Ben Shapiro is headed to CPAC, where he will be joined by conservative firebrand Ann Coulter. He also talks about gun control, and why you should trust your child in the classroom with a trained, armed teacher to prevent mass shootings like Parkland, Florida, where a former high school baseball coach was shot to death by a former student. And he explains why we should build schools with fail-safe mechanisms to deal with a mass shooter in the first place. Links From Today's Episode: Ben Shapiro's CPAC Speakers' Note: Ann Coulter's appearance at CPAC has been canceled due to a scheduling conflict, but there's no reason why you shouldn't be prepared for her to speak at the event, he says. The Daily Wire's Peter Bergen's new book, "America's Next Top Gun" is out now, and it's a must-listen for anyone who wants to know who should and shouldn't have a gun in their home. Check it out at The Wire's new online store, The Wire Wire Wire Daily, wherever you get your news and information, and don't miss the latest updates from the world of politics, including the latest breaking out of Washington, D.C. and beyond. Subscribe to The Wire Daily on Apple Podcasts and listen to his newest podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show wherever you re listening to the news and opinions are available. Thanks for listening! The opinions expressed in this episode are our own, and we'd like to know what you think of our thoughts on the latest news and views on the topic. Please reach out to us on social media using the hashtag . and we'll be checking out your thoughts on this episode of the show on the next episode of The WireWireWireWire Daily on on our socials! on Instapreneurs and other media outlets to let us know what s trending on your feed so we can help spread the word out there about what s going on in your feed! and what you're listening to on the Wire Wire is your thoughts and what s your thoughts are listening to you're watching on the show! Thanks again for listening to this episode! - Ben, Ben, too much value, right? Thank you for listening, Timestamps: 5/27/19th/says so much love, right away, and thanks for listening and sharing it on your thoughts?
00:00:00.000The Left trots out students as their point people, everything is about race, and the media spin wildly for gun control in every possible direction.
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00:02:41.000All right, so the debate over gun control continues.
00:02:44.000And as I said yesterday, I think there are some things that we actually can do.
00:02:48.000There is what has been called the gun violence restraining order.
00:02:52.000This is something I talked about yesterday.
00:02:54.000David French at National Review spoke about the possibility of having laws on the books that allow immediate family or close friends to go to the court and petition to have your capacity to own a gun temporarily removed from you if a court finds that you are a threat to yourself or others.
00:03:09.000That would be a useful measure, in my view.
00:03:11.000Another useful measure would be dramatically heightening security.
00:03:14.000I talked about this on Fox & Friends this morning.
00:03:22.000There's no reason why our dollars should be guarded more closely than our children.
00:03:26.000There's been a lot of talk about arming teachers, and some people object to this.
00:03:28.000Well, I don't understand why a trained armed teacher would be a threat to your child.
00:03:32.000You trust your child in the classroom with that teacher every single day.
00:03:35.000And right now, we are leaving teachers at the whim of mass killers.
00:03:39.000There's that coach in Parkland who was shot to death while he was attempting to defend students.
00:03:43.000Wouldn't it have been better if he'd actually been licensed to carry a handgun and had a gun with him, so he maybe could have done something about it?
00:03:51.000From now on, they should build schools with fail-safe mechanisms, so that if a mass shooter were to enter the school, there would be a capacity to actually lock down separate parts of the school.
00:03:59.000They have this lockdown capacity at a lot of hospitals.
00:04:01.000There's no reason why they shouldn't use it when it comes to schools as well.
00:04:05.000And another thing that ought to be done is something that we here are now doing at Daily Wire.
00:04:09.000So at Daily Wire, as I've said on the show, I said it in the last week that I wasn't going to name the shooter on the show.
00:04:15.000I wasn't going to show pictures of the shooter on the show.
00:04:18.000And somebody emailed me and said, well, then why is your website naming the shooter and showing pictures?
00:04:21.000And I thought, well, that's a good point.
00:04:23.000And so we at Daily Wire will no longer be showing the names or the faces of mass shooters.
00:04:27.000The reason being that studies tend to show that mass shooters are driven by a need for media attention.
00:04:33.000And so this time we are going to try to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
00:04:37.000The media, the race to show faces, the race to show names in the media is obviously ratings driven.
00:04:41.000It's obviously click driven because people are curious.
00:04:43.000People want to know what the guy looks like who went and shot up a school.
00:04:46.000We're not going to be part of that game because we can give you all the relevant information as we have been doing on the show.
00:04:53.000We've told you what you need to know for the public policy debate.
