Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep. 25 - A Gun for Every Appendage w/ Shane Claiborne
58 Plays4 years ago
Today, we ask the age-old question: "Does Jesus own an AR-15, or does he own ALL AR-15s?"
There are an estimated 390,000,000 guns in the US - a country with a population somewhere around 328,000,000. In January alone, Americans bought over 4.1m guns, which is a 60% increase! Within five years, every man, woman, and child in the country will be able to dual wield AK-47s to combat the impending alien invasion invasion, and I just don't know that we can, in good conscience, condemn that strategy. However, easy access to firearms comes at a price. 2020 saw an increase in gun violence, with 20k deaths attributed to firearms, as well as 24k suicides using guns. Regardless of where you stand on the 2nd Amendment, we should ALL strive to curb those statistics.
Our guest, Shane Claiborne, is an accomplished Christian author, activist, and founder of Philadelphia-based non-profit The Simple Way. His most recent book "Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence" (coauthored by Michael Martin) is an in-depth critique of gun culture in the United States. Shane and Michael examine the history of gun culture in the US, it's strange relationship with American Christians, and the real world implications that gun laws have on people, especially in our most vulnerable communities.
This is a difficult subject to tackle. Many of you (like me) are probably gun enthusiasts, and have been staunchly opposed to gun regulations of any sort. Others may have little or no association with guns, and think that this whole issue is insane. Regardless of which side of the fence you're on, we have to learn how to have productive, respectful conversations about the realities that access to firearms creates, and in my opinion there's no better person to do that with than Shane Claiborne!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Humorous Beginnings
00:00:00
Speaker
First of all, I appreciate you having this conversation and much less hosting someone that you probably don't agree with on everything. Well, Sam invited you to. I was like, Casey, you're probably going to hate me for this, but I want to talk to this guy. I told him about it after it was confirmed. At some point, I'll invite Sean Hannity's son on here, and Sam will have to sweat it out. Well, hopefully we'll invite you back. I think that could be a good time.
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grown Up Christian. I'm Casey. And I'm Sam.
00:00:52
Speaker
And I've been, okay, so the other day, I've been sitting on this story for a minute because I feel like this is something, I don't know, it just pulled a lot of strings in my brain when it happened. So I've been getting my hair cut at this place in Wichita. I've
Haircuts and Personal Stories
00:01:10
Speaker
decided that I can afford to pay a little more for people who have seen like a modern haircut before.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, right. Getting a haircut and finding the right place was like a real struggle for me.
00:01:25
Speaker
I mean, I had dreads for like nine years and I didn't get a haircut for at least 10. And then after getting a haircut, after cutting them off, after my son was born, I was like, what am I supposed to even, what do I do? I went from having an emo swoop to growing my hair out and getting dreadlocks. So I didn't know how to have an actual grown up haircut.
00:01:52
Speaker
Dude, so many years where your hair was your personality too. Yeah, I know. You have no idea how difficult of a time this still is for me, Casey. I still have panic attacks over haircuts. I'm like, it's not right. It's not what I wanted. Hence, becoming a hat guy. Dude, as problematic as they were, you looked really good in dreadlocks.
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, I miss them. I would redo them too, man. I would redo them in two seconds if my wife wouldn't divorce me and my company wouldn't consider why they hired me in the first place. Yeah. I mean, what's the difference, right? You just smell like a hay barn all the time. That's it. They weren't that bad, but they did get, dude, when I cut them, I should post the pictures on the Instagram.
00:02:40
Speaker
When I cut them off, like the dread rot, which is what they call it, when like all the shit builds up inside of them, it looks pretty fucked up. I should post those on Instagram. Oh my God. I'm not familiar at all with that. What do you got, like termites or something living in there? Well, I mean, all your dead skin cells, everything, literally like all your dead hair, like your hair never, well, the dead hair is fine because they make wigs out of other people's hair. Like nothing happens to your hair.
00:03:07
Speaker
Hair apparently stays hair forever. It doesn't decompose when your body does. That's why you see those like skeletons with like the creepy ass hair coming out. Like they still have like their head, like their scalps on and shit. But yeah, it's like, you know, your hair grease and your dead skin cells. Like that literally just builds up inside of them.
00:03:30
Speaker
It's like when a tree cracks and falls over and you look inside and it's just straight up mush in the middle and you just didn't know it. Yeah, that's basically dreadlock. Yeah, you got a gooey, a soft candy core. Anyway, okay, so you finally start paying big boy dollars for a haircut. Is this a salon or a barber?
00:03:55
Speaker
No, it's like a salon. And it's like the cost of your haircut is inversely related to the age of the person cutting hair. It's like the exact opposite of every other industry. Like the younger they are, the more you're gonna pay for the haircut. I suppose unless you hit like, unless you're one of those people that goes to the Paul Mitchell school and lets them just like hack away at you. Like Edward Scissorhands. We have Rob Roys. You have Rob Roy down there?
00:04:25
Speaker
So Paul Mitchell, Rob Roy, apparently they named these hair schools after just people with generic ass names. The whitest dude. So I've been going to this place and it's like takes a little longer, you know, you end up in the chair for longer and then they like shampoo you out and stuff like that. But I got to talk into this young girl who's cutting my hair and just like asking her some basic questions.
00:04:55
Speaker
You know, and well, what's uh, so, uh, where is your, are you from here? Uh, yeah, originally. Okay. What about your, what about your fiance? And she's like, well,
Reflections on Relationships and Maturity
00:05:06
Speaker
it's not my fiance. Well, it's kind of my fiance. Um, I think it's my fiance as of last night. I'm like, okay. What do you mean? She's like, well, we'll probably be married within the year.
00:05:19
Speaker
I was like, I gotcha. How did that happen? She's like, well, it came up in conversation last night. He told me that my ring would be here soon, and he asked me if I wanted him to ask me sooner or wait a little while and ask me after a while.
00:05:42
Speaker
Well, first red flag right there. Like, you don't get to like, you don't get to probe. You gotta just, you gotta shoot your shot, boy. But it was funny because I was like, the more questions I start asking, oh, what's your, what's your fiance do? He's a children's pastor.
00:06:03
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Like we're at and she's like, well, it's at a church plant in downtown Wichita. Nice church plant. She's like, yeah, he's not, he's not full time. He's a, you know, a bank teller, but he's eventually, he hopes that they're going to start paying him to do it soon.
00:06:21
Speaker
And the more she told me about this church, it sounds like it's kind of a cool place. They're meeting in a communal space and it's very community focused. They're trying to do a bunch of stuff in the community and serve local people, which I think sounds great. It made you almost consider going back to church. Yeah, sure. Okay. But I'm like, so how long have you guys been together? And she says five months.
00:06:51
Speaker
Hey-o. It's like, oh, I've read this story before. She goes, well, but we were aware of each other on social media and stuff beforehand. That counts. Yeah, pretty much. That counts for what? I mean, at least another five months. This is all how I started out. I literally saw April on campus and thought she was good looking, and so I just messaged her. I was like, hey, you should check out my band sometime.
00:07:20
Speaker
It's terrible. Nice move. It worked, but I mean, it shouldn't have. You should be single and sad right now. Right. Yeah. But you know what? Don't fix what's not broken. But so they started basically like met in person
00:07:38
Speaker
I'm assuming it sounded like six months ago, started dating five months ago, talking about marriage now. It's one of those things where it's like people do that and they're fine.
Small Talk and Social Interactions
00:07:53
Speaker
I certainly wouldn't
00:07:57
Speaker
presumed to judge This girl or her fiance or their situation and I wish them all the best But it was just like there's so many of the things that like she said while telling me about this that I was like, oh Yeah, I I thought that or I heard that before or you know, like she says well, you know, I just feel like I I
00:08:22
Speaker
you know, matured a lot faster than a lot of my friends. Oh my God. The amount of times I heard that from everyone who was getting married again. Okay. From someone who got married a young, I love, we, we will talk about this all day. We were those people too. Now I, to some degree will stand by the fact that I, I was,
00:08:48
Speaker
I don't know if mature is the right word, but I had, I was more ready for that stage of life at an early age. I don't think mature is the right word, but I was like, I was just a, I don't know. I wasn't interested in like, we weren't, both of us, like we weren't party guys. We had like a small group of friends that we were close with. Like we weren't,
00:09:15
Speaker
not a lot was like changing for us. And we weren't always looking for like the next best thing. Oh, I don't know. Maybe this person, someone else will come along. Like we were just like easy go. I don't know. I just, I shouldn't speak for you, but I was just not interested in like,
00:09:32
Speaker
But I don't know if that's maturity. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying I was more mature. I'm saying my demeanor in general baseline personality that I have no control over was more ready for that phase of life at that time than peers.
00:09:48
Speaker
I feel like I was less mature than most of the people around me. Me getting married, I wasn't giving up anything that I wanted. I wasn't sacrificing the life that I had hoped for or wanted so that I could marry April. I wanted to marry April.
00:10:10
Speaker
But I was a child, and she was a child, and we were only equipped to make each other miserable over time. And we did fine. We're fine. But yeah, there was just so many little things that she said. I'm like, oh man, this is like talking to 22-year-old me.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, I also want to point out how you were the one probing for conversation from the person cutting your hair and it's supposed to be the other way around. You should everybody wants to talk about themselves. Like if you ask a question, shortly soon after people are going to start talking about themselves. Yeah, that's true. I think the hardest part about getting a haircut for me is
00:10:57
Speaker
when people try to talk to me, I'm like, I just would rather, I don't really wanna do this. I want you to cut my hair. I wanna say that looks good or a little bit off, a little bit shorter right there. And then I wanna pay you and move on. Like I know some people have like connections with their barber and they like that. I don't, I don't care about that at all. And that's the small talk of like, so what do you, you got hobbies? It's like, yeah, I got hobbies.
