The Second Amendment Explained: History, Rights & Government Power

Moore To Consider: Welcome once again to Moore to consider. I'm going to read you something. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. I believe it's 27 words. think that's right. 27 words. I didn't do another count, but it's 27 words. This probably led to some of the greatest confusion in U S history. Not so much, maybe the 19th century. ⁓ Certainly in the 20th century, it became an issue. What does it really mean? And how we, think, I say we, we as a people don't really know the history because we don't look into the history. And I think the best place to look at the history, as a Virginian, somebody said this to me one time, you got the father of the country. You got the basic author of the declaration and you got the guy that pretty much wrote the constitution. So you're Washington, you're Jefferson, you're Madison are pretty important. So you might want to look at what Madison said and Madison said a lot. prior to the second amendment in the bill of rights. He said a lot and I think he had a driving force in his ideas. Today I'm honored to have Isaac Botkin. He is the co-founder of T-Rex Arms. It's a Tennessee based company that specializes in firearms accessories and training. And he frequently discusses the second amendment and gun ownership rights. Isaac, sir, pleased to have you on. How are you?

Isaac Botkin: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. I ⁓ love this topic. I love that you're coming at it as a Virginian. And now is a fantastic time to talk about it because yeah, there's been a lot of confusion in the 20th century. We're in the 21st century. And while there's still a lot of confusion, there's still a lot of infringement. I also feel like we're kind of in, we've developed a lot of momentum the other way. So there's a lot of conversation about firearm freedom that is really positive. There's a lot of action that's been positive. But lot of the confusion is still there. So it's a fantastic thing to dig into and read about, study, and talk about. So I'm excited about this conversation.

Moore To Consider: So I'm a history major. got a master's degree in history and then I went to law school. So does it make me the smartest guy in the room? I actually had a show with somebody yesterday and they sort of got into, you know, the block against some poor people that don't have an opportunity for education. I said, Hey, the elites get everything wrong because they're indoctrinated into everything that's stupid. And I said, I've been with people. I used to work on a military base 40 years ago when I was in college. And there were guys that were high school graduates, often Vietnam vets. traveled the world, but they had been in combat overseas. They were some of the smartest people I've ever seen. And they were turning wrenches out there in the motor pool, but they were vets. And they would talk about the world and all the places they'd been, the ports they'd been in, the combat theaters they'd been in. I'm like, man, these guys know a lot about oral history because they lived it. And I learned a hell of lot more from them than I a lot of college professors. So I've never taken that. And I told the young lady yesterday too, my father was a 16 year old high school graduate.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: Red clay part of, uh, near Lynchburg, Virginia grew up poor gets drafted during Korea goes in his IQ in 18 months. He made E five and then they put him into OCS because of his IQ scores. First day they tell him, if you don't have a college education, we're not redoing the math. If you didn't get it in college, he doesn't. He gets a waiver on that. He finishes in the top three in his class goes to state police school in Virginia. He's first in his class. I never saw a person and you know, you're. Your dad's a larger than life figure, but I never saw him ever in a situation. He couldn't outthink anyone. He didn't have the greatest education, but I understood. And I would tell him the best thing that ever happened to you is getting drafted, got him off the farm and out into the world. But he had innate intelligence. So I've seen a lot of second amendment types. They don't have the law degrees and they know what they're talking about because they've actually done the deep dive history that so many that are in academia and on the news and politicians for sure.

Isaac Botkin: Mmm.

Moore To Consider: They're just spouting ideas about the Second Amendment, not really knowing anything about it. So how did you get involved with this?

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Yeah. So it started out, my dad comes into the picture here. So I grew up not far from you. I lived in Maryland, just outside of DC for a while and rooted for the Redskins when I was a kid. And then my dad was involved in political media. So different things for conservatives. And one of the groups that we worked with was Gun Owners of America. So when I was a little kid, we shot a video for Gun Owners of America.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm. There you go. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: Pratt went out and shot different guns into watermelons and talked about the threat and the danger because this was this would have been right before the 94 assault weapons ban or possibly right after right around there that people were banning guns for cosmetic features. And so he was shooting watermelons with different guns and trying to shoot the same round. And, you know, the scary one is actually less dangerous and less controllable and does less damage. So that was that was the first.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Isaac Botkin: Second Amendment or Firearm Freedom video that I ever worked on at 10 or 11 years old. ⁓ so that's always been a part of what our family has done over the years. ⁓ But about 12 years ago now is when T-Rex started making holsters and they originally started making holsters for guys in our local fire department. Because the four of us, owners of T-Rex, were on the volunteer fire department and Just making different tools and things for the guys on the department is how it kicked off. But ⁓ because there's always been this understanding of and appreciation for history that's come from mom and dad and some roots here, this has always been a priority for the company. The company isn't just a plastic ulcer company, doesn't just make widgets. There's a very important purpose to the keeping and bearing of arms that goes beyond. ⁓ It's a cool thing to make accessories for.

Moore To Consider: So I just jump right into what we talked to. I'm an old radio guy, so I'll talk about off the air before we start the show. This all came to me, I graduated law school 30 years ago, and I was interested in a lot of this stuff. And again, when I started doing talk radio, I had this friend of mine turn me on to Frederick Bastiat, who is a man who is an economist and a philosopher dying of tuberculosis and knows it. And he's fighting socialism in 1848, same year that the... Communist Manifesto comes out and he writes this treatise called The Law. It basically kind of opens up and says the law perverted when the government does that which it's not supposed to do, it becomes criminal. that really the only authority that the government can write just all law, he said all rights come from God and government can only have righteous authority. They can only have that authority when it... mimics what the individual can do and that's self-defense. Anything outside of it, you don't feed, clothe, educate, none of that. And of course, yeah. And he was right, of course. The guy's beautiful and he knows he's dying of tuberculosis. And I think he dies at 50, like a year later after the law comes out. So I read that a lot of these things are hitting me kind of hard.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah

Moore To Consider: You know, I read the Federalist Papers, I get into that a lot, you know, and you got Madison, who's kind of a Jefferson guy, you got Hamilton, clearly hates Jefferson and all the tension there. And I just watched a guy do Washington the other day who was apolitical, but ambitious. And I think he did kind of say, okay, I'll be the first president because everybody's begging me to do it. And it doesn't have the authority under Article II that we've turned it into. So there's all these figures and what are they really driving at?

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: So a friend of mine years ago, who was a PhD from the University of Virginia in foreign affairs, one of the brightest, we coached together, we coached baseball. He said to me one day, he goes, Hey, have you ever really thought about the order of the bill of rights? And I went to the archives, I had a friend, I recruited his kid and ended up becoming his friend and he works in the national archives. So I go up there one day and there's a guy with a PhD from James Madison university. He's awesome. He brings me out.

Isaac Botkin: Nice.

Moore To Consider: the original pencil drawn drafts of the Bill of Rights that they're marking through and erasing and, yeah, it's all in cellophane, know, and he's laying it out with his white gloves. I'm like, oh my gosh, like these are the writings of Mattith. Right. So he said there was like a hundred proposed, 12 went to vote. And the first two don't make it. One of the two that doesn't make it gets ratified 202 years later. That was the one that was ratified, I think the 27th amendment.

Isaac Botkin: Nice. Mm-hmm. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: that was ratified in the 1990s that said that Congress couldn't get a pay raise until they'd gone through another cycle of election. And that actually comes back 202 years later. The other one was Madison saying, we got to have a system as the population grows to grow the Congress. Had his formula worked, we'd have 8,100 members of the House now. So that's what some people thought is not practical. Yeah, good.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, which sounds like a lot. And you know, I'm a small government guy, so you might say, well, Isaac, you'd be opposed to this because 8,100 representatives is a lot. But in some ways, it would be a great check and balance against too many bureaucrats. It would be a way where you and I could actually get our voices heard. It's very hard to talk to your representative when he's representing millions of people. ⁓ So it's a...

Moore To Consider: Yep. Right.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, that's a fascinating conversation and figure out how you do the math. And ironically enough, I feel like ⁓ he was right on the money and it gets unwieldy to have that many people for sure, but technology that we've developed over the time that the country's grown, you know, we could work it out. I think it would be pretty easy to do with modern technology. So forward thinking.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because Madison, well, and Madison's looking at like, roughly 35,000 people were represented in the first Congress by a one member of the House. And that was voted on by the people. And of course, here's another thing that's bastardized the whole thing was the 17th amendment. They didn't want to send two more whores to Washington. They let the state legislatures who were there to, so basically your U S senators were sent to Washington to protect the state from the government. And then once you give the vote to the people. Okay. So anyway,

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: He gets into then the 10 that are, so actually the first amendment is third in order of vote, but it becomes the first amendment. So my friend then said, okay, what's the second amendment? said, I have right to keep him bear arms. He goes, what's the third amendment? Quartering act, stay out of my house. know, in the military, stop, you know, stay out of my house. Fourth amendment. said, probable cause, what it takes to secure a warrant under oath or affirmation. And he goes, you know why this is right? And he was really, I thought this was great. I'd never heard anyone else say it. He goes, there are people of a certain race and religion generally, and they've just broken the bond with hundreds of years of being attached to that same group of people. And so the people are like, how do we know you won't come to our house and take our weapons? How do you know you won't come around and stay in our house, you know, in times of peace and then have, you know, kick our kids out of bed so the soldiers can stay there? So that's why they're putting this in, is they're coming out of a revolution.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: And they want guarantees from this new government that you won't do the same thing that England did. And I was like, wow, that makes sense. So in that light, what happened in the Northeast during the war? think General Gage was one of the major ones. They were going house to house into people taking, taking the militia's weapons.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Yes, yeah. And that was what kicked it all off. And it's fascinating to talk about this because a lot of, I think it's real easy to simplify. ⁓ 250 years ago, and there's a lot of factors at play, it's real easy to simplify. But let's remember the militia up in New England, the men of Lexington, ⁓ the men who fought in that battle there of Lexington and Concord and then the other towns on the way back, they were ready to go before the second amendment was written.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: They were ready to go before the Declaration of Independence. There was an understanding of these rights even before we wrote them down. So much of this was built into the culture and the understanding of the common law and some of these different things that people were ready to go on this before any of the official documents and paperwork had been written and before these rights had been ⁓ recognized in the Bill of Rights. There's this...