00:04:55.000We're just not going to put a name and a face on him because we don't want to give him any sort of unearned notoriety.
00:05:00.000We don't want him to be unintentionally given levels of exposure that will drive the next mass killer.
00:05:07.000There's no reason why we should know the names of mass shooters particularly except out of just normal human curiosity or why their pictures should be flashed across the news.
00:05:15.000We can give you all the information that you need to know without that pictorial evidence behind it.
00:05:19.000The reason we're doing this is because there are a series of studies that have shown, again, that mass shooters tend to feed off media attention.
00:05:25.000So, Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the APA, that's the American Psychological Association, in 2016, quote, media contagion can help make mass shootings more common.
00:05:37.000Unfortunately, Johnston says, we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame.
00:05:43.000They say that the rise of such a trait in mass shooters
00:05:45.000So, some studies say that the dramatic reduction won't be that dramatic, but there is a similar conclusion, which is that a lot of these shooters are driven by the need for fame.
00:06:13.000We can give you all the details that you need to know without speaking the name of the person who did it, because, again, there's a lot of people out there who want the world to know their name, but we're not going to help them in that quest.
00:06:22.000That's not something that we think is a worthwhile thing.
00:06:26.000The media, of course, are not going to—a lot of other outlets in the media are not going to do this, unfortunately.
00:06:33.000CNN shows the names and faces of the shooters.
00:06:34.000Fox News shows the names and face of the shooter.
00:06:37.000The Washington Post, The New York Times, all the major outlets, I believe, still show the names and faces of mass shooters.
00:06:42.000Because they said the public has a right to know.
00:06:45.000Well just because you have a right to know doesn't mean that I have an obligation to show you.
00:06:49.000And I do not feel the obligation to show you the face of a shooter outweighs my obligation as a human being to prevent the dissemination of material that helps possibly create the next shooter.
00:07:00.000That's not something that I want to be a part of.
00:07:03.000Speaking of media malfeasance and the left's malfeasance on the gun control issue and the fact that every mass shooting now has become a cause celeb, that this has become the club to wield against law-abiding gun owners, the media have really done an outsized job here.
00:07:19.000I just want to show you some of the things the media have been doing because they're truly insane.
00:07:22.000So, ABC News had a tape of a guy named Scott Pappalardo.
00:07:27.000You've never heard of Scott Pappalardo.
00:07:28.000Scott Pappalardo is some dude who they found on Facebook.
00:07:32.000Why are they putting him on ABC News' Twitter feed?
00:07:35.000Well, because he's a gun owner and he decided to destroy his gun for some odd reason.
00:07:39.000Here's a video of him talking about it.
00:07:41.000Hi, my name is Scott Pappalardo and this is my pre-ban.
00:07:47.000Legally registered AR-15, which I purchased over 30 years ago.
00:07:52.000Now, I'm a firm believer in the Second Amendment, and I even have it tattooed on my arm.
00:07:56.000And a lot of people have said to me, well, what do you need to own a weapon like that for?
00:10:13.000And yet the media pushed this out as though this is some sort of great act of heroism, Olympic gold in virtue signaling for Scott Pappalardo, who made no one safer in this act.
00:10:23.000But he got his name on the news, and the news got to put out this sort of propaganda, which I guess is very exciting.
00:10:28.000I'm going to show you some more media malfeasance on the gun control issue in just a second, plus we still have to get to the Children's Crusade, which is something that the left is now pushing.
00:10:35.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Tommy John's.
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00:12:20.000So instead what they do is they put out a bunch of people talking about how gun control is obviously the thing that has to happen here.
00:12:26.000So CNN is having an entire special, I believe it's tomorrow night, and that special tomorrow night is going to feature all of the students over at Parkland basically talking about why they want gun control.
00:12:35.000And the reason this is stating the news is because the media have decided to use the children over at Parkland in order to push their agenda.
00:12:41.000And we'll talk about whether it is moral to use children in order to push an agenda, teenagers to push an agenda in just a second.
00:12:46.000But first, I'm going to show you some more elements in the news that are just plain false, that are just fake news.
00:12:51.000So CBS News put out this promo saying that in Florida, it's easier to buy an assault rifle than it is to obtain cold medicine.
00:12:58.000It says, here's what's more difficult to purchase than a gun in Florida.
00:13:05.000Sudafed contains pseudofedrin, which can be used to legally manufacture methamphetamines.
00:13:10.000Federal regulations require it be sold behind the pharmacy or service counter, and customers need to show they're over 18 years of age.
