Ben Shapiro and Piers Morgan Revisit Their Viral Gun Control Debate

so let's talk about your general view of what government ought to do so what makes you a liberal in sort of not the classical liberal sense where we agree but the part where we disagree what do you think government ought to do well it should be as small as possible right i don't believe in massive governments sprawling government agencies with lots of people doing jobs you're not quite sure what they're doing soaking up public expenditure i think government should be responsible it should take action even if it's against the popular will of the people you're made to be a government because people expect you to take difficult decisions and to govern an example i would use is someone like margaret thatcher in in britain i would compare her to the other female prime minister about theresa may margaret thatch was prepared to make difficult tough decisions she was a conservative but theresa may wasn't she just wanted to please everybody i don't believe in people-pleasing governments i believe you are elected by the people you should live up as far as possible to the manifesto that you ran on and i think trump to his credit has basically delivered on most of the things he said he would deliver on and he certainly tried to you couldn't argue that he's been elected in a completely different thing um so i think that that you know that's a central part of government is to do whatever the administration has been elected has decided it wants to do that's why they got elected you know doing what the people have elected you to do is important in democracy so i believe in that i don't believe in a nanny state except to the point where the public can sometimes be stupid too stupid for his own good you know do i think that government should occasionally interfere in the well-being of the people yes i do actually um so where do you draw the lines around that what's the limiting principle when it comes to because people are very often quite stupid as it turns out and and you know that and if you're on the right you think that's the left and if you're on the left you think that's the right but the truth is that in personal habits people make lots of mistakes make lots of bad decisions where do you draw the line around where is the government's role in bettering people's lives because i think this is a fundamental distinction between liberal and conservatives take cigarette smoking right most smokers knew it was bad for them right they know it's bad cigarette smoking but they want the right to smoke right sort of constitutional right but they want to have the right to smoke it's my life fine okay it's your life but actually what has happened in countries like britain and america in the last 20 years is you don't now go into a bar and be full of smoke if you don't want it to be that to me seemed to be sensible government you know yes you are impinging on the right of a civilian to lead the life they want to lead which is to walk into a bar and have a cigarette at the bar but actually if most people in that bar don't want to have a cigarette why should they be subjected to unhealthy smoke from you in the way that they were being now is that nanny state by government to ban smoking from public places i would think it was the right thing to do i'm a non-smoker i spoke the odd cigar but most smokers i know actually shrugged their shoulders and kind of accepted it and there's a kind of template there i would argue mr shapiro for the gun debate which we haven't had yet i'm sure we're coming to which is at what point does the safety and the health of a lot of people get dictated to by a group of other people at what point do you bring them together or what point do you try and reach a consensus whether smokers can still smoke or they can still have a gun but actually what they can't do is go into a bar and shoot it up and how do you stop them doing it it's a fundamental question for the public health of the country and treating guns like a public health issue would be a really smart move for america right now it might take the politics out of it which has become so vicious and polarizing in glasgow and scotland had a huge problem with knife crime a lot of knife murders young kids mainly white kids stabbing each other so they treat it like a public health debate and they've massively reduced knife crime in scotland which has been great so you know nanny state to a point i believe in people's fundamental freedoms but the cigarette debate to me was an interesting one you know drink driving was an interesting debate in america wasn't it you go about 50 years you could you get in your car and have a few drinks and drive around and then mothers against drink driving mad i think they were called rose up after a particularly heinous drink driving incident and they affected real change and now you can't do that um now there will be people who still think i wanna have a few beers and have a drive okay but you can't actually because you might kill people and they have as much right to not be killed as you do to get in your car with a few drinks it's fascinating to go a little bit beneath the surface on this debate because i think that the debate here is really about externalities meaning that the reason that we have laws about not smoking in public places and there you'd have to distinguish for me even between public parks which are run by the government and public establishments