CLAY: Joe Biden, although they haven’t officially confirmed it, is going to Saudi Arabia, hat in hand — after calling them a pariah country — to try to desperately get more oil produced as we are going to hit over $5 — it seems quite clear, over $5 for a gallon of gas — in this country, which will be another all-time record. Many of you out there, depending on what parts of the country you’re listening in right now, are paying well over $5 a gallon of gas right now.
And we talked opening the show, Buck, about some of the stumbling, haphazard nature under which the Biden administration has tried to find a reason to give people to vote for them in the midterms. And I don’t think there are very many people out there who were saying, “Hey, you know what we need more of? More Biden control, more radical adjustments to the overall national consciousness.”
This cut I heard, and I was like, are you kidding me? This might be the worst possible argument for more of Joe Biden. This is, I believe, Democrat Representative Mondaire Jones arguing that they’re going to fix everything if gun legislation does not pass so that everything in terms of the democratic progress is overridden. Listen to this.
CLAY: Kind of just saying the quiet part out loud basically, Buck.
BUCK: Can we just take a moment here. Here’s an elected Democrat who is saying, “Let’s destroy our checks and balances within government as they currently exist, particularly in the case of court packing, Supreme Court. Let’s just undermine the entire system so that,” he mentioned weapons of war, “we can deal with three or four percent of shootings,” and, by the way, there’s always this assumption. “Oh, if they didn’t have an assault rifle, they wouldn’t do the shooting.” That is not true, and then there’s also the — ’cause as we know, some of the biggest shootings of all time, the Virginia Tech shooting, two pistols.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And beyond that the idea that even if you were to ban assault rifles, even if you had a federal law that says everyone has to have… You’re totally unserious if you don’t talk about a buyback program which is forced… When I say unserious, it doesn’t even make intellectual sense, right, ’cause you have tens of millions of these rifles already in circulation. You’re just gonna ban new sales of them?
CLAY: Which theoretically would create a huge black market for people who already have them, right?
BUCK: Well, that is exactly right. Now you just have people that say, “Okay. I’m just gonna buy my AR-15 illegally from either somebody who had it grandfathered in,” which did happen under the 1994 assault weapons ban, or somebody who just kept their assault rifle legally, which I remember, the estimate within the state of Connecticut — not exactly Kentucky, folks — they thought that maybe a hundred thousand people had firearms that were declared illegal after Sandy Hook.
They just didn’t hand them in. But, you know, they’re not kicking in everyone’s door trying to find them. Point here being, they’re gonna do court packing and they’re gonna blow up the filibuster in the Senate so that they can get a gun control package through that’s not even… These people are absolutists — and also, absolutely not very bright.
CLAY: I also think they’re making the best possible argument for why Republicans need to be in control of the House and the Senate. Because even if you’re just a moderate person out there, it’s fair to say that Joe Biden having more power is unlikely to make the country better. And the argument that I would unpack there is, if Joe Biden had had more power — let’s say Joe Biden had 54 senators instead of 46 senators — we’d probably be 60 right now at 15% or higher inflation.
He would have passed Build Back Better, $5 trillion in additional expenditures would have flooded into our marketplace and we’d be sitting at 15% inflation. And the idea that you want to give Joe Biden a filibuster-proof majority so that he could then pack the Supreme Court, because you know how the Supreme Court packing works, right? Once one side decides that they’re gonna go to 12 or 15, the next time the party that is in power again, well, then they’re gonna raise it to 18 or 21.
BUCK: And for all of the big chest thumping you get from Biden, you know, the (impression), “Yeah, you know, we’re gonna stop all the violence and do all this stuff,” all right. All right, Democrats. You’re such heroes on this issue. Why not just say we’re gonna ban all handguns? Why not just say it, right?
CLAY: Have that debate, if that’s your goal.
BUCK: That’s what I mean. Obviously, I think that would be insane, illogical, people wouldn’t do. But that’s not the point. The point is if they were serious about this, they wouldn’t be making the case for, “Oh, let’s stop new sales of certain rifles that look scary,” and the background checks? There already are background checks on 95%-plus of all of the gun transfers that actually happen in this country.
So they’re nibbling around the edges, not actually getting at it problem, infringing and engaging in incrementalism and we all see this. I just wish they would be honest. You know, be honest about what you want. If you want an Australian-style gun buyback… You know what’s fascinating about the gun buyback problem in Australia, by the way, which they’ll never tell you. They always say there was a mass shooting in Australia. I think was it in Tasmania. I think Tasmania.
CLAY: I think that’s right, in, like, 1996, right?
BUCK: Yeah, was a mass shooting and then they had the gun buyback program, and they say, see, violence went down. Now, keep in mind violence in the U.S. also went down in the period of the nineties and violence in places like New York went down 90%.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: But they always say, “Oh, it’s because the gun buyback program, which was a mandatory buyback,” right? It’s not like you have a choice you have to sell the gun back to the government. By the way, they weren’t getting top dollar but that’s near the here nor there. You know there are more firearms now in private hands in Australia — and there have been for the last 15 years or so — than there were before the buyback program.
Because of all the different loopholes and all the different changes and all the different things. And still the violence in Australia is overall very low. So if the gun buyback program worked so well let’s say from, you know, the 1990s to, you know, the 2010s, why is it that there are more guns in Australian hands circa 2010 and less violence? Their ideas never actually work, but they don’t care.
Also, a lot of the people that have the guns — you want to talk about violence? — would be violent when people came and tried to take their lawful firearms away. But if you are going to really be trying — and this is what the NRA gets, right? The goal here is not to say — and that’s why I always take it outside and just say, “Hey, you know, think about the way the progressive movement works.,” If you sit down across from them and you said, “Hey, I’ll give you the Robert E. Lee statue if we just agree that we never take anything else way.
“I’ll give you the Washington Redskins name if we never have to argue about mascots anymore.” That’s not how it works. Buck, you know and everybody out there listening knows, this is not the goal. The goal is not to chip away at the very edges. It’s to destroy the entire right, which is why I understand anybody who says, “Hey, we can’t negotiate,” because their goal isn’t to be reasonable and try to reach an approximation. It’s to take away the entire right.
BUCK: This is like the Churchill quote about appeasement that it’s feeding the crocodile and hoping that it eats you last.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: Does anyone think for a second that if Republicans went along with an assault weapons ban, that after the next mass shooting — whether it was with an assault rifle or whatever the case may be — that they would say, “You know what? Republicans made a good-faith gesture to try to do common sense gun reform, so we have all the laws we need.” I would give anyone the odds they want on that bet. The chance is zero. There’s a 0% chance.
CLAY: You’re right.
BUCK: And then it would just be, “Okay, well, now, we have to take another step and another step,” because ultimately what they want is a disarmed population. That is actually what the Democrats want.
BUCK: That is what the left believes in. They want the state — because they’re at heart authoritarians, they want the state — to have all of the force and all of the weaponry and the ability to crush dissent once they are in power. And they use the power as they see fit. We always sit around and like, “Oh, maybe with everybody to have a neutral space.” So we all know who wants the government to be in total control. It’s not our team.
CLAY: And, by the way, what are he doing spending $40 billion on right now of our taxpayer money? Giving Ukraine weapons. So we want to disarm America — Democrats do — and simultaneously give tens of billions of dollars to arm Ukraine so they can do what? Defend their homes from an invader, which is really kind of what the Second Amendment was designed to do.
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