Chip Franklin Show - Jan 5

President Obama started off the new year with a press for more gun control. Chip Franklin and I go at it again in our lively discussion on this issue.

Transcript:

Chip Franklin
Gayle Trotter is a political analyst and commentator and an attorney, as well, and often a foil for me. Hi, how are you doing, Gayle?

Gayle Trotter

Great to be with you, Chip. How are you?

I’m good. I know you were probably crying, too, this morning watching the President speak; I’m sure.

Yes, watching the rights go away.

What rights were actually eroded today?

What makes me really sad is that we have a legislature set up to vote on laws for our country. And when the President acts as he has on these very vague ideas or designs that he has on trying to limit our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms, then he is not only just legislating from the Oval Office, he’s doing it about the most important rights that we, as Americans, have. Those to defend ourselves, our family, and to make sure that we have the proper relationship with our government. So I was weeping, not literally, but I was very sad watching it, because I do, like you – you said at the beginning – you think that we do need to take action. But I think the President is leading the nation in the wrong direction after many, many times he’s been told by the nation that this is not the answer and, most importantly, all of the things that he’s proposing, none of these proposals would have stopped any of the recent mass shootings. So he is doubling down on what his policy is. But it really makes you think what is the real objective of gun control in this administration? I don’t think it’s to limit violence in our society. I don’t think it’s to limit gun violence and I don’t think it’s because he wants to make Americans safer, unfortunately.

Well, what is it then?

I think it’s an idea that the government can exercise control over us, because if you look at the data there are over two –

That’s kind of crazy. That’s kind of crazy. I mean I was with you up until then.

Well, Chip, let me tell you.

I was with you up until then.

Let me explain to you. I have a new piece, a new op-ed coming out that is based on an amicus brief that a group filed with the Supreme Court in 2008 when the Supreme Court heard the D.C. v. Heller case, which I’m sure you’re familiar with; it was a pivotal Second Amendment case.

The first time ever the Supreme Court has acceded the Second Amendment gives individuals a right to own firearms. The first time the Supreme Court ever addressed in its history.

Right, because it had been part of the history of the nation and going back to England as well. So it was something that had not come up. It was an assumption that we have an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Actually though in the American Revolution, you weren’t allowed to own a gun in Boston ironically, but go ahead.

And that’s exactly the point. Why we were able to overthrow the British government or the king at that point.

This is after we had ceded from Britain. This is not when the Tories and the colonists were battling over what to do, this was afterwards. I mean during the –

There have been many laws that were ill founded and unconstitutional. So whether or not a particular law was put in place, that doesn’t mean that it was constitutional or not constitutional or more importantly that it was prudential or not prudential. But back on this brief, which I think it’s really important to share with you, it is well documented in this brief that gun control is the first step towards genocide and oppression and that’s something that a lot of people don’t want to talk about. But if you look back at the history of the 20^th Century, 70 million mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters were victims of oppressive governments and there was a three-step process that these oppressive governments used in order to create their aim of mass oppression and genocide. They had gun control, which started out with little simple things and then escalated to registration of all firearms. Then there was confiscation.

Okay. But, Gayle, I’ve got to stop you. You know Scalia wrote the majority opinion that you’re quoting from in the Heller case.

It’s the brief. I’m quoting the brief, not the majority opinion.

Okay. Again, who wrote the brief? Was it one of his – I’m sure Scalia didn’t write the brief. I’m sure the brief was written by somebody –

No briefs are outside parties so they’re called amicus briefs, friends of the court.

How many briefs were a part of this Heller case? Do we know?

There were many. I think in favor of preserving the Second Amendment right for all American citizens, there were probably ten.

So that’s even more important. It was a third party brief that came in with this opinion that leads to genocide. Don’t you think that’s a little over the top?

No, it’s not. Because they did research on this showing that many examples in the 20^th Century, like Communist China, Nationalist China, Uganda, Guatemala.

We had a constitution and that’s why those things don’t happen here. That’s why they won’t, but –

Right. That’s my exact point, Chip. You have hit the nail on the head. We have a Second Amendment and when James Madison was writing the adoption of the Constitution, he said the American people have the advantage of being armed, unlike citizens of other countries.

But, Gayle, he owned slaves while he wrote the Ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Don’t you see that it’s a fraud? It was broken?

And that’s part of my piece that I wrote, too, is that you think it can’t happen here; it’s already happened here. We had slaves in the South.

No, no, no. We brought it here.

Who were unable to own firearms.

We brought it here and it was good people that got rid of it, but in the meantime, we did enact a genocide against the American Indian who were pretty well armed, they were just outnumbered and literally outgunned. Here is the deal is that you have people in this country, the 99 percent of the people that own a firearm, that have never ever and won’t be trained how to use them under duress. And you talk to cops, 99 percent of these cops will tell you this and they’ve talked to many police, they get the pucker factor. When bullets start firing – if you want somebody in the theater, in Aurora, shooting back at Holmes, than even more people die. The innocent people around that person.

No, I have an inconvenient statistic for you, Chip. In less than one percent of defensive gun uses in the United States is someone injured or killed, less than one percent, and we have over two million defensive gun uses per year.

I’m talking about the mass shootings. And a mass shooting when somebody was AR15, and you’re shooting a Glock back, you’re going to lose. And James Holmes, by the way, was head to toe –

No, that’s not true. It gives you a fighting chance.

No, no, no, it doesn’t, because he was head to toe in body armor.

It does.

That would have protected him. Okay. But I want you to hang; can you hang for a little bit? We’ll take some phone calls and we can scream at each other in a minute.

Yes, yes.