00:11:28
Speaker
If I wanted to talk about them, I would have started talking about them. I feel like I can handle the haircut place. I don't like it when the dentist tries to talk to me. They've got their fingers in my mouth and they're asking me questions and I'm like,
00:11:47
Speaker
Like even yes or no questions, like what's the point? Like I literally fell asleep in the dentist chair getting a filling the other day. I want to point out that the dentist isn't, well, the dentist is doing fillings. If you're getting your teeth cleaned, it's a hygienist. Wow.
00:12:05
Speaker
Hold on. All right. Well, sorry. I get my mother-in-law is a hygienist, so she cleans my teeth. So I have to do the whole, like, her talking to me while cleaning my teeth and just be like, her, her, her, her. And it's like, and then now it's your mother-in-law. Imagine that. And every time after you swish and spit, you're like, you know you're not a dentist.
00:12:32
Speaker
Yeah, that would be that would be a little uncomfortable, I guess. It's not anymore. It's just like that's just that, you know, it's like it is weird, though, because it's like outside. It's like, obviously, I live right down the street from my mother-in-law. So like I see my wife's family all the time and. But it's also weird because I forget to go like you're supposed to go like what, twice a year or some shit. Yeah.
00:12:59
Speaker
I'll definitely go over a year and then go in and it's like, then I have to like, my mother-in-law knows when I'm not going because she's the hygienist who cleans my teeth. So it's like super weird when you go. It's like normally like, haven't been in here in a while. And then it's just like having that conversation with your mother-in-law is like, yeah, yeah. Dude, you know what I hate? It's like going to places where you are at this advantage in the discussion and then having them try to like upsell you stuff.
00:13:28
Speaker
Like the vet is really bad about that. Oh my god. And then, like the dentist, I've been to the dentist like three times in the past year for different things. And they're like, we can fill two cavities. Do you want three? You have three cavities. Four? Like the first time I went in in the past year, they're like,
00:13:46
Speaker
Hey, uh, just so you know, we're seeing some signs that like you grind your teeth and you know, that can be really bad for your teeth over time. And we would really like to fit you for a night guard and like, get you fitted for that. And it's, you know, it's 800 bucks for the fitting and stuff like that. But you know, this is something that would really be a good idea for you. And I'm like, I don't want, I don't want that. I do not want to have to sleep with that thing
Social Dynamics and Public Etiquette
00:14:10
Speaker
in. I would rather just pretend this problem didn't exist, you know?
00:14:14
Speaker
And the whole time I'm kind of thinking in the back of my head, like, no one's ever mentioned this to me before. So I told them, like, I didn't really want to. I wasn't going to do it. I've been back twice and they haven't said a thing about me grinding my teeth or anything like that. And maybe I just got a check mark next to my name is like, Oh, this guy's cheap and he doesn't buy night guards. But I feel like if it was really important, they would tell me on a regular basis, like, Hey, just so you know, you're grinding your teeth down to the nub.
00:14:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's always, I'm always skeptical of those kinds of solutions when they're like, we're seeing signs of it's like, I'm either doing it or I'm not. Okay.
00:14:55
Speaker
Your job is to look at my mouth and know if there's a problem. If you're just making guesses based on a couple of things, that's called data. So next time I come in, collect more of that, and then we'll see if I need this mouth guard a little bit later on.
00:15:13
Speaker
I'm just going to make my own by melting down Jolly Ranchers. Perfect. I can't see anything go wrong with that. Do you remember when you were a kid and they had all those, I don't even know if they still have them, but they had all those weird candies that no one ever bought next to the cash register. They'd have candy toothpaste that had a little brush with it.
00:15:34
Speaker
You'd squirt like that weird candy gel out. Yeah. Yeah. Or just straight up sour drops that you just put in your mouth. Oh, yeah. Man, I remember those. It was just burning a hole in your tongue. That was awful. Anything sour like that, it felt like somebody sandpapered the fuck out of your tongue. It was awful.
00:15:59
Speaker
felt awful I hated anything sour or did you ever get those like giant ass like the job breakers like they would
00:16:10
Speaker
They're like the size of her did. I feel like that's one candy that like I have no experience that and I have one experience with gumdrops. I threw up naturally these these job breakers are so big like you have to like you just lick them like you just hold like it's like holding like a
00:16:32
Speaker
cue ball and just licking me like a pervert and you do it so long you do it so long that like all the color is gone right and then you as you're looking at you realize it's just getting red you're like what the fuck and then you realize it's because your tongue's bleeding all over the
00:16:57
Speaker
They were terrible. You got one of those big sugary gonads that makes my mouth bleed, please? Oh my God. Dude, so are you fully vaccinated now? Mm-hmm. I am. I can now rejoin the public without any worry, except for I love it because
00:17:23
Speaker
you know, I'm fully vaccinated without the, a lot of the perks of being fully vaccinated, right? Because nobody knows like if you are so like you still wear a mask so you don't look like a dickhead. I do. Other people don't care about looking like a dickhead. And I have seen a lot of those people, uh, literally I swear the day after like the CDC was like,
00:17:45
Speaker
You don't have to, if you're vaccinated, you don't have to wear masks. Everyone who wasn't vaccinated was like, we're not going to find out now. And I go to like, just the other day, I went to like a gas station, go inside to get like, I get gas station, iced coffee. Combees, we got combees in New England. Combees is the best, dollar iced coffees. Anyway, you go in, I'm like, there's, up until that point, I would generally, no matter what people's political leanings, you would,
00:18:14
Speaker
And you could you can know people's political leanings without talking to them because they're probably wearing like a American flag shirt with a bald eagle like silhouette on it and shit like that. Like there's plenty of ways to know where I live, what people's political leanings are without ever having a conversation with them. And they would even wear masks. And then all of a sudden, like that switch flipped.
00:18:38
Speaker
And now we're in this like, don't ask, don't tell policy of being vaccinated, I guess. And they're just walking around without masks, getting coffee, coughing on your cups, sneezing on the sugar, cute. It's like the table with all the everything on it. It's like the creamers, sugar. It's like they're just like, God, I don't even care if I'm vaccinated. I'm getting COVID.
00:19:03
Speaker
But anyway, fully vaccinated. Interesting story though, while I was in, I was like, I had to stand in line to get my first shot. And nobody there knew how a line worked. So I stood there for longer than I needed to before realizing that the people standing in front of me
00:19:24
Speaker
didn't know why they were standing in line. I was there for like 40 minutes. That's the last time I ever just get in a line because I see it formed and somebody tells me what it's for. I'll go check that shit out for myself for the rest of my life. So I'm standing in line. I'm like two people from getting inside the store. So I'm pretty close to the front door where the handicap parking spots are.
00:19:48
Speaker
And there's a, it looks like a delivery van, like you're, you know, you're 15 passenger type, all white, no windows on the sides, kind of deal delivery van. And it's idling and it's pulled into a parking spot that's right next to the handicap spot. But the back of the van is like a foot, maybe a foot over the line on the back. And this woman comes marching up beside me and
00:20:14
Speaker
turns into the parking lot and pounds on the guy's door. And she's like, are you handicapped? And he's like, what? She's like, are you fucking handicapped?
00:20:25
Speaker
He's like, uh, just rolls his window up. She's like, you shouldn't be parked here. My 90 year old mother had to walk into this, into the CVS because you, because assholes like you are parked where they shouldn't be. And she's really losing her shit. So he just rolls his window up, throws it in reverse, backs out because that's what a normal person does in
00:20:46
Speaker
had he known and had that conversation happened ahead of time, he wouldn't have just backed out. Like she could have just like pulled in next to him and been like, excuse me, you're over the line and he would have moved and then she could have parked and her 90 year old mother wouldn't have had to walk a mile and a half uphill in the snow to get to a fucking CVS. So he wasn't parked in the handicap spot. He's just a crappy parker. Yes, exactly. And he was idling. He was clearly waiting for something. Like it's not like he'd left his vehicle. So anyway, after trying to lecture him,
00:21:15
Speaker
She turns around and trips over the shit that stops your car from rolling forward in a parking spot and just eats shit on the pavement in front of everybody. Just instant karma? Oh, yeah.
00:21:35
Speaker
I felt the wind of her fall. It was just, she collapsed in front of me. I was a foot and a half away from her. And you do this little,
Travel Woes and Public Confrontations
00:21:42
Speaker
you try to put your arms out, but within a pretty short period of time, in between her falling, you put your arms out and you're like, I feel like if I catch her, I'm just going to make this worse.
00:21:55
Speaker
And I don't know if I could have caught her, but that's what made me scared. So you just kicked her away. Yeah, I just was like, you just watch it. Like I don't think I was really able to react as much as I was thinking about it. Like my arms weren't moving. It wasn't an involuntary reaction, but I'm like, I probably could have stopped that. And then my, I mean, she's mad at this guy in the van. Like if I touched her, she would have blamed her fall on me, but then she just gets up.
00:22:20
Speaker
and turns around and throws up her middle fingers at the guy in the van and starts yelling at him. She's like, look what you just made me do, you asshole. And then stomps her way into the store and everyone's just there. There's at least 10 people outside just quietly standing by while that whole thing happens. It was weird. Oh, man.
00:22:45
Speaker
That is the worst. That's one of the few times I've ever gotten snotty with somebody in public is because they were doing something like that.
00:23:02
Speaker
There's a there's a way to handle that situation, right? The guy parked poorly. You have a handicapped mother. I'm assuming she was with her. She wasn't just talking about it, right? Yeah, because she left. She had to like leave and everyone was still there watching her leave. And she did come out like she pulled the car up and then her her mother got into the car. Her mother was old. Like she really shouldn't have been walking that far to get in. But there was clearly a way to have handled that.
