Western Standard - EXCLUSIVE： Spike Cohen on American firearm culture and controls.

00:00:00.000 Part of why I really wanted to get you on is because we've got, I mean, when the United States, something happens there, it ripples over into Canada.

00:00:05.900 I mean, we've got some differences. We've got some cultural differences, legislative ones, but still we share our issues.

00:00:12.480 And the big debate on both countries right now is firearm control.

00:00:17.380 That always happens whenever there's a terrible tragedy, as there was in Texas.

00:00:22.140 Down there, you guys are really discussing whether you can start infringing, I guess, on the Second Amendment or not with some controls up here.

00:00:27.920 We've always been heavily controlled, but our prime minister has reacted by cracking down even harder now.

00:00:32.640 And it looks like they're working towards banning all legally owned handguns in Canada in response to something that never even happened up here.

00:00:40.960 But, you know, where do we go from there? I guess like I'll just start out, though, like from a there is a problem.

00:00:49.460 I mean, I think it's hard to deny whether it's cultural, where do we go with it?

00:00:53.460 But I mean, there's not really many developed nations that are dealing with such, even if they're sporadic and horrifying, you know, shootings like that in schools.

00:01:00.660 Like, where do we look to try and reduce those and stop that sort of thing from happening?

00:01:05.820 Well, I think, Corey, we have to look at the fact that in the United States, and like you said, this ripples over into Canada because anything that you can get in the United States can easily be taken to Canada through multiple points of ingress and egress.

00:01:20.160 In the United States, there are more guns than people. Now, whether you like that or not doesn't really matter.

00:01:27.240 There are more guns than people. That's not going to end without some kind of massive door to door gun confiscation program, which ironically would end in much more gun violence than any other proposal being floated.

00:01:40.320 So unless you're going to try to pretend that we can make guns go away, which we can't, there are guns. They simply exist.

00:01:47.960 So now we have to decide how do we interact with and allow people to or not allow people to have access to those guns?

00:01:56.100 Who should we be allowing or not allowing to have those guns?

00:01:59.040 And that results in the kind of policies that we have right now, which led to the Evalde shooting.

00:02:03.380 Let's be clear what happened there. Government mandated through the no gun zone laws that they passed in the 80s and 90s.

00:02:11.880 I'm not sure exactly when it happened in Texas, but it was in that period.

00:02:14.860 They mandated that school children in public schools be vulnerable and completely unguarded from attack, which has led to school shooters picking schools as their target for mass shootings because they know that they're fishing to barrel zones.

00:02:29.020 There's no one there that's going to protect them. Then they had the police stay outside for over an hour and stop horrified parents from going in to try to protect or protect their children or stop the shooting from happening.

00:02:43.700 Then they tried to lie about it and say that, you know, that there was nothing they could do.

00:02:47.380 They had tried everything they could when the reality was they had literally stood there.

00:02:51.020 Then finally someone showed up and broke the government's orders and stepped in and stopped the shooter.

00:02:57.160 And then they lie. Then they are now blaming it on the fact that, you know, I and many other Americans may or may not own a rifle, that that's the reason why this happened.

00:03:06.620 You cannot legislate bad people into not having guns, at least not in the U.S. and by extension, not in Canada, because in order to be a shooter or a mass shooter or a murderer, you have to have two things.

00:03:19.040 First, not caring what the law is and a desire to hurt lots and lots of people.

00:03:24.420 Oh, you need a third thing, too. You need to not care what the consequences of your actions are.

00:03:29.160 The laws aren't going to stop someone like that. What they are going to stop are law abiding people who might actually defend themselves against someone like that.

00:03:37.260 Yeah, and that's what we keep getting to. I mean, the bottom line is law abiding people are the low hanging fruit.

00:03:41.880 They're the easy ones to go after because they're compliant. And we've seen this, as you pointed out, in Canada, we have a 9000 kilometer border between our countries.

00:03:50.120 It's huge. It's the longest undefended border in the world. And it's very easy to smuggle things across it, particularly small items like handguns.