Okay. Good. That’s Gayle Trotter. Nice enough to come on and do this with me. We’ll get your phone calls. My opinion is that Obama didn’t go far enough and I’ll tell you why and she’ll tell you why she thinks I’m wrong, like people love to do. It’s 2:27. I’m Chip Franklin KGO810.

[commercial break]

Thank you, boss man. It is 24 minutes before 3:00. Shrimp boy trial looks like it’s been given to the jury now and we’ll talk to Scott Lettieri in about 15 minutes and find out – well, there is actually something really weird happen on the last day and we’ll have that for you in a couple minutes. Here is the thing and Gayle Trotter is nice enough to stay with me, a political analyst, commentator, and lawyer and believes that the President overstepped his bounds to say the least. Is that accurate?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay. And my point is that we have 300 million guns, by some estimates, in this country and I say that’s too many guns and I say that we should start tomorrow making it even more difficult to get a gun. Make it exceedingly difficult. Let me ask you a question, since most people never use a gun in self-defense, in fact, if you believe the CDC – and I’m sure you don’t – you’re more than two times likely to have that gun used against you or against somebody in your family when you have it in your home, what’s the –

Those are inaccurate statistics. A lot of those studies that people on the left rely on to push for more gun control on law-abiding citizens are flawed and I know we don’t have time to go into that. But I would caution everybody to check those statistics, because most of those studies are flawed.

How about this stat: 87 percent of the Republicans in the House and Senate accept money from the NRA and they make opinions against guns. What’s your thought on that?

The NRA is the number one advocate of Second Amendment freedoms, which undergird all of our other freedoms. So the NRA is a powerful voice for those people. The 100 million people in America who own guns and I would say the reason why most people don’t have to use guns to defend themselves even though over two million defensive gun uses per year occur, the reason is because people know that we are an armed society. So it helps. There have been many, many studies that show the more guns there are, the less crime. And I’m talking about not just gun violence, but rape, robbery, assault, violent attack, and I think this other statistic is really important to remind you about, Chip. Over 90 percent of violent crime in the United States occurs without a firearm.

So if we give every American like two or three guns, you think it’d be a safer society.

If they chose to. If they wanted to.

All right. So if Americans decided they were going to arm themselves, you’re saying – if everybody listening to me went out and got a gun for their car, got a gun for their house, had a concealed carry gun.

They couldn’t. It would be against the law.

Let’s say you guys got your way and that everybody could have a gun, it’d be that much safer with everybody with guns, because the bad guys would go, ‘Oh, my God.’

I have to put an asterisk. I wouldn’t allow felons to have guns. I wouldn’t allow people who are on psychotropic drugs or have a history of violence to have guns, but if you’re talking about everyone in the country who is above the age of majority and has the ability and the desire to go out and get the training and to have the safety requirements in your stores to –

But you don’t have to have training; you don’t need training. Most of the people –

No, but you’re asking, like, if I could create the ideal America.

But the vast majority of these gun owners don’t have training.

Actually, a lot of gun owners have more training than the police officers do.

Not a lot, the vast majority. Estimates as high as 80 percent of people who own firearms have never been trained to use them.

It depends how you define training. If you mean, like, sitting at a desk and taking actual classes.

A YouTube video doesn’t count as training, okay.

Versus growing up with guns and having access to, you know, shooting ranges (crosstalk) –

World of Warcraft does not count as training. Okay. I’m talking about real training.

It does. It definitely does. It’s real training.

A video game?

(crosstalk)

Is training?

No, no, I’m sorry. I said ranges. Going to ranges with their fathers or –

Yeah, but that doesn’t train you for when people are shooting at you and your pulse is at 140 and you don’t know how to respond. People don’t know how to do that and that’s what we’re talking about. You’re saying –

Police officers don’t either, but we don’t disarm our police officers.

Well, that’s a great point. Cops don’t.

They have the same problem.

In fact, cops will tell you that – see what the police understand is that they don’t pull their gun out and shoot unless they have a clear shot to kill; at least they’re not supposed to. People aren’t taught that. They don’t have that. Police officers are taught how to respond in these situations. They’re taught the pucker factor is going to happen. People don’t know that. Because they listen to people – and I don’t meant this personally – but people like you to come and say, “Get a gun and you’re going to be safer.” They’re not going to be safer.

No, I say get a gun, get trained, take safety measures, and then not only will you and your family be safer, but you will make the entire society safer. Because people will know, criminals will know, that the risk to them if they go out and try to do something violent or some sort of criminal activity, the risk is much higher to them, because they don’t know who is armed and who is unarmed. And if you’re saying that more law-abiding citizens will be armed, then it’s more likely to them that they’re going to face resistance and we want to be able to create a safer society and President Obama’s strategies have not worked. They’re not working. They wouldn’t have stopped any of the recent mass shootings and it makes me question why he’s on such a, you know, warpath to continue to limit Second Amendment rights.

My plan would stop, that mother of the Newtown shooter would never have been able to get guns. And, you know, but, again, you know, look, here is the bottom line. You’ve won. Your side is going to win. I mean the majority Americans agree even though they don’t know the real statistics and how people really respond. And it’s true; you guys have won. And you’re going to get your guns and we’re going to continue to be the Wild Wild West and I just, I think it’s sad, personally. Hey, how can we follow you on Twitter? What’s your Twitter handle?

Gayle Trotter, G-A-Y-L-E, T-R-O-T-T-E-R, and I share your concern. I want to make a safer community, too. We just differ on what we think will work.

We agree on that. All right. Thanks a lot, Gayle. As always, I appreciate you being with me. Thank you.