00:13:17.000Okay, and then it says, customers are limited to purchases of 9 grams per month about two 15-dose boxes of 24-hour Claritin D, or three 10-dose boxes of Aleve cold and sinus, or six 24-dose boxes of Sudafed.
00:13:31.000In Florida, you can buy as many guns as you want at one time, according to the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action.
00:13:35.000Right, but there's no federal background check for cold medicine.
00:13:38.000There's no federal background check for Sudafed.
00:13:40.000It says you don't need a permit to purchase a rifle or shotgun.
00:13:43.000Right, but there is a federal background check that happens at every federally licensed firearms dealer.
00:13:46.000It says there are restrictions on the amount of fertilizer one can purchase because ammonium nitrate, when mixed with other substances, can become explosive.
00:13:52.000Right, because you don't have a right to explosives, you do have a right to keep and bear arm for your own safety.
00:13:57.000But the headline here that it's easier to buy a gun than it is to buy Claritin-D is just not true.
00:14:22.000I think that from a libertarian perspective, there's a solid argument that I should be able to buy as much Sudafed as I want at a given shot.
00:14:28.000And I'm not sure that the government has a place in regulating how much Sudafed I can buy.
00:14:31.000So I have problems with that on a libertarian basis just automatically.
00:14:36.000I know I should have to go back to the store every so often to buy Sudafed if I just want to stock up and use it later.
00:14:41.000And if I'm producing meth, then the government can bust me.
00:14:44.000But again, this is the media pushing falsehoods, the idea that it's difficult to buy guns, that it's easier to buy lots of other things in the United States than it is to buy a gun.
00:14:56.000Just not true if you're doing it legally through a federally licensed firearms dealer.
00:15:00.000That's not the only piece of propaganda being put out.
00:15:02.000CNN has a commentator named Gagliano, and this person says that James Gagliano, who's the FBI supervisory special agent, retired.
00:15:13.000Who says that the Founding Fathers never could have envisioned an 18-year-old kid buying a gun.
00:15:20.000The first guns were mid-14th century invented.
00:15:23.000The 1791, the Second Amendment comes online, and here we are in 2018, and we're hanging on to this and we're going, we just can't talk about this because if we do that, we're somehow going to tick off the Founding Fathers.
00:15:37.000The Founding Fathers could not envision that an 18-year-old kid could go into a gun store
00:15:42.000He can't buy beer, but he could buy a semi-automatic weapon, and it's a weapon of war, Dave.
00:16:07.000There are people in the Revolutionary Army who are 14 years old, 15 years old.
00:16:11.000If you actually go and watch Mel Gibson's movie, The Patriot, there are a lot of kids in there.
00:16:15.000The reason that they're in there is because that was true.
00:16:17.000There were a lot of kids who were in the American Revolutionary Army.
00:16:20.000And by the way, virtually everybody in the United States at the time of the founding owned a weapon and brought it home, and then they would drill on the green together as part of a well-regulated militia, but it was personal gun ownership.
00:16:31.000Everyone owned a gun back in the day, including people who were young.
00:16:34.00018-year-old kids, by the way, were not kids in 1791.
00:16:39.000In 1791, 18-year-old people were expected to be looking to get married and have a family already.
00:16:45.000We're only considering 18-year-old kids because this is our modern society where 18-year-olds are considered kids, except if they have something to say about gun control, in which case we consider them adults, as we'll get to in just a second.
00:16:57.000Simone Sanders, commentator on MSNBC, said, well, you know, what this is really about is race, because everything is always about race.
00:17:02.000Invariably and always, everything is about race.
00:17:10.000We wouldn't be talking about the types of legislation we could and could not make happen.
00:17:14.000Because if he was yelling Allah Akbar, Congress and the President, one would have been tweeting about it and they would have swooped in and did whatever they felt needed to.
00:18:21.000The reason that the issues are demagogues is because the left wants to push this notion that anyone who disagrees with them is a bad person.
00:18:26.000David Brooks has a good column on this over at the New York Times.
00:18:29.000It's rare that I recommend a David Brooks column because he's one of the in-house conservatives over at the New York Times, which means he's not particularly conservative.
00:19:20.000One of the reasons that no agreement has been reached here is that gun owners will say, why don't we talk about these issues that have nothing to do with guns?
00:19:25.000And the left will say, I don't want to talk about any of those issues.
00:19:27.000You're just doing that because you want to distract from guns.
00:19:30.000And the right will say, gun owners will say to the left, well, the only reason you want to talk about guns is because you hate guns.
