Debate between Bryan Reece and Dennis Falcon about Gun Control

FALCON: My name is Professor Dennis Falcon. I'm joined by Professor Bryan Reece and we're going to talk about gun control today. Bryan, does gun control violate the Second Amendment?  REECE: Yes, guns do not kill people, people kill people. I don't understand why you want to keep trying to isolate the attention on guns. Let's go after the people that misuse guns. Doesn't make any sense to me.  FALCON: Now, Bryan, we do regulate automobiles. Automobiles also kill people; or is it people that kill people who happen to be driving cars?  REECE: If automobiles kill people, let's get rid of them all like you want to do. Let's put safety latches on the doors and stuff like that or --  FALCON: I don't want to get rid of all of them, but --  REECE: Dogs kill people. Let's get rid of dogs in society.  FALCON: But since you're making it a matter of scale or a matter of availability, there are currently more guns or enough guns on the streets of America today to basically give two to every adult in America.  REECE: What's your point? There’s a lot of guns.  FALCON: We don't need that many.  REECE: So there's a lot of them in the United States. Do we get rid of stuff there's a lot of?  FALCON: M&Ms don't kill people, but guns do.  REECE: No, that's a good point. You could choke on an M&M. Should we get rid of the M&Ms? I mean, there are people who are doing individual behavior and we're trying to take stuff away from them and not address the behavior.  FALCON: But let's go to the original question: does the Second Amendment guarantee every person in this country the right to own a gun?  REECE: You have the right to bear arms according to the United -- now, you don't have the right to own a bazooka. You don't have the right to own a tank.  FALCON: Why not?  REECE: It's too powerful.  FALCON: The Second Amendment doesn't specify handguns, it doesn't specify rifles, it doesn't say anything about bazookas and hand grenades, but you currently accept that we can regulate those types of weapons. Where are you reading that from?  REECE: I'm reading that from court decisions in the past that have said these are where we are going to draw these lines. Now, these more aggressive movements --  FALCON: So it's not absolute, then. The right to keep and bear arms is not absolute.  REECE: It is not an absolute.  FALCON: We can regulate them, but I'm waiting for you to give me an argument --  REECE: But the right to protect yourself is an absolute, and given the current set of guns that we have in society people have a right to protect themselves.  FALCON: Bryan, Bryan. More people in the United States are killed by each other with guns every year than are killed by terrorists.  REECE: So let's go after the people doing the killing, not after the guns.  FALCON: We are going after the people, but we need to disarm the society.  REECE: You know what would happen if we got rid of guns in society? If we said, "No more guns." You know who would end up with no guns and who would end up with the guns? The people that are law-abiding people would not have guns, and the criminals in your house, you think they're law-abiding? No, they're breaking the law and they're going to have a gun. FALCON: And you know that's an interesting argument, because it makes me think about the intention of the Framers at the time they wrote the Second Amendment. We were in a revolutionary war against Great Britain and we were able to win, because we had militias of armed people, armed citizens, who were able to take up the fight. I'm not saying disarm America, but I am saying that we have excessive arms in America.  REECE: Where are we in excess?  FALCON: We have a diversified law enforcement. Agents are structured today. We have a military, National Guard by state. We have the capacity as citizens to defend ourselves against aggressors, foreign and domestic. We don't need to have two guns in every adult home, irresponsibly owned, in America today the way we have --  REECE: Well I agree. I like the little caveat you put there.  FALCON: And I'm glad you're agreeing with me already, and it took me five minutes.  REECE: Irresponsibly with two guns. What are you going to say? We don't have to have two guns in every room. We don't need two TVs in every house, but you're not trying to regulate that.  FALCON: But Bryan, the problem is I'm only suggesting that gun control is a legitimate form of government authority. It's a legitimate end --  REECE: We have gun control right now. We have a nice line right where we are at gun control. Anymore --  FALCON: I think we need more, though. We don't need bullets that can go through bulletproof vests.  REECE: Do you have examples of some of the more stuff we need?  FALCON: We don't need cop killer bullets. We don't need people carrying automatic weapons that have banana clips that can shoot 60 rounds. No hunter is going to use such a banana clip and that kind of a weapon in the first place.  REECE: A person is entitled to own that type of weapon and they're required by law to use it responsibly. We already have gun control. You know what kind of gun control it is? It's, if you use a gun to kill somebody, the government is going to hunt you down, the government is going to prosecute you, the government is going to incarcerate you, and sometimes the government will sentence you to death.  FALCON: Let's get clear on this one.  REECE: That's not gun control?  FALCON: You are accepting a rightful use of gun control.  REECE: I'm accepting the current standard we have. And no more --  FALCON: So you would not take away any weapon that's currently available off the market today?  REECE: No, I would not take any weapons --  FALCON: Assault weapons?  REECE: No, let's --  FALCON: What legitimate purpose do assault weapons serve?  REECE: Let's give the police department equal weapons to what the criminals have.  FALCON: How about would you go with me on this one? Let's introduce a bill in Congress to require people who own assault weapons to first prove that they know how to use them. We make people do that with automobiles. We make people do that with a lot of things that are dangerous in our society. People have to get prescriptions for drugs. Why don't we do something more to protect the rest of society?  REECE: We do do that. If a person uses it in inappropriately, if a person uses it to intimidate somebody --  FALCON: But by then it's too late. Why don't we make them take courses? REECE: No, it's not too late. It's not too late.  FALCON: Why don't we make them prove they've taken gun safety? Why don't we make them prove they have a gunlock or a cabinet at home to protect their children from getting in there?  REECE: When we take a person that's misused a gun, throw them in jail, throw the book at them, possibly even sentence them to the death penalty, it is a loud statement to the United States that we take action on the misuse of guns, not on guns, on behavior.  