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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the wire. The podcast then created the hit TV show The wire. But we were first. Our idea was stolen by that hack, David Simon. We went to HBO in 1998. And you said, have you ever considered making a show about wires? Yeah. And we said, you know who understands Baltimore? Me and Matt Lee. That's right. Exactly. That's right, baby. We understand Baltimore more than anyone understands Baltimore. I stopped there once for gasoline. On a road trip. So, yeah, I get. I get it. I was. I played for the Baltimore Orioles. That's a lot of people are talking about that right now. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I feel, I feel like, I mean, it was in Los Angeles. That's right. And I was in fifth grade, but yeah, I was an oriole. So. And, you know, we famously season two was based on the fact that I once bought a sandwich from a Polish man. That's right. That's right. I said, what if this was a whole show, but if this was a whole season about long? Your amendment? Yeah. Yeah. Just like longshoremen like stevedores and like, you know, that's a word that doesn't get used enough. I love the word stevedore. It isn't incredible job title. It's a the the coolest job title. I don't know, like what about moving? Like, it makes no sense to me based on what the job is, why they're. I I imagine there was just like the first guy to ever do that was named Steve. Steve. And he was just so good at it that they were like everybody's. We're all Steve out here right now. Yeah. With Steve. Doors, you're like look at how good he is and moving crates. Jesus. Shipping crates like Steve did. Hmm. Oh man, I want that job. This was a meandering way of introducing the podcast behind the ********. Matt Lieb guest. Also host of a podcast. Yeah yeah, pod yourself a gun, which is The Sopranos podcast. And then soon to be a wire podcast coming out shortly. So which is excited for that? We were talking about the wire. Yeah, it's a good show also. Soon to be the host of a baby I know I'm having, a baby dude will subsequently launch a podcast called The Goo Goo Gah. Dude, I can't wait to do a Barney rewatch podcast. Yeah, with my little baby. Just, like, analyzing, like, you know, the role of American imperialism in the Happy purple dinosaur. Well, you know, there was that whole season of Barney that took place in a Contra camp in Nicaragua. Yeah, that was great. Yeah, choice. You have to give it to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barney was like, teaching, you know, a classes over at the school for the Americas. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that he worked hand in glove with Oliver North. Exactly. All those missiles to Iran. Exactly. The only person the shot trusted or that. Yeah. The shot the Ayatollah trusted. Exactly. Dinosaur. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Soul stack, he did sell a lot of crack, but that was that was completely unrelated. We should probably talk about where, you know, when we last left off we were about to we were talking about Operation Cloudburst. This attempt by Harlan Carter and the Border Patrol and Scott General swing to cleanse the border area. We would probably have a little bit more background about what's happening border in this. So this is kind of. Again, I think Harlan's primary motivation is racial, but there's other stuff happening. So in the early 1940s, the US government had created a this thing called the Bracero Program, which is like a guest worker visa program that would let Mexican farm workers enter the country legally, temporarily, to work for American farmers. This gets started during World War Two because, like, we don't have any, we don't have any dudes left in the country. We send them all over there, you know, like, we need, we need we need some more dudes. Yeah, shortage of dudes at this point. But it also it one of the reasons why it's popular even with people who like are are pretty racist is that it it by providing kind of a legal regulated way for them to work here. It also provides a legally regulated way to get them out of here. Well, yeah, they they can't become residents, right. The Bracero program does not these people are supposed to leave. But in fact part of the deal is that like 10% of the migrants wages are taken out of their paychecks and deposited to an account that are given to them when they come back to Mexico, right. So that's part of why this is popular is that. It allows them to do the work that the country can't function without, but it also ensures that they don't stay right. Yeah, that's why this is such a big deal. For a lot of folks. So it's actually very popular and it one of the things about it is it doesn't limit the number of workers because why would you, right? Because they're not you anyway. Millions and millions of Mexican workers use the bracero program over the years. And from the perspective of the US government, it works pretty well for a while and it certainly keeps workers in farms, but and so by like the early 1950s, there's like 2,000,000 of these workers. Or there's like 5 million people have worked in through the Bracero program, but also like unauthorized migrants continue to cross into the border. And by the early 1950s, there's like 2,000,000 of these people. And part of one of the things like that happens in this. Is that there's suddenly, like a big surge of folks coming in unauthorized in the early 1950s. And this is part of what like, inspires Operation Cloudburst, is that, like, Border Patrol has never had to deal with, like, these kind of numbers of people crossing post war, and they're not really capable of handling it. So by the early 1950s, the number of like voluntary departures and had raised like in 1946, like 101. 1000 undocumented migrants voluntarily leave the United States in 1952. More than 700,000 due and you can like these numbers are just kind of useful in seeing like how many folks are coming in, sure. So this, a lot of people are not wild about this because again you know, racism, racism and such. Yeah. So Joseph Swing, part of his motivation here is that like he wants to get the employers of unlawful migrant workers to cooperate so that they can like increase the number of folks who are working there under the bracero program and shrink the unauthorized workers. And so his justification for like. Participating in some of the stuff that that Harlan Carter is building is that he wants to cut down the supply of unauthorized workers in order to get more of these employers on board with the bracero program. So again, a lot of there are a lot of like kind of wonky aspects to what's happening with migration here that you can, as always, justify is like not based in racism is based in like, well, there's a lot of these undocumented people coming over and it's like create a problem for the Border Patrol and the conditions they're working under are like really bad. And we want to reform this program so that, you know, everyone is, is documented and legal and like, we're not, we're not trying to stop them from coming over. But also one of the things you're trying to do by expanding this program is making sure that they don't stay right. Yeah. And I guess, again, you can look at what's happening with the bracero program in a couple of different ways, but if you really want to know what's going on with the immigration sweeps that Carter and swing eventually. Enact the main thing you need to know is what they call it. And this is Harlan Carter's name for this is operation Wet back. Ohh. That is the official name of the this immigration purge that they're going to do. And it was did they invent the term or was. No, no, it it existed for a while. OK. So they did just explicitly name it after a slur. Yes. Yes. OK. Yeah. That's exactly it. And and obviously, like, again, for folks who maybe are not aware of this, I know we have a lot of like European listeners. Canadian listeners may not have heard this. Like, yeah, back is a racial slur for Mexican immigrants to the United States. It takes its name from when people would cross illegally. They would do so through the Rio Grande often. And like, so you, you know, you get wet when you do that, right? And so like, that's the, that's the origin of the Slayer. The backs part. I don't, I don't know why they specify. I know why they specify, but this happens. There's like a history of this, like an old anti Italian racial slur is WAP, which means without papers. And I think it was. Rarely just for Italians. But like, you know, this is like the late 1800s, I think, right. Yeah. So yeah. And. And Carter, again, so swing. Swing is the kind of guy who can sit down and explain to you like, well, this is where the bracero program is broken down. And, like, these are the problems that we're having. And these are the different violations that we're seeing. And, like, we need to get these, you know, employers on board with this program to reform the system. And the only way to do that is to cut down on the like so he can get very wonky with it in a way that doesn't sound racist. Whereas Harlan Carter's like, yeah. Operation ******* let's get him out of here in in Carter is not great at like he