Riley Bowman: And welcome to the Concealed Carry
Riley Bowman: Podcast, part of the ConcealedCarry.com network, brought to you by HK.
Riley Bowman: Today is Wednesday, July 1st, 2026, as of the recording of this live episode.
Riley Bowman: And I am your host, Riley Bowman, joined today by co-host Jacob Paulson.
Jacob Paulsen: I'm here, feeling it, feeling the season 14. I'm feeling the,
Jacob Paulsen: I don't know, just like the seriousness, importance of this episode.
Riley Bowman: Yeah for sure uh and our apologies to you listeners uh we could have wrapped
Riley Bowman: up season 13 in a little more you know like meaningful way like hey by the way
Riley Bowman: this is the end of season 13,
Riley Bowman: uh but now you know now now that one ended this isn't.
Jacob Paulsen: Daytime tv really
Riley Bowman: Now we are beginning number 14 we.
Jacob Paulsen: Don't need a cliffhanger
Riley Bowman: Yeah we do every episode should be a cliffhanger we've got to get the people to come back for more um,
Riley Bowman: today is a really special episode because we're gonna go back to our roots and
Riley Bowman: in some respects with regard to the podcast our very first year of the podcast our first,
Riley Bowman: independence day episode we did a pretty you know thorough look at the events
Riley Bowman: leading up to uh lexington and concord specifically gun control that the Brits, that the,
Riley Bowman: British Navy and Army were trying to exact upon,
Riley Bowman: the Colonials.
Riley Bowman: And that was a fun time. And we replayed that episode for you last week.
Riley Bowman: Well, it actually just went...
Riley Bowman: Oh, it just published this week.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, it did.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, like on two days ago, I think, or something like that.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. So that just went live. And so we hope you enjoyed that.
Riley Bowman: That's a little bit more of an in-depth look at those specific events.
Riley Bowman: But what we're doing in this special episode in our 10th, now I guess you could
Riley Bowman: say our 11th year of the podcast, because we are in the 11th year,
Riley Bowman: and now approaching not just annual Independence Day, but a big one.
Jacob Paulsen: The big one.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, this is the 250th anniversary of what we deem the founding of our nation,
Riley Bowman: the Declaration of Independence, our breakaway officially,
Riley Bowman: from the Brits, from England.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, it's heavy.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, super heavy. It's a big deal. It's a big, big deal. And so today we're
Riley Bowman: going to go back through history with you.
Riley Bowman: Our hope is that we can share with you the story, the evolution of what led
Riley Bowman: us up to and including and beyond the establishment, the recognition through
Riley Bowman: a formal document of the right,
Riley Bowman: to keep and bear arms,
Riley Bowman: which is a big part of that is a right to personal and self and community and,
Riley Bowman: defensive country as well.
Riley Bowman: And we're gonna go really far back we're gonna go all the way back to the 1300s even.
Jacob Paulsen: But we're also going to come all the way forward exactly now we're gonna talk
Jacob Paulsen: about major federal gun laws and Supreme Court decisions that have continued
Jacob Paulsen: to shape and define what Second Amendment means for us today
Riley Bowman: Yeah so this is really important we hope I mean it's going to be,
Riley Bowman: I don't know. I hope we can make it interesting. I know that some people are
Riley Bowman: like, oh, a history lesson? Tune out now.
Riley Bowman: But we hope that you'll stick with us and listen and learn along with us about,
Riley Bowman: all this very significant historical context.
Riley Bowman: Because I think it's super important to us as Second Amendment believing Americans,
Riley Bowman: to understand more about it and how it came to be and what it means.
Riley Bowman: And understand, especially in the modern era with things like the Bruin Decision,
Riley Bowman: back in 2022, that has created this new framework.
Riley Bowman: Part of that framework is looking at the historical context and what it means, the Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: And so I think the better we can understand the historical context,
Riley Bowman: then the better informed we'll be as gun-toting Americans.
Riley Bowman: And so nothing more appropriate to discuss this as we honor the creation of this nation.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, and I hope that we do it justice because we're not exactly professional
Jacob Paulsen: scholars, but we care and we try.
Riley Bowman: That's a fair point. You should get that disclaimer out of the way.
Riley Bowman: We are not constitutional law authorities,
Riley Bowman: or history authorities or professors or anything like that, just students of
Riley Bowman: our own making that it's something we like and are passionate about and have
Riley Bowman: done some research on and hope we can share with you what we've learned.
Riley Bowman: But first, today's episode is sponsored by our special Happy Birthday America
Riley Bowman: sale. Yeah. Why don't you tell them about us?
Jacob Paulsen: It's super awesome. We do two big sales. I mean, we do lots of sales here and
Jacob Paulsen: there, right? But we do two kind of major sales a year. We do the Independence
Jacob Paulsen: Day sale. We call it Happy Birthday America sale. And then we do the Black Friday
Jacob Paulsen: deal like everybody else.
Jacob Paulsen: So our Happy Birthday America sale, this might be like our 8th or 9th or 10th year doing this sale.
Jacob Paulsen: And it is open to the public, but it is certainly intended to particularly reward
Jacob Paulsen: members of Guardian Nation.
Jacob Paulsen: So you can go to concealedcarray.com forward slash HBA to get all the details
Jacob Paulsen: regardless if you are or are not a member.
Jacob Paulsen: Everybody is going to love the sale and save lots of money and get lots of cool stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: But members are particularly rewarded. They get a deeper discount on everything
Jacob Paulsen: like they always do. And they also will receive special vouchers of store credit
Jacob Paulsen: after the sale based on their purchases.
Jacob Paulsen: But here's the big one. and this is what we think is really cool.
Jacob Paulsen: Maybe you'll think it's lame, but I'm pumped about it.
Jacob Paulsen: And that is that this year, during the Happy Birthday America sale,
Jacob Paulsen: everybody who places an order during the sale period will receive a special
Jacob Paulsen: 250th anniversary commemorative coin.
Jacob Paulsen: And you can see pictures exactly what this coin looks like and everything just
Jacob Paulsen: by going to concealedcarry.com forward slash HBA.
Jacob Paulsen: But needless to say, it is epic awesome.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, it is. I got my hands on it for the first time today, actually.
Riley Bowman: Meant to have it with me so I can hold it right up here to the camera,
Riley Bowman: those of you that are viewing the podcast as opposed to listening only.
Riley Bowman: It's awesome. It is spectacular in first person to be able to hold it.
Riley Bowman: First of all, it's a good size coin. It's pretty large.
Jacob Paulsen: It's two and a half inches. Almost two and a half inches.
Riley Bowman: It's hefty. It's thick. It's just got beautiful engraving to it showing a lot of the,
Riley Bowman: history, like things we're going to talk about today.
Jacob Paulsen: In fact. Yeah, I think of it this way, like that coin, one half of it is like
Jacob Paulsen: America, be awesome, and the other half is sort of like, and guns be part of that.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it says on there, you know, what's the phrase?
Riley Bowman: Freedom bought with a gun, maintained with a gun.
Jacob Paulsen: Yep.
Riley Bowman: Which is kind of the title of today's episode. Freedom bought,
Riley Bowman: freedom maintained. 700 years of receipts.
Riley Bowman: Okay, we'll be bringing the receipts, and as I mentioned, we're going to go
Riley Bowman: back all the way to the 1300s that's where really that's where it's first recognized,
Riley Bowman: uh in fact some some key modern day supreme court rulings referenced uh some
Riley Bowman: of the earliest history here that we're going to be covering and that's why
Riley Bowman: it's relevant to today's discussion but guys don't,
Riley Bowman: forget and don't miss it okay the sale the happy birthday america sale starts
Riley Bowman: this week starts tomorrow in fact for guardian nation members,
Riley Bowman: so july 2nd the sale starts concealed carry.com forward slash hba,
Riley Bowman: if you're not already a guardian nation member you can join immediately and
Riley Bowman: have access to that sale tomorrow,
Riley Bowman: and so you probably want to consider doing that because one you're going to
Riley Bowman: save the most uh not only get the extra 10 off of everything that's on sale,
Riley Bowman: but you're going to also get that voucher post-sale, you're going to get a voucher,
Riley Bowman: where you can basically get another 10% back, which is a big deal.
Riley Bowman: You're really saving 35%, if you want to think of it that way.
Riley Bowman: It's across the board. You're going to get the super awesome commemorative 250th,
Riley Bowman: anniversary america coin that's cool uh,
Riley Bowman: so anyway that and again that sale starts tomorrow july 2nd for everybody else
Riley Bowman: starts july 3rd and you'll still still save big you'll still qualify for the
Riley Bowman: coin and all that awesomeness uh you just won't save quite as much if you don't
Riley Bowman: want to be a member of guardian nation,
Riley Bowman: but uh the sale starts tomorrow july 2nd for all for guardian members july 3rd
Riley Bowman: for everybody else runs through the 5th of july midnight july 5th sale closes Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: That's mountain time on Sunday.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. So concealedcarry.com forward slash H-B-A. And if you want to become a
Riley Bowman: member of Guardian Nation, go to guardiannation.com.
Riley Bowman: Let's jump into history, Jacob.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Yeah. So English common law is, well, England is kind of a weird place.
Jacob Paulsen: But we start, like you said, in the 1300s.
Jacob Paulsen: And apparently with a concern, because this is a time where there's no guns, but there are weapons.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: And so there's a concern, apparently, presumably, yeah, that people are intimidating
Jacob Paulsen: or causing some disruption or unrest with their arms.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. It could be bows or crossbows or swords, knives. I know it's not.
Riley Bowman: It doesn't matter. Okay. It's just referencing arms.
Riley Bowman: So this is where this begins, because understand this, that even in the Bruin
Riley Bowman: decision of the modern era,
Riley Bowman: they referenced this statue, this old English statue from, get this, 1328.
Jacob Paulsen: That's a minute ago.
Riley Bowman: That's a minute. We're talking the better part of a millennium. Of millennium.
Riley Bowman: The statute of Northampton. Okay. So this was a law that was put in place in
Riley Bowman: 1328 forbidding people from going about armed to terrify the king's subjects.
Riley Bowman: And the reason why this statute was put into place was to make a distinction.
Riley Bowman: So essentially there was this presumption already that there was a context that
Riley Bowman: people were carrying arms. Yes.
Riley Bowman: And that that was permissible. but that this statute was needed to put in a
Riley Bowman: clarification that what is illegal is to go about carrying weapons for the purpose of terrifying,
Riley Bowman: the king's subjects, the public, in other words.
Riley Bowman: And so that law was put into place in 1328 to make that distinction,
Riley Bowman: to say, hey, you're packing around your knife or your bow and arrow or whatever.
Riley Bowman: That's fine as long as you are not terrifying the king's subjects.
Jacob Paulsen: Unless you're willing to forfeit your armor and your body to the prison of the king's pleasure yeah
Jacob Paulsen: so that was that was apparently the consequence of breaking this one yeah yeah
Jacob Paulsen: and this is a package of laws this whole writing while armed is one kind of section of it
Jacob Paulsen: but you know it would suggest that there's some issue with this you know people
Jacob Paulsen: running around armed terrifying the public or something so we You have to say,
Jacob Paulsen: you can't do that anymore. You got to stop scaring people.
Riley Bowman: And so that kind of is, as I mentioned, the first recognition as far as in some kind of law or statute,
Riley Bowman: an acknowledgment that there was this inherent right of the people to bear arms.
Jacob Paulsen: Right, right, right. Because, yeah, it's assumed that people just have arms
Jacob Paulsen: and that's just stop intimidating people riding around with them.
Riley Bowman: Right. So as long as you're just going about your business, doing your thing,
Riley Bowman: not bothering anybody, no issue.
Jacob Paulsen: Or if they're in your home, that's fine.
Riley Bowman: Right.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. If you're hunting, that's
Jacob Paulsen: probably fine. There's a presumed assumption that you can have them.
Jacob Paulsen: We just need you to stop riding around intimidating people with them.
Riley Bowman: So the key here is that the statute of Northampton of 1328 established that
Riley Bowman: bearing arms lawfully or legally was never disputed, but only in the manner
Riley Bowman: of doing so menacingly. All right.
Riley Bowman: So the Bruin case dealt with this by looking at how the statute established
Riley Bowman: that historical precedent,
Riley Bowman: that acknowledgement that, hey, this exists, the bearing of arms exists,
Riley Bowman: essentially is a right, a recognized right.
Riley Bowman: There can be limitations. In this case, the limitation in England was don't
Riley Bowman: do it menacingly. Don't menace the public. Don't do it to intimidate people.
Riley Bowman: You may have your arms for lawful purposes, but as soon as you start creating
Riley Bowman: problems for other people, then we got a problem. All right.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, you just set up the critical point here, so I'll just reiterate that this
Jacob Paulsen: established that there's a right, but there are circumstances in which that
Jacob Paulsen: right could be restricted.
Riley Bowman: We see that across the board with almost all the other rights,
Riley Bowman: including in the Bill of Rights, so the freedom of speech, for instance,
Riley Bowman: and right to assemble and worship peaceably.
Riley Bowman: All those things can be done, but there are times and places and instances where,
Riley Bowman: we don't want to be infringing upon other people's rights or causing problems
Riley Bowman: like running into movie theaters and yelling fire.
Riley Bowman: That causes a problem. right okay so,
Riley Bowman: that's what's interesting is realizing that there was a standard created 700
Riley Bowman: ish years ago it's just under 700 years 698 years to be precise,
Riley Bowman: that acknowledged the bearing and keeping of arms but with some recognized limitations
Riley Bowman: such as don't terrify people,
Riley Bowman: now it wouldn't surprise me at all jacob knowing how uh,
Riley Bowman: kings work kings and queens uh that things like this could also be used whenever
Riley Bowman: it was convenient or if they could say sure hey you're terrifying people,
Riley Bowman: like whether you actually are not you know if the king says so it gives them a way to,
Riley Bowman: hey i take i'm taking your weapons from you kind of it's.
Jacob Paulsen: Not exactly a republic
Riley Bowman: And so actually that's kind of a segue into the next kind of key moment in history,
Riley Bowman: uh which is referred to as the
Riley Bowman: stewart era selective disarmament i don't know where this came from but,
Riley Bowman: what we're talking about here is really under the kings charles ii and james
Riley Bowman: ii okay this is the 1660s to 1680s.
Jacob Paulsen: And for some context on this timeline this is when like the british empire is being
Riley Bowman: Born oh yeah i mean and it's going having.
Jacob Paulsen: This massive expansion yeah I mean, really the beginning of the British Empire,
Jacob Paulsen: as we think of it as like the 1500s.
Jacob Paulsen: And so now we're in the mid 1600s and we are just exploding.
Jacob Paulsen: Yep. We are claiming territories and colonies. And I mean, it's hot right now.
Riley Bowman: Right.
Riley Bowman: Uh what's the word i'm looking for kingdom you know is going worldwide yeah
Riley Bowman: they're colonizing all over the place wherever they can uh staking claims upon
Riley Bowman: lands and yes oceans and sea and.
Jacob Paulsen: Establishing a lot more standardization because of that right we need to have
Jacob Paulsen: more clarity of law of the magistrate of uh what's the word i'm looking for
Jacob Paulsen: sovereignty so you know those those things become relevant at this time
Riley Bowman: Period you also have of course this is in that era too or shortly after uh where
Riley Bowman: you've got essentially the church which is you know the catholic church of course
Riley Bowman: later becomes the church of england,
Riley Bowman: uh and the protestants protestant church you know and that course becomes a
Riley Bowman: and we're not going to go into that
Riley Bowman: that's not part of the the discussion necessarily as far as that history.
Riley Bowman: However, there is an important tie-in here which has to do with the fact that during this time,
Riley Bowman: the king started to create, or in parliament, started to create laws that specifically
Riley Bowman: targeted certain people and classes of people.