00:03:57.660 And it's been it's been documented by the police. Toronto has a big gang war going on. They have a lot of shootings over 86 percent of the firearms they've picked up off the gangsters were smuggled in from the United States.

00:04:09.540 But what's the Canadian reaction? Let's go after the law abiding handgun owners who are already very seriously controlled and were never committing the crimes in the first place. 0.51

00:04:18.640 But I mean, how do you stop that knee jerk reaction? That's the problem.

00:04:23.060 Well, and this is a tale as old as time, Corey, in the U.S. and possibly in Canada as well.

00:04:27.840 During alcohol prohibition, during that war on that particular drug, thanks to alcohol prohibition, it created a black market for rum for at that point.

00:04:38.280 They were two bit thugs, but they turned into some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country inside of a year or two because they were handed a billion dollar industry for them to have exclusive.

00:04:48.560 Control over. And as a result, they engaged in brutal gang warfare in order to to fight each other for turf.

00:04:56.740 This, by the way, was something that did not happen when alcohol was legal, because you if you had a legal product that you were selling, why would you engage in brutal gang warfare?

00:05:05.160 You would just compete with your competitors legally like all other legal products.

00:05:09.220 And and as a result of that, the government blamed the Tommy gun.

00:05:13.740 That was the problem. It wasn't the fact that they had created a black market and that the black marketeers were fighting each other.

00:05:20.140 No, it was a gun that had existed for at least a couple of decades at that point.

00:05:24.200 That was the problem. And so they passed the NFA.

00:05:26.520 We're seeing that now. The war on drugs has created gang violence, which is blamed on the gun.

00:05:32.680 And it makes no sense at all. Well, yeah, that's getting to where I wanted to go with that, too, because I mean, actually here in Calgary, we have a record amount of shootings happening as well.

00:05:41.040 And pretty much all of them are always gang related.

00:05:43.220 When you have a limited commodity, the unprincipled are always going to get in there and they're going because it makes it profitable.

00:05:48.980 I mean, we used to have cigarette smuggling when we put the cigarette taxes up too high in Canada 30 years ago.

00:05:54.060 We literally have cheese smuggling, a side note, but because we control our dairy up here so much that it's actually 30 percent cheaper to get dairy products from the United States if you can get them across the border.

00:06:03.960 But the underlying issue then is the addiction issues.

00:06:08.260 We do have an opioid crisis going on.

00:06:10.040 We've got more people addicted to items like fentanyl and meth and things like that than we've ever seen in the past.

00:06:14.860 That brings about a massive drug trade that's very lucrative and they're having their turf wars.

00:06:20.340 But again, how can we realistically get to that?

00:06:22.760 I mean, I suspect yourself and more like me, but it's a hard thing to sell if we start moving towards decriminalizing actually some of these drugs and cutting into that.

00:06:30.820 We can get to the solution of that problem.

00:06:32.320 But that's difficult to get past on people.

00:06:34.200 They're too busy looking at the firearms.

00:06:36.260 It is both from the firearms perspective and from the drug itself.

00:06:40.360 You know, it's hard saying I think that these drugs should be legal or at least decriminalized to people who have, for example, lost a loved one to an opioid overdose or to someone who lost a loved one to the gang violence in the drug trade.

00:06:54.300 But the reality is those things are a side effect of illegalizing that drug trade.

00:07:00.000 Or at least it's been greatly made worse by that.

00:07:03.140 I mean, tens of thousands of people die from alcohol poisoning every year in the U.S.

00:07:07.720 And it's an absolute tragedy, right?

00:07:09.400 But we've already learned and we don't even talk about the suggestion of making it illegal because we already learned our lesson with it.

00:07:16.300 We know that that doesn't make it any better.

00:07:17.960 It makes it worse.

00:07:18.840 When you treat a health problem, which is what addiction and overdose is, when you treat it as a criminal problem, you now create a much larger criminal problem.

00:07:28.380 You create a criminal trade.

00:07:30.320 You create violence related to that criminal trade.

00:07:33.000 You create massive cartels that pay off government officials to look the other way, which makes them more corrupt and everything else.

