert Evans?

  And they get rid of, they do get rid of the Laredo Police Force with guns. So.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Only time in American history that police have been able to be fired.

• 36:44Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah, this is, this is the one time it happened. This is what it took.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  The one time.

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  So it's safe to say that Laredo was a pretty wild place when Harland Carter was an adolescent. His father, Horace, was among the first cohort of Border Patrol agents hired in 1927. And he was transferred to Laredo in 1927 as part of this process. It's entirely possible that Horace Carter was one of the guys shooting that police station.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:11Robert Evans?

  And, and in this period of time, Harland's father would have seen his job as explicitly to use violence to assert white supremacy in a place where most people were not white. Quote from Migra, although most local stations developed their own strategies, policies and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican-American leadership. The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge for white violence within Mexican-dominated Laredo. So they've turned the Border Patrol prior to this, and they're all like, local guys, right? So they don't really care about like, Mexican-American, like Mexicans coming into America, because like, that's how they got there, right?

• 37:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:55Robert Evans?

  That's like, their family, everybody, like, and again, they also probably don't see the border as this solid thing.

• 38:00Speaker 04

  No, it's completely made up.

• 38:01Robert Evans?

  Because their relatives have lived here for forever. It used to not be like, a thing to cross.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:06Robert Evans?

  But this is the period where the border is really is becoming a thing, in a way that hadn't been before. And part of how they do that is they clean house, bring in a bunch of white people and have them shoot anybody who disagrees, right? Like, that's how the border becomes real in Laredo.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  The American way. And it's how borders are enforced everywhere.

• 38:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  That's why borders are bad, folks.

• 38:27Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. Although today, I mean, there's a long conversation to be had about the fact that the Border Patrol today is extremely diverse. Like, one of the things people on the left particularly have gotten wrong about Uvalde is like, the assertion that like, well, they probably didn't go in because those kids were Hispanic. And it's like, have you seen the pictures of the Uvalde police? A lot of them are Mexican-American. It's, and the Border Patrol guy, like, it's, it's the whole thing. Like, if you go down to border communities, you'll see.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:53Robert Evans?

  It's not that simple.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  White supremacy isn't, is always as like, superficial and simple as it, as it seems.

• 38:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So in 1930, Harlan, aged 16, joins the National Rifle Association. And again, the NRA is rightfully, again, I'm, I'm more pro-gun than most people on the left tend to be. But the NRA is like, undoubtedly, for, we'll be spending hours talking about this, incredibly toxic. It's not at this point, right?

• 39:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:21Robert Evans?

  It's not, there's nothing wrong with the NRA at this stage, really. And in fact, the NRA has its roots on the, the correct side of the Civil War.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  There are these two- Union generals who are like, because again, civil war, one of the things early on, uh, the South is doing pretty well. And part of why they're doing pretty well is that like, all the boys who like wind up fighting in the Confederacy's military, like they're country boys, right? They've grown up shooting and hunting. They're like, and, and using guns to enforce white supremacy. They're good with firearms. Whereas, most of the northern boys who get drafted are like city kids, and many of them had never had any chance to, to use firearms. So they're like, they, they suck with them, right? Um, and these two union generals are like, boy, our soldiers are really bad at shooting, and it takes a long time to train them up. Maybe if we should get ready for the next war by having

• 40:10Robert Evans?

  an organization where boys who grew up in urban areas can like go in and learn how to shoot, you know, like, that seems like a good thing to encourage. Um, so that's, and the NRA up until the early 20th century is like a sportsman's association. You're doing it for target shooting, you're doing it for hunting. Um, now it is worth noting that like from the beginning, and this was not seen as problematic at all at the time, there's a military aspect to it as well. It's not like a military organization, but part of the purpose of the NRA is to prepare people to be part of the military if necessary. And this is also, the military is a really different thing in this period. You know, we have a big standing army during the civil war, but we hadn't before, and we don't quickly afterwards, right? Like this is again, when World War I happens, they have to like make

• 40:55Robert Evans?

  an army. When World War II happens, they have to like make an army in a way that like it had not hugely existed prior to this. So there's this understanding that like if there's an emergency, we're going to need to activate all of these civilians and they need to be ready to like fight and, and, and whatnot. Um, so yeah, uh, the US Defense Department would regularly hand over old weapons and other equipment to the NRA, which would sell them to members quite cheaply. This, it, it used to be able to get like World War II guns, like Garens for really cheap from the NRA. It was a bunch of stuff they did like that. Um, so in February 1931, the Carter family's car is stolen from in front of their house, right? Um, now they have no idea who does this.

• 41:35Speaker 04

  This is the origin story of so many racists, but go on.

• 41:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy, Matt. So again, as far as I know, it was never figured out who had done this. But a couple of weeks after their car is stolen on March 3rd, 1931, while Horace Carter is out at work, Harland's mother sees three Hispanic boys, quote unquote, loitering out in front of the house. Now, she says loitering, we have no idea. It's they may have just been like walking around or what like even if they're loitering, it doesn't justify this, but like racist white lady sees people who are not white vaguely close to her house and she decides that like these boys must have been who stole my car.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes. The earliest recorded incident of Karen.

• 42:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Karen Carter calls the cops.

• 42:21Robert Evans?

  Karen Carter, well, you can't really call it's 1931. Some people do have phones. I don't know if they do. It's not easy to call. It's not as easy to call the cops.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  They send a pigeon or whatever those those guys did.

• 42:32Robert Evans?

  No, um, her son winds up taking this into his own hands.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  Ah, yes, that's right.

• 42:37Robert Evans?

  I'm going to quote from a write up in timeline here. The elder Carter was at work and likely wouldn't be home for hours. So the son picked up his shotgun and walked out the door. It didn't take him long to find the boys who were between the ages of 15 and 12 at a swimming hole nearby. He demanded they come home with him. When they asked why he wouldn't say 15 year old Ramon Casiano responded, hell no, we won't go to your house and you can't make us. Carter and Casiano started swearing at each other. Casiano pulled out a knife and asked if he wanted to fight. Carter lifted his shotgun to Ramon's chest. According to testimony from that time, Ramon told him not to do it and pushed the shotgun aside. Then he took a step back and laughed annoyed by Ramon's lack of fear. Carter asked if he thought he wasn't going to shoot. Then he did. Casiano lay dying on the ground with a two inch shotgun wound in his chest.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 43:23Robert Evans?

  So that sounds familiar, right? There's there's shades of Rittenhouse. There's shades of of Zimmerman, you know? Like this is again, not and obviously I'm sure like if we had been around at the time and paying attention to the news would say, oh, there's shades of like this thing that happened in like 1920 and this thing that happened, right? Like.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  We just happen to know the most recent incidents.

• 43:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. This is a very familiar incident, right? And you can imagine if this happened today, it would be a massive culture war. Well, he had a knife. What was supposed to be was just defending his family and yada, yada, yada. So it's worth noting. Talking about why Harland felt comfortable leaving the home carrying a shotgun, which there are somewhat like, obviously it's not entirely legal to carry shotguns because people go out and hunt and stuff, but this is, you're not supposed to like walk out to try and solve the robbery of your car with a 12 gauge shotgun.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:15Robert Evans?

  Like, that's not explicitly legal.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:17Robert Evans?

  Um, but there's a long history of vigilante violence by white people. And so whether or not this actually is legal is going to come down heavily on the local courts, right? And so the fact, because this is happening in Laredo, if this had happened in like Dallas, you know, the city of hate, perhaps it would never have been even an issue, but because it's happening in Laredo, this is going to be a problem for Harland.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Did you call Dallas the city of hate?

• 44:40Robert Evans?

  That's literally its nickname.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  What?

• 44:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the nickname of Dallas, Texas is the city. We killed JFK.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, good point. Holy shit.

• 44:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  The city, the city of brotherly hate. That's, um, wow.

• 44:55Robert Evans?

  I mean, not anymore, but like, that is, that is the nickname of Dallas, Texas. Like, um, yeah. So because this happens in Laredo, the law is not as on his side, um, as you might expect if it had happened in some other parts of Texas. Harland Carter is arrested, he is tried, and he is convicted of murder. Um, he's sentenced to three years in prison. Again, you can say like, he should have been sentenced to more. I, I, I'm mixed because he was a child, right?

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  This is bad, but also like, I think you have to, if you believe children are not culpable in the way that adult, but anyway, this is academic because he only serves two years. Um, his family appeals the, the, uh, the judgment, um, and they complain for about a number of things. They say the judge is related to the prosecutor, uh, that, that self-defense had not been adequately explained to the jury, that one of the witnesses was like a criminal himself and wasn't trustworthy. A bunch of racist shit.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. They were like, well, uh, the judge failed to consider that, uh, the victim was no angel.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. That like, that's based, yeah. Although they focus more on like the, the kid who watched his friend get his brother or whatever get murdered was no angel.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. He was also no angel.

• 46:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, so eventually-

• 46:13Speaker 04

  You are legally allowed to kill no angels.

• 46:15Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  That's in the Bible.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's why anytime I see a bunch of floating eyes, I just start shooting.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:22Robert Evans?

  Um, that was a biblical angel joke.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Sure was.

• 46:27Robert Evans?

  So eventually, a judge with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agrees that like, the case was bad, and he overturns Harland Carter's conviction on these grounds and because, quote, "Several of the material witnesses for the state have been discredited, having been convicted of infamous crimes." It does not seem accurate that they were convicted of infamous crimes. But, you know, it's also worth noting that like Harland's dad helped run law enforcement in Laredo. It's impossible that some of the people who had witnessed the shooting were like targeted by the police to provide plausible deniability for his kid, if not likely. So Harland gets let out of prison. His conviction is overturned, and he proceeds with life now as a young adult, as a free

• 47:12Robert Evans?

  man. He enrolls in the University of Texas, but he changes his name. So his original name had been Harland, H-A-R-L-A-N, and he swaps out the A for an O. And he does this basically under the understanding that like, well, this will make it hard. If people go looking for Harland Carter's criminal record, they won't find anything.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  Wait, so he changed it to Horland?

• 47:34Robert Evans?

  Harland. Harland. H-A-R-L-O-N as opposed to H-E-R-L-A-N, right?

• 47:38Speaker 04

  Okay, okay, got it.

• 47:39Robert Evans?

  And again, it's a marker of like how different the time is that like this works perfectly for him for decades. Like people are like, "Ah, well, they swapped an A with an O. No other we can do."

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like, well, the search engine doesn't do other letters, so fuck it.

• 47:55Robert Evans?

  It was so easy to get away with crimes back in the 30s. My God, was it easy.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Speaking of getting away with crimes, do you know?

• 48:03Robert Evans?

  If you walked fast, like if you could walk pretty fast, you could get away with a crime.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Oh, man, those were the days.

• 48:11Robert Evans?

  Those were the days. Let's bring them back.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Robert, do you know who else gets away with crimes?

• 48:17Robert Evans?

  The corporation when they hired those mercenaries to gun down union organizers in Latin America?

• 48:22Speaker 03

  That was a lob, and you took it. I'm very proud of you.

• 48:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Drink.

• 48:30Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back and I'm just gonna have a nice refreshing sip of

• 48:35Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a classic drink, you know?

• 48:38Robert Evans?

  That tastes like locking a bunch of nuns and you and organizers in a church and lighting it on fire. Mmm, god, that's good stuff.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  Yummy.

• 48:46Robert Evans?

  Love it. So, uh, again, it's one of those things, if this had kind of been the end of Harland Carter's story, I'd say like, well, that was a fucked up thing that happened, but I guess I don't believe a 16 year old should be locked in prison for their whole life. Um, so, uh, but that's not the end of the story.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it sucks that like, there are, yeah, like cases where I'm like, it would be sick if he had

• 49:14Robert Evans?

  It's like with Kyle Rittenhouse. I don't think the right thing was to throw him in a hole for forever. Certainly the right thing is not to turn him into a celebrity and give him millions of dollars. That's maybe even worse, but like, I, I think fundamentally, you have to believe that like, well, if a child does something, even if it's heinous, you have to be extra focused on the possibility of rehabilitation because otherwise, you don't actually believe that children are less responsible than adults.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  And anytime you like, uh, try to set up, anytime you, you know, try to be more punitive, uh, it always affects, you know, uh, brown people and people of color way more.

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  And obviously, yeah, like Raymond Casiano suffers even more for, you know, whatever, however questionable you want to think. His call to pull a knife might have been, although I think it's, again, you could argue justified because the other kid had a fucking gun. Anyway, whatever.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  Fucking shotgun.

• 50:06Robert Evans?

  It's like, it's, it's, uh, one of the problems with guns in America is how often, uh, angry teenage boys get a hold of them. And this is again, quite an old story.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, tale as old as time.

• 50:18Robert Evans?

  But regardless of like, what you think of should be done when kids commit murder, uh, Harland definitely committed murder. That's not self-defense. Uh, and anyone who says otherwise is probably racist. But it's worth noting that even modern sources, and this is something, this is where things get really uncomfortable. Even modern sources that are like very pro gun. Gun control, very anti Harlan Carter, who will attack Harlan for his later work with the NRA, tend to tell the story of what happened with him and Raymond Cassiano in ways that sometimes subtly reinforce Harland's claims of self-defense. This is a very strange thing I've noticed in a couple of sources. I've read a lot of articles about this guy and his, his actions can be framed in fascinating ways.

• 51:00Robert Evans?

  I want to highlight particularly a passage from the book Gunfight by Adam Winkler. And Gunfight, there's actually like five books titled Gunfight. I think one of them's like, seemed to be slightly grifty. It's like a former gun industry lobbyist who like, does an anti-gun book because I think maybe that's where the money was. I don't know. I'm not going to go into day because I haven't read it. I haven't, I haven't read it. But like, there's a bunch of books with this title. The good one, the one that you would actually be worth reading is Winkler's Gunfight. He's a, he's a UCLA professor. And Gunfight is a critical history of the battle over the second amendment in US politics. That has a lot of really useful context, including some of what I went over about like the early racism and gun control. It's, it's a good, and again, very much anti NRA.

• 51:43Robert Evans?

  But here's how Winkler describes what happened between Harlan Carter and Raymond Cassiano, which I find very peculiar. Quote, "Carter loved guns from childhood. He was an excellent shot and would go on to win two national shooting titles and set 44 national shooting records during his lifetimes. His most infamous shot, however, came at the age of 17, when in defense of his mother, he unloaded a shotgun into the chest of a knife wielding Mexican teenager."

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 52:08Robert Evans?

  That's a weird way to describe that, right?

• 52:10Speaker 04

  That's not what happened at all.

• 52:11Robert Evans?

  That's not what happened at all. That's such a weird way for, and again, Winkler is like, he's a professor of law at UCLA, like he's all over the New York Times writing about this kind of stuff. It's like really weird that he describes it that way.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  Maybe it was just like, oh man, I've done all this other research. I'm just not gonna, I'm just gonna go with the autobiography that he wrote, this description.

• 52:35Robert Evans?

  It's like calling Ramon Cassiano a knife wielding Mexican teenager. It's such like an unsettling way to choose to phrase that.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  Strange. It was just like, people forget that Cassiano was guilty and the first man.

• 52:48Robert Evans?

  He had a knife. Yeah.

• 52:49Speaker 04

  Guilty of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

• 52:51Robert Evans?

  It is, yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:53Robert Evans?

  It's again, the book is not at all right winger reactionary. There's a lot of good stuff in there. The fact that he describes Cassiano's murder in this way, though, makes me question some stuff that like, maybe I missed in vetting this thing because it's, it's a really weird passage.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  It's so strange.

• 53:08Robert Evans?

  Now, let's compare that to this write up by a right wing dude, Dave Copel, from an article he wrote explicitly defending Harland Carter's legacy. Now, in this article, he's critiquing a fundraising letter from a gun control organization that accurately noted, quote, "50 years ago, Carter shot and killed a 15 year old boy and was convicted of murder." Arguing against this, Copel writes, "The letter admitted the fact that Carter was defending his mother's ranch against a gang of intruders led by the boy and that the boy was menacing Carter with a knife." Again, this is also not true. He was not defending his mother's ranch. They were swimming.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. They were swimming and having a good time and being accused of doing a crime that they, I mean, did they do the crime even?

• 53:51Robert Evans?

  I don't think there's ever been any evidence that they did.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  They even stole a car.

• 53:55Robert Evans?

  Again, this is a little murky, but it kind of seems like what happened is their car was stolen. A couple of weeks later, she sees some Mexican kids walk past their house towards a swimming hole and sic's her son on them. Right? That kind of seems like what happened.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  That seems, that tracks.

• 54:10Robert Evans?

  And it's, it's weird because Winkler and Copel could not be more apart ideologically. But their description of this murder is very similar in way like I just, it's, I don't want to harp too much on this, but it's like really weird to me that that happened.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do you have any like inkling as to why that may be? Or is there just a?

• 54:31Robert Evans?

  Most people don't dwell too much on, it took me a while actually to find good, specific details about what happened that day. And I think most people take the attitude that just like.

• 54:48Robert Evans?

  Well, he said he was defending his mom and like that's the, I don't know, I think in part, you know, Winkler's covering a lot of ground, right? Cause his book is a whole, is not, it's not focused on Carter. It's a whole history of like, kind of the, how the second amendment has been interpreted and ruled on and whatnot over a couple of centuries. So he does have a lot of ground to cover. It's just very, and I guess that, one of the things he did was just kind of brush over what happened there. It's

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, just an unconscious bias, yeah.

• 55:16Robert Evans?

  Like the way I would do it, right? Cause it's perfectly reasonable if you're covering a broad history to not go into detail, but I would have just said something like, uh, he confronted, you know, another teenager, uh, over like, you know, something his mother said and like, or he just confronted another teenager and shot him under suspicious, even that would be better, right?

• 55:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And also this is, you know, you do a podcast, this guy's a UCLA professor.

• 55:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's, yeah. Again, I don't want to like shit on him too much because it's like, there's a lot of good stuff in the book. It's, it's just that part, I don't get it. I don't get why you would write about it though. Anyway, um, so Harland Carter commits murder, does two years in prison, goes to college. Um, and then he decides to follow in his father's footsteps and join the border patrol. He becomes an agent in 1936, three years after leaving prison. Carter's rise was rapid, if not meteoric. So he joins in 36, having been in prison two years earlier. In 1950, he's running the entire border patrol.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 56:15Robert Evans?

  Now again, border patrol's a lot smaller back then. It's a lot newer. It's easier to become head of the border patrol.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  And also his murder was definitely something on his resume. You know what I mean?

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  Like, probably unlike the secret, I don't think he put it on his paper resume, but I'm sure because he's known in Laredo is like, I'm sure the guys giving him his first gigs all know about it and think it's rad, right?

• 56:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:40Robert Evans?

  But he also, he does keep it a secret publicly, right? Like, he doesn't brag about it in public. Again, when he's hanging out with his buddies, I'm certain it comes up fucking constantly. But it's not like a part of his public persona as a, you know, once you're the head of the Border Patrol, that is like a political position, you know?

• 56:57Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. Yeah, it's not like today in which that would be something he would be celebrated for and talk about on, you know,

• 57:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. The shotgun that he used to kill Raymond Casiano would have been auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars. And he would have used it to buy an F-350 with-

• 57:14Speaker 04

  The Daily Wire would give him his own column.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  It would be a whole thing.

• 57:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he'd be making documentaries with Matt Walsh.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  Times were a lot more chill back then, which is-

• 57:25Robert Evans?

  It is, it is when we're talking about the story of this guy who does like a racist murder as a teenage boy. And like, wow, he really was less proud of it than he would be today.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. Yeah, that's where we're at, where we're like, oh, wow, he didn't make that like his whole brand? It's weird.

• 57:43Robert Evans?

  Wild. So, the Border Patrol had shifted at this point from being geared mainly towards policing the border to being a force for policing Mexican-Americans inside the United States, on the pretext of them being potentially undocumented migrants. As a result, their work strayed further and further from the border and increasingly into American cities, factories, farms, and anywhere expected of harboring illegals. Some Border Patrol agents had difficulty with this, right? This was not, a lot of the folks who had signed up earlier, this was not like the thing that they had signed up for specifically. Harland, though, is hugely supportive of this change. And in fact, he wanted to expand the Border Patrol's purview even further and use it to eliminate Mexicans from the country entirely.

• 58:27Robert Evans?

  This was justified in his mind by the fact that a large number of undocumented migrants were living and working, or this was justified publicly, right? So, Harland, there's like a racial motivation. But you can't use that, like, as we talked about earlier, right? Like, you have to hide when your laws are racially motivated. So, the justification is that a large number of undocumented migrants are living and working on ranches and other businesses- In the borderlands, often under nightmarish slave-like conditions. Now, this is a real problem that's happening, right? Like, as it is today, right?

• 58:57Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, completely.

• 58:59Robert Evans?

  And, yeah, there's this, like, suggestion of a new, of a thing called the Becero Program that will provide kind of like a legal way for these people to, like, work, but they'll have, you know, there will be more control over the conditions that they can work in, which, obviously, the people who would be hiring them don't like.

• 59:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:16Robert Evans?

  It's a whole thing.

• 59:18Speaker 04

  Just fucked, fucked every which way.

• 59:20Robert Evans?

  For, from the perspective of Harlan Carter, though, this is primarily a humanitarian pretext for carrying out, like, a purging of Mexican-Americans and from, like, the borderlands. And I'm gonna quote from Migra again. "Carter had convened a meeting to request the assistance of the US military and the National Guard to purge the nation of undocumented Mexican nationals and seal the US-Mexico border. The Border Patrol's proposal was titled Operation "Cloud Burst" and consisted of three basic steps. First, an anti-infiltration operation on or near the border would seal the border with the assistance of 2,180 military troops. In addition to stationing troops along the borderline, the Border Patrol planned to build fences along the areas of heaviest illegal traffic.

• 1:00:03Robert Evans?

