SPECIAL EDITION: The DEFINITIVE Debunking of the Left’s Gun Myths
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
170.98969
Summary
In the wake of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Texas, we ve seen how the left uses every tragic event to try to infringe on our Second Amendment rights. The same people bring up the same myths about guns over and over again, and we have to set the record straight. So Blaze has developed a special for this episode of Stu Does America, debunking the left s gun myths.
Transcript
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Hey, it's Glenn. We've seen how the left uses every tragic event to try to infringe on our
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Second Amendment right. The same people bring up the same myths about guns over and over again,
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and we have to set the record straight. So Blaze has developed a special for this episode of
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Stu Does America. It is the definitive debunking of the left's gun myths. Now, if you know Stu from
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the radio show, you know he loves to take the scalpel to nonsense of the left, and he does it
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every day on his podcast and on my radio show. But I want you to take a minute now and click over to
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his podcast and follow Stu Does America for new episodes every weekday, or click the link in the
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show notes. Stu Does America. Welcome to our special program, Stu debunks gun myths. If
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you think telling the truth is important, please support us by subscribing to Blaze TV at
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blazetv.com slash Stu. Use the special promo code debunked right now to save 20 bucks off your
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subscription. And you can follow the podcast or the YouTube channel and support us for free.
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We really would appreciate it. Last week, I was walking through my kitchen when I got a news alert
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on my phone. It read there has been a mass shooting at an elementary school in Texas.
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And when you saw that you probably felt sad and angry and felt empathy for the victims.
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But I felt a little different. I felt scared. At that moment, I had two kids had an elementary school
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in Texas. Now, while rationally, I knew the odds of our school being affected were low,
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you can't help but have that moment where your heart skips a beat. I mean, it's just natural.
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And no parent should have to go through that. The left wants to paint us as heartless monsters.
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But that's not true. We hate gun violence just as much or more than the left does. We not only grieve
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for the victims, but we also see the rights that have protected the nation's freedoms withering away.
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And we also know what comes next. It's understandable to feel emotion after what we saw in Texas.
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Emotion comes naturally. It's easy to prey on people's emotions to try to push through an agenda.
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Never let a crisis go to waste after all. And some of the lowest forms of humanity will even try to
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exploit this tragedy for their own personal benefit. But I don't want to be Beto O'Rourke.
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I want to do what does not come naturally. I want to suck every last ounce of emotion out of this
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for the next hour. And I want to focus on the truth. There is a time to be emotional when you
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see that news alert on your phone. There's a time to go against what seems rational when you're a
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police officer about to run into a classroom and take on an active shooter. But this is the time to
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act rationally, to make sober decisions based on facts and reason and to know the truth.
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On this episode, we are going to look at some of the most common myths, misunderstandings,
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outright lies, all of them being told by the left and the media about guns. What is the truth about
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gun violence? Have we really had 27 school shootings this year? Why is this happening all the time over
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and over again? Is it true that more guns means more murder? How can we stop this? What about
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Australia's approach? Did that work? Why doesn't this happen in other countries? And what are about
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our rights? I mean, Joe Biden is always saying you couldn't own a cannon at the time of the founding.
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Is that true? Can we and should we ban AR-15s? Are AR-15s really 200 times as deadly? And would
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banning assault rifles even work? Did it work last time we tried it? The truth is, whenever something
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like this happens, we hear the same arguments over and over again. The same people telling the same
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lies or, at the very least, ignorantly repeating those lies over and over again. My hope is to give
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you a resource that you can continue to come back to whenever you see these lies start to spread.
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It's the definitive takedown of all the left's gun lies. We start debunking next.
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STU with Upside. Hi, this is Glenn Beck, and you are listening to a very special episode of
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Stew Does America, the definitive debunking of the left's gun myths. If you like what you hear,
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make sure you take a second right now and follow Stew Does America for new episodes every weekday,
00:06:19.240
or you just click the link in the show notes. All right, blazetv.com slash stew. Promo code is
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debunked for 20 bucks off your subscription to Blaze TV. Let's get right into this. Remember the goal
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here. The left wants you to give up a constitutionally guaranteed right that cannot
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be infringed. That is a heavy lift for them. The first step in that process is to make you feel
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overwhelmed. You need to feel like this is always happening, like it never stops, like everywhere you
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turn is another school shooting. You've seen this headline probably online over the past week.
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There have been 27 school shootings in 2022. So far, it comes from Education Week. They've been
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maintaining a list of school shootings for several years. But to get to 27 and make you feel overwhelmed,
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they include stuff like this. In Illinois, a seven-year-old student was grazed by a bullet
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when a gun in another student's backpack accidentally discharged. That counts as a school shooting.
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In North Carolina, a teenager was shot and injured in the school parking lot during a fight over a gun
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on a teacher workday. So not in the school, not on a school day, but still a school shooting.
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In Florida, a male student shot and injured an 18-year-old student. Police say the shooting
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appeared to have been a result of a dispute between the kids. So a shooting occurred, yes. It was an
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isolated incident, however. It was not a random attack on the entire school. Ten more of the
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recorded school shootings didn't even take place inside the schools. Several were in parking lots,
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a few more in buses or vehicles around or en route to the schools, and a handful took place after
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school hours during sporting events or graduation ceremonies. Of the 27 recorded school shootings this
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year, if you think about what a school shooting really elicits in your head, about four of them
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were even close to what most of us would think of when we hear about students being killed at school,
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and that includes Uvalde. And only one child in addition to Uvalde has died, thankfully. There is a
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reason why we always refer to events that happened four years ago and 10 years ago, because the reality
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is not that we have constant school shootings, but rather that we have had one really, really
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horrific incident very recently, and it's on our minds. I want to add a little perspective here,
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because the media wants you to believe that your kids are constantly in danger, and perhaps more
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importantly, that they are the only ones that have the solutions, these solutions that could easily
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be implemented if, if, if, if just those darn Republicans would get out of the way. That's the way they talk
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about this stuff. The average kid goes to school for about 180 days a year. The average school has about 500
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students in it. That's about 90,000 students, student days per school per year. Right now, our focus is
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understandably on one school in Uvalde, but there are 150,000 schools in America. That's 13.5 billion times
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every year that a kid goes to school, and almost every single kid on almost every single day never has
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to face anything like what we saw last week. In fact, even if your child went to school in Uvalde on the
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day of the shooting, you still had about a 99.5% chance that your kid came home. Now, that's not
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acceptable in any way, obviously. It needs to be 100%. This doesn't make anyone who has to deal with
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the impossible grief of losing a child feel any better, and the physical and emotional scars are
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going to haunt this community forever. It goes way beyond those who are killed in the incident. But I lay it
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out this way for two reasons. Number one, your best defense against this happening to you or someone
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you love is not gun control or even red flag laws or even armed security at every school. Your best
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defense is the odds. It's true. The media wants you to think that this country is filled with maniacs
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looking to murder kids around every corner, but that's not who we are. Statistically, even when you
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consider the terrible mass shootings that we've experienced, school remains one of the safest places
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your kids will ever be. They might be learning CRT instead of math, but they are not constantly on the
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verge of catastrophe. The second reason I point this out is to illustrate how difficult of a problem this is
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to solve. Think back to your days in school. Remember that kid who was, you know, a little bit off, and you
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thought maybe he might wind up showing up at a school with a gun. If you can't remember that kid,
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I hate to break it to you. It was probably you. But every school has one or more of these guys that,
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I don't know, they might just go off the deep end at any moment. At least that's what we think.
