BUCK: We have much to discuss with you, including — (sigh) ugh –Canada’s action to freeze all handgun purchases, and this is gonna be something the Democrats are pointing to to say, “See? They’re taking action. They’re doing something.” We’ll discuss the specifics of that in a moment, and then also I know Clay spoke with you all on Friday about the latest revelations, the latest information about the response to that horrific shooting in Uvalde, and it is clear beyond doubt…
I was on Sean Hannity’s show, Clay, on Thursday right before I left for the weekend speaking about this. The response timeline is unacceptable. There was a clear breakdown here, and they’re gonna be looking at this from the perspective of law enforcement command failure on the scene and, even I think for many more distressing, the possibility here that there were some of those sworn law enforcement officers who were not willing to charge in knowing that there was a shooter with children in a school building just feet away behind that classroom door. That’s very troubling to hear. I know you said you spoke to a lot of law enforcement on Friday, Clay, and they were pretty uniformly outraged.
CLAY: Furious.
BUCK: Furious. Tell me a bit, just by way of review before we talk about Canadian response.
CLAY: Yes. So, I mean, obviously I know a lot of people were traveling on Friday. Right as we started the show, they were having the Texas Department of Public Safety director address the situation. And he admitted it was the wrong decision to wait. But, Buck, we opened up phone lines and we had people calling from all over the country. I said, “Hey, if you’ve been trained for these school shooting, active shooter, mass shooter events,” all them called in and they were curious at the way that the Uvalde police department responded.
And look, we support police on this show, overwhelmingly. But it doesn’t mean that every police officer and every police department gets every incident right. And in this one, I don’t think there’s any doubt. In fact, they’ve already admitted that they got it wrong, but how in the world they allowed 75 minutes to pass with that guy armed inside of that room and who knows how many additional lives were lost with 9/11 calls coming in, Buck, with —
BUCK: Yeah. They knew there were kids trapped. They knew there were kids trapped in a classroom with a mass shooter. That has to be, “Go!”
CLAY: No matter what.
BUCK: Everyone who’s stacking up against that wall who has a vest on and has a gun, they’ve gotta enter that room and they’ve gotta deal with the threat. Full stop. Otherwise, what do we have law enforcement training for these situations for? Now, I know there was that are BORTAC, effectively Border Patrol SWAT team that went in there, thank God, and ended the threat. But they weren’t there two minutes after the situation.
CLAY: And there were reports, Buck, that they got so fed up being held from being able to go that they finally said, “Screw it, we’re going,” ’cause they got there at 12:15 and they didn’t actually breach the door until 12:50 because reportedly the local police was not allowing them to do it, and there’s some report that they finally just said, “Screw you guys. We’re going in.”
BUCK: Yeah. By the way, that is the sentiment that I think the whole country shares, which is, “You gotta go in. What are you doing? How could you wait? How could you allow this situation?” If you’re a sworn law enforcement officer and you’re not gonna risk your life in a situation where there are children being massacred inside of a school building — and there’s one 18-year-old shooter inside without tactical training, proficiency. By the way, not that that should really even matter to the response all that much. but if you’re not gonna go in then, you shouldn’t be carrying a gun and a badge.
CLAY: I agree.
CLAY: And this you would think would be the ultimate situation, right, where you have a clear case of awful evil that you are the good guy being able to combat. There are relatively few situations in most police officers’ lives where you would ever have the opportunity to save young kids lives from a madman in a situation like this. To not do it? This would seem to be the exact reason why almost everyone would become a police officer, to protect the innocent from the violent and the evil.
BUCK: Yes, and let’s be clear. We’re also very supportive of military on this show, you are, I am, this audience is. We have a lot of active military listening. Military wouldn’t be okay with it if you came under fire and somebody in the unit threw down their gun and said, “Ahhh, I want no part of this,” and deserted.
CLAY: Might get shot.
BUCK: Made a run for it. The military wouldn’t say, “Oh, well, that’s…” Of course not, right? There are certain expectations. Of course, we have the greatest military in all history, but the point here is that there are expectations that come along with these roles. So there was a massive law enforcement failure on the scene by local law enforcement. I think that’s clear. The DOJ, Department of Justice, is conducting a review of this now.
I don’t think they’re gonna let us know anything more than we already know. Kids are inside, kids are dying, kids are making panicked 911 calls — little kids — and there’s 19 officers in a hallway and they’re doing nothing. Unacceptable. Full stop. Somebody can say, “Oh, you don’t know. You weren’t there.” Wrong. This was unacceptable.
Okay. Now what do we do from a legislative perspective, if anything? Right? This is what the big political debate always turns into in this country after a mass shooting. First off, now, I know this is Canada; it’s not the U.S. So I bet we… I’ve never really looked into this. I bet we have a lot of Canadian certainly podcast listeners, and some of our signals must extend into Canada from radio, I would assume.
CLAY: Yeah, we have a lot of Canadian listeners.
BUCK: I know we’ve got a lot of Canadian podcast listeners on the terrestrial side, I bet some of our stations reach to them. But here’s what they’re doing in Canada. They don’t have a massive gun violence problem, and they already have a lot of gun regulations, gone laws in place. Justin Trudeau — who is, remember, willing to use state force to bludgeon truckers for opposing a vaccine mandate for a vaccine that failed.
