You’re right to bear arms
Summary
Host Sean is joined by Tyler Austin Harper—recently transitioned from academia to full-time journalism at The Atlantic—to talk about why he left the university world, how siloing and institutional incentives narrowed intellectual life on campus, and how the politics of 2020–2022 pushed him to speak more publicly. Harper describes feeling that progressive institutions often used the language of justice to mask economic exploitation, and he explains why he became highly engaged online before stepping back from the constant volatility of Twitter.
The conversation then centers on Harper’s reporting and argument about the Minneapolis shooting of Alex Preti, an American citizen killed by ICE agents after being disarmed. Harper frames the case as both a civil-liberties crisis and a Second Amendment issue: he says it was predictable that aggressive, poorly trained federal enforcement would eventually collide with lawful gun carrying, leading to panic and lethal force. He emphasizes that regardless of how the first shots began, continuing to fire into a motionless body points to something closer to an execution than a split-second mistake.
From there, they broaden to politics: Harper argues Democrats’ reflexive gun-control stance conflicts with their warnings about rising authoritarianism, while also criticizing the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to weaponize “gun control” rhetoric when convenient. He discusses why gun rights became culturally “right-coded,” how grassroots liberals may be rethinking guns amid fears of lawless federal action, and why understanding firearms matters even for people who favor regulation—using suppressor policies as an example of symbolic restrictions that may do little for public safety.
Bookmarks
- 00:16:19 — Epstein’s open secret: In a promo for Today Explained, the narrator frames the question of how Jeffrey Epstein stayed embedded in elite circles for decades despite widespread awareness of his behavior. A quoted voice argues that it would be impossible to be friends with Epstein—whose M.O. is described as “obviously having sex with young girls,” including a reference to Trump saying “on the younger side”—and not know what he was up to, setting up the episode as an attempt to untangle the “Epstein conspiracy.”
- 00:16:42 — ICE presence in Maine: After the ad break, the host asks Tyler Austin Harper whether ICE actually came to Maine, and Harper confirms they did, saying they were “all over Portland.” The host follows by asking how comfortable Harper felt walking around concealed carrying after what he saw in Minneapolis, teeing up Harper’s description of how those events changed his behavior.
- 00:17:27 — Trying to look “whiter” and leaving the gun at home: Harper explains that he changed his appearance—cutting his beard and hair shorter—because he believed ICE was in Maine to harass the local Somali population and had shown in other places, including Minneapolis, that they racially profile people based on skin color, appearance, or accent. Describing himself as “racially ambiguous,” he says it felt prudent to get a haircut, but he also decided to stop carrying for a week: he did a “calculus” that he might be in more danger from ICE while carrying than from anything else, because he didn’t trust them to know Maine’s gun laws and feared they might grab someone like him, feel a firearm, panic, or cause it to fall—so he left his Glock at home until they left.
- 00:37:55 — Suppressors and “smarter” gun control: Harper argues that even liberals committed to gun control should learn how firearms work so they can push policies that are effective rather than “political theater.” He says liberals often advocate restrictions that “save no lives” while alienating gun owners, offering Virginia’s proposal to raise taxes on suppressors as an example. He notes suppressors—called “silencers” in Hollywood—don’t actually silence guns, only make them somewhat quieter (he cites an AR-15 round dropping from roughly 160–170 decibels to 130–140), and he says suppressors are nearly never used in crime; in his view, most people buy them to protect their hearing at the range, so targeting them mainly just “piss[es] off gun owners.”
Recommendations
Articles / Links
Topic Timeline
- [00:01] — Introduction to Tyler Austin Harper and his move from professor to The Atlantic staff writer
- [00:02] — Why journalism felt freer and more intellectually alive than siloed academia
- [00:05] — Harper’s background (Black, father was a cop) and why 2020-era politics pushed him into public debate
- [00:07] — Minneapolis shooting overview and why Harper felt compelled to write from a gun-owner perspective
- [00:08] — Harper’s warning: ICE harassment plus liberal carry laws made a lethal misunderstanding feel “inevitable”
- [00:10] — Why the continued shots matter: the argument that this went beyond panic into state violence
- [00:12] — Death threats, political backlash, and how online hostility shaped Harper’s personal safety choices
- [00:16] — ICE presence in Maine, racial profiling fears, and Harper deciding to stop carrying temporarily
- [00:18] — “Wake-up call” thesis: the Second Amendment as protection against government tyranny for everyone
- [00:21] — Right-wing hypocrisy vs. principled gun enthusiasts; anti-federal sentiment in gun culture
- [00:24] — Why guns became associated with the right: demographic shifts in the Democratic Party and urbanization
- [00:27] — Authoritarianism debate: Trump vs. MAGA ideologues, and why pressure/markets can still constrain Trump
- [00:33] — Harper’s pitch to left-leaning skeptics: guns are politically entrenched; reconcile risk of authoritarianism with disarmament
- [00:37] — Call for “smarter” gun control informed by real firearms knowledge (example: suppressors and misconceptions)
Episode Info
- Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
- Author: Vox
- Category: Society & Culture / Philosophy / News / Politics / News Commentary
- Published: 2026-02-20
- Duration: 0h39m
- Episode UUID: 9f7ad984-3892-48ac-856c-c80718b00b84
Podcast Info
- Name: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
- Type: episodic
- Site: https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast
- UUID: 1d3ce9a0-ae3d-0133-2e33-6dc413d6d41d
Transcript
[00:00:00] When things get hard, how do you talk to yourself?
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[00:00:28] I think it’s just important for people to understand
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[00:00:45] Well, we should say that the two people ICE have killed
[00:00:49] in Minneapolis, we’re both white.
[00:00:50] And so as you point out,
[00:00:52] that may be the most impressive achievement
[00:00:54] in the DEI space, in the anti-DEI space
[00:00:57] of the Trump regime.
[00:00:59] Congratulations, you guys, you finally did it.
[00:01:01] Now we’ve extended.
[00:01:02] Multicultural Colorblind America.
[00:01:03] Yeah, now everybody is,
[00:01:05] is, is, uh,
[00:01:06] is, uh,
[00:01:07] is, uh,
[00:01:08] is, uh,
[00:01:08] is, uh,
[00:01:09] is, uh,
[00:01:10] is, uh,
[00:01:11] is, uh,
[00:01:12] is, uh,
[00:01:13] is, uh,
[00:01:13] is, uh,
[00:01:14] is, uh,
[00:01:16] equally targeted.
[00:01:36] Welcome to the Gray Area Friday.
[00:01:38] My guest today is Tyler Austin Harper.
[00:01:42] Uh, one of my favorite writers,
[00:01:44] a pretty interesting guy with a pretty unique story.
[00:01:47] He was, until very recently,
[00:01:49] a professor of environmental studies at Bates College.