says, he just kind of says the loud part loud, right in in interviews with the press, he describes it as the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history. He tells the Los Angeles Times that he intends to deploy, quote, an army of Border Patrol officers, complete with jeeps, trucks and seven aircraft in order to declare, quote all out war to hurl Mexican ******** into Mexico. Jesus Christ. So he's not added a subtle man, he added. Yeehaw after every sentence, yeah, you have to imagine he's shooting his six guns into the air as he gives these speeches to the press. Ohh, he was in the middle of burning across. He has has he lit across on fire on someone's lawn? Harlan Carter gave a statement to the LA Times. So what followed was close to, again, Operation ******* is kind of, he tried. It's a lot of what he had tried to do with Operation Cloudburst only just toned down a little bit so that they could get the federal government on board. Obviously this is follows like a massive hiring campaign of border patrolmen and they, they take thousands of Border Patrol agents and they separate them into mobile task groups and they set up mobile immigration systems to block roads. So basically doing like this, they've already put this like started putting these fences up. But they do like kind of a. You could call it a kind of like racist defense, like defensive white supremacy in depth when they're setting up blockades deeper into the country and they're also carrying out raids on factories and restaurants and just through whatever means they can, arresting and containing huge numbers of Mexican migrants. And I'm gonna quote from Migra again. To hold the detainees, the officers turned public spaces into temporary detention facilities. For example, in Los Angeles, the Border Patrol transformed Elysian Park, a popular public park, into a temporary holding station where apprehended Mexican nationals. Were processed for deportation. Well countless fields and along many a country roads. Border Patrol officers set up mobile immigration stations to process unsanctioned Mexican immigrants for official deportation. They used trucks on loan from the Armed Services to transport the apprehended immigrants from California to Nogales, AZ for deportation to Mexico. To showcase the large numbers of migrants being processed for forced removal into Mexico, officers were directed to raise mejicano communities, leisure spots and migrant camps, ranches, farms and parks. They also paid close attention to urban industries known to employ undocumented Mexican immigrants. Between June 17th and June 26th, 1950, four 2827 of the 4403 migrants apprehended by the Task force assigned to Los Angeles had worked in industry after Border Patrol raids. During the summer of 1954, three Los Angeles Brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of workers. And temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, Border Patrol officers Plit paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as busboys, kitchen, help, waiters, etcetera. Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known establishments such as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood, Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times, Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running through the servant area. Everywhere they went, the officers were chased. Photographed by journalists who had come to witness what general swing had promised would be a spectacular show of US immigration law enforcement, swing pledged that the Border Patrol would deport or otherwise purge the 1,000,000 undocumented Mexican nationals estimated to be living in the United States at the time. Oh well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Just, yeah, there's just going buck wild with journalists in the back. Like, this is great footage. Yeah. And it's interesting because a huge number of these guys are immediately let back into the country. Like a lot of times what they're doing is they're pushing them across the border and then making them recross under, like, the bracero program. So again, they can be because they need the labor, right? They don't want the Brickyard shut down. They don't want these places to go out of business. They just don't want these people to be able to actually build a life in the United States. Yeah. They want to guarantee that they go back. So that's like a huge chunk of what's of what's happening here. Like, it's it's basically taking, it's taking the natural movement of of people across an area where, like, their ancestors and relatives had been moving freely for centuries. And it's stopping that, stopping like, the ability of populations to move and build lives and turning them entirely into economic units. Right. Yes. You're not a member of the community. You're you're labor. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You're in. Entirely different class of citizen which is non citizen, which means you have your rights. Yeah, you have no rights. You're you're you're not entitled to any of the human rights that we give to our citizens. Super, Super Normal and definitely a natural state of things. Certainly not the way things are supposed to go. Exactly. Not an invention of humans at all. So at the same time as they're doing this and obviously the media is a big part of, like, why this is such a hit cause, you know, INS says, hey, we're gonna raid the Biltmore. Like, yeah, you're gonna show up there and like, that's like, who doesn't wanna see that as like a a journalist? So like, yeah, part of like, what? Part of like, what increases sort of the cause. The people hadn't really, the Border Patrol had not been probably most Americans had only been kind of vaguely aware of its existence right up until this point. Yeah. This is part of what turns them into, like, an institution within the United States. It's like all of the press around Operation ******* right? It's it's it's like the, you know, they took a cue from the FBI. They're like, we need we need to be flashy. We need to, we need to look cool as **** doing a bunch of horrid **** to people. Yeah. I mean, like, and you're talking about like what the FBI does against anarchists and socialists and like the late, you know, the the early 1900s. Yeah. This is this is like the border patrols equivalent of that. Yeah, right. And creating like, you know, an entire propaganda arm. That made like, yeah, you know the G, man. Cool. Yes. You know, yes. And at the same time, they're doing this, Carter and swing are like meeting with these influential ranchers and farmers and industrialists, the people using the undocumented migrant labor. And they're getting them in line between, like, a revamp of the bracero program that is again like supposed to fix some of the issues. The program ahead. I'm not going to get terribly into the weeds on that kind of stuff. There's plenty of places to read about that if you'd like. There's a pretty good article. Yeah, we'll have some sources in here, but the book migra goes into a tremendous amount of detail about it. So in the end, it was a wild success. More than 1,000,000 people are deported, potentially as many as one and a half million people are deported. Beyond that. The precedent was established that the US Border Patrol could and should conduct operations from deep within. the United States Border Patrol is legally able to carry out immigration checkpoints within 100 miles of the border. Of any border. Like that's the exactly of any border, right, which includes the coast, right, in Canada. So basically, all of the places where most Americans live are covered by the two. About 2/3 of the US population are in this area. Which is why the Border Patrol has, like, the widest ranging purview of any law enforcement agency. Pretty much, yeah, I guess, yeah, like the FBI technically has more, but like their mission is more limited. You know, it's whatever. Like, this is like the Border Patrol. This is what turns them into what? Started this monster, this juggernaut they are today, as opposed to like some dudes literally on the border, you know, like, yeah, say what you like again and not that like they weren't getting up to problematic **** earlier in their history, but their ability to do harm was limited by geography. It's not after Operation Wet back and we can thank Harlan Carter for that and it's it's it's worth kind of noting here, I'm not going to get too much into to Trump, but he, Donald Trump consciously looks back to Harlan Carter's period of time running the Border Patrol as as an inspiration. Yeah, clearly. During a 2015 presidential Republican presidential debate, Donald Trump said, quote, let me just tell you that. Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president. People liked him. I liked him. I like Ike, right? The expression I like Ike moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of the country. Moved them just beyond the border. They came back, moved them again beyond the border. They came back, didn't like it, moved them way South. They never came back. Dwight Eisenhower. You don't get nicer. You don't get friendlier. They moved 1 1/2 million people out. We have no choice. We have no choice. So First off, obviously it's probably to surprise people. That's again as we've said completely wrong for among other things, nearly all of them come back, yeah, always under like the bracero program, like that's part of the point, like they're not. But yeah, it's it's so Carter and again. There's the kind of folks who like, again, swing, I'm sure, has his racism, I there's racism and like his motivations, but it's also, there's a lot of economic and just like, they're the kind of people who believe all of this stuff should be done based on a set of laws. So they're like, kind of fundamentally, they're probably more offended by the fact that people are undocumented than they necessarily about the racial element. That's a chunk of these people. Absolutely lack of documents alone is just like, Jesus Christ, Carter's doing it for white supremacy. And yeah, that's the thing. You'll notice the thing Trump. Takes out of Operation ******* isn't the way they establish this kind of like system in order to like documented like, make these workers legal in order to provide labor, a labor for it. Like, that's not the thing he takes out of this. The thing he takes out of this is they got 1 1/2 million Mexicans to leave, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that's the thing that has come down in history from Carters. Is that he's cutting to the heart of really what's going on here behind all of the, you know, I don't know, respectability politics or whatever of it. Yes, that's what has lived on that. And of course. Militarization of the Border Patrol and the fact that it gets to work every we get all of that from Harlan Carter. And here's the thing. Harlan's just getting started. Ohgod, this ain't even this ain't even his whole thing, right? This, like, this isn't even his main gig. You know, we haven't even gotten to the. Yeah, the, the, the beginning, which is like, we're gonna talk about some NRA and some gunships. We're not even into that **** yet. Like, this is just his first gig, right? God, this is his, like, the the equivalent of the time. Like the rest of us spent, like working at a Wendy's or something. This is that Harlan Carter, right? This is this is Hitler at painting school? Yeah, this is. Yeah, this is Hitler at ******* like, hanging out in Austrian opera houses. Exactly. Arguing with homeless people about the Jews, which was like a whole chunk of his life. But anyway, because he was homeless too, it's whatever they were living in a men's shelter anyway. Yeah, Hitler. So I should note before we move on to the NRA that while Harlan Carter was massively expanding the reach and power of the Border Patrol, he was also robbing it blind for his own benefit. See, Harland loves shooting, right? Like he's not one of these NR like like Wayne. Pierre, the current head of the NRA, I don't think Wayne particularly cares much about, like a lot of these guys, like, it's a political thing, as opposed to them, like Harlan Carter is, you have to say, loves to shoot guns. Yeah, but here's the thing about shooting guns. Bullets cost money. So three years after Harlan Carter retires from government service in 1957, the Justice Department opens an investigation into what are termed, quote, various allegations against him, including the claim that he had stolen 40 to 50,000 rounds of ammunition from the Border Patrol. Quote with the sole intent of converting this property to his own use after he retired. Wow. Wow. So he steals like a pallet of bullets to go shoot privately. I would love it if we found out that he's the one who stole his mom's car. Yeah, you would enjoy riding and crash. It was him. Kinds of Mexicans, 15 year old gets murdered. So yeah, it's not that funny, but like, that's not impossible, right? Yes. So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here about this theft of 10s of thousands of bullets that Harlan Carter perpetrated. Quote, asked in an interview in Denver about the allegations, Mr. Carter said that he had testified before a federal grand jury in San Diego for some hours and they covered a lot of things, none of which I'm ashamed of and none of which I had any difficulty asking. He added that he did not, quote, know anything about the disappearance or misappropriation of government ammo. The missing ammunition, worth several $1000, was never traced, according to an agent who worked on the investigation, and no charges were fired. Filed. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, very slip. Now, obviously, Carter didn't need to steal those bullets because he's about to get a new job that is never gonna let this him run out of ammunition. Yeah. So as we stated earlier, there's a little bit of debate about when he joined the NRA, whether it was before or after he killed Ramon Casiano. Probably he was like 16 when he when he joins. And in 1951, the year after he becomes head of the Border Patrol, he joins the NRA's National Board. And again, at this point in time, there's obviously there's people who are right wing in the NRA, there's people who want it to be more of a conservative institution. It's not really a political organization, right, right, right. It's almost at this point from this, just from what I remember, it's almost an apolitical just kind of gun lobbying group that kind of they're not lobbying. They're not lobbying. They they do not lobby in this period of time. They don't. They have in the Sierra Club at this point, yeah, they're they're just kind of like, yeah, they're there to provide training courses for people. They're, they're there so that one of the things they do is when the government demilitarize weapons, right, they're like, OK, we're not using like the M1 Garand is no longer the gun that the army uses. So we have a couple of million of these things. We will sell them at a discount to the NRA, who can sell them very cheap to their members and like, it's part of this. So there's like stuff that they're doing, but they're not, they're not getting in and there are, they have some involvement politically. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but they are not like lobbying on behalf of the Republican Party or something, right? Like that's not really a thing that the NRA is doing yet. Harlan Carter wants that to be a thing that they're doing, but they're not. In 1951, when he joins the board, they're still not very political. But now that he's on the board, he starts to see the organization with friends and comrades from the Border Patrol, right? Because he can help get people hired. He can put in a good word. So he starts all of his buddies from the Border Patrol who are like wanting a cushy job and the private sector after, you know, working for the guy, like, he starts filling them, filling the the NRA with them. So he finally leaves government service in the early 1960s. He stops running the Border Patrol in 57, but he does some other **** not really that important for our purposes, but he's he's he retires. Been working for the government in the early 60s, and he gets pretty much immediately elected president of the NRA from 1965 to 1967. But that doesn't mean he's actually running the NRA like, right? It's just like a job within the organization. You've still got this Board of directors. So he's an influential figure in the NRA, but he's not actually, like, directing it at this point, right? He's collecting a check and he's probably getting like, you know, a bunch of free bullets, which is probably even more free bullet. Yeah, well, he also wants it. He wants the NRA to get more political. And again, we're gonna, we're gonna chat a little bit about why in a second, but one of the things that happens is like the folks at the NRA who kind of don't necessarily want that know they have to do something with Harlan Carter, right? Like you can't like ignore him. So they stick him, they create a lobbying arm for the first time of the NRA, the Institute for Legislative Action, and they put him in charge of it. And again, this is the first time the NRA had had a lobbying arm in in the early 1960s. It was like, not. They they barely funded it. So there's this, you know, there's kind of this growing fight and and Harlan is one of these guys saying that like, hey, the NRA needs to eat more political. We need to be lobbying. We need to be focused on 2nd amendment advocacy that was not had not like the NRA's planks. Like they're they're like stated purpose as an organization did not include like protecting or defending the Second Amendment at all. Like that was not on there, even on their radar. Wow. He thinks it needs to be. And the old guard who run the NRA don't see it that way. They see themselves as essentially in partnership with the government to ensure the development of a heavy of a healthy shooting sports culture in the United States, right? And part of what that means is that when gun control laws get passed, they work with the government to formulate those laws. So again, there's certainly like they're not anti gun, right but they're not anything we would recognize as like in like a modern political context. They just wanna. So it sounds like they just want to make sure that gun control doesn't affect hunting and or like regulation of people owning actual rifles or. Yeah yeah and it's again everything is different, right. Like nothing the AR15 