CLAY: All right. Here’s the deal, Buck. That entire address — and I watched it all — is nearly 20 minutes. I know you reacted to it on Tucker right after that speech ended. He didn’t mention police once, and increasing the number of police. He didn’t discuss where 99% of the violence is occurring, which is outside of mass shootings, and it felt to me like a continued a separate attempt to find something that is motivating Democrats to come out and support the Biden administration.
We’ve seen abortion, right? “They’re gonna take away your contraception! Not just abortion, They’re gonna take away your contraception!” That seems to have faded as an issue and hasn’t resonated. It was that, “We had to have voting rights legislation or we were gonna have Jim Crow 2.0,” and then we had record turnout in Georgia. Every rationale that they tried to advance seems to be failing. And even the rationales that they were advancing are a small pinprick of what the number- one way to solve these issues would be, which is — particularly with guns — put more police on the streets and allow them to do their jobs.
BUCK: Biden is in a tough spot right now; his whole party is. Reminds me of The Godfather Part II when Michael Corleone says, “My final offer is this: Nothing.” What does he offer the Democrats going forward based on what he’s accomplished so far? The answer is nothing. So to your point, Clay, there’s a desperate need for Democrats who look at this — an economy that people are deeply unhappy with, failures all around on whole covid, “Oh, the science!
“We’re gonna be in charge; it’s all gonna be fine.” Really? More people died under Biden in his first year that Trump in the last year of his presidency, first year of the pandemic. We all know that that’s not what was promised. There’s so many failures. So on this issue they think they get to be the good guys. Here’s the problem. Their arguments are garbage. Their arguments are no better now than they were after Sandy Hook when there was no massive federal legislation that was passed under the Obama administration that was going to stop all of this.
Everything they talked about here, everything that they said, whether it’s red flag laws… He just sort of threw in there “tackling the mental health crisis.” Oh, gee, that’s kind of like saying, “We’re just gonna end poverty.” Good luck with that. There’s a lot that goes into it. It’s not as easy as waving your hand and muttering something that you’re reading off a screen. Let’s look at the red flag laws. Much more complicated and wouldn’t stop it. Safe storage laws? How are you gonna even enforce that, and what’s that really going to stop?
CLAY: And also, by the way, to your point on safe storage, it also reflects, Buck, the reason why people have guns is to protect themselves. So now you’re gonna make them have to spend 10 minutes to go get a gun in order to protect themselves?
BUCK: It’s the same mentality as people who double or triple mask, but in this case it’s, “Why not have…?” In New York, as I told you — and I remind people of this because one of the most absurd talking points that Biden really leans in on is “no right is absolute.” The Second Amendment is full of restrictions and regulations and criminal statutes and prohibited-possessor laws, you have to go to a federally licensed firearms dealer to go buy a gun.
You could sit here… You have to be a legal specialist in places like New York and California to even know the gun laws, and they’re gonna act like, “Oh, it’s all unrestricted”? So that’s a totally bogus, it’s a lie, it’s a totally bogus talking point. In New York you have to have, as I’ve said, your handgun in a lockbox with a trigger lock on it inside the lockbox. Clay, why not put it in a locked trunk and put a locked box around that? Why not go with four layers of protection?
CLAY: How long would it take you in New York, with those restrictions, if you needed a gun and you were following all of the restrictions and guidelines? How long would it take you to be able to use that gun?
BUCK: If you were doing what the City of New York requires for a licensed handgun premise permit owner, legitimately, you hear someone break down your front door you’re looking at… You probably can have fingerprint locks, but I don’t know if everybody would trust that. You might have a key lock because that fingerprint reader — and I know because ’cause I have friends that have these.
CLAY: Yeah, that’s why I’m curious.
BUCK: Yes. You’re probably looking at doing one lock, another lock, trigger guard, you know it will take you about 60 to 90 seconds legitimately. But if someone’s —
CLAY: That’s what I’m saying.
BUCK: — hearing a bump in the night, do you want to wait 90 seconds before you get your gun?
CLAY: Do you even have the ability to have 90 seconds? The reason you have it is so you have immediate protection, not protection in 90 seconds.
BUCK: And it’s 90 seconds probably after you get it; so I don’t know if you’re keeping it under your bed or your closet. So these are all things that the left doesn’t care about it. It’s to antagonize gun owners, it’s to make people who own guns annoyed, frustrated — and, remember: These laws whether it’s magazine limitations, assault rifles, is not a law if they don’t enforce it, Clay. So they’re going to have people that they’re going to bring criminal charges against who’ve done nothing other than be in violation of these laws that they want to change where your lawfully owned magazine, your lawfully owned AR-15 or whatever is now all of a sudden banned.
So they’re willing to send men with guns paid by the state to take away your guns that are legal today but they’ll say they’re illegal tomorrow ,and act like they’re the good guys. My biggest problem with… I can’t even say my biggest problem ’cause there’s so many. Clay, they’re ignoring… When they talk about “assault rifles,” they are de facto, by the numbers, Biden, the Democrats, ignoring 95%, literally 95% or more of gun violence. When they’re talking about mass shootings and legislation for mass shootings, they are ignoring 99% of gun violence.
CLAY: Correct.
