BUCK: We are diving into this Biden speech.  It’s like a speech that we’ve all heard already from the left a million times about guns.  He’s saying stuff about how no one needs a hundred rounds.  Meanwhile, in things like the New York SAFE Act, to give you a sense of how this goes, they ban 10-round magazines, which is standard in pretty much all handguns that you’d go out and buy. So you have to go get a special magazine. Not a clip, by the way.  If you call it a clip, all of conservative media, Clay, comes for you and gets angry at you.

CLAY: I’m gonna defer to you, Buck, on all gun-related issues even though I am from Tennessee. And when you are young in the state of Tennessee, they give you guns and just let you start shooting at things, right? Like, that’s kind of a birthright in The South.

BUCK: See, I’ve had to deal with it from the opposite end —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — which is where if you want to get a gun in New York City — and I’m not even talking about getting a concealed carry. If you want a premise permit — and people in Texas and Tennessee and Florida and Montana — name a state, right; I can’t name all the red states now — they’re gonna laugh at this. You have to wait about six to nine months, probably more like over a year now that the post-covid bureaucrat thing has delayed everything, you have to go get fingerprinted, background check done. It costs you 350 bucks or something like that.

CLAY: It’s wild.

BUCK: And this is to be able to own anything. A shotgun for going, you know, sporting clays, anything you want to do — and you have to keep the weapon in a lockbox with a lock on it. This is the actual rule: Your ammunition in a separate lockbox, and, oh, by the way, a trigger guard on the firearm that is in the locked box. So the best thing you can do when the home invasion or the burglar comes is actually throw your weapon in the case at the guy’s head.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: So that’s how the libs actually want to do gun control.

CLAY: This is all wild to me. Well, the good thing is we know that all of the criminals are definitely putting their weapons in that manner. The video that went viral in Brooklyn, I believe it was — I’m sure you’ve seen it — of the kids, the 13-year-old and the 6-year-old out in the street that miraculously were not hit as the 25-year-old, I think it was, guy was being shot.

The great fallacy of all of this — and I think anybody with a functional brain would acknowledge this if you really sat down with them. Every single crime that is committed with a gun has been prohibited by law 10 or 15 different ways by the time the crime is occurring. Right? The idea that you can legislate, in some way, more safety is, I think, one of the great fallacies that is out there right now.

BUCK: And this also, then, bring us to, why are they doing this? Why would Joe Biden yesterday take time out…? Think of what we still have. We’ve got an economy that should be off like a rocket ship post-pandemic, which I think we can all say. There’s still covid, yes, but we are really post-pandemic now in this country. And we should have been a booming economy.

But it instead we have crises like the deeply unsecure, really open border and a huge spike in violence which Clay and I have been talking about a lot all week. And what do they want to focus on? Guns. Why? Because it excites the left-wing base. The journos’ parade ignorance about firearms. They think of them as icky. This is how you got…

Remember a few years ago USA Today had the attachments, the scary attachments on AR rail systems, and they had the famous — infamous now — chainsaw bayonet?

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: You remember the chainsaw bayonet photo? Which every gun guy I know, and gal, was like, “This is the most amazing thing.” There was a run on chain saw bayonets on the internet now, because it became a thing, you know, people wanted to get one, ’cause that’s how absurd the journos are when they talk about these issues.

But, Clay, the reason that you had this speech yesterday, I think it’s very clear, is they need a narrative other than defund the police is the problem. They now know they can’t hide from us anymore, so it’s, “Let’s make guns the problem! That keeps our base happy and allows us to stick a thumb in the eye of every Republican in the country by saying, ‘Okay. You don’t like all this crime? We’re coming after your lawfully owned firearm.'”

CLAY: It’s a clear bait-and-switch, and it’s devious in its profoundly dishonest perspective because, as we talked about on the show earlier this week, the Ferguson Effect is a real thing, Buck. In the wake of the Ferguson protests, we saw murder rates in cities that were the most active skyrocket.

And then we finally kind of got back to some form of normalcy, and then what happened? Another election year. It’s amazing — and it’s probably just a total coincidence, right? — every four years Black Lives Matter surges up, people protest, the police are awful, and then we dial it back, and you know what’s gonna happen again?

In 2024, there’s gonna be another viral incident and the thing is gonna cycle back up. And the people who end up being the victims here really in this maniacal pursuit of power are… This is real, Buck. This is real. It’s what gets me so fired up. There are thousands of people that would otherwise be alive right now but for the defund the police movement.

If police had been allowed to do their jobs, Buck, all over this country and protect everyone — black, white, Asian, Hispanic. These are the numbers that are out there: Atlanta homicides this year up 58%. Portland, Buck, 533% increase in murders! Philadelphia, 37%. Los Angeles, 22%. New York City where they just had the mayoral election, up 13%. These are tangible lives that are being ripped away, and no one cares.

BUCK: If defund the police was in any way a good idea, if this made any sense, don’t you think that there would be at least some people from within the law enforcement community — retired, let’s say — who don’t have to draw a paycheck anymore who’d come out and say, “You know what? You really do need to do something here.”