exists in this. But it's not what it's going to become right like because it's it's harder to make. They're much less common like today an AR like. One of the things that has made the AR15 what it is, is that it's a perfectly modular platform. So it's basically like gun Legos. So there's like a million you can customize it infinitely. You can make the basic gun itself for a couple of 100 bucks if you have some stuff. It's not like that at this point, right. It's it's it's now it's the it's like the Honda Civic of guns. Yeah yeah. So they they just haven't like for part of why it's not political in the way it will become is there's not really a need to, you know like no one's there's not like. Uh, there's not. The culture that that the NRA helps to create doesn't exist because they're not doing that. So yeah, their primary focus is like hunting and target shooting. Right? Right. And again, Carter has his own interpretation of the Second Amendment, and in the 1970s, he's going to go to war with the NRA's old guard in order to change it. But before we get into that, we should probably have some ads. I love ads. Oh, I do too. Including this ad for. Guns. The concept of yeah, guns. Sure. How about the life card? The life card? It's a gun that's built into a little credit card. Can it shoot? Well, no. Is it accurate? Of course not. Is it is it a stupid thing to carry in your pocket? Yes. 100%. Enjoy. It's a real thing. Look, look it up. Very silly gun of the of the of the of the meme guns easily the memoirist. Wow, that's the whole thing we have these days. There's no meme guns in the 1960s. We haven't invented memes, you know, but we had one. But it yeah. Which was the meme from the 1960s. Well, it's it's earlier than that. You know that this is getting way off topic. But ever heard of Kilroy was here? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's memes. But yeah, I was thinking I was like. Was the Zapruder film? Was that a me? I guess that came out in the 70s. Yeah. No, it comes out a little late. No, that's like the 60 or mid 60s, right? That's all the. But when what did the did people see the Zapruder film? I thought that was like, it. I don't know. I mean, I will tell you, my entire life I have specifically picked houses with a floor plan where the bathroom is kind of like back and to the left of the living room so that when people ask where the bathroom is, I can say, oh, just take a Kennedy. Yeah. You know, go back into the left. It's worth JFK getting murdered joke. Anyway, here's ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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Better help from behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Anything, particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Everybody's having a good time. You know, Robert Kennedy was killed with the 22, which is the same caliber as the lifeguard, the gun that's built into a credit card. There's a credit card gun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, if Sir Han Sir Han had had one of those, RFK would probably be alive. Yeah. Be fine. Is a really stupid gun. Yeah. Anyway, the Second Amendment. Well, actually, weirdly enough, that's getting close to an argument Harlan Carter will later make. But I don't want to. I don't want to get ahead of things. So the Second Amendment is, I think it's fair to say, the most politicized part of the Bill of Rights today, right? That's probably not maybe the 1st Amendment gives it a run for its money, but even then it's usually people differing over interpretations of the 1st amendment as opposed to the argument over the second is really. Should it exist, or does it exist in the way that it's like currently being interpreted? Right, because an awful lot of Americans think it it shouldn't be the law of the land at all, which is difficult to square with actually doing something legislatively, because it does exist. But anyway, in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in DC versus Heller that the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to bear arms. Now, obviously a lot of liberals see this as terrible jurisprudence and claim that an individual right to bear arms was basically invented. By the NRA, Conservatives will say the opposite, that, you know, this was clearly what the Founders had intended. And the reality of it is that while an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment at a federal level is only, like, 20 years old, different courts have ruled very differently on the Second Amendment for quite a long time. And also, the Supreme Court is stupid. So, yes, like, I don't personally give a good *** **** about what the founders intended. Yeah, that seems like the weirdest standard to uphold to this day where we're like, well, the founders. Intended. And it's like the founders. First of all, none of them had teeth. None of them had. And it's one of those, this is it's comprehensively wrong because, again, the rules will often be like, well, the founders would never have wanted people to have AR15. And it's like, did you know some of those guys? Yeah, I know a lot of those dudes would have been like, this will kill so many more like indigenous people. And maybe we should have these. They they all ward powder powdered wigs because they all had, like herpes on their heads and they, you know, they were all syphilitic. So, yeah, they were insane. Being like, the founders wouldn't like that. It's like, no, no, no, don't defend the founders well. And they would have, they would have liked it for a variety of different reasons. Thomas Paine would have liked it because it would allow you to shoot government agents much, yes. Right. Like Thomas Jefferson would have liked it because he was scared of how many slaves he had, you know, like different, different people would have liked it for different reasons. They all would have loved to have that gun. Yes. So obviously, again, as as regards my personal standing towards gun control, I don't care about what the Founders thought. About anything, including free speech. Because they didn't actually believe in free speech either. Yes. Yes. Because a lot of them owns, well, Thomas Paine did. Again, I, I, he's he's he's our one good one. He was, yeah. You know, although kind of in a reactionary during the French Revolution, you know, they locked his *** up. They did lock his *** up during the French because they locked a lot of people up. They really just kind of went overboard, as is the left. So I I think it's probably valuable to discuss how interpretations of the right to bear arms. Varied over time in the United States. Because, again, if you're ever saying it's always meant this thing or that thing that's not, you're not going to be correct because a bunch of different courts have found a bunch of different things. So the Bill of Rights was the brainchild of James Madison, and in portraits he's the founding father with just massive bags under his eyes. Like, you look up a drawing of this dude, he looks ******* exhausted in every and he was every sketch of it. He probably was literally dying at all times in his famed career. He was dying all the time. If only every American political leader had followed in his footsteps of dying. I know, I know. You know. So, yeah, he didn't. He was supposed to write way more of The Federalist Papers, but he was so sickly he couldn't. We are getting to that. So obviously he's a, he's, you know, on that side of the federalist anti-federalist divide. But he drafts the Bill of Rights because the anti federalists are worried and they have a very good point that like, OK, well, we're establishing this supposedly democratic government, but if we don't place limits on the powers of the federal government. We could get the power to do anything one day, which is a very reasonable thing 100% about right. Broadly speaking, one of the better ideas the Founders had was having a Bill of Rights. Yeah, so most of them are terrified of the idea of a permanent standing army, which is also a good thing to be frightened of. And if we had stuck with that idea, maybe things would be a little bit better. One of the things that, like, these guys are all ancient Roman history nerds, right? And they are well aware that, like the history of the Roman Republic includes, so many times, we're just like a guy. It's an army and takes over, right? Or tries to take over and there's a big ******* fight over it. So they they don't like the idea of like a big centralized standing army because it's very dangerous. Yeah. So the Second Amendment was initially drafted to guarantee people's right to form a militia. The original text, and this is not what's in the Bill of Rights now, but this is the original text Madison writes is quote the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; A well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country. Poland. But no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person. Now, this is interesting because if that had been in the the Bill of Rights today, right, this would have done a couple of things. Among other things, it would probably have made a draft impossible, right? That second clause is like you cannot force someone to render military service which is like you would think would