First, I deeply appreciate Jesse running this interview. Eileen McCarron is an incredible leader who has been working extremely hard on this issue for decades. Her work deserves far more attention than that of Here 4 the Kids, and it is sad that many of those in media chase what is flashy more than what is important.
Second, I'm a marketing idiot and forgot to plug GVPedia's Substack in addition to the GVPedia website: (armedwithreason.substack.com).
Third, to indirectly respond to some of the comments, Eileen is a very evidence based. If a policy doesn't work, she doesn't pursue it. In terms of the impact of weakening concealed carry laws (from may-issue to shall-issue, and more recently from shall-issue to permitless carry), here is a summary from 2021 (while 2 years old, the academic evidence has grown even stronger since then):
"From 1997-2021, 65 academic studies on concealed carry laws and their impact on violent crime have been published: 18 find a decrease, 21 find no effect (or mixed), and 26 find an increase. Forty percent of studies find that loosening concealed carry laws has a detrimental effect on crime, which is a plurality. Only 28% find a beneficial impact....
Since the 2005 NRC report, 35 studies were conducted on loosening concealed carry laws, five of which find a decrease, seven find no effect (or mixed), and 23 find an increase in crime. In summary, 66% of the modern academic literature finds that loosening concealed carry laws has a detrimental effect on crime, while only 14% finds a beneficial impact."
The primary causal pathway for this is through increased gun thefts as more people carry with ever decreasing amounts of required training. A firearm is vastly more likely to be used to harm its owner, the owner's loved ones, or be stolen than to be used in self defense (and before you cite Kleck, the NRC report, or the "CDC study," I've written a 12 part series on this for our Substack, which is summarized with helpful links here: https://www.gvpedia.org/dgu-lie/).
If you still want to have a gun for self-defense, that is your right. Just please be aware of the risk, securely store it, and do more training than required (which in most states now is 0).
So hear me out... if I have a gun for self defense and laws are passed so that I can conceal it in fewer and fewer places, wouldn't that make it more likely to be left in my car and stolen by a criminal?
First I'll say that in the overwhelming majority of states, the trend of GFZs (gun free zones) is in the exact opposite direction, as in there are more and more places where one can carry. And yet there are more than 200,000 guns reported stolen annually (unreported thefts mean this number is likely closer to 400,000), and police chiefs across the country have reported dramatic spikes in car related thefts even before Bruen was decided.
Second, the easy solution is to have a safe in your car (one firmly attached to car so they don't just steal the safe), to also lock your car, and to not have stickers announcing the presence of a gun. The overwhelming majority of gun thefts from cars could be stopped with those 3 easy steps.
To pull this thread, a reduction in gun free zones doesn't mean there's a causal relation in gun theft, right?
As for the second point- I'm totally with you on the sticker thing. I shake my head every time I see a Ram truck (it's always a goddman Ram) with a Glock sticker on his back window. Locking your doors seems obvious.
The safe is better than nothing, but it's incredibly hard to understate how little theft protection vehicle safes offer. They usually operate on a cabinet tumbler lock and are made out of very thin sheet metal.
In terms of safes, I mean a dedicated gun safe, not one of the cheap sheet metal things that I agree would do little (though they are definitely better than nothing, as most thieves are going for the obvious grab and then moving to the next car).
I'd also say that having a gun on ones person is not a guarantee against theft either, as unless you are John Wick, getting out of a situation where a gun is already drawn on you is unlikely (not impossible, but the odds are not in your favor).
I'm not aware of any study done on gun thefts and GFZs (largely because the data would be so insanely murky, if it even were to exist). My main point was that I've seen no evidence that increasing the areas in which one can carry has reduced gun thefts, while there has been a documented increase in gun thefts at a time when gun sales surged around the pandemic and into the summer of 2020. Correlation is not causation, but the causal pathway of more guns in public meaning more guns are being stolen in public is pretty suggestive at least. There are earlier studies documented a relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and more gun thefts, but that includes homes as well so isn't directly related to our current conversation.
I've got to go do my actual jobs, so if I'm silent for a while that is why. Thank you for the respectful conversation.
Understood, and I thank you as well. I like listening to people I disagree with, though I think we have common ground even though I hold my gun rights pretty dear.
"I'm not aware of any study done on gun thefts and GFZs (largely because the data would be so insanely murky, if it even were to exist). My main point was that I've seen no evidence that increasing the areas in which one can carry has reduced gun thefts, while there has been a documented increase in gun thefts at a time when gun sales surged around the pandemic and into the summer of 2020."