00:07:41.520 They don't stop being corrupt on the other things.

00:07:43.580 So you have a more corrupt government.

00:07:45.300 You have more violent trades.

00:07:47.360 And you have people that have a legitimate health problem that are being treated like criminals or not being treated at all and end up dying in the streets as a result of it.

00:07:55.940 That's not fixing anything.

00:07:56.940 It's certainly not fixing the gun violence problem.

00:07:59.300 Yeah, so I mean, a lot of it's not just health, but it's mental health.

00:08:03.040 And it should be bundled.

00:08:03.880 I mean, actually, I think as a world, we're getting better at losing that stigma.

00:08:06.720 A person with a mental health issue is just as sick as somebody who has type 1 diabetes.

00:08:10.940 They can't help it. 0.90

00:08:11.520 Exactly.

00:08:11.940 It's treatment.

00:08:13.000 And that's the root of where we've got to go with these addiction issues.

00:08:15.980 I mean, a lot of people are trying to self-medicate for an untreated mental health problem, things such as that.

00:08:20.300 But getting further, can that be tied a little bit?

00:08:24.040 Because the thing that mystifies so many of us, again, is what is compelling?

00:08:27.360 I mean, we'll never know for sure, but somebody to get up and say, I want to go out into a school and start shooting children.

00:08:32.480 I mean, we see them sporadically.

00:08:33.900 It's going to happen.

00:08:34.860 But it just is it a perception that we're seeing this more now?

00:08:38.200 Or are there really more of these shootings happening?

00:08:41.960 So if you look at the data, the number of murders, including murders by gun, have been kind of, at least in the U.S., I don't know the Canadian stats.

00:08:51.100 So these could be completely wrong for Canada.

00:08:52.740 But in the U.S., they've been kind of slowly dropping.

00:08:56.000 They reached a peak in the 1960s and 70s.

00:08:58.580 Some would argue because of the massive gun control that had happened in the 60s and 70s that it reached a peak around them because a record number of Americans were unable to legally defend themselves.

00:09:08.440 Regardless of whether it was because of that or not, starting in the 60s, starting in the 80s, it started to slowly drop.

00:09:14.200 In the last few years, it's been ticking back up, but it's still nowhere near the highs that it was even 20, 30 years ago.

00:09:20.360 So it is much lower.

00:09:22.600 Mass shootings had a major increase in the 1990s.

00:09:27.200 But part of what happened was they lowered the number of deaths from, I think, or number of shootings from a number of people that had to be shot from either, I think, five down to three to qualify it as a mass shooting.

00:09:37.500 So it's hard to compare apples to apples there.

00:09:40.160 What I do know is that looking at it at a granular level, at the why would someone choose to go and kill a bunch of people level, I think that we're looking at very often a failure of the health system to identify actual mental health issues.

00:09:55.400 I think we're looking at a failure of the school system, at least in the U.S. we're looking at that.

00:10:00.520 And I think we're looking at a lot of failures that result in someone who feels so angry and desperate that they end up doing something terrible like this.

00:10:07.280 And I think in some cases it's just that some people, whether you want to call it evil or whatever else, some people end up just doing something like this.

00:10:13.660 And that's where you need to look at the deterrent effect.

00:10:16.660 You have to look at what are the targets they choose.

00:10:19.600 This kid didn't go to that school.

00:10:20.880 The reason they pick schools and malls and theaters and things like that is because they know that these are no gun zones.

00:10:27.820 In other words, they're a place where a bunch of people who are law abiding are likely to not have a gun.

00:10:32.920 And they know that the police and the resource officers and the security guards, they're more concerned about their own lives and livelihoods than they are for saving a bunch of innocent people.

00:10:42.600 And so they know they can get in there and shoot up a bunch of people before anyone actually stops them, if they ever stop them.

00:10:47.940 And we need to, I will ask your audience and you that is listening to this.

00:10:52.780 Imagine two schools exactly the same, except one has a sign that says no guns allowed.

00:10:57.440 And the other one says we are heavily armed and will protect these children with our lives.

00:11:00.860 Which one do you think is a greater deterrent to school students?