Moore To Consider: Yes.

Isaac Botkin: great long track record in human history that we're building on. These men are standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants. And in many ways, ⁓ the stuff that happens before the document is not only just as important, but in some ways it's more fascinating to go back and see how these ideas developed from like King Alfred in England putting some of these restrictions on government. King Alfred's law, the doom book, the dooms of King Alfred.

Moore To Consider: Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: those put significant restrictions on government. And they assume that men have the right to keep and bear arms back then. And then the size of arms and then the Magna Carta, like there's a common trend throughout here that if we're gonna preserve liberty, then there has to be limits on authority. There has to be limits on civil government. So yeah, so our founders are standing on the shoulders of giants and they're looking back over seven or 800 years of

Moore To Consider: Yes.

Isaac Botkin: not just European history, specifically English history, trying to solve this problem, like what happens when the church gets too powerful? What happens when the barons get too powerful? What happens when the king gets too powerful? We've already swung this pendulum back and forth, and there's a lot of lessons that have been learned throughout history. And so it's a fascinating thing to see them not just fight against England and win as a people who are united.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: But look back over all of that history and prioritize these things and put them in order, and often in order of how they are abused, and make that a really important set of limits on our new government here in the United States.

Moore To Consider: Here's the next thing that absolutely put me over the top on how I came to the view of the second amendment I have. And I ask a lot of people this, that I've talked to people, take all the guns people, and I'll add, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I'm going to ask you, do you know what article one sec, powers of Congress, article one section eight says about the Navy?

Isaac Botkin: Not off the top of my head, but I'll bet you it involves privateers and letters of marks.

Moore To Consider: Well, that is part of this, but then this is what it says about the United States Navy. One, two, three, four, five, six words. It says to provide and maintain a Navy. That's it. So what do think they wanted? They wanted a standing army. I mean, I'm sorry, standing Navy. This is where I'm going. Standing Navy. Now when Jefferson's hit with the Barbary pirates and in the Marine Corps, him to the shores of AAA, who did he send to put that down? The Marines.

Isaac Botkin: Okay. pretty simple. Yeah, the Marines, yeah.

Moore To Consider: And what are they in effect? They're federal troops. I mean, when you think that...

Isaac Botkin: They're, yeah, and they're attached to the Navy, yeah.

Moore To Consider: They are, yes, they're a department of Navy. So then if I'm not mistaken, I love my Marines. I've had a lot of friends that were Marines and Marines are cool. I've always been a big fan of the Marine Corps. I think it's, is it November 10th? But think it's 1775 is when it was born, right? So it's born in, yes, they're born, right, exactly. They're born in the conflict. So they're born in the conflict and they are, and this is another thing a lot of people I think find fascinating.

Isaac Botkin: Yes, yeah, they're older than the army,

Moore To Consider: When John Brown had his raid at the arsenal at, ⁓ at Harper's Ferry, which was Virginia then later becomes West Virginia. The person that was sent to put that down was Colonel Robert E. Lee, United States Army. You know who he took? Marines. He took Marines. Yeah. To put that down at this federal arsenal, arsenal. didn't send the state militia. They didn't send the Virginia militia. Lee was in charge of Marines to go put this down. So.

Isaac Botkin: Who do you take? Okay, yeah.

Moore To Consider: You can see the function of the Marine Corps was the federal troops. Now this is the next big key thing. So to raise armies, well, to declare war, letters of marquee and reprisal and make rules concerning captures of land and water. Okay. So that is the part. Followed by to raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that purpose for longer than two years.

Isaac Botkin: Okay. Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: Now, you know what that was about? You could vote the bastards out that voted for an unpopular war. It gave you a two year cycle to get rid of and the exact language appropriation of money to that you shall be for no longer term than two years. Followed by to provide for Navy. Then it says to make rules of government and regulation of the land and naval forces to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrection, and repel invasion. to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. So brother, this is what I got. The more I read this and I read Madison, they didn't want standing armies. And when they wrote the second amendment, now the conflict comes in, because I talked to some people that I love that are second amendment types to talk about individual firearm ownership and all that said, that didn't preclude the Commonwealth of Virginia regulating firearms any way they wanted.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Right.

Moore To Consider: Now they came from a mindset that, ⁓ of course you could have a rifle to hunt and protect your home. mean, they wouldn't have thought otherwise. Then have you ever read the 17th, September, 1775, and this is for the, for the viewers here, or 1776 for the viewers here as the war is now official, the declaration has been signed.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: The States began to rip up their own constitutions if they had them and they started to write constitutions even prior to the U S constitution. That convention can, you know, finishing in September of 1787. So I just want the, I want the listeners to hear this and then I'll, I'll shut up and I just want your response to this, but this is crazy. I love Pennsylvania. It's like as a Virginian, I have so many friends of mine that are.

Isaac Botkin: Yes. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: You know, from Pennsylvania, it's, it's a great state and it's interesting how they dealt with the issue of firearms. And I had it here and I got to find it here again. They basically say what every person I'm sure wishes that had been said in the U S constitution. I did what I'm going to look for that. That's awkward. Cause I'm going to look for that, but let me ask you that first thing. Have you, have you ever.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah.

Moore To Consider: really kind of viewed it from that lens and thought, maybe that all this was really about was the formation of the military and times military need. And they were leaving it up to the states to arm the citizens so they could fight the wars and not the standing armies we have today.

Isaac Botkin: Yes, and the interesting thing about this is you can see the different colonies as they become states and they change their constitutions. Really interesting to see what they keep and what they leave. Obviously they get rid of all the stuff where the king gets to appoint the governors, so that obviously has to change. And there's certain things they keep and there's certain things that they shore up. And ⁓ they really stick to a lot of the stuff that they had before, because these colonies, ⁓

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: before we had the Articles of Confederation of the United States, we had a confederation of the New England colonies. It wasn't even all the colonies yet, but they formed a federation and they were, this is back when they're tiny, tiny colonies. This is way before, ⁓ this would have been early 1700s. And they give themselves, or they don't give themselves, they recognize that they have the ability to make military treaties amongst themselves and come to each other's defense. and start and end wars. So oftentimes when we think about the civil government, we think that, well, down here is dog catcher and then up here is Navy sheriff and then up here is your state legislature. And then at the very top is the executive office. And at the very top of the executive office is the commander in chief. And that's where war happens. It's only the very highest level of government that does war. But these colonies recognized, no, we're doing defense at a local level.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm. Right. Yes.

Isaac Botkin: We're organizing militias at the town level and we can declare and end wars at the, essentially at the state level. And again, they're small states population wise. They recognize that we don't have to wait for the King of England to make treaties for us and to declare and end wars. ⁓ We can do that ourselves. We can go out to Pennsylvania, we can go to Massachusetts, we can form this confederation, we can bind ourselves to.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: support one another in war and be on the same page about starting and ending wars and who we sign other treaties with. They recognize that that war fighting capability is not just at the top of government. That's a responsibility that lives much, much lower. And so that is another idea that you see throughout the colonies up to and through the ⁓ war. That's part of the reason that so many of those town militias in Massachusetts were able to start fighting the Redcoats without waiting for the Continental Congress to sign a Declaration of Independence. They knew that disarmament was unacceptable. It was a violation of the rights of free Englishmen. They knew that the King was doing something that he was absolutely barred from doing by the English Bill of Rights, not to mention all the tradition that came before. They knew that it was utterly unacceptable and they knew that they had rights ⁓ as free Englishmen and as men made in the image of God. And so they were ready to go to war with the British Redcoats.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Exactly.

Isaac Botkin: at that time, based on that, and ⁓ small town militias organized and worked together because they had drilled together, they had trained together, they'd already built the mechanisms necessary, much more bottom up. Now, as the war goes on and things become more official and it becomes a continent-wide war, you need top-down organization for sure. But... There's never the assumption that it's only top down. There's the assumption that it's gonna be both. You're gonna have your militias down here, the responsibilities of the people, the rights of the people attached to responsibilities. And then you organize this army for these two year long wars from the top based on organization that already exists at the bottom.

Moore To Consider: So I do find this fascinating as I stumbled through this to find my place again on this, but so in section 12, this is what Pennsylvania literally says in 1776. The bill of rights is what ratified 1791. So they're, they're a decade and half out in front of this. And this is why when you read these people, you see the overlay as you said, they're saying the same things over and over, over two, three decades. They're saying the same things.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: So in 12, they say that the people have a right to freedom of speech and of writing and publishing their sentiments. Therefore the freedom of the press ought not to be restrained. They're saying that in 1776, God bless Pennsylvania. Then 13, that the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state. Next line.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: And as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to Liberty, they ought not to be kept up, meaning no standing armies in times of peace. And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power. Isn't that interesting? And that's what I'm saying. It started, and I read this in Madison too, Madison 10 years prior to the bill of rights was saying the same thing. Now I say all that to say this. Pennsylvania.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: And their own individual constitution just said, you have the right to keep arms to defend yourself. I don't think that's what the wording of the second amendment was because I think it was implied. really do. And I think this is where it becomes a stumbling block is that Madison's like, Hey, the States take care of that because it's in their jurisdiction to regulate firearms, however the hell they want to. And I mentioned off the air before we start again, this is hard for people sometimes to wrap their mind around.