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And we have 150,000 schools and over 13 billion student days to try to defend. Changing some gun
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laws is not going to stop a problem that is such a needle in a haystack. I know it doesn't feel this
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way, but this is not an epidemic. Mass shootings at school are incredibly rare events. And that's not
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me saying that. Those are researchers at Northeastern University. Quote, this is not an epidemic. Mass
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school shootings are incredibly rare events. These are exceedingly rare events. We're not talking about
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even one in a million. Even if you include mass shootings that aren't in schools, we're talking
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about something like one in a hundred million. Your chances of being killed in a mass shooting are
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probably no greater than being struck by lightning. Again, that's not me saying that. That's a
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criminologist from the Minnesota Department of Corrections who literally wrote the definitive
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history on mass murders in America. Quote, mass shootings are exceedingly rare events. The average
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annual rate of U.S. mass shootings is less than one per 100 million people. Chances of being killed in a
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mass shooting are probably no greater than being struck by lightning. End quote. This isn't a needle in a
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haystack. It's a speck of dust on a needle in a haystack. And that's what makes these incidents so
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difficult to stop once they have become ingrained into the dark reaches of our culture. But even if
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they're rare events, why are they increasing so much? Here's the thing. They're not. I know it feels like
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they are, but they're not. Over the past 30 years, the most dangerous year when it comes to risk of
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dying from a school shooting was the year I graduated high school, 1994. That's not me saying
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that. That's Northeastern University. Again, here's the chart to show you exactly how it looks. This goes
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back to up to 2015. This particular chart obviously doesn't include the last week, but there's not been a
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rise above Sandy Hook level violence since then. And what you see is that we have a major downtrend,
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down since the mid 90s. That's in schools. And the overall peak of mass shootings in this country was
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not 2021. It was 1929. Mass shootings get a lot of attention, and that is understandable. But it's also
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the main reason why they occur. The attention, the spectacle, the pain, the anguish, the terror,
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the fear. That's what these shooters are after. But the simple truth is this. White supremacists and
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scary looking guns get the focus from our president and our politicians. But mass shootings only make up
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about 0.2% of the murders in this country. 0.2%. Yes, of course, we should do whatever we can within the bounds
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of the Constitution to eliminate that 0.2%. But even if we're completely successful at doing so, we still have
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99.8% of murders that still remain, the overwhelming majority of which occur in Democratic-run cities
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supported by decades and decades of Democratic voters and policies voting in Democrats over and over and
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over again. And that's why the president and the media don't want to talk about it.
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realestateagentsitrust.com. Hi, this is Glenn Beck, and you are listening to a very special episode of
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Stew Does America, the definitive debunking of the left's gun myths. If you like what you hear,
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make sure you take a second right now and follow Stew Does America for new episodes every weekday,
00:16:20.580
or you just click the link in the show notes. Today, we're debunking the biggest claims about guns on
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the left and in the media. If you want more of this type of stuff, subscribe, blazetv.com slash
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stew. The promo code is debunked. It'll save you 20 bucks off your subscription. The foundation of the
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left's claims on guns is the more gun control you have, the less violence you have. But fundamentally,
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we know this isn't true. Look at the recent past here in America. Americans buy more than guns today
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than they did in the 1990s, about four times the number of background checks performed than in 1999.
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But violent crime has decreased radically since those years, with homicides falling almost by half
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between 1991 and 2020. So what does that mean exactly? In a period where violent crime has fallen
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by half, we've added 150 million guns to the country's constitutionally protected private arsenal.
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Again, 150 million more guns, half the rate of violent crime. But our rates are still higher than
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other countries. And that's true. So why don't we just do what Australia did? To give you some
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background about Australia, in 1996, a man killed 35 people with a semi-automatic rifle in Australia.
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12 days after this happened, they passed the National Agreement on Firearms, or the NFA.
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A quick side note here, it's always a good idea to pass new laws when you're in the middle of national
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mourning. What could possibly go wrong? But it wasn't just a set of gun control laws. It was a full-fledged
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gun confiscation program. The measure prohibited automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles,
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made it tougher to get a license, tightened ownership rules, made people demonstrate a
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genuine need for their guns, take a firearm safety course, launch a mass gun confiscation program,
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among a million other things. Before we move on, it's important to realize that this program
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goes much farther than any of these sensible gun solutions that any Democrat has the balls to propose.
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This confiscation program collected about 650,000 guns. Think about that. They forcibly bought back
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somewhere between 20 and 35% of all the guns in Australia. To do that here, you'd have to
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forcibly buy back close to 150 million guns. And if you somehow got past the cost of all of that,
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and the fact that it's obviously unconstitutional and somehow avoided the civil war that it would
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start, you would still have as many guns on the street that you had in the 1990s when violent crime
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rates were twice as high. And you'd still have a country with double the amount of guns per capita
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than any other country on earth. So it doesn't make any sense. But did it actually work in Australia?
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Was it a success in Australia? Left wing outlet Vox attempted to make that case following the
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Texas shooting with this headline, Australia confiscated 650,000 guns, murders and suicides
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plummeted. Of course, even their own write up of the research doesn't support that headline.
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Quote, bottom line, Australia's gun buyback may well have saved lives, likely by reducing homicides and
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almost certainly by reducing suicides. Again, Australian lessons might not necessarily apply
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to the US given the many cultural and political differences between the two countries. But in
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thinking about gun violence and how to limit it, this seems like a worthwhile thing to look at.
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Got that? The headline is Death's Plummet. The article seems like it might be a worthwhile thing to look
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at. Even this, though, is a stretch. And you can tell by the way they write the article. For example,
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here's their big mic drop claim. Ready for it? The Rand authors conclude the strongest evidence is
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consistent with the claim that the NFA caused reductions in firearm suicides, mass shootings and
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female homicide victimization. So how are they scamming you? Well, first of all, they give it away in the
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disclaimer from the paragraph directly before their big mic drop moment. Here it is. Quote, a 2021 meta
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analysis of the available evidence conducted by the Rand Corporation found that it's very tricky to pin down
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the contribution of Australia's policies to a reduction in gun violence due in part to the preexisting
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declining trend that when it comes to overall homicides in particular, there's not especially
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great evidence that Australia's buyback had a significant effect. Nevertheless. And then they
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have their big mic drop moment. Nevertheless, they nevertheless to all of that. That's like Elaine on
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Seinfeld yada yadaing sex. And note the words they use here. There's not especially great evidence.
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What does that mean? That, my friends, is the Vox translation of this line from the study. Quote,
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in total, evidence is weak for an effect of the NFA on firearm homicides. Why would you turn evidence
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is weak into not especially great evidence? I mean, I guess weak is not especially great. But the only
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reason you'd say it like that is to fool your own readers. In the analysis from Rand, they looked at
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five studies, four of which try to actually compare real world Australia before and after the gun
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buyback. Here's what they found. This is remember, this is the study they're talking about. A 2015
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study found, quote, no evidence of an effect. It also found a notable drop in non firearm homicides,
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but nothing significant with guns. A 2016 study found, quote, no evidence of an effect, though it also
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found a bigger difference in non firearm homicides. A 2018 study found, quote, no evidence that trends
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differed for firearm and non firearm assault, assault mortality for men or women. Another 2018 study found
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a small decrease in homicide rates as opposed to a prediction made by the authors of the study of a
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synthetic future. And this only showed up among women. Men showed no statistically significant
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difference. I'll also note that somehow Vox seemed to have missed a few of the other studies on this
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topic, like this one from the University of Melbourne that concluded there is little evidence to suggest
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that the Australian mandatory gun buyback program had any significant effects on firearm homicides.