  Two metal picket barbed wire fences, eight feet high and eight feet apart, with rolls of concertina wire in between and one roll of concertina wire on top of the fence nearest Mexico, built several miles along the border, would form the fence. But previous experience had taught the Border Patrol that fenced areas still needed additional security. Therefore, the concertina fence would be reinforced by officers in jeeps who will be directed to the scene of any attempted fence or canal crossing by observers in radio-equipped towers." So, this is the first modern, this is the wall, right? This is the start of it. This is the beginning of that. Not that there hadn't been, like, fences and stuff in different areas before then. This is the first time someone's like, "We need to build a wall", and has, like, a concerted vision of that.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Robert Evans?

  And specifically, a vision- Of using the of the wall as a system of violence in order to keep the borderlands white, right?

• 1:00:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Robert Evans?

  That's that's what he's doing here. And he had he invents that shit, you know?

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Wow, wow. He's like the Thomas Edison of making racist borders.

• 1:01:03Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's the he's the Elon Musk of

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:08Robert Evans?

  Border racism.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:01:10Robert Evans?

  Um, yes. So, uh, to continue that quote.

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  Race X.

• 1:01:15Robert Evans?

  Race X.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Sorry, I just wanted to do a

• 1:01:17Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  I wanted to do a pun.

• 1:01:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 1:01:21Robert Evans?

  Good, good, good work.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:01:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So I'm going to continue that quote. Second, a containment operation would maintain roadblocks on all major roads leading from the southwest to the interior of the United States. These roadblocks would be used to inspect traffic, including railroad traffic, for the purpose of detecting illegal entrance and to maintain safety patrols around the checkpoints. The roadblocks were planned for strategic locations that would prevent aliens from fleeing to the interior of the nation when the mopping up operations, the third phase, began. The mopping up operations would be conducted in northern areas such as San Francisco, where the task forces would raid designated locations such as migrant camps or places of business. So San Francisco, I don't know if you've ever been, Matt.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  Not super close to the border.

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:04Robert Evans?

  Right? Well, I guess close to like a sea border, right? Which is what we're building towards, but

• 1:02:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, those are the other aliens that they also want to put a fence around, you know? Watch out for all those turtles and fucking, you know?

• 1:02:15Robert Evans?

  Don't worry, we'll get rid of those in a couple of decades.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. Just put a few more of those soda, you know, fucking soda rings in the water. But yeah, no, not close to the border. I lived in San Francisco and I'll tell you, it was a trek to get to TJ from San Francisco.

• 1:02:30Robert Evans?

  Pretty far north. Yeah, exactly. Um, so the primary downside to his plan, right? This is a pretty good idea if you're a white supremacist, right?

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:02:40Robert Evans?

  Uh, solid plan. The only problem with it is that it is Wildly unconstitutional. So there's this thing, right? This law that that kind of gets in the way of this. So right at this point in time, nowadays, the Border Patrol, like you see those guys fucking walking around and they look like soldiers, right? They've got their plate carriers and their their AR 15s and all their fucking cool tactical gear. At this point, the Border Patrol is like slightly better armed than a modern Boy Scout troop. You know, like they're not, they're not, they're not packing that much heat compared to what they're going to be packing.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they have a lot of merit badges.

• 1:03:19Robert Evans?

  They have a lot of merit badges in racism, but there's not a ton of them, right? So they're not, they can't do this without the US military. And in fact, the military is going to wind up being a significant portion of the effort if they try to do this. But here's the problem. There's this stupid fucking bullshit ass 1878 law called Posse Comitatus, right? And that means you can't use the military to enforce domestic laws without Congress's approval.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Oh, damn.

• 1:03:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I know. I know. We all hate Posse Comitatus.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:03:49Robert Evans?

  I for one think the military should enforce all of the laws.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Yes, dude.

• 1:03:53Robert Evans?

  Particularly jaywalking.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  Exactly. They're the best at it. You don't want, you don't want a bunch of, you know, Boy Scout Border Patrols getting a looking merit badge for walking a Mexican old lady across the border.

• 1:04:06Robert Evans?

  We should have drones making sure, watching for people to cross the street illegally. And we should have MLRS rocket systems to just bombard the area if they cross the street, not at a crosswalk.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  Exactly, dude. We want more robo cops and we want them to be federal.

• 1:04:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Reinstate the draft and use it to stop jaywalking and littering.

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone, you know.

• 1:04:30Robert Evans?

  Absolutely.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Someone like cuts you off, someone's speeding, Agent Orange, immediately.

• 1:04:36Robert Evans?

  Absolutely, absolutely. So this, this fucking law, Posse Comitatus, really, really grinds Harland's gears. So obviously, I should also note here that like the fact that it's the military is not supposed to be used to enforce the law doesn't mean it isn't, right? If you casually Googled the Watts riots, you know, the government has a way. Of finding out, figure, making it, being able to use soldiers to do cop shit when it needs to. But in this case, the government wasn't willing to like push things that far, right? And the general who's like job it is to like, basically the general who's liaising with Carter is a guy named Swing, who really wants to do this, like he's a racist too.

• 1:05:17Robert Evans?

  But he's like, hey, we can't make this work legally right now, but we could do it if the president issued a proclamation. Like it's not impossible to do, but like it's, you'd have to get Eisenhower on board. So Harland Carter gets in touch with Eisenhower's people and he tries desperately to get approval. But Eisenhower isn't quite willing to deploy troops. Now, he, again, not to give Ike any credit, he agrees with Harland's basic goals. He just, this like using the army in this way is a little too far for him.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Robert Evans?

  But again, he's not against this. So in May of 1954 Eisenhower appoints General Joseph Swing to be Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Right? INS, we don't have INS anymore now, we've got ICE, whatever. But like these guys are in, so he's basically, now he's Carter's boss, essentially, this like general. And Swing had a long history of commanding troops in battle from Mexico to Korea. Obviously you could see the fact that now a, a general is in charge of INS is like the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:19Robert Evans?

  And Swing is a bastard in his own right, but this is really happening in part because of like, what Carter is pushing to turn the Border Patrol into, right? This is, this is not just the start of the militarization of the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is going to become the first large police agency to militarize, right? This happens decades before, you know, we talked about the Watts riots, which happened like a decade or so from now. And then the LA riots, which were a big, you know, decades later, which were a big pusher. This happens way before all of that. This is 1954. So this is like, in a lot of ways, the, the beginning of police militarization happens because Harland Carter and General Joseph Swing want to cleanse the borderlands of, of, of Mexican-Americans.

• 1:07:03Robert Evans?

  Quote, "As promised, one month after joining INS, Swing announced that he would lead the US Border Patrol in an intensive, innovative and paramilitary law enforcement campaign designed to end the problem of illegal Mexican immigration along the US Mexico border. No one questioned how in four short weeks he had prepared the officers of the Border Patrol for such a massive campaign."

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  I mean, at this point, too, what was even the, the like, what were the migration numbers? Like, was it even that? I mean, certainly, it's not as much as it was now, but I'm thinking about like, what 1950s, 1950s, Mexico was what they had, you know?

• 1:07:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the, the, the civil war is not that long ended.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, the PRI is in power. It's, isn't it fairly stable at this point? I feel like.

• 1:07:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  So it's like, it's like what they were doing this pretense of like, oh, we got to stop the illegals. I mean, we're not even talking about like, you know, uh, we're not talking about modern, uh, Latin American immigration that we have today, which is uses a pretext for all sorts of racist laws against, um, Latin Americans here legally.

• 1:08:15Robert Evans?

  We're talking about a lot like.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Robert Evans?

  Labor stuff that's taught. And again, they have to like, do moral panic and stuff about.

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:23Robert Evans?

  The treatment of migrants, but like, it, this is all very messy because like, some of the biggest people opposing the government doing this crackdown are these different ranchers and other employers who are like.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  Right. Who want to exploit.

• 1:08:35Robert Evans?

  Exploit people's labor. Like, it's not, there's a lot that's, that's going on overall in this issue. But when it comes to Harland Carter, it's pretty simple, right? He's, he's a racist, you know?

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's trying to do a racial purge under the pretext of like, oh, man, you know, they're not paying fair wages. Like, he gives a shit.

• 1:08:54Robert Evans?

  And it's, you know, he's, he's also like, starting the process of, of justifying, figuring out ways to justify, uh, this, that are like palatable to large chunks of Americans.

• 1:09:09Robert Evans?

  And yeah, that's, uh, that's what's happening in this period of time. Um, and you know what else is happening right now?

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:09:19Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna ask you for your pluggables.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  Oh, hell yeah. Um, so my pluggables are, I just finished, um, the entire series, The Sopranos. Pod Yourself a Gun is a, uh, podcast that I do with Vince Mancini. And we just did our very last episode. We watched all of it. We watched all The Sopranos, uh, and, uh, you can listen to the series finale, uh, wherever you get your podcasts. So check that out and also follow me on Instagram, cause, uh, you know, I feel like that's where all the like cool kids hang out. So like, you know, hit me up, hit me up there and also be, be excited because me and Vince, our next show, we're gonna be talking about the wire. That's right. 20 years after the wires come out, finally,

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  two white men will break down the wire because

• 1:10:12Robert Evans?

  Finally, finally.

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  Someone's gotta do it.

• 1:10:15Robert Evans?

  I mean, that is the right group to break down the wire, season two.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure, for sure. Very excited.

• 1:10:20Robert Evans?

  You gotta make sure at least one of you is a pole.

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, we're gonna get some, we got some poles who are gonna come on. We got a bunch of, uh, Greek Baltimore friends who are gonna come on. It's gonna be great, but, uh, yeah, look, look, look for that.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  What are you, what are you calling it?

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  Uh, probably, uh, when you pod through the garden, uh, you know, which, uh, you know, kinda continues our, uh, tradition of having a really bad title for a TV rewatch podcast. Um, yeah. So check it out whenever that comes out, but for now, listen to Pod Yourself a Gun. Uh, you can go back, listen to the whole thing.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  I have to know who your favorite character on the wire was.

• 1:10:58Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, I relate the most to Bubbles, cause I used to love heroin. Um, but, uh, other than that, shit, probably Clay Davis. Clay Davis is cool. He's a, he's a state senator.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  Who says, who says shit a lot.

• 1:11:16Robert Evans?

  She.

• 1:11:17Speaker 04

  She, you know, for a show that is like, Lift, Lift It Up is one of the greatest TV shows of all time. There are sure, certainly are a lot of catchphrases. It's a weirdly catchphrase heavy show for something that is incredibly serious.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm so excited.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  What the fuck did I do? You gotta, you know, you got Proposition Joe is like, I got a proposition for it. It's like, this is a serious show, but they love catchphrases. Anyways.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  I'm excited. That sounds awesome.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Podcast.

• 1:11:51Robert Evans?

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• 1:13:30Robert Evans?

  Welcome to The Wire, the podcast that created the hit TV show The Wire.

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  We were first.

• 1:13:37Robert Evans?

  Our idea was stolen by that hacked David Simon.

• 1:13:40Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. We went to HBO in 1998 and you said, have you ever considered making a show about wires?

• 1:13:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and we said, you know who understands Baltimore? Me and Matt Lieb.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  That's right. Exactly.

• 1:13:53Robert Evans?

  That's right, baby.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  We understand Baltimore more than anyone understands Baltimore.

• 1:13:58Robert Evans?

  I stopped there once for gasoline on a road trip, so I get it.

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  I played for the Baltimore Orioles.

• 1:14:07Robert Evans?

  That's a lot of people are talking about that right now.

• 1:14:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, and you know, I feel like, I mean, it was in Los Angeles.

• 1:14:15Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  And I was in fifth grade, but I was an Oriole, so.

• 1:14:20Robert Evans?

  And we famously, season two was based on the fact that I once bought a sandwich from a Polish man.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right. I said, what if this was a whole show?

• 1:14:29Robert Evans?

  What if this was a whole season about longshoremen?

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Just like longshoremen, like stevedores and like, you know.

• 1:14:36Robert Evans?

  That's a word that doesn't get used enough. I love the word stevedore.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:14:40Robert Evans?

  What an incredible job title.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  It's the coolest job title. I don't know like what about moving like crates?

• 1:14:48Robert Evans?

  It makes no sense to me based on what the job is, why they're called.

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  I imagine there was just like the first guy to ever do that was named Steve.

• 1:14:55Robert Evans?

  Steve. And he was just so good at it that they were like, everybody's.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  We're all Steve out here.

• 1:15:00Robert Evans?

  Now, yeah, with stevedores.

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  You're like.

• 1:15:02Robert Evans?

  Look at how good he is at moving crates. Jesus.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  Moving shipping crates like Steve did?

• 1:15:07Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:07Speaker 04

  Oh, man, I want that job. Yeah.

• 1:15:10Robert Evans?

  This was a meandering way of introducing the podcast, Behind the Bastards. Matt Lieb, guest, also host of a podcast.

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Pod Yourself a Gun, which is a Sopranos podcast, and then soon to be a Wire podcast coming out shortly. So.

• 1:15:25Robert Evans?

  Which is why.

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  Excited for that.

• 1:15:27Robert Evans?

  We were talking about The Wire.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a good show.

• 1:15:31Robert Evans?

  Also soon to be the host of a baby.

• 1:15:33Speaker 04

  I know. I'm having a baby, dude.

• 1:15:36Robert Evans?

  Will subsequently launch a podcast called The Gugu Ga.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, dude. I can't wait to do a Barney rewatch podcast.

• 1:15:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  With my little baby. Just like analyzing like, you know, the role of American imperialism in the happy purple dinosaur.

• 1:15:52Robert Evans?

  Well, you know, there was that whole season of Barney that took place in a contra camp in Nicaragua.

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was great. Yeah.

• 1:15:58Robert Evans?

  Bold choice. You have to give it to them.

• 1:16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barney was like teaching, you know, classes over at the school for the Americas.

• 1:16:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that he worked hand and glove with Oliver North.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:16:10Robert Evans?

  Sell those missiles to Iran.

• 1:16:11Speaker 04

  Exactly, dude.

• 1:16:12Robert Evans?

  The only person the Shah trusted, or the Shah, the I told the trusted, was Barney the dinosaur.

• 1:16:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Soul's crack.

• 1:16:20Robert Evans?

  He did sell a lot of crack, but that was that was completely unrelated.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:16:24Robert Evans?

  We should probably talk about where, you know, when we last left off, we were about to, we were talking about Operation Cloud Burst, this attempt by Harland Carter and the Border Patrol and this guy, General Swing, to cleanse the border area. We should probably give a little bit more background about what's happening.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:16:39Robert Evans?

  In this period. So this is kind of, again, I think Harland's primary motivation is racial, but there's other stuff happening. So in the early 1940s, the US government had created a, this thing called the Becero Program, which is like a guest worker visa program that would let Mexican farm workers into the country legally temporarily to work for American farmers. This gets started during World War II, because like, we don't have any, we don't have any dudes left in the country.

• 1:17:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:05Robert Evans?

  We send them all over there, you know?

• 1:17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:07Robert Evans?

  We need, we need some more dudes.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. That's a shortage of dudes at this point.

• 1:17:11Robert Evans?

  But it also, it, one of the reasons why it's popular, even with people who like, are, are pretty racist, is that it, it, by providing kind of a legal, regulated way for them to work here, it also provides a legally regulated way to get them out of here.

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:17:25Robert Evans?

  They can't become residents, right? The Becero Program does not, these people are supposed to leave. But in fact, part of the deal is that like 10% of the migrants' wages are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an account that are given to them when they come back to Mexico, right? So that's part of why this is popular, is that it allows them to do the work that the country can't function without, but it also ensures that they don't stay, right?

• 1:17:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Robert Evans?

  That's why this is such a big deal for a lot of folks. So it's actually very popular. And it, one of the things about it is it doesn't limit the number of workers, because why would you, right? Because they're not, you're, anyway, millions and millions of Mexican workers use the Becero Program over the years. And from the perspective of the US government, it works pretty well for a while. And it certainly keeps workers in farms. But, and so by like, the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these workers, or there's like 5 million people have worked in through the Becero Program, but also, like, unauthorized migrants continue.

• 1:18:30Robert Evans?

  To cross into the border and by the early 1950s, there's like 2 million of these people. Um, and part of one of the things like that happens in this period is that there's suddenly like a big surge of folks coming in unauthorized in the early 1950s. And this is part of what like inspires Operation Cloud Burst is that like Border Patrol has never had to deal with like these kind of numbers of people crossing post-war. Um, and they're not really capable of handling it. So by the early 1950s, the number of like voluntary departures in had raised like in 1946, like 101,000 undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United States in 1952, more than 700,000 do.

• 1:19:14Robert Evans?

  And you can like, these numbers are just kind of useful in seeing like how many folks are coming in.

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:19:21Robert Evans?

  So this, a lot of people are um, not wild about this because again, you know,

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  Racism and such.

• 1:19:29Robert Evans?

  Racism and such, yeah. So Joseph Swing, part of his motivation here is that like, he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers to cooperate. So that they can like increase the number of folks who are working there under the Bracero program and shrink the unauthorized workers. And so his justification for like participating in some of the stuff that that Harlan Carter is building is that he wants to cut down the supply of unauthorized workers in order to get more of these employers on board with the Bracero program.

• 1:20:04Robert Evans?

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

• 1:20:35Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 1:20:36Robert Evans?

  And I guess, again, you can look at what's happening with the Bracero program in a couple of different ways, but if you really want to know what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and Swing uh, eventually.

• 1:20:49Robert Evans?

  Inact, uh, the main thing you need to know is what they call it. Um, and this is Harlan Carter's name for this is Operation Wetback. Uh, that is the official name of the, this immigration purge that they're going to do. And again,

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  Did they invent the term or was?

• 1:21:07Robert Evans?

  No, no, it existed for a while.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  Okay. So they did just explicitly name it after a slur.

• 1:21:12Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:21:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's exactly it. And, and obviously like, again, for folks who maybe are not aware of this, I know we have a lot of like European listeners, Canadian listeners who may not have heard this, like wetback is a racial slur for Mexican immigrants to the United States. It takes its name from when people would cross illegally, they would do so through the Rio Grande often. And like, so you're, you know, you get wet when you do that, right? And so like, that's the, that's the origin of the slur.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  Right. The backs part, I don't, I don't know why they specified it.

• 1:21:42Robert Evans?

  I don't know why they specify, but this happens. There's like a history of this, like an old anti-Italian racial slur is WAP, which means without papers. I don't think it was entirely just for Italians, but like, you know, this is like the late 1800s, I think.

• 1:21:53Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:21:55Robert Evans?

  So, yeah. Um, and, and Carter, again, so swing, swing is the kind of guy who can sit down and explain to you like, well, this is where the Bersera program was broken down. And like, these are the problems that we're having and these are the different violations that we're seeing. And like, we need to get these, you know, employers on board with this program to reform the system. And the only way to do that is to cut down on the like, so he can get very wonky with it in a way that doesn't sound racist, whereas Harlan Carter's like, yeah, Operation Wetback, let's get it out of here. Um, and, and Carter is not great. It's like, he says, he just kind of says the loud part loud. Um, in, in interviews with the press, he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history. He tells the Los Angeles Times that he intends to deploy, quote, "an army of border patrol

• 1:22:37Robert Evans?

  officers complete with jeeps, trucks and seven aircraft in order to declare, quote, 'all out war to hurl Mexican wetbacks into Mexico.'"

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:22:47Robert Evans?

  So he's not, not a subtle man.

• 1:22:49Speaker 04

  He added yee-haw after every sentence.

• 1:22:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You have to imagine he's shooting his six guns into the air as he gives these speeches to the press.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  He was in the middle of burning a cross.

• 1:23:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. As, as he lit a cross on fire on someone's lawn. Harlan Carter gave a statement to the LA Times. So what followed was close to, again, Operation Wetback is kind of, he tried, it's a lot of what he had tried to do with Operation Cloud Burst, only just toned down a little bit so that they could get the federal government on board. Obviously, this is follows like a massive hiring campaign of Border Patrolmen, and they they take thousands of Border Patrol agents and they separate them into mobile task groups, and they set up mobile immigration systems to block roads. So they're basically doing like this, they've already put this like, started putting these fences up, but they do like a kind of a, you could call it a kind of like racist defense, like defense of white supremacy in depth, where they're

• 1:23:46Robert Evans?

  setting up blockades deeper into the country. And they're also carrying out raids on factories and restaurants, and just through whatever mean they can, arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican migrants. And I'm going to quote from Migra again. "To hold the detainees, the officers turned public spaces into temporary detention facilities. For example, in Los Angeles, the Border Patrol transformed Elysian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals were processed for deportation. In countless fields and along many country roads, Border Patrol officers set up mobile immigration stations to process unsanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation. They used trucks on loan from the armed services to transport the apprehended immigrants

• 1:24:26Robert Evans?

  from California to Nogales, Arizona for deportation to Mexico. To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise Mexicano communities, leisure spots, and migrant camps, ranches, farms, and parks. They also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ undocumented Mexican immigrants. Between June 17th and June 26th, 1954, 2,827 of the 4,403 migrants apprehended by the task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry. After Border Patrol raids during the summer of 1954, three Los Angeles brick yards were left without sufficient numbers of workers and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, Border Patrol officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented

• 1:25:10Robert Evans?

  Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen help, waiters, etc. Officers reported apprehending such workers at well-known establishments such as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times, Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running through the servant area. Everywhere they went, the officers were chased and photographed by journalists who had come to witness what General Swing had promised would be a spectacular show of US immigration law enforcement. Swing pledged that the Border Patrol would deport or otherwise purge the 1 million undocumented Mexican nationals estimated to be living in the United States at the time.

• 1:25:46Speaker 04

  Oh, well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Just, uh, you know, just going buck wild with journalists in the back like, this is great footage.

• 1:25:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's interesting because a huge number of these guys are immediately let back into the country. Like, a lot of times what they're doing is they're pushing them across the border and then making them recross under like the Bracero program. So again, they can be, because they need the labor, right? They don't want the Brickyard shut down. They don't want these places to go out of business. They just don't want these people to be able to actually build a life in the United States, right? They want to guarantee that they go back. Um, so that's like a huge chunk of what's, of what's happening here. Like, it's, it's basically taking, it's taking the natural movement of, of people across an area where like their ancestors and relatives had been moving freely for centuries. And it's stopping that, stopping like the ability of populations to move and build

• 1:26:41Robert Evans?

  lives and turning them entirely into economic units, right?