Isaac Botkin: Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: Because in the year 2026, they know the history. mean, you can look it up. ⁓ ⁓ when John Marshall is the secretary of state ⁓ 1800, well in 1801, as John Adams is going out, he makes his midnight appointments. He's trying to put as many federal judges as he can in. ⁓ Marshall's literally moving his stuff down the hall because he's going from secretary of state to Supreme Court Chief Justice. He's one of the people being appointed. He doesn't sign Marbury's, he doesn't sign the final paperwork on Marbury. So Marbury walks into the Jefferson administration and he goes, hey, I want my district magistrate position in DC. Madison goes down to Jefferson and he goes, hey, this cat's coming. He goes, ignore it. Don't even handle it. So he sues Marbury versus Madison. And this is the famous case where John Marshall, who hated his cousin, Thomas Jefferson,

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: Got a bunch of shots in at Jefferson, but in the end said, and this is where judicial review comes from, um, in Marbury versus Madison, he's like the, the act that you're looking at from Congress in 1789 doesn't apply or it doesn't work here because it's unconstitutional. Now they have judicial review and in Barron versus Baltimore, which comes in 1833, a guy sues under the fifth amendment. The guy's got a wharf. He feels like the governor and the state are screwing him over. So that same John Marshall, who's established a judicial review, he goes before him and Marshall literally says, nice try. I like what you're thinking. You got a good point here. It's a takings clause sounds like you're saying they took from me. He lost finance because of how they operated his wharf and the tides. And he goes, the problem is you're suing under the fifth amendment and doesn't apply to the states. Boom. There he makes that declaration. So in 1833.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: as it would have been in 1841 or any of that time. I don't see where anyone at Virginia had passed the law taking your firearms or Maryland or any of the other several States that that person would have had any redress to go in and say, I want my firearm back. Look at the second amendment. Would you agree with that take?

Isaac Botkin: Right, yeah. I would agree with that take. And now it sounds like we're leaving a big hole for people to have their guns confiscated in these other states. And the reason why I don't see that as a hole is at the time, and still to this day, most states, their constitution has something like the Second Amendment that recognizes the right to self-defense, the right to the militia, the right to keep and bear arms. So many of these rights, remember that the federal government is made up of representatives from the states. And so when they ratify these things, this isn't federal bureaucrats doing it. It's literally the guys from Virginia that wrote the Virginia constitution and the guys from Pennsylvania wrote the Pennsylvania constitution getting together in a room and being like, what's a good summary for this organizing body that needs real strong limits and real small amounts of powers for coordination? So they'd already put these same ideas into their state constitutions. It's the same reason that a bunch of states back then had religious tests and had recognized churches. And then they said, well, the federal government shouldn't have that. It would be like there being a federal football team when all these different cities and states have their own football teams. We'll leave that out because they've already got it covered.

Moore To Consider: Well, that's another misconception about the First Amendment. If I'm not mistaken, I've read some history on this. There were six states at the time of the ratification of the First Amendment that were still taxing their people in support of churches. So when people see the Establishment Clause, it just meant there would not be a national church. We're not going to mess with free exercise thereof, and we're not going to establish a church. If states are out there, and to pick up like a cleanup on aisle six, but I just love what you just said.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Moore To Consider: So given what I just said about the Barron versus Baltimore decision in 1833 saying that the bill of rights didn't apply yet to the states, then the person who had his firearm taken away from Pennsylvania would have got his redress at the state level. The state Supreme court most likely would have said, hey, it's right there in that section 13 I just read. You can't take that guy's firearm. But what if Virginia had some rogue legislators and they went in, very similar to what just happened, how...

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: They tried to amend the Virginia constitution. They did it procedurally incorrect. And we just had this famous decision that just came out from the Virginia Supreme court. You got to hope the Supreme court of said state is going to uphold what the constitution says. But, but I still think that the state's, yeah. Go ahead.

Isaac Botkin: Right, yeah. Which is another, yeah, go for it. I was gonna say, which is a great argument for decentralization. Like there's this idea that says, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, this is a little too much power to give to the states, because what if the Virginia Supreme Court doesn't do what's right? What if they go off the deep end? Shouldn't we build strong top-down controls from the federal government? It's like, well, if there's a possibility that the Virginia Supreme Court might get things wrong, then you have to admit the possibility that the Supreme Court of the federal government might get things wrong too. Wouldn't it be better to have a whole bunch of decentralized bits of authority? So if California, that means hard to imagine, but if California went crazy, people could leave California and go to a place that wasn't crazy. This decentralization, instead of tying everything to one single authority figure, is a feature, not a bug. The fact that a state has the ability to mess up is a feature, not a bug. you don't correct everything from the top. You correct some things from the bottom.

Moore To Consider: So we go through, there is, and kind of also inform the listener, what do we have history-wise? We have an American Civil War followed by, in 1868, the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which has also been on the news, it's been on the front pages because of the question of birthright citizenship. But there was a lot of aspects to the 14th Amendment. And the 14th Amendment was in large part ratified. There was the Civil Rights Act of 1866. that put some teeth into how are we going to go, how is the nation going to go about during reconstruction, making sure that the newly freed slaves freed by the December 1865 13th amendment, how are we going to know in these, these 12 military districts that are created that we're going to get some type of acceptance of black folks as citizens and their rights will be recognized. So the 14th amendment is passed or it's ratified.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: Then we get into the 20th century and in early 20th century, the Supreme court begins to say, Hey, there's an aspect in the incorporation doctrine. There's an aspect of the language of the due process clause of the 14th amendment that says we can apply this to the States. Meaning what? Fundamental rights. So they started to have selective incorporation. They started to say, Hey, here's something we think like, and I used to talk criminal justice to students. like, so the fourth amendment, what that means is.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: the state of Maryland, Commonwealth, Virginia, whoever, you have to provide at least as much protection to the rights of the person as the fourth amendment allows. But if Virginia wants to go even further in the protection of the rights of the accused, can knock yourself out. You just have to meet that minimum standard. So it goes through time. And I want to say Heller is what? 2008? The Heller decision? So, yeah, so you have...

Isaac Botkin: Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. DZ versus Hillary. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: ⁓ the first case I think was United States versus Cruikshank. They ruled that the right to bear arms is not granted by the constitution. Neither is it any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment means no more than you shall not be infringed by Congress and has no other effect than to restrict power of the national government. United States versus Miller, 1939, Supreme court ruled that the second amendment did not protect weapon types, not having a reasonable relationship to the preservation. or efficiency of a well-regulated militia. that became a thing. And if I'm not mistaken in the United States versus Miller, the guy had like a sawed-off shotgun.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Yeah, they made the argument that because the sawed-off shotgun isn't being used by militaries, it's not a military weapon. And if it's not a military weapon, it's not a Second Amendment thing. Today, they argue the opposite. They say an AR-15 is a weapon of war, therefore the Second Amendment doesn't cover it. just do the, know, whatever, you know, whatever works for the pragmatists, yeah.

Moore To Consider: Interesting. Isn't that? I love that you brought that up. I always thought that fascinating too, that now Miller is, you know, it's 90 years ago. It's approaching a hundred years ago. It's about, you know, roughly nine decades ago. It's pushing 1940. So, and I can kind of understand the rationale there. They're the second amendment's got this language about something about a well-regulated militia. So I guess it has to be a militia type of weapon. But when you think about the militia, a person in the militia can have a kitchen knife. mean, they can be out there fighting with what that doesn't mean.

Isaac Botkin: Right, yeah. Yeah, that's another argument that people bring up sometimes where there's a difference between the organized militia, the unorganized militia, and there's ways in which when the militia gets activated and comes under the authority, when it's called up, then you equip it. But prior to that, you don't equip it. Those guys are buying their own stuff. So the sizes of arms and various other things that we have in section 10 is like, you will have a rifle and you will have a cartridge box and you will have a powder horn. But you buy that stuff, that's your stuff. At no point did the government ever own that stuff ⁓ that you were supposed to have as a private militia member. So that's another argument against, has to be, the Second Amendment's only talking about the National Guard. That's a different thing, but yeah. Yeah, sometimes those guys were just grabbing the only thing that they could go to war with.

Moore To Consider: I used to love to go to

Isaac Botkin: and it was private property and they carried it into the field with them and that was what they had and that was what they did to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens.

Moore To Consider: You know, I was listening to a story and talking about not only the history of the second amendment, but the history of this country, that a people who came from a part of the world that really control, you know, the sun never set on the, on the English empire. So this is the most powerful Navy in the world. The column has come, you know, it's spun the different stories, Jamestown versus Plymouth, you know, the period of it, was pretty much the same people, but they hit different spots. I think if I'm not mistaken, that The landing in Massachusetts was a big miss. know, they're so they come to Virginia. Yep. And missed.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, they were headed for Virginia. Now at the time, Virginia was quite large and they still missed it. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: And they still missed it, right? But anyway, the guy makes up the point that by the time you get to the conflict, we go from 1607 to now you're into the mid 18th century and clearly, you you've had the, ⁓ the, the seven years war or the, ⁓ the French and Indian war. This conflict's clearly had been going on in North America during this period. But these people, unlike the guy living in downtown London, whatever downtown London is like in 1757.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah.

Moore To Consider: He's not in an open range shooting at game and he's not shooting at people that he thinks are going to potentially bring harm to him. So they get pretty good at it. And now because everyone's had a firearm and they've had a socially imposed upon them idea, you better have, like you said, you went to church to muster, you know, the pastor, the parish might say, you got to be here on a certain time. got to, you had duties and responsibilities to be a citizen, to have a firearm and be pretty good at it.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: And they're making their own. So I've heard the story that the standard issue musket that the British army was using had an effective range of maybe 70 yards, sometimes 80. And the U S or the, the, the colonists are using rifles with effective range of plus 300 yards in the Kentucky long rifle. ⁓

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, with the downside, I mean, it's great for certain types of combat, but it's also slower to load. So there's advantages and disadvantages to both sides. The British Brown Bess had a bayonet lug so they could fight with bayonets. A lot of the American rifles didn't have that. Now, those guys did have tomahawks and the kitchen knives that you mentioned earlier, there's a lot of times when you...