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Or this study from the British Journal of Criminology that said, quote, the gun buyback and restrictive
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legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia. Of course, all these studies are filled as well
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with references about why you just can't apply Australia's non existent solution to the United States. Luckily,
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Rand also did a study of gun laws generally. For all those people that say the science is settled, that there are
00:23:41.380
easy ways to stop mass shootings and gun violence. Here's what Rand found. I'm going to give you all of these for full
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transparency. Raising the minimum age for purchasing guns, inconclusive effect on firearm homicides. Raising the minimum age for
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possessing guns, inconclusive. Mental health prohibitions, inconclusive. Domestic violence prohibitions, inconclusive.
00:24:05.140
Background checks through the dealer, you know, aka the background checks we already have. They say there is a moderate amount of
00:24:10.960
evidence that they are helpful. But background checks for private transfers, the ones the left is always
00:24:16.120
begging for, inconclusive effect on firearm homicides. Gun licensing, inconclusive. Waiting periods, the lowest
00:24:23.880
confidence level, limited evidence. It changes firearm homicide rates. Ban on assault weapons, inconclusive.
00:24:31.320
Bans on high capacity magazines, inconclusive. Bans on low quality handguns, inconclusive. Child access
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prevention laws. Inconclusive. How about pro-2A reforms like shall issue concealed carry? Surely that's
00:24:46.680
going to make rates of violence skyrocket, right? No, inconclusive. The only policy that had what they
00:24:53.920
considered supportive evidence of a rise in homicide was stand your ground laws. But remember, and this
00:25:01.400
doesn't sound right when you say it, but homicides aren't always bad things. The legal definition of
00:25:08.900
homicide is, quote, when one human being causes the death of another. Not all homicide is murder. And some killings
00:25:17.140
are, some killings are manslaughter and some are lawful, such as when justified by an affirmative defense like
00:25:23.700
insanity or self-defense. So it would make sense that stand your ground laws would increase self-defense
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shootings. I won't read all the categories again for you, but there's a similar result when it comes to mass shootings.
00:25:35.920
Inconclusive, inconclusive, inconclusive, inconclusive, inconclusive, inconclusive, inconclusive, inconclusive,
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and inconclusive. You guessed it. The point here isn't to say that no laws could ever have any effect.
00:25:49.200
Some of these policies you probably would even support. But it's important to understand that we
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have little to no evidence that they actually work. This is not the equivalent of water freezing
00:26:00.160
at 32 degrees. But the left has to present it like it's a rock solid science because their goal
00:26:07.860
is not to solve the problem. It's to vilify you, the gun owner, the conservative. You can't just be
00:26:14.420
someone who disagrees. You have to be someone who's denying science, risking the lives of innocent
00:26:20.100
children just so you can get your jollies at the range. It's a despicable tactic, but it's also
00:26:26.540
essentially the official Democratic Party platform at this point. So, okay, okay, okay. So if none of
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these laws show any real effect, why doesn't this happen in other countries? Here's the thing.
00:26:40.320
It does. If you listen to these claims carefully, they always use a little sleight of hand.
00:26:46.780
First of all, they eliminate all mass killings that were committed by and sanctioned by various
00:26:52.720
governments, which of course hold all of the top one zillion places on the mass murder countdown.
00:26:59.040
But they also eliminate everything outside of other rich countries. It's not really clear why
00:27:05.120
wealth would be the characteristic to look for when you're comparing these things. Part of it,
00:27:09.620
I guess, would be better record keeping. But more conveniently, it allows them to eliminate a lot
00:27:14.480
of countries that look a lot worse than us. One researcher who decided to look at the entire world
00:27:19.740
wrote up the results in the Chicago Tribune, quote, from 1998 to 2015, the U.S. makes up 1.49% of murders
00:27:27.440
worldwide, 2.20% of the attacks, and less than 1.15% of mass public shooters. All these are much less
00:27:36.880
than America's 4.6% share of the world population. Of the 97 countries where we identified mass public
00:27:43.900
shootings, the U.S. ranks 64th per capita in its rate of attacks and 65th in fatalities. Major European
00:27:51.540
countries such as Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, and Russia all have had at least 25% higher per capita
00:27:58.980
murder rates from mass public shootings. Another trick the media uses is that they simply just don't
00:28:05.660
adjust for population. The U.S. is a big country. It's a lot bigger than New Zealand. We have way more
00:28:13.260
mass shootings than New Zealand. That's true. But on a per capita basis, you are over 4.3 times as likely
00:28:20.220
to be killed in a mass shooting in New Zealand than you are in the United States. Now, some might argue
00:28:26.560
that they had that one big shooting, and that's messing up their numbers. But even if you take out the
00:28:32.800
Christchurch shooting, you are still about 1.7 times as likely to be killed in a mass shooting in New
00:28:38.340
Zealand than you are in the United States. The bottom line is all of these country-to-country
00:28:44.860
comparisons have incredible amounts of problems. We are a different country with different problems
00:28:50.580
and different trends and different cultures and different times have different cultural crimes
00:28:56.220
of spectacle. Some places it's terrorism. Some places it's cars running over crowds. Some places
00:29:03.340
it's political assassination. I mean, it certainly was here back in the 60s and 70s. Maybe it was serial
00:29:09.220
killers after that, and then there was extremist terrorism, and now it seems to be mass shootings.
00:29:15.000
Of course, the biggest difference between us and other random countries is that we have a second
00:29:20.840
amendment. So unless you're going to repeal it and then start going door-to-door collecting weapons,
00:29:26.360
good luck with that. All of these comparisons are meaningless. We already have all of these guns in
00:29:33.340
private hands. And I might note one other thing to the left. Even if you take some of these guns and
00:29:40.520
make others harder to buy, there's still a border to our South that you seem to have absolutely no
00:29:47.700
interest in protecting. So until you want to deal with that, you have absolutely no credibility.
00:30:04.220
Hi, this is Glenn Beck, and you are listening to a very special episode of Stew Does America,
00:30:09.700
the definitive debunking of the left's gun myths. If you like what you hear, make sure you take a second
00:30:15.720
right now and follow Stew Does America for new episodes every weekday, or you just click the
00:30:21.240
link in the show notes. Welcome back. Help us debunk more of the left's lies. Go to blazetv.com
00:30:27.060
slash stew. The promo code is debunked. You'll save 20 bucks off your subscription, and you'll help
00:30:32.280
support efforts like this to take the lies out of the news. It's really hard to do. It's happening all
00:30:38.360
the time. They're constantly stretching the truth and telling lies. We need to call them out on it.