This is kinda what I was getting at. Gun ownership has increased by a TON, even leading up to the pandemic. So if you're more likely to find a gun in a car anyway, you're double-likely to find one in the parking lot of a college campus or a post office where you can't carry. (Actually, there's some legal murkiness over the post office marking lot.) If gun ownership has increased so much, but we're worried about gun theft, it seems like designated no-carry zones make easy targets for people looking to shave a serial number off a gun. I don't mean to put words in your mouth here but given that you're not a fan of concealed carry laws, I imagine you'd think of this as a moot point since if people didn't leave the house with a gun, they wouldn't have to leave it in their car.
Last point on the gun safe thing- the part on most console safes that's easiest to defeat is the lock. The locks the industry uses can be tapped with a screwdriver and a hammer a couple times and will fail in seconds. Most of them are really barely better than a locking glovebox. I'm just venting though, because I'm shopping for one and I'm pretty disappointed by the market's offerings.
I’m a gun violence researcher who comes at this from a different perspective, reporting trends so that we can identify local, state level and national fluctuations over time. You might find my Substack of interest.
Thanks for commenting here, Devin. I thoroughly appreciate your comments, especially your third point about what kind of policies, in the very general, McCarron advocates for. I'm glad she's apparently a "let's try this as it seems to work" person and not a "let's do this because it's what I think should be true" or "let's do this because it feels good" person.
I live in Florida, a place everyone thinks is Super Gun Central. I’m from Indiana, which has ten times the gun culture Florida does.
businesses are cancelling conventions here because of the recently passed unlicensed carry law--which over half the states have, and had before we did.
No, but seriously, if they don’t realize how ridiculous that sounds to the average normie who they need to win over to build any kind of momentum as a movement, then they are out of their minds. Anybody working at a non-profit could tell you that your goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Banning the human inclination to do evil that has been present since we climbed out of the primordial ooze is…none of those.
That statement, more than anything else, shows me they are not a serious organization and they have no actual intention of moving the needle on gun crime, climate change, or anything else other than their own publicity.
Lmao H4TK's first response to you is that good old word salad "rooted in white supremacy and anti blackness". Is there anything that they think that doesn't apply to?
What I think is funny is these are often the exact same people who want to “defund the police” and “abolish prisons” and think that “police are descended from slave patrols.” For example,
Okay. Abolish the police. Who’s going to go house to house and take away all the guns? Social workers? People who ask nicely? Saira Rao and Tina Strawn?
You can have gun control, or you can get rid of the cops and abolish prisons. You can’t do both.
If you ever managed to get a real answer out of one of these goofballs on police abolition, their answer would essentially be that roving gangs of (appropriately left-wing) vigilantes would enforce the new utopia, although life would be so perfect that there would be no need anyway, as nobody would feel the need to transgress against their fellow man.
While I disagree with McCarron on guns, she, on the whole, seems reasonable and someone with whom one could have a productive discussion on guns. (I say "seems" because I don't believe she said at any point in this what her specific end metrics and/or policies are, so it's possible she just has slightly-less-crazy aims than H4TK, but based on the rest of the interview, I don't think that's the case).
And then there's H4TK and Strawn. Just... Jesus Christ. How can anyone actually believe the things she, and by extension H4TK, says? Just complete extreme-left word vomit.
Agreed, but I did find it interesting that her measure of success seems to be “how many gun laws can we get passed”. Are any of these laws actually effective? Are they preventing shootings? I worry she suffers from the same tendency of a lot of the “practical/reasonable/common sense” anti-gun crowd, which is that they focus on low hanging fruit restrictions that mostly seem to make things more inconvenient for people who want to own guns legally, without actually doing much to make murders less likely. And they spend almost all of their time focused on high profile mass shootings, which on the one hand makes sense from a visibility/advocacy perspective, since it drives people to support them, but on the other hand remains a pretty tiny sliver of the overall gun violence picture.
The idea that legal concealed carry is what “normalized carrying guns” is kinda bonkers (and exactly backwards, it was largely a response to people fearful of being defenseless against gun-based street crime). I don’t think there’s any actual evidence that legal concealed carry (especially in states that require a permit to do so) is significantly driving crime.
“Guns stolen from vehicles” is an interesting point. It’s good that she acknowledges that illegally acquired guns are a big part of the problem. Of course gun promoters might say “well maybe if there weren’t so many ‘gun free zones’, owners would leave guns in cars less”. I don’t really know how to fix that, especially since police seem to largely shrug at vehicle break ins any more (not sure if it’s as bad in Denver, but in LA they will literally do nothing except take a report for insurance purposes). I guess you could argue that if public carry were banned entirely, that would reduce the supply available to steal, but hopefully you can see why that’s a tough sell to gun owners - “we’re going to restrict your rights because somebody else might steal your property and then use it in a crime”.
