Smith and Wesson first billion dollar sales year and an interview with national abuse Charles cook about the history of the second amendment that and more on this episode of the weekly reload.

I gave him poison. Just for fun. 

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to the inaugural episode of the weekly reload podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Gutowski, founder of the reload, and we're trying something new here we're doing a podcast, I'm going to try and bring you some really interesting interviews with some of the top writers and newsmakers in the gun world. Hopefully, you'll get some interesting points of view that you might not have heard before as well. I'm hoping to make this an extension of what we're trying to do overall at the reload, which is bring sober serious firearms reporting and analysis to you know, the general public trying to do something that you don't really see a lot of elsewhere. And, you know, if you're looking for somebody to scream your opinions back in your face, well, this is probably not the right place for you. But if you want some reasonable, open discussions about firearms and firearm policy and politics, then this is probably the place that you'll want to be. And on that foot, I want to start off talking a little bit about some of the big stories leading up to this weekend here jorf, Fourth of July weekend, I hope you're having a good time out there, by the way, stay safe, but also blow some things up, you know, like a good American ship to celebrate the birth of our nation.

let me tell you that this podcast is brought to you by the reload buy a membership today and you will actually get this podcast early as a perk of membership. You will also get exclusive access to other special posts on the website as well as my weekly analysis email that where I break down all of the most important gun stories of the week. So make sure you head on over to the reload comm to get your membership today. Alright, on to the interview. We're gonna have a nice conversation here with Charles cook of the National Review. I guess it's just National Review. There's no right that's a that's a point of contention out there.

But Charles has been writing about the Second Amendment for quite a long time now even before he became a gun over gunner himself. Is that is that right Charles? 

Well, I'm before I became an American fight before I moved to America.

That's a so you've been discussing this topic for a long time. And you got a very special renewal in interest. Just recently here, I believe when President Biden himself gave us his thoughts on on the history of the Second Amendment. When he said that the Second Amendment from the day it was past limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn't buy a cannon.

When he talks about guns, he has certain certain anecdotes, he likes to bring up certain little jokes and sayings. And this is certainly one of them that the Second Amendment always banned people from or at least, that there was always there always bans on certain kinds of weaponry, even going back to the founding era. And now, the washington post to their credit, has given the president four pinocchios for this, this one in their fact check.

In essence, that's their, their worst rating. So essentially, just a flat out lie. It's Can you give us a little bit more about what gun regulation was actually like, during the founding era?

Show us not to break down here. I'll say to start with it is better to hear him talking like this, then implying that he would launch nuclear missiles against the American citizenry, which was last week's Biden phobar. So it is important to want to start here by pointing out that there wasn't a gun control debate at the time of the founding. This was not on the table. If you look at the passage of the bill of rights, as he is introducing it, James Madison says that he has chosen only those liberties that would be uncontroversial to everyone within the new country. Of course, this is two years after the Constitution is written just after it's been ratified, and it will be two years before the Bill of Rights is added in 1791. And you do not have a debate over whether freemen should own guns. In one sense, Biden is right when he says that from the time of the founding, certain people were restricted from owning guns. But that's not something that a gun control activists really should want to point to. Because, yes, at least up until about 1970, the history of gun control in the history of racism, were inextricable. The first gun control laws, the only gun control laws that are passed in the United States, until 1934, are race based that they've passed against Native Americans. They're passed in Louisiana against blacks, Black Code laws that passed in the south, both before and after the war, against slaves, free blacks. And then in the Jim Crow era, really against anyone that white supremacists don't like. And even the Sullivan, Lauren in New York, is passed by a legislature that is freaking out of immigrants that they perceive to be anarchists they perceive to be non English. So I mean, Biden is right in that sense to point to restrictions, but those aren't restrictions that are countenanced by the Second Amendment. And they're certainly not restrictions that we're counting in store are allowed by the 14th Amendment, which was passed explicitly to incorporate the first eight provisions within the bill of rights to the states to all people, including freed slaves. Now on the question of canon, I mean, Biden's actually sort of wrong both ways here, because Americans own canon at the time of the founding, and there weren't any laws prohibiting them from doing so. So can and will not, can still. Yeah. 

own them today, that's the only thing. You know, it's regulated by the National Firearms Act. As you know, cannons are regulated as destructive devices, but you can own artillery pieces, if you want to. But yeah, now, certainly, back in the founding era. Absolutely. You could own all sorts of different you could own warships, right, as a private citizen.