00:19:34.000It's not because you actually think this is going to prevent school shootings.
00:19:37.000And you've provided no evidence that this will prevent school shootings other than a mass gun confiscation, like a regime in Australia or Britain, where the sample size is too small to really identify it anyway.
00:19:46.000The number of school shootings in Australia prior to the gun ban, the gun confiscation, the gun buyback program was so low that when it went to zero, that is within margin of error.
00:19:57.000But the left has a real stake in avoiding the consequences of having real discussions about real issues, and the right knows that.
00:20:04.000People on the right, gun owners, feel insulted by this, as well they should.
00:20:07.000When ABC shows that video of that guy cutting his gun in half, and then suggests to me, a law-abiding gun owner, that if I were a good person, I would saw my gun in half, my answer is no.
00:20:18.000If I were a good person, I would maintain my gun, keep it in good working condition, and shoot bad guys when they attempt to shoot innocent people.
00:20:24.000It's always the cops who take down these folks, by the way.
00:20:27.000It's always people with guns who take down mass shooters.
00:20:30.000It is always the threat of another gun that stops a mass shooter in the end.
00:20:33.000That's why it's so foolish to cast doubt on all law-abiding gun owners.
00:20:38.000Now, you want to talk about measures that you can take because you think that they are reasonable with regard to buying guns and owning guns.
00:20:45.000You're going to have to show, number one, how that connects to the issue at hand, school shootings.
00:20:50.000And number two, you're going to have to explain why it is that gun violence in the United States has been dramatically declining for the last two decades, despite skyrocketing numbers of guns in circulation in the United States.
00:21:00.000The rate of gun ownership has gone down overall, I believe, among households.
00:21:04.000But the number of guns in the United States on an absolute level has gone up pretty tremendously over the last 20 years.
00:21:10.000Meanwhile, the rate of gun violence has gone down.
00:21:11.000So if the absolute number of guns were supposed to be a good measure of how much gun violence was taking place, it simply is not.
00:21:20.000But in their drive, their desire to ignore the evidence in front of them, the left seeks to avoid the consequences of these discussions.
00:21:29.000And instead, they cast aspersions at people on the right.
00:21:31.000When people on the right say, guys, we're all on the same side here, people on the left say, no, we're not, because the NRA kills people.
00:21:37.000They've—there was literally a tweet yesterday asking how many people the NRA had killed today, how many children the NRA had killed today.
00:22:14.000OK, we're going to get to the student crusade, the children's crusade in just a second, and whether we should listen to the children, whether the children should lead us, because this is the new pitch from the left.
00:22:22.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Texture.
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00:22:31.000The New Yorker, of course, broke the Weinstein scandal.
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00:24:31.000And what it probably is, is that we've been using the wrong messengers.
00:24:34.000The messengers that we truly need in this crusade are children.
00:24:39.000As you know, this is a pet peeve of mine.
00:24:41.000When Jimmy Kimmel trotted out his small child, his baby, who has no political views from what I can see, to talk about Obamacare and suggested that his child's heart surgery at Children's Hospital with Dr. Von Starnes was an excuse for maintaining Obamacare, I said that this was immoral.
00:24:56.000I said it was immoral because my daughter had the same surgery at the same hospital with the same—well, a different surgery, but an open-heart surgery, same hospital with same doctor.
00:25:03.000This did not confer expertise upon me regarding Obamacare.
00:25:07.000You actually have to study the issues.
00:25:08.000I objected when Democrats under President Obama would routinely trot out children and use children's letters as an excuse to talk about public policy.
00:25:25.000The other day, my parents brought over a box of old papers, stuff I'd had from when I was a little kid.
00:25:30.000And I went to a public school, and I found a paper in there that I'd written when I was maybe six or seven years old.
00:25:36.000And the entire thing was about environmentalism and how human beings are ruining the environment.
00:25:40.000And the reason that I was writing that paper when I was six or seven years old is because this is basically what they teach in public school.
00:25:45.000They teach you that you're supposed to care about the environment, which is fine, but then they teach you that man is ruining the environment.
00:25:50.000Man, responsible for the death of all the geese.
00:25:54.000This is the routine that they teach in public school.
00:25:58.000In fact, the facts don't tend to back up the idea that human beings are solely responsible for degradation in every aspect of the environment.
00:26:06.000In many ways, the environment has gotten better in the last few decades.
00:26:09.000But this is what I was writing when I was seven.
00:26:12.000Should I have been deciding gun policy?