which run by private business owners so in my view the government actually shouldn't be involved in that if a private business owner wants to have a successful business they will stop people from smoking in their business in most cases because they're going to lose business because most people don't smoke and it's annoying to have people smoke there but but take the drunk driving example it's a better example so the drunk driving obviously there are obvious externalities to people weaving all over the road and the way you actually police drunk driving is by pulling somebody over who is weaving all over the road and driving recklessly so you could theoretically have a crime defined as reckless driving without the actual drink being a part of it per se because you know you if you drink in your home fundamentally and again this comes back to the guns debate for me right fundamentally you want to stop people getting in their car drunk that's really what you want you want to affect a cultural change in thinking and the undeniable reality is that a far smaller percentage of americans now get into a car under the influence of alcohol than used to because of the effect of that campaigning and most americans accept that america you've got to remember one of my sort of strange things about the gun debate was that america's probably the one of the most regulated countries on earth in so many ways if i want to buy a car i couldn't believe the amount of paperwork i had to do i wanted to buy a pet dog my god i mean you're there all day you know in other words you know my my 21 it's now 26 but my 21 year old son at the time six foot two inch long hair and a beard with his mate it's the same took them to gladstones in malibu for a lunch and they wanted a non-alcoholic beer and they got refused because they didn't have their id on them a non-alcoholic beer because it has 0.001 alcohol in it i didn't even know that and when i asked them to explain why they went yeah i'm afraid that's the problem they they can't prove they're 21 and you have to be 21 even of a non-alcoholic beer the same month up in arizona an eight-year-old girl went to a bullets and burgers had her burger then went to the range was handed by a former marine a load of firearms loaded fired them eventually got handed an uzi submachine gun fired two bullets and lost control and shot the instructor in the head and killed him a terrible tragedy she will never get over that i'm sure her parents were videoing it on their phone and you see them suddenly lose control of the phone they won't get over it the guy's dead his family won't get over it what i won't get over is the extraordinary disparity between this draconian ruling of my son age 22 to have a non-alcoholic beer in la and this eight-year-old girl i have a seven-year-old girl now an eight-year-old girl being able to fire an uzi machine gun submachine gun loaded at a gun range and that remains legal because it's her constitutional right to do that that's where i have a problem it's more the disparity of the way that america regulates these things well i think that the the real question there is criminalizing recklessness meaning that it's a weird thing to criminalize a 21 year old drinking a non-alcoholic beer right and in the other case obviously i would think that it should be criminal recklessness to hand an eight-year-old girl a gun she's not capable of controlling and that would be chargeable in my view you know just under probably basic negligence but it was i mean i don't know a particular case but in my view that should be although not necessarily as an effect of banning guns per se because as we've discussed now several times i think that the the countervailing view is that there are lots of law-abiding citizens who do want to be able to own a gun and should be able to own a gun i understand why americans want to defend themselves in a country with 330 million guns i understand why americans i've heard bill maher say he has a gun right because he knows he has threats and he knows that they may come with guns the countries are washed with guns what i don't get and this is the same debate we had before but let me make it probably a simpler debate for the purposes of this which is there has been an undeniable increase in the number of massacres i'm not talking about shootings of two three people mass shootings on a grandiose horrific scale in the last 20 years they are accelerating for whatever reason and the fire power that's being used is ferocious the guy in date in ohio recently he was shot dead within 24 seconds of firing his first bullet but because he had an ak-47 he's able to get off i think 41 rounds and hit 26 people maybe more i think nine died and at that point i'm like okay surely surely if you're concerned about gun safety and you fundamentally believe in the principle of regulation you could have it in every other part of your life right you have in every part of your life you also accept i presume machine guns are bad right automatic weapons right so you've accepted regulation on guns so i say well why can't you go a step further now except that the preferred weapon of choice of almost every one of these massacre shooters they all use these rifles but that is the countervailing question is whether what we are actually doing here is reverse engineering the regulation by focusing in on the mass shootings meaning that every year in the united states approximately 400 people are killed with