Moore To Consider: Right. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: There's a mismatch one way or the other, and it depends on terrain, training, situation, but yeah, it's a fascinating thing to look at. And there was an assumption at the beginning that the British had, particularly the regulars, that these guys were country bumpkins. They weren't gonna be able to stand up. They won't be able to stand, and all they would be able to do is hide behind trees and shoot at them. I think everybody was a little bit surprised by Lexington and Concord.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: But the big surprise was the Battle of Bunker Hill, because there were a bunch of Boston men, not even like wilderness wildcat guys, but like a bunch of Boston men, businessmen, they stood on Breed's Hill, and that's where the famous quote comes, don't fire till you see the whites with their eyes. Like that, that is not just an awesome quote, but it's also a demonstration of superb military discipline that these Boston shopkeepers,

Moore To Consider: Fights to the Rise.

Isaac Botkin: could see the most powerful army in the world coming towards them, hold their fire until the moment, and then they fought until the last man. They knew that they were not winning. They were only buying time for the evacuation of Boston. They were only buying time for their wives and their children to go. And they stood in ranks. They fired in ranks. They fired ball for ball. They stood to the last man. They died as they stood. And that was when the British went, actually, you know, maybe these guys are not country bumpkins.

Moore To Consider: Wow.

Isaac Botkin: and hobbyists. Maybe these guys ⁓ are actually gonna muster a professional fighting force and this is gonna be hard. That was a big wake up call for the serious British officers. I'm sure there were still parliament guys back in England who didn't see it, but there were men leading the British in Massachusetts who said, uh-oh, this is actually gonna be rough.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Yeah. You know, and then basically a century and a half later, almost pushed in two centuries, there's an historian that I love to listen to about World War II. And given what I said about my dad, my dad was born in 1928. I know that world he grew up in. I he told me as a kid, I took my 22 rifle out one day with nine rounds and brought back nine squirrels. And he had 2010 eyesight. I was with him firing a firearm and it was crazy. He fought, he, ⁓ shot the 45 count, the 1911, he fired that, um, competitively. So, you know, big strong guy, great eyesight and all that. Well, all of his uncles were like that. One of them landed a D-Day. He was a bad ass. I remember stories with him. So this historian said one of the other interesting things about the makeup of your M1A1 type of kid that came out of, into combat in 41 as they started or 42 as they started to put together the army. You know, they were drilling sometimes with broomsticks because they didn't have the firearms yet. But once they put these guys on the range, they had incredible marksmanship because they'd all grown up with granddaddy's rifle. They'd all grown up, well, I say all, many, the inner city kids, not so much, but a good portion of the United States Army that was being made up overnight and Marines, these kids had all been on farms. So I've heard these stories about when they fought in Europe, the other nations, namely Germany, was like, wow.

Isaac Botkin: Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: These guys can hit anything from great distances, but they grew up with daddy's firearm. They grew up on farms and they learned to shoot to survive. So that's how they grew up. The other thing is they said the German army would typically like have something break down in the field and the Americans would come along and they figure out how to fix it. Cause they worked on granddaddy's tractor. So I.

Isaac Botkin: Yes. Yeah, no, there's this fascinating tradition of the citizen soldier. And we think of it now as being a very American thing. It's also a very English thing, because the English did this back in the past, way back again, talking about King Alfred, the furred system was like local militias. And the sizes of arms said that the people have to be armed. Then they had the archery laws that said that ⁓ English men must train with bows. And these were private. private individuals have to train with bows. And what that gave them was a tremendous defensive capability without a big standing army. And so that's the tradition that Americans had. And so there were guys that landed ⁓ in the European theater of World War II that had spent more time on the boat than in training. And the reason that that worked was because the Americans, many of them, not all, but many of them, they had firearm experience.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Isaac Botkin: They had survival experience. They knew how to read maps. They knew how to fix things. Thanks to Henry Ford, almost every boy in America either had fixed a Model T or had watched people fix a Model T. We had a generation of mechanically savvy people ⁓ that was really incredible at that time for that very reason. That one car basically ⁓ kind of created a generation of mechanically savvy Americans. And so

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: That's part of the reason they can fix German stuff in the field. And the Germans had a little bit more of an aristocratic sort of top-down standing military, Imperial Army sort of way of doing things. Very professional and very good. But the citizen soldier has a generalist capability where a nation that doesn't have the expense of a standing army can have incredible defensive capability. Now in World War II, we used it offensively.

Moore To Consider: view. Right. Yeah. No doubt.

Isaac Botkin: It was incredibly expensive, but it was also incredibly effective. You would just pull guys out of Iowa and they could just land on D-Day and stand toe to toe with these professional soldiers because of the disciplines and martial virtues and character that had been built into them. And sometimes it was marksmanship and sometimes it was mechanical ability, but...

Moore To Consider: Yeah.

Isaac Botkin: But that idea of rights and responsibilities shown through Americans even by the 1940s, it's still there. You can still see that citizen soldier step onto the field of battle and be like, I'm a soldier now. I've had just enough time to learn this stuff because I've spent all of my life learning the other stuff.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. I just think that's what makes us, and this is what the historian said about, know, maybe about even the American revolution. You have a group of people who maybe unlike, I don't know if it was really that much unlike some of the other colonies that the British would have ruled, but these were, you know, the British subjects that had learned to overtake this land. They're pioneers and they're survivors. And a large part of their survival is we're saying is their ability to fire weapons. If you don't hit the target, if you throw rocks at the rabbit and you don't hit it, you die. So if you're going to throw rocks or you're going to shoot at something, sooner or later, self-preservation comes in and you get to be pretty good at it. And then it's interesting, like we're saying, to that same pioneer spirit and how every kid, that's a great point, early 20th century, all these kids are growing up with either the Model T or, I don't know, Ford probably made the tractors do it that time, and then the International Harvester. ⁓

Isaac Botkin: Yes, yeah, the Fordson. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: Yeah, but yeah, they're all kind of Ford products. So, and then what happens, they go over there and they're driving around in Jeeps. Well, it's pretty much like what they rode around in back when they were in the States. So there is something I think uniquely, I don't know, maybe we put, as Americans, we put too much into that, but again, bringing it up at my dad and my mother's side, her mother had six brothers, four were Navy. One was Marine. One was shot up at the bow of the bulge in the army. That's everybody's family story.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: If there were six brothers in the home, they all were fighting. So I'm old enough to have been around those people in the latter parts of their life. They were some very self-sufficient people that, and they could do anything. They were farmers. my, my dad was out surveying when he was 10 years old, like with the surveyor, know, they all had these crazy experiences that, that made them very solid citizens, but lack of firearm experience was not a problem. They, definitely, yeah.

Isaac Botkin: Right.

Moore To Consider: And it's just a, it's a cultural thing. And I gotta say this, yeah.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, and I think that that self-reliance is a big part of it. That self-reliance is really the bones or the foundation that you build your other skill sets onto. And it gives you the mentality where American soldiers ⁓ just had a different... It's very interesting because throughout ⁓ America's young history, we were always the new world and Europe was always the old world. But in many ways, what you see, even up to World War II,

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: you see the new ideas being played out in Europe. And America are like the old fashioned guys. Like we're the ones that have this much more old fashioned ⁓ sort of way of doing business and way of doing war. And it's Europe that has gone this way of, no, we're gonna have professional states like the... The Westphalian state is gonna be the way that we do things. Positive laws, how we're gonna do things. We're gonna have standing armies and organization and bureaucracy. That's what we're gonna have in Europe. And then these Americans just show up and like, well, you I ain't never seen a policeman in my entire life. We just take care of things out in the range by ourselves. And now here we are fighting the troops, ⁓ fighting alongside these professional soldiers and like, we'll figure stuff out. So it's very interesting that there's very much a much more old fashioned.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Isaac Botkin: mentality that has served America very well. And even in the war between the states, you see that it's the guys in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and Virginia that are holding on to these old British traditions and the King and parliament are going in this new direction of pursuing empire.

Moore To Consider: Yeah, I guess nothing can really trump one's experiences. Like you say, the people that grow up in situations, and I'm not saying that it's necessarily, I think, you know, in 1607, it clearly was, in 1695, it clearly would have been, but there's just a different interest that the colonists have leading up to the war when it comes to survival. And when one has been in the woods, And one has had to take down trees, build cabins and all the rest, all these different skills come into play. And I think it's a, it's something that's been shown in history quite a bit. We experienced it as a nation in Vietnam. It's hard to fight people on their own soil. And in the British coming over with the British regulars, and of course there were many other mercenaries that were fighting on that side of the situation. But.

Isaac Botkin: Yes. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: You got a bunch of colonists that know everything about the terrain. They know everything about every aspect of moving around in that. And I guess they got pretty good, pretty quick. All right. So to get back into the Supreme court thing, in the 21st century, the amendment has been subject subjected to renewed academic inquiry in district of Columbia versus Hello. The Supreme court handed down a landmark decision that held that the amendment protects an individual's right to keep and.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: keep a gun for self-defense. And of course that's in the District of Columbia. So that is a federally run, you know, city and it doesn't really affect the state. So coming back two years later, McDonald versus Chicago, the Supreme court clarified that the due process clause of the 14th amendment incorporated the second amendment against state and local governments. So they basically, and when I talked about the incorporation doctrine earlier, it's the application of certain language in the 14th amendment.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: as against the States. And I had, I was, I did a radio show one time with Akhil Amar, who was like a bill of rights expert. ⁓ he's an expert. He teaches at Yale. He was like teaching at 23. The guy's brilliant. And he was on the air and I got, I got a chance to talk to him and I said, do you believe that that's exactly what the drafters of the 14th amendment were after? And he goes, they clearly were as to equal protection of the law.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: that equal protection of the law should have been applied to the states. But to go farther into what has led to Supreme court cases where they've written the law based upon what they think is an abridgment of what they think is a fundamental right. No, I don't think it meant that at all. It just meant there would be equality for everyone within the state as the laws applied to individuals. whatever it is, we have that.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Yeah. yeah, and the mentality definitely changed by the time of that 1860s war between the states. Obviously, there's a lot of conversation about slavery before, during, and after, but ultimately that battle, that war is the government of the individual states. something that they have control over or does the federal government get to decide and pick what the states can do? Like ultimately that is a really major part of the struggle and ultimately that has a big effect. Cause think about reconstruction. Think about Virginia and Tennessee and these Southern States under reconstruction. We didn't have representation at the time. We were occupied by federal troops. The mentality of the time was definitely that yes, the federal government can come in and make. make these other states play ball by whatever rules the federal government comes up with. So there's definitely a shift that happens there. And I think that it affects the way that people think about the Bill of Rights ⁓ at that time and after.