But But even though that is true, it also it doesn't tell us anything interesting about the Second Amendment. I mean, it could have been true, it's not. But it could have been true that at the time of the founding canon were restricted by state governments or by the federal government, the federal government would have had a much harder time under the enumerated powers doctrine, but suppose that it had and it wouldn't have told us anything, because at the time of the founding, and of course, that's what we have to care about, given that the Second Amendment was was ratified in 1791. The A distinction the founders drew between ordinance and arms was very much in play, there is a legal definition of arms. And it doesn't include motors or cannon, at least not fixed motors. Black's Law Dictionary would include bearable motors. So he's basically just grabbing things from the air here as usual and throwing them out there. I'm glad the Washington Post did that. But the President really should know better.

Yeah, I mean, and to a certain degree, this this debate over whether or not you could own cannons during the founding is a bit of a wild goose chase, it's not really super relevant to the things we are worried about today. But I do think that it gets at a certain kind of historical literacy. that's inherent to a lot of the arguments made about why certain kinds of gun controls should be implemented, or, or what the actual limits of the Second Amendment are, what the limits of the protections afforded in the Second Amendment are, and I know that you've written about the more serious I don't know, serious is the right word. But But some of the more academic arguments in that regard about what exactly the Second Amendment even means? Because, you know, you have a lot of people out there, in sort of the camaraderie, the comments, comments, commentators and talking head types, who really don't have a very developed understanding of what the Second Amendment even means. Oftentimes, even though the courts have delved very, you know, a little bit into this, with Heller, and you know, a few of the cases since then, you know, oftentimes in public debate, it really just boils down to a lot of the people who advocate for for restrictive gun control measures, don't have any sort of developed idea of what exactly the Second Amendment means. Like kind of just argue that it doesn't really mean anything at all. It seems to be you know, the the way that it boils down, you have seen a couple of people try to make more creative, I guess, justifications or more interesting justifications for why it doesn't really mean anything at all. Especially with the you know, the the the argument lately that it's sort of, you know, this has come up with the last couple years that basically Second Amendment was a racially motivated amendment designed to protect slave patrols in which Leopold

in which he just says is nonsense, not least because slave patrols in the south were conducted under the general police powers of the states, not not the militia. And so there would have been no need to apply a federal Second Amendment protection in order to justify them.

Right. And then, I mean, you're obviously you still get very often the argument that the Second Amendment the right to keep and bear arms is only reserved for a well regulated militia, which people will argue means. You mean, people argue all sorts of things about what that supposed to mean. But generally speaking, what you'll hear on especially on social media, and another space, even in like, you know, the the op ed pages of major newspapers, that basically it just means that, you know, the government can put whatever restrictions they want on, you know, the ownership of firearms. And there's, again, I think it really just kind of boils down to the second amendment doesn't protect anything, which is just such an odd arguments, because it's like, why did they even write it down? Why even put it in there, if it just doesn't mean a single thing? Now, I do think that that comes a bit from like, recent history, and you've written a lot about this and the password, essentially, that that kind of was the accepted legal theory of the Second Amendment for, you know, the, during the 20th century that it basically just doesn't really do anything. So can you talk a little bit more about that, how that came to be. That that came to be the like, accepted legal theory for the 20th century, and then how, really, we've gotten away from it since since