[00:01:53] And he’s now a full-time staff writer at The Atlantic,
[00:01:58] where he writes about all kinds of things,
[00:02:01] most notably a piece about the shooting in Minneapolis,
[00:02:05] which we are going to get into today.
[00:02:07] But before we do that,
[00:02:08] Tyler, that is, that is my intro of you.
[00:02:10] That is my description of who you are and what you do.
[00:02:13] How did that land for you?
[00:02:14] How do you describe what you do?
[00:02:16] That’s pretty accurate.
[00:02:17] I am a, you know, degenerate journalist and podcaster.
[00:02:20] That’s, that’s, you know, that’s spot on.
[00:02:22] Yeah, I do a podcast with Jay Kang
[00:02:24] from the New Yorker called Time to Say Goodbye.
[00:02:26] Yep.
[00:02:26] Yeah.
[00:02:27] Former recovering academic.
[00:02:29] Well, what did you feel like you could do
[00:02:32] as a journalist that you couldn’t do as an academic,
[00:02:36] especially one on the tenure track?
[00:02:37] The idea of tenure is that you have all this
[00:02:39] intellectual freedom you can, you can do and say
[00:02:41] and write whatever the hell you want without any worries.
[00:02:45] So why, why did you feel hemmed in?
[00:02:47] What did you feel like you could do here
[00:02:49] that you couldn’t do in that space?
[00:02:51] I think I realized I was doing more and more
[00:02:54] public writing, mostly for the Atlantic,
[00:02:56] but also in New York Times and a few other places.
[00:02:58] And over the course of my time as a professor,
[00:03:01] I realized most of the people I encountered
[00:03:04] who were intellectually curious
[00:03:06] and most of the conversations I had that were,
[00:03:10] driven by a deep interest in the world and ideas
[00:03:14] were mostly coming from editors and writers
[00:03:17] and journalists, not academics.
[00:03:20] As an academic, you are so siloed and so specialized
[00:03:23] that it’s actually really hard to have a substantive
[00:03:26] and wide ranging conversation with your colleagues
[00:03:29] because most of them are so way down some rabbit hole
[00:03:31] that there’s not a familiar corpus of work or ideas
[00:03:34] you can even discuss.
[00:03:35] Even within something like an English department,
[00:03:38] you’d think you would have this common lingua franca.
[00:03:40] And to a certain extent you do,
[00:03:43] but not nearly as much as you would think.
[00:03:45] I don’t know that I was,
[00:03:48] in certain ways I was well suited for academia,
[00:03:51] but I think I get impatient too quickly
[00:03:54] and always have the next project I wanna jump on
[00:03:58] and journalism was just a better fit.
[00:04:00] I think in a previous iteration of academia,
[00:04:02] I probably would have stayed.
[00:04:04] I think, like I said,
[00:04:06] there were a number of things going on,
[00:04:07] I wanted to write more than I was writing for the public,
[00:04:09] but also teaching at a place that charges $95,000 a year
[00:04:15] while some of your colleagues don’t have health insurance
[00:04:18] because they’re not on the tenure track.
[00:04:20] I don’t know, I couldn’t take it to a certain point.
[00:04:23] I don’t wanna paint myself as having taken
[00:04:25] the moral high road in some sort of way.
[00:04:28] I would have kept dealing
[00:04:30] with the ubiquitous exploitation
[00:04:32] if that was my only way of getting a paycheck,
[00:04:33] but I could do something else
[00:04:35] without making myself financially destitute,
[00:04:37] so it was an easy choice.
[00:04:40] By the way, 10 points for using the phrase lingua franca.
[00:04:43] That’s well done.
[00:04:44] Thanks.
[00:04:45] It’s a first.
[00:04:46] It’s a pair of literature, sir.
[00:04:48] I’m also curious,
[00:04:51] I didn’t know who you were,
[00:04:52] and then suddenly you were kinda everywhere on Twitter.
[00:04:55] You really lunged pretty aggressively
[00:04:57] into the discourse.
[00:04:59] Was there something about the politics of the moment
[00:05:04] that sort of compelled you for whatever reason
[00:05:07] that made you feel like I’ve gotta get involved?
[00:05:11] Did you feel the political gravity of the moment,
[00:05:13] or were there just other reasons,
[00:05:15] tangential, that led to it?
[00:05:17] Because you’re very engaged, very engaged.
[00:05:20] Yeah, I think I had a
[00:05:25] interesting set of personal experiences.
[00:05:28] I’m a black dude.
[00:05:29] My dad was a cop.
[00:05:31] I was employed in a very progressive academic institution,
[00:05:38] and really didn’t fit in with the cultural milieu there,
[00:05:45] and it was a moment where I felt like
[00:05:47] a lot of people were speaking on my behalf
[00:05:50] in ways that really conflicted
[00:05:53] with a lot of my core beliefs about the world,
[00:05:57] and so, yeah, I just felt really,
[00:06:00] I felt like I had something to say about that moment,
[00:06:03] and that I could say it in a way
[00:06:05] that was not reactionary,
[00:06:08] that was articulated through
[00:06:10] traditional leftist universalism.
[00:06:14] So, yeah, I felt sort of compelled to intervene,
[00:06:16] but mostly out of frustration.
[00:06:18] I was, like I said,
[00:06:19] working in a very progressive institution
[00:06:22] that embodied a lot of the trends we saw
[00:06:26] in 2020, 2021, 2022,
[00:06:29] that was using the language of justice to paper over
[00:06:34] severe and spiraling economic exploitation.
[00:06:38] So, yeah, I felt like I had something to say,
[00:06:42] so I said it, and yeah, but you’re right.
[00:06:44] I certainly am not shy about sharing my views.
[00:06:47] I’ve toned down Twitter,
[00:06:49] mostly because I just really don’t,
[00:06:51] like I don’t mind being yelled at at all, truly.
[00:06:54] I have very thick skin.
[00:06:55] That doesn’t bother me at all.
[00:06:56] I just do not like being yelled at
[00:06:58] when I’m not prepared to be yelled at.
[00:07:00] So the experience of tweeting something
[00:07:01] you think is a kind of innocuous observation,
[00:07:03] then it gets two million views,
[00:07:05] and a lot of people are shrieking at you,
[00:07:06] like that experience I didn’t like so much.
[00:07:10] But yeah, so I’ve toned down Twitter a bit,
[00:07:12] but certainly was in the trenches for a while.
[00:07:15] So Minneapolis, how’s that for a pivot?
[00:07:19] Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:21] You wrote a piece about what happened there,
[00:07:24] obviously, Alex Prady,
[00:07:27] an American citizen was shot and killed
[00:07:30] in the back on the street by an agent
[00:07:34] who apparently was mag-dumped.
[00:07:36] I don’t know, how many?
[00:07:37] 10 rounds.
[00:07:38] 10 rounds.