Moore To Consider: You know, let me ask you, this is way off topic, but I just want to get your take on it. I'm teaching criminal justice a few years ago in a rural part of Virginia in a community college system. And one of the kids there is playing intern with one of the local sheriff's offices and he's all excited one day. He goes, yeah, we, we basically just got an anti-drug tank. Like they get some type of military apparatus and he's all excited about it.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: And I made the point to the class, I had not thought about this to the time, because I also have friends in law enforcement that are getting more and more, especially post 9-11, getting more and more federal training and they're federalizing local law enforcement more and more. So I made this point, the Passe Comitatus Act that comes at the end of Reconstruction, that was one of the throw-ins after the Hayes-Tilden election, where not only the Northern troops basically leave, there was also like, yeah, and we'll never use the military.

Isaac Botkin: Yes. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: for civil police work again, but that doesn't address the reverse. That doesn't address if local law, local law enforcement is basically becoming federal troops or federal law enforcement, should say. And when I start hearing that there, yeah, when there's time, time that using heavy, like some type of vehicle in some,

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting.

Moore To Consider: part of the world that you're not exactly thinking is downtown, fill in the blank city. They're talking about having an anti-drug force thing where they got a tank. And this kid, you can't believe, and what are they putting on the streets? They're putting on the streets. mean, generally, I guess it's an AR-15 that they're often using and they've got that in the back of the trunk. know, it's the, the, ⁓ it is the semi-automatic weapon. It's not a fully automatic weapon, but it's still, it's still, yeah.

Isaac Botkin: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes they get the three position switches. It does happen. So I think there's two things we're talking about here. One of them is the militarization of police. And that gets a lot of conversation, it sounds scary. And sometimes they're only talking about the equipment. And I actually, since I argue for the militarization of the private citizen, ⁓ I'm obviously less scared about the militarization of the police. Like, yes, he can have a rifle and body armor, because I got a rifle and body armor too.

Moore To Consider: Wow.

Isaac Botkin: Should the local cops have night vision? Yeah, I have night vision. I feel like he should get night vision too. Like this is only scary to people that don't want to level up with 21st century equipment as a private citizen. But the second thing that you mentioned ⁓ is a big deal, which is kind of the federalization of stuff. You know how DC sends out tentacles and you can see them come down through Arlington and they come down through, I mean, that's...

Moore To Consider: As long as you get to have it too. ⁓ yeah.

Isaac Botkin: you see it happen in the property market in Northern Virginia and the voting in Northern Virginia. But you can also kind of see that happening inside of agencies where an agency really wants to have a input or a bigger effect inside of state level stuff. And so they run seminars, they make new rules, they train, they provide equipment. just they really do kind of get a tentacle down here into like Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is very much not dependent, but very much, well, they're dependent on a lot of federal money, like all states are. But they just sort of get attached to some of these federal agencies and they kind of get used that way. And another good example of this would be not even a law enforcement agency, but Southern Poverty Law Center has been working hand in glove with the FBI for a very long time. And now it turns out they've also been working with the KKK. But this is a great little way where people can subvert some of these

Moore To Consider: Yeah.

Isaac Botkin: barriers. There's supposed to be barriers between family church and state. There's supposed to be barriers between federal, state, and county. There's supposed to be these jurisdictional limits. And so it's really easy to be like, well, you know, I'm an FBI agent and I want to run this CI over in the KKK, but I don't want to let anyone know that I'm doing that because there's all these rules and reporting requirements if I do that. So I'll just make a donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center and then they'll do this.

Moore To Consider: Right.

Isaac Botkin: then maybe there's another guy who's like, well, I would really like to hire an FBI agent to go hassle a political enemy of mine, but that's clearly not okay. So I'll just make a donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center and they'll go create a hate group with this guy in it and then it'll happen. people will work very hard to subvert some of these really important walls and barriers that our constitution puts into effect, the checks and balances that are there, the bill of rights. puts limits that are hard limits and people try to find loopholes and ways around those all the time. ⁓ The government school system is a great example of this where the education of children is now assumed to be the entire responsibility of the government and parents get just kind of squished a little further out all the time. that's, ⁓ I think that's what we're seeing when we see some of these federal agents say, hey, you know what, we want to investigate everything down to here now. Okay, actually we want to investigate all of this. Okay, actually we want to give you a whole bunch of gear in exchange. We'll teach you how to use it and we'll write all your SOPs for you. Like these are just, you know, just little tentacles, but ⁓ you got to watch out for those kinds of things.

Moore To Consider: Well... When I was working with, and again, I was teaching at a local community college. A lot of my kids went to state police school. They went to local law enforcement. So I'm in that academic setting. And again, having a dad that was in law enforcement, had a grandfather, was a federal agent. He was FBI and in an ATF. So I grew up in a law enforcement household and I had the greatest respect. And my dad, again, he passed away at 92 five years ago. He ended very libertarian. It was funny. I he was always a part of.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: Either military or uniformed law enforcement. And I remember right after he retired one day, goes, Jack, you know, I think his whole drug war is wrong. I just, I just don't think you should wear it. You know, and I was like, wow, dad, goes, yeah, the more I see it, I just think it's a scam. I think there's a lot of sources in there that make money off of it. You know, so he was that guy. And he was a very objective thinker, but you know, the famous, I think it was William Blackstone, the famous, would it be better in the system? Then a hundred guilty go free. Then one innocent person suffer punishment. So I asked her that in class one time and a young lady said, uh-uh, that could be a child molester or whatever. And I'm like, okay, are you willing to be the one? Well, and I'm like, okay, if you're not willing to be the one that serves 20 years on something so that the hundred guilty are punished, then you don't really believe it. But I was really shocked at the number of the students that were in there. Like as long as we get the bad guy. And I say that, I want to run this by you too. You've probably seen these like circular fire squad or firing squads where they get 20 people in and one person at the table. I was watching a guy that I love to listen to, the former mob boss that is sitting with 20 cops. And he makes a declaration and I don't disagree with him. He said too often law enforcement, he means federal, he means FBI basically, will create crimes to nab a person they're after.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: And that happened to him. And then all of these cops are of this mindset. But you know, the entrapment rule says that if you have a proclivity to do that, it's not entrapment. He goes, yeah, but you're still creating the crime and they won't accept that. They're like, no, no, no. If we take our informant or we take our insider undercover and come to you with a scheme to commit a crime, that's not us creating the crime. And I'm like, the hell it isn't. And it was,

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: Where I'm going with this is, and this is what scares me about law enforcement. I have friends in law enforcement and this whole federalization, I'm not so sure some of them wouldn't be on board with at the top of the federal government. like, go around and get everybody's weapons. I got no problem with that. And we're armed to the teeth and we have firearms and we need to get the, you hear that argument often. The only people that should have those types of weapons on the street are the cops. And I'm like, why? ⁓

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so this is really interesting. So here in Tennessee, we're Republican supermajority state. We've got a Republican governor. And ⁓ we have found it very difficult to pass laws here in the state that extend firearm freedom. At T-Rex Arms, we have a lobbyist. He's full-time during session. ⁓ And... He works on lobbying for bills. I mean, essentially what he does is he's just a, he represents Tennesseans on the Hill. T.R.X. Arms pays him to go up there and be a firearm law expert to work with anybody that wants to help pass good bills. And oftentimes he goes up there, we give him ideas and we've passed some good laws, but it is an uphill struggle a lot of the time. And our biggest opponent. in Tennessee is not every town. It's not Brady. It's not any of the usual gun control suspects. It is people that work at the Department of Public Safety in Tennessee, because sometimes we want to pass a bill that legalizes something. And they're like, man, that would take a tool away from us going after people that we need to go after. we shouldn't. know, this technically it's bad for this to be in this case, but we never prosecute good people. So let's just leave it on the books. So it's a tool that we can use to go after bad guys. That conversation happens constantly. And I am on the side of justice and law enforcement. There's nothing more honorable than enforcing a good law. But on the flip side of that, there's nothing worse than enforcing a bad law or not enforcing a good law. There's nothing worse than ⁓ just playing really fast and loose with this incredibly important, honorable

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Right.

Isaac Botkin: ⁓ profession and this is one of the legitimate roles of government. It's terrible when the civil magistrate, the civil government gets out of its lane and starts doing things that are outside of its jurisdiction and out of its business and then at the same time stops doing the thing that it is required to do, which is to do justice and to carry the sword for that purpose. So it is frustrating to have this conversation and it's never with the cops, it's never with the guys on the street.

Moore To Consider: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and the re-

Isaac Botkin: It's with kind of the higher ups and the more the bureaucratic folks who are like, nah, we really wanna be able to pull over anybody that we think has a gun no matter what. Cause sometimes we catch bad guys that way. It's like, I'm sure you do. However, you catch good guys that way too. And people get caught up in the gears of the justice system before, and it kind of boils down to where's your starting point in this? Are people innocent until they're proven guilty or not?

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Yes, yes, kind of my point. Well, and Right. Exactly. And that's what I'm saying. What was interesting to watch that for the listener, this like, what were you, what point were you making? The way this former mob figure and these cops were talking past each other, they were very respectful to each other, but you could hear that the mindset, the indoctrination or whatever is you're a mobster, you're a bad guy. Whatever it took for us to get you was fair game. And he's just making the point you created the crime. And I think in that case, if I'm not mistaken,

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: where there was an alleged plot to, ⁓ kidnap a particular political figure in Michigan. Remember that one? If I'm not mistaken, that was all set up by federal agencies. So they find some guys that maybe lean that way and they're like, Hey, what if we goose you a little bit to get you to be involved with this? Then they want to go after them. So they create the situation. And the point that was frustrating to me too, when I heard them argue is I wanted, I wanted the, the former mob guy to kind of say like,

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. ⁓ Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: There's a difference if you put a confidential informant in and bed that person and he observes the stuff that you're doing and you mastermind some kind of crime and then he lets you in on it or he lets the cops in on it. But they're talking about literally going in and suggesting to the mob figure that they do these crimes. They're throwing him ideas for a crime. And his only point was you are in effect then creating the crime. And I agreed with him.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes, yeah. And legislators do the same thing. Like the first really bad federal firearm bill that we ever had as a country was the National Firearms Act in 1934. And it was kind of a similar thing. It was like, well, there's these Chicago gangsters and they're shooting each other with Tommy guns, which is murder. Turns out that's already illegal. You can already bust people for murder. Back then you could even hang people for murder. But they were like, you know, a lot of these mobsters own machine guns. So if we make machine guns illegal,

Moore To Consider: The mobsters. Yep.