• 1:26:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:26:45Robert Evans?

  You're not a member of the community, you're, you're labor.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're an entirely different class of citizen, which is non-citizen, which means, uh,

• 1:26:56Robert Evans?

  You have no rights.

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  You have no rights. You're, you're, you're not entitled to any of the human rights that we give to our citizens. Super, super normal and definitely a natural state of things. Certainly not a-

• 1:27:10Robert Evans?

  Definitely the way things are supposed to go.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  Exactly. Not an invention of humans at all.

• 1:27:15Robert Evans?

  No. Um, so at the same time as they're doing this, and obviously the media is a big part of like, why this is such a hit, because, you know, INS says, hey, we're gonna raid the Biltmore. Like, yeah, you're gonna show up there and like, that's like, who doesn't- Want to see that um as like a journalist. So like part of like what part of like what increases sort of the because the people hadn't really the Border Patrol had not been probably most Americans only been kind of vaguely aware of its existence

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 1:27:42Robert Evans?

  Up until this point.

• 1:27:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Robert Evans?

  This is part of what turns them into like an institution within the United States is like all of the press around Operation Wetback.

• 1:27:50Speaker 04

  Right, it's like the uh you know, they took a cue from the FBI. They're like we need, we need to be flashy. We need to uh, we need to look cool as shit doing a bunch of horrid shit to people.

• 1:28:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, like, and you're talking about like what the FBI does against anarchists and socialists and like the late, you know, the, the early 1900s. Yeah, this is, this is like the Border Patrol's equivalent of that. Yeah.

• 1:28:14Speaker 04

  Right, and creating like, you know, an entire propaganda arm that made like,

• 1:28:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18Speaker 04

  you know, the G-Man cool.

• 1:28:19Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Um, and at the same time they're doing this, Carter and Swing are like meeting with these influential ranchers and farmers and industrialists, the people using the undocumented migrant labor. And they're getting them in line between like a revamp of the Bracero program that um is again like supposed to fix some of the issues the program had. I'm not going to get terribly into the weeds on that kind of stuff. There's plenty of places to read about that. If you'd like, there's a pretty good article. Um, yeah, the, the, we'll have some sources in here, but the book Migra goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So in the end, it was a wild success. Uh, more than 1 million people are deported.

• 1:28:58Robert Evans?

  Potentially as many as one and a half million people are deported. Um, beyond that, the precedent was established that the US Border Patrol could and should conduct operations from deep within the United States. Border Patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within 100 miles of the border, right?

• 1:29:17Speaker 04

  Of any border, like?

• 1:29:18Robert Evans?

  That's the, exactly, of any border, right? Which includes the coast and Canada. So basically, all of the places where most Americans live are covered by the two, about two thirds of the US population are in this area, which is why the Border Patrol has like the widest ranging purview of any law enforcement agency, pretty much.

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:38Robert Evans?

  Um, I guess, yeah, like the FBI technically has more, but like their mission is more limited. Anyways, whatever. Um, like this is like the border patrol. This is what turns them into what they are to this monster, this juggernaut they are today. As opposed to like some dudes literally on the border, you know, like, yeah, say what you like, again, and not that like they weren't getting up to problematic shit earlier in their history, but their ability to do harm was limited by geography. It's not after Operation Wetback and we can thank Harlan Carter for that.

• 1:30:08Robert Evans?

  And it's, it's, it's worth kind of noting here, I'm not going to get too much into, to Trump, but he, Donald Trump consciously looks back to Harlan Carter's period of time running the border patrol as, as an inspiration.

• 1:30:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Robert Evans?

  Um, during a 2015 presidential, Republican presidential debate, um, Donald Trump said, quote, "Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him, I liked him, I like Ike, right? The expression, I like Ike, moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of the country, moved them just beyond the border, they came back, moved them again beyond the border, they came back, didn't like it, moved them way south, they never came back. Dwight Eisenhower, you don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier. They moved one and a half million people out, we have no choice, we have no choice." So first off, obviously it's probably not going to surprise people. That's again, as we've said, completely wrong for, among other things, nearly all of them come back.

• 1:30:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh, it.

• 1:30:59Robert Evans?

  Under like the Becerra program, like that's part of the point, like they're not, um, but yeah, it's, it's, so Carter, and again, there's the kind of folks who, I'm like, again, swing, I'm sure has his racism, Ike, there's racism in like his motivations, but it's also, there's a lot of economic and just like, they're the kind of people who believe all of this stuff should be done based on a set of laws. So they're like, kind of fundamentally, they're probably more offended by the fact that people are undocumented than they are necessarily about the racial element. That's a chunk of these people.

• 1:31:31Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Lack of documents alone is just like, Jesus Christ.

• 1:31:36Robert Evans?

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

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:59Robert Evans?

  Like, that's the thing that has come down in history from Carter's period is the racism.

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  Right. He's cutting to the heart of really what's going on here behind all of the, you know, I don't know, respectability politics or whatever of it.

• 1:32:09Robert Evans?

  Yes. That's what has lived on. That and of course, the militarization of the Border Patrol and the fact that it gets to work every, we get all of that from Harland Carter. And here's the thing, Harland's just getting started.

• 1:32:21Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:32:22Robert Evans?

  This ain't even, this ain't even his whole thing, right? This like, this isn't even his main gig, you know?

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  I know. We haven't even gotten to the, the beginning, which is like, we're gonna talk about some NRA's and some gun shit.

• 1:32:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we're not even into that shit yet. Like, this is just his first gig, right?

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  God damn.

• 1:32:38Robert Evans?

  This is his, like, the equivalent of the time, like, the rest of us spent, like, working at a Wendy's or something. This is that for Harland Carter, right?

• 1:32:45Speaker 04

  This is, this is Hitler at painting school.

• 1:32:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, yeah, this is Hitler at fucking, like, hanging out in Austrian opera houses.

• 1:32:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:54Robert Evans?

  Arguing with homeless people about the Jews, which was like a whole chunk of his life. But anyway, because he was homeless, dude, it's whatever. They were living in a men's shelter. Anyway.

• 1:33:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Robert Evans?

  Hitler. Um, so, uh, I should note before we move on to the NRA, that while Harland Carter was massively expanding the reach and power of the Border Patrol, he was also robbing it blind for his own benefit. See, Harland loves shooting, right? Like, he's not one of these NR, like, like Wayne Lapierre, the current head of the NRA. I don't think Wayne particularly cares much about, like, a lot of these guys, like, it's a political thing as opposed to them, like, Harland Carter is, you have to say, loves to shoot guns.

• 1:33:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:31Robert Evans?

  But here's the thing about shooting guns. Bullets cost money. So, three years after Harland Carter retires from government service in 1957, the Justice Department opens an investigation into what are termed, quote, "various allegations against him," including the claim that he had stolen 40,000 to 50,000 rounds of ammunition from the Border Patrol, quote, "with the sole intent of converting this property to his own use after he retired."

• 1:33:54Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:33:55Robert Evans?

  So he steals like a pallet of bullets to go shoot privately?

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  I would love it if we found out that he's the one who stole his mom's car.

• 1:34:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He went joyriding and crashed it.

• 1:34:07Speaker 04

  It was him and he's just like, oh, fuck, I gotta find some Mexicans to murder.

• 1:34:10Robert Evans?

  A 15 year old gets murdered. So yeah, it's not that funny, but like that's not impossible. Right?

• 1:34:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Robert Evans?

  So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here about this theft of tens of thousands of bullets that Harland Carter perpetrated, quote, asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations, Mr. Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand jury in San Diego for some hours, and they covered a lot of things, none of which I'm ashamed of, and none of which I had any difficulty asking. He added that he did not, quote, know anything about the disappearance or misappropriation of government ammo. The missing ammunition worth several thousand dollars was never traced, according to an agent who worked on the investigation, and no charges were fired. Filed. Yeah.

• 1:34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:50Speaker 04

  It's a Freudian slip.

• 1:34:52Robert Evans?

  Now, obviously, Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's about to get a new job that is never going to let this him run out of ammunition.

• 1:34:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Robert Evans?

  So as we stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when he joined the NRA, whether it was before or after he killed Ramon Casiano. Probably he was like 16 when he, when he joins. And in 1951, the year after he becomes head of the Border Patrol, he joins the NRA's National Board. And again, at this point in time, there's obviously, there's people who are right wing in the NRA, there's people who want it to be more of a conservative institution. It's not really a political organization.

• 1:35:27Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:35:28Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 1:35:28Speaker 04

  It's almost at this point from, just from what I remember, it's almost an apolitical, just kind of gun lobbying group that kind of.

• 1:35:36Robert Evans?

  They're not lobbying. There's no lobbying. They do not lobby in this period of time.

• 1:35:41Speaker 04

  Oh, so they're like the Sierra Club at this point.

• 1:35:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're, they're just kind of like, yeah, they're there to provide training courses for people. They're, they're, they're there so that one of the things they do is when the government demilitarizes weapons, right? They're like, okay, we're not using like the M1 Garand is no longer the gun that the army uses. So we have a couple of million of these things. We will sell them at a discount to the NRA who can sell them very cheap to their members and like, it's part of this. So there's like stuff that they're doing, but they're not, they're not getting in, and there are, they have some involvement politically. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but they are not like lobbying on behalf of the Republican Party or something, right? Like, that's not really a thing that the NRA is doing yet. Harland Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing, but they're not in 1951, when he joins the board, they're still not very political.

• 1:36:28Robert Evans?

  But now that he's on the board, he starts to see the organization with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol, right? Because he can help get people hired, he can put in a good word. So he starts all of his buddies from the Border Patrol, who are like wanting a cushy job in the private sector after, you know, working for the government. Like, he starts filling them, filling the NRA with them. So he finally leaves government service in the early 1960s. He stops running the Border Patrol in 57, but he does some other shit. Not really that important for our purposes. But he retires from working for the government in the early 60s. And he gets pretty much immediately elected president of the NRA from 1965 to 1967. But that doesn't mean he's actually running the NRA, like, right? It's just like a job within the organization. You've still got this board of directors.

• 1:37:13Robert Evans?

  So he's an influential figure in the NRA, but he's not actually like directing it at this point.

• 1:37:19Speaker 04

  Right. He's collecting a check and he's probably getting like, you know, a bunch of free bullets, which is all he wants.

• 1:37:25Robert Evans?

  Even more free bullets. Well, he also wants it, he wants the NRA to get more political. And again, we're gonna, we're gonna chat a little bit about why in a second. But one of the things that happens is like, the folks at the NRA who kind of don't necessarily want that, know they have to do something with Harlan Carter, right? Like, you can't like ignore him. So they stick him, they create a lobbying arm for the first time of the NRA, the Institute for Legislative Action, and they put him in charge of it. And again, this is the first time the NRA had had a lobbying arm. In the early 1960s, it was like, not, they barely funded it. So there's this, you know, there's kind of this growing fight. And Harlan is one of these guys saying that like, hey, the NRA needs to get more

• 1:38:08Robert Evans?

  political, we need to be lobbying, we need to be focused on Second Amendment advocacy. That was not, had not, like, the NRA's planks, like, their, like, stated purpose as an organization did not include, like, protecting or defending the Second Amendment at all. Like, that was not on their, even on their radar.

• 1:38:24Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:38:25Robert Evans?

  He thinks it needs to be, and the old guard who run the NRA don't see it that way. They see themselves as essentially in partnership with the government to ensure the development of a heavy, of a healthy shooting sports culture in the United States. Right? And part of what that means is that when gun control laws get passed, they work with the government to formulate those laws. So again, they're certainly like, they're not anti-gun, right? But they're not anything we would recognize as like, in like, a modern political context.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  They just wanna, so it sounds like they just wanna make sure that gun control doesn't affect hunting and/or like, regulation of people owning actual rifles?

• 1:39:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's, again, everything is different, right? Like, nothing, the AR-15 exists in this period, but it's not what it's going to become, right? Like, because it's harder to make, they're much less common. Like, today, an AR, like, one of the things that has made the AR-15 what it is, is that it's a perfectly modular platform. So it's basically like gun Legos. So there's like, a million, you can customize it infinitely. You can make the basic gun itself for a couple of hundred bucks if you have some stuff. It's not like that at this point, right?

• 1:39:33Speaker 04

  It's, now, it's like the Honda Civic of guns.

• 1:39:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So, they just haven't, like, for, part of why it's not political in the way it will become is that there's not really a need to, you know? Like, no one's, there's not like, uh, there's not, the culture that, that the NRA helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that. So, yeah, their primary focus is like hunting and target shooting, right?

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:39:57Robert Evans?

  And again, Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment. And in the 1970s, he's going to go to war with the NRA's old guard in order to change it. But before we get into that, we should probably have some ads.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  I love ads.

• 1:40:12Robert Evans?

  Oh, I do too. Including this ad for...

• 1:40:17Speaker 04

  Guns.

• 1:40:18Robert Evans?

  The concept of, uh, yeah, guns.

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:40:23Robert Evans?

  How about the Life Card? The Life Card. It's a gun that's built into a little credit card. Can it shoot well? No. Is it accurate? Of course not. Is it, is it a stupid thing to carry in your pocket? Yes, 100%.

• 1:40:37Speaker 04

  Enjoy.

• 1:40:39Robert Evans?

  It's a real thing. Look, look it up.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  I'm going to.

• 1:40:43Robert Evans?

  Very silly gun of the, of the, of the, of the meme guns, easily the memiest.

• 1:40:47Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:40:48Robert Evans?

  That's the whole thing we have these days. There's no meme guns in the 1960s. We haven't invented memes, you know?

• 1:40:54Speaker 04

  Oh, so sad.

• 1:40:55Robert Evans?

  But it, yeah.

• 1:40:57Speaker 04

  Which was the meme from the 1960s?

• 1:40:59Robert Evans?

  Well, it's, it's earlier than that. You know, the, this is getting way off topic, but you've heard of Kilroy was here?

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's memes, but, but yeah.

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  I was thinking, I was like, was, uh, this is the Zapruder film? Was that a meme? I guess that came out in the seventies or something.

• 1:41:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, it comes out a little late. Oh, that's like the 60 or mid 60s, right?

• 1:41:18Speaker 04

  Well, but when would the, did people see the Zapruder film? I thought that was like, it, I don't know.

• 1:41:24Robert Evans?

  I mean, I will tell you, my entire life, I have specifically picked houses with a floor plan where the bathroom is kind of like back into the left of the living room. So that when people ask where the bathroom is, I can say, oh, just take a Kennedy.

• 1:41:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I love it.

• 1:41:39Robert Evans?

  You know, go back into the left.

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  It's worth it for the bit.

• 1:41:40Robert Evans?

  That's a JFK getting murdered joke. Anyway, here's ads.

• 1:41:48Robert Evans?

  Oh, we're back.

• 1:41:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:50Robert Evans?

  Everybody's having a good time.

• 1:41:51Speaker 04

  Great time.

• 1:41:52Robert Evans?

  You know, Robert Kennedy was killed with the 22, which is the same caliber as the Life Card.

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:41:57Robert Evans?

  The gun that's built into a credit card.

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  I love that there's a credit card gun.

• 1:42:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly, if Sirhan Sirhan had had one of those, RFK would probably be alive.

• 1:42:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it'd be fine.

• 1:42:08Robert Evans?

  Life Card is a really stupid gun.

• 1:42:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:10Robert Evans?

  Anyway, the second amendment, well, actually, weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument Harland Carter will later make, but I don't want to, I don't want to get ahead of things.

• 1:42:20Robert Evans?

  So the second amendment is, I think it's fair to say the most politicized part of the Bill of Rights today, right? That's probably not, maybe the first amendment gives it a run for its money.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:42:30Robert Evans?

  But even then, it's usually people differing over interpretations of the first amendment as opposed to the argument over the second is really. Should it exist or does it exist in the way that it's like currently being interpreted? Right? Because an awful lot of Americans think it shouldn't be the law of the land at all, which is difficult to square with actually doing something legislatively because it does exist. But anyway, in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in DC versus Heller that the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to bear arms. Now, obviously, a lot of liberals see this as terrible Jewish prudence and claim that an individual right to bear arms was basically invented by the NRA. Conservatives will say the opposite, that, you know, this

• 1:43:12Robert Evans?

  was clearly what the founders had intended. And the reality of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment at a federal level is only like 20 years old, different courts have ruled very differently on the Second Amendment for quite a long time. And also, the Supreme Court is stupid. So, like, I don't personally give a good goddamn about what the founders intended.

• 1:43:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, that seems like the weirdest standard to uphold to this day where we're like, the founders intended. And it's like, the founders, first of all, none of them had teeth.

• 1:43:42Robert Evans?

  None of them had. And it's one of those, this is, it's comprehensively wrong. Because again, liberals will often be like, well, the founders would never have wanted people to have AR-15s. And it's like, did you know some of those guys?

• 1:43:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, no.

• 1:43:52Robert Evans?

  A lot of those dudes would have been like, this will kill so many more, like, indigenous people. Of course, we should have these.

• 1:43:57Speaker 04

  They all wore powdered wigs because they all had like herpes on their heads and they, you know, they were all syphilitic. So, yeah, they were insane. Being like, the founders wouldn't like that. It's like, no, no, no, don't defend the founders.

• 1:44:12Robert Evans?

  Well, and they would have, they would have liked it for a variety of different reasons. Thomas Paine would have liked it because it would allow you to shoot government agents much better, right? Like, Thomas Jefferson would have liked it because he was scared of how many slaves he had, you know?

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:24Robert Evans?

  Like, different, different people would have liked it for different reasons.

• 1:44:27Speaker 04

  They all would have loved to have that gun.

• 1:44:29Robert Evans?

  Yes. So, obviously, again, as regards my personal standing towards gun control, I don't care about what the founders thought about anything, including free speech, because they didn't actually believe in free speech either.

• 1:44:43Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 1:44:44Robert Evans?

  Because a lot of the most, well, Thomas Paine did. I he's he's he's our one good one.

• 1:44:50Speaker 04

  Um, he was, yeah, you know, although kind of in a reactionary during the French Revolution, you know, they locked his ass up.

• 1:44:57Robert Evans?

  They did lock his ass up during the French Revolution, but they locked a lot of people up.

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  They really just kind of went overboard. Um, as is the left.

• 1:45:06Robert Evans?

  So I think it's probably valuable to discuss how interpretations of the right to bear arms have varied over time in the United States, because again, if you're ever saying it's always meant this thing or that thing, that's not, you're not going to be correct, because a bunch of different courts have found a bunch of different things. So the Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison, and in portraits, he's the founding father with just massive bags under his eyes. Like, you look up a drawing of this dude, he looks fucking exhausted in every, every sketch of it, he probably was.

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  He was literally dying at all times in his famed career.

• 1:45:39Robert Evans?

  He was dying all the time. If only every American political leader had followed in his footsteps of dying.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  I know, I know, you know, he's, yeah, he didn't, he was supposed to write way more of the Federalist Papers, but he was so sickly, he couldn't.

• 1:45:54Robert Evans?

  We are getting to that. So obviously, he's a, he's, you know, on that side of the Federalist, anti-Federalist divide, but he drafts the Bill of Rights because the anti-Federalists are worried, and they have a very good point, that like, okay, well, we're establishing this supposedly democratic government, but if we don't place limits on the powers of the federal government, they could get the power to do anything one day, which is a very reasonable thing to be concerned about, right? Broadly speaking, one of the better ideas the founders had was having a Bill of Rights.

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:46:23Robert Evans?

  So most of them are terrified of the idea of a permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to be frightened of, and if we had stuck with that idea, maybe things would be a little bit better. One of the things is that, like, these guys are all ancient Roman history nerds, right? And they are well aware that, like, the history of the Roman Republic includes so many times where just like a guy gets an army and takes over, right? Or tries to take over, and there's a big fucking fight over it. So they they don't like the idea of like this big centralized standing army, because it's very dangerous.

• 1:46:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Robert Evans?

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

• 1:47:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Robert Evans?

  That second clause is like, you cannot force someone to render military service, which like, you would think would make a draft impossible. That said, it also might have made it impossible to do things that a lot of liberals support, like banning weapons like the AR-15. Because when you have well armed in there, it does kind of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the current text of the Second Amendment does.

• 1:47:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Robert Evans?

  That interpretation could at least be argued. Now, this is all academic because the wording winds up being changed to the present text, which puts well regulated up front and fun times also makes it legal to draft people. Obviously, people have argued for years and will be arguing for years, what the Second Amendment should mean about gun control and how it should function. I'm not an originalist. I think the Constitution is too old for anyone to care about, but obviously it does matter because it is the law of the land and how it's written and how it's interpreted has a huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation. And so I think the context of how the Second Amendment like was seen at the time is helpful to have.

• 1:48:39Robert Evans?

  Even though, again, I'm not an originalist, please don't take this as me arguing because the founding fathers felt this way, this is how people should act, but.

• 1:48:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think we've, we can stress enough, we do not care what the founding fathers thought about literally anything.

• 1:48:53Robert Evans?

  My, my, my stance broadly in support of civilian arms ownership has nothing to do with the Constitution.

• 1:48:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00Robert Evans?

  Because it's a stupid document written a long time. Well, again, given the time, not a stupid document.

• 1:49:05Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:49:06Robert Evans?

  Better than, anyway, whatever. I don't need to have this conversation. I am going to quote from The New Yorker here because I think it gives some helpful context.

• 1:49:14Robert Evans?

  None of this, this being the Second Amendment, had anything to do with hunting. People who owned and used long arms to hunt continued to own and use them. The Second Amendment was not commonly understood as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As Gary Willis once wrote, "One does not bear arms against a rabbit." Meanwhile, militias continued to muster. The Continental Army was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, but the national defense was increasingly assumed by the US Army. By the middle of the 19th century, the US had a standing army after all. And this is what I, one of the things I think is interesting because, again, the kind of, especially on Twitter, common takes on one side or the other of this is that like, well, you don't need these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of the Second Amendment, which, no, it's absolutely not.