I grew up in Colorado. Hunters used to walk through grocery stores with .a 308s slung over their shoulders and a snake pistol on their hips. Safest place I’ve ever lived.
Look at the sorry situation of my home state now.
How to convince these people that changing a law mean absolutely nothing to people who break laws?
They have to understand which people are the ones causing these statistics in the first place, which they will never admit to. So it's all just theater. And it's working; they keep getting paid to continue this anti-gun grift.
It’s also noteworthy that there’s been so much gun violence in Aurora, Colorado despite Colorado passing like a dozen new laws after the movie theater shooting. I will be publishing a bunch of data analyses that include numerous cities in Colorado in the upcoming weeks and months. Access to guns is a partial explanation, but it does not tell the whole story. I grew up in Alaska and the handful of cities up there have some of the lowest gun violence rates in the entire country. We have a lot bigger problems with people being addicted to meth in Alaska than shootings arising out of interpersonal conflict.
I’ll add that I do also appreciate her noting that red flag laws need to be enforced. I’m I think justifiably worried that such laws could be abused, and law enforcement has a bad habit of taking stuff from people on dubious probable cause and then dragging the owners through kafkaesque legal hell to get it back.
But at the same time, it’s disturbing how many mass shooters were “known wolves” that were allowed to slip through the cracks many times before they finally went on their rampages.
I'm with you on this. On the one hand, I think the benefits of a red flag law are obvious.
On the other hand, I remember reading (listening to a podcast?) where a suspected serial killer was at large, and the local police received hundreds of tips from different women calling to let the police know that they were pretty sure the killer was each of their respective ex-boyfriends. Depriving somebody of a constitutional right based on a tip makes me cry hypocrite on some judicial system reformer types.
"Agreed, but I did find it interesting that her measure of success seems to be “how many gun laws can we get passed”. Are any of these laws actually effective? Are they preventing shootings? I worry she suffers from the same tendency of a lot of the “practical/reasonable/common sense” anti-gun crowd, which is that they focus on low hanging fruit restrictions that mostly seem to make things more inconvenient for people who want to own guns legally, without actually doing much to make murders less likely."
Exactly this. It starts feeling like team sports, you're scoring one for your side without really caring if it makes a practical difference.
My governor just tried to ban concealed and open carry in a public health order, and in her introductory presser, she clearly stated that lawful, responsible gun owners are not the problem- at all. Then, when pushed by a journalist in the crowd, she admitted that she didn't think criminals would stop carrying guns because of her new decree. So what are we doing here?
Yeah, that's typically my problem with gum control advocates is that no matter what happens, the answer is always, "we just didn't go far enough in out laws and so need more!"
I have a similar critique of the measure of success being how many new laws we can pass, since the vast majority of gun murders and shootings don’t results in an arrest, and even then sentences are incredibly short for most offenses.
You might find my Substack informative:
I publish deep dives of firearm homicide and injury data from an over 1300 American cities. One thing that’s notable is some of the cities with the lowest levels of gun violence also happen to have open carry, like Billings, Montana. I definitely think people stealing guns, especially from vehicles is well substantiated by the evidence as contributing to the pipeline of illegal guns that are being trafficked and used in crimes. So I can see the link between that, and the increase an open carry laws, but there is a missing mechanism which has to do with the things that structure behavior, and intent to engage in violence.
Saira Rao is a sleazy grifter. She exploited her version of 'racism' until it was no long profitable. So she moved on the gun control. I predict that she will move on to 'new, new' thing when her latest grift is no longer paying dividends. Actually, she already has, 'climate change' is her latest grift. What is her next grift? I don't know.
Yeah, I think the $2K per plate dinners ran their course, and she moved on to creating a sham non-profit organization to solicit $20 donations. I'm a little surprised at the climate change add-on. Maybe she wants to prepare for a future pivot, seeing how the block-highways/glue yourself to something anti-fossil fuel group are so widely applauded and beloved. I'm putting my money on a David Icke/QAnon path for her, something completely off the rails.
The thing with people like Saira Rao is that success is the last thing they need. Rather like the Democrat & media establishment's need for Trump, the point is all in the performance.
Anyway, I would like you all to send me money for my brilliant and very caring new organisation SABTRN4E. Stop All Bad Things Right Now For Everyone will not rest until every bad thing is stopped for everyone. If you don't support this, you are in favour of all bad things.
This was a great article. There's a disincentive to follow local news these days, given people's attention to national issues. So, I'm a Coloradan who had no information about people like McCarron. I don't have well-formulated opinions about guns, so that prevents me from participating in activist causes. But I worked on the March for Science here in Denver, and I wish I could have worked with someone like her on that problem because what I experienced was frustrating and underwhelming in the long run.