Jacob Paulsen: Specifically Protestants. Yeah, exactly. It's like banning glocks in California
Jacob Paulsen: without using the word glock.
Jacob Paulsen: That's kind of what happened here is that these laws were written or established
Jacob Paulsen: in order to prevent Protestants from having access to guns.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: And simultaneously to ensure that Catholics did have access to guns.
Jacob Paulsen: Church and state were one and the same. It's really the American experiment
Jacob Paulsen: was the first government on the planet in a very, very, very,
Jacob Paulsen: in a millennia to decide to separate church and state.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. So this is at a time when church and state is married and that church
Jacob Paulsen: specifically is the Catholic church.
Jacob Paulsen: And so the idea that all these Protestants are popping up and they're gaining
Jacob Paulsen: some momentum and some popularity, well, them being armed is seen as a threat.
Riley Bowman: Oh, we have a comment, by the way, from Brian Shuler on YouTube saying,
Riley Bowman: I think the Three Musketeers had something to do with the passage of this law.
Riley Bowman: Anyway, that's fun. Yeah, so this is where we start to see...
Jacob Paulsen: Alexander DeMauw is a genius.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: And, you know, Three Musketeers... Have you read the book? Because the book is terrible. Yeah.
Riley Bowman: I had tried to read it when I was like 13, and I don't think I actually got all the way through it.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, it's a rough read by our modern context. Obviously, at the time,
Jacob Paulsen: highly successful book, along with his others as well, The Man and the Iron Mask and others.
Jacob Paulsen: But The Three Musketeers is among
Jacob Paulsen: the most adapted book to television of any book in history.
Jacob Paulsen: I think there's like three books that have been adapted to television more than The Three Musketeers.
Jacob Paulsen: One of them is like Dracula. Dracula is the most adapted book to screen of all times.
Jacob Paulsen: But The Three Musketeers is pretty high up there. So anyway,
Jacob Paulsen: I guess I just had to get my little three musketeers comment out.
Riley Bowman: That's a great story. I mean, people love it.
Riley Bowman: Now, so back in 1662, there was a law passed called the Militia Act of 1662,
Riley Bowman: which allowed royal officers to confiscate arms from anyone judged dangerous to the peace.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, at their own discretion.
Riley Bowman: Yep. So again, so this is not all that different than probably,
Riley Bowman: you know, the statute of Northampton from the 1300s,
Riley Bowman: but was probably for them at that time, a more modern interpretation or variation of that,
Riley Bowman: and giving them the opportunity or need or justification, I guess,
Riley Bowman: word I'm looking for to confiscate weapons, to take weapons from those they
Riley Bowman: deemed dangerous to the peace.
Riley Bowman: The challenge is that this could then be,
Riley Bowman: interpreted to be, you know, well, what's dangerous to the peace?
Jacob Paulsen: Those Protestants, apparently.
Riley Bowman: Exactly, right?
Jacob Paulsen: Those people who are a threat to the Catholic Church, those are the ones that
Jacob Paulsen: are, you know, that's dangerous, so take away their guns.
Riley Bowman: So that's exactly what started happening with King James II,
Riley Bowman: was using this selectively against Protestants that he didn't like or disagreed with.
Riley Bowman: Well, really, he disagreed with all of them because they were not part of,
Riley Bowman: you know, the national religion.
Jacob Paulsen: This is important because, for all, we will see this repeated with African Americans
Jacob Paulsen: in the United States in the early days of the U.S. Constitution.
Jacob Paulsen: But more importantly, it's because what happens today under Bruin,
Jacob Paulsen: and we're going to hit there eventually, is that gun grabbers who are trying
Jacob Paulsen: to justify their anti-gun laws are looking for historical analogs to justify them.
Jacob Paulsen: And so they look back at things like this, like, well, this law existed that
Jacob Paulsen: was designed, you know, to allow to remove guns from people,
Jacob Paulsen: right? So does that make red flag laws, you know, constitutional?
Jacob Paulsen: But, you know, we'll see that the Supreme Court doesn't put up with historical
Jacob Paulsen: analogs if those historical analogs were like evil and morally corrupt.
Jacob Paulsen: And so that's come up many times in federal district courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jacob Paulsen: Is it basically said, well, I guess that's a historical analog,
Jacob Paulsen: but that doesn't make it okay.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, so that's kind of how these laws started to be used was with the intent
Riley Bowman: of selectively going after certain people or groups of people.
Riley Bowman: So to your point, I mean, this was used as gun control in the 1600s.
Riley Bowman: But this is what came out of it, though. And that's what this sets us up for,
Riley Bowman: is that the English Bill of Rights passed in 1689 was a direct response to those abuses.
Jacob Paulsen: Which is a huge win
Riley Bowman: Yeah it was not only in terms of what we're talking about here today with regards
Riley Bowman: to second amendment type issues,
Riley Bowman: but was a huge win for religious freedom as well in England at that time too
Riley Bowman: because it became people basically started having enough of,
Riley Bowman: Protestants being the target of the crown and hey we need to put a stop to this,
Riley Bowman: or at least try to put a stop to it.
Riley Bowman: We know there were still a lot of challenges for the Protestant churches even
Riley Bowman: after that time, but this was a start.
Riley Bowman: The English Bill of Rights passed by Parliament in 1689,
Riley Bowman: and in those Bill of Rights it said this, that subjects, the people,
Riley Bowman: may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. In fact, I see this almost echoing the National Firearm Act,
Jacob Paulsen: excuse me, the Gun Control Act of 68 and the Fire and Motor Protection Act of 1986 in America.
Jacob Paulsen: Sort of like, you know, we went one step too far in controlling guns and,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, the pendulum had to swing back and kind of correct it.
Jacob Paulsen: But also a piece of context I think here is relevant is think that like the Mayflower, right?
Jacob Paulsen: The original Puritans that left England and became the first real true white
Jacob Paulsen: settlers of the United States, in my opinion, they left in 1620,
Jacob Paulsen: I think, or they landed here in 1620.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, about then.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, so you got to put this in context of what's going on in England at the
Jacob Paulsen: time, right? Like there's this huge rise of resistance against the Catholic Church.
Jacob Paulsen: And so the government's basically fighting against that. The king is fighting against that.
Jacob Paulsen: And now it's starting to swing back out and say, wait a minute,
Jacob Paulsen: we got to respect the rights of people, including their faith,
Jacob Paulsen: but certainly their right to bear arms.
Jacob Paulsen: And so anyway, I just think some of that historical context matters.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Isn't it remarkable when we look at this in the modern era,
Riley Bowman: and I mean looking at it from the perspective of—,
Riley Bowman: brits right yeah where i mean it they they put in their their own version of
Riley Bowman: their bill of rights the english bill of rights the phrase that says that people
Riley Bowman: may have arms for their defense there's another part there i'm going to come back to in a moment,
Riley Bowman: but acknowledge that people may have arms for their defense and then today contrast that with where,
Riley Bowman: the uk is today where you're not allowed to have weapon for defense you can't.
Jacob Paulsen: Even have a kitchen knife
Riley Bowman: Right so Like you're told that basically, I remember we covered this in the
Riley Bowman: podcast several years ago, where like the only suitable tool at your disposal
Riley Bowman: was like a whistle or a rape alarm or something to that effect.
Riley Bowman: So pretty sad to see how far they've really swung against their old Bill of Rights.
Jacob Paulsen: Another piece of context that's relevant here is 1689 is this English Bill of Rights.
Jacob Paulsen: So fast forward to 1773, 1774, 1775 in America, the English Bill of Rights is less than 100 years old.
Jacob Paulsen: And the colonists are feeling like, hey, we're being abused by the king.
Jacob Paulsen: This ain't cool. We've got to deal with some of these things,
Jacob Paulsen: the Tax Act and the Stamp Act and the Coercion Act, et cetera.
Jacob Paulsen: And so I just wanted to put that in context, right, that we're talking about a timeline.
Jacob Paulsen: In fact, 1689 to 1789 basically is 100 years from the English Bill of Rights
Jacob Paulsen: being written to the U.S. Constitution being affected.
Riley Bowman: That's pretty spot on.
Jacob Paulsen: So context, right? And the U.S. Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the
Jacob Paulsen: U.S. Constitution, 1791.
Jacob Paulsen: So 103 years after the English Bill of Rights.
Jacob Paulsen: So anyway, I just think to us, this is a long time ago, but to the American
Jacob Paulsen: founding fathers, the English Bill of Rights was not yet 100 years old.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. I appreciate you pointing that out it's a relatively new thing at that
Riley Bowman: time and again this is all context this is the world that,
Riley Bowman: Our colonials, you know, those that became our founding fathers grew up within this framework.
Riley Bowman: And by the way, it was Justice Scalia who wrote the majority opinion on the
Riley Bowman: Heller decision, the famous Heller decision of 2008.
Riley Bowman: And he noted in that.
Riley Bowman: The English Bill of Rights, specifically this phrase that people may have arms
Riley Bowman: for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law,
Riley Bowman: while that's not perfect, and while we've certainly, in our own Bill of Rights,
Riley Bowman: went well beyond that as far as not having something like suitable to their conditions,
Riley Bowman: or even as allowed by law in our Bill of Rights with respect to the Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: But he noted that this part of the Bill of Rights acknowledged or creates,
Riley Bowman: this was evidence that the right predates, meaning the right to bear arms,
Riley Bowman: predates and is independent to our own Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Jacob Paulsen: And the specific key here is this idea for their defense. Because a common thing
Jacob Paulsen: you hear from people today is, oh, the Second Amendment, it's all about militia.
Jacob Paulsen: It was all about forming, creating, and standing up of militia.
Jacob Paulsen: And so it's not about an individual's right to have guns for their own personal
Jacob Paulsen: satisfaction or self-defense.
Jacob Paulsen: And here it's like in 1689 it was.
Jacob Paulsen: In 1689, the English Bill of Rights set forth that this was for the personal
Jacob Paulsen: defense, for one's personal ability
Jacob Paulsen: to defend themselves with whatever arm would be appropriate for that
Jacob Paulsen: within the scope of what's allowed by law.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is setting forth that it's not just, hey, Americans can,
Jacob Paulsen: or this time, the English people could own guns, but they can own guns for self-defense.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, that's such a valid point. And understand, I mean, we're going to talk
Riley Bowman: some more about Heller, of course.
Riley Bowman: We're going to give its own space on this podcast today. But how significant
Riley Bowman: that was, I think, is important to recognize that, you know,
Riley Bowman: as far as that Heller decision for the first time officially in our nation's history.
Riley Bowman: Very clearly pointed out the second amendment,
Riley Bowman: is about an individual right protecting an individual right that's right and
Riley Bowman: that's why this is so key understanding this history and the english bill of
Riley Bowman: rights and how it was about,
Riley Bowman: people subjects to the king people we're not talking about militias it militias
Riley Bowman: weren't part of this this verbiage here it was about people having arms for their defense.
Jacob Paulsen: It was about all people. In fact, that was one of the points,
Jacob Paulsen: right? It's like, it's not about a select group of citizens.
Jacob Paulsen: It's about all of the subjects of the king. It's about all of them having this right.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. And I understand the English Bill of Rights wasn't perfect,
Riley Bowman: and there was still a lot of class-based related issues and problems and challenges,
Riley Bowman: but this was a step in the right direction, and this again,
Riley Bowman: is part of that framework that established our own Bill of Rights here in our country,
Riley Bowman: and again was used as that evidence for later rulings super important rulings
Riley Bowman: like the Heller decision that,
Riley Bowman: on record established no this is about an individual right super super key so this,
Riley Bowman: is a recognition of where it all started for America okay,
Riley Bowman: Let's now, let's turn our attention now a little more to America,
Riley Bowman: Jacob. Let's talk about the colonies a little bit.
Riley Bowman: Our own history, of course, is not without stains. Yeah.
Riley Bowman: We're going to talk quite a bit more about that throughout this episode even.
Riley Bowman: But we had settlement here of the American colonies.
Riley Bowman: American people here are doing their thing. They're creating their lives.
Riley Bowman: They're creating their own version of a country.
Riley Bowman: I mean, they recognize themselves as subjects to the king, as part of that great
Riley Bowman: kingdom, the United Kingdom.
Riley Bowman: But they were very much independent and, like I said, doing their own thing here. Right.
Riley Bowman: And so what's interesting is that by the time you arrive to that critical period
Riley Bowman: of history, you know, the late 1700s, 1760s, 1770s,
Riley Bowman: the American colonialists are some of the most armed people in all of the world.
Jacob Paulsen: Big time. I mean, and for lots of reasons that are very practical.
Jacob Paulsen: Right. For one, you know, there's a massive concern about the natives.
Jacob Paulsen: For better or for worse, the natives are seen as enemies of the people,
Jacob Paulsen: savages that are dangerous, that will steal your wife and baby and burn your house down, right?
Jacob Paulsen: So that's an issue. Then we have the reality of just food procurement. This is the wilderness.
Jacob Paulsen: At least then it was the wilderness. I don't think you'd feel that way if you
Jacob Paulsen: were hanging out in New York City today.
Jacob Paulsen: But at the time, Long Island was the wilderness. Right. So even as Manhattan
Jacob Paulsen: became populated. So you've got to think of it like, well, this is our primary
Jacob Paulsen: means of getting food is the gun.
Jacob Paulsen: And then you go beyond that, and certainly the king is not going to pop over
Jacob Paulsen: here on the weekend to help protect us from any potential threat.
Jacob Paulsen: Other colonists from France or from wherever they might be coming.
Jacob Paulsen: And so this idea of standing up a militia becomes really critical for each community,
Jacob Paulsen: for each group to have their own militia.
Jacob Paulsen: And we're talking about – and this is where this one gets a little bit harder
Jacob Paulsen: because some of these other ones we've talked about have been kind of,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, the country of England did this.
Jacob Paulsen: And now this kind of section of the podcast, we're really suggesting that what
Jacob Paulsen: you see is this trend of popular gun-related things across various colonies
Jacob Paulsen: in the Americas that served kind of two core patterns.
Jacob Paulsen: The first pattern is one of almost, in many cases, literally,
Jacob Paulsen: requiring that people owned a gun.
Jacob Paulsen: You know, that, hey, part of you being part of this colony, this community,
Jacob Paulsen: this society, is that you need to have a gun.
Jacob Paulsen: And you need to be capable of deploying that gun in sometimes a matter of minutes
Jacob Paulsen: and assembling in a common area to be part of a community militia.
Jacob Paulsen: And then the other pattern that's common here is, we start to refer to the stain
Jacob Paulsen: that I said, and that is this idea that we can't have slaves having guns.
Jacob Paulsen: So, hey, in our colony, I mean, as early as 1600s, you see slave codes being
Jacob Paulsen: established in South Carolina.
Jacob Paulsen: So these slave codes are established, and among these various slave codes,
Jacob Paulsen: one of them is all about guns.
Jacob Paulsen: No touchy of the guns for the slaves.
Riley Bowman: Yep. Yeah, and so that's exactly where I was going with this discussion.
Riley Bowman: It was to point out, here in the colonies, the colonies were really on their own.
Jacob Paulsen: Yep.
Riley Bowman: Right? There were some of the king's troops here. Yes, sir.
Riley Bowman: The colonies, like already with 13 colonies, was already significantly larger
Riley Bowman: than all of England. Yes. Right?
Jacob Paulsen: Way bigger. Not even close.
Riley Bowman: And on top of that, the king has gone throughout the world establishing his kingdom.
Riley Bowman: Like England is fighting wars all over the world throughout this part of history,
Riley Bowman: and claiming territories and islands. Oh, yeah.
Riley Bowman: You know, and so, you know, the English Empire has just become so massive. That's strong.
Riley Bowman: And very strong. I mean, it is the dominant force in the world at that time.