You never see anyone — whether they were in the force, in law enforcement, or not — come out who knows anything about the issue of criminal justice, statistics, any of the metrics you could use to gauge whether this works or not. No one ever comes out and says, “Yeah, you know what? This is really going to help us!”

In fact, what you see — and the Democrats don’t want to this to take root in people’s minds — is at some level, the activist left… I really believe this. The activist left thinks exactly what you’re talking about, which is the enormous increase in homicides, in shootings overall. And remember, even if somebody doesn’t die, people are getting wounded.

Having a shooting on your block is bad for neighborhood morale. It makes people terrified. It makes real estate value go down over time. These kinds of things have secondary order effects. But as we continue to look at this, they view this as a price that we have to pay both because, Clay, of the sins of the past and also as part of our rethinking and essentially revolution in law enforcement in this country.

The rethinking of police that we’ve been talking about is going to result in something like this: A big surge in crime. They won’t say it openly, but I’ve heard people talking about this when the cameras aren’t around: To make an omelet you gotta break a few eggs. That’s the attitude.

CLAY: One of my big theories, Buck, is that the internet is a blame factory. As soon as anything happens, people immediately rush to figure out who’s to blame. And it could be things that aren’t that serious. Remember Harambe at Cincinnati Zoo when the kid ended up in there with the gorilla? Immediately everybody’s like “Okay, who’s to blame? The mom? The dad.”

Whatever the situation is, the internet assesses blame. That’s fine, as long as the blame is in some way connected to data and rational policy analysis. The data is transparent, clear, and there is no argument to the contrary. The reason why the murder rate is skyrocketing is because of defund the police and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is 100% incontrovertibly the reason why this crime rate is increasing.

BUCK: Clay, I just want to tell you: Jen Psaki disagrees.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: So we’re gonna have to… You know, the Psaki bomb is gonna go off in this office in a few minutes.

CLAY: It’s infuriating to me, though, because the data is so transparent. Look at it. It tells the story. We don’t even need to argue about it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: We’re unpacking what I would say the Democrats’ attempt to pivot away from defund the police. “Pivot” might be too lenient a turn of a phrase. They’re trying to run as fast as they can pell-mell in the opposite direction. And they’re also trying to obfuscate, to confuse people as to why the murder rate and violent rate of crime is skyrocketing across the country, including in there last night on CNN (no big surprise here) Susan Rice, the White House domestic policy adviser.

She wanted to make it clear that Joe Biden, he’s not opposed to police at all.

RICE: President Biden’s approach is not to defund the police. He has been very explicit, uh, in opposing that. He wants to invest in our communities and in safety. That includes investing in public safety and giving police and police forces the resources they need, but it’s much broader than that because you can’t just deal with this problem through law enforcement. You need to deal with its root causes.

BUCK: Clay, these are word games, you’ll notice. “Investing in communities… investing in public safety.” She won’t say “investing in police,” because that would basically be saying, “Defund, bad idea; refund, good idea,” and the Democrats can’t allow that narrative to take hold, because then they would start to see…

Remember when I was talking about the activist class thinking that this was a necessary period of transition with the escalations in violence in cities across the country, that’s 10 to 20% of the Democrat Party that feels like abolish police is the real goal. Actually, they talk about this.

But when you look at the top of the Democrat power apparatus, Joe Biden himself, and Susan Rice — who obviously was a big deal in the Obama administration, too — these are people who recognize that the American people are absolutely not with this defund police notion in real numbers, especially as they see what the data that you’ve been talking about shows for what this means for public safety.

So it is funny that they’re trying to walk away from this. Now, why won’t they condemn it, though, Clay? If we had real journalists in this country, every Biden official would be like, “So do condemn defund the police? Do you agree?” No questions about it now. No, let’s talk about guns. Let’s talk about ban be chainsaw bayonets and 500-round bazooka machines and whatever stuff they talk about ’cause they don’t know anything about guns.

CLAY: What I would say, Buck, is there’s an easy analogy to draw here. Think about how often Republicans have been quizzed about Liz Cheney and what they believe about her political beliefs. How many times have you heard Joe Biden really pressed on, “Hey, do you agree with AOC and The Squad’s relentless attack about the idea of police?”

That’s a real issue that has a tangible cost in lives lost, that almost no one is talking about. And keep in mind — we’ve played Susan Rice, we played Joe Biden — the number of different excuses for the rise in violent crime and murder: Guns, covid, lockdowns (which is ironic). We have all these different things, and then now Susan Rice:

“We don’t even agree with defund the police from the get-go!” All of these are excuses for what the root cause is here, which is the murder rate is skyrocketing on a level, Buck, that a huge percentage of our listeners have never seen happen in their lives. If you are 40 or younger, this is the biggest and most sustained crime increase of your life.

BUCK: The lies that they told about the reason for the rise weren’t even sensible. It didn’t even add up when they started to look at this and say things. Covid, lockdowns, people out less, doing less, around each other less — and every other country that had lockdowns, mind you, saw decreases in violent crime, which makes sense because you have people interacting, in general, less. The lies were obvious from the beginning, but people went along with it.