Jesse, I know it's difficult, but I hope you continue to bring attention to local issues like this and reasonable people like McCarron. It would make me, and I think others, more hopeful about the country's direction.
I remember hearing about this when Rao was shaming white women for travelling to see Taylor Swift in concert instead of flying out to support her protest in Colorado. I sometimes wonder about the damage she did even with that one unhinged statement.
Anyway, great article and interview! McCarron’s reasonableness and deep knowledge about this issue was a salve to the teeth-grinding I was doing reading about Rao attempting to set back yet another movement by 100 years.
Love this, and appreciate you getting deep into the sausage-making. McCarron's combination of deeply-held conviction and unwillingness to badmouth or burn any bridge was a pleasure to read.
The sheriffs in Washington have also unilaterally refused to enforce many firearm laws in the past few years. Sheriffs in the US are startlingly unaccountable to the State, which means elections are the only way to punish them for deciding to take the Constitution into their own hands. Of course, some counties find this more palatable than others. But the sheriffs' actions sure pushed me further toward a hardline anti-gun position than I had been before.
I agree with you. And refusal to enforce gun-control laws is not unique to a particular end of the political spectrum. Ultra blue urban prosecutor’s offices are also declining to uphold gun possession laws in the name of “social justice.” I don’t understand the compulsion to create more laws when we can barely be bothered to enforce those that already exist.
Every elected official swears to reject the mandates of the Legislature and interpret the Constitution on a case-by-case basis according to their own personal idea of what the laws should be?
These are elected officials in *law enforcement*. They don't get to pick and choose what laws they like and don't like.
"I, (individual will state name) do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter."
No to rejecting the legislature. Yes to defending the Constitution. And for the Second Amendment, the interpretation is clear.
Kinda ironic that Rao believes she can bypass normal protocol and go straight to demanding action from the president. If that isn’t *Karen asking to speak to the manager*, I don’t know what is.
This interview drives me a little nuts, but I'm a gun owner in Bernalillo County, NM so I'm a little hot under the collar right now.
The "gun show loophole" is the biggest misnomer in the gun debate, and I blame gun control advocates for creating it to try to get gun shows protested. The real loophole it's pointing to is a private party sale loophole that exists because regular citizens don't have access to the federal instant background check system that gun shops do. The fix for this is to treat private party sales like out-of-state transfers and have them take place at a FFL dealer.
Moving on...
"And I’m just going to editorialize here: I actually think a lot of our problems in the country are because of concealed carry."
That's weird, because concealed carry holders are actually less likely to commit violent crimes than the general public. Maybe they're just really good instigators.
"Half the stolen guns in Denver are stolen out of vehicles, because people are carrying guns around. People leave them in their car when they go in someplace that can’t have them..."
No obvious conflict here?
I'm a gun owner, but I actually support gun safety laws when they make sense. If you're trying to pass things just to pass things and are a political activist who is going off your gut instinct like this, I take issue.
I am sympathetic to your perspective! I research gun violence in over 1300 American cities, and one thing my findings show is that there is substantial geographical variation that is not explained by state or local gun laws. I don’t disagree that easy access to guns explains why we have such a high firearm homicide and injury rate in the United States, but fluctuations year to year are not explained simply by the amount of guns since that is relatively constant, and as you state legal gun owners are not the ones committing the lions share of violence. You might find my newsletter interesting. Some of the safest US cities are in places with both very strict and very lenient gun laws. And laws aren’t or if anything if they are not enforced.
I'm the Devin Hughes mentioned in the article.
First, I deeply appreciate Jesse running this interview. Eileen McCarron is an incredible leader who has been working extremely hard on this issue for decades. Her work deserves far more attention than that of Here 4 the Kids, and it is sad that many of those in media chase what is flashy more than what is important.
Second, I'm a marketing idiot and forgot to plug GVPedia's Substack in addition to the GVPedia website: (armedwithreason.substack.com).
Third, to indirectly respond to some of the comments, Eileen is a very evidence based. If a policy doesn't work, she doesn't pursue it. In terms of the impact of weakening concealed carry laws (from may-issue to shall-issue, and more recently from shall-issue to permitless carry), here is a summary from 2021 (while 2 years old, the academic evidence has grown even stronger since then):
"From 1997-2021, 65 academic studies on concealed carry laws and their impact on violent crime have been published: 18 find a decrease, 21 find no effect (or mixed), and 26 find an increase. Forty percent of studies find that loosening concealed carry laws has a detrimental effect on crime, which is a plurality. Only 28% find a beneficial impact....