BUCK: And so at some point you have to say, “Hold on a second. Why is all the other gun violence not even addressed with this whole, ‘Oh, we have to stop all the gun violence out there’?” Because most gun violence occurs in cities with handguns and disproportionately affects the minority community. Disproportionately the people that will be arrested by the laws that are already on the books in places Luke New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, you name it, are young African-American men.
The ending of the mass incarceration state that these district attorneys promised they would do has resulted in reductions in enforcement of the very laws that would deal with much more of the actual gun violence. And as a result of that, more minority men are being — law-abiding minority men, grandmas walking in their neighborhood to go to the store. They’re being robbed, they’re being shot, they’re being carjacked. That’s the actual gun violence mother lode right there. In cities, people with criminal records who DAs like Krasner and Kim Foxx and you name it won’t actually enforce the laws against because “social justice.”
CLAY: And that’s actually blowing up in the Democrats’ faces. There’s a front-page article today talking about the civil war that’s going on inside of the Democrat Party right now over, how do you respond to gun violence? And it’s easy to blame the guns. But a lot of minority, black, Asian, Hispanic people out there who have traditionally been a part of the Democrat coalition are looking around and saying, “Wait a minute. We’ve got an epic failure on our hands when it comes to rates of violence in this country,” which, as we have been pointing out on this show for a year now, exploded in the wake of George Floyd. Right?
You can go look now. There’s no argument to the contrary that Black Lives Matter didn’t lead to rampant lawlessness in our streets and the fact that Democrats won’t take responsibility for defund the police and the legitimate consequences. The more active BLM was in a city, by and large, the higher the rates of violent crime are in that city right now, the more difficult it’s become to hire police officers. We were talking yesterday to start the show, Buck, about the disastrous situation in Seattle where they can’t even investigate rapes.
Minneapolis is maybe, of every city, all cities in America… They can’t even hire anybody now to work on their police. The rates of violent crimes are through the roof. We got people in the Minneapolis area listening right now, most of the media — as Rush liked to call them, the Drive-By Media — disappeared in the wake of the George Floyd verdicts, and they aren’t covering the lawlessness which now exists in many parts of Minneapolis. And the total and complete collapse that their police force, has also befallen them in the wake of all this. That’s the story that should be told. George Floyd, the convictions happened, everybody bailed, and thousands and those of people who would otherwise be alive are dead now.
BUCK: There was a project stretching back very openly… Now, you could say it stretches back for decades. It depends on how you want to trace it. But you started to hear a lot about progressive prosecutors who were backed by George Soros — and this is a matter of financial record; this is not some conspiracy theory: backed financially heavily by George Soros — in America’s major cities, right around 2017, 2018, during the Trump administration, because the media had also created a social justice and racial justice panic because, “Oh, my gosh, Donald Trump, he’s a…” They were saying, “He’s a white nationalist! He’s evil, he’s racist.” Meanwhile, as we know, he did better with… More minorities voted for Trump than previous Republicans. And, you know, they used —
CLAY: Increased wages substantially. I mean, if covid doesn’t happen, Trump is probably, from an economic perspective, the best thing to ever happen to black Americans in the twenty-first century.
BUCK: But right around 2017, 2018, you started to have a lot of these district attorneys who were saying, “We need to end the mass incarceration state.” You go back, you look at these interview — and they were proud of it. “Oh, we have too many people”. In the Philadelphia area they went from — over the course of 2018 to present — 8,000 people in the county jails to 5,000 people in the county jails. Now, you may say, “Oh, that’s great.” Well, who are they letting out? Let’s really think about that.
That’s a huge reduction. And they hide what’s going on. They take plea bargains for somebody who’s a gangbanger with a gun. They say, “Oh, no, it’s just a simple possession crime for drug possession. We don’t want to put somebody away for drug crimes.” They pleading to donw. So they played all these games. District Attorney Gascon in Los Angeles is a perfect example of this. He just was slapped down by an appeals court today — and this has just happened — who says (summarized):
“You actually, as an elected official, have to enforce the three-strikes law. It was passed by the state legislature. You don’t get to say, ‘This habitual offender, I don’t like that the law says they actually have to do prison time. I want to just let them out.’” But that’s the extreme it has gotten to in places like Los Angeles and New York, where an appeals court in the state of California has to say:
“He, buddy! Mr. District Attorney, you’re not God. You actually have to enforce the law against criminals.” This is the foundation of it all, Clay. While they’re doing this whole shiny-object things about magazine limitations and private sales at gun shows or whatever, they’re won’t take any accountability for the violence in cities. And this has been a direct result of a leftist program to go easy on criminals, to change how many people are actually being punished for the crimes they commit, and we’re seeing the anarchy as a result of it. And Joe Biden wants to lecture us anyway.
CLAY: There’s no doubt. And, by the way, big elections coming up in San Francisco directly on that DA front. Chesa Boudin is on the recall list.
BUCK: Next week.
CLAY: He was one of the leaders of this soft-on-crime policy and San Francisco’s overwhelmingly rejecting him. Also, a big mayoral election coming up in L.A. Former Republican turned Democrat, which feels in many ways Bloombergian for what happened in New York City. They may be going back to law and order in L.A. too. When you’re seeing California revolt against left-wing policies, it’s a sign that the Democrat worldview is collapsing from a governance perspective.