• 1:49:57Robert Evans?

  But at the same time, the idea of the Second Amendment as referring to an individual's ability to stockpile an arsenal is not really accurate because it was within the context of a militia. However, if you're bringing that up, it's one of the things that they meant by, like, one of the things that the founding fathers wanted with this militia was for it to be the primary method of defending the country as opposed to a massive standing army. So again, if you are, if you are, for one reason or the other, if you're arguing that we should do things the way the founding fathers argued, probably the most accurate thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of the context of a militia and also ensure that the militia is the only armed force in the country, including police. So that like a massive civilian militia is the only armed force, there's no federal

• 1:50:42Robert Evans?

  power to deploy a massive military and there's not really federal policing in any meaningful way, because that's how things were in the 1800s, right? If you're, or 1700, if you're arguing that, that's probably closer to an originalist interpretation than anything being argued right now.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:50:58Robert Evans?

  Which is not to say that that makes much sense in the current day at all, although I would argue, there's a number of, you could look at like what Switzerland does, right? Which is often brought up by Second Amendment advocates.

• 1:51:10Speaker 04

  What do they do? I don't even know what.

• 1:51:11Robert Evans?

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

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:51:47Robert Evans?

  But also not in a way like, the Swiss, like, the civilians who own guns in Switzerland are not like, deployed for, obviously, Switzerland, right?

• 1:51:54Speaker 04

  Switzerland.

• 1:51:55Robert Evans?

  They don't do that kind of shit.

• 1:51:56Speaker 04

  Famously.

• 1:51:57Robert Evans?

  But anyway, I mean, this is again, when I talk about like, Rojava and like, what I think about in terms of the value of the state not having a monopoly on the use of force, these are some of the things that I think about. Broadly speaking, you know, the stuff has been different about the Second Amendment.

• 1:52:14Speaker 04

  Shit's changed, like, a little bit.

• 1:52:16Robert Evans?

  And, and kind of as a result, the Second Amendment, as heavily politicized as it is now, was kind of like, nobody, it was like the Third Amendment, right? Nobody talks about that anymore. Nobody fucking talked about the Second Amendment on a national level for like, a century or so, right?

• 1:52:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Robert Evans?

  We talked about like, gun control earlier, but it was basically all state level, right? Different states, different cities would have like, different rules based on shit that was happening there. The federal government left them alone. Like, there was not really any kind of federal interest in regulating the Second Amendment until the early 1930s, and that is when we get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now, the NFA, or National Firearms Act, was a response to the era of the gangster, right? In particular, you get this weapon, starting in like, I don't know exactly when it was invented, I could have looked it up, but like, it becomes popular in the 30s, the Tommy gun, right?

• 1:53:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Robert Evans?

  Which is the Thompson submachine gun, and it is...

• 1:53:15Robert Evans?

  Broadly speaking, kind of like, at least in terms of the way it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used in crime, kind of like the AR-15 of its day. Because it is the Thompson, it's an automatic 45 caliber weapon. It's a submachine gun, right? So it's not like a full sized rifle. This will be one of the most popular squad weapons that the United States uses in World War II, right? A very effective weapon for what it does, which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets very quickly at people at close range. So, super good if you're, for example, a gangster who wants to murder a bunch of people in an enclosed room, right? If you're like lining a bunch of other gangsters up against the wall, you can kill a shitload of people with a Tommy gun, you know?

• 1:53:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very fun for, you know, pulling off some sort of Saint Valentine's Day massacre.

• 1:53:59Robert Evans?

  Incredible bank robbing weapon, great for all sorts of stuff.

• 1:54:03Speaker 04

  Going to the local gobba ghoulery and shooting up the gobba ghoul.

• 1:54:07Robert Evans?

  Exactly. You could gobba a hell of a lot of ghoul with this gun.

• 1:54:10Speaker 04

  Lots of ghouls.

• 1:54:11Robert Evans?

  It's nowadays, honestly, not that impressive of a weapon. But at the time, right, like prior to this, most Americans, like their experience with this, like, single shot rifles and lever action guns and like revolvers and shit, right? Even semi-automatic handguns are pretty new and fancy in the 30s. The Thompson is just so much deadlier than anything else.

• 1:54:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, scary as fuck.

• 1:54:35Robert Evans?

  And the crimes that get committed with it, again, as with the AR-15, on like a national scale, very little gun crime involves a Thompson submachine gun. And again, the AR-15, not the most common gun used in crime by any, like, it's not super common compared to a lot of other kinds of firearm, but the crimes that it's used in are so spectacular and kind of like horrifying that they shock the nation and law enforcement gets nuts about this because one of the things that gangsters do with Tommy guns is shoot lots of police officers with them. So, there's a whole, kind of, America's first panic over a gun, right? Is what happens with the Tommy gun in the 30s. And it's not just the Tommy gun, they're also freaking out about sawed off shotguns,

• 1:55:19Robert Evans?

  which is actually pretty dumb. They're only scared about them because you can like...

• 1:55:23Speaker 04

  Hide them?

• 1:55:24Robert Evans?

  Like hide them, but they're they're not even like, anyway, it's dumb for sawed off shotguns to be regulated more than regular shotguns. They're actually less deadly.

• 1:55:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:55:32Robert Evans?

  But whatever.

• 1:55:33Speaker 04

  They they look cool as fuck.

• 1:55:34Robert Evans?

  They look and and that you see them a lot in the hands of gangsters, right? So it's again, there's this part of this is that like, yeah, the Thompson is a lot deadlier than guns that had been available before. But part of it's also just like, there's this media sort of panic around the Thompson.

• 1:55:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:55:48Robert Evans?

  Um, and by the way, I should note at this period of time, if you want a Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail one to your house. Like, this is not, there are not like, you don't have to go to a gun store, you don't have to do it, they're like, background checks, like, they just will send it to you. It's like if you order like a book on Amazon, it was that easy to get a Thompson submachine gun.

• 1:56:07Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 1:56:08Robert Evans?

  So the NFA puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the ownership of machine guns, sawed off shotguns and silencers. Now, the NRA is again, not a political organization at this point. It does initially oppose the NFA, and this is kind of the first time it gets political. The organization writes a dissent in their magazine, American Rifleman. And this is a pretty like, tamely phrased dissent, and it prompts congressional leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to limit their bill. The main thing that it does is that like, it stops the ban from being total. So rich people can still get machine guns.

• 1:56:45Speaker 04

  Oh, thank God.

• 1:56:46Robert Evans?

  And silencers, right? Well, and we could, I could rant about silencers, which are not what people tend to think that they are.

• 1:56:52Speaker 04

  They're not silent.

• 1:56:53Robert Evans?

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

• 1:57:14Speaker 04

  I guess I don't know what a machine gun is. What's an AR-15?

• 1:57:17Robert Evans?

  An AR-15 is a semi-automatic gun. The legal definition of a machine gun is a weapon that will fire more than one bullet per trigger pull, right? This is all very wonky, because like, we had bump stocks a while ago.

• 1:57:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:57:30Robert Evans?

  Function more or less as a machine gun, but legally Aren't technically a machine gun. There's a couple of weird kinds of triggers you can, as with anything with guns. Because when you, like, when you make a law to ban a thing, you have to specify what that thing is in mechanical terms.

• 1:57:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:57:45Robert Evans?

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

• 1:57:54Speaker 04

  Right, different compound.

• 1:57:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And the same thing happens. Now there are sought off shotguns that aren't legally shotguns because of very, anyway, whatever.

• 1:58:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:03Robert Evans?

  Um, this is getting off of the point a bit, but the NRA works with, it works with Congress, right? They don't do like a big political brouhaha. They're like, hey, we want to make sure that rich people can still own these weapons. Let's, let's sit down and work some things out and Congress is happy to work with them. Now, some people in Congress are. The Attorney General claims that they emasculate the bill, but broadly speaking, the NFA seriously limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have. And this is the first time anyone had done that at the federal level. And the NRA is pretty happy with the resulting bill and they endorse the 1934 NFA. Now, there was still no real, like, massive national discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this period.

• 1:58:46Robert Evans?

  Not that it was like particularly discussed much at all. This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period of time.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  It's not yet part of the culture war.

• 1:58:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it has, yeah, that hasn't really evolved yet. The context, the discussion of the, the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms doesn't really start to take off until the early 1960s. Uh, and this is when the very first law review articles arguing an individualist interpretation are published. Now, this period coincides with the Civil Rights Movement and the second big push for gun control in federal history. This time, rather than, well, racism and crime have a role to play, as we'll discuss, but one of the first things that sets it off is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Famously, John F. Kennedy is assassinated by Bernard Sanders using a Manliker Carcano rifle that he'd ordered from a classified ad in the American Rifleman Magazine, which is the NRA's magazine. So the gun that kills JFK is ordered from

• 1:59:43Robert Evans?

  The back of a magazine, right?

• 1:59:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:44Robert Evans?

  Um, and this is, it's not, again, he's not killed with like anything you would consider an assault weapon. It's like an old bolt action rifle. But the fact that he was able to get it from like a magazine ad becomes like, and like, you know, again, background checks are not really a thing yet. And that's, uh, that, that makes a lot of people very angry. And I'm going to quote now from an article by Alina Savadra Buckley, quote, "For years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had been watching television and learning how to shoot. In the 1950s, when Hollywood studios were churning out Westerns, Popular Science estimated that half a million Americans had started quick draw shooting for fun. And by the end of the decade, 3,000 Western-style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smythe in his book, The NRA: The Unauthorized History.

• 2:00:29Robert Evans?

  At the same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise, and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures as a result. The NRA braced itself for new legislation in the early 1960s, sprinkling the first references to the Second Amendment in American Rifleman. Eight months after Kennedy died, the magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead: 'The strength of the NRA, and therefore the ability to accomplish its objects and purposes, depends entirely upon the support of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep and bear arms.' And a lot of this push is coming at the direction of Harlan Carter, who writes stuff for American Rifleman and who is a big believer that the NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization.

• 2:01:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:01:10Robert Evans?

  And that's, again, that's different from what they had always been pro-gun, because obviously it's the NRA, right? But when you look at what they're doing in 34, that, they're not advocating for the Second Amendment. They're advocating for what they see as sportsmen, right? And obviously, there's problems with that. It's based heavily on like, the desire of rich people to be heavily armed. But they're arguing for sportsmen, as opposed to Carter wants to turn it into an advocacy organization for this thing, this, this, this idea of the Second Amendment. And when you do something like that, number one, if you, if you kind of are an essentialist and you claim that this is like, there's this kind of inherent, timeless, essential interpretation of this rule, and that's your, your guiding light, there's not any ability to compromise there, right? Right? Like you have to be kind of a fundamentalist about it.

• 2:01:55Speaker 04

  Right. Doesn't matter if a president was just murked in front of everyone in Dallas.

• 2:02:00Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  You have to be like, sorry, the law's the law. And this is, you know, this is my interpretation of it.

• 2:02:08Robert Evans?

  And Carter understands, again, he's a very smart guy. What he done with the border patrol shows, he understands how the media works. He understands how to advocate for white supremacy without advocating for white supremacy.

• 2:02:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:02:23Robert Evans?

  Right? And so he knows that it's not just enough to like, say that you support gun ownership. And I'm going to continue with a quote from Buckley here. "In order for there to be good guys with guns, there had to be an opposing force. The NRA and many lawmakers, that opposing force was usually black." Now, this gets into the aspect of the gun control push. Again, there's an aspect that's just based in these assassinations. That's not at all based in racism. And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots. So in 1965, the LAPD beats a black man named Marquette Frye with a baton during a traffic stop. And protests erupt. It becomes an insurrection and spreads throughout the country. The military is eventually called in to augment an overwhelmed LAPD.

• 2:03:06Robert Evans?

  This is part of what jumpstarts the war on crime, a period of largely racist gun or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator panic that Biden is famous for. And the NRA, huge supporters of crime bills, anti-gun control, support crime bills, right? So you see what they're doing here is you have some folks, because people are during the Watts riots, using guns to fight the LAPD. And so there are like, and this is kind of, there's pushes, this is what starts some of the momentum for gun control in California comes from this.

• 2:03:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:03:37Robert Evans?

  But more than that, what the NRA looks at is they see these armed black people carrying out an uprising. And they're like, well, We can take away focus on guns and on legislating guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people, right?

• 2:03:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:03:54Robert Evans?

  And that's what Harland Carter realizes like, well, this is some, this is the business the NRA needs to be in.

• 2:03:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:00Robert Evans?

  And also like, this is the business of like arming the police, arguing that like, because that's where, you know, that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts, right?

• 2:04:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:04:10Robert Evans?

  Is the idea that like, you need to, the police need to have more and more weapons to deal with today's like dangerous heavily armed criminals, right?

• 2:04:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and also the, you know, guns don't kill people. This racial group that I do not like kills people.

• 2:04:24Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, which is an argument you still see made today. There's just a fucking Republican congressional candidate who was arguing that like, America doesn't have a gun violence problem, black people have a gun, or something like that, right? Like, this is an old argument. And Harland Carter is the one who first figures out how to make it, right? So two years after the Watts riots, the members of the Black Panther Party start assembling and openly carrying firearms, which is lawful at the time. They would assemble with guns and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure that cops did not abuse members of the public. One could argue, this is in some ways closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment than anything today. Now, their activism scares the fuck out of white people.

• 2:05:07Robert Evans?

  And again, white people who are not pro-gun, right?

• 2:05:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:05:12Robert Evans?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna chat about all of that. And we're gonna chat about my favorite president, Matt. I know your favorite president, Ronald Reagan.

• 2:05:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:05:22Robert Evans?

  Star of Bedtime for Bonzo.

• 2:05:24Speaker 04

  Love him. The monkey movie, the, um, those McCarthy hearings.

• 2:05:30Robert Evans?

  We, we owe Ronald Reagan a lot, including the beginning of the career of my favorite musician, John Hinckley Jr.

• 2:05:36Speaker 04

  Oh, he's so good, dude. I just like, you gotta get his mixtapes.

• 2:05:40Robert Evans?

  I like his early stuff better, but he's still really cranking, cranking out some solid things, you know?

• 2:05:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. His early stuff is, oof.

• 2:05:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, his early stuff, unbelievable.

• 2:05:49Speaker 04

  Unbelievable, just, mm-hmm. Number one with a bullet.

• 2:05:53Robert Evans?

  Here's, here's, here's our ads.

• 2:05:58Robert Evans?

  Oh, we're back. And, you know, I just wanted to give a special statement from our sponsors that they completely support the career of John Hinckley Jr.

• 2:06:08Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:06:09Robert Evans?

  And, uh, I don't know. Sophie, how do we, you're shaking your head. Probably shouldn't. Probably not good.

• 2:06:17Speaker 03

  It's just a boring bit.

• 2:06:19Robert Evans?

  It's a boring bit. You think it's boring that John Hinckley Jr. is making a comeback tour now.

• 2:06:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's touring and he's

• 2:06:29Speaker 04

  he's got a guitar and it says, this machine almost kills fascist.

• 2:06:34Robert Evans?

  Pretty close to killing a fascist. This machine's shot the side of an armored limousine with, and it bounced and managed to penetrate a fascist's chest cavity.

• 2:06:47Speaker 04

  This machine loves Jodie Foster and almost killed a fascist.

• 2:06:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this machine heads was very creepy. She did say she was impressed.

• 2:06:56Speaker 04

  She should be.

• 2:06:57Robert Evans?

  I mean, it is impressive, right?

• 2:06:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07:01Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Mixed bag, whatever. That was probably enough John Hinckley Jr. jokes.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  Mixed bag.

• 2:07:08Robert Evans?

  Look, he did. He did shoot Ronald Reagan.

• 2:07:10Speaker 04

  He did, unarguably.

• 2:07:12Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  All right, Evans.

• 2:07:16Robert Evans?

  So, uh, two years.

• 2:07:19Robert Evans?

  So you get the Black Panthers start assembling with guns in public and this scares the shit out of both kind of the progressive liberal crowd in California and conservatives in California. And so all of California gets on board the idea of banning the open carry of firearms.

• 2:07:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07:36Robert Evans?

  And the NRA happily endorses the measure. The Black Panthers assemble with their guns in the Capitol. On one of the last days, it would remain legal to do so. It's described in local news as an invasion, even though again, it was people legally protesting in a way that was not again, whatever.

• 2:07:55Speaker 04

  Fighting for the exact rights that the same, you know, like white wackadoos do now.

• 2:08:01Robert Evans?

  But again, fucking Harland Carter, totally on board with criminalizing this, as is again, Ronald Reagan is the governor.

• 2:08:07Speaker 04

  Governor of California.

• 2:08:08Robert Evans?

  Reagan's totally against.

• 2:08:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, some of these guys get arrested during their protest in Sacramento. As they are handcuffed, Bobby Seal read from their executive mandate, which protested, quote, "The racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless." The measure passed, and it laid the groundwork for the extensive gun control that the state of California now enjoys. To this day, those laws primarily impact poor black people. Rich white folks can acquire concealed weapon permits very easily. You just have to be able to have a second home in a place like San Bernardino, and you can get the license to carry a concealed gun in the state of California. They can also purchase to so California, one of the things that they have is a handgun roster, right?

• 2:08:53Robert Evans?

  So the only handguns you can buy in the state of California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state. However, you can bring handguns into the state if you move there, as long as they don't have an illegal, you know, as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than a 10 round capacity, you can bring those into the state. And then you can have them, or you can sell them to people through an FFL. And if you're a police officer, you can buy any kind of gun you want, and you can sell it to whoever you want. So there is a massive industry in California of police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in the state of California to buy unless a police officer sells them to you for twice the normal price. Anyway, whole bunch of sketchy shit happens.

• 2:09:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a nice side hustle for the cops, you know? I mean, because, hey, there was a gig economy back then, too. A lot of us are Uber drivers slash gun salesmen now, so I get it.

• 2:09:42Robert Evans?

  And it's one of those things. There's a number of things about, including like waiting periods and stuff in California that there's a strong argument to be made in favor of. But this is where a lot of it starts, and it never entirely gets divorced from from this thing of like, again, you can look at the same thing in the 1934 NFA of like, well, no, we want to, we don't want rich people to be affected, right?

• 2:10:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:06Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 2:10:07Speaker 04

  The, you know, they banned, what is that, the Saturday night specials, like any like?

• 2:10:11Robert Evans?

  Oh, we're getting to that. That's where the handgun, that's where the handgun roster starts, though. Yes, with the Saturday night special.

• 2:10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:10:17Robert Evans?

  But we're, we're, we'll get to that. Don't worry.

• 2:10:19Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:10:19Robert Evans?

  So Harland Carter's support of an individual right to bear arms was not out of principled belief that all Americans deserve to defend themselves, or out of a desire to even check governmental power. Again, he militarized the Border Patrol.

• 2:10:31Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:10:32Robert Evans?

  Instead, he believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this. And back in California's open carry ban, he was engaging in an intelligence strategy. You draw attention away from guns and you focus on who is carrying them. This is the origin of the quote, guns don't kill people, people don't kill people argument. But when Harland made it, the people were explicitly quoted as black. I'm going to quote from Epic magazine now. The same year, American Rifleman published an editorial titled, Who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like Watts as mob violence, who then supports the police, who then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery and pillaging. It read, with home front safeguards spotty and uncertain, the armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer. Right?

• 2:11:18Speaker 04

  Nothing is more stable, stabilizing for a community than a bunch of armed white people.

• 2:11:24Robert Evans?

  Well, and he's, he's very much making the Rittenhouse argument here, right?

• 2:11:27Speaker 04

  Oh, 100%.

• 2:11:28Robert Evans?

  The armed citizen supports the police. The Black Panthers are making what I might argue is more of an originalist interpretation, which is the armed citizen protects the community from government overreach. That's the Black Panthers. He's saying the armed citizen aids the police in enforcing white supremacy, right?

• 2:11:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:11:44Robert Evans?

  That's the argument being made by the NRA here.

• 2:11:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's funny because like, you know, obviously, you know, you do have your, you know, right wing insurrectionist militias and shit like that. But for the most part, what is being supported is like arming the suburbs.

• 2:12:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:03Speaker 04

  And anyone who supports the police should be armed and anyone who in any ways against it shouldn't be. And. That is, uh, you know, yeah.

• 2:12:12Robert Evans?

  It is a problem.

• 2:12:13Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, it's, uh, cause some issues.

• 2:12:15Robert Evans?

  It's a problem that deserves a more complex series of solutions than tend to get suggested on, on and in debates over this, but that's a separate topic.

• 2:12:26Robert Evans?

  So after RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. are murdered in 1968, Senator Thomas Dodd reintroduces the Gun Control Act to Congress. This has been put it through it forward a couple of times. He puts it through again in 1968 after those assassinations and the, the Gun Control Act is intended to ban the interstate sale of guns, ban their sale to children, uh, to convicted felons and because of some bigotry, mental defectives, right?

• 2:12:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:12:54Robert Evans?

  So again, like, like all of these laws, there's like, okay, you don't want people to just be able to like ship guns through a mail order catalog across the country. I can get on board there.

• 2:13:02Speaker 04

  Fair, yeah.

• 2:13:03Robert Evans?

  Right, probably shouldn't be selling them to children or, you know.

• 2:13:05Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 2:13:05Robert Evans?

  Although I have issues with like who becomes a felon, right? Like if somebody's got a violent history, sure, that makes sense. You don't want somebody who's like a convicted rapist buying guns. And then like, and mental defectives. Well, how the hell do you define that? Now, now, right now I've got some concerns. But this, this law, again, there's a lot that's very reasonable in here and the NRA rallies against it in huge numbers. Harlan Carter and his partner in the, and they are not in, they don't have an issue with the mental defectives part, right? That's not the thing that's a problem to them.

• 2:13:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13:37Robert Evans?