Since the 2005 NRC report, 35 studies were conducted on loosening concealed carry laws, five of which find a decrease, seven find no effect (or mixed), and 23 find an increase in crime. In summary, 66% of the modern academic literature finds that loosening concealed carry laws has a detrimental effect on crime, while only 14% finds a beneficial impact."
https://www.gvpedia.org/clarifying-misinformation-in-nysrpa-v-bruen-amicus-briefs/ (the list of studies is at the end of the admittedly quite long post)
The primary causal pathway for this is through increased gun thefts as more people carry with ever decreasing amounts of required training. A firearm is vastly more likely to be used to harm its owner, the owner's loved ones, or be stolen than to be used in self defense (and before you cite Kleck, the NRC report, or the "CDC study," I've written a 12 part series on this for our Substack, which is summarized with helpful links here: https://www.gvpedia.org/dgu-lie/).
If you still want to have a gun for self-defense, that is your right. Just please be aware of the risk, securely store it, and do more training than required (which in most states now is 0).
So hear me out... if I have a gun for self defense and laws are passed so that I can conceal it in fewer and fewer places, wouldn't that make it more likely to be left in my car and stolen by a criminal?
First I'll say that in the overwhelming majority of states, the trend of GFZs (gun free zones) is in the exact opposite direction, as in there are more and more places where one can carry. And yet there are more than 200,000 guns reported stolen annually (unreported thefts mean this number is likely closer to 400,000), and police chiefs across the country have reported dramatic spikes in car related thefts even before Bruen was decided.
Second, the easy solution is to have a safe in your car (one firmly attached to car so they don't just steal the safe), to also lock your car, and to not have stickers announcing the presence of a gun. The overwhelming majority of gun thefts from cars could be stopped with those 3 easy steps.
To pull this thread, a reduction in gun free zones doesn't mean there's a causal relation in gun theft, right?
As for the second point- I'm totally with you on the sticker thing. I shake my head every time I see a Ram truck (it's always a goddman Ram) with a Glock sticker on his back window. Locking your doors seems obvious.
The safe is better than nothing, but it's incredibly hard to understate how little theft protection vehicle safes offer. They usually operate on a cabinet tumbler lock and are made out of very thin sheet metal.
In terms of safes, I mean a dedicated gun safe, not one of the cheap sheet metal things that I agree would do little (though they are definitely better than nothing, as most thieves are going for the obvious grab and then moving to the next car).
I'd also say that having a gun on ones person is not a guarantee against theft either, as unless you are John Wick, getting out of a situation where a gun is already drawn on you is unlikely (not impossible, but the odds are not in your favor).
I'm not aware of any study done on gun thefts and GFZs (largely because the data would be so insanely murky, if it even were to exist). My main point was that I've seen no evidence that increasing the areas in which one can carry has reduced gun thefts, while there has been a documented increase in gun thefts at a time when gun sales surged around the pandemic and into the summer of 2020. Correlation is not causation, but the causal pathway of more guns in public meaning more guns are being stolen in public is pretty suggestive at least. There are earlier studies documented a relationship between higher levels of gun ownership and more gun thefts, but that includes homes as well so isn't directly related to our current conversation.
I've got to go do my actual jobs, so if I'm silent for a while that is why. Thank you for the respectful conversation.
Understood, and I thank you as well. I like listening to people I disagree with, though I think we have common ground even though I hold my gun rights pretty dear.
"I'm not aware of any study done on gun thefts and GFZs (largely because the data would be so insanely murky, if it even were to exist). My main point was that I've seen no evidence that increasing the areas in which one can carry has reduced gun thefts, while there has been a documented increase in gun thefts at a time when gun sales surged around the pandemic and into the summer of 2020."
This is kinda what I was getting at. Gun ownership has increased by a TON, even leading up to the pandemic. So if you're more likely to find a gun in a car anyway, you're double-likely to find one in the parking lot of a college campus or a post office where you can't carry. (Actually, there's some legal murkiness over the post office marking lot.) If gun ownership has increased so much, but we're worried about gun theft, it seems like designated no-carry zones make easy targets for people looking to shave a serial number off a gun. I don't mean to put words in your mouth here but given that you're not a fan of concealed carry laws, I imagine you'd think of this as a moot point since if people didn't leave the house with a gun, they wouldn't have to leave it in their car.
Last point on the gun safe thing- the part on most console safes that's easiest to defeat is the lock. The locks the industry uses can be tapped with a screwdriver and a hammer a couple times and will fail in seconds. Most of them are really barely better than a locking glovebox. I'm just venting though, because I'm shopping for one and I'm pretty disappointed by the market's offerings.
I’m a gun violence researcher who comes at this from a different perspective, reporting trends so that we can identify local, state level and national fluctuations over time. You might find my Substack of interest.
https://open.substack.com/pub/1000citiesproject?r=d65gn&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for commenting here, Devin. I thoroughly appreciate your comments, especially your third point about what kind of policies, in the very general, McCarron advocates for. I'm glad she's apparently a "let's try this as it seems to work" person and not a "let's do this because it's what I think should be true" or "let's do this because it feels good" person.