FALCON: Why I think –- my argument -- you keep talking about criminals and guns. What we know is that the danger of guns in American society today isn't the danger that criminals cause. It's the danger that law abiding citizens have to live among --  REECE: How do we know that? That doesn't make any sense. There's criminals with guns, that's the biggest problem.  FALCON: It's the angry husband. It's the angry girlfriend. It's the angry spouse. It's the man working at a liquor store counter that is scared, because of racial profiling. There's just all these different mixes. We live in a society that is dangerous and complex and hard enough as it is. We don't need to make it any harder to live amongst each other.  REECE: Are you saying that a husband that has gone out of his mind with rage and reaches for a gun to kill his wife, are you saying that if the gun was not in there --  FALCON: He's not a criminal.  REECE: -- he would not have killed his wife?  FALCON: It makes it easier.  REECE: There are so many other ways he would have killed his wife. I mean, these people, this behavior --  FALCON: It makes it easier and it's less reversible, and he's not a criminal until he actually pulls the trigger. Having the gun there, the ready access to such a lethal weapon, is irreplaceable. You can't turn that back. You can't -- something else, a rope, a stick, a rock, a brick, people can withstand the first punch. But with a bullet, if it's an assault weapon, they don't survive the first punch. Let's take that danger away.  REECE: This debate always reminds me of picking on a subculture in the United States. I don't know if you own a gun or not, but a lot of times the people who say, "We need to get rid of guns. We need to get rid of guns. We need to limit guns," they are the non-gunowners, and they're really thinking, "Oh, that's just the Southern hunter with the gun rack and the pick up truck," and those people are entitled to have that type of lifestyle. If that's what they do. I personally am not a hunter, but I am all about respecting somebody's right to their lifestyle, and just because it's a minority -- if it is a minority group in the United States -- we can't come in as a majority and start picking on them.  FALCON: Just recently, a state here in the United States passed a law that makes it possible for people to defend their homes themselves, people in public. I believe they call it the No Retreat Law. People are going to be able to use force now as a first option to protect themselves and property. And it also happens to be in the state where people are allowed to carry sidearms and weapons in public, loaded. I can't believe that that's a good idea. Do you think that's a good idea?  REECE: What's wrong with it?  FALCON: We're going to have some lady at a stoplight someday with her kid in the backseat, a panhandler --  REECE: You think he's going to "pow, pow."  FALCON: -- a panhandler is going to approach the window just asking for a dollar --  REECE: And she's going to blow him away?  FALCON: She's going to think it's a carjacker, because with the gun violence, with the criminal violence, with the general violence in our society as it is now, the last thing we need is to make it more incendiary.  REECE: See, this argument assumes that a lot of Americans are idiots and I'm not willing to go that direction.  FALCON: I am willing to go that far.  REECE: Look at the bag lady coming to the car and blow her away. I don't know anybody that is that crazy. Maybe it's a movie we watched or something.  FALCON: I remember we had a situation in a New York subway not that long ago when a man, many people believed, acted irrationally, irresponsibly, and actually shot some people that he believed were attacking him, when in reality, if you listen to other witnesses, he wasn't in the danger that he believed, that he thought subjectively he was in. He overreacted. Guns and overreaction in untrained hands -- if everybody was trained like a police officer, and that's what I suggested earlier -- why don't we introduce legislation that forces gun owners to go to some kind of formal training? Make them prove that they can act responsibly when they're scared, when they're in an uncommon situation.  REECE: Look, I know there are examples you can point to where somebody has misbehaved with a gun and we prosecute those individuals, but I'm worried if you take all these guns of law-abiding citizens, and I'm sitting in my home -- I don't own a gun, I don't want students to get the wrong impression here, but if I was a gun owner and I havea gun under my bed or something like that, and you get rid of my right to do that, someone breaks in, now you got -- how do you like that example? I reach for my gun to protect myself and my family, and now protection is not there. What am I supposed to do? Dial 911; wait for a minute while this person kills all of us? Why can't I protect myself? I can't protect myself against a gun. We are not going to get rid of guns in our society.  FALCON: There are other means -- there are other things we can do that don't make it more dangerous. The same gun is just as likely in that home to be used by a family member against themselves out of anger and passion or by accident. How many children have to die every year? I just saw a newspaper clipping, maybe within the last month, of another probably teenage boy or girl who shot a playmate, because they found a gun in their home that was accessible. How many kids have to die like that? Because --  REECE: How many Americans are protected every year, are kept from being killed, because we have people defending themselves?  FALCON: I don't think they balance out. I don't think a criminal being shot by a person defending their home makes up for the child that was killed.  REECE: Now, of course we don't have any statistics. We can't get all the criminals together and say, "Hey, how many of you did not break into that home where you thought there might be a gun, because you were worried about the person defending themselves." We'll never have those statistics, but criminals know that.  FALCON: This is a good debate, but I think you've already jumped on my side, because from the beginning, when you argued that gun ownership, bearing arms isn't absolute, that government has a right to regulate them, and that we do, and -- you'll accept where we are today.  REECE: I'll accept where we are today, but no more.  FALCON: But that's going to be a hard argument to hold, and as weapons become --  REECE: We're holding it right where it is.  FALCON: --as weapons become more legal.  REECE: We're holding it; we're keeping the line right where it is.  FALCON: Well, I don't think we're going to settle this.  REECE: I mean, we're changing all the time. Technology is modifying, the weapons are going further and further, we're going to have to be moving the line a lot, but we cannot eliminate the right.  FALCON: Thank you for accepting my arguments. We're going to have to stop this for today. We're done. All right. This issue of gun control and how we protect American society is a very complicated one. What do you think?