make a draft impossible. That said, it also might have made it impossible to do things that a lot of liberals support, like banning weapons like the AR15. Because when you have well armed in there, it does kind of seem to more specifically endorse heavier firepower than the current text of the Second Amendment does. Yeah, that interpretation could at least be argued. Now this is all academic because the wording winds up being changed to the present text, which puts well regulated upfront and fun times also makes it legal to draft people. Obviously people will have argued for years and will be arguing for years what the Second Amendment should mean about gun control and how it should function. I'm not an originalist. Yeah. I think the Constitution is too old for anyone to care about. But obviously it does matter because it is the law of the land and how it's written and how it's interpreted has a huge impact on what is legally possible within the present situation. And so I think the context of how the Second Amendment like, was seen at the time is helpful to have, even though, again, I'm not an originalist, please don't take this as me arguing because the founding fathers felt this way. This is how people should. Act. But yeah, I don't think we've said we can stress enough. We do not care what the founding fathers thought about literally anything. My, my, my stance broadly in support of civilian arms ownership has nothing to do with the the Constitution. Yeah, because it's a stupid document written along time. Well, again, given the time, not a stupid document. Probably better than. Anyway. Whatever. I don't need to have this conversation. I am going to quote from The New Yorker here because I think it gives some helpful context. None of this, this being the Second Amendment, had anything to do with hunting. People who owned and used long arms to Hunt continued to own and use them. The Second Amendment was not commonly understood as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As Gary Willis once wrote, one does not bear arms against a rabbit. Meanwhile, militias continued to muster the Continental Army was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, but the National Defense was increasingly assumed by the US Army. By the middle of the 19th century. the US had a standing army after all. And this is what I one of the things I think is interesting because. Again, the kind of, especially on Twitter comment takes on one side or the other, this is that like, well, you don't need these guns for hunting, which is obviously the intent of the Second Amendment, which no, it's absolutely not. But at the same time, the idea of the Second Amendment is referring to an individual's ability to stockpile and Arsenal is not really accurate because it was within the context of a militia. However, if you're bringing that up, it's one of the things that they meant by like one of the things that the founding fathers wanted with this militia. Was for it to be the primary method of defending the country as opposed to a massive standing army. So again, if you are, if you are one for one reason or the other, if you're arguing that we should do things the way the founding fathers argued, probably the most accurate thing would be to limit civilian arms ownership outside of the context of a militia, and also ensure that the militia is the only armed force in the country, including police, so that, like a massive civilian militia is the only armed force. There's no federal power to deploy a massive military, and there's not really federal policing. In any meaningful way, because that's how things were in the 1800s. Yeah, yeah, if you're or 17, if you're arguing that, that's probably closer to an originalist interpretation than anything being argued right now, right. Which is not to say that that makes much sense in the current day at all, although I would argue. There's a number of you could look at like what Switzerland does, right, which is is often brought up by Second Amendment advocates. What do they do? I don't even know what Switzerland has. Like basically, if you want to own a a weapon in Switzerland, the government will give you one. But like there's training and you're part of a militia to get it. It is a military assault rifle, right? And a lot of Switzerland's are. The percentage of Swiss people who own guns is not significant compared to the United States, but it's one of the highest in the world, right? But it does come as you don't. It's not, well, you can buy some arms in Switzerland. It's not like you're not like just stockpiling guns for your own personal thing. You are being armed by the state as part of the state's defense apparatus, right, right, right, right. But also not in a way like the Swiss, like the civilians who own guns in Switzerland are not like deployed for obviously Switzerland, right? That's they don't do that kind of **** famously. But anyway, I mean on this is again, when I talk about like Rojava and like what what I think about in terms of the. Value of the state not having a monopoly on the use of force. These are some of the things that I think about broadly speaking. You know the stuff has been different about the Second Amendment like a little bit and and kind of as a result. The Second Amendment. As heavily politicized as it is now was kind of like nobody, it was like the Third Amendment, right? Nobody talks about that anymore. Nobody ******* talked about the Second Amendment on a national level for like a century or so, right? Yeah, we talked about like gun control earlier, but it was basically all state level, right? Different states, different cities would have like, different rules based on **** that was happening there. The federal government left them alone. Like there was not really any kind of federal interest in regulating the Second Amendment until the early 1930s. And that is when we get our first major piece of national gun control legislation. Now, the NFA, or National Firearms Act was a response to the era of the gangster, right? In particular, you get this weapon starting in, like, I don't know exactly when it was invented. I could have looked it up, but like, it becomes popular in the 30s. The Tommy gun, right, which is the Thompson submachine gun, and it is. Broadly speaking, kind of like, at least in terms of the way it's interpreted by the media and the way it's used in crime, kind of like the AR15 of its day, because it is Thompson. It's a an automatic 45 caliber weapon. It's a submachine gun, right? So it's not like a full-sized rifle. This will be one of the most popular squad weapons that the United States uses in World War Two, right? A very effective weapon for what it does, which is shoot a lot of big, heavy, slow bullets very quickly at people at close range. So super good if you're for example, a gangster. Who wants to murder a bunch of people in a in a in an enclosed room, right? If you like mining a bunch of other gangsters up against the wall, you can kill a **** load of people with a Tommy. Yeah, you know. Yeah, very fun for, you know, pulling off some sort of Saint Valentine's Day massacre, credible bank robbing weapon, great for all sorts of stuff. Going to the local gabagool, airy and shooting up the gabagool exactly. You could gobble a hell of a lot of good with this. Lots of ghouls. It's it's nowadays, honestly not that impressive of a weapon. But back at the time, right? Like prior to this, most Americans like their experience with this like single shot rifles and and lever action guns and like revolvers and **** right? Even semi automatic handguns are pretty new and fancy in the 30s. The Thompson is just so much deadlier than anything else that's scary as ****. And the crimes that get committed with it, again, as with the AR15, unlike a national scale, very little gun crime involves the Thompson submachine gun and again the the air 15. Not the most. Common gun used in crime by any like, it's not super common compared to a lot of other kinds of firearm, but the crimes that it's used in are so spectacular and and kind of like a horrifying that they shocked the nation. And law enforcement gets nuts about this because one of the things that gangsters do with Tommy guns, I shoot lots of police officers with them. So there's a whole kind of America's first panic over a gun, right? Is is what happens with the Tommy gun in the 30s. And it's not just the Tommy gun they're also freaking out about. Bought off shotguns, which is actually pretty dumb. They're only scared about them because you can like them, like hide them. But they're they're not even like anyway, it's dumb for sawed off shotguns to be regulated more than regular shotguns. They're actually less deadly. But they they look cool as ****. They looked and they and they, you see them a lot in the hands of gangsters, right? So it's again, there's this part of this is that like, yeah, the Thompson is a lot deadlier than guns that had been available before, but part of it's also just like there's this media sort of panic around the Thompson, right. And by the way, I should note at this period of time, if you wanna Thompson, you write to Sears and they mail one to your house like this is not. They're not like you don't have to go to a gun store. You don't do