[00:07:39] Over five seconds, which sounds very quick
[00:07:42] if you don’t shoot,
[00:07:43] but that is an excruciatingly long time.
[00:07:45] This unfolded over a while,
[00:07:46] and the guy kept firing into his back.
[00:07:48] You have time to think in between those.
[00:07:50] Yes, you have time to think, exactly.
[00:07:51] Five seconds doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a lot.
[00:07:53] I’m not gonna try to summarize your piece,
[00:07:55] because you can do that better than I did,
[00:07:57] but you did write about it, obviously,
[00:07:58] and you came at it from, I think, a pretty unique angle.
[00:08:03] So I’m just gonna let you run with that.
[00:08:05] What did you write?
[00:08:06] What was the argument you made, more or less,
[00:08:08] and why did you feel like you needed to say it?
[00:08:11] Yeah, I had been warning and saying
[00:08:14] to friends, colleagues, people in my life,
[00:08:19] over the last week or two before the Prady shooting
[00:08:22] that I was very worried
[00:08:24] that we were going to have a killing
[00:08:28] stemming from somebody legally exercising the right
[00:08:31] to carry, whether concealed carry or open carry.
[00:08:34] I live in Maine.
[00:08:35] ICE had come to Maine, was surging into Maine,
[00:08:38] not to the extent that they did in Minneapolis,
[00:08:39] but for a while they were really ramping up,
[00:08:43] and I did not trust at all
[00:08:45] based on what I was seeing coming out of Minneapolis.
[00:08:47] They are harassing people on the streets
[00:08:50] solely based on the color of their skin,
[00:08:52] detaining Native Americans
[00:08:53] because they don’t have a passport on them,
[00:08:56] pushing people to the ground, grabbing people, et cetera.
[00:09:00] This is not a professional organization,
[00:09:02] and I did not trust at all
[00:09:03] that they were even familiar with the gun laws
[00:09:05] in either Minneapolis or Maine,
[00:09:07] both of which are states
[00:09:08] that have relatively liberal Second Amendment protections.
[00:09:14] And so it felt inevitable to me
[00:09:16] that somebody was gonna get grabbed
[00:09:18] who was legally carrying a firearm,
[00:09:20] ICE being an unprofessional organization,
[00:09:22] many of their agents knew, very untrained.
[00:09:27] I really worried you were gonna have an untrained agent
[00:09:29] who feels a gun beneath someone’s sweatshirt,
[00:09:32] doesn’t know anything about the gun laws,
[00:09:34] panics and shoots somebody.
[00:09:36] And I think when I was telling some friends that
[00:09:39] they really thought I was,
[00:09:40] because they know I’m a gun person,
[00:09:41] they thought I was being a kind of kooky gun nut
[00:09:43] that this was a silly thing to be worrying about.
[00:09:47] But that’s exactly what happened with Alex Preti.
[00:09:49] I felt compelled to speak up
[00:09:51] because a lot of people conceal carry every day
[00:09:55] for a number of reasons.
[00:09:56] One, I’m an American and I’m allowed to,
[00:09:57] but two, I’ve received death threats
[00:09:58] for things I’ve written and said on Twitter, et cetera.
[00:10:02] And so I come from a family of gun owners,
[00:10:05] I’ve owned guns since I was 12,
[00:10:07] and I felt compelled as somebody
[00:10:09] who does carry to say something.
[00:10:13] It was not something I was really comfortable
[00:10:14] speaking up about,
[00:10:15] but given the circumstances,
[00:10:18] it felt important that somebody say as a gun owner,
[00:10:21] this guy’s rights were infringed.
[00:10:23] He was disarmed, thrown to the ground
[00:10:26] after being pepper sprayed
[00:10:27] for trying to help a woman do her feet,
[00:10:29] shot in the back 10 times while disarmed.
[00:10:33] And I think something that’s been lost here
[00:10:35] that I just wanna mention, Sean,
[00:10:36] there’s been so much discussion
[00:10:38] of how the shooting starts, right?
[00:10:40] Those first couple shots.
[00:10:42] What is lost, and to me is arguably
[00:10:45] the most important fact,
[00:10:47] after they shoot him multiple times in the back,
[00:10:49] the agents scramble backwards
[00:10:51] and are at that point several feet away from him,
[00:10:54] if you watch the video.
[00:10:55] And two, one or two of them continue to fire
[00:10:58] into his motionless and apparently lifeless body,
[00:11:01] four or five more rounds.
[00:11:03] Once they’re far away from him,
[00:11:05] the threat is neutralized, et cetera.
[00:11:07] So this was clearly a state execution.
[00:11:10] I think people on the right
[00:11:11] are trying to make the argument that,
[00:11:13] oh, well, someone heard gun,
[00:11:16] so they started shooting.
[00:11:17] One, that’s not an excuse.
[00:11:19] The police disarm people who are carrying legally
[00:11:21] and illegally every day in this country
[00:11:23] without killing them.
[00:11:24] But even if you want a grant,
[00:11:25] this was an untrained or under-trained agent
[00:11:28] who heard someone say gun, panicked and shot,
[00:11:31] that explains the first couple shots.
[00:11:33] That does not explain continuing to empty a magazine
[00:11:36] into a guy’s back while he lays on the pavement.
[00:11:38] No, it does not.
[00:11:40] How long have you been concealed carrying?
[00:11:42] About 18 months I’ve been concealed carrying.
[00:11:45] I’ve been a gun guy who shoots regularly
[00:11:48] and is a gun nut, as they put it, for a very long time.
[00:11:51] But I live in Maine.
[00:11:52] Maine’s a very safe state.
[00:11:54] And so until I started receiving more threats,
[00:11:58] it did not seem like something I felt compelled to do.
[00:12:01] I have various guns for home protection,
[00:12:05] I always have, but carrying every day
[00:12:07] was something that is a recent response
[00:12:09] to just some of those things I mentioned.
[00:12:11] Well, you mentioned death threats.
[00:12:13] What does that mean?
[00:12:14] You got some weird emails, some weird calls,
[00:12:16] people showed up at your door.
[00:12:18] No, no, nothing as bad as people showing up at my left.
[00:12:20] And what about?
[00:12:24] If you’re familiar with my writing,
[00:12:25] people know I am on the left side of the spectrum,
[00:12:28] but I will be honest and say,
[00:12:30] I have written about, I’ve critiqued the left,
[00:12:32] I’ve critiqued the right,
[00:12:33] I’ve written about literal neo-Nazis,
[00:12:36] but all of the death threats I’ve received
[00:12:38] have been for either my political writing
[00:12:41] that’s been critical of the left,
[00:12:42] or most of it honestly was during the 2024 election
[00:12:48] where I was very critical of Biden
[00:12:49] and at later on Kamala Harris
[00:12:51] and the way she was conducting her campaign,
[00:12:53] those were the basis of most of the death threats.