Jacob Paulsen: Largest army, largest military, or largest navy on the planet.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, and probably up to that point in history, right?
Riley Bowman: And so it is the dominant force in the world. But that huge kingdom requires
Riley Bowman: a huge force to just try to maintain.
Riley Bowman: And it can't be everywhere all at once.
Riley Bowman: And if there's a conflict going on somewhere in the Caribbean or in Africa or
Riley Bowman: in India or whatever, troops are getting sent there.
Riley Bowman: So the point is, this is where the colonies are like, yeah, we are on our own
Riley Bowman: to a large extent to defend our communities.
Jacob Paulsen: There was a local government structure. The king would establish governors that
Jacob Paulsen: would be sent to rule over a colony or to establish
Jacob Paulsen: a system of grievances and addressing those kinds of things.
Jacob Paulsen: So yeah, these colonies are established as colonies and they are ruled by a
Jacob Paulsen: governor appointed by the king or by parliament, depending on how you want to
Jacob Paulsen: think of it, to kind of manage that colony.
Jacob Paulsen: So that's where you start to see some of these trends where these governors
Jacob Paulsen: are like, hey, are you having this issue? Yeah, me too. Cool. Let's do this.
Riley Bowman: Exactly. And so the colonies have their own form of government.
Riley Bowman: Each colony had a colonial government of some sort managed by a governor.
Riley Bowman: And as you already covered, there were laws in some colonies requiring the owning
Riley Bowman: and bearing of firearms and weapons, requiring people to be a part of militia.
Riley Bowman: Because, again, at any time, they could be called upon because they're attacked
Riley Bowman: by a tribe of Indians. Later in the mid-1700s, 1750s, 60s, you start having
Riley Bowman: more conflicts with the French.
Riley Bowman: And so...
Riley Bowman: Yeah. And then, of course, on the flip side, where you've got laws that were
Riley Bowman: passed to keep certain people, in this case, specifically black people,
Riley Bowman: from being able to possess their own arms.
Riley Bowman: Let's fast forward now, too.
Riley Bowman: We're jumping ahead, jumping around a little bit, but let's go now to 1774.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah so some historical context here this is a rough time basically the British
Jacob Paulsen: have just crushed France again
Jacob Paulsen: in a military campaign in a war and it was costly it was expensive and we need
Jacob Paulsen: to get some money recovered from that and those colonies in America they are
Jacob Paulsen: just crushing it they are growing like crazy they are putting out tons of crops and
Jacob Paulsen: cotton tobacco I mean they're just doing so much good and so There's a lot of
Jacob Paulsen: wealth in the Americas, and over here, we need to recoup.
Jacob Paulsen: We kind of need to restock the fridge and the bank account, so to speak.
Jacob Paulsen: So you see all these acts getting passed by parliament to basically tax and
Jacob Paulsen: burden a little bit these Americans, which I think from the perspective of the
Jacob Paulsen: king is sort of like, you're my subjects. Go do me the thing, man.
Jacob Paulsen: But Americans don't like that very much, they decided.
Jacob Paulsen: Not just that we don't like these things happening, but that we have no say
Jacob Paulsen: in them happening. There's a good old taxation with that representation.
Jacob Paulsen: So you start to see a lot of conflicts. And the heartbed of this,
Jacob Paulsen: speaking of turnarounds, is Boston.
Jacob Paulsen: And so Boston is – this is the place of rebellion. This is the place where it's
Jacob Paulsen: like we are not putting up with this crap anymore.
Jacob Paulsen: So all these things start to come, Stamp Act, and the –
Jacob Paulsen: The tax on tea and coercion acts all this is kind of coming boom boom boom boom
Jacob Paulsen: boom we have the boston massacre massacre in 74 as well so this is basically
Jacob Paulsen: where that was earlier 73 so
Riley Bowman: I thought that was like.
Jacob Paulsen: Anyway i'm not sure so this you know the boston massacre is basically where
Jacob Paulsen: you have a bunch of british troops that open fire on some protesters and they
Jacob Paulsen: kill a bunch of people and And we don't like that, we decided.
Jacob Paulsen: So anyway, these hostilities are kind of escalating.
Jacob Paulsen: And so enter what we call the powder alarm.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, I mean, you had the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Townsend Acts.
Riley Bowman: That was a big one, right? And all these things just stacked,
Riley Bowman: stacked, stacked, stacked, stacked.
Riley Bowman: And the Intolveral Acts were passed in 1774. And a part of that was the Boston
Riley Bowman: Port Act to shut down the Boston Port and basically punishment for what happened during the Tea Party.
Riley Bowman: Okay that was basically direct just retaliation for the tea party and so boom
Riley Bowman: we're punishing you boston we're shutting down your port until you pay back uh,
Riley Bowman: for the tea that you destroyed okay uh you had,
Riley Bowman: uh the massachusetts government act which was basically just stripped the colonialists
Riley Bowman: of their any of their own part in the government okay so all these things just stack stack stack
Riley Bowman: the first continental congress was formed in direct response to all these things yes
Riley Bowman: and it's in the midst of all this is where you've got,
Riley Bowman: the powder alarm as you said which was boston's basically shut down the port shut down okay uh,
Riley Bowman: they're they they actually the uh the british raided a boston uh powder magazine
Riley Bowman: was called but basically a huge storehouse of gun powder.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, bear in mind at the time that, you know, gunpowder is volatile.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. And so we don't store it in homes.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Except for small amounts.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, small amounts. But mostly you have these community powder houses where kind of the...
Riley Bowman: They're generally away from...
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, away from homes and things. And that's where the major storage of powder
Jacob Paulsen: is so that if something goes wrong, you know, you're not blowing up a bunch of houses. Yep.
Riley Bowman: And so, you know, of course, there's all this tension between the colonialists,
Riley Bowman: the Bostonians especially, and the Brits, the British troops,
Riley Bowman: and their governor, of course. And,
Riley Bowman: So what starts to happen is they're like, hey, we got to get this tamped down.
Riley Bowman: We got to go after the stuff that matters. In this case, we want to get a hold of that powder.
Riley Bowman: So the Boston Powder Magazine is taken away. They raid it.
Riley Bowman: And that's kind of like the first clue into the colonialists that,
Riley Bowman: hey, this is a tactic that they're starting to use.
Riley Bowman: And so when they get word that they're heading for lexington uh via con or concord
Riley Bowman: via lexington right um to seize that powder house that's that's where it really kicks.
Jacob Paulsen: Off well we know it's going to happen right and in fact there was another failed
Jacob Paulsen: attempt uh to the north of boston i can remember what that community was called
Jacob Paulsen: where they tried to seize the powder and they failed and so it's sort of like
Jacob Paulsen: hey we know that you know that this is their game that they're doing this right now.
Jacob Paulsen: The intelligence was clear that they were headed to Concord next.
Jacob Paulsen: It was just a question of like, when are they going and how are they going?
Jacob Paulsen: So that's the good old, you know, one if by land, two if by sea,
Jacob Paulsen: the old North Church, et cetera.
Jacob Paulsen: Paul Revere and William, whatever his name was that went off and warned everybody.
Jacob Paulsen: So that's, yes, that's where all that goes down is this is all about protecting
Jacob Paulsen: our ability to arm and fire back by keeping the
Riley Bowman: The British know they have a problem on their hands because they're way outnumbered,
Riley Bowman: and they're way outnumbered by an angry populace that is all armed, right?
Riley Bowman: And so where this is relevant in the discussion of the Second Amendment for
Riley Bowman: our purposes today is that what do you do about that is you got to exact gun control, right?
Riley Bowman: And so when you have people that you need to control, to get them under control,
Riley Bowman: you need to control their arms.
Riley Bowman: And so that's really what was the tipping point here was, hey,
Riley Bowman: we need to get a hold of all – we can go confiscate guns. That's one thing.
Riley Bowman: But what makes those guns run is their powder.
Riley Bowman: We need to get the powder. And powder was difficult to manufacture.
Riley Bowman: You had to have the right ingredients from the in they're not always they're
Riley Bowman: not available just anywhere yeah right and so if you can get a hold of the powder,
Riley Bowman: then it doesn't matter how many guns they have.
Jacob Paulsen: And in fact we were we we basically never had enough power powder throughout
Jacob Paulsen: the entire american revolutionary war yeah like the war for independence we
Jacob Paulsen: were constantly like low on powder
Jacob Paulsen: yep um which prevented us from being able to train and practice and prepare
Jacob Paulsen: and be a capable fighting force.
Jacob Paulsen: So anyway, yeah, it's effective technique.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Yep.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is basically British policy executed by the local authority,
Jacob Paulsen: the governor, in order to tame a rebellion.
Riley Bowman: Yep, exactly. Exactly.
Riley Bowman: That in itself, I mean, it explains the historical context of what led to the revolution,
Riley Bowman: but it also frames the, for the purposes of our discussion of the Second Amendment,
Riley Bowman: as like this establishes the historical context as well, that it was a recognized
Riley Bowman: thing, like that people owned, kept, and bore arms.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. That it was just a part of life. It was a part of society.
Riley Bowman: It was something that everyone had a right to do. Okay.
Riley Bowman: Except for in the case of blacks, like we already talked about.
Riley Bowman: And in some cases where I think Massachusetts was one of those states that required
Riley Bowman: its citizens to have arms for purposes of participating in militia.
Riley Bowman: And so that also establishes this pre-constitutional recognition of the right to keep and bear arms.
Riley Bowman: So that's why this is an important historical context.
Riley Bowman: I know we're preaching to the choir, but we want to understand the history here.
Jacob Paulsen: The timeline matters.
Riley Bowman: And so, of course, we know what happens with Lexington and Concord.
Riley Bowman: And you guys just got a replay of that episode where we went into the specifics
Riley Bowman: on the events surrounding that.
Riley Bowman: So I don't know, we didn't need to spend a ton of time on actual Lexington and
Riley Bowman: Concord, but hey, hurrah. Like, you know, the little skirmish at Lexington was,
Riley Bowman: that's really what it was, was skirmish. It wasn't a whole lot.
Riley Bowman: Concord was a little bit heated, but what was really remarkable was the...
Riley Bowman: The patriotic spirit was really, you see that, I mean, I think it always and
Riley Bowman: already did exist, but you see it in,
Riley Bowman: these patriots as they chase the British all the way back to Boston following Lexington and Concord.
Riley Bowman: And they just, they're just ambushing them all along the way.
Riley Bowman: And, uh, I mean, I just, I, I admire these, these scrappy men.
Riley Bowman: That's really, that's the word I was looking for a moment ago.
Riley Bowman: I was trying to think of this word. Like how do we describe them? They were scrappy.
Riley Bowman: They were tough, but it was really, it was a scrappy toughness that they were not an organized army.
Riley Bowman: Far from it. They didn't have a lot of training. They were just hardworking,
Riley Bowman: Americans that said, we've had enough and.
Riley Bowman: We're willing now at this point
Riley Bowman: to give up our lives and chase the British all the way back to Boston.
Jacob Paulsen: I don't know if I can talk about this without crying. Just no hesitation.
Jacob Paulsen: They had already made the decision. When the call came, no hesitation.
Riley Bowman: We have to honor these folks of Massachusetts, in that Boston area especially,
Riley Bowman: for their part in the revolution because they really forced the hand of the rest of the colonies.
Riley Bowman: I mean the other colonies they forced.
Jacob Paulsen: The hand of King George King George forced the hand of the rest of the colonies
Riley Bowman: I mean because as you find and we don't,
Riley Bowman: we're not going to go into the actual war for independence and the whole you
Riley Bowman: know and the continental congresses and everything that happened there but there was,
Riley Bowman: and of course even drafting the constitution there was a lot of you had 13 colonies
Riley Bowman: eventually 13 states that,
Riley Bowman: they all viewed this very differently You had certain colonies that were like,
Riley Bowman: eh, we're cool with, you know, like we don't like it, but we're still going
Riley Bowman: to try to play nice with England.
Riley Bowman: And others like Massachusetts, like we are done.
Jacob Paulsen: It was the center hub, right? So things spread out. I mean, it went from being
Jacob Paulsen: like Bostonians are all about this independence thing. The rest of us don't love it.
Jacob Paulsen: Then it was about, well, those new Englanders are all about this independence thing.
Jacob Paulsen: And then, of course, you have the Carolina campaign where Clinton runs down,
Jacob Paulsen: General Clinton's British officer runs down to the Carolinas and tries to rabble-rise a little bit.
Jacob Paulsen: And all of a sudden, the Southerners are like, oh, we're on board now.
Riley Bowman: That pissed us off. The fight's coming to us now?
Jacob Paulsen: It spread like a fire. That's really the takeaway. Exactly.
Riley Bowman: Now we're going to fast-forward to the drafting and ratification of the Constitution.
Riley Bowman: And, of course, a big part of that, the Second Amendment.
Jacob Paulsen: The Constitution's getting drafted. You can call it from...
Jacob Paulsen: 87 to 88 is really kind of the ratification and signing of the U.S.
Jacob Paulsen: Constitution, which initially, of course, has nothing in it about the right to bear arms.
Jacob Paulsen: And this was a highly debated topic. You know, when James Madison and that whole
Jacob Paulsen: contingency were meeting and drafting the U.S. Constitution,
Jacob Paulsen: there was a lot of debate about a lot of these things. And it was sort of like,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, we can add those amendments later.
Jacob Paulsen: Like let's leave out anything that might be, you know, that might overcomplicate
Jacob Paulsen: or lengthen the document. So that's where, you know, and it was also sort of
Jacob Paulsen: like, those are the kinds of things that could be enumerated later.
Jacob Paulsen: And in fact, there were, you know, if you go look at the Federalist Papers and
Jacob Paulsen: some of these things, there were a lot of these, I guess we call them states
Jacob Paulsen: at that time, a lot of these states that basically didn't want to ratify the U.S.
Jacob Paulsen: Constitution unless there was a promise of this Bill of Rights coming immediately thereafter.
Jacob Paulsen: And so you really have the U.S. government, as we know it today,
Jacob Paulsen: stood up in 1989, excuse me, 1789 with President Washington.
Jacob Paulsen: Immediately, we start working on the bill of rights.
Riley Bowman: That's exactly right. There had to be this compromise. The Federalists and the
Riley Bowman: Anti-Federalists, that was where this sticking point was.
Riley Bowman: The Federalists, of course, wanted a very strong federal government.
Riley Bowman: Anti-Federalists, not so much. More focus on states and state rights.
Riley Bowman: Of course, we I mean, we know it's not perfect, but I think what our founding
Riley Bowman: fathers achieved in creating this nation and drafting our Constitution with
Riley Bowman: its accompanying Bill of Rights did a remarkable thing to...
Riley Bowman: Come as close as possible to perfect as far as checks and balances within a
Riley Bowman: federal government and between federal and states uh not an easy thing to do and.
Jacob Paulsen: And there's nothing else out there like it at the time yeah so it is they're
Jacob Paulsen: really building from scratch um there were democracies and republics at this
Jacob Paulsen: time but they were all really tiny little governments
Jacob Paulsen: um like little tiny colonies and things like that there was nothing like the
Jacob Paulsen: dutch i believe were right a republic.
Jacob Paulsen: In fact, it was thought, it was believed at the time that that kind of a government
Jacob Paulsen: system couldn't work at scale.
Jacob Paulsen: So yes, what they did was absolutely revolutionary in so many senses of the word.
Jacob Paulsen: They did so many things that had never been done before. I already mentioned
Jacob Paulsen: one, the separation of church and state.
Jacob Paulsen: Maybe I'm going too deep for this episode, but without question,
Jacob Paulsen: yeah, like perfect you may not think it is, but as close to perfect.
