In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Alex Jones to discuss his views on gun control and the Second Amendment. Alex has been a long time supporter of the pro-Second Amendment movement in America and has been involved in a number of high profile debates on the issue. He is a regular guest on conservative media outlets such as Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro, and has a long history of criticism of both sides of the debate.
00:00:00.000In regards to, you know, you've had Ben Shapiro on when he was super young, when you were, you know what I'm talking about, when you had him on the Constitution, when you guys had that conversation, you had Alex Jones on when he came in with the whole, you know, 1776.
00:00:13.620Well, he had a petition to deport me. It was quite funny, actually, because he said that because of my opposition or criticism of the Second Amendment, that I should be deported. And in fact, Obama was president. And it was done on the White House petitions page. And if it reached, I think it was a threshold of 25,000 signatures, the president had to give a verdict. And it went to like 120,000 people signed the thing to have me deported.
00:00:40.360And Obama, I was on air at the time, and the news came, you're not going to believe this. Obama's just saved you for the American people. I went, what do you mean?
00:00:48.400They said he's, you can stay. He said that you're covered by your First Amendment rights, which is probably to anybody who's living in America, citizen or not, you're covered by your First Amendment right to criticize the Second Amendment. And he was absolutely right. I was.
00:01:01.820So, you know, I don't want to relitigate my whole view about guns in America. It rapidly became clear to me that whilst I may have validity to my views, these were not views shared by many Americans. And I didn't want to hear a Brit lecturing them on how to how to lead their lives. I get it. But on that point, they both missed the fundamental point, which is I was entitled under my First Amendment rights to criticize the Second Amendment. And so I should be.
00:01:26.760And your position hasn't changed about Second Amendment.
00:01:29.840Well, no, I mean, I think my position has changed in this regard. I would say that I come from a country that used to be steeped in guns. Everybody had a gun 200 years ago in Britain. And now very few people have a gun. We had a horrific mass shooting like Sandy Hook at Dunblane in Scotland in the mid 90s. I was editor of the Daily Mirror at the time.
00:01:48.100It led to a very interesting campaign started by a conservative prime minister, John Major, taken up by Tony Blair, a Labour prime minister, a cross party agreement that we were going to stop most private ownership of guns to try and stop this happening, because the person who did it in Dunblane, Thomas Hamilton, had built up a big arsenal of private weapons.
00:02:08.180And it was successful. And now we've not had a mass shooting since. In Australia, they had a horrific one in Hobart and Tasmania, 35 people got murdered around the same year, actually, they did a buyback program, and I think six, 700,000 guns got handed in, and the government paid people for them. They've not had a mass shooting like that since Hobart. So, you know, it's different culture, America, you're more open to it now.
00:02:32.680Well, no, what I would say is this. America has 400 million guns in circulation. Neither Britain nor Australia had more than, you know, a tiny fraction.
00:02:40.000But with all the knife crimes that's going on in London...
00:03:43.720Well, I think you have to, I think it's interesting.
00:03:45.380I do, look, there are lots of aspects of that gun debate I had here where I understood the American viewpoint.
00:03:51.340I mean, Jay Leno said to me, Piers, it's like you're going to Germany and lecturing them every night on television about speeding too fast on the autobahn, right?
00:04:36.420But I do think in a country with over 400 million guns in circulation, with the amount of gun deaths you have a year and general gun violence, you have an almost unique cultural issue with guns in America, which never gets tackled at all.
00:04:51.840A million new guns get sold every month in America.
00:04:54.640So the number of guns in circulation rises exponentially all the time.
00:04:58.340And it's logical to assume that the number of gun deaths will rise exponentially to in line with the amount of guns in circulation.
00:05:06.160My targets were never law-abiding, peaceful people who want to use guns for shooting.
00:05:11.880My brother was a British Army colonel, one of the best shots in the army.
00:05:15.240I don't get shooting for sport or in the military or any controlled environment.
00:05:19.580The problem is when you have it in such open usage in civilian usage, to me, that I get the self-defense thing, particularly if everybody else has a gun.
00:05:30.060But at some point, I do think the amount of mass shootings you have in America, at some point, there has to be a mature, non-confrontational debate about what actually as a society can be done to make things safer.
00:05:44.380Let's use the word safety, not control, and let it not be a Brit like me that leads this debate.
00:05:50.800Let it be Americans having a debate amongst themselves in a way that can remain calm and rational and simply focused on reducing the number of people who get killed by guns.
00:06:00.720Have you had Alex Jones on since that?
00:06:17.920There were graphs showing that every time he went on the airwaves to lie about the Sandy Hook thing being staged and the families being behind it, two things would happen.
00:06:27.240One, there'd be a massive spike in his earnings.
00:06:29.400And we're talking tens of millions of dollars were coming into him every time he did this on the airwaves.
00:06:36.380And secondly, you would have people then believing this who would go to gravesides and they would urinate on the graves of the child victims.
00:06:45.400And I'm sorry, to me, it's just unconscionable that someone would do that.
00:06:49.640And this idea that he didn't know that he was spewing lies is bullshit.
00:06:55.580So he was deliberately perpetrating a lie about Sandy Hook being staged to make money and in doing so endangering the lives of all those things.
00:07:07.760I had an argument with Elon Musk about it because he was going to come on my show.
00:07:12.140And he pulled it at the last minute because he found a clip that someone sent him of me criticizing him for allowing Alex Jones back on the platform.
00:07:20.660You may remember when he bought X, bought Twitter, he said he was going to keep Jones off the platform because he didn't like the way he danced on the graves of children.
00:07:30.620And I was disappointed when he let him come back on because I think that his whole business model was telling deliberate lies about grieving families.
00:07:38.680I was disappointed he let him back on.