  This is the first law that causes the NRA to get like hugely political and, and Harlan Carter, again, there's this war still within the NRA that hasn't been resolved between the old guard and the new guard. Carter, cause he has a lot of influence in American Rifleman Magazine. He, he enlists like the people that he's been seeding the NRA with, these new guard folks to start like coming up with a series of blistering editorials in American Rifleman Magazine that are urging people to write letters to Congress to like, this is the first real concerted lobbying campaign by the NRA.

• 2:14:08Speaker 04

  And I'm trying to figure out what, which part of it it is. Is it the children part? Is it the fact that they're like, no, children is, I mean, neutral, racially neutral. So they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we can't do that. What is it?

• 2:14:20Robert Evans?

  A big part of it, this is an attempting to establish like if you're buying a gun, you have to do it through, there has to be like this, this legal process, like it can't just be a dude has a gun and I get it, right?

• 2:14:33Robert Evans?

  And that's, that's the big, that's the center of the problem, right? Is the idea that the federal government is now going to be involved in like, in all legal gun purchases, which is obviously not what the Gun Control Act does. There's these things called face to face sales in a lot of states where if you're not a gun dealer, you can sell a gun to anybody without there being any kind of a background check. That is still the law in a lot of the country. But most gun purchases, you have to do, you have to fill out what's called a Form 4473, which is, and you have to have like a federal background check, right? And the government gets involved, right? That's, that's the thing that they're scared about. And again, you can't divorce this from like the John Birch Society, from all of these panics about communism, about like, you know, the government getting increasingly centralized.

• 2:15:18Robert Evans?

  And I guess you might argue that that's also closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment. But anyway, so the NRA, you know, Harlan Carter urges like, helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against the Gun Control Act. And it's not popular with many of the folks running the NRA at the time. And again, the way they'd done things before, Congress would suggest a bill. The NRA would usually have some issues with it, but they would like make those issues clear. Then they'd sit down and like hash something out as they did in 1934. So the Vice President of the NRA, a guy named Franklin Orth, figures that's what we're going to do, right? He doesn't want the organization to take like a really public political stance, because that's kind of permanently alienated from like one party, right?

• 2:16:02Robert Evans?

  And he doesn't, that's not his goal with the NRA. He doesn't want it to be like a Republican or a Democratic thing.

• 2:16:07Speaker 04

  Short sighted idiot.

• 2:16:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So for what would be the last time, because again, Orth and his people are still in charge of the NRA broadly, the NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach a compromise on the bill. And they, you know, they, they alter it and whatnot to be a little bit, whatever. Orth describes it as a law the sportsmen of America can live with. The fact that anything had been passed at all enrages the base that Carter has put together, and they respond with a flood of hate mail so voluminous, it nearly makes Orth resign. It becomes increasingly clear that the old guard did not speak for the increasingly radicalized masses of the NRA. And these, again, these people are, they're frightened of black mobs of the Watts riots,

• 2:16:53Robert Evans?

  right? They're also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys with like fears of communist infiltration and invasion. This is all kind of coming together as part of it. And obviously, a lot of the right in this time sees the Watts riots as like, it must have been the Soviet Union.

• 2:17:07Speaker 04

  Right, 100%. There's, is like a synonymous, like, you know, any kind of black uprising synonymous with communism at this.

• 2:17:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So kind of what you're seeing here is the radical chunk of the NRA doesn't want, like, wants to oppose any, like, this law under all conditions, right? There's no, no way in which they'll be okay with this. And they, they lose the fight to the old guard who works with the government to, to pass this law. But the new guard, I guess, new guard isn't really a term, but like the, the Harland Carter's faction becomes, starts to become more dominant as a result of this because it pisses off so many people. And because it's so much easier to electrify people with like threats of the, the communist government is coming to like, take your guns to stop, you have to be able to protect your family against these dangerous, like, that's easier to rile people up for than, we should

• 2:17:59Robert Evans?

  work with the government to come to like sensible, you know, accommodations, right?

• 2:18:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's compromise.

• 2:18:05Robert Evans?

  That's not a selling point, right? So because of what Carter builds here over this fight, membership in the NRA soars to over a million people for the first time in the association's history. So this is part of what scares the old guard and makes them silo Harland Carter off to the ILA, which is the NRA's first registered lobby. And when they make this lobbying group for him to run, they don't like fund it. So he's going to have to raise his own money to do anything. And their hope is that like, this guy is dangerous, but we can't kick him out. So if we give him this lobbying organization, but don't give him any money, he's going to have to spend all of his time raising funds and he's not going to be able to like, cause any trouble.

• 2:18:44Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:18:45Robert Evans?

  This proves to be a bad strategy because Harland Carter invents the concept of right wing fundraising.

• 2:18:51Speaker 04

  Damn it.

• 2:18:52Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:18:53Speaker 04

  The first podcaster.

• 2:18:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's the first guy to figure out how everything is going to work for right wing fundraising in the future. And he does it because he figures out, he start, he uses computers, right? Like, that's the thing he figures out is going to be critical. And I'm going to quote from Alina Buckley again. Their computer could print 1,100 lines per minute, letting Carter's team produce thousands of letters addressed to members over a 24 hour period. It was the latest iteration of a powerful tool, direct mail. The medium had reached prominence by the early 1970s, when it was first pioneered by Richard Vigery, who, as a campaign worker, had copied down the names and addresses of people who had donated to Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential bid. With that list of Republicans and their addresses, as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote, Vigery had developed a way for conservatives to reach the people

• 2:19:39Robert Evans?

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

• 2:20:06Speaker 04

  Oh, god damn it. He built a mailing list.

• 2:20:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He's one of the very first people to do this.

• 2:20:13Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 2:20:14Robert Evans?

  And is arguably the most successful of anyone in this period of doing this.

• 2:20:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:19Robert Evans?

  And, uh, yeah, that's where we're going to leave things for today. But first, Matt, you got a mailing list you wanna?

• 2:20:26Speaker 04

  Oh, I got a- Mailing list.

• 2:20:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:27Speaker 04

  It's called Instagram. You can find me there. At Matt Leib jokes, please follow me. And also, hey, if you like The Sopranos, listen to Pod Yourself a Gun. It is a rewatch podcast where me and Vince Mancini talk about every episode. We just wrapped it up and it is the greatest and only Sopranos podcast in the world. And I would love for y'all to check it out and tell your friends.

• 2:20:54Robert Evans?

  That's, that's wonderful. I would like to use this time to get everyone to get involved in my fundamentalist, right wing mailing list, NACA, the, the National Anti Quartering Association. We're third amendment fundamentalists, Matt.

• 2:21:09Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:21:10Robert Evans?

  Not only do I think that soldiers shouldn't be quartered in houses.

• 2:21:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:14Robert Evans?

  I don't think they should be quartered anywhere.

• 2:21:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:15Robert Evans?

  I think soldiers should be kept awake constantly with heavy doses of amphetamines for the duration of the time that they're serving. No quartering of soldiers anywhere, not even on a military basis. Keep them in the sea or in the sky on drugs at all times. That's the NACA line.

• 2:21:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I love it, dude.

• 2:21:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Find, find us online, give us your email, send us money and.

• 2:21:37Speaker 04

  Actblue.com slash anti quartering.

• 2:21:41Robert Evans?

  No quartering, nowhere.

• 2:21:46Speaker 04

  Good times.

• 2:21:47Robert Evans?

  Good times.

• 2:21:52Robert Evans?

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• 2:22:52Robert Evans?

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• 2:22:59Speaker 02

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• 2:23:31Robert Evans?

  What's Epstein My Bar Virus?

• 2:23:36Speaker 03

  Why was that your intro? Why was that your intro?

• 2:23:39Robert Evans?

  Sophie, as with all of our podcasts, this show is sponsored by the Epstein Bar Virus.

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  It is not, but okay.

• 2:23:46Robert Evans?

  Have you had mono? No? Well, maybe try it. Maybe try mono.

• 2:23:51Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:23:51Robert Evans?

  It's good. It might cause multiple sclerosis later in life. There's all sorts of things that mono does.

• 2:23:57Speaker 04

  Hard to tell.

• 2:23:57Robert Evans?

  Hard to tell.

• 2:23:58Speaker 04

  You will know if you had it if you ever take the Epstein Bar Exam.

• 2:24:02Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 2:24:03Speaker 04

  Which is a test. You get the rest of the joke.

• 2:24:06Robert Evans?

  You can do it for free on this podcast if you sign up for a week of food.

• 2:24:15Robert Evans?

  We love the Epstein Bar Virus.

• 2:24:18Speaker 03

  You just like to make our poor editor bleep things.

• 2:24:22Robert Evans?

  I do. I do.

• 2:24:23Speaker 04

  It's fun.

• 2:24:24Speaker 03

  I'm so sorry for him, Chris.

• 2:24:26Robert Evans?

  Well, once upon a time when we still went to the office, somebody dinged my car. Maybe. I'm not 100% sure, but I've decided it was our editor.

• 2:24:34Speaker 03

  It was not Chris. It was not.

• 2:24:37Robert Evans?

  You don't know that, Sophie. You don't know that he didn't come in.

• 2:24:39Speaker 04

  You can't prove it.

• 2:24:40Robert Evans?

  You don't know that he didn't do it.

• 2:24:41Speaker 04

  Oh, wait, unless you did it.

• 2:24:43Speaker 03

  Do you want to know how I know that? I've seen his dogs. His dogs are honest. He would never do that.

• 2:24:48Robert Evans?

  Well.

• 2:24:49Speaker 03

  It was the, it was the, you know who it was.

• 2:24:52Robert Evans?

  You're on blast, Chris.

• 2:24:52Speaker 03

  You know who it was.

• 2:24:54Robert Evans?

  And I don't know who it was. It does wrench us back on the topic, which is Harland Carter and the birth of the national, well, not the birth of, but the rebirth of the, like, this is, it's, it's like a racist, you know how Gandalf is like Gandalf the Grey? And then he, he gets reborn as Gandalf the White after fighting a Balrog? The NRA gets rebirthed as a white supremacist organization after fighting the Balrog of the Black Panthers assembling legally with guns to check police power?

• 2:25:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25:24Robert Evans?

  I may have lost the thread a little bit.

• 2:25:25Speaker 04

  No, I got you. You shall not pass legislation.

• 2:25:31Robert Evans?

  All right, we figured it out. We got it. We got it back on.

• 2:25:33Speaker 04

  We worked it out. It got there.

• 2:25:35Robert Evans?

  See, people, this is how the sausage gets made.

• 2:25:37Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:25:38Robert Evans?

  So.

• 2:25:38Speaker 04

  Disgustingly.

• 2:25:40Robert Evans?

  Now, we're talking about the NRA, and particularly, we have this, over the Gun Control Act, this, this first big clash between Harland Carter's people and the Old Guard. Um, and the Old Guard wins, right? Because they're still broadly speaking in control. But it become, that like, they kind of sack, like, in the course of winning, it becomes clear that an awful lot of, perhaps most NRA members are actually not on board with the direction they want, are really excited about this more fundamentalist attitude towards the Second Amendment.

• 2:26:12Robert Evans?

  And while Harland Carter was busy building the bones of a fundraising and lobbying machine that would dominate conservative and really, in a lot of ways, American politics for the next half century, the Old Guard were wistfully looking back to the organization's past as a sporting association and, and figured, maybe we could go back to that, right? And so they are the conservatives. Harland Carter is the radical, right?

• 2:26:36Robert Evans?

  Politics kind of leaves a bad taste in these people's mouths. Because again, they're all aristocrats, right? They're all like, they're, they're kind of like Joe Biden. They want to have all of their friends, right? They, like, on both sides of things. They don't want things to get too political because that gets nasty and it reduces the number of people who can give you money.

• 2:26:55Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 2:26:55Robert Evans?

  So in 1973, the Old Guard had purchased land in Colorado and they wanted to turn it initially into a shooting range, which is a pretty normal thing for the NRA to do. But in 1976, they decided to go with a grander plan, the National Rifle Association Outdoor Center. This was going to be a massive compound dedicated to classes on like wood crafting and wilderness, you know, stuff and conservation research. There's supposed to be like scientific research done there and also other sporting skills. And of course, there would be a shooting range there and people would be able to hunt on the land, but like guns were not the primary purpose, right? It was like a whole outdoor recreation center for the NRA. And this was in line with, they wanted to expand the organization because that's obviously

• 2:27:36Robert Evans?

  it's more money and whatnot, but they didn't want to like hone in on guns entirely. They wanted to be like, well, we could be like the, we could be like the, the American go-to organization for like outdoor, you know, sporting and stuff. So in order to help them kind of make this shift, right? Cause this is, at this point, but that is different from the NRA's initial vision, as is Harlan Carter's vision, right? So they're both trying to move it in different directions, right? It's become clear that like this thing the NRA had been isn't going to continue and the old guard has a vision and the new guard has another one. And so the old guard hires a PR firm, the Orem Group, to help them drum up funding to make this facility a reality because they need tens of millions of dollars to build this thing. It's a pretty impressive vision.

• 2:28:20Robert Evans?

  And they hope that the, they see Carter's built this like massive fundraising arm. He's getting all these people organized on behalf of his second amendment absolutism and they want this PR firm to help them like take back like power from, from Harlan Carter and like get people on their side. Now, here's the thing.

• 2:28:37Speaker 04

  Be like, yeah, you know, second amendment absolutism is fun, but what if we built a rec center?

• 2:28:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. What if we had a rec center for rich people? You can see what, this is kind of like how you've got like those, those like old political ghouls in the, the, the Democratic Party and like the parts of the Republican Party that turned into the Lincoln Project who opposed Trump with like. Very slick political ads that did nothing, whereas Trump just got people angry and that works a lot better than like, anyway, this is a version of that same fight, right? And part of how you could tell the Orem group was not going to succeed in their goals is that their founder, like the guy they're named after their founder is this wealthy New York philanthropist whose most prominent clients before the NRA were Planned Parenthood and the NAACP.

• 2:29:20Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 2:29:21Robert Evans?

  So, this, these, this guy maybe doesn't get the base of the NRA and it's gonna have trouble speaking to them, right?

• 2:29:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's gonna be a problem.

• 2:29:30Robert Evans?

  That might be a problem.

• 2:29:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's one thing if it's just like, hey, we have two different branches of conservatism or whatever, but, no, these guys are going to be politically and morally opposed with each other. It's gonna, it's not gonna, it's not gonna work out well.

• 2:29:45Robert Evans?

  It's not gonna work out well for them. It may have, it may be such a bad idea that literally anyone could have called it. But the NRA bigwigs, they bring this guy on the team and his goal, in his organization's goal is to chart like a safe new course for the NRA in which they kind of keep out of politics. And this is in part because like they want to build this new facility, you're not gonna get $30 million in 1970s money, like by, by hewing to a hard political line, right?

• 2:30:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:30:14Robert Evans?

  So, they succeed in roping in a bunch of big donors from all across, you know, major American business interests. They get Bill Spencer, who's like the second guy at Citibank, they get Ezra Taft Benson, who's the highest apostle of the Mormon church, they get a bunch of oil and gas industry bigwigs, all of whom agree to like, start putting money into this project. So, in order to like celebrate that they've found enough rich old dudes to fund this thing, the NRA sets up a big party on their land in Colorado for all of these, these rich guys. And they basically host like a multimillionaire summer camp. People are like camping in their private jets on the land, like they park their private jets there and like sleep on them and then they hunt and fish in the daytime.

• 2:30:51Speaker 04

  I love it, super relatable.

• 2:30:53Robert Evans?

  Exactly, right? You see, again, car, this, this just makes it really easy for Carter to be like, well, these guys don't have your interests at heart, because they don't, right?

• 2:31:01Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:31:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's not defending Carter to say that like, these guys don't give a shit about The average person who might want to join the NRA because most people who join the NRA are not millionaires with private jets.

• 2:31:12Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. They're missing the entire cultural aspect of it at this point.

• 2:31:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and so this is not going to work out well for them. Right, so there's some backlash. And Alina Buckley describes kind of the old guard's vision of the association's future as, quote, "One in which shooting accompanied frontier abundance funded by corporations that had long bankrolled conservative causes. One in which guns were a reflection of American might, cowboy-like to be sure, but still with a military-like formality, rather than a vigilante ethos that saw federal power as a threat." So again, the NRA, this is the attitude, the NRA works with the federal government in order to ensure this sporting culture and in order to ensure a degree of military readiness, which is basically back to their old principles as opposed to

• 2:31:58Robert Evans?

  the NRA is an association that enables individual Americans to be vigilantes, right?

• 2:32:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:32:03Robert Evans?

  Like, which is more what Carter's pushing.

• 2:32:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The fun, the fun type of NRA.

• 2:32:08Robert Evans?

  The guy who was a vigilante, you know?

• 2:32:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:12Robert Evans?

  So while the old guard are hobnobbing with the great and good, Harlan Carter is making a strategic alliance with a gun industry journalist, a guy named Neil Knox. Now Knox had been educated at a Christian college in Abilene, Texas. And the fact that he comes from Abilene is a red flag.

• 2:32:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:32:29Robert Evans?

  In general, don't go to Abilene. No, it's almost as bad as Brady. So, anyway, sorry, Abilene.

• 2:32:38Speaker 04

  I wish I knew anything about Texas.

• 2:32:39Robert Evans?

  This is just Texas lore. You have to, if you come from Dallas, as I do, you have to shit on every other city in Texas.

• 2:32:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:47Robert Evans?

  So that people don't notice how terrible Dallas is.

• 2:32:49Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 2:32:51Robert Evans?

  So I like to throw a lot of flak Houston's way in order to ignore that their food is better. It's whatever. So he goes to Abilene College and every social find on Neil Knox will note that he marries his wife because she was the only girl on campus who kept a rifle in her dorm room.

• 2:33:08Robert Evans?

  Well, hey, you know what? That's love, right? Like he finds his, he finds his person. Good for him.

• 2:33:13Speaker 04

  He was interested in safe sex. Am I right? Tell us.

• 2:33:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:33:18Speaker 04

  We're having fun.

• 2:33:19Robert Evans?

  I mean, it is, this is like getting into like how different some things are in the country. But like at the elementary school where I went to, it was not uncommon for like,

• 2:33:29Robert Evans?

  people, particularly like teachers to have like guns in their cars in the parking lot. And at the high school, like kids would regularly have their guns in their cars in the parking lot during the hunting season and stuff. Well, it's like they're hunting rifles, right? Cause they're like, this is in like Idabel, Oklahoma. Like it's not uncommon during the season, like you go straight from there to like whatever blind you've got.

• 2:33:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:33:49Robert Evans?

  So again, this is like different, different time. But also Neil Knox is a very modern kind of gun guy who is going to help make the NRA into like the gun culture war organization that it becomes.

• 2:34:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It sounds like the kind of origin story of like the first guy horny for guns. That's going to be normal. Like he's going to normalize being horny.

• 2:34:10Robert Evans?

  He's going to normalize being gun horny, but also with conspiracy baked into it, right? That's one of the keys, right? It's not just like an appreciation for guns. It's an appreciation for guns within this like conspiratorial milieu that Neil Knox is like, he's the A guy on this.

• 2:34:25Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a, it's a, yeah, he's, he's read the Turner diaries and shit.

• 2:34:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, he, he would have been the kind of guy to help write them. Not that he was, because that's a different set of guys, although they are kind of connected by the Goldwater campaign, but that's another story. As the Dallas Morning News writes, Knox was, yeah, I'm just going to quote them walking through this guy's background. In the mid 1960s, Knox, Knox worked as a reporter and editor with newspapers in Vernon and Wichita Falls before getting a job as founding editor of Gun Week, a newspaper covering firearms issues of the day. From his base in Arizona, the bearded gun evangelist spent the next 40 years railing against gun control and pitting himself against NRA leaders he saw as too compromising. In the 1960s and 70s, the gun industry and the NRA were inclined towards pragmatism, said Jeff Knox, who's his kid from his home in Buckeye, Arizona, and willing to make concessions.

• 2:35:13Robert Evans?

  The elder Knox believed strongly that the second amendment was absolute and he especially didn't like the. The idea of registering guns, which to him raised the specter of a dictator confiscating all arms and subduing the citizenry, Jeff Knox said. At one point in the mid 1990s, Neil Knox even suggested the assassinations of Kennedy and King might have been staged to build support for gun control. So Knox is the start of specifically the strain of the American right and American gun culture that kind of culminates in Alex Jones, right?

• 2:35:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 2:35:40Robert Evans?

  And he's not super big about pushing that, but he is like the first kind of prominent voice to start talking about like these, these, these shootings.

• 2:35:48Speaker 04

  Flag attacks that were made specifically for gun control.

• 2:35:51Robert Evans?

  That's one of the big things that Neil Knox introduces into American culture, at least helps to introduce. I'm not going to claim that he was entirely on his own there. But he's like, he's like the vanguard of that kind of guy who winds up doing the Sandy Hook conspiracy shit later on. And it's, it's worth noting though, that wow, when Knox partners with Harlan Carter, again, this is 76, 77. So he has not yet started pushing conspiracies outright. But you can see kind of where he goes is where he, he and Carter helped to lead a lot of the gun culture.

• 2:36:27Robert Evans?

  And yeah, so these guys, the old guard, see Carter and Knox and see them as like, kind of unhinged, but even more than that, they're not primarily objecting necessarily to their goals as much as the fact that they're so extreme that it's going to take away funding, right? It's going to reduce the NRA's ability to attract a lot of like people to give them money for their support.

• 2:36:49Speaker 04

  It was the Republican establishment during like Trump's run. They were just like, listen, we agree all Mexicans are rapists, but you're not going to get the nomination by saying it. And it's like, want to bet?

• 2:37:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like that's, that's kind of like you, they're arguing like these people are too extreme. The NRA will like die out if their kind takes over. And Harlan Carter's like, oh, motherfucker, you want to see how to make the NRA make a lot of money? I will show you some things. He's about to.

• 2:37:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37:20Robert Evans?

  So one Friday in November of 1976, the head of the NRA purged 80 staff members loyal to Carter, right? They fire everybody with like very little warning because again, Carter spent years getting his Border Patrol guys in there. So they tried to get rid of all these people. And what's becomes known later is the Weekend Massacre. And Harland, it's the only massacre.