Riley Bowman: It
Jacob Paulsen: Must be pretty good since every other nation on the planet has basically adopted it since then yep
Riley Bowman: Or a version of it for sure well and i only shared that because i think this
Riley Bowman: context is important and especially because if if you had had the fearless way
Riley Bowman: and like james madison's you know of way uh.
Riley Bowman: We would have just had the Constitution. And I think eventually we would have
Riley Bowman: had amendments added, but we would not have had the Bill of Rights,
Riley Bowman: which has enshrined so many very core and key principles in our nation's government
Riley Bowman: and constitutional structure.
Riley Bowman: That would not have happened had there not been this compromise and eventually agreement to,
Riley Bowman: i mean because you had multiple states that were holdouts essentially on ratifying
Riley Bowman: the constitution they're like we're not we're not doing it we're not doing it,
Riley Bowman: but you guys got to give us the word we're gonna we're gonna actually then work
Riley Bowman: on these bill of rights and so in 1791 the bill of rights is finally you know
Riley Bowman: crafted and ratified as well,
Riley Bowman: uh and and and think.
Riley Bowman: I'm just gonna say, thank God that happened.
Riley Bowman: Because if we didn't have, can you imagine what life would be like today if
Riley Bowman: we didn't even have the Second Amendment?
Riley Bowman: Understand that, like, I think where the mind was at for some of the Federalists,
Riley Bowman: especially those that were like, no, the Constitution's good, man.
Riley Bowman: As I think where they were at was, they weren't thinking about all the possibilities down the road.
Riley Bowman: They were just looking like, and it's hard to do. It's hard to be forward thinking
Riley Bowman: when you look at your world and you have all these assumptions and biases that you just live with.
Riley Bowman: And to them, probably something as simple as the right to keep and bear arms was just a given.
Jacob Paulsen: Right? Right, right. And it was this, remember, the English Bill of Rights had
Jacob Paulsen: been written basically 100 years before the US Constitution is being ratified by each state.
Jacob Paulsen: So yes, it was a given because it was a given. as colonies of the British Empire
Jacob Paulsen: it was a given right enumerated in the English Bill of Rights and so it was, yes, I think that
Jacob Paulsen: Like how I would rephrase what you said in my own words would be that maybe
Jacob Paulsen: the sense was we don't need to write those things out because we just all know that it's a thing.
Jacob Paulsen: And then you have states like, wait a minute. Like if we sign this though,
Jacob Paulsen: it's not good enough for us that there's an assumption. Like we want it in the document.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: And so in order to kind of get the ratification process complete across all
Jacob Paulsen: the colonies, the promise is basically made like, okay, you got it.
Jacob Paulsen: Like we will just sign it and then we'll work on that. We'll get it in there.
Riley Bowman: I'm sorry. I'm chuckling a little bit because it sounds like,
Riley Bowman: you know, the Obamacare bill.
Riley Bowman: Just sign it. Just pass it. And then read and find out what's in it.
Riley Bowman: But anyway, so that's kind of how this went down.
Riley Bowman: And as I said, thank goodness that we actually ended up with a Bill of Rights,
Riley Bowman: and the Second Amendment as part of that.
Riley Bowman: And it is the second thing that they included in that.
Riley Bowman: I think it is appropriate. It's in the order that the amendments are in the order that they are.
Riley Bowman: First Amendment, free speech, right to assembly, right to worship.
Riley Bowman: I think that is so, so important and so key and so core to our nation's founding and values as well.
Riley Bowman: And then the Second Amendment, just like right on its heels,
Riley Bowman: like this is important to us as a nation, the right to keep and bear arms.
Riley Bowman: And it is an individual right.
Jacob Paulsen: Oh, yeah.
Riley Bowman: And it is a right to defense. Okay.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. I mean, it is the right of the individual to have the gun.
Jacob Paulsen: It is the right of the individual to have that gun for self-defense.
Jacob Paulsen: It is the right of the individual to go about their business on a day with that
Jacob Paulsen: gun in into in order to protect those rights.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: Like these are the things that time has been required to prove that that was
Jacob Paulsen: the intention of that of that bill of rights.
Jacob Paulsen: And of course, you know, that's kind of where we're going next.
Riley Bowman: So, Constitution, Bill of Rights are created.
Jacob Paulsen: 1791. That'll be our next big
Jacob Paulsen: 250th anniversary. It'll be the 250th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, we should do something about that. And so, that happens.
Riley Bowman: And then things kind of go quiet for a while.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, we don't have a lot of people running around shooting up schools.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: So, you know, that's just kind of a non-issue. And not to mention,
Jacob Paulsen: the gun is allowing us to.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, the next century allows us to conquer a continent, to become a superpower.
Jacob Paulsen: Like you could think of it like the founders of this country were handed a trust
Jacob Paulsen: fund in the form of land and territory.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. And man, we cashed in on that trust fund big time. But in order to do it, we used guns.
Jacob Paulsen: And some of the things we did, you know, another stain on America,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, we mentioned slavery, another stain on the legacy of the founders,
Jacob Paulsen: of course, is how we dealt with Native Americans.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, Native Americans, yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: But putting all that aside, the reality is the gun was a necessary element for
Jacob Paulsen: us to conquer a continent and to establish the first real, I shouldn't say,
Jacob Paulsen: a new order of a global superpower.
Riley Bowman: It's an unfortunate reality that had we not marched west and conquered this
Riley Bowman: nation, this continent,
Riley Bowman: majority of a continent some of it.
Jacob Paulsen: With money some of it by by
Riley Bowman: Force um you know because i'm sure some some there's probably somebody out there
Riley Bowman: even listening that would be like well i wish we hadn't you know,
Riley Bowman: done what we did to the native americans i'm with you there we did horrible
Riley Bowman: and atrocious things um but what happened happened and and they did things maybe
Riley Bowman: didn't they didn't have the knowledge we have today either uh or an understanding um,
Riley Bowman: but uh you could you could suppose that we just stayed within you know the original
Riley Bowman: 13 colonies or maybe a slightly larger version of that,
Riley Bowman: but somebody would have conquered like if we didn't do that somebody would have
Riley Bowman: filled that vacuum right i mean mexican we well mexicans already had part of that,
Riley Bowman: right but you know what i mean like like if we didn't do it somebody else was
Riley Bowman: going to do it like that was going to happen one way or another,
Riley Bowman: anyway but let's jump now to the mid uh mid 19th century So the mid-1800s.
Riley Bowman: And of course, we know another stay in our nation's history,
Riley Bowman: of course, we already touched on it, was dealing with the rights of all people
Riley Bowman: in America. And by that, I'm specifically referring to black Americans.
Riley Bowman: And of course, there's the whole Civil War that took place as a big deal.
Riley Bowman: Chunk you know big part of that but something led up to that specifically,
Riley Bowman: and in 19 or in 1857 you had the dred scott versus sanford uh supreme court
Riley Bowman: case that came before the court there,
Riley Bowman: uh and this is important to acknowledge we won't spend a ton of time on this
Riley Bowman: and it was something that kind of accelerated some of the tensions between north
Riley Bowman: and south uh leading up to the civil war,
Riley Bowman: but the dred scott case was basically the case involving a,
Riley Bowman: uh a slave who uh.
Riley Bowman: Through you know the laws were kind of complex back then but the his his owner
Riley Bowman: moved to illinois and he felt and there was a law that after a certain amount
Riley Bowman: of time he could basically become a free man okay,
Riley Bowman: and his owner was basically saying no that's not the case you are not a free
Riley Bowman: man This man is basically suing for his emancipation,
Riley Bowman: and for that of his family, his wife and his children as well.
Riley Bowman: And so he went to the Supreme Court arguing this. Now, what the specifics of
Riley Bowman: that case, we're not here to talk about, you know, whether the merits of that case per se.
Riley Bowman: But what was included in that case was kind of interesting because in the opinion
Riley Bowman: written by Chief Justice Taney at that time.
Riley Bowman: He talked about the right to keep and carry arms wherever they went. That's a quotation.
Riley Bowman: To keep and carry arms wherever they went. Referencing one of the privileges
Riley Bowman: of citizenship. Yes. Okay.
Riley Bowman: And so basically one of the reasons why he could not rule and why the majority
Riley Bowman: did not rule in favor of this black man seeking his freedom,
Riley Bowman: was because that would mean that we therefore must grant to this man and his family,
Riley Bowman: all rights, and including the right to keep and bear arms. And we just can't have that happening.
Jacob Paulsen: Right. The way this is established in this case is that there's full citizenship
Jacob Paulsen: and there's partial citizenship.
Jacob Paulsen: And being a full citizen of our wonderful country means you get all of these rights.
Jacob Paulsen: And we don't want these black people, speaking for the perspective of the Supreme
Jacob Paulsen: Court at the time, the majority of the Supreme Court, we don't want these black
Jacob Paulsen: people to have all the rights, particularly the Second Amendment one.
Jacob Paulsen: It sounds pretty scary if they get that.
Jacob Paulsen: So therefore, we're going to kind of create this concept that black people are
Jacob Paulsen: not a full citizen of the United States. And therefore, they don't have a right
Jacob Paulsen: to all of the rights that come with citizenship in this country.
Jacob Paulsen: This is widely regarded to be one of the worst decisions the U.S.
Jacob Paulsen: Supreme Court ever made. And obviously, it leads to some pretty nasty things.
Jacob Paulsen: We come out of it better in the end.
Jacob Paulsen: But there's also a little interesting side note here that's worth pointing out.
Jacob Paulsen: And that is that the Supreme Court, in writing this decision,
Jacob Paulsen: which was terrible for black people and terrible in that respect,
Jacob Paulsen: they also wrote it based on the assumption that citizenship in this country
Jacob Paulsen: gave you the right to go about bearing arms. Right? Exactly.
Jacob Paulsen: It's also like, yes, this is a problematic stance. And this decision was obviously
Jacob Paulsen: overturned later with an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, the 13th and specifically the 14th Amendment, which granted all rights to all citizens.
Jacob Paulsen: But you can't look at it as, at the time, the precedent was citizenship grants
Jacob Paulsen: you the right not just to own a gun, but to have it and go about with it in society.
Riley Bowman: Exactly.
Riley Bowman: So another important piece of this historical context that we're here discussing today.
Riley Bowman: And that, I believe, is also referenced in the Heller decision to basically
Riley Bowman: show, hey, here is this historical context.
Riley Bowman: And what was so key about the Heller decision was that this is an individual right.
Riley Bowman: And that's the acknowledgement here in this Dred Scott case.
Riley Bowman: In this majority opinion written by Chief Justice Taney,
Riley Bowman: that's where this individual right was in a way being referenced that hey here
Riley Bowman: is an individual suing for his freedom and if we grant him that then we must also grant him this,
Riley Bowman: individual right of keeping and bearing arms,
Riley Bowman: super important part with those arguments that were made in the Heller case 151 years later,
Riley Bowman: Then, of course, we know what happened. Civil War, of course, happens.
Riley Bowman: Horrible, terrible, nasty thing, but unfortunately, it was necessary,
Riley Bowman: I think, to fight our way through these challenges and to, as you said a moment
Riley Bowman: ago, come out the other side eventually stronger and better for it.
Riley Bowman: Immediately following the Civil War, so in 1865, the 13th Amendment was passed,
Riley Bowman: and the 14th Amendment very, very shortly thereafter.
Riley Bowman: Granting all rights to all citizens, which now, of course, all citizens meant
Riley Bowman: we are including all people, including especially black people. And so.
Jacob Paulsen: But not women yet.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. That's a topic for another day. And so what happened? So this is an interesting
Riley Bowman: thing. We have a section of history we're referred to as the Black Codes.
Riley Bowman: This was like 1865 to 1866.
Riley Bowman: And the reason why this even exists, and this is interesting to kind of note
Riley Bowman: and point out, was that with the passage of the 13th Amendment, we now say all people,
Riley Bowman: white, black, whatever color you are, you're a citizen of America, a full citizen, right?
Riley Bowman: And so now, hey, these are free people, and that must mean that it comes with
Riley Bowman: rights. If they're citizens, they get rights, right?
Riley Bowman: Well, you immediately start seeing different states, especially the Confederate,
Riley Bowman: the Southern states, passing laws known as Black Codes to restrict as much as they could,
Riley Bowman: as far as they felt they could, these new citizens' rights.
Jacob Paulsen: This is very equivalent to what we're seeing happening right now post-Bruin. Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: The U.S. Supreme Court says all this stuff about guns. Well, then fine.
Jacob Paulsen: We're going to then pass this new gun law and this new gun. And then we've got
Jacob Paulsen: to go fight the same kind of thing then where it's like, hey,
Jacob Paulsen: we've decided that these black people are citizens. And therefore,
Jacob Paulsen: as such, they get all these rights.
Jacob Paulsen: Okay, well, then fine. Then we're going to restrict this, this,
Jacob Paulsen: and this so far as we can within our state.
Jacob Paulsen: So a similar kind of thing happening at that time.
Jacob Paulsen: And devastating, I might add. It requires more civil rights reform down the road to clean this up.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Specifically, you had states like Mississippi and South Carolina that
Riley Bowman: passed laws that specifically barred freedmen from owning or carrying weapons.
Riley Bowman: They didn't totally say that you couldn't do it.
Riley Bowman: But part of that was you got to have a license to do so. And then,
Riley Bowman: of course, what do they do? They make those licenses dang near impossible to get.
Jacob Paulsen: Sounds familiar.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Strange, right?
Riley Bowman: Right so um and so that's what happened almost immediately after the 13th amendment,
Riley Bowman: before reconstruction protections were in place,
Riley Bowman: so that's where the 14th amendment was an answer to a lot of this because it
Riley Bowman: just needed further clarification like the 13th amendment basically said hey
Riley Bowman: all people are now citizens and are free,
Riley Bowman: and it was sort of like what we talked a moment ago, now there's this assumption that that means,
Riley Bowman: all citizens get the same rights, right?
Riley Bowman: In theory. But that's not how it was actually being implemented.
Riley Bowman: And so the 14th Amendment was that amendment that now was like,
Riley Bowman: no, we need this to specify.
Riley Bowman: Because what does the 14th Amendment say? I can't quote it exactly,
Riley Bowman: but it basically says that no government shall restrict the rights of any citizen.
Riley Bowman: And so, and of course, there's the due process clause and other things that
Riley Bowman: are part of that 14th Amendment, but that was a big part of it was this clarification
Riley Bowman: that, no, this means all citizens have access to all of the same rights.
Riley Bowman: And so that's where the 14th Amendment comes from. So then, and the other thing,
Riley Bowman: if I recall, in some of my research, Jacob, there was even some debate about
Riley Bowman: some of the verbiage in the 14th Amendment.
Riley Bowman: And that went back and forth a little bit. But one variation of the 14th Amendment
Riley Bowman: had, I think, something more specific regarding the Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: But the way that, see here,
Riley Bowman: I had a quote here from the 14th Amendment.
Riley Bowman: I might not be able to pull that up.
Jacob Paulsen: In the end, it was just decided to be unnecessary to have it in there. Right, right.
Riley Bowman: Right. And so anyway, but there's my point I'm trying to make here is that it's
Riley Bowman: important to see that the 14th Amendment.
Riley Bowman: Oh, that thing that this is some of the tie in I was looking for,
Riley Bowman: Jacob, that the 14th Amendment, it's clear in reading the text of the 14th Amendment
Riley Bowman: that it is applying to individuals, not a collective right.
Riley Bowman: And that that must also therefore mean that you know kind of sort of,
Riley Bowman: indirectly we're also suggesting that again or reinforcing the idea that things
Riley Bowman: like the first amendment the second amendment and so on we are talking about
Riley Bowman: individual rights and so the 14th amendment is reinforcing these individual rights,
Riley Bowman: uh and therefore you know that's another context piece to where we're trying
Riley Bowman: to lead to today you know so we get we get into this part of history and we're
Riley Bowman: going to talk about that some more here in a moment where,
Riley Bowman: It starts to become interpreted that the Second Amendment was more about militia
Riley Bowman: and this collective right, right?