it. They're like background checks, like they just will send it to you. It's like. If you order like, a book on Amazon, it was that easy to get a Thompson submachine gun. Yeah, so the NFA puts an end to that. It heavily restricts the ownership of machine guns, sawed off shotguns, and silencers. Now, the NRA is again not a political organization at this point. It does initially oppose the NFA, and this is kind of the first time it gets political. The organization writes a dissent in their magazine, American Rifleman. And this is a pretty like, tamely. Raised dissent, and it prompts congressional leaders to sit down with the NRA and work to limit their bill. The main thing that it does is that, like, it stops the ban from being total, so rich people can still get machine guns. Oh, thank God. Guns and silencers, right? Well, and we could I I could rant about silencers, which are not what people tend to think. They're not silent. They're not silent. All of these things are still legal if you have the money, right? In the case of like a silencer or a what's called a short barreled shotgun, it takes like a $200.00 tax stamp and a couple of months. It's technically like that. A similar legal process to get a machine gun, but machine guns cost. The cheapest machine guns today are like $10,000. So it's ohh that's why you don't see them like used in crimes. Yeah I guess I don't know what a machine gun is. What's an AR15 and an AR15 is a semi automatic gun. The legal definition of of a machine gun is a weapon that will fire more than one bullet per trigger pull, right? This is all very wonky because like we had bump stocks a while ago right? Function more or less as a machine gun, but legally weren't technically a machine gun. There's a couple of weird kinds of triggers. You can, as with anything with guns, because when you you like, when you make a law to ban a thing, you have to specify what that thing is and mechanical terms. Right. And so you find a way to people do this with drugs too, where it's like, OK, they banned MDMA. Let's make a drug that affects the same parts of the brain but doesn't like, isn't explicitly banned. Right. Different compound. Yeah. And the same thing happens. Now there are sawed off shotguns that aren't legally shotguns because of very anyway. Whatever. Yeah, this is getting off of the. Quite a bit. But the NRA works with works with Congress, right? They don't do like, a big political brouhaha. They're like, hey, we want to make sure that rich people can still own these weapons. Let's let's sit down and work some things out, and Congress is happy to work with them. Now, some people in Congress are the attorney general claims that they emasculate the bill but broadly speaking, the NFA. Seriously limits the types of weapons that civilians are allowed to have. And this is the first time anyone had done that at the federal level and the NRA is pretty happy with the resulting bill. And they endorse the 1934 NFA now, there was still no real like massive national discussion of the Second Amendment as an individual right in this. Not that it was like, particularly discussed much at all. This is just not super constitutionally controversial in the period of time. It's not yet part of the culture. Or yeah, it has, yeah. That hasn't really evolved yet. The context, the discussion of the the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms doesn't really start to take off until the early 1960s. And this is when the very first law review articles arguing an individualist interpretation are published. Now, this. Coincides with the civil rights movement and the second big push for gun control in federal history. This time, rather than, well, racism and crime have a role to play, as we'll discuss, but one of the first things that sets it off. Was the assassination of President John F Kennedy famously, John F Kennedy is assassinated by Bernard Sanders using a Mannlicher Carcano rifle that he'd ordered from a classified ad in the American Rifleman magazine, which is the NRA's magazine. So the gun that kills JFK is ordered from the back of a magazine, right? Yeah. And this is, it's not again, he. He's not killed with, like, anything you would consider an assault weapon. It's like an old bolt action rifle. Hmm. But the fact that he was able to get it from, like, a magazine ad becomes like and like, you know? Again, background checks are not really a thing yet, and that's that. That makes a lot of people very angry. And I'm gonna quote now from an article by Alina Savedra Buckley quote. For years prior to Kennedy's assassination, America had been watching television and learning how to shoot. In the 1950s, when Hollywood studios were churning out westerns, Popular Science estimated that half a million Americans had started quick draw shooting for fun. And by the end of the decade, 3000, Western style guns were selling per week, according to Frank Smith and his book the NRA. Unauthorized history at the same time, accidental gun wounds and deaths were on the rise, and three out of four Americans supported stricter gun control measures. As a result, the NRA braced itself for new legislation in the early 1960s, sprinkling the first references to the Second Amendment in American Rifleman, 8 months after Kennedy died, the magazine had even added a new statement to its masthead. The strength of the NRA, and therefore the ability to accomplish its objects and purposes, depends entirely upon the support of loyal Americans who believe in the right to keep and bear arms. And a lot of this push is coming at the direction of Harlan. Carter, who writes stuff for American riflemen and who is a big believer that the the NRA needs to be a Second Amendment advocacy organization? Yeah. Yeah. And that's again, that's different from what they had always been pro gun, because obviously the NRA, right. But when when you look at what they're doing in 34 that they're not advocating for the 2nd Amendment, they're advocating for what they see as sportsmen, right? And obviously there's problems with that. It's based heavily on like the desire of rich people to be heavily armed, but they're they're arguing for sportsmen as opposed to Carter wants to turn it into an advocacy organization for this thing, this, this, this idea of the Second Amendment and when you do something like that. The one if you if you kind of are in essentialist and you claim that this is like there's this kind of inherent timeless essential interpretation of this rule and that's your your guiding light. There's not any ability to compromise there. Right. Like you have to be kind of a fundamentalist about it, right. It doesn't matter if a president was just murked. Yeah. In front of everyone in Dallas. Yes. Yes. You have to be like, sorry, the law is the law and this is, you know, this is my interpretation of it and and and Carter understands. He again, he's a very smart guy. What he'd done with the Border Patrol shows he understands how the media works. He understands how to advocate for white supremacy without advocating for white supremacy. Right? Right. And so he knows that it's not just enough to, like, say that you support gun ownership. And I'm going to continue with a quote from Buckley here. In order for there to be good guys with guns, there had to be an opposing force to the NRA and many lawmakers. That opposing force was usually black. Now this gets into the aspect of the gun control push again. There's an aspect that's just based in these assassinations that's not at all based in racism. And then there's an aspect that's based on the Watts riots. So in 1965, the LAPD beats a black man named Marquette Fry with a baton during a traffic stop, and protests erupt. It becomes an insurrection. And spreads throughout the country. The militaries eventually called in to augment an overwhelmed LAPD. This is part of what jump starts the war on crime, a period of largely racist gun or crime bills that culminate with the whole super predator panic that Biden is famous for. And the NRA, huge supporters of crime bills, anti gun control support crime bills, right. So you see what what they're doing here is you have some folks because people are during the watts riots using guns to fight the LAPD. And so there are like. This, this is kind of there's, there's pushes. This is what starts some of the momentum for gun control in California comes from this right. But more than that with the NRA looks at is they see these armed black people carrying out an uprising and they're like, well. We can take away focus on, on guns and on legislating guns by focusing on legislating to criminalize black people. Right, right. And that's what Harlan Carter realizes, like, well, this is some, this is the business the NRA needs to be in. Yeah. And also, like this is the the business of like, arming the police, arguing that, like, because that's where, you know, that's where the good guy with a gun argument starts. Right. The idea that, like, you need to the police need to have more and more weapons to deal with today's, like, dangerous. Have a lot of criminals, right? Yeah. And and also the, you know, guns don't kill people. This racial group that I do not like. Yes, yes, yes. Which is an argument you still see made today. There's just a ******* Republican congressional candidate who was arguing that, like, America doesn't have a gun violence problem, black people have a gun or something like that. Right? Like, this is an old argument and Harlan Carter is the one who first figures out how to make it right. So two years after the Watts riots, the members of the Black Panther Party start assembling an openly. Carrying firearms, which is lawful at the time, they would assemble with guns and they would audit police during traffic stops to ensure that cops did not abuse members of the public. One could argue this is in some ways closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment 100% than anything today. Now their activism scares the **** out of white people and again, white people who are not pro gun, right? Right, and we're going to, we're going to chat about all of that. And we're gonna chat about my favorite president, Matt. I know your favorite president. Ronald Reagan's All Star of bedtime for Bonzo. Love him. Star of the monkey movie The those McCarthy hearings we have we we owe Ronald Reagan a lot, including the beginning of the career of my favorite musician, John Hinckley, Junior OHS. So good dude. And I just like you gotta get his mixtapes. I like his early stuff better, but he's still really cranking, cranking out some solid things, you know? Yeah, his early stuff is. Yeah, his early stuff. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Just right. Number one with a bullet. Here's here's here's our ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com. Slash behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals, like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back and you know, I just wanted to give a special statement from our sponsors. That they completely support the career of John Hinckley junior. Yeah, and I don't know, Sophie, just how do we you shaking your head probably shouldn't. Probably not good. It's a boring bit. You think it's boring that John Hinckley junior is making a comeback tour now? Yeah, he's he's touring and he's making it. Hmm. It's he's got a guitar, and it says this machine almost kills fascists. Pretty close to killing a fascist. This machines shot the sight of an armored limousine with, and it bounced and managed to penetrate a fascist chest cavity. This machine loves Jodie Foster and almost killed the fast. Yeah, this machine heads was very. Creepy. She did say she was impressed. She should be. I mean, it is impressive, right? Yeah, good, bad. I don't know. Mixed bag, whatever. Probably enough, John Hinckley junior jokes. Look, he did. He did shoot Ronald Reagan. He did. Unarguably. Hmm. Yeah. So two years. So you get the Black Panthers start assembling with guns in public, and this scares the **** out of both kind of the progressive liberal crowd in California and conservatives in California. And so all of California gets on board the idea of banning the open carry of firearms, and the NRA happily endorses the measure. The Black Panthers, a symbol with their guns in the capital on one of the last days it would remain legal to do so. It's described in local news as an invasion. Though again, there was people legally protesting in a way that was not again, whatever for the exact rights that the same, you know, like white wackadoo's do now. But again, ******* Harlan Carter, totally on board with criminalizing this as is. Again, Ronald Reagan is the governor at the Governor of California. Reagan's totally against yeah. So yeah, some of these guys get arrested during their protest in Sacramento as they are handcuffed, Bobby Seale read from their executive mandate, which protested. Quote the racist. California Legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless. Uh. The measure passed and it laid the groundwork for the extensive gun control that the state of California now enjoys to this day. Those laws primarily impact poor black people. Rich white folks can acquire concealed weapon permits very easily. You just have to be able to have a second home in a place like San Bernardino, and you can get the license to carry a concealed gun in the state of California. They can also purchase to so California. One of the things that they have is a handgun roster, right? So the only handguns you can buy in the state of California are specifically ones that have been approved from the state. However, you can bring handguns into the state if you move there as long as they're they don't have an illegal, you know, as long as you don't bring magazines with higher than a 10 round capacity, you can bring those into the state and then you can have them or you can sell them to people through an FFL and if you're a police officer, you can buy any kind of gun you want and you can sell it to whoever you want. So there is a massive. Industry in California of police officers selling handguns to people that are illegal in the state of California to buy unless a police officer sells them to you for twice the normal price anyway. Whole bunch of sketchy **** happens. Yeah, it's a nice side hustle for the cops, you know? I mean, cause, hey, there was a gig economy back then too. A lot of us are Uber drivers. Slash gun salesman now. So I get it. And it's one of those things there's a number of things about, including like waiting periods and stuff in California that that there's a strong argument to be made. Favor of but this is where a lot of it starts and it never entirely gets divorced from from this thing of like, again, you can look at the same thing in the 1934 NFA of like, well, no, we wanna we don't want rich people to be affected, right. Yeah. Yeah. The the You know, they banned what is that the Saturday night specials like any like, oh, we're getting to that. That's where the handgun. That's where the handgun roster starts, though. Yes, with the Saturday night special. Yeah, but we're we're we're we'll get to that. Don't worry. OK. So, Harlan. Better support of an individual right to bear arms was not out of principled belief that all Americans deserve to defend themselves, or out of a desire to even check governmental power again. He militarized the Border Patrol instead. He believed that guns were a tool to enforce white supremacy, and he wanted to ensure that white people maintained the right to do this. And, backing California's open carry ban, he was engaging in an intelligent strategy. You draw attention away from guns, and you focus on who is carrying them. This is the origin of the quote. Guns don't kill people. People don't kill people. Argument. But when Harlan made it, the people were explicitly coded as black. I'm gonna quote from Epic magazine now. The same year, American Rifleman published an editorial titled who Guards America's Homes? It depicted protests like watts as mob violence. Who then supports the police, who then guards the doors of American homes from senseless savagery and pillaging? It read with home front safeguards, spotting an uncertain the armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer, right? Nothing is more stable stabilizing for our community than a bunch of armed white people. Well, and he's he's very much making the Rittenhouse argument here, right 100 Armed Citizen supports the police, and the Black Panthers are making what I might argue is more of an originalist interpretation, which is the armed citizen protects the community from government overreach. That's the black Panthers. He's saying the armed citizen aids the police in enforcing white supremacy. Right. Right. That's the argument being made by the NRA here. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because. Like, you know, obviously you know, you do have your, you know, right wing insurrectionist militias and **** like that. But for the most part what is being supported is like arming the suburbs, you know? And anyone who supports the police should be armed and anyone who in any way is against it shouldn't be. And that is a, you know, yeah, it is a problem. It's yeah, it's a cause, some issues. It's a problem that deserves a more complex. Series of solutions that didn't get suggested on on in debates over this, but that's a separate topic. So after RFK and and Martin Luther King Junior are murdered in 1968, Senator Thomas Dodd reintroduces the Gun Control Act to Congress. This has been put through it forward a couple of times. He puts it through again in 1968 after those assassinations and the the Gun Control Act is intended to ban the Interstate sale of guns, ban their sale to children. Uh, to convicted felons. And because of some bigotry, mental defectives. Right. Right. So again, like, like, all of these laws, there's like, OK, you don't want people to just be able to, like, ship guns through a mail order catalog across the country. I can get on board with there. Yeah, right. Probably shouldn't be selling them to children or, you know, 100%. Although I have issues with like, who becomes a felon. Right. Like, Oh well, yeah. Violent history. Sure. That makes sense. You don't want somebody who's like a convicted ****** buying guns and then, like in mental defectives. Well, how the hell do you define that? Now, now, right now. I've got some. Concerts. But this, this law, again, there's a lot that's very reasonable in here and the NRA rallies