00:30:42.680
So if you watch Joe Biden bumble his way through his speech last night, and if you've watched him
00:30:47.220
bumble his way through the gun debate for as long as you've seen him in public life, you have
00:30:51.920
definitely heard this claim. The Second Amendment from the day it was passed limited the type of
00:30:58.060
people could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn't buy a cannon. Very
00:31:03.160
beginning, the Second Amendment didn't say you can own any gun you want, as big as you want. You
00:31:06.800
couldn't buy a cannon when, in fact, the Second Amendment passed. When the amendment was passed,
00:31:11.420
it didn't say anybody can own a gun and any kind of gun and any kind of weapon. You couldn't buy a
00:31:16.980
cannon when this amendment was passed. The Second Amendment is not absolute. When it was passed,
00:31:29.400
Hmm. Let's just drop this one quickly. Joe Biden, as with many other things, has no idea what he's
00:31:38.920
talking about. David Harsanyi wrote a book about the history of guns in America. He notes, quote,
00:31:43.520
there is zero historical evidence that Americans were barred from purchasing or constructing any type
00:31:48.960
of weapon they pleased. Not only are there numerous accounts of the American military using or purchasing
00:31:54.700
private cannons, privateers, as the name strongly suggests, relied on their own cannons as well.
00:32:02.640
The right to own a cannon is so ingrained in American history that literally Lewis and Clark
00:32:09.440
owned them, along with a rifle that could shoot 30 times before reloading. By the way, David French,
00:32:16.800
who is even sympathetic to some restrictions like red flag laws, wrote, quote,
00:32:20.960
It is historically indisputable that the founders protected the rights of Americans to possess weapons
00:32:27.400
that gave individual citizens far greater military parity with the government than American citizens
00:32:33.820
possess now. The musket was the principal weapon of armed conflict in the 18th century. An American
00:32:41.420
leaving his home with a musket was on par with a member of the Continental Line. Not so with an
00:32:47.900
American who possesses any number of AR-15s or AK-47s. The contemporary gap between civilians
00:32:54.240
and the military is vast and growing. Weapons of war indeed. How about this? These are a couple of
00:33:02.600
historians for you. It seems highly unlikely that there were restrictions on the private ownership
00:33:07.580
of cannons, said Julianne Sweet, a historian and director of military studies at Baylor University.
00:33:13.580
David Cappell, research director and Second Amendment project director at the Free Market
00:33:17.560
Independence Institute, agreed, quote, I am not aware of a ban on any arm in colonial America.
00:33:25.000
Charles C.W. Cook points out, we don't need the past tense here. Americans can still buy a cannon.
00:33:31.560
If the cannon you want to buy was manufactured before 1898, it's a muzzle loading model,
00:33:37.000
you can do so without regulation. If it is a saluting cannon, it is also exempt. And if it's neither
00:33:43.340
a saluting cannon or a pre-1898 model, you need to pay a $200 tax stamp, fill in some forms,
00:33:50.720
wait a bit, and well, that's it. Cannons are categorized as destructive devices under the 1934
00:33:57.960
National Firearms Act, and they're legal under federal law and in most states. You may have to
00:34:03.740
jump through a few hoops to get one, but get one, you assuredly can. As even left-leaning PolitiFact
00:34:12.600
notes, Biden was unable to come up with an example of a law banning private ownership of cannons and
00:34:20.420
historians of the period doubt that any existed. To the contrary, there are documented instances of
00:34:26.360
privateers or privately owned vessels setting sail with cannons during the period. We rate the statement
00:34:33.200
false. As amazing as it is that they would actually call Biden out, what is more amazing is the date
00:34:41.560
of this fact check, June of 2020. This guy was called out years ago for blatantly false claims by a bunch of
00:34:51.740
historians, and he's still trotting out as a central part of his argument on guns two years later that you
00:34:59.500
couldn't own a cannon back when the Second Amendment was passed. Now, some might argue that Joe Biden is just
00:35:06.040
an idiot, and that's true. But no one other than him is talking about cannons. Is that true? Well, I guess so. He seems
00:35:14.860
to be the only one talking about cannons. Why not just ban AR-15s? Well, that depends on what your goals are.
00:35:21.320
Is your goal to ban a scary-looking gun, or is it to stop gun violence? Because AR-15s are not the issue
00:35:28.140
here. Rifles of all types, but including the AR-15, are a minuscule part of the problem. Quote,
00:35:35.660
all rifles together, accounting for only 2.5% of homicides. In fact, more people are killed each year
00:35:43.860
by personal weapons, also known as hands and feet. Yes, more hands and feet kill people
00:35:52.120
than AR-15s. And that's, by the way, not just AR-15s, all rifles combined. The number is just
00:35:58.560
slightly higher for AR-15s and all rifles combined than clubs and hammers, and is less than one-third
00:36:06.240
of knives. And restricting the purchase of guns doesn't go very far. According to the Bureau of
00:36:13.600
Justice Statistics, only 1.3% of state and federal prisoners used a firearm that they acquired from a
00:36:21.540
retail source. Your laws are cute and everything, but criminals don't care about them. So where did
00:36:28.220
they get their guns if they had them? The number one source by a mile was, quote, off the street slash
00:36:34.400
underground market. The second biggest category were guns that were bought for them illegally by
00:36:41.000
relatives and friends. Many of them were also shockingly stolen, which I believe is also technically
00:36:47.620
illegal. Some were found at the scene of other crimes. Add it all up, about 90% of these guns came
00:36:55.640
from other means. These things happen about 12 times as often as purchase at gun stores, and about
00:37:03.300
112 times as often as the purchase of one of these guns at the vilified gun show. How does this relate
00:37:12.520
to mass shootings, though? Well, you know, it does seem like most mass shootings are carried out with AR-15s,
00:37:19.520
and undoubtedly some of them are. The majority of them, though, use handguns. And remember, we already
00:37:26.800
tried banning, quote, unquote, assault weapons long, long ago. How did that work out exactly? Well,
00:37:34.860
there's been a renewed effort lately to try and claim that assault weapons and the ban of them in the 1990s
00:37:40.480
was successful. But the government itself told the story correctly 20 years ago. Here's what it said.
00:37:45.960
Although the ban has been successful in reducing crimes with assault weapons, any benefits from this
00:37:52.020
reduction are likely to have been outweighed by a steady or rising use of non-ban semi-automatics
00:37:58.760
with large-capacity magazines, which are used in crime much more frequently than assault weapons.
00:38:04.920
Therefore, we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation's recent drop in gun violence.
00:38:11.200
And indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence
00:38:17.460
based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire
00:38:23.180
incidents resulting in injury, as we might have expected, had the ban reduced crimes with both
00:38:28.160
assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. Got it? So, boil it down. There may have been fewer deaths
00:38:34.580
by assault weapons, but they were just replaced by additional deaths by handgun. He later went on to
00:38:40.600
clarify, in general, we found really very, very little evidence, almost none, that gun violence
00:38:49.120
was becoming any less lethal or any less injurious during this time frame. So, on balance, we concluded
00:38:55.520
that the ban had not had a discernible impact on gun crime during the years it was in effect.
00:39:02.160
The study's author went on to say that the assault weapons ban could potentially produce at least a
00:39:08.940
small reduction in shootings if allowed to remain in place for a longer time frame. So, maybe at some
00:39:16.140
point in the future, it might have started to work eventually. Quite the endorsement there.
00:39:23.880
The left-wing media has now just begun to literally fabricate evidence out of thin air now.