00:23:31
Speaker
that didn't require like, why not? Why not make that scene? Or if you're gonna make that scene, why not like have that conversation with a person before driving to the opposite end of the parking lot and making your mother walk in like, right, you could have just pulled up next to the dude and been like, Hey, I can't fit and he would have just moved. It was weird, man. Like, look, Mom, you got to walk because I've got a point to make.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, I'm using you as credential so I can freak out right now. So that was like, I don't know, I have like very little sympathy for people who do that sort of thing to other people in almost any context.
00:24:18
Speaker
you know, like, everybody's like, Hey, don't talk like that to your waiter, waitress or whatever. But yeah, there's so many situations where people are like, they can see there's like a gleam in their eye where they're like, I have the justification to act like a total jerk right now. And I'm gonna do it. And I'm gonna enjoy it. You know, and like, I just don't
00:24:41
Speaker
Just don't do that. I just don't understand why people do that. So I traveled for my company all over the US and a little bit internationally, not much, for like three years. And you just end up stuck in airports. You travel enough. If you fly six times a month, you're going to get stuck once in a while. Things are going to happen. You're going to get delayed.
00:25:08
Speaker
And there's two kinds of people. There's the vast majority of people that are upset, but they just kind of deal with it. And then there's the people who are like, maybe if I yell enough, I'll get faster. Maybe they'll charter me a private plane to take me to Dallas or whatever. And so there was this one trip where I was coming back from New Orleans and I had to go to Atlanta and then go back to Wichita.
00:25:37
Speaker
because that's how flights work here. I get to Atlanta, just normal, everything's fine, and Delta got hacked. It was like a big ordeal. They shut down flights all over the country for, I don't know how long, long time. Anyways, you're stuck.
00:25:59
Speaker
There's so many things that it interferes with on the airport side of things that it's just they don't have any control over, you know? So we wait around for like six hours. The plane that we were supposed to fly on wasn't getting there, so they had to get us a different plane. By the time they got us the plane, the pilots that we had,
00:26:21
Speaker
They're they're too close to their hourly limit to make the flight. So Just one thing after another so we end up getting on the plane it was supposed to leave at like 6 p.m and it's like midnight now and we're about to make our three-hour three and a half hour flight to Where I guess whatever it was anyways, we get on the plane we wait on the tarmac for like a
00:26:47
Speaker
It was a long time. I remember I watched an entire movie while we were waiting on the tarmac. Oh my God, that's so frustrating though. You have to just sit there that long. It was like Batman, the killing joke. I don't remember much about it. But anyways, we take off finally. We fly like an hour and there's something wrong with the plane.
00:27:05
Speaker
So they have to turn us around and take us back to Atlanta. No. Yeah, it was so terrible. It was like the worst case scenario. It was like an overnight ordeal, you know, but everyone on the plane thinks it's only happening to them and nobody else on the plane. Oh yeah. And there's this couple. It's like middle aged couple.
00:27:27
Speaker
and immediately, like they're making it clear that they are going to get a special deal out of this. And it's going to include an apology from the CEO of Delta. Oh my God. I mean, literally just freaking out on the plane. Then we get off the plane. Everybody has to just, you know, uh, deboard where there's 250 people standing there that just got off of this plane. Everybody's exhausted and they're just waiting to hear what they're going to
00:27:54
Speaker
do for us, right? And this couple is standing at the desk and they are just screaming at the girl at the desk.
00:28:04
Speaker
And she's just a salaried airport employee, just there trying to figure it out like everybody else. And this couple is just lambastiner. I mean, going to town on her, making a scene. And then the pilots and the flight attendants, they're up against their hours, so they have to leave. And so they come out of the plane and they run to the gate.
00:28:29
Speaker
and yell at the pilots and the flight attendants as they're getting off the plane, you told us we would be in blah, blah, blah by now and blah, blah. You know, just screaming at them and stuff. Oh my God. And so we're waiting around and they're standing in the back just kind of like muttering to themselves really loud for the whole crowd to hear. You know, it's like the people who are trying to rally the crowd with them. Yeah. Like they're kind of like elbow and everybody around them like, this is crazy. I mean, have you ever seen such a thing?
00:28:58
Speaker
And this lady came down to announce what was going on, and these people keep screaming over us. And finally, they were standing right behind me, and I come trying to remember what I said. I had a really good line, but I was just like,
00:29:21
Speaker
I was like, why don't you shut up, you prick? We're all waiting. Shut your mouth. And it's like the one time I've ever yelled at someone. And it was like it caught them by surprise so much that they just kind of like, you know, and they were still obnoxious, but they didn't scream at anyone from there forward. And it felt like so good. Like all the times I didn't try in high school basketball, it was like, man, this is what it felt like.
00:29:50
Speaker
Oh my god, I don't ever have it in me to call people out. I think I'm scared for my personal safety or something. Like, you have to, I don't know. I mean, you get to a tipping point, obviously, if it's going on for a long time, but to think about just trying to call somebody out for being a dick like that for that long. I mean, maybe, maybe after like all that time and the flight and everything just going wrong for that many hours, like I'm surprised
00:30:20
Speaker
everyone there didn't just like turn in on them and cannibalize them. Just stomp them to death right in the tarmac. Yeah, it was like, it was bad. But like, that's a good instinct to have. Like, I don't know, you know, we were, we were having a conversation this week about a person that was everybody knows, especially if you're a guy, like,
00:30:50
Speaker
you've got that guy in your life that always wants to tell you about the last time they got in a fight. Oh, yeah. And I despise I hate it so much. When a grown man starts telling me a fight story, I just want to like walk off in the middle of it. Like, yeah. Like, what is wrong with you? Like, if you're getting in fistfights as a grown man, like you're doing it wrong. All of that.
00:31:17
Speaker
It's so ridiculous. I know. It's strange when you hear, and there's always a pride in it. Like, like that's cool. Like you beat, you beat someone up. I don't know. I don't think this, this isn't a MMA. Like you don't get a trophy. You might get a, I don't know.
00:31:39
Speaker
criminal charge possibly, but you didn't really hurt somebody, you know, like maybe because I'm the kind of person who would have lost every fight they could possibly get into. But I so maybe that has something to do with the fact with why I've never understood
00:31:58
Speaker
the mentality of people who get in fights, for your reaction to be that. Even when you're young, usually there's alcohol involved with most fights, I feel like. If there isn't, then those are the kind of people you need to be probably scared of, really scared of. If someone's gonna kick your ass without any alcohol in their system, I don't know. That's scary. College fights, bar fights.
00:32:28
Speaker
man, I just can't even ever imagine getting into one of those. I would have backed down so quick. And the second anyone came out, I was just like, oh, you want to... When you think of the type of person who says, whose response to, you want to fight, is to throw a punch. There's something that's in your brain that just turns off. You need to not be able to consider the consequences of that. It's really interesting to me.
00:32:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to know like in those situations and like fighting aside just like intervening in a situation or like speaking up when someone's doing something like, I don't know, there's certain circumstances where you should, right? Of course. Like somebody, somebody recently, I think it was, what is it? Talk, talk purity to me.
00:33:24
Speaker
She was talking about being at like the drug store and someone just like bothering her, like some creepy old dude just bothering her and like, do you intervene in that situation? I mean, you should, right? Verbally.
00:33:39
Speaker
So I don't know, it's hard. I don't feel like I've been in very many situations though, where it was bad enough that like, it was like my duty to stand in and say something. I just don't
Introduction to Shane Claiborne and His Work
00:33:51
Speaker
think that you do end up in many of those. But if it happens, I guess, you know, that's what you need to do.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the amount of whenever a fight breaks out or you see something wild, there's always like a dozen people standing around videotaping the whole thing and they're just but no one's going to get involved. Like that's going to post that shit on YouTube and try to go viral to make some money off. I'm not fighting anybody, but I I won't rule out the possibility of berating someone if they really have it coming. Yeah, man.
00:34:24
Speaker
All right, so we're kind of, I guess we're at that point where we should introduce our guest coming up. Probably. So our guest coming up today as the title of the show implies is Shane Claiborne. If you are not familiar with Shane Claiborne, he is an author, he is an activist. Some of his books include The Irresistible Revolution,
00:34:49
Speaker
Jesus for President and his most recent one, which is kind of the meat of what we get into in the conversation, is a book called Beating Guns, where he talks about, I guess, just the gun, I mean, really gun violence in the United States and ways to curb it and where we're at as a culture, as a gun culture or as a culture that's having a very difficult time
00:35:19
Speaker
Finding a way to have productive conversations about gun violence and how to mitigate it. So I think this is a great conversation We're not it's you know, this might be one of the few we've had at this point where we're not all on the same page here there's some differences of opinion and what this looks like and not they're not they're not so vast but You know Casey
00:35:46
Speaker
And I don't necessarily agree all the way on this, but there's a lot of overlap. So I like this conversation. It's not an easy one to have, but I think just the fact that people who have differences of opinion can get together and have this conversation is what we want to see more of in our worlds.
00:36:04
Speaker
even in our own lives you know it's not easy to have these conversations with maybe family or friends that you know disagree so i appreciate it i thought it was not only fun but a good exercise and just having conversations that might not be easy so yeah yeah for uh i mean i guess we get into it in the episode but
00:36:27
Speaker
I have been a gun enthusiast for most of my life and I feel like there's a bunch of people in the audience that are gun enthusiasts and a lot of people who are not. I think either way,
00:36:46
Speaker
what we're trying to do, both in this podcast and another one that we just did a guest spot on, is come together on the issues, the things that we think we've got common ground on. We may not agree on exactly the minutia of what guns should be legal and which one shouldn't and all of that stuff. Sometimes Sam tried to tread on me and I'm like, don't. No step on snick.
00:37:14
Speaker
You know, I think that there's a lot of common sense stuff that we can come together on. And you know what? It's not going to fix every problem out there. And there's still going to be loopholes and stuff like that. But the idea that like any sort of action is of negative consequence to gun owners, I think is ridiculous.