Isaac Botkin: then it's easier for us to prosecute mobsters and we don't have to do all of the rigmarole of trying to find their tax records and like actually build a murder case against them. We could just do that. Well, that is the exact same mentality of entrapment, but it's literally making something that wasn't a crime before a crime to go after a specific group of people. And of course, who got caught up in the machinations of justice was regular folks and firearm manufacturers and other people.

Moore To Consider: That's right.

Isaac Botkin: And this happens pretty often, this very pragmatic approach. You're like, well, wouldn't it be easier if we just let there be a standing army instead of us, you and I, having to go out and drill every so often? Yeah, let's just do that. Wouldn't it be great if we let the government have our kids all the time instead of us teaching them? Yeah, you're right, that'd be simpler. It's a very, very seductive, tempting thing.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then once one grows up in some type of environment, and that's what I'm saying clearly from these police officers who I'm sure we're all good people, but they were all arguing, we got to get rid of you because you're the bad guy. And he goes, I have the same rights as anyone else. Of course, he's a former mob boss, but he's saying, you know, we worked in a certain lane. did certain types of crimes. get it. I wasn't a good guy. You know, I'm a reformed person. He went through what he went through, but he's right. He just as much bears the image of God and he just as much has a right.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: to procedurally do it right. But that's what scares me, what you just said about education, the idea that the collective can do what it does in taxing people. And you can see people for their real colors when you go like, well, let's at least come up with a voucher system. Let them shop around their dollars. you're saying it's costing $21,319 for every student, give the parent that. Oh, no, no, no, we can't do that. We can't do that. Because teachers union is kind of upset.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah.

Moore To Consider: public education obsolete and put everybody out of a job. What if they want to shut down for two years for COVID and not go to work? Well, that's, they're the union, you know, and we don't want to mess with them on that. So it's obvious what the tentacles, like you say, the government gets involved with certain organizations and groups and all, and they basically run everything and people just sit back and there's accepted things. You know, there has to be public education and it has ruined the country. Public education more than anything else and all the things we're talking about.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: The ability to capture and indoctrinate the youth over decades. Now, of course, our parents or you're much younger than I am, but our grandparents, if they went to public education and many of them did, they got a different message than, you know, in 1947 than they're getting today.

Isaac Botkin: ⁓ yeah. ⁓ yeah, that's, mean, my grandfather, actually my dad had this conversation with my grandfather where my dad was ⁓ in school during the 60s and he was like, and this is Tulsa, Oklahoma, and there are some very interesting things that happened during reintegration. And dad's like, you know, I really think that you should take me out of school and put me somewhere else. And my grandfather was like, nah, I went to that school. It was fine. Things were a little different.

Moore To Consider: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The 40s versus the 60s. Yeah. Yeah. And well, and that's the whole thing about.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. And I think it's easy for us to do that all the time. Like my kids are pretty young and I think to myself like, you know, we should be able to do this. And I think like, it's different now than in the eighties though. think it might be different.

Moore To Consider: Well, when was the Department of Education, when did that become a thing? Was that 60s? Carter, okay, so 70s. Yeah, even 70s. Okay.

Isaac Botkin: That was under Carter. ⁓ So, ⁓ now test scores, let's be fair, test scores had been declining before, but not as fast as after they created the Department of Education.

Moore To Consider: Right. And I mean, my whole point is if, and I've made, think the department of education is unconstitutional. I think any act that the federal government makes is unconstitutional as it relates to education. But I know in the Commonwealth of Virginia's constitution, I've read it, it provides for quote unquote free public education. I don't like it. I can go to my general assembly member and squawk, or I can go to some state that doesn't have that requirement. I think they all do. I don't know of a state that probably handles it different.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: But at least at the state level, if we have a community, I mean, when I went through high school, you know, I graduated 1980. I don't think we were getting radical indoctrination at the level I think now do I think that there were problems in school? Yeah. 20 years later, friends of mine were like, you wouldn't recognize the school now. You know, people, people that taught were leaving and drove like, I can't deal with this anymore. The kids are out of control, but you know, I've been in schools and they're not pleasant places to be sometimes.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah.

Moore To Consider: And it's clearly the level of education has declined.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, well you see, ⁓ you you look at the different graphs, you see the, you know, the money being put in goes up and the scores go down, but the number of teachers stays the same and the number of administrators goes up. It's very interesting to look at these different graphs, but that is, that's like a, I would say textbook example of when the government does something it's not supposed to do. A, it's not good at it. B, it takes it away from who is supposed to be doing it and who is good at it.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Isaac Botkin: And C, it pulls in all kinds of other ⁓ special interest groups or opportunists. There's always opportunists that will come in to take advantage of a situation like that. And so, yeah, there's political folks that have made just unbelievable amounts of money in all of these systems, and they've allowed power hungry people to grab unimaginable amounts of power through these things. And after a while, it gets really difficult to ⁓ unwind the thing. Going back to your starting assumption, ⁓ let's go back to the American founders. The American founders had a starting assumption that was different from the empires of Europe that we're coming about. The founders believed that a nation is a people, the government belongs to the people. And then the more sort of modern ⁓ scientific... imperial state that was developing in Europe is like, no, the people belong to a government. A country is a government and that is what makes it legitimate. And the people that had been carving America out of the wilderness and came from this British common law tradition that goes back to Alfred had this very different assumption that a nation is a people and they have a government. That's what a nation is. The government belongs to the people, not vice versa. And it's really easy to talk about the same things and end up at very different places because you had that different starting assumption. Innocence versus guilt and the people having the rights and authorities or whether the government owns them and doles those things out as is convenient.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. All right, we've been an hour. I'd go all day with you. You're wonderful. I'd love to, I'd hope we could probably do this again. So let me ask you one other question about.

Isaac Botkin: I was afraid we were gonna talk about football the whole time, which I don't have an hour worth of football content, so this has been fantastic.

Moore To Consider: Well, you're a skins fan, so that's all that, that's all that matters. And I grew up 70 miles from DC. So I grew up, I have a picture over here, my first ticket 1968, I was six. It was still DC stadium. And here's another piece of Evan or another piece of trivia that everybody's already heard. The first time the Washington Redskins ever played in what was then called RFK. was at that game, October 12th, 69. And I just thought about that a few years. It struck me. like, wait a minute. I was at the home opener 69, the year Vince Lombardi was coach.

Isaac Botkin: Ha

Moore To Consider: So yeah, I go back that deep with the Redskins. I did watch a video, it's a guy that was in the military fighting for states' rights or the federal government's right to take all the weapons they wanted. And he makes an interesting point. Now I've read, and to be fair, to raise and support armies for no more than two years, et cetera, provide for the Navy, which I think again, if you're doing an apples to apples comparison, or you're making the apples to oranges, they're looking at the Navy one way, clearly. provide for nothing else, nothing about two years. No, it's like, this is it. Then they're saying support armies, call them up, having the authority of the declaration of war. But in that language to provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the militia arming. he said arming seems kind of interesting in, in light of the second amendment now to provide for the organizing, the discipline, cetera.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: I would, love to go into old ⁓ antique shops and I was in there a few years ago and one, I actually think I have it around here. So give me one second. think this is it. Yeah. I think it's actually right here beside me. Nope. Is that not it? That's not it. It's, it's a book that's old like this and it's the 1845 congressional edition of how to train the troops. It's literally it says on it, you know, ⁓ congressional printing press, whatever 1845, and then it goes into how the militias are supposed to be trained, when and called into service. But what do you think about that language when they provide for organizing arming? Now this guy goes into a whole two hour discussion on what that meant was it was the duty or authority, I guess would be a better way of putting it, of the federal government to arm the troops. Therefore, what the hell do you mean by second amendment means the person could have a firearm.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Right, yeah. this is a really interesting conversation. It's actually, this conversation is part of the reason that Alexander Hamilton wanted a big government and a centralized bank, because we called up the militia and we put them under the command of General Washington and we made them a Continental Army. At which point, I mean, they're showing up with their own, they've trained themselves, they're bringing their own gear.

Moore To Consider: I don't see that at all, he did. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: But now we're leading them into the field and now we need to pay for their food and we need to pay for their ammo and we need to pay for other consumables, which as war goes, eventually everything is consumable. So that I think is really the thing. There's a certain base level of equipment and base level of training and base level of capability that they come to the table with. And then after that, yes, now they need to be supported in ongoing operations. And the responsibility does come from however they're being led. So when they're being when they're on their own, ⁓ they manage this. And when they're being organized locally, there's local directives and then there's local supplies. And if they're required to do ⁓ Continental Army stuff and the Continental Army needs to try to get them supplied. And the Continental Army had a massive issue with this because it was a long, hard war and you can read about how miserable Valley Forge was. And Alexander Hamilton was Washington's I believe he was his aide at the time, but he was involved in logistics. He was involved in logistics and it was rough because they're... And at this point, when Congress is supplying the Continental Army, what that usually means is John Hancock is pouring his own personal money into his supplies. And everybody realized, hey, this is not actually tenable. Like John Hancock almost ran out of money, a bunch of other people did. They'd spent their fortunes and their sacred...

Moore To Consider: That's right. Yes.