00:39:30.420
Unfortunately for them, Kevin Williamson caught them in the act. Saul Cornell is a professor at Fordham and a
00:39:36.940
contributor to Slate. He recently made the claim that AR-15s are 200 times as deadly as muskets.
00:39:45.540
So, where did this claim come from? When pressed, he referenced a 1964 military study, which is
00:39:53.060
interesting because the cartridge used in the AR-15 typically wasn't even developed until a decade
00:39:59.400
later, after 1964. So, it's weird that they would have referenced it in 1964. When pressed by Kevin
00:40:05.760
Williamson, he basically said he took a military machine gun from the study that was listed as 115
00:40:13.260
times as deadly and then just increased the number because, well, because he wanted to.
00:40:21.880
Eventually, Slate decided to issue a sort of correction, which still doesn't seem to have much
00:40:26.580
of a basis, but that's not really the point. As Williamson notes, quote, I have a good deal of
00:40:30.940
experience in writing about bias in gun policy journalism, but this is not bias. It is fabrication.
00:40:38.120
Here we have a professor at a major university writing an article in a major media outlet.
00:40:42.920
on the subject of a very contentious public policy matter. And the first claim of fact in the piece
00:40:50.160
is simply made up in order to bolster a weak argument made by a writer who believed, with good
00:40:57.380
reason, apparently, that he could count on the bias and laziness of his editors and the stupidity of
00:41:04.040
his readers to permit the fabrication to go undetected and unchallenged. And this is the crux of it,
00:41:11.060
of the whole show, honestly. The media hopes they can get away with saying whatever they want,
00:41:17.300
whenever they want, true or not. Most people will have no idea that they're lying. And even if they
00:41:25.020
get caught, they can always fall back on the emotion of the moment to shield them. We need to do
00:41:32.120
something. They say it over and over and over again. But this idea of running quickly in any
00:41:39.360
direction, even if there's a brick wall in the way, is just blather. We need to do something just
00:41:45.620
means we need to do exactly what I want you to do. When the American people hear that, they instinctively
00:41:53.040
want to push back. And now you know why they find it so important to take your rights away.
00:42:00.040
Hi, this is Glenn Beck, and you are listening to a very special episode of Stew Does America,
00:42:10.940
the definitive debunking of the left's gun myths. If you like what you hear, make sure you take a
00:42:16.740
second right now and follow Stew Does America for new episodes every weekday, or you just click the
00:42:22.460
link in the show notes. You know, sometimes these gun control measures seem like good ideas. Sometimes
00:42:27.420
they sound decent even to conservatives. Some of the stuff is, I don't know, it wouldn't be super
00:42:32.940
restrictive to my life. It's not that big of a deal. And that's an understandable instinct. Some of the
00:42:38.100
stuff, if we were actually dealing with honest brokers, maybe some of the stuff could be stuff
00:42:41.560
that you could talk about with the other side. The problem is they're not honest brokers. There is an
00:42:46.720
agenda here, and it's quite clear what they want to do in the long term. And every time you see one of
00:42:53.460
these little baby steps, you have to realize that you're just shortening the time frame until they
00:42:58.180
get what they want, which is your ability to protect yourself, your constitutionally guaranteed
00:43:05.880
God-given rights are going to go away. They do want to get all of these guns off the streets. They do
00:43:14.060
want all of the powers that you're seeing being utilized right now in Canada, where they just said,
00:43:19.200
basically, guns are going to be banned completely with this generation. You can't transfer them.
00:43:26.500
You can't sell them. You can't buy new ones. So guess what happens eventually, boys and girls?
00:43:33.020
The problem is if you give them an inch, they will take a thousand miles. Every single time the same
00:43:43.540
thing happens. And that's why it's so important for you to know the facts and how to push back against
00:43:48.240
these arguments to make sure we don't get caught up in their traps, because that's what they're
00:43:52.700
laying here. Traps for all of us. We did everything we could today to get through as many of those
00:43:59.180
traps, as many of those gun myths as was possible in this hour. But of course, we couldn't fit
00:44:04.540
everything in. I will tell you, Glenn Beck wrote a book a few years ago that goes into even more depth
00:44:10.400
and deals with a lot of the constitutional arguments associated with this as well. It's called
00:44:15.300
Control. And if you don't have it, you should have it in your library or on your device.
00:44:20.720
But we still have tons of stuff that we prepped for you in this special today. So this is what I'm
00:44:25.140
going to do. We're going to extend this episode on our podcast feed. So wherever you get your
00:44:30.700
podcast, you can go there, look for Stude's America, or you can just go to studebunksmyths.com.
00:44:36.760
That'll get you there directly. That's the only way to get the full extended episode of what we're
00:44:42.000
doing tonight with all of the myths that we could come up with to debunk. While you're there,
00:44:47.080
make sure to follow the podcast and do the same on YouTube. It makes a huge difference if you want
00:44:54.060
us to continue to do this type of stuff, to debunk the lies of the left. If you want to see those lies
00:44:58.860
go down, please join us. And you can join us as well at Blaze TV. Special discount going on now,
00:45:04.700
blazetv.com slash stew. You can get 20 bucks off your subscription right now with the code
00:45:09.640
debunked. It's blazetv.com slash stew. The promo code is debunked. We'll see over on the podcast
00:45:15.100
side. Hi, this is Glenn Beck, and you are listening to a very special episode of Stude's America,
00:45:20.620
the definitive debunking of the left's gun myths. If you like what you hear, make sure you take a
00:45:26.220
second right now and follow Stude's America for new episodes every weekday, or you just click the
00:45:31.940
link in the show notes. All right, welcome to our extended bonus coverage here. Stude debunks gun myths.
00:45:38.060
We went through a ton of them already. We appreciate you hanging out and trying to get as
00:45:42.860
much information on this really important topic as is possible. I was flipping through my cards here,
00:45:47.900
and I looked at this U.S. murders by weapon chart that we featured, and there's a viral video that's
00:45:54.240
going around that's about this chart, basically. It's a guy out in front of the NRA convention.
00:45:59.660
He's wearing like an oxygen going up his nose, and he's got a liberal comes up to him and says,
00:46:06.620
hey, you know, what do you think about gun rights? And he says, you know, guns are used in less murders
00:46:12.320
than hands and fists, I think he says. And the guy pulls out his phone, and he goes, and he pulls up
00:46:20.600
the chart, and he's got the chart on his phone. He goes, no, actually, it's guns are way higher than hands
00:46:25.600
and fists. And the guy just sits there like, uh, and he doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't know what to say.
00:46:30.640
He says, oh, but I still want my Second Amendment rights. Then they're basically like,
00:46:34.800
this guy, oh, look at this sucker outside of the NRA. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
00:46:38.520
Now, of course, when you look at the chart, we have the chart again, by any chance.