[00:12:55] People felt that I was trying to help elect Trump,
[00:12:58] threatening to come to my house, shoot it up,
[00:13:00] not with my address, thankfully,
[00:13:01] my address is delisted, not too easy to find.
[00:13:05] But yeah, I’ve received a number of them.
[00:13:08] Nothing truly scary.
[00:13:11] I have friends that work in journalism
[00:13:12] that have gotten truly scary death threats.
[00:13:14] I gotta say, I feel a little inadequate.
[00:13:16] I’ve been all my years doing this.
[00:13:19] I’ve only had one half-baked death threat,
[00:13:22] which really wasn’t a death threat,
[00:13:23] and it was only because I wrote a piece
[00:13:26] calling Ted Cruz an asshole
[00:13:28] and making the argument that he was objectively unlikable,
[00:13:34] by which I still stand, but that’s it.
[00:13:36] Apparently, I haven’t written anything interesting.
[00:13:42] I’m provocative enough to piss off anyone else
[00:13:43] to that level.
[00:13:44] I don’t get inundated.
[00:13:45] I probably get, I don’t know,
[00:13:47] three or four years, something like that.
[00:13:49] Yeah.
[00:13:50] Yeah.
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[00:15:59] In the wake of the release of millions of documents
[00:16:01] related to the Jeffrey Epstein case,
[00:16:03] the rich and famous are finally feeling some pain.
[00:16:06] But even with corporate resignations here
[00:16:08] and with former Prince Andrew being arrested in the UK,
[00:16:11] the question remains,
[00:16:13] how did Jeffrey Epstein remain a thriving member
[00:16:16] of the elite for decades
[00:16:18] when everyone seemed to know what he was up to?
[00:16:21] I don’t think you could be friends with Jeffrey Epstein
[00:16:23] whose M.O. was obviously having sex with young girls,
[00:16:27] even as Trump said, on the younger side,
[00:16:29] and not know his M.O.
[00:16:31] Untangling the Epstein conspiracy.
[00:16:33] That’s this week on Today Explained.
[00:16:35] Every weekday and now on Saturdays.
[00:16:43] Well, did ICE actually come to Maine?
[00:16:46] Oh yeah.
[00:16:46] Yeah, they were all over Portland.
[00:16:48] Did you feel comfortable walking around
[00:16:50] concealed caring after what you saw in Minneapolis?
[00:16:53] Because you say something interesting in the piece,
[00:16:55] which is like for the first time in your life,
[00:16:56] you felt like you needed to look a little whiter.
[00:16:59] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:00] I got my, in the winter I usually keep my beard
[00:17:03] pretty long and my hair sometimes, you know,
[00:17:06] starts to get more into the Afro territory.
[00:17:08] So I went to my barber and had both cut short.
[00:17:12] Just because they are here
[00:17:14] to harass the local Somali population,
[00:17:16] we’ve seen in other states,
[00:17:18] we’ve seen in Minneapolis that they are not,
[00:17:20] they’re solely racially profiling people
[00:17:23] on the basis of their skin color,
[00:17:24] stopping them on the street because of how they look
[00:17:26] or because they have an accent.
[00:17:28] I don’t have an accent,
[00:17:29] but I am, as they say, racially ambiguous.
[00:17:32] So it felt prudent to, yeah, to get a haircut.
[00:17:37] But I also stopped caring.
[00:17:38] I mean, the reason I carry is, you know,
[00:17:41] to protect myself.
[00:17:42] And I did a calculus, which was that
[00:17:45] I’m probably in more danger from these people
[00:17:50] caring than I am from anything else, right?
[00:17:54] Because I, like I said,
[00:17:55] I do not trust them to know the laws in Maine.
[00:17:57] I do not trust them to grab someone like me
[00:18:00] on the basis of skin color.
[00:18:02] Feel a firearm and panic or dislodge a firearm.
[00:18:06] It falls to the ground.
[00:18:08] It just did not seem worth it.
[00:18:10] They’ve since left.
[00:18:10] I started caring again.
[00:18:11] But yeah, for the week or so they were in Maine,
[00:18:15] I left the Glock at home.
[00:18:18] Well, we should say that the two people
[00:18:20] ICE have killed in Minneapolis were both white.
[00:18:23] And so, as you point out,
[00:18:24] that may be the most impressive achievement
[00:18:26] in the DEI space, in the anti-DEI space
[00:18:30] of the Trump regime.
[00:18:31] Congratulations.
[00:18:32] You guys, you finally did it.
[00:18:33] Now we’ve extended it.
[00:18:34] Multicultural colorblind America.
[00:18:35] Yeah, now everybody is equally targeted.
[00:18:40] Well, the piece was titled a wake-up call.
[00:18:43] Like, that this is a wake-up call
[00:18:46] for the Second Amendment.
[00:18:47] What do you mean?
[00:18:49] I think we need to realize
[00:18:51] that the Second Amendment is for everybody.
[00:18:54] I think Democrats, both strategically
[00:18:58] and as a matter of politics,
[00:19:00] but also otherwise have not taken
[00:19:03] the Second Amendment seriously enough.
[00:19:05] I do, I have a lot of problems with the NRA.
[00:19:09] However, I do basically agree with the NRA talking point
[00:19:13] that the purpose of the Second Amendment
[00:19:14] is the prevention of government tyranny.
[00:19:16] It is not to ensure that you can own a deer rifle
[00:19:18] or a shotgun for home defense or whatever.
[00:19:19] It does that.
[00:19:20] That’s not the point.
[00:19:21] The point is to prevent government tyranny.
[00:19:23] And I think we should take that seriously.
[00:19:29] If Democrats talk a big game
[00:19:32] and liberals talk about a big game
[00:19:33] and anti-Trump people talk a big game about fascism,
[00:19:36] we’re in this moment of fascism.
[00:19:38] And I have found it persistently beguiling
[00:19:41] that as they correctly point out
[00:19:43] all of the warning signs of democracy
[00:19:45] that are blinking red,
[00:19:47] that has not changed at all how they’ve thought
[00:19:49] about an armed citizenry.
[00:19:51] Instead, they are still beating the drum
[00:19:54] of gun control, gun control, gun control,
[00:19:57] assault weapons ban, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:19:59] The Virginia State Legislature is pushing through
[00:20:02] an assault weapons ban, magazine restrictions,
[00:20:05] suppressor taxes, et cetera.
[00:20:08] I realize one can feel a number of ways about that,
[00:20:11] but it has always just felt a little inconsistent to me
[00:20:13] to say fascism and authoritarianism
[00:20:16] are incendent in America
[00:20:18] and also let’s disarm ourselves in liberal states.
[00:20:21] I find that preposterous.
[00:20:23] But I do think this was a wake up call for everyone
[00:20:26] and not just folks, liberal folks on the left.