the idea that it means nothing at all was the official position of the American Bar Association in the 1970s. But this would of course, have been shocking to the people who drafted and debated and ratified it, as well as the general population in British colonial America and within the New Republic. What the people who do this are trying to do is short circuit the debate, not necessarily from a legal perspective, because the Supreme Court is not really the biggest obstacle to gun control. Almost every gun restriction that has been repealed or loosened over the last 30 years has been done so at the behest of the voting public, not at the behest of the courts. But the gun control side understands that the Constitution is a talisman of sorts, and that it informs people's expectations. James Madison said that himself when the Bill of Rights was being debated that he hoped that if these liberties were written down and enumerated that they would become more deer in the bosom of the public. And of course, if you could demonstrate that the Second Amendment never protected an individual right to bear arms, then you would in some way diminish the strength of that feeling, which is what they're trying to do. The problem is they aren't going back far enough. What has happened is that as of about the 1990s, there was considerable pushback against what's known as the collective rights model. And those who examine the history, start there and assume that the collective rights model is the one that has obtained throughout history, and that it was then somehow changed by a combination of the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party, and Justice Scalia, in favor of what's called the standard model. Now, the fact that it's called the standard model should actually give people pause. Because the standard model was indeed the standard model for almost all of American history until about the mid 20th century. It wasn't that in the mid 20th century, there was a particular desire to get rid of the Second Amendment. And you can see this because when in 1959, both Alaska and Hawaii become states, they both pass their own Second Amendment equivalent Hawaii rights, the second amendment explicitly word for word verbatim into its constitution. Alaska makes it Second Amendment, even more rigorous, which makes sense if you've ever been to Alaska. But if you go back throughout American history, you won't see the collective rights model on display, anywhere. It's not there at the time of drafting ratification. It's not there during the discussions in early newspapers in early legal textbooks, it's not there at the time of the Civil War, and the drafting of the 14th amendment, especially the privileges and immunities clause. It's not there, in the textbooks of the late 19th century in particular, Cooley, who writes at the end of the 19th century, essentially, at look at the wording of this, people are going to misinterpret what it means. And he explains what the amendment means He notes that it is an individual write that exists independently of its preparatory clause. But he says, Yeah, I can see by the construction that some students and he's writing for students will assume that the second part is contingent upon the first. And it's only really once you get into the middle of the 20th century, that this idea that it protects a collective right becomes regnant and it slowly needs to be dismantled. And it's worth saying it was dismantled, but not just by the NRA and republicans and orrin hatch. And Scalia, it was dismantled by progressives. You know, the seminal academic piece on this that really opened the floodgates was by Sanford Levinson, who really hates guns, called the embarrassing Second Amendment. He doesn't like the conclusions he comes to, but he's honest enough to arrive at Lawrence tribe, the first two versions of his legal textbook that almost every law student will have us cast the Second Amendment as a collective right, but the third one does not came in the year 2000. So what you have is a realization that the lazy mid century conception is wrong. And look, of course, it's wrong. There is no such thing in the US Constitution, let alone in the bill of rights as a collective right. Look at the wording of it. It says the right of the people, how else is people used in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere in the constitution? Look at what Madison wanted to do with it. He wanted to put that part of the Bill of Rights into the constitution with the other individual rights not next to the militia clause. Every single stage, it becomes clear what this was, and I don't know quite how perhaps because we wanted to that Certainly Sanford Levinson's theory that academics and law professors wanted to diminish the role of the Second Amendment, pretend it means nothing. So they did. Whatever the reason is, this was forgotten, and it was restored to its original meaning, culminating in the 2008. Heller decision in 2010. McDonald decision.

Right, yeah, no, I mean, I've always looked at it as more of a, I guess, a textualist interpretation, right, where you just just read the text. It's fairly straightforward. It says who the rights reserved to, and it says what the right is. And, yeah, there's a preparatory clause that says why the right matters. But it's pretty hard to read the second amendment and come up with a conclusion that it's not a right reserved to, you know, regular individual people, because that's, that's what it says. I mean, the, as you pointed out there, the Bill of Rights is pretty clear about who, what rights are and who they're reserved to, you know, the press, the people, the states, it goes out and says, specifically, who who is this? Who is this reserved for? And if the Second Amendment if the right to keep and bear arms was reserved to the militia? Like why why doesn't it say, the militia, you know, the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. But you know, it doesn't.

I'll just add one more thing to that. And that is that the idea that we have somehow misinterpreted this in a disastrous fashion and led to the invention of a right, that nobody considered they had, is contradicted by everything we know about American history, and also by almost every single state constitution. And for a start, there is absolutely no doubt that Americans assume the right to keep and bear arms and did so from colonial times. All of the writings that we have demonstrate that, but also, you know, the terrible decision in Dred Scott implies that when justice Tony says, Look, if African Americans are allowed to be citizens, they'll start carrying guns everywhere they go, Well, yeah, they would, because that's what American citizens do, and independently of the militia, African American citizens of the sort that Tony was worried about, were not in militias. And he assumes, well, there'll be stopped carrying guns. But the other point is that 45 of the 50 state constitutions have individual rights to keep and bear arms. So it's not as if this is some document we found in a drawer. And then 235 years later, we said, You know what, I guess we should all go out and buy guns from Walmart. The Pennsylvania constitution has had an individual right to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state since 1776. Vermont copied it verbatim before it was a state one year later, in 1777. Every new state that joins the union, after the constitution adds one fact that they're still doing it. I mentioned Hawaii, and Alaska at the height of the collective rights theory, you have a broad culture of owning and and bearing arms here that exists independently of the Second Amendment. And the last thing on this is, even if the Second Amendment weren't in there, the federal government would still according to an originalist interpretation, not have the capacity to disarm the people. The federal government is based upon a set of enumerated powers, it doesn't have pure police powers 45 states, so you can't take away the guns, which is the part of the constitution that allows the federal government to even regulate this area. So I don't think it's even necessary to get to the meaning of the Second Amendment, although that is clear, in order to understand that there was never any question at the time of the founding, that the federal government would have a broad based power to regulate or prohibit firearms.