Yes, I was also very impressed with her interview. It gave me hope, as conversations about gun control seldom do.
I live in Florida, a place everyone thinks is Super Gun Central. I’m from Indiana, which has ten times the gun culture Florida does.
businesses are cancelling conventions here because of the recently passed unlicensed carry law--which over half the states have, and had before we did.
no one knows a damned thing.
As a Texan, your first sentence made me exclaim very gunly.
“We are here to BAN inhumanity.”
Well, good luck with that.
No, but seriously, if they don’t realize how ridiculous that sounds to the average normie who they need to win over to build any kind of momentum as a movement, then they are out of their minds. Anybody working at a non-profit could tell you that your goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Banning the human inclination to do evil that has been present since we climbed out of the primordial ooze is…none of those.
That statement, more than anything else, shows me they are not a serious organization and they have no actual intention of moving the needle on gun crime, climate change, or anything else other than their own publicity.
Plus, hasn't "banning inhumanity," or immorality or what have you, been what every awful, authoritarian government has said it was trying to do?
…Immediately prior to becoming extremely inhumane, indeed.
Most people who claim to be “anti-authoritarian” are pretty authoritarian in their own way.
Yeah they’re obviously not serious. They’re in it for the money and the clout, full stop.
Lmao H4TK's first response to you is that good old word salad "rooted in white supremacy and anti blackness". Is there anything that they think that doesn't apply to?
What I think is funny is these are often the exact same people who want to “defund the police” and “abolish prisons” and think that “police are descended from slave patrols.” For example,
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sairarao_rest-in-peace-tyre-nichols-rest-in-power-activity-7025084465697710080-Bl9h
Okay. Abolish the police. Who’s going to go house to house and take away all the guns? Social workers? People who ask nicely? Saira Rao and Tina Strawn?
You can have gun control, or you can get rid of the cops and abolish prisons. You can’t do both.
If you ever managed to get a real answer out of one of these goofballs on police abolition, their answer would essentially be that roving gangs of (appropriately left-wing) vigilantes would enforce the new utopia, although life would be so perfect that there would be no need anyway, as nobody would feel the need to transgress against their fellow man.
Just like what happened in the CHAZ zone and nothing bad came from that whatsoever
One wonders if she believes the Black Panthers relying on the 2A to open-carry in Oakland were practicing “white supremacy”
While I disagree with McCarron on guns, she, on the whole, seems reasonable and someone with whom one could have a productive discussion on guns. (I say "seems" because I don't believe she said at any point in this what her specific end metrics and/or policies are, so it's possible she just has slightly-less-crazy aims than H4TK, but based on the rest of the interview, I don't think that's the case).
And then there's H4TK and Strawn. Just... Jesus Christ. How can anyone actually believe the things she, and by extension H4TK, says? Just complete extreme-left word vomit.
Agreed, but I did find it interesting that her measure of success seems to be “how many gun laws can we get passed”. Are any of these laws actually effective? Are they preventing shootings? I worry she suffers from the same tendency of a lot of the “practical/reasonable/common sense” anti-gun crowd, which is that they focus on low hanging fruit restrictions that mostly seem to make things more inconvenient for people who want to own guns legally, without actually doing much to make murders less likely. And they spend almost all of their time focused on high profile mass shootings, which on the one hand makes sense from a visibility/advocacy perspective, since it drives people to support them, but on the other hand remains a pretty tiny sliver of the overall gun violence picture.
The idea that legal concealed carry is what “normalized carrying guns” is kinda bonkers (and exactly backwards, it was largely a response to people fearful of being defenseless against gun-based street crime). I don’t think there’s any actual evidence that legal concealed carry (especially in states that require a permit to do so) is significantly driving crime.
“Guns stolen from vehicles” is an interesting point. It’s good that she acknowledges that illegally acquired guns are a big part of the problem. Of course gun promoters might say “well maybe if there weren’t so many ‘gun free zones’, owners would leave guns in cars less”. I don’t really know how to fix that, especially since police seem to largely shrug at vehicle break ins any more (not sure if it’s as bad in Denver, but in LA they will literally do nothing except take a report for insurance purposes). I guess you could argue that if public carry were banned entirely, that would reduce the supply available to steal, but hopefully you can see why that’s a tough sell to gun owners - “we’re going to restrict your rights because somebody else might steal your property and then use it in a crime”.
I grew up in Colorado. Hunters used to walk through grocery stores with .a 308s slung over their shoulders and a snake pistol on their hips. Safest place I’ve ever lived.