[00:20:29] The Trump administration after the Prede shooting
[00:20:31] immediately started talking like
[00:20:34] the most libed out lib you can imagine.
[00:20:37] They were referring to his SIG P320,
[00:20:40] which is just a standard pistol a lot of people own
[00:20:43] as a military style pistol,
[00:20:45] whatever the hell that means exactly.
[00:20:46] They were complaining, oh, he had extra magazines,
[00:20:49] which is, you know, Cash Patel was like,
[00:20:50] he had extra fully loaded magazines,
[00:20:52] which is, you know, basically tacitly proof
[00:20:55] that he’s a domestic terrorist.
[00:20:56] Most people, many people who carry,
[00:20:59] carry an extra magazine, the magazine of the gun,
[00:21:01] the thing that loads it
[00:21:02] is one of the most common failure points.
[00:21:04] So if you need it and your magazine malfunctions,
[00:21:07] it’s prudent to have a backup.
[00:21:08] It is not because you are a domestic terrorist.
[00:21:11] So I really think both,
[00:21:13] this was a wake up call on two fronts,
[00:21:15] one for left and liberal folks
[00:21:16] that actually exercising peacefully
[00:21:19] our second amendment rights is for everyone,
[00:21:21] but also for folks who might be more conservative
[00:21:24] that this administration talks a big game
[00:21:27] about guns and the second amendment,
[00:21:28] but the reality is they are not supporters
[00:21:31] of the second amendment either, right?
[00:21:32] Donald Trump is a dude from New York City
[00:21:34] who likes Broadway plays, the musical theater.
[00:21:36] He is not a gun guy.
[00:21:37] Cash Patel is a podcaster.
[00:21:38] He’s not a gun guy.
[00:21:39] Kristi Noem doesn’t know anything about guns.
[00:21:42] If you see her hold an AR-15,
[00:21:44] it is completely fucking comical.
[00:21:45] Brutal, brutal, I saw the clip.
[00:21:48] Brutal, brutal, brutal.
[00:21:49] So these are not gun people.
[00:21:51] They’re not protecting your rights.
[00:21:52] They’re not protecting my rights, so.
[00:21:53] We’ll do the right and the left.
[00:21:54] I guess we’ll just go with the right first
[00:21:56] because it’s funnier.
[00:21:59] There’s nothing all that surprising about hypocrisy
[00:22:02] from like this version of the American right,
[00:22:05] but this has still been pretty fucking stunning
[00:22:08] this quickly to basically morph into like an anti.
[00:22:11] How dare an American citizen show up to a protest
[00:22:16] with a firearm.
[00:22:17] This is the same party who when white militia bros
[00:22:22] like showed up to like the state capitol in Michigan.
[00:22:26] And their Hawaii t-shirts.
[00:22:27] And their, you know, Bahama Jama,
[00:22:29] whatever the hell, shirts with rifles,
[00:22:32] not even concealed.
[00:22:33] Right, right, right.
[00:22:34] That’s totally cool.
[00:22:35] That is freedom in action.
[00:22:37] But this, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
[00:22:40] That’s a bridge too far.
[00:22:42] I mean, what is there to say about that
[00:22:45] other than it’s just rank hypocrisy?
[00:22:48] Well, I think it’s important to distinguish
[00:22:51] Trump administration and conservative influencers
[00:22:53] from conservative American gun enthusiasts.
[00:22:57] Most of whom in response to this
[00:22:59] have been really principled.
[00:23:00] And I’ve said, this guy,
[00:23:02] pretty, I don’t like his politics, whatever,
[00:23:04] but he had a right to be doing what he was doing.
[00:23:06] It’s important to note that there is a strong strain
[00:23:10] of anti-federal agent sentiment among the gun community,
[00:23:15] particularly on the right,
[00:23:16] particularly among the kind of quasi libertarian right.
[00:23:19] People hate the feds.
[00:23:20] And I think this has awoken
[00:23:22] some of that anti-fed sentiment,
[00:23:23] which goes back through Ruby Ridge
[00:23:25] and a whole bunch of other pieces of American history.
[00:23:28] Why do you think being pro-Second Amendment
[00:23:30] or pro-guns became so right-coded?
[00:23:34] There’s nothing inherent about the Second Amendment
[00:23:37] that makes it so.
[00:23:38] I mean, a lot of people don’t even know.
[00:23:39] I mean, one of the reasons we have stricter gun laws
[00:23:43] is because of the Black Panthers.
[00:23:45] Like in 1967, right, where they were doing
[00:23:48] armed patrols against police abuse.
[00:23:51] And the state of California was like,
[00:23:53] whoa, we eat and we eat, what, black guys with guns?
[00:23:55] I hope, wait a minute, the Second Amendment thing,
[00:23:57] maybe we need to reconsider.
[00:23:59] We’ve got to monitor it.
[00:24:00] But now it’s so right-coded.
[00:24:03] Is that just like an accident of history
[00:24:05] or do you have some?
[00:24:06] I think it is partly a reflection
[00:24:08] of the changing demographic base of the Democratic Party,
[00:24:11] which is more highly educated,
[00:24:12] but more importantly, much more urbanized
[00:24:15] and suburbanized, right?
[00:24:17] Not to say people in cities,
[00:24:18] and I mean, we just saw people in cities in Minneapolis
[00:24:22] who are gun owners.
[00:24:23] Not to say people in cities don’t own guns,
[00:24:24] but certainly it is more rural-coded,
[00:24:27] working-class-coded than it is associated with.
[00:24:31] People live in urban areas and the professional class.
[00:24:33] So to me, a lot of the gun stuff
[00:24:36] with the Democratic Party is just a reflection
[00:24:38] of the changing makeup of its base.
[00:24:41] The fact that it is now the party
[00:24:43] of the professional class,
[00:24:44] it is now the party of the educated,
[00:24:45] it’s now the party of the affluent.
[00:24:47] It’s no longer the party of the working class.
[00:24:49] God willing, maybe again, one day it will be,
[00:24:51] but for right now, it certainly isn’t.
[00:24:53] And so I think those Second Amendment politics,
[00:24:57] the gun control politics,
[00:24:58] are just a reflection of the demographic makeup
[00:25:01] of the Democratic Party.
[00:25:09] What are the main takeaways of the foreign policy
[00:25:11] section from Donald Trump’s State of the Union address?
[00:25:14] I do think they’ve made a decision
[00:25:16] to elevate domestic issues
[00:25:18] as we head towards the midterms.
[00:25:20] We’ll see if that sticks,
[00:25:21] because he keeps getting drawn back
[00:25:23] to the foreign policy issues.
[00:25:24] I’m John Finer.
[00:25:26] And I’m Jake Sullivan.
[00:25:27] And we’re the hosts of The Long Game,
[00:25:28] a weekly national security podcast.