rifles approximately 600 people are killed with knives about 30 000 people die of handgun wounds many of those are suicides so are we focusing in on the mass shootings because we are focusing on the rifles or are we focusing on the rifles because we are focusing in on the mass shootings why not why not just go for a full gun ban in other words so i don't propose a gun bat i accept there are too many guns in circulation it's not like australia where they after the hobart massacre in the mid 90s they banned almost all guns from civilians even then only one third of guns were turned in in the australian gun buyback and that's a lot of guns it's certainly a lot of guns the equivalent here would be a 110 million guns 100 i mean the murder rate in america went down faster after the hobart i know we'll remember and our gun supply increases you and i we can argue the details we can do a whole other hour about this there's a bigger thing which is a cultural response to these kind of massacres i found it extraordinary that after sandy hook when 20 young first graders are literally blown to pieces in their classroom that america the number one superpower in the world was incapable of coming together and finding a unified response to try and prevent that happening again of any kind in britain we had a direct equivalent of dumb lane in scotland but there was an a cultural reaction from britain from left and right was never political at all that after 16 children were killed in dunblane and scotland in a similar attack by a lone gunman that something fundamentally had to change and we were very draconian as you know we banned almost all guns from civilian circulation interesting thing happened for five years gun crime ticked up a bit actually and then they said okay we need to make it more punitive so that's a five-year mandatory prison sentence if you're caught with one of these guns and ever since that moment gun crime has gone down we have other issues in britain like knife crime very serious problems of knife crime and the reaction from the british is the same we've got to stop this what can we do let's limit the amount of knives let's make it draconian to carry an eye for the three in other words our reaction to knife crime epidemic now is the same as our reaction to gun crime which is we can't allow this to continue let's bring in laws to change it and it's not left and right arguing about it the three things i've always tried to campaign for here universal background checks i don't think you're against that not in concept although if it does end with a massive government gun registry i have a problem right and i understand why because that comes back to the threat of tyranny and everything else right i get that but i've always campaigned for that i think there should be a limit on all magazines of 10 bullets i don't understand why anyone would need more you don't need it for hunting you don't have a sports shooting you can do that within britain if you want a sports shoe you have a license why can't you have that here and thirdly i don't see a need a need in the same way that only the only possible need for a machine gun is to kill lots of people very quickly i think that has now become the preferred way of using one of these assault rifles and i don't understand why the argument against machine guns is this and the argument against these assault rifles is a different argument to me it's the same thing you're just extending you're extending common sense so are you talking about a ban on the sale of of ars and and so-called assault rifles which are really also my autos are you talking about a full confiscation is there a hundred million of those in circulation i think you would you would try and do what they did in australia you would have a buy-back you know you'd say look we are going to try i know i know good luck because at the moment people are so entrenched about this driven by political partisan debate but actually i would i would appeal to the company because you're talking about confiscating 100 million guns on the basis of 400 yearly deaths not confiscating asking people to give them up well i mean unless you're going to punish them and you're going to pay them you're going to pay them unless you you're going to pay three times what they're going and okay it is okay nobody's going to turn that in but you have to do something is my point did you know that every like on this video creates one additional leftist tear gleaming in the sunshine don't ask me why that's called science to take advantage of this amazing opportunity hit the like button

Channel: Ben Shapiro

Views: 1,744,961

Rating: 4.9089298 out of 5

Keywords: ben shapiro, shapiro, ben shapiro show, ben shapiro interview, ben shapiro debate, the ben shapiro show, ben, ben shapiro conservative, ben shapiro vs, ben shapiro ep, ben shapiro best, ben shapiro obama, ben shapiro (author), ben Shapiro ben shapiro, gun control, gun control bills, u.s. gun control, biden gun control orders, president biden gun control, president joe biden gun control, san diego reaction to gun control, president joe biden gun control plan

Id: xAaagsvG0YY

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/tenebrapetrichor]

This is how adults with different point of views look. You don’t have to share the same point of view but you can’t still come together and talk.

[u/tensigh]

This was interesting but Piers gets so much wrong on guns. Still the debate was enjoyable.