Riley Bowman: And we had to have this Heller decision, this famous Heller decision to really make that distinction.
Riley Bowman: No, we are, this is still an individual right that we're talking about here.
Riley Bowman: But before we get to that, let's talk now about the Colfax Massacre and United
Riley Bowman: States versus Crookshake.
Riley Bowman: This is in the 1870s, Jacob.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is a massive setback because the context here is you basically have
Jacob Paulsen: a group of free black men defending a church
Jacob Paulsen: that's – it's all part of an election drama thing.
Jacob Paulsen: And so you have a white militia that kind of starts to march on the church and the black free men.
Jacob Paulsen: Back then we called them free men. We're trying to clarify that they are, in fact, not slaves.
Jacob Paulsen: Anyway, they defend that church. And
Jacob Paulsen: The conflict kind of ends in a surrender where the black dudes are like,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, okay, we'll put the guns down kind of thing.
Jacob Paulsen: And after they surrender, a bunch of them are slaughtered. They're just shot dead.
Jacob Paulsen: So a local jury basically convicts these dudes.
Jacob Paulsen: Well, it goes through a process. They were convicted. But then there's some
Jacob Paulsen: appeals and it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court overturns
Jacob Paulsen: their convictions and says, nope, they're good. And I've not read that decision.
Jacob Paulsen: I don't know all the details.
Jacob Paulsen: But it's a massive failure because what it basically did is it said,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, we're not changing the fact that you have these rights.
Jacob Paulsen: And these rights exist, but we are going to basically stop enforcing them.
Jacob Paulsen: We're going to stop backing you up when you try and exercise these rights.
Jacob Paulsen: It really kind of set up the future several decades of Ku Klux Klan
Jacob Paulsen: activity and really put the African-American community in a very vulnerable
Jacob Paulsen: spot because they had no legal recourse when their rights weren't recognized.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Hey, before, I got some commentary on that. We got Project 1868 commenting
Riley Bowman: right now on YouTube saying, two comments, one man with one gun can control
Riley Bowman: 100 men without guns. Touché. Very true.
Jacob Paulsen: Depends on what gun.
Riley Bowman: Fair enough, but it's a great point. But then he says in a follow-up comment,
Riley Bowman: for obvious reasons, I love the 14th Amendment.
Riley Bowman: Ratified in 1868, says Project 1868. So I'm glad you're joining us here today, Project 1868.
Riley Bowman: Thank you for your comments.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, this Crookshank case, Jacob, is, as you mentioned, a terrible ruling, a big step back.
Riley Bowman: The key to this ruling is essentially the Supreme Court said that things like the Second Amendment,
Riley Bowman: only apply to Congress or the federal government being able,
Riley Bowman: being restrained from restricting those rights and that it didn't apply to states or individuals.
Riley Bowman: And that was the key difference here is that essentially these men that murdered,
Riley Bowman: that massacred these black men,
Riley Bowman: these white men that massacred these black men in the Colfax Massacre.
Riley Bowman: They were just a loose private group of militia.
Riley Bowman: They weren't a part of any government. They weren't part of the state.
Riley Bowman: They weren't part of any official organization. They were just a private group
Riley Bowman: of white men, militia that did this act.
Riley Bowman: And so the reason the Supreme Court essentially overturned their convictions,
Riley Bowman: was because they're like, hey.
Riley Bowman: These were private individuals acting against these other private individuals.
Riley Bowman: And the Second Amendment in this case, we're talking about on the Second Amendment
Riley Bowman: issues here, don't apply because that only really applies at the federal level.
Riley Bowman: Now, this came from, I had to do a little digging on this, Jacob,
Riley Bowman: because I was like, this is really strange to me.
Riley Bowman: And so there's actually an earlier case in 1833. This was not a Second Amendment
Riley Bowman: case, but was a case that was dealing with some other Bill of Rights issues.
Riley Bowman: And in the Barron v. Baltimore case of 1833, that case established that the
Riley Bowman: Bill of Rights only restrains the federal governments, not state governments.
Riley Bowman: Okay so the theory was that the bill of rights was added specifically because
Riley Bowman: people feared a powerful new federal government but states still had their own
Riley Bowman: constitutions to govern and police themselves,
Riley Bowman: and so that was kind of and this became sort of this new interpretation of,
Riley Bowman: and the i mean again we're talking 1833 now up to 18 what 70 something um 1873
Riley Bowman: 1876 okay So this is the interpretation now at this time in the federal court system is that,
Riley Bowman: hey, Bill of Rights, Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: That's a federal thing.
Riley Bowman: We're talking about a state or an individual matter. That doesn't really apply.
Riley Bowman: And so that's where you start to see the beginning, this creeping in of,
Riley Bowman: well, that's not talking about individual rights.
Riley Bowman: No.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Yeah.
Riley Bowman: And that becomes a...
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, it sounds crazy to us today, right? Yeah. Like we hear that and we're like, what?
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Like, you know, the Bill of Rights is not enforced at the state level?
Jacob Paulsen: What are you talking about?
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Because it's about sovereignty and the nature of, you know,
Jacob Paulsen: kind of how that's evolved over time.
Riley Bowman: It wasn't until the McDonald versus Chicago case, 134 years later,
Riley Bowman: that this was fixed. You know, that was specifically an individual versus a city in that case.
Riley Bowman: So for that ruling to then say, no, we're not just talking about federal government
Riley Bowman: or Congress being restrained.
Riley Bowman: We'll come to that here. We'll give it its own time as well.
Riley Bowman: Let's now turn to the National Firearms Act 1934. There's not a whole lot that happens.
Riley Bowman: There's probably a few things here and there, but as far as significant cases
Riley Bowman: or events, We don't see a whole lot from this point forward until we get to
Riley Bowman: 1934 in the National Firearms Act.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, 1934. So this is Prohibition era, right, time, and kind of the rise of
Jacob Paulsen: mobsters and gangsters in American society, right?
Jacob Paulsen: People who are bootlegging and kind of enforcing their own rules.
Jacob Paulsen: And so the U.S. government decides they've got to take some action to try and
Jacob Paulsen: minimize the potential damage that these groups can do.
Jacob Paulsen: And so they look at the types of guns and things they're using and say,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, let's regulate the tools that only these mobster-type groups can afford
Jacob Paulsen: and use, and let's manage that.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. And so, you know, we come up with this legislation, the National Firearms Act of 1934.
Riley Bowman: And let me say this, Jacob,
Riley Bowman: the NRA was a part of this.
Jacob Paulsen: Yes. Yeah. By a part of this, you mean they supported it?
Riley Bowman: Very much so. And not only that, but the president, I think it was the president
Riley Bowman: of the NRA at that time, was key, you know, and I think testified on behalf of this.
Riley Bowman: And specifically, I think, advised on this legislation from the standpoint of
Riley Bowman: they knew, they couldn't just say, we're going to take away these guns,
Riley Bowman: like these whole classes of guns.
Riley Bowman: And so the way they knew they had to frame it was through the tax,
Riley Bowman: the tax stamp, the $200 tax stamp that we're all familiar with today.
Jacob Paulsen: It's a financial bill.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. So Congress didn't have the right by the Constitution.
Riley Bowman: They didn't have the authority to just say, pick these guns away. Okay.
Riley Bowman: What Congress has the authority to do though, was pass a tax.
Riley Bowman: And so they didn't totally make illegal these classes of firearms.
Riley Bowman: They just said, Hey, to get these guns, you have to go through a process and pay a tax.
Riley Bowman: And we have the authority to do that tax. And therefore we have the authority to do this.
Riley Bowman: And that's where the NRA and the president of NRA at that time came into play.
Riley Bowman: Was actually saying, here, here's how you can get this done.
Riley Bowman: You know, legally and constitutionally within the bounds of the authority of Congress.
Riley Bowman: And so that's an interesting part of history. Now, there was not a lot of pushback
Riley Bowman: on the National Firearms Act at that time.
Jacob Paulsen: No, it went through Congress without much pushback. And for those who aren't
Jacob Paulsen: following, and today we often just refer to this as the NFA.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is the law, Title II, that established what a Class III weapon is.
Jacob Paulsen: And these class three weapons were, again, not banned. They just required a
Jacob Paulsen: purchase of a tax stamp to acquire.
Jacob Paulsen: And so these are things that you're familiar with today. Obviously,
Jacob Paulsen: suppressors are part of this list. Sawed off or short barrel rifle shotguns.
Jacob Paulsen: And then fully automatic machine guns. And so bear in mind that $200 then,
Jacob Paulsen: according to my little quick Google search I just did on my phone,
Jacob Paulsen: is about the equivalent of $5,000 today.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is you coming up with five grand to pay a tax stamp to be able to acquire that tool.
Riley Bowman: Which there's some irony in that because you'd think that some of those gangsters
Riley Bowman: and mobsters, especially the
Riley Bowman: more organized ones, would probably have the resources to pull that off.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, probably not a problem.
Riley Bowman: Or they would just, because they're criminals anyway, would just not abide by
Riley Bowman: the law in the first place. But anyway, because since criminals follow laws
Riley Bowman: all the time. But here is one other thing.
Riley Bowman: I brought the NRA into this discussion. There's one other thing that's important
Riley Bowman: to point out. And that is that the NRA was responsible for making sure that
Riley Bowman: handguns were not included in the NFA.
Riley Bowman: The handguns were originally included in that.
Jacob Paulsen: To the first purpose.
Riley Bowman: Understand that the context of society at this time is that guns are still a
Riley Bowman: very popular thing. Most households still own one or several.
Riley Bowman: But they don't typically own them in the context that we think of them a lot
Riley Bowman: of times today as far as like for personal defense especially.
Riley Bowman: That's not really a thing at this time.
Riley Bowman: People aren't really, like, I think there's some instances of it,
Riley Bowman: but it's just not as common that people are packing around a revolver,
Riley Bowman: or I guess it could be 1911 at this time, but those certainly existed.
Riley Bowman: They're not packing around a handgun as part of their normal day-to-day lives.
Riley Bowman: Most households, they think, hey, I have my guns, I've got my rifle,
Riley Bowman: my hunting rifle, I got my hunting shotgun, I have my .22, I got what I need, right?
Riley Bowman: And so So most people did not see the National Firearms Act as being something
Riley Bowman: that was coming after them or coming after their guns.
Riley Bowman: They didn't own machine guns. They didn't own short-barreled shotguns because
Riley Bowman: who hunts with a short-barreled shotgun?
Jacob Paulsen: Well, those were expensive firearms. I mean, think Tommy gun.
Jacob Paulsen: Think Fuliato submachine gun.
Riley Bowman: They weren't that expensive then.
Jacob Paulsen: Well, relatively.
Riley Bowman: But I think it's more about the people didn't see a practical use for them.
Riley Bowman: You know and so why would i why would i have a short-barreled rifle why would
Riley Bowman: i hunt with a short-barreled rifle that doesn't make any sense that just in
Riley Bowman: you know reduces my my velocity is going to make my hunting rifle less effective and so forth,
Riley Bowman: but handguns were part of that because also again gangsters mobsters were using
Riley Bowman: handguns also so that was another one of the things they were going after but
Riley Bowman: the nra did win on that point to say hey there are still,
Riley Bowman: legitimate uses where citizens have handguns for personal defense and they stripped
Riley Bowman: that out of the nfa thank goodness thank goodness if we were still having to
Riley Bowman: fight the nfa fight today on handguns i would be,
Riley Bowman: so that's the nfa that's how it came to be and it didn't have much pushback
Riley Bowman: against it most people were in support of it sadly we regret that now for sure don't we.
Jacob Paulsen: Well and as recently as you know in the last 12 months, we've seen the $200 tax stamp be removed.
Jacob Paulsen: So as of January 1st, 2026, we've reduced the tax on NFA items from $200 to $0.
Jacob Paulsen: And one of the biggest pro-gun efforts happening today is the initiative to
Jacob Paulsen: either abolish the NFA completely or at very least to remove suppressors from
Jacob Paulsen: it. So those are hot topics right now.
Riley Bowman: Now, one thing that the NFA did set us up for was a case known as United States v. Miller.
Riley Bowman: And the Miller case was used for anti-gunners, and still is today, as their evidence,
Riley Bowman: for a lot of different things over the years.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, made a mess.
Riley Bowman: And it's important to understand what went on with the Miller case.
Riley Bowman: Okay so essentially you had a situation this man uh got caught with a short-barreled
Riley Bowman: shotgun okay just a little it's probably one of those situations right you know
Riley Bowman: like you know that by you know,
Riley Bowman: the nfa law you're you're right you're excuse me your shotgun's got to have
Riley Bowman: a barrel no less than 18 and a half inches right and by golly if you accidentally
Riley Bowman: took a little too much off that shotgun and you're 18.49
Riley Bowman: inches well you're in violation of the law right,
Riley Bowman: so you got a gentleman he's caught with a short barrel shotgun um he's convicted
Riley Bowman: he takes it up to supreme court,
Riley Bowman: um but something about that case for some reason he didn't show up and defend
Riley Bowman: like there was there was no defense to this case yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: He just no showed yeah probably was in mexico by then
Riley Bowman: You know so so that's the important thing about miller that you need to understand
Riley Bowman: is that you end up with this Miller decision that was then used as,
Riley Bowman: for other court, you know, used as case law for other future federal court cases for decades.
Riley Bowman: And it was a case that had zero defense. Nobody showed up. Nobody argued against it.
Riley Bowman: It just, it got pushed through. And so that's how the Miller case ends up being
Riley Bowman: this decisive, for several decades, court case about clarifying.
Riley Bowman: So part of what that had to deal with, too, was there was a tie-in with malicious service.
Riley Bowman: And so, again, this removal of individuals from the picture of,
Riley Bowman: you know, the Second Amendment picture, but, you know, it's got to be relevant to militia service.
Riley Bowman: And so that's how this came to be, this Miller decision.
Jacob Paulsen: Well, and this is not necessarily the U.S. Supreme Court saying,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, the shotgun has no application of militia service. The Second Amendment's about the militia.
Jacob Paulsen: And therefore, what happens here is there's an appeal made.
Jacob Paulsen: The U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear the case.
Jacob Paulsen: And the case is basically what the prosecution wrote.
Jacob Paulsen: So, again, no defense, right? So the state comes and says, well,
Jacob Paulsen: you should uphold this guy's conviction because we arrested him on the shotgun.
Jacob Paulsen: And the shotgun is not needed for the militia. And the Second Amendment says
Jacob Paulsen: militia, so therefore we should win.
Jacob Paulsen: And the Supreme Court says, okay, well, what's your side of the story,
Jacob Paulsen: Mr. Oh, wait, you're not here. Okay, well then, you know, it's back the gavel. That's the deal.
Jacob Paulsen: And so this is used, yes, by anti-gunners, you know, up until and including
Jacob Paulsen: today to say, hey, here's a U.S. Supreme Court decision where the decision was
Jacob Paulsen: all about what's appropriate for militia use.
Jacob Paulsen: And so, you know, does a militia need this or not? And clearly this is indicative
Jacob Paulsen: that it's not about an individual. It's about a militia.
Riley Bowman: Exactly. And as we've already established in this episode so far,
Riley Bowman: as we've given numerous examples going back,
Riley Bowman: to hundreds and hundreds of years where it's a recognized individual's right to have and bear arms.
Jacob Paulsen: So it does self-correct.
Riley Bowman: It does. It does. Of course, Heller, huge deal. McDonald's, another big deal.
Riley Bowman: Brewing, huge deal. We're getting to that. But first, we've got a couple other
Riley Bowman: things. Let's talk now about the civil rights era. The Mulford Act, 1967, Jacob.
Riley Bowman: You had California ban the public carry of loaded firearms.