I just want to remind everybody of this: It was all about vaccine mandates. The vaccine didn’t stop the spread. We’ll talk more about that data later on this week, as we all know. But here is Justin Trudeau, oh, so self-satisfied and smug announcing what they’re gonna be doing to our Canadian brothers and sisters up north.
BUCK: Okay. There’s so much that’s wrong, bad, idiotic. There’s so much here, Clay. First of all, the five-round limitation in the magazine, bullets in the magazine, rounds… Don’t yell at me. I know it’s not the bullets; it’s the rounds, but in the magazine. That’s just going to make people much happier to have their previous magazines. You’re not gonna be able to get people to put changes in magazines they already own in Canada.
For the bad guys, for the people who want to commit violence, commit crimes, they’re gonna know. “This is great, I’m gonna have a 30-round magazine, and even if I come up against somebody I’m gonna have an advantage against them if it does come to a gunfighter, I’m gonna know that somebody defending their home is limited to five…”
Now, this is unworkable, unenforceable, and moronic, but they’re doing it because they think that guns are the problem when really actually criminals and the criminally insane are the problem, which is something else we gotta talk about. But Democrats are gotten point to this and say, “See? Canada is taking action.” But they’re not gonna do anything in this country which I think is so interesting.
CLAY: Well, this just is a big-picture question. We’ve got 400 million guns in the United States, 400 million. I don’t know what the number is in Canada, but there are more guns than people in the United States. I would imagine that Canada has 10, 15, 20 million at least guns as well.
BUCK: Twelve million legal and illegal is the estimate they have.
CLAY: Okay. So they have a big percentage of people who have access to weapons there as well. Tell me why I’m wrong in this, Buck. All this is going to do is, if this were to pass, create a monstrous black market in the guns that everybody is going to want, which are far better than the guns that you can buy now. I don’t understand how this is going to solve anything at all.
BUCK: Well, Clay, there’s also the problem of they pass these gun laws, and all it does is agitate the law-abiding. People like me, for example, who live in New York City… Now, we’re expecting a Supreme Court ruling to come down any day now.
CLAY: This month.
BUCK: Yes. Any day now, that will invalidate, most likely, on concealed… Well, it’s may issue with regard to concealed carry, right? It gets complicated. Basically, you can’t carry a gun in New York unless you’re connected, unless you really have some in within the system.
BUCK: Clay, the rules right now are — and I know people, I have friends who have gotten their license here for a handgun. You can get a premise permit. The premise permit takes about six months to get. You have to go out to some office in Queens, New York, somewhere to get fingerprinted for it. You have to go down to One Police Plaza. I think it costs three or four hundred dollars. It takes 6 to 9 months to get.
And that only allows you then to buy a handgun that you keep in a lockbox, and you have a trigger guard on it in the lockbox and in a separate lockbox. I am not making this up. You must keep your ammunition so that when a burglar or a home invasion happens, you can throw your lockboxes at that home invader and know that maybe you’ll give them a concussion. Because you’re not gonna be able to get to your firearm in an expeditious or a fast enough manner. New York is probably gonna have its gun laws invalidated here pretty soon.
CLAY: And Washington, D.C., as well, right? I think that Washington, D.C., is also tied up in this ’cause there’s so many people listening to us right now who go across to Virginia or Maryland and every time you drive into D.C. you become a felon basically, based on their rules, if you just have a gun in your car.
BUCK: And my friend Joe Borelli who’s the city councilman from Staten Island here in New York had a great piece recently in the New York Post where he talked about how… New York’s Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t talk about guns, doesn’t talk about bad guys, doesn’t talk about criminals, “We’re gonna crack down on the strident, the proprietors,” it’s always the gun. The inanimate object is the problem, right, the thing that tens of millions of people legally own, constitutionally protected, commit no crimes whatsoever.
But somehow that object is a thing that we’re fighting. We’re not fighting against criminals; we’re fighting against guns, that’s the mentality. There were over 3,000 gun arrests in the 2021. Over a thousand of them the district attorney here dismissed, basically. I deferred prosecution agreement, Smith & Wesson dismiss. So here’s the problem. They make these really onerous and annoying gun rules for people.
CLAY: And in Mayor Bloomberg’s defense — ’cause I was fascinated by stop-and-frisk in genera — what he said was, ‘We’re stopping and frisking based on the percentages of people that commit crimes,” right? So if you have violent crime involving guns, and then stop-and-frisk suddenly became unacceptable, and guess what happened? Crime started to skyrocket again.
BUCK: It’s actually “stop, question, and frisk” is the way the process would actually work. And by that you would have NYPD officers who would walk up… First of all, there were a lot of… You see somebody walking and they walk with a certain gait. They’re favoring one side, you see a bulge, you want to go talk to them, what is that you have. People that have an illegal gun on the streets and have a cop come up to them, guess what?
They usually start to panic, and they sound a little bit nervous because they realize that it’s very, very illegal. But they got rid of stop, question, and frisk. They got rid of so many… They made it so you can legally smoke weed on the street, urinate on the street. They turned this place into an open sewer on the streets, and they wonder why…? This is the true of every major city where Democrats are in charge across the country. They wonder why we have all the crime problems that we do. Gee. I wonder, everybody. It couldn’t be any more obvious. Democrats have to pay a price for this one too.
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