• 2:37:41Robert Evans?

  Harland resigns from his position in protest. And Alina Buckley continues, quote, "And Gun Week, Handloader and Rifle, all publications Knox had once edited, writers began reporting rumors about a shakeup at headquarters. The Orem Group's report on the outdoor center had been leaked, and gun group leaders around the country bristled at its language." And this is from the the Orem Group's report. "In the public mind, the NRA's current image is based almost totally on its supposed opposition to any form of gun control. This public image constitutes a weakness for fundraising." A new piece of, again, very bad at being at their job, by the way. "A new piece of information had gotten out, too, via a brochure sent in the mail to some members. The executive committee was considering moving the headquarters to Colorado Springs,

• 2:38:23Robert Evans?

  not far from Raton, where the NRA could focus more squarely on its sports shooting ties. Regional gun groups began receiving concern notes from their members. The Shooters Committee of Political Education, Scope, based in New York, wrote a letter to Rich protesting the NRA's recent board appointees, and to let him know that they would advise their membership to write in Neil Knox, among several others, as board candidate at the annual meeting in Cincinnati. In the American Rifleman, an unsigned editorial appeared. There have been charges that the National Rifle Association is being subverted," it read, "in abandoning its fight against gun control." So this, and you see here, they've built, in their partnership, Knox and Carter have built a very effective, both fundraising and propaganda wing. That is, they're, they're

• 2:39:07Robert Evans?

  building a moral panic over this, right? In a very modern way, in a way that is, and it's modern because this is like the, the fucking, this is part of like the blueprint of like everything the right will do in the future. So for the next couple of weeks, Knox and Carter call every other NRA lifetime member they can. In brief, like, you, when you have an organization like the NRA, every year you have to have a meeting. And you have to do like voting at that meeting and stuff and like there's people who are the actual like board and stuff, but also the lifetime members get to vote. And so the board is in control unless you can get like enough of those members to vote on measures that would like replace the leadership, right? So, and they didn't, they had never worked, no one had ever really tried to do this before.

• 2:39:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:39:50Robert Evans?

  The fact that the members get to vote had kind of been like, like stock options voting where it's like,

• 2:39:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:39:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the random citizens who control 20% of the company's stock could get a vote, but like our CEO controls 45% and his best friend controls 20. So it doesn't matter what they say, right?

• 2:40:05Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 2:40:05Robert Evans?

  That was the, the thinking, but obviously the NRA isn't like a, a publicly traded company. You just, each, each of these people has a vote and if you can whip them all into shape, you could actually wrest control of the organization away from the old guard. Which is what Knox and Carter start planning to do. Now, there's a lot of politicking that goes on here. You can read about it in day, in detail in Alina Buckley's article. One thing I think that's worth noting is that the whole event has something of an early Trumpy vibe. The folks Carter lines up to back their plan to take over the NRA saw the old guard as out of touch aristocrats, which they were. They framed themselves as like Paul Revere types, right? They're founding fathers, right? They're, they're fighting a revolution against an unjust like aristocracy.

• 2:40:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:40:48Robert Evans?

  One person who was present-

• 2:40:50Speaker 04

  They're all doing the cosplay now. It's all begins with the don't tread on me flags and the three pointed, you know, fucking hats and-

• 2:40:56Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:40:57Speaker 04

  Oh, hey, babe.

• 2:40:58Robert Evans?

  And one person who was present later recalled, some members were angry enough to bring rope, tar and feathers to Cincinnati.

• 2:41:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:07Speaker 04

  What's their obsession with? It's like, oh, the tea party, a tar and feathering. It's just like, they just have an obsession with this like patriotic forms of like, you know, like old style LARPing. It's just, just the same fucking-

• 2:41:23Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 2:41:24Robert Evans?

  I mean, this gets into a broader issue that actually is is present in different forms everywhere, which is that like, um, everyone has their types of violence that are like good and traditional and okay, and there are types of violence that are so black people breaking a bunch of windows during a riot, um, or like, you know, um, flipping a cop car and lighting it on fire, that is not okay. That's horrifying. That's, that's

• 2:41:54Speaker 04

  Evil violence, you know, end of civilization.

• 2:41:57Robert Evans?

  Tarring and feathering a guy trying to like raise taxes, like literally melting a man's skin off in order to stop him from like getting the taxes that will pay for a road. That's traditional, right?

• 2:42:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's, it's allowed, you know, it's, uh, I mean, burning their skin off and then the feathers is just so they look like a chicken. Just the most horrifying joke that you can possibly think of. Yeah. There was like that John Adams HBO series with Paul Giamatti.

• 2:42:26Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:27Speaker 04

  They had like a tarring and feathering in it. And it was like, the first time I was like, oh yeah, that's incredibly violent.

• 2:42:33Robert Evans?

  It's really, really violent, actually, to tar and feather a person.

• 2:42:36Speaker 04

  I thought it was just like, hey, we're gonna make you look like a funny chicken, like a pie in the face. I put it on the same level as a pie in the face, but it's, um, no, it's not. It's pretty bad.

• 2:42:44Robert Evans?

  No, and it's like, um, I mean, everyone, there's a degree to which this is very common across the political spectrum because on one that you get like whenever people suggests like, well, the cops should, uh, confiscate this or the cops should like do that. It's like, well, okay. What happens when police confiscate things? Like, what does that look like violence wise? You know?

• 2:43:04Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:43:05Robert Evans?

  And it's, it's because like, I don't know, everyone's got, it's, it's a, it's a, it's, I mean, it's a common political tactic, right? To frame the violence you want to do, or you want to have the government do as not violence because it's being done by the government. It's like, you know, when people do a panic about like drug dealers sneaking fentanyl into things and their solution to that is have the DEA raid more people. It's like, well, the DEA kill people too, you know?

• 2:43:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely.

• 2:43:32Robert Evans?

  Uh, I don't know. This is just what people do. Um, anyway, uh, so.

• 2:43:39Robert Evans?

  Knox takes point on the actual day of the convention. He's the one who's actually whipping votes at the NRA convention to propose a series of bylaw changes. Using the support base Carter had built, he gets them to vote in a defense of the Second Amendment to the NRA's mission for the first time, right? So he's like, this is the first time they actually add, because they have a mission statement or whatever as an organization. The first thing they do is they add like Second Amendment, you know, like we are advocating for like the, you know, this interpretation of the Second Amendment to that. The next thing they do is they block the sale of the NRA headquarters in DC and they block the development of the outdoor centers. They put it into this plan.

• 2:44:18Robert Evans?

  And then Carter or Knox brings up a guy named Bob Kukla, who's one of Carter's people who's still in the NRA. When Carter resigns in protest, Kukla takes over the lobbying arm. And he's apparently, I guess, the old guard had thought he was trustworthy, but he secretly records one of their managing committee meetings. And they play this in front of the crowd. And in the tape, you can hear the current head of the NRA and the other members of the old guard criticizing Kukla for, quote, "going to war every time someone mentions gun control."

• 2:44:49Speaker 04

  He pulled a Project Veritas on the ass.

• 2:44:52Robert Evans?

  He veritas it. Again, these guys are really building the playbook that's going to be used everywhere, well outside of guns. So, following this, Knox and his voters strip the board and managing committee of power. And basically, again, this is, you can go into a lot more detail about how they do this all legislatively, but by the end of things, the old guard are no longer in charge of the NRA and Harlan Carter is the new executive vice president.

• 2:45:15Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 2:45:16Robert Evans?

  At 3:30, yeah, yeah, they do it, they do it fucking street style. And at 3:30 AM, Carter takes to the stage to give his first speech to his newly conquered NRA. "You're America's greatest people, my friends. Don't ever forget that you are. You have afforded the NRA this wonderful, historically important reaction of yours to the way the association has been going, to the way you want it to be, to the way it ought to be. And if I have anything to do with it, you are going to win because you are the NRA."

• 2:45:45Speaker 04

  Fuck.

• 2:45:45Robert Evans?

  So.

• 2:45:47Speaker 04

  He did it.

• 2:45:48Robert Evans?

  He did it. Very Trumpy speech. Yeah.

• 2:45:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, he did his Trump speech and he took over the NRA and I imagine now, uh, people are gonna start falling in line.

• 2:45:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, the NRA is gonna make a lot of people fall in line and we're gonna talk about what they do. But first, you know who loves to carry out coups?

• 2:46:12Speaker 04

  Who?

• 2:46:13Robert Evans?

  Our sponsors, who backed a series of coups in Indonesia in order to gain access to the island that you can go to hunt kids on.

• 2:46:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what they're known for.

• 2:46:24Robert Evans?

  And hey, if you're not, if you're not into guns, understands, you can use bows, you can use an Atalatal, you know?

• 2:46:30Speaker 04

  Uh, Ninja Stars.

• 2:46:31Robert Evans?

  Ninja Stars for sure. Look, they can't stop you. Yeah.

• 2:46:36Speaker 04

  A bow staff, literally any weapon the Ninja Turtles use.

• 2:46:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the government of Indonesia has no control over this island, so it's all on.

• 2:46:47Robert Evans?

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• 2:48:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, we're back. So, immediately after carrying out his coup, Harland Carter sets to work remaking the NRA in his own image. One of his first hires is a guy you may have heard of, Matt, Wayne LaPierre.

• 2:48:39Speaker 04

  Ah, yes.

• 2:48:40Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 2:48:41Speaker 04

  Good old Wayne.

• 2:48:41Robert Evans?

  There we go. W., Big Wayne.

• 2:48:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, Big LaPierre. Pepe LaPew, pew, pew, pew.

• 2:48:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:50Speaker 04

  He's not French, but you know, it's LaPierre.

• 2:48:52Robert Evans?

  I mean, probably somewhere along the line.

• 2:48:54Speaker 04

  Somewhere along the lines. Point is, Pepe LaPew, pew, pew, pew is a very good one.

• 2:48:57Robert Evans?

  That was a good joke. You should be proud. So, by 1986, LaPierre is running the NRA's entire lobbying arm, right? So, he kind of takes the job that Carter had had, basically. But by the 80s, he has turned it into, because again, it was, I mean, and Carter started this process, but it becomes the most, the best funded and most effective lobbying organization in DC, right? In the entire country. Again, Carter draws kind of the blueprints. LaPierre carries them out, though.

• 2:49:27Speaker 04

  There's no other sport that, you know, exists that, you know, has a lobbying arm that changed into just like a, you know what I mean? It was like, this was a sportsman lobby that wasn't even a lobby, and now it is the most powerful lobbying group.

• 2:49:42Robert Evans?

  And again, there's like critiques about, well, they're primarily interested in like preserving rich people's right to ownership, but they were, broadly speaking, saw that like, okay, when a law affecting guns is proposed, we'll sit down and we'll let them know this is how we think this will affect our members, and these are some changes we plan. Again, it's like, broadly speaking, like, what you would kind of want to see in a democracy that's supposed to function the way As opposed to like, we are going to become so key to right wing fundraising that if somebody proposes any kind of law meant at curbing gun crime, we will destroy them forever, right?

• 2:50:18Speaker 04

  Which is by any means necessary.

• 2:50:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, by any means necessary and to an extent that like, it doesn't matter how like reasonable the the restriction might be, like even outside of stuff like an assault weapons ban, like if you're going to propose like universal background checks, which most gun owners support, like we're we're gonna come for your ass, you know?

• 2:50:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:39Robert Evans?

  Unless you're the Black Panthers, but whatever.

• 2:50:43Robert Evans?

  So another 1977 hire brought onto the NRA at the same time as Wayne Lapierre is a guy named Robert Dowlett. Uh, now Dowlett becomes the NRA's general counsel and it's his job to begin wrangling together legal scholars to push hard the idea of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment. So between 1960, 1970, there's only three law review articles endorsing an individualist interpretation, right? There are some like state level rulings, you could argue kind of endorse one earlier, but there's never been like a national, like a Supreme Court ruling on the matter one way or the other. And it hadn't really, people had not even talked about it in that way until the 60s. So three law review articles written between 1960 and 1970 endorsing that interpretation.

• 2:51:25Robert Evans?

  Between 1970 and 1989, the period in which Dowlett is the NRA's general counsel, there are 27 law review articles, three of which are authored by Dowlett himself.

• 2:51:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:51:34Robert Evans?

  And his work would start to bear fruit. Again, there's some like lower level rulings, but it makes the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment makes its way to the Supreme Court for the first time in 2001. Some people will say, like point to DC as Heller, that's not the first time, it happens in 2001. And the case in question has its origins in a 1997 criminal case in which a Texas woman divorced her husband and filed for a protective order against him because he had threatened to murder the man she cheated on him with. The next year, while he's got this protective order, which he's not supposed to have guns because he has the protective order against him, right? During a meeting with his wife and daughter over some financial issue, he pulls a gun during an

• 2:52:14Robert Evans?

  Argument and points it at them. So he gets indicted. Again, if you're a rational gun owner, you would think like, well, this is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't have access to a fucking gun.

• 2:52:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:25Robert Evans?

  He gets indicted for possession of a firearm or subject to a court order, and he files for dismissal, arguing that this had unfairly infringed on his Second Amendment right. And the ruling, what it actually rules is kind of complicated. The ruling is not entirely in favor of this guy, Emerson. It's Emerson versus the United States. But in the ruling, the Supreme Court rules that the sec- describes the Second Amendment as an individual right, right? So this is the first time that happens at a federal level. And then this ruling in 2000 is reinforced by 2008's DC versus Heller, which is like the big ruling that is really more explicitly on can you ban like categories of weapons and whatever. It's based on like a DC, I think handgun ban. And then in 2010, the Second Amendment is finally incorporated in McDonald v. Chicago. But this is all, you

• 2:53:10Robert Evans?

  know, orchestrated by Robert Dowlett, right? Starting in the 70s. And one thing you have to say about the man is he earned his salary, right? That's a significant change in US Jewish prudence that he kind of painstakingly is the architect of pushing. It's probably worth noting here that he was a murderer. So I'm going to quote from the Boston Review here. Robert J. Dowlett was convicted of murdering Anna Marie Yocum, the mother of his then-girlfriend in 1963. Dowlett also robbed and shot the owner of a pawn shop. Like Carter, Dowlett was 17 years old when he pulled the trigger. He confessed to the shootings and served six years in prison before his conviction was overturned on a technicality. The crimes were not made public until 2014.

• 2:53:56Speaker 04

  God damn. No wonder. It's like, this is-

• 2:54:00Robert Evans?

  It's also, he and-

• 2:54:01Speaker 04

  Same origin story, over and over.

• 2:54:03Robert Evans?

  He and Carter, and Kyle Rittenhouse, all 17, when they fucking kill people in like these, I guess, I would, maybe you wouldn't call what Dowlett does vigilante violence. He's really just murdering people.

• 2:54:14Speaker 04

  No, that just sounds like straight up murder.

• 2:54:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he just murders a woman and then shoots a pawn shop owner in a robbery. So I guess you would say he's not a vigilante. He's just straight up an armed criminal.

• 2:54:24Speaker 04

  That is fucking insane. And this is the guy who's made it easier for fucking everyone in the world, in the United States to-

• 2:54:32Robert Evans?

  He's the NRA's general counsel.

• 2:54:37Speaker 04

  So at one point, I assume you went to law school?

• 2:54:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause again, he gets off like, like, uh, like Carter does, right? He gets off and then he goes to college and then he starts his career.

• 2:54:46Speaker 04

  Good for them, I guess. Nice to know we live in the land of opportunity like that. I believe firmly that people should be able to get a second chance after making a mistake, especially when they're, you know, uh, not a legal adult age.

• 2:54:58Robert Evans?

  I believe in certain second chances for certain kinds of mistakes. I think perhaps if you murder your girlfriend's mom and then shoot a pawn shop owner during a robbery, an avenue that we ought to close to you is representing the National Rifle Association as a lawyer. Like maybe that's not okay.

• 2:55:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, listen, that guy explicitly does gun crimes.

• 2:55:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:21Speaker 04

  For fun.

• 2:55:22Robert Evans?

  This perhaps should not be his job.

• 2:55:25Speaker 04

  I want to know what happened with the, with the, the relationship.

• 2:55:29Robert Evans?

  Um, I don't actually know.

• 2:55:31Speaker 04

  Did it suffer after the murder of the mother?

• 2:55:33Robert Evans?

  It must've been hard. Well, she was his girlfriend, so I don't think they wind up staying together.

• 2:55:37Speaker 04

  Oh, damn.

• 2:55:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's like, you know, with Harland Carter, I think a 17 year old who in a crime of racism commits a murder, there should be some way for like that person to be rehabilitated. But perhaps they should never be allowed to be a border patrol officer.

• 2:55:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's like little things like not giving them, I don't know, uh, authority over other people or requiring them to use lethal force as a part of the job.

• 2:56:08Robert Evans?

  And maybe the guy who murders his girlfriend's mom shouldn't help to be an architect of federal gun policy. Perhaps not that guy.

• 2:56:19Speaker 04

  It sounds rational.

• 2:56:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:20Speaker 04

  But you know what? I don't know if that's, I think, I think it'll work out fine.

• 2:56:25Robert Evans?

  I'm, I'm not even arguing against an individualist interpretation of the second amendment. Cause again, I don't really believe that the constitution is something that we should treat as a religious document, but not this guy, not this guy making that case. If you're gonna make that case, maybe Ross Dowlett shouldn't be the man doing it.

• 2:56:42Speaker 04

  Seems, seems like not.

• 2:56:44Robert Evans?

  No. Um, so that's cool. Um, and the Boston review article I found does a good job of pointing out that the NRA's embrace of the specific legal interpretation does not occur in a vacuum. While Dowlett's lawyers are making their case, right? So while they're, and again, this is a very, it's a pain, it's 40 years. It's a painstaking process of, well, not, I guess. 20 ish, 23, something like that. Long time. But while they're making their case, the NRA is carrying out mass mailing campaigns, some of the most extensive in political history, and they're publishing magazines that reach millions of people. They're paying for ads in all of these different gun press magazines. They're paying, having paid spokesmen show up and talk radio stations, right? And part of like what they're doing, they're obviously, they're arguing for this interpretation

• 2:57:29Robert Evans?

  of the Second Amendment, but they're also pushing a cultural change. What some scholars have turned to the, termed the tactical turn in US gun culture. Again, even to the extent that like, I mean, it, one thing that liberals get wrong is like, it is not new for civilians to own on a widespread scale, military grade weapons. Among other things, one of the most popular guns in civilian hands that the NRA, before its political turn, sold to people was the M1 Garand, which was the US service rifle of World War II, right? Right. But what is really new is, is that it's, is this, is this kind of paramilitary turn for gun owners. Because people were not buying M1 Garands primarily to like play act as soldiers. They were buying them because the Garand is a perfectly good hunting rifle,

• 2:58:13Robert Evans?

  right? It's a 30 out six, which is a very effective hunting round. And those were cheap, right? So it was a good weapon to buy. So people are not dressing up as soldiers with their M1 Garands primarily, right? That kind of stuff, the tactical turn in US gun culture occurs because it occurs alongside the militarization of the police and these kind of Hollywood valorization of the militarization of police. Yeah. So there's a lot that's going on here, right? And including like broadly speaking, the kind of like, you could, you also should tie in what Hollywood's partnership with the Defense Department, right? And the increasing degree to which like military tactical culture becomes like popularized. But the NRA recognizes like, this is-

• 2:58:59Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of promise in this. Number one, you can get more people involved. You can, you can sell more shit to people, which means you can have more companies funding the NRA who are not selling not just guns, but all this tactical gear.

• 2:59:12Robert Evans?

  I'm going to read a quote again from that Boston Review article, and it's quite long, but it really ties all of this together. Quote, "Though the story of this tactical development in US gun culture is complex, I focus in this essay on a few particularly crucial components. The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized since the 1970s and diffused deeper into the interior of the country. This has blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers into nearly every US town, and turned militarized border security into a ubiquitous mechanization of radicalization. This has also corresponded with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly worsened by the war on terror, but which historian Elizabeth Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson administration's war on crime, which of course the NRA backs.

• 2:59:56Robert Evans?

  Like the nationalization of border security, it turned the nation's city streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement. Second, individuals once arming themselves for self-defense, often out of racial fears or a perceived threat to their masculinity, are now frequently claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and freedom itself. The NRA has played an outsized role in this vigilante reframing by promulgating the myth that gun ownership has always been about an individual constitutional right and oriented towards a nativist version of self-defense. This vigilantism operates in conjunction with extralegal violence of law enforcement officers and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty more dangerous than any military-grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom of others as equal to one's own and views any attempt to support such equality as tyranny.

• 3:00:42Robert Evans?

  More importantly, this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power to take life in defense not of law, but of particular social and racial orders." There are now 25 federal agencies with special tactical units. In May of June of 2020 alone, 16 deployed their tactical teams to Black Lives Matter protests, including the Border Patrol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, the US Marshals, the US Coast Guard and every one of the FBI's 56 field offices. And at the local law enforcement level, special weapons and tactics SWAT units are now a staple of daily policing. Their very ordinariness is a testament to how dramatically local policing has changed since 1969, when a SWAT unit was first used to raise the Black Panther headquarters

• 3:01:24Robert Evans?

  in Los Angeles, pioneering what was at the time an almost unprecedented domestic use of military force. In Carter's victory speech, he declared, "Beginning in this place and this hour, this period in NRA history is finished. The post-1977 NRA was decidedly partisan, took an absolute position against gun regulation, and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a social identity and authoritarian political ideology among its members."

• 3:01:50Speaker 04

  God damn.

• 3:01:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Pretty bleak when you lay it all out like that.

• 3:01:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. All of that in a row and concisely done?

• 3:01:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:59Speaker 04

  Fucked up. Yeah.

• 3:02:01Robert Evans?

  And it's, again, I, I, I, there's, some in our listenership will agree and some will disagree. I'm a believer fundamentally that, um, I don't like the idea of the state having a monopoly on violence, and I certainly don't like the idea of the police being able to own things that I cannot own.