Isaac Botkin: to fight for liberty. And so that's part of the reason that Hamilton was like, let's have a big centralized bank so that when we do need to call up the militia, we can supply them and then do all the other stuff that the government should do. And he had a much bigger picture government than some of the other folks. ⁓ So this conversation is, ⁓ what this actually meant is not just a thing where we have to read the second amendment and really try to figure out what

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: what is in between those 27 words. There is pages and pages of letters from the people who were supplying the military and how the Continental Congress was organized. And a lot of the debate over the ⁓ why we need a constitution and not just keep rolling with the Articles of Confederation was the Articles of Confederation doesn't have a method for supplying an army. So that's a big part of the push for the constitution. And everybody that had a... ⁓

Moore To Consider: You agree. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: wanted more checks and balances, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers all come out of this. So it is a fascinating discussion. ⁓ I don't say that there's a ⁓ right or wrong answer. I think that you do need to change some of these things based on ⁓ technology and the time and the situation. I actually think that now is a better time for us to have... ⁓ Citizen soldiers and less of a standing army than than the 50s and the 60s if you look back to the 50s and the 60s warfare is Battleships and submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles stuff that you you don't do as an individual ⁓ But if you look at warfare in Ukraine right now, it is a backpack full of drones like it is very much man portable stuff people are you can have a small Air Force unit in your backpack, so The capability of that citizen soldier in the 21st century is tremendous. It's huge. So the ability for us to think even in these 18th century terms of the Minuteman and the citizen soldier going out and being individually capable, being locally capable, joining a ⁓ continental army and being effective at that level, we're kind of there again. You can have amazing capabilities at the individual level and at the squad level with modern technology and modern warfare. It actually, the 20th century in some ways is more of the anomaly ⁓ than the 18th century. So we should get back to some of these starting conversations about what the second amendment is and what the responsibilities of individuals are and what a non-standing army national defense policy might be. because a lot of it does come down to really small units now, thanks to some technological developments.

Moore To Consider: You know, I, and I pretty much mentioned this on every show. I wrote my master's thesis on the Kennedy assassination and I think Oswald did it. I don't know who he did it for, but I think Oswald did it. But in doing that, I've, gotten into, ⁓ a lot of discussions about the, about firearms, you know, in that, in that particular case, he buys it as a mail order, you know, he goes to a mail order catalog and

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: That kind of started a wave of the anti-gun stuff. of course it then in 66, and you really think of what an outlier this is, but when Charles Whitman does the firing at in Austin, Texas, at a, off the 27 story observation deck, America's becoming a different place. It's clearly been a violent, it has a violent history, no question. But for a guy to think, go up in top of a building, a sniper.

Isaac Botkin: Absolutely, yeah. Bell Tower, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: a Marine Corps train sniper and start firing down and kill 14 people. And I've watched the reports 1966 and you see Chet Huntley and you you see David Brinkley and they're like, damn, what's, what's, what's happening here? What's, where's the country going? So there became more and more calls. But I remember when I was teaching at that community college, let's face it, most of the people are around kind of lean left and they bring a woman in from the state and they're talking about what to do in case of. We're kind of having that whole drill. And I walked up to her and I said, ⁓ you know how all of these end, don't you? And she goes, yeah, somebody with a firearm ends it. Like, yes, it's always firearms that end it. So they opened up this Appalachian school of law 20 years ago or something like that in the Western part of Virginia, where they felt it was coal mining region. didn't have access to lawyers. Let's put in this, ⁓ law school.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah.

Moore To Consider: And they had a young man who was from another country who had failed several times and kept giving opportunities to stay in law school. He goes in one day, kills the Dean, kills like a vice president. He's on a shooting rampage and he's killing people. There's a guy there, law enforcement, who violates the rule of the school and has his firearm in the car. There's a guy there in the national guard that has a firearm in his vehicle. They both run, they both draw down, he quits.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: They both were in vibe and you know, this whole argument, got a soft target. There's the person that's going to the school to fire knows that most likely there aren't going to be anyone armed or very, very limited number of people. It's a no gun zone. That's where all these killings. And I know that sounds like a bumper sticker type of thing, but I thought it was interesting in those two cases, the very young man that stopped him from killing anyone else both violated.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah.

Moore To Consider: the law and the rules of the school to bring the firearms, but they were both firearm trained guys. knew what the hell they were doing. That's how they pulled it off, but

Isaac Botkin: Right. Yes. Yeah, and I think that should be the norm. I mean, I'm gonna say something that's really ⁓ horrifying and unpleasant to think about, but the thing is, shooting 14 people from a bell tower with a rifle is easy. The reason that it doesn't happen all the time is not because it's hard to do that, it's because we had the character or the obstacles or

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: Disincentive, whatever the reason, it was not the norm. It wasn't some freak accident where the rifle got too powerful. You can look at, as soon as repeating rifles exist, you can look at engagements between armed combatants. ⁓ Texas Rangers fighting banditos and things where there are guys that are getting in gunfights ⁓ and they're using repeating rifles to shoot five or 10 people. This is a thing that happens in World War I. This is a thing that happens in World War II. Having a guy shooting an unarmed population from an elevated position with a repeating rifle, this is easy. It's so easy. that's in Australia, we saw a guy do this with a bolt action rifle very recently down at the beach. And that's very unpleasant to think about. And so everybody would much rather a world in which it's impossible to do that than a world in which you might have to confront that. And the way that you confront that is, you also have a very dangerous weapon and you also have these difficult to acquire perishable skills that require you to use lethal force. That's also unpleasant to think about. So I can understand why people would say like, ⁓ well, we can stop the next JFK from getting shot if we just make it illegal to buy ancient Italian surplus rifles. Like that'll solve it. ⁓ But no, all of these things, all of these things are stopped by another gun on the scene. ⁓ Sometimes the shooter is stopped by a bullet from the other gun. Sometimes the shooter shoots himself, but when another gun shows up on the scene, that's when it stops. ⁓ And so that's the reality that has to be confronted. And it's very unpleasant to go out. I was at an event recently and I was looking up at one parking garage and I was looking up at another parking garage and I said to the security guy, you're what I'm thinking? And he was like, yep, sniper's paradise. Like that's just.

Moore To Consider: Yes. Mm-hmm. You start to think that way.

Isaac Botkin: if you think about this is very unpleasant, but it's an inescapable reality. It's far better to face it and understand, well, all of these terrible things that are unpleasant to think about are possible. It's better to meet them head on ⁓ than it is to pass a bunch of rules that will do nothing and then feel better about

Moore To Consider: You know, when I was working with that gentleman, said the former Marine Vietnam vet one after one of the, I think it was after Virginia Tech. I go there. ⁓ when Columbine happened, my birthday is April 20th, same day as Hitler, also Luther van draws, but you know, that's the saving grace on that. Don Mattingly was born on April 20th. But I remember I was teaching, yeah, I was teaching at school and I came in and they're like, have you heard the news? And I heard it I'm like, I bet it's to me, it's going to be a Hitler reference somehow when it was April 20th.

Isaac Botkin: That's better, yeah.

Moore To Consider: But I think it was after Virginia Tech, I come in and this buddy of mine starts to read, because I'm going to read to you from the newspaper. And he goes in boom, boom, boom. And he's talking about the bath school disaster. And it's where the gentleman was a gentleman. Andrew Kehoe was a political figure in the town. He lost on whether they built a new school. So he starts to pack the school with dynamite. He has this whole elaborate scheme to kill as many people as he can. So, so Tony's reading this. I'm like, I've never heard this story. And he goes, now anybody want to guess what day? May 18th, 1927. So in that, I'd never heard of this, Michigan. It's the Bath Township, Michigan, killing 45 people, including 38 children and injuring over other 50 other people. I'm watching a thing, I don't know, I want to say seven or eight years ago, they have a woman on who missed school that day with a headache. She didn't go to school.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: And I'm thinking she might've been, you know, third grader. She was a senior in high school. So it turns out she's like 111 years old at the time and they interview her. And she said, I'll never forget it. I'm at home with my mom because I didn't feel well that day. We hear the explosion at the school, then they take off over to the school. So she was actually a witness to some of this. But my point is Tony said, In 1927, how many people you think really understood that this even happened? There's no AP, there's no wire service, no UPI, it's radio, there's no TV, not 1927. So how much of this is feeding? And we know the copycat type of thing. How much is, ⁓ and I know still people will say, video games have, I just don't, I don't believe that you can take children.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: And they grow up with images of head explosions and the rest and that type of violence and not be desensitized to some level that they don't get the connection between firearms and what actually happens with firearms. You know, and then every kid's on drugs. Right. So.

Isaac Botkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and there's, ⁓ yeah, that's the other thing. You look at these ⁓ school massacres, and yeah, they're not new. ⁓ America's first school massacres were during the Indian Wars. ⁓ There were raiding parties that understood that schools were soft targets back then, and the solution was to make the schools not be soft targets. But yeah, there's a very interesting aspect to this. ⁓ which is that it does seem like there needs to be multiple events. ⁓ There needs to be multiple events to get somebody's attention or they need to see things multiple times. So this Bath School incident was reported on once, but there wasn't another dynamite attack afterwards. But in just a few years later, in 1934, we got the National Firearms Act because there were many gangsters killing people. There was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Moore To Consider: Yeah.

Isaac Botkin: And then every other movie was a gangster movie with the Chicago typewriter in it. So the image was already in people's head and they were like, ⁓ I guess this is a problem. Cause I seen James Cagney do this like 10 times to people. it's, got to, we got to stop that Edward G. Robinson character. So it's a, it's a very interesting thing where there's a, it's a cultural, there's a cultural piece to this, both on the.

Moore To Consider: Yeah, that's right.

Isaac Botkin: know, pushing for more control and changing things, but there's a cultural piece as well to the people that actually perpetrate these things, the copycats and so forth and so on. It is a really interesting thing to study. Unpleasant, but it's also human nature. This isn't just a thing that happens in a certain country. This is a thing that happens throughout human history.

