Is Universal Carry The Solution To The Gun Control Issue?

September 19, 2013

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Here’s a little Latin for you: quid leges sine moribus vanae proficient, which is “What good are laws when there are no morals?” This is from the Roman Horace. I think that goes a long way to explaining an awful lot of this. Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike: Cliff in New York, my buddy I play golf with, says, when a shot goes errant and doesn’t do what you want to do: Nice effort, nice effort. Cliff, how are you?

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Caller Cliff: I’m fine, Mike. I’m a recent listener since I subscribed to Sirius. I’m from the formerly-great State of New York. I come from a little bit further east than that, having emigrated from the UK. Full disclosure, I am a multiple weapon owner. Yes, I do sleep with them close by. It appears to me there are multiple issues here, military base security being one of them. Weapons rights or the denial thereof, I’m interested in that. I think you were barking up the wrong tree vis-à-vis this mass shooting hysteria. You cannot legislate against the mentally ill with respect to their owning of weapons. What we find out about these mentally-deficient shooters is that they are nuts after the event. How can you screen them out or scan them out before the event? You just can’t; it’s impossible. What about those who present well when they go to purchase their weapons? I presented pretty well when I bought my weapons. What happens if I subsequently to that date go nuts? How can you legislate that?

Mike: I don’t recall saying that you could legislate that.

Caller Cliff: No, I’m not taking issue with what you said. I’m just —

Mike: I’m trying to follow along here. Legislation is only as strong as the virtue of the people that live under it.

Caller Cliff: Correct. By the way, you’re talking to a scholar here, so I fully understand.

Mike: I could have spoken to you in Latin then.

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Caller Cliff: Here’s my totally simplistic solution, three words: universal carry rights. One good, well-trained gun owner could have stopped all of these nuts without exception. If it were me, God forbid I should ever find myself in that situation. I’m not prepared to say whether I’m licensed to carry or not. If it were me in close quarters, center of mass, he’s going down before he gets one into me, center of mass or two shots to the head. That’s it, over, no mass murders. I just don’t understand why you’re whipping this up into a lather. I did use the term former-great State of New York. You know what sort of repressive gun laws we have here. I find that my weapons were illegal overnight because of the capacity of my magazines. How ridiculous is that?

Mike: Pretty ridiculous.

Caller Cliff: Whoever said you don’t need a 30-round clip to shoot a deer, yeah, but if you do need a 30-round clip to shoot a deer, you better take up tiddly winks, fella.

Mike: You’re not a very good aim, are you?

Caller Cliff: Exactly. I’m just thinking of moving so it’s where the right to carry is a right to carry, and unless you’re mentally deficient or a felon or whatever, you can’t deny that.

Mike: Here’s a little Latin for you: quid leges sine moribus vanae proficient, which is “What good are laws when there are no morals?” This is from the Roman Horace. I think that goes a long way to explaining an awful lot of this. I’ll also share a tidbit from American history with you. When he was a lawyer, after he was five times elected governor of the State of Virginia, Patrick Henry, and you’ll read this in the new book Patrick Henry American Statesman, written in 1888 by Moses Coit Tyler and finally brought into the modern age by Founding Father Films Publishing and yours truly. We added a lot to this book, including information about Henry that had never before been written about. There were 100 cloth-covered, signed and numbered by yours truly, the editor and contributor of the chapter on Patrick Henry in art. Anyway, Henry has gone back to lawyering after he has retired from public life.

Caller Cliff: He retired from public life?

Mike: Yes, he did.

Caller Cliff: Didn’t he have life tenure?

Mike: In one of the cases he takes up is the defense of a guy who is accused of going into this other guy’s house and in front of his wife shooting the guy dead. He actually springs the guy. The jury refused to convict. All those that watch the trial say it was only because Henry had hypnotized them. It’s very interesting to read about the trial and the transcript that survived and what was said afterwards about the trial. The reason it went to trial is because the person that pulled the trigger was believed to be unstable, that he couldn’t control himself and he was going to do it again. I can find nothing in that historical record from 1791 of anyone suggesting that the weapon that was in that guy’s hand should not have been in his hand, or that he shouldn’t have been able to buy it, or shouldn’t have been able to buy powder, or shouldn’t have been able to buy lead to melt into balls.

My point is, they were dealing with was the result of what had happened and not the cause, not the mental condition of the guy, even though that’s what Henry used to spring the guy. Henry said he was in the throes of passion at the time and that’s what altered his mindset, and would anyone else have acted any differently. As I said, they said he hypnotized the jury. Everyone thought this guy was going to be swinging from a tree. They thought when the jury was finished, somebody was going to construct a rope to go around his neck and that was going to be the end of it.

Caller Cliff: Isn’t that just a prime example of how we all live under the unintended consequences of these goombas in Washington?

Mike: Yes.

Caller Cliff: Every law that they institute has unintended consequences. The unintended consequences of denying the right to carry arms is mass shootings.

Mike: I agree. The concept of universal carry is, I think, congruent with the concept of universal self-defense. If the next guy has a weapon and you don’t have one, it’s like the old proverb of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Unless you’re really good at throwing a knife like the guys in the movies are and you can throw the knife and it’ll hit the other dude in the forehead and actually go through his skull, or unless you’re good enough to throw a knife so it penetrates his ribcage and goes into his heart and stops him right there in his tracks, bringing knives to gunfights is not going to win you very many gunfights. The concept of universal self-defense, I think, is from God, from our Creator. We all have the right to defend ourselves. The concept of universal carry is congruent.

Because we are men, and because we do and are inspired ecclesiastically to try to avoid and avert sin, that does not mean we can’t all in some way identify — what if you buy the weapon and you’re sane at the time, no background, no nothing. Then somewhere along the way the townspeople get the idea: Hey, man, this guy is totally unstable. He’s going out in the woods and killing all sorts of squirrels and stuff. He doesn’t even eat the damn things. He just throws them in a pile and burns them. There’s something wrong with this dude. We ought to have an intervention. That’s what I was getting at earlier today. What if you then went to say: Mr. Smith, we just want to talk to you about the dead squirrels and the burning, the ritual. That is people dealing in a very responsible and personal manner with someone in their midst that may have a problem. You don’t have any objection to that, do you?