00:37:40
Speaker
It's in everyone's best interest to try to find a way to curb some of the stuff that's been going on, whether it's mass shootings or just the more traditional gun violence and stuff. If you're a gun enthusiast,
00:37:58
Speaker
Think of it this way. Those things are the greatest threat to guns ownership. You know, that's, that's what I feel like I've tried to like communicate to some of the people that I know that are very, very wary of any discussion of these topics is like, if you are really interested in protecting gun rights, quote unquote, whatever that means to you.
00:38:20
Speaker
like mass shootings and violence and stuff like that, that's the greatest threat. Anything that us as law abiding people, gun owners or not can do to help curb some of that, even if it doesn't fix every little thing about it, I think it's in all of our best interests long-term for us to do that.
00:38:43
Speaker
I did.
Shane Claiborne on Social Issues
00:38:44
Speaker
Hey, I just want you guys to know, I did make my best effort to read Shane's book. I made it through about 60% of it. It's good. Getting through 60% of a book for an interview is impressive, Casey. It's exponentially better than my record previously. I'm not reading the Bible though. Well, luckily we're not interviewing God about that.
00:39:11
Speaker
Anyways, Shane's a great dude. We don't like I said, we don't agree on everything but just a really gracious Compassionate guy with the best of motivations and just It's just a really good dude to talk to so yeah if this is an uncomfortable conversation for you as a as a gun owner or something I look just I just stick with it and
00:39:39
Speaker
And just hear him out and some of his ideas on these things. And I think that that's ultimately like where we need to go with things is just a better, more open conversation. So enjoy our talk with Shane Claiborne.
00:39:59
Speaker
Hey, everybody. We're back with our guest, Shane. Shane, thanks so much for hanging out with us. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you, fellas. I'm glad to have a conversation. Yeah. So, Shane, just for our listeners who might not be familiar with you or your work, I was introduced to it when I was in college with your book, The Irresistible Revolution, and that was really
00:40:24
Speaker
pretty foundational to me as I was trying to figure out what I thought being a Christian meant and things like that. So I find your story fascinating. I think a lot of people would. I would like you to just kind of give a quick backdrop into who you are and how you kind of got into the work that you're doing
00:40:42
Speaker
Today, you know with the simple way and things like that like how you've drifted into a line of work. That's not entirely Common. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I grew up down south. That's why I got the you know, the the nice southern draw going and I grew up in Tennessee fell in love with Jesus down here I grew up in the Methodist United Methodist Church and then I got a little bored with it and died I dove into the
00:41:08
Speaker
Pentecostal thing and I like that you know and I've kind of been spitting out the bones all along the way but taking what I could and it's shaped me you know and it's a little town I grew up in down here in Tennessee so I always had this sort of curiosity and even kind of a longing to see the world bigger than that you know so I went to school up in Philly
00:41:32
Speaker
a little college Eastern University. And that's where I studied. I like how Karl Barth said, we need to read the Bible in one hand, but we need to read the newspaper in the other, right? So that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and an excuse to ignore the world that we live in right now. So I really love studying the Bible and studying sociology in college. But I mean, really the life changing moment for me was when we were in undergrad,
00:42:02
Speaker
studying there in the suburbs of Philly. And we heard about a group of homeless families that had moved into an abandoned Catholic church building. And these are literally moms and dads on the waiting list for housing. And as we read the newspaper article about it, it said that they were given an eviction notice by the Catholic church. And if they weren't out within 48 hours, they could be arrested.
00:42:24
Speaker
And that's one of those things. Man, something about that just doesn't feel right. And so it really organized a student solidarity movement. And I was a part of that. We basically moved in as much as we could in solidarity with those families. And that standoff didn't just last 48 hours. It lasted for months and months. Many of them got housing. And out of that, we started our community. Man, this is back, this is 25 years ago. So how about that?
00:42:55
Speaker
We moved into that same neighborhood, and we started The Simple Way, the community I've been a part of for the last 25 years, which is really inspired by these families, but also inspired by the early church in the book of Acts, where it says that the early Christians shared everything they had. No one claimed any of their possessions were their own.
00:43:15
Speaker
And, you know, they live the gospel out of their their homes. And so we're really drawn to that. So we started this little village and we've got community gardens, murals, all kinds of stuff, you know, going in the neighborhood, still taking abandoned houses and fixing them up and
00:43:31
Speaker
And then, you know, out of living there, a lot of my other the sort of fire in my bones on some of these other issues surfaced out of seeing too many kids killed on our street corners, you know, and wanting to do something about gun violence. But not just that, I mean, we have a whole movement around welcoming immigrants in Philadelphia, we've been a part of, we've
00:43:55
Speaker
been trying to fight for restorative justice and alternatives to the death penalty and all that's fueled by my faith but it's also fueled by my proximity you know that like the neighborhood that I'm living in a lot of these issues have names and faces they're not just ideologies you know.
00:44:11
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like the past four years have probably made a little bit more work for you in terms of like conversations being had about whether, I mean, it seems like everything that you're working for has been, you know, those are the conversations that have been prominent in the news over the past four years, even though they were always issues, certain things brought to light other, you know, where we really stand and where things have been and where they're going and where we want them to go.
00:44:38
Speaker
in regards to immigration, gun violence, the death penalty, all of those have been really prominent conversations. Absolutely, dude. I mean, some of these are not partisan. I mean, we're right now having deep conversations with the current administration under Biden because his refugee numbers of welcoming refugees are lower than Trump's, his historic lows, lower than any modern presidency. And so we're trying to, to me, welcoming immigrants, welcoming refugees,
00:45:06
Speaker
is not a Republican thing or a Democrat thing, it's a Jesus thing. Jesus said, when you welcome the stranger, you welcome me. And same with the death penalty. Joe Biden used to be for the death penalty. Now he's come out against it, so I'm optimistic that he can make some changes on that. But a lot of this is state by state too, so it's not just all
00:45:27
Speaker
Change doesn't happen from the top down. It really comes from the bottom up. We've been building momentum. These Trump years have been devastating because I think what I've been saying is Trump didn't change America. He revealed America. I think the same is true of the evangelical church, especially white evangelicalism. He didn't change it. He
00:45:52
Speaker
He really revealed it to us. I remember when Trump was first elected, my wife was asking her third graders, she's an educator, and she was asking her third grade students, what do you think of? How are you processing this? And the kids said, these are some of the real things that they said.
00:46:15
Speaker
Are we going to be slaves again? Is my family going to have to move back to Puerto Rico? Is my friend Muhammad, who's Muslim, going to be allowed to stay in this country? So I think that was initially what we heard and saw. And so over the years, we've been trying to respond to that. But I think it's also the kind of meshing of Christianity with the ideologies and rhetoric of Trump that's been so disturbing.
00:46:44
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not partisan. I wrote a book called Jesus for President that's challenging where we put our hope and our faith. But I find it just absolutely baffling that many of my fellow evangelicals have kind of forfeited any credibility to try to defend things that are not only indefensible, but they're very anti-Christian, anti-Christ-like.
00:47:07
Speaker
On your refugee project, where are a lot of the refugees coming from right now that you guys are lobbying for? Well, there's folks from all over. There's folks that are already here. I think our situation with Dreamers, young people whose parents came here,
00:47:25
Speaker
Many of them have never even lived in the countries that their parents came from. They were born here, brought here really early on, and don't even speak the language that some of the countries of origin speak. So I think that that's one of those that we just need a path to citizenship for folks like that. I've got friends from El Salvador. I've got friends from Honduras. I've got friends from Syria. So I think when we think about the persecuted church overseas, sometimes we're really good at
00:47:54
Speaker
caring about christians in syria as long as they stay in syria you know but as soon as they want to come here we're like nope sorry about that you know so i think that that those kind of contradictions have got to change it seems to me like a lot of like if you look at immigration as a whole like one of the biggest problems that we've got now is just the the shoots and ladders that you have to jump through to be a citizen you know in a in a legal way it seems like
00:48:23
Speaker
A lot of times that's what nobody's talking about. And it seems to me to be the most important thing is like we need a streamlined, easier to follow path to citizenship. So people can be here in a legal way when we know who they are and we're not, you know, I mean, because there are, you know, human trafficking and things like that going on. If we had a more rational way for people to become a part of our society, I think it would alleviate a lot of those problems, you know?
00:48:52
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I don't know anybody that's just saying, well, just throw open the borders and not have any process. But that's the question is, what does it look like to really create a path to citizenship? And refugees are one of the most vetted populations out there. So they've also already gone through multiple layers and
00:49:13
Speaker
where there's many that we're ready just to let in because we already know that you know what they're escaping and their situations so yeah and for me you know one of the big questions is I love the scripture that says perfect love casteth out fear and I think that what's really at war in our country right now is love and fear
00:49:36
Speaker
And you start to wonder what would America look like if our policies, whether it's immigration or guns or healthcare, like whatever, if it was driven more by love and compassion than by fear. And I saw a study that the Cato Institute put out, and we mentioned this in our Beating Guns book, but they list about a dozen things that are more likely to kill you than an immigrant or refugee. And on that list are things like swing sets.
00:50:07
Speaker
Lightning. One of them, a cow. A cow is more likely to kill you. One of my favorites was the vending machine falling on you is more likely to kill you than an immigrant or a refugee, but we're conditioned to fear. I think our rhetoric, especially over the last few years, has been all about fear.
00:50:24
Speaker
And so we got to choose. I think fear and love are sort of like opposing magnets. They can't occupy the same space. And so we really need to choose love over fear. And another conversation
Faith and Social Justice
00:50:38
Speaker
that no one is having right now, vending machine anchors. Yeah, there you go. Why can't we bolt these things down? I'm tired of living in a country where I have to worry about a coke machine killing me.
00:50:51
Speaker
Shane, one of the things I think is neat about you, and you mentioned your evangelical brothers and sisters. As far as I know, you really still consider yourself to be evangelical and kind of hold that title as much as you, I don't know, to what extent. But I think some of the things that you're talking about has been one of the biggest factors in why so many people are having a hard time staying in the church.