[00:25:31] This week, we’ll react to President Trump’s
[00:25:32] State of the Union address,
[00:25:34] the situation with Iran,
[00:25:35] and the eruption of violence
[00:25:37] involving cartels in Mexico.
[00:25:39] The episode’s out now.
[00:25:40] Search for and follow The Long Game
[00:25:42] wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:45] This week on Network and Chill,
[00:25:46] I’m joined by her first 100K,
[00:25:49] AKA Tory Dunlap,
[00:25:50] a fellow personal finance creator
[00:25:52] who’s changing how an entire generation
[00:25:53] thinks about money.
[00:25:55] Tory’s journey is a masterclass
[00:25:56] in turning personal finance wins
[00:25:58] into a platform that empowers millions.
[00:26:00] She opens up about the real strategy
[00:26:02] behind hitting that six-figure milestone
[00:26:04] without the typical privileged blind advice
[00:26:06] and how she’s redefining what it means
[00:26:08] to be a wealthy woman in 2026.
[00:26:10] We’re diving deep into investment strategies
[00:26:12] for real people with real budgets
[00:26:14] and why financial feminism
[00:26:15] isn’t just a buzzword,
[00:26:17] it’s a movement.
[00:26:18] Get ready for an unfiltered conversation
[00:26:19] about money, entrepreneurship,
[00:26:21] and what it really takes
[00:26:22] to build both personal wealth
[00:26:23] and a business empire.
[00:26:24] Listen wherever you get your podcasts
[00:26:26] or watch on YouTube.com slash Your Rich BFF.
[00:26:31] I hate to even ask this
[00:26:32] and I hate to use this phrase turning point
[00:26:35] because I’ve been in this business
[00:26:36] for the entire Trump era
[00:26:39] and twice a fucking month,
[00:26:41] something happens that’s a turning point.
[00:26:46] But here I am.
[00:26:47] On the left at least,
[00:26:48] do you feel like this may be some kind of trigger, right?
[00:26:51] Where like maybe the left might start
[00:26:55] reconsidering its orientation
[00:26:57] to guns and the Second Amendment.
[00:27:00] I think certainly some people are.
[00:27:01] I think the grassroots everyday Democrats
[00:27:05] are more quickly than the party is.
[00:27:09] I mentioned earlier what’s going on in Virginia.
[00:27:11] There are other similar pushes elsewhere.
[00:27:13] So I think everyday Democrats, absolutely.
[00:27:16] I have had a lot of friends who know I’m a gun person
[00:27:20] ask, will you take me shooting?
[00:27:21] Will you show me how one of these things works?
[00:27:22] If I wanted to buy a gun, what should I buy, et cetera.
[00:27:25] So I think that is really, really changing
[00:27:28] for reasons that make perfect sense.
[00:27:30] People are scared.
[00:27:31] You have armed federal agents
[00:27:33] who are behaving lawlessly,
[00:27:35] running rough shot over civic liberties.
[00:27:38] People are rightly afraid
[00:27:41] and they feel like we are in a moment
[00:27:44] that is perhaps slipping toward authoritarianism.
[00:27:47] And so-
[00:27:48] Do you buy that?
[00:27:49] Do you buy that?
[00:27:50] That we’re slipping toward authoritarianism?
[00:27:51] Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:52] I believe that,
[00:27:55] and this is not my original distinction,
[00:27:57] but I will repeat it.
[00:27:58] There is an important distinction to make
[00:28:00] between Donald Trump and Trumpism and MAGAism.
[00:28:05] I also think there’s an important distinction
[00:28:06] to make between Trump supporters and Trump voters,
[00:28:10] by which I mean people who support full-throatedly
[00:28:13] Donald Trump’s agenda and people who have voted for him
[00:28:16] even perhaps three times.
[00:28:17] Many people who support him just hate the Democratic Party
[00:28:20] or who vote for him just hate the Democratic Party,
[00:28:22] but they think he’s an idiot.
[00:28:24] That may be most, actually.
[00:28:25] That may be most.
[00:28:27] But to answer your question,
[00:28:28] do I think Donald Trump is fascist-sympathetic?
[00:28:31] Sure.
[00:28:32] Do I think he’s a fascist, not really?
[00:28:33] I think he is a, what he’s always been,
[00:28:35] a con artist and a grifter.
[00:28:36] I think he wants to make a lot of money
[00:28:38] on various crypto and bribery schemes,
[00:28:40] which, by the way, he seems to be doing
[00:28:42] with remarkable success.
[00:28:44] I think some estimates he’s earned a billion dollars
[00:28:46] in wealth since he ascended to presidency
[00:28:48] for the second time.
[00:28:49] I think that’s where, when the rubber meets the road,
[00:28:52] that’s what he cares about.
[00:28:53] He doesn’t care about Stephen Miller’s
[00:28:55] bullshit Nazi fantasies.
[00:28:57] If those are compatible with him
[00:28:59] enriching himself, then great.
[00:29:00] But the moment that comes into conflict
[00:29:03] with his financial self-interest,
[00:29:05] I think Donald Trump clearly backs off.
[00:29:08] I do think elements of MAGA are absolutely authoritarian.
[00:29:12] We are seeing Twitter accounts
[00:29:15] associated with this administration,
[00:29:17] the Department of Homeland Security,
[00:29:18] tweeting KKK song references and Nazi phraseology.
[00:29:25] Yeah, absolutely, but I don’t think Donald Trump is.
[00:29:28] And in a way, I think Donald Trump
[00:29:31] is what is keeping the lid on this thing right now.
[00:29:33] Well, no, that’s part of what’s vexing about Trump,
[00:29:36] is the unseriousness.
[00:29:39] If he is a fascist, it is by accident.
[00:29:43] It’s not like he read the history of fascism
[00:29:47] and adopted a serious.
[00:29:48] No, he’s not Nidhi or Carl Schmitt or something.
[00:29:50] He’s just fucking bebopping along.
[00:29:52] Sometimes he careens into something like
[00:29:54] uber-fascism, sometimes it’s just,
[00:29:56] I don’t know, you’re just a garden variety idiocy.
[00:30:00] But the Stephen Millers of the world,
[00:30:04] who are serious, deadly serious,
[00:30:07] see that unseriousness.
[00:30:08] They see him as an avatar onto which they can project
[00:30:11] whatever they need to,
[00:30:12] because he doesn’t really give a shit, right?
[00:30:14] So it almost makes him more dangerous
[00:30:16] because he is a vehicle.
[00:30:17] Yeah, absolutely.
[00:30:18] For people who are serious
[00:30:20] and do have a real worldview and want to impose it.
[00:30:24] And again, that’s just been the story
[00:30:26] of this entire era, you know what I mean?
[00:30:28] Totally.
[00:30:31] Yeah, I don’t know, man.