00:26:14.000Probably not, because what I'd probably be parroting is what I'd heard from my teachers and from my parents.
00:26:19.000Adults teach children, and then children parrot what the adults have to say because they think adults are smart.
00:26:23.000It's only later, when children become adults, that they realize that adults are just as stupid as kids most of the time.
00:26:28.000One of the great disappointments of being an adult is realizing that all the people who have houses and cars are just the same stupid kids, but a little bit more mentally developed.
00:26:39.000Adults are adults and children are children.
00:26:40.000But because there are a bunch of high school kids who are now speaking out about gun control and the media wants to confer upon them virtue, the media wants to confer upon them the capacity for leadership, it's quite shocking and quite fascinating and quite stupid.
00:26:55.000So here, as I showed you before, is these kids chanting, hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?
00:27:34.000But David Hogg, he came out and was ripping anybody who has taken money from the NRA and, of course, being treated with full seriousness by the anchors on this show, even though there is no credibility to the actual words that this human being is speaking.
00:27:48.000Emma Gonzalez, another shooting survivor, doing the same thing.
00:27:52.000We would hope that you have the decent morality to support us at this point.
00:27:56.000And not take money from people that want to keep lessening gun legislation and making it even easier for these horrifying people to get guns.
00:28:04.000Because if you can't get elected without taking money from child murderers, why are you running?
00:28:30.000And the NRA gives money to politicians because they think that the politicians are going to support gun rights.
00:28:35.000One of the memes that was going around yesterday that is an absolute falsehood, it's an absolute lie, there was a meme going around yesterday suggesting that the NRA had paid for the gun training of this kid.
00:29:13.000That's what the media was pushing, because again, the message matters more than the actual truth of the message.
00:29:19.000And just because these kids experienced pain and suffering,
00:29:22.000Our hearts go out to them for experiencing pain and suffering, but it doesn't mean that what they're saying makes any sense.
00:29:26.000Lots of people experience pain and suffering.
00:29:28.000Jim Garrity was making this point yesterday with regard to the Jersey girls.
00:29:31.000These are the women whose husbands were lost in 9-11.
00:29:36.000They were very radically left, and they were conferred what some people on the left, I think it was Maureen Dowd, suggested was absolute moral authority.
00:29:52.000You don't have moral, moral authority to say something simply because you've suffered.
00:29:56.000The question is whether what you are saying is effective and truthful and whether it forwards a proper agenda for the American people, not whether you have personally suffered in doing this.
00:30:05.000There are lots of people who have personally suffered and then do terrible things.
00:30:07.000It doesn't mean that they're allowed to do terrible things or say terrible things.
00:30:10.000Personal suffering does not make something more legitimate.
00:30:16.000But what Gary was pointing out is that the Jersey Girls were treated with this tremendous respect by the media.
00:30:20.000They would go on national television shows and say things like it was an inside job, like 9-11 was an inside job.
00:30:26.000There were certain members of the Jersey Girls who said that.
00:30:28.000And members of the media would give exactly the reaction you're seeing from Alison Camerota there, the kind of shakehead, serious tone, like pretending that this is OK, what you're saying, just because you went through something terrible.
00:30:41.000Well, you going through something terrible doesn't make what you say any more or less true.
00:30:46.000But again, the left has an agenda here, and the agenda here is to put up the most sympathetic faces possible in order to push an agenda that the left already wants.
00:30:53.000As I said yesterday, CNN's town hall they're holding tomorrow night, with regard to gun control, I don't remember them doing the same thing after the Boston Marathon bombing.
00:30:59.000I don't remember them doing the same thing after San Bernardino, at least not for people who are stumping for a travel ban.
00:31:04.000They would never do the same thing with regard to people who are looking for better screening of illegal immigrants.
00:31:09.000I don't remember them doing a panel with Kate Steinle's family talking about why we need Kate's law.
00:31:14.000Instead, they push stories about sanctuary cities every day.
00:31:18.000One of the things that happens in the media that people tend to ignore is selection bias.
00:31:21.000So CNN will say, yes, we covered the pro-gun control position and the anti-gun control position.
00:31:29.000Fox News is biased in a particular way because they choose what they want to put on TV.
00:31:34.000And CNN is biased in a particular way because they choose what they want to put on TV.
00:31:38.000The segments that you choose to put on TV are just as important as how those segments are actually presented.
00:31:44.000So CNN spending blanket coverage on a bunch of students who don't know anything about gun control or gun laws or the efficacy of various proposals being trotted out because they're sympathetic faces, I just find really disheartening.