Jacob Paulsen: Shocker. Yeah, right. California, right here.
Riley Bowman: Now, this was in direct response to, you had a lot of civil unrest at that time.
Riley Bowman: And the Black Panthers became this huge movement, this huge organization.
Riley Bowman: And the Black Panthers started doing these armed neighborhood patrols.
Riley Bowman: Which I would say, by the way, they had every right to do. Okay.
Riley Bowman: Just, I would say every American has a right to do. If they decide that that's
Riley Bowman: something, you know, that you got to do something, that you got to take action
Riley Bowman: to protect your neighborhood.
Riley Bowman: You want to have an armed patrol? I'm all for that. Okay.
Riley Bowman: But the Californians didn't like these armed neighborhood patrols.
Riley Bowman: And so they signed the legislation. In fact, this was backed by the NRA again.
Jacob Paulsen: Yes.
Riley Bowman: And signed by Governor Ronald Reagan.
Riley Bowman: Uh, but this was specifically targeting these Black Panther armed neighborhood
Riley Bowman: patrols to keep them from being able to do that because it's just,
Riley Bowman: this just banned outright a public carry of loaded firearms, period.
Riley Bowman: So it did go across the board, but I think the way this was viewed is,
Riley Bowman: well, not many people generally carry loaded gun publicly, but these Black Panther
Riley Bowman: folks are doing it in their little neighborhood patrols.
Riley Bowman: So what can we do to go after that? Let's just ban outright the public carry of loaded firearms.
Jacob Paulsen: And in modern language, we would address this as open carry.
Riley Bowman: Right, exactly.
Jacob Paulsen: So to be clear, this was, in fact, we've seen, what's the 2026 case? Barrett v. Bonta.
Jacob Paulsen: Yep. So that's a 2026 federal district court ruling that pointed back to this
Jacob Paulsen: law from 19, what was it? 67.
Jacob Paulsen: To justify the ban on open carry.
Jacob Paulsen: So, yes, this is an open carry ban specifically targeting these Black Panther neighborhood patrols.
Riley Bowman: You're probably picking up on a couple of things, some hints that there are,
Riley Bowman: pluses and minuses on both sides of the aisle, I guess you could say, as far as,
Riley Bowman: on the conservative side and more liberal side or Republican versus Democrat.
Riley Bowman: I don't care how you want to phrase it, but you've got mistakes made on all
Riley Bowman: sides, on all sorts of issues throughout history with regards to even Second
Riley Bowman: Amendment issues. All right.
Riley Bowman: The Gun Control Act of 1968 was the next piece. And this sort of is kind of
Riley Bowman: that next step up from the NFA. Right.
Riley Bowman: And some of the kind of catalysts to the Gun Control Act of 1968 were things
Riley Bowman: like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy.
Riley Bowman: Okay those happen close you know like boom boom uh in in timeline in history and uh people are like,
Riley Bowman: dang like we got to do something about these people just running out with guns
Riley Bowman: and assassinating people right and so that's where the gun control act came to be and it.
Jacob Paulsen: You note that most of these things we're talking about when we get into American
Jacob Paulsen: time, post-U.S. Constitution, we have very few actual federal laws.
Jacob Paulsen: We really had the NFA, now the Gun Control Act 1968, and then we're going to have FOPA in 1986.
Jacob Paulsen: But we just don't have a lot of – most of it's about court cases.
Jacob Paulsen: That's how most of these things get sorted out. This is a big one.
Jacob Paulsen: And what it does – in terms of what Gun Control Act actually does,
Jacob Paulsen: it kind of establishes two core things.
Jacob Paulsen: First off, it creates the Federal Firearm Licensing Program,
Jacob Paulsen: the FFL program. So it establishes the idea of gun dealers, you know,
Jacob Paulsen: that we're going to have people come to us and get a license in order to be
Jacob Paulsen: engaged in the business of selling firearms.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: Something that's already been sorted today.
Riley Bowman: Because up to that point, you could still mail order firearms.
Jacob Paulsen: Right. Yeah. It's all good. Like they could be, they were in the Sears catalog probably.
Riley Bowman: Absolutely.
Jacob Paulsen: If Sears was around, I assume they were. Yeah. So, so yeah, now we're going
Jacob Paulsen: to like, oh, no, no, no, no.
Jacob Paulsen: No, like, I mean, we're not going to regulate individual, like,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, give a gun to your buddy or your neighbor or sell a gun to your friend.
Jacob Paulsen: But we are going to regulate people who are going to be in the business.
Jacob Paulsen: So that gun store, we are going to regulate what the gun store can do.
Jacob Paulsen: So we create a system to license gun dealers, and then we regulate those dealers.
Jacob Paulsen: We also create a classification of people who are prohibited from buying and possessing guns.
Jacob Paulsen: People who are mentally ill or have been convicted of felony,
Jacob Paulsen: all these kinds of things.
Jacob Paulsen: So we create all those requirements. Now, we don't really have any way to enforce
Jacob Paulsen: them other than just tell the FFL, hey, you can't sell guns to these people knowingly.
Riley Bowman: Yep, exactly. So that's essentially what happens with the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Riley Bowman: And that sets us up for a contrasting piece of legislation known as the Firearm,
Riley Bowman: Owners Protection Act of 1986.
Riley Bowman: Yep. And so...
Riley Bowman: Some of what happened with the dealer registration and licensing in 1968 was
Riley Bowman: there was a whole bunch of regulations or rules for how dealers were to conduct business,
Riley Bowman: which turned out, and this is no surprise to really anybody,
Riley Bowman: I'm sure, but the government started to use some of those regulations to really go after dealers.
Jacob Paulsen: Persecute.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, there you go. Persecute and just, yeah. So it made things really difficult as a dealer, right?
Riley Bowman: And so the Fire Emblem Owners Protection Act helped roll back some of that and
Riley Bowman: make things a little bit less crazy on the dealer side.
Riley Bowman: The other big thing, though, was that interstate transportation of firearms,
Riley Bowman: I think that was also part of the Gun Control Act of 1968, that became,
Riley Bowman: I don't know what the exact limits were, but basically you couldn't.
Riley Bowman: What was the law? Do you know on that?
Jacob Paulsen: Article 926A.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. So the way we utilize or think about this as it applies to us as individuals
Jacob Paulsen: today is not the way it was intended back then.
Jacob Paulsen: This was really about the mass transportation of guns from one state to another.
Jacob Paulsen: So if guns were being manufactured in New York or Massachusetts or Connecticut,
Jacob Paulsen: which is where most guns were manufactured back then,
Jacob Paulsen: but we wanted to ship those to Florida to a gun dealer so they could be sold
Jacob Paulsen: to consumers, this was a problem at the time because all Florida's laws might
Jacob Paulsen: be different than Connecticut's laws.
Jacob Paulsen: And so the part of FOPA was to step in and say, Hey, we need to create some
Jacob Paulsen: federal allowance that firearms can be trans. It's, it's part of a commerce bill.
Jacob Paulsen: This particular amendment to the fire motor protection act is part of a U S
Jacob Paulsen: department of commerce and transportation bill.
Jacob Paulsen: And so it established that part of free commerce is the ability to move guns
Jacob Paulsen: from one place to another.
Riley Bowman: There we go. That's where we're trying to get to with that. I appreciate your explanation on that.
Jacob Paulsen: There's some other important critical parts of FOPA. In addition to kind of
Jacob Paulsen: pulling back a little bit some of the strenuous requirements on FFLs,
Jacob Paulsen: FOPA also establishes that it's a criminal act for a government, local jurisdiction,
Jacob Paulsen: state, county, whatever governing body or organization to keep a database or
Jacob Paulsen: list of gun owners and their guns.
Jacob Paulsen: So this establishes basically a protection against gun registration.
Jacob Paulsen: Which is really important. And of course, today we see that there are still
Jacob Paulsen: some jurisdictions doing it, but they were doing it prior to 1986.
Jacob Paulsen: And so they kind of keep getting away with doing it.
Jacob Paulsen: But establishing a new database of gun owners and their guns post-1986 is strictly
Jacob Paulsen: prohibited because of the Fire Motor Protection Act.
Riley Bowman: Now, there's this thing called the Hughes Amendment that was a part of that.
Riley Bowman: It was never really intended to be a part of that.
Riley Bowman: Now, understand the Fire Owners Protection Act was rolling back some of the
Riley Bowman: legislation or regulations and laws that were put in place in 1968.
Riley Bowman: And you had certain individuals, especially on the left-leaning side of the
Riley Bowman: aisle, that weren't exactly in favor of doing that because they'd rather just
Riley Bowman: constantly march forward on taking and restricting things more and more, right?
Riley Bowman: So the Hughes Amendment, it's interesting how this came to be.
Riley Bowman: It was thrown in the last minute.
Riley Bowman: And it was done in such a way that, in fact, Mr. Hughes, I don't think he in
Riley Bowman: the end, we actually don't know.
Riley Bowman: Because the whole Fire Emblem Owners Protection Act bill was passed on a voice vote.
Riley Bowman: There was never even a recorded vote. We don't know who voted in what way for
Riley Bowman: or against the FOPA bill. Okay.
Riley Bowman: And the Hughes amendment was slipped right in there at the end.
Riley Bowman: And, and again, like, and there's actually debate today, Jacob,
Riley Bowman: about whether it was truly enough yays versus nays in passage of the BOPA bill
Riley Bowman: along with that Hughes amendment.
Riley Bowman: Because there are those that say that the nays were a lot louder than the, than the eyes.
Jacob Paulsen: They're welcome to uh go write a new piece of legislation to repeal it
Riley Bowman: And it actually was challenged uh in court but came back saying basically like
Riley Bowman: yeah the court basically said hey whatever the um,
Riley Bowman: the the the uh i'm at a loss for the word all of a,
Riley Bowman: whoever certifies the bill we will talk about it whoever certifies the court
Riley Bowman: basically came back and whoever certifies the bill they're like yep it is what
Riley Bowman: it is it's a done deal like it's passed as far as we're concerned and assuming
Riley Bowman: it's signed by the president,
Riley Bowman: so it's a law like there's nothing they can do about it alright Hughes Amendment.
Jacob Paulsen: It's sad it's tragic yep the Hughes Amendment basically freezes the
Jacob Paulsen: the legal sale of newly manufactured, non-semi-automatic, fully automatic firearms,
Jacob Paulsen: machine guns to civilians.
Jacob Paulsen: So it's created an interesting environment where
Jacob Paulsen: it's a weird law because it doesn't say you can't buy and sell machine guns.
Jacob Paulsen: It says you can't, as a civilian, non-military, non-law enforcement,
Jacob Paulsen: that you can't buy or sell machine guns that were manufactured post-1986 when this bill was passed.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is why a machine gun made in 1985 is a very good thing to own today.
Jacob Paulsen: It's worth a lot of money because it can still be sold
Jacob Paulsen: as long as you're compliant with the NFA. But it can still be sold,
Jacob Paulsen: transferred among private citizens, whereas a machine gun manufactured in 1987 cannot.
Jacob Paulsen: It's exclusively available for military and law enforcement use.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Riley Bowman: That's the Hughes Amendment. This is what I was trying to say.
Riley Bowman: Certified by the Speaker. They call it the Enrolled Bill Rule.
Riley Bowman: The 11th Circuit ruled this,
Riley Bowman: when this was challenged in court. They upheld the law invoking the Enrolled
Riley Bowman: Bill Rule, saying that once a bill is certified by the Speaker and signed by
Riley Bowman: the President, it's considered law, and the courts won't look behind the legislative
Riley Bowman: process that produced it.
Riley Bowman: So there you go uh the here's the other thing back to the i'm not i'm not the
Riley Bowman: intent is not to make not make this an anti-nra episode at all okay.
Jacob Paulsen: But of interesting note
Riley Bowman: But of interesting note and i know that there are those of you already out there
Riley Bowman: that know some of this you know this back history and backstory but the nra
Riley Bowman: was also on board with the fopa,
Riley Bowman: of course it was rolling back some of the legislation passed in 1968 so that
Riley Bowman: makes sense like yeah we're on board,
Riley Bowman: they were willing it said to and wayne lapierre was involved in this he was
Riley Bowman: a lobbyist at the time for the nra was willing to let the machine gun ban go
Riley Bowman: forward rather than risk the whole reform package,
Riley Bowman: it was just sort of considered to be a risk versus reward you know kind of approach
Riley Bowman: like you know that's a small thing we need these other things these other things
Riley Bowman: are more important it was a strategic play,
Riley Bowman: and so whatever you think of that you can think of that which you will just
Riley Bowman: know that you know the NRA was playing a part in that,
Riley Bowman: so alrighty let's now move to Brady yes okay.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is the next big one, and a lot of the Brady Bill was ultimately sunset
Jacob Paulsen: and went out of business, but some of it did not.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is Clinton-era legislation, and the Brady Bill effectively establishes
Jacob Paulsen: two core things as we think of it today.
Jacob Paulsen: The first is the background check system, the NICS system, National Instant
Jacob Paulsen: Crime something. What does it stand for?
Riley Bowman: National Instant Criminal.
Jacob Paulsen: Check system? I don't know.
Riley Bowman: National instant check system, I think. That sounds true.
Jacob Paulsen: So establishes NICs, which is the background check that you undergo when you
Jacob Paulsen: buy a gun from an FFL in this country.
Jacob Paulsen: And so it creates that. It also creates a ban on what we think of today as assault
Jacob Paulsen: weapons or what the political rhetoric refers to an assault weapon.
Riley Bowman: That's where we first see, I think, that term really,
Riley Bowman: established.
Jacob Paulsen: Oh, yeah. You know, codified. WNWR. Yeah, that's when.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Yeah, big time. And it also bans high-capacity magazines, as defined by that bill.
Jacob Paulsen: Now, the way the bill is written, though, is it sets up, it goes into effect
Jacob Paulsen: in 1994, and it sets up that the assault weapon, air quotes there,
Jacob Paulsen: ban and magazine capacity ban will sunset in 2004, a decade later,
Jacob Paulsen: if Congress doesn't renew it.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is sort of a tactic to get it passed. It's like, oh, we don't know if we
Riley Bowman: Can get the votes.
Jacob Paulsen: To make this happen. But if we agree to put this 10-year sunset clause in here,
Jacob Paulsen: then maybe we can gain the votes we need to get this passed.
Jacob Paulsen: So that's how it goes down.
Jacob Paulsen: And good news for us, it sunsets and Congress will not renew it, and it goes.
Jacob Paulsen: I remember, I mean, this is an interesting time because 1994 to 2004 is really
Jacob Paulsen: me going into adulthood.
Jacob Paulsen: And first and foremost, in this period of time, we have the Columbine shooting.
Jacob Paulsen: It's not the first school shooting, not by a long shot. But it is what I call
Jacob Paulsen: the first major national media attention school shooting takes place.
Jacob Paulsen: A lot of kids get slaughtered, and none of those shots fired out of a magazine
Jacob Paulsen: that holds more than 10 rounds.
Jacob Paulsen: Those boys just reloaded a lot. But the other thing that I just,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, a personal anecdote, I remember buying my first gun and it was during this period.
Jacob Paulsen: I bought my first gun like from a dealer as a real adult person in,
Jacob Paulsen: well, let's think, it would have been December 2003?
Jacob Paulsen: No, December 2004, something like that. Anyway, I was right in there as this
Jacob Paulsen: was getting ready to sunset is when I, oh, okay. No, it would have been 2001.
Jacob Paulsen: That's when I went in to buy some magazines for my 22.