[00:30:33] Here’s another hackneyed question,
[00:30:35] but what do you think, where’s this go?
[00:30:40] It feels to me that the same fundamentals of Trumpism
[00:30:44] that held in Trump 1 are holding in Trump 2.
[00:30:47] I think it’s taken a while for us to realize that,
[00:30:50] but just like the Muslim ban in Trump 1
[00:30:52] or the kids in cages or whatever it is,
[00:30:55] if there’s enough public pushback,
[00:30:57] if there’s enough public resistance,
[00:30:59] he will cave, because at the end of the day,
[00:31:02] what he cares about is the stock market.
[00:31:03] And so I haven’t seen anything
[00:31:07] that changes those basic fundamentals.
[00:31:09] We saw this with tariffs,
[00:31:10] where he backed off on some of the tariff stuff
[00:31:12] after the stock market got wobbly.
[00:31:15] Wall Street is not going to tolerate
[00:31:18] in masked agents terrorizing American cities,
[00:31:23] executing citizens.
[00:31:24] God forbid there starts to be conflict
[00:31:26] between a local national guard and federal agents,
[00:31:29] which it looked like we were potentially on track for
[00:31:32] in Minneapolis. Yeah, I was worried about that.
[00:31:33] Exactly, I was worried about that too.
[00:31:36] The market will freak out,
[00:31:38] and Donald Trump doesn’t want a market freak out.
[00:31:41] He doesn’t want to be worried
[00:31:43] about the 25th Amendment or impeachment.
[00:31:45] He just wants to continue making money
[00:31:46] and then pardon everyone on his way out.
[00:31:49] And so I do think this illustrated
[00:31:53] that those same fundamentals of the Trump era still hold,
[00:31:56] which is that at some level,
[00:31:59] one, he wants the market to be stable,
[00:32:02] but two, he wants to be liked in some kind of way.
[00:32:04] And if you push hard enough,
[00:32:08] and if public, the political opinion swings enough,
[00:32:11] he backs off.
[00:32:12] And I haven’t seen anything that changes that.
[00:32:14] To be honest with you, I would be much more worried
[00:32:17] if JD Vance is in office than I am in Donald Trump,
[00:32:21] because I think Vance has ideologies and ideas
[00:32:24] in a way that Trump just doesn’t.
[00:32:26] And I think Trump’s utilitarianism
[00:32:31] and his greed and avarice
[00:32:34] are ironically an important safeguard.
[00:32:38] If you had to make the pro-Second Amendment case
[00:32:40] to a fellow lefty, right?
[00:32:43] To someone who doesn’t like guns,
[00:32:46] doesn’t like gun culture, or doesn’t understand it,
[00:32:48] or as is maybe more often the case,
[00:32:52] doesn’t like the people who like guns and gun culture,
[00:32:57] what is your pitch to them?
[00:33:00] What is your pro-Second Amendment pitch?
[00:33:03] I’ll give you the pitch,
[00:33:04] and then what I would advise Gun Curious Liberals to do.
[00:33:06] My pitch would be to ask yourself,
[00:33:10] sure, in a vacuum, many people I’m sure agree
[00:33:14] that this country would be better off
[00:33:15] if there weren’t guns, but we are not another country.
[00:33:20] American gun culture is deeply entrenched
[00:33:22] in hundreds of years of our history
[00:33:24] going back to the revolution.
[00:33:26] That ship has sailed.
[00:33:27] Yeah, the ship has sailed.
[00:33:28] You would have an easier time getting cheese out of France.
[00:33:31] And so you should recognize that when you talk about
[00:33:33] something like an assault weapons ban,
[00:33:35] which might pass at state levels,
[00:33:36] but will never pass at the federal level,
[00:33:37] and what’s more, logistically,
[00:33:39] there are millions of AR-15s all over this country.
[00:33:42] When you talk about assault weapon ban
[00:33:44] and things like that,
[00:33:45] you are engaging in a thought experiment
[00:33:47] that is untethered from political reality.
[00:33:50] And the question you should ask yourself is,
[00:33:52] accepting that guns are here,
[00:33:55] what are the odds in your mind
[00:33:58] that we are slipping toward
[00:34:00] some kind of technologically updated fascism
[00:34:04] powered by Palantir and an authoritarian
[00:34:06] Trump administration?
[00:34:08] I’d put the odds like 10% or 15%.
[00:34:11] That’s a lot of percent.
[00:34:12] That low?
[00:34:13] Maybe a little higher, maybe 20, maybe 25%,
[00:34:16] but whatever it is, even if it’s as low as 10%,
[00:34:19] you really wanna bet on that?
[00:34:21] That’s still high.
[00:34:22] That’s still very high.
[00:34:24] So my pitch to you would be,
[00:34:26] if you are somebody saying,
[00:34:29] this administration is fascist and authoritarian
[00:34:32] and Nazi 2.0,
[00:34:35] if you were living in Nazi Germany,
[00:34:37] would you rather be armed or unarmed?
[00:34:39] And if your answer is,
[00:34:41] well, I’d probably rather be armed,
[00:34:43] then I think you should, at minimum,
[00:34:45] take seriously the right of your fellow Americans
[00:34:48] to keep and bear arms.
[00:34:50] Does that mean you personally need to go out
[00:34:52] and arm yourself?
[00:34:53] No.
[00:34:54] If you don’t like guns, that’s totally fine.
[00:34:56] But I think you should at least take seriously
[00:34:59] that there might be a bit of a contradiction
[00:35:01] between the insistence that this administration
[00:35:03] is authoritarian and that they’re gonna cancel
[00:35:06] the elections and also,
[00:35:08] guns are bad and we should ban assault weapons.
[00:35:10] I don’t think those are consistent positions.
[00:35:13] Now, if you are a gun skeptical or gun curious liberal,
[00:35:19] what I would recommend you do is just
[00:35:21] go to a range, look up the Yelp reviews beforehand.
[00:35:25] If a place gets pretty good reviews,
[00:35:27] odds are it’s gonna be-
[00:35:29] You can’t trust Yelp reviews, come on.
[00:35:30] Whatever, a normal, comparatively apolitical.
[00:35:34] Most gun shops in most parts of the country,
[00:35:36] particularly the parts of the country liberals live in,
[00:35:39] try to be apolitical.
[00:35:40] The people are nice.
[00:35:42] Gun culture is way more diverse than liberals imagine.
[00:35:44] They are all imagining these mouth breathing people.
[00:35:49] There are all sorts of people
[00:35:50] in the average American gun shop.
[00:35:52] It is not as scary as you think.
[00:35:54] And just go and give it a shot at minimum.
[00:35:57] Even if you come away saying,
[00:35:59] I didn’t like that experience.
[00:36:01] I don’t wanna own a gun.
[00:36:02] I never wanna shoot again.