00:33:45.000When you talk about children, when whenever people in the pro-life movement show pictures of aborted babies.
00:33:51.000Or show pictures of non-aborted babies, and they say, this is what you are killing.
00:33:54.000Then it turns into, how dare you use children as a crutch for your argument?
00:33:58.000Even though it's children's lives that are really at stake.
00:34:00.000They're calling this gun control march, they're planning a gun control march for March 24th, and they're calling it the march for our lives.
00:34:07.000The thing about the unborn is they can't have a march for their lives, because by definition, they are unborn.
00:34:12.000But the march for our life is really stupid, at least in the way that it's termed.
00:34:18.000The terminology, March for Our Lives, is silly, because nobody is suggesting that they want you to die.
00:34:23.000The March for Civil Rights mattered, because there were a lot of people who wanted to actively deprive you of civil rights.
00:34:28.000I don't know a single person in the United States, outside of some evil mass shooters, who actually wants to deprive any of these kids of their lives, their liberty, or their pursuit of happiness.
00:34:36.000I don't know anyone in the United States who actually wants to do that.
00:34:38.000We're all talking about different ways to assure that these kids can be protected, even if the left refuses to acknowledge that fact.
00:34:45.000Lawrence tried, because he's so eager to push the idea that kids can lead us, a child shall lead us.
00:34:50.000He suggested, quote, This is certainly not true.
00:35:05.000Okay, I speak to lots of kids who are 14.
00:35:08.000At some point, my daughter will be... I remember being 14.
00:35:10.000Kids between 14 and 18, when I say they're dumb, I don't mean they don't have the capacity to be smart.
00:35:14.000I mean, they literally have underdeveloped brains.
00:35:17.000Brain science suggests that your brain does not stop developing until you are 25.
00:35:20.000Your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that is responsible for higher function, it's the part of your brain that is basically the brakes on your amygdala.
00:35:26.000Your amygdala is your emotional response center.
00:35:28.000That is really overdeveloped when you're a teenager.
00:35:30.000And then, your prefrontal cortex, because it's underdeveloped, doesn't stop you from doing stuff.
00:35:52.000There's a reason that 16-year-old drivers are the worst drivers on the road.
00:35:55.000There's a reason that teenagers make the worst sexual decisions imaginable.
00:35:58.000There's a reason that teenagers make dumb life decisions about drugs.
00:36:01.000Teenagers are not known as a typical matter, especially in our infantilizing era where we don't actually confer responsibility on children.
00:36:09.000In that infantilizing era, kids are not capable of making good public policy decisions as a general rule.
00:36:15.000This is not necessarily true for every individual, but it is certainly true as a broad generality, which is why the age of consent in most states is 16 years old or higher.
00:36:22.000It is why the age for voting is 18 years old.
00:36:42.000The idea there was that a bunch of children were going to go to the Middle East, and they were going to convince all of the Muslims in the Middle East to become Christian, or at least give up control over Jerusalem.
00:36:50.000It ended, variably, by various accounts, with the enslavement of thousands of children, or with them becoming homeless on the streets of Rome.
00:36:58.000If you're talking about Martin Luther King's Children's Crusade, in which a bunch of children marched for civil rights, the idea there was to demonstrate just how evil the anti-civil rights forces were by showing Bull Connor sticking dogs on eight-year-old children.
00:37:11.000I mean, honestly, there are some questions about whether it's moral to do that, really, but not the sickening of the dogs.
00:37:21.000There are questions about whether it is moral to put children in the line of fire, to push even a useful political agenda, but at least there was a use here.
00:37:29.000If there were a children's crusade now for gun control, which apparently there's going to be, no one is going to stop them.
00:37:33.000No one is stopping these kids from lying down and getting on TV and making whatever point they want to make.
00:37:38.000But the left has a very bifurcated view of when children are responsible for their actions.
00:37:44.000So when children parrot the left agenda, then all of a sudden, they're responsible for their actions.
00:37:48.000When they don't parrot the left agenda, then they are not responsible for their actions.
00:37:52.000So the left is constantly pushing more sexual autonomy for youngsters.
00:37:56.000They say that laws restricting minors' access to abortion and contraceptives are unconstitutional, that children have a capacity to declare themselves men or women, even if they are members of the opposite sex, and that they should go through gender transitioning, regardless of what their parents have to say.
00:38:09.000This week, a judge in Ohio ruled that a custody of a 17-year-old girl
00:38:13.000So, you want to lower the voting age to 16, but you want to increase the gun purchase age to 21.