00:46:41.720
If you look at the chart, what he meant, of course, was rifles. He's heard the chart. It's true. Rifles
00:46:47.540
are used less than hands and fists. We mentioned it just a second ago. He had heard the statistic,
00:46:52.660
but got it kind of slightly wrong. And, you know, it was wrong. But to try to make this guy out to be
00:46:58.620
an idiot who didn't know what he was talking about, it's totally unfair. The point is the AR-15
00:47:03.420
is used in much less, fewer deaths than, uh, than hands and feet. Uh, and he, and he messed the stat
00:47:10.080
up. I'm sorry. He's not a pro. That's one of the reasons why we wanted to do this particular special
00:47:14.960
is because I, you know, I know when we were putting this together, we were looking for all
00:47:20.700
these gun myths and then someone would come up and they'd be like, what about this claim? What about
00:47:24.620
the cannons thing? And I was like, you know, I, it's been a while. I kind of remember that. I
00:47:29.540
mean, that's not true. I'm pretty sure, but it's been a while since I looked it up. Let me look it
00:47:33.040
up. I take some time. We do the research. We bring you all the quotes and everything else. So you have
00:47:37.820
them all in one place. And now next time you hear somebody, probably Joe Biden saying that you can go
00:47:43.500
back and come back to this special and know where the information came from, get the sources, see the
00:47:48.160
charts, see the quotes, see who said it, all that stuff. It's all in one place because, you know,
00:47:53.280
I don't know if you're like me, I've done too much, too many brain cells are dead already.
00:47:58.300
I can't remember everything anymore. I want to make sure I can come back to a resource
00:48:01.540
that I trust. So hopefully you're getting that out of the special tonight. Let's, I want to go
00:48:05.620
through a few of these other things that we had prepped and just didn't have a chance to get to.
00:48:09.740
And one of the things I want to talk about is this idea that 90% of people support these common
00:48:17.220
sense gun measures. This is a thing, a trope that the left brings out all the time. You'll see it from
00:48:22.920
mainstream media sources constantly. And part of it is actually true. When asked, people respond to
00:48:29.920
polls and say generally about 90% of people, sometimes it's in the 80s, sometimes it's in the
00:48:34.680
90s, support things like universal background checks. Now there's big caveats to that statistic.
00:48:40.940
Number one, most people don't understand the nuances of gun laws. They don't understand that
00:48:45.800
almost every weapon purchased right now already goes through a background check. If you were to go from
00:48:51.420
zero background checks to universal background checks, the support probably would be around,
00:48:57.420
you know, maybe not universal, but from where, from zero to where we are now, it'd probably be
00:49:01.360
around 90%. People would want, people want some sort of background check done on the majority of gun
00:49:07.340
purchases. However, they don't know that they're already checked. I mean, I, you know, I am not a gun
00:49:13.520
guy. I've talked about this before. I'm not a guy who's constantly at the range. I do own some
00:49:17.420
firearms until they were lost in a tragic boating accident. Uh, not that long ago, all of them at
00:49:22.860
the bottom of the lake, never to be recovered. So that's unfortunate. But I, at one point did buy,
00:49:27.940
uh, I bought several guns and, uh, some of them I bought at gun stores. Uh, but I did buy one at a
00:49:33.700
gun show and I've heard the gun show loophole thing over and over and over again. I pretty much thought I
00:49:40.500
could have sent in my 10 year old and he could go buy one. I mean, that's pretty much the way the media
00:49:44.320
presents it. But of course that's not true. I went through a full background check, just like I did
00:49:49.140
at the gun store. Uh, you know, that is kind of what goes on with almost every gun purchase. So
00:49:54.540
that's part of the reason why that number is so high. And then 90%, they're not supporting the
00:49:59.980
democratic proposal. They're just supporting the idea that people should have background checks
00:50:05.360
generally when guns are purchased. Now go beyond that. Uh, the, the left has fooled themselves
00:50:12.100
with this. They have actually hurt their own movement by believing the hype on these polls,
00:50:17.380
which I think any, any person who really works in politics has to know the truth here.
00:50:22.760
The truth is that 90% don't support the democratic policy in Maine. Uh, they, uh, they decided to put in
00:50:29.460
a background check, uh, bill, um, basically to be voted on by the people and they put it out there
00:50:36.180
and they made it really like tailored to conservatives, right? So one of the big complaints
00:50:41.780
about background check laws are, well, what about, what if I'm giving my gun to my son when he gets,
00:50:47.400
he turns 18, I just want to give him the gun or I pass away. I want to hand it down to him.
00:50:51.300
Um, do I have to get a background check to give the gun to my son? What if we're out hunting and
00:50:56.460
I'm using my gun and my buddy wants to use it. If I hand it to him, technically that's some violation.
00:51:01.800
If I don't have a background check, all this stuff, you know, they're, they're not the vast
00:51:06.580
majority of, of, uh, of, of transfers of guns, but you don't want to, you see how seriously
00:51:11.940
they take gun crimes. I used to live in Pennsylvania and I lived one block away from the river. So
00:51:17.900
every day when I commuted to work, when we did the show at CNN and at Fox, I would go one block
00:51:23.220
to the river. Then I would cross a bridge. I'd be in New Jersey and I'd go for another, about a mile
00:51:27.200
before I got to the train station. And then I got on the train and come to New York. Well, I was
00:51:31.360
terrified, terrified that I would forget and leave my gun in my trunk and then get pulled over in New
00:51:38.260
Jersey and then go to prison because that has happened to people who have just gone across the
00:51:44.040
river to the convenience store or to a restaurant or whatever, get pulled over and then wind up going
00:51:49.520
to prison because they're gun criminals. So this is a serious thing. Anyway, the main law was tailored
00:51:56.760
to those concerns. They really did go after and try to persuade conservatives to say, okay, we'll go
00:52:02.860
along with this. Now they did a study and basically try to figure out what was the expected support level
00:52:08.680
for this, uh, this vote when they went in front of people. This was in 2016. They expected 83% of the
00:52:16.120
vote. However, it didn't even pass. They only got 48% of the vote. That's because answering a question
00:52:23.360
to a pollster seems like the right answer to say is, of course I'm for background checks. Yes,
00:52:27.420
of course. But in reality, when you're faced with the actual policy, it was only 48%. It didn't even
00:52:34.080
pass. The other States were essentially the same stories though. Some of them did pass in California.
00:52:38.780
They expected 91% only got 63 in Washington. They expected 81% only got 59 in Nevada. They expected 86%
00:52:47.400
and only got 50%. And this is because people don't actually support these policies the way the media
00:52:55.320
wants you to believe that they do. They want everyone to believe these policies are overwhelmingly
00:53:01.100
popular. People want these gun restrictions. Gun owners are demanding them, but they just won't give
00:53:07.040
them those restrictions on law abiding citizens who aren't the ones committing the crimes as we covered
00:53:12.540
earlier in the program. And, and this is goes on as well. Nate Cohen from the New York times pointed
00:53:18.660
this out that guns are a very specific issue in America. You know, I, I kind of breezed by this
00:53:24.860
quickly in one of the, in one of the segments of the past hour, but it's not like we like guns here in
00:53:31.800
America. We freaking love them. They are, I mean, arguably one of the most centrally defining
00:53:39.340
characteristics of our culture. And I know Europe would say, yeah, that's why we never have anyone
00:53:44.820
die in our lands. I mean, sure. People run over thousands at a time at, you know, street fairs,
00:53:50.280
but generally speaking, we never have any shootings, which of course, as we covered earlier, isn't true
00:53:54.480
either. But like guns are a central part of who we are in this country. We are one of only, it depends
00:54:02.620
on who you ask. I would say we're the only one with a actual second amendment in our constitution.