[00:36:03] You’re probably gonna come away with some of the myths
[00:36:06] that you had built up in your head
[00:36:07] about what these people are like a little bit busted.
[00:36:10] And I think at minimum, that’s good.
[00:36:12] It is kind of fun.
[00:36:13] It’s so fun.
[00:36:14] No, it’s so fun.
[00:36:16] Like there is, one of the reasons I’m saying
[00:36:18] just go and try it,
[00:36:19] is it’s very hard to go shooting
[00:36:22] and you should be safe
[00:36:23] and you should know all the proper procedures
[00:36:26] and start whatever.
[00:36:28] So responsible.
[00:36:29] But I was a former range safety officer.
[00:36:31] That’s why I’m saying all that.
[00:36:32] That was my first job in high school.
[00:36:33] I worked at a gun club.
[00:36:35] But I say all that, it’s fun as hell.
[00:36:38] There’s very little chance you go shooting
[00:36:41] and you might still come away and say,
[00:36:43] I think these should be banned,
[00:36:45] but there’s no chance you don’t have a good time.
[00:36:46] It’s really loud.
[00:36:47] What if you just don’t like guns
[00:36:49] because they’re so fucking loud?
[00:36:51] That’s what suppressors are for.
[00:36:52] The only good thing Donald Trump has done
[00:36:53] in this administration is he’s taken
[00:36:55] the suppressor tax stamp from 0.
[00:36:58] It has been a while since I’ve been to the range,
[00:37:00] but the last time I went, I didn’t have my muffs.
[00:37:04] And so I just had to put on
[00:37:05] those little styrofoam.
[00:37:05] Yeah, the little sponges.
[00:37:07] Holy shit.
[00:37:08] I couldn’t hear for like 72 hours.
[00:37:11] So kids, if you’re listening, get your muffs.
[00:37:15] Well, actually this brings up a point if you don’t mind.
[00:37:17] Like another thing that I think really matters
[00:37:20] is that even if you are a liberal bent on gun control,
[00:37:24] you should advocate for smarter gun controls
[00:37:26] and you should actually know something about firearms.
[00:37:30] One of the main problems liberals run into around guns
[00:37:32] is that they don’t understand them.
[00:37:33] They don’t know anything about them
[00:37:35] and they advocate forms of gun control
[00:37:37] that save no lives while just pissing off gun owners.
[00:37:40] Right now in Virginia, a prime example
[00:37:42] is they are trying to raise the tax on suppressors.
[00:37:45] Suppressors are what Hollywood refers to as silencers.
[00:37:49] They sound really scary,
[00:37:51] but what a suppressor does
[00:37:52] is make a rifle slightly quieter.
[00:37:54] They do not silence anything.
[00:37:56] An AR-15-
[00:37:57] It is not the movie.
[00:37:58] No, it is not the movie.
[00:37:59] An AR-15 5.56 round is about 160, 170 decibels.
[00:38:03] A suppressor reduces that to 130 or 140.
[00:38:06] It is still loud as shit.
[00:38:07] The point of a suppressor,
[00:38:09] the reason so many people own them
[00:38:10] and apply to get tax stamps so they can buy them
[00:38:13] is they spend a lot of time at the range
[00:38:15] and it saves their hearing, right?
[00:38:16] But Democrats in Virginia, suppressors sound scary.
[00:38:20] So we’re gonna make them harder to own.
[00:38:22] Meanwhile, suppressors are nearly never used in crime.
[00:38:26] You’re not saving any lives.
[00:38:27] You were just pissing off gun owners
[00:38:29] who are mostly just trying to protect their hearing.
[00:38:31] So the best thing you can do if you are listening to this
[00:38:34] and you are an enthusiastic proponent of gun control
[00:38:37] is at least learn a little bit about guns and gun culture
[00:38:40] so you can advocate in ways that are smart
[00:38:43] and not just political theater.
[00:38:46] Anything else you wanna say about any of this
[00:38:47] before we get up out of here?
[00:38:49] No, no, I think that’s it, man.
[00:38:50] Thank you for letting me rant.
[00:38:54] So I guess we’re gonna,
[00:38:57] because I think my team here is like hell bent
[00:38:59] on making me look as goofy as possible.
[00:39:02] Please.
[00:39:02] In front of as many people as possible.
[00:39:03] So we’re gonna do this like credit thing
[00:39:05] where he tells me like the line and I gotta say it.
[00:39:08] If you feel the need to comment on anything
[00:39:11] like a booger flies out of my nose
[00:39:13] I don’t know. Gotcha, I’ll let you know.
[00:39:14] I’ll give you a signal.
[00:39:15] Parable something, you can give me shit about it.
[00:39:18] All right, all right, all right.
[00:39:19] This episode is produced by Beth Morrissey
[00:39:22] and Thor Newwriter.
[00:39:24] This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
[00:39:26] and Thor Newwriter.
[00:39:27] Edited by V Jorge Just.
[00:39:30] Edited by V Jorge Just.
[00:39:33] Engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala.
[00:39:36] Engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala.
[00:39:39] Theme song by Emma Munger.
[00:39:40] Theme song by Emma Munger.
[00:39:42] Thanks to Devon Howard.
[00:39:44] Thanks to Devon Howard.
[00:39:45] For running our studio.
[00:39:46] For running our studio.
[00:39:48] Say that again.
[00:39:49] Thanks to Devon Howard for running our studio.
[00:39:51] Thanks to Devon Howard for running our studio.
[00:39:54] This show is part of Vox.
[00:39:55] This show is part of Vox.
[00:39:57] You can support Vox’s journalism
[00:39:59] by joining our membership program today.
[00:40:01] Support Vox’s journalism
[00:40:02] by joining our membership program today.
[00:40:06] Get out the old clickety clack.
[00:40:07] Get out the old clickety clack.
[00:40:09] And go to Vox.com.
[00:40:10] What is a clickety-clack?
[00:40:11] What the fuck is a clickety-clack?
[00:40:14] I’m sorry.
[00:40:15] Break out the clickety-clack.
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[00:40:25] let us know.
[00:40:26] And also, if you decide to sign up
[00:40:29] because of the delightful words you just heard today
[00:40:31] from Tyler Austin Harper, also let us know and tell us
[00:40:36] it was because of this show.
[00:40:38] Tyler, what would you like to say for yourself before we go?
[00:40:42] The floor is yours.
[00:40:43] You can find my writing at The Atlantic.
[00:40:46] I podcast every week with Jay Kang at the podcast
[00:40:49] Time to Say Goodbye.
[00:40:51] If you’re going to buy a gun, do so responsibly.
[00:40:53] But do so.
[00:40:55] I like ending on a pro safety note.
[00:40:58] So yeah, this is great, man.
[00:41:02] You’re awesome, man.
[00:41:03] Oh, this is so fun.
[00:41:04] Really fun.
[00:41:05] Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.