00:51:19
Speaker
when it's not being representative of their moral intuitions and what they understood to be what they learned about the love of God or the person of Jesus and things like that.
00:51:34
Speaker
You know, maybe it turns out that they, from what they've experienced, it's hard to trust that there's any power or truth to it and they kind of keep some of the ideologies, but, you know, in a more postmodern light. But, you know, you really, like, I appreciate the way that you've kind of stayed in it and continue to preach to
00:51:57
Speaker
and speak to people within that fold. Even the way you talk about Jesus, that's the stuff that we heard growing up, but without the drifting away from the message that maybe we would have appreciated.
00:52:12
Speaker
in our early 20s and 30s before a lot of us kind of felt like that just didn't stick for us anymore. So, you know, I think, so you mentioned your book, you beating guns. And, you know, I know when you when you put that book out, you know, as I want you to speak to kind of the premise of the book, but in some of the work that you did on the road, because I think what you're doing there is neat. And I want to get into the conversation around it, because
00:52:41
Speaker
Gun control is such a difficult conversation in our society right now, probably. I don't know if it's more difficult than immigrants, but as you stated, it's certainly killing more people than immigrants. So it's probably worth talking about. Yeah, man. And before we go there, I just want to say in response to the evangelical thing, I can remember back when I was in high school, the DC talks
00:53:04
Speaker
I don't know if anybody knows DC talk, but you know, they played, um, Brennan Manning in the background, you know, this kind of wild, uh, like writer and speaker, but he, he passed away, but he said, um, he said, one of the biggest obstacles to Christ is Christians, uh, who, you know, pronounce Jesus with our mouths, but deny him with our lives. And it reminds me of the words of Gandhi when he said, uh, you know, he's asking about Christianity and he said, I love Jesus. I just wish the Christians acted more like him.
00:53:34
Speaker
So I think, you know, my preferred label these days, my preferred label, you know, is Red Letter Christians, because we're organizing this movement and network of Christians who want a Christianity that looks like Jesus again, you know. And ironically, I think that the interesting thing is that one of the best critiques of what's gone wrong in evangelicalism is Jesus.
00:53:57
Speaker
A lot of evangelicals have taken their eyes off Jesus, and then you end up talking about things Jesus didn't talk about. You don't talk about things Jesus did talk about. And I think that for a lot of folks, what they're rejecting is a version of American nationalism
00:54:15
Speaker
that's trying to camouflage itself as Christianity, but it doesn't really look much like Jesus at all. So if it's that version of evangelicalism, I'm not interested in it at all. I think it's actually a heresy.
00:54:31
Speaker
The word evangelical, the word evangel means good news. And even though a lot of what we see in the evangelical church doesn't look like good news at all, I still keep going back to Jesus. And I think for a lot of folks, when they reject
00:54:46
Speaker
Trump evangelicalism or this kind of distorted, toxic evangelicalism, it may not be the end of your faith, but it might be the beginning of something better and more robust and beautiful. So what we're doing in Red Letter Christians is trying to organize folks that they've dedicated their lives to Jesus and justice, and they're living out kind of a better version of Christianity than we've seen kind of hijack the airwaves.
00:55:15
Speaker
You know, I think that all that's kind of where I find myself. And I still, you know, I'm in love with Jesus, despite the shameful and embarrassing things that we Christians have done. Yeah, so I mean, you know, looking at guns, it was one of those things where I started to see those contradictions even in myself, let alone, you know, like kind of in the larger
00:55:39
Speaker
uh evangelical church so i grew up saying i'm pro-life but i really had a very narrow scope with which i thought about that you know it was really on the only on the issue of abortion and i think a lot of folks that say that they're pro-life would be more accurate to say that they're pro-birth or anti-abortion
00:55:58
Speaker
because when you look at the other issues of life and death, we're often on the wrong side of it. So for me, I was for the death penalty. I grew up with guns. I grew up hunting and I love guns. I grew up, my dad was in the military, so I was very pro-military. And then I started seeing Jesus say, love your enemies.
00:56:20
Speaker
And it became harder and harder to reconcile, you know, preparing to kill them. That throws a wrench in the works. Yeah. And so what I'm after is just a more consistent ethic of life. That's not just about single issues, but I see a lot of these as interconnected, you know, and to care about life is to say that every human being is made in the image of God. So whether it's
00:56:44
Speaker
police shootings and racial justice or its immigration or the death penalty or gun violence. I know that any time a life is crushed, we lose a part of God's image in the world and that breaks God's heart. In preparation, to be honest, I've been pretty nervous about this conversation. Sam is still in the church and is, I would say, pretty liberal.
00:57:14
Speaker
He's one of those wishy-washy Christians like you. I'm out of the church. And I tend to be, I would say I'm center right for most things. But guns have been a big part of my upbringing and my family. And I hunt a lot. And I fall into some of your statistics for sure that you shared in the book.
00:57:43
Speaker
It sounds like just summarizing how you ended up just feeling strongly about these things. It sounds like your community has been really heavily affected by gun violence over the years.
00:57:58
Speaker
Oh, yeah, man. It's almost every corner of our neighborhood that we have memorials to shootings. We've got the collective memory of those shootings. Eventually,
Gun Violence and Policy Debates
00:58:11
Speaker
for me, there's just a point where I really resonate with Dr. King when he said, we're called to be the good Samaritan and lift our neighbor out of the ditch. But after you lift so many people out of the ditch, you start to say, maybe we need to rethink the whole road to Jericho.
00:58:25
Speaker
And on this, I'll say this bro, like I'm actually really optimistic. I mean, even as I have conversations with my family who are still hunters, who still have, you know, shotguns and stuff that they're an overwhelming majority of gun owners want to see some basic changes and are questioning, you know, want to see things like background checks, even like the ghost guns, one of the executive orders that we're seeing now that
00:58:52
Speaker
you shouldn't be able to assemble a gun without a serial number that no one can trace and be able to use it for terrible things. We need to be able to know where guns come from and we need to, folks that are domestic abusers, maybe they shouldn't have access to guns. If you're on a no fly list, maybe you should be on a no gun list. So I'm really optimistic that
00:59:12
Speaker
Even things like assault rifles. I did a vigil with a whole group of hunters that on their shirt it said, we're hunters against assault rifles because you don't need 10 rounds to shoot a deer. And I think there's some weapons of war that are just designed to kill a lot of people as quickly as possible. And that's what they keep getting used for in our mass shootings. So I don't buy into this idea that if we make some minor changes on guns,
00:59:41
Speaker
They're coming for everything. We're going to overturn the Second Amendment. Nobody's going to be able to hunt or have a shotgun and keep a coyote away from the sheep or something. I just don't think that.
00:59:52
Speaker
I think what makes this conversation really difficult for me and a lot of people that are in my neck of the woods is like, you talked about proximity. Proximity changed a lot of your perspective about some of the things that you thought over the years. Here, I mean, I live in Kansas.
01:00:14
Speaker
almost everyone I know, my liberal friends and my conservative, they're all gun owners. Probably somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of those own an AR-15 or an AK-47 or something that falls into that category. I have three of those. It's a tough thing to, I can definitely understand how
01:00:43
Speaker
You know people who didn't grow up around guns or people who aren't around the type of gun owners that that, you know, like I meet and talk with on a regular basis could see us, you know, like high capacity magazines and things like that is just being totally unnecessary and really only designed to
01:01:06
Speaker
I mean that's the one that comes up in the news a lot that's what's been used in the mass shootings and things you know those those are that's a that's a big category that encompasses a lot of different things and i think sometimes maybe people don't don't.
01:01:23
Speaker
realize that that AR-15 platform is used for a lot of different things. Short barrel, long barrel, heavy barrel, folding stocks, they use them for coyote hunting and pig hunting and they come in all different calibers and stuff now.
01:01:39
Speaker
Is there some specific traits that when you talk about, quote unquote, common sense gun control, what are some of the specific things about certain firearms that you think put them into a category where you would rather just not see them in private hands? Yeah, thanks, man. Well, first of all, I appreciate you having this conversation and much less hosting someone that you probably don't agree with on everything. Well, Sam invited you to.
01:02:10
Speaker
I was like, Casey, you're probably going to hate me for this, but I want to talk to this guy. I told him about it after it was confirmed. At some point, I'll invite Sean Hannity's son on here, and Sam will have to sweat it out. Well, hopefully we'll invite you back. I think that could be a good time. Well, let me start just by saying that
01:02:34
Speaker
So there's one way that I would approach this as a Christian, that I find it really hard to reconcile loving our enemies with preparing to kill them. And so there's a part of this that's rooted in my faith. But then there's a whole other side of this that I can talk about it as one person's rights and the Second Amendment. And this is where I would start, man,
01:03:00
Speaker
When they wrote the Second Amendment, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, he said that liberty can be endangered by the abuse of power, but liberty can also be endangered by the abuse of liberty. That one person's right to own whatever guns they want, wherever they want them, can begin to encroach on another person's right to live. That's why they put well-regulated in it. Even now, as we look at the evolution of guns from
01:03:30
Speaker
shooting a couple of rounds a minute at top. Maximum when they wrote the Second Amendment to where we're at now, where guns have such a massive capacity to do so much harm. That asking questions about the capacity of magazines is a good one. I believe that, and zooming out just a little bit, think about cars. Cars aren't designed to kill.