00:38:39.000If kids are so good at stuff, if kids are so capable of making fully grown people decisions, then why would you not lower the age of consent for buying a gun to 16?
00:38:48.000After all, these kids have far better BS detectors on average than adults.
00:38:52.000They're more responsible than adults, apparently.
00:39:04.000Because when you're 16, you're on the left.
00:39:06.000And then they want to say that 16-year-olds should not be able to drink or have a gun.
00:39:09.000So responsibility without any accountability is, I guess, the order of the day.
00:39:15.000These are the same folks who suggest, by the way, that children are disadvantaged if they are not on their parents' health insurance until they're 26 years old.
00:39:22.000They actually say that the criminal justice system should try you as a juvie until you're 25, because it's not until you're mid-twenties that your brain finally reaches complete maturity.
00:39:54.000No, what the left means is adults aren't doing what you want them to do, and therefore you want to get a bunch of sympathetic, cute faces to do it.
00:40:01.000Listen, my kids are really, really cute.
00:40:02.000As I've said before, they've been judged by an objective scale as the cutest children on planet Earth.
00:40:08.000But they don't get to make policy in my house.
00:40:10.000I make policy in my house because my kids are not good policymakers.
00:40:14.000If my kids were good policy makers, then I'd listen to my son every time he waddles out of his bedroom at 8 o'clock at night, waddles over to the refrigerator, opens it up, and then says, ice cream, ice cream.
00:41:13.000What relevant life experience is it to actually see a shooting?
00:41:17.000Does that make it more relevant when you make a statistical argument?
00:41:20.000Nate Silver is captain statistics, and yet that all seems to go out the window when there's a personal experience that is had.
00:41:26.000Personal experience is not an argument, it's an emotional appeal.
00:41:29.000If we all understand that, then we can withhold the emotional appeals.
00:41:33.000I mean, we can stand up to them or we can take them as they are, but to use that as a substitute for actual logic is really, really dumb.
00:41:41.000Now, speaking of really, really dumb, there are a series of articles over the last couple of days about homelessness in California.
00:41:46.000This is something I know a little bit about because there's a serious homeless problem in my community.
00:41:49.000There's a serious homeless problem in Los Angeles.
00:41:52.000Last check, I think there were 53,000 homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles, so basically Dodger Stadium filled with homeless people.
00:41:59.000In San Francisco, it's just horrifying.
00:42:03.000Apparently, in San Francisco, the NBC Bay Area investigative unit surveyed 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco in search of trash, needles and feces.
00:42:12.000The investigation revealed trash littered across every single block.
00:42:16.000The survey also found 41 blocks dotted with needles and 96 blocks sullied with piles of feces.
00:42:42.000There are some of them who are drug users.
00:42:43.000Not the overwhelming majority, but certainly a significant percentage of homeless people are drug users or alcoholic or mentally ill.
00:42:49.000And there are a bunch of people who are saying, in the richest cities in the world, San Francisco, should there be this homeless problem?
00:42:55.000A couple of things to note about that.
00:42:57.000One, if you are a believer that homeless people are created by the price of housing, then maybe it's the high level of regulation in San Francisco that's driving the homeless problem.
00:43:05.000When you create rent control, when you prevent developers from actually building new buildings, that sends the prices skyrocketing.
00:43:10.000And that means that if you are a believer that it's people who are on the fringes, people on the economic margins, who end up homeless, if that's your take, then you should really be against regulations with regard to building new units of housing.
00:43:23.000They foolishly cling to this idea that rent control is going to somehow bring about cheaper housing, which it never has done anywhere for any large scale of people.
00:43:32.000Only additional development does that.
00:43:34.000I'm not a believer that that's what causes the homeless problem.
00:43:36.000What causes the homeless problem, in my view, and there are a number of good books,
00:44:01.000has actually sued to allow people to keep their stuff on the streets in Los Angeles.
00:44:05.000So there have been judges in the state of California, of course, who have suggested that you have a state and federal constitutional right to sleep on the streets in Los Angeles.
00:44:13.000And then we wonder why the streets are littered with feces and needles.
00:44:18.000When you leave mentally ill people on the streets, when you leave people who are drug addicts on the streets, you end up with poop and drugs on the streets.
00:45:13.000It's about bad policy that is happening in our nation's democratic cities, which is where the vast majority of homeless people are living at this point.
00:45:20.000Okay, so, time for a couple of things that I like, and then some things I hate.