Moore To Consider: Right. Yeah. The St. Valentine's day massacre was February 14th, 1929. Yeah. I think that, well, that's, well, that's, actually predates, ⁓ the, ⁓ black Friday, but yeah, the stock, guess, aspects of the depression were already setting in, but you know, everybody kind of puts the depression feeds or prohibition prohibition is clearly going on at this time.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, they go together, yeah. ⁓ so prohibition. I know we don't have time for this now. Prohibition is awful. ⁓ It's just incredible. Everything about it is a failure. Everything that it was supposed to do, ⁓ everything that it was supposed to do, it did the opposite, even for the people that were pushing it.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Crooked. Yes. Yeah.

Isaac Botkin: So I talk about this I have a video series on the history of the ATF and the first episode is basically just about prohibition because ⁓ Again going back to starting principles you start out with the principle that like ⁓ some people can't handle alcohol So nobody can have it whose job is it to control this always the government. How do we control it? ⁓ we do it this way ⁓ That that is a yeah, it's a terrible start to America's firearm control laws

Moore To Consider: Yeah, I actually saw a libertarian type do a study of alcoholism rates going into those 12 years with 19, ⁓ was 1919 and then when Roosevelt was going in, guess it had effective or 21 to I think 33 is 12 years. And, and you know, when they first enacted it, they go, yeah. And you got one year to knock away all you want or lock away all you want. And the rich were just like bringing in liquor from all over the world.

Isaac Botkin: ⁓ yeah.

Moore To Consider: And they could hold it and then, you know, it became, of course it created a black market. But what was interesting is it also led, they said to some greater ⁓ levels of alcoholism because if people were going to transport it, you weren't doing beer. You're going to do the hardest liquors with the highest concentration of alcohol you could. So people began to drink when they did harder liquors. And then they even put some, ⁓ They even put things in that actually killed people to try to discourage drinking. Is this. Yep.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, they put wood alcohol and other poisons in there and there's an estimated 10,000 people killed by the government. Yeah, it's fascinating to study, but yeah, at the end of Prohibition, when they ended it, there were twice as many bars as before it became illegal. yeah, and there were so many things that it was supposed to fix. One of them was like, ⁓ we have all these immigrants coming in and like these Irish guys are...

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: Like if only the Irish guys and the Scottish guys and the Italian guys would stop drinking, they'd all get together and be good Americans. Like, nope, actually they created these tightly knit crime families, like even tighter. Yeah. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: That was a, that was a big part of, you're right. The, the, the whole immigrant thing was a big, it was a really big part of it. And, ⁓ that's some of the dark history that's not really reported. Okay. Isaac, you've been wonderful. I'd love to come back and do a show on prohibition, just the drug war or anything like, yeah, I would, I would love for us.

Isaac Botkin: ⁓ absolutely. What should we drink while we talk about it? The Guinness, perhaps? Probably a Guinness. We'll go with Irish.

Moore To Consider: What do you like? Yeah. Why not Guinness? Right. I think that sounds right. But we could have some further. What would you like to say ⁓ going out? ⁓ How people can reach you? You've talked a little bit about your mission. Yeah. Tell us that.

Isaac Botkin: ⁓ yes, yeah. ⁓ for sure. I always forget that that's kind of the reason that you're supposed to do podcasts. I get involved in a fun conversation, I forget. Actually, the purpose of podcasts is marketing. So T-Rex Arms, ⁓ T-R-E-X-Arms.com, we make a lot of the equipment for the modern Minuteman, for the Citizen Soldier, or for just self-defense. We have some of the best Kydex holsters that make carrying

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Isaac Botkin: comfortable, you can carry concealed comfortably all day. ⁓ But we also do educational materials, so sometimes videos on the ATF and Prohibition. And we have a book, this is cool book for this year in particular, 250th anniversary. It's called The Path of Liberty, and it goes over a bunch of these documents ⁓ from King Alfred all the way down to the Bill of Rights. And it includes all the documents, which by the way, You should have copies of these documents on paper before AI, you know, changes everything without you noticing it. So you should buy the book just because it has the documents in it. But it also has a bunch of commentary explaining how one led to the other. So look up Paths of Liberty is the book. T-Rex Arms is the company. But, yeah, based on the conversation that we've had, maybe you would like to ⁓ carry a firearm on you more often. And we have holsters that make it easy and comfortable to do that.

Moore To Consider: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So how much are you targeted by bad people with, I mean, it seems like you're, I would think that certain government agencies, or you may not wanna talk about it. Yeah, you may not wanna talk about it.

Isaac Botkin: to add people. We get an unexpected ATF audit every so often. We do talk about that. No, we got an unexpected ATF audit the day after we passed a bill in Tennessee. That was kind of interesting. We had a bill legalizing short-barreled rifles in Tennessee, and as soon as it passed, we got an ATF audit, which I'm sure is a coincidence. So we'll see what happens in the future.

Moore To Consider: Okay. things happen.

Isaac Botkin: These things happen, but we're continuing to stay involved in ⁓ this space. Earlier this year, we raised a bunch of money for gun owners of America. They have a big lawsuit against the National Firearms Act. So we helped raise money for that. ⁓ And then we just ended session and we got a couple of good bills passed here in Tennessee. One of them is a bill that prevents, it basically says that if you rent a house, For all intents and purposes, if you rent a house, that's your house. You're responsible for stuff, almost everything that happens there. You're liable for most of the stuff that happens there. But we passed ⁓ a bill that said you also are allowed to keep firearms in that house. The landlord cannot make that a gun-free zone ⁓ if it's the house that you are renting. And the reason for that is... ⁓ partly because of BlackRock. BlackRock is owning more and more rental houses in Tennessee and they can have corporate policies that make it illegal to own a firearm if you are renting or have a firearm in the home that you live in if you rent from them. So it feels like a real small technicality, but it actually has a ⁓ pretty big effect on your right to keep and bear arms in Tennessee as Tennessee citizen to protect that. So yeah, it's interesting.

Moore To Consider: One of the things I want to close on, we can close on this, but one of the thing I notice is, again, I'm not Audie Murphy, I'm not a tough guy, I didn't serve in some great war, but I've been around people that did. I've been around people that were good people. And like I said, the first time, talking about my dad again, the first time he took me out with a rifle, was, you will hold it in this position. You will not point, I mean, that's how it was.

Isaac Botkin: Yes, yeah.

Moore To Consider: Now again, he's military and law enforcement. He knew his way around firearms and he was very, very careful. Now I also grew up in a house where he had 50, 60 firearms in the house. I never thought anything of it. He would come home and take his service revolver and his belt and hang it over the back of the chair when he went to the kitchen table. I would have never thought of touching that firearm because of him, you know, but I say all that to say this. I did a show recently or sometime back. I'm an attorney, did play representation in professional baseball. And one time this buddy's like, Hey, there's this kid out there that lives in this rural area. You know the area. And I'm like, yeah. So we go to the house. We come in and it's a chorus of dogs barking. So we walk in the house. I'm like, what do we got out there? He goes 29 hunting dogs. He 29. Okay. Then I'm looking at the walls and I said, what are we looking at with firearms here? It's 55. They had 55 firearms. had every type of shotgun, rifle, anything you could imagine. These are the people you want to have firearms. I know these people. These are country people. They're completely safe. They hunt all the time. This is what they do. I say that on the show. I look in the comments and literally somebody in the comments wrote, all I heard was blah, blah, blah. I'm for school shootings and Trump is a tyrant. And I thought, all I was saying is if you've never been around that level of gun culture,

Isaac Botkin: It's a start.

Moore To Consider: You don't recognize that's the person you want to be your neighbor. That's the guy that grabbed his, his, ⁓ AR 15, that time of that church in Texas had ran across the street and stopped the shooter and saved more lives. That that's who that guy is. And I'm like, you're around those people with firearms like that. They're not dangerous to you. But I thought this person processed that story as all I heard was blah, blah, blah. You want kids dead in schools and Trump's a tyrant. I'm like, holy shit. Like.

Isaac Botkin: Yes, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Moore To Consider: Now I know it could be a bot. know it could be somebody just doing it for what? Yeah, but I'm thinking there are people, yeah.

Isaac Botkin: Sure, yeah. But it's fascinating to see that level of division and separation that we have now. Because almost half of the, we don't know for sure, and it's good that we don't know for sure. It's nice when the government doesn't know who has guns and who doesn't. That's a feature, not a bug. ⁓ But polling indicates that it is likely that half of the households in the United States own firearms, and there's

Moore To Consider: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Botkin: probably somewhere between six and 800 million firearms here. if the guy with 50, know, if we gun owners were as big a problem as you think, you'd know about it. would be, it would kind of be obvious. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: Yeah. And if that, if it wasn't clear on that, that kid ended up playing professional baseballs. We were going into the house, the dad's the nicest guy and he was a hunter. Dad was a hunter. Granddad's a hunter. He came from that part of the world and he could throw 90 plus miles an hour. So you ended up getting a chance to get drafted. He played pro ball for a while. Just the nicest people. Can we get you something to drink? Can we get you, mean, nicest people. Just had a lot of firearms around, but I had grown up in that culture where firearms were everywhere and I never thought anything of it. You know what I mean? Like I didn't think anything of it because I was exposed to it.

Isaac Botkin: Yeah. Yeah.

Moore To Consider: But I do think there's people that I know that seem like otherwise pretty rational people. They're scared to, I'm scared to death of firearms, but I have the healthy fear of them, but I don't mind them in the hands of people that I know are supposed to have them. I'm glad that they have them. Okay. Isaac, you've been wonderful. Anything else you'd like to say on the way out?

Isaac Botkin: Yeah, thanks for the conversation. Well, ⁓ next time we'll talk football, but it'll only last for like two minutes, then it'll be out of football material and we can talk about prohibition. So yeah, looking forward to our next conversation, Jack, I appreciate it. Be fun.

Moore To Consider: We'll talk about football. Yeah, brother. You've been awesome. Thank you so much. This is more to consider. Please like, subscribe, comment. Please follow Isaac, see what he's doing and please support his movement and the things he does and the businesses that he runs. Thank you so much, sir.

Isaac Botkin: Thank you.