Right. And now, going off of that, moving into the modern era here that the Supreme Court, do you think that the court has been effective at, you know, interpreting the Second Amendment, and ensuring that its protections actually apply? In in reality, even since the Heller decision, like how do you view the way the court has handled this even since it's reverted to the standard model?

Why I think it's fallen down on the job. I think Hello did a great deal of good because it made obvious what was already obvious to most people that right if the people to keep and bear arms means that I think that has had a cultural effect, but the court has done very little since McDonald to uphold this. Right now. It is of course difficult to do that. You have to draw lines somewhere that is generally better done. By legislators than it is by courts. But there are some really flagrant examples not of regulation, but of prohibition, or some of them, the court has struck down. I said, Did inhalers it didn't McDonald as it did in Chicago, the general ban on gun stores. But otherwise, it's been happy to stay out of it. That has not been the disaster that one might have imagined. I often just oppose the first and second amendments in this area, the court is really good at policing the First Amendment. And yet we have a culture that is decreasingly virtuous, when it comes to free speech, everyone's trying to cancel everyone else, we're told that hate speech should be prohibited. We don't talk to each other properly. And yet the court is a shining city on a hill, and yet with guns, the courts largely stayed out of it, and you have maybe the most pro gun polity that we've had in the United States for 60 years. So, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to bed every night, you know, tear rolling out of my eyes worried that we're about to see a reversal of that. But at the same time, if you're going to wade into the question, as they did with Heller and McDonald, if you're going to take the case, and then if you're going to set out, say an in common use standard, which holds that the government cannot prohibit firearms that are commonly used, at some point, you're going to have to actually follow through. And I would hope that the silence we've seen is not permanent. I mean, there aren't the votes at the moment for a ban on so called assault weapons. But if we did get one, and California has one, which was just struck down, but it's now in litigation, the courts gonna have to clarify, did it mean in common use or did it not? Because the AR 15 is in common uses? How many of them 20 million, maybe more. So I do think we're getting to the point at which it is untenable. The only reason that it hasn't become a huge problem is that if anything, gun laws are being repealed more than they're being added,

do you see an issue with the common use standard? You know, I remember reading Jake Charles from Duke University, his critique of the assault weapons ban being struck down in California. And he talks a little bit about the common use standard, which I know is fairly popular among Second Amendment advocates, right? Because presumably, it implies that a lot of things that deep blue states like to ban are actually protected by the Second Amendment like ar 15. But he has an interesting critique in his writing, where he talks about, you know, there is a fairly obvious problem with the common use standard, which is essentially that. Well, on one side, obviously, sort of a lot of guns that are currently heavily restricted or banned would would be protected by the Second Amendment under current common use data, including probably, you know, machine guns, because there's 700,000 plus registered machine guns in the United States, which, you know, I guess there's an issue of what exactly is common use. But, you know, obviously 19 million a ours would probably imply that that's, that's coming. He's got 19 times the number of all guns owned by law enforcement in the in the United States. Just to put some context on that. So yeah, common use is probably applicable there. But But yeah, so you have that on the one hand, that it would mean, a lot of things are in common use that are, are and have for quite a while been banned, although only really going back to the 20th century, not, you know, the National Firearms Act only goes back to 1934. But on the other hand, it would also sort of imply that as long as the government were to step in early and ban something, before it became common, that that would be perfectly kosher with the Second Amendment. And, you know, I wonder if that's, that's really, in the in the grand scheme of things, the best standard, especially because it comes really from Miller. Right, which is the really the only other major Supreme Court case, before Heller that dealt with the National Firearms dealt with the short, short barrel shotgun ban. And essentially, the court just said that short barrel shotguns aren't useful for militia service. So they aren't in the purview of the second amendments, because the Second Amendment was about, you know, really, kind of the argument was kind of that the Second Amendment protected arms that would be effective in military service. Ironically, too. Given, given what people are given the common arguments about why we should ban things like ar 15. Miller, the first Supreme Court case that really dealt with the Second Amendment went the exact opposite way. And so the second amendment really is only useful, only protects things that could be useful in military service. So and then Heller kind of also goes back on that. So that, you know, with Scully is talk about, and 16th. And really is his aside, that essentially just says the, the Kate, the the ruling doesn't strike down the National Firearms Act, regulation of machine guns and so forth. But, you know, it does seem like there's a lot of questions left open on the legal front on like coming up with a really solid standard of review for second amendment cases going forward. You know, gee, what do you what do you see as like the weak, the weak areas that need to be thought through more when it comes to the second amendment litigation and strategies and standards? Do you think that the common new standard is like, the ideal standard? going forward? Like, I guess, what is What's your ideal standard look like? In terms of Second Amendment case law? And like, where is it any of the ones we've that are currently being, you know, argued in court.