00:45:24.000And then we'll do a Federalist paper, since we did not do one yesterday.
00:45:39.000And all the myths about him as a robber baron who decided to give back to the poor as he was old and dying, that's not true.
00:45:46.000From the time that he was middle-aged, he knew he wanted to give away all his wealth, which is why the Carnegie Endowment is so large, it's why there's Carnegie Hall, it's why there are libraries named after Andrew Carnegie.
00:45:54.000It demonstrates, again, that just because you become wealthy doesn't mean that you become non-virtuous.
00:45:58.000Now, the way that he got his wealth is a little more controversial.
00:46:01.000So Carnegie was involved with a lot of insider deals.
00:46:03.000He got wealthy the way a lot of people got wealthy in the Gilded Age, which is to say that he got a bunch of insider contracts from government-connected players.
00:46:11.000I'm not in favor of that sort of cronyism, obviously.
00:46:14.000But the historical read on Carnegie is that he was a bad man, a cruel man.
00:46:19.000At the end of his life, he had sort of a Scrooge-like Reformation.
00:47:21.000This has been part of her shtick for a very long time.
00:47:24.000When she says that celebrities should shut up and do whatever it is that they do, what she is saying is that we don't really think that your opinion matters very much.
00:47:30.000Not that you have to shut up, not that you don't have a right to speak, but that why would we take your opinion that seriously if you don't have any expertise on the issue?
00:47:38.000Yet, the entire media decided that it was time to call her a bigot on this basis.
00:47:41.000So, Kevin Durant, the star player for the Golden State Warriors, he says that this was racist.
00:48:01.000We rose up in our profession to be able to take care of our families forever, all of which is fair.
00:48:05.000But then he says, I kind of feel sorry for her because she's not looking through the lens of being free and what that's about.
00:48:10.000It feels bad that she doesn't know what we came from or who we are personally.
00:48:12.000She might actually enjoy being around us, but might actually feel inspired by being not just around me or LeBron, but guys in our position, anybody of color who has risen up and done something positive in life.
00:48:21.000This is putting some accusations on Laura Ingraham that do not exist.
00:48:24.000I'm sure that Laura Ingraham knows a lot of black people.
00:48:26.000I'm sure she would enjoy hanging out with a lot of NBA players.
00:48:28.000I'm sure I would enjoy hanging out with a lot of NBA players.
00:48:30.000They seem like pretty cool folks, some of them.
00:48:33.000But that doesn't mean they have any political expertise, or that if I criticize LeBron James for not knowing what he's talking about, that's somehow a racist take.
00:48:39.000Michael Wilbon was doing the same thing on ESPN.
00:48:43.000He's a columnist for The Washington Post.
00:48:45.000And he says that Laura Ingraham comes off like a bigot.
00:48:58.000It's interesting that all these, again, uber-conservatives who talk about how, what stable geniuses they are, but yet they sound like morons when they try and dictate to other people what they should talk about, what they're intelligent enough to talk about.
00:49:13.000I turn as frantically off Fox as I can.
00:49:16.000OK, well, if you don't know her and you don't know her work, then why are you calling her a bigot?
00:49:19.000And she says she comes off like a bigot.
00:49:21.000And then he acknowledges at the very beginning of that statement that Laura Ingraham wrote a book called Shut Up and Sing about the Dixie Chicks, who are as white as white can be.
00:49:29.000Now, I will say that there are a bunch of people on the right who say, why should celebrities have opinions on politics?
00:49:34.000And then when it's Kid Rock running for Senate, then suddenly they're fine with it.
00:50:55.000Neil deGrasse Tyson knows more about astrophysics than I do.
00:50:57.000By the same token, Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a politician, and he doesn't know anything about politics, and when he speaks about politics, he sounds like a doof.
00:51:10.000Alexander Hamilton continuing to talk about the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation and why they should be replaced by the Constitution.
00:51:16.000He says, confederacies tend to devolve into civil war because there's not a strong enough centralized government.
00:51:21.000If there's not enough that the federal government does, if it's basically just there, then the only way to enforce the rules is with a large standing army, whereas if there's a broad
00:51:30.000A broad federal government with large pockets of agreement, then people actually have a stake in the preservation of that government.
00:51:36.000And he says, if a confederacy breaks down into civil war, then it's going to get really bloody.
00:51:41.000Now remember, all of this is 80 years before the Civil War, or 70 years before the Civil War, and it all comes true.
00:51:46.000He says, once the sword is drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.
00:51:51.000The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the states against which the arms of the Union were exerted.