01:03:55
Speaker
But they can, they can be deadly. And so we've done all sorts of stuff to protect people from cars. You have to pass a driver's test. You have speed limits. We have airbags, seat belts, all these things. If you abuse your right to drive a car, then your license can be revoked. And even as technology changes, cell phones, we have like no texting and driving laws. So I think all of these things we've evolved and we've tried to protect people
01:04:25
Speaker
from being killed by cars and yet guns are one of the most unevolved industries that's out there so i think there's things that we could do legally that would help like i'm a i'm a fan of what's called the one handgun a month law right that would limit the amount of handguns
01:04:46
Speaker
one person can purchase in a year to one a month, 12 a year. And you start to go, that makes a lot of sense, right? Who needs more than 12 handguns in one year? And I'll tell you, folks that are selling them on the corner, right? So I think that things like limiting the capacity that one person can do so much damage on, those are good places to start. And when I'm looking at these statistics, it's like,
01:05:15
Speaker
70% 80% of gun owners want to see those changes. And I think what we're up against is a group that, you know, in my book, I call the gun extremists or the gun, the folks that just have no compromise on any of these things. And, you know, so I think there's a legal side. I also think that there's like technology, you know, we've got I mean, there's there's gun safes where you can use fingerprint technology. We've got, you know, ATMs and stuff where you use a fingerprint.
01:05:43
Speaker
There's no reason that we can't have a fingerprint technology on guns that would, I believe, really cut down the number of suicides. It would keep someone from stealing a gun, being able to use it as easily. A kid in the house finds a gun, it wouldn't operate it. So I think it's not just legislation, but I think that
01:06:02
Speaker
The place I do begin, bro, is by going, man, we're losing 100 lives every day to guns. That's unprecedented anywhere else in the industrialized world. We're not going to save every life, and people that want to do evil are going to find out ways to do it without a gun.
01:06:20
Speaker
And yet, I think we can do better than 100 lives a day. In my lifetime alone, I don't know how old you guys are, but I'm 45, we've had more people killed by guns in America in my lifetime than in all of the wars in US history combined. We can do better. I think we can do better than that.
01:06:42
Speaker
So reading your book, I had to do a lot of self-evaluation, which I'm not a fan of. I didn't enjoy. But there was some stuff in there that, especially hearing some statistics and stuff, I do agree on. A couple of the things that made a lot of sense. There's a lot of parallels between gun ownership and owning and operating a car.
01:07:11
Speaker
And I think you brought up a couple of them there. I remember in Michigan, and you have to realize, if you're not deeply into gun culture and stuff, laws vary state by state a lot. And when I was in Michigan,
01:07:28
Speaker
Any handgun sale had to have a background check. You had to go through the sheriff's department. You had to go get a purchase permit where you left your name and all your personal information. You took that purchase permit to the person who was selling it. They would sell it to you. There was an exchange of ownership from a legal standpoint.
01:07:52
Speaker
So there was no back and forth trading of handguns, you know, because I mean, when we start talking about gun violence, I mean, the vast majority of gun violence is handguns. But I mean, hands down over anything. I mean, assault rifles get a lot of the a lot of the hype because, you know, mass shootings and things like that. But almost all of the statistics that you quote are our handgun deaths.
01:08:13
Speaker
So there's some things there like at the same time living in Michigan like I got really into motorcycles for a while and I was wheeling and dealing motorcycles all the time and I remember one year I sold more than five vehicles.
01:08:29
Speaker
And it almost got me in trouble because to sell more than five vehicles, you had to have like a dealer's permit. And, you know, because they want to make sure that you're paying your taxes and things like that on there. Some of the things like that, like you said, you know, capping the number of handguns that you can buy and sell in a year.
01:08:48
Speaker
I don't think that's a bad idea at all. And you know what, if you are a gun trader or dealer or something like that, maybe you should have a license and we should have some history on you. If you're a felon or something, maybe that's not a business that you should be in. Yeah, dude.
01:09:04
Speaker
See, I knew that we find common ground on all this. I mean, literally, I'm also living in a house that has, or I'm at my mom's house. And then we got guns, you know, my uncle right over here has got a assault rifle, you know, you've got a little gun above your head. So it's very, it's very...
01:09:21
Speaker
I think we need better conversations like this because I really do think that we can find some common ground. There's pieces of this that we peel away the layers of in our book. Suicide is a big part of this. Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicide. The reason a gun is a big deal in that is 90 percent of people who attempt suicide over 90 percent by gun end up dying.
01:09:47
Speaker
tragically, but when you look at other methods of trying to take your own life, 90% of the people who try other methods survive, right? Their first suicide attempt and they don't go on to commit suicide. And so I think some of this is about just like, man, how can we make a safer society? You know, we think of our military service members traumatized by violence,
01:10:11
Speaker
They're taking their lives at almost one per hour. It's the largest cause of death of military service members. It's not combat. It's suicide by their own guns. All of this, to me, comes out of a place of trying to have a little compassion and to be a little bit more responsible.
01:10:30
Speaker
And some of it is we don't even know things because there are those gun extremists that have blocked us from even being able to know, for instance, which gun shops are the worst because we know that like 5% of gun shops are responsible for overwhelming number of the crime guns are literally
01:10:46
Speaker
selling guns irresponsibly to straw purchasers and things like that. And if we could figure out some of the research, we could hold them accountable. And I think some of that's just like we need to do better and we can do better. It's not a matter of if we can, but if we had the willpower to stand up to some of the kind of extremist rhetoric that we hear.
01:11:07
Speaker
That was the surprising part to me too is when you talked about gun shops in particular. You mentioned the shooter shop, if I remember right? Yeah, that's right. Right around the corner from me and Philly. I got to imagine that this is a small number of stores that are doing this because every gun store or official gun dealer I've ever done a purchase with has been an absolute stickler about rules and regulations and stuff.
01:11:33
Speaker
And I probably shouldn't say this. I did try to make a straw purchase at one point and got turned down in Flint. My grandpa wanted this .22 rifle and the store wouldn't sell to anyone from out of state. And so I was like, well, I want it. And they're like, nah, get lost.
01:11:53
Speaker
I mean, I would like to be able to know, like a Yelp rating or something. Let's have some reviews of the gun shops that are responsible and the ones that aren't so we can know. And then there's some things that are just, to me, no brainers.
01:12:08
Speaker
Some folks don't even know that you're not in many places, you're not even required to report stolen guns. And so it allows some like real wiggle room for gun shops to have guns that are stolen and stuff like that. So it's just like, man, some of this stuff is not really rocket science. We can do better. So I appreciate your openness. And I think that there are, I mean, a lot of the gun owners I'm talking to, they're really grieved by where we're at.
01:12:34
Speaker
And to me, that's again why I keep coming back to me. This is also about proximity. Sometimes it's not a compassion problem, but it's a proximity problem. And until gun violence has names and faces, some of this doesn't have quite the urgency that maybe it should for us. And that's my own story too. But even like an AR-15 or
01:12:58
Speaker
One of these guns like I see it in the mass shootings, but I will never forget the night that I heard them on my block and Ran outside and we had two people that were killed. I mean, it's a wonder where there weren't more people killed But then the police began to pick up
01:13:16
Speaker
look at the shots and we had 39 shots in like a minute. And so, you know, everywhere in the world, there are people who have mental health issues or people who are violent. But what's unique about our country is we're allowing almost anyone to have this this nearly unrestricted access to carry out, you know, horrific crimes and evil. So, yeah. And so I think we got to start by grieving the lives that are lost.
01:13:44
Speaker
So I live in the state of Massachusetts, which is one of the more, I don't know, as a state, we regulate probably more than others, certainly more than Kansas. And, you know, for the people in my life, I know who are gun owners, there's a lot of, I've heard frustration or just general complaining about the red tape they have to go through to get it and all.
01:14:04
Speaker
these kinds of things. I don't think I never, that's more recent too, because I grew up in a home that had guns or shot rifles when I was a kid. My dad would take us to the shooting range and I thought it was entertaining enough. Me and my brother never really gravitated towards it or found an interest in it ourselves. But, you know, every once in a while we end up at a shooting range who
01:14:27
Speaker
where you'd shoot different things. Like I went to Montana and that was the first time I shot a varying degree of weapons into a mountainside because they're the only people who lived on this mountain. And you're just like, I saw a little bit more of a world that I'm not used to seeing. But in an area like Massachusetts where it does feel like there's more regulation, I'm personally not super familiar with what all the regulations are.
01:14:56
Speaker
but some of the concerns and the complaints that you hear are, look, we wanna own these guns, so we're clearly jumping through all the red tape to get them.
01:15:05
Speaker
And the people I know generally treat them properly and put them up properly. So the frustration then becomes, you know, there's plenty of access to weapons illegally. So, you know, there's always that conversation of the more regulations you put on weapons, given the amount that are circulating in this country and how many exist, like trying to have the conversation around whether or not
01:15:32
Speaker
That would solve any problems because the people like I said the people I know they're not the ones going out shooting people are doing unsafe things with guns so But the ones who are the ones who might be are not might not be going through the red tape that right criminals aren't gonna obey the rules So where do we go from there? I guess what's what what's your your thoughts on that and that type of response?
01:15:54
Speaker
Yeah, so I I think that that's the delicate dance and any policy issues is what are the guardrails that you know you need to kind of keep cars on the road and what gets too much that you can't even drive right and I think that's always the endless kind of thought on it on most political issues and Sure, yeah
01:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, I guess where I would say on this is that I think we can have better guardrails on guns in America and still people have the right to have hunting rifles and things like that.
01:16:30
Speaker
I'm not even one that's going to say, I think we should get rid of all handguns or something like that. But I do think that having some limits is really helpful. And even Justice Scalia, who passed away in the Supreme Court, one of the most conservative justices said, even our ruling,
01:16:48
Speaker
on guns, I think it was 2008, where we really, the Supreme Court made it clear that the right of the Second Amendment was not just for militia groups, but for individuals. But he said, that doesn't mean you should just be able to have any amount of guns and carry them wherever you want and have
01:17:08
Speaker
any type of gun that you want. There need to be restrictions and limits on this. I think that that's really helpful to hear from one of the most conservative Supreme Court justices. I do think it has to happen across the board because otherwise you have exactly what happens in Chicago. Everybody goes to Indiana to grab a gun.