00:54:08.000
Some people say there's as high as three countries in the world that have that type of thing. But the
00:54:13.720
second highest gun ownership per capita is Yemen and Yemen's I think 52 per 100 people. We're at like
00:54:21.900
120, 120, 130. We have more guns than people. Nobody else has half as much except Yemen, who is slightly
00:54:32.020
over that amount when it comes to gun ownership. We really do love our guns. And there's just no way
00:54:39.780
you're going to reverse 200 years of history by a couple of laws. These things are not going away.
00:54:47.080
You better do what you can around the margins to try to manage the situation. And that's why
00:54:51.820
security and mental health and those types of things are far more likely to get done and far more
00:54:57.920
likely to actually make a difference. To give you a sense of how unpopular gun restrictions are with
00:55:05.020
Republicans, they are less popular than Hillary Clinton. I kid you not. This is from Nate Cohn's
00:55:13.400
analysis. In California, they looked at heavily Republican counties and found in 2016, when the
00:55:19.840
gun background check bill was, the referendum was going through, 31% in those counties voted for Clinton
00:55:27.240
for president and only 30% supported background checks. In Maine, same story, 35% supported Clinton
00:55:34.460
for president, only 27% supported background checks. And other issues were just as popular. I mean,
00:55:43.000
45% would rather support taxing the rich for schools, 45% legalizing marijuana, 46% raising the minimum
00:55:52.140
wage among conservative counties. And yet 19 points behind that was background checks for guns. These
00:56:01.800
are not as popular as the media wants you to believe. And as I think we covered in extreme depth,
00:56:07.520
probably too much depth, honestly, probably too much detail, but I really wanted to paint the picture
00:56:12.380
for you. This is not settled science that any of these things really do much of anything. There's
00:56:19.700
no, they're trying to act like, like it's, you know, the 212 degrees is when water boils. That is not what
00:56:27.080
this is. It's a totally different situation. And you've seen them do this on so many different issues.
00:56:32.700
It's science that trans men are actually men and not women. It's science that, you know, CRT should
00:56:42.300
be taught in schools. It's science that every, every COVID thing they said from beginning to end with
00:56:49.920
masks and all the rest, that was all settled science, global warming, settled science, everything
00:56:54.380
settled science. They have to make you look that way to bully you. And that's just not the case with
00:57:01.080
these gun laws at all. Another big thing we wanted to get to, but didn't have the chance is the idea
00:57:06.680
that these are all white people. You notice how these are all white males doing these mass shootings.
00:57:11.720
You get a bunch of white males. They come out there, they're shooting up schools. They're,
00:57:16.400
they're all racist. This is a white supremacy problem over and over and over again. You hear
00:57:20.440
the same thing. And you always know when it's not a white guy, like in Tulsa, because they don't,
00:57:25.800
they report on it for like 10 minutes and a bunch of people tweet that this has got to be white
00:57:29.800
supremacy. And then they delete their tweets and the story is forgotten forever. Uh, that is just
00:57:35.480
the pattern every single time. Here's the graph of the ethnicity of mass shooters between 1982 and
00:57:42.060
2022. I'd say there's about 130 on this list. About 68 of them are white. 21 are black. 11 are Latino,
00:57:52.440
Asian, uh, eight, uh, and then native American three. And you might say, well, look, that proves
00:57:58.000
white people are all the mass shooters. They're by far the biggest amount. Yeah. But white people
00:58:03.400
are also the biggest part of the country. About 56% of these mass shooters are white. That is far
00:58:10.060
lower than their population represented, uh, representation would lead you to believe you'd
00:58:15.360
think they'd be about 70, 75% of mass shooters and instead are only about 55% of mass shooters. So
00:58:23.160
there's a huge difference there. And I will tell you right now, any EU Asians out there, we're watching
00:58:28.280
because you are overrepresented in these ethnic numbers. And if we've learned anything, we know
00:58:33.900
that ethnicity is the most important defining characteristic of any person. I used to think
00:58:39.680
that skin color wasn't supposed to matter, but now we know thanks to Ibram X. Kendi that it's the only
00:58:44.560
thing that matters. Um, let's see, let's go through some of this as well. And how about defensive uses of
00:58:50.080
guns? We had a ridiculous Congress person. Uh, we played the audio on a radio today, uh, yelling
00:58:57.060
that these things are never stopped. Guns don't stop these mass shootings. It's never happened before.
00:59:02.580
It had happened the week before, but defensive uses of guns are a, uh, something that happens all
00:59:09.700
over the place all the time. I tweeted a video today actually of an amazing, amazing video. It's a video
00:59:16.300
from inside somebody's house where he's looking through the people. He sees somebody coming up to
00:59:22.040
the door and he, uh, uh, turns around, calmly walks inside. Then you see the door get kicked down.
00:59:28.600
And as they, the burglars try to come in, he's just got an AR-15 pointed right at their chest. The
00:59:34.680
second they, they kick that door down and man, you want to see people move fast. Wow. They go
00:59:40.960
really quickly the opposite direction. It's at Studos America. If you want to see the video
00:59:45.400
and it's really illustrative of, of, of these types of situations, uh, here, let me give you
00:59:50.040
some of the facts here. This is from, uh, the journal of quantitative criminology.
00:59:53.640
Armed citizens use guns to defend themselves at least 989,883 times every year. The journal of
01:00:00.720
criminal law and criminology published a study by scholars, Gary Kleck and Mark Gertz that revealed
01:00:05.940
that gun owners use their legally owned firearms to defend themselves. An average
01:00:09.800
of 1.8 plus million times per year center, uh, for disease control and prevention. Now,
01:00:17.240
as you know, they're never wrong about anything. Uh, they estimated annual defensive gun use
01:00:22.200
ranges from about 500,000 to more than 3 million times per year. That's significant. And the best
01:00:29.560
thing, the best thing and the worst thing about defensive gun use is like the video I told you
01:00:35.660
about, there were no shots fired. There was no trading of gunfire. It wasn't a shootout. The gun
01:00:43.260
just ended the crime. The crime doesn't even get really recorded. And maybe because they kicked the
01:00:49.380
door open, I guess maybe that one would if you reported it to police. But the bottom line was
01:00:52.680
there's nobody hurt. There's nobody injured. Nothing was stolen. No one was, went to the hospital.
01:00:57.240
No one ended up in a cemetery. It was just an event that could have been much, much worse and instead
01:01:03.040
wound up being nothing. That's what guns do in the overwhelming majority of cases. They stop the
01:01:11.360
event before it starts. And that's one of the issues that I find to be so perplexing. The left has gone
01:01:19.340
down this road for a very long time where they've said, well, security isn't the answer. Maybe it can help
01:01:23.440
occasionally, but it's going to make kids feel like they're in a police state. And, you know, look,
01:01:27.480
when I go to a bank, I don't feel like I'm in a police state. And I understand certain things of
01:01:31.660
value need to be protected. We do it at federal buildings. We do it at courthouses. We do it at banks.
01:01:35.840
Why don't we do it at schools? You know, and they say, well, there's one study out there that we didn't
01:01:40.740
get a chance to go through. It's really light on detail. So there's not much to really pick apart.