00:11:03.820 Yeah, absolutely.

00:11:05.000 I mean, it's similar to just even owning a dog.

00:11:06.960 If a burglar is scouting houses in a neighborhood and he sees one with a barking dog in the window and one without, he's going to pick the one without.

00:11:12.080 I mean, it's just a mother.

00:11:13.680 Predators pick the easiest prey.

00:11:15.100 Exactly.

00:11:15.780 But I mean, is there room for perhaps some increase on controls within the United States?

00:11:20.780 Like licensing, for example.

00:11:22.620 I know that people worry about the incremental effect because that's what we got happening in Canada.

00:11:26.360 Every time the government makes one step, they just take another step and another step.

00:11:29.240 Exactly.

00:11:29.600 But a lot of people don't find it unreasonable.

00:11:31.760 That's looking at the individual rather than the firearm itself.

00:11:35.120 You know, some people just shouldn't qualify to have one.

00:11:37.920 And I know if they're really determined, they're going to get one anyways.

00:11:40.460 But perhaps it could reduce some of the spontaneous possessions and purchases.

00:11:45.120 Is there room for that kind of discussion?

00:11:46.980 So where that comes from is the reality that some people should not have a gun.

00:11:50.640 That's 100% correct.

00:11:51.760 There are some people that should never be anywhere near a gun.

00:11:54.820 The problem is asking the further question, do we trust the government to make that decision?

00:11:59.620 And no, I don't.

00:12:01.080 It's ironic when we talk about things like background checks and licensing and everything else.

00:12:04.800 If we looked at government as an entity and had them subjected to these background checks and these types of things, they would never pass their own background checks given their history.

00:12:12.980 Right.

00:12:13.260 But you have to look at it at another level.

00:12:15.500 So, for example, this Evaldi shooter, and I refuse to use his name, but this shooter, he legally purchased this firearm, which means he passed a background check.

00:12:25.500 He went through the waiting period.

00:12:27.060 He did all the stuff that we are told will stop these shootings.

00:12:30.300 It didn't.

00:12:31.280 Do you know who, what licensing and regulations and waiting periods and all these other, and background checks, do you know who they stop?

00:12:41.980 They stop veterans with PTSD who use cannabis for their, or anyone else who's using cannabis medicinally for a medicinal reason that they have.

00:12:51.780 They stop people that have a conviction for a nonviolent felony 20 years ago who haven't hurt anyone since and have never been violent.

00:12:59.460 They round up a bunch of people, people who can't afford the cost of running through all these background checks and inspections and everything else that sometimes double or triple the cost of a firearm.

00:13:09.180 They run up the cost.

00:13:10.980 They make it impossible for people who are not bad people.

00:13:14.780 And if someone is a bad person, then they don't care what the gun laws are.

00:13:18.820 And they just go and get a gun illegally, probably for cheaper.

00:13:21.880 Right.

00:13:22.080 So that doesn't actually fix anything.

00:13:24.220 So from the, I guess, philosophical standpoint of, are there people who shouldn't have guns?

00:13:30.460 Yes, there are people who shouldn't have guns.

00:13:32.120 Is there an effective way for government to stop them from getting them?

00:13:34.960 I haven't seen that.

00:13:36.040 And I've seen instead that they create this sort of captured market where only those people can get guns illegally.

00:13:41.540 Yeah, and it's funny.

00:13:44.680 Your argument was similar when I had some debates with my own and some of the more small-c conservative viewers when I opposed capital punishment.

00:13:49.800 My point is, it's similar to saying, are there some people who are so horrific that they'd probably be better off dead?

00:13:54.120 Yeah, I agree.

00:13:55.020 But I don't trust the government to be the ones to figure out who they are.

00:13:58.540 They can't even get their taxes right.

00:14:01.280 I don't want them to be the only ones armed in the nation as well.

00:14:04.920 I mean, that's where you get into some very serious difficulties.

00:14:08.720 Just to kind of close off, though, as you were saying, where proposed solutions can become bigger than the problem.

00:14:14.400 I saw you respond to a tweet.