Look at the sorry situation of my home state now.
How to convince these people that changing a law mean absolutely nothing to people who break laws?
They have to understand which people are the ones causing these statistics in the first place, which they will never admit to. So it's all just theater. And it's working; they keep getting paid to continue this anti-gun grift.
It’s also noteworthy that there’s been so much gun violence in Aurora, Colorado despite Colorado passing like a dozen new laws after the movie theater shooting. I will be publishing a bunch of data analyses that include numerous cities in Colorado in the upcoming weeks and months. Access to guns is a partial explanation, but it does not tell the whole story. I grew up in Alaska and the handful of cities up there have some of the lowest gun violence rates in the entire country. We have a lot bigger problems with people being addicted to meth in Alaska than shootings arising out of interpersonal conflict.
https://open.substack.com/pub/1000citiesproject?r=d65gn&utm_medium=ios
I’ll add that I do also appreciate her noting that red flag laws need to be enforced. I’m I think justifiably worried that such laws could be abused, and law enforcement has a bad habit of taking stuff from people on dubious probable cause and then dragging the owners through kafkaesque legal hell to get it back.
But at the same time, it’s disturbing how many mass shooters were “known wolves” that were allowed to slip through the cracks many times before they finally went on their rampages.
I'm with you on this. On the one hand, I think the benefits of a red flag law are obvious.
On the other hand, I remember reading (listening to a podcast?) where a suspected serial killer was at large, and the local police received hundreds of tips from different women calling to let the police know that they were pretty sure the killer was each of their respective ex-boyfriends. Depriving somebody of a constitutional right based on a tip makes me cry hypocrite on some judicial system reformer types.
"Agreed, but I did find it interesting that her measure of success seems to be “how many gun laws can we get passed”. Are any of these laws actually effective? Are they preventing shootings? I worry she suffers from the same tendency of a lot of the “practical/reasonable/common sense” anti-gun crowd, which is that they focus on low hanging fruit restrictions that mostly seem to make things more inconvenient for people who want to own guns legally, without actually doing much to make murders less likely."
Exactly this. It starts feeling like team sports, you're scoring one for your side without really caring if it makes a practical difference.
My governor just tried to ban concealed and open carry in a public health order, and in her introductory presser, she clearly stated that lawful, responsible gun owners are not the problem- at all. Then, when pushed by a journalist in the crowd, she admitted that she didn't think criminals would stop carrying guns because of her new decree. So what are we doing here?
Yeah, that's typically my problem with gum control advocates is that no matter what happens, the answer is always, "we just didn't go far enough in out laws and so need more!"
I have a similar critique of the measure of success being how many new laws we can pass, since the vast majority of gun murders and shootings don’t results in an arrest, and even then sentences are incredibly short for most offenses.
You might find my Substack informative:
I publish deep dives of firearm homicide and injury data from an over 1300 American cities. One thing that’s notable is some of the cities with the lowest levels of gun violence also happen to have open carry, like Billings, Montana. I definitely think people stealing guns, especially from vehicles is well substantiated by the evidence as contributing to the pipeline of illegal guns that are being trafficked and used in crimes. So I can see the link between that, and the increase an open carry laws, but there is a missing mechanism which has to do with the things that structure behavior, and intent to engage in violence.
https://open.substack.com/pub/1000citiesproject?r=d65gn&utm_medium=ios
Saira Rao is a sleazy grifter. She exploited her version of 'racism' until it was no long profitable. So she moved on the gun control. I predict that she will move on to 'new, new' thing when her latest grift is no longer paying dividends. Actually, she already has, 'climate change' is her latest grift. What is her next grift? I don't know.
Yeah, I think the $2K per plate dinners ran their course, and she moved on to creating a sham non-profit organization to solicit $20 donations. I'm a little surprised at the climate change add-on. Maybe she wants to prepare for a future pivot, seeing how the block-highways/glue yourself to something anti-fossil fuel group are so widely applauded and beloved. I'm putting my money on a David Icke/QAnon path for her, something completely off the rails.
The thing with people like Saira Rao is that success is the last thing they need. Rather like the Democrat & media establishment's need for Trump, the point is all in the performance.
Anyway, I would like you all to send me money for my brilliant and very caring new organisation SABTRN4E. Stop All Bad Things Right Now For Everyone will not rest until every bad thing is stopped for everyone. If you don't support this, you are in favour of all bad things.
This was a great article. There's a disincentive to follow local news these days, given people's attention to national issues. So, I'm a Coloradan who had no information about people like McCarron. I don't have well-formulated opinions about guns, so that prevents me from participating in activist causes. But I worked on the March for Science here in Denver, and I wish I could have worked with someone like her on that problem because what I experienced was frustrating and underwhelming in the long run.