• 3:02:20Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 3:02:20Robert Evans?

  Um, but, and, and there's, there's an argument to be made, if you're, again, care about being an originalist, that that is close to the original interpretation of the Second Amendment, right?

• 3:02:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:02:30Robert Evans?

  Um, what, part of what, by, and they're claiming to be originalist, they're claiming to be, that the, that the initial, original interpretation was individualist, but what they're doing that for is not any idea of community, self-defense, or a fear that the federal government will accumulate too much power, although it's often framed that way. Fundamentally, it is about allowing...

• 3:02:56Robert Evans?

  Regular white citizens to emulate the military and the police and to act as vigilantes in their stead, right? That is where the NRA turns. And that is, that is the tactical turn, right? It's not that, there's nothing evil about owning body armor, which people can do for defend perfectly reasonable defensive purposes. There's nothing like, um, but, but what, what they're, what they're doing is pushing this idea of like, not just the milit, not just that like society ought to be militarized, which you get in every kind of argument that like, what we need to do is harden the schools, we need to add more cops. Um, but it's this idea that the individual white person should militarize themselves

• 3:03:38Robert Evans?

  in order to, in order to protect this kind of racial hierarchy, right?

• 3:03:43Speaker 04

  Right, yeah. Uphold white supremacy.

• 3:03:45Robert Evans?

  And this is, and this is the thing, this is what, what I wish folks who are supportive of, of more gun control would more often do is tie in all of this to what has happened to the police. Cause they cannot be extricated, right?

• 3:04:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:04:01Robert Evans?

  And that, that's, I think Uvalde made that perfectly clear, that like, these are two sides of the problem. Um, and, and the NRA is a huge part of how we get there, both how we get these cops that look indistinguishable from like Marines in downtown Fallujah. Not that, I think the Marines necessarily should have been in downtown Fallujah. Um, but you, you, you have these guys, it's this, there's this thing called the weapons effect, right? And which is a psychological phenomenon that's noted that like, the presence of weapons in an area, um, visible weapons can increase the willingness of people to use violence, right? There's like something about that that heightens it. And that's happening here.

• 3:04:43Robert Evans?

  And part of why that happens is just the fact that America has so many goddamn guns, right?

• 3:04:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:04:49Robert Evans?

  Um, but another part of that is the fact that everywhere you go, you see fucking cops in a way that like, you don't see cops dressed as, armed as heavily as our cops in fucking war zones a lot of the time, right? Like, it's, um, it's, anyway, whatever.

• 3:05:04Speaker 04

  No.

• 3:05:05Robert Evans?

  That's, that's what Arlen Carter builds, you know?

• 3:05:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I, I, I hear exactly what you're saying and I, I, I agree to an extent with, with what you mean. I feel like in general, my problem with liberals is that, um, they tend to kind of like, Put guns in the same category, like they moralize guns the way they moralize, like the right will moralize drugs.

• 3:05:33Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 3:05:33Speaker 04

  And kind of this idea that like, you know,

• 3:05:39Speaker 04

  if we were to just make all the guns illegal, then you know, this would solve the problem and whatnot. And that's not to say that it, there isn't, it wouldn't be helped if you had some serious regulation. But um, this like moralization of it like misses the entire point of why exactly the uh, why the people who want guns and have those guns have them, you know, it's like,

• 3:06:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:02Speaker 04

  And you're, the people you're speaking to are not, it's people speaking to the choir. Liberals often just speak to themselves and go like, uh, isn't it crazy that, you know, all these people have so many guns? And it's like, yeah, well, while you're talking amongst yourselves, all these guys have created an entire family filled with guns.

• 3:06:21Robert Evans?

  And it's like looking at these right wing like militias that people are rightly like concerned to see militias marching around US streets like threatening people. And, but also failing to see the thing that is like, well, every one of those guys has friends who are cops. And like a significant percentage of them are cops, which is why a whole bunch of cops were present at January 6th. And that's a huge chunk of it. And like, you can't, you can't divorce your desire to reduce the number of guns in American culture from the need to reduce the militarization of the police. Cause they are both inextricably tied to the problem.

• 3:06:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:06:54Robert Evans?

  Which is the constant gun violence in this country has, has, has two points that need to be really like hit on. It's not, it's not just civilian gun ownership. It's also the way in which the state uses and legitimates armed force. Going back to even the earliest days where it's like, yeah, in Texas, your right to carry guns was heavily restricted. But if you were a white vigilante who carried guns to do racist violence, you would often get off, right? Even though you'd broken the law, right?

• 3:07:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:07:20Robert Evans?

  Like Harlan Carter, you know?

• 3:07:21Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 3:07:21Robert Evans?

  Um, anyway, under Harlan Carter, the NRA's membership triples from 1 million to more than 3 million. It would reach 5 million members under Wayne LaPierre. Obviously the NRA, we're not going to get into this a lot, but it's like well past its prime at this point for a variety of reasons of primarily rampant corruption. There's a pretty good podcast about like what the fuck happened there, but.

• 3:07:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's called Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos podcast. I'm sorry.

• 3:07:47Robert Evans?

  Um, so the NRA tops out at about 5 million members. Um, but as of 2017, about 14 million Americans claimed some sort of affinity for the organization.

• 3:07:56Speaker 04

  And I forget who did the poll, but whatever.

• 3:07:59Robert Evans?

  And one of the things that's interesting here is that like, that's like a lot of people to get around anything, but that's also not a lot of people as a voting block compared to the entirety of the United States, right?

• 3:08:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:10Robert Evans?

  And so, looking at that, you have to kind of marvel at the success of the NRA in making their ideas a cornerstone of right wing politics.

• 3:08:17Speaker 04

  100%. I was just thinking to myself, that seems like a low number.

• 3:08:20Robert Evans?

  It's right, because again, if you look at actually polling of Republicans on gun control issues, they are a lot less hardliners on guns than you would guess by how the party acts. And it's because the party's ability to fund elections for decades was heavily based on who could get the NRA's approval, right?

• 3:08:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, got to get that A plus rating.

• 3:08:39Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Uh, in 2016, they spent more than $30 million on Donald Trump's campaign. Um, and this again, people often miss this, like my parents are, were hardcore right wingers, right? So was my whole family. I had like two relatives who owned guns, like my grandpa and one of my uncles, right? Um, and I did go shooting as a kid, but my parents didn't have any, my aunt and uncle didn't have any, there were not guns in the house of, of my family in Texas, you know?

• 3:09:05Robert Evans?

  Because like, it's actually not as integral to conservatism as a, as a, at least, I mean, this is again changed because the culture wars have accelerated. So like this is that, uh, there's less conservatives like the ones I grew up with when there were today. But the NRA, it wasn't that everyone on the right was in lockstep, it's that the elected leaders were scared to cross them because that's where the fucking money came from.

• 3:09:26Speaker 04

  Right, of course.

• 3:09:27Robert Evans?

  Um, that's why they were able to wield power so effectively. Um, one of the most peculiar, but also influential aspects of Harland's time in power was his repeated and intense defense of cheap shitty handguns. And this gets us to the Saturday night special.

• 3:09:41Speaker 04

  Here we go.

• 3:09:43Robert Evans?

  Saturday Night Special in brief, like, there's a type of handgun that was very cheap in the 70s, up through in the 80s and stuff called a Saturday, it was nicknamed the Saturday Night Special. It's like a five or a six-shot, usually 38 caliber handgun.

• 3:09:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:09:58Robert Evans?

  Um, these are still guns like this are still used in violent crime way more often than like the guns that are politicized, like cheap handguns in general are the primary guns that are used in violent gun crime.

• 3:10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:11Robert Evans?

  Um, although what, what is a cheap shitty handgun is different now because actually six-shot revolvers are kind of pricey these days as opposed to like, um, a High Point or something.

• 3:10:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:22Robert Evans?

  Um, but yeah, so this is a cheap shitty handgun. Um, and these are particularly low quality handguns. They were not like well-made as a general rule.

• 3:10:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:10:31Robert Evans?

  Um,

• 3:10:31Speaker 04

  They didn't always work.

• 3:10:32Robert Evans?

  They did not always, we are, that's that we're building to that.

• 3:10:35Speaker 04

  Okay, sorry. Jumping the gun.

• 3:10:37Robert Evans?

  So you have this massive crime rate raise that starts in the 70s and really like peaks in the early 90s. And again, a lot of Joe Biden's career is based off of this like violent crime panic that starts in this period. And one of the first like legislative like tsunamis that forms around the crime surge is around this fear of the Saturday Night Special. And one of the reasons why people are so scared of the Saturday Night Special is that it is a gun that black people can afford.

• 3:11:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:11:09Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 3:11:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:11:10Robert Evans?

  It is a cheap handgun and so it is affordable for those folks.

• 3:11:13Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:11:14Robert Evans?

  Um, Harlan Carter opposed new legislation to ban the Saturday Night Special. Um, although he didn't do it on the grounds that poor people deserved firearms, but fascinatingly on the grounds that they were shitty and broke easily. Um, and this is one of the most incredible arguments I've ever heard from the, from NRA on the record.org, quote, "Speaking in opposition to legislation that aimed to ban Saturday Night Specials and other inexpensively produced handguns, Carter stated in a 1972 speech before the NRA's Executive Committee, 'I can produce actual cases that the cheap handgun that snaps in a police officer's face instead of firing has saved many, many lives.' And the question arises, what are we trying to do? Upgrade the quality of handguns in the hands of our criminals?"

• 3:11:56Speaker 04

  God.

• 3:11:56Robert Evans?

  That's an amazing logical argument.

• 3:11:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's like he has a point, a really fucked up evil point. And it's also, he's getting straight to, I mean, the crux of it here, which is like, he's lucky to be in a situation in which he can claim like, oh, actually, I don't want to ban this because this makes me feel safer to know that they have, you know, the, the poor, their, their quality of handguns is, is, uh, it's way worse.

• 3:12:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot that's messy on this whole, this whole thing, but it is very funny and it's going to wind up getting a lot of people killed, not in necessarily, not, not just from violence, a lot of people are going to die, um, because of Carter's defense of terrible handguns and where it leads. But before we get into that, you know, who else loves shitty handguns that break in their owner's hands and they

• 3:12:52Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, Sophie.

• 3:12:54Robert Evans?

  Absolutely loves. Motto is, we want you to be armed and we want you to never know if that gun's gonna fire or not.

• 3:13:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:13:02Robert Evans?

  Completely inexplicable. We, we, we want a weapon that you cannot trust under any circumstances. That's guarantee.

• 3:13:09Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 3:13:10Robert Evans?

  Remove drop safeties from handguns. Let them free, you know?

• 3:13:14Speaker 04

  I enjoy this because I am watching Sophie just shaking her head every time you do this bit. She's like, please stop.

• 3:13:23Robert Evans?

  She hates it. Makes you so angry.

• 3:13:25Speaker 03

  Do you know why I hate it?

• 3:13:27Robert Evans?

  Why is that, Sophie?

• 3:13:28Speaker 03

  Cause there's like 50 Reddit threads of people being like, wait, what is this? I've never read about this before.

• 3:13:35Robert Evans?

  Who has a child hunting island?

• 3:13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I just, it just feels like betrayal to our listeners. I love it. Who I love with most of my heart.

• 3:13:43Robert Evans?

  I like fucking with them.

• 3:13:45Speaker 03

  I know.

• 3:13:46Robert Evans?

  I, I, I feel the same way towards them that I do with my cat when I like, I like, pick it up and I like toss it in the air and it hates it, but it can't, it can't, it has to let me like squeeze it and, and wrap it in a blanket.

• 3:13:58Speaker 04

  It's called rent. It's called paying rent.

• 3:14:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right, motherfucker.

• 3:14:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, you gotta be adorable for me. Sometimes your fear makes me smile.

• 3:14:07Speaker 04

  I feel the same way about our piggies, you know, everyone, it's like you feed the slot to the piggies and you let them oink, but it's you're the farmer. Remember that.

• 3:14:16Robert Evans?

  That's right. You're the farmer. Well, I'm the farmer.

• 3:14:19Speaker 04

  You are. Yes, exactly. Remember.

• 3:14:21Speaker 03

  Don't do that to the goats. I don't think it'll work out, work out well.

• 3:14:24Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's really fun to fuck with the goats. If you pick them up, like they don't know what to do with their little legs and they just like kick in the air and then you can hug them.

• 3:14:32Speaker 04

  Oh, I love it.

• 3:14:35Robert Evans?

  They go, except for my boy goat. He's the ram. He loves it. He fucking he'll as soon as he sees you, he'll run up because he wants to get cuddled.

• 3:14:43Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 3:14:44Robert Evans?

  His sister hates it, but yeah.

• 3:14:48Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 3:14:48Speaker 03

  Of course she does. Of course she does.

• 3:14:54Robert Evans?

  We're back. So before we get on to the consequences of Harland Carter's embrace of terrible unsafe firearms, let's talk about the his defense of the virtues of arming small children with Derringers. Now, Matt, if you're not a gun guy, the Derringer is a tiny ultra concealable one or two shot pistol that were originally made for riverboat gamblers as documented in the documentary Maverick.

• 3:15:17Speaker 04

  Hmm. Okay. All right. I know exactly which gun.

• 3:15:20Robert Evans?

  Right? Yeah. They're like little, little bitty like, yeah.

• 3:15:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. Little hot girl guns. This is the way I think of them.

• 3:15:26Robert Evans?

  Here's something he said to Congress. There was a little boy and it was real cold and he had his hands in his overcoat. He had one of these little old Derringers and four bushy guys ambled up in an arrogant manner. He stopped them and three of them were very nice and decent. And one of them said, what would you do if I told you I had a pistol and I was going to kill you? And he says, I would kill you, you son of a bunch. These little guns have a very noble and important purpose and we should make our position clear.

• 3:15:51Speaker 04

  God, that is the first recorded incident of like someone being like, my five year old just said, Daddy, why does Trump do the bad thing? And I couldn't explain is like a totally fake story that did not exist.

• 3:16:04Robert Evans?

  There's absolutely no way this happened, but also none of it makes sense. Like, what does it mean by they're bushy? What does that mean? It has to be racist, right? He has to be being racist here.

• 3:16:14Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 3:16:15Robert Evans?

  But I don't know how.

• 3:16:17Speaker 04

  Which race I'm going like, were they Hasidic Jews?

• 3:16:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. What does this mean? What does Bushy mean?

• 3:16:23Speaker 04

  I don't know. It could be Italians.

• 3:16:26Robert Evans?

  It would be funny if like, the real story is that, that Jeb and George Bush, who were younger at this point, like it was, it was all of the Bush brothers, like trying to mug children.

• 3:16:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, Bushy, like, uh, the former head of the CIA.

• 3:16:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think he was current, probably would have been current when this was, this is like the late seventies. Yeah. So obviously that's probably a lie. Um, but it's very, again, Harland Carter is, he is the kind of guy who is not just like, I think, uh, children should be able to engage in shooting sports, but like, I think children should be routinely carrying handguns on their person.

• 3:17:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, because what if a Bushy guy shows up?

• 3:17:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. That is out of its damn mind.

• 3:17:12Speaker 04

  Just, oh man, a Bushy man could strike at any point.

• 3:17:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you never know when a Bushy dude's gonna come in. You gotta be, you have to always have a Derringer in your five-year-old's pocket.

• 3:17:22Speaker 04

  It's the seventies, maybe he's talking about like a Tom, like a, like a lot of chest hair type guy, you know? Like, like a disco stew shows up.

• 3:17:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a bunch of disco guys come out and start threatening children. Um, so anyway, back to the point. Under Harland and his successors, the NRA acted repeatedly to defend the rights of gun manufacturers to build dangerously shoddy firearms. Like this is, we talk a lot about, rightly so, the things they do like legislatively to defend the gun industry, but this is often left out because one of the things is its primary victim is gun owners, right? I'm going to quote here from a write-up in Bloomberg. "In 1972, Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this agency oversight of defective weapons.

• 3:18:17Robert Evans?

  Representative John Dingell, uh, sorry, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975, he did it again when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. 'We put in there and express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,' Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed 339 to 80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again." And it's one of those like, this is again,

• 3:18:48Robert Evans?

  a perfectly, even if you're like a gun fundamentalist, you should want there to be oversight of guns that don't work or explode and like ammunition that doesn't work, like, right? Right? That seems to make, that shouldn't be a political issue.

• 3:19:04Speaker 04

  It seems like you'd be into that.

• 3:19:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:07Speaker 04

  And the only explanation for you not being into it is like, oh, good. They can't get the good guns. I mean, like, like, poor, poor people, black people, getting the defective guns seems to be the only excuse here. I mean,

• 3:19:23Robert Evans?

  Well, I mean, there are specific excuses that like this will, this will enable potentially the government to like, regulate what kind of ammo is illegal and ban types of like, whatever.

• 3:19:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:19:34Robert Evans?

  Which they do anyway. Like, there's, that shit happens. Like, whatever. It's dumb. It's dumb that this happens this way. It is worth noting that, yeah, it's, it's like a blue dog Democrat who is the one who like, blocks this shit. So the end result is that when gun manufacturers produce firearms that, for example, fire for no reason and kill their owners, it is impossible for the government to order them to recall those weapons. Not even the BATFE, which supposedly regulates firearms, can force a gunmaker to take broken guns off the market. And I'm going to quote again from that Bloomberg article. And this is actually how the article opens. "Thomas Bud Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising

• 3:20:16Robert Evans?

  a trembling arm, pointing at something. It's where he found his boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house around 7:15 a.m. on the last day of 2016, bleeding out. Brown is telling the story now about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot. His son Jared, 28, had just picked up Bud's Taurus PT145 Millennium Pro pistol and headed out to do some shooting near their house in Griffin, Georgia, with his best friend, Tyler Haney. Bud figured Jared had fired at something for the fun of it, like he did sometimes. "I was thinking I'd better go out there and tell him be careful or something," Bud, 54, says, his voice trailing off. But what he'd heard was the pistol going off without anyone pulling the trigger, sending a 45 caliber slug through Jared's femoral artery. "Oh, shit, my leg, my leg," Jared yelled, loud enough for his father to hear. Haney,

• 3:21:01Robert Evans?

  26, rushed to the house in a panic, pleading for help. When Bud got out there, the pistol was still in its holster, tucked into Jared's waistband." So.

• 3:21:12Speaker 04

  And he can't sue. He can't do nothing.

• 3:21:14Robert Evans?

  Absolutely nothing. Bud is one of, we have no idea how many Americans died due to defective Taurus guns. The company did eventually issue a recall on something like a million weapons that were potentially defective. But they didn't have to run ads anywhere to inform people of the recall. They were not required to reach out to their customers, to reach out to gun stores, to take any action at all to warn people that they'd sold guns that could fire for no reason. An unknown number of those weapons are still in people's gun safe closets and holsters today.

• 3:21:43Speaker 04

  That's fucking crazy. Just like, I don't even know the justification. It's just guns don't kill people.

• 3:21:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's this.

• 3:21:52Speaker 04

  Fate kills people.

• 3:21:54Robert Evans?

  The NRA, they are, there's this like social, like a culture war component of how they do what they're doing. But they fundamentally represent the gun industry in any industry that can stop there from being a way to sue them if their products don't work.

• 3:22:09Speaker 04

  Right, of course.

• 3:22:10Robert Evans?

  We'll do it if they can, you know?

• 3:22:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's just, it's.

• 3:22:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:15Speaker 04

  It's so insane to get to a point where it's so clearly a manufacturing lobby mixed in with a culture war issue that just creates death everywhere.

• 3:22:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, and it's, I mean, again, for, among other things, don't buy Taurus guns for any practical purpose.

• 3:22:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 3:22:36Robert Evans?

  In the 1990s, more than 40 US cities filed lawsuits against gun manufacturers spurred on by a surge in violent crime. This was the super predator era. Now, I can't speak as to the legal merits of the individual cases of these cities against these gun manufacturers. But the response the NRA chose was interesting. They used their lobbying arm to launch a campaign that got Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida to propose a piece of legislation that would end all pending litigation against gun companies and prevent any future litigation. It took a while to actually get the law, which is the PLCA written. And by the time it was introduced, George W. Bush was on his second term.

• 3:23:17Robert Evans?

  In October 2005, he signed the PLCA into law, which blocked lawsuits from seeking damages on gun industry companies for unlawful use of a firearm. Right? So if the company could be sued for like breaking the law in some way, but they cannot be sued for what people do with their weapons. And I have some conflicting feelings on some of these lawsuits. But one of the things that people will point out is that the advertising of a lot of these companies like leads to the like, and this is a big thing like the Sandy Hook lawsuit, right? One of the big issues, one of the big like points used to justify like the suing against the Bush master,

• 3:23:57Robert Evans?

  who made the gun that was used in Sandy Hook, was this, um, this ad campaign they'd just done where it was like, consider your man card reissued and they would like send you a man card with an AR-15. And it's, it's, it's again, there's a, again, I, this is like a complicated thing to get into entirely. But there's a debate to be had and to my mind, the area in which it's kind of most relevant to have this debate is on, to what extent is, does the way the gun industry tries to sell weapons to people complicit in when those weapons are used for violence? So for example, when Daniel Defense launches an ad where you have like a Bible verse and a small child holding an AR-15,

• 3:24:39Robert Evans?

  to what extent does that help to lead to, to what extent does that help make gun culture in the United States more violent? Right? And this is not really what the lawsuits are like, the Uvalde families aren't suing Daniel Defense or they're attempting to right now. This is all happening at the moment on those lines. But to my mind, that's kind of the most, that's the thing that like, I think there's a point on.

• 3:24:59Speaker 04

  Sure. I mean, it's like, uh, I mean, the way cigarettes were marketed changed, you know, were regulated like crazy and has actually had an effect on the amount of smokers.

• 3:25:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And so anyway, again, I have some complicated thoughts on like, Suing companies for the unlawful use of their products, but there's like, anyway, the, the PLCIA kind of in, ended that for a long time. This is starting to be challenged, but for, for 15s or 17 years, whatever, made any kind of like debate meaningless, right? Because it was just prohibited and it was prohibited again. This is the NRA spent a lot of money on George W. Bush's campaigns, you know?