00:14:16.100 I'm forgetting his name now.

00:14:17.080 The fellow from Star Trek there, who I kind of like, George Takei.

00:14:21.100 Yes, George Takei.

00:14:21.980 The one he was talking about, oh, let's take all the AK or AR-15s and send them over to Ukraine. 0.89

00:14:26.860 You know, just kind of a vacuous celebrity sort of tweet.

00:14:28.920 But where you pointed out, well, how much damage would be caused if you really actually try to go door-to-door and seize every AR-15 in the country?

00:14:36.260 You're going to cause more shootings than you ever imagined.

00:14:38.820 Yes.

00:14:39.640 And in order to – I love watching, in this case, the progressives.

00:14:44.400 They fully are on board with giving millions, tens of millions of unregistered, untraceable machine guns to an entire country of people right now or any kind of gun, rifles, machine guns, advanced weapon systems, javelin missiles, long-range weapon systems.

00:15:03.360 Surely that will never come back to bite us like any of the other times that we've handed off billions of dollars of weapons, right?

00:15:08.860 But, you know, that's okay.

00:15:11.280 But allowing the – I'm sorry?

00:15:13.540 It worked great with the Taliban. 1.00

00:15:15.040 It worked great with the Taliban. 1.00

00:15:16.220 It worked great with all these freedom fighters that we've armed in the past, like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

00:15:20.580 They'll never come back to bite us, right?

00:15:22.700 But at the same time, your neighbor who just wants to be able to defend their home absolutely should not have a semi-automatic rifle because a bad guy who would have gotten that gun regardless of the laws did something bad,

00:15:36.800 something terrible and unspeakable and absolute travesty, but that that's the fault of my neighbor who has a gun.

00:15:44.800 But these other people over there, they should have machine guns or whatever else they can have.

00:15:47.940 It is a cognitive dissonance that I hope resolves itself soon.

00:15:53.580 Yeah.

00:15:53.920 Well, people are trying to apply simple solutions to a very complicated problem, and they want a quick fix and an easy fix where there just isn't one to be had.

00:16:02.100 So I just hope we can keep having these rational discussions while we maintain what individual rights we have.

00:16:07.440 I assure you, at least you're nowhere near where we are up in Canada with where things are going right now.

00:16:13.260 It's getting ludicrous up here.

00:16:15.000 But I appreciate you coming on to talk to us about that and just offer a good reasoned liberty point of view on it.

00:16:19.900 I always do like seeing that perspective rather than some of the traditional conservative liberal sort of things.

00:16:25.920 We've got to look at the individuals.

00:16:27.200 So where can we find more information about you and what you're doing these days, Cohen?

00:16:30.680 Sure, absolutely.

00:16:32.480 So my website is SpikeCohen.com.

00:16:35.320 You can find me on all social media at Spike Cohen.

00:16:38.300 I've recently started an organization called You Are the Power.

00:16:41.680 We do grassroots, localized, single-issue advocacy.

00:16:46.360 And that's if you are involved.

00:16:47.860 And if you're an American citizen, I just realized I'm talking to a bunch of Canadians.

00:16:51.060 So You Are the Power is a political action committee, so we're not actually able to take any contributions from Canadians.

00:16:55.520 But if you're interested in seeing what we're doing, you can go to youarethepower.net.

00:16:59.240 And if you're an American, you can join us and become a part of it as well.

00:17:02.500 But if you just want to follow me and see what I'm talking about, Spike Cohen on all the major socials.

00:17:07.620 And thank you again for having me on, Corey.

00:17:09.080 Thank you.

00:17:09.780 I appreciate it.

00:17:10.260 And like I said, there's a lot of resources that we can still share and appreciate up here in Canada and see what's going on.

00:17:15.420 So thanks again.

00:17:16.380 I hope we get to talk again soon, perhaps on something a little less dark than this.

00:17:19.900 Yes, hopefully so.

00:17:20.920 Yeah.

00:17:21.360 All right.

00:17:21.760 All right.

Western Standard - June 09, 2022

EXCLUSIVE： Spike Cohen on American firearm culture and controls.

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