01:17:26
Speaker
You can go to Jersey or whatever. If we don't have some kind of comprehensive gun laws, then what's happening state to state doesn't really matter. Or even worse, like Philadelphia passed laws that we don't want assault weapons on our streets in the city of Philadelphia.
01:17:44
Speaker
And then the NRA will take those municipalities to court and challenge them and win. So they'll sue the cities that pass laws that want to have some sort of limitations on the type of weapons or whatever we have on our streets. So yeah, I think that's exactly what we're doing right now, having a better conversation.
01:18:03
Speaker
on it can help and finding some things that we agree on, you know, and maybe it's, you know, I think some of the things that the Biden administration is doing are good. I think we need more than that. You know, I think we need some research and access to information. We need like
01:18:19
Speaker
Folks that are profiting off of gun sales irresponsibly to be able to be held accountable. If Nerf, this is the irony, you can sue a toy gun company, but you can't sue a real gun company or like a gun shop that's
01:18:34
Speaker
Those guns irresponsibly. Sam, if you shot my eye out with a Nerf gun, we could sue Nerf, but not so with real guns. Even with real distributors, folks that we know that are selling guns irresponsibly, gun shops. The gun shows. I went to a gun show when I was writing my book.
01:18:57
Speaker
Literally had folks just lining the way in, selling guns without any ID or anything. Once you get in the gun show, you're a little bit more strict about it. But even there, there was a grenade launcher. I'm talking to this woman, I'm like, this is a grenade launcher. Holy Mary. I said, what do I need to buy that? She's like, cash and ID. She said, but the cash is the most important thing.
01:19:24
Speaker
And I just think, man, and my wife's looking for a 410. She's like, when to look for a 410? And literally in this gun shop, you could not find a 410 hunting rifle. It was just filled with these assault rifles and grenade launchers and everything else. I think that's part of the funk that we're in, right?
01:19:42
Speaker
Yeah, so you've mentioned a couple of times that I want to I want you to expand on it a little bit if you can is the the roadblocks towards Research and learning more about gun deaths statistics you mentioned bad shots so I might have a slightly poor understanding or redacted understanding but
01:20:07
Speaker
You know, NRA is obviously one of the biggest groups involved in trying to keep things the same or even deregulate more because they would profit off of it. But when you mention these types of roadblocks to study and gun deaths,
01:20:23
Speaker
I'm aware of types of laws that have been passed that have made it difficult for these types of things to be studied, maybe on a federal level, perhaps. I know there's probably some private studies, but what are those? Is that something you can speak to a little bit more and expand upon so people have an understanding of the attempts being made to keep the waters muddied so that way it's more difficult to pass legislation to solve a problem you can't really know enough about?
01:20:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's good. I mean, we're kind of getting in the weeds a little bit, but you know, we got into some real depth on some of these different and we're not trying to prescribe all the answers. I think we're trying to raise the right questions in our book, you know, and one of those is about the
01:21:09
Speaker
Protection of Lawful Commerce Act which was passed under George Bush that didn't allow you companies that are making money off guns to be held accountable so I think that immunity is being exploited and that's one of one of the changes I think that makes a lot of sense.
01:21:27
Speaker
But when it comes to research, I mean, you think research is a good thing on almost every issue we can agree, like cancer research, you know, research on opioids, research on like car safety, it's ways that we just kind of keep evolving, you know, and progressing. And yet, like, there have been so many restrictions on Center for Disease Control and Prevention that have not allowed it to study gun violence. And those have been very clearly passed by sort of the radical
01:21:56
Speaker
Like NRA, you know that and I want to say when I when I say the NRA like it We say this in our book that the NRA says that they have five million members But what we also have to hear in that is is if that's true. That means 95% of gun owners are not a part of the NRA and in fact recent studies are showing that a majority of gun owners are finding themselves at odds with the NRA is kind of You know uncompromising rhetoric. So I think that's where we go
01:22:24
Speaker
We want research. We want to know what protects lives. Would fingerprint technology help save lives from suicide and other gun deaths? We need some data that has been forcibly removed, that all data has to be destroyed. So this is all part of the lobbying of some of those. So you imagine if automobile makers halted all research.
01:22:53
Speaker
on car safety. It wouldn't be good. I think that's just what I'm saying. I think there's some really clear changes that we can make that would make research more available and would also allow us to trace some of those gun shops that are irresponsible and hold them accountable. It's like 15 guns disappear every day from gun shops, 300,000 are stolen. All of this, I think we need to
01:23:21
Speaker
be able to keep track of it a little bit better. So coming from that camp, especially in the past, and even still, I think one of the notions that I have trouble with is like the slippery slope argument. So that is something that is on a lot of gun owners' minds. And that's the motivating factor behind the resistance to a lot of changes.
01:23:48
Speaker
And I think there's some motivation there, which I understand I could sympathize with. We get into these discussions about high-capacity magazines and AR-15-style rifles and all of that kind of stuff. I think the gun-owning community's legitimate concern about passing some of these regulations
01:24:12
Speaker
is that slippery slope in that like we pass some sweeping gun control legislation, right? The Biden administration does some sort of executive order and all of a sudden like high capacity magazines are banned or semi-automatic rifles are banned. The concern is like, well, when the next bad thing happens,
01:24:35
Speaker
then what?
Gun Rights and Cultural Perspectives
01:24:36
Speaker
And I feel like that's where a lot of gun owners and even myself to some extent, like, I think that there's just I, boy, I'm really struggling to put words together here. But we'd like he said, I mean, people who are who have a mind to do evil, are a lot of times going to figure out a way to do it. And
01:24:53
Speaker
When we pass some of these regulations and give up some of the access and stuff that we have to some of these weapons, and the shootings don't stop, or the violence doesn't get better, or we still get these high profile cases where, you know, I mean, just awful stuff like the Parkland shooting and stuff. You know, the thought is that it's not going to be enough and they're going to push further.
01:25:18
Speaker
for more regulations and eventually it's slippery slope. You're just going to eventually erode some of those rights that we've had for so long. Yeah, I hear that argument a lot and I really do believe that part of this has been the rhetoric of the people that are profiting from the absolutely unrestricted sale of guns. It was Henry Ford that said, if you want to figure out how to
01:25:46
Speaker
in violence and figure out who's profiting from it. I don't really think that even looking at the polls of gun owners, even the polls of NRA members that want to see changes that most people believe that if we limit handguns, if we require background checks, that they're coming for the hunting rifles. I don't think that that's what most people
01:26:12
Speaker
But that's not what most of these people are concerned about. I don't think most of these people are worried that anyone's going to come try to take their bolt-action deer rifle. They're concerned that, like I said, the vast majority of people I know have an AR-15 of some sort, and they don't want to give it up.
01:26:32
Speaker
As someone from the other side, and to, I guess, keep the conversation going and maybe generate some, who knows, maybe there's no real, I think the problem is, I think there's so many things that you can do that, I think, like Shane was saying, there's so many things you can do where we can pass it, 100%, maybe everyone agrees. Even someone like me, when you think about an AR-15, like, my understanding, you mentioned they can be used for hunting.
01:26:57
Speaker
I feel like for most people, it's like an enthusiast type thing. It's like hobbyism. The fun of shooting guns, it's like we enjoy doing this. I think the thing that kind of goes off in my mind when I hear stuff like that is always, it's like stuck a little bit between, and I've said it I guess before, I don't know if I've said it on the podcast, but stuck between
01:27:25
Speaker
You some people like there's a lot of responsible like i'm not worried about what you're doing in your ar-15 in your backyard case it's really not a concern to make sure i'm so getting kind of being stuck between that and when you look at what's going on in society and saying this is why we can have nice things.
01:27:42
Speaker
At what point does someone's hobby trump someone's right to live when you just create such a need of access to it? But I also hear the counterpoint of if you eliminate access to it, they're here and they're in existence. I mean, our country has, you probably have the numbers to this in front of you, Shane, more guns per capita than
01:28:03
Speaker
anywhere else. When you're thinking about it from an access perspective versus a personal responsibility and right perspective, that balance is a really difficult thing for me to grapple with. I don't know. Yeah. A lot of this is that tension between one person's liberty and another person's safety. I think when we're looking at our country right now,
01:28:27
Speaker
We, you mentioned the amount of guns, like we've got 100, the newest stats I've seen are 120 guns for 100 people. So we've got more than one gun per person. And yet we have two thirds of Americans that live without guns, two thirds. And so there's a few people that have a whole lot of guns. There's 3% of our population that almost have half the guns. So, you know, average is 17 or more each. And so, you know, I think that's where we got to kind of meet, find this equilibrium.
01:28:56
Speaker
where folks can be grieved by the gun violence and the suicide rate around our country. And I mean, a lot of the guns that we're transforming in the garden tools right now are suicide guns. They're guns like a family that the
01:29:11
Speaker
the father snapped and shot himself and shot the wife, and then the families left with a house full of guns. We're transforming those and trying to grieve that with them. I think that the fact that
01:29:28
Speaker
African American children are 10 times more likely to be killed than white kids. Like all of that is it's not kind of getting outside of ourself, you know, and just going, man, like, I don't want gun violence to be the number one cause of death of our kids. Like I
01:29:46
Speaker
I don't want, you know, I mean, you know, Casey, you may even be able to like, use a grenade safely in your backyard. Frankly, I love blowing things up. And so, yeah, and yet, like, I think we've got some like, there's some places that you can't even buy fireworks, but you can get guns. And I think that's just one of those things where we got to go, man, we just need to do
01:30:09
Speaker
a little better at protecting people than protecting guns. There does come a point where there's a delicate dance there. I really do believe that often we've been better in America at protecting the right to own guns than the right to live and other people's lives that
01:30:26
Speaker
Um, may not be taken by you, but you're kind of that right. I don't mean to bust the Bible out, but I, you know, there's that street scripture that talks about like how one person's freedom can begin to hurt another person. And so you, you know, we may have the right to do something and yet there's a part of me that feels like, man, um,
01:30:50
Speaker
maybe our commitment to loving our neighbor causes us to make some sacrifices. I mean, even with masks, I would rather everybody just wear a mask because it's a good idea.