• 3:25:41Speaker 04

  I am wondering if the, like initially, the Hitachi magic wand actually was a back massager. And if you could sue, sue a company because it gave your wife an orgasm.

• 3:25:55Robert Evans?

  Well, like again, there, I, I think people do need to consider when we talk about like, to what extent should a gun manufacturer be liable for something about a mass shooting? There are some unsettling implications to some of that. It's not a super cut, it's not as cut and dry as certain other things are.

• 3:26:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I'm not saying it's a slippery slope necessarily, but I am saying that I thought it was a back massager.

• 3:26:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:18Speaker 04

  And now it's better at making my wife calm than I am.

• 3:26:22Robert Evans?

  And that always has been.

• 3:26:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And well, I mean, it seems kind of unfair to me to have not known that.

• 3:26:29Robert Evans?

  What's really, I mean, people are bringing up, people on Twitter have brought up the fact that like, you're limited to six dildos, I think, in the state of Texas.

• 3:26:36Speaker 04

  Is that right?

• 3:26:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like literal laws on how many, I mean, I don't think they've ever been in, what has been enforced though, is that like, anyone you know who works at a sex shop in Texas has to be like, has, is like prepared, this is a little bit less the case now, but when I had friends in the early 2000s, like you get training on like what to do if you get raided because you're not allowed to sell sex toys. They had, they were always called cake toppers, right? Like the dildos and shit were like cake toppers or personal massagers or whatever.

• 3:27:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:27:04Robert Evans?

  But you couldn't, like, you couldn't say like, these are for fucking in the same way that like, you could sell a bong, but you had to call it a, a water pipe for tobacco? Like if you use the ball, word bong in a Texas, again, head shops were always kind of inconsistent about how much they were paranoid about this, but like, you, you could get asked to leave for calling something a bong in a, in a.

• 3:27:24Speaker 04

  Right, but I mean, what do you, what do you call the, you know, that, you know, that silicon butt that has both the pussy and the vagina?

• 3:27:32Robert Evans?

  That's a sex ass. That's a sex ass.

• 3:27:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, but you. I mean, I'm just saying, how do you market that?

• 3:27:39Robert Evans?

  I don't, I don't think they really had sex ass, although I know people bought fucking, what do you call them, the, the fleshlights? So there must have been some, like, I'm guessing they probably, they must have been advertised as like a novelty, right? It's like, this is for joking around at a bachelorette party. You put it on a, like, I don't, they're, like, it's dumb. All, Texas's whole legal system is stupid as shit.

• 3:28:01Speaker 04

  That's insane. That's a lot of fun, though. I mean, you know, but people get around it. Like, I didn't have access to a big silicon, you know, uh, butt vagina. And so I fucked a big mouth Billy Bass.

• 3:28:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Who didn't fuck a big mouth Billy Bass?

• 3:28:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:28:18Robert Evans?

  And that was just a universal experience of people in the early 2000s.

• 3:28:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'm sorry, I just like, eventually I just was like, we're gonna start talking about cum.

• 3:28:27Robert Evans?

  We're gonna start talking about cum. Look, you know, the same year that George W. Bush signs the PLCA into law, that's the year that many millions of young American boys encountered a Billy's largemouth bass for the first time.

• 3:28:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:28:40Robert Evans?

  And, and thanks to the NRA's lobbying, the Billy Bass Company couldn't be sued for taking the virginity of all those boys.

• 3:28:50Speaker 04

  Take me to your virginity. All right, I'm done.

• 3:28:53Robert Evans?

  All right. The last thing I want to talk about here, and this is maybe the most unsettling thing the NRA has done, um, is that they have made it impossible, not just to, like, not only do they fight like any regulation that might potentially impact positively America's gun violence problem or America's gun death problem, they've made it impossible to research how gun violence works and like the extent to which different policies affect it. In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article that show, showing that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide in the home. Now, this is a study you'll see cited a great deal, and it's often used to argue that firearms in the home make people less safe.

• 3:29:35Robert Evans?

  This study was widely reported on at the time, and it scared the shit out of the NRA. So the NRA campaigned to eliminate the organization that had funded the study, the CDC's National Center for Energy Injury Prevention. Congress included language in the 1996 omnibus appropriations bill to insist that, quote, "None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control." Now, you may note, they weren't doing that with that study. It was a study that you could use to argue gun controlled, supported gun control.

• 3:30:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:30:08Robert Evans?

  But it was just a study on like the homicide risk and how that changes when you have a gun in the home, right?

• 3:30:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:30:12Robert Evans?

  Like, the CDC was not like lobbying specifically. They were carrying out a study, but the NRA basically argued.

• 3:30:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, they were basically arguing how people get hurt in the home.

• 3:30:22Robert Evans?

  And the NRA argued that was inherently like, that's political and should be illegal.

• 3:30:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:30:27Robert Evans?

  And then they make that happen, right?

• 3:30:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:30:29Robert Evans?

  Like, Congress goes through with this shit. This is later referred to as the Dickey Amendment because of some dude named Dickey. Now, under extensive lobbying pressure, Congress also removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget, as that was the amount they had invested in firearm injury research the year before. So, they cut all of the money out of the CDC's budget that had been used to research firearm industry. And again, whatever you think about gun control, there are 400 million of these things in the fucking country. There should be research into how they affect people, right?

• 3:30:56Speaker 04

  It just seems prudent.

• 3:30:58Robert Evans?

  It seems prudent.

• 3:30:59Speaker 04

  It just seems prudent.

• 3:31:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, if fucking, if auto companies were blocking research into how car accidents work, right? Like, you would say that's nuts, you know?

• 3:31:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:31:10Robert Evans?

  Because it would be.

• 3:31:11Speaker 04

  And it's not even, it's like, it's not even that I fault.

• 3:31:15Robert Evans?

  I'm sure car companies have tried to do that, but yeah.

• 3:31:16Speaker 04

  Right. It's, I don't fault them for trying. It's the same way with the, you know.

• 3:31:20Robert Evans?

  That's what they're going to do, right?

• 3:31:21Speaker 04

  That's what they're gonna do. They're gonna try to do that. And, you know, it's a fucked up capitalist system we're in. If you have the money, you can try. The crazy thing is, the success rate of the NRA in these, in these things that are completely like, like, common sense ideas.

• 3:31:41Robert Evans?

  There's, there's a wide variety of arguments about how should you interpret this, this, you know, the findings to studies like this? To what extent should they inform policy? All that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, I think if you're saying you shouldn't be studying this kind of stuff at all, you're the bad guy here, right?

• 3:31:57Speaker 04

  You're definitely. Bad like for sure you're the very least coming in bad faith.

• 3:32:02Robert Evans?

  But yeah.

• 3:32:03Speaker 04

  You are 100% doing bad guy stuff.

• 3:32:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:07Speaker 04

  And should be stopped.

• 3:32:09Robert Evans?

  And federal funding for research into gun violence and gun related injuries dried up after that. Since 1996, the CDC's funding for firearm injury prevention has fallen 96% and similar attempts to fund research have met with further attacks on the ability to study any of this stuff, most recently in 2012. And yeah, so anyway, that's broadly speaking, the story. Our buddy Neil Knox, I should give you a little bit of context on how our heroes turned out.

• 3:32:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, how they doing?

• 3:32:37Robert Evans?

  Neil Knox wound up being way too radical for even Harlan Carter's NRA. He was forced out of the organization in 1982 after being overshadowed by the rise of Wayne LaPierre. I think LaPierre kind of helps maneuver him out. He dies of colon cancer in 2005. He outlived Carter by a fair amount. Harlan died, not surprisingly, of lung cancer in 1991. So the tobacco industry did us all a solid on this one.

• 3:33:00Speaker 04

  Yay, occasionally it works out.

• 3:33:02Robert Evans?

  One of his final acts in this world was to hand over control of the NRA to Wayne LaPierre.

• 3:33:08Speaker 04

  Oh shit.

• 3:33:10Robert Evans?

  That's the, that's the Harlan Carter in the NRA, everybody.

• 3:33:13Speaker 04

  God damn.

• 3:33:14Robert Evans?

  There's a pretty good song about him called Raymond Cassiano by the Drive By Truckers, which is good.

• 3:33:21Speaker 04

  That guy fucking, he sucks. It sucks that he's sucks. That he's dead too. I feel like the, one of the big reasons why I'm just like, I don't, you know, I'm not for like, hey, let's make guns illegal or whatnot is because like, I feel like guns might end up being very useful in stopping all these ridiculous, you know, fucking NRA lobbies. You know what I'm saying?

• 3:33:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and this is, um, I have, I have tried, I think I've done a very good job of like, not inserting a bunch of my own specific opinions on gun control because at the end of the day, there is a history of here and it deserves to be like, talked about.

• 3:33:59Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 3:33:59Robert Evans?

  Without a tremendous amount of editorializing. But yeah, I feel similarly like my attitudes on what gun control should be. Around are impacted by like, number one, I don't think only rich people should have guns. I don't like the idea of a thousand percent excise tax on AR-15 so that only wealthy people can afford them.

• 3:34:19Speaker 04

  Right. And I don't like the idea that like, at this point, at least culturally, the only people who are interested in having guns are people who are interested in upholding white supremacy, and that is deliberately designed that way.

• 3:34:32Robert Evans?

  And one of, I mean, one of the things that has happened in the last couple of years, this has really accelerated since 2020, is the demographics of people buying firearms have changed wildly, particularly first time gun buyers, and it's gotten a lot more left leaning and a lot less white. And, you know, there's a variety of personally, okay, because people do ask about this, because I talk about guns sometimes, in terms of what I think are the number one, the laws that you could most easily pass without the Supreme Court guaranteed shutting them down. And I think a federal assault weapons ban, the Supreme Court will rule against, right? Like, it will go to the Supreme Court and they will rule against it in their current construction. Outside of like, talking about, should we stack the Supreme Court, whatever, like Biden's not doing that.

• 3:35:13Robert Evans?

  So, stuff that I think would not, number one, would not necessar- like, obviously, anything is a crapshoot with the Supreme Court. So, literally, anything could get turned down by them, right? Because they're about to rule on a concealed handgun carry bill, anyway. But, um, the, I think, I think it's perfectly reasonable and is also, there is legal precedent for raising the age at which someone has to be in order to buy a semi-automatic firearm. Certainly, 18-year-olds are not full adults, and our current gun legislation recognizes that by banning them from buying handguns. Although, that's also not entirely accurate, because you can still buy handguns through like, face-to-face sales, or have them given to you by a parent, or whatever, there's always, at every, there's always like, ways around this kind of stuff.

• 3:35:58Robert Evans?

  But, it is, it's been established since, I think, 1986, that the federal government regulates, does not want people under 21 buying handguns. So, it's the kind of thing where, if you were to pass a law extending that to semi-automatic rifles. You'd have a stronger argument in front of the Supreme Court if it came to the Supreme Court in order to like defend that piece of gun control legislation and both of our most recent mass shootings as of this recording, there may have been another one by the time this drops.

• 3:36:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:36:26Robert Evans?

  Were 18 year olds who bought a gun and immediately carried. So I do think just on a moral level, there's a case to be made that yeah, this might fucking save some lives. And I think the best thing you could do, you would probably not have to call it a red flag law because that term has been politicized, but a law that would allow you to take guns and stop people from buying guns if they have a history of domestic violence and violence towards women and making violent threats of mass shootings, which seems like a no brainer.

• 3:36:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:36:50Robert Evans?

  Again, like everything has been politicized to a stupid degree, but the Buffalo shooter was on, had been doing like threatening shootings and threatening women and like had, was on law enforcement's radar, should have been, it should be possible to do something there, right?

• 3:37:03Speaker 04

  You'd figure. And yeah, I feel like that there's so many like common sense like laws that you're, that don't exist that you're surprised every time you find out they don't exist.

• 3:37:15Robert Evans?

  I do think, I think one of the things where gun control advocates make a mistake is focusing on universal background checks, not because I don't think it's a good idea to have background checks for buying a gun, but because nearly all of the guns bought and even used in massacres were by people who passed a background check, including the Buffalo and Navalny shooters. They both like, universal background checks, they, they passed those. So like that, that's not as much of the solution as I think something like an effective kind of, again, I think you would need a better term than red flag law, cause, but also maybe, I don't know, the right's gonna culture war, whatever you try to do.

• 3:37:51Speaker 04

  Right. Everything's poison pill, no matter what. You can name it any fucking euphemistic, nice sounding thing.

• 3:37:59Robert Evans?

  If you hit your wife and kids, you shouldn't have a gun bill. But of course, one of the issues with that is that you're going to disarm like 40% of the police.

• 3:38:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:38:07Robert Evans?

  I can talk about like what I think would be a good idea at the end of the day like I don't know like what I what actually is going to pass that's a totally different fucking conversation and

• 3:38:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I don't I don't know what the answer is. I know that one thing that I don't think the answer is is is this like mutually assured destruction thing where we're all armed at all times and that's the society we live in. I also know the answer isn't every like liberal and leftist being like, oh, well, I'm, you know, I'm going to trust that the government and the police will keep me safe from this the bad men. And so I'm like, it's it's hard to know. It's hard to know what to do.

• 3:38:53Robert Evans?

  I mean, this is a very difficult issue because again, people, a lot of people say, no, it's simple. Just like ban the guns. But it's like, well, how are you going to do that? There is legal precedent. There is a Supreme Court. And also, there's a police force that's not going to disarm certain people like this is not as simple as you're making it out to be. You can say it is the guns and yeah, of course, access to guns is like why a lot of this is happening. But also like that doesn't that's not the end of of like the complexity of the issue because there are 400 million of these fucking things in the country right now. And a whole culture built up around being ready to immediately use them against right now gay and trans people are particularly in the fucking crosshairs. And again, this is like, so I don't

• 3:39:37Robert Evans?

  know, I think fundamentally, like I argue a lot about gun control with people. I think the folks who want to see more of it are coming from a fundamentally natural and noble position, which is looking at repeating massacres and going like, we gotta be able to do something about this, right? Like, there's gotta be something we can do about this shit.

• 3:39:54Speaker 04

  No, I completely understand it. I mean, and yeah, I feel I feel the same way. It's like there's certainly got to be a fucking solution to this that is Um, systemic solution, a governmental solution.

• 3:40:06Robert Evans?

  This is like an acceptable state of affairs.

• 3:40:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:40:09Robert Evans?

  Um, but like so many of the problems we have, like how to fix it and like how to fix it without having a shooting war over it and like who does the fixing and like, um, I, I think like one of the things that is frustrating to me is that like it is, it is just a big fundraising issue in a lot of ways and in ways that I think are kind of like unhelpful and actually solving the problem. And I, uh, again, nobody knows what to do with this because it's, it's so much like, no one has ever had anything like this happen, right? People bring up the, the Dunblane massacre, the Port Arthur massacre. They bring out like, you know, when Australia confiscated all those guns and like, that was 200,000

• 3:40:54Robert Evans?

  guns. Like there are 20 million AR-15s in the United States. There has never been a society this heavily armed or a society that has turned the random mass killing of civilians into a meme.

• 3:41:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:41:08Robert Evans?

  Both of those things have happened here and they've happened alongside like the, the militarization of an increasingly unaccountable, violent, uh, police force that wants dictatorial control of American cities. And all of this stuff is pretty, pretty unique historically. So.

• 3:41:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:41:24Robert Evans?

  I don't know how we fix it.

• 3:41:25Speaker 04

  It feels so American and unique that it feels like, uh, yeah, if I knew the answer to it, I would, I would say it, but I really do not.

• 3:41:38Robert Evans?

  I mean, and again, it's like one of those, I don't vote. I'm not a gun issue voter. I'm barely a voter, right? Like I do vote, but I don't believe in it. I don't believe it's going to do any, I vote as, I vote as like a, well, what if I'm wrong? If I'm wrong and it's best to vote and, and vote and the people who say you gotta vote, if I'm wrong and they're right, then, um, at least I, I, I put in the vote and I tried that thing. I don't think it's going to work. I don't think they're going to solve any of these problems. I think, um, other things are going to be happening in the future that are not. What we recognize as part of American politics, but are going to become the way things get decided in this country. And I think they're going to be uglier and weirder than our parents were used to.

• 3:42:22Robert Evans?

  But I do like voting is like a, well, okay, but maybe I'm wrong about that. It's the same reason I have a 401k, right?

• 3:42:27Speaker 04

  Right, right, right, right, exactly.

• 3:42:29Robert Evans?

  Maybe there will be an economy in 30 years, so I'll get to retire, you know?

• 3:42:32Speaker 04

  It's the same reason I own half of a Bitcoin.

• 3:42:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. Maybe I'm wrong, yeah.

• 3:42:38Speaker 04

  You know, you got it. Yeah, you got it, just in case. What if I'm not missing out? I just have a one, it's all I could afford. But the point is, is, yeah, I, I, I just want to say I vote and I also am cynical. And I have the exact same, I have the exact same pessimism that you do.

• 3:43:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:01Speaker 04

  But, you know, the, the only optimism that I have is there's gonna be some, someone smart who does something good.

• 3:43:12Speaker 03

  You one would have.

• 3:43:13Speaker 04

  And I don't want to miss the bus. I don't want to miss, you know?

• 3:43:15Robert Evans?

  I, I mean, my, and I tend to think we should all, maybe if, if people are more committed to like, getting out there and taking personal responsibility, not, not as a militia, but in, in a, in a, in a, in a responsibility for, in believing, I, I think sometimes, because we just had a mass shooting in Portland that was stopped by an armed member of the community, a shooting at a, at a, at a protest for a, a, a police violence victim. That was stopped by an armed member of the community. But I think community defense is, everyone should have an IFAC, right? Downsides to owning a gun, no downside to having a tourniquet and some gauze on you and some chest seals and knowing how to use them. Zero downside, could be useful in a car accident.

• 3:43:59Robert Evans?

  You could have a fucking piece of rebar fall off of a building construction and impale somebody. And maybe you'd get to save their life with an IFAC. Million times that could be useful. Have an IFAC, right? Organize in your community to provide houseless people with, you know, defense against sweeps, to provide people who are low income with eviction defense, to, to stock food pantries. Like, all of that stuff is, you can wear, you can wear cool uniforms if you want while you do. You can get a plate carrier, you can put patches on it, you know?

• 3:44:28Speaker 04

  Can I wear tactical sunglasses?

• 3:44:30Robert Evans?

  Fuck yeah, why the hell not? Be the, be the, be the- Be the

• 3:44:35Speaker 04

  Tactile Sunglass Guy.

• 3:44:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, whatever. Make it make it cool. Just help your help your Black Panthers look cool as shit when they were like serving food to kids, you know?

• 3:44:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, they did.

• 3:44:44Robert Evans?

  They had swag, you know?

• 3:44:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, they wore berets and they made berets look badass, you know?

• 3:44:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, look cool as hell and protect your community and

• 3:44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:44:53Robert Evans?

  Uh, yeah.

• 3:44:54Speaker 04

  Doesn't mean you need to own a gun, but maybe a little more community involvement might be helpful.

• 3:45:00Robert Evans?

  And also Variety of things that you can you can do. Yeah.

• 3:45:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, abolishing the police.

• 3:45:07Robert Evans?

  That is a good idea. Anyway.

• 3:45:11Robert Evans?

  Matt, got any pluggables?

• 3:45:13Speaker 04

  Oh, man, I've had a great time. And if you love

• 3:45:19Speaker 04

  the bastards and getting behind them, you'll love the podcast Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos rewatch podcast that me and my friend Vince Mancini do. We just finished the entire series, so you can re-listen and re-watch the whole thing. And it's great. You'll love it. And yeah, you look forward to us doing our The Wire podcast very soon. It's going to be great. And, you know, speaking about cops being bastards, it's a whole show about it. So you'll you'll love it. And I promise you that, you know, well, we're not gonna

• 3:45:59Speaker 04

  you know, be it's two white guys talking about the wire. We're not gonna it's, you know, so just don't worry. It's a good it'll be good. You'll I promise. I don't know how to say that.

• 3:46:09Robert Evans?

  I'm excited to listen to it.

• 3:46:10Speaker 04

  We don't, you know, we're leftists. Anyways, I'm excited. Follow me. At Matt Lieb Jokes on Instagram.

• 3:46:19Robert Evans?

  Follow Matt Lieb home.

• 3:46:22Speaker 03

  You have a Twitter?

• 3:46:23Robert Evans?

  Tracking.

• 3:46:24Speaker 04

  I do. It's it's it's at Matt Lieb and you can follow me there, too. That's fine.

• 3:46:28Speaker 03

  No jokes?

• 3:46:30Speaker 04

  No jokes on that one.

• 3:46:31Speaker 03

  Oh, got it, got it, got it.

• 3:46:31Speaker 04

  Definitely serious. That one, you know, I just post whatever. Today, in fact, I posted something from a doomsday dried food ad that I saw.

• 3:46:40Robert Evans?

  Oh, good. I love those.

• 3:46:42Speaker 04

  And it was really weird. It was like Like a Mac versus PC commercial, but they made the doomsday, the like, you know, dried food guy, you know, he was talking about his product. And then the other guy who was selling the, the fake patriot food was very much an anti Semitic meme.

• 3:47:00Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 3:47:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, God. Oh, no.

• 3:47:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, they made him very clearly a Jew and he's sweet. It opened with like, hello fellow patriots. And I was like, holy fuck. They went for it. And yeah, so I posted a little bit of that. And

• 3:47:18Robert Evans?

  You love to see it.

• 3:47:19Speaker 04

  You love to see just straight up antisemitism on the, on, this was an Instagram ad, by the way. But hey, it was on.

• 3:47:30Speaker 03

  It usually is.

• 3:47:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. Anyways, follow me on all the things.

• 3:47:35Robert Evans?

  And learn to can. Look, it's cheaper than food buckets.

• 3:47:39Speaker 04

  Yes, learn to can and it works way better.

• 3:47:42Robert Evans?

  It does work very well.

• 3:47:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:47:48Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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