Jacob Paulsen: My Ruger 1022 and I wanted the banana magazines and the guy behind the counter
Jacob Paulsen: told me that those were illegal and I remember just being pissed
Riley Bowman: You and I grew up in that era we were teenagers essentially during a lot of
Riley Bowman: this Brady Act time frame and Federal Assault Weapons Ban and,
Riley Bowman: we grew up in that era of hearing people talk about pre-ban versus post-ban
Riley Bowman: right yeah well that's a pre-ban magazine you know and so like
Riley Bowman: you know you'd go into the gun shop and all you could find were the 10 round
Riley Bowman: versions right but if you knew somebody that had a pre-ban version.
Jacob Paulsen: If you want to
Riley Bowman: Pay for it then you could you could purchase those right and so guys i mean
Riley Bowman: it was a huge i remember you know folks neighbors family members talking about like
Riley Bowman: pre-ban pre-ban AR magazines that
Riley Bowman: were, you know, 30 round, they were just standard USGI, 30 round aluminum
Riley Bowman: bodied magazines.
Riley Bowman: And that was a big deal to have the pre-ban mags. Right.
Riley Bowman: And then a lot of the things you'd, you know, you'd see AR-15s and magazines
Riley Bowman: that were engraved with, you know, for government use only because they were
Riley Bowman: manufactured for military or police contracts.
Jacob Paulsen: 1994.
Riley Bowman: Right. And yeah, that's, that's the era we grew up in, man. And thank goodness
Riley Bowman: for that sunset clause because we would have had to still be fighting that one off probably too.
Jacob Paulsen: Well, Congress didn't renew it because this is one of those rare times in history
Jacob Paulsen: where Congress solicited
Jacob Paulsen: and retained on contract a group to perform research to determine whether or
Jacob Paulsen: not the Brady Bill had reduced gun violence.
Jacob Paulsen: And the research came back, no, not a lick.
Jacob Paulsen: And so it was like, okay, we're not going to renew this if the research we solicited
Jacob Paulsen: from a neutral third party says it did nothing to help.
Riley Bowman: All right. Now we get to the 2000s. I mean, it sunsetted in 2004,
Riley Bowman: but in 2008, a landmark case comes before the Supreme Court.
Jacob Paulsen: The first big kahuna.
Riley Bowman: Now understand, this is the first big kahuna case since the Miller case.
Riley Bowman: And as we just talked about, the Miller case wasn't even that big of a kahuna
Riley Bowman: because there was nobody even fought for it.
Riley Bowman: And so uh the district of columbia versus heller case this is of course dick heller,
Riley Bowman: he's like hey um i live in dc uh,
Riley Bowman: dc's got a handgun ban i think i should be able to own a handgun,
Riley Bowman: and i think it's trigger locked assembly requirements a bunch of bull bull crap,
Riley Bowman: um so yeah he decides to challenge this and thank goodness for dick heller,
Riley Bowman: uh because just getting started yeah oh yeah uh he is just getting started,
Riley Bowman: so he he sues and of course this goes all up to the supreme court and in a 5-4
Riley Bowman: decision with antonin antonin scalia writing the majority opinion,
Riley Bowman: on that strikes down dc's handgun ban uh and,
Riley Bowman: But in so doing, affirms the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.
Riley Bowman: And that means arms, especially in this case, includes handguns.
Riley Bowman: And so therefore, DC ban, boom, struck down.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, because DC's major argument was you're not part of the militia.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. That was the key point.
Riley Bowman: Going back to Miller.
Jacob Paulsen: This case was, hey, is this right, the Second Amendment thing,
Jacob Paulsen: does it apply only to militias or does it apply to individuals?
Jacob Paulsen: And it's crazy to look back and think this was a 5-4 decision.
Jacob Paulsen: This was close. This was one Supreme Court justice made the switch, made the flip here.
Jacob Paulsen: So huge, huge, huge, huge victory and established the first kind of real foundation
Jacob Paulsen: for stop with this militia nonsense, the individual right.
Jacob Paulsen: That's the key component here. and look at all of this history
Jacob Paulsen: from 1300s up till today that constantly reestablishes that this is not about
Jacob Paulsen: a military, this is not about a militia, this is about individual rights over
Jacob Paulsen: and over and over and over again. And here it is all laid out for us.
Jacob Paulsen: And you're going to tell me that that's not what this means? Forget it.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Riley Bowman: And this is kind of the, this is the, this lays the groundwork for everything else that follows,
Riley Bowman: including the, the way they went about this ruling in Scalia's written opinion,
Riley Bowman: going back and looking at some of that historical context.
Riley Bowman: That was a big part of it, referencing many of these things that we've talked
Riley Bowman: about here today. We've pointed out some of those things.
Riley Bowman: That became a framework that we've built upon over the last almost two decades
Riley Bowman: now. This was 18 years ago. Keep that in mind.
Riley Bowman: To get to where we are now as Bruin and other supporting cases.
Jacob Paulsen: This is why this is one that you heard Hillary during the 2016 or whatever election
Jacob Paulsen: cycle. This is why she said Heller got it wrong.
Jacob Paulsen: These gun grabbers will point back to this Heller 1 because there's a second
Jacob Paulsen: Heller decision coming they'll point back to Heller 1 and say that's where the
Jacob Paulsen: Supreme Court screwed up there was a tight decision and it ruled in favor of
Jacob Paulsen: creating this foundational element of gun rights that is
Jacob Paulsen: well it's a snowball rolling down a hill now
Riley Bowman: Again because her opinion in that was no second amendment is about militias
Riley Bowman: and collective rights not individual rights,
Riley Bowman: Yeah, Heller didn't get it wrong. And McDonald agreed.
Riley Bowman: All right. So two years after Heller, okay, 2010, the McDonald versus City of Chicago case.
Riley Bowman: This was key because we mentioned a while back about how the Crookshank case,
Riley Bowman: basically one of the logic, you know,
Riley Bowman: some of the logic that was used there was that, hey, we're dealing,
Riley Bowman: we're talking about state or local matters. So it doesn't really apply.
Riley Bowman: If it was a federal thing or a congressional thing, then that's a different
Riley Bowman: animal and the Second Amendment would apply.
Riley Bowman: McDonald pointed out, because this was a challenge against Chicago's handgun ban,
Riley Bowman: where McDonald got that ruling to basically point out that no,
Riley Bowman: the Second Amendment applies to individual rights and...
Riley Bowman: It applies as far as federal, state, and local governments may not restrict
Riley Bowman: these rights, the Second Amendment.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, it is preemptive and it is sovereign. And that was key.
Jacob Paulsen: And I'm no judicial expert, but I would imagine that you could see how the D.C.
Jacob Paulsen: Ruling in Heller 1, maybe Chicago is like, well, that's D.C.
Jacob Paulsen: That's a federal district, right? No, we're under the jurisdiction of a state
Jacob Paulsen: and remember that Crookshank thing.
Jacob Paulsen: So that applies here too, right? We can do our own thing, leave us alone.
Jacob Paulsen: And the U.S. Supreme Court said, no. You can't do that.
Riley Bowman: There's some important distinctions here. With the Heller decision,
Riley Bowman: Heller 1, and McDonald decision, these were specifically dealing with handgun bans.
Jacob Paulsen: Yes.
Riley Bowman: And these rulings were narrow in that respect as well.
Riley Bowman: So they were basically affirming that, hey, it's an individual right,
Riley Bowman: and handguns are primarily an individual's tool, something that's mostly used for personal defense,
Riley Bowman: and that's relevant because we're not talking about community level or collective
Riley Bowman: or militia level type stuff.
Riley Bowman: We're talking about individual rights, and that means handguns that are personal
Riley Bowman: defense tools, and these rulings dealt with those issues narrowly in that regard.
Riley Bowman: And so that's basically what has forced all jurisdictions nationwide to at least,
Riley Bowman: and they do their best, they do
Riley Bowman: their darndest to restrict as much as they can and to go after things as,
Riley Bowman: narrowly as they can with respect to certain handgun restrictions or bans.
Riley Bowman: But this Heller 1 decision and McDonald decisions basically forced all jurisdictions
Riley Bowman: nationwide to at least recognize that individuals have a right to possess a handgun.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, key, critical. These were the big turning points in the modern era of gun rights.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Then we have the Heller II decision. This came just a year after McDonald
Riley Bowman: and three years after Heller I.
Riley Bowman: Dick Heller went back again against DC because what happened,
Riley Bowman: of course, after Heller I, DC basically wants to try to tighten things where
Riley Bowman: they can as much as they can.
Riley Bowman: Of course, they also had continued bans on assault weapons and magazines over 10 rounds.
Riley Bowman: Now, the D.C. Circuit Court upheld nearly all of those laws or those local regulations
Riley Bowman: or whatever. I don't know what they call them in D.C.
Riley Bowman: Typically on a city level, we'd call it an ordinance, right?
Riley Bowman: But anyway, but the interesting thing here is, and of course,
Riley Bowman: this is where Bruin is going to come back into play about a decade later.
Riley Bowman: The D.C. Circuit Court, of course, used the classic two-step,
Riley Bowman: I say classic now by today's standards, intermediate scrutiny framework that
Riley Bowman: circuit courts nationwide would then adopt.
Riley Bowman: This is where we start seeing more challenges against assault weapon bans,
Riley Bowman: magazine bans, different things that people challenge those laws.
Riley Bowman: And you have these federal courts that are like, well, we're going to apply this,
Riley Bowman: either a strict or an intermediate scrutiny to these standards to,
Riley Bowman: you know, kind of weigh these things on a scale as far as, well,
Riley Bowman: how strong or compelling of a government interest in public safety.
Jacob Paulsen: The importance to public safety exists here,
Riley Bowman: Relevant to the right. And that became kind of this new standard for weighing
Riley Bowman: a lot of these challenges in court.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, if there's a demonstrable need of this for public safety,
Jacob Paulsen: then it's an appropriate restriction on someone's Second Amendment rights. Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: That's kind of the scrutiny that begins to be applied until Bruin.
Riley Bowman: So that's an important thing to understand that, and I had to,
Riley Bowman: I went back and had to do a little bit of,
Riley Bowman: research, Jacob, on this because I was curious, like, where did this sort of
Riley Bowman: strict or intermediate, this kind of two-step approach, like,
Riley Bowman: first it was, we have to first look at a law and weigh in the balance.
Riley Bowman: Is that dealing with an individual right or not, okay?
Riley Bowman: And then two, okay, where's the government's interest in this?
Riley Bowman: And do we apply an intermediate or a strict scrutiny here?
Riley Bowman: Strict scrutiny meaning that we really like,
Riley Bowman: view the government's interest quite strictly versus intermediate where it's
Riley Bowman: like more of this a balanced beam approach where it's like, hey,
Riley Bowman: you know, we've just got to weigh these interests in the balance.
Riley Bowman: And try to balance government's interest and public safety with individual right
Riley Bowman: to possess or have or use or whatever, right?
Riley Bowman: And that basically started, we saw this trend nationwide where these cases would
Riley Bowman: just sort of get stalled out because courts were like, yeah,
Riley Bowman: you know, we think that there's a compelling government interest or public safety,
Riley Bowman: involved. And so, you know, we'd see these assault weapon bans in certain jurisdictions
Riley Bowman: and magazine capacity limitations upheld.
Riley Bowman: And that's kind of what came out of Hell or Two.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, not super favorable.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting there. By the way, that was a circuit court rule.
Riley Bowman: That was a D.C. circuit court that ruled this.
Riley Bowman: And Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a part of that. It was a three-judge panel.
Riley Bowman: He was the minority. There were two judges that voted, obviously,
Riley Bowman: with the majority there. Brett Kavanaugh, though, was in the minority.
Riley Bowman: He wrote an interesting dissenting opinion here that if you go and read it,
Riley Bowman: It's basically a preview of Bruin.
Riley Bowman: He made the argument in his dissenting opinion about how we need to look back
Riley Bowman: at the historical context,
Riley Bowman: as part of how we evaluate these challenges, these laws.
Riley Bowman: So kind of cool to see how that's come full circle now that he,
Riley Bowman: of course, just a few years later gets put in the Supreme Court and is playing
Riley Bowman: a huge role in this there.
Riley Bowman: So now we go from, there's a few other cases here and there that popped up,
Riley Bowman: but big cases, and that's what we're here to talk about today,
Riley Bowman: are these big events, the biggest events of the Second Amendment in its history.
Riley Bowman: Now we come to New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin, 2022.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, so the issue at root here in this case is that what we used to refer to
Jacob Paulsen: as may issue versus shall issue as it relates to concealed carry permits.
Jacob Paulsen: So what it really comes down to is the idea of, you know, does the Second Amendment
Jacob Paulsen: protect you a right to conceal or carry or have, not even conceal,
Jacob Paulsen: does the Second Amendment protect you a right to have a gun on your person outside of your home,
Jacob Paulsen: in public, one way or another?
Jacob Paulsen: Like, is that protected as a right?
Jacob Paulsen: And New York says no, it's not. Like, you know, Heller and McDonald said you
Jacob Paulsen: have an individual right to a gun, you know, for self-defense,
Jacob Paulsen: but, you know, we think that applies to your home.
Jacob Paulsen: In public, we're going to give you no legal means to be armed,
Jacob Paulsen: and we think that's perfectly within the Constitution.
Jacob Paulsen: And, you know, obviously the plaintiff doesn't agree. So that goes to the U.S.
Jacob Paulsen: Supreme Court, and that's where we get brought.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Huge, huge landmark case.
Riley Bowman: If we were kind of weighing these things, we don't have to put them on a Well.
Jacob Paulsen: They build on each other so it's hard to really do.
Riley Bowman: But Heller was huge and probably because it was like the first really significant
Riley Bowman: thing like ever, especially in favor of the Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: Bruin is also just a huge landmark case.
Jacob Paulsen: Spoiler alert, the U.S. Supreme Court says yeah, you do have a right to have a gun on you in public.
Riley Bowman: And the other huge, huge part of Bruin was basically doing away with this silly two-step,
Riley Bowman: intermediate scrutiny test that federal courts were using for years now at this point.
Jacob Paulsen: The hell of two was in 2011.
Riley Bowman: Right. And so that had become the standard. And Bruin did away with that by
Riley Bowman: saying, no, the standard here is we look back at the text, the text of the Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: And we look at the history, we look at the context with that and where it came
Riley Bowman: from and what the framers intended.
Riley Bowman: And well, how do we know what they intended? Well, we look at,
Riley Bowman: you know, what were the books they were reading?
Riley Bowman: What were the historical frameworks they were operating within?
Riley Bowman: What were the cases they referenced and other cases that were referenced, you know, going back to,
Riley Bowman: you know, we already talked about them here today, the English Bill of Rights
Riley Bowman: and going back to that statute of Northampton all the way back in the 1300s
Riley Bowman: and pointing all these things out, that's what Bruin really honed in on,
Riley Bowman: and clarified on as far as how are the courts supposed to evaluate and look
Riley Bowman: at these laws when they come before us for review.
Riley Bowman: And that's having a huge,
Riley Bowman: impact on things. In fact, there's an interesting statistic here, Jacob.
Riley Bowman: Bruin has triggered an explosion of Second Amendment lawsuits.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah.
Riley Bowman: Roughly 680 cases a year.
Riley Bowman: So on average, 680 cases a year.
Riley Bowman: So challenges on Second Amendment issues have been brought before the courts
Riley Bowman: since Bruin versus 74 cases a year before.
Jacob Paulsen: Makes a little sense, right? It's like, oh, by that standard,
Jacob Paulsen: like all this stuff that's happening like all over the place is unconstitutional.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. And we think we can win the fight because Bruin said that they,
Jacob Paulsen: in order for them to win, this is what they have to show and they got nothing. So let's go to battle.
Riley Bowman: Exactly. That's why this is such a landmark case.