against it in huge numbers. Harlan Carter and his partner in the and they are not in, they don't have an issue with the mental defectives part, right? That's not the thing that's a problem to them. This is the first law that causes the NRA to get like hugely political and and Harlan Carter again there's this war still within the NRA that hasn't been resolved between the old guard and the New Guard. Carter because he has a lot of influence in American Rifleman magazine. He he enlists like the people that he's been seeding the NRA with these new guard folks to start like coming up with a series of blistering editorials in American Rifleman magazine that are urging people to write letters to Congress to like this is the first real concerted lobbying campaign by the. And I'm trying to figure out what, which part of it it is. Is it the children part? Is it the fact that they're like, no children is, I mean, neutral, racially neutral? So they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We can't do that. Or what is it a big part of it? This is an attempting to establish, like, if you're buying a gun, you have to do it through. There has to be like this, this legal process. Like, you can't just be a dude has a gun. And I get it, right? And that's that's the big. That's the center of the problem, right, is the idea that the federal government is now going to be involved. And hair like in all legal gun purchases, which is obviously not what the Gun Control Act does, there's these things called face to face sales in a lot of states where if you're not a gun dealer, you can sell a gun to anybody without there being any kind of a background check. That is still the law in a lot of the country. But most gun purchases you have to do, you have to fill out what's called a form 4473, which is and you have to have like a federal background check, right. And the government gets involved, right? That's that's the thing that they're scared about. And again, you can't divorce. This is from, like, the John Birch Society, from all of these panics about communism, about, like, you know, the government getting increasingly centralized. And I guess you might argue that that's also closer to an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment, but anyway, so the NRA. You know, Harlan Carter urges, like, helps to organize this massive campaign of resistance against the Gun Control Act. And it's not popular with many of the folks running the NRA at the time. And again, the way they've done things before Congress would suggest a bill, the NRA would usually have some issues with it, but they would, like, make those issues clear. Then they'd sit down and, like, hash something out as they did in 1934. So the vice president of the NRA, guy named Franklin Orth, figures that's what we're going to do, right? He doesn't want the organization to take, like, a really public political stance. Because that's kind of permanently alienated from like one party, right? And he doesn't. That's not his goal with the NRA. He doesn't want it to be like a Republican or a democratic thing. Short sighted idiot. Yeah. So for what would be the last time? Because again, Orth and his people are still in charge of the NRA broadly, the NRA sits down with Franklin Dodd and they reach a compromise on the bill and they, you know, they they alter it and what not to be a little bit, whatever. Orth describes it as a law the Sportsman of America can live with. The fact that anything had been passed at all enrages the base that Carter has put together, and they respond with a flood of hate mail so voluminous at nearly makes Orth resign, it becomes increasingly clear that the old guard did not speak for the increasingly radicalized masses of the NRA. And these, again, these people are they're they're frightened of black mobs, of the watts riots, right? They're also have been stoked by Carter and his lackeys with, like, fears of Communist infiltration and invasion. This is all kind of coming together as part of it, and obviously a lot of the right in this time sees the Watts riots is like it must have been the Soviet Union, you know, work right 100%. There's this is like a synonymous like, you know any kind of black uprising synonymous with communism at this. Yeah. So kind of what you're seeing here is the radical chunk of the NRA doesn't want like once to oppose any like this law under all conditions. Right. There's no no way in which they'll be OK with this. Mm-hmm. And they they lose the fight to the old guard who works with the government to, to pass this law. But the new Guard, I guess you new guard isn't really a term, but like the the Harlan Carter's. Action. Becomes starts to become more dominant as a result of this, because it ****** off so many people and because. So it's so much easier to electrify people with like threats of the the Communist government is coming to like, take your guns to stop. You have to be able to protect your family against these dangerous like that. That's easier to rile people up for than we should work with the government to come to like sensible, you know, accommodations, right? That's compromised. That's not a selling point, right? So no, because of what Carter builds here over this fight, membership in the NRA soars to over 1,000,000 people for the first time in the association's history. So. This is part of what scares the old guard and makes them Silo Highland Carter off to the ILA, which is the NRA's first registered lobby. And when they make this lobbying group for him to run, they don't like fund it. So he's going to have to raise his own money to do anything. And their hope is that, like, this guy is dangerous, but we can't kick him out. So if we give him this lobbying organization but don't give him any money, he's going to have to spend all of his time raising funds and he's not going to be able to, like, cause any trouble. This proves to be a bad strategy because Harlan Carter invents the concept of right wing fundraising. Damn it, yes, the first podcaster. Yeah, he's the first guy to figure out how everything is going to work for right wing fundraising in the future. And he does it because he figures out he he start, he uses computers, right. Like, that's the thing he figures out is going to be critical. And I'm gonna quote from Alina Buckley again. Their computer could print 1100 lines per minute, letting Carter's team produce thousands of letters addressed to members over a 24 hour period. It was the latest iteration of a powerful tool, direct mail. The medium had reached prominence by the early 1970s, when it was first pioneered by Richard Viguerie, who, as a campaign worker had copied down the names and addresses of people who had donated to Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential bid. With that list of Republicans and their addresses as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, he once wrote, Viguerie had developed a way for conservatives to reach the people most likely to become coveted. Single issue voters with the right messaging. Carter hoped to use the tool to drum up support for ILA's legislative work. Viguerie himself collaborated with Carter to build their database. Iowa did all of this under the noses operated with Carter to build their database. I did all of this under the noses and the shoes of the NRA executives, gaining ground for a hardened line against gun control. I'm building an organization capable of public persuasion, not only in Washington, but in the states, Carter said at the time. We don't know the best way to reach all the people yet, but of course we shall. No, *** **** it. He built a mailing list. And yeah, he's one of the very first people to do this, this, and is arguably the most successful of anyone in this period to do it. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that's where we're going to leave things for today. But first, Matt, you got a mailing list? You want to, you know, I got a mailing list. It's called Instagram. You can find me there at Matt Leaf jokes, please follow me. And also. Hey, if you like The Sopranos, listen to pod yourself a gun. It is a rewatch podcast where me and Vince Mancini talk about every episode. We just wrapped it up and it is the greatest and only Sopranos podcast in the world and I I would love for you all to check it out and tell you, well, that's that's wonderful. I would like to use this time to get everyone to get involved in my fundamentalist right wing mailing list, NACA, the the national Anti Quartering Association. They're third amendment fundamentalist, Matt. Ohh. Not only do I think that soldiers shouldn't be quartered in houses, yeah, I don't think they should be quartered anywhere. Yeah, I think soldiers should be kept away constantly with heavy doses of amphetamines for the duration of the time that they're serving. No quartering of soldiers anywhere. Not even on military bases. Keep them in the sea or in the sky on drugs at all times. That's the NACA line. Yeah. So I love it, dude. Yeah. Find find us online. Give us your e-mail, send us money. And. Actblue.com/anticorporate, no quartering nowhere. Ohh, good times, good times. Behind the ******** is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. 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