01:01:44.820
They just kind of give you the summary and not really the underlying data. So I didn't think it was worth too much
01:01:48.320
time. Plus, it's just obvious that it's not true. The idea that secure, if you
01:01:53.400
have armed guards, you are more likely to have a mass shooting. Now, there's a bit of a chicken
01:02:00.200
and the egg problem going on here. And to their credit, the study authors do note that it's not
01:02:05.880
controlled for characteristics of the school. So, I mean, one of the big issues here is kind of one
01:02:12.820
of the reasons you have armed guards is if you've already had problems. So you're probably more likely
01:02:16.980
to have issues at a school that has armed guards because they put the armed guards there because they
01:02:21.520
were worried that something might happen. So there's a chicken and an egg situation going on
01:02:25.000
there. But the thing to remember more than anything else is all 100% of mass shootings
01:02:31.520
end with armed security. All of them. That's what happens. The question for you is not whether they
01:02:38.980
end with armed security. The question is whether the cops come after the shooting is done
01:02:45.620
or if they're there in advance and can have at least a chance to prevent it. As we saw in Parkland,
01:02:52.200
having an armed guard on premises does not mean there's no chance of a mass shooting. If the guy
01:02:58.280
decides to sit by the stairs, well, no, it's not going to work very well. You need to have people
01:03:02.820
who are actually doing something. If you've got 19 cops outside of the school room while the shooting
01:03:08.680
is going on, no, it's not going to work that well. But at least it gives you a chance. At least it gives
01:03:14.620
you an opportunity to fight back. You put one of these gun-free zones out there. These people know
01:03:21.020
without exception, they will go into a place where no one can protect themselves. And that is not a
01:03:27.320
place I want my kids to be. So anything else here? The Connecticut assault weapons ban we were going to
01:03:33.720
talk about as well. I just felt like it was a little too in depth to go into in a short period of
01:03:41.420
time. They passed an assault weapons ban. There were a bunch of studies on it. One of them in
01:03:45.340
particular, the one that shows the evidence that it worked, basically they couldn't, and this is a
01:03:52.260
problem with these studies, and I will give some leeway to the authors of these studies, in that
01:03:58.920
you don't have two Connecticut's, right? You don't have Connecticut 1 and Connecticut 2, and you pass the
01:04:04.180
assault weapons ban in Connecticut 1, and everybody, all the same people are there, and they all do the
01:04:08.000
same things, and we can judge easily which one worked and which one didn't. You don't have that.
01:04:11.780
What the authors tried to do, and I would say did intentionally to make their numbers look better,
01:04:17.900
was to create what they call a synthetic Connecticut. Yes, beautiful synthetic Connecticut. I grew up in
01:04:26.300
regular Connecticut. I can't imagine what synthetic Connecticut might be like. It's got to be a
01:04:30.880
wonderful place to go. So synthetic Connecticut basically was a amalgamation of Rhode Island and a
01:04:38.300
couple of other areas to make it kind of like Connecticut with the same general demographics
01:04:42.200
and the same general population and all the rest. The issue, of course, is there was one big shooting
01:04:47.260
in Rhode Island in this time period, which makes up almost the entire difference between synthetic
01:04:53.000
Connecticut and regular Connecticut. So, I mean, basically what we can say here is that we defeated
01:05:00.480
our gun policies have defeated SimCity, but other than that, I don't think we learned all that much.
01:05:07.180
You guys have been great in sending in a bunch of different claims, and I would encourage you to
01:05:12.100
keep doing it. This is something we want to do more of. We want to take these claims, especially these
01:05:17.420
big ones that seem to last forever, and debunk them one by one and give you kind of a collection of
01:05:24.380
videos and podcasts that you can come back to when these things come back in the news. It's an
01:05:30.220
important part of pushing back against these mainstream media narratives when they don't have
01:05:35.900
the facts on their side, but they do have this authoritative voice that you're supposed to trust
01:05:41.400
that most people don't have time to go read a bunch of nerdy studies to learn every bit of the back
01:05:49.880
side of these efforts to change your mind. I mean, that's what they are. These are efforts to change
01:05:56.440
your mind, so you think, man, I mean, there are a lot of these mass shootings, and maybe they are
01:06:01.200
going the wrong way. This is a real problem in our society. I started the show today telling you
01:06:07.240
about that moment where I saw the news alert, and my heart dropped for a second. I mean, I can't imagine
01:06:12.220
none of the stuff, none of the stuff we've talked about is going to make a family that has dealt with
01:06:17.540
feel one little bit better. When these terrible things happen, there's no answers. There's just
01:06:26.320
no answers, and it is incredibly frustrating to have to talk and tell people, hey, there's nothing
01:06:34.720
we can do, but there are some things we can do. I don't want to say it's hopeless. It's not going to
01:06:41.300
say that we can't work around the margins to make these things a little bit better. There's some evidence
01:06:46.440
that some of these things can help in certain ways. It's not as easy as we want to believe it is,
01:06:52.320
though. It is really, really hard if you have a free society, a society with 400 million guns out in
01:07:00.500
the population, a society that allows people to move freely, that doesn't have a great mental health
01:07:08.020
situation, does not treat that particular ailment very well, and is a country where, you know,
01:07:15.640
someone like this guy in Uvalde can have no criminal record, and people will say, well, what about a
01:07:23.400
red flag law? Well, you know, the red flag law, I would look at what he did and say all sorts of red
01:07:28.940
flags all over the place, but the person who is closest to him, his best friend, had an extensive
01:07:35.940
interview, and he covered a lot of this stuff and said he did all sorts of weird stuff and said weird
01:07:39.980
things, and I thought he was joking, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he ends it with,
01:07:43.340
I never would have thought he was capable of doing something like this. It is really, really hard
01:07:50.940
to figure out who is going to do something like this and how to stop them without convicting people
01:07:58.280
of crimes they had not yet committed. It is really, really hard if we value freedom to stop this stuff
01:08:05.000
completely. Luckily, the overwhelming majority of people are good. They actually are good people.
01:08:11.620
They don't want to commit crimes. They don't want to hurt others. They are generally speaking good
01:08:16.120
people. All we can do is do our absolute best to be vigilant, and hopefully the events over the past
01:08:21.640
couple of weeks have encouraged some people to say, you know, that weirdo that I know, I'm gonna bring
01:08:29.420
that up to somebody because, I don't know, that went a little bit far. We already have seen one case
01:08:34.620
like this where a student said, hey, you know, I think there might be a problem there. They looked at some
01:08:41.800
of his messages, and it looked like he was at least fantasizing about doing something terrible, and they
01:08:46.440
caught it early. That's good. There are things that we can do, but it's important to understand
01:08:51.900
the facts, and it's important to have that foundation of understanding about these issues so that you can't
01:08:58.880
be manipulated, and more importantly, if you're here already, you probably are already skeptical about
01:09:03.320
what the mainstream media is telling you, but that your friends and other people around you take the
01:09:08.420
time to think about the other side because they're not getting it anywhere else. Thank you for joining
01:09:15.360
us. If you have a second, subscribe to this podcast right now so we can do more of this stuff.
01:09:19.880
If you subscribe here, you subscribe and follow over on YouTube. That's all free. If you take a
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01:09:40.180
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01:09:45.340
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01:09:50.520
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is debunked. I hope you have a great weekend, and I hope you take some time to yourself to enjoy your
01:10:02.300
family and not get bogged down in the news all weekend, but this show will always be here when you
01:10:07.900
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