Jesse, I know it's difficult, but I hope you continue to bring attention to local issues like this and reasonable people like McCarron. It would make me, and I think others, more hopeful about the country's direction.
Hi Folx,
Question- since folks is already gender neutral... what's with the x? Is it just an extra way to obnoxiously telegraph one's politix?
Great question!
Yes.
I remember hearing about this when Rao was shaming white women for travelling to see Taylor Swift in concert instead of flying out to support her protest in Colorado. I sometimes wonder about the damage she did even with that one unhinged statement.
Anyway, great article and interview! McCarron’s reasonableness and deep knowledge about this issue was a salve to the teeth-grinding I was doing reading about Rao attempting to set back yet another movement by 100 years.
Love this, and appreciate you getting deep into the sausage-making. McCarron's combination of deeply-held conviction and unwillingness to badmouth or burn any bridge was a pleasure to read.
The sheriffs in Washington have also unilaterally refused to enforce many firearm laws in the past few years. Sheriffs in the US are startlingly unaccountable to the State, which means elections are the only way to punish them for deciding to take the Constitution into their own hands. Of course, some counties find this more palatable than others. But the sheriffs' actions sure pushed me further toward a hardline anti-gun position than I had been before.
I agree with you. And refusal to enforce gun-control laws is not unique to a particular end of the political spectrum. Ultra blue urban prosecutor’s offices are also declining to uphold gun possession laws in the name of “social justice.” I don’t understand the compulsion to create more laws when we can barely be bothered to enforce those that already exist.
"which means elections are the only way to punish them for deciding to take the Constitution into their own hands."
That's their oath. It's what every elected official swears to do.
Every elected official swears to reject the mandates of the Legislature and interpret the Constitution on a case-by-case basis according to their own personal idea of what the laws should be?
These are elected officials in *law enforcement*. They don't get to pick and choose what laws they like and don't like.
Here's from Orange County:
"I, (individual will state name) do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter."
No to rejecting the legislature. Yes to defending the Constitution. And for the Second Amendment, the interpretation is clear.
That interpretation is flatly undemocratic and in direct contradiction with the concept of law enforcement.
A century plus of jurisprudence would suggest that the interpretation is only clear to you. And some sheriffs, I guess.
"That interpretation is flatly undemocratic and in direct contradiction with the concept of law enforcement. "
How?
"A century plus of jurisprudence would suggest that the interpretation is only clear to you. And some sheriffs, I guess. "
I'm not sure how people trying to limit an enumerated right makes the text unclear.
H4TK should make their proposal more palatable by also including a fossil-fuel buyback program.
Sure, ban fossil fuel. Let’s go back to burning wood and cut down every forest. Dam up every river so we can bring back water power.
See NM Governor’s attempted end run around the Constitution.
This will not end well.
I'm surprised there was no note about this. Seems relevant.
Kinda ironic that Rao believes she can bypass normal protocol and go straight to demanding action from the president. If that isn’t *Karen asking to speak to the manager*, I don’t know what is.
This interview drives me a little nuts, but I'm a gun owner in Bernalillo County, NM so I'm a little hot under the collar right now.
The "gun show loophole" is the biggest misnomer in the gun debate, and I blame gun control advocates for creating it to try to get gun shows protested. The real loophole it's pointing to is a private party sale loophole that exists because regular citizens don't have access to the federal instant background check system that gun shops do. The fix for this is to treat private party sales like out-of-state transfers and have them take place at a FFL dealer.
Moving on...
"And I’m just going to editorialize here: I actually think a lot of our problems in the country are because of concealed carry."
That's weird, because concealed carry holders are actually less likely to commit violent crimes than the general public. Maybe they're just really good instigators.
"Half the stolen guns in Denver are stolen out of vehicles, because people are carrying guns around. People leave them in their car when they go in someplace that can’t have them..."
No obvious conflict here?
I'm a gun owner, but I actually support gun safety laws when they make sense. If you're trying to pass things just to pass things and are a political activist who is going off your gut instinct like this, I take issue.
I am sympathetic to your perspective! I research gun violence in over 1300 American cities, and one thing my findings show is that there is substantial geographical variation that is not explained by state or local gun laws. I don’t disagree that easy access to guns explains why we have such a high firearm homicide and injury rate in the United States, but fluctuations year to year are not explained simply by the amount of guns since that is relatively constant, and as you state legal gun owners are not the ones committing the lions share of violence. You might find my newsletter interesting. Some of the safest US cities are in places with both very strict and very lenient gun laws. And laws aren’t or if anything if they are not enforced.
https://open.substack.com/pub/1000citiesproject?r=d65gn&utm_medium=ios