But it's important always to separate out the argument that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms from the Heller decision. Heller is broadly correct. But it is obviously the product of some wrangling. And I think some of its Vega provisions are likely the consequence of bringing john roberts and Anthony Kennedy aboard. So Hitler is not perfect is is a good starting point. The income a new standard is unusual for precisely the reason you outline. It's really two ways of looking at it, and it hasn't been fleshed out. The lower courts have tried and come to different conclusions, but the Supreme Court's never explained it. On the one hand, if you say, if the income a new standard had applied in, say, the late 19th century, then the, let's say, a state government to avoid federalism issues. a state like Tennessee could have said, well, lever action rifles are prohibited, because they're not in common use. Of course, they weren't in common use, it only just been invented, right, semi automatic firearms, which are much older than people think they are 30 years old. And penicillin could also have been outlawed in the late 19th century. Now we say, Well, of course, you can't outlaw semi automatic firearms as 150 million of them, but that wouldn't have been the case in 1885. And that is a problem. Unless you don't take common use in a chronic, excuse me, in a chronological or in a numerical sense. But you look at it by type. Now, if you go back to the founding, arms had a discrete meaning. When people say, Well, I can have arms, why can't I have a nuclear weapon? they're failing to understand what was meant by arms. But there are so many definitions from the founding era, muskets or arms. But that doesn't mean that only muskets around carbines are defined as arms in the late 18th century, while an AR 15 is a carbene. So if you take the categorical approach to in common use, then it becomes much harder for government to step in at the first stage and say why we're banning that. Now that is, of course, a balancing act. Is there a substantial enough difference between a carbene as understood by Thomas Jefferson and a carbene, as understood by browning? Maybe. But that's why ultimately, this is a this is a question for legislators and why the court should step in when it sees a an all out prohibition or a denial of the right to keep and bear arms.

What are those situations that you see like, what just some real world examples of what you mean there? Well,

well desease ban on handguns. And clearly that is a categorical ban. Right. If a state were to ban the bearing of arms open and concealed, carry When Chicago banned gun stores from the city limits, that's an categorical prohibition. If a state were to ban rifles, if a state were to ban shotguns I'm not of the view that it would be constitutional to prohibit the AR 15. Partly because the Supreme Court laid out the common new standard, and there's no interpretation of that, that I can arrive at that doesn't include the most commonly on rifle in the United States. Right. But I think we will get to that detailed stage iteratively, you're going to need in a number of cases that slowly explain what is meant, what what I would like to see as a precursor to that is the state jumping in much more. Sorry, the court jumping in much more proactively when asked to deal with obvious and flagrant violations. And that is what it hasn't done. And as I say, that hasn't actually caused huge numbers of real world problems, at least in most states, because state legislators haven't been to gun control happy. That's no great consolation if you live in California or in New Jersey, but but it has caused a problem in fleshing out the law, because at the moment, at least, irrespective of what it should be, or what was intended. No one is quite sure whether the fourth circuit's right or the seventh circuit's right, no one is quite sure whether the AR 15 is protected under Heller, or it's not protected under Heller. And that's because none of the legwork has been done. To get us to that point.