01:31:04
Speaker
But I think loving our neighbor means, yeah, you may have the right not to wear a mask, but maybe it's just a loving thing to do to do that. And I think we have that same like, we've got this wild contradiction. I don't need a mask to protect me because God will protect me, but I need a gun.
01:31:23
Speaker
There's some of that theology and our religion plays a role in some of this. It breaks my heart that Christians are one of the biggest champions of guns and the death penalty in our country, the highest gun-owning demographic, the highest population that's in favor of the death penalty. I would just think that our sensitivity to life
01:31:47
Speaker
because we're worshipping a savior who is a victim of violence and dies with forgiveness on his lips, that should do something to us. And our sensitivity to the suffering of other people should do something to us to cause us to be the biggest obstacles to death and violence rather than the folks that are often on the wrong side of that.
01:32:13
Speaker
I think there's a fundamental disconnect between the sides of the aisle, like in that regard. Because on the one hand, like you said, we should all be invested in reducing gun violence. Gun owners should be the most invested in reducing gun violence. And what you've said so far about
01:32:38
Speaker
The abuse of freedom is the greatest threat to that freedom. If you want to keep your right to own guns, you should be championing restrictions that keep them out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them or reduce the number of accidents and stuff that happen in households.
01:32:56
Speaker
But I think like where a lot of people would, where you guys would, where we disconnect, I guess, on things is like laying, you know, you attribute a lot of the gun violence to guns themselves, you know, and looking at the studies and stuff like that, you know, like two thirds of gun violence is suicides. There's a huge percentage of that pie that's left on the other side that's
01:33:24
Speaker
That's gang and drug related violence and things like that. And I think it's really hard for, you know, I think about like my friends that I know from work that are big gun enthusiasts. It's really hard for them to understand the logic of, you know,
01:33:40
Speaker
Guns are what's doing this to people. Do you see the point I'm trying to make? I'm struggling to bring it all together. I think a couple of things I hear you saying. One of them is there's folks that say that
01:33:58
Speaker
that gun violence is not a gun problem, it's a heart problem. I really believe it's both. I think that you can't legislate love. No law is going to change someone's heart. We've already seen people in the Boston Massacre that turned a pressure cooker into a bomb. You can find ways to kill people, to use a car as a weapon, drive it into a crowd.
01:34:22
Speaker
I think in particular, guns are designed to kill and many of them are designed to do that very efficiently. When we look at mass shootings and even the profile,
01:34:39
Speaker
Most acts of domestic terrorism have been done by white men with guns. It's one of the biggest threats to public safety, especially as we look at our country right now. And so Martin Luther King, he I think saw racism as both a heart problem and a policy problem. And he said things like, no law can make you love me, but it can make it harder for you to kill me.
01:35:05
Speaker
And I really vibe with that. I think that we needed God, we still need God to change racist hearts. But meanwhile, we also needed black folks to be able to swim in the same swimming pools and go in the same schools and vote and be seen as fully human. And some of those same pains I think we see in the
01:35:29
Speaker
around guns. And so we can't ignore the heart problem and God heals hearts. But I think sometimes we, you know, we're waiting on God to change laws and God's given us that power. So we shouldn't just, you know, offer thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting while then dodging the actions that might save lives in the future. Yeah. And
01:35:52
Speaker
There's a lot of common ground, as we've already talked about. I listened to a couple episodes of Dan Carlin's show where he talked about guns and gun violence, and both of them, the ones that I listened to were directly after mass shootings. One was after Aurora, Colorado, and the other was after Sandy Hook. And so he was talking about it in regards to those
01:36:18
Speaker
those laws. And one of the things that that Dan said that I thought was a great point was, you know, he talked about changing the culture around guns and guns, accessibility and things and how big of an impact that can have, which seems like an insurmountable task. But, you know, the the the example that he gave was drunk driving. He's, you know, he talked about like, he's like, hey, when I was a young man, you know, drunk diving driving was not an abhorrent
01:36:46
Speaker
You know sin against the rest of the peaceful public like drunk driving was something that a lot of people did and you chuckle about you met you know. It was a it was a run of the mill thing that a lot of people did on a regular basis and through legislation you know punishing really just hammering the people who abuse.
01:37:05
Speaker
that freedom. We've not only reduced that number, but we've changed the culture around it to the point where like, you know, nobody wants to hear that you're drunk, drive. I mean, nobody thinks it's funny. No one's gonna like, you know, and a lot of people will stand in the way if you think you're going to get in your car after you've been drinking.
01:37:23
Speaker
And I think that was a – that to me I think made a pretty powerful point and I think where we need to – some of the common ground that we can go with this is like how do we change the culture around – and how do we do it in a way that punishes people who abuse that freedom that we're talking about? And you know, you brought up – you had a great chapter about domestic violence in your book.
01:37:46
Speaker
and talked about how like the vast majority of, you know, domestic violence that ended in murder, there was a complaint beforehand. There was some sort of interaction with cops where they were called in on a domestic violence complaint. You know, the the there's a lot we could do there to help prevent some of those those deaths. You know, and if if you know, if you get the cops called on you because you punched your wife, I mean, you should probably forfeit your gun rights for a while.
01:38:16
Speaker
I don't know. I think there's some really good things that we could do there. Like you said, I mean, to try to decrease the number of senseless instances of gun violence that really, by all accounts, we should be able to prevent.
Proactive Prevention and Symbolic Gestures
01:38:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, man.
01:38:32
Speaker
Yeah, the culture part of it, I think is is because you hear people respond every mass shooting with citing maybe Australia banning all their weapons as like an example of what we should do to solve the problem. And typically, I think if you can come up with a solution in five seconds and say it in five seconds, it's probably not going to work. But it's like the when you think about culture and Constitution and
01:38:55
Speaker
the mentality around guns in our country. It is way different. As far as I know, I've never really been to Australia, so I could just be totally full of it. I mean, it is a big part. I mean, it is part of our constitution. It is just depending on how you interpret it, I guess. I know there's a lot of conversation around what it means. And even throughout, even before the Second Amendment, we had gun control legislation. We've had it through that. And up through 2008, like you said, Shane, they
01:39:24
Speaker
They didn't just open it up to everybody and seal the deal on the conversation. It's still open to discussion and regulation. I think your point about culture, I think the culture is changing culture and changing minds about
01:39:42
Speaker
I guess what that looks like and how people should consider their freedoms versus other people's lives. I think that's such a good point. I really appreciate this conversation, Shane and Casey. Casey, this is easy, right? We were fine. It wasn't as bad as I thought. It's been great. It's been great, y'all. I think we got to keep thinking outside the box. There are countries that have made changes that have worked and there's probably
01:40:10
Speaker
changes that haven't worked. There's things like, you know, we talked about the study in Israel where soldiers just stopped taking their weapons home and massively cut down the amount of suicides. You know, I think there's just all these things, but all of it, I think, begins by having a deeper sensitivity to life and going, you know what, let's step back from the rhetoric, from the polarizing stuff, and let's like first remember that
01:40:37
Speaker
I mean, all the way back to Cain and Abel, when the first life was lost, a brother killed his own brother. It says that the blood cried out to God from the ground. And so this matters to God and it should matter to us. You know, it should shake us that
01:40:54
Speaker
we're losing, even in the pandemic, we lost 40,000 people to gun deaths. So start by even just feeling like it pains us. I think the same with drunk driving. Probably more and more people care because more and more people knew someone personally who had been hit by a drunk driver or somebody in their family. And so even if gun violence hasn't personally affected us,
01:41:19
Speaker
maybe kind of keep trying to have a softened heart to realize that this is affecting so, so many people. It's over 40% of Americans right now that know someone who's been shot. And so let's not wait till it hits us, right? Or it comes to our school or to our own family. Let's try to think about how we can save more lives before it becomes more personal. But thanks both. Yeah, did your wife ever find a 410? You want me to keep an eye open?
01:41:50
Speaker
My wife is a she's she's going she's turkey hunting with her dad these days But now she's good to go I think but I'll let her know I've been looking for an old 16 gauge side-by-side and if I find out you beat one into a shovel I'm gonna be really upset to tell you I just got a motherload of guns and I do not want to show you all of the ones that one of them was a Man what's that it was?
01:42:18
Speaker
Oh, I can't remember the exact name of it, but it's one of those really, really fancy ones. It starts with a B anyway. And if you, you know, man, if you decide you want to get rid of one of those salt rifles, I can make you one of these shovels out of it, so. Yeah. See, I'd put one of those behind me. If you get a gun above your head while I put one of those. Shane, what are you going to start out with? This is what we call a very expensive shovel right there. Yeah.
01:42:48
Speaker
You got to start selling those on your website to raise money for Red Letter Christians, man. We can't make enough of them. We give one to each gun owner that gives us a gun, and then we can usually make two or three more, but we're always going through them because we give a lot of them away. We did have this guy that just won an AR. It wasn't a 15. Wow, I can't remember if it was like a 500 series or something. It was a big AR gun that he won in a raffle.
01:43:17
Speaker
He's like, I don't know, probably $1,500, $2,000 gun. He just said, man, I thought it was going to be a hunting rifle. And so he gave it to us, brand new in the box. So I think this is made out of that one there. But yeah. That hurts me a little.
01:43:35
Speaker
Thanks, Shane. Thanks so much for the conversation. This was a great time. We really appreciate you and your time. Well, I appreciate you. Casey's coming around. No, it was great to meet you, man. Appreciate both y'all. Let's do it again sometime. Bless you. Cool. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. Yeah. We will catch you next time.