Riley Bowman: And I appreciate what you said. And I completely agree as far as like each of
Riley Bowman: these, the Heller, McDonald, Heller 2,
Riley Bowman: and Bruin have all just, they've just been, and we see that framework just kind
Riley Bowman: of, you know, as I mentioned a moment ago about how Scalia's opinion in Heller 1, you know, where he,
Riley Bowman: that's when he first started really going back and looking at some of that old
Riley Bowman: case law and English law and all those historical contexts that he then applied in that case.
Riley Bowman: And that was just built upon all the way up here now to Bruin.
Riley Bowman: One more case here we're going to talk about in the historical context.
Riley Bowman: This happened two years ago. This is the United States versus Rahimi case.
Riley Bowman: This has been pretty notable.
Riley Bowman: And this is not what we'd call a win necessarily, right?
Riley Bowman: But this was a law that is the first real test of the Bruin standard.
Riley Bowman: And that's why this is notable. And Bruin is not perfect either.
Riley Bowman: We have to recognize that too.
Riley Bowman: In fact, there's people on both sides, both on the more liberal side that say
Riley Bowman: Bruin got it wrong and Bruin's not.
Riley Bowman: Clear enough or it's causing all kinds of problems. I've seen some things from
Riley Bowman: some more liberal justices that are basically criticizing Bruin because of it
Riley Bowman: complicating matters for the federal court system.
Riley Bowman: And people on the other side saying that it didn't quite get it fully right
Riley Bowman: because it's, you know, this is an example of it.
Riley Bowman: So the Rahimi case, basically this was a domestic violence restraining order
Riley Bowman: case, so a red flag type law, that kind of thing. Okay. So a domestic violence restraining order.
Riley Bowman: And we don't have to go into the specifics of the case, but what came out of
Riley Bowman: this was a ruling of eight to one.
Riley Bowman: And ironically, the only dissenting justice was Justice Thomas,
Riley Bowman: who wrote the Bruin majority opinion, right?
Riley Bowman: And basically, the Rahimi case suggests that the lower courts had been applying
Riley Bowman: Bruin's historical test, or, and I'm getting this wrong, backwards.
Riley Bowman: And Justice Thomas is the one that basically said, no, you're getting it wrong.
Riley Bowman: He's a brewing purist. Right. He's absolutely a brewing purist.
Riley Bowman: He wrote to clarify, no, you are trying to apply this too narrowly.
Riley Bowman: Whereas the majority opinion justices on the Rahimi case, he's like, you got this wrong.
Riley Bowman: You went back and basically took parts of two different laws from way back and
Riley Bowman: tried to mix them into one to use as an analog for this Rahimi case.
Riley Bowman: He's like, that's not the intent of Bruin, and that's not the intent of the Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: And so it's an interesting thing here to see kind of how that swung like that.
Riley Bowman: But why Rahimi is relevant is because it's helping, at least in some regard,
Riley Bowman: provide some clarification.
Riley Bowman: Whether we agree with the majority in that case or not.
Riley Bowman: But even in Justice Thomas's own words, we can gain some more clarification
Riley Bowman: on what Bruin is really all about.
Jacob Paulsen: I think that this is the first place where we've basically seen the Supreme Court say,
Jacob Paulsen: You can remove someone's Second Amendment rights, not just because you can demonstrate
Jacob Paulsen: a historical perfect similarity to the law you have now.
Jacob Paulsen: If you can just get close. We want a historical analog, not a historical exact
Jacob Paulsen: replica of the current restriction. Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: And that was the, I think, so it, you know, from a gun rights perspective,
Jacob Paulsen: the argument could be made that Rahimi was not positive, that it sort of pulled back.
Jacob Paulsen: It's almost like Bruin, you know, pushed it really far down the road.
Jacob Paulsen: Like, hey, if you can't show that there was some perfect historical example
Jacob Paulsen: of what the restriction you're imposing today, then forget it.
Jacob Paulsen: Then Rahimi kind of pulled back like, well, I mean, maybe not a perfect historical,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, example, but, you know, just something that's close.
Riley Bowman: It rained it back a little bit.
Jacob Paulsen: It rained it back a little bit.
Riley Bowman: And I can see that. I may not entirely agree with where the court stood on this,
Riley Bowman: and obviously Justice Thomas didn't at all.
Riley Bowman: But that's kind of what we – that's the whole point here is that we see Bruin,
Riley Bowman: like you said, just pushed it way far down the road, and Rahimi's like,
Riley Bowman: hold on here just a little bit.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some restrictions are okay. We don't need a perfect historical
Jacob Paulsen: example of the exact same restriction.
Jacob Paulsen: We need we need a historical analog you know to
Riley Bowman: Justify this that's fair yeah that's
Riley Bowman: where we are today and that sets the framework for where we are today,
Riley Bowman: uh and we are seeing a whole bunch of cases right now working through the court
Riley Bowman: system i mean we've got things uh testing the courts on purchasing of of handguns,
Riley Bowman: of 18 to 20 to 18 to 21 year olds we got magazine capacity limitations We've
Riley Bowman: got assault weapon type stuff, you know, AR-15s, whatever.
Riley Bowman: A number of things work on their way through the courts or sitting in the courts,
Riley Bowman: or in some cases have been turned down by the Supreme Court. You know, they've...
Riley Bowman: Received,
Riley Bowman: those cases and said, no, we're not going to take that right now.
Riley Bowman: But here's some big news as of just yesterday. Two days ago?
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, yesterday.
Riley Bowman: I think it was yesterday. Maybe it was two days ago. But just in the last 24,
Riley Bowman: 48 hours, the Supreme Court is now going to hear two cases combined into one.
Riley Bowman: They're combining the Viramontes versus Cook County cases out of Illinois,
Riley Bowman: kind of like the McDonald case, and the Grant v.
Riley Bowman: Higgins case. They're both AR-15 related cases.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, so the question that they're going to answer is, can a specific type of
Jacob Paulsen: firearm, i.e. the AR-15, be banned or not?
Riley Bowman: Semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines.
Jacob Paulsen: Right. This may or may not also address magazine capacity limitation questions.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, it's a relevant question. And in some of those cases, I think in the Higgins
Riley Bowman: case, well, one of those cases, I think it touches on that.
Riley Bowman: The feeling I'm getting from reading some other online legal analysis of this
Riley Bowman: is that the court's probably going to just tackle the AR-15 question.
Riley Bowman: And the court generally tries to be as narrow as possible in such things anyway.
Riley Bowman: That's just like a standard practice. Like they try to just,
Riley Bowman: what's the issue before us? We're going to go after that issue and not try to,
Riley Bowman: it's very rare that it's application.
Jacob Paulsen: With its context, right?
Riley Bowman: It's very rare that Supreme court issues rulings that are like super broad,
Riley Bowman: super wide, you know, all encompassing.
Riley Bowman: Uh, not that it doesn't happen. It's just, it's very rare. And so it,
Riley Bowman: it, it, it's possible. It's possible. I don't think it's terribly likely that
Riley Bowman: they're going to also pick up as part of these two cases, anything to do with magazine capacities.
Riley Bowman: But I think a natural assuming, and I do think the court is favorable in this
Riley Bowman: regard, because, I mean, especially you still have Justice Thomas, um,
Riley Bowman: And Alito and Kavanaugh, certainly.
Riley Bowman: Those are certainly the three that are pretty pure on the Second Amendment issues.
Riley Bowman: Some of the others are also pretty strong.
Riley Bowman: But I think the court is leaning very favorably on the issue of probably coming
Riley Bowman: down on the right side as we see it with regards to AR-15s or semi-automatic rifles.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, looks positive.
Riley Bowman: That will create a natural consequence of, well, okay,
Riley Bowman: if this gun, this tool is a protected arm and we have a right to possess,
Riley Bowman: therefore can't be restricted or banned,
Riley Bowman: then the tools in common use, for instance, then the tools that also support
Riley Bowman: using that arm, such as standard capacity magazines, 30 round magazines,
Riley Bowman: for instance, should also be a part of that.
Riley Bowman: Well, if that's not ruled on in these Veramontes or Grant v.
Riley Bowman: Higgins cases, it's going to probably be kind of a second order.
Jacob Paulsen: A near future thing.
Riley Bowman: It's going to have to come up as well. So I don't know what the intent of the court here is.
Riley Bowman: Maybe they have no intent on the magazine's thing. I don't know.
Riley Bowman: I don't know where they stand on that. But I'm glad to see that they're going
Riley Bowman: to take up a semi-automatic rifle case.
Jacob Paulsen: This is significant because we're seeing in a very short period of time a lot
Jacob Paulsen: of Second Amendment-related cases.
Jacob Paulsen: We've already had the –
Jacob Paulsen: man, I'm struggling. We've had two U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the last
Jacob Paulsen: 60 days related to the Second Amendment. We had a Hawaii ruling.
Jacob Paulsen: We had the – man, struggling with the other one, the marijuana one that just
Jacob Paulsen: came out. That's the – It's with an H. Yeah.
Riley Bowman: Yep.
Jacob Paulsen: Hamani?
Riley Bowman: We just talked about it. Something like that. Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: So that ruling just came out as well. And now we're taking up the AR-15 question.
Jacob Paulsen: This is unprecedented if you look at kind of a historical view of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jacob Paulsen: Of course, it's also unprecedented the number of lawsuits that are being filed,
Jacob Paulsen: right, and the number of issues that are being brought up. Wait,
Jacob Paulsen: based on the Bruin, is this constitutional?
Jacob Paulsen: Is this constitutional? Is this constitutional?
Jacob Paulsen: This is bubbling up and the U.S. Supreme Court is getting busy.
Jacob Paulsen: And this is the time you thank your lucky stars that the right people were appointed
Jacob Paulsen: to the U.S. Supreme Court in recent history.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think this last session is the first time ever that
Riley Bowman: Supreme Court issued opinions on more than one Second Amendment case.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, and now we're picking up another one.
Riley Bowman: Exactly. So big, big, big deal. So I'd say the future looks bright,
Riley Bowman: and especially in light of the last 20 years of court rulings,
Riley Bowman: especially where we see this boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all the way up to Bruin,
Riley Bowman: that this is, I think our future is bright for the Second Amendment.
Riley Bowman: And I'm very, I'm proud of the fact that, I mean, all the imperfections aside
Riley Bowman: of our nation, certainly there's perfections of many, imperfections of many.
Riley Bowman: They're in problems and challenges and all kinds of things, issues,
Riley Bowman: but we still live in I think the greatest country on earth.
Riley Bowman: And I'm proud to live here. I'm proud that we even have the rights that we do have.
Riley Bowman: Proud that I have, like, I'm carrying my gun right here. You carrying your gun?
Jacob Paulsen: Naturally.
Riley Bowman: You know?
Riley Bowman: Where else in the world could we be living the way we live our lives,
Riley Bowman: carrying our guns, shooting, going to the range, going to shoot?
Riley Bowman: Yes, there's some countries where you can do some of those things,
Riley Bowman: but you can't do all the things like we're able to do here in the U.S. of A.
Jacob Paulsen: Not even close.
Riley Bowman: And so it's pretty remarkable. The intent here today was to break down for you
Riley Bowman: guys, and I know it was a lot.
Riley Bowman: It's been a two-hour episode. I knew it was going to be a mega episode.
Riley Bowman: But I thought it was an important one to do.
Riley Bowman: And I think a perfect time to, in this 250th birthday period of our nation,
Riley Bowman: to look back and establish,
Riley Bowman: the context and the history, the story behind our nation and how we got to where
Riley Bowman: we are today with respect to the Second Amendment and to honor that a little
Riley Bowman: bit. And I hope we've accomplished that at least somewhat here in our episode today.
Jacob Paulsen: It's also a reminder that you have to continue to exercise and protect your
Jacob Paulsen: rights if you want to maintain them.
Jacob Paulsen: Absolutely. So keep doing your part to support the organization.
Jacob Paulsen: 700 lawsuits, someone's got to pay all those attorneys.
Jacob Paulsen: Where's that coming from? That's coming from people like us who are supporting
Jacob Paulsen: all those organizations. So keep doing your part.
Riley Bowman: We talked about in the episode about what happens when people don't appreciate
Riley Bowman: or exercise those rights.
Riley Bowman: We talked about what happened with the National Firearms Act.
Riley Bowman: They laid down. And we're paying for it today.
Riley Bowman: I mean, we just didn't think it was a big deal. People didn't care.
Riley Bowman: They slept on it a little bit. They just kind of, meh, doesn't affect me,
Riley Bowman: so I'm not going to worry about it.
Riley Bowman: And what we know from history, on the legislative side especially,
Riley Bowman: is that the anti-gunners will try to take, even if it's just an inch at a time,
Riley Bowman: they will take a little more, they'll take a little more, they'll take a little bit more.
Riley Bowman: We have a lot to be thankful for and a lot of wins on the judicial side of the equation.
Riley Bowman: But the fight's not over and it's going to continue. And when the courts rule
Riley Bowman: a certain way, the anti-gunners go another way and they try another tactic.
Riley Bowman: So the future is bright and there's a lot of great things happening for us,
Riley Bowman: The fight's not over, and we can't sit on our hands and do nothing.
Riley Bowman: We need to respect our Second Amendment and fight for it.
Jacob Paulsen: Game on. Let's go to battle.
Riley Bowman: Happy birthday, America. Happy 250 years. Our nation is not perfect. It never was.
Riley Bowman: I think we could say it was intended to be perfect, but the founders knew what
Riley Bowman: they were creating was not perfect, nor would it be perfect.
Riley Bowman: In fact, some of them thought that it would only last a few decades at most.
Jacob Paulsen: It was referred to as the American experiment.
Riley Bowman: It was an experiment. And here it is still experimenting. I'm thankful for it. I hope you are too.
Riley Bowman: We wish you all a happy 250th birthday, America.
Riley Bowman: May you spend it doing those things that you enjoy most, enjoying your freedoms
Riley Bowman: with people that you care the most about.
Riley Bowman: Have a great weekend. Be safe. Don't blow off your hands with fireworks or anything.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, don't light a forest fire, you know.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, or shoot yourself with your gun, you know, because you're having too much fun.
Riley Bowman: Don't drink and shoot. Don't drink and drive, all that stuff,
Riley Bowman: okay? We just hope that you have a wonderful, safe, enjoyable holiday weekend
Riley Bowman: here as it's coming up here in just a few days.
Riley Bowman: Don't forget about our Happy Birthday America sale. Go to concealedcarry.com
Riley Bowman: forward slash HBA for details.
Riley Bowman: Pick yourself up one of those. It's the only way you can get one, okay?
Riley Bowman: To get one of those commemorative 250th birthday America coins,
Riley Bowman: you got to go and participate in our happy birthday America sale.
Riley Bowman: All orders will get one of those coins.
Riley Bowman: And join Guardian Nation, guardianation.com if you want to learn more so you
Riley Bowman: can take advantage of the biggest deals.
Jacob Paulsen: Well, there it is.
Riley Bowman: Until next time. A reminder to train right, train often, and train safe.
Jacob Paulsen: So you can fight hard, fight fast, and fight true. Take care.
Riley Bowman: A reminder that laws vary from place to place, and we encourage listeners to
Riley Bowman: seek local legal advice to understand applicable laws.
Riley Bowman: Concealed Carry, Inc., its brands and properties, and the Concealed Carry podcast
Riley Bowman: is not a legal service, nor are we attorneys at law.
Riley Bowman: We make our best faith effort to share Concealed Carry-related insights and
Riley Bowman: information about firearm-related incidents and the laws pertaining,
Riley Bowman: based on our own understanding and experience.
Riley Bowman: But things can be different where you live, or laws may have changed by the
Riley Bowman: time you listen to this. We cannot be held liable for your actions based on
Riley Bowman: the information shared in this podcast.
Riley Bowman: Please exercise care with all things pertaining to firearm use,
Riley Bowman: concealed carry, and always practice following basic firearm safety rules.
Riley Bowman: More information about safety can be found at concealedcarry.com forward slash safety.