Right. Right. Exactly. So I wanted to hear a little bit about how you got into this what what is it that that got you interested in? You know, constitutional law, especially the Second Amendment, and the history of it, and, and so forth? Because I know you, like you said earlier, you got into this before you ever own a gun or even move to America. So what was it that that got you into it? And then how did things progress from there

are other ones that again, I should say, I grew up anti gun English people do. In fact, I can remember after Columbine, which was obviously huge news in England to saying to my dad one day when he was mowing the lawn, you know, if Bill Clinton just banned all the guns, he'd be the greatest president ever. I look back on that now. And I think was just every single thing is wrong about that for start, he caught his president, Congress. Secondly, it would be illegal. And thirdly, it will be undesirable, which is a view I arrived at over time. What got me interested in this initially was the legal and historical question. When I was at Oxford, I wrote my thesis on the passage of the Second Amendment. Because I had got interested in British colonial America in the lineage of rights that were transferred from Britain into the United States as it became. And in the course of reading about the construction of the Constitution, I realized that what I had been told and believed about the Second Amendment, and this is pretty Hello, was a lie, not just wrong, but was a lie. And the more I read, the more it irritated me. You know, I mentioned the Dred Scott decision. Obviously, the Dred Scott decision is one of if not the worst, Supreme Court decision in American history, but you cannot read it without realizing that the collective right theory is nonsense, because of the parade of horribles that justice Tony lays out. And the combination of that, and understanding how the system worked in the United States, put me on to the second amendment question. And once I had realized that I had been lied to, I got really annoyed. And so I decided to write my thesis on it. So I spent five, six months in the library, just reading every single document available from that era. And I came out of it, absolutely convinced that the Second Amendment protected an individual right, and, moreover, that this would soon be recognized by the Supreme Court, which one year later, it was, no thanks to me. I didn't do any of that. And then I suppose, once I was interested in the area, and even before I moved to the United States in 2011, I followed gun politics and constitutional gun politics, and I slowly became more and more interested in the political and cultural and economic questions around it. And then I realized that what I had thought as a child was just really quite simplistic. And you know what? Once you've started to question yourself in an area you can't stop. And over time, I changed my mind quite dramatically on on this question. You know that it's not that I am unaware that guns are extremely dangerous and supposed to be. And it's not that I am unaware that if you fill a country with 400 million of them in private hands, you're going to have more people killed by guns than if you don't. But of course, most of the gun problem to see how the left does in America is already baked in. So the question is not should America have 400 million privately owned guns? The question is, given that America has 400 million privately owned guns, what is the best policy? And over time, I realized that actually restricting law abiding people from owning those guns is the worst thing you can do. Not just because they have an unalienable right, which I do strongly believe, but because it doesn't do anything except take away that right, and the ability of those people to defend themselves from the very people you don't want to take it away from. And from that point on, you know, I essentially became a gun rights guy.

Right, right. And now you're a gun owner and you live in flow, the gun shine state, you've kind of gone all the way in the other direction, I suppose from Australia and Oxford, Oxford, educated the Britain to a one, I thought that President Clinton should ban all the guns right to a ar 15 toting Florida, man, that's correct. All right. And going off of that, I think, just briefly, to circle back to President Biden for a moment, and sort of Hill historical literacy on guns. You mentioned it earlier. But in addition to saying this false thing about how the Second Amendment, you know, even even during the founding era, people were prohibited from owning guns and cannons and so forth. He also took a shot at the philosophical foundation of the Second Amendment, right, because the the concept of the Second Amendment is that, you know, well regulated militia is necessary to the safety of a free state, right, this concept that the public or the people, an armed populace could throw off a tyrant. That's the concept behind American consent, belief in gun ownership, right. That's sort of the core part of it. Certainly, there's other benefits to gun ownership. And some of them that you mentioned there, like being able to protect yourself against, you know, common crime. If someone breaks into your house or attacks you in the street, you can use firearms to protect yourself in that interpersonal situation like that. But the core of the Second Amendment is clearly derived from the revolutionary concept of the American Republic, which came about obviously through armed violent revolution against a monarch. And, and so Biden's argument was, and, you know, he's done his center thing where he's done this a lot. He's he said this in the past, he said it was running. He has these kinds of things that he likes to, he has like a certain number of jokes that he likes to tell whenever he's talking about guns, he does the nobody needs more than like three rounds, they don't need 100 rounds, because the deer aren't wearing Kevlar vests as he says that one all the time. And then, and then the other one, somebody must have read him the Thomas Jefferson quote about the tree of liberty at some point, and he didn't. He did not like the concept of, you know, the tree of liberties being refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patient patriots. And so he likes to mock this Jefferson quote, because now, and this is not an uncommon thing to hear, right. But now you have the President himself making this this point, but essentially, he says, you know, your ar 15 is useless. It's, it's pointless, because the government has f fifteens. And, and nuclear weapons. And so resisting a government, in and of itself is, is futile Resistance is futile. There's no point in even conceptualizing the idea that you could resist a modern tyranny with modern military weaponry and the size The obvious, like creepy implications of that, like, essentially the president talking about how in at least in theory, he could he would like the United States as an abstract concept would use nuclear weapons against a, you know, its own people essentially. I know he's doing this as like a thought experiment, but it's very uncomfortable, obviously, when, when he's the one in charge of the United States military, and the nuclear stockpile and saying these things, it's it's obviously insane and bizarre, but it's also like,

extremely nihilistic. And I don't think that people who make these arguments including the President, but have a conception of how nihilistic this argument is, essentially, that, again, they're just saying that resistance is futile, doesn't matter if the government is actually tyrannical, like, you know, a dictator took over the United States tomorrow and put, you know, 30% of the country into concentration camps and had, you know, a, you know, a Nazi style death program, it doesn't matter because they've got the modern military weapons, so you couldn't resist them anyway. And you wouldn't shouldn't even bother thinking about trying, like, Okay, well, so what's just strikes me as extremely nihilistic. And basically, like, our the argument is that, you know, if, if the military ever wanted to rule with an iron fist and impose their, you know, despotism on the United States, they that you shouldn't even think you could try to resist them.

Yeah, a couple of things on that. The first thing is in john Locke's estimation. And this, of course, matters enormously because the founders were so well versed in Locke, there's no distinction drawn between somebody who attacks you a criminal, for example, and a tyrannical government, the unalienable rights to self defense, this isn't just lucky in philosophy, this goes back to Justinian in the sixth century, there's a great history of this in the West, and frankly, everywhere else, that you have a right to try to defend yourself, whether that's from a monarch, or a car jacker. And the fact that you might not prevail, doesn't enter into it. Any more than one could diminish the importance of the First Amendment because you might lose an argument, you have a right as a human being, to try to stay alive. And that obtains as much in a neighborhood as it does in the Warsaw ghetto. In terms of the founders. I think Biden's argument is a strange one, in that he is, in one sense, repudiating The reason the United States exists. Now, the Thomas Jefferson quote, is problematic as the kids say, because Jefferson did have this odd view that all laws should be sunsetted after a few years, and maybe we should have revolutions all the time. But that was Jefferson. He wasn't involved in the drafting of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights he was abroad. The rest of the founders did not think that. And the constitution that they came up with, was intended to be permanent, but was not predicated upon the idea that if the rulers became tyrannical, the people had to put up with it. Of course, revolutionaries become conservatives when they win. So no, the day after the revolution was won. The day after the constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation The day after the Bill of Rights was ratified. George Washington did not say, Well, I guess it doesn't really matter if we're overrun, he was the president, or about to be the president. And he had a responsibility to uphold the law. And yes, you did see that done. In, for example, the Whiskey Rebellion. But the fact that the United States government exercise the powers that it was given, and the fact that decades later, the United States government under Lincoln exercise, the powers that it was given, in order to crush the Confederacy, do not mean that the founders did not believe that that remain they rights to revolution. They did believe that it's clear that they believe they still talked about it, they just fought what. So sure, Joe Biden took an oath to uphold the law and often that will include putting down rebellion. But there is in a cosmic sense often but well, potentially, yeah. I mean, if one has to do it often that will involve putting down rebellion, but in a cosmic sense. It's the law is not always good enough. It is. unavoidable when discussing this to discuss the great tyrannies of the 20th century Godwin's law be damned, then it does not matter that Soviet law allowed for the Gulag. And it does not matter that Nazi law allowed for Kristallnacht, and it does not matter that Chinese law allowed for organized famine. When that happens, human beings have a right to fight back. The founders thought that yes, even the ones who wrote the rules and established themselves as as the new powers that be, and so I'm never quite sure what it is that Biden thinks he is doing. Because it is not inconsistent simultaneously to demand order and fail to to the rules and to acknowledge that there is such a thing as a right to revolt if those rules become illiberal.

Right. And well, one, I think Biden just believes he's has a very clever line, to be honest with you. That's probably as far as the thought process goes. He just hears someone say that we need guns to, you know, potentially resist the tyrannical government and he thinks, okay, but your handgun isn't going to stop a tank or a nuke? Right? So he just thinks it's a clever line is my girl, I don't think he puts a lot of philosophical debate into it in his mind before he goes out and makes the, what he what he thinks is a quip. I will say, though, that Jefferson's quote, I know that there's the 2020 year timeframe is in there. But he that cold quote comes from a letter where he's essentially defending the concept of the American Revolution of revolutions against tyrannical. And he points to the United States and says, we haven't just had a bunch of ongoing revolutions after the one that, you know, succeeded. Basically, he's arguing like you can have a stable, right, right. Republic after a armed revolution, but also that, you know, that he's just arguing for the basic concept of, of armed revolution in, in, in situations where it becomes necessary after long periods of unaddressed grievances again, yeah, and here's the fun fact, that's basically where the 17 It wasn't like, oh, as soon as there's something bad happens, or the government does something wrong, immediately, we should turn to violence that wasn't anything. What the valley right

and tie together this conversation in the previous one about originalism, the 1784 constitution of New Hampshire contains a right to revolution and, but no right to keep and bear arms. So I think we can assume that it was assumed, unless the drafters in New Hampshire believed that the the Constitution itself could be used as sort of parchment barriers, as Madison put it, disparagingly.

Right. Right. And so I also think there's obviously practical problems with Biden's argument there. If you just look at American military history over the last 60 years, yeah, pretty sure that armed populace can resist even modern militaries. And that's sort of one of the main ironies of him making that statement was that at the same time, he's overseeing the withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan, as the Taliban, recaptures much of the territory there, which we spent 20 years fighting them, and they are probably less well armed than your average suburban dad in a lot of cases. So you know, practical, yes, certainly, the America has nukes, and could your your AR would not stand up against a nuclear strike, but that just completely ignores or an Abrams tank or whatever else, but that just totally ignores the nature of modern guerrilla warfare and an asymmetrical, you know, fighting? So there's all kinds of problems with it. I think the main one is the philosophical one, which just kind of says, Resistance is futile. Please don't even think about it. There's no point. And you could have said the exact same thing about the British military against the American colonists at the time. That was the greatest military power in the world during the 18th century. And so, you know, it was considered rather ridiculous for colonists to have any chance of winning that war at the outset. So, you know, these sorts of arguments have been around forever, and they're not very practical, and I think that they're disturbing when you think about the philosophical Applications of them. But anyway, this has been a really great conversation. And I really appreciate you coming on and being one of the first guests on the weekly reload podcast here. Yeah, Charles has been a longtime friend. He shot this, this a Alright, let's hear your favorite if I recall the one that I built. I believe we've got a build plan. At some point here now that you're in a free state down there in Florida. We should definitely get together and build one for you. I know you already have some but

I have I have another low. It's ready for about it's ruby red. So

I've got about five or six. lying around these lowers lying around. Yeah, anytime I get one that has a like a cool design on it. I'm sure my camera will pick it up. But yeah, this one's a I've got one here. That's Virginia. 15 has the lady little the the wonderful Virginia logo on it. The liberties killing a tyrant, sort of, I guess goes to the crux of our conversation here. But anytime there's a call to strip flowers on an AR 15. So it's easy to just collect them and be like, I'll buy the five or $600 worth of other parts to finish this later. But yes, I get a bunch of them. But we definitely have to do a build. So I think it'd be a lot of fun. And we have to go. Charles is also very big. Yeah, amusement park fan is as am I and now that the you know, I'm vaccinated. I'm sure the parks are all opening back up again. And there's some pretty cool new roller coasters out there. I think jury, you know, there's new one and great adventure. I think universal has a new one. Even even the great American Maryland has new one. Oh, and Hershey just pandemonium that was a chocolate. Yeah, I can't imagine that. So I think we'll have to plant an AR building and roller coaster ride on American trip. Yeah, there you go. All right. Well, we really appreciate you coming on. And giving us your thoughts and insight into especially the the historical background of the Second Amendment and how that applies today. And really look forward to having you want again. Thanks for having me. It was great. And that will do it for the inaugural episode of the weekly reload podcast. Thank you for joining me today. And please remember to head over to the reload comm to buy a membership. If you want exclusive early access to this podcast. We're going to be doing this with lots of interesting new guests coming in the near future. So make sure you head over there, buy your membership. And you will get this a day early as well as special access to a bunch of other content, including a lot of my personal analysis on the biggest gun stories of the week. You'll get that in the newsletter every Sunday morning. And you'll get special access to exclusive posts on the website as well as the ability to comment. That is a special privilege. We don't let just anyone comment there. So we want the best. please head over and check it out today. And I will see you guys again real soon.

All right. I gave him poison just for fun. I had one friend. Now there's none. I'